Prodigal sons; Indigenous missionaries in the British Atlantic world, 1640-1780.

ITRODUCTIO

PRODIGAL SOS:

IDIGEOUS MISSIOARIES I THE BRITISH ATLATIC WORLD, 1640-1780

The spring of 1765 was an extraordinary time for Philip Quaque. On May 1st of that

year, he was ordained as an Anglican minister by the Bishop of London in the breathtaking

Chapel Royal at St. James Palace. This had been a long time coming, for Quaque had been

training for this very moment since he first set foot on English soil nearly a decade before.

The newly ordained preacher probably spent the rest of the day mingling in elite clerical

circles, reminiscing about his training, and discussing the obstacles he would face in his

future career as an African missionary. The following day must have been even more

emotional, for on that day Quaque married a young English girl named Catherine Blunt in an

Anglican ceremony officiated by the very person who tutored him for nearly a decade.1

Within only a few months, he and his English wife set sail for West Africa’s Cape Coast

Castle, one of the many African forts that constituted the backbone of the British transatlantic

slave trade. Quaque would stay there for half a century, trying to convert Africans,

monitoring the religious piety of English merchants there, and witnessing the horror of

African slavery firsthand. The dozens of letters he wrote back to his Anglican sponsors

complained bitterly about the irreligion of English traders, the depravity and barbarity of

1 Margaret Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast,” in Africa Remembered: arratives by West Africans

From the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 107.

Priestly notes on page 112 that Quaque’s second and third wives were African rather than English. Quaque

was also known by the name “Kweku”. Although his name became Anglicized as “Quaque,” “Kweku” or

“Kwaku” actually meant “born on Wednesday” in most Akan-speaking African groups.

African natives, and the haughty attitude of the mixed race population of the Cape Coast. 2

Quaque characterized Africa as a “barren land” and a “barren country” that begged for the

introduction of the gospel to save it from its own primordial sins.3 Although his white wife,

English training, and critical comments about Africans might have situated him as one of the

hundreds of white missionaries sent throughout the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century,

Quaque was actually a native-born West African trying to convert the very people from

which he sprang. As the first African ordained in the Anglican Church, Quaque became a

walking paradox; a literate, English speaking, well educated African preaching in a place

where the denial of African intelligence helped justify the slave trade that surrounded him.

As an African preaching among Africans, Quaque was certainly not alone. He was

but one of the hundreds of African, black slave, and Native American evangelists who

attempted to evangelize blacks and Indians throughout the British Atlantic world during the

early modern era. These native missionaries – meaning, native to the people they were

evangelizing – became absolutely central to the intercultural exchange between Europeans,

Africans, and Native Americans during the most formative years of their encounters. James

Axtell found that there were at least 133 ordained native preachers in the mainland colonies

by the era of the American Revolution, and many more informal teachers and church office

holders.4 My estimates, which include black slave, African, Afro-Moravian, and Amerindian

preachers throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, puts the number well over 300, roughly

the same number of “white” missionaries that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

2 Quaque was sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in

1701, so most of those letters (though not all) were addressed to that organization.

3 Philip Quaque to the SPG, undated but probably written in the fall of 1767; and Quaque to the SPG, 6

August 1782, both in Philip Quaque, Letters of the Rev. Philip Quaque of West Africa (East Ardsley,

England: Micro Methods Ltd., 1980-1985).

4 James Axtell, “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of Missions,” Ethnohistory 29 (Winter 1982), 36.

in Foreign Parts (the largest missionary organization in the eighteenth century) employed in

the American colonies. By the nineteenth century, 85% of the people working for British

missions were not actually British.5 In the Travancore state of southern India during the turn

of the twentieth century, for example, there were 50 European missionaries stationed among

882 native ones.6 Nearly 900 native missionaries left Fiji, Somoa, the Cook Islands, the

Solomon Islands, and Tonga to act as Christian missionaries on other Pacific Islands in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 Historians of nineteenth century missions have

already recognized the importance of native preachers to the development of Christian

evangelical enterprises in the Great Plains, Central Africa, East Asia, and elsewhere.8

Historians of the early modern Atlantic, however, trail far behind in that regard. Although a

handful of literary scholars and historians have provided a few biographies of some of the

most celebrated and documented indigenous missionaries of this era (such as the famous

Samson Occom), no scholar has undertaken a systematic study of how native Christian

preachers as a whole fit into larger problems of race, authority, and the debate over the future

5 This statistic was estimated by Jeffrey Cox when he served as Chair of a panel entitled, “Religion,

Empire, Indigenous Worlds,” at the November 2006 meeting of the North American Conference on British

Studies.

6 Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (The Oxford History of the British Empire) (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.

7 Charles W. Forman, “The Missionary Force of the Pacific Island Churches,” International Review of

Mission 59 (1970): 215-226; and Forman, The Island Churches of the South Pacific: Emergence in the

Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982). The Church Missionary Society recorded that

they employed about 360 native teachers in their North Pacific Island missions in the last few decades of

the nineteenth century, and the Methodists listed about 635 native preachers in the same place and time.

See Peggy Brock, “New Christians as Evangelists,” in Missions and Empire, 132-152. See also E. Palmer

Patterson, ‘Native Missionaries of the North Pacific Coast: Philip McKay and Others,” Pacific Historian 30

(1986): 22-37.

8 Bonnie Sue Lewis, Creating Christian Indians: ative Clergy in the Presbyterian Church (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Louise M. Pirouet, Black Evangelists: The Spread of Christianity in

Uganda, 1891-1914 (London: Collings, 1978); Peggy Brock, ed., Indigenous Peoples and Religious

Change (Boston: Brill, 2005); and Brock, “New Christians as Evangelists.”

of Indians and Africans in Western Christendom.9 Perhaps most importantly, no one has yet

employed an Atlantic approach to this subject. In doing so, this dissertation demonstrates

that native preachers from Iroquoia to India, Carolina to the Caribbean, and West Africa to

Narragansett were vital participants in an increasingly global Protestant missionary effort.10

Philip Quaque’s exceptional history was therefore a product of an Atlantic-wide

attempt to use Native Americans, black slaves, and Africans to evangelize people like

themselves. Just as Edmund Morgan identified the simultaneous development of slavery and

freedom as the “central paradox” of American history, this study of indigenous missionaries

presents its own paradox: during a period characterized by Native American dispossession,

the expansion of the British transatlantic slave trade, the institutionalization of racial slavery,

and the creation of the concept of race itself, British missionary groups invested a

tremendous amount of time, effort, money, and spiritual authority into hundreds of native

9 See Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in

Eighteenth-Century ative America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);

Joseph Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776, ed.

Laura J. Murray (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Hilary E. Wyss, Writing

Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and ative Community in Early America (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2000); Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American

and ative American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s

Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005);

and Margaret Connel Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan as Spiritual Intermediary,” in Between Indian and

White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). For more on

Native American literary expression, see Bernd C. Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in

Antebellum America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); and Jace Weaver, That The

People Might Live (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

10 The term “native,” of course, is somewhat problematic. Here I use the phrase to describe non-white

Christian evangelists who were intended for missionary work among their own people. Although there

were a few famous exceptions to this rule – such as when Eleazar Wheelock sent eastern Algonquian

Indians among the Iroquois in the 1760s – this definition of “native” and “indigenous” still applies to most

of my subjects. Peggy Brock, an expert in British missionary history of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, prefers to use the phrase “New Christians.” And yet, her essays still use the words “native” and

“indigenous,” while “new Christians” precludes the possibilities of generations-old traditions of indigenous

Christian preaching. See Brock, “New Christians as Evangelists.”

peoples in the hope that they would spread the gospel among others.11 This dissertation not

only explains why, but also investigates what these native preachers meant for the history of

cultural interaction, the development of indigenous Christianities, and the relationship

between missions and empire.

The Historiography of Missions

Historian James Ronda once observed that the reputation of missionaries is in many

ways analogous to the volatile stock market: “bullish and up one day, bearish and down the

next.”12 In fact, historians of missions and missionaries have generally approached their

topic in three unique but mutually conversant ways. The first scholars to draft the histories of

Christian missionaries often provided hagiographic descriptions of their physical trials,

evangelical efforts, and occasional martyrdoms at the hands of recalcitrant natives. These

historians – many of whom were churchmen and missionaries themselves – invariably cast

missionaries as godly saints who heroically spread the light of Christianity even when natives

preferred to stay in darkness.13 For these historians, the active presence of native preachers –

11 Edmund Sears Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New

York: Norton, 1975). The best overview of Protestant theology and race in an Atlantic context can be

found in Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-

2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

12 James P. Ronda, “Reverend Samuel Kirkland and the Oneida Indians,” in The Oneida Indian Experience:

Two Perspectives, eds. Jack Campisi and Laurence M. Hauptman (New York: Syracuse University Press,

1988), 23.

13 The work of Kenneth Scott Latourette exemplifies these tendencies. See especially Latourette, A History

of the Expansion of Christianity, 7 Volumes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937-1945). In his

presidential address to the American Historical Association, Latourette suggested that all scholars pursue

what he called a “Christian understanding of history.” See Latourette, "The Christian Understanding of

History," American Historical Review 54 No. 2 (January 1949): 259-76. See also the work of Bishop

Stephen Neill, especially Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (New York: Penguin Books,

1986). Andrew Porter suggests that this missionary-as-martyr interpretation is still alive and well within

the circles of church historians. He notes that their “own evident confessional commitment, the tendency to

hagiography or institutional piety, the study of the missionary past with the commitment of the determined

reformer intent on future success, both seem almost as strong as ever.” See Andrew Porter, Religion versus

Empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester: University of

people who were “native” to the group they were trying to convert – threatened to undermine

the religious and racial purity of Western civilization’s narrative of progress. Even more

importantly, it also threatened to reveal the kind of syncretism, hybridity, and creative

adaptation of Christianity that orthodox evangelists abhorred. Thus, when scholars did

mention indigenous preachers, they tended to focus on the ones who appeared to have

undergone the largest transformation from “pagan” to converted Christian, such as Samson

Occom and Philip Quaque. And yet, the historiographical process of highlighting their

exceptionality, uniqueness, or “genius” only served to underscore the recalcitrance of the

rest.14 In this view, native peoples were not subjects, but rather objects of the “white man’s

burden” to spread Christianity and civilization across the globe.

Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, a period marked by civil rights

movements, anti-colonialism, and a growing suspicion of institutionalized Christianity (at

least among academics), missionaries assumed a different form.15 Scholars such as Francis

Jennings, Neal Salisbury, and Robert F. Berkhofer presented Christian evangelists as arrogant

and rapacious imperialists who paved the way for cultural disintegration, social enslavement,

Manchester Press, 2004), 2. For an example of how Catholic historians constructed a hagiographical

history of a famous Indian convert in French Canada, see Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine

Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

14 Two good examples are Samson Occom and Philip Quaque, both of whom had been memorialized as

completely converted Christians by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and

both were frequently characterized as “celebrities.” For some of these tendencies, see William DeLoss

Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of ew England (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1899). For

Quaque and other Christian African celebrities, see Rev. S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, Memoirs of West African

Celebrities, Europe, &c. (1700-1850). With Special Reference to the Gold Coast (Liverpool: D. Marples &

Co., 1905).

15 For more on the religiosity of American college professors, see Neill Gross and Solon Simmons, “How

Religious Are America’s College and University Professors,” published on 6 February 2007, for the Social

Science Research Council, URL: http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Gross_Simmons.pdf accessed on 20

November 2008.

and territorial dispossession.16 In the words of historian David Silverman, the scholars of the

1960s and 70s usually characterized Christian missionaries as “ideological shock troops for

colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.”17 Christianity was now seen as a monolithic

and imposing entity that colonists forced upon native peoples even as they violently resisted

Christian imperialism.18 While emotionally appealing to many, this interpretation was not

completely intellectually satisfying. As James Axtell noted, this imperialist view was “little

more than the familiar Eurocentric plot turned on its normative head.”19 Missionary heroes

became the villains, indigenous victims became the new heroes, and Christianity and

indigenous religions were once again viewed as mutually incompatible. In the later,

imperialistic interpretation, native preachers were cast as race traitors, “deracinated

16 A classic example of this interpretation can be found in Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America:

Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975);

Neal Salisbury, “Conquest of the ‘Savage’: Puritans, Puritan Missionaries, and Indians, 1620-1680” (PhD

Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1972); James P. Ronda, “We Are Well As We Are: An

Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” The William and Mary Quarterly 34 No. 1

(January 1977): 66-82; and Robert F. Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant

Missions and American Indian Response, 1787-1862 (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press,

1965). Louis B. Wright argued in 1943 that religious interests were key to the expansion of England’s

economic empire in Elizabethan and King James’ England. See Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire:

The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558-1625 (Chapel Hill: The University

of North Carolina Press, 1943).

17 David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity

in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 No. 2 (April 2005): 144. In

this quote Silverman is characterizing the historiography, not agreeing with that interpretation.

18 See Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For the African context, see the important works by the

Comaroffs, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism,

and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Comaroff and

Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Volume Two. The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African

Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also the extended reviews of the Comaroff’s

work in Paul S. Landau, “Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff’s ‘Of Revelation and

Revolution,’” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 70 No. 3 (2000): 501-519; and

Elizabeth Elbourne, “Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of

Jean and John Comaroff,” The American Historical Review 108 No. 2 (April 2003): 435-459. For the

imperialistic interpretation, see also Landeg White, Magomero: Portrait of an African Village (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1987).

19 James Axtell, “Review: Invading America: Puritans and Jesuits,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14

No. 3 (Winter 1984): 636.

sycophant[s]” who forfeited their Indian and African identities to ameliorate their own

temporal circumstances.20 Native preachers, therefore, were rarely taken seriously by either

group of scholars because they were not orthodox enough for one and not “authentic” enough

for the other.21 Both the missionary-as-saint and missionary-as-imperialist framework

therefore left little interpretive space for the hundreds of native preachers who actively

participated in British evangelical efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The missionary-as-imperialist interpretation has exhibited considerable staying

power. In 2004 Laura M. Stevens proclaimed that “it is well known that the missionary and

imperial aspirations of early modern Europe were intertwined.”22 Stevens and other scholars

have identified the ways in which missions, and the native neophytes who accepted

Christianity, helped craft a colonial, imperial identity. Alden T. Vaughan even recently

called missions “a handmaiden of colonial diplomacy.”23 Perhaps, but the past two decades

have witnessed yet another fluctuation in the historical reputation of missions. Instead of

20 Introduction to Jennifer Thorn, Phillis Wheatley: Gender, God, and Grief (forthcoming).

21 Terence Ranger is right to note that scholars have too frequently employed circular reasoning to mark out

the boundaries that define indigenous peoples as “authentic” or not. He suggests that scholars have defined

anti-Christian, anti-imperial societies as authentic ones, leaving little room for any sense of indigenous

Christians – in America or in Africa – as “authentic.” See Terence Ranger, “Christianity and Indigenous

Peoples: A Personal Overview,” The Journal of Religious History 27 No. 3 (October 2003): 255-271. For

more on the problem of authenticity in native voices, see the introduction to Hilary E. Wyss, Writing

Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and ative Community in Early America (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2000), 1-16. Rachel Wheeler has also criticized previous scholars’ search for

“authentic” voices and argues that focusing on religious practice, rather than belief, helps to avoid getting

entangled in that thorny conceptual problem. See Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican

Village,” Religion and American Culture 13 No. 1 (Winter 2003): 27-67.

22 Laura M. Stevens, “Gold for Glasse: The Trope of Trade in English Missionary Writings,” in The

Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, ed. James Muldoon (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2004),

233.

23 Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150. For excellent and recent analyses of how Protestant missionary

rhetoric helped fashion imperial identities, see Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries,

ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and

Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians and Colonial American Identity (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

outposts of civilization or the advanced guard of an avaricious imperialist program, historians

now see missions as sites of contestation as well as conversation and cultural negotiation. As

such, the relationship between religion and empire becomes messier and more ambiguous

than the imperialistic school might have it. British and Australian scholars like Andrew

Porter and Norman Etherington have cast doubt on the view that missions were, in

Etherington’s words, “a reflex of imperialism.”24 Brian Stanley, a leading scholar of British

missions in the nineteenth century, has recently attacked what he called the “unquestionable”

orthodoxy that “the Bible and the flag” traveled together during the history of Western

imperial expansion.25 Andrew Porter concluded that missionaries’ engagement with empire

“more often than not took the form of bitter experience,” leaving them feeling “deeply

ambiguous at best.”26 In fact, even some of the architects of the imperial school of

missionary studies began to publish articles that emphasized ambiguity over imperialism,

negotiation over resistance, and exchange over violence.27 To invoke Richard White’s

seminal study of intercultural relations in the Great Lakes region, historians over the last few

decades have begun to examine the very important and quite sizeable “middle ground,”

24 Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, 1; see also Porter, Religion versus Empire?; and Porter,

‘“Cultural Imperialism” and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780-1914,” Journal of Imperial and

Commonwealth History 25 No. 3 (1997): 367-391.

25 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the ineteenth

and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1990).

26 Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 12-13.

27 For earlier interpretations that fell into the imperialist framework, see Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The

“Praying Indians” of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” The William and Mary Quarterly 31 No. 1

(January 1974): 27-54; and Ronda, “We Are Well As We Are”: 66-82. Salisbury and Ronda both

published more recent articles, with Salisbury emphasizing “ambiguity” during King Philip’s War and

Ronda focusing on the “generations of faith” that developed among the Wampanoag Christian Indians of

Martha’s Vineyard. See Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in

Seventeenth-Century North America,” Ethnohistory 50 No. 2 (Spring 2003): 247-259; and Ronda,

“Generations of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” The William and Mary Quarterly 38

No. 3 (July 1981): 369-394.

where Christian missionaries and indigenous peoples negotiated with one another, exchanged

ideas, and tried to create a world of accommodation rather than one of violence.28

Native preachers inhabited that physical, metaphorical, and cultural space in between,

and the recent turn in missionary scholarship away from the imperialist school owes much to

the study of indigenous Christianities from Africa to the Americas. As Norman Etherington

has recently asserted, “the greatest difficulty faced by those who have tried to argue that

Christian missions were a form of cultural imperialism has been the overwhelming evidence

that the agents of conversion were local people, not foreign missionaries. None of them were

coerced into believing and very few were paid.”29 In the meantime, established scholars like

Lamin O. Sanneh, T.O. Ranger, Peggy Brock, and others have demonstrated the ways in

which Christianity was “translated” into African, Indian, and Asian cultural contexts by

indigenous preachers like Samuel Crowther, Arthur Wellington Clah, and Moses

Tijalkabota.30 Literary scholars and historians of early America have also begun to portray

28 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-

1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). It should be noted, of course, that the middle ground

gave way to empire during the age of revolution, thus it was just as important as it was tenuous. For a book

that emphasizes this process of division and the erosion of negotiation, see Alan Taylor, The Divided

Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the orthern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2006).

29 Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, 7.

30 See Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY:

Orbis Books, 1989); Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids,

MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003); Sanneh, Disciples of All ations: Pillars of World

Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peggy Brock, “New Christians as Evangelists,”

132-152; Brock, ed., Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change; Brock, “Two Indigenous Evangelists:

Moses Tjalkabota and Arthur Wellington Clah,” The Journal of Religious History 27 No. 3 (October 2003):

348-366; Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 163-190; Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley, eds., The Church

Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing

Company, 2000), 147-282; Marilyn Robinson Waldman, Olabiyi Babalola Yai, and Lamin Sanneh,

“Translatability: A Discussion,” Journal of African Religion 22 Fasc. 22 (May 1992): 159-172; Terence

Ranger, “Christianity and Indigenous Peoples: A Personal Overview,” The Journal of Religious History 27

No. 3 (October 2003): 255-271; Ranger, “Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,”

African Studies Review 29 No. 2 (June 1986): 1-69; Ranger, "Mission Adaptations of African Religious

Institutions: The Masai Case," in The Historical Study of African Religion, ed. Terence Ranger and I.

Kimambo (Berkley: University of California Press, 1972), 221-251; Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground:

missions as sites of conversation between religious systems, with indigenous peoples playing

a central role in those conversations.31 The end result is a growing understanding that

Christianity is not, and was never intended to be, an exclusively white man’s religion.

Instead, Christianity was experienced as a set of evolving, organic, and translatable concepts

and practices from which all peoples could appropriate what they pleased while disregarding

the rest.32 Native preachers sought to detach Christianity from its white, Western moorings

and insert it into their own religious, historical, and social worlds.

Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853

(Montreal: McGill University Press, 2002); Elbourne, "Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity," in

HMissions and Christianity in South African History, ed. C. Bredekamp and Robert Ross (Johannesburg:

University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1995), 65-96; Elbourne, “Indigenous Peoples and Imperial

Networks in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Politics of Knowledge,” in Rediscovering the British

World, ed. Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005); J.D.Y.

Peel, Aladura: A Religious Movement Among the Yoruba (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); Peel,

Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000),

589; Paul Stuart Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern

African Kingdom (London: James Currey, 1995); John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African

Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750,” The Journal of African History 25 No. 2 (1984):

147-167; Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The

Americas 44 No. 3 (January 1988): 261-278; Susan Neylan, "'Eating the Angel's Food': Arthur Wellington

Clah - An Aboriginal Perspective on Protestant Missions in Northern British Columbia, 1857-1909,” in

Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, ed. Alvyn

Austin and Jamie S. Scott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 88-110; and Neylan, The Heavens

are Changing: ineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (Montreal: McGill-

Queens University Press, 2003). See also Tiyo Soga, The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend

Tiyo Soga ed. Donovan Williams (Cape Town: Rhodes University, Graamstown, A.A. Balkema, 1983); and

Tolly Bradford’s forthcoming dissertation on native missionaries in nineteenth century British missions

(University of Alberta). See also a roundtable discussion of Africans and missions in Derek Peterson, Jean

Allman, Paul Landau, Nakanyike B. Musisi, Carol Summers, Kathleen R. Smythe, and Barbara Moss,

“Special Issue: Africans Meeting Missionaries,” Journal of Religious History 23 No. 1 (February 1999): 1-

127. For more on how Africans, subcontinental Asians, and other groups appropriated Christian literature

like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and situated it into their own cultural contexts, see Isabel

Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2004). I would like to thank Nancy Jacobs for this last reference.

31 For examples of translation and early American missions as sites of conversation, see Silverman,

“Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists,

Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1781 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint

Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2005); and Bonnie Sue Lewis, Creating Christian Indians.

32 Robin Horton, “African Conversion,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41 No. 2

(April 1971): 85-108; and James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial orth

America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100-124.

Translation and appropriation– rather than diffusion and conversion – is therefore a

more appropriate framework for understanding indigenous encounters with Christianity.33

There is little doubt that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most indigenous

peoples from Native America to Africa expressed either apathy or disgust at the Christian

missionaries who appeared in their lands, villages, and homes. At the same time, hundreds of

Indians and Africans voluntarily became preachers to their own peoples. Their diverse and

wide-ranging motivations are explained in the following chapters, but many of them shared

the belief that Christianity offered an opportunity to amass new spiritual power. They

usually did not see their appropriation of Christianity as a complete rejection of their

indigenous past, but rather one of several alternatives for understanding and explaining their

world. Some even understood evangelical Christianity as but one component of a larger

native revitalization movement.34 Their choices were not expressive of a complete

surrendering of their cultural traditions but rather a “highly conditional and selective

acceptance” of some elements of Christianity.35 While these preachers were certainly not

“representative” of their indigenous populations, they were nevertheless essential to the ways

33 Recent studies have correctly suggested that complete and total “conversions” to Christianity were

extremely rare. Indeed, Carla Pestana has argued that, “Because native spirituality was flexible in allowing

the incorporation of new concepts and novel spiritual beings, Indians could adapt some of the new religion

brought by Christians without rejecting their own traditions.” See Carla Gardina Pestana, “Religion,” in

The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2002), 81. For more on the problem of conversion in a comparative context, see Kenneth Mills

and Anthony Grafton, eds. Conversion: Old Worlds and ew, Studies in Comparative History Series

(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003). For more on the difference between diffusion and

translation, see Sanneh, Translating the Message. Neal Salisbury has recently suggested that conversion

itself is a bogus phrase and should no longer be used as a framework for understanding indigenous

identities during this period of contact. See Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity”: 257.

34 For more on Indian revitalization movements, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The

orth American Indian Struggles for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1992); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East From Indian Country: A ative History of Early America

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 180-233; Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and

Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Knopf, 1969); and Wallace, “Revitalization Movements,” American

Anthropologist 58 No. 2 (April 1956): 264-281.

35 Horton, “African Conversions”: 104.

in which some Native Americans and Africans appropriated and translated Christianity. For

them, translation was a two-fold process. On the one hand, translation was a literary project

whereby native preachers translated sacred texts into indigenous languages. On the other

hand, translation was also an intellectual exercise of translating Christian concepts into

indigenous spiritual frameworks. Good Peter, Old Isaac, and Deacon Thomas, for example,

were three Oneida Indians who translated Presbyterian Christianity to other Oneidas and

Mohawks in the middle of the eighteenth century. These preachers could “conceive and

relate Christian precepts in Oneida terms to aid nation members in grasping basic concepts.

Whenever they spoke to friends and relatives, these Oneidas were especially effective in

transferring biblical teachings and images into established Oneida constructions of reality.”36

Native preachers were therefore absolutely central not only to the rise of the Protestant

missionary enterprise, but also to the creation of indigenous Christianities during this period.

While I have tried throughout the dissertation to avoid jargon-laden theorizing, I

should note that there is certainly no lack of theoretical models to help us understand native

preachers in the early modern British Atlantic. Scholars like Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha,

and Paul Gilroy have all provided conceptual frameworks for understanding the nature and

boundaries of resistance, identity formation, and the “inescapable hybridity” of cultural

encounter in the early modern and modern eras.37 In fact, some of these missionaries could

accurately be classified as “cultural brokers” or even “Atlantic creoles”: people who lived

36 Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American

Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 62. Good Peter was also in the business of literal

translation, for he could also knew Mohawk as well as Oneida and English.

37 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Said, Culture and Imperialism (New

York: Knopf, 1993); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Paul

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1993), xi. A nice summary of postcolonial theory’s application to early American contact can be

found in Robert Blair St. George’s introduction to Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

between the worlds of Western colonialism and indigenous traditionalism. And yet, not all of

them were cultural brokers or Atlantic creoles, for those terms themselves are simply too

reductionist to explain the multiplicity of identities that missionary encounters created. A

cultural broker, for example, is usually defined as a person between Western and indigenous

cultural systems who attempted to negotiate the economic, political, social, and cultural

(including religious) relationships between them. From our perspective, native preachers

certainly fit the bill. And yet, from the perspective of a third-generation Christian preacher at

Martha’s Vineyard or Mashpee, Indian Christianity was not an alien religion but an organic

experience that was deeply engrained into Wampanoag culture. They were therefore not

negotiating between cultures because Christianity had become a central part of theirs. At the

same time, “Atlantic creoles” cannot possibly explain all of the black preachers who

participated in Atlantic world missionary efforts. While Ira Berlin has described an Atlantic

creole as someone who spoke both English and their native tongue, one African missionary,

at least, lost his native tongue in his effort to become Anglicized in the 1750s and 60s. In

other words, native preachers could be Atlantic creoles, highly Anglicized Africans, cultural

brokers, full-fledged Christian evangelists, conniving opportunists, and everything in

between. Since these native evangelists exemplified the multiple levels of hybridity, they

simultaneously reinforce and challenge the conceptual models of cultural exchange that

characterize our understanding of this period. 38

38 The historical and theoretical literature on cultural brokers is enormous. See Margaret Szasz, Between

Indian and White Worlds; Daniel K. Richter, “Cultural Brokers and Intercultural Politics: New York-

Iroquois Relations, 1664-1701,” The Journal of American History 75 No. 1 (June 1988): 40-67; Nancy L.

Hagedorn, “‘A Friend to go between Them”: The Interpreter as Cultural Broker during Anglo-Iroquois

Councils, 1740-1770,” Ethnohistory 35 No. 1 (Winter 1988): 60-80. Ira Berlin coined the term “Atlantic

Creole” in Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society

in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53 No. 2 (April 1996): 251-288; See also

Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in orth America (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1998), 17-92.

This dissertation in no way intends to serve as an apologia for Protestant missions,

and it does not seek to return to the hagiographic approach by painting native preachers as

innocent saints or culture heroes. Indigenous evangelists believed they had access to spiritual

power, but their roles as native preachers often left them abysmally poor, socially ostracized,

psychologically depressed, and spiritually anxious. They frequently lived, worked, and died

in social isolation, and the letters we do have from them reflect a sincere concern for the

souls of the people they were trying to save as well as their own. At the same time, their

position as sometime cultural intermediaries also gave them unique opportunities to oppose

empire, situate indigenous peoples into a longer history of Christian brotherhood, and use

scripture as a rhetorical weapon to secure a place for themselves and their people in the

physical, spiritual, and discursive landscape of the early modern British Atlantic world.

Sources and Organization

Fortunately, theologians, ministers, and missionaries were among the most literate

and conversant of all Atlantic world characters. Missionaries left an enormous documentary

trail of both published and manuscript sources that chart the role of native evangelists in

cultural interaction. Because most Anglo-American missionary history has often sought to

elevate or immolate white missionaries, the role of indigenous peoples has usually been

relegated to the background. But it was rarely erased. Instead, the stories, choices, and

experiences of native missionaries are often deeply embedded in the manuscript and printed

texts they left behind. My strategy has therefore been to examine most, if not all, of the

extant missionary literature of the period, fully understanding that a dramatic reconsideration

of early modern missionary history would inevitably entail a comprehensive review of all the

primary literature. I have therefore examined every tract produced by Puritan New England

missions, every publication by Eleazar Wheelock’s native evangelical program, nearly every

annual sermon and proceeding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign

Parts, and essentially every piece of missionary literature published from 1640 to 1780 in the

British Atlantic world. Although these missionary sources are highly mediated, usually

formulaic, and generally problematic, they still – when used cautiously and when cross-

referenced with other sources – provide a wealth of information about cultural exchange in

the early modern era. Like Emma Anderson, I view the complexity of these primary

materials as “a positive feature to be embraced rather than as a daunting hurdle foreclosing

further exploration.”39 Missionary writings were certainly complex and problematic, but they

were far from “fiction in the archives.”40

At the same time, I have privileged indigenous voices in telling this story, and there is

a surprising wealth of material on native Christians produced by their own hands.41 Philip

Quaque wrote several dozen letters - totaling nearly 200 pages - that detail his mission to

West Africans for over half a century. Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, whom I examine in the

fifth chapter, collectively wrote hundreds of letters, sermons, and diary entries.42 Their

39 Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial ative Convert (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 241.

40 Here I borrow from Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in

Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).

41 American Indian scholars have urged other academics to include indigenous voices in their studies of

native peoples, and I have sought to do that effectively. I do not, however, rely upon oral traditions, simply

because the wealth of written material and the flexibility of oral historical narratives of eastern American

Indians. For more on this argument, see Devon A. Mihesuah, “Introduction,” and Angela Cavender

Wilson, “American Indian History of Non-Indian Perceptions of American Indian History,” in atives and

Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, ed. Mihesuah (Lincoln, NE: University of

Nebraska Press, 1998), 1-26.

42 There is a major debate, of course, about the value of missionary sources. While some scholars have

described them as malleable and flexible (and therefore unreliable), others have found that few editorial

changes actually took place when they made the transfer from on-site recording to actual publication. See,

for example, Kenneth M. Morrison, “Discourse and the Accommodation of Values: Towards a Revision of

Mission History,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 No. 3 (September 1985): 365-382;

Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 235-241; Kristina Bross, “Come Over and Help Us: Reading Mission

Literature,” Early American Literature 38 No. 3 (September 2003): 395-400; Erik Seeman, “Reading

mission to the Oneidas alone produced nearly 100 letters that detail their work among the

Iroquois, their relationship with their hosts, and the conflicts that their evangelism

engendered. Native preachers thus left a surprisingly robust trail of manuscript and published

material to track their movements, ideas, challenges, and strategies for converting indigenous

peoples. As I explain in the first chapter, their writings, sermons, and songs might best be

understood as “autoethnographic texts.” While scholars have traditionally viewed indigenous

Christianity as passive subjugation to imperial and colonial authority, native preachers would

have thought otherwise. Indeed, they used their sermons, letters, writings, and even identities

as fulcrums against empire, colonization, dispossession, and racial slavery, and they

employed Christianity as a spiritual and rhetorical weapon to fight that battle. These

autoethnographic texts were therefore opportunities for native preachers to “represent

themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”43 We should not be so

quick to dismiss native preachers as pushovers simply because they never took up the musket

or tomahawk against white colonists. They instead turned to narration, the discursive power

to frame reality through words rather than weapons. “The power to narrate,” Edward Said

reminded us, “is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main

connections between them.”44 Native preachers were quite unique in that they had the

narrative power to destabilize and redraw those connections between culture and empire

along lines that they saw most fit. Privileging these texts while simultaneously using them in

Indians’ Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches,” The Journal of American

History 88 No. 1 (June 2001): 17-47

43 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

Hillary Wyss also employs Pratt’s concept of autoethnographic as well as transculturation to discuss Indian

texts in Writing Indians. “Transculturation” was first coined by Fernando Ortiz in his Cuban Counterpoint:

Tobacco and Sugar (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1947).

44 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.

conjunction with printed sources offers an amazing opportunity to outline the ways in which

native preachers understood Christianity, carved out a space for indigenous peoples within a

larger Christian history, employed their spiritual authority to lobby for indigenous rights and

protection, and fabricated their unique identities as indigenous Christians during a period of

intense cultural contact, exchange, and conflict.

In order to address these historical problems, I have organized Prodigal Sons into six

chronological and thematic chapters. While the first chapter establishes the centrality of

native evangelists to the seventeenth century Puritan New England missions, the second

explores the lingering debates about using Native American and black evangelists in the

Anglican Atlantic. It discusses the ways in which Anglicans supported an

interdenominational native mission to India while simultaneously failing to cultivate an

indigenous missionary corps in their own Atlantic realm. The third chapter situates Afro-

Moravianism in the Caribbean, South Carolina slave education, and Amerindian separatism

into a larger context of transatlantic evangelism from the 1740s to the 1760s. The fourth

chapter is an analysis of an African Anglican’s mission to West Africa. Based upon nearly

200 pages of letters he produced in fifty years of missionary work, this chapter explores

Philip Quaque’s narration of Christian African identity as well as his conceptualization of

empire and slavery. Chapter five investigates the mission of Eleazar Wheelock’s Algonquian

pupils to the Iroquois Indians in the 1760s. I argue that this mission produced unprecedented

conflicts between Wheelock and his pupils, his pupils and other native missionaries, and his

pupils and the Oneidas they were trying to convert. By the late 1760s, Wheelock had

conceded that native missionaries were ineffective, even if most ministers throughout the

Atlantic vehemently disagreed. In fact, Wheelock’s experiment greatly influenced the

development of a failed native mission to Africa by former slaves in 1773. My final chapter

looks at the ways in which Native American missionary history, as well as transatlantic Afro-

evangelism, formed the foundation of an ambitious mission to West Africa on the eve of the

American Revolution. It aims to show not only the comparisons between Native American

and African missionary histories, but also the deep entanglements therein. The conclusion

summarizes my findings while forecasting how black and Indian Christian leadership formed

the basis for autonomous communities from New York to Sierra Leone in the post-

Revolutionary era. Each of these chapters takes on a different conceptual problem as well,

including the themes of war, imperialism, religious translation, slavery, the boundaries of the

Atlantic world, evangelical revivalism, native Christian perceptions of other natives, and

connections between Indians and Africans. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate that

black and Indian evangelists were central to the development of Christian missions in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Pragmatism, Sacred Genealogy, and the Centrality of ative Missionaries

Native evangelists have always been a vital component of Christian missionary

activity. Writing about the rise of native clergy in the Philippines, Jesuit scholar Horacio De

La Costa noted in 1947 that “one of the most important tasks of the missionary, if not the

principal one, is the formation of native priests who can eventually receive from his hands the

administration and propagation of the Catholic Church in their own country.”45 De La Costa

went on to quote from French scholar Pierre Charles to assert that “the native clergy,

therefore, is not the coping stone of the missionary edifice; it is the foundation stone. The

truth is, that as long as it does not yet exist, the mission itself does not exist either.”46 While

45 Horacio De La Costa, S.J., “The Development of a Native Clergy in the Philippines,” Theological

Studies 8 No. 2 (June 1947), 219.

46 De La Costa, “The Development of a Native Clergy in the Philippines,” 221; Here he quotes from Pierre

Charles, Missiologie: Études, Rapports, Conférences (Paris: Desclée, 1939), I: 111-112.

De La Costa was writing about Catholic missions, the same could also be said for Protestant

ones. In spite of the centrality of native agents to the history of Christian evangelism, the

conventional image of a Protestant missionary as a white Anglo-American completely

unfamiliar with indigenous cultures has maintained a remarkable persistence. In spite of the

overwhelming corpus of scholarship on white missionaries, native preachers usually

outnumbered the white ones working beside them. A mission simply could not exist without

native participants.

Protestant missionaries had always been compelled to train indigenous peoples to

preach to other indigenous peoples. There were many reasons for this, but we can identify

several main advantages that native missionaries had over English ones. The most important

was language. Native preachers could act as literal and cultural translators between English

church officials and indigenous audiences. In spite of the best efforts by divines like John

Eliot, John Cotton, and Roger Williams to understand and publish texts in indigenous

languages, native missionaries’ ability to speak local dialects gave them an advantage that no

English minister had.47 As early as 1642, Thomas Lechford contended that, if Puritans were

to instruct Indians, it “must be in their owne language, not English.”48 John Eliot compared

the useless effect of English preaching with the efficacy of Indian preaching: “An English

young man raw in that language, coming to teach among our Christian-Indians, would be

47 See Roger Williams, A key into the language of America, or, An help to the language of the natives in

that part of America called ew-England [microform] : together with briefe observations of the customes,

manners and worships, &c. of the aforesaid natives, in peace and warre, in life and death : on all which

are added spirituall observations, generall and particular, by the authour ... / by Roger Williams ..

(London: Gregory Dexter, 1643); and Anne G. Myles, “Dissent and the Frontier of Translation: Roger

Williams’s A Key into the Language of America” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America,

ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

48 Thomas Lechford, Plain dealing: or, nevves from ew-England. A short view of ew-Englands present

government, both ecclesiasticall and civil, compared with the anciently-received and established

government of England, in some materiall points; fit for the gravest consideration in these times. By

Thomas Lechford of Clements Inne, in the County of Middlesex, gent. (London: W. E. and I. G., 1642), 53.

much to their loss; there be of themselves such as be more able, especially being advantaged

that they speaketh his own language, and knoweth their manners.”49 Eliot even admitted that,

“as for my preaching…I see that it is not so taking, and effectuall to strangers, as their own

expressions be, who naturally speak unto them in their own tongue.”50 The apparent

diversity of indigenous languages did little to dissuade church leaders, as they assumed that

any Indian who knew his own could easily pick up as many as 20 different languages in a

few years and be serviceable to as many as 40 different Indian nations.51 The importance of

indigenous languages is best demonstrated by Philip Quaque’s lack of it: when his Anglican

sponsors discovered that Quaque had lost his West African dialect during his decade of

training in England, they emphatically urged him to “recover his own language.”52 The

variety and complexity of indigenous languages made native peoples vital to any missionary

project.

The second major advantage that indigenous missionaries had over English ones was

the ability to tap into existing networks of kinship, trade, and friendship to spread the gospel

49 John Eliot, A Brief arrative of the Progress of the Gospel Among the Indians of ew England. (Boston:

John K. Wiggin & William Parsons Lunt., 1868), 5.

50 Henry Whitefield, Strength out of vveaknesse; or a glorious manifestation of the further progresse of the

Gospel among the Indians in ew-England· Held forth in sundry letters from divers ministers and others to

the corporation established by Parliament for promoting the Gospel among the heathen in ew-England:

and to particular members thereof since the last treatise to that effect, formerly set forth by Mr. Henry

Whitfield, late Pastor of Gilford in evv-England. Published by the aforesaid corporation (London: M.

Simmons, 1652), 6.

51 See Matthew Mayhew, The conquests and triumphs of grace: being a brief narrative of the success

which the gospel hath had among the Indians of Martha's Vineyard (and the places adjacent) in ew-

England: with some remarkable curiosities, concerning the numbers, the customs, and the present

circumstances of the Indians on that island : further explaining and confirming the account given of those

matters, by Mr. Cotton Mather, in the Life of the renowned Mr. John Eliot (London: Nath. Hiller, 1695),

11-12.

52 SPG Journal in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Records of the Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel. (East Ardsley, Yorkshire: Micro Methods, 1964), Volume 18, page 267. I want

to thank Mark Thompson for his insightful suggestion that Quaque’s loss of language might have been a

self-conscious way to fashion a new, English Christian identity. Although it made him less valuable as a

missionary, he might have intentionally lost his language to make him more English than African.

along those lines. Peer pressure, in other words, made Indians attractive missionaries. This

perplexed many New England Indians, for they often asked whether they should abandon

kinship ties if they were Christian and their relatives were not. John Eliot asked a group of

Indians about this problem in 1649, and they replied, much to Eliot’s satisfaction: “when a

strange Indian comes among us whom we never saw before…if he pray unto God, we do

exceedingly love him: But if my own Brother, dwelling in a great way off, come unto us, he

not praying to God, though we love him, yet nothing so as we love that other strangers, who

doth pray unto God.”53 Although this vignette suggests that Indians might have abandoned

some kinship ties, it would be foolish to assume that all did so as soon as a native preacher

came knocking. In fact, Indians had questions about how they could fuse an understanding

of their new relationship to their preacher with traditional ideas about native kinship. One

group even asked, if a wise Indian who teaches “good things” came among them, whether

that Indian was to be “as a father or brother unto such Indians he so teacheth?”54 Some

missionaries embraced Christianity simply because their kin did so. When Anthony, a

Christian minister at Natick, Massachusetts, gave an account of his own Christian awakening,

he told of how his brothers “prayed morning and evening; and when they eat, and on Sabbath

dayes…then I thought I would do so: but it was not for love of God, or fear of God, but

because I loved my brothers.”55 Black and Indian evangelists could take advantage of

53 Henry Whitfield, The light appearing more and more towards the perfect day. Or, a farther discovery of

the present state of the Indians in ew-England, concerning the progresse of the Gospel amongst them.

Manifested by letters from such as preacht to them there. (London: T.R. & E.M., 1651), 22.

54 Thomas Shepard, The clear sun-shine of the gospel breaking forth upon the Indians in evv-England.

Or, An historicall narration of Gods wonderfull workings upon sundry of the Indians, both chief governors

and common-people, in bringing them to a willing and desired submission to the ordinances of the gospel;

and framing their hearts to an earnest inquirie after the knowledge of God the Father, and of Jesus Christ

the Saviour of the world. / By Mr. Thomas Shepard minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ at Cambridge in

ew-England (London: R. Cotes, 1648), 35-36.

55 John Eliot, A further account of the progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in ew England: being a

relation of the confessions made by several Indians (in the presence of the elders and members of several

existing loyalties and kinship networks, shoehorn native missionary work into traditional

ideas of kinship, and sometimes even fashion new forms of identity based upon a sense of

Christian community and identity. Compared to English missionaries, for whom they had no

such loyalty, this was a very attractive advantage.

Native preachers were also more cost-effective than English ones. Ordained

Anglican preachers usually demanded anywhere between 40 and 100 pounds English sterling

per year, depending on the circumstances. By contrast, Petrus Paulus, a Mohawk Indian who

catechized, read prayers, and directed religious services at New York’s Fort Hunter when

Anglican preachers were absent, only cost about 7 pounds annually.56 Native preachers who

left their homes to be educated in English schools were significantly more expensive than

local catechists such as Paulus, but they were still more cost-effective. One Presbyterian

missionary organization ran the numbers in 1767 and found that it would cost about 120

pounds to give a native preacher seven years of education among the English. It would then

cost another 50 pounds annually (20 for salary, 30 for maintenance) to support that native

preacher in his mission. The Presbyterians anticipated that an English missionary would cost

about 100 pounds for one year, while an interpreter would charge about 50 pounds. English

preachers were definitely cheaper in the short run, but native ones were more cost-effective

down the stretch. Therefore, and in spite of the time and money spent on his education and

re-introduction among native peoples, a native preacher could actually provide a return on a

churches) in order to their admission into church-fellowship. Sent over to the corporation for propagating

the Gospel of Jesus Christ amongst the Indians in ew England at London, by Mr John Elliot one of the

laborers in the word amongst them (London: John Macock, 1660), 10.

56 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Classified Digest of the Records of the Society

for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1892 (London: Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1893), 837. Paulus’ salary can be found in the anniversary sermons of the SPG

during the 1740s and 50s. For more on the training of Anglican missionaries, see Alfred W. Newcombe,

“The Appointment and Instruction of S.P.G. Missionaries,” Church History 5 No. 4 (December 1936): 340-

358.

missionary organization’s investment just after his first year of service.57 This was an

attractive proposition for Protestant missionaries and it helps explain why Protestants kept

turning to native preachers, even when dozens of them left the schools, turned “apostate,” or

created their own religious followings. Their cost-effectiveness, combined with a general

propensity among English clergy to “decline the Difficulties and Dangers” of missions to

Indians and Africans, only made native preachers all the more indispensable.58

The very poverty, wandering, and scattered living that Protestant ministers often

found in Amerindians and Africans was the final pragmatic reason why native peoples

seemed ideal for missionary work. Few English ministers could learn the Indian language,

but fewer still would bear “going native,” moving out to the frontier, and living with the same

Indians they hoped to save. “Experience has taught us,” Eleazar Wheelock proclaimed in

1763, “that such a change of Diet, and manner of Living as Missionaries generally come into,

will not consist with the Health of many Englishmen.”59 John Eliot, writing several

generations before Wheelock, noted that missionary work in New England was difficult, “not

only in respect of the language, but also in respect of their barbarous course of life and

poverty; there is not so much as meat, drink or lodging for them that go unto them to preach

57 The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, Recommendation By The Society in

Scotland for propagating Christian Knowledge, In favour of the Academy established by Mr Eleazar

Wheelock, of Lebanon, in Connecticut, in ew England, For the education of Indian Missionaries

(Edinburgh: s.n., 1767), footnote on page 2.

58 Kenneth White, The Lets and Impediments in Planting and Propagating the Gospel of Christ. A Sermon

Preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, At Their Anniversary

Meeting, In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday the 15th of February, 1711/12 (London: J.

Downing, 1712), 41.

59 Eleazar Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful arrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present

State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763),

27.

among them, but we must carry all things with us.”60 Eliot believed that this Native

American depravity rationalized his preference for native missionaries over English ones. He

admitted that he found it completely “hopeless to expect English Officers in our Indian

Churches; the work is full of hardship, hard labour.” “Men have bodies,” Eliot wrote, and it

was pointless to expect an army of English missionaries to volunteer their efforts when the

challenges of eking out a living and providing for their own families demanded nearly all

their energies.61 A missionary’s life, Eliot claimed, was “Nothing but poverty and hardships,

unsupportable in a constant way by our cloathed and housed nations.” Indians, who were

members of “Their own nation” and had been reared in the rigors of Indian lifeways, would

therefore be “the most likely instruments to carry on this work.”62 Unlike white ministers,

who would find the uncultivated climates of the American frontier unsuitable to their

constitutions, native preachers would simply “return to what they were used to from their

Mother’s Womb.”63 Protestants expected that native missionaries would gladly take the

burdensome and demanding evangelical jobs that English missionaries shunned. After all,

their bodies seemed particularly well suited for to do so.64

60 Letter from John Eliot to Unknown, 12 November 1648, in Edward Winslow, The Glorious progress of

the Gospel amongst the Indians in ew England manifested by three letters under the hand of that famous

instrument of the Lord, Mr. John Eliot, and another from Mr. Thomas Mayhew, Jun., both preachers of the

word, as well to the English as Indians in ew England ... : together with an appendix to the foregoing

letters, holding forth conjectures, observations, and applications, by I.D. ... / published by Edward

Winslow. (London: Hannah Allen, 1649), 10.

61 Eliot, A Brief arrative, 5.

62 “An Account of Indian Churches in New-England, in a Letter Written A.D. 1673, by Rev. John Eliot, of

Roxbury. Copied Under President Stiles’s Inspection from the Original MS. Letter in Mr. Eliot’s Own

Hand Writing, in the Library of the Mathers at Boston,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical

Society, First Series, Vol. X (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1809), 128.

63 Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful arrative (1763), 27.

64 For more on Anglo-American ideas about climate and English constitutions, see Karen Ordahl

Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” The William and Mary

Quarterly 41 No. 2 (April 1984): 213-240; Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early

African bodies also made Africans particularly useful for the hard work of traversing

the West African, Caribbean, and Carolinian landscapes, but in unique and distinct ways

from Native American bodies. Not only were Africans understood to be more physically

adept at surviving in the tropical climates of those places, they were also seen as much less

vulnerable to the epidemiological havoc that tropical diseases could wreak on English bodies.

These pragmatic reasons for employing native missionaries were probably the most ironic

component of early modern cultural interaction. In fact, the very attributes that many English

commentators began to perceive as cultural liabilities for Indians and Africans (language,

difficult living, mobility, and strong bodies), ironically created opportunities for native

preachers to amass and exercise a tremendous amount of spiritual authority as preachers. In

other words, the same cultural characteristics that served to justify transatlantic slavery and

Indian dispossession paradoxically generated openings for Indians and Africans to perform as

native preachers. Because of their linguistic skills, access to kinship networks, cost-

effectiveness, and durable bodies, native preachers would eventually become vital

components of the early modern Protestant missionary enterprise.

There was more than mere pragmatism at work, for Protestants also looked back to

the days of early Christian history as a model for evangelization. This phenomenon can be

partially explained by a concept I call “sacred genealogy,” which I define as the myriad ways

in which Protestant neophytes were cast – and cast themselves – as part of a larger Christian

lineage that was both spatially expansive (part of a universal global church) as well as

temporally encompassing (stretching back to the early days of Christianity and looking

Colonial Period,” The American Historical Review 87 No. 5 (December 1982): 1262-1289; Joyce E.

Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in

North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54 No. 1

(January 1997): 229-252.

forward to the conversion of the entire world).65 This is more than just repackaged

millennialism. While Christian millennialism assumes that the world’s gentiles would be

recipients of the gospel, “sacred genealogy” – as I use it – is more concerned with the ways

in which indigenous peoples were vital participants in missionary work. Sacred genealogy

involved an intellectual exercise whereby understandings of scripture and early Christian

history created a space for Native Americans and Africans to gain access to Christian

spiritual authority as preachers. At the same time, native preachers participated in this

process of narrating themselves and their congregations into the history of Christianity. They

thus found ways to detach Christianity from its Western moorings to give it a uniquely

syncretic identity.66

The employment of scripture in missionary discourse goes much deeper than citing

the book of Matthew to remind Christians to go “teach all nations” or using the Acts of the

Apostles, which said “come over and help us,” to justify English missionary work among the

Indians.67 In fact, Protestant understanding of scripture and the early history of Christian

expansion in the first century both underwrote and explained why native missionaries would

not only be common, but ubiquitous in their missions throughout the Atlantic world. Early

modern ministers understood the discovery the New World and Europeans’ dominion over it

65 I borrow this phrase from Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962).

66 Historians of Christianity in Africa have been particularly helpful in conceptualizing the ways in which

Christianity became appropriated and translated by indigenous peoples. The literature on this topic is

overwhelmingly broad, but some important examples are Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion is

Christianity?; Sanneh, Translating the Message; Ranger, “Christianity and Indigenous Peoples: A Personal

Overview”: 255-271; and Brock, ed., Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change.

67 Matthew 28:19 and Acts of the Apostles 19:45. Throughout this dissertation I use the King James Bible,

a version with which Protestant minds would have been conversant. Kristina Bross has also argued that

Ezekiel 37, a passage where dry bones are resurrected by the word of the gospel, was also an important

metaphor for understanding missionaries’ role in converting native peoples. See Bross, Dry Bones and

Indian Sermons.

as, in the words of one Anglican minister, “a second remarkable period in the Gospel-

progress.”68 The first, of course, was when preachers like Paul and Barnabas traveled

through and evangelized the Mediterranean in the years after Christ’s death. This first age of

Christian evangelization was therefore universally understood as a model for future

gospelization, especially in the early modern Atlantic world. Consider language, for

example. Although language was a pragmatic advantage that native preachers naturally

possessed, Protestant divines called upon scripture and their understanding of early Christian

history to explain why native languages were a central component of missionary work. John

Eliot, for example, invoked the spread of Christianity in the first century and compared it to

native evangelical missions in Massachusetts, noting that “God is wont ordinarily to convert

Nations and peoples by some of their owne countrymen who are nearest to them, and can

best speake, and most of all pity their brethren and countrimen.”69 For Eliot, Wheelock, and

other missionary organizers, the cultivation of native preachers was not just a pragmatic

policy, but actually part of God’s divine plan.

This position derived partially from Protestants’ perception of their place in sacred

history. They often referred to the earliest days of the church as the “age of miracles,” a

period when God participated directly in the evangelizing process by giving the first apostles

access to certain spiritual powers that were unavailable to everyone else. These included not

only the nifty gift of healing, but also the “gift of tongues,” or the ability to speak in any

language extemporaneously. Yet most early modern Protestants lamented the fact that the

68 William Smith, A Discourse Concerning the Conversion of the Heathen Americans, And the final

Propagation of Christianity and the Sciences to the Ends of the Earth. In Two Parts. Part I. Preached

before a voluntary Convention of the Episcopal Clergy of Pennsylvania, May 2d, 1760; and published at

their joint Request. Part II. Preached before the Trustees, Masters and Scholars of the College and

Academy of Philadelphia, at the first anniversary Commencement (Philadelphia: W. Dunlap, 1760), 15.

69 John Wilson, The Day-breaking, if not the sun-rising of the Gospell with the Indians in ew-England

(London: Rich. Cotes, 1647), 16.

age of miracles had passed, and that human means were now necessary to accomplish the

“gospelization” of the world.70 St. George Ashe suggested that, since the gift of tongues was

absent and the age of miracles over, Anglicans should focus their energies on creating native

teaching colleges to “improve further the Natives so initiated, and such as may be judged

most capable of being useful in the Work of the Ministry.”71 Because of their linguistic

skills, native preachers were expected to perform the same functions that God’s miracles did

in ages before.

Sacred genealogy also implied a kind of spiritual equality even as missionaries

described indigenous peoples as savage and barbarous. Joseph Leng invoked sacred

genealogy when he noted that all peoples who participated in the advancement of Christ’s

kingdom were “Fellow-heirs” to Christ’s legacy. “The Gentiles,” he observed, “are now by

the Gospel capable of the same Privileges and the same Title to Salvation as the Jews,

without any Difference.” As spiritual descendents of Christ himself, each member was a

congregant in a universal church where national distinction and even ethnicity did not matter.

Leng concluded, “The church or mystical Body of Christ is but one, made up of the Faithful

of all Nations, Jews and Gentiles, of which Christ is the Head, and all true Christians are

members.”72 Experience Mayhew also made this point when he cited chapters 34 and 35

70 Letter from Sir John Percival to William Byrd, 3 December 1729, in George Berkely, Berkeley and

Percival: The Correspondence of George Berkeley Afterwards Bishop of Cloyne and Sir John Percival

Afterwards Earl of Egmont, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 260.

71 St. George Ashe, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday the

18th of February, 1714 (London: J. Downing, 1715), 15.

72 John Leng, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on Friday the 17th of February, 1726. Being the

Day of their Anniversary Meeting (London: J. Downing, 1727), 20-23. Joseph Butler suggested a similar

approach to missionary work when he noted that all people were fundamentally of the same human

creation, therefore they were of the same Christian family. See Joseph Butler, A Sermon Preached before

the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting

from the Acts of the Apostles to remind his readers that, in spite of the lurid tales of Indian

barbarity that emanated from Boston’s printing presses in the wake of King Philip’s War,

Indians were nevertheless part of a larger Christian family.73 He noted that God was “no

Respecter of Persons,” for he had made each human equally. As equal products of God’s

divine will, “all nations stand on one common Level before God, both in the Duty and the

Privilege of Sanctification: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, Barbarian, Scythian, Bond

nor Free.”74 Again, this missionary worldview was fundamentally predicated upon their

sense of sacred history. John Egerton, for example, reminded his Anglican audience that,

although Native Americans might seem barbaric in their eyes, they must remember that the

English, too, were formerly just as barbaric and savage before they were exposed to the

saving light of Christianity. Any man who engaged in the project of taking stock of Indian

barbarity must, Egerton concluded, “lead him to think with humility on the former condition

in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on Friday February 16, 1738-39 (London: J. and P. Knapton,

1739), 16.

73 Jill Lepore has estimated that over 15,000 copies of firsthand accounts of King Philip’s war glutted the

New England book market in the years after the war. See Lepore, The ame of War: King Philip’s War

and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 52.

74 Experience Mayhew, All mankind by nature equally under sin : a sermon preach’d at the public lecture

in Boston, on Thursday, Dec. 3, 1724 / by Experience Mayhew, M.A., preacher of the Gospel to the Indians

in Martha’s Vineyard (Boston: B. Green, 1725), ii. Interestingly, Cotton Mather uses exactly the same

language when discussing African slaves’ right to Christian instruction. See Mather, The egro

Christianized An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, The Instruction of egro-Servants in

Christianity (Boston: B. Green, 1706), 24-25. Finally, William Fleetwood argued in 1711 that Indians,

Africans, and Europeans were “equally the Workmanship of God, with themselves; endued with the same

Faculties, and intellectual Powers; Bodies of the same Flesh and Blood, and Souls as certainly Immortal:

These People were made to be as Happy as themselves, and are as capable of being so; and however hard

their Condition be in this World, with respect to their Captivity and Subjection, they were to be as Just and

Honest, as Chast and Virtuous, as Godly and Religious as themselves: They were bought with the same

Price, purchased with the same Blood of Christ, their common Saviour and Redeemer.” See William

Fleetwood, A Sermon Preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, At

the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday the 16th of February, 1710/11,Being the Day of their

Anniversary Meeting (London: J. Downing, 1711), 13.

of his own country.”75 Access to Christ was not solely based upon a national or ethnic

identity. God could bestow his grace upon anyone he chose. While native missionaries

might not have been as well groomed as their English counterparts, the fundamental belief of

universal spiritual equality by virtue of God’s creation (as well as their equality under sin)

gave them access to membership in a larger Christian church.76

According to Protestant writers, God’s omniscience and omnipotence also helped

validate the use of native agents in Protestant missions. One metaphor that was frequently

used in missionary discourse was that of the instrument. Protestants agreed that instruments

were vessels of God’s will, even if they could not understand their place in God’s divine plan

at that time. They believed that God’s knowledge and power could create suitable

instruments as God saw fit, even when such an act seemed irrational or illogical to English

eyes. “One single Savage,” an Anglican divine proclaimed in 1760, “may perhaps, thro’ the

power of the living God…be rendered an Apostle to the rest, and an instrument of turning

thousands from the ways of Darkness.”77 When Ezra Stiles and Charles Chauncy squabbled

over the propriety of sending African missionaries to Annamaboe in the 1770s, Stiles

reminded his colleague that God can make use of whatever instruments he desired. He noted

that God could “endow those whom he intends for Singular usefulness in the world especially

those whom he designs for propagating the Gospel among the benighted Heathen &

enlarging & building up the Kingdom of the blessed Emmanuel.” “From small beginnings

75 John Egerton, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday

February 18, 1763 (London: E. Owen and T. Harrison, 1763), 11. Joyce Chaplin has argued in a similar

vein for the nostalgia that English observers viewed in Indian archery. See Chaplin, Subject Matter, 79-

115.

76 For the ways in which Christian theology supported a monogenetic, or common creation, interpretation

of humanity, see Kidd, The Forging of Races,

77 Smith, A Discourse Concerning the Conversion of the Heathen Americans, 18.

and seemingly despicable Instruments,” Stiles concluded, “God has often accomplished great

things though often undertaken in spem contra spem [hope against hope].”78 In spite of

contemporaries’ concerns about the innate “capacity” of Indians and Africans, many

missionaries still believed, or at least suggested, that God could fashion a native ministerial

elite if he ultimately saw fit. This was how (Protestant divines believed) the gospel was

spread in the earliest days of Christianity, and they applied the same evangelical model to

their own era in history as well.

Protestant theologians thus articulated an interpretation of early Christian history, as

well a belief in God’s infinite knowledge and power, to reveal how native missionaries could

gain access to Christian spiritual authority. The symbolic process of ordination was another

way in which sacred genealogy connected indigenous preachers not only to the early days of

the Christian church, but also to Christ himself. During a typical ordination ceremony, the

clergy would participate in the practice of laying their hands on the new minister.79 Although

this might seem like a fairly insignificant moment, the act of putting one minister’s hand on

the future preacher signified a transfer of spiritual authority. Two Wampanoags from

Martha’s Vineyard participated in this ceremony, with John Cotton, Jr., and John Eliot being

the hand-givers. When one of them (Japhet Hannit) used his newfound spiritual authority to

secure William Simmons’ position as Dartmouth’s Indian preacher, he did the same.80

Although the laying on of hands might appear as an arcane ecclesiastical formality, the

performance solidified in the minds of the new preacher, the ministers, and the congregation

78 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, 8 December 1773, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Microfilm Reel 3.

79 This was a Judeo-Christian tradition that found expression in the Acts of the Apostles, chapters 6 and 8.

80 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of ew England, From its

First Planting In the Year 1620, Unto the Year of the Our Lord, 1698, Vol. II (Hartford: Silus Andrus,

1820), 375-376. The Magnalia was originally published in 1702 by Thomas Parkhurst in London.

that Simmons (like Hannit before him) had been initiated into a global community of

preachers; a community that traced its spiritual lineage back to Christ through the ceremony

of laying on of hands. This practice was repeated in 1759, when Samuel Buell ordained a

Mohegan named Samson Occom. After praising Occom’s piety, modesty, and Christian

conversion, Buell placed his hand on Occom and urged the new minister to “Go in the Spirit

of an Apostle, go do the Work of an Evangelist; Go lift up your voice in the Huts of Savages,

and cry aloud to the People that dwell in the gloomy Shades of Death!”81 As a newly

ordained minister, Occom had just been accepted into a sacred community that traced its

lineage back to the apostles. In fact, by virtue of his ordination, Occom had become one of

them.

Native preachers did not necessarily need this official process of ecclesiastical

ordination to participate in the propagation of the gospel. Although Puritans and Anglicans

alike assumed that the church-based ministry was the backbone of the Christian community,

they also understood that evangelism could not happen without a certain degree of itinerancy.

Some even noted that itinerant preachers, rather than settled ministers, could more accurately

be called the successors to the famous apostles. In 1733, Joseph Sewall claimed that

“Evangelists, or Preachers of the Gospel and Gatherers of Churches among the Heathen, are

much more properly and strictly, the Successors of the Apostles, than the stated Bishops or

Elders of particular Churches: the Office of the former much more resembling that of the

81 Samuel Buell, The Excellence and Importance of the Saving Knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ in the

Gospel-Preacher, plainly and seriously represented and enforced: And Christ preached to the Gentiles in

Obedience to the Call of God. A Sermon Preached at East-Hampton, August 29, 1759; At The Ordinaton

of Mr. Samson Occum, A Missionary Among the Indians. To Which is Prefixed, A Letter to the Rev. Mr.

David Bostwick, Minister of the Presbyterian Church, in ew-York, giving some Account of Mr. Occum’s

Education, Character, &c. (New York: James Parker and Company, 1761), 32.

Apostles, than the Office of the latter.”82 Indians who set out on the road to preach to other

Indians – such as Hannit, Occom, and even unordained teachers and preachers – were

therefore acting as latter day apostles.83 All of this is to say that, even as missionary writings

provided the rhetorical ammunition for dispossession, enslavement, religious violence, and

the creation of British imperial identities, there were a few unique ways in which missionary

discourses opened a window for native preachers to gain access to spiritual authority.84 The

decision to use native preachers was therefore not just a pragmatic one, for most missionary

minds looked to the early days of Christianity to explain how the gospel could be spread

through the rapidly expanding Atlantic world.

Missionary History as Atlantic History

Any attempt to convert indigenous peoples in the early modern era was but part of a

larger transatlantic, and even Supra-Atlantic, process, one that involved Europeans as well as

Native Americans, Africans, and even subcontinental Asians. Christian missionaries and

ministers were the most learned, connected, literate, and letter-obsessive people in a period

that had seen its highest rates of literacy up to that time, and by the eighteenth century they

had built integrated and complex networks of correspondence and information throughout the

82 Joseph Sewall, Christ Victorious over the Powers of Darkness, by the Light of His preached Gospel. A

Sermon Preached in Boston, December 12. 1733. At the Ordination of the Reverend Mr. Stephen Parker,

Mr. Ebenezer Hinsdell, and Mr. Joseph Seccombe, Chosen by the Commissioners to the Honourable

Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge at Edinburgh, to carry the Gospel to the Aboriginal atives

on the Borders of ew England (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1733), 42.

83 At the same time, there was a great debate about indigenous itinerant preaching, most Protestant divines

also understood that the rise of separate Indian congregations threatened to undermine the unity and purity

of Protestant Christianity. See Linford Fisher, “Traditionary Religion: The Great Awakening and the

Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776,” (Phd Dissertation, Harvard University,

2008), 210-266.

84 Stevens, The Poor Indians; Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons; and Catherine Hall, Civilising

Subjects: Colony and Metropole in The English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2002).

Atlantic world and beyond. Ezra Stiles, who planned an African mission in the 1770s, spent

his days writing to friends as far away as Surinam, Mexico, and Russia. Philip Quaque, an

African missionary stationed on the Cape Coast, wrote to colleagues in London, New York,

and Boston. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Puritan divine John Winthrop

was receiving news about Catholic missions in India and Japan from a friend in Bermuda.

Cotton Mather contributed money and books to a German Lutheran mission, sponsored by

Danish Royalty and funded by Anglicans, to southern India. While Susan M. O’Brien has

correctly argued that the First Great Awakening cultivated a “transatlantic community of

saints,” the revivals of the 1740s only crystallized pre-existing networks of communication.85

In other words, missionary networks from Native America to Europe, Europe to India, Africa

to London, and from the Caribbean to New England, “increasingly reinforced each other as

settlers, preachers, and religious literature passed to and fro between” these spaces.86 Most

Protestant missionary activity was centered on North America. And yet, that region became

both a model for and a product of other missions in the Caribbean, West Africa, and India.

Even as Euro-American preachers hoped to use imperial backing to advance Christianity,

they also understood that the “geographical empire of faith” usually outstripped national,

85 Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical

Network, 1735-1755,” American Historical Review 91 No. 4 (1986): 811-832. See also O’Brien,

“Eighteenth Century Publishing Networks in the First Years of Transatlantic Evangelicalism,” in

Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in orth America, the British Isles, and

Beyond, 1700-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and Goerge A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994), 38-57; Pestana, “Religion,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800; Stevens,

The Poor Indians; and Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons. For the transatlantic revivalism of the First

Great Awakening, see Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic

Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Eric Leigh Schmidt, Holy Fairs:

Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing

Co., 2001); and Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial ew England’s Revival Tradition in its

British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

86 Andrew Porter, “Church History, History of Christianity, and Religious History: Some Reflections on

British Missionary Enterprise Since the Late Eighteenth Century,” Church History 71 No. 3 (September

2002): 555-584.

geopolitical ones.87 This is certainly not to say that the Protestant missionary enterprise was

a homogenous, united, and monolithic venture. Missions were highly localized phenomena,

governed by their own local circumstances, problems, and exigencies, and I highlight these

problems throughout the dissertation. In fact, the history of these missions is ultimately the

history of tension between ideas, people, empires, generations, and cultures. Nevertheless,

the global nature of Christian evangelization, as well as the networks of correspondence that

knit these missions together, ensured that, no matter how isolated, every mission was viewed

by contemporaries as a component of a much larger effort. I have therefore followed their

evangelical efforts – focusing specifically on the native preachers employed by these

missionary organizations – throughout the Atlantic world and beyond. As such, this

dissertation could accurately be classified as what David Armitage calls a “Circum-Atlantic”

history, one that follows its subjects beyond geographical and political borders and into the

zones of religious exchange and cultural contact.88

My invocation of Atlantic history is not simply because it seems to be in vogue right

now, but rather because the subjects of this dissertation, the native peoples who tried to

evangelize their kin, were products of a global effort to spread Protestant Christianity. In

fact, of traders, empire-builders, and missionaries, missionaries were the only group whose

overriding ideology (to convert all nations) was truly global in nature. Merchants had to

battle the seas and competitors while empires had to battle one another, and world

domination by either traders or nations was unrealistic and implausible. Christian

87 Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, 1.

88 David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 15.

Armitage contends on page 16 that Circum-Atlantic history is “the history of the Atlantic as a particular

zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission…It is the history of the people who crossed

the Atlantic, who lived on its shores and who participated in the communities it made possible, of their

commerce and their ideas, as well as the diseases they carried, the flora they transplanted and the fauna

they transported.”

missionaries of the early modern era, however, sincerely believed that global evangelization

was not only possible, but actually inevitable. Catholics and Protestants agreed that the

world outside Europe was like a “sacred garden” that only Western Christianity could

cultivate and transform into God’s acres.89 As Anglicans noted in 1706, Christianity was

never meant to be “confined to one People or Nation, but to be Preach’d, and to prevail thro’

the whole World.”90 Early modern missionaries understood the age of exploration not as an

end in itself, but rather a preparatory moment in the eventual gospelization of the world, and

they viewed their world in millennial terms: the faster they could spread the gospel, the

quicker Christ would return.91 Every mission, no matter how far away, was therefore

connected to every other mission by a sense of a shared sacred history and a common

millennial future. One publication even took its readers on a virtual tour across the globe and

beyond the Atlantic, giving its audience a view of the progress that the gospel had allegedly

made from the West Indies to the East: “FROM viewing the joyful Progress of Christianity

among the Aboriginal Natives in the West-Indies,” the publication narrated, “it may be a

suitable Transition to pass over the Atlantick Ocean thro’ the Continents of Europe and Asia,

in a straight Course, about 10,000 miles, to view the happy Progress of the same Religion

89 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2006). For more on the idea of the American colonies as a religious periphery,

see Charles L. Cohen, “The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of

Christianity,” Church History 72 No. 3 (September 2003): 553-568. Laura Stevens has argued that

missionaries also frequently employed commercial tropes, as well as metaphors relating to husbandry, to

explain and articulate Christian evangelical motives. See Stevens, The Poor Indians, 34-61; and Stevens,

“Gold for Glasse.”

90 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, An Account of the Society for Propagating the

Gospel in Foreign Parts : Established by the Royal Charter of King William III. With their Proceedings

and Success, and Hopes of continual Progress under the Happy Reign of Her Most excellent Majesty

Queen Anne (London: Joseph Downing, 1706), 1. Lamin Sanneh has also reminded us that Christianity

was never meant to be just a “white man’s” religion. See Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity.

91 James Muldoon, ed., The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida,

2004), 1.

among the Aboriginals at Bengal, Cormandel, Malabar, and the Islands of Ceylon, and

Batavia in the East-Indies.”92 Protestants made explicit and direct connections and

comparisons between missions in Native America, Africa, and the East Indies, and this

dissertation takes seriously Peter Coclanis’ call for “the growing number of scholars studying

Indians in the West to pay a bit more attention to the Indians in the East.”93 No group was

more ambitious in scope than missionaries, and native evangelists would prove to be central

to Protestant evangelical activity throughout the Atlantic and beyond.

Furthermore, Protestant missionaries actually believed that the gospel had already

been spread in places where it did not thrive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Anglican divine John Wynne asked rhetorically in 1725, “How many large Countries are

there in Asia and Africa, where, in former Ages, the Gospel universally prevail’d, and was in

a flourishing Condition, that have now scarce any Footsteps of it left?”94 The answer to that

question, according to Wynne, was all of them. Protestant missionaries understood that the

key agents of returning these peoples to the fold of the church – or “reducing” them, in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ sense of the word – would be the future native converts

who already lived there. This explains why I chose Prodigal Sons as my title. Protestant

missionaries believed that, like the subject of the 15th chapter of Luke, the indigenous peoples

of the world had strayed from Christianity, and it was incumbent upon native preachers to

bring them back home.

92 The Christian Monthly History: Or, An Account of the Revival and Progress of Religion, Abroad, and at

Home Number I. For April 1745 (Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison, 1743-1746), 79.

93 Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang ach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic

History,” Journal of World History 13 No. 1 (Spring 2002): 179.

94 John Wynne, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday, the

19th of February, 1724 (London: J. Downing, 1725), 25.

This dissertation does not limit itself to Native Americans or Africans, but rather

integrates the history of native preachers from Native America, Africa, and even India.

Scholars of the Black Atlantic and Native America, however, have perpetuated the

assumption that Africans and Indians had “diametrically different experiences” with

European encounters.95 There is little doubt that African and Native American experiences

with European expansion and colonization were distinct, unique, and different, but they were

not always diametrically opposed. Missions to black slaves, Native Americans, and Africans

were connected through direct comparison as well as actual historical entanglements.96

Contemporary missionaries acknowledged these connections and entanglements between

indigenous peoples throughout the world, and particularly between Africans and Indians. As

one Anglican minister noted in 1760, preaching to Indians, white settlers, black slaves, and

Africans were “but different parts of the same undertaking.”97 Part of this was, of course,

grounded in a fundamental ignorance of the subtleties of indigenous religions. Anglican

Thomas Bray, for example, sent over a copy of evangelical instructions originally intended

for South Africans to some of the parishes in the colonial American colonies. His reasoning

was because Africans were “as to Religion, and their Way of Living…exactly like your

95 Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical

Review 111 No. 3 (June 2006): 751. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. See Brooks, American

Lazarus. Part of this debate stems from the problems of identifying the nature and boundaries of what

scholars have called the “Amerindian Atlantic.” For more on that problem, see Paul Cohen, “Was There an

Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European

Ideas 34 Issue 4 (December 2008): 388-410. See also Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, for examples

of Amerindians who crossed the Atlantic.

96 Here I invoke the concept of “entangled history.” See, for example, Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled

Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical

Review 112 No. 3 (June 2007): 764-786. See that journal’s forum on “Entangled Empires in the Atlantic

World.”

97 Smith, A Discourse Concerning the Conversion of the Heathen Americans, 18.

American Indians.”98 Bray concluded that Anglicans should “shew your Christian Zeal in

Converting the one, as well as the other.”99 “Both the American and African Indians,” Bray

suggested, were “upon the same Level, as to Matters of Religion.” Any evangelical effort,

therefore, may be “as proper to be pursu’d in the instruction of the one, as well as of the

other.”100 According to Bray, “African Indians” – an interesting phrase in and of itself – had

much in common with their indigenous counterparts in the Americas. This overriding, if

ignorant and shallow, attitude towards indigenous religions ensured that Protestants would

use similar methods when trying to convert non-Christians throughout the Atlantic world.

Native preachers would be central to these efforts. In spite of our natural propensity to divide

the history of blacks and Indians into distinct sub-fields, the missionary histories of the Black

Atlantic and Native America were inextricably intertwined.101

John Eliot and Eleazar Wheelock, for example, are most famous for their evangelical

work among Indians, but both had also preached to New England’s blacks while trying to

boost their missionary credentials.102 As I argue in Chapter 3, evangelical revivalism had

98 “A Memorial Relating to the Conversion, as well of the American Indians, as of the African Negroes. To

the Reverend Mr. Henderson, and Mr. Wilkinson, Commissaries, and the Rest of the Reverend Clergy of

Maryland,” in Thomas Bray, Missionalia: Or, A Collection of Missionary Pieces Relating to the

Conversion of the Heathen; Both the African egroes and American Indians (London: W. Roberts, 1727),

19. See also Morgan Godwyn, The egro's [and] Indians Advocate : Suing for their Admission to the

Church: or A Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the egro's and Indians in our Plantations.

Shewing, That as the Compliance therewith can prejudice no Man's just Interest; so the wilful eglecting

and Opposing of it, is no less than a manifest Apostacy from the Christian Faith. To which is added, A brief

Account of Religion in Virginia (London: J.D., 1680).

99 Bray, Missionalia, 14.

100 “A Memorial Relating to the Conversion, as well of the American Indians, as of the African Negroes,”

in Bray, Missionalia, 56.

101 See Cohen, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic?”: 388-410; and Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters.

102 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2004), 109; Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society,

and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 124.

similar effects on Afro-Moravian communities in the Caribbean as it did on Native American

Moravian ones in the Mid-Atlantic. John Quamine’s failed mission to West Africa, which I

examine in Chapter 6, was profoundly influenced by Native American missionary history.

Furthermore, and although European, Native American, and African religions were different,

they were neither mutually exclusive nor completely irreconcilable. All believed in an

omnipotent higher, supreme God, all contained creation stories that traced their origins back

to primordial battles between good and evil, all believed that good forces and evil forces were

actively involved in the natural world around them, and all provided a way of understanding

and extracting meaning out of human existence. Thus, Native American, African, and even

subcontinental Asian preachers – as different as they were – shared similar dilemmas of

religious translation, recasting their identities as indigenous and Christian, navigating the

problems of evangelical revivalism, positioning themselves in between empires and

indigenous peoples, and using Christianity as a tool for cultural, territorial, and spiritual

preservation. It is therefore essential for us to examine the ways in which the connections

and entanglements between Europeans, black slaves, Native Americans, Africans, and even

subcontinental Indians fashioned the Protestant missionary enterprise in the early modern era.

ative Missionaries in a Global Context

Just as Protestant ministers looked to early Christianity’s first apostles as a model for

how indigenous evangelization might unfold, they were also enormously interested in how

other groups – particularly the Catholic nations of France, Spain, and Portugal – dabbled with

indigenous preachers. For every missionary enterprise created by European powers, native

agents would play a central role, and not only in the attempt to propagate Christianity in the

terra incognita. Native missionaries would be at the crux of several imperial debates about

the relationship between indigenous capabilities and spiritual authority, the best methods for

spreading the gospel, and even the nature of empire itself. The Catholic Church led the way

by consistently maintaining the official policy of attempting to foster a native pastorate. This

received its most earnest expression when Pope Urban VIII founded a seminary, known

generally as the Propaganda Fide, for the training of both European and native missionaries

in the 1620s. The secretary of the college, Francesco Ingoli, agreed with Urban that because

indigenous peoples were still men, they were “consequently able [to understand] Religion,

and among them there must be some who are apt to be promoted to priesthood.”103 The

Propaganda Fide and the handful of other seminaries that developed around it were designed

to serve as the hub of an international, intercontinental missionary thrust from which native

preachers would commence converting the world. The college contained a polyglot mix of

students, cultures, and languages. A multilingual printing press churned out sacred texts in a

panoply of languages, and during the Epiphany one could hear sacred speeches being

delivered in “Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, Polish, Russian,

Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese and in diverse dialects of

India.”104 Pope Urban even offered several sees in Greece to native Greek preachers.105 Yet

the impact of this policy had been severely circumscribed by previous bargains the Vatican

had struck with Iberian powers during the age of exploration. In a series of papal bulls dating

from 1493 to 1508 Popes Alexander VI and Julius II granted the Catholic Iberian royalties

103 Luca Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North America,

1486-1760,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 216-217.

104 Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes From the Close of the Middle Ages Dawn From the Secret

Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources translated by Dom Ernest Graf Vol. XXIX (London:

Kegan Paulo, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1938), 214.

105 Luca Codignola talks at length about the Catholic Church’s proposals for spreading the gospel, calling

the Propaganda Fide the “least Eurocentric agency of the church” on page 217. See Codignola, “The Holy

See and the Conversion of the Indians.”

the authority to establish churches, ordain the clergy necessary to operate those churches, and

spread Catholicism in the New World. Although this ensured that Iberian Catholic

missionary work would have the patronage of royal authority, the agreement also implied that

Rome itself had surrendered the ability to dictate the specific policies that Portuguese and

Spanish missionaries would adopt. Rome’s role would only be an advisory one. While the

Catholic Church actively supported the creation of a native ministry, the Iberian powers

would be much more ambivalent about the propriety of such a policy.

The Portuguese had long understood the necessity of native pastors but consistently

kept them in subordinate positions. In their exploratory journeys of the early sixteenth

century, they brought back to Portugal several West Africans for missionary training. One

Congolese was Lisbon-educated and even ordained as titular Bishop of Utica (in present day

Tunisia). The Pope himself urged the Portuguese to ordain any “Ethiopians, Indians, and

Africans” that might be particularly suited for such work.106 By the middle of the

seventeenth century, one Portuguese cleric reported that the Cape Verde Islands had “clergy

and canons as black as jet, but so well bred, so authoritative, so learned, such great

musicians, so discreet and so accomplished, that they may be envied by those in our own

cathedrals at home.”107 Seminaries were formed for the education of a native pastorate in

Cape Verde, São Tomé, Principe, and Angola in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

When the Portuguese opened up a native seminary in Mozambique in 1761, they looked to

those previous institutions as models for how to successfully recruit, train, and prepare native

clergy for the rigors of missionary work.

106 C.R. Boxer, “The Problem of the Native Clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires from the

Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Studies in Church History VI, The Mission of the Church and

Propagation of the Faith, ed. Geoffrey J. Cuming (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1970), 85-86.

107 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 95. See also Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo”: 263.

Portuguese missionary policy in Asia, on the other hand, was fraught with

ambivalence. Because the Franciscan missionary Frei Rodrigo complained that his outpost in

Goa, India did not have enough evangelists, the Franciscans decided to open a school solely

for non-European students in 1541. By 1556 there were 111 students there, consisting of

mestizos, Malabarians, Canarins, Chinese, Bengalis, Peguans, Africans, Armenians, Moors,

Abyssinians, Gujaratis, and “5 boys from the Deccan sultanates.” And yet, some Portuguese

officials began to question whether a fully ordained native pastorate was a wise expedient.

The problem, of course, was race. It was alleged that Portuguese colonists would never

attend religious services if they were conducted by someone other than a pure-bred

Portuguese. The Jesuits responded to these pressures in 1579 by banning native clergy in

India, though they made a few exceptions for clergy in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and China.

This was the official policy of the Jesuits in Asia until the 1760s, when the Portuguese

empire began to crack down on Jesuit practices and reopen the door for the ordination of

native priests. Unlike the Jesuits, Franciscans and other orders still allowed a select few

natives to receive ordination if they possessed the right qualities. Yet the handful of native

preachers that emerged out of this messy situation faced an incredible amount of racism, not

only from Portuguese settlers but also from other clerics. After Pero Luis, a Christian

Brahmin, was ordained in 1575, he unsuccessfully spent the rest of his life trying to get other

native preachers like himself ordained.108 Another Christian Brahmin named Matheus de

Castro was refused ordination by the Archbishop in Goa. Seeing no other alternative, the

neophyte trekked overland from India to Rome in 1625, finished his theological studies, was

ordained a priest, and then was consecrated Bishop of Chrysopolis and appointed Vice-Vicar

of Bijapur. When he proudly returned back to India years later, the Jesuits accused him of

108 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 87, 90.

forging his ecclesiastical documents and declared that he could never be little more than “a

bare-bottomed Nigger.”109 Years later, the brother of an East African chief would travel to

Goa to receive religious instruction and ordination. Yet an Italian missionary would report

home that, in spite of the fact that this African Dominican was a “model priest,” he still faced

intense discrimination. As the missionary sadly reported, “not even the habit which he wears

secures him any consideration whatever in these places, just because he has a black face. If I

had not seen it, I would not have believed it.”110 The Portuguese empire began their

missionary drive by embracing native pastors, but intense racism had ensured that only a few

indigenous peoples in their empire would be ordained. By the middle of the eighteenth

century, the Portuguese returned to their original policy of allowing indigenous peoples to be

ordained within the Catholic Church. The result was that of the 200 Catholic missionaries

operating in India in 1835, only 16 were European.111 Indeed, by 1939 over 2,000 fully

ordained Chinese priests were attempting to spread Roman Catholicism throughout the

world’s most populous nation.112

Clerics in Spanish America expressed a similar ambivalence about the propriety of

employing native missionaries.113 As in other evangelical enterprises, the language barrier

necessitated the use of cultural brokers who could translate the word of God into indigenous

languages. Bernardino De Sahagun, for example, would not have been able to publish his

109 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 99.

110 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 97.

111 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 89,102.

112 Horacio De La Costa, S.J., “The Development of a Native Clergy in the Philippines,” Theological

Studies 8 No. 2 (June 1947): 222.

113 The best overview of native clergy in New Spain is in Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico:

An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in ew Spain, 1523-

1572, Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 217-235.

Psalmodie Christiana, the only Catholic songbook in Nahuatl, without the guidance of four

Mexican assistants who helped translate these sacred texts into the indigenous vernacular.114

Some theologians believed that the church could never be truly founded in the New World

unless indigenous agents formed its cornerstone. Rodrigo de Albornoz wrote back to Spain

requesting support for such a plan, anticipating that native preachers “will be of greater profit

in attracting others to the Faith than will fifty [European] Christians.”115 Another missionary

observed that he and his colleagues were absolutely dependent upon indigenous preachers.

He recalled that native interpreters would hear his own sermons, put on their clerical

surplices, and then preach to Mexican audiences “with so much authority, energy,

exclamations, and spirit, that it made me very envious of the grace that God had

communicated to them.” “It was they,” the missionary conceded, and not he and his Spanish

colleagues, “who carried the voice and sound of the word of God, not only in the

provinces…but to all the ends of this New Spain.”116 These attitudes helped catalyze the

opening of a college for the indigenous elite in Mexico City during the 1530s. The College

of Santiago Tlatelolco annually had about 60-70 indigenous students taking classes in

grammar, music, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, and even “Indian Medicine.”117 They lived a

monastic life, reciting the prayers of the Virgin Mary, attending Mass, and gaining enough

fluency in Latin to speak it “with the elegance of Cicero,” as one commentator put it.118

114 Dennis Channing Landis, The Millennium: Christianity in the Americas. An Exhibition at the John

Carter Brown Library, May – September 2000 (Providence: The John Carter Brown Library, 2000), 11.

115 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 90.

116 Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia Eclesiastica Indiana (Mexico: Antigua Librería, 1870). I want to

thank Barry D. Sell and Cristián Roa de la Carrera for assistance on translating this text.

117 Ricard, The Spiritual Cnquest of Mexico, 220.

118 Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 222.

Although the school had the nominal support of some of New Spain’s ministers, it

was constantly under fire by settlers, government officials, and even Catholic clerics from the

moment it opened its doors. There were two reasons for this. The first had had to do with

developing racial ideologies. There was a growing suspicion in New Spain that Indians

could never learn biblical truths because their intellectual capacity, and therefore their

spiritual acuity, was minimal at best. In his Historia Eclesiastica Indiana, Father Gerónimo

de Mendieta suggested that most native Mexicans “are not fitted to command or rule, but to

be commanded and ruled. I mean to say that they are not fitted for masters but for pupils, not

for prelates but for subjects, and as such they are the best in the world.” He even claimed

that if he could only get backing from a king, he could “have a province of 50,000

Amerindians” who would obey him and become Christian.119 Another commentator simply

stated that Indians “cannot and should not be ordained, because of their incapacity.”120

Racial lines hardened in New Spain during the sixteenth century, leaving the promise of a

native clergy a relic of the past. The second reason why the school in Mexico City became

defunct was a universal anxiety about religious heresy. Some clerics observed that it was “an

error fraught with dangers” to teach Indians and “put the Bible and all the Holy Scriptures

into their hands to be read and interpreted as they pleased.”121 Several skeptics even

suggested that reading about the polygamy of Old Testament patriarchs would only provide

scriptural justification for the Indian practice of having more than one wife. Offering literacy

and spiritual authority to Indians would naturally produce immeasurable challenges to the

Catholic orders that operated the missions of New Spain. At the First Council of Mexico in

119 Boxer, “The Problem of a Native Clergy,” 92.

120 Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 228.

121 Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 225.

1555, Catholic leaders agreed that Indians, Africans, mestizos or any other mixed-race

peoples could never be fully ordained in the Catholic Church. Although this would be

tempered somewhat by later councils and royal decrees, the point was clear: the Spanish had

briefly experimented with a native priesthood, and the experiment had apparently gone

terribly wrong.122 A few Indian preachers were operating in the countryside in the

seventeenth century, but they were never ordained and were often relegated to the “inferior

posts” and “thankless work” of preaching to poor mission villagers.123

Native preachers in New Spain – even though they were unordained – helped to

produce an à la carte version of Mexican Christianity from which natives would pick and

choose the scriptures, doctrines, and beliefs that grafted most easily onto their existing

spiritual practices and needs. Steven Hackel has recently noted that even as Catholic

missionaries in California carried devastating diseases while initiating a massive cultural

offensive on indigenous traditions, native peoples still maintained a significant amount of

control over the character and development of the missions themselves, serving as alcades

who kept Christian rules in place and overseeing the quotidian operations of the California

mission stations.124 Even without the creation of a native pastorate, Christian ideas, beliefs,

rituals, and practices could still be freely adopted in indigenous societies, as native peoples

merged these elements with their own religious traditions.

Like their Catholic counterparts to the south, the Jesuits who arrived on the shores of

New France also used native catechists regularly to help Indians learn the fundamentals of

122 This history of native missionaries in Mexico repeats itself in the Philippines, where the contest between

racial ideology and the need for native pastors also developed along similar historical trajectories. See De

La Costa, “The Development of a Native Clergy”: 219-250.

123 Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 235.

124 Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in

Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Catholic theology. Claude Chauchetiére recalled how, after the Jesuits had given some

Indian catechists a picture book that summarized Catholic history and practice, the neophytes

not only read them “with pleasure and profit” but also “preache[d] long sermons” from the

pictorial text.125 In 1637 two Montagnais girls were sent to Paris, baptized as Carmelite nuns,

and shipped back to Canada in the hope that they would assist Catholic missionaries by

acting as “dogiques,” or catechists, in the Catholic seminaries.126 The Jesuits also

manipulated the life experiences of certain converts to generate hagiographic symbols that

would implicitly urge other Indians to convert as they did. The most famous of these was

Catherine Tekakwitha, who Chauchetiére and Pierre Cholenac turned into a veritable symbol

of the Virgin Mary after Catherine died. In fact, Catherine eventually had 300 hagiographic

texts written about her life, conversion, and alleged salvation at the hands of God.127 This

strategy, of course, had its risks as well as its rewards. Recollect missionaries spent a

tremendous amount of time and money on one Innu named Pastedechouan, who was sent to

France, trained as a missionary, and then returned home to convert other Indians. The

tension between the two cultures, however, eventually caused him to be despised by other

Indians and distrusted by the French, and he died a lonely death as a cultural and religious

outcast.128

Historians have noted that the Jesuits became more flexible in their approach to

missionary activity after 1640, allowing more indigenous rituals and customs to penetrate

125 Allan Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations: atives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century orth America

(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 150.

126 Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” 217.

127 Greer, Mohawk Saint.

128 Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial ative Convert (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

into native Christianity and attempting to find common ground between native religions and

their own.129 Ironically, this flexibility did not translate into a recruitment of native

preachers. As late as 1832, when two Ottawas were sent to Rome to become Catholic

missionaries, there were still no native priests in Canada. We can only speculate about the

reasons for this general ambivalence towards native missionaries. Perhaps the Catholic

emphasis on martyrdom, a cup from which Protestants did not so freely drink, ensured that

there would be a steady stream of European missionaries in the New World. Whatever the

reasons, and in spite of their many attempts to employ native evangelists in their missions,

not one North American Indian was promoted to the Catholic priesthood during the first few

centuries of cultural encounter.130 Perhaps learning from these missed opportunities,

Protestant missionaries would take a different approach.

The Dutch, in fact, proved to have the biggest influence on English attempts to use

indigenous missionaries in the Americas. In 1691, Cotton Mather boasted that “our

Examples had awakened the Dutch to make some noble Attempts for the Furtherance of the

Gospel in the East-Indies.”131 Mather was either a liar or a bad historian, for the Dutch had

been using indigenous missionaries in the East Indies well before the English began training

them on the North American continent. A Scottish emigrant to Holland named Junius

undertook a missionary trip to the Dutch East Indies from 1631 to 1643. Working in and

around Taiwan, Junius claimed to have learned the languages of the indigenous peoples of

the East Indies. By the time he returned to Holland in 1643, he guessed that he had “taught

Six Hundred Schollers to Reade and to Write and that instructed, as well the elder as younger

129 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial orth America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 71-90.

130 Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” 219.

131 Cotton Mather, The triumphs of the reformed religion, 94.

persons, in the Rudiments of Christian Faith.”132 These teachers, Junius hoped, would

continue spreading the gospel while he traveled home to teach others the indigenous

language so he could return with an even stronger missionary corps. The Dutch, like the

Spanish and French, radically overestimated the success of their missionary work in the East

Indies. By 1650 they claimed to have converted 5,900 Indians, by 1671 the number was

17,000, and by 1702 it was up to about 300,000 converts on Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and other

islands.133 The ministers who carried on this work in the seventeenth century were probably

“utterly ignorant of their language,” so they relied extensively upon indigenous “School-

Masters who teach them, The Lords Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, a Morning

Prayer, an Evening Prayer, a Blessing before Meat, and another after.”134 The French,

Spanish, and the Dutch were therefore all very dependent upon indigenous agents in their

overseas missions.

Ironically, the first English effort to employ indigenous missionaries in the Americas

was in tidewater Virginia, not Puritan Massachusetts. The first charter of Virginia in 1606

claimed that one of the colonists’ motivations was to spread Christianity “to such People, as

yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God.”135

132 Caspar Sibelius, Of the conversion of five thousand and nine hundred East-Indians, in the isle Formosa,

neere China, to the profession of the true God, in Jesus Christ; by meanes of M. Ro: Junius, a minister

lately in Delph in Holland. / Related by his good friend, M.C. Sibellius, pastor in Daventrie there, in a

Latine letter. Translated to further the faith and joy of many here, by H. Jessei, a servant of Jesus Christ.

With a post-script of the Gospels good sucesse also amongst the VVest-Indians, in ew-England.

Imprimatur, Joseph Caryl (London: Iohn Hammond, 1650), 8.

133 For these statistics, see Sibelius, Of the Conversion of Five Thousand ine Hundred; John Eliot, Indian

Dialogues, For Their Instruction in that Great Service of Christ, in calling home their Country-men to the

Knowledge of God, And of Themselves, and of Jesus Christ (Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson, 1671);

and Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana.

134 Mather, The triumphs of the reformed religion, 94.

135 Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History, 7th edition (New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts, 1963), 8.

In fact, one of Pocahontas’s travel partners to England was a Powhatan Indian named

Nanamack, who was sent to England purportedly for baptism, a college education, and

missionary training. Although groomed as a future evangelist to the Powhatan Confederacy,

Nanamack died before he was even baptized.136 Since the English failed to bring such

Indians across the Atlantic to an English college, they decided to build an English college for

them in Virginia instead. This was precisely Sir Thomas Dale’s plan for a settlement at

Henrico, only a few miles up the river from Jamestown. By the 1610s Dale was trying to

establish the settlement as both “an impregnable security against foreign invasion” and a

springboard for cultural diplomacy with Native Americans.137 He dreamed that the more

scholarly of the Indian students would transform into “fitt Instruments to assist afterwards in

the more generall Conversion of the Heathen people.”138 Dale’s ambitious plan had major

flaws. Although he intended to pay ministers 40 pounds a year – plus room and board – he

had trouble securing them. Colonists who were recruited early to settle there were irate at the

lack of urgency in constructing the settlement, as Indians shot at unsuspecting settlers from

behind the forest’s trees. Furthermore, no indigenous peoples seemed willing to part with

their children and place them in Dale’s English school. He had neither teachers nor students,

so it was no surprise that, by 1622, the college had yet to be built. In that year

Opechanganough’s violent uprising effectively destroyed Dale’s utopian scheme just as

swiftly as Indians and English destroyed one another on Virginia’s riverbanks. The history

of Catholic, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch use of native preachers was therefore

136 Robert Hunt Land, “Henrico and Its College,” The William and Mary Quarterly 18 No. 4 (October

1938): 474 ff. 24.

137 Land, “Henrico and Its College”: 462. For a quick summary of the Henrico project, see Jennings, The

Invasion of America, 53-56; and Axtell, The Invasion Within, 179-180.

138 Cited in Land, “Henrico and Its College”: 491. Dale’s plan was not only to educate a native pastorate;

he also hoped to build a hospital in this utopian community.

fraught with ambivalence, contradiction, and missed opportunities. British missionaries

would remember these missionary failures vividly, even as they often threatened to repeat

them.

The English missionaries and native evangelists who comprise this story were never

completely isolated from these events, for their leading divines were quite aware of the

missionary histories of other nations. Transatlantic networks of printing and correspondence

ensured that they would always be tied into larger developments happening in other regions

throughout the Atlantic world and beyond. For example, Patrick Copeland, a former

employee of the East India Company and preacher in Bermuda, wrote to Massachusetts

patriarch John Winthrop in December of 1639. Winthrop had lately sent Copeland about a

dozen Indians who had taken part in the Pequot War and were stranded in Providence. The

letter indicates that the Indians had not yet arrived safely, but that Copeland had a grand

design for when they did. He told Winthrop that he would have “trained them up in the

principles of Religion; and so when they had been fit for your Plantation, have returned them

againe to have done God some service in being Instruments to doe some good upon their

Country men.” Copeland was quite optimistic that this strategy would work wonders in the

Puritan missions, for he had witnessed firsthand the success of such a policy along the littoral

of the Indian and Pacific Oceans while working for the East India Company in years prior.

He explained that the Dutch employed indigenous evangelists effectively in what is now

Ambon, Indonesia, where they had native preachers and schoolmasters who would

disseminate biblical truths in the “Molaya” tongue. “By these meanes,” Copeland reflected,

“many thousands of them are converted to the Christian faith.” Copeland also told Winthrop

that the Jesuits did the same thing in Nagasaki, Japan, through which method they “poisoned

thousands” with their Catholic fopperies. Copeland thus served as a kind of informant,

linking not only Atlantic, but also Indian and Pacific world missionary enterprises.

Protestants were quite aware of which missionary strategies were working in other places,

even when they seemed a world away.139 Therefore, when Protestants began to consider

missionary work among Africans and Indians in the British Atlantic, they looked to scriptural

history as well as other missionary enterprises throughout the world as models from which to

guide their own efforts. Practical considerations, an understanding of early Christian history,

and an acute awareness of what their religious competitors were doing all led to one

conclusion: native preachers would be central to any Protestant evangelical enterprise they

undertook.

139 Letter from Patrick Copeland to John Winthrop, dated 4 December, 1639 in Massachusetts Historical

Society, Winthrop Papers, Volume IV, 1638-1644 (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1944), 157-158. I

would like to thank Shona Johnston for this reference.

CHAPTER OE

APOSTLES TO THE IDIAS, 1640-1700

The sermons delivered to a small Massachusetts congregation in November of 1658

were part of a longer period of fasting and prayer that was organized “because of the great

raine, and great floods, and unseasonable weather, whereby the Lord spoileth our labours.”1

Ruined crops, cattle on the brink of death, and rampant disease had ravaged the community.

These were dark times. God clearly seemed upset with the congregation, and the first

sermons of the morning made it all too evident that they had to repent for the sins which

brought this terrible fate upon them. One preacher, described elsewhere as a “bashful man,”

appeared none too bashful when he chastised the praying community for their lackluster

spiritual piety.2 He drew upon the 22nd chapter of the Book of Genesis to explain how Noah,

like Nishokon’s own congregation, had to make sacrifices to God in order to be preserved.

The comparison with Noah made sense, for the torrential downpours they experienced that

autumn drew obvious parallels to the flood that Noah providentially escaped. This preacher

1 John Eliot, A further accompt of the progresse of the Gospel amongst the Indians in ew-England, and of

the means used effectually to advance the same set forth in certaine letters sent from thence declaring a

purpose of printing the Scriptures in the Indian tongue into which they are already translated : with which

letters are likewise sent an epitome of some exhortations delivered by the Indians at a fast, as testimonies of

their obedience to the Gospell : as also some helps directing the Indians how to improve naturall reason

unto the knowledge of the true God (London: M. Simmons, 1659), 14-15.

2 John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, Tears of repentance: or, A further narrative of the progress of the

Gospel amongst the Indians in evv-England setting forth, not only their present state and condition, but

sundry confessions of sin by diverse of the said Indians, wrought upon by the saving power of the Gospel;

together with the manifestation of their faith and hope in Jesus Christ, and the work of grace upon their

hearts. Related by Mr. Eliot and Mr. Mayhew, two faithful laborers in that work of the Lord. Published by

the corporation for propagating the Gospel there, for the satisfaction and comfort of such as wish well

thereunto (London: Peter Cole in Leaden-Hall, 1653), 53.

exclaimed, “God has chastised us of late, as if he would utterly Drown us; and he has

Drowned and Spoiled and Ruin’d a great deal of our hay, and threatens, to kill our Cattel.

‘Tis for this that we Fast and Pray this Day.”3 “We must by repentance purge our selves,” he

continued, “and cleanse our hearts from all sin.”4 If they were sufficiently penitent, the

preacher claimed, God would “with-hold the Rain, and Bless us with such Fruitful Seasons as

we are desiring of him.”5 The message of repentance during a time of trial was a classic

Puritan jeremiad: repent for your sins lest your soul (and your society) descend into an

infinite pit of hellfire.

In spite of the similarities with typical Puritan sermons, these were not typical

Puritans. Instead, the audience was a group of Massachuset Indians. Most importantly, their

preachers were also Indians. That Nishokon, the “bashful” Indian evangelist who implored

his audience to repent for their sins, chose the story of Noah is no coincidence. Although the

parallel with the torrential downpours was obvious, Nishokon had another agenda in mind.

In fact, his sermon can be read against the many debates and tensions inherent in the effort to

bring the Christian gospel to Native Americans during the earliest periods of cultural

encounter. While some historians have interpreted Indian preaching as an expression of

passive subjugation to imperial authority, I argue that Nishokon consciously chose Noah’s

story because he was situating Native American trials and experiences into a larger, sacred

3 Cotton Mather, The triumphs of the reformed religion, in America. The life of the renowned John Eliot; a

person justly famous in the church of God, not only as an eminent Christian, and an excellent Minister,

among the English, but also, as a memorable evangelist among the Indians, of ew-England; with some

account concerning the late and strange success of the Gospel, in those parts of the world, which for many

ages have lain buried in pagan ignorance (Boston: Benjamin Harris and John Allen, 1691), 119.

4 Eliot, A further accompt, 10.

5 Cotton Mather, The triumphs of the reformed religion, in America, 119.

history of the Christian commonwealth. 6 The Bible claims that, after the famous flood,

Noah’s three sons populated the earth. Japhet went to Europe, Shem to Asia, and Ham (the

one failed to cover up his father’s nakedness in a tent) went to Africa.7 Nishokon’s diatribe

established a subtle but ironic connection between Old Testament history and Native

American Christianity by employing a biblical story that offered no place for Native

Americans in the sacred geography of the world.

Nishokon’s sermon can be read in two ways, though both are not mutually exclusive.

The first is to characterize it as what Mary Louise Pratt has dubbed an “autoethnographic

text,” or an instance “in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways

that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.” “Autoethnography,” Pratt has argued,

“involves partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror.”8 The

sermon was therefore an attempt to use Christianity as a rhetorical device through which the

Indian preacher could establish his congregation as legitimate heirs to Christ’s salvation. By

analogizing Indian trials with those of Noah, Nishokon sought to carve out a space for

indigenous Christians within a larger community of believers. On the other hand, the sermon

was more than a text, for its orality also identified it as an act of sacred performance. As

Joshua Bellin has recently argued, performances like Nishokon’s discourse constituted “a

(more or less conscious) act of surrogation, a reinvention of a prior original.”9 The very act

6 See Constance Post, “Old World Order in the New: John Eliot and the “Praying Indians” in Cotton

Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana,” The ew England Quarterly 46 No. 3 (September 1993): 416-433.

7 For more on the invention of the story of Noah and the creation of geographic identities, see Benjamin

Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and

Early Modern Periods,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54 No. 1 (January 1997): 103-142.

8 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

9 Joshua David Bellin, “John Eliot’s Playing Indian,” Early American Literature 42 No. (January 2007): 4.

For more on the conceptual problems of interpreting Indian speeches, see Kristina Bross, “Come Over and

Help Us: Reading Mission Literature,” Early American Literature 38 No. 3 (September 2003): 395-400;

Craig White, “The Praying Indians’ Speeches as Texts of Massachusetts Oral Culture,” Early American

of having an Indian preach the gospel, in other words, meant that Nishokon, like other native

preachers, became an active participant in the process of constantly reinventing and

translating the meaning of the gospel message.10 In placing Indians within a sacred

genealogy that connected them not only to Christ but also to the ancient patriarchs of the Old

Testament, Nishokon assured his listeners that Native Americans did have a place, and a

central one, in the history and future of Western Christianity.

Explorers, printers, philosophers, and missionaries all wondered how Indians got to

where they were by the time Europeans arrived, and many searched for biblical evidence of

their origination. The result of these searches, more often than not, was the assertion that

“these are the children of Shem as we of Japhet…yea it seemeth to me probably that these

people are Hebrews, of Eber, whose sonnes the Scripture sends farthest East…certainly this

country was peopled Eastward from the place of the Arks Resting.”11 Several commentators

wrote extensive tracts, including the cleverly titled Jews in America, to prove that Native

Americans were one of the lost tribes of Israel.12 If this was true, of course, the significance

Literature 38 No. 3 (September 2003): 437-467; Erik R. Seeman, “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes:

Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches,” The Journal of American History 88 No. 1 (June 2001):

17-47; and Laura J. Murray, “Joining Signs with Words: Missionaries, Metaphors, and the Massachusett

Language,” The ew England Quarterly 74 No. 1 (March 2001): 62-93.

10 Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 1989); Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand

Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003); David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation:

Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary

Quarterly 62 No. 2 (April 2005): 141-174; and Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity,

and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1781 (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2005).

11 Henry Whitfield, The light appearing more and more towards the perfect day. Or, a farther discovery of

the present state of the Indians in ew-England, concerning the progresse of the Gospel amongst them.

Manifested by letters from such as preacht to them there. (London: T.R. & E.M., 1651), 14-15.

12 Thomas Thorowgood, Jews in America, or Probabilities, That Those Indians are Judaical, Made More

Probable by Some Additionals to the Former Conjectures. An Accurate Discourse is Premised of Mr. John

Eliot…Touching Their Origination, and his Vindication of the Planters (London: Henry Brome, 1660);

Manasseh ben Israel and Moses Wall, The Hope of Israel (London: R.I., 1650).

for Indian and English preachers could not be overstated, for it was believed that the

rediscovery and conversion of the Jews would lead to the eventual conversion of the world,

which “may be as a preparatory to his own appearing.”13 This was, in the words of one

historian, a “radically millennial” view: if Native Americans could be converted, Christ’s

return would be hastened, the days of judgment would begin, and the truths of God’s

revelation would finally be revealed to all humankind.14 The stakes were high. Protestant

ministers believed that the creation of American missions would be a seminal moment in the

sacred history of Christianity, rivaling that of Christianity’s rapid expansion in the first

century. They also believed that native preachers would be as central to the expansion of

Christianity in the early modern Atlantic as they were when the first apostles set out from

Jerusalem. And yet, in spite of their centrality to the hopes of ministers and the daily practice

of native Christian communities, indigenous evangelists have remained an overlooked

component of cultural encounter in seventeenth century Puritan New England. This chapter

seeks to fill that gap.

Historians of early American missions have often depicted English missionaries as

greedy, land-grubbing, and ethnocentric imperialists who simply used missionary activity to

mask imperial designs. In this interpretation, New Englanders appeared as early modern

mafiosos, using duplicitous strategies to pursue their “missionary racket” and shake down

13 Edward Winslow, The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in ew England manifested

by three letters under the hand of that famous instrument of the Lord, Mr. John Eliot, and another from Mr.

Thomas Mayhew, Jun., both preachers of the word, as well to the English as Indians in ew England ... :

together with an appendix to the foregoing letters, holding forth conjectures, observations, and

applications, by I.D. ... / published by Edward Winslow (London: Hannah Allen, 1649), 17.

14 Michael P. Clark, ed, The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and

Richard Baxter (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 32. For a much more nuanced view of Eliot’s

millennialism, see Richard W. Cogley, “John Eliot and the Millennium,” Religion and American Culture 1

No. 2 (Summer 1991): 227-250.

monetary funds from benevolent donors.15 They sought “complete control” over the

indigenous population and demanded that Indians commit “cultural suicide” to be admitted

into a second-class and segregated Christian community.16 Natives who did convert, at least

in this narrative, simply did so because they had no other options other than to ally

themselves with the English colonists who now seemed to dominate them. One scholar even

described the cultural disintegration of one Christian Indian group as “pathetic.”17 Over the

past two decades, however, historians influenced by the emphasis on agency within the fields

of social history and postcolonial studies have begun to reassess indigenous Christianities and

understand them as part of several viable options for dealing with, resisting, and encountering

European colonialism. This more recent scholarship has emphasized negotiation,

appropriation, and cultural translation in precisely the same places where older studies saw

opposition, imposition, and imperialism.18 Recent studies have also attacked previous

15 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 53.

16 Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The “Praying Indians” of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” The

William and Mary Quarterly 31 No. 1 (January 1974): 30; James P. Ronda, “We Are Well As We Are: An

Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” The William and Mary Quarterly 34 No. 1

(January 1977): 67. See also Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the

Making of ew England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). The historiography on

New England missions can be overwhelming. For two useful bibliographies on the subject see, James P.

Ronda and James Axtell, eds., Indian Missions: A Critical Bibliography (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1978); and Michael P. Clark, ed, The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas

Thorowgood and Richard Baxter (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 46-52.

17 Kenneth Morrison, “That Art of Coyning Christians:” John Eliot and the Praying Indians of

Massachusetts, Ethnohistory 21 No. 1 (Winter 1974): 89. Recent studies by literary scholars have focused

on the ways in which the Puritan evangelical enterprise derived its sense of mission and identity from its

encounter with Indians. See, for example, Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians

and Colonial American Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Laura M. Stevens, The

Poor Indians: British Missionaries, ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

18 The most comprehensive overview of missionary work in early America is James Axtell’s The Invasion

Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial orth America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),

which examines English, French, and Indian attempts to convert one another. Axtell’s work, in particular,

bridges the literature on invasion and cooperation. Although Axtell concedes that English missionaries

were certainly out to “reduce” indigenous peoples through Christianity, he notes that they ultimately failed.

interpretations of culture change because they usually perpetuated the “erroneous assumption

that it was imposed.”19 As David Silverman has recently argued, “Puritan missions, no less

than Catholic ones, were sites of conversation between two dynamic religious traditions,

rather than the imposition of a monolith.”20 This chapter embraces the latter interpretation of

intercultural exchange by exploring the origins of indigenous missionary activity in New

England, its appropriation by native peoples, the tensions it created, its demise during King

Philip’s War, and its resurgence shortly thereafter. It demonstrates that indigenous

missionaries were central agents in both the Christian missionary enterprise as well as larger

cultural encounters played out on the stage of early American history. This chapter therefore

places native preachers, who have usually been relegated to supporting roles, center stage in

this drama.

Ironically, Indians were better at converting English people to their own ways, rather than vice versa. For

works that eschew the imperial domination narrative for a more complex analysis of cultural interaction,

see Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1999); James Axtell, “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of Missions,”

Ethnohistory 29 (Winter 1982): 35-41; Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and ative

Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Elise M. Brenner, “To

Pray or to Be Prey: That is the Question. Strategies for Cultural Autonomy of Massachusetts Praying

Town Indians,” Ethnohistory 27 No. 2 (Spring 1980): 135; David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and

Religious Translation”: 141-174; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, Richard R. Johnson, “The Search for a

Usable Indian: An Aspect of the Defense of Colonial New England,” The Journal of American History 64

No. 4 (December 1977): 623-651; and also Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying

Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646-1730,” The ew England

Quarterly 63 No. 3 (September 1990), 396-428. Although it does not deal specifically with New England

missions, Richard White’s work on the Great Lakes region had had a powerful impact on the way scholars

read intercultural relations. See White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great

Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Allan Greer also uses a model

of religious translation in his recent book on Catherine Tekakwitha, though he also argues, as Natalie

Zemon Davis does, that “braiding,” rather than monolithic dominance, is the best way to examine

intercultural relations. See Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005). Davis has a much anticipated work coming out, entitled Braided

Histories. The best and most recent bibliography on the Eliot missions can be found in Clark, ed., The

Eliot Tracts, 46-52.

19 Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey”: 135.

20 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 174.

Puritan Missions as Indigenous Missions

Historians who have traced the history of early New England missions have usually

focused their attention on the writings and activities of the ubiquitous John Eliot. With the

volume of biblical texts he translated into indigenous languages as well as his creation of an

ambitious network of Indian praying towns, Eliot was certainly a key figure. But he was not

the only missionary in the field. There were a handful of other English missionaries

operating in early New England, including Richard Bourne, Thomas Mayhew, and John

Cotton, Jr. There were also Indian preachers. In fact, the Indian evangelists outnumbered the

English ones. From about 1640 to 1700, New England held 24 ordained Indian ministers and

many more native teachers, deacons, and informal missionaries.21 By the time of the

American Revolution, over 130 indigenous preachers had worked as evangelists to other

Native Americans in the American colonies.22 Decentralizing Eliot and declassifying him as

the most important figure in early American missionary activity helps move away from the

kind of New England exceptionalism that has plagued early American studies. 23 As

important as he was, Eliot was just one actor in a long drama of Christian missionary activity

among New England Indians. In fact, most of the main players in this drama were not

actually English.

New England Puritans expressed a complex range of impressions about Indian

culture and religion. On the one hand, many agreed with the convention that the region’s

21 Henry Bowden and James P. Ronda, John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues: A Study in Cultural Interaction

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 52.

22 Axtell, “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of Missions”: 36.

23 For a rebuke of American exceptionalism in American history, see Joyce E. Chaplin, “Expansion and

Exceptionalism in Early American History,” The Journal of American History 89 No. 4 (March 2003):

1431-1456.

indigenous peoples were, as Cotton Mather put it, “infinitely barbarous.”24 Indians were

often characterized as “Forlorn and wretched heathen,” and “wild creatures, multitudes of

them being under the power of Satan, and going up and downe with the chains of darkness

rattling at their Heels.”25 However, for a group of religious believers who contended that the

wily power of Satan reached everywhere, and for all of their rhetoric about the barbarity of

Indians, Puritan ministers from John Eliot to Jonathan Edwards still believed that Indians

were ultimately redeemable.26 Although there were major religious differences between

Indian and Puritan spiritualities – the Puritan emphasis on sin and literacy were novelties to

New England Indians – there were some general similarities. Both Puritans and indigenous

New Englanders believed that God (or multiple forces) and Satan (or an evil counterforce to

God) were active in peoples’ everyday lives. Daniel Gookin even remarked in 1674 that

indigenous religion was akin to the religion of the primitive Christian churches. He claimed

that natives had some nascent ideas of God and Satan. “Generally they acknowledge one

great supreme doer of good,” Gookin explained, “and him they call Woonand, or Maunitt:

another that is the great doer of evil or mischief; and him they call Maupand, which is the

devil; and him they dread and fear, more than they love and honour the former chief good

which is God.”27 Unlike Gookin, John Eliot painted Indian religion as nonexistent, as a

24 Mather, The triumphs of the reformed religion, in America, 80.

25 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of ew England, From its

First Planting In the Year 1620, Unto the Year of the Our Lord, 1698. Vol. I. (Hartford: Silus Andrus,

1820), from the epistle dedicatory.

26 Gerald R. McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and American Indians: The Devil Sucks Their Blood,” ew

England Quarterly 72 No. 4 (December 1999): 539-557.

27 Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in ew England (Boston: Belknap and Hall, 1792),

14. For more on religious similarity and dissimilarity, see Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence:

Indians, Europeans, and the Making of ew England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press,

1982); William Simmons, “Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans’ Perception of Indians,” The William

and Mary Quarterly 38 No. 1 (January 1981): 56-72; and Bowden and Ronda, John Eliot’s Indian

Dialogues, 29-32. For more on the persistence of witchcraft, superstition, and belief in the occult in Puritan

tabula rasa that Puritan theology would inscribe with its own meaning. He claimed that New

England Indians had no fundamental principles of religion at all, thus they “most readily

yield to any direction from the Lord, so that there will be no such opposition against the

rising Kingdome of Jesus Christ among them.”28 Nevertheless, Eliot, Gookin, and other

Puritan ministers agreed that Indians were savage but salvageable, riddled with barbarity but

ultimately redeemable.

Indian redemption was allegedly one of the driving forces behind Puritan

colonization in the first place. Like the Spanish missionaries working to their south, New

New England see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early

ew England (New York: Knopf, 1989).

28 Letter from John Eliot to John Winslow (?), dated October 29, 1649, in Whitfield, The light appearing,

28.

England Puritans understood the New World as a sacred garden that civilization and

Christianization would ultimately cultivate. Converting the native inhabitants of the New

World was vital to such acts of sacred gardening.29 The First Charter of Massachusetts,

drafted in 1629, contended that one of the primary motives of colonization was that Puritans

“maie wynn and incite the Natives of Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie

true God and Savior of Mankinde, and the Christian Fayth.” This, it proclaimed, was “our

Royall Intencon” and “the principall Ende of this Plantacion”30 The Massachusetts Bay

Colony’s official seal even had a Massachuset Indian at its centerpiece, invoking the 16th

chapter from the Acts of the Apostles and imploring English Christians to “Come Over and

Help Us.”31 By the 1640s, however, little had been done in the way of missionary activity, a

point that Thomas Lechford noted in his notorious tract, Plain Dealing. Lechford assaulted

Puritan leaders for not going out and preaching in Indian country, exclaiming, “They have

nothing to excuse themselves in this point of not labouring with the Indians to instruct them,

but their want of a staple trade, and other business taking them up.”32 Lechford’s criticisms

highlighted English laxity in preaching to the natives. In fact, the first Christian missionary

to Indians in Massachusetts was not John Eliot, but rather a Massachusett native who traveled

to a minister’s house in Salem, heard stories from the Bible, and then “went out amongst the

29 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2006).

30 Henry Steele Commager, ed. Documents of American History, 7th edition. (New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts, 1963), 18.

31 Acts 16:9 (New American Bible)

32 Thomas Lechford, Plain dealing: or, nevves from ew-England. A short view of ew-Englands present

government, both ecclesiasticall and civil, compared with the anciently-received and established

government of England, in some materiall points; fit for the gravest consideration in these times. By

Thomas Lechford of Clements Inne, in the County of Middlesex, gent. (London: W. E. and I. G., 1642), 21.

Richard Cogley has argued that the late start was a product of an “affective model” of missionary activity,

or the idea that conversion would begin slowly, eventually, once Indians conceded that they were ready to

hear the gospel. See Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War, 5.

Indians, and called upon them to put away all their wives save one, because it was a sinne.”33

Indian evangelists thus began the work of Christian evangelization while Puritan ministers

dragged their feet.34

Even John Eliot, whom historians recognize as the most famous apostle to the

Indians, did not express interest in missionary activity until the 1640s, and he had been in

Massachusetts since 1631. Exactly why he took up the call to preach to Indians is still

heavily debated, but we do know that he began learning indigenous languages in 1643, most

likely from an Indian who was taken captive during the Pequot War.35 Far from an expert in

native languages, Eliot felt that by 1646 he knew enough Massachuset to try to convert some

Indians, so he organized a series of camp meetings in the fall and early winter of that year.

They took place in the hut of an Indian named Waban, a man who previously held no office

or position of honor in indigenous society. The choice of Waban as a go-between is worth

exploring. English missionaries usually tried to cultivate an indigenous spiritual leadership

among existing native political leaders to graft a new, Christian hierarchy onto what they

perceived as an already well-established indigenous one. When they failed to do so, they

33 Anonymous, evv Englands first fruits in respect, first of the conversion of some, conviction of divers,

preparation of sundry of the Indians, 2. of the progresse of learning in the colledge at Cambridge in

Massacusets Bay : with divers other speciall matters concerning the country (London: R.O. and G. D. for

Henry Overton, 1643), 4.

34 Letter from John Eliot to Thomas Shepard, September 24, 1647, in Thomas Shepard, The clear sun-shine

of the gospel breaking forth upon the Indians in evv-England. Or, An historicall narration of Gods

wonderfull workings upon sundry of the Indians, both chief governors and common-people, in bringing

them to a willing and desired submission to the ordinances of the gospel; and framing their hearts to an

earnest inquirie after the knowledge of God the Father, and of Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world. / By

Mr. Thomas Shepard minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ at Cambridge in ew-England (London: R.

Cotes, 1648), 23-24.

35 Letter from John Eliot to Edward Winslow, December 2, 1648, in Edward Winslow, The Glorious

progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in ew England manifested by three letters under the hand of

that famous instrument of the Lord, Mr. John Eliot, and another from Mr. Thomas Mayhew, Jun., both

preachers of the word, as well to the English as Indians in ew England ... : together with an appendix to

the foregoing letters, holding forth conjectures, observations, and applications, by I.D. ... / published by

Edward Winslow (London: Hannah Allen, 1649), 19.

simply worked with whoever was willing to work with them, as was the case with Waban.

The meetings that Waban and Eliot established were informal gatherings, but Eliot used them

as opportunities to ask Indians questions concerning religion, deliver a series of lectures (one

of the main themes was the scattering of peoples after Noah’s flood), and even draw support

for a praying town in Noonatomen, near present day Watertown.36 Waban was installed as a

kind of Justice of the Peace there, and the town had a series of behavioral codes that included

cutting one’s hair, avoiding alcohol, shunning local shamans, and even refusing to “lie with a

beast” upon penalty of death.37 Waban began using his newfound authority to set out on his

own and preach among Indians near Concord, Merrimack, and other destinations north and

west of Boston. His most important accomplishment, according to English officials, was to

encourage others to take up the mantle of also spreading the gospel. One Puritan divine even

recalled that he produced a veritable cadre of skillful indigenous evangelists, as there were

“now many others whom he first breathed encouragement into that do farre exceed him in the

light and life of the things of God.”38 Puritan preachers imagined Christianity as a kind of

spiritual virus, one that could be transmitted most effectively through indigenous hosts. As

Waban and other native preachers began the work of evangelizing other Indians, Puritan

commentators began to boast of the progress of Christian evangelism in their own city upon a

hill. Thomas Shepard, the popular Puritan divine and Eliot’s personal friend, even

proclaimed that the early evangelical triumphs of Eliot and Waban should “move bowels, and

awaken English hearts to be thankfull.”39

36 For a general narrative of these first meetings, see John Wilson, The Day-breaking, if not the sun-rising

of the Gospell with the Indians in ew-England (London: Rich. Cotes, 1647).

37 Shepard, The clear sun-shine, 5.

38 Shepard, The Clear Sun-shine, 33.

39 Shepard, The clear sun-shine, 15.

In spite of Shepard’s optimistic, if quirky, assessment, church officials understood

that praying towns alone would not spread the gospel to the rest of New England’s

indigenous population. The praying towns that Puritan missionaries established were simply

the skeletal system of this new Christian community. Native missionaries, on the other hand,

would be the muscle, sinew, and tendons that connected the body of newly converted

Christian Indians together. Historians have suggested that praying towns were quite similar

to the famous reducciones of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, though they were much

smaller and involved forced migration only after King Philip’s War.40 Yet scholars have

rarely acknowledged the tremendous degree of autonomy that was so characteristic of many

growing Christian Indian communities.41 Although Eliot was the central figure in their

creation, the offices of church leadership were almost always filled with Native Americans,

and usually along genealogical lines.42 The ascension of Native Americans into positions of

secular and spiritual authority therefore meant that the quotidian operations of Puritan

missions were left to the Indians themselves. In transferring that spiritual authority to

Indians, Puritan missionaries created opportunities through which native preachers could

exercise an incredible degree of cultural and spiritual autonomy.

The most famous praying town was Natick, founded in 1651 and based upon a

Mosaic system of civil rulers and spiritual pastors and teachers.43 But, if Natick was the most

40 John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 74. Many of these towns became virtual Indian reservations after

King Philip’s War; a Massachusetts law restricted any Indian from living outside of these communities.

41 A comparable autonomy was felt in the Spanish mission of California in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. See Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish

Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

42 Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey”: 142-144.

43 For this plan see Exodus 18. See also John Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth: Or, The Civil Policy of

The Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ (1657).

celebrated praying town, it was also the most atypical, as it was large, close to English

settlements, and frequently visited by English officials. Natick’s Indian residents built

English-style houses, wore English clothes, and sported shortly cropped haircuts, mainly

because English ministers believed it was “absolutely necessary” for their Indian charges to

“carry on civility with Religion.”44 However, Natick’s status as an Indian city upon a hill

made it just as much a point of departure for native missionaries as it was a destination. Just

as Waban set out from Noonatomen, praying Indians who lived in Natick and other towns

also traversed the Indian frontier, using the towns as bases of operations. Cutshamoquin, for

example, traveled all the way from Natick to Narragansett Country to try to convert the

Indians of Rhode Island.45 When Daniel Gookin and Eliot began establishing a second wave

of praying towns in 1673 and 1674, they usually installed native preachers who lived,

learned, and prayed in Natick as teachers and preachers in the new towns. Eliot bragged in

1673 that many of these missionaries could “read, some write, sundry able to exercise in

publick,” and that many of them “doe every lecture day.”46 In other words, the praying

towns, especially Natick, were designed to serve as the multiple hubs of an integrated

indigenous missionary network that stretched to southern New Hampshire, Cape Cod, Rhode

Island, Connecticut, and even Long Island. When Indians set out on this missionary road,

44 Letter from John Eliot to a Gentleman of New-England, September 13, 1649, in Winslow, The Glorious

Progress of the Gospel, 16. For a historical survey of Natick, see Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by

Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in atick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997).

45 Undated letter from John Eliot, probably written in the summer of 1650, in Whitfield, Strength out of

Weakness, 10. Unfortunately, Cutshamoquin only brought back “strong water” instead of converts. When

he returned to his praying town, the congregation “suffered not him to teach; only he began the day with

confession of his sinne, and made a short prayer, wherein he confessed, Satan acted in his heart, begged

pardon.”

46 “An Account of Indian Churches in New-England, in a Letter Written A.D. 1673, by Rev. John Eliot, of

Roxbury. Copied Under President Stiles’s Inspection from the Original MS. Letter in Mr. Eliot’s Own

Hand Writing, in the Library of the Mathers at Boston,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical

Society, First Series, Vol. X (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1809), 127.

they were usually on their own.47 If this might have created tensions in the Protestant

missionary model, Eliot never mentioned it. For Puritan and other Protestant theologians, the

parish-based community was the locus of religious activity, and bands of wandering Indians

could certainly challenge that model of Christian community.48 Puritan divines probably

realized that Indians had to hit the trails as itinerant preachers if they were to pull other

Indian tribes into the orbit of Puritan Christianity. Ironically, Puritans believed that it took a

wandering Indian to keep other Indians from wandering and persisting in lives of darkness,

mobility, and savagery.

Each of the seven praying towns that were firmly established by 1670 had their own

indigenous ministers, church officers, deacons, and rulers. Hassanamesitt, near present day

Grafton, had a teacher named Joseph Tackuppawillin, whose father had previously been a

deacon of the church there.49 Okommakamesit, near Marlborough, employed a hard-drinking

teacher before Solomon, a “serious and sound Christian,” took over and restored order.50

There were also Indian preachers at Nashope (near Littleton), Wamesut (Tewksbury),

Magunkukquok (Hopkinton), Panatuket, and Ponkapog (Stoughton).51 Samuel Danforth

noted that, in Little Compton (in present-day Rhode Island), “They have pastors and elders of

their own, ordained sometimes by the hands of English Ministers, and sometimes by the

47 Elise M. Brenner argues, correctly, that praying towns were characterized by autonomy and self-

sufficiency. See Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey”: 140-141.

48 This tension between parish and itinerant preaching was a major theological controversy in seventeenth

and eighteenth century ecclesiastical history. For more on this tension, see Timothy D. Hall, Contested

Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1994).

49 Gookin, Historical Collections, 45. It should also be noted that, in traditional New England fashion,

place names (and even people names) had multiple spellings.

50 Eliot, A Brief arrative, 8.

51 For more on these individual towns see Gookin, Historical Collections, 40-45; and Eliot, A Brief

arrative.

hands of Indian Ministers in the presence of the English.”52 By 1674 there was only one

English missionary working in Cape Cod among a handful of Indian ones. The New England

Puritan missionaries who traversed the frontiers, supervised the praying towns, and

connected thousands of praying Indians through an interlocking web of native relations were

Native Americans, not English colonists. The praying towns were thus not the most

important or effective aspect of Puritan missions: the native evangelists who administered

them were.

Massachusetts Indian praying towns were certainly important, but native preachers operated all

over New England, within and outside of the institutional structure of the praying town. The tacks

represent all the places where native preachers operated in the first 100 years of religious contact. Image

courtesy of Google Maps. An interactive version of this map, including other native preachers in other

places, can be found at

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=111088942994730993369.00045afa8f7

52f7b46b26&ll=23.563987,-61.523437&spn=77.577758,112.5&z=3/.

52 Cotton Mather, A letter, about the present state of Christianity, among the Christianized Indians of ew-

England. Written to the Honourable, Sir William Ashhurst, governour of the Corporation, for Propagating

the Gospel among the Indians, in ew-England, and Parts Adjacent, in America (Boston: Timothy Green,

1705), 7.

If the missionary effort on the Massachusetts mainland was fundamentally dependent

upon indigenous agents, efforts on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, which the Wampanoags

who lived there called Nope, were even more so.53 In fact, while Eliot was learning the local

language and preparing to preach in the early to mid 1640s, a nascent Indian Christian

community was being formed around a handful of charismatic Wampanoag leaders. This

development happened simultaneously with, but separate from, the missions that were being

established on the Massachusetts mainland. When Thomas Mayhew, Sr. settled on the island

around 1642, he and his son began to learn the Wampanoag dialect and peripatetically

instruct Indians in Christian literacy. Although the younger Thomas would die tragically in a

mysterious shipwreck in 1657, by that time the mission was in the hands of the native

preachers whom he and his father had trained. The Mayhews were merely catalysts. As

historian David Silverman noted, indigenous agents, “not the Mayhews or [John] Cotton,

were the most active missionaries on the island.”54

The first of these was Hiacoomes, a man who became perhaps the island’s most

celebrated Christian Indian. About 23 or 24 years old by the time the Mayhews arrived,

Hiacoomes was described as a “sad and sober spirit” who had few friends and even less to

say in his community.55 Writing in the 1720s, Experience Mayhew (grandson of Thomas

Mayhew, Sr.) recalled that Hiacoomes’ “Descent was but mean, his Speech but slow, and his

Countenance not very promising.” Chiefs and other local men of import thought him “scarce

53 For general overviews of the Martha’s Vineyard Indians, see Silverman, Faith and Boundaries;

Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 141-171; and James P. Ronda, “Generations

of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” The William and Mary Quarterly 38 No. 3 (July

1981): 369-394.

54 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 168-169.

55 Whitfield, The light appearing, 3-4.

worthy of their Notice or Regard.”56 Faced with disrespect from the Indian community,

Hiacoomes probably viewed the arrival of the Mayhew family as an opportunity to recast his

identity as a person of repute. He approached the English family, befriended them, asked for

Christian instruction, and began fashioning a new identify for himself as a Christian Indian.

From 1643 to 1646, Hiacoomes studied scripture with the Mayhews, coming to understand

his own sinfulness, the love and wrath of God, the inner depravity of man, and other classic

Puritan doctrines. He got his big break, however, when his neighbors got sick.

Disease, which would later prove to be a major disadvantage to the indigenous

missionary movement in other places, actually worked in favor of missionary Indians on

Martha’s Vineyard. The Vineyard Indians had experienced periodic illnesses, but few were

worse than the series of epidemics that swept the island from 1643 to 1645.57 Miraculously,

the small band of converts who were beginning to listen to Hiacoomes’ preaching were hit

less hard than the rest of the population by this wave of diseases, and Hiacoomes and his

family suffered not at all. Hiacoomes cleverly seized the moment to rail against indigenous

customs, especially the use of medicine men and shamans (also called pawwaws) to cure

sickness. When his neighbors inquired about his apparent immunity to diseases, he replied

that he no longer needed medicine men or the spirits with which they tried to court favor. He

explained, “I have throwne away all these, and a great many more some years ago, yet am

preserved as you see this day.”58 He openly declared his faith in Christianity, doing so in

excessive “Zeal and Boldness,” attacking the pawwaw system, and exhorting his neighbors to

56 Experience Mayhew, Indian converts, or, Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable

number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard, in ew-England [microform] / by Experience

Mayhew ; to which is added, some account of those English ministers who have successively presided over

the Indian work in that and the adjacent islands (London: S. Gerrish, 1727), 1-2.

57 Ronda, “Generations of Faith”: 370.

58 Whitfield, The light appearing, 6.

repent for their sins lest another epidemic wipe them off the face of the island.59 Hiacoomes’

charismatic preaching and alleged immunity to English diseases helped him to cultivate a

sizeable following, even as other Christian Indians emerged as new spiritual leaders to

challenge the traditional religious authority of local shamans. When one of his own children

died from disease, Hiacoomes used the heartrending event as an opportunity to try to

extirpate Wampanoag funerary practices and embrace Puritan ones. As Experience Mayhew

recalled, “at the Funeral there were no black Faces or Goods buried, or howling over the

dead, as the manner of the Indians in those Times was, but instead thereof a patient

Resignation of the child to him that gave it.”60 At least for Hiacoomes, his embrace of

Christianity remade him into a new man who accrued temporal and even epidemiological

advantages from his transformation. While disease was a scourge to native peoples, it also

seemed to provide tangible evidence of the English God’s redemptive and saving powers for

Hiacoomes and his followers.

Although Hiacoomes remained a student of the Mayhews, who still instructed him

and offered weekly advice on how to deliver compelling sermons to the Island Indians, by the

1650s he had become a leader of impressive standing in his own right. Henry Whitfield, a

Puritan visitor, traveled to the island in 1651 and desired greatly to meet Hiacooomes, whom

he declared to be “a man of prompt understanding, of a sober and moderate spirit, and a man

well reported of for his conversation both by English and Indians.”61 In Hiacoomes’ view,

Christian teaching offered a chance to shake off a life of isolation and inconsequence to begin

a new one characterized by leadership, social importance, and spiritual power. By the 1660s,

59 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 9.

60 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 7.

61 Whitfield, The light appearing, 1-2.

his sacred transformation seemed complete. Experience Mayhew summed up Hiacoomes’

spiritual and social journey eloquently when he said, “tho formerly he had been a harmless

Man among them, yet he had not been at all accounted of, and therefore they wonder’d that

he that had nothing to say in all their Meetings formerly, was now become the Teacher of

them all.”62 When Hiacoomes attended a Puritan service in Boston during one of his

missionary trips to the mainland, the Puritan Congregation politely offered to “receive that

good Indian into one of their pewes,” not an insignificant gesture considering the rigid

hierarchy with which Puritans ordered their seating.63 A formerly forsaken Indian,

Hiacoomes now found himself sitting shoulder to shoulder with Boston’s elite.

It was propitious timing for the indigenous missionary movement on Martha’s

Vineyard. Disease forced the residents to explore alternative explanations for their trials

while Hiacoomes’ sudden transformation from quiet outcast to respected leader provided a

model and catalyst for future Christian indigenous leaders. They came in droves. Mittark, a

sachem at Gay Head, embraced Christianity in 1663 but was shunned by his own people. He

went off to the other side of the island and, like a prodigal son, eventually returned to his own

people as a preacher. Cotton Mather even gave Mittark sole credit for making the Gay Head

Indians “all Christians by profession.”64 John Tackanash, a more scholarly Indian

missionary, was “reckoned to exceed the said Hiacoomes, both in his natural and acquired

Abilities.”65 He preached with Hiacoomes at Edgartown, but when the church became too

big, it split into two congregations, Hiacoomes taking the small island of Chappaquiddick

62 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 5.

63 Letter from John Wilson, October 27, 1651, in Whitfield, Strength Out of Weakness, 13-14.

64 Mather, Magnalia Christa Americana, 378. See also Mayhew, Indian Converts, 21-23.

65 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 14.

and Tackanash heading the one at Edgartown. Japhet Hannit, another famous Indian

preacher on the island, seemed destined for greatness since his birth. His mother had

experienced several failed pregnancies before finally forsaking her pawwaws. One day,

when she was pregnant with Japhet, she slipped off into a field and had an epiphany that

there was only one true God, the God of the Englishmen. Her child was miraculously

delivered without a hitch and ended up becoming a Christian preacher “who not only is

pastor to an Indian church on Martha’s Vineyard, consisting of some scores of regenerate

souls, but also has taken pains to carry the gospel unto other Indians on the main land with a

notable effect thereof.”66 In addition to these major leaders, there were dozens of other

preachers, deacons, and ministers in Wampanoag churches. These included Momonequenm,

John Nahnosoo, Wunnanauhkomun, William Lay, Janawannit, Paul (or Mashquattuhkooit),

Joshua Momatchegin, and nearly 50 others. Like their counterparts on the mainland, native

preachers were the backbone of Christian missionary activity on Martha’s Vineyard.

The island’s women also played a central role in Wampanoag translation of

Christianity. Historian James Ronda has argued that, far from giving women a marginal role,

Christianity actually gave native women important roles as wives, mothers, and public

figures who could serve as Christian models for other women. In a kind of Christian twist on

the later concept of “republican motherhood,” Wampanoag women contributed to the

community publicly by raising their children as devout Christians.67 For example,

Experience Mayhew took special notice of Sarah Hannit (Japhet’s wife), who “was careful to

bring up her Children in the Nurture and Admonition of the Lord, frequently gave them good

66 Mather, Magnalia Christa Americana, 384. This miraculous birth is also recounted in Silverman, Faith

and Boundaries, 16-17.

67 For the original presentation of the concept of “republican motherhood,” see Mary Beth Norton,

Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1980).

Instruction, and would faithfully reprove them when they did amiss; and did also frequently

exhort them to the great Duties of Religion, and particularly of that of secret Prayer to

God.”68 Even though they never acted as official preachers, women still performed as

important agents in the adoption of at least some elements of Puritan Christianity among New

England’s native population.

By the mid-1670s Martha’s Vineyard had become a veritable city on a hill for

Christian Indians. As on the mainland, positions of Christian Indian authority descended

through genealogical lines, creating what James Ronda has called “Generations of Faith.”69

Of the 30 native church officials operating in Massachusetts by the end of the seventeenth

century, well over half of them came from the families of chiefs, elders, or other elite

lineages.70 These native Christian leaders also merged secular positions and spiritual offices.

Japhet Hannit was a magistrate before he became a minister. William Lay used both

religious authority and civil power to punish transgressors. Experience Mayhew recalled that

Lay’s “Way was first to apply himself to them as a Minister of Religion, or of the Word of

God, of which he was a Preacher, and endeavour to convince their Consciences of the Sins of

which they were guilty, and then bring them to a humble Sense and Confession of their

Faults.” If Christian supplication did not work, Lay would change his tune and “severely

chastise them for their Offences, making them know what Stripes for the Backs of Fools do

68 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 168. For more on women’s role in the Martha’s Vineyard Christian

community, see Ronda, “Generations of Faith”: 384-385.

69 Ronda, “Generations of Faith”: 369-394. David Silverman also argues that using maintaining traditional

native leaders, but just installing them as Christians, was central to the process of “religious translation,” or

fitting Christianity into indigenous systems of thought and power. See Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries,

and Religious Translation”: 146.

70 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 167. In this respect Hiacoomes was the

exception to the rule, a walking anachronism that both defied most social patterns while simultaneously

embodying the transformative power of Puritan Christianity.

intend.”71 Through their identity as Christian leaders, their apparent immunity to devastating

diseases, and even through physical force, Lay, Hannit, Hiacoomes, and other native

preachers jealously guarded their authority as spiritual and social leaders even as they sought

to carve out a space for native Christians in a colonial world.

Saints Out of “Savages”

New England’s Puritan missions were more dependent upon indigenous actors than

historians have previously recognized, but how did indigenous missionaries perceive that

relationship and conceptualize their own place in the history of Western Christendom? The

answer to this question is, of course, difficult to ascertain because they left few records. And

yet, the narratives of Indian conversion that John Eliot and other English missionaries

recorded do give us a sense of why at least some native preachers found Christianity

appealing and compelling. Far from being forced into embracing Christianity, native

preachers became evangelists for multiple reasons, and on their own terms. As historian

James Axtell has noted, indigenous peoples did not accept Christianity simply because of its

“inherent rational superiority.” Instead, “Christianity provided a better – comparatively

better – answer to the urgent social and religious questions that the Indians were facing at that

particular juncture in their cultural history.”72 In other words, Christianity was not forced

upon the converts, but was one of several systems of meaning, including indigenous ones,

that native evangelists could draw from to explain their past and provide hope for their future.

On the micro level, Native American conversion narratives – recorded by English

observers, of course – run the gamut from the compelling and sincere to the bizarre and likely

71 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 26.

72 Axtell, “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of Missions”: 36.

apocryphal.73 John Speen, a preacher at the famous praying town of Natick, recalled that he

knew little of, and cared less for, Puritan doctrines of sin and the afterlife when the

missionaries first came knocking. In a confession taken down in the 1650s, he admitted that

“When I first prayed to God, I did not pray for my soul but only I did as my friends did,

because I loved them; and though I prayed to God, yet I did not fear sin, nor was I troubled at

it. I heard that when good men die, their souls go to God, and are there happy, but I cannot

say that I believed it.”74 John’s brother, Anthony, who began praying because his brothers

prayed, never expressed a belief in the Christian gospel until one day, as he was building a

house, a hefty piece of lumber fell from above and crashed directly on his skull, splitting it

open. Anthony survived, but he always remembered the winter that “God broke my head” as

a seminal moment in his spiritual transformation, for he believed that this incident was a sign

that he needed to undergo a dramatic spiritual transformation to survive in this new cultural

landscape.75 Nishokon, the supposedly bashful man who gave that emotional sermon on

Noah’s flood, admitted at first that he only did what was fashionable in order to increase his

chances with the ladies. Cutting one’s hair was essential to living in a Christian community

(it was illegal to keep one’s hair long), but Nishokon said, “If I cut my hair, it was with

respect to lust, to please women; if I had long hair, it was with respect to lust, and all I did

was with respect to lust and women.”76 Nishokon’s first exposure to Christianity and English

civility, then, was not predicated upon a profound spiritual longing, but rather an attempt to

stay up on the latest fashions. A few native ministers probably became Christians in name

73 For more on Indian conversions, see Wyss, Writing Indians, 25-29.

74 John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, Tears of repentance, 28.

75 Eliot, A further account, 10. Historian James Axtell also uses this quote as an epigraph to begin chapter

nine of The Invasion Within.

76 Eliot, A further account, 4.

only and began preaching just for the money. It is impossible to determine how often this

happened, but being a preacher certainly had its temporal rewards. By 1671 Hiacoomes was

paid 10 pounds a year (half as much as an English minister), John Tackanash made 5, and

Mittark made 3.77 There is little doubt that some New England Indians became preachers

simply because the money was right.

And yet, other native missionaries might have had more weighty motives. For

Monequassum, his acceptance of Christianity was heavily dependent upon his sense of place.

He confessed that he initially rebuked the Christian message he heard in his town at

Cohannet. As the town became Christianized he even considered running away. Yet he

eventually agreed to become a Christian because, “I loved to dwell at that place, I would not

leave the place, and therefore I thought I will pray to God, because I would still stay at that

place, therefore I prayed not for the love of God, but for love of the place I lived in.”78 Love

of place, rather than love of Christ, motivated many indigenous evangelists. Other

confessions taken down by John Eliot and his son suggest many more reasons, including an

anxiety about sin (a novel but increasingly problematic concept for Indian religions), an

attempt to gain the upper hand against Indian enemies, or even to protect oneself from the

wrath of English military forces. One Indian named Wequash became a preacher out of fear.

A captain during the Pequot War, Wequash witnessed an English slaughter of the Pequots,

“where divers hundreds of them were slaine in an houre.”79 When he went out to preach in

77 Letter from Thomas Mayhew to the United Commissioners of New England, June 21, 1671, in Company

for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some

correspondence between the governors and treasurers of the ew England Company in London and the

commissioners of the United Colonies in America, the missionaries of the company, and others between the

years 1657 and 1712, to which are added the journals of the Rev. Experience Mayhew in 1713 and 1714

{Edited by] John W. Ford [Governor of the ew England Company] (New York: B. Franklin, 1970), 42.

78 Eliot and Mayhew, Tears of Repentance, 12.

79 Anonymous, ew England’s First Fruits, 5-7.

Connecticut, Wequash warned Indians of the apparent power that Englishmen had by virtue

of their relationship with God, telling of their successes in war and admonishing his

neighbors to cast off their sin, lest they share the same fate as their Pequot neighbors.

Indigenous Christianity was also a matter of power. Many indigenous peoples began

to believe that traditional methods alone could no longer serve as efficient responses to the

novel conditions of disease, colonization, and war that the English presence had wrought.

Accepting elements of English religion, therefore, was not a marker of complete and total

subservience, but rather a way to appropriate Christian power, command it, and use it to

guide future Indian affairs. Indians were seeking manitou, defined by Neal Salisbury as

“great resources of supernatural power,” and many did not necessarily see Christianity as a

form of cultural suicide, but rather as a spring of spiritual power.80 Hiacoomes was an

idealized example of this phenomenon. The Martha’s Vineyard Indian who appeared

completely powerless suddenly had access to great reserves of manitou that even the

traditional pawwaws could not break. He and his family were generally immune to diseases,

he was now a person of great repute, and in his preaching he “gave so great a measure of

faith and confidence in his power that he [was] soon beyond the fear of concealing his

contempt of their gods.”81 Pawwaws who tried to harm him were ineffectual. Hiacoomes,

some Indians now believed, clearly had access to new forms of spiritual authority by virtue of

his covenant with the English God. As one scholar has recently noted, Indians embraced

Christianity not solely on the basis of politics or convenience, but because “they believed

80 Neal Salisbury, “Religious Encounters in a Colonial Context: New England and New France in the

Seventeenth Century,” American Indian Quarterly 16 No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 502.

81 Matthew Mayhew, The conquests and triumphs of grace: being a brief narrative of the success which the

gospel hath had among the Indians of Martha's Vineyard (and the places adjacent) in ew-England: with

some remarkable curiosities, concerning the numbers, the customs, and the present circumstances of the

Indians on that island : further explaining and confirming the account given of those matters, by Mr.

Cotton Mather, in the Life of the renowned Mr. John Eliot (London: Nath. Hiller, 1695), 23-24.

they had entered into an alliance with an unprecedently powerful spirit whose guardianship

renewed their hope for the future without severing their ties to the past.”82

At the same time, indigenous preachers expressed varying levels of Christian

commitment, appropriated and translated different elements of Puritan theology, and fused

Christian beliefs and practices with native ones. Some Indians even saw Christianity as a

kind of native revitalization movement, or even a rebirth of spiritual knowledge that the

ancestors possessed but had long been forgotten by later generations. An oral tradition taken

down in the seventeenth century reminded audiences that, far from introducing novel

concepts and cosmologies, Christian missionaries were simply picking up where the ancients

had left off. The folktale suggests that the central tenets of the Christian message dealing

with “the Commandments of God, and concerning God, and the making of the world by one

God” were part of the Indian corpus of spiritual beliefs. In fact, the older Indians had

apparently “heard some old men who were now dead, to say the same things, since whose

death there hath been no remembrance or knowledge of them among the Indians until now

they heare of them againe.”83 Native preachers therefore rarely saw their adoption of

Christianity as a paradigm shift in their spiritual lives, for they sought ways to incorporate

Christian beliefs into existing Indian cosmologies and spiritual traditions. And, far from

producing a single, monolithic hybrid culture, this spiritual encounter produced innumerable,

complex fusions and resulted in multivalent answers for what it meant to be a Christian

Indian in New England.

It was one thing to embrace parts of Christianity, but quite another to prepare for the

rigors of missionary activity that Puritan officials demanded from native evangelists.

82 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 147.

83 William Scranton Simmons, Spirit of the ew England Tribes: History and Folklore, 1620-1984

(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986), 67.

Although indigenous missionaries possessed countless advantages over English ones,

including language proficiency, access to kinship networks, and the ability to survive in the

difficult terrain of the frontier, not everyone could take on the task, for being a missionary

meant being invested with an incredible amount of authority and responsibility. The New

England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in 1649, even rejected English

ministers who appeared to have some intellectual skills, but were not so “Godly & soe

qualified for the spirtuall parte of this worke.”84 For native missionaries, their newfound

roles as spiritual leaders sometimes produced in them a crisis in confidence. One such

preacher doubted his own abilities and feared that “I am one blind, and when I teach other

Indians I shall cause them to fall into the ditch.”85 Indian missionaries also needed to be well

prepared for the onslaught of questions and criticisms they expected to face in the field.

Puritan divines often commented on the number and difficulty of such questions, and they

interpreted Indian criticisms as both a demonstration of sincere interest in Christianity as well

as a real challenge for missionaries who were just learning Christian doctrine. Since such

criticisms and complex theological questions made preaching to Indians all the more

difficult, a missionary had to be familiar with theological argument and rhetoric. As John

Wilson noted, “there is need of learning in Ministers who preach to Indians, much more to

English men and gracious Christians, for these had sundry philosophicall questions, which

some knowledge of the arts must helpe to give answer to; and without which these would not

84 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, The ew England Company of 1649 (Boston:

The Prince Society, 1920), 34. For a general, institutional history of the Company, which I have

consciously avoided in order to focus on native experiences, see William Kellaway, The ew England

Company, 1649-1776: Missionary Society to the American Indians (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1975).

85 Eliot and Mayhew, Tears of Repentance, 6.

have been satisfied.”86 Although contemporaries might have doubted the intellectual aptitude

of America’s indigenous peoples, Puritan divines looked at the propagation of the gospel in

providential terms. If metropolitan audiences ever expressed doubts about Indians’ scholastic

abilities, Puritan clerics could simply invoke the infinite power of God, saying that God “can

make use of what Instruments hee pleaseth for this work.”87

Because Indians were perceived as an essential component of God’s plan for the

salvation for the world, their training and education would be central to how the rest of

sacred Christian history would unfold. “Seeing they must have Teachers amongst

themselves,” John Eliot summarized, “they must also be taught to be teachers.”88 It was in

this spirit that indigenous missionaries underwent two main types of training. The first was

in-school training, and there was no better place to build an “Indian Oxford” than at

Cambridge’s Harvard College.89 By 1656, the New England Company had amassed enough

funds to construct a basic structure on campus. One Indian student who graduated from

Harvard even before this “Indian College” was built was named John Sassamon, who had

served as a preacher at Natick, attended Harvard and eventually became an advisor to King

Phillip. His death in 1675 would spark one of the bloodiest wars in American history.90 Two

other students were personally educated by college President Charles Chauncy in the late 50s

and early 60s. One was Joel, the son of Hiacoomes, and the other was a very promising

86 Wilson, The Day-Breaking, 17.

87 Shepard, The Clear Sun-Shine, 36.

88 Eliot, A Brief arrative of the Progress of the Gospel, 5.

89 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth Century Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1936), 340. For more on this design, see Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth Century, 340-360.

90 For more on Sassamon, read Jill Lepore, The ame of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of

American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 21-47.

student named Caleb. Chauncy publicly examined the Indian candidates at Harvard’s spring

commencements in subjects they had learned that academic year, especially Latin. If they

followed the traditional Harvard regimen, the future preachers probably would have also

dabbled in logic, medicine, ethics, politics, arithmetic, geometry, and even astronomy, not to

mention Greek, grammar, and etymology. The best students would undergo some training in

Hebrew and other languages in order to access and understand ancient sacred texts.91 By

1664, Chauncy proudly boasted to Robert Boyle, the famous scientist who headed The New

England Company at the time, that, “I have trained up two of the Indians and instructed them

in Arts and languages until that nowe they are in some good measure fit to preach to the

Indians and doe it w(th) hope of comfortable success.”92 Sadly, Joel and Caleb’s futures

were not as bright as their successes at Harvard. Joel died when his boat was shipwrecked

during a return trip from visiting his family on the Vineyard in 1665. Caleb, who graduated

from Harvard that same year, died the following winter from tuberculosis.93 Another

promising young Indian student named Eleazar died right before his own graduation.

Benjamin Larnel, of the class of 1716, did the same.94 Harvard had a handful of capable

young Indian students, but they seemed to keep dying, perennially putting the indigenous

missionary effort back at square one.95 Proximity to English education also entailed

proximity to English diseases, and native preachers who went to Harvard or received an

91 Anonymous, ew England’s First Fruits, 12.

92 Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some

correspondence, 10.

93 Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, Some Correspondence, 13-14.

94 Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth Century, 356-357.

95 John Eliot anticipated that it might cost 10 pounds a year to educate a student, but that was probably well

short of the mark. See Letter from John Eliot to [???], October 29, 1649, in Whitfield, The light appearing,

17-18.

education from white ministers often died in droves. The problem of Indian death became so

acute that Harvard eventually abandoned the Indian College and their native missionary

project. Only a few years after the Indian College was opened did it get transformed into a

printing office. By 1698 the building was torn down without pomp or ceremony to make

way for other college offices.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the printing press stored at the Indian College was the

same press that began printing thousands of pages of biblical texts in Algonquian in the

1660s and 1670s. The New England Company sent printer Marmaduke Johnson, a man

reputed to be “loose in his life and conversation,” to set the type.96 Eliot had previously

published a catechism in 1653, but in the 1660s he published an entire bible, an Indian

grammar, and an Indian primer. He also had printed Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety and his

good friend Richard Baxter’s A Call to the Unconverted, two texts which emphasized

repenting for sin while embracing inward piety.97 Historians have examined these texts but

have neglected the primary reason why Eliot printed them in the first place: to train

indigenous missionaries. As early as 1650, when there was dim hope he would have

anything printed at all, Eliot asserted, “my chief care is to communicate as much of the

Scriptures as I can by writing: and further, my scope [is] to train up both men and youths;

that when they be in some measure instructed themselves, they may be sent forth to other

parts of the Countrey, to train up and instruct others, even as they themselves have been

96 Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, Some Correspondence, 9.

97 Salisbury, “Red Puritans”: 44-45; and John Eliot, The Indian Primer; or, The Way of Training up of Our

Indian Youth in the Good Knowledge of God, in the Knowledge of the Scriptures and in an ability to read

(Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson, 1669).

trained up and instructed.”98 No text would be as important in pursuing this plan as Eliot’s

Indian Dialogues, published in 1671.

John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues consisted of a series of three prolonged, imaginary

conversations between indigenous missionaries and audiences who questioned them.

Designed to help English and educated Indian evangelists in the missionary field, the

dialogues resembled the structure and format of a play, and the line between fact and fiction

in these Socratic conversations was not very clear, as Eliot readily admitted. In the preface

he conceded that “These dialogues are partly historical, of some things that were done and

said, and partly instructive, to show what might or should have been said.”99 While the

second dialogue discussed the theological intricacies of Puritan doctrine, the third was an

imaginary conversation between King Philip and other indigenous missionaries, with King

Philip eventually coming around to the Christian persuasion, of course. The first dialogue,

however, represented what Eliot and other English missionaries assumed, or even hoped, a

typical meeting between an indigenous missionary and a non-Christian Indian would be like.

In this first dialogue, Piumbukhou, an Indian preacher, visits Kinsman, his long-lost

relative.100 They begin with a cordial salutation and Kinsman wishes to hear more of the new

religion that Piumbukhou was proselytizing. After only a few minutes, however, Kinsman

quickly accuses Piumbukhou of leaving his home, abandoning his identity, and forgetting his

old ways. Piumbukhou cleverly responds that his new religion, his new identity, was forged

in the light, whereas his former self lived in perpetual darkness. The debate rises in intensity

after Piumbukhou is invited into Kinsman’s home to stay the night. Once inside, Kinsman

98 Whitfield, Strength out of vveaknesse, 6.

99 Bowden and Ronda, eds., John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues, 61.

100 This scenario points to the centrality of kinship networks in the reasoning behind the use of native

preachers.

asks the obvious question that most Indians wanted to know: what were the material

advantages of conversion, and will “your praying to God exempt you from sickness, poverty,

nakedness? Will praying to God fill you with food, gladness, and garments?” Piumbukhou

immediately notes that all Christian Indians, at least at Natick, were healthy, well-fed, and

happy. Yet even as the native missionary answers in the affirmative to these questions, he

also contends that material advantages were not the main reason for his own conversion: “If

praying to God did bring with it outward plenty and worldly prosperity, then a carnal people

would pray to God, not because they love God, or praying to God, but because they love

themselves.”101 Kinsman seems satisfied with the answer – he was, all the while, a fairly

easy sell – but his wife and family are less convinced. In order to persuade them,

Piumbukhou ups the ante, comparing indigenous religious practices to living like dogs and

even invoking the fire and brimstone rhetoric that had become so central to Puritan oratorical

practices. Piumbukhou warns his audience to repent, for there were more than lifestyle

changes at stake: “Your souls feed upon nothing but lust, and lying, and stealing, and killing,

and Sabbath-breaking, and pauwauing. And all these sins are sins which poison, starve, and

kill your souls, and expose them to God’s wrath that they may be tormented among devils

and wicked men in hell fire forever.”102 Predictably, Kinsman and his kin eventually come

around, acknowledging the inherent truth and logic of Christianity. Although this was a

fictional exchange between a neophyte and a potential convert, the lessons that native

missionaries in training could take from it were quite tangible: kinship networks could be

vehicles for conversion, Christianity did imply some material advantages, traditional Indian

101 Bowden and Ronda, eds., John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues, 65.

102 Bowden and Ronda, eds., John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues, 85.

religion was equated with a life of sin, and different sectors of Indian society would respond

differently to native missionaries.

Although it is impossible to assess the success of Indian Dialogues in training native

missionaries for their work – it was certainly limited to those who could read English, or

have someone who could read it to them – the text does shed light on the centrality of

indigenous actors to debates about missionary work and exposes the kinds of opportunities

and challenges they might have encountered. When historians look at the Puritan missionary

enterprise, however, they often focus on Eliot’s translations or the major praying towns

(especially Natick) that he established. In fact, we have seen that Natick was not typical but

rather quite exceptional, which probably explains why Eliot invoked it so frequently in

publications and letters to friends, donors, and colleagues. Cotton Mather, for all of his later

effusive hagiography of Eliot, noted that the apostle’s translations were flawed, to say the

least. Mather suggested that “There are many words of Mr. Eliot’s forming which [Indians]

never understood. This they say is a grief to them. Such a knowledge in their Bibles as our

English ordinarily have in ours, they seldom any of them have; and there seems to be as

much difficulty to bring them unto a competent knowledge of the Scriptures, as it would be

to get a sensible acquaintance with the English tongue.”103 In other words, because Eliot was

very rarely in the praying towns he established, and because his Algonquin texts were poorly

translated, the connection between Eliot and the scores of Indians he tried to convert was

relatively weak. Eliot began the mission, but he was not the mission. In fact, Eliot’s

absences and shortcomings placed more pressure on native missionaries even as his rare

visits created spaces in which they could operate. Native preachers, not John Eliot, were

103 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, The ew England Company, xlviii.

therefore the ones responsible for spreading Christianity to New England Indians in the first

stages of cultural encounter.

Conflict and Contradiction

Although native preachers became indispensable to Christian missionary work by the

middle of the seventeenth century, the role of these indigenous missionaries was still fraught

with ambiguity, tension, and contradiction. Missionaries faced many challenges in their new

identities as apostles to Indians and were often caught between two societies that regarded at

them suspiciously. As one native missionary said, “because wee pray to God, other Indians

abroad in the countrey hate us and oppose us, the English on the other side suspect us, and

feare us to be still such as doe not pray at all.”104 Some of the challenges native missionaries

faced were obvious ones. It was difficult for indigenous missionaries to befriend Indians if

the latter felt that they were being victimized by imperialistic and land-hungry English, to

whom native missionaries seemed allied. Alcohol abuse, which was forbidden in praying

towns and Christian communities, also became increasingly problematic as liquor became

more readily available. Many missionaries also forsook their Christian religion and training,

using the cultural negotiation skills they learned while at school to try to make a more

lucrative living. Daniel Gookin recalled in 1674 that some well-trained evangelists had

“entered upon other callings: as one is a mariner; another, a carpenter; another went for

England with a gentleman.”105 There was also a concern that missionaries were not fully

supported by the institutions and people that sent them out in the first place. Eliot often

complained that the New England Company never paid its missionaries enough (or at all).

104 Shepard, The Clear Sun-shine, 34.

105 Gookin, Historical Collections, 33.

He complained in 1671 that “messengers & instruments looke for theire pay. & if y[t] faile

the wheele moves very heavyly, & will quick stand still….if instruments faile, the work will

fall.”106 Native missionaries also had to worry about challenges from competing religious

groups, including Jesuits, Quakers, Baptists, and Anabaptists. The biggest challenges,

however, came from three sources: the struggle of enforcing religious orthodoxy, the

resistance of the pawwaws, and the affliction of disease.

No moment better exemplified the tension inherent in native missionaries’ position

than the Sabbath Day. Every week Indian preachers would gather their congregations at the

beating of a drum, and the services would include prayer, singing of psalms, reading from

scripture, and, of course, sermons.107 Indians sometimes asked for assistance from English

ministers on their sermons, but they often performed them on their own. Cotton Mather

described these Indian sermons as rather formulaic and consisting of several parts: “you may

have in their sermons, a, Kukkootamwehteaonk, that is, a Doctrine, ahrootomtoehceaonk,

or, an Answer, a Witcheayeuonk, or, a Reason, with an Ouworeank, or an, Use for the close

of all.”108 It was a perpetual challenge to gather an audience in the first place, for many

Indians naturally opted to spend their Sundays in other ways.109 When one Indian woman

went out on a Sunday morning to get some water, she met a friend and began to discuss

“worldly matters.” The local native preacher discovered the exchange and took this

106 Letter from John Eliot to William Ashurst, October 1, 1671, in Company for the Propagation of the

Gospel in New England, Some Correspondence, 50.

107 Indians at Stockbridge used a conch shell to gather their congregation in the 1750s. See Patrick Frazier,

The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 95.

108 Mather, The Life of the Renowned John Eliot, 119-120.

109 Some Ministers sometimes blamed this laxity on the English for setting bad examples among the Indians

they encountered. Thomas Shepard singled out Roger Williams, the famous founder of Rhode Island, as a

Sabbath-breaker who clearly embodied “what a stumbling block to all Religion the loose observation of the

Sabbath is.” See Shepard, The Clear Sun-shine, 31.

opportunity to organize his entire sermon around respect for the Sabbath, pointing her out

and chastising her while confirming the centrality of Sabbath-breaking in the pantheon of

sin.110 Native preachers even employed cautionary tales about breaking the Sabbath. One

local chief, for example, tried to stop his men from killing pigeons on a Sabbath day. When

they ignored him and climbed high into a tree to get the pigeon, “one of them fell down from

off the tree and brake his neck, and another fell down and brake some of his limbs.”111

Whether this story was apocryphal is irrelevant: native missionaries could use these

cautionary tales to emphasize that Sabbath-breaking was not only sinful, but worthy of God’s

quick and decisive punishment. At the same time, while native preachers could use these

examples as teaching moments for their Christian Indian congregations, making examples out

of Sabbath-breakers also threatened to humiliate and alienate the very people to whom they

were trying to appeal.

Indigenous missionaries were not always as orthodox as Puritan clergymen probably

hoped. Indeed, there was a great deal of syncretism, or cultural mixing, between Puritan

theology and indigenous religious thinking and practice. David Silverman has thoroughly

outlined this phenomenon for Martha’s Vineyard’s Wampanoag Indians.112 Neal Salisbury

reminds us that when Indians placed English material objects into the graves of their loved

ones, they were “seeking to reinforce [their relationship with traditional spiritual power] by

integrating the spiritual power of the newcomers with their own.”113 Although historians

have conceded that Puritans rarely used images, dance, or other rituals to proselytize, native

110 Letter from John Eliot to Thomas Shepard, September 4, 1647, in Shepard, The Clear Sun-shine, 19.

111 Anonymous, ew England’s First Fruits, 4.

112 Silverman, Faith and Boundaries; and Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation.”

113 Salisbury, “Religious Encounters in a Colonial Context”: 502.

missionaries made fairly effective use of song.114 It was in biblical psalms that native

missionaries found common ground with indigenous traditions of singing and chanting. Eliot

noted that many native evangelists and their congregations expressed their religious devotion

by becoming “skilful and graceful Singers.”115 John Endecott, the Governor of

Massachusetts Bay Colony, visited Natick in 1651 and heard both the sermons and singing.

He recalled that praying Indians sang the psalms “with such reverence, zeale, good affection,

and distinct utterance, that I could not but admire it” and admitted that this was “one of the

best journeys I made these many years.”116 If the Sabbath was a point of contention, song

was a point of accommodation. English audiences viewed Indian singing as outward

expressions of Christian piety while Indian congregations easily incorporated psalm-singing

into their religious cosmology because orality and singing were already central to their own

religious practices and rituals.

Native missionaries also faced fierce resistance from Indians who felt challenged by

the new authority they wielded. These included both sachems and pawwaws, or shamanistic

medicine-men. According to the Puritans who represented them in print, these conflicts

always ended poorly for the non-Christians. For example, Hiacoomes had a heated rivalry

with Pakeponesso, a sachem on Martha’s Vineyard. Pakeponesso invited Hiacoomes to his

home, ridiculed him, and even slapped him across the face. Later on, after Pakeponesso

ridiculed him again, a bolt of lightning surged through his wigwam and struck him down. As

he lay unconscious, his leg remained burning in the fire. He survived, however, and

114 Bowden and Ronda, eds., John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues, 34.

115 Mayhew, Indian Converts, xvi.

116 John Endecott to the President of the New England Company, August 27, 1651, in Whitfield, Strength

out of Weakness, 28-29. See the entry for “psalmody” in the index of Experience Mayhew, Experience

Mayhew’s Indian Converts: A Cultural Edition, ed. Laura Arnold Leibman, (Amherst, MA: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2008) for more on the use of psalms by early New England Indians.

eventually (and predictably) converted to Christianity.117 Others who resisted God’s word

were not so lucky. Japhet, another Martha’s Vineyard missionary, took a trip to the mainland

and supposedly converted a large group of Indians there. Yet as soon as Japhet left, one of

them mocked the missionary and vowed not to worship God. Coming home from a long

journey only a few days later, the man discovered that “His house was consum’d by fire; and

his three children, where were all he had, consum’d in it.”118 He, like Pakeponesso,

predictably offered a sincere conversion to Christianity after his affliction.

Unlike sachems and skeptics, pawwaws attacked native missionaries because they

represented a direct assault on the traditional religious authority that they had historically

possessed. Daniel Gookin described pawwaws as “partly wizards and witches, holding

familiarity with Satan, that evil one; and partly are physicians, and make use, at least in show,

of herbs and roots, for curing the sick and diseased.”119 Because many Puritans believed in

the power of witchcraft, the occult, and superstition, a pawwaw’s authority was not to be

taken lightly, and it was assumed that traditional shamans were in league with the devil.120

Praying villages even had explicit rules against “pawwawing” as shamans were accused of

sending spies to infiltrate Christian communities and even killing native Christians.121

However, the fundamental tension between pawwaws and indigenous missionaries was less a

matter of religious incompatibility and more an issue of competition: both groups demanded

obedience, provided explanations for historical and spiritual forces, and both called on

117 Whitfield, The light appearing, 3.

118 Mather, Magnalia Christa Americana, 385-386.

119 Eliot, The Dying Speeches of several Indians, 11.

120 See Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment; and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing

the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 67-97.

121 Anonymous, ew England’s First Fruits, 7; Whitfield, The light appearing, 12.

spiritual authorities that could never be proven to actually exist. “Black James,” at least,

understood the similarities, as he was a rare pawwaw who converted to Christianity to

become a Christian teacher.122 Just as Hiacoomes had a showdown with a sachem, he also

took on the pawwaws, producing a confrontation which eventually gave him legitimacy on

the Vineyard. One of the pawwaws there tried to conjure up a snake to kill Hiacoomes, but

that was ineffectual. Others claimed that they could kill him in an instant, but he publicly

called their bluff and exclaimed, “Let all the powawes in the island come together, I’ll

venture my self in the midst of them; let them use all their witchcrafts; with the help of God,

I’ll tread upon them all.”123 Some pawwaws even showed up after Hiacoomes had finished

preaching on a Sunday and threatened to kill him. Hiacoomes allegedly sat back, relaxed,

and said they could do nothing, pointing to his heel and saying that he would crush them

underneath it.124 Hiacoomes thus not only tried to derail the pawwaws’ power, but also

endeavored to publicly humiliate them. Hiacoomes was not alone in attacking the pawwaws.

When one Christian Indian name George got sick, he consulted a pawwaw. But his

neighbors suspected that the pawwaw had actually made George sick in the first place, so

they grabbed the pawwaw and threatened to throw him in a fire. As soon as he felt the heat,

the curse was lifted and George felt right as rain.125 These victories over pawwaws, of

course, were surely not as lopsided as Puritan commentators assumed them to be. Yet this

challenge from the pawwaws was both a problem for indigenous missionaries and an

122 John Eliot, The Dying Speeches of several Indians (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Greeen, 1685), 11-12.

123 Mather, Magnalia Christa Americana, 516.

124 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 6.

125 Mayhew, The conquests and triumphs, 20.

opportunity for them to demonstrate their own authority as new spiritual leaders of

indigenous communities.

Disease, however, proved to be as capricious as ever. Just as disease temporarily

blessed native missionary efforts on Martha’s Vineyard by preserving Hiacoomes and

quieting the pawwaws, it almost destroyed the indigenous missionary movement on the

mainland. Caleb, the Harvard graduate trained under Charles Chauncy, died from

tuberculosis. In 1652 a massive flux swept through many of the praying towns, killing off

missionaries and their family members and casting doubt on their newfound status as God’s

chosen people. Some tried to capitalize on disease by using its transmission as an

opportunity to highlight those who had become model Christians and admonish those who

had not. John Eliot, for example, published a tract called The Dying Speeches of Several

Indians, which emphasized that disease, for all its temporal pain, ultimately brought victims

to the light of the gospel. One dying victim even rejoiced, “By this sickness God calleth me

to repent all my sins, and to believe in Christ. Now I confess myselfe a great sinner, Oh

pardon me and helpe me for Christ his sake.”126 The famous Waban gave a sermon in 1659

that equated bodily sickness with a lack of faith, which he called “sicknesse in our soul.” In

Waban’s view, Christ was not only a spiritual power but also a physician, supplanting the

responsibilities of the traditional pawwaws and offering an alternative method for dealing

with the demographic and epidemiological implications of European colonization.127 For all

126 Eliot, The Dying Speeches of Several Indians, 3. Interestingly, this direct connection between affliction

and salvation, called the “fortunate fall” by Vincent Caretta, would be repeated by many African authors,

like Olauduh Equiano and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronnioswa, who endured the horrors of the American

slavery. Vincent Caretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 2005); and Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-

Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). I discuss the

fortunate fall in further detail in Chapter 6.

127 Eliot, A Further Accompt, 9.

of these attempts, Puritan ministers could not help but notice that their best missionaries were

dying all around them. A group of ministers complained, “It hath pleased the Lord to frown

upon our endeavours in this kind; taking away by death, at sundry times, six youths or more,

upon whom considerable cost had been expended for their education.”128 Puritan divines felt

“great discouragement” at losing so many “pretious instruments” and “hopefull buds” for the

missionary enterprise.129 In 1669 John Eliot regretted that, in Natick, “many of our choyce

instruments of this place are dead.”130 Martha’s Vineyard, which had experienced periodic

epidemics from the 1640s to 1690, felt the pain of disease more acutely by the end of the

century.131 Matthew Mayhew lamented that, “of the number of more than one hundred Adult

Persons that dyed, not less than three fourths, were of the Sober Religious Professors.”132

Intimate access to English culture, of course, also meant exposure to English diseases.

Ironically, the very people who claimed to be under God’s protection became the ones

hardest hit by God’s wrath.

Distressed on Every Side: King Phillip’s War

Of all the impediments that native preachers faced as brokers of Protestant

Christianity, few were bigger than the conflict that erupted in New England in the middle of

the 1670s. The decade actually began fairly well for the indigenous missionary effort. John

128 Letter from the New England Commissioners to Robert Boyle, September 10, 1662, in Gookin,

Historical Collections, 77.

129 Letter from the New England Commissioners to Robert Boyle, September 8, 1670, in Company for the

Propagation of the Gospel in New England, Some correspondence, 35.

130 Letter from Eliot to Robert Boyle, June 7, 1669, in Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New

England, Some correspondence, 28.

131 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 172.

132 Mayhew, The conquests and triumphs, 34.

Eliot and John Cotton had recognized an official indigenous church on Martha’s Vineyard in

1670. Eliot had also published his Indian Dialogues, which he expected would serve as a

missionary training manual for future evangelists. In the meantime, he and Gookin had taken

up the task of traveling even further west and south to establish new praying towns. A

fundamental component of that work would be, in Gookin’s words, “to settle teachers in

every town.”133 Many of those new teachers and preachers were trained and educated in

Natick, confirming that town’s status as a nucleus for indigenous evangelical activity.134 At

Manchage, or Oxford, they installed a preacher named Waabesktamin. Joseph, who was a

member of the Hassanamesitt (Grafton) church, became the teacher at Chabanakongkomun,

or Dudley. In fact, Joseph had actually established this praying village and had been

preaching to the inhabitants there well before Eliot and Gookin made him official. An Indian

named Jethro became a preacher at Nashaway, near Lancaster. James Speen was from one of

Natick’s most prominent Christian families, and he was installed at Pekachoog, near

Worcester. Woodstock, Connecticut also became a veritable outpost of praying Indians, as it

had several villages with native ministers there, including Daniel and Sampson. The latter

was a former alcoholic who had recently abandoned his drinking, patched things up with his

alienated wife, and began a life of Christian exhortation. When John Moqua was presented

as preacher to the village of Maanexit in Woodstock, his first act was to set and sing a psalm,

which he concluded with a prayer. These new praying towns reportedly had sober, well-

133 Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in ew England. (Boston: Belknap and Hall,

1792), 49. Gookin first wrote this text in 1674, though I use a later printed version of it.

134 Gookin, Historical Collections, 43.

established, and active native ministers who were willing to expand the kingdom of Christ.

The 1670s thus began auspiciously for native missionary enterprises in New England.135

The rest of the decade would be quite different, and there is no better evidence that

native missionaries were central to the relationship between English and Indians than the fact

that the man who sparked King Philip’s war was a native missionary. Land greed,

competition over trade, and other troubles were the root causes of the conflict between

Indians and English, but John Sassamon’s murder was the catalyst. A Christian minister who

had been educated at Harvard, taught at Natick, and had also been a teacher at Nemasket,

Assawompsett, and Titicut, Sassamon became a personal advisor to Wampanoag chief King

Philip just before the war broke out.136 Through Sassamon, Philip gained access to not only a

skilled interpreter, but also a powerful cultural negotiator who could provide some leverage

against the English while ostensibly gaining the support of Christian Indians. For Sassamon,

his position as both a Christian evangelist and personal advisor to a sachem who maintained a

notorious aversion to Christianity put him in an awkward position. Perhaps Sassamon

thought he could strengthen his own hand by acting as Philip’s advisor. Perhaps he thought

he could be the native preacher to convert Philip, as forecasted in Eliot’s Indian Dialogues.

He would do neither. When Sassamon overheard a plan for Philip to attack English

settlements, he informed the English of Philip’s scheme and was then mysteriously murdered.

After the war, Increase Mather would argue that Sassamon was murdered “out of hatred

135 The narrative of Eliot and Gookin’s travels to these new towns, including descriptions of the teachers

and preachers who presided over them, can be found in Gookin, Historical Collections, 49-53.

136 Frederick L. Weis, “The New England Company of 1649 and its Missionary Enterprises,” Publications

of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Volume XXXVII (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts,

1959), 168-178. Nemasket and Assawompsett were two separate Indian villages located near present day

Lakeville, Massachusetts. Titicut was located near present day Middleborough, Massachusetts. Jill Lepore

offers a detailed discussion of Sassamon’s life and eventual death. See Lepore, The ame of War, 21-47.

See also Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians”: 410.

100

against him for his Religion, for…he was a Preacher amongst Indians.”137 Although his

status as a preacher may not have necessarily sealed his fate, it nevertheless granted

Sassamon access to the kinds of abilities and skills that cultural brokers needed to negotiate

between two worlds. Unfortunately for Sassamon, when these negotiations broke down, the

brokers were often the ones caught in the middle. When three of Philip’s Wampanoag

subjects were caught and quickly executed for Sassamon’s gruesome murder, the war

officially began.138

On the eve of King Philip’s War there was a handful of praying towns led and

operated by dozens of native evangelists. In total, there were as many as 1100 praying

Indians in the praying towns and thousands more on the Cape and Islands.139 The war put

these Christian Indians and the preachers that led them in an untenable position. In spite of

the professed allegiance between Christian Indians and English authorities, many English

could not distinguish between a friendly Indian and an enemy one. For example, in 1675

Massachusetts passed a law making it legal for any person to “kill and destroy” any Indian

caught walking or “skulking” in any English towns or woods.140 This law must have been

problematic for Indians who were on the move. Even as English authorities fantasized about

keeping Indians stationary during the war, the conflict catalyzed a horrific cycle of

displacement. Preachers and their congregations fled Natick and other praying towns in

droves, coalescing in towns like Marlboro and Concord, migrating to Connecticut and New

Hampshire, or even seeking refuge in the woods. Eventually, the English would throw

137 Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in ew-England (Boston: J. Foster, 1676),

11.

138 For a general history of the war, see Lepore, The ame of War.

139 Gookin, Historical Collections, 55.

140 Lepore, The ame of War, 183.

101

hundreds of Christian Indians, like refuse, on Boston’s Deer Island, a “bleake Iland” that was

barren, cold, and windswept. There they would find only meager food supplies, tattered

clothing, and little shelter or fuel to protect them from the harsh Atlantic winds that pounded

this veritable concentration camp in the winter.141

Indian missionaries suffered horribly during the war. John Sassamon’s untimely

death was only the most prominent example of a native evangelist being murdered, but there

were other preachers and teachers who suffered similar fates. Jethro, the teacher who had

been installed at Nashaway, was accused of helping to cause the conflict and was summarily

executed by English settlers. His son was killed with him.142 Natick’s Anthony Speen dealt

with his feelings of horror and loss by drinking himself into oblivion and forfeiting his

prestigious position as the town’s teacher.143 Joseph Tuckapawillin, the preacher at

Hassanamesit (Grafton), feared the English would raid his praying town and kill the women

and children, so he sent his family into the woods to fend for themselves. When Eliot met

with Tuckapawillin during the middle of the war, Eliot recorded what the Indian preacher

said to him:

I am greatly distressed this day on every side: the English have

taken away some of my estate, my corn, my cattle, my plough,

cart, chain, and other goods. The enemy Indians have also

taken a part of what I had; and the wicked Indians mock and

scoff at me, saying, ‘Now what is become of your praying to

God?’ The English also censure me, and say I am a hypocrite.

In this distress I have no where to look, but up to God in

heaven to help me; now my dear wife and eldest son are

(through English threatenings) run away, and I fear will perish

141 Letter from John Eliot to the Robert Boyle of the New England Company (undated), in Company for the

Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some correspondence, 53.

The pun is intentional; Boston Harbor’s Deer Island is currently a waste treatment facility.

142 Gookin, Historical Collections, 85-87. Although this rash accusation was completely false, his acquittal

came well after he and his son were dead.

143 Eliot, The Dying Speeches of several Indians, 7.

102

in the woods for want of food; also my aged mother is lost;

and all this doth greatly aggravate my grief. But yet I desire to

look up to God in Christ Jesus, in whom alone is my help.144

Tuckapawillin’s complaints demonstrate the fragile position that native evangelists occupied

during a period of conflict and displacement. Caught between the English who distrusted

them and the Indians who despised them, native missionaries often had to find their own

solutions to their problems. Tuckapawillin had good reason to complain to Eliot, and he

certainly had reason to fear. Although his family would eventually return to him, his son

would die of starvation by the winter of 1676.

Tuckapawillin eventually became one of many native evangelists who enlisted on the

side of the English during King Philip’s War (he would be captured by enemy Indians soon

into his mission). Although most colonists were vehemently opposed to employing natives

as military allies, their skills as scouts, spies, messengers, and warriors eventually became a

key factor in the English victory.145 Ironically, the very treacherous and deceitful attributes

that later writers would ascribe to inherent Indian character apparently made Indians valuable

spies and scouts. For their own part, native ministers enlisted with the English not only to

demonstrate their loyalty (which the English might have assumed was the paramount

motivation), but to help their families navigate the troubled waters of war. Job Kattenanit,

for example, was a minister of “piety and ability” who had been preaching at Magunkog

(Ashland) prior to the war. When he enlisted as a spy, he used the opportunity to spearhead a

dangerous rescue mission to help secure the release of his children, who had been taken

144 Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of The Christian Indians in ew

England, in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677, in American Antiquarian Society, Archaeologia Americana:

Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society Vol. II (Worcester: The Society, 1834),

504.

145 For more on the attempt to use Indian military aid as a buffer against hostile native tribes, see Johnson,

“The Search for a Usable Indian”: 623-621.

103

prisoner by hostile Nipmuck Indians in weeks prior.146 Paid five pounds and given a pass

from the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Kattenanit went off to spy with James

Quannapohit, a relative of Natick’s most prominent Christian Indians. Once among the

Nipmucks, they encountered Joseph Tuckapawillin, the Grafton preacher who had been

captured during his own scouting mission. Joseph relayed that, given James’s pedigree, it

was too dangerous for him to stay. Job, on the other hand, waited to secure the release of his

children. Relying upon a network of native evangelists, Job organized a rescue mission

involving himself, Joseph Tuckapawillin, and Joseph’s father, Naoas, who also happened to

be a deacon at Joseph’s church. His children apparently made it to safety, though Job’s own

retreat from the enemy Indians was much more tenuous. When he finally returned to the

English, and in spite of the fact that he carried a pass from Daniel Gookin and warned the

English of an impending attack on Lancaster, he was suspected of being a hostile Indian,

shuffled off to the army captain, sent to Boston, and transported to Deer Island.147 He was

only able to leave the miserable island when Thomas Savage began organizing an expedition

consisting of native scouts. Of the six Indians the appropriately named Savage chose for his

mission, three of them were native preachers. Job Kattenanit was one of them.148

Kattenanit’s experiences during the war demonstrate that native missionaries enlisted on the

side of the English not just to express their loyalty, but to secure their families, aid other

146 Job’s wife had apparently been killed in this raid. It is still unclear whether the Hassanemit Indians were

taken.

147 The attack on Lancaster did eventually happen, and one woman taken in that attack wrote a detailed

narrative of her experience as captive among the Indians during the war. See Mary Rowlandson, The

Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed. Being a

arrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Related Documents, ed. Neal

Salisbury (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997).

148 Job’s story can be found in Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian

Indians, 475-482; and Lepore, The ame of War, 141-143.

104

ministers and praying Indians, and flee English military camps. When Indian preachers

fought for the English, they certainly did so on their own terms.

Some praying Indians chose to fight against the English during the war. Although the

older praying towns had long-established communities of Christian Indians, the new towns

that Gookin and Eliot recently organized in the 1670s seemed much more ambivalent about

their allegiances. Gookin recalled that the new praying Indians, “being but raw and lately

initiated into the Christian profession…fell off from the English and joined the enemy in

war.”149 Neal Salisbury has noted how Christian Indians were involved in both sides of King

Philip’s War and that the number of Christian Indians fighting against the English went from

an “inconsequential minority” to a “highly visible one” by the war’s end.150 The most

“visible” of all the Christian rebels must have been James Printer. The aptly named Printer

was best known for setting the type for the famous Indian press, but he was also a native

missionary. He lived at Hassanamesit with several other Indian preachers and was assigned

to teach at Waeuntug (Uxbridge) from 1669 to 1674, only a few miles off. In fact, his father

was Naoas, the deacon in the Hassanamesit Church, and his brother was the same Joseph

Tuckapawillin who helped James Quannapohit and Job Kattenanit in their spying missions

during the war.151 In spite of, or perhaps because of, his family ties, long history as a

Christian minister, and prominent position as a typesetter, Printer chose to side with the

Nipmucks when the war hit. Remarkably, after fighting on the side of the enemy Indians,

Printer was able to get his old jobs back after the war. He returned to Natick for several years

149 Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians, 436.

150 Neal Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North

America,” Ethnohistory 50 No. 2 (Spring 2003): 248.

151 Weis, “The New England Company of 1649,” 168-169; Hugh Amory, First Impressions: Printing in

Cambridge, 1639-1989 (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1989), 41.

105

and eventually returned to his hometown of Hassanamesit, where he remained a teacher from

1698 to 1717. He even took up his old job of typesetting, this time contributing to the

expanding market for captivity narratives by printing Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty

and Goodness of God. 152 James Printer’s choices during the war demonstrate that Christian

Indian identity did not necessarily entail a passive subjugation to English authority. Instead,

Christianity could be empowering for some Indians in ways that allowed them to choose

sides based upon their own sensibilities and not upon an allegiance to a nominally Christian

nation. James Printer, like other native preachers who fought against the English, was not

abandoning his Christianity. Instead, he probably believed that his Christianity empowered

him to fight against the same nominal Christians who threatened to destroy his people.

When faced with such a harrowing decision as choosing between the untrustworthy

English or the hostile Indians, some native missionaries opted to remain neutral, leading their

congregations out of their towns and into the relative protection of the forest. The praying

Indians at Wamesit (Lowell), for example, fled their town out of fear of both Indians and

English. The Nipmucks burned their wigwams with the elderly inside while the English

executed other residents as traitors or shipped them off as slaves to the West Indies. Mystic

George, one of their Christian teachers, died from disease and could not retreat with his

people into the forest. When the Wamesit Indians wrote to English officials to explain their

plight, they raised the specter of Indian defection to the French by blaming their forced

diaspora on the English themselves. They then proclaimed that they were not sorry for

leaving, but did regret that “the English have driven us from our praying to God and from our

Teacher. We did begin to understand a little of praying to God.”153 Although Mystic George

152 Lepore, The ame of War, 136-149; Wyss, Writing Indians, 41-51.

153 Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians, 483.

106

was dead, Simon Beckom led the remaining Wamesit refugees north and into the woods,

hoping to find either French or friendly Indians to take them in. During the three weeks that

the Wamesit Indians were marooned in the forest, Beckom led three separate Sabbath-day

meetings. He later told Daniel Gookin that he “read and taught the people out of Psalm 35,

the second Sabbath from Psalm 46, the third Sabbath out of Psalm 118.”154 The use of

psalms as the scriptural basis for Beckom’s meetings is notable for two reasons. First, the

psalms were often the first pieces of scripture taught to indigenous converts. Missionaries

could use psalms because they reflected a direct relationship with God, were relatively easy

to remember, and were presented in song, or musical, form. They thus represented the first

exposure that native peoples often had to scripture. Secondly, Beckom’s careful choice of

psalms reveals that native evangelists had a much deeper understanding of scripture than

most scholars have acknowledged. Beckom did not choose these psalms randomly. Instead,

he deliberately selected specific passages that spoke to the unique experiences of a people

who were torn between two choices, forced into exodus, and questioning whether their

allegiance should be based upon religion or ethnicity.

The first week Beckom taught from Psalm 35. He could have been preaching about

both the antagonistic Indians and the hostile English when he said, “without cause have they

hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul.” He

continued, “I behaved myself as though he had been my friend or brother: I bowed down

heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother. But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and

gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I

knew it not…for they seek not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are

quiet in the land.” The next week Beckom turned away from the theme of betrayal to preach

154 Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians, 483.

107

to the displaced Indians about the protection of God during a time of severe trial. Calling on

Psalm 46, Beckom reminded his listeners that “God is our refuge and strength, a very present

help in trouble…He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and

cutteth the spear in sunder…Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the

heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our

refuge.” Transitioning from God’s power to emphasize God’s mercy, Beckom’s third and

final Psalm – 118 – assured his congregation that, in spite of the war waging around them,

they still had to remain faithful to God, for God had remained faithful to them. Beckom told

his listeners that God’s mercy endures forever, and that “It is better to trust in the Lord than

to put confidence in man. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes.”

“All nations compassed me about,” Beckom proclaimed, “but in the name of the Lord will I

destroy them.” If he sang the entire psalm, Beckom would have concluded by remarking that

“The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the

Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” In lieu of harping on their present tribulations,

Beckom’s invocation of this final line instead looks to the future. Indeed, native evangelists

might have believed, as Beckom probably did, that the war was a scourge to cleanse the

world of evil, redeem the faithful, and establish a new church built on the back of a truly

Christian congregation. Given his invocation of Psalm 118, Beckom probably foresaw his

congregation, and perhaps even himself, playing a central part in the construction of this new,

post-war Christian order.

If Simon Beckom’s final Sabbath day meeting revealed some measure of optimism

about indigenous Christianity in the postwar world, the reality would be very different. Even

John Eliot naively hoped that the war would not bring a cessation to native missionary

108

activities, but an intensifying of them.155 Yet it was very clear that King Philip’s War had

devastated and nearly destroyed the Puritan missionary project. The generation that

witnessed this disaster recognized the havoc that it wreaked on Indian populations. As

disease and warfare ravaged native communities, produced forced diasporas, created

thousands of refugees, engendered persistent poverty and starvation, and soured the already

uneasy relationship between English and Indians, several generations of Puritan writers

commented in eerily similar ways about the disintegration of native Christian populations.

Increase Mather stated that the destruction of native communities represented a “signal blast

of heaven,” while his son, Cotton, agreed that there appeared to be a “strange Blast from

Heaven consuming them” 156 The missions, like the English and the Indians during the war,

seemed to be dying all around them.

In no place was the death of the Puritan mission more evident than in Natick,

formerly the most important of all the praying towns. As a site where generations of native

preachers taught dozens of Indian families, as an Indian town that had embraced several

aspects of English-style civilization, and as one of only four praying towns rebuilt after the

war, Natick was both literally and symbolically significant. The decades after King Philip’s

War, however, exposed the challenges of maintaining an indigenous Christian community on

a frontier wracked by war. Land was certainly at the center of the conflict, and the constant

incursion of English settlers into Natick after the war created social and generational tensions

155 Letter from John Eliot the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, September 4, 1671,

in Letters of John Eliot the Apostle, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society Vol. XVII

(Boston, MA: The Society, 1880), 249.

156 Letter from Increase Mather to William Ashurst, 20 January 1697, in Company for the Propagation of

the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some correspondence, xviii.

109

that put the community on edge.157 Language and the employment of English ministers,

however, proved to be just as problematic for the Christian Indian community. Although

they had always thought of John Eliot as a “spiritual father,” Natick Indians were irate when

Englishman Daniel Gookin took over the pulpit after the war. Gookin believed that

indigenous languages were a major component of native barbarism, so he preached to his

new Indian congregation entirely in English. The Indians wisely petitioned the New England

Commissioners in charge of the mission and urged Gookin to do his utmost to learn their

language. They even praised Gookin’s interpreter and brilliantly invoked Paul’s first letter to

the Corinthians to explain that the use of an interpreter and the continuance of native

languages had biblical sanction.158 By 1687 the Natick Indians got their wish; an Indian

named Daniel Takawombpait, whom John Eliot had personally groomed for the pastorate,

became Natick’s preacher. Although he could speak the native tongue and exhibited some

scriptural knowledge, Puritan divines complained about his “errata” and considered replacing

him before realizing that they could not find anyone suitable to take his place.159 By the

1710s the Commissioners launched an inquiry into the temporal and spiritual state of Natick,

found it to be “languishing and withered,” and blamed its degeneration into “a very lax

Procedure” on Takawombpait himself.160 Even if the Commissioners considered dismissing

157 For more on the problems that Natick’s Indians faced immediately after the war, including Mohawk

raids and depopulation, see Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians”: 424-427. For more

on the gradual process of Indian displacement at Natick, see O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees.

158 Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some

correspondence between the governors and treasurers of the ew England Company, 74-75.

159 William Kellaway, The ew England Company, 1649-1776: Missionary Society to the American

Indians (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1961), 237. It is not entirely clear what Daniel’s “errata,” or

errors in Puritan Congregational doctrine, actually entailed.

160 Letter from Cotton Mather to Sir William Ashurst, 10 October, 1712, in “Cotton and Increase Mather

Letters, 1713-1726” Massachusetts Historical Society Manuscript Collection, 7; Daniel R. Mandell, Behind

the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 1996), 35.

110

Daniel, they did not have to make that decision. He died in 1716, and John Neesnumin, an

Indian preacher from Sandwich, was chosen to replace him. Neesnumin himself died only a

few years later, and Thomas Waban of Natick replaced him. By 1721 an English minister

named Oliver Peabody became the first-ever minister in Natick who knew absolutely nothing

of Indian languages. Not surprisingly, it was around this time that land deeds were being

drafted in English more frequently, a new generation of Indian schoolchildren were more

comfortable with the English language, and more English settlers began traveling to Natick

for religious services.161 With the slow displacement of the Massachusett language from the

experience of Christian Indian spirituality, the need for native ministers decreased. The era

of Indian spiritual leadership in Natick had come and gone.

As destructive as the war was to towns like Natick, the battle of words to remember

the war, and the role of Christian Indians in it, was equally important to indigenous

missionaries. Historian Jill Lepore has estimated that the postwar New England book market

became glutted with as many as 15,000 copies of accounts of the war and Indian activities in

it, most of them describing Native Americans as barbarous savages.162 Daniel Gookin used

the power of print to highlight the contributions made by Christian Indians to the war while

John Eliot desperately did the same to try to rebuild his prized praying towns.163

Nevertheless, accounts by military leaders and other Puritan clergy alike emphasized ferocity

and brutality while simultaneously blaming Indians for starting this horrific war.164 Wildly

161 Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 104-105. In spite of the fact that he missed his English neighbors and

friends, Peabody would stay in Natick until 1753.

162 Lepore, The ame of War, 52. For more on how the war, and the praying Indians who participated in it,

were remembered, see Wyss, Writing Indians, 30-51.

163 See Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of The Christian Indians.

164 See, for example, Thomas Church, Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War Which Began in the

Month of June, 1675. As Also of Expeditions More lately made Against the Common Enemy, and Indian

111

popular captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God,

first published in 1682, crystallized in audiences’ minds the negative stereotypes of Indians

as barbarians and irredeemable savages that common New Englanders suspected all along.

Although she despised her hostile captors, Rowlandson saved her harshest words for the

praying Indians, describing them as treacherous, deceitful, and wicked. Rowlandson blamed

them for failing to save English captives and even described one of them as “so wicked and

cruel, as to wear a string about his neck, strung with Christians fingers.”165 As these popular

texts were sold, printed, and reprinted, the image of the Native American as an irredeemable

savage began to contradict the great power and authority that Puritan clerics had invested in

native preachers in seasons prior. The war had done its damage, but words about the war

might have done a lot more.166

All of this is to say that, naturally, a debate about the propriety and efficacy of native

ministers was underway in the years after the war. We have already seen how the New

England Commissioners tried to install English preachers at Natick, which Natick Indians

resisted until the 1720s. But the postwar period was also characterized by a flurry of new

proposals to extend the Christian missionary enterprise, and native evangelists were not

always at the center of those plans. Immediately after King Philip’s War, Daniel Gookin

Rebels, in the Eastern Parts of ew-England: With Some Account of the Divine Providence Towards Benj.

Church Esqr; by T.C. (Boston: B. Green, 1716), a text which was republished several times by Benjamin

Church and even later edited by famous divine Ezra Stiles. See also Increase Mather, A relation of the

troubles which have hapned in ew-England, by reason of the Indians there, from the year 1614 to the year

1675 (Boston: John Foster, 1677); and Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in ew-

England. See also Lepore, The ame of War, 173-190; and Wyss, Writing Indians, 17-51.

165 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 98. Although this might have been meant to

demonstrate the military power Indians had over the English, it is also possible that this was an attempt by

the Indian to gain access to the Manitou that the English God possessed by wearing fingers of enemy

Christians as a kind of protective amulet. See Axtell, The Invasion Within, 112.

166 For more on the debate over Indian missions after King Phillip’s War, see Axtell, The Invasion Within,

184-186.

112

proposed to create a series of English-speaking free schools around Marlborough,

Massachusetts, where Indians would learn firsthand the benefits of agriculture, civilization,

and, of course, the English language. He also hoped to supplement the school with an

expansive apprenticeship program that placed Indian children with colonial families in the

hopes of reducing them to civility and alleviating the threat of another war. There was no

place for native missionaries in Gookin’s scheme. He complained that their training was too

costly and ultimately “ineffectual to the ends proposed.” Instead, he argued that native

preachers be replaced with English ones, for they were “better to instruct them in substantial

and orthodox divinity, than teachers of their own nation, who cannot in reason be imagined to

be so sufficient, as if they were learned men.”167 Gookin clearly doubted that native

preachers were the most effectual method for converting Indians to Christianity after the war.

While Gookin and other missionary figures argued that eradicating Indian language

and employing English ministers would be the most sensible approach to postwar missionary

work, other divines still looked to native tongues and native preachers as instruments of

gospelization.168 Cotton Mather, for example, printed a Christian dialogue in English, Dutch,

French, and Iroquois for use among the Indians west of the Connecticut River.169 Mather

also urged the New England mission’s backers to publish another Indian bible in the 1710s,

arguing that the propagation of Christianity through indigenous languages was much more

167 Gookin, Historical Collections, 32 and 81.

168 Predictably, Gookin and others also believed that these new proposals would ensure the safety of the

New England settlements and root out any hostile Indian sympathies by making English the lingua franca

of New England’s Indians.

169 Cotton Mather, Another Tongue brought in, to Confess the Great SAVIOUR of the World. Or, some

COMMUICATIOS of Christianity, Put into a Tongue used among the Iroquois Indians, in America.

And, Put into the Hands of the English and the Dutch Traders: To accommodate the Great Intention of

Communicating the Christian Religion, unto the Salvages, among whom they may find anything of this

Language to be Intelligible (Boston: B. Green, 1707).

113

important and feasible than a full-scale civilization plan.170 Mather’s plans were echoed by

the Mayhew family, who had been serving as missionaries to the Wampanoags on Martha’s

Vineyard since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the postwar period the Mayhews

printed not only accounts of successful Indian conversions and tales of prominent native

preachers, but also Indian Psalters to be used by native evangelists.171 The Mayhews had

ample evidence to prove the efficacy of native ministers. Facing west from Natick, the war-

torn missionary effort appeared to be in steep decline. Yet the Christian Indian communities

in southeastern New England, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod emerged from

the war shaken but not destroyed. A growing cadre of native preachers there would attempt

to redefine Native American identity while securing for Christian Indians a place in the

postwar world.

ative Preachers in a Postwar World

It is often assumed that King Philip’s War not only pushed New England’s Indians

west, but also occasioned “the end of the missionary program as conceived by Eliot.”172

Although there was a dramatic diaspora of Massachusett Indians to the north, south, and

west, there were thousands of Indians who remained, in one historian’s words, “behind the

frontier,” eking out a living and trying to raise their children, protect their lands, and survive

170 Cotton Mather to Sir William Ashurst, 20 November 1713, in the “Cotton and Increase Mather Letters,

1713-1726” Massachusetts Historical Society Manuscript Collection, 8.

171 Matthew Mayhew, A Brief arrative of the Success which the Gospel hath had, among the Indians, of

Martha's-Vineyard (and the Places Adjacent) in ew-England : With Some Remarkable Curiosities,

concerning the umbers, the Customes, and the present Circumstances of the Indians on that Island.

Further Explaning [sic] and Confirming the Account given of those matters, by Mr. Cotton Mather in the

Life of the Renowned Mr. John Eliot (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1694); Experience Mayhew, The

Massachuset Psalter, or, Psalms of David: with the Gospel according to John: in columns of Indian and

English: being an introduction for training up the aboriginal natives in reading and understanding the

Holy Scriptures (Boston: B. Green, 1709).

172 Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans”: 53.

114

in the wake of war.173 These communities retained a remarkable degree of autonomy in spite

of their newborn status as de facto reservations. Though only a few thrived, many survived.

While original praying towns like Natick seemed to be falling apart, a new generation of

native preachers took the helm of Christian Indian leadership in southeastern New England.

A quick survey of their communities reveals the extent to which native evangelists were not

only prevalent but ubiquitous in Indian villages after King Philip’s War. On Cape Cod and in

southeastern Massachusetts there existed 23 Indian villages that hosted over 50 Indian

preachers. Mashpee, an Indian town on Cape Cod, was dominated by two Indian ministerial

families: the Briants and the Popmonits. Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands had five

congregations led by about 18 Indian evangelists. Martha’s Vineyard became the most

illustrious model of Native American Christian leadership, having 12 separate Indian

congregations and over 50 indigenous preachers.174 Even on the mainland, where praying

towns like Natick were on the fritz, there were still dozens of Indian preachers and

teachers.175 In all of these Indian villages, native preachers, called nohtompeantog in

173 Mandell, Behind the Frontier. Part of this was certainly compulsory. Massachusetts passed a law that

any Indian not sold into slavery or pushed westward was to live in the praying towns, thus effectively

making them both centers of indigenous Christianity and precursors to modern-day reservations.

174 See Mayhew, Indian converts. Many of these narratives include dying speeches of Indians, which are

analyzed methodically in Seeman, “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes”: 17-47. See also Wyss, Writing

Indians, 75-76 for a methodological discussion of deathbed narratives.

175 Frederick L. Weis computed (on page 151) that there were 133 native preachers working in about 60

Indians towns and villages in New England. However, on page 202 he indicates that there were actually

157. Then, on page 202, he lists all of the native preachers and the total number comes to 159. That can be

compared with the 118 English preachers working in these towns, many of whom did not remain in their

posts for too long. For an analysis of each of these New England towns, see Weis, “The New England

Company of 1649,” 134-218.

115

Massachusett, began to restructure Indian communities, furnish examples of indigenous

leadership, and articulate a new sense of Indian identity as both Indian and Christian.176

Just as Natick became a symbol for the apparent dissolution of the native missionary

effort, Martha’s Vineyard became an icon of its success.177 In fact, the small island off the

southern coast of Massachusetts had several advantages that Natick did not: the atrocities of

war never came home to the island’s residents, there was a comparatively small number of

English settlers there until well into the eighteenth century, and the Islanders enjoyed a

tradition of autonomy and independence among Indian churches that dated back to the days

of Mittark, Hiaccomes, and other native leaders. 178 By 1687 Increase Mather could boast to

a Professor at the University of Utrecht that there were 24 Indian preachers on the Island.179

By the 1720s the Island churches were still “under the teaching of some English and more

Indian Ministers.”180 These native preachers also reached out to the mainland and even

installed Christian preachers on the island of Nantucket. Martha’s Vineyard, not Natick,

would eventually become the new “city upon a hill” for indigenous Christianity. As such, the

Vineyard became vital for not only providing native Christian leadership, but also acting as a

hub for indigenous itinerant preaching throughout New England.

176 “Nohtompeantog” can mean preacher, minister, or teacher in the Massachusett language, suggesting that

the term is connected with didactic oratorical speech. Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, ative

Writings in Massachusett, Vol. II (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1988), 672.

177 The foremost scholar of the Native American community on Martha’s Vineyard is David J. Silverman.

See Silverman, Faith and Boundaries; and Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”:

141-174.

178 On Martha’s Vineyard during King Philip’s War, see Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 78-120.

179 Letter from Increase Mather to Dr. John Leusden, July 12, 1687, in Mather, Magnalia Christa

Americana, 508-509.

180 Mayhew, Indian Converts, xvii.

116

Indian preachers were employed by English missionaries who returned to the paths to

try their luck among distant Indians in southeastern New England.181 At the same time,

Indians in southeastern Massachusetts cultivated their own practice of itinerancy, with

preaching Indians crisscrossing southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha’s

Vineyard, and even parts of Rhode Island to try to cultivate Christian audiences. This was

not necessarily unique to native itinerancy, for there were people “always to be found among

the Indians” who traveled from village to village to share news.182 What was distinctive

about the preaching Indians was their effort to foster a sense of shared Christian Indian

identity. Martha’s Vineyard’s Indians were particularly active in this itinerant missionary

work. John Coomes (the son of the famous Hiacoomes) left the island to take over the

preaching duties at Assawampsit, near present-day Lakeville.183 Jonathan Amos moved from

the Vineyard to Dartmouth, Zachariah Hossueit often traveled from the island to preach at

Mashpee, John Neesnumin went from Sandwich to Natick, and Japhet Hannit set out from

the Vineyard to traverse the southern coast of Massachusetts and even attempt to convert the

Narragansetts of Rhode Island.184 In fact, Hannit traveled from village to village, ordaining

181 When he left Martha’s Vineyard to preach to the Pequot and Mohegan Indians in Connecticut,

Experience Mayhew not only relied upon Indian interpreters, but actually attempted to find native

preachers to train along the way. He did this with Joseph, his interpreter, and Joseph’s nephew. See Rev.

Experience Mayhew, A brief Journal of my Visitation of the Pequot & Mohegin Indians, at the desire of the

Honourable Commissioners for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians in ew England (1713),

from Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some

correspondence between the governors and treasurers of the ew England Company in London and the

commissioners of the United Colonies in America, the missionaries of the company, and others between the

years 1657 and 1712, to which are added the journals of the Rev. Experience Mayhew in 1713 and 1714

{Edited by] John W. Ford [Governor of the ew England Company] (New York: B. Franklin, 1970), 102-

103 and 126-127.

182 Quoted in Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in

ative American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9-11.

183 “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698.” Copied for Dr. Stiles, By Rev. Mr. Hawley, Missionary at

Mashpee, From the Printed Account Published in 1698, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical

Society, First Series, Vol. X (Boston: The Society, 1809), 134.

184 Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 59 and 126; and Mather, Just Commemorations, 53-55.

117

native preachers whom themselves could establish new churches and further promoting

indigenous Christian spiritual authority. One of his new protégés was William Simmons, a

Dartmouth Indian whom Hannit ordained in 1695.185 When Simmons accompanied

Experience Mayhew through Rhode Island, he opted not to continue the journey to the

Connecticut Indians. Instead, Simmons traveled north, on his own, “to a Town of Indians,”

where he would ostensibly do the same thing that Hannit had done for him: prepare an

individual for the responsibility of establishing and leading a Christian congregation.186 In

short, it was not just English ministers conducting itinerant missionary trips to the Indians. It

was Indians themselves, most of them hailing from the Vineyard. Even Matthew Mayhew

had to admit that, “by the alone Ministry of the Martha’s Vineyard-Indians, was the

Civilizing and Conversion of the Indians on the Maine land, at a place called Succonet, and

parts Adjacent: who as they were Converted by the Ministry, sent from the church of

Martha’s Vineyard, to the Officers were by them (as likewise were those of antucket)

Ordained.”187 Indian preachers were not only preaching to their own congregations. They

were actively forming new ones.

Native ministers were the social thread that knit these postwar indigenous

communities together. As such, their personal relationships with one another reflected some

of the challenges and opportunities that indigenous preachers faced. First and perhaps most

importantly, native ministers were not always friendly with one another. Zachary Hossueit

apparently made some kind of “offense” after accepting Solomon Briant’s invitation to

preach on a Sabbath day in Mashpee. Trying to heal the rift between the two ministers,

185 “Account of an Indian Visitation,” 130.

186 Mayhew, A brief Journal of my Visitation of the Pequot & Mohegin Indians, 97-98.

187 Mayhew, A Brief arrative of the Success with the Gospel hath had, among the Indians, of Martha’s

Vineyard, 31.

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Hossueit wrote to Briant and his congregation, assuring them that “I have love for all of you

in the name of our God Jehovah and the Lord Jesus Christ. And also I desire that you should

be very diligent to pray to our saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ…And I desire to protect (‘for

them’) true religion before God and the Lord Jesus Christ as long as I live, always.” Hossueit

concluded by addressing Briant personally and imploring, “I…your loving brother, I shrink

from (?) offending in any teaching or in anything against you.”188 Although the initial

reasons for the conflict are unclear, Hossueit was wise to maintain diplomatic ties with

Briant, for they had collaborated on several important projects together and each represented

an important ally to the other. For example, when Briant’s personal debt forced him to ask

the New England Commissioners to pay it for him (so he would not have to abandon his post

as a native preacher), Zachary Hossueit was the one who helped him write the petition.189

Native ministers needed each other just as much as their congregations needed them.

Hossueit and other Indian preachers also frequently utilized their linguistic skills to

protect, transfer, and prove ownership of Indian lands. Part of this might have been

motivated by blatant self interest, for native preachers like Abraham Speen, Thomas Waban,

Job Nesutan, John Thomas, Sr., Daniel Takouwompbait, and a handful of others owned

significant tracts of land in their own communities.190 When Mashpee Indians’ lands were

reorganized under the guardianship system (discussed below), a special clause protected

188 Letter from Zachary Hossueit to Solomon Briant (spelled Priant), 17 January 1766, from the Watkinson

Library of Trinity College, Hartford, in Goddard and Bragdon, ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I,

361.

189 “Petition from the native assembly at Mashpee to the Commissioners of the New England Company on

behalf of their minister Solomon Briant, and incidentally concerning a proposal to send an English minister

to them,” 22 November 1753, from the Massachusetts State Archives (32:427), in Goddard and Bragdon,

ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 179.

190 Goddard and Bragdon, ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 305, 333, 281, 307.

119

Indian preacher Solomon Briant’s personal property.191 Being a native minister, in other

words, definitely had temporal advantages. Yet native preachers were also actively involved

in land transfers and debates over land among Indians themselves. They were often called on

to act as witnesses when wills were executed, a few of them drafted such wills for friends or

members of their congregation, they served on juries that debated who maintained proper title

to land, and at least one of them even surveyed land under dispute.192 Native preachers even

helped other native preachers secure their property, as when James Spotso traveled from

Natick to Nantucket to ensure that James Momog kept title of the two commons he allegedly

owned.193 Native ministers were therefore not only landowners, but active participants in the

process of selling, transferring, and surveying land.

Not surprisingly, they were also protecting it from colonial land greed. While

missionaries have generally been perceived as the advance guard of an imperial effort to

displace indigenous peoples and gain access to their lands, native preachers were tirelessly

engaged in resisting colonial efforts to displace Indians. In 1746, Massachusetts passed a law

that hired white agents to act as “guardians” over Indian lands. Decisions about Indian land

use would fundamentally rest in the hands of these white guardians. Indians resisted this

guardianship system because of its questionable legality as well as the myriad ways in which

the guardians wantonly abused their privileges.194 When Martha’s Vineyard Indians drafted a

petition to resist this unjust law, the signatories’ names were Ponue, Hossueit, Abram,

Sowamog, and Paul – all names of either active native ministers or direct descendents of

191 Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991),

84.

192 Goddard and Bragdon, ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 81, 85, and 35-37.

193 Goddard and Bragdon, ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 269.

194 For more on resistance to the guardianship system, see Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 156-157.

120

people who had been.195 Native missionaries also marshaled scripture to attack English land

greed while simultaneously casting themselves as pious Christians who truly deserved to

remain on their property. When Massachusetts assigned colonist Elisha Amos to be the

guardian at Gayhead on Martha’s Vineyard, local ministers drafted a petition to resist the

appointment. They urged the Commissioners to rethink their decision, “lest if he should do

this work we would be much more miserable because of this Elisha Amos, just as the word of

God says in Job 34:30.” Brilliantly citing a passage that urges its readers “to keep a godless

man from ruling, from laying snares for the people,” the Island’s Indians tried to position

themselves as legitimate descendents of Christ’s word who were being taken advantage of by

rapacious and ungodly settlers.196

Native preachers protected their ecclesiastical autonomy just as jealously as they

guarded their lands. On two separate occasions New England authorities attempted to install

Experience Mayhew as the Indians’ preacher at one of the Vineyard congregation. Although

Mayhew came from a well-established and friendly missionary family, the Indians chose

Sowamog the first time and Joash Panu the second.197 A few white preachers administered to

southeastern New England Indians in later years – such as Joseph Bourne and Gideon

195 Petition by Martha’s Vineyard Indians to the Boston Commissioners, 5 September, 1479, in Goddard

and Bragdon, ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 173-175.

196 “Petition from the natives of Gay Head to the Commissioners of the New England Company objecting

to the appointment of Elisha Amos as a local Magistrate,” at the Massachusetts Historical Society,

Miscellaneous Unbound Manuscripts, in Goddard and Bragdon, ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I,

225. In 1734, a group of Indians in Lyme, Connecticut sent a petition to that colony’s authorities,

indicating that they would accept no minister or be willing to learn to read unless they had “the Bounds of

their Land Settled between them & some of the English, neighbouring upon them.” Letter from Jonathan

Parsons (Lyme) to Benjamin Colman about teaching the Indians at Lyme and settling the question of their

land boundaries, 26 Feb. 1734 in the Benjamin Colman Papers, 1641-1806 – Massachusetts Historical

Society Mss. Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard believed, often correctly, that deposing a sachem who

was open to selling lands to the English for his own personal profit was the best way to not only protect

lands, but to protect native leadership itself. See Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 121-156.

197 William Kellaway, The ew England Company, 1649-1776: Missionary Society to the American

Indians (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1961), 241.

121

Hawley – but Native Americans usually preferred their own preachers. Such preferences

sometimes occasioned institutional schisms in Indian churches, as Indians could move to and

from congregations. Such a schism happened on the Vineyard around 1700, when some

Indians left their Congregational churches and began attending Baptist ones instead.

Although Puritan divines tried to chalk this shift up to Indians being “seduced” by Baptists, it

was usually a conscious decision made because of the popularity of the preachers, the

influence of other kinship members on their decision, or because they were attracted to

Baptist styles of preaching and rituals.198 Indeed, dozens of Mashpee Indians expressed their

rage at the guardianship system by gathering themselves into a new church under indigenous

Baptist preachers.199

Language was at the root of this anxiety about cultural and ecclesiastical autonomy.

A keen knowledge of indigenous dialects was a prerequisite for preaching to these Indians,

even though Puritan divines had long argued that urging Indians to learn at least some

English was a priority. As Samuel Sewall noted in 1724, the Indians at Mashpee were “very

fond of their own nation, and their own Language; Insomuch that Mr. Joseph Bourn [a

colonist] who succeeds Simon Papmonnit [an Indian]…can’t prevail with the Indians to

assemble on the Lord’s Day, unless he will preach to them in their own Language.”200 Part of

this obsession with language was the concern over its slow demise. There were no sacred

texts printed in Massachusett after 1720, and in some places the spoken language itself was

198 John Eliot, A Letter of the Reverend John Eliot of Roxbury to the Reverend Thomas Shepard of

Charlestown, August 22, 1673 concerning the state of the gospel work among the Indians (Portland, M.E.:

Anthoensen Press, 1952), 3.

199 Simmons, Spirit of the ew England Tribes, 21.

200 Kellaway, The ew England Company, 229.

122

falling into disuse by the middle of the eighteenth century.201 As such, Indian congregations

embraced native missionaries as defenders of indigenous culture. These preachers would not

only protect the lands and physical property of Indians, but they might also guard native

culture by preserving Indians’ sense of linguistic and cultural autonomy and re-channeling it

through Christianity.

It would be naive to assume that Indian preachers always acted alone. As we have

seen, they were in constant correspondence with other native missionaries and often

collaborated on social and political projects, such as writing petitions, surveying land, or

preaching at one another’s congregations. They also cooperated with English ministers.

Cotton Mather assured his readers that Indian preachers “very frequently apply themselves to

these English ones, for their Advice, about Instructing their Flocks under their Charge.”202

Samuel Treat, an English minister at Eastham, reported that Indian preachers came to his

home about once a week for instruction. Although Treat held his pastorship for over 45

years, he admitted that he preached to Indians only about once a month. In the meantime,

“the more sober, well-affected and understanding persons among them…duly preach to

them, when I am not with them.”203 It was probably in English ministers’ best interest to

emphasize their own participation in native Christianity. Such posturing could help curb any

concerns about the indigenization of Christianity while simultaneously bringing glory and

esteem to their own reputations. Some English ministers, like the Mathers and the Mayhews,

201 Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians”: 424-427.

202 Cotton Mather, A letter, about the present state of Christianity, among the Christianized Indians of ew-

England. Written to the Honourable, Sir William Ashhurst, governour of the Corporation, for Propagating

the Gospel among the Indians, in ew-England, and Parts Adjacent, in America (Boston: Timothy Green,

1705), 7-8.

203 Letter from Samuel Treat, 23 August 1693, in Mayhew, A Brief arrative of the Success which the

Gospel hath had, among the Indians, of Martha’s Vineyard, 48. Weis, “The New England Company of

1649,” 184.

123

might have fancied themselves barons overseeing an empire of native Christians.

Nevertheless, and in spite of their cooperation with white missionaries, native leaders were

the ones running the quotidian spiritual exercises in these Christian communities.

Most of these native-led religious practices reportedly followed a fairly formulaic

pattern. First, Indians would begin with a prayer. Then an Indian minister would conduct a

sermon, as discussed below. Then followed a psalm, and English missionaries noted not only

the gravity with which the psalms were sung, but also the melodious tones emanating from

Indian congregations. One witness observed that Indian singing was “Grave,” “Serious,”

and “Attentive,” and that it displayed a “ravishing Melody” and even had a reputation for

“outdoing many of the English.”204 Psalms, however, were not simply an opportunity for

showing off the vocal chords. As Simon Beckom’s Sabbath Day meetings during King

Philip’s War remind us, the singing of the psalms represented an important moment for the

Christian Indian community to reflect upon their shared problems of disease, population loss,

displacement, and cultural change. Just before Isaac Ompany concluded an Indian service

with his own prayer, the congregation sang the third psalm, which begins: “O Lord, how

many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying to me, ‘There is no help for

you in God.’ Selah. But you, O Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts

up my head. I cry aloud to the Lord, and he answers me from his holy hill.”205 More than

just a melody, the psalms were a way for native preachers to utilize scripture and foster a

sense of Christian Indian identity during a time of tumultuous change. These services

certainly did not represent a wholesale surrender of indigenous religious practices and

beliefs, but rather a selective amalgamation of native spiritual traditions and Christian ones.

204 Mather, A Letter, About the Present State of Christianity, 9; Mather, Just Commemorations, 50.

205 Samuel Sewall Diary, 1714-1729, Massachusetts Historical Society (on Microfilm), 30.

124

First and foremost, these services were still conducted in Massachusett. Furthermore, many

Indians still smoked tobacco after their religious meetings. As James Axtell has observed,

tobacco was often used in native spiritual practices as a way to “appease or open

communication with the more powerful spirits of nature.”206 Smoking tobacco after a

religious exercise therefore had precedent. Before and after their selective appropriation of

Christianity, Indians used tobacco to mediate between themselves and the powerful spirits

that were actively involved in their daily lives.

Because English witnesses rarely attended Indian religious services, and because

Indians left few written records, it is difficult to determine exactly what an Indian sermon

would entail. According to one English minister, Japhet Hannit’s sermons were “not very

accurate.” Yet Hannit made up for his gaffs because his preaching was “very serious,” and

his sermons contained “a great deal of good Matter in them.” Hannit even seemed to give his

best sermons “when he did not try to oblige himself to any strict Method in them.”207 While

English ministers always had pre-written sermons prepared for nearly every occasion, Indian

preaching was much more self-reflective, personal, and extemporaneous than English

preaching. Elisha Paaonut was a preacher at Gay Head from 1683 to 1714 who had a

famously superior memory (in spite of his addiction to strong drink in years prior).

Experience Mayhew recalled that Paaonut, like Hannit, “used no Notes in preaching, nor did

he seem to need any.” This extemporaneous style did not always mean that Indian ministers

were wholly unfamiliar with scripture. Paaonut, for example, was much better versed in

sacred texts than Hannit, as Mayhew recalled that he “seemed to be the best acquainted with

the Scriptures of any Indian that I ever met withal, could most readily turn to almost any Text

206 Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 59-60; and Axtell, The Invasion Within, 16-17.

207 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 49-51.

125

that one could mention to him, if a Word or two of it were but named.”208 Only the most

accomplished Puritan divines shared Paaonut’s extraordinary ability to cite scripture so

effortlessly.

While colonial commentators offered a sense of native missionaries’ preaching styles,

the marginalia that indigenous ministers left in their Indian bibles also reveal hints about their

own spirituality as well as the content of their public sermons. Because no sacred books

appeared in Massachusett after 1720, the thousands of Indian primers, catechisms, and bibles

that were still in the hands of native preachers were literally read to shreds.209 Taken

together, the writings that Indians left in the margins of these texts reveal several important

aspects of native preaching. The first is the emphasis on spiritual poverty and sinfulness.

Perhaps the most pressing problem for missionaries from Canada to Carolina was that Native

Americans had no concept of, or word for, sin. The Jesuits tried to use words that meant

anything from an offense to the Great Spirit to sexual indiscretion.210 Native preachers

instead used the metaphors of pity and poverty to describe sinfulness as a state of pitiable,

spiritual want. One owner of an Eliot bible wrote, “we are pitiful, because of our sin” and

then admitted that “Oh I am a pitiful man. Who will save me from my death’s body [sic]?”211

One of the Eliot bibles now in possession of the Library Company of Philadelphia was

owned by Simon or Joseph Papenau (or both). Joseph was a deacon in Solomon Briant’s

Mashpee church, and like the notes left by other Indians, his marginalia reflect a dire concern

208 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 57.

209 Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians,” 424.

210 Axtell, The Invasion Within, 108.

211 Transcription of an Eliot Bible from the Congregational Society Library, in Goddard and Bragdon,

ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 409 and 387. In this last line the writer is simply repeating the 24th

verse of Romans 7.

126

with sin and a harrowing sense of self-pity. “Pitiful people (are) we,” he recorded. “It is not

good. Always falsehood is heard among us.” The writer later admitted that “I am forever a

pitiful person in the world” who was “not able to defend myself from the happenings in the

world.”212 Papenau’s anxieties about sinfulness, spiritual depravity, and poverty were themes

that certainly would have emerged in his, and other native missionaries’, sermons. In fact,

this bible eventually left the hands of the Papenaus and found its way into the study – and

probably the pulpit – of another native missionary: Martha’s Vineyard’s Zachary Hossueit.

When Hossueit read that Indian bible, he was sure to read Papenau’s Mashpee marginalia

included in it.213 These themes of self-reflective pity, spiritual fragility, and sin as poverty

surely made their way into the sermons and prayers that Indian ministers led in early New

England.

In spite of native preachers’ intense focus on spiritual depravity and sinfulness –

classic Puritan tropes – the marginalia in these bibles also reflect some degree of optimism.

Much of this has to do with native preachers’ relationship with the bible as text. Many native

preachers wrote not only about their own sense of sinfulness, but also the ways in which they

believed that reading, studying, and learning from the bible could be a pathway to spiritual

deliverance. Joseph Papenau, for example, clearly connected his reading of the bible to his

own salvation when he wrote a note to himself in the margins: “This is your book, you

212 Transcription of Eliot Bible at the Library Company of Philadelphia, in Goddard and Bragdon, ative

Writings in Massachusett Vol. I, 423 and 431. This last note, about the “happenings in the world,” is

placed right after the first chapter of Kings, where King David’s friends and families try to keep him warm

and comfort him with blankets and women, but to no avail.

213 Transcription of an Eliot Bible from the Congregational Society Library, in Goddard and Bragdon,

ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 445. Laura M. Stevens has argued that poverty and pity, along

with monetary commercialism, were the most important metaphors at work in the British missionary effort.

In her argument, the act of pitying “poor” Indians once at once an expression of compassion as well as a

moment of participation in a wider community of civilized, and saved, Britons. See Stevens, The Poor

Indians.

127

Papenau. Read it with c[oncentr]ation (?). Your God will bless you.”214 Native ministers

probably urged their congregations to read whatever primers, catechisms, and bibles they

possessed as a tried and true avenue to grace and salvation. In spite of the declining

availability of texts in Massachusett after 1720, literacy rates in praying Indian towns were

remarkably high. One visitor to an Indian village on Cape Cod even noted that almost every

head of family in the praying village he visited was capable of reading scripture.215 Joseph

Papenau thus recorded in his own bible, possibly with some delight, that “Many have read

this book. I saw it.”216 Just as the trope of the “talking book” – a text which could reveal the

secrets of God’s creation and offer its reader immense spiritual power – was a prominent

theme in Black Atlantic writings, so too did native ministers emphasize the centrality of

engaging the Bible as an indispensable spiritual exercise.217

Native missionaries and the congregations they led did not disappear into the sunset

after King Philip’s War. Indeed, the ones who remained behind the frontier maintained a

remarkable degree of autonomy in spite of demographic loss, colonial land greed, and laws

designed to restrict their physical and economic mobility. New England’s indigenous

ministers were not only crucial to rebuilding native churches after the war, for they knit

communities of praying Indians together, fought against colonists eager to take native lands,

and formulated an indigenous Christian spirituality that was Indian and Christian in nature.

214 Transcription of an Eliot Bible from the Congregational Society Library, in Goddard and Bragdon,

ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 423.

215 “Account of an Indian Visitation,” 133.

216 Transcription of an Eliot Bible from the Congregational Society Library, in Goddard and Bragdon,

ative Writings in Massachusett, Vol. I, 433.

217 The Black Atlantic talking book trope is discussed in detail in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and William L.

Andrews, eds., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave arratives From the Enlightenment, 1772-1815

(Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1998), 1-29.

128

In their relationships with one another, in their itinerancy, in their sermons, and even in the

marginalia they recorded in their Indian bibles, native missionaries actively fashioned a

Christian Indian identity, constantly hoping to secure a place for themselves and their

congregations in the postwar world.

Ironically, a more sophisticated, nuanced, and detailed understanding of the “Eliot

mission” demands that we take Eliot out of the picture. Heralded as the “apostle to the

Indians,” Eliot only traveled from his Roxbury pulpit to Natick about every two weeks, and

he had the same arrangement with the praying town of Punkapoag, near present day Canton.

By the end of his life, Eliot was going to these villages only a few times every year,

depending upon his health.218 The Puritan missionary enterprise, therefore, was not

organized and operated solely by English missionaries, let alone John Eliot. Instead, native

evangelists were usually on their own. Indian preachers and teachers appropriated

Christianity for multiple reasons, and their translation(s) of Christianity and newfound roles

as Christian evangelists did not necessarily involve a complete break with their past or a

rejection of their people. Instead, Christianity offered an alternative system of spiritual

meaning that some Native Americans sincerely embraced during this period of tumultuous

change. As apostles to other Indians, these New England preachers would become the

benchmark and standard by which later indigenous missionaries were judged. Although John

Eliot is the most famous missionary to the New England Indians, there were in fact dozens of

Native American preachers, teachers, and catechists, all of whom formed the backbone of

these Puritan missions. In their translation of Christianity and in their ascension to positions

218 Letter from Increase Mather to Dr. John Leusden, 12 July 1687, in Mayhew, The conquests and

triumphs of grace, 64-65.

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129

of spiritual leadership within a rapidly changing cultural landscape, Indian preachers played a

central but thus far neglected role in early American encounters.

130

CHAPTER TWO

AGLICAS AD THE EXPASIO OF THE IDIGEOUS

MISSIOARY ETERPRISE, 1700-1740

It must have been a pretty awkward meeting between the two men, despite the

superficial similarities that bound them together. Both were named George, both were royal

representatives from their respective nations, and neither could speak English very well.

Missionary history, however, would tie these men together, at least for their brief meeting in

1715. One of the Georges was the powerful King of England; the other a “Prince” from the

Yamassee Indian nation of the Carolinas. The first was a product of the Hanoverian

succession, and as such was much more comfortable with German language and culture than

English. The second was the son of a powerful Yamassee chief, and was sent by the Society

for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) to England for a missionary

education. In spite of the obvious cultural divides that separated George I of England and

Prince George of the Yamassees, their meeting was collegial and the King of England

received the Indian prince “very graciously.”1 Indeed, it was hoped that, when finished with

his baptism, conversion, and evangelical training, the Prince would be an invaluable addition

to the missionary effort among Indians in the southern colonies. As such, these two royal

Georges represented the future of the evangelical effort in the British Atlantic world. While

the members of the SPG expected moral and institutional support from King George I, they

1 St. George Ashe, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday the

18th of February, 1714 (London: J. Downing, 1715), 49.

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also assumed that native royalty like Prince George would flock to their ranks to serve as

preachers to their people. These assumptions expose one of the most striking ironies of the

early modern Protestant missionary enterprise: the nature of Atlantic world encounters forced

English ministers to rely upon non-English people for the creation and development of their

missions.2

This chapter examines some of the tensions involved in Anglicans’ use of native

missionaries, particularly the ways in which Anglicans attempted to transform Indian royalty

into Christian evangelists during the first half of the eighteenth century. Although neither

Puritans nor Anglicans would admit to any major theological or doctrinal similarities, they

nevertheless acknowledged their mutual distrust of Catholics, were quite aware of each

other’s attempts to preach to native peoples throughout the world, and even collaborated on

several missionary projects. Like the Puritans before them, Anglicans attempted to use

native preachers, but their obsession with native “royalty” ensured that their numbers were

always relatively small. At the same time, imperial wars constantly put these potential

preachers in harm’s way, forcing them to decide between English Christianity and the

indigenous peoples from which they originated. At least in this period, they almost always

chose the latter.

In spite of the Anglicans’ failure to produce a native pastorate, by 1740 there was an

integrated network of communication that linked Protestant missionary activity not only

throughout the Atlantic world, but also into the sphere of the Indian Ocean. This network

included Puritans, Anglicans, German and Danish Lutherans, and Protestants of all pales and

2 The Yamassee Prince was probably baptized with the name “George” in honor of the present king. The

story of the Yamasee Prince can be found in Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American

Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 133-135; Frank J.

Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706-1717 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1956), 165-175; and Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost Yamasee Prince,” South Carolina

Historical Magazine 63 No. 1 (1962): 18-23

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gave Anglicans the opportunity to participate in and contribute to native missionary projects

as far away as India. This experience, as well as their simultaneous failures in the American

colonies, forced several Anglican divines to design new and innovative evangelical proposals

that would reflect and catalyze a wider, transatlantic debate about the propriety and efficacy

of using native preachers. In sum, this chapter examines the various impacts that war, an

obsession with royalty, utopian fantasies, and the expansion of Anglican missions had on

native evangelical efforts in the Protestant Atlantic world and beyond.

Puritans and Anglicans in the Missionary Field

Puritans had never been alone in their reliance upon native evangelists. Portuguese,

Spanish, Dutch, and French missionaries had all employed indigenous missionaries to

varying degrees, and the Catholic Church had long made the creation of a native pastorate

one of its central goals. Although they possessed a near monopoly on Protestant

evangelization in the British Atlantic during the seventeenth century, Puritans received some

competition at the turn of the eighteenth century when a flood of new Anglican organizations

attempted to spread the gospel throughout the British empire and beyond. The Society for

Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was established in 1698 while The Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) was created in 1701.3 The SPG would

eventually become the best funded, most widely scattered, and most tightly organized

missionary organization of the eighteenth century, sending out around 300 missionaries to

3 The literature on these missionary organizations is enormous. However, the two most classic texts are

William Osborne Bird Allen, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian

Knowledge, 1698-1898 (New York: B. Franklin, 1970); and the outdated but useful Charles Frederick

Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G.: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1900, Vols. I-II (London: The Society’s Office, 1901). Laura Stevens

provides an incisive critique of these missionary organizations, their sermons, and their use of pity to create

integrated, transatlantic networks of philanthropy in Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British

Missionaries, 7ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2004).

133

stations and parishes throughout the Caribbean, British mainland colonies, and Africa. Both

the SPG and the SPCK were the brainchildren of Dr. Thomas Bray; the SPCK was designed

to distribute books and establish schools while the SPG was primarily a missionary

organization. Additionally, The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge

(SSPCK) was founded in 1709 in Edinburgh as a Presbyterian missionary organization that

both distributed books and supported missionaries throughout the Atlantic.4 Some associates

of Dr. Thomas Bray also founded their own missionary branch in 1723 and creatively named

it The Associates of Dr. Thomas Bray.5 In all, this new collection of organizations attempted

to spread Protestantism in places where Puritan missions failed to reach. In spite of the

confusing array of titles and responsibilities, all of these organizations would compete,

correspond, and sometimes cooperate with Puritan missionary efforts. Like other evangelical

enterprises before them, they too would tap into a long tradition of using native agents in

their own missionary stations.

Anglicans missionary projects were, in several ways, dramatically different from their

Puritan counterparts.6 The most important difference was their faith in hierarchy and their

incredible organization. Although Puritans had always hoped for a centrally organized

missionary effort, the exigencies of cultural encounter and circumstances on the ground

dictated that there would be a tremendous amount of autonomy on the part of local preachers.

4 Frederick V. Millis, Sr. is right to note that the SSPCK, relative to the SPG and the SPCK, has been

ignored by most scholars, in spite of their active participation in American missions during the eighteenth

century. See Mills, “The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in British North

America, 1730-1775,” Church History 63 No. 1 (March 1994): 15-30.

5 John C. Van Horne, ed., Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of

the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

6 The best summary of Anglican efforts to Christianize blacks and Indians is Travis Glasson, "The Society

for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts of the World and the Creation of Race in the Atlantic

World” (PhD Diss., Columbia University, 2006).

134

While some Puritans embraced this autonomy, Anglicans generally feared it. Instead, the

tight, mechanical, and centralized organization of the SPG included hundreds of missionaries

scattered throughout the Atlantic who took their policies directly from the organization’s

secretary, who received his direction from a larger committee. At the end of this great chain

of authority was not the king, but the Archbishop of Canterbury (often called the ABC), who

oversaw all things Protestant in the British empire. The Anglicans therefore had a very

different view of the relationship between centers and peripheries in the Atlantic world.7

Puritan preachers had several hubs from which missionary policy could spring, including

London, Boston, Natick, and Martha’s Vineyard. The Anglicans, on the other hand, believed

that missionary policies should be handed down only from London, and that there was little

room for deviation or improvisation on the ground. Anglican ministers and missionaries had

to travel to London to be ordained, whereas Puritans could ordain preachers anywhere they

saw fit. Some Anglicans begged for an American bishopric to ordain native preachers, and

one minister even declared in 1718 that “it will be highly necessary to transfer the Center of

this great Work to that side, where it may rest, as in its proper place.”8 In spite of these pleas,

Anglicans would never create an American bishopric, and preachers would continue to be

ordained only in England. The result was that, while Puritans had officially ordained Indian

ministers by the 1670s, Anglicans did not ordain a “native” preacher for almost a century

afterwards.9

7 For more on the concept of center and periphery in the context of political ideology and practice, see Jack

P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British

Empire and the United States, 1607-1788 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

8 Philip Bisse, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday the 21st

of February, 1717 (London: Joseph Downing, 1718), 20.

9 For more on the training of Anglican missionaries, see Alfred W. Newcombe, “The Appointment and

Instruction of S.P.G. Missionaries,” Church History 5 No. 4 (December 1936): 340-358.

135

In spite of the differences in their thinking about centers and peripheries, Puritans and

Anglicans nevertheless had much in common, as both were part of a larger Protestant-wide

effort to spread the gospel, in their own unique ways, to indigenous peoples. There is no

question that Puritans and Anglicans distrusted (if not despised) each other, and they

constantly berated one another for failing to propagate Protestantism among the world’s

gentiles.10 Yet despite the squabbling and doctrinal differences, Puritans and Anglicans still

corresponded with one another frequently and even allied themselves against Catholic

missionary efforts. For example, Puritans and Anglicans agreed that the French Catholic

menace among the Iroquois of New York and Western New England was detrimental to any

English missionary effort. Part of this conflict was, of course, theological. Protestants of all

pales assumed that Catholic missionary work would expose indigenous peoples to what they

thought were the perfidious rituals of the Catholic Church while making them “seven times

more the Children of Hell than they were before.”11 The intrusion of French Jesuits into

Iroquoia in the late seventeenth century represented not only an affront, insult, and challenge

to Protestant missionary efforts, but also a blatant act of aggression that made frontier

warfare all but inevitable. Increase Mather even foresaw a “dark Cloud…which streameth

forth blood” from that region as early as 1676.12 Some Puritan commentators suggested

during the imperial wars of the first decades of the eighteenth century that their evangelical

neglect of the Indian nations out west was the chief reason why Indians had attacked English

10 Differences between Anglicans and Dissenters are recounted comprehensively in Carl Bridenbaugh,

Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689-1775 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1962).

11 Increase Mather, A Confession of Faith Owned and consented unto by the Elders & Messengers of the

Churches Assembled at Boston in 7ew England, May 12, 1680. Being the Second Session of that Synod

(Boston: Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1699), from the epistle dedicatory.

12 Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in 7ew-England, 75.

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settlers in the first place. Using this logic, Puritans began to argue that they had provoked the

wrath of God by allowing the French to be the first ones to reach these powerful Indian

nations.13 Puritans in New England and Anglicans in New York, therefore, both had a lot at

stake when it came to offsetting the influence of French Catholicism in Iroquoia.

This explains why Cotton Mather, of all people, was a vocal proponent of Anglican

intrusion into Indian affairs. According to its charter, the Puritan-led New England Company

could not extend its evangelical efforts past the borders of New England proper. It was

therefore up to the SPG or some other institution to offset the threat of Frenchified Indians

and put a stop to what Mather called the expanding “Empire of Antichrist.”14 In the 1710s

Mather urged the governor of New York to send Anglican missionaries to the Indians of

Long Island. He also expressed a desire for the SPG to send some missionaries out to the

Iroquois. “Lett the Gentlemen of the New Society,” Mather quipped, “send a Missionary or

two, for the Christianizing of the Iroquois Indians.” Mather believed that the use of SPG

missionaries among these Indians would not only offset the popery of the French Jesuits, but

also relieve the New England Company from worrying about the task, since these “objets

[the Indians] are without ye bounds of New England.”15 Mather, as he so often did, got what

13 Solomon Stoddard, Question Whether God is not Angry with the Country for doing so little towards the

Conversion of the Indians (Boston: B. Green, 1723).

14 Cotton Mather, Another Tongue brought in, to Confess the Great SAVIOUR of the World. Or, some

COMMU7ICATIO7S of Christianity, Put into a Tongue used among the Iroquois Indians, in America.

And, Put into the Hands of the English and the Dutch Traders: To accommodate the Great Intention of

Communicating the Christian Religion, unto the Salvages, among whom they may find anything of this

Language to be Intelligible (Boston: B. Green, 1707), 2.

15 Cotton Mather to William Ashurst, 9 November 1710, in Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in

New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Some correspondence between the governors and

treasurers of the 7ew England Company in London and the commissioners of the United Colonies in

America, the missionaries of the company, and others between the years 1657 and 1712, to which are

added the journals of the Rev. Experience Mayhew in 1713 and 1714 {Edited by] John W. Ford [Governor

of the 7ew England Company]. (New York: B. Franklin, 1970), 11. Even after the Anglicans had

established a mission among the Mohawks in 1712, Mather was still unhappy with the lackluster effort of

the Anglicans. He complained that they were a “mighty Society” with “ample” revenues and who “for

137

he wanted, as Anglican missionaries were stationed among the Mohawks by 1712. Even if

Puritans and Anglicans rarely saw eye to eye, their missionary efforts often overlapped and

influenced one another. There is no better evidence for this than Cotton Mather – perhaps the

most Puritanical of Puritans – pleading for an Anglican mission to the Indians of New York.

Anglican missionary rhetoric and practices were not all that different from Puritan

ones. Both Puritans and Anglicans alike envisioned their missions as a city upon a hill, and

Anglicans like Philip Bisse had no problem with invoking the same classic Christian motif

that John Winthrop employed when the Puritans arrived in New England. “Corporations

erected for Charitable uses,” Bisse reminded his Anglican audience in 1717, “are as that City

set on a Hill, which cannot be hid.”16 In spite of their theological and doctrinal differences,

this city upon a hill motif was used generously by Puritans, Anglicans, and even German

Lutherans working in India.17 In addition to viewing their missions as beacons of Christian

light, the seals that Puritans and Anglicans fashioned to act as visual representations of their

respective missions drew from scripture in precisely the same ways. While a naked Indian

cited the sixteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and begged Puritans to “come over and

Number and Figure are such as to raise the greatest expectations concerning their performances.” In spite

of all these advantages, Mather proclaimed, the Puritans were much more effective at preaching to Indians

than their better funded counterparts. See Mather to Sir William Ashurst, 1 April 1714, in Mather, “Cotton

and Increase Mather Letters, 1713-1726,” Mss., Massachusetts Historical Society.

16 Philip Bisse, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday the 21st

of February, 1717 (London: Joseph Downing, 1718), 2.

17 In 1718 Bartholemew Ziegenbalg predicted that his mission to India “would thereby in some Degree

appear again like a City that is set on an Hill, and may be seen at a Distance.” See Bartholomaeus

Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East: Being an Account of the Progress Made by Some

Missionaries at Tranquebar in the East-Indies, For The Conversion of the Heathens in Malabar. Of the

Methods by them taken for effecting this Work; of the Obstructions they meet with; and of the Proposals

which they make in order to promote it. Together With Some Observations relating to the Malabarian

Philosophy and Divinity: And concerning their Bramans, Pantares, and Poets. Part II. (London: Joseph

Downing, 1718), v.

138

help us,” the Indians in the Anglican seal made the exact same request but in Latin: transiens

adi uva nos.

In spite of their institutional and doctrinal differences, Puritans and Anglicans both looked to

Native Americans as willing recipients of missionary efforts. Both the seal for the Massachusetts Bay

Colony (left) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (right) depict naked Indians

in the wilderness, pleading for missionaries to “come over and help us.” Massachusetts seal courtesy of the

Public Records Office, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. SPG seal courtesy of the John Carter Brown

Library at Brown University.

Like Puritans, Anglicans looked to their own missionary neglect with a great deal of

shame, especially when comparing their measly successes to the grandiose baptismal

numbers published by Spanish and French missionaries. While Puritans believed that the

examples of the French and Spanish missionaries should “make us Ashamed,” Anglicans

139

admitted that “7o 7ation has been so guilty of this neglect as ours”18 In spite of their

obvious doctrinal differences, Puritans and Anglicans were both spurred on by a desire to

save the “poor Indians,” expel the papist Catholics, expand Protestant Christianity, and

redeem their missions from the failures of the past.19

Anglican divines also agreed with Puritans that indigenous agents should be chief

participants in the process of evangelization. When Thomas Bray began drumming up

support for the SPCK and SPG in the 1690s, he suggested that every English colony should

have at least one or two schools “for the Instruction of half a dozen Indian Youth, to be sent

afterwards amongst their own People, to civilize and convert them.”20 The Puritans of the

seventeenth century had, like the Anglicans after them, obsessed over the conversion of

native royalty. John Eliot divulged this missionary fantasy by publishing a fictional account

of the conversion of Wampanoag Chief King Philip in the 1670s, and Puritans usually liked

to pull evangelical leadership from existing indigenous leadership. At the same time, they

also understood that Christian leadership need not always come from the top down.21

Anglicans, on the other hand, expressed an almost pathological obsession with royalty and

18 Stoddard, Question Whether God is not Angry, 9; Thomas Bray, A Memorial, Representing the Present

State of Religion, on the Continent of 7orth-America (London: William Downing, 1700), 12.

19 For more on the rhetoric of Puritan and Anglican missionary work, see Stevens, The Poor Indians; and

Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians and Colonial American Identity (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

20 Thomas Bray, Apostolick Charity, Its 7ature and Excellence Consider’d, in a Discourse Upon Dan. 12.

3. Preached at St. Paul’s, at the Ordination of some Protestant Missionaries to be sent into the Plantations.

To which is Prefixt, A General View of the English Colonies in America, with respect to Religion; in order

to shew what Provision is wanting for the Propagation of Christianity in those Parts. Together with

Proposals for the Promoting the same: And to induce such of the Clergy of this Kingdom, as are Persons of

Sobriety and Abilities to accept of a Mission (London: William Hawes, 1699), from the fifth point of his

“General View.” This section of the document lacks page numbers.

21 See the third dialogue from John Eliot, Indian Dialogues, For Their Instruction in that Great Service of

Christ, in calling home their Country-men to the Knowledge of God, And of Themselves, and of Jesus

Christ (Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson, 1671).

140

assumed that indigenous political leaders would be the agents of native conversion. This was

partly due to the social and cultural milieu in which they lived: a hierarchical society where

every individual had their place in the great chain of being. Royalty commanded respect,

reverence, and especially deference, and many ministers believed that Indians had “the best

of all Governments, Monarchy.”22 The English assumed that hierarchy, kingship, authority,

and royalty were part of a common social grammar which Englishmen and Indians alike

could respect and understand. Just as the conversion of New England sachems like King

Philip might have resulted in the widespread Puritanization of countless Indian souls,

Anglican missionaries also began their efforts among America’s native population with the

working assumption that the conversion of a king would result in a general Christianization

of the rest of his people. This policy, of course, did not account for demographic and

generational change, nor did it acknowledge the long tradition of consensus (as opposed to

hierarchical rule) that characterized Indian polities. Nevertheless, the figure of an Indian

king was a powerful icon that was just as naturally appealing to Anglicans in the eighteenth

century as it had been to Puritans in years prior.

Indian “Kings”

Anglicans had long been interested in recruiting Native Americans for missionary

work. One of the first efforts was the construction of Brafferton Hall at the College of

William and Mary at the turn of the eighteenth century. Virginians and Anglicans believed

that Brafferton would become an Indian Oxford, from which native preachers would set out

22 Mayhew, A Brief 7arrative of the Success which the Gospel hath had, among the Indians, of Martha's-

Vineyard, 32. Alden T. Vaughan has recently argued that the obsession with indigenous “royalty” can

clearly be seen in the popularity of the figure of Indian kings, queens, and princes who were brought over

to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters:

American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

141

to convert and “civilize” their Indian kin throughout Virginia and beyond. Enrollment,

however, was always meager, and native parents often refused to part with their beloved

sons. It probably did not help the cause that the college’s promoters tried to boost student

enrollment by purchasing Indians who had been captured in war. Furthermore, there were

few examples of success even after willing Indians had been educated there. One Virginian

noted that Brafferton’s Indian students had indeed “been taught to read and write, and have

been carefully instructed in the Principles of the Christian Religion, till they came to be

men.” And yet, soon after they returned to their people, the observer complained, “instead of

civilizeing [sic] and converting the rest, they have immediately Relapst [sic] into Infidelity

and Barbarism themselves.”23 Brafferton’s failure only demonstrated that early Anglican

efforts to cultivate a native pastorate in the Americas got off to a discouraging start.

Nevertheless, in the 1710s Anglicans began to invest a tremendous amount of time,

money, and effort on cultivating native preachers who came from “royal” Indian families.

The earliest and most prominent examples were the Four Indian Kings of Iroquoia and

George, the Yamassee Prince of South Carolina. In the spring of 1710, four representatives

of the Iroquois Confederacy (one was actually a Mahican who became an Iroquois leader)

visited London to secure a diplomatic alliance with the English. The English, of course,

relished the idea of using four native sachems not only as diplomats, but as Protestant

missionaries as well. Even though later historians would assert that these men were not

kings, but rather “young and relatively powerless anglophiles,” the English visit was

nevertheless seen by contemporaries as a crucial moment in linking the interests of England

23 Quoted from William Byrd II, in Stitt Robinson, Jr., “Indian Education and Missions in Colonial

Virginia,” The Journal of Southern History 17 (February-November 1952): 166. For more on Brafferton,

see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial 7orth America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 190-196.

142

and Iroquoia.24 Their visit was accompanied with pomp and majesty, and they even had an

audience with Queen Anne. Newspapers reprinted the kings’ dramatic speeches to the Queen

while ballads and poems romanticized their visit.25 The Indian representatives asked Queen

Anne not only for her military protection, but also for missionaries to instruct the Indians,

claiming that any person they sent to Iroquoia would be given a “most hearty Welcome.”26

Two years later William Andrews arrived at Fort Hunter, a recently constructed outpost

located right next to Mohawk Castle. The English were clearly trying to graft a Christian

empire onto a Mohawk polity, and a key agent in that effort would be Hendrick. The most

prominent of the four sachems, Hendrick would assist Andrews as a lay preacher in this new

Anglican mission on the Iroquoian borderlands.27

Even if Hendrick’s claim to Indian “royalty’ was dubious, he certainly was no pawn,

for he and the three other “kings” understood how to prey upon English anxieties about

religious competition. The French Jesuits had, of course, been a consistent factor in

Iroquoian diplomacy for decades, and any English mission would have to account for the

complications of competing against Iroquoian Indians who allied themselves with the French

and prayed for the Catholic Church.28 One Anglican commentator even called Iroquois

24 Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire”

The William and Mary Quarterly 53 No. 3 (July 1996): 491.

25 See Anonymous, The Four Indian Kings (Boston: Fowle and Draper, 1762). This timely poem was

printed just at the end of the Seven Years War.

26 Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 120.

27 For more on the Four Indian kings, see Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 113-136; Richmond P.

Bond, Queen Anne’s American Kings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian

Kings’”: 487-526; and selections from John Wolfe Lydekker, The Faithful Mohawks (New York: The

MacMillan Company, 1938). For a romanticized love-poem about the Four Indian Kings, see Anonymous,

The Four Indian Kings (Boston: Fowle and Draper, 1762).

28 For more on the ways in which the Jesuit missions factionalized Iroquoian politics, see Daniel Richter,

“Iroquois versus Iroquois: Jesuit Missions in Village Politics, 1642-1686,” Ethnohistory 32 No. 1 (Winter

1985): 1-16.

143

Indians “The Praying Indians of Canada” and, in his letter to the SPG, Hendrick signed his

name with a Frenchified “Henrique.”29 In their speech to the Queen, the kings admitted that

they had been “importuned by the French, both by the insinuations of their Priests, and by

Presents, to come over to their interest.” As allies to the English, however, the Indian kings

assured the Queen that they had always looked upon French missionaries as “Men of

Falsehood.” To make things even more complicated, the first Protestant missionaries among

the Mohawks were not Anglicans, but rather a Dutch immigrant and a Calvinist minister. In

fact, the Indian kings who visited England were actually attached to the Dutch Reformed

Church.30 Any Anglican missionary who began working among New York’s Indians

therefore had to worry not only about the persistence of Iroquoian traditional religion, but

also the strength of French Catholic, Dutch Reformed, and Calvinistic influences among the

Mohawks.31 But even as Anglican preachers railed against Jesuit efforts among Iroquoian

Indians, they simultaneously looked to the order of Jesus as a model for how to best

evangelize Indians. One commentator noted that the SPG might not be able to sustain a

mission among the Indians unless they were “able and willing to live with the Indians in their

own Country, and according to their Way and Manner, which is the Method the French

29 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, An Account of the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts : What the Society Establish’d in England by Royal Charter hath done since their

Incorporation, June the 16th 1701. in her Majesty’s Plantations, Colonies, and Factories: As also what they

Design to do upon further Encouragement from their own Members and other well disposed Christians,

either by Annual Subscriptions, present benefactions, or future Legacies (London: J. Downing, 1704), 1-2;

Indian Sachems to the SPG, undated, in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Records

of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (East Ardsley, Yorkshire: Micro Methods, 1964), Letter

Series A, Volume 5 (hereafter referred to as SPG Records).

30 David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts. Containing Their Foundation, Proceedings and the Success of Their Missionaries in the

British Colonies, to the Year 1728 (London: J. Downing, 1730); and Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters,

127.

31 For the earliest Protestant efforts to convert the Mohawks, see Daniel K. Richter, “‘Some of

Them…Would Always Have a Minister with Them”: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683-1719,” American

Indian Quarterly 16 No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 471-484.

144

take.”32 All of these exigencies, in addition to the sensitivity of Iroquoian politics, made

native intermediaries like Hendrick absolutely necessary to any Anglican missionary attempts

in New York. Andrews could never navigate the treacherous waters of Iroquoian cultural

encounter without him.

We do not know very much about Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, also called Hendrick

Tejonihokarawa.33 Although born into a Mahican family in the last half of the seventeenth

century, Hendrick became a Mohawk leader by the turn of the century, and his visit to

England only bolstered his reputation – at least among the English – as a man of import.

Like his Anglican sponsors, Hendrick believed that Christian missions were opportunities to

solidify diplomatic and political allegiances. In their letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury,

for example, the four Indian kings noted that the construction of a chapel and the presence of

English ministers would not only spread the light of the gospel, but also “occasion a credit to

our Six Nations.”34 And yet, Hendrick was not just an anglophile, for he seemed to be a man

of many overlapping and sometimes contradictory identities. Throughout his life he urged

New York and SPG officials to protect Indian lands even as he signed some of those lands

off to the English and fought viciously for the English during their incessant battles against

the French.35 We also know that Hendrick was deposed from his sachemship momentarily in

the 1710s. Although the reasons for this are still unclear, they might have had something to

32 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, An Account of the Society for Propagating the

Gospel in Foreign Parts : Established by the Royal Charter of King William III. With their Proceedings

and Success, and Hopes of continual Progress under the Happy Reign of Her Most excellent Majesty

Queen Anne (London: Joseph Downing, 1706), 56-57.

33 The name of Hendrick was fairly common among some of the Iroquois tribes. There were in fact several

Hendricks in the history of the Mohawks, which can make identifying them quite difficult.

34 Undated letter from the Indian Sachems to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in SPG Records, Letter Series

A, Volume 6.

35 Lydekker, The Faithful Mohawks, 26. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 132. Hendrick died at the

Battle of Lake George in 1755, where there is now a statue and a tiny motel named after him.

145

do with his evolving and seemingly incongruous identity. A Mahican Mohawk who signed

his name in French, allied himself with the Dutch Reformed Church, and begged for English

missionaries, Hendrick was certainly a product of the interlocking cultural matrixes that

transatlantic religious interaction fostered in the Iroquoian borderlands.

John Verelst’s portrait of Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row depicts Hendrick the Sachem not only as a

diplomat, leader, and orator, but as a Christian ambassador as well. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown

Library at Brown University.

146

After his trip to England, Hendrick began to recast himself as a cultural broker, or an

intermediary who could slip between Indian and English worlds quite easily.36 His visual

representation became an essential component of this multivalent identity. As one English

commentator noted, by 1722 Hendrick had become a “polite Gentleman…apparall’d as we,

Speaks pretty good English and Scarcely distinguishable from an Englishman but by his

tawny complexion.”37 In fact, a series of portraits of the Indian kings – painted by Dutch

artist John Verelst – record Hendrick’s metamorphosis from Indian “royalty” into Christian

evangelical. While most scholars have emphasized the diplomatic characteristics of the

Verelst portraits, Hendrick also stands out from the other three Indian kings because of the

obvious Christian symbolism and iconography inscribed in the image. For example,

Hendrick is the only Indian out of the four painted without a weapon, decorative tattoos, or a

scene of battle or hunting in the background. Instead of a weapon, Hendrick carries a

wampum belt, a traditional icon of economic networking and diplomacy. Interestingly, the

belt is not decorated with traditional indigenous imagery, but rather with crosses,

symbolizing his newfound identity as a Christian diplomat. Perhaps most illustrative of

Hendrick’s new identity were his clothes. Instead of traditional Indian clothing and

moccasins, which the other Indians sport in their paintings, Verelst painted Hendrick with

English-style stockings and shoes. The final touch was Hendrick’s other vestments. Instead

of a shirt or waistcoat, he was dressed in a robe, ironically very reminiscent of the clothing

worn by the French missionaries he earlier claimed to distrust. In short, John Verelst painted

36 The historical and theoretical literature on cultural brokers is enormous. See Margaret Connell Szasz,

Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,

1994); Daniel K. Richter, “Cultural Brokers and Intercultural Politics: New York-Iroquois Relations, 1664-

1701,” The Journal of American History 75 No. 1 (June 1988): 40-67; Nancy L. Hagedorn, “‘A Friend to

go between Them”: The Interpreter as Cultural Broker during Anglo-Iroquois Councils, 1740-1770,”

Ethnohistory 35 No. 1 (Winter 1988): 60-80.

37 Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 133.

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Hendrick just as much as a preacher as a statesman.38 While Hendrick was not “above

ethnicity,” as one scholar has argued, the portrait does suggest the ways in which Hendrick’s

image tried to make the oxymoronic idea of a Christian Indian consistent and completely

reconcilable.39

Hendrick assisted the Anglican mission at Fort Hunter by serving as a lay reader. It

is difficult to ascertain exactly what impact Hendrick’s assistance to missionary William

Andrews meant, either to Hendrick, Andrews, or even the Mohawks who heard him preach.

In spite of this fact, Andrews did record that he had some small successes during the initial

period of Hendrick’s tenure as a native evangelist. Within the first six months of Andrews’

arrival, for example, he and Hendrick oversaw 100 Mohawk baptisms.40 By 1716, about one-

third of the Mohawks at Mohawk Castle had been baptized in the rites of the Anglican

Church.41 Even if the Mohawks began attending religious services because of the “victuals”

that Andrews offered them, this is certainly not a paltry number, and there is a great chance

that Hendrick was personally responsible for many of these baptisms. Hendrick’s position as

an established leader probably helped the cause, as some Mohawks might have found it

compelling that their military leader, diplomat, and orator had already been baptized and

converted. And yet, language was most likely at the center of Hendrick’s small successes,

for the Mohawks had historically expressed an antipathy towards, and utterly refused to be

taught, the English language. This is because the worst people they knew – the traders –

38 For an analysis of Verelst’s paintings, see John G. Garrant, The Four Indian Kings (Ottawa: Public

Archives, 1985), 139-143.

39 Garrant, The Four Indian Kings, 143.

40 Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 131.

41 Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), xiii.

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spoke English. Because William Andrews spoke very little Mohawk, it was up to Hendrick –

who could speak English, Mahican, Mohawk, and probably a little French – to communicate

the religious doctrines necessary for Christian baptism. Hendrick therefore wore many hats

at Fort Hunter: as a political leader, orator, interpreter, leader of religious meetings, catechist,

and preacher.

Mohawks’ suspicion of the English language also spurred the publication of an

Indian primer in the “Mahaque” tongue, and it is probable that Hendrick utilized this primer

as a tool for teaching the Lord’s Prayer and preparing Mohawks for baptism.42 Prayer was

certainly no alien concept to the Mohawks, as they and other Iroquois frequently offered up

prayers of thanksgiving and supplication to the spiritual forces that guided the universe.

When Anglicans included a “Prayer in the time of War and Tumult” in the Mohawk primer,

native Christians like Hendrick could seize upon this opportunity to situate Christianity into

the problems of international and intertribal warfare that plagued Iroquoia throughout the

eighteenth century.43 Hendrick might have also used the primer to introduce Christian

psalms into existing constructions of Iroquoian song-singing. The most prominent psalms in

the primer were Psalms 23 (“the lord is my shepherd”), 67, 100, and 117. Psalm 103, also

included in the Mohawk primer, spoke directly to the material advantages that Christian

neophytes like Hendrick probably expected from their newfound covenant with the English

God. “Praise the Lord…and forget not all his benefits,” Psalm 23 declares. It then proclaims

42 David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts. Containing Their Foundation, Proceedings and the Success of Their Missionaries in the

British Colonies, to the Year 1728 (London: J. Downing, 1730), 300.

43 Church of England, The Morning and Evening Prayer, The Litany, Church Catechism, Family Prayers,

and Several Chapters of the Old and 7ew-Testament, Translated into the Mahaque Indian Language, by

Lawrence Claesse, Interpreter to William Andrews, Missionary to the Indians, from the Honourable and

Reverend the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (New York: William Bradford,

1715), 37.

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that God alone “forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from

the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things

so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” The eagle analogy certainly would have

struck a cord with Native Americans, for they respected and revered animals that

demonstrated the most freedom and were the least constrained by their environment.44 In the

end, however, we do not know the extent to which Hendrick employed these Psalms in his

reading and preaching. And yet, their inclusion in the Mohawk primer at precisely the time

that Hendrick was preaching to other Mohawks is worth nothing. It suggests, though does

not prove, the various ways in which native neophytes might have understood Christianity as

accruing not only spiritual benefits, but temporal ones as well, protecting them from disease,

hunger, and old age. The Mohawks even developed their own word for the personage

responsible for protecting them: “Neoni,” or Jesus Christ. In this and many other ways,

native preachers like Hendrick translated Christianity – literally and figuratively – into a

context of Iroquoian spiritual and temporal dilemmas.45

In spite of the many baptisms and opportunities for religious translation, Hendrick

and Andrews faced innumerable dilemmas in attempting to convert the Mohawks to

Christianity. Hendrick was partially to blame for some of these failures. As early as 1710

one Anglican noted that the great Indian “King” was not really royalty at all, and that he

“cannot command ten men.”46 Hendrick was also noticeably and inexplicably absent from a

conference of Christian Iroquois held at Schenectady in the summer of 1711, so his power

44 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial 7orth America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 16.

45 Church of England, The Morning and Evening Prayer, 54. See Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the

Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989).

46 Mr. Barclay to the SPG, 26 September 1710, in SPG Records, Letter Series A, Volume 5.

150

and faith was probably not as consistent as Anglicans had hoped.47 Some of the fault also lay

with Andrews’ high expectations for the mission. For example, he complained incessantly

about the Indians’ roving lifestyle, affinity for liquor, constant swearing, and inattentiveness

to the Sabbath.48 Less than a decade after he began his mission, Andrews angrily observed

that the Mohawks were little more than a “sordid, mercenary, beggarly people, having but

little sense of religion, honour, or goodness among them; living generally filthy, brutish lives:

they are of an inhuman, savage nature; kill and eat one another.” “Heathens they are, and

heathens they will still be,” Andrews summarily concluded.49 Andrews abandoned his

Hobbesian nightmare in 1719, taking a post in a more congenial New Jersey parish and

leaving Hendrick in the lurch. There were a few sporadic attempts to rekindle the missionary

fire after Andrews’ departure, but it was not until the 1740s that the Anglicans would

reestablish a permanent (rather than an itinerant) presence among the Mohawks. Until then,

native Christians like Hendrick were left to preach to the Mohawks on their own.50 The

Anglican experiment with native “royalty” – at least in Iroquoia – was therefore by any

standard far from a success.

Like Hendrick the preacher, South Carolina’s Yamassee Prince’s flirtation with

Christianity also gave him access to English alliances while simultaneously putting him in

47 Mr. Barclay to the SPG, 12 June 1711, in SPG Records, Letter Series A, Volume 6.

48 Andrews’ complaint about Indian swearing is ironic, since indigenous languages had no swear words in

them. Paradoxically, it was English “civilization” that exposed Indians to the barbarity of cursing.

49 Ernest Hawkins, Historical 7otices of the Missions of the Church of England in the 7orth American

Colonies, previous to the independence of the United States: Chiefly From the MS Documents of the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), quoted on page

269.

50 Hendrick died at the 1755 battle at Lake George, fighting against French and Indian forces. The best

overview of this mission can be found in Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of

the Iroquois in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,

1992), 214-236.

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the middle of Indian and English conflicts.51 The son of a Yamassee Sachem, Prince George

was only 17 years old when he accompanied Gideon Johnston to England in 1713. He

resided there for a year and a half while the SPG paid for his instruction, housing, and even

clothing. As was the case with Hendrick, the SPG’s intentions in supporting the Prince were

both diplomatic and evangelical. George Stanhope explained in 1714 that the SPG spent so

much money supporting the Yamassee Prince because they believed he would not only

further British interests in South Carolina, but also “promote the Christian Religion” among

other southeastern Indian tribes.52 The Prince, however, never fared very well in England.

He struggled with his studies, flunked his scholarly examinations in 1714, and was

perpetually homesick. In spite of these challenges, he continued his instruction and was

baptized as “George” after giving the SPG proof of his learning in 1715.53

Just as Hendrick’s metamorphosis into a Christian preacher required his dressing the

part, the redressing of the Yamassee Prince was also a crucial component of converting

native royalty into an Anglican evangelist.54 The SPG footed the bill for the Prince’s coat (a

necessity in the cold English winters), breeches, socks, shoes, pants, a new cravat, and a

whole new wardrobe. The impetus for this came partially from the SPG’s desire to make the

Yamassee Prince presentable to the upper crust of English society in an attempt to procure

funding. As noted in the beginning of the chapter, the Prince was even presented to King

51 The best source on the Yamassee Prince is still Frank J. Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost Yamassee

Prince”: 18-32.

52 George Stanhope, The early Conversion of Islanders a wise Expedient for propagating Christianity. A

Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; At

Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday the 19th of February,

1713-14 (London: J. Downing, 1714), 32.

53 It is highly probable that the Yamassee Prince either took or was given the name George as a symbolic

gesture in honor of King George I, the Hanoverian king who sat on England’s throne.

54 Within the SPG’s journals and letters there are a handful of sources that document the course of clothing

the Yamasee Prince.

152

George I just before he returned to South Carolina in 1715. At the same time, the redressing

of the Yamassee Prince was also intended to prepare him for his re-entry into South

Carolinian English-Indian relations. Recast as an educated, English gentleman, it was

important that the Yamassee Prince be both represented and re-presented to the Indians as a

figure of honor, class, and ability. In a society as highly structured as eighteenth century

South Carolina, where race trumped all, the Yamassee Prince was one very exceptional

figure who might possibly transcend racial boundaries (admittedly by supplanting them with

Christian ones) if only given the proper education and attire. Furthermore, Anglican

missionaries truly believed that clothing was an important tool in converting Indians, one that

spoke volumes about a person before that person even spoke. Indigenous peoples, it was

believed, understood hierarchy, place, and honor, so dressing the Yamassee Prince was vital

to recasting his identity as an Anglican missionary. Gideon Johnston, the Prince’s mentor,

confirmed this assumption when he observed that “Indians in Generall are most affected with

that kind of garb, which is gawdy and makes the finest shew.”55 When the Yamassee Prince

arrived in Charleston after his year and a half away, his education, language, and attire made

him, at least in appearance, partly an English gentleman.

The dramatic conversion of the Prince promised to fulfill the fantastical expectations

of Protestant missionaries. Prince George was fitted out with a new education, new

wardrobe, and importantly, a newfound sense of gratitude towards the SPG. Even as they

trained indigenous peoples in the complexities of Anglican theology, SPG ministers still

expected deference from their students, and the Yamassee Prince did not disappoint. Writing

to the SPG upon his return to Carolina in the winter of 1715, he thanked his Anglican

55 Quoted in Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 134.

153

sponsors and appeared grateful for all “their Favours which I never forget.”56 Unfortunately

for both George and the SPG, the Yamassee War of 1715 alienated the Prince from his

Anglican sponsors and catalyzed a violent diaspora of the same people that English

missionaries were trying to convert. Gideon Johnston, who sailed back to the Carolinas with

the Prince in 1715, reported to the SPG that when the war broke out the Prince

instantaneously became “Extremely Sunk and dejected.”57 The drowning of Johnston in

April of 1716 might have made him feel even more despondent, for Johnston had vowed to

treat the Prince as one of his own children during this time of tribulation. Yet the most

grueling challenge the Prince faced was the fate of his father, the Yamassee sachem.

Although the sachem had offered up his own son for Anglican training, English officials in

South Carolina did little to protect their valuable ally during the war. Rumors circulated that

the sachem had been taken prisoner by enemy Indians, killed at the hands of his own tribe, or

that he had fled to St. Augustine, seeking refuge with the Spanish Catholics. By 1716 the

Prince’s father was captured by the English, and he and his men were shipped off as slaves.58

In all of this confusion the SPG lost track of the Prince, who most likely abandoned his

Christian mission, followed his people to Spanish Florida, and disappeared off the face of the

map and out of the purview of Anglican missionaries.

56 Yamassee Prince to the SPG, 8 December 1715, quoted in Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost

Yamassee Prince”: 27.

57 Quoted in Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 15.

58 Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost Yamassee Prince”: 29.

154

The Yamassee Prince’s expenses included “Passage and Cloths” that he would need to get to

South Carolina, as well as training from tutors Johnston, MacBeth, and Noblet. It also included a small,

ceremonial gun as a gift to his father. Letter 26, in SPG Records, Letter Series A, Volume 7, page 64.

The approbation that Gideon Johnston received from the SPG, clergy in South

Carolina, and Anglican missionaries like Francis Le Jau for his work with the Yamassee

Prince inspired him to turn to other native royalty even before his untimely death in 1716.

No sooner had he stepped off the ship in Charles Town than he asked the “Emperour of the

Cheriquois, to let me have his Eldest Son.” The Cherokee sachem allegedly “most willingly

and cheerfully consented” to this proposition because “he saw how well the Yammousea

155

youth had far’d, by his being among us; and he has promised to bring him to me.”59 The

Yamassee War and Johnston’s death conspired to make this attempt into Cherokee royalty

little more than a pipe dream. Several years later a schoolmaster in Charlestown brought an

Indian youth to school to try to “make a good Use of him.” Predictably, this youth was none

other than the “Son to one of the Chiefs of the Creek Nations.”60 Like all the experiments

with native royalty before it, this enterprise never materialized. In fact, none of these efforts

even came close to replicating the same near-success that the Anglicans had with the famous

Yamassee Prince. Although the Anglicans had gained the trust of a few members of Indian

royalty by the 1740s – a feat of which Puritans could rarely boast – they learned the same

lesson that Puritans had learned generations before: war would always hamper Protestant

missionary efforts, leaving native evangelists with little but torn identities, difficult choices,

and displaced families.

India and the Supra-Atlantic Missionary Enterprise

Both Puritans and Anglicans, as we have seen, tried to cultivate a native evangelical

corps in their Atlantic missions, and the Anglican emphasis on Indian kingship produced only

meager results. Another limitation they faced was that the Puritan New England Company

and the Anglican SPG were both geographically limited by their own charters. While the

NEC could not send evangelists past the bounds of New England proper, the SPG’s charter

dictated that it could only send its missionaries wherever England was sovereign. The SPG

undeniably bent that rule frequently, but this limitation nevertheless meant that English

59 Gideon Johnston to the SPG, 19 December 1715, quoted in Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost

Yamassee Prince”: 28.

60 Joseph Wilcocks, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday the

18th of February, 1725 (London: Joseph Downing, 1726), 36.

156

missionaries would have to correspond with other, non-English Protestant groups to inquire

about, and participate in, missionary work in other parts of the world. Protestant missions

were therefore never operating in either a denominational or geographical vacuum and they

constantly sought to transcend the permeable boundaries of the Atlantic world. One of the

most pressing concerns was the spread of Christianity into the East Indies.61 As Andrew

Porter has argued, there was “always an Asian dimension” to Christian missions, for the

conversion of the Atlantic world was only a stepping stone towards the larger goal of

“gospelizing” the entire world.62 Even some of the most outspoken critics of Atlantic history

have rightly urged historians who study Indians in the West to “pay a bit more attention to

the Indians in the East.”63 Indeed, Protestant missionary work was always a global

61 For more on the transatlantic networks of missionary writings, see Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic

Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735-1755,” American

Historical Review 91 No. 4 (October 1986): 811-832. See also O’Brien, “Eighteenth Century Publishing

Networks in the First Years of Transatlantic Evangelicalism,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of

Popular Protestantism in 7orth America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll,

David W. Bebbington and Goerge A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 38-57; Carla

Gardina Pestana, “Religion,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J.

Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 69-89; Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British

Missionaries, 7ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2004), 62-83; and Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons; For the transatlantic revivalism of the First Great

Awakening, see Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals,

1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Eric Leigh Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland

and the Making of American Revivalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001);

and Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial 7ew England’s Revival Tradition in its British

Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

62 Andrew Porter, “Church History, History of Christianity, Religious History: Some Reflections on British

Missionary Enterprise Since the Late Eighteenth Century,” Church History 71 No. 3 (September 2002):

573.

63 Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang 7ach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic

History,” Journal of World History 13 No. 1 (Spring 2002): 179. See also Alison Games, “Beyond the

Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 No. 4

(October 2006): 675-692; Philip J. Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and

Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 No. 4 (October 2006): 693-712; Paul W. Mapp, “Atlantic

History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 No. 4

(October 2006): 713-724; and Peter A. Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” William and Mary

Quarterly 63 No. 4 (October 2006): 725-742. Interestingly, many English people believed that the “Four

Indian Kings” who visited England in 1710 were actually from India, not North America. See Hinderaker,

“The ‘Four Indian Kings’”: 524.

157

enterprise, an effort that linked missions in New England, the Caribbean, Africa, and

elsewhere to conduits of information emanating from England, India, and other parts of Asia.

The debate about native missionaries, then, was not only an Atlantic-wide phenomenon, but a

Supra-Atlantic conversation that bound these communities in spite of the vast distances and

deep oceans that separated them. When Protestant missionaries pondered the problem of

converting Indians in the Americas, they often looked to Indians in India as an evangelical

model. The East and West Indies, therefore, were inextricably linked in the Protestant

missionary mind.

Even though Puritan missionaries were limited to New England, clergymen like

Cotton Mather tapped into wide networks of Atlantic, and even Supra-Atlantic,

correspondence to find out about missionary work in other regions. This curiosity was fueled

by missionaries’ assumption that gospelization was a global process, one not circumscribed

by political, geographical, or topographical boundaries. Samuel Sewall, for example,

envisioned New England as a “New Jerusalem” and believed that this city on a hill would

“invigorate Christianity in the several Quarters of the World; in Asia, in Africa, in Europe,

and in America.”64 Continental Europeans also regarded missionary work in America as a

decisive moment in the sacred history of Christianity. When Dutch Reformed theologian

Johann Hoornbeek published a book about the conversion of the gentiles in 1669, he was sure

to include a large section on the efforts of Puritan missionaries across the Atlantic.65 And yet

64 Samuel Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam Aapocalyptica Ad Aspectum 7ovi Orbis configurata. Or, some

few Llines towards a description of the 7ew Heaven As It makes to those who stand upon the 7ew Earth

(Boston: Bartholemew Green, 1727), 2.

65 Dennis Channing Landis, The Millennium: Christianity in the Americas. An Exhibition at the John

Carter Brown Library, May – September 2000 (Providence: The John Carter Brown Library, 2000), 19.

See Johann Hoornbeek, De Conversion Indorum & Gentilium (Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius à

Waesberge & the widow of Elizaeus Weterstraet, 1669). Dennis C. Landis has argued that, in the

seventeenth century, German Lutherans actually held a very intense and sustained debate about whether

they should be involved in missionary work at all. Although it appeared to be mandated by scripture,

Martin Luther said nothing about missions himself. By the turn of the century, however, the ascension of

158

this spirit of New England exceptionalism did not preclude the possibility that other gains

were being made by other Protestants in other zones of contact.66 Cotton Mather, for

example, developed an intimate correspondence with August Francke, a Pietist scholar who

founded a famous orphan school in Halle, Germany. Francke even developed a very

successful school for future tutors – a kind of missionary training program – that was

designed to send its graduates out to propagate Christianity throughout the world.67 Mather

was also in touch with Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, a German Lutheran missionary sent to India

by the Danish Court at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a mission which was also

supported by the Anglican SPCK. Mather’s letters to and from Ziegenbalg reflected the

collective interests that all Protestants shared, in spite of the doctrinal differences and vast

oceans that separated them. As Mather stated, German Lutherans working in India and

Puritan evangelists in the Americas were “Joyned in our Minds, tho’ parted by the Waters;

One Soul, tho’ not one Soyl, Uniting of Us.”68 Mather even shipped money and books to

German Pietism assured that there would be a strong German Protestant missionary impulse, and these

missionaries would be reading about Spanish, French, and Puritan efforts to convert Indians throughout the

Americas. See Dennis C. Landis, “Lutherans Meet the Indians: A Seventeenth Century Conversion

Debate” in James Muldoon, ed., The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (Tallahassee: University Press of

Florida, 2004), 99-117.

66 In fact, Puritans often wrote disparagingly about their own missionary efforts in contrast with other

Protestant, and even Catholic, ones. See Stoddard, Question Whether God is not Angry.

67 Cotton Mather, 7uncia Bona e Terra Longinqua. A Brief Account of Some Good & Great Things a

Doing for the Kingdom of God, in the Midst of Europe. Communicated in a Letter to from Cotton Mather

,

D.D. & F.R.S. (Boston: B. Green, 1715). See also Mukhtar Ali Isani, “Cotton Mather and the Orient,” The

7ew England Quarterly 43 No. 1 (March 1970): 46-58; Ernest Benz, “Pietist and Puritan Sources of Early

Protestant World Missions (Cotton Mather and A.H. Francke),” Church History 20 No. 2 (June 1951): 28-

55; and Ernest Benz, “Ecumenical Relations Between Boston Puritanism and German Pietism: Cotton

Mather and August Hermann Francke,” The Harvard Theological Review 54 No. 3 (July 1961): 159-193.

68 Letter from Cottom Mather to Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, 31 December, 1717, in Cotton Mather, India

Christiana. : A discourse, delivered unto the Commissioners, for the Propagation of the Gospel among the

American Indians : which is accompanied with several instruments relating to the glorious design of

propagating our holy religion, in the Eastern as well as the Western, Indies. : An entertainment which they

that are waiting for the kingdom of God will receive as good news from a far country (Boston: B. Green,

1721), 74.

159

India as a show of support for Ziegenbalg’s interdenominational mission. New England

Puritans were therefore very curious about, and quite active in, Protestant missions well

beyond the bounds of the Atlantic world.

So were the Anglicans. As stated earlier, the SPG could not officially preach beyond

the boundaries of the British empire, but the SPCK did not have such a caveat in their

charter. In fact, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, the SPCK was directly

participating in Ziegenbalg’s interdenominational, international, and intercontinental mission.

This ambitious enterprise employed Puritan money and books, German missionaries,

Anglican financial support, Danish royal backing, and Indian catechists. The English

collaboration with the Germans should not be surprising. After all, England had already had

a few continental Europeans on their throne, and George I, a German by birth, was the King

of England by the time this mission got started. Germans and English thus had a lot more in

common by 1710 than they did in decades prior. Although the mission to the coast of India

was operated by German Lutherans and supported by the Danish royalty, the SPCK provided

a significant amount of funding for it. They received annual updates from the Lutheran

missionaries and even claimed it as one of their own missions.69 Like the Puritans, Anglicans

believed that they had a direct stake in the India mission, even if they were not physically

there. Halle’s Professor Francke also noted these connections. Just as he kept in contact with

69 It was not until 1825 that the SPCK would hand over the direction of the India mission to the SPG. For

more on this mission, see W.K. Lowther Clarke, D.D., A History of the S.P.C.K. (London: S.P.C.K., 1959),

59-76. For more on religious identity formation in eighteenth century India, see Susan Bayly, Saints,

Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989). Even the Scottish, Presbyterian organization of the SSPCK extended

their view past the bounds of Edinburgh by sending monies and books to places as far away as the Greek

Church in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt. The books included 6,000 psalters, 10,000

testaments, and 5,000 catechisms, all of which amounted to about 3,000 pounds sterling. This was roughly

the same cost of employing 75 SPG missionaries in the field. See The Christian Monthly History: Or, An

Account of the Revival and Progress of Religion, Abroad, and at Home Number I. For April 1745

(Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison, 1743-1746), 35.

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Puritan divine Cotton Mather, he also sent the SPG free copies of accounts of his school and

its role in Protestant missionary work in Southern India.70

Puritan clergy, Anglican missionary organizations, German Lutherans, Danish royalty, and Indian

neophytes collaborated to make southern India one of the most active arenas for Protestant missionary

activity in the early eighteenth century. From Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the

East: Being an Account of the Success of Two Danish Missionaries, Lately Sent to the East-Indies, For The

Conversion of the Heathens in Malabar. In Several Letters to their Correspondents in Europe. Containing

a 7arrative of their Voyage to the Coast of Coromandel, their Settlement at Tranquebar, the Divinity and

Philosophy of the Malabarians, their Language and Manners, the Impediments obstructing their

Conversion, the several Methods taken by these Missionaries, the wonderful Providences attending them,

and the Progress they have already made. Part I. (London: Joseph Downing, 1718). Courtesy of the John

Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Many of the same rhetoric and motives that characterized Puritan and Anglican

missions could also be found in the German Lutheran mission to India in the first decades of

70 Frederick Michael Ziegenhagen to the SPG, 2 February 1747/8, in SPG Records, Letter Series B.

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the eighteenth century. Like the Puritans and Anglicans before him, Bartholomew

Ziegenbalg described his mission to India as “a City that is set on an Hill, and may be seen at

a Distance.”71 He also shared other Protestants’ disdain for the Catholic menace that

surrounded him. The Lutheran missions were enclosed by French and Portuguese stations in

India, and Ziegenbalg complained bitterly about the “sorry Performances” of the Catholic

priests there.72 Like the Anglicans in New York and South Carolina, Ziegenbalg must have

felt encircled by his Catholic competitors. For our purposes, however, the most important

connection between Ziegenbalg’s mission and those of the Anglican Atlantic was the

tremendous amount of authority placed into the hands of native peoples.

German Lutherans agreed with Puritans and Anglicans that native evangelists would

be absolutely necessary to any sustained evangelical effort. Beginning in Tranquebar and

working their way up the east and west coasts of India, Ziegenbalg and the other Continental

missionaries who followed him cultivated a corps of native elders, exhorters, catechists, and

teachers.73 While a “pretty young Man of the Malabarian Race” volunteered to be an

interpreter and preacher, other Indians offered their services as teachers or leaders of prayer

groups.74 John Ernest Grundler reported in 1719 that experience had taught him that local

catechists – every catechist was an Indian – were supremely effective at not only sustaining

the church, but expanding it beyond its borders and reaching out to other Indians. Although

the documentary evidence never tells us exactly how that worked, it is important to note the

71 Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, v.

72 Ziegenbalg to Anonymous, 6 January 1710, in Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, 52.

73 Letter from John Ernest Grundler to Cotton Mather, 10 December 1719, in Mather, India Christiana, 84.

The best general history of the Tranquebar mission can be found in Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity

in India, 1707-1858 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28-58.

74 Letter from Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, 1 September 1706, in Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in

the East, 41.

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extent to which native Indians controlled and ran these missions. The German Lutherans

officially supervised these locals, but the catechists themselves led biblical, exegetical, and

theological exercises, where they selected passages from scripture and expounded upon them.

After they offered these reflections as “a Sermon for the Publick,” the Indian catechists

would then apply these passages to the temporal and spiritual challenges that Indians faced in

the early eighteenth century.75 Grundler hoped that the best of these catechists would

eventually make the German missionaries obsolete and “take the work of this Mission into

their management.” He, like other Christian missionaries around the world, longed for the

day when, “by their means, we shall one day see much Advantage and a mighty Harvest.”76

Ironically, the more successful European missionaries were, the more obsolete they would

become.

Bartholomew Ziegenbalg also relied upon a native poet to acquire as many

indigenous texts as he could in order to learn about the local caste system, languages, and

religion. This poet eventually became a native teacher who translated the catechism and

history of Christ into Damulian, sang psalms with Indian children at night, and even offered a

narrative of his own conversion. When he gave Ziegenbalg this confession in 1709, he

admitted that his conversion experience was based upon a search for metaphysical truths

rather than a desire for spiritual salvation. This emphasis on religious truth was a common

one for many Indian neophytes, and argument and reason – rather than ecstatic revelation –

usually won out in India. Ziegenbalg rejected European assumptions that Indians were

somehow pliable and impressionable in their religion. He declared that Indians as a whole

were not “so destitute of Arguments as we imagine,” and were “able to baffle…one Proof

75 Letter from John Ernest Grundler to Cotton Mather, 10 December 1719, in Mather, India Christiana, 56.

76 The italics are mine. John Ernest Grundler to Cotton Mather, 10 December 1719, in Mather, India

Christiana, 84.

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alleged for Christianity, with ten others brought against it.”77 The Indian search for religious

truth was therefore a paramount concern that native missionaries had to confront head on.

Some native congregations even made lists of sacred truths – derived from Christian scripture

– and disseminated them among their neighbors.78 Ziegenbalg’s native poet engaged in the

same intellectual project by scouring Malabarian, Hindu, and Islamic books, reading every

sacred text he could procure. After his studies he eventually concluded that all of these

religions “contain nothing but a pack of Lies, and a Huddle of odd and confused notions.”

Protestant Christianity, however, had proven to the poet to be “the only true, and saving

Religion in the World.”79 The Indian poet’s conversion appeared more like a humanistic

search for sacred knowledge than a blind leap of faith.

Before his embrace of Christian evangelism, Tondaman Mudaly was a Pandaram, or

a low-caste Hindu Priest, who resided in Cuddalore.80 “In my infancy,” Mudaly recalled,

“my Parents taught me, that there was a Being who had created Heaven and Earth, and that

good Men would go to Heaven, but the Wicked to Hell.”81 Yet Mudaly’s later quest for

further religious education, as well as his temporal experiences among other Indians, caused

him great uneasiness. He became incensed at the “dancing Girls” who sang and offered sex

at the many pagodas throughout India. He was shocked by the innumerable sacrifices made

77 Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, 5.

78 John Ernest Grundler to Cotton Mather, 10 December 1719, in Mather, India Christiana, 56.

79 Letter from Bartholomew Ziegenbalg to a friend in London, 19 October 1709, in Ziegenbalg,

Propagation of the Gospel in the East, 32.

80 His story can be found in “The Life of a Pandaram, a Sincere Convert to Christianity at Cudulore,” from

Letters from George Huttenan to the SPCK, 12 and 20 of January, 1768, in George Henry Hutteman, A

Genuine Account of the remarkable Conversion of an Indian Priest to Christianity, in the Year 1763

(London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1765). Cuddalore is on the eastern side of southern

India, located about 10 miles south of Pondicherry.

81 “The Life of a Pandaram, a Sincere Convert to Christianity at Cudulore,” 4.

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to mythical creatures during sacred days. And, after a prolonged spiritual struggle

characterized by intense longing, rejection from family and friends, and combing sacred texts

for divine truths, Mudaly finally decided to hear what the Protestant missionaries had to say.

When that happened, Mudaly recalled, “the mists of mine Understanding began to clear up,”

and the knowledge that the Protestants disseminated was “immediately approved by the silent

Voice of Reason and Conscience.”82 Like the Malabarian poet, Mudaly’s appropriation of

Christianity was based upon a search for knowledge rather than an anxiety about the status of

his soul.

Mudaly also integrated Christianity into Indian Hinduism by describing his spiritual

transformation as a fundamentally corporeal experience. In his own confession, he admitted

that this “Wedam [religion] enables a Man to curb and subdue his Passions and wicked

Appetites of the Flesh; and makes the Mind in Love with Holiness by the Spirit of Jesus.”83

Just as the traditional practice of asceticism helped Indians reign in their primal impulses and

strive for spiritual lucidity, Mudaly observed that the exercise of Christian rituals also served

that function perfectly. Mudaly had thus concluded that Christianity was the only religion

that could curb his passions while helping him remain loyal to the sacred dictums his parents

had taught him when he was a child. He envisioned his Christian transformation not as a

complete conversion or a surrendering of his Indian identity, but rather as a “reduction” in the

seventeenth and eighteenth century sense of the word: he believed Protestant Christianity

represented a return to the initial intentions of the Parabara Wastu, or Supreme Being.84 For

82 “The Life of a Pandaram, a Sincere Convert to Christianity at Cudulore,” 5.

83 Hutteman, A Genuine Account, 6.

84 “The Life of a Pandaram, a Sincere Convert to Christianity at Cudulore,” 6. Mudaly’s use of “Parabara

Wastu” for God and “Jesus Mattiastar” for Jesus Christ would, according to Lamin O. Sanneh’s

interpretation, reflect the indigenization of Christianity on Indian soil. As such, Christianity thus becomes

detached from its Western moorings and reoriented, recast, and remanifested as an indigenous Indian

165

Mudaly, Christianity was not an alien or invasive religion, but rather a reawakening of the

fundamental essence of human spirituality that he learned from his elders and sacred texts.

In spite of the vast physical and cultural spaces that separated Indian Indians from

American ones, Indian preachers still faced the same kinds of problems that native

missionaries throughout the Atlantic world experienced. Most pressing of all was the

recasting of their identity as both Indian and Christian, a difficult thing to do in the caste-

oriented social world of southern India. Native missionaries in India faced resistance not

only because they appeared as agents of a new, imperial religion, but also because their very

existence seemed to upset the vital, but sometimes quite delicate, caste system upon which

Indian society was based. The story of Johannes, another Indian preacher, reveals the ways

in which Indian Christians navigated these problems of identity in such a caste-oriented

society. Johannes reminded his Indian audiences that, although he was a “wretched sinner,”

he had never upset the careful social order of the Indian caste system. When his enemies

accused him of forfeiting his caste via his conversion to Christianity, he simply replied, “I

have changed my Religion, but not my Cast. By becoming a Christian I did not turn an

Englishman: I am yet a Tondaman. Never did the Priest of this Place desire of me any Thing

contrary to my Cast. Never did he bid me to eat Cow Flesh or Beef, neither have I seen him

eat it, or any of the Tamulian Christians, though such a Thing be not sinful in itself.”85

Johannes, like other Indian preachers, believed that his adoption of Christianity was not an

affront to the caste system, but rather an affirmation of it.

religion. See Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand

Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003); and Sanneh, Translating the Message: The

Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989).

85 Hutteman, A Genuine Account, 8-9. Johannes was originally named Arunasalam Pandaram, but changed

his name to Aruhananden and then Johannes.

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The Malabarian Poet who translated sacred texts for Ziegenbalg faced even more

persecution from his fellow Indians. Fearing the cultural power of persuasion that the poet

wielded, his parents locked him in their home for three days without food or water. A mob of

200 neighbors gathered to force him to renounce his newfound Protestant Christianity while

others threatened to poison and even hang him. Much to the delight of his Protestant

supporters, the poet never renounced his new faith. In spite of Indian fears that these

neophytes were abandoning their traditional ways, Mudaly, Johannes, the poet, and other

Indian preachers were not interested in becoming Englishmen or betraying their countrymen.

Instead, they sought ways to graft Christianity onto indigenous Indian notions of the social

caste system, personal behavior, and even the pursuit of spiritual knowledge, and in the

process they translated Protestant Christianity into an Indian cultural vernacular.

Although Protestants from India to the Americas viewed the apparent success of the

Indian mission with delight, the ascension of Indians into positions of ecclesiastical

leadership also highlighted some questions about the nature of ordination, the authority of

native preachers, and the relationship between missions and the home church.86 This was

certainly not a new problem. As early as 1694, years before the SPCK and SPG were even

established, several Anglicans made a proposal to erect a native seminary in India. The

object was so that ministers might be “bred up and ordained there upon the spot.”87 The

86 The same was true for missionary work in North America, which was often perceived as a religious

periphery that demanded certain ecclesiastical policies to be bent, if not broken. See Charles L. Cohen,

“The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of Christianity,” Church History

72 No. 3 (September 2003): 553-568.

87 Anonymous, A Farther Appeal to the Unprejudiced Judgment of Mankind, In Behalf of the Indians. In

Two Parts, Containing, I. Animadversions upon some late Arguments of a Right Reverend Prelate of the

Church of England, in reference to our sending Missionaries from hence to convert the Indians. Written in

the Year 1760. II. Thoughts upon the proper Means and Measures of converting the Indians to true

Christianity. Written in the Year 1764. To which are added, Considerations relative to the Subject of the

foregoing Proposals, particularly that of appointing Bishops or Superintendents in our Colonies abroad.

By Another Hand: Both Joint-Writers in the Free and Candid Disquisitions relating to the Church of

England, &c. (London: A. Millar, 1766), 39.

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college was never built, but the problem of native ordination resurfaced when an Indian

named Pastor Aaron was ordained in 1733 and another catechist named Diego was ordained

in 1741, both with Lutheran, and not Anglican, rites. Every minister understood that sending

natives to Europe for ordination would be attended with “insuperable difficulties,” not to

mention excessive costs. And yet, there were questions as to whether the German

missionaries in India even had the power to ordain native preachers. Some SPCK authorities

tried to squash that question immediately, noting that it was a “tender point” that could “yield

no service to this mission but might do abundance of mischief.”88 Henry Newman, who

served as the librarian of Harvard College, acted as personal administrator of George

Berkeley’s Bermuda scheme (discussed later in this chapter), and was secretary of the SPCK

in the 1730s, hoped that Anglicans could prevent any “difficulties or misunderstandings that

may hereafter grow in those parts upon a supposition of the Holy Orders conferr’d in India

not being valid.”89 Some Anglicans vehemently disagreed. One respected divine complained

to Newman that he would “allow of no Pastor Aarons to preach the gospel without they come

over to England for Episcopal ordination, or some bishop goes over to India to ordain

them.”90 This situation was resolved, partially, by the fact that the mission was officially

under the auspices of the Danish Crown. Even though the SPCK donated books and monies

to the mission, they were not in a position to dictate such an important policy as that which

dealt with the problem of native ordination. The College at Copenhagen, rather than the

Church of England, gave the German Lutherans permission to officially ordain native

88 Henry Newman to Mr. Wynch, 4 February 1736, in Clarke, A History of the S.P.C.K., 65.

89 Henry Newman to A.H. Francke, 6 June 1735, in Clarke, A History of the S.P.C.K., 64.

90 Henry Newman to Archdeacon Denne, 31 January, 1739, in Clarke, A History of the S.P.C.K., 65.

168

preachers in India.91 Nevertheless, the very presence of native evangelists in India was cause

for an ecclesiastical debate that challenged the ways in which Anglicans understood the

relationship between the home church and the widespread missions they supported. No

native preacher would ever be ordained outside the bounds of England proper.

By 1740 Puritans, Anglicans, Danes, Germans, and Indian preachers had collaborated

to establish a series of schools and missions throughout the coasts of India. While ten

European missionaries supervised the missions, half a dozen native preachers and 30 native

catechists oversaw their daily operations, which included Christian teaching, leading prayers,

translating sacred texts, and singing psalms.92 Indian evangelists faced persecution from

other natives and struggled to create a new sense of identity, one that was characterized by a

synthetic fusion of Christian spirituality and indigenous culture. Warfare, which wracked

New England, New York, and South Carolina, also came to India in the 1750s, as the French

attacked Protestant missions and occasioned a veritable diaspora of Christian Indians to the

north (an event that some Protestant commentators believed was wonderfully providential).93

The India missions also underscored the fact that Puritans, Anglicans, Danes, and Germans

were all connected to a wider world of correspondence and information than we have

previously recognized. Central to these transatlantic, even Supra-Atlantic, conversations was

the debate over what role native people would play in their own conversion to Christianity.

Whether among Indians in America or Indians in the East, indigenous evangelists were

essential to the development of, and discussions about, the Protestant missionary enterprise.

91 The Christian Monthly History, 83.

92 W.O.B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of The Society for Promoting

Christian Knowledge, 1698-1898 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1898), 266.

93 See Hutteman, A Genuine Account, 1.

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The Berkeley Plan and the Problem of Slavery

The abysmal failure of Anglican missionary efforts in the Atlantic during the first few

decades of the eighteenth century, especially when compared to the apparent successes of the

Protestant missions in India, forced Anglican divines to propose new, creative, and more

ambitious plans for the evangelization of Indians and Africans in the Atlantic world. The

Indian royalty model certainly had staying power, but new alternatives were emerging that

made the education of indigenous children the focus of the native missionary project. By the

middle of the 1720s, for example, Anglican cleric George Berkeley had concluded that the

expansion of British dominion abroad had thus far represented only a missed opportunity for

spreading Christianity. Naturally, he turned to the missionary organizations charged with

converting Indians and Africans and blamed the SPCK and SPG for the “very inconsiderable

progress” the gospel had made among native peoples throughout the Atlantic world.94

Berkeley then drafted his own ambitious plan to convert the world’s indigenous peoples and

rescue Christianity from its failures: he would create a college where Indians and Africans

could be educated, trained as missionaries, and sent back among their people to affect a

general conversion. In the middle of the 1720s, Berkeley secured funding, Parliamentary

backing, and had even decided on Bermuda (a place he had never visited) as the location for

his college.95 Situated as it was at the crossroads of the British Atlantic, Berkeley assumed

94 George Berkeley, A Proposal For the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, and For

Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity, By a College to be Erected in the Summer Islands,

Otherwise Called the Isles of Bermuda (Dublin: George Grierson, 1725), 3. For more on Berkeley’s

theories about the degeneration of the English nation, see George Berkeley, A Discourse Addressed to

Magistrates and Men in Authority, Occasioned by the Enormous License, and Irreligion of the Times. To

Which is Added, A Report From the Lords Committees for Religion, Appointed to Examine into the Causes

of the Present 7otorious Immorality and Prophaneness: Made by the Earl of Granard, on Friday the 10th

of March, 1737 (London: J. Roberts, 1738); and An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great-Britain,

which can be found in George Berkeley, A Miscellany, Containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects

(London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1752).

95 While Berkeley was concocting this plan, the agent in charge of his affairs was Henry Newman, a man

who had been educated at Harvard, served as its librarian from 1690 to 1693, and then became the secretary

170

that Bermuda would be a perfect locale for the convenient intermingling of English preachers

with Amerindian and African students. Although modern historians have viewed this plan

primarily as a fantastical and utopian scheme that became entangled in the personal politics

of English society, the Berkeley Plan was much more than that. Berkeley’s scheme, in fact,

represented a seminal moment in larger transatlantic debates about the propriety and efficacy

of using native missionaries.96

In letters to his colleagues and in A Proposal For the Better Supplying of Churches in

our Foreign Plantations (1725), Berkeley explained why native missionaries would be more

effective than the English ones already in the colonies. Even the most zealous and skilled

Anglican missionary, Berkeley claimed, “must find himself but ill qualified for converting

the American Heathen, if we consider the difference of language, their wild way of living,

and above all, the great jealousy and prejudice which savage nations have towards

foreigners.”97 “Children of savage Americans,” he continued, would “make the ablest and

properest missionaries for spreading the gospel among their countrymen: who would be less

apt to suspect, and readier to embrace a doctrine recommended by neighbours or relations,

for the SPCK. Newman, in some ways, personifies the connections between Puritan missionary efforts and

Anglican ones.

96 The Berkeley proposal has been covered by several scholars. See Edwin S. Gaustad, “George Berkeley

and New World Community,” Church History 48 No. 1 (March 1979): 5-17; A.A. Luce, “Berkeley’s

Bermuda Project and His Benefactions to American Universities, with Unpublished Letters and Extracts

from the Egmont Papers,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Volume 42, Section C, No. 6 (London:

Williams & Norgate, 1934); Graham P. Conroy, “Berkeley and Education in America,” Journal of the

History of Ideas 21 No. 2 (April – June 1960): 211-221; Benjamin Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival: The

Correspondence of George Berkeley Afterwards Bishop of Cloyne and Sir John Percival Afterwards Earl

of Egmont (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 31-46. Gaustad is generally recognized as the

foremost scholar of George Berkeley, so consult his works for more on Berkeley’s life and thought. I also

thank Margareta Lovell, of the University of California at Berkeley (appropriately), for urging me to

examine Berkeley’s plan in light of the longer history of debates about native missionaries.

97 Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, 4.

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men of their own blood and language, than if it were proposed by foreigners.”98 His plan was

to secure Indians while they were young and keep them at the Bermudian seminary until they

were ready to be transported to England for ordination. They would then be sent back to

their own nations and serve as “powerful instruments” to convert their brethren.99 Although

Berkeley suggested that his ambitious scheme had “never been tried,” this was not entirely

accurate.100 By calling upon and explaining the need for native missionaries, Berkeley was

participating in a much older transatlantic conversation about the best means for propagating

the gospel. Two characteristics made his plan unique. The first was that this was one of the

first times in which Anglicans did not demonstrate an obsession with fawning over native

royalty. Second was Berkeley’s plan to isolate Native Americans and Africans on a distant

island 600 miles from the American coast. Secluded from the traders, merchants, and

profanity of the world, Berkeley’s students would serve as cogs in the hub of a transatlantic,

Anglican evangelical effort centered in Bermuda.

Berkeley and his supporters also believed that this Bermuda Plan would finally give

Anglicans the opportunity to strike back at Catholics and provide an institutional framework

for giving Spanish, Portuguese, and French missionaries some competition in the Americas.

Berkeley implied that the SPG was weak when compared with the veritable army of Jesuit

and Franciscan “regulars” who did the bidding of the Catholic Pope. This numerical

advantage, Berkeley anticipated, “may be over-balanced by our employing American

missionaries.” In fact, Berkeley believed that, given their understanding of local languages

and cultures, native preachers “would in all probability have much greater influence on the

98 Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, 5.

99 Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, 17.

100 Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, 14.

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Americans, than the utmost endeavours of popish emissaries can possibly have.”101

Ironically, Berkeley’s plan for native missionaries tried to emulate, and replicate the

successes of, the Catholic missionaries he claimed to despise. Even one of Berkeley’s friends

applauded his scheme and predicted that Berkeley’s reputation would “in some time exalt

your name beyond that of St. Xavier.”102 Berkeley eagerly tapped into anxieties about anti-

popery even as he drew obvious parallels between Catholic missionaries and the army of

native preachers he expected to graduate from his Bermuda school.

Although Bermuda had many advantages, it lacked the two main ingredients that

Berkeley needed: Indians and Africans.103 Berkeley thought he had an easy solution to that

obstacle: if peaceful methods could not be used to procure potential seminarians, he might

obtain some by “taking captive the children of our enemies.”104 Such a suggestion aroused

the indignation of Anglican missionaries and American settlers alike. Thomas Bray called it

not only “un-Christian” but “anti-Christian,” and declared that it would provoke “an Eternal

War” between Indians and English.105 William Byrd, a wealthy Virginia planter, lampooned

the idea of using enemy Indians as future missionaries. He declared that the only way

101 Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, 12.

102 Sir John Percival to George Berkeley, 30 June 1723, in Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival, 209. Xavier

was, of course, perhaps the most famous of the early Jesuit missionaries.

103 Berkeley outlined the advantages of Bermuda in his Proposal as well as in his letters to his friend, Sir

John Percival. These included its equidistance to all colonies, its healthy climate, its protection from

pirates, and its distance from both the heathen practices of Native Americans as well as the outright

commercialism of the English. See Letter from Berkeley to Sir John Percival, 4 March 1723, in Berkeley,

A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority, 204-205. Berkeley’s dectractors, on the other

hand, noted that Bermuda lacked Indians and Africans and was a barren country where “there is no bread,

nor anything fit for the sustenance of man, but onions and cabbage.” See William Byrd to Sir John

Percival, 10 June 1729, in Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival, 244.

104 Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, 5.

105 Samuel Clyde McCullough, “A Plea for Further Missionary Activity in Colonial America –Dr. Thomas

Bray’s Missionalia” (n.p., 1946), reprinted from Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church

(September 1946), 10.

173

Berkeley could succeed would be if he had “the command of half a dozen regiments, with

which he or one of his professors in the quality of Lieutenant General must make a descent

upon the coast of Florida and take as many prisoners as he can.” Byrd sarcastically

concluded that such a maneuver would “be as wise, and as meritorious, as the Holy War used

to be of old.”106 Byrd was quite right. George Berkeley’s enemies-as-missionaries proposal

exposed his absolute naiveté in engineering this scheme. The idea of native missionaries was

neither novel nor controversial, but proposal to kidnap potential evangelists and take them to

a barren island certainly was.

In some ways, Berkeley’s ignorance about his own plan doomed it to failure. He had

never been to the island where he proposed to construct this seminary, he had probably never

met any Native Americans in his life, and he was utterly inexperienced in missionary work.

Historians are right to acknowledge that such a fantastical scheme of taking Indians 600

miles from their homes to a deserted island was improbable, if not impossible.

Contemporaries agreed. Even though Berkeley had plenty of clout in the Anglican

community, many believed the logistics of this plan were ludicrous. The Bishop of Salisbury

said it was a “ridiculous project,” and William Byrd thought it was simply a “romantic”

musing engineered by a veritable “Don Quixote,” and that it would only result in a “religious

frenzy.”107 Even Berkeley himself acknowledged that some of his colleagues would think he

was “mad and chimerical.”108 A further setback occurred when King George I died (he

apparently supported the plan) and Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole blocked the scheme.109

106 William Byrd to Sir John Percival, 10 June 1729, in Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival, 244-245.

107 Journal of Sir John Percival, 27 February 1732, in Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival, 282; William Byrd

to Sir John Percival, 10 June 1729, in Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival, 244.

108 Berkeley to Sir John Percival, 4 March 1723, in Berkeley and Percival, 206.

109 Conroy, “Berkeley and Education in America”: 214.

174

Berkeley’s plan also represented an implicit affront to the SPG itself. Thomas Bray,

the influential founder of the SPCK and SPG, wrote Missionalia a few years after Berkeley’s

plan went public, and Bray tried to persuade readers that Berkeley’s scheme was absurd and

impossible. Ironically, Bray was the same person who in 1699 supported the creation of

colonial colleges for the training of native preachers for evangelical roles.110 By 1727, when

Bray published Missionalia, he had changed his tune. Casting doubt on the idea of native

preachers as a whole, Bray used several examples from missionary efforts in Africa to

demonstrate the ways in which supposedly converted indigenous peoples would only return

to the rude and barbaric cultures they reveled in before they were exposed to Christianity.

Two “Black Princes” from Mozambique, for example, were “sorry Fellows” who were

baptized and trained in Bray’s parish in the early eighteenth century. One of them committed

suicide in England and the other converted to Christianity, only to cast it off as soon as he

returned home.111 For Bray, these examples demonstrated the futility of using native

Christians to preach the gospel. Berkeley’s plan was, in Bray’s eyes, silly and impractical

because natives would not travel far from home to be educated by Christian strangers, they

may never return home if they actually did travel, and their return to savagery was almost

inevitable if they did return home. Any indigenous student attending Berkeley’s school or

any other native missionary program, according to Bray, would quickly “return like the Dog

to his Vomit, to the former Wild and Savage Ways.”112 Bray believed that this was equally

110 Bray, Apostolick Charity, the fifth point from “A General View.”

111 Bray, Missionalia, A2 and 44-46. A similar story about another African taken from the Cape of Good

Hope is related on pages 78-79. The two Africans were James Macquillan Mussoom and John Chaung

Mussoom. See Travis Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost: Philip Quaque in London and

Cape Coast, 1756-1816,” Journal of British Studies 48 No. 1 (January 2009): 32; and Douglas Grant, The

Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of the African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1968), 97-98.

112 “A Memorial Relating to the Conversion, as well of the American Indians, as of the African Negroes.

To the Reverend Mr. Henderson, and Mr. Wilkinson, Commissaries, and the Rest of the Reverend Clergy

175

evident for Africans as it was Indians, and that “artificers” (people who could teach

indigenous peoples civilization before Christianity would be introduced) should be the focus

of any missionary project.113

Bray’s voice, no matter how loud and influential, was in the minority. Berkeley’s

plan may have been logistically problematic, but few agreed with Bray that native preachers

were the problem. Some Anglican ministers even suggested that the SPG should start

employing black evangelists in the south, especially since the plantations were so distant

from one another. Edmund Gibson, the Lord Bishop of London, suggested in 1728 that

plantation masters and SPG officials should begin selecting specific slaves and targeting

them as future missionaries. “Some of them, who are more capable and more serious than

the rest,” Gibson argued, “might be easily instructed both in our Language and Religion, and

then be made use of to convey Instruction to the rest in their own Language.” The minister

even coolly anticipated that this “may be done with great ease.” 114 In spite of the alleged

“ease” that would accompany such a plan, Gibson’s scheme remained a pipe dream well until

the 1740s, when a school for young black evangelists would be overseen by slaves owned by

of Maryland,” in Thomas Bray, Missionalia: Or, A Collection of Missionary Pieces Relating to the

Conversion of the Heathen; Both the African 7egroes and American Indians (London: W. Roberts, 1727),

77.

113 McCullough, “A Plea for Further Missionary Activity in Colonial America –Dr. Thomas Bray’s

Missionalia,” 9. When a man remembered only as “Mr. Lyttleton” tried to revive Berkeley’s plan again in

1765, the proposal was quickly tabled by Parliament. See J. Maxwell Greene, “Bermuda (alias Somers

Islands). Historical Sketch,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 33 No. 3 (1901): 231.

114 Bishop Edmund Gibson, Letter to the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations

abroad; Exhorting them to encourage and promote the Instruction of their 7egroes in the Christian Faith,

in David Humphreys, An Account of the Endeavours Used By The Society For the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts, To instruct the 7egroe Slaves in 7ew York. Together with Two of Bp. Gibson’s

Letters on that Subject. Being an Extract from Dr. Humphreys’s Historical Account of the Incorporated

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, from its Foundation to the Year 1728 (London:

s.n., 1730), 23.

176

the SPG.115 In the meantime, it was one thing to educate a few Indian kings, but to give

slaves access to such spiritual authority and opportunity for social networking seemed

foolhardy, if not suicidal.

At the center of this Anglican debate over native missionaries was the problematic

relationship between missions and slavery. By the eighteenth century, for example, there was

a veritable “black majority” in South Carolina, making the evangelization of that colony’s

slaves a matter of utmost importance to most ministers and an issue of extreme controversy

to others.116 Although a few missionaries, most notably Samuel Thomas and Francis Le Jau,

established schools and preached to some slaves, instruction was customarily left to the

masters.117 The SPG faced an uphill battle in convincing slave masters that Christianization

would not make their slaves more likely to rebel. The majority of plantation owners and

overseers assumed that the slaves who harnessed the most spiritual and intellectual acuity

would be the ones most prone to lead a bloody rebellion. This assumption appeared to be

correct when, in 1712, New York City experienced a brief rebellion among its urbanized

slave population. Not surprisingly, rumors circulated that the idea for rebellion originated

115 The Charleston Negro School, as it is called, is discussed in the next chapter.

116 Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: 7egroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono

Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974). On page 143 Wood estimates 1708 was the year in which the colony

transformed demographically into a black majority. The best sources on Christianization in early South

Carolina are Wood, Black Majority, 131-142; Annette Laing, “Heathens and Infidels”? African

Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700-1750,” Religion and American

Culture 12 No. 2 (Summer 2002): 197-228; and Shawn Comminey, “The Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts and Black Education in South Carolina, 1702-1764,” The Journal of 7egro History

84 No. 4 (Autumn 1999): 360-369.

117 As part of their campaign to urge slaveholders to give their slaves Christian instruction, the SPG often

printed stories of prominent Carolina families who either taught their slaves themselves or allowed their

slaves to attend church services. Annette Laing suggests that Africans who volunteered for instruction

from Le Jau were not forced to do so, but rather viewed the missionary as a “purveyor of an important

religious tool.” As such, African slaves believed that conversion to Christianity was not a demonstration of

their subjugation to a dominant culture, but rather “promised to enhance their spiritual power.” See Laing,

“Heathens and Infidels?”: 197-198.

177

among the slaves who attended Elias Neau’s Anglican school. This ended up being a false

accusation and SPG commentators gloried in the fact that the slaves who started the rebellion

were actually the property of men who were “declared Opposers of Christianizing

Negroes.”118 Nevertheless, New York passed a law that limited slave mobility and curtailed

blacks’ access to education. Some masters even threatened to send their slaves south if they

attended Neau’s school.119 Such an angst-ridden social climate made it difficult, if not

impossible, to suggest the creation of a black evangelical corps. Even if they remained as

slaves, black preachers still threatened to undermine the very racial hierarchies that formed

the backbone of colonial American society.

The root of the problem was the doctrine of Christian liberty, and masters feared

slave instruction because they feared the rebellions that could result from it. The SPG

responded to this suspicion (and neglect) of black instruction by sending over thousands of

sermons and personal addresses to remind masters of their biblically-mandated injunction to

spread the gospel.120 In every one of these texts, SPG missionaries clearly explained that

conversion did not imply freedom and that Christian instruction in no way tested the racial

118 John Moore, Of the Truth & Excellency of the Gospel: A Sermon Preached before the Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, At Their Anniversary Meeting, In the Parish-Church of St.

Mary-le-Bow, on Friday the 20th of February, 1712/13 (London: J. Downing, 1713), 49.

119 Hawkins, Historical 7otices of the Missions of the Church of England, 271. For more on a later slave

uprising in New York, see Jill Lepore, 7ew York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-

Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005).

120 Some of these documents include a fairly famous sermon by William Fleetwood, which reminded his

readers that failing to spread the Gospel is in fact failing to be a Christian at all. See William Fleetwood, A

Sermon Preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, At the Parish-

Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday the 16th of February, 1710/11,Being the Day of their Anniversary

Meeting (London: J. Downing, 1711). An early example of such missionary literature is Morgan Godwyn,

The 7egro's [and] Indians Advocate : Suing for their Admission to the Church: or A Persuasive to the

Instructing and Baptizing of the 7egro's and Indians in our Plantations. Shewing, That as the Compliance

therewith can prejudice no Man's just Interest; so the wilful 7eglecting and Opposing of it, is no less than a

manifest Apostacy from the Christian Faith. To which is added, A brief Account of Religion in Virginia

(London: J.D., 1680).

178

boundaries of American society. Edmund Gibson, the same Anglican who supported a black

slave missionary program, assured masters that “Christianity, and the embracing of the

Gospel, does not make the least Alteration in Civil Property, or in any of the Duties which

belong to Civil Relations.; but in all these Respects, it continues Persons just in the same

State as it found them.”121 Other Anglicans lambasted the “horrid” and “erroneous” notion

that Christian spiritual liberty implied temporal freedom.122 In his famous sermon advocating

the Christian instruction of black slaves, William Fleetwood asserted that “the Liberty of

Christianity is entirely Spiritual.” Fleetwood and his compatriots thus had little concern for

the temporal status of slaves, for the spiritual consequences of remaining in heathenish

darkness were significantly more ominous than the earthly conditions of southern slavery.

“Let the Christians,” Fleetwood proclaimed, “be Sold, and Bound, and Scourg’d, condemn’d

to Bonds and Imprisonment, to endure all Hardships and Disgrace, and to enter into Heaven,

Blind, and Halt, and Maimed, rather than having Two Eyes, and Hands and Feet entire, to

perish miserably.”123 SPG ministers even suggested that slaves would be “much better

121 Gibson, Letter to the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations abroad, in Frederick

Dalcho, An historical account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South-Carolina, from the first

settlement of the province, to the war of the revolution; with notices of the present state of the church in

each parish: and some account of the early civil history of Carolina, never before published. To which are

added; the laws relating to religious worship; the journals and rules of the convention of South-Carolina;

the constitution and canons of the Protestant Episcopal church, and the course of ecclesiastical studies.

(Charleston, SC: E. Thayer, 1820), 109.

122 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Classified Digest of the Records of the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1892 (London: Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1893), 64; George Berkeley, A Sermon Preached before the

Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in

the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on Friday the 18th of February, 1731 (London: J. Downing, 1732),

20. Cotton Mather actually made the same argument to advocate for the Christianization of New England’s

slaves. He assured New England’s slaveholders that “Your Servants will be Better Servants, for being

made Christian Servants.” Cotton Mather, The 7egro Christianized An Essay to Excite and Assist that

Good Work, The Instruction of 7egro-Servants in Christianity (Boston: B. Green, 1706), 21.

123 Fleetwood, A Sermon Preached before the Society, 17-22. Fleetwood was building off of a previous

work that he published in 1705, which articulated the ways in which social relationships among Christians

should be constructed along hierarchical lines and bound by duty. See Fleetwood, The relative duties of

179

servants to their earthly masters” if they had a sense of the divine master residing above.124

In this way Anglicans contributed to a planter ethos that, as historian Jon Butler put it,

demanded obedience while fashioning a kind of “Christian absolutism” in American slave

society.125

Anglicans had several reasons to express such concern about the relationship between

slavery and Christianity, not the least of which was that the SPG itself was a corporate

slaveholder. When Christopher Codrington bequeathed his Barbados plantation to the SPG

in 1710, the missionary organization accepted the donation with glee. The plantation

contained about 300 African slaves, and the SPG envisioned this windfall as a Protestant

utopia, where they could demonstrate to other slaveholders that Christian instruction did not

inevitably result in outright rebellion. In fact, the Christianization of the SPG’s slaves (who

later had the word “SOCIETY” branded upon them) was of the utmost concern to the

Anglican organization precisely because they could not chastise American colonists for

failing to instruct their slaves if they exhibited the same neglect. As William Fleetwood put

it, “if all the Slaves throughout America, and every Island in those Seas, were to continue

Infidels for ever, yet ours alone must needs be Christians.”126 Anglicans therefore looked to

Barbados as an ideal place to begin a fresher, more ambitious missionary endeavor, with a

parents and children [electronic resource], husbands and wives, masters and servants, consider'd in

sixteen sermons: with three more upon the case of self-murther (London: Charles Harper, 1705).

124 Samuel Bradford, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On

Friday the 19th of February, 1719 (London: John Wyat, 1720), 36-37. If the SPG’s assurances were not

enough, South Carolina passed a law in 1712 that effectively repeated what the Anglican missionaries had

been declaring all along: that conversion to the Christian faith made no alteration whatsoever in civil status.

See “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves,” in Dalcho, An historical

account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South-Carolina, 94-95.

125 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1999), 146.

126 Fleetwood, A Sermon Preached, 25.

180

new college structure as the backbone of this enterprise. This scheme was actually part of

Christopher Codrington’s last wishes, as he requested that students emerging out of the

College would be either missionaries or doctors. The training of blacks for missions in the

West Indies and Africa was even one of the College’s founding principles.127 According to

John Moore, Codrington College would serve as a “sort of perpetual Seminary for Catechists

and Missionaries” and establish Barbados as a new beacon of Protestant missionary

energy.128 Although the SPG started construction on the college in 1714, the unprofitability

of the plantation and other distractions barred it from opening before the fall of 1745.129

Unfortunately for the Anglicans, and against the designs of Christopher Codrington, it never

served as a factory of native missionaries. Nevertheless, the Codrington bequest was an

important moment in Anglican missionary history, for it created an opportunity for the SPG

to get involved in evangelical work in the rest of the West Indies. By the middle of the

eighteenth century they had missionaries on Barbados and the Mosquito Shore, as well as in

the Bahamas and several enclaves dotting the Caribbean. Codrington’s bequest also left

Anglicans with a legacy of deep involvement in slavery and the slave trade, a legacy with

which the Anglican Church is still coming to grips.130 In spite of their attempts to nurture a

native pastorate through royalty, and in spite of the ambitiously utopian schemes conceived

of by Berkeley, Gibson, Codrington and others, Anglicans would enter the 1740s without a

127 Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 156.

128 Moore, Of the Truth & Excellency of the Gospel, 41.

129 For more on the Codrington bequest, see John A. Schultz, “Christopher Codrington’s Will: Launching

the S.P.G. into the Barbadian Sugar Business,” The Pacific Historical Review 15 No. 2 (June 1946), 192-

200; and Frank J. Klingberg, “British Humanitarianism at Codrington,” The Journal of 7egro History 23

No. 4 (October 1938): 451-486.

130 In 2006 the Anglican Church voted to apologize for their role in perpetuating slavery and the slave

trade. See the article from The Telegraph at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1510048/Church-

offers-apology-for-its-role-in-slavery.html (accessed on 28 April 2008).

181

single indigenous missionary on the payroll. The First Great Awakening would quickly

change that.

Anglican missionaries learned important lessons about native preachers from 1700 to

1740. The first was that war would always disrupt native missionary work. Imperial wars in

New York, South Carolina, and India all took their toll on the native missionaries intended to

mediate between Protestants and Indians. Furthermore, Anglicans found that obsessing over

royalty and trying to convert Indian “kings” and “princes” was not necessarily productive or

effective. In a period of colonization and massive demographic change, indigenous

leadership was never as stable as English missionaries hoped, and native preachers proved

just as unpredictable as the wars which disrupted their work. While this obsession with

royalty produced meager results, the overly ambitious utopian schemes were also failures.

Plans like Codrington College and Berkeley’s Bermuda scheme never generated the elite

corps of native preachers that they had promised. In fact, neither plan created so much as one

native minister in the eighteenth century. Because of these multiple challenges, Anglicans

were constantly recasting, revising, and revisiting their formula for missionary work. In spite

of these revisions and in spite of some resistance from influential divines like Thomas Bray,

indigenous preachers almost always remained a central component of that formula. By the

time of the First Great Awakening, Puritans and Anglicans alike had moved away from the

royalty-centered approach and towards one that focused on the education of Indian and

African children throughout the Atlantic world. Not surprisingly, Anglicans envisioned

Africans and Indians teaching these children.

For their own part, indigenous missionaries from India to Iroquoia tried to create

sustainable Christian communities, preserve their sense of cultural autonomy, and carve out a

space where being Indian and Christian was not a contradiction in terms. The Indian kings

182

supported by the Anglicans faced their own obstacles, and yet preachers like Hendrick began

a tradition of native Christian leadership that would be cultivated by other Indians later in the

eighteenth century. Finally, although Indians in India faced problems and opportunities

unique to the subcontintental Asian cultural landscape, they engaged in similar exercises of

appropriation and translation that blacks and Native Americans across the Atlantic engaged

in. By translating texts, singing psalms, leading prayer groups, and pushing for their own

ordination, Christian Indians situated themselves within a sacred genealogy that had always

reserved a space for native conversion of the gentiles.

The period from 1700 to 1740 was immensely important in establishing a precedent

for future employment of native missionaries by Anglicans. Both Puritans and Anglicans

participated in a transatlantic – even Supra-Atlantic – exchange of information that put

various missionary projects in touch with one another. Although vast distances separated

New York, South Carolina, the Caribbean, and India, they were nevertheless all part of the

same global process of evangelization; a process that, by definition, transcended political,

geographical, and topographical boundaries. As such, this period set the stage for an

explosion of native missionaries after 1740. George Berkeley’s failed Bermuda plan serves

as a perfect example. Although Berkeley’s project failed miserably, it did have some long-

term repercussions. Berkeley never went to Bermuda, but he did land in Rhode Island,

mailed his books there, and purchased a plantation just north o f Newport. When he left

Rhode Island and returned to England, he donated many of these books to Harvard and Yale

Colleges. He even let Yale receive a portion of the profits from his plantation because he

revered it as an institution that bred “the most clergymen and most learned of any in

America.”131 Yale honored the generous donation by offering a post-graduate scholarship

131 Luce, “Berkeley’s Bermuda Project”: 107.

183

(the first in Yale’s history) in Berkeley’s name. One of the first Yale graduates to win this

prestigious award, supported by the funds from Berkeley’s Rhode Island plantation, was a

determined and imperious young man named Eleazar Wheelock. Wheelock’s first Indian

pupil would be a famous Mohegan preacher named Samson Occom, and Wheelock would

eventually engineer the most ambitious, and certainly most controversial, native missionary

project in the history of the early modern Protestant Atlantic world.132

132 Wheelock’s plan is discussed in Chapter 5 of this dissertation.

184

CHAPTER THREE

SLAVE PREACHERS, IDIGEIZATIO, AD SEPARATISM

I A ERA OF REVIVAL, 1735-1770

Harry probably had a case of the first day of school jitters. That universal sensation

of nervous excitement that accompanies the dawn of every new school year must have also

been exacerbated by the unique circumstances of the school he was in. Harry had good

reason to be restless, for his school was part of an exceptional experiment in colonial South

Carolina’s race relations. Built several weeks before in the blazing summer of 1742, Harry’s

“Charleston Negro School” was envisioned as the backbone of a new Anglican effort to

evangelize South Carolina’s black majority. The sprawling and separated geography of the

Carolina plantation system, resistance from slave owners, and harsh laws against the

education of bondspeople in this slave society conspired to make the evangelization of the

rice country’s slaves nearly impossible. The creation of this new educational institution was

thus anticipated as a seminal moment in the history of black Christianity, for the students

themselves would be the ones to spread the word of Christ, hopefully succeeding where

previous white missionaries had failed. Harry therefore had an even more compelling reason

to be anxious on the first day of school. Trained in the fundamentals of Christian doctrine by

Anglican missionaries, he was not there to learn, but rather to teach. Like the students

walking into his classroom on that first day, Harry was also a slave.1

1 Brief summaries of the Charleston Negro School can be found in Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come

Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 70-73; Shawn Comminey, “The Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and Black Education in South Carolina, 1702-1764,” The

185

Scholars have debated feverishly over the nature of what has usually been called

“The Great Awakening.”2 Some have identified it as a transformative event that not only

laid the foundations for future American religious history, but also paved the way for the

American Revolution.3 Others, most famously Jon Butler, have attacked the monolithic

implications of this approach. Butler has described the Great Awakening as an “interpretive

fiction,” urging scholars to cease calling it “The Great Awakening” because the phrase

implies a coherent and unified event where none ever existed. In Butler’s interpretation,

what we know as “The Great Awakening” was instead a series of individualized and distinct

revivals that had unique origins, different characteristics, and disparate outcomes.4 More

recent studies have turned away from these questions and instead focused on the impact that

Journal of egro History 84 No. 4 (Autumn 1999): 363-365; and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The

“Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 116-117.

2 The Great Awakening is also referred to as the First Great Awakening, distinguishing it from the second

wave of revivalism that crested around the 1820s and 30s.

3 See, for example, Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, From the Great Awakening to the

Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); Harry S. Stout, "Religion, Communications, and

the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 34 No. 4 (October

1977): 519-541; and Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in

Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). While all three interpretations differ in

some regards, each underscores the fact that the Great Awakening was a momentous event that not only

changed American religious belief and practice, but also provided some of the rhetoric, communication

networks, and attacks on deference that the Revolutionary generation would rely upon decades later.

4 Butler rightly notes that the phrase “Great Awakening” did not even come into use until 1842. See Jon

Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” The Journal of

American History 69 No. 2 (September 1982): 305-325. Frank Lambert contradicts Butler’s argument

directly by focusing on how revivalist leaders made the Awakening a public event. See Lambert, Inventing

the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Erik Seeman instead

emphasizes the continuity of revivalism, preferring to see evangelical activities as a series of connected

revivals, rather than one monolithic whole centered upon the years from 1739 to 1745. See Seeman, Pious

Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century ew England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1999). The most comprehensive treatment of the First Great Awakening is Thomas S.

Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2007).

186

eighteenth century revivalism had on African American and Indian communities.5

Meanwhile, historians of the Atlantic world have insisted that we situate American

revivalism into a much larger spatial and temporal context of transatlantic evangelicalism.6

This chapter is not necessarily concerned with engaging in the historiographical

debate over the utility of the phrase, “The Great Awakening.” While it takes Butler’s

criticisms seriously, it also acknowledges that, from 1735 to 1770, Protestants of all pales

witnessed and participated in a transatlantic explosion of evangelical revivalism that had a

colossal impact on indigenous missionary work. Before 1735 only New England

Congregationalists had a substantial number of native preachers in their missions.7

Anglicans supported native preachers in India and even tried to train Native American

5 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 80-117; Frank Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk: Slave Readings

on the First Great Awakening,’” The Journal of egro History 77 No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 185-198; Jane T.

Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill, NC:

University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 89-128; William S. Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett

Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 10 No. 2 (May 1983): 253-271; and Linford

D. Fisher, “‘Traditionary Religion’: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern

New England, 1736-1776,” (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2008). Gregory Evans Dowd uses the phrase

“Great Awakening” to describe the rise of nativist spiritualism in the Ohio River Valley in the 1750s and

60s. See Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The orth American Indian Struggle For Unity, 1745-1815

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 23-46. For more on Jonathan Edwards’ ideas

about and missionary work among the Indians, see Rachel Wheeler, “‘Friends to Your Souls”: Jonathan

Edwards’ Indian Pastorate and the Doctrine of Original Sin,” Church History 72 No. 4 (December 2003):

736-765; and Gerald R. McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and American Indians: The Devil Sucks Their

Blood,” ew England Quarterly 72 No. 4 (December 1999): 539-557.

6 For more on the transatlantic networks of the First Great Awakening, see Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic

Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735-1755,” American

Historical Review 91 No. 4 (October 1986): 811-832; O’Brien, “Eighteenth Century Publishing Networks

in the First Years of Transatlantic Evangelicalism,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular

Protestantism in orth America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W.

Bebbington and Goerge A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 38-57; Frank Lambert,

Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2003); Eric Leigh Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism

(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001); and Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of

Grace: Colonial ew England’s Revival Tradition in its British Context (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1991). See also Carla Gardina Pestana, “Religion,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed.

David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 69-89; Laura M.

Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 62-83; and Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons.

7 This is discussed in the first chapter of my dissertation.

187

royalty as missionaries in the first decades of the eighteenth century, but incessant imperial

wars interrupted this program.8 By 1770, however, native preachers had become vital to the

Moravian missions of the Caribbean, North America, and beyond. Anglicans had purchased

slaves to teach other slaves, employed Mohawk catechists in their New York mission

schools, and began training a few young Africans for the propagation of the gospel in West

Africa. Eleazar Wheelock commenced training Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and other

eastern Algonquian Indians to serve as missionaries to the powerful Iroquois tribes to the

west.9 New England Indians were beginning to form their own separate congregations under

native pastors. The years from 1735 to 1770 therefore witnessed an astonishing burst of

indigenous missionary work. But this explosion of evangelical fervor was a mixed blessing.

Moravians, Anglicans, and Congregationalists all came to realize that the appropriation and

translation of Christianity by indigenous preachers and teachers during a period of intense

revivalism could be encouraging and inspiring, but also socially destabilizing and – from an

orthodox standpoint – theologically problematic. Even as black and Indian preachers became

the backbone of the Protestant missionary enterprise, their access to ecclesiastical and

spiritual authority became increasingly controversial. The genesis of Afro-Moravian

preachers in the Caribbean, the rise and fall of the Charleston Negro School, and concerns

over Indian separatism all illuminate the ways in which missionaries throughout the

Protestant Atlantic addressed these problematics of race, slavery, dispossession, and

indigenization during a period of revival.

8 This is discussed in the second chapter of my dissertation.

9 This is discussed in the fifth chapter of my dissertation.

188

First Fruits and ational Helpers

The Unitas Fratrum had a peculiar relationship with other Protestant missionary

enterprises in the British Atlantic.10 While their history, theology, and unique approach to

evangelization made the Moravians, as they were commonly called, a distinctive element

within the evangelical resurgence of the mid-eighteenth century, their rapid spread and

alleged successes among Indians and blacks throughout the Atlantic world made them both a

competitor of and model for other Protestant missionaries. When Ezra Stiles, a

Congregationalist minister in Newport, Rhode Island, altered his view that civilization should

precede conversion among indigenous peoples, he attributed the change of heart to reading

the history of the Moravian mission to Greenland.11 David McClure, a contemporary of

Stiles and a missionary among New York Indians, reported that Moravians practiced the

“best mode” for converting the gentiles: “They go among them without noise or parade, and

by their friendly behaviour conciliate their good will. They join them in the chace, and freely

distribute to the helpless and gradually instil into the minds of individuals, the principles of

religion.”12 McClure, like Stiles, suggested that the culturally flexible approach to Protestant

evangelism might ultimately be more successful than previous attempts had been. Stiles and

McClure were not the only ones paying attention to the Moravian missions. As Sylvia Frey

and Betty Wood have noted, “the mission techniques pioneered…by the Brethren are crucial

for understanding the pedagogy of conversion employed with particular success by the

10 Unitas Fratrum means “unity of brethren” in Latin.

11 Stiles, like many Congregationalists before him, had formerly believed that civilization was necessary for

Christian conversion. His research into the history of Moravian missions in Greenland, which were much

more culturally flexible than British Protestant evangelical enterprises, made him change his mind. See

Ezra Stiles to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 January 1768, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Microfilm Reel 2.

12 Quoted in Merritt, At the Crossroads, 102.

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Methodists, who adopted almost all of the Moravian innovations.”13 These relationships

went both ways, of course. Moravian missionaries possessed Anglican sacred texts,

including the daily prayers, litany, catechism, and chapters of the Bible that the Church of

England printed into the “Mohoque” language.14 Although Moravians were distinct from

other Protestant groups, Anglicans and dissenting Protestants were well aware of each others’

movements, successes, and failures among black slaves and Indians within the British

Atlantic world and beyond. As such, Moravians were a part of British Atlantic missionary

history even as they weaved in and out of it.15

Moravians owed their origins to a wave of German pietism that developed decades

before the eighteenth century missions were even conceived.16 Led by Count Nicholas

Ludwig Von Zinzendorf, they used their community in Herrnhut, Germany as a base for

missionary work.17 Well organized, adequately funded by Zinzendorf and other donors, and

driven by an insatiable evangelical enthusiasm, Moravian missionaries spread throughout the

globe with astonishing rapidity. By 1740 they had missions in Bern, Stein, Malhausen,

13 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 83.

14 In fact, two of these three books held at the American Philosophical Society were owned by Moravian

missionaries. One was owned by David Zeisberger and the other by Christopher Pyrlaus. See the APS’s

copies of Church of England, The Morning and Evening Prayer, The Litany, Church Catechism, Family

Prayers, and Several Chapters of the Old and ew-Testament, Translated into the Mahaque Indian

Language, by Lawrence Claesse, Interpreter to William Andrews, Missionary to the Indians, from the

Honourable and Reverend the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (New York:

William Bradford, 1715).

15 The best analysis of the connections between Moravians and the First Great Awakening of the Atlantic

world can be found in W. Reginald Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1992).

16 For a summary of the rise of the Moravians, see Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 116-159.

17 Moravians were the spiritual descendents of John Huss (also Jan Hus), a pietistic theologian martyred in

1415. Zinzendorf gave refuge to more than 600 refugees who were freeing religious persecution in

Moravia on his estate in Saxony. Zinzendorf himself was eventually exiled from Saxony in 1736, so he

also hit the missionary trail. See Rachel Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,”

Religion and American Culture 13 No. 1 (Winter 2003), 30.

190

Schaffhausen, Estonia, Swenia, Lapland, Muscovy, Wallachia, and Constantinople. They

had earlier established themselves in the Danish islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St.

John by the beginning of the 1730s. They began preaching to and teaching slaves in the

British colonies of Jamaica in 1754, Antigua in 1756, and Barbados in 1765.18 While they

failed in their attempt to settle a mission in South Carolina in 1737, they established

themselves in Georgia by 1735, New York and Pennsylvania by 1740, Connecticut in 1743,

New Jersey in 1751, North Carolina in 1753, and Ohio in 1772.19 In addition to these

European, Caribbean, and North American missions, Moravians could also boast by 1740

that they had sent missionaries to Greenland, the Cape of Good Hope, North Africa, Surinam,

and even Sri Lanka.20 One commentator reported that the Moravians had ambitious plans to

convert “the other Parts of the East Indies, the Savages of ew-York, and the Magi of

Persia.”21 The reference to Caribbean slaves, Iroquois Indians, and Persian clerics in the

same sentence illuminates the global aspirations of this rapidly expanding Moravian

missionary endeavor. Essentially stateless, Moravians weaved in and out of the British

Atlantic world as easily as they did in the German, Danish, and Dutch.

18 By the end of the eighteenth century there were over 11,000 Moravian slaves who were catechumens or

converts in these British Caribbean stations. See Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 86-87.

19 The Moravians would eventually have two major settlements that would serve as bases for later

missionary work. The first was at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and was the Moravian headquarters by 1741.

The second was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which Moravians settled in 1753. Jon F. Sensbach, A

Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in orth Carolina, 1763-1840 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

20 J.S. Cummings, Christianity and Missions Vol. 28 of “An Expanding World: The European Impact on

World History, 1450-1800,” (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1997), xxvi.

21 The Magi were a class of priests within what had formerly been the Persian Empire. See A Dissenting

Minister in England to a Gentleman in Scotland (anonymous and undated), in Anonymous, Copy of Three

Letters, The First Written by Dr. John icol at ew-York, to Mr. William Wardrobe, Surgeon in the

Grassmarket of Edinburgh; the Second by a Dissenting Minister in England to a Gentleman in Scotland;

the Third From a Minister at Boston to His Friend at Glasgow. Giving an Account of the Progress and

Success of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (Edinburgh: A. Alison, 1740), 6-7.

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Moravian theology was dramatically different from that of their British counterparts.

While they shared many common doctrines with other denominations, Moravians’ “blood

and wounds” pietism situated them at an extreme fringe within Protestantism.22 Moravians

emphasized, and indeed celebrated, the temporal suffering of Christ for the forgiveness of

sinners. They highlighted the physical anguish and excruciating pain that Christ underwent

during his last hours of life in order to draw attention to the ultimate sacrifice he made for

humanity. They thus focused on everything from Christ’s crown of thorns and his spilled

blood to the massive gash made by a spear during his last hours on the cross. Moravians also

stressed the nearness of Jesus Christ to their neophytes, noting that he was not simply a

historical figure or theological abstraction, but rather a potent spiritual force that was

constantly serving as their protector.23 Suffering under the traumatic realities of colonial

wars, dispossession, slavery, disease, and racial violence, Indians and slaves alike could find

in Moravian doctrine a form of Christianity that spoke to the lived experiences of oppressed

indigenous peoples throughout the Atlantic world. In addition, and as Aaron Fogelman has

recently argued, Moravian theology was highly feminized. Unlike other Protestant

denominations, Moravians sent men and women into the missionary field together. German

Moravian missionaries married Indian and slave women, women had their own separate

religious meetings with their own female spiritual advisers, and women played a major role

in their congregations.24 Moravians also sometimes described Christ as an “eternal husband”

22 Rachel Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,” Religion and American Culture

13 No. 1 (Winter 2003): 30-31. Wheeler argues that Moravian doctrine can be categorized into three main

aspects. First, Moravians emphasized the utility and necessity of family metaphors. Secondly, they spoke

to the spiritual and physical sustenance derived from Christ’s wounds and suffering. Finally, they

highlighted the nearness of Christ himself.

23 Merritt, At the Crossroads, 105. Merritt suggests that some Indians even elected Christ himself as their

tribal leader or council elder.

24 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 83-86.

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to female converts and even went so far as to compare the wound on the side of Jesus’ body

to a woman’s vagina.25 As peculiar as it sounds, this system of Moravian belief helped craft

an inclusive community that emphasized spiritual egalitarianism as well as the ubiquity and

nearness of Christ, emotive qualities of Christian pietism, painful suffering of Christ’s last

hours on the cross, and the feminized nature of Christianity.26

Most importantly, like their Protestant competitors throughout the British Atlantic,

the Moravians placed a significant degree of authority in local, native preachers to help

evangelize their brethren. Yet they anticipated that the conversion of the world would be

neither spontaneous nor immediate. Instead, the “first fruits,” or the small segment of the

gentile population that first received the Gospel, would be the ones to carry the message of

Christ’s salvation to all the peoples of the earth.27 Thus, when Moravians set out from

Germany in the 1730s, they aimed to create a base of “national helpers” to serve as the

foundation of the new church among blacks and Indians.28 The ascension of the first fruits

into positions of Moravian spiritual leadership was therefore seen not as a goal in itself, but

rather a preparatory moment in the gradual conversion of the world.

25 Merritt, At the Crossroads, 105. Aaron Spencer Fogleman, “Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge in

the German Communities of British North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60 No. 2 (April

2003): 295-332; and Fogleman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in

Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). See also Wheeler, “Women and

Christian Practice in a Mahican Village”: 27-67.

26 For an example of the emotive and reflective pietism of the Moravians, see the autobiographical

confessions of Zinzendorf in Nicolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf, My Dear Fellow-Traveler, Here hast

Thou A Letter, Which I have wrote to Thee out of the Fulness of my Heart And With many Tears For Thy

Salvation’s sake; And The Lamb of God Hath sprinkled it with His Blood, That it will be profitable for

Thee, If Thou abidest by thy Heart, or now findest thy Heart (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1742).

27 The Moravians based this idea off of Revelation 14:4, where it says that the “first fruits” were the first

gentiles redeemed from the race of man.

28 The national helper system worked differently in different places. In the Caribbean, Moravians

appointed the most visibly pious blacks from certain African “nations” to be the spiritual mentors of other

blacks from their nation. The term “national helper” was not necessary among North American Indian

groups, for the meetings were segregated by gender.

193

First Fruits, completed by German Moravian émigré John Valentine Haidt, dramatically details

the ways in which blacks and Indians would be central to the conversion of the rest of the world. Digital

copy courtesy of http://www.explorepahistory.com/images/ExplorePAHistory-a0a6p1-a_349.jpg. The

original can be found at the Moravian Church Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.29

For Afro-Moravian preachers in the Caribbean, these positions of evangelical

authority were not necessarily new. Indeed, we get a much better sense of the religious

autonomy of black Moravians if we employ a broader, transatlantic approach to the problem.

Most of the slaves on St. Thomas were Kongolese, and Catholic missionaries had been

preaching among the Kongolese in West Africa generations before St. Thomas’ slave

suppliers began to import them into the Caribbean island. As a product of Catholic

missionary work and traditional Kongolese spirituality, Kongolese Catholics expressed a

unique and syncretic set of Afro-Catholic beliefs and practices, including and especially the

veneration of the Virgin Mary. In fact, the Africans sold into slavery and sent to St. Thomas

29 A further description of the painting can be found in Charles C. Jones, The Religious Instruction of the

egroes, in the United States (Savannah: Thomas Purse, 1842), 33.

194

were pulled from the same cultural groups who used the birth of the Virgin Mary to time the

notorious Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739.30

Kongolese Catholics possessed a rich tradition of indigenous spiritual Christian

leadership among them, even well before any of them set foot in the New World. Jose

Monzolo, a Kongo slave shipped to Cartegena, was chosen as a Catholic catechist there

because he learned the catechism well from other black preachers when he was a child in

West Africa. As John K. Thornton has noted, Catholic priests maintained only an itinerant

presence among the West African Kongolese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; their

duties were more sacramental than evangelical, as they conducted mass baptisms, oversaw

marriages, and fulfilled other sacramental offices. The real evangelical work in the Kongo,

Thornton noted, was done by local African catechists, who “traveled more frequently, stayed

longer and remained at work even when there was no priest or missionary.”31 For many

Afro-Moravians, their work as national helpers was therefore not a dramatic departure from

their religious experiences in Africa. Prepared by a strong tradition of indigenous African

spiritual leadership, Afro-Moravians probably expected – and may have even demanded –

that their missionaries be Africans.

Even the national helper system – where Moravians divided Africans into different

“nations” and assigned black evangelists to instruct them – would not have been a novel

concept to Kongolese Catholics. When ships full of Africans sailed into the harbor of

Cartegena in the seventeenth centuries, Jesuit priests gave mass baptisms and administered

last rites to any Africans who were on death’s door. The rest were divided into national

30 Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” The Journal

of Southern History 67 No. 3 (August 2001): 513-534; and John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the

Stono Rebellion,” The American Historical Review 96 No. 4 (October 1991): 1101-1113.

31 John K. Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The

Americas 44 No. 3 (January 1988): 269-274.

195

(ethnic and linguistic) groupings and were led by “a catechist of their own nation.” These

African catechists translated the Jesuit missionaries’ message while the Jesuits stood on a

makeshift alter. One Jesuit missionary showed a picture of Christ’s last moments, “with

blood flowing from his wounds.” Another Jesuit would use the blood to baptize Africans.

The catechists would teach their Christian pupils the Lord’s and other prayers while

employing a picture book to show images of sinners burning in hell as demons tortured them.

The blood and wounds rhetoric that so defined Catholic missionary work in Africa and the

Americas was, in reality, not terribly different from the Moravian theology that Kongolese

Africans would embrace in the Danish Virgin Islands.32

Just as the Catholics did in their missions throughout the Atlantic world, Moravians

also used national helpers as key evangelists in their attempt to convert Africans in the

Caribbean. The role of a national helper was to lead groups of 5-10 potential converts in

theological reflection and teach them Moravian doctrine and rituals. In his 1777 history of

the Moravian mission to the Danish Caribbean Islands, C.G.A. Oldendorp noted that national

helpers were charged with “looking after the Negroes who lived near them, of coming to

know them in regard to their internal condition, of remembering them diligently in their

prayers before God, and of reporting on them to the white workers.”33 These helpers met

with white missionaries, as well as each other, at least once a week to report on the activities

of the groups they led, the spiritual development of baptismal candidates, and the possibilities

32 Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo”: 271-272. See also Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian

Pietism: The World of Marotta/Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the

British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2005), 115-136.

33 C .G.A. Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, ed. Johann Jakob Bossard, trans. By Arnold R. Highfield and

Vladimir Barac (Ann Arbor, M.I.: Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1987), 457. This text was originally published

in 1777 as Geschlichte der Mission der evangelischen Brueder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S.

Croix und S. Jan.

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of bringing new national helpers into positions of leadership. They also filled in for white

Moravian missionaries when they visited other mission stations, returned to Germany, or

passed away. When there were too many communicants at a religious service on St. Croix in

October of 1744, a white Moravian missionary asked four black national helpers to distribute

communion. Furthermore, St. Croix was notoriously difficult to traverse, so German

Moravians relied upon helpers like Maria Magdalena and Catharina Barbara to travel

southward and westward in the sultry summers to try to convert slaves who lived far away

from Moravian religious activity.34 The national helper system thereby gave Afro-

Caribbeans access to the performance of the “important services” of religious mentorship,

distributing communion, and serving as evangelical missionaries. 35 It was through black

national helpers, not German Moravians, that most Caribbean slaves experienced and

expressed their developing sense of Afro-Christian identity.36

Although there were dozens of national helpers in Moravian Caribbean stations by

the 1760s, the most important ones were the “first fruits”: initial converts who helped bring

other Afro-Caribbeans into the fold. The first national helpers in St. Thomas were Andreas

and his brother Johannes, Petrus and his brother Christoph, and Anna Maria. Although they

34 Magdalena’s story is recounted in Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism”: 115-136.

35 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 586 and 427.

36 Perhaps the most famous “first fruit” was Jacob Protten, the son of a Danish soldier and an African

woman, who was sent from his home on the Gold Coast to Copenhagen for an education. The same year

that Zinzendorf and Protten met (1735), Protten agreed to return to Africa as a Moravian missionary. After

several unsuccessful attempts to preach the gospel there he returned to Germany and then traveled to the

Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where he met and eventually married a slave girl named Rebecca. Protten

and Rebecca crossed the Atlantic to Germany and then traveled to modern-day Liberia, eventually landing

in Christiansborg in the late 1750s. They returned to Germany one last time and finally made it back to

Christiansborg by 1763. Jacob Protten died in 1769. Protten’s life story can be found in Rev. S.R.B. Attoh

Ahuma, Memoirs of West African Celebrities, Europe, &c. (1700-1850). With Special Reference to the

Gold Coast (Liverpool: D. Marples & Co., 1905). Rebecca Protten is the inspiration for and subject of Jon

F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2005).

197

were officially installed by the Moravians in 1738, Oldendorp recalled that these helpers

were established spiritual leaders in their own slave societies, for they “had already been

busy among their people, inspired by the divine grace bestowed upon them by the Savior.”37

Their new role of national helper was therefore not a break with the past, but rather a

continuance of previous religious mentorship that certainly had its roots in Afro-Caribbean

spirituality. Although Moravianism was a form of Western Christianity, there were aspects

of Moravian doctrine that these first fruits found emotionally or spiritually satisfying. On the

one hand, slaves were drawn to the Moravian message because it emphasized equality and

friendship while simultaneously privileging the spoken word over biblical exegesis. One

national helper, for example, explained to a group of young catechumens that religious

experience was more a matter of the heart than of the head. “You must not think,” he assured

his listeners, “that I know what I know and say what I say merely from my head and that I

have learned it from a book. No, I say it out of my own experience and out of the feeling in

my heart.”38 Personal experience, rather than biblical scholarship, was at the center of

Moravian theology, and Afro-Caribbeans could easily participate in religious experiences

that privileged orality over literacy.

Moravian spirituality and African cosmology also matched up fairly well. Africans

taken to the Americans could often draw upon a rich and diverse religious heritage that was

comprised of Muslim, Christian, and traditional African cosmologies. The diversity in

religious beliefs naturally makes it very difficult to generalize about the precise religious

vocabulary that Afro-Moravians would be employing when translating Christianity into Afro-

Caribbean spiritualities. West Africans who had embraced at least some elements of

37 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 333.

38 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 629.

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Christianity or Islam before enslavement, for example, might have found pegging Christian

Moravianism into their existing cosmologies relatively easy. At the same time, traditional

West Africans who were neither Christian nor Muslim also had religious cosmologies upon

which Moravianism might be grafted. Although traditional West African religions were

technically not monotheistic, they ultimately articulated a belief in a higher, supreme power

that governed the universe. Many West Africans also believed in a series of lesser divinities

that were much more active in their individual lives.39 Moravian Christianity therefore fit

into existing Afro-Caribbean cosmologies. Afro-Moravians would recognize the sovereignty

of an all-powerful God above but would approach that God through the lesser deity of Jesus

Christ. Christ was therefore translated by black preachers into a minor divinity who was

constantly active in the temporal and spiritual experiences of Caribbean slaves. “He sees us

all the same,” one black preacher observed, “both when we are awake and when we sleep, at

home and in the field.”40 Finally, the physical experience of racial slavery made Christ all

the more impressive. Slaves could identify with someone who suffered as they did under the

weight of oppression, violence, and death. For black slaves, Christ’s suffering was not a

passage from a text, but rather a lived episode of intense physical suffering that paralleled

their own personal experiences within the Caribbean plantation system.

This theological and social psychological context helps explain what Moravianism

meant to national helpers in the Caribbean missions, but it also hints at the spiritual meanings

that black preachers inscribed into their rapidly developing Afro-Moravianism. These black

Moravians often took the opportunity to preach during class lectures, funerals, morning

prayers, and Sunday meetings. Yet the most important times came when national helpers

39 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 1-62; and Raboteau, Slave Religion, 4-92.

40 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 628.

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were asked to instruct baptismal candidates or catechumens on the saving grace of Christ.

Although the speeches for these events varied in substance and style, they still followed a

somewhat formulaic pattern. The image of Christ’s personal suffering, for example, was a

ubiquitous and recurring theme. Jesus’ “blood, wounds, and death,” one national helper

named Mingo explained, struck his “evil heart.” “My heart lives in that experience, and that

is the sole ground on which I base my existence,” he recalled. After acknowledging the

sinfulness of his heart and the physical anguish his wrongs had caused, Mingo turned to the

redemptive power of Christ’s personal suffering. He proclaimed that “His blood and His

death constitute more than adequate means to compensate for all my sins. My heart sings:

Wounds and blood have bound us to God!”41 The blood, wounds, death, and heart rhetoric

were classic Moravian tropes. Yet the reliance upon Christ as a spiritual intermediary

between sinners and God was rooted in West African cosmologies of lesser divinities. The

emphasis on personal suffering and Christ’s corporeal experiences, of course, struck a chord

with Afro-Caribbeans living in a slave society. Like other national helpers, Mingo translated

Moravianism into an Afro-Caribbean context, grafting Moravian theology onto African

cosmology while forging it in the fire of Caribbean racial slavery.42

Although there were around 40 national helpers on the island of St. Thomas by 1740,

the two most prominent preachers were Abraham and Petrus. Both men led their own

spiritual meetings, addressed catechumens and candidates for baptism, spoke at weekly

gatherings, and sermonized at funerals. “Their presentations,” Oldendorp explained, “were

evangelical: they stressed the redemption of sinners through Jesus’ death and their acquisition

41 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 420.

42 See also Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival; and Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The

Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

200

of Grace in Christ.”43 Yet their styles could not have been more different. While Petrus had

some prestige within Moravian circles because he was one of the first fruits, Abraham’s

“extraordinary gift” of oratorical prowess, combined with his ability to speak several African

dialects, put him head and shoulders above other black Moravian preachers.44 Abraham’s

lectures were remarkable events that had “fire” and “were charged with a special force that

swept his listeners along with him.” When Abraham preached his listeners were not only

struck with “pleasure and blessings” but frequently “broke into loud crying.”45 Predictably,

his reputation as a preacher skyrocketed in the 1740s, as he was able to use his power of

preaching to “produce his own rendition of church teaching and at the same time create a

shared awareness of a common language and a common cultural heritage.”46 Yet there were

temporal advantages that Abraham’s fiery preaching accrued to him. After complaining that

his slave labor was getting in the way of his work as a preacher, white Moravians negotiated

a deal whereby they exchanged Abraham for another black slave that was more capable of

doing hard manual labor. Although Abraham was still a slave, his avoidance of hard work

ensured that he could “dedicate himself fully to his tasks as a helper in the work of God

among his people.”47 Membership in Christ’s kingdom certainly had its privileges.

Unlike Abraham’s powerful speeches, Petrus’ lectures were “filled with love and

gentle feelings.” If Abraham exhorted his neophytes in a commanding voice, Petrus’ lectures

were softer, more emotive, and much more introspective. Like Mingo before him, Petrus

43 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 418.

44 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 470.

45 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 419 and 487.

46 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 85.

47 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 418-419.

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fused Moravian blood and wounds theology with a sentimental reflection on his own status as

a sinner. Christ’s blood, Petrus confessed, “has redeemed me from the darkness. Now I have

peace in my soul. All I am concerned about is to remain a poor sinner before Him forever.”

For Petrus, his personal experience with God’s grace also mandated that he take up the

evangelical task of preaching to others. “I feel in my heart,” he admitted, “a great urge to

search for souls which I can bring to the Saviour, souls which are as much in the dark as I

once was.” Whereas Abraham’s lectures were manly and fiery, commentators described

Petrus’ sermons as “more motherly.”48 In most denominations this observation might have

been an insult, but for Moravians the description of Petrus as “motherly” reflected yet

another way in which Moravian theology was highly feminized. Petrus could maintain his

revered status as a preacher even while his lectures expressed the femininity common in

women’s preaching. This softer, more maternal preaching was just one of several models of

Christian discourse that national helpers could draw upon to help fashion Afro-Caribbean

Moravianism.

Generational change made a difference in Moravian messages, as well. Cornelius,

for example, was born a slave to Benigna, one of the national helpers who – along with

Abraham, Petrus, and others – operated as the spiritual foundation of Afro-Moravianism in

the Danish Virgin Islands. Cornelius became a master mason, purchased his own and his

mother’s freedom, and helped Abraham and other national helpers in articulating Moravian

beliefs throughout the slave and free black population of St. Thomas and St. Croix.

Cornelius certainly drank from the same emotive cup as Petrus and Abraham, and his

personal reflections upon his own spirituality demonstrate his emotionalism. “For my part,”

Cornelius assured some young black Moravians in the 1760s, “I feel very miserable and

48 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 418-420.

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needy. However, at today’s prayer day I have experienced His grace in my heart and felt His

love.” The emphases on misery, spiritual longing, and the physical experience of God’s

penetration into the heart were tried and true Moravian rhetorical devices. And yet, as a

second generation Afro-Moravian, Cornelius had more practice with and access to scripture,

and he pulled generously from different biblical texts in order to craft a Moravian message

based upon both penitent emotionalism and scriptural history. Invoking the fifth chapter of

Paul’s letter to the Romans, Cornelius assured his young black audience that access to God’s

salvation was not limited to the free, the wealthy, and the educated, but available to all. “My

dear people!,” Cornelius exclaimed, “Each of you should come to Him just as you are,” for

“The heathens shall see His light and become His people.” Cornelius also updated this

Christian message in order to translate it into the transatlantic Afro-Moravianism that had

been germinating in the Caribbean for over a generation. Instead of describing heathens as

Jews and Gentiles, he characterized them as “Moors.” The “Moors shall come to Him,”

Cornelius told his audience of young Moravians, “and He will accept them.”49 For a

community of slaves and free blacks who witnessed thousands of Muslim Africans being

imported into their midst, the attempt to emphasize the inevitability of the conversion of the

Moors spoke to the powerful heritage of Islam in Africa as well as the unsettling potential for

religious competition on Moravian turf.50 As such, second generation Afro-Moravians like

Cornelius built upon the tradition of black spiritual leadership while simultaneously refining,

revising, and emphasizing Moravian messages in different ways and for different audiences.

49 Cornelius to the Catechumens at New Herrnhut, in Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 628.

50 For more on the impact of Islam on Afro-American culture, see Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging

Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 59-87.

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Black women were also national helpers, and in no other Christian denomination did

women retain as much authority to preach and lead. The basis for this authority was in the

gender-segregated meetings that served as the backbone of Moravian evangelical techniques.

Although Afro-Moravians would congregate weekly for larger gatherings, they also had daily

meetings with the national helpers, nearly half of whom were women. These included

Benigna, Johanna, Magdalena, Maria, Anna Sophia, Susanna, Rosina, and others.51 Many of

these women were older and some were free blacks, but they all operated as missionaries to

51 As discussed in the section on Native Americans (below), name changing through baptism was a major

step in establishing oneself as a Moravian. It also fit easily into both Amerindian and African traditions of

using a change in name as a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.

“Cornelius, Danish Virgin Islands,

mid-18th century.” Cornelius was a

second-generation Moravian who

participated in the constant

refashioning of Moravian messages

in the Caribbean during the middle

of the eighteenth century. Image

reference Sensbach 2, as shown on

www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored

by the Virginia Foundation for the

Humanities and the University of

Virginia Library.

204

other black women. In spite of Magdalena’s age, for example, she visited unconverted black

slaves and “took it upon herself to further the growth in Christ of those Negroes living nearby

with whom she associated.”52 Like Magdalena, Rebecca Protten embraced the tremendous

amount of influence she had on other women in her own meeting. She led spiritual meetings,

discoursed with friends about their own religious travails, and served as a conduit through

which the Moravian clergy and black female slaves could be connected.53 Once again, the

national helper system tapped into African religious spiritualities and practices, for West

African women often possessed a tremendous amount of spiritual power as “sacred

specialists.” These specialists used divination, healing, and spirit mediumship to lead the

spiritual lives of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic.54 Often mistaken by white observers

for witches, African women often practiced the same kind of magic, fortune-telling, and

astrology that was so evident in popular folk Christianity throughout the early modern

Atlantic world.55 Afro-Caribbean women like Rebecca and Magdalena thus found in

Moravian doctrine a system of theology that could not only be grafted onto existing African

cosmologies, but also offered them opportunities for social and religious leadership that were

unavailable to them through either the Caribbean plantation system or other Protestant

missions.

The status of Caribbean Moravian preachers, however, was always tenuous.

Although most of the “national helpers” came from the rank and file of the slave societies on

52 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 333.

53 Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival.

54 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting To Zion, 56-59.

55 For more magic as a central component of early modern folk religion, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of

Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 67-97; and

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early ew England

(New York: Knopf, 1989).

205

St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, several active preachers were either assistant overseers

or free blacks. This strategy was parallel to English and Spanish practices of trying to pull

elite members of the native community into a Christian devotion and transforming them into

an evangelical aristocracy. In these highly stratified slave societies, the status of freedom and

the position of authority within the social hierarchy of slavery could crystallize spiritual

relationships just as it did social ones. There was, therefore, a constant fear that black

Moravian preachers would situate themselves as unique specimens of the slave class who

were “better” than the slaves to whom they were preaching. The national helper system

probably exacerbated these tensions by nurturing a class of elite black preachers in a rigidly

hierarchical slave society. German Moravians therefore had to constantly remind national

helpers like Abraham and Mingo that “nothing would be more contrary to the purpose of

their orders than if they were to imagine that they enjoyed an advantage over their fellows.”56

But they actually did. Abraham, who had Moravians exchange another slave for himself so

he could avoid hard manual labor, was not the only convert to use his role as a preacher to

improve his temporal standing. Mingo, for example, was an assistant inspector who looked

after blacks, possessed his own household, and was allegedly “as good as free” because of

the temporal and spiritual benefits of his preaching.57 In spite of its professed egalitarianism,

Moravianism in the Caribbean could also intensify the already uneasy tensions in these

highly stratified slave societies.

Naturally, the strains and pressures within the Afro-Moravian community paled in

comparison to the tensions between black Moravians and the agents of racial slavery,

including plantation owners, free whites, and even black overseers. As Jon Sensbach has

56 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 458.

57 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 419.

206

noted, German Moravians made a “devil’s bargain” with slavery: they accepted the

institution of slavery, participated in it, and even negotiated with and depended upon slave

owners to gain access to thousands of souls of black folk.58 Like Anglicans, Moravians

owned plantations and even their own personal slaves.59 They also anxiously tried to assuage

any fears that missionary work would upset the racial status quo. They assured masters as

well as neophytes that baptism, conversion, and religious instruction would actually make

blacks better slaves, not worse. Some Afro-Moravians actually bought into this idea. A

group of national helpers reported to the King of Denmark that, before their embrace of

Moravianism, “we stoll before from our Masters, we run away to Porto Rico, have been lazy,

and have cheated our Masters.” “But,” they concluded, “now it is quite otherwise with us.”60

Another neophyte noted that, as long as his name was Harry (before his Moravian baptism),

“I was a bad negro.” But after he heard Moravian preaching, changed his name to Heinrich,

began going to church and talking about the evil things he had done, he became certain of his

spiritual salvation. After his peaceful and faithful conversion to Moravianism, Heinrich

admitted that he could now “promise my master that I shall be a faithful slave in God’s

grace.”61 When a national helper named Nathanael gave a speech to young students at one of

the Moravian mission stations, he observed that they would be “doubly slaves, if we remain

in sin, for, if we are not redeemed, we are also the slaves of Satan and will also remain as

58 Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 133-161.

59 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 426 and 457.

60 St. Thomas Negroes Congregation to the King of Denmark, 15 February 1739, in The Christian Monthly

History: Or, An Account of the Revival and Progress of Religion, Abroad, and at Home Number IV. For

February 1744 (Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison, 1743-1746), 59.

61 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 574.

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such if we depart from this world in that state.”62 Nathanael focused on the horrors of

spiritual enslavement to Satan, making a subtle comparison between plantation owners and

the devil while simultaneously implying that spiritual salvation, rather than the trauma of

temporal slavery, should be the main focus of Afro-Caribbeans’ thoughts and prayers. These

Afro-Moravians peddled the classic convention that Christian slaves made obedient slaves.

Everyone in the Caribbean plantation system knew better. The conversion of

thousands of slaves to Moravianism, and especially the rise of an elite black preacher class,

obviously threatened to undermine the social, racial, and psychological anchors that kept the

plantation system tied down.63 In fact, the Danish island of St. John had experienced a short-

lived but violent rebellion in the early 1730s, just as Moravian missionaries were becoming

established in the Danish Caribbean. The tensions between missionary work and slavery

would therefore be quite high.64 Abraham’s preaching to blacks was tolerable, but his

frequent preaching among whites was perceived as socially dangerous.65 When a black

Englishman came to the Moravian mission station from Groot Hanslolk Cay (now Hans

Lollik Island), he reported that “white residents of the cay were eager to hear the preaching of

the Negroes’ teachers.” This could mean two things. On the one hand, it might have meant

that white residents were asking for spiritual instruction from black national helpers. On the

other, it could signify that they wished for instruction from white Moravians. In both cases,

white residents of the cay were either requesting instruction from blacks or to be taught like

62 Nathanael’s speech to the catechumens at New Herrnhut, in Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 627.

63 Slaveholders were correct to be afraid of the democratizing and egalitarian impulses of Christianity, for

missionaries and black preachers would often play major roles in Caribbean slave rebellions. For the most

famous example, see da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood.

64 Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 8-27.

65 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 418.

208

blacks. Both scenarios threatened to invert the precarious power relations upon which racial

slavery was built.66 Even when Afro-Moravianism did not subvert the plantation system

explicitly, the presence of elite black preachers threatened to do so implicitly.

National helpers were also attuned to the racial implications of their preaching and

often used their oratorical skills and sacred authority to situate themselves as Christ’s chosen

people. Not only could Moravian doctrine remind African slaves of their humanity, it could

also pose a challenge to the social order of plantation slavery. The rhetoric of property serves

as an ideal example. When Mingo wrote to other Moravians in the Pennsylvania missions,

he said that he sincerely hoped that Christ would “not abandon us, for although we are poor,

we belong to Him. He has earned us.” “We beg you,” Mingo implored his brethren, “to

think of us continuously and pray to the Savior that He might wish to keep us as His

property.”67 This was not a tongue-in-cheek aside, but rather a racialized theological critique

that challenged the rigid hierarchy of racial slavery. By invoking the concept of faithful

slaves as Christ’s property, Mingo was offering up a spiritual challenge to the temporal

power of white masters and overseers. God was, of course, the ultimate “master,” for he

reigned above even the seemingly all-powerful white planter class. A mirror image of

Mingo’s approach to God’s positioning within the hierarchy of slavery was expressed when

an Anglican in Maryland told masters and slaves alike that masters were “God’s overseers.”

To act against the master’s will was to act against God’s will.68 Mingo’s preaching inverted

this relationship. Black preachers’ relationship with God, generated as it was through the

66 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 570. There were also around 100 slaves on that island, although

official ownership of land did not begin on that island until the late 1760s. While many of these cays, or

keys, were used as bases for pirate activity, it is unlikely that these residents were active pirates, for they

had too many slaves and complained that they could not get from their cay to St. Thomas.

67 Mingo to the Members of Bethlehem and Nazareth, in Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 493.

68 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 142.

209

conduit of Christ, promised to circumvent the racial hierarchy of plantation slavery and create

a new spiritual hierarchy where God and Christ were the ultimate overseers of a benevolent

kingdom of believers.

White planters understood these problematics. Only a few years after the arrival of

German Moravians they launched a sustained attack on Afro-Moravianism. White planters

and overseers “come to beat and cut us,” a group of national helpers on St. Thomas reported

to the King of Denmark in 1739. Writing on behalf of over 650 black Moravians, Abraham,

Mingo, and the other authors of this letter lamented that “they burn our Books and reject our

Baptism, they miscal [sic] the Brethren for Beasts; saying, a egroe ought not to be baptized,

and a baptized egroe be like a Piece of burnt Wood in Hell.”69 When another master

chained up his slave “until he promised that he would learn nothing more from the brethren

about Christianity,” he tacitly recognized not only the egalitarian impulses of Afro-

Moravianism, but also the subtle ways in which slaves could invert the power relations

within plantation slavery and reorient them along the axis of Moravian theology.70

The problem, of course, was the doctrine of Christian liberty, a concept that made

slave evangelization astonishingly problematic. For Catholics and Protestants alike,

Christian liberty complicated and obscured the hierarchical relationships between slaves and

masters, oppressors and oppressed. As Martin Luther articulated in his treatise, Concerning

Christian Liberty, a Christian man was the most free person of all people, governed only by

the laws of God and Christ and subject to the worldly laws of man only if they coincided with

God’s law. True faith in God, Luther and others after him suggested, guaranteed spiritual

69 St. Thomas Negroes Congregation to the King of Denmark, 15 February, 1739, in The Christian

Monthly History, 58. For another famous letter from a converted slave, see Anna Van Popo to the Queen

of Denmark, undated, in The Christian Monthly History, 60.

70 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 420.

210

freedom. For Luther, the doctrine of Christian liberty helped explain his system of faith over

works and justified his scathing critiques of the Catholic Church.71 Christian liberty could

empower slaves and threaten to undermine the racial conventions, colonial laws, and imperial

authority upon which slave societies rested. The major problem was not only that a theory of

Christian liberty existed, but that Christian slaves actually understood and often articulated it.

When Mingo invoked the trope of property to identify slaves as Christ’s belongings, he

expressed a version of Christian liberty that simultaneously circumvented and overrode the

racial hierarchies upon which his slave society was built. When a Scotch woman named

Janet Schaw spent Christmas on Antigua in 1774, she recalled how African slaves interpreted

the holiday season. Slaves apparently believed that “good Buccara God,” or the white man’s

God, would punish masters who physically battered their slaves during this time of

celebration. The sanctity of the holiday season and the image of God punishing slave masters

naturally resulted in heightened racial tensions and anxieties about slave rebellions. Schaw

slept uneasily during “this season of unbounded freedom,” even as white patrols constantly

surveyed the island to ensure that no slaves employed the doctrine of Christian liberty to

secure their worldly liberty or harm their masters.72 When slaves rebelled in Demerara in

71 The theological premises behind Christian liberty are, of course, much more complicated than outlined

here. See Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004). See

also William Hammond, The Christian Liberty: A Discourse on Galatians iii. 24, 25 (Bristol: Felix Farley,

1745). Jon Butler argues instead that, although Christianity empowered slaves, the doctrine of Christian

liberty actually constrained them. Butler contends that Luther and other theologians before him suggested

that total liberty was only spiritual in nature. Worldly liberty, or liberty of the flesh and liberty from laws,

was of a different sort. This was how, in Butler’s view, Christian liberty came to be seen as a tool of racial

oppression. I see it as both a tool of racial oppression as well as a weapon against it. For a fuller

discussion, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 138-139. Most Catholic and Protestant understandings of

Christian liberty derive from Pauline texts.

72 Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews, eds., Journal of a Lady of Quality; Being

the arrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, orth Carolina, and Portugal, in the years

1774 to 1776 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 108–09. See also Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of

Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” The William and Mary

Quarterly 60 No. 3 (July 2003): 471-510.

211

1823, the rebellion was fueled partially by an internalization of Christian liberty rhetoric that

members of the London Missionary Society unwittingly helped germinate.73 Even though

Protestant missionaries throughout the early modern Atlantic tried to shift the focus away

from Christian liberty and towards obedience to one’s master, slaves nevertheless picked up

on, translated, and employed Christian liberty in ways that white missionaries often predicted

but rarely approved.74

Resistance from slave owners and the specter of Christian liberty was only one of

many reasons why Moravian success in the Caribbean was never total. Although tensions

over slavery could both sustain and challenge Afro-Moravianism, there were other basic,

more logistical problems with Moravian missions. One problem was that the vast distance

between missions and potential converts was often insurmountable. As the first fruits got

along in age in the 1760s, their evangelical trips to the outskirts of the missions became much

less common.75 The grueling sugar harvest cycle kept Afro-Moravians in the fields and away

from the churches, periodic bouts of epidemic disease wracked the slave population, and

perennial storms destroyed roads, paths, and churches. All these natural – for Moravians,

supernatural – events conspired to hinder the gathering of Afro-Moravian communities on the

Danish Caribbean Islands. But the biggest problem was within the core of national helpers

itself. Death and old age of the first fruits, the models of Afro-Moravian piety, certainly took

73 da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood.

74 Jon Butler is particularly effective at outlining some of the theological and rhetorical gymnastics that

Anglican preachers had to perform in order to push for slave evangelization while simultaneously

reinforcing the authority of white masters and overseers. See Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 129-163.

Butler also argues that slave rebellions with religious impulses were more common in the nineteenth

century than in the eighteenth. See Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 156.

75 One national helper named Albert, for example, had to endure a four hour walk (one way) in order to

travel from his home to the Moravian mission at New Herrnhut. See Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission,

542.

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its toll. But there was also a significant degree of religious backsliding. Petrus, that

“motherly” preacher and one of the first fruits, was eventually expelled from the Moravian

church in the spring of 1762 “on account of his bad behavior.”76 Oldendorp also recalled that

bombas, or former Moravian converts who held positions of authority within the plantation

system, were partially responsible for spiritual backsliding in the Caribbean. These

apostates, Oldendorp lamented, “could abuse their power that went along with their position

to harass the others for as long as it took to make them as faithless as they.”77 In spite of

these problems, German Moravians and national helpers collaborated from the 1730s onward

to create the most successful missionary effort that the Caribbean had yet seen. Most

importantly, this was the first time in the history of Protestant missions that black slaves were

used as agents of evangelism. Even if Anglicans, Congregationalists, and other groups

disapproved of this radical move, within years they would be doing the same thing.

The Moravian national helper system was not limited to the Danish Caribbean. In

1753 Mingo addressed a letter to his “white and brown brethren” in the Moravian settlements

of Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Speaking to whites and Indians alike, Mingo

hoped that the Pennsylvania Moravians would “never forget us.” “We are poor,” Mingo

lamented, “and it is necessary that you think often of us.”78 Mingo’s letter was not the only

thing that passed between the Moravian communities of the Caribbean and North American

mainland, for German Moravian missionaries as well as recent converts frequently migrated

to and from Caribbean mission stations throughout the Atlantic world, ensuring that pens,

76 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 543. The actual behavior that cost Petrus his membership in the

Moravian congregation is still unclear.

77 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 611. Unfortunately, Oldendorp never specifically explained how the

bombas resisted the spread of Afro-Moravianism in the Caribbean.

78 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 493.

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paper, and people would always keep these communities connected. Indeed, the Native

American encounter with Moravianism paralleled, in many ways, what was happening in the

Caribbean from the 1730s to the 1760s. While scholars like Jane Merritt, Rachel Wheeler,

and Amy Schutt have already traced the general contours of the Native American encounter

with Moravianism in the middle of the eighteenth century, the connections and comparisons

with the rise of Afro-Moravianism in the Caribbean is certainly worth exploring.79

Moravians had established a praying community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by

1741, and within five years they had built half a dozen settlements within a day’s journey of

that town. The Indians who lived there, of course, were suffering through the same problems

that other Indians had experienced: territorial dispossession, forced migration, disease, and

being pulled into the endless imperial wars between France and Britain. But in Moravianism,

some Indians discovered a way to address both the spiritual and temporal concerns of

indigenous peoples trying to work through the troubles of colonialism. As Rachel Wheeler

has noted, Moravian Indian preachers and their listeners were certainly not “victims to a

colonization of consciousness,” for they crafted and articulated “a distinctive, Indian

Christianity that expressed both deeply rooted cultural values and the realities of a

dramatically changed world.”80

Like Afro-Caribbeans, Native American preachers indigenized Moravian doctrine by

fusing it with their own spiritual rituals, traditions, and beliefs. Like African cosmologies,

Native American cosmologies had much in common with Moravian theology. Moravian

79 Rachel M. Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century

ortheast (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican

Village”: 27-67; Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in

Pennsylvania”: 723-746; Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier; and

Amy C. Schutt, ““What Will Become of Our Young People?” Goals for Indian Children in Moravian

Missions,” History of Education Quarterly 38 No. 3 (Autumn 1998): 268-286.

80 Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village”: 46.

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Indians in the Housatonic and Delaware Valleys, like their counterparts in the Afro-

Caribbean missions, also understood Christ as an ever-present “guardian spirit” that offered

Indians protection and watched over their lives.81 Furthermore, the ritual practices of torture

and bloodletting fit easily with Moravian concepts of Christ’s corporeal suffering, and even

Indian rites of passage into manhood and womanhood melded with rituals of Moravian

baptism.82 Indian women, like female Caribbean slaves, embraced Moravianism because it

offered them opportunities for social and spiritual leadership.83 Indian Moravians also tried

to cultivate an ethos of spiritual communitarianism by having husbands and wives construct

written salutations (which praised the piety and faith of their spouses) to one another.84 Even

if they did not believe in any aspect of Moravian theology, many Indians accepted Moravian

education to improve their physical and spiritual health, maintain a sense of kinship and

community, and acquire literacy skills.85 In sum, while many Native Americans likely

81 Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village”: 34.

82 Merritt, At the Crossroads, 106; Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village”: 37; and

Schutt, “What Will Become of Our Young People?”: 278. Jane Merritt argues that, while the blood and

wounds theology could speak to the cyclic rhythms of Indian women’s menstruation, it also tapped into

Indian traditions of bloodletting as physical and spiritual catharsis. See Merritt, At the Crossroads, 112-

121. For the sybmolgy of baptism, see Merritt, At the Crossroads, 100 and 112. John Heckewelder also

suggested that, for Indian men, the taking on of new names signaled a transition into full manhood. The

ritual of baptism was therefore a Christian ritual, but also a sacred practice within indigenous culture that

represented a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. See John Heckewelder, “An Account of the

History, Manners, and Customs, of The Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the

Neighbouring States,” in Transactions of the Historical & Literary Committee of the American

Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, For Promoting Useful Knowledge Vol. I (Philadelphia:

Abraham Small, 1819), 129.

83 White Moravian missionaries also fostered a spirit of racial inclusiveness by marrying Indian women.

Rachel, one of the spiritual leaders in a Mahican village, for example, was married to white missionary

Christian Frederick Post. See Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village”: 42.

84 A few examples of these can be found in Records of the Moravian mission among the Indians of orth

America. Film Number 1279 at the American Philosophical Society. Reel 34, Box 319, Item 8, Folder 2.

85 Schutt, “What Will Become of Our Young People?”: 271.

215

cringed at the thought of becoming Moravian converts, others embraced some elements of

Moravianism by fusing them with their own traditional beliefs, practices, and rituals.

Like their Afro-Moravian counterparts, indigenous spiritual leaders were central to

the development of Indian Moravianism in the middle of the eighteenth century, for they

served as church elders, teachers, and exhorters. One example was Nicodemus, the elder of

the Moravian Indian Congregation at Gnadenhütten (just north of Bethlehem). In his

writings, sermons, and prayers, Nicodemus merged Moravianism with Indian spirituality by

employing naturalistic metaphors to explain the value of Moravian cosmology to his fellow

Indians. He confessed that “My heart is just so as a little run, which flows down from a

mountain, if there is a little fish in the water, it will be carried along down with the water, and

so is it with my heart, it swims always in the wounds and is carried away by the blood.” He

then went on to employ metaphors from the animal world to elucidate his point. “At first my

heart was like a young Pidgeon, which can not yet fly, but does try so long, till it can fly.

And such is my heart now, I always fly into the wounds.” But Nicodemus finished his

confession with a reference to the centrality of military security on the Anglo-Indian frontier,

for he noted that, “I feel my heart is nowhere better preserved than in the wounds of the

Saviour, therein I find myself just as if I was in a Fort.”86 By variably describing his heart as

a fish floating down a mountain river and a young pigeon flying into the wounds of Christ,

Nicodemus grafted Moravian theology onto Native American understandings of the

(super)natural world. In invoking the metaphor of Christ’s wounds as a fort, Nicodemus

implied that Moravian Christianity might, at the very least, offer some veneer of physical

86 Nicodemus, Elder of the Indian Congregation at Gnadenhutten, January of 1747, in Records of the

Moravian mission among the Indians of orth America. Film Number 1279, American Philosophical

Society. Reel 34, Box 319, Item 8, Folder 3.

216

protection from settlers, soldiers, traders, and speculators who wished to harm and dispossess

his Indian brethren.87

Like their Afro-Moravian counterparts, membership in Christ’s kingdom also gave

Moravian Indians access to certain skills and opportunities that other Indians did not possess.

The most basic was their attempt to use Christian identity as a wedge against rabid

colonization of Indian lands.88 When a Moravian Indian named Tishcohan and another

Christian Indian named Moses Tatamy petitioned the government of Pennsylvania to protect

Indian lands, they did so by using the idioms of Christian supplication.89 They suggested

that, because they “embraced the Christian Religion and attained some small Degree of

Knowledge therein,” they should have the chance to live “under the same Laws with the

English.” They also hoped that “some place might be allotted them where they may live in

the Enjoyment of the same Religion and Laws with them.” Instead of being moved by the

language of Christian humanitarianism, the colonial government simply called these Indians

“rascals” who possessed the “impudence to subscribe themselves, ‘Your Honour’s brethren

87 This is not to say that Indian Christianity did not create its own set of problems. Disease, migration, and

imperial wars certainly did its damage to the Moravian Indian communities of Pennsylvania, New York,

and other locales. Also, and as in every other Protestant mission, there was a major fear of religious

backsliding among the recently converted. This apprehension was realized when Isaac, one of the teachers

in a Mahican Moravian village, went to a tavern, got drunk, and threatened to kill one of the most

prominent Christian Indians. The situation was only resolved when Abraham, the elder of the Indian

church, and his wife Sarah chastised Isaac for his backsliding. Moravian Indian preachers therefore

struggled to synchronize Moravian theology with indigenous beliefs while simultaneously maintaining a

level of discipline, even among their own sacred leadership. See Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice

in a Mahican Village”: 39.

88 Another possible advantage was the ability to tap into existing social and economic networks among

Moravian Indians. As the receipts from an Indian named Joshua indicate, Moravian Indians contracted

with one another to clear land, shingle houses, cut wood, and act as intermediaries in sales involving

livestock. While this certainly interrupted traditional practices of social and economic exchange, some

Indians nevertheless might have used their identity as Moravian converts to gain access to certain economic

advantages. For Joshua’s receipts, see Records of the Moravian mission among the Indians of orth

America. Film Number 1279, American Philosophical Society. Reel 33, Box 311, Folder 7.

89 Tatamy, who was David Brainerd’s interpreter, is discussed below.

217

in the Lord Jesus.’”90 While Tishcohan and Tatamy tried to tap into and exploit the grammar

of universal Christian brotherhood, the colonial government saw through this rhetoric.

Periodic massacres of Moravian Indians and other religious tensions between missionaries,

their charges, and frontier settlers also belied the fragile existence of Christian missionary

work. In spite of some Native American embrace of Christianity, by the 1760s many

Moravian converts on the Anglo-Indian frontier began to realize that even if their

appropriation of Christianity might help save their souls, it could save neither their lands nor

their lives.91

Success can beget success, but the ascension of the Moravians from the 1730s

onward also drew severe criticism. Although some ministers like Ezra Stiles and David

McClure suggested that Moravian evangelical techniques among blacks and Indians were

more effective than those tried by previous Protestant missionaries, others saw in Moravian

expansion a grave danger. Referring to the Moravians’ unique blood and wounds theology,

George Whitefield complained that Moravians introduced “a whole Farrago of superstitions,

not to say idolatrous Fopperies” into the Protestant Atlantic.92 In spite of such criticism, the

Methodists who followed Whitefield actually ended up incorporating much of the Moravian

pedagogical repertoire into their own missionary work in the 1760s and 1770s. There was no

denying that the Moravians had made at least some headway into the Caribbean and the

90 Quoted in Merritt, At the Crossroads, 97-98.

91 Perhaps the most egregious assault on Moravian Indians were the infamous massacres at Salem and

Gnadenhütten in early 1782. See Dowd, A Spiritual Resistance, 85-88.

92 George Whitefield, An Expostulatory Letter Addressed to Count Zinzendorff, And Lord Advocate of the

Unitas Fratrum (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1753), 4. Whitefield was particularly concerned with

some of the liberties that Moravians took in their social practices. One example he gave was when

Moravians used ribbons to identify the marital status of a congregant. Whitefield argued, correctly, that

there was no biblical precedent for such a practice, so he argued that it should be expelled from Moravian

missionary work.

218

North American frontier. They had baptized over 4500 free blacks and slaves in the Danish

Caribbean and had cultivated a national helper system that had over 100 black spiritual

leaders at its apex.93 This national helper system and other Moravian practices provided a

model for later Protestant missionary groups engaged in the debate over whether to use black

slaves and Indians as preachers, teachers, and catechists. Every Protestant denomination

eventually did.

Slave Teachers

Like the Moravians before them, Anglicans began using black slaves as evangelical

agents in the 1740s, and they did so through the institutional edifice of the “Charleston Negro

School.” One of the most unique educational experiments in early American history, the

school was opened in September 1742 under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation

of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), and was designed to instruct black children in the

tenets of Anglican Protestantism. The final goal, of course, was to have those black children

then “diffuse their Light and Knowledge to their Parents, Relations, Countrymen, and Fellow

Servants.”94 Yet perhaps the most remarkable characters in the school were not the students

and future Christian evangelists, but rather the teachers. Indeed, both Harry and Andrew, the

teachers charged with instructing these Carolina slaves, were slaves themselves, purchased

by the SPG for the important task of educating others. Although it closed in 1764 and had a

negligible impact on the Christianization of Carolina’s slaves, the school’s history

nevertheless demonstrates the major changes undertaken in missionary policy in a period of

93 Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 625-626.

94 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, 10 October 1743, in Journal of the SPG, Society

for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

(East Ardsley, Yorkshire: Micro Methods, 1964), Volume 9, 238.

219

transatlantic revivalism. By purchasing slaves to teach other slaves, Carolina Anglicans

walked a slender line between reinforcing and destabilizing the fragile racial hierarchies that

ordered southern society. The ascension of slave teachers in South Carolina was therefore

simultaneously innovative and socially dangerous.

The origins of the school lay in two historical developments within South Carolina.

The first was the explosion of racial tensions in the 1730s. In 1731 there were two rumored

slave rebellions in South Carolina, and in both of them it was feared that Christianized blacks

had used their training to interpret their own doctrine of Christian liberty in their fight against

temporal slavery. In 1736 South Carolina papers reported on a slave uprising in Antigua,

where some slaves apparently “administered the Sacrament...according to the rites of the

Bishop’s Church,” before beginning their rebellion.95 But the threat of rebellion became

palpable in 1739, when the Stono Rebellion took place. While previous generations of

scholars have interpreted the Stono Rebellion as a violent response to the overwhelmingly

disproportionate power relations of Carolina slave society, recent studies by John Thornton

and Mark M. Smith have suggested that there was also a common ideology, indeed a

religious spirituality, that motivated and defined these rebellions. This ideology was a

widespread Afro-Catholic religiosity that gave Carolina slaves the organizational ability,

means of communication, and even sense of sacred timing to begin the revolt. It also

explains why the Stono rebels chose Spanish Florida – a Catholic colony – as their getaway

destination.96 The violence of the event, its Christian timing and iconography, and even the

95 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 71.

96 Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion”: 1101-1113; Smith, “Remembering Mary,

Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion”: 513-534; and Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to

Zion, 71. While Thornton explored the African dimensions of the Stono Rebellion in religious and military

terms, Smith argued that the roots of the rebellion, including its unique timing and iconographic

significance, lay in Afro-Catholicism generally and the Kongolese veneration of the Virgin Mary more

220

literacy of its leaders all struck fear into the hearts of southern masters.97 When the South

Carolina legislature wrote new slave codes in the wake of the 1739 rebellion, they outlawed

teaching a slave to write or even using an already literate slave as a scribe.98 It is therefore

ironic that Anglicans turned to literacy and Christian instruction as a method to demand slave

obedience, spread the Gospel, and maintain peace in the Carolinas.

The second development that provided the foundation for the Charleston Negro

School was the itinerancy of John Wesley and George Whitefield in the late 1730s and early

1740s. Wesley, who was friends with the most influential Anglican clergymen in South

Carolina, began working in Georgia in the late 1730s to put together a parish of slave

congregants.99 While he was only marginally successful, he cleared the way for George

Whitefield, who would also extend his evangelical itinerancy to include southern blacks.

Whitefield was irate at the lackluster record of Anglican evangelization in the Carolinas,

arguing that the withholding of Christian instruction from slaves by masters was sinful,

unchristian, and “Evil.”100 Questioning the popular convention of innate African inferiority,

particularly. Jon Butler has argued against this thesis, claiming instead that nineteenth century rebellions,

and not earlier ones, were motivated by religion. See Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 156.

97 Smith argued that Cato, the apparent leader of the rebellion, had literacy skills and wielded a tremendous

amount of cultural power among his fellow slaves. See Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt”:

528.

98 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 116; and Comminey, “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts,” 364.

99 For more on Wesley’s itinerancy in the south, see Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 87-91.

100 George Whitefield to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina 23 January 1740,

in A Collection of Papers, Lately printed in the Daily Advertiser (London: Booksellers in Town and

Country, 1740), 8. The problem was certainly much more complicated than masters’ refusal to their slaves’

to access education. Albert Raboteau has concluded that the small number of Christian converts was a

result of slaveholders’ objects as well as “the unsettled state of religion in the Southern colonies, which

held the great majority of the slave population; the paucity of missionaries to catechize slaves; linguistic

and cultural barriers between Africans and European; [and] the very way in which conversion was

generally perceived – as catechesis, a time-consuming process of religious instruction.” “All these factors,”

Raboteau concluded, “ensured that Christianity touched most slave indirectly if at all.” See Raboteau,

Slave Religion, 126. For more on Anglican education among southern blacks in the first half of the

221

Whitefield argued that blacks were “just as much, and no more, conceived and born in Sin, as

White Men are.” If both white and black men were “born and bred up here,” then they were

also “naturally capable of the same Improvement.”101 Equal under sin, blacks also had the

same access to spiritual rebirth, regeneration, and divine judgment as their white

counterparts.102 Like his predecessors and contemporaries, however, Whitefield also argued

that slaves would be more faithful, obedient, and docile if they were Christian slaves. In fact,

Whitefield suggested that the Stono Rebellion and the recent spread of smallpox were

products of God’s displeasure towards Carolinians for their lack of missionary zeal.103

Whitefield’s remedy was “to buy” some of that “despised Generation” and set aside a large

plot of land upon which a school for their instruction could be built.104 The evangelical

preacher also anticipated that, at this school and in other orphan houses that he constructed,

several blacks with “suitable abilities” would eventually be “bred to the Ministry.”

Whitefield claimed that, by 1740, he already had one or two “in view for that Purpose.”105 In

1740 the Bryan family took their cue from Whitefield and raised their own funds to open a

school for black children in St. Helena Parish, hoping that the school’s graduates would teach

eighteenth century, see Comminey, “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts”: 360-

369; and Laing, “Heathens and Infidels”?: 197-228.

101 George Whitefield to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina 23 January 1740,

in A Collection of Papers, Lately printed in the Daily Advertiser, 9.

102 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 92. Mechal Sobel has argued that this evangelical emphasis on

spiritual rebirth matched up easily with West African concepts of regeneration and that baptism melded

easily with ritual bathing. The two cosmologies which governed African religion and Baptist religion were

therefore not entirely incompatible, but rather mutually accommodating. See Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On:

The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979).

103 George Whitefield to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina 23 January A

Collection of Papers, Lately printed in the Daily Advertiser, 10.

104 George Whitefield to a friend in London, 27 April, 1740, A Collection of Papers, Lately printed in the

Daily Advertiser, 2. See also Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 92.

105 “The Manner of the Childrens spending their Time at the Orphan-House in Georgia,” in A Collection of

Papers, Lately printed in the Daily Advertiser, 43.

222

other slaves about the blessings of Christ.106 In short, Whitefield and his followers came to

believe that the rise of black preachers would serve as a panacea for South Carolina’s

lackluster reputation in preaching to slaves while easing the social and racial tensions that

threatened to tear that society apart.

Whitefield put the Anglicans on the defensive, blaming both licentious slave owners

and lazy missionaries for failing to make any headway into South Carolina’s slave

population. The Anglicans responded in kind by attacking Whitefield’s theology, especially

the kind of ecstatic revivalism and excessive enthusiasm that more traditional Protestants

found abhorrent in Great Awakening preaching. The biggest problem was the debate about

conversion. While revivalists generally understood conversion as an immediate, life-

changing experience, traditional Protestants (including Anglicans and Puritans) believed that

conversion was instead a protracted and gradual process characterized by intense self-

scrutiny, biblical study, and intellectual reflection.107 Although these debates were

theological and scriptural in nature, when placed within the fire of South Carolina race

relations, they became even more controversial. How should slaves be converted? Who was

primarily responsible for their conversion, and what did this mean to their status as slaves?

Although Anglicans had been debating these questions for decades, the rise of evangelical

revivalism just as the Stono Rebellion shook the south made the question of black

Christianity all the more pressing. As such, Anglicans scrambled to mount a defense of their

own missionary tradition.

The “chief antagonist” of both the Anglican rebuttal of Whitefield and the renewal of

missionary activity was Alexander Garden, an Anglican missionary and commissary to the

106 Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America

(New York: Oxford University press, 2003), ix.

107 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 94.

223

Bishop of London.108 Garden thought Whitefield was a “very wicked man” who, even as he

helped orphans in his schools, still had a nasty reputation for “Pinching their Bellies.”109

Personal animosity and unusual allusions aside, Garden found himself in the awkward

position of rebutting Whitefield’s claims that masters were oppressive towards their slaves

while simultaneously explaining why so many slaves were still unconverted. Garden

addressed the first point by invoking the classic trope of the paternal slave owner, noting that

masters and overseers were not violent tyrants to their slaves, but rather benevolent fathers

who constantly treated their charges with gentle love.110 Garden then suggested that the

reason why Carolina’s slaves were ignorant of the Gospel was because the Anglicans lacked

a “certain uniform Method of teaching them.”111

Ironically, Garden found his “uniform Method” in the pedagogy and practices of

Whitefield himself, for in the early 1740s he began to formulate an idea of a school for young

black children. Anglicans, like other Protestants throughout the Atlantic world, were

108 George C. Rogers, Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,

1969), 91. For more on the dispute between Garden and Whitefield, see William H. Kenney III,

“Alexander Garden and Kenney, “Alexander Garden and George Whitefield: The Significance of

Revivalism in South Carolina, 1738-1741,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 71 No. 1 (January 1970):

1-16. See also George Whitefield, Three Letters From the Reverend Mr. G. Whitefield: Viz. Letter I. To a

Friend in London, concerning Archbishop Tillotson. Letter II. To the same, on the same Subject. Letter

III. To the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, orth and South-Carolina, concerning their egroes

(Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1740); and Alexander Garden, Six Letters To The Rev. Mr. George Whitefield.

The First, Second, and Third, on the Subject of Justification. The Fourth containing Remarks on a

Pamphlet, entitled, the Case between Mr. Whitefield and Dr. Stebbing stated, &c. The Fifth containing

Remarks on Mr. Whitefield’s two Letters concerning Archbishop Tillotson, and the book entitled, The

Whole Duty of Man. The Sixth, containing Remarks on Mr. Whitefield’s second Letter, concerning

Archbishop Tillotson, and on his Letter concerning the egroes (Boston: T. Fleet, 1740).

109 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 9 April 1742, in SPG Records, Letter Series B (hereafter referred to as

SPG Records); and Alexander Garden to George Whitefield, 30 July 1740, in Garden, Six Letters to the

Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 52. The historical basis for Garden’s allusion to Whitefield’s strange behavior

towards the orphans is unclear.

110 Alexander Garden to George Whitefield, 30 July 1740, in Garden, Six Letters to the Rev. Mr. George

Whitefield, 51.

111 Alexander Garden to George Whitefield, 30 July 1740, in Garden, Six Letters to the Rev. Mr. George

Whitefield, 53.

224

beginning to believe that the education of adult Indians and blacks alike would prove futile.

They believed that children were the future of the mission and that the only way to make any

advances was to focus on a younger generation; a generation less sullied by the pagan rituals

of their forefathers. Garden expected that, with two black teachers at the head of the class,

his school might produce upwards of 40 graduates per year; those graduates would

subsequently preach to the thousands of slaves that had formerly been so hard to reach.

Slaves, Garden complained, were a kind of “Nation within a Nation,” and the only way to

introduce Christianity to the thousands of slaves in the rice country was to infiltrate their

ranks with other, Christianized slaves. “Parents and Grand Parents, Husbands, Wives,

Brothers, Sisters, and other Relations,” Garden hoped, “would be daily teaching and learning

of one another.” Anglican Christianity would thereby spread throughout the Carolinas like a

kind of virus, being transmitted via the hundreds of students that Garden expected to graduate

from the school. Garden even anticipated that, within 20 years, “knowledge of the Gospel

among those other Slaves…would not be much inferiour to that of the lowest Sort of White

People.”112 On Monday the 12th of September in 1742, the Charleston Negro School

officially opened, and within a few weeks the total enrollment of black slaves was up to 30.

Garden’s dream of using slaves to convert slaves seemed to be coming to fruition.

If the creation of a school for blacks was not particularly innovative or controversial –

Elias Neau had a school for black children in New York in the 1710s – the choice of teachers

for the slaves was certainly unique. Rather than relying upon white Anglican instructors for

the maintenance of the school, Garden instead envisioned a group of three to five slaves

serving as the teaching corps for this school. In Garden’s view, these slaves had to be

112 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, 6 May 1740, in SPG Journal, SPG Records,

Volume 8, 176.

225

between 12-16 years old and must have had “sober and Docile Dispositions.”113 The age

requirement and the emphasis on sobriety and docility certainly went hand in hand. These

teachers in training needed to be young enough to be molded but old enough to understand

some of the complexities of Christian theology. In the end, Garden settled on two boys –

Harry and Andrew – who were 14 and 15 years old, respectively. Formerly slaves of

Alexander Skene, the two boys were born in Carolina, had been baptized, and could say the

Church Catechism from memory. Although neither could read, Garden hoped that, with

sufficient schooling, they could become teachers within the span of about a year. “This,”

Garden bragged, “is the only method, at least the most Efectual [sic]…that the whole ever

will, or by Ordinary Human means, can be done.”114 Most importantly, the identity of the

two teachers as slaves would protect Garden’s school against any claim of intellectual elitism

while simultaneously guarding against social divisions within slave society itself. Garden

believed that the two teachers “must be…Negroe Schoolmasters Home born, and equally

property as other Slaves.”115 In the wake of the Stono Rebellion, ensuring the status of these

slave teachers as property was crucial to insulating the school from future attacks from

anxious masters. Indeed, it was precisely because Anglicans understood the liberating effects

of Protestant evangelism that the Charleston School had to exhibit the classic pattern of slave

domination that characterized the wider plantation society.

The benefits of Garden’s plan were both spiritual and temporal. While the school

would help spread Christianity among slaves, that Christianity itself would serve as a

113 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, 6 May 1740, in SPG Journal, SPG Records,

Volume 8, 175.

114 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, 6 May 1740, in SPG Journal, SPG Records,

Volume 8, 176.

115 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, 6 May 1740, in SPG Journal, SPG Records,

Volume 8, 173-174.

226

protection against future slave revolts. As Anthony Ellys noted in his 1759 sermon to the

SPG, the Christianization of slaves could result in a paradigm shift in southern race relations.

“Instead of needing to be always watched in order to prevent their doing any mischief,” Ellys

argued, “they may become guards, and defenders of their masters; and there will be no longer

any such revolts and insurrections among them as have sometimes been detrimental, if not

even dangerous, to several of the colonies.”116 Garden exemplified this argument and

conceived of his school as a cure-all for Anglican anxieties. The school would help offset the

Catholic menace from Spanish Florida, redeem the Anglican reputation from the attacks of

the evangelists, ensure slaves’ fidelity to their masters, and provide a new mechanism for

slave instruction in the widely spread Carolina plantations. As Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood

have noted, Garden also believed that the school would be a weapon for “nullifying” the

gains made by the kind of evangelical Protestantism that could undermine Carolina’s fragile

racial, religious, and social order.117

Most importantly, the school was going to be very cost effective. Indeed, Garden

purchased the two boys for the SPG on the cheap, buying them both for 52 pounds sterling, a

sum the Anglicans found completely reasonable.118 One of the most tangible benefits of

using slaves to teach, of course, was that, unlike teachers, catechists, and missionaries who

frequently complained about their insufficient annual salaries, once slaves were purchased

there would be “no further charge about them.”119 The SPG was learning the lessons that

116 Anthony Ellys, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday

February 23, 1759 (London: E. Owen and T. Harrison, 1759), 30-31.

117 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 72.

118 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 9 April 1742, in SPG Records, Letter Series B.

119 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 9 April 1742, in SPG Records, Letter Series B.

227

American slavery had been teaching planters for decades: African slaves could be much more

profitable than comparable white labor. Despite four decades of combined service for the

SPG from the 1740s to the 1760s, Harry and Andrew never appeared on the payroll. In fact,

Garden had explicitly calculated that the service of a “young healthy slave” could be counted

on for three to four decades and he hoped that none of his successors would request from the

SPG “any Charge for [Harry’s] Maintenance.”120 This was not the first time that the SPG

dabbled in slavery. They owned approximately 300 slaves at their Codrington plantation on

Barbados and purchased individual slaves as assistants and domestics to Anglican

missionaries.121 The Anglicans’ growing status as slave owners also required that they

continue attacking the “vulgar error” that Christianity implied temporal freedom.122 When

Philip Bearcroft boasted that the Charleston school would “make them free indeed,” he was

offering a not-so-subtle allusion to the spiritual enslavement of the unconverted. The kind of

freedom that the school would bring about was spiritual, not temporal.123

120 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 10 October 1742, in SPG Records, Letter Series B. Garden actually

believed that whatever small sum – he called it a “trifle” – that would be necessary to maintain his slave

teachers could be procured from slave masters and mistresses. He even alluded to a ridiculous notion of

having the enslaved parents of these slave teachers contribute their mite to the teachers’ maintenance.

121 For more on Codrington Plantation, see see John A. Schultz, “Christopher Codrington’s Will:

Launching the S.P.G. into the Barbadian Sugar Business,” The Pacific Historical Review 15 No. 2 (June

1946): 192-200; and Frank J. Klingberg, “British Humanitarianism at Codrington,” The Journal of egro

History 23 No. 4 (October 1938): 451-486. Mr. Langhorne, who was a missionary to St. George’s Parish in

the mid-1750s, apparently purchased two slaves to help build a new parsonage and to do any other tasks

associated with the physical maintenance of the parish. See Robert Hay Drummond, A Sermon Preached

before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary

Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday February 15, 1754 (London: E. Owen,

1754), 63.

122 Drummond, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts, 19.

123 Philip Bearcroft, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday

February 15, 1744 (London: Edward Owen, 1744), 19.

228

Harry and Andrew’s bill of sale reminded the two young teachers, as well as their Anglican owners, that

in spite of their unique role as Christian instructors, they were still property of the SPG. From SPG Records,

Letter Series B, Volume 10, Letter 140.

Like a contemporary slaveholder, Alexander Garden exhibited the classic

paternalistic ethos that served to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans in the

Americas.124 Although the SPG technically owned the two slaves, Garden guaranteed his

bosses that he would take special care for their education and maintenance. In short, there

was no question that Garden and the SPG embraced the role of benevolent slave masters.

Assuring his superiors that these slaves would not enjoy any special privileges due to their

role as teachers, Garden compared them to rank and file slaves, noting that Harry and

Andrew would be “employed in it during life, as the others are in any other Services

124 For more on the philosophy of paternalism, see Howard McGary and Bill E. Lawson, Between Slavery

and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), Ch. 2.

229

whatsoever.”125 Garden’s slaves worked in a classroom instead of the fields, wielded books

instead of hoes, and cultivated unconverted minds instead of rice. By 1740, Anglicans were

fully participating in and contributing to the realities of racial oppression by purchasing

Harry and Andrew to teach in their budding school. Garden played the role of the slave

master while Harry and Andrew, in spite of their elevated status as Christian teachers,

nevertheless remained chattel slaves.126

There is no better evidence for the Anglicans’ embrace of their role of slave master

than their treatment of Andrew, the older teacher who eventually became the forgotten son of

the project. While Harry, the younger slave, was an “Excellent Genius,” Andrew was “of a

somewhat slower Genius.”127 Even though he was more mild-mannered than Harry, served

as an assistant to Harry when enrollment became too overwhelming to manage alone, and

even though another Anglican missionary asked Garden to place Andrew in his own parish,

Garden concluded that Andrew could never teach on his own. 128 Therefore, and because

Andrew apparently had shown “so weak an understanding” of Christian doctrine, in the fall

of 1744 Garden asked his superiors for “discretionary Power to Sell him, and to purchase

another of a better Genius in his Room.” The committee in London instead directed Garden

to ship him to the SPG plantation in Barbados, where he would work as a servant at

125 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, 6 May 1740, in SPG Journal, SPG Records,

Volume 8, 174.

126 Jon Butler has correctly argued that Anglican ministers like Garden “articulated a planter ethic of

absolute slave obedience that ran thoroughly counter to contemporary English political and social theory

and became a principle foundation of American slavery’s distinctive paternalism, violence, and

sentimentalism.” See Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 129.

127 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 24 September 1742, in SPG Records, Letter Series B.

128 W. Guy to the SPG, 26 March 1744, in SPG Records, Letters Series B.

230

Codrington College .129 For reasons still unclear, Garden was unable to send Andrew away.

Andrew spent the next six years in Carolina in limbo, suffering from a “Bruise in his Breast”

and eventually being sold by Garden in 1750 for 28 pounds sterling.130 Like the scores of

other slaves who proved to have lackluster performance in the fields, Andrew was sold when

he could not adequately serve his Anglican masters. Harry was on his own.

It is difficult to determine exactly what Harry taught his students, and the inner

workings of the school remain unclear. The list of books needed for the school – 100

spelling books, 50 Testaments, 50 Bibles, and 50 Psalters with the Book of Common Prayer

inside them – reveals that the students probably focused on the basics of Christian

instruction: literacy, psalm-singing, the lord’s creed, and other essential lessons from

scripture.131 By 1744, Alexander Garden claimed that enrollment had jumped from 30 to 60,

15 could read the testament very well, 20 were in the Psalters, and the rest were in the

alphabet and spelling books.132 Harry and Andrew (before the latter was sold) apparently

examined the students twice a week to determine their progress and graduated about 10-15

students every year. The Charleston Negro School even expanded its enrollment to include

“grown Slaves,” who were given the same Christian instruction at the conclusion of the

slaves’ workday.133

129 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, SPG Records, SPG Journal Volume 10, 11-12.

130 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, SPG Records, SPG Journal Volume 11, 300.

131 Summary of a letter from Alexander Garden to the SPG, SPG Records, SPG Journal Volume 9, 239;

Raboteau, Slave Religion, 117.

132 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 18 October 1744, SPG Records, Letter Series B.

133 John Thomas, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday

February 20, 1746 (London: Edward Owen, 1747), 55-56.

231

In spite of Garden’s contention that the Charleston Negro School was instrumental in

“spreading the Light of the blessed Gospel among these poor heathens” of South Carolina,

the school was never really successful.134 Andrew’s intellectual shortcomings and his being

sold away was only a portent of the many challenges the school would face in the future. A

hurricane tore the school down in 1752, enveloping the students’ books and forcing them to

start anew.135 Garden, the main catalyst behind the program, suffered from increasingly ill

health and died in 1755, forcing an apathetic Richard Clarke to replace him. Clarke resigned

four years later. Smallpox struck Charleston in 1760, once again temporarily closing the

school. When Harry died in 1764, the school officially stopped operating and was never

reopened by the SPG. By 1764, the three founders of the school – Alexander Garden, Harry,

and Andrew – had either died or been sold away. The Charleston Negro School disappeared

from the records of the SPG by 1765.

Even though it eventually closed, Harry and Andrew’s school was both a product of

and catalyst for indigenous missionary work in the British Atlantic. Alexander Garden

founded the school in response to evangelical revivalism, racial tensions after Stono, and

concerns about Catholic Spanish influence in the Carolinas. Garden also called upon a

longer history of using black and even Indian missionaries in the field, for he was certainly

aware of the Moravian use of “national helpers” in their Caribbean plantations. Furthermore,

as commissary to the Bishop of London, Garden might have also been tapping into a history

of Anglican employment of non-whites in their Carolina missions. Indeed, it should be

remembered that Garden’s predecessor – Commissary Gideon Johnston – was the man to

134 Alexander Garden to the SPG, 4 February 1750, in SPG Records, Letter Series B.

135 Edward Cressett, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday,

February 16, 1753 (London: Edward Owen, 1753), 53-54.

232

sponsor and direct the education of the Yamassee Prince in the 1710s. The Charleston school

was therefore a product of transatlantic revivalism, Caribbean mission history, and Anglican

experimentation with native missionaries.

The school was illustrative of a major shift in Anglican missionary policy, for this

was the first time that Anglicans had employed black slaves in their missions. By 1765,

however, another Anglican group known as the Associates of Dr. Bray had opened up

schools for black children in Philadelphia, Newport, New York, Williamsburg, Norfolk,

Yorktown, and Fredericksburg, as well as Chester, Maryland, Edenton, and Wilmington.

Their missionaries also employed black intermediaries to teach other slaves. Jonathan

Boucher, a Virginia missionary, reportedly trained Aaron to teach other slaves in “Reading &

some of the first Principles of Religion.”136 Using slaves as teachers, Boucher argued to his

bosses, was “the only practicable Method” for propagating the Gospel among slaves in

Virginia.137 John Barnett, a contemporary and colleague of Boucher who was preaching in

North Carolina, gave some slaves several copies of Anglican tracts because they “promised

me to take pains to instruct such of their fellow Slaves as are desirous to learn.”138 During

these same years a young African named Philip Quaque was trained in London to become a

missionary in his own home near Cape Coast Castle in West Africa. He would become the

first African ordained in the English church.139 Indians, too, became central to Anglican

136 Jonathan Boucher to John Waring, 28 April 1764, in John C. Van Horne, ed., Religious Philanthropy

and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 1985), 206.

137 Jonathan Boucher to John Waring, 9 March 1764, in Van Horne, ed., Religious Philanthropy and

Colonial Slavery, 255.

138 John Barnett to John Waring, 17 August 1767, in Van Horne, ed., Religious Philanthropy and Colonial

Slavery, 262.

139 For more on Quaque, see Ty M. Reese, “‘Sheep in the Jaws of So Many Ravenous Wolves': the Slave

Trade and Anglican Missionary Activity at Cape Coast Castle, 1752-1816,” Journal of Religion in Africa

34 No. 3 (September 2004): 348-372; Margaret Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast” in Africa

233

missions. Beginning in the 1740s and lasting through the Revolutionary war, Mohawks like

Daniel, Cornelius, and Paulus officially worked for the SPG as schoolmasters, catechists, and

readers in their fragile New York missions.140 The Anglicans had no Indian or black teachers

on their payroll in 1739. By 1765, they had recently closed a school that, for 20 years, had

used slaves as teachers. They also had several black teachers working for the Associates of

Dr. Bray, half a dozen Mohawks operating in New York as catechists and lecturers, and were

finishing their training of Philip Quaque to return to the Cape Coast of West Africa. If native

preachers were a pipe dream for the Anglicans before 1740, they were vital to Anglican

missions by 1770.

The introduction of native preachers in such mass numbers and with such rapidity

was a major change for Anglicans, who still believed that literacy and formal education were

the most important keys to conversion. Great Awakening evangelists like George Whitefield

and John Wesley, on the other hand, believed that sincere penitence – rather than classical

education – was much more important in the conversion process. Anglicans were afraid (and

rightfully so) about losing their grip on the ecclesiastical and spiritual conduct of religion in

the Americas and beyond, and they watched their control slipping away as uneducated

speakers took to the pulpits, preached to Indians and slaves, and even performed as

Remembered: arratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); F.L. Bartels, “Philip Quaque, 1741-1816,” Transactions of the Gold

Coast and Togoland Historical Society I No. 5 (1955); and Frank J. Klingberg, “Philip Quaque: Pioneer

Native Missionary on the Gold Coast, 1765-1816,” The Journal of egro Education 8 No. 4 (October

1939): 666-672. There is also a brief discussion of Quaque in Daniel C. Littlefield, “‘Almost an

Englishman’: Eighteenth-Century Anglo-African Identities,” in Cultures and Identities in Colonial British

America, eds. Robert Olwell and Alan Tully (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 70-

94.

140 See William B. Hart, “Mohawk Schoolmasters and Catechists in Mid-Eighteenth Century Iroquoia: An

Experiment in Fostering Literacy and Religious Exchange,” in The Language Encounter in the Americas,

1492-1800, ed. Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 230-257.

234

evangelical imposters.141 The Charleston Negro School was just one of several attempts to

address these problems by changing the direction of Anglican missions, maintaining control

over the development of Afro-American spirituality, and ensuring that education – rather

than an ill-defined “conversion experience” – be the centerpiece of black spirituality. This

veritable marketplace of religious ideas, however, found Anglicans losing out to and falling

farther behind their Great Awakening competitors. In the Charleston Negro School the

Anglicans created a moderately ambitious program, one that promised to provide the kind of

viral evangelism that Great Awakening preachers were producing while simultaneously

ensuring that its preachers – the slaves – were instructed within the circumscribed confines of

an Anglican education. In spite of this negotiation, and in spite of its alleged early successes,

the Anglicans allowed the school, and their plans for the evangelization of Lowcountry

slaves, to fail.

The Specter of Separatism

While the movement of black slaves into positions of ecclesiastical and spiritual

authority was a cause for both celebration and concern, the same could be said for the

development of Indian Christianity during this same period. Early modern Protestants

throughout the Atlantic world viewed the appropriation of Christianity by black and Indian

preachers ambivalently. On the one hand, the ascension of native evangelists into positions

of religious authority could not only justify the secular pains taken to evangelize indigenous

peoples, but also anticipate the eventual gospelization of the globe’s people. Perhaps this is

why Moravians rejoiced to hear about a “converted Negroe” living in Genoa and

“endeavouring to erect Schools in the neighbouring Parts, with a View to the Propagation of

141 Thomas Kidd, “Passing as a Pastor: Clerical Imposture in the Colonial Atlantic World,” Religion and

American Culture 14 No. 2 (Summer 2004): 149-174.

235

Christian Knowledge.”142 In New England, Benjamin Colman noted with glee that Indians

suddenly exhibited a “surprising concern” for their souls in the early 1740s, as they earnestly

began “voluntarily applying to the ministers” for Christian instruction.143 One commentator

recounted the 1741 reformation among the Montauk Indians in Connecticut and Long Island

and observed that almost all of them had “renounced their heathenish idolatry and

superstition, and many of them became true Christians.”144 While Daniel Mandell has

rightfully asserted that Indians in eastern Massachusetts were “barely affected by the Great

Awakening,” it was a different story for Connecticut and Rhode Island.145 The rise of

evangelical revivalism there from the 1730s onward offered new ways for Native American

preachers to craft constantly evolving spiritual meanings out of Christianity.

On the other hand, Protestant divines feared the permeability of the boundaries

between the sincere piety and excessive zeal of indigenous preachers. The explosion of

ecstatic revivalism that accompanied the 1730s and 40s – among both white and Indian

populations – was often cast by religious conservatives as a dangerous portent of future

142 A Dissenting Minister in England to a Gentleman in Scotland (unauthored and undated), in Unauthored,

Copy of Three Letters, 6.

143 Draft of a letter from Benjamin Colman to Governor Shirley, 18 June 1742, in Benjamin Colman

Letters, 1728-1745, Massachusetts Historical Society Manuscript Collections.

144 “A Letter From Rev. John Devotion of Saybrook, to the Rev. Dr. Stiles, Inclosing, Mr. Occum’s

Account of the Montauk Indians,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, Vol.

X (Boston: Munro, Francis, and Parker, 1809, 110.

145 Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 127. See Fisher, “Traditionary Religion”: and Simmons,

“Red Yankees”: 253-271 for more on the First Great Awakening among southeastern New England

Indians. Part of Mandell’s argument rests on the fact that Christian Indian congregations in places like

Mashpee and Martha’s Vineyard were already well established by the time of the revivals. They were also

using many of the same ecstatic revelatory techniques and syncretic forms of Christianity in their own

churches. Finally, they also used Christianity to protect their own sovereignty and sense of cultural

identity. See, for example, “Rough Copy of a Petition from over 20 indians in Mashpee, dated 13 August,

1761,” in Gideon Hawley Letters, 1754-1807, mss at the Massachusetts Historical Society. For more on

Mashpee in the eighteenth century, see Mandell, Behind the Frontier. For more on Martha’s Vineyard, see

Silverman, Faith and Boundaries.

236

spiritual anarchy that threatened to subvert the fragile ecclesiastical order. One of the most

pressing problems was that many native preachers, exhorters, and prophets led their own

meetings, followings, and congregations away from the eyes of white authority. One

Anglican complained that, by 1750, “even the ignorant egroes and Indians have set up

preaching and praying by the Spirit, and they have their Meetings, in which such of them as

can neither write nor read, hold forth in their Turn.”146 Old Light divine Charles Chauncy

scoffed at this democratization of sacred authority. There was a risk, Chauncy lamented, of

having “so many Exhorters” preaching in the colonies. In Chauncy’s view, these new

evangelists had:

no Learning, and but small Capacities, yet imagine they are able,

and without Study too, to speak to the Spiritual Profit of such as

are willing to hear them: Nay, there are among these Exhorters,

Babes in Age, as well as Understanding. They are chiefly indeed

young Persons, sometimes Lads, or rather Boys: Nay, Women and

Girls; yea, egroes, have taken upon them to do the Business of

Preachers. Nor has this been accidental only, or in a single

Place, or at a private House; but there is scarce a Town in all the

Provinces, where this Appearance has been, but there have been

also these Exhorters, in smaller or greater Numbers.”147

146 Richard Trevor, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday

February 16, 1749 (London: E. Owen, 1750), 41.

147 Charles Chauncy, Seasonable thoughts on the state of religion in ew-England, a treatise in five parts.

I. Faithfully pointing out the things of a bad and dangerous tendency, in the late, and present, religious

appearance, in the land. II. Representing the obligations which lie upon the pastors of these churches in

particular, and upon all in general, to use their endeavours to suppress prevailing disorders; with the great

danger of a neglect in so important a matter. III. Opening, in many instances, wherein the discouragers of

irregularities have been injuriously treated. IV. Shewing what ought to be corrected, or avoided, in

testifying against the evil things of the present day. V. Directing our thot's more positively, to what may be

judged the best expedients, to promote pure and undefiled religion in these times. With a preface giving an

account of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines, who infected these churches, above an hundred years

ago: very needful for these days; the like spirit, and errors, prevailing now as did then. The whole being

intended, and calculated, to serve the interest of Christ's kingdom. By Charles Chauncy. D.D. Pastor of the

First Church of Christ in Boston (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), 226.

237

Chauncy conceded that this kind of religious imposture was not limited to the white

evangelical population, but also extended to African slaves and Indians.148 The problem was

that, in an era of intensively divisive evangelical revivalism, Indians, slaves, and others began

incorporating elements of “Great Awakening” theology into their own cosmologies, thereby

complicating the boundaries between Christianity and indigenous religions while

simultaneously offering an implicit rebuttal to entrenched ecclesiastical authority.

No one exemplified these tensions better than Samuel Niles. Born around 1701,

Niles eventually became a spiritual, cultural, and social leader of the Narragansett people.149

His propulsion into a position of indigenous leadership was the result of two major

developments in eighteenth century Narragansett history: the crisis in Indian dispossession

and the outburst of Christian revivalism. Although English settlers were unapologetically

buying up Indian lands in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Narragansett

sachemship was partly responsible for this dispossession.150 Niles, along with other

Narragansett leaders, blamed Thomas Ninigret, the Narragansett sachem, for drinking too

much, selling land without the consultation of the rest of the tribe, and using those land sales

to resolve his own personal debts.151 Niles even wrote to Sir William Johnson, the British

148 Clerical imposture was a major concern. See Kidd, “Passing as a Pastor”: 149-174; and John Freebairn,

A Caution Against False Teachers. A Sermon Preached before The Society in Scotland for propagating

Christian Knowledge, At their Anniversary Meeting, In the High Church of Edinburgh, On Friday, June 7.

1771. (Edinburgh: Robert Mundell, 1771).

149 By this time the “Narragansetts” were actually a collection of different southeastern New England tribes,

made up of mostly Narragansett and Niantic Indians. See Simmons, “Red Yankees”: 256-257.

150 A similar conflict over land and the authority of the sachemship occurred on Martha’s Vineyard. See

David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the

Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005),

121-156.

151 Thomas was not the first sachem to do this with Narragansett Lands. Many of his predecessors were

also complicit in selling native lands to English colonists in order to pay off debts, purchase liquor, or

amass personal wealth. See Simmons, “Red Yankees”: 256-258.

238

Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and complained that Narragansetts were quickly losing

land, had no access to the sea, and that Indian children would eventually “come into bondage

to the English.”152 He also petitioned the colonial government for assistance and even tried

to depose Ninigret and replace the sachemship with a system of Indian counselors.153 It was

within this context of dispossession, internecine power struggles with the sachem, and

colonial apathy that Niles tried to use his spiritual authority as a preacher to preserve the

land, power, and cultural identity of his Narragansett people.154

The second major development that inaugurated Samuel Niles’ rise to power was the

spread of evangelical revivalism in southeastern New England in the 1730s and 40s. It

should be remembered that the first Christian missionaries to actively court the Narragansetts

were two Indians. Japhet Hannit of Martha’s Vineyard and William Simmons of Dartmouth

both undertook several evangelical trips to Narragansett in the first decades of the eighteenth

century.155 While Thomas Mayhew, several Anglican missionaries, and a handful of

Congregationalist ministers also invited Narragansetts into a Christian communion, the rise

of New Light preaching in the wake of James Davenport’s 1741 tour through southeastern

New England marked the moment when some Narragansett Indians began to embrace the

152 Quoted in William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways: The arragansett

Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 39, ff1.

Strangely, Niles actually supported Ninigret’s 1759 petition to have the authority to liquidate all Indian

lands. See Simmons, “Red Yankees”: 259.

153 Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, xxxv.

154 Niles was not the only Narragansett Christian to use his status as a preacher to protect Indian lands and

identity. The brothers Shattock (John and Tobias) traveled to London in 1768 to try to get official

protection of Indian lands from the King himself. Unfortunately for the Narragansetts, Tobias died from

smallpox in Edinburgh and John failed to succeed in the mission after his brother passed away. See Alden

T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2006), 179-181; and James Dow McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians

(Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), 201-217.

155 Simmons, “Red Yankees”: 260.

239

revivalist evangelism that became a hallmark of Christian spiritual leadership.156 Previous

Protestant missionaries had emphasized scriptural knowledge and ecclesiastical deference as

fundamental components of Christian spirituality.157 Davenport and his successors – most

notably Westerly, Rhode Island’s Joseph Park – instead introduced “revelations, visions,

trances, and emotional participation in services.” In doing so, New Light preaching

amounted to a sustained attack on ministers who relied upon literacy and learning to maintain

their positions within the hierarchy of “intellectual Puritanism.” Personal feelings from the

heart, rather than intellectual wanderings of the mind, were to be the new basis of spiritual

experience and ecclesiastical authority.158 Davenport, Park, and the growing number of

Indian converts also opened up new opportunities for Christian Indians to redefine what

Christianity meant, where sacred authority originated, and how God’s revelation was to be

understood. Samuel Niles and other native preachers would therefore combine the new

evangelicalism’s emphasis on personal spiritual revelation with a critique of traditional

indigenous authority to become one of the strongest forces in Narragansett society.

For both of these reasons – the failure of whites to respect Indian lands and the

genesis of new models of Indian spiritual leadership – southeastern New England Indians

156 Narragansett Indians had, of course, been exposed to Christian teaching, missionaries, and cultural

practices for decades. Yet Davenport’s mission represented the first sustained attempt to introduce

evangelical revivalism into southeastern New England Indian culture. For more on his itinerancy in

southeastern New England, see Harry S. Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening

in New London,” The Journal of American History 70 No. 3 (December 1983): 556-578. Due to lack of

time and space, I intentionally have given this section on the history of Narragansett exposure to

Christianity short shrift. Linford Fisher correctly argues that the Narragansett encounter with Christianity

was much more protracted and uneven than I have described here. For a fuller examination that that given

here, see Fisher, “Traditionary Religion”; and Simmons, “Red Yankees.”

157 It is difficult to determine exactly how Japhet Hannit and William Simmons might have tried to preach

to other Indians. While the emphasis on scriptural study was certainly central, they were probably more

culturally flexible than their English Protestant counterparts. Nevertheless, they were probably not flexible

enough, for their evangelism among the Narragansetts amounted to very little.

158 Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, xxiv.

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consistently demonstrated a preference for indigenous pastors. The rise of native pastors

gave Indians who were suspicious of white ones an alternative form of leadership that, they

believed, spoke directly to the unique problems of being a Christian Indian during a period of

dispossession. One Anglican preacher, for example, complained that his Indian flock would

not receive him because they feared “I would get their Land from them.”159 Narragansetts

were irate when an Anglican minister hired a Mr. Cross to oversee the construction of, and

future instruction in, a new school. Because Cross had recently bought up some of the best

Narragansett fishing lands, Indian leaders rejected the offer and preferred to have nothing to

do with him.160 But Indians’ growing suspicion of white preachers was not only about land,

for they also distrusted English ministers because they accepted payment for their spiritual

labors. Joseph Fish, a minister at Charlestown, Rhode Island and Stonington, Connecticut,

complained that Indians would not attend his services because “I take Money of my Own

people, for preaching; so Am a Hireling, And therefore cant be a true Minister of Jesus

Christ.”161 Native preachers like Samuel Niles often took the opportunity to exploit these

sentiments and recruit new congregants to their own churches. Niles reportedly told Indians

to cease attending Fish’s congregation because all learned ministers were “Thieves, Robbers,

Pirates, etc.” “They steal the word,” Niles argued. “God told the Prophets the words they

159 John Beach, A Continuation of the Calm and Dispassionate Vindication of the Professors of the Church

of England, Against The Abusive Misrepresentations and fallacious Argumentations of Mr. oah Hobart,

in his second Address to them. Humbly offered to the Consideration of the good People of ew-England

(Boston: D. Fowle, 1751), 70.

160 Andrew Eliot to Joseph Fish, 2 January 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways,

19 ff3.

161 Diary entry for 22 May, 1769, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 59. When Fish

was pressed by an Indian woman as to why he received money for his work, he responded: “I have; And

Justified It. The good people, over the Water, have Sent over Money to Commissioners Boston, on purpose

for Ministers and Schoolmasters to the Indians: and Commissioners employed me; and so I had what

providence had allotted for me, And twas the Will of God that I, and all ministers, that were devoted to the

Ministry, Should be paid etc. etc.” See diary entry for 17 June, 1771, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light

on Separate Ways, 78.

241

Spoke: and These Ministers Steal that Word.”162 By describing white ministers as burglars of

revelation, Niles and other preachers tapped into psychological anxieties about dispossession

and market interactions with white settlers. This strategy was so effective that, by the 1760s,

native preachers were beginning to replace white ones. Joseph Fish complained in 1762 that

Narragansett Indians had “a great Fondness for the Indian Teachers” and preferred to hear

lectures and attend services by Indians rather than Englishman.163 One instructor named

Robert Clelland filed a truly pathetic complaint in 1764 to his bosses in Boston when he

asked to be dismissed from the “Low and Melancholy Situation” of trying to teach Indians

who refused to hear him. Clelland admitted that in spite of his best attempts to generate an

Indian congregation, he was still “forc’t to make way for an Indian master.”164 The rise of

native preachers in an era of revival gave Indians new figures for spiritual leadership and left

many English missionaries out of a job.

These tensions manifested themselves and culminated in the creation of a separate

Christian congregation under Samuel Niles in the 1750s. The origins of Niles’ separate

church actually lay in a post-Great Awakening schism within Joseph Park’s congregation at

Westerly. At the same time that Niles was being chastised for “exhorting” in Park’s church,

a deacon named Stephen Babcock was establishing his own separatist congregation. Niles

joined Babcock but, to the dismay of Niles and other Narragansett Indians, Babcock ordained

a Pequot preacher named James Simon as their Indian minister. The Narragansetts expressed

their dismay, either for placing a Pequot as minister of a Narragansett church or for having a

162 Diary entry for 4 September 1769, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 60.

163 Joseph Fish to Andrew Oliver, 15 November 1762, in Massachusetts Historical Society Miscellaneous

Bound Manuscripts.

164 Robert Clelland to Andrew Oliver, 19 September 1764, Massachusetts Historical Society Miscellaneous

Bound Manuscripts.

242

white Englishman decide who their pastor should be. Either way, the Narragansetts

threatened to separate again, but Simon’s eventual migration out of Narragansett avoided the

conflict and elevated Niles to the position of pastor within the newly formed church by the

early 1750s.165 Samuel Niles was now at the head of his own congregation.

One of the problems that Old Lights faced when dealing with someone as

controversial as Niles was that he was not only supported by the majority of Narragansett

Indians, but was also a pretty good preacher. Joseph Fish, who became Niles’ nemesis in the

1760s, conceded that Niles was “a Sober Religious Man, of Good Sense and great Fluency of

Speech; and know not but a very honest Man. Has a good deal of the Scriptures by heart, and

professes a Regard for the Bible.”166 Even at the height of the Niles separation controversy,

one New England divine told Fish that Niles should be “treated and Spoken of with great

tenderness.”167 Ezra Stiles, an Old Light minister in Newport, Rhode Island, entertained

Niles at his home in the spring of 1772. Although Stiles found it “extraordinary” (and not in

a good way) that Niles could not read, the former was nevertheless impressed with his guest’s

theological and scriptural knowledge. “He is however acquainted with the Doctrines of the

Gospel,” Stiles observed, “and an earnest zealous Man, and perhaps does more good to the

Indians than any White Man could do.” Stiles also concluded that his Indian guest was “of

an unblameable Life as to Morals and Sobriety” and generally had a “very great Influence

165 Simmons, “Red Yankees”: 262-264.

166 Joseph Fish to Joseph Sewall, written after 18 September 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on

Separate Ways, 4-5.

167 Andrew Eliot to Joseph Fish, 2 January 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways,

11.

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over the Indians.”168 By the 1760s Niles had become a wildly popular and widely respected

Narragansett pastor.

In spite of his personal popularity, there were several serious theological and

ecclesiastical complications that Niles’ ascension into ministerial authority exposed. The

first was his unique ordination. Because no white ministers would officiate at his ordination,

Niles’ church instead “chose and appointed three Brethren Indians to ordain him.” Niles told

Ezra Stiles that, during his lengthy ordination (it lasted an entire afternoon), the “3 Brethren

laid their Hands” on him and one of them “prayed over him and gave him the charge of that

Flock.” “Such a Spirit was outpoured and fell upon them,” Niles recalled, “that many others

of the Congregation prayed aloud and lift up their hearts with prayers and Tears to God.” In

the meantime, white witnesses, who probably mistook this entire process for utter confusion,

“were disgusted and went away.” At the end of the ordination the Indian congregation sang a

few psalms and exited the meeting house.169 Joseph Fish told a friend the same ordination

story and emphasized that the Indians who ordained Niles were definitely “not in any

Office.”170 When Niles was baptized for the second time in his life – the first by sprinkling

and the second by total immersion – Stiles made note that it was conducted “by an Indian not

an Elder.”171 The problem, therefore, was the source of Niles’ ordination. Although his

168 Diary entry for 8 May 1772, in Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Under the Authority of

the Corporation of Yale University, Vol. I., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons,

1901), 233.

169 Diary entry for 8 May 1772, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 232.

170 Joseph Fish to Joseph Sewall, 18 September 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate

Ways, 4.

171 Diary entry for 8 May 1772, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 232. Although Niles

probably did not officially change his name during this second baptism, it is noteworthy that many Indians

within his congregation referred to him as “Father Sam.” For Old Light Congregationalists, such a

nickname only validated their fears that separatism could result in outright popery (i.e. “Father”) or a total

breakdown in deferential social relationships (i.e. “Sam”). For “Father Sam,” see Joseph Fish to Joseph

Sewall, 18 September, 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 6.

244

congregation had accepted him by incorporating some elements of Christian ordination, the

foundation for this ecclesiastical exercise was suspect. Indeed, the laying on of hands not

only symbolized a transfer of spiritual authority, but also bound all ministers into a sacred

genealogy that could trace itself back to the first apostles and even Christ himself.

Employing lay Indians – who had no claim to this spiritual lineage – to ordain Samuel Niles

was analogous to Pope Leo III placing the crown on Charlemagne’s head: it only highlighted

the pressing question of where ultimate authority originated. Niles’ fanatical popularity

within Narragansett society, his unblemished personal record, and his church’s separate

establishment away from the Congregational mainstream ensured that irritated white

ministers could only complain about Niles’ dubious claim to ministerial power. They had

neither the will nor the authority to depose him.

For conventional Congregationalists, the most infuriating aspect of Niles’ pastorate

was his illiteracy. “He cannot read a word,” Fish complained to a friend, “and So is wholly

dependant [sic] Upon the (too Seldom) Reading of others: Which exposes him, (doubtless) to

a great deal of Inacuracy [sic] in using Texts of Scriptures, if not gross Mistakes in the

Application of them.”172 For Protestants who understood scripture literally as God’s

revelation, the inability of a pastor to read and communicate divine truths to his congregation

could be unorthodox at best, heretical at worst. Fish contended that separatists of all pales

(including Indians) generally lacked any knowledge of scripture and were pathetically weak

in biblical exegesis. This not only made them poor scholars and teachers, but also resulted in

“low and empty performances” in the pulpit.173 Fish heard from one source that Niles’

lectures were filled with “gross Error…Ignorance, Railing,” and “outpourings of

172 Joseph Fish to Joseph Sewall, 18 September 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate

Ways, 5.

173 Quoted in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, xxvi.

245

Ignorance.”174 “These Indian Teachers,” Fish whined to Andrew Oliver, “were very

ignorant: some of them, especially the Chief Speaker…could not read a word in the Bible.”175

Ironically, literacy was one of the reasons why Indians turned to Niles in the first place. At

least one Narragansett reported that Fish told Indians they could not hope for a saving

conversion if they could not read. They therefore concluded that, because they were

illiterate, they “Were All going to hell.”176 Although Fish tried to reassure Indians that

literacy was ultimately not necessary for salvation, Narragansetts still preferred to turn to a

person like themselves: an illiterate Indian who claimed that his own spiritual authority

derived not from a sacred text but from personal revelation, visions, and dreams.

If Niles’ inability to read was problematic, the source of his spiritual knowledge was

even more so. Although he did have scripture read to him, Niles also relied upon personal

revelation, including visions and dreams, to access what he believed was God’s message. In

doing so, Niles called upon an established indigenous tradition of using dreams and vision

quests to communicate with the spirit world. James Axtell has noted that Indian men often

undertook vision quests “in hopes of receiving instruction from a guardian spirit.” For Niles

and other Christian Indian preachers, the guardian spirit they were trying to communicate

with was probably Christ himself. Indeed, Axtell has also argued that Manitous, or sacred

spirits who possessed a wealth of spiritual power, served as advisors and guardians to those

who needed assistance. Furthermore, Manitous were known for their “ultimate power of

174 Diary entry for 4 September 1769, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 60.

175 Joseph Fish to Andrew Oliver, 15 November 1762, in Massachusetts Historical Society Miscellaneous

Bound Manuscripts.

176 Diary entry for 8 November 1773, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 98.

246

metamorphosis.” 177 As a spirit who multiplied loaves of bread, converted water into wine,

and himself became transubstantiated during communion, Christ could have been interpreted

and perceived as the ultimate Manitou for Narragansett Indians. Like Afro and Indian

Moravians, Narragansetts approached the ultimate deity – God – through the lesser spiritual

force of Christ. Christ was therefore a gateway and intermediary between humans and the

creator of all things.

Dreams could also reveal visions of heaven that reflected the socio-historical realities

of colonialism. One Indian named Tobe had a dream where he went to heaven and saw “the

Great God” as well as Jesus Christ (whom he described as a “handsome Man”). Tobe also

dreamt that he saw “a Multitude of Folks in Heaven, Resembling Butterflies of Many

Colours.” While Tobe’s dream certainly could have been subconscious nonsense, it may

have had its origins in Rhode Island’s vibrant multicultural population, as Indians, whites,

and blacks intermingled in the Narragansett region.178 It was probably no accident that

Tobe’s vision of heaven was an inclusive one that welcomed all souls, regardless of race,

ethnicity, or class.179 In their dreams, vision quests, and recounting of scripture through

memory, Niles and other Christian Indians creatively translated Christianity – including the

personage of Christ and their visions of heaven – to incorporate it into a framework of

indigenous cosmology and spirituality.

Congregational contemporaries, of course, did not see Niles’ reliance upon dreams

and visions as a “creative translation” of Christianity. Joseph Fish thought Tobe’s dream was

177 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial orth America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 15-16.

178 Perhaps the best treatment of black, Indian, and white interaction in New England is John Wood Sweet,

Bodies Politics: egotiating Race in the American orth, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2003).

179 Diary entry for 5 July 1773, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 93.

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“Strange,” “Horrible,” and even “Gross.”180 Fish and his colleagues also scoffed at the

“inward impressions,” “False Religion,” “wild Imaginations,” “visionary things,” and “idle

dreams” of Indian separatist preaching.181 Andrew Eliot told Fish that he was sorry that Niles

threatened to lead his Indian congregants “from the Sacred oracles to his own whims and

imaginations.”182 As if this was not clear enough, Niles’ reliance upon direct revelation,

rather than biblical study, threatened to undermine the very fabric of New England’s spiritual

order. Fish feared that Niles relied too much upon his own spirit to teach him church

doctrine and conduct, and was therefore “in imminent danger of leaving the Word, for the

Guidence [sic] of Feelings, Impressions, Visions, Appearances and Directions of Angels and

of Christ himself in a Visionary Way.”183 If Fish did not put it directly enough in his letters

to friends and colleagues, he stated it plainly in his diary: Indians threatened the status quo

because they were “taught by the Spirit, immediately from Heaven: So have teachings above

the Bible.”184 It was one thing to create congregations separate from English ecclesiastical

authority, but quite another to cast off thousands of years of scriptural tradition to find new

revelations in dreams. Samuel Niles and other Indian separatists thereby represented not only

a threat to Congregational orthodoxy, but also an implicit challenge to biblical authority

itself. As such, Fish could only interpret his battle with Samuel Niles theologically. When

180 Diary entry for 8 November 1773, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 98.

181 Quoted in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, xxvii; Joseph Fish to Nathaniel

Whitaker, 30 July 1766, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 29; and Andrew Eliot to

Joseph Fish, 2 January, 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 11.

182 Andrew Eliot to Joseph Fish, 2 January 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways,

11.

183 Joseph Fish to Joseph Sewall, 18 September 1765, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate

Ways, 5. Fish actually implied that this vision-based approach to preaching motivated Niles to ordain

another Indian, an action would have been abhorrent to conservative Congregationalists already upset at

Niles’ own ordination.

184 Diary entry for 22 May 1769, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 59.

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Niles urged his Indian congregation not to attend any of Joseph Fish’s services, the latter

recorded that “Satan has a hand in Stirring up Sam iles.”185 While Fish attributed the rise of

separate native churches under Indian pastors to Satan’s malicious designs, the roots of Niles’

spiritual leadership lay instead in Narragansett concerns over dispossession as well as a wider

effort to fuse indigenous spirituality with Christian revivalism.186

While the line between sincere piety and ecstatic excess was certainly thin, the

boundaries between Christian preacher and native revitalist were also very porous. In fact,

Samuel Niles might be viewed as a kind of native revivalist, or a spiritual leader who used his

sacred authority as a tool to try to maintain Indian land and preserve Narragansett culture.187

As was the case with Niles, native preachers who were members of established Protestant

congregations or trained in English schools had the potential to use Christianity in ways that

185 Diary entry for 21 November 1774, in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 110. These

concerns over native separatism never stopped Joseph Fish and other ministers from employing native

preachers in their schools and missions. In fact, Fish employed Sampson Woyboy, Charles Daniel, and

John Shattock, Jr. as teachers in his Indian school in Stonington, Connecticut. For Woyboy see Joseph Fish

to Andrew Oliver, 15 November 1762 in Massachusetts Historical Society Miscellaneous Bound

Manuscripts. For Daniel see Joseph Fish, “Accounts of journeys and lectures, 23 October 1771,” in

Massachusetts Historical Society Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts; Diary entry for 27 May 1771 in

Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 77; and Joseph Fish to Andrew Oliver, 10 November

1773 in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 99. For Shattock see Simmons and

Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 70 ff. 11; and Joseph Fish and John Shattock, Sr., to Eleazar

Wheelock, 30 January 1771 in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 214-215. In fact, the

rise of Indian separatist churches urged Fish to find other, more manageable, native preachers who could

combat Niles’ whimsical theology with their own form of intellectual Indian Congregationalism. This

probably explains why, in the fall of 1770, Fish urged Indians to establish yet another Christian

congregation, this time under the tutelage of James Daniel and the rest of Ninigret’s sachem party. This

attempt to break Niles’ influence among the Narragansetts failed. See diary entry for 24 September, 1770

in Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 67.

186 Writing in 1768, Ezra Stiles saw these conflicts differently. He suggested that Indian separation was a

result of New Light ministers leading their congregations into “Irregularities & Separations.” Although

they refused to ordain Separatists of all pales – including Baptists and Indians – Stiles noted that “in Truth

they had bro’t these Illiterates forward by making them pub. Exhorters.” Stiles, in other words, argued that

the New Lights themselves were responsible for the wave of separation that characterized New England

churches in the middle of the eighteenth century, for it was a classic example of the chicken coming home

to roost. See Ezra Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D.,

1755-1794 : With a Selection From His Correspondence, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1916), 252.

187 This is, in fact, Linford Fisher’s argument in “Traditionary Religion.”

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white ministers did not approve. Puritan divine Charles Chauncy rejected the idea of

bringing Indian children to English schools because, after the great expense paid for their

education, there was no guarantee that they would not be “viciously turned” into renegade

preachers or apostates.188 Although Presbyterian missionary David Brainerd rejoiced that his

interpreter, Moses Tatamy, had taken up preaching to other Indians in the Delaware Valley,

he noted that the specter of Indian separatism always abounded when offering spiritual

authority to indigenous peoples. “Spiritual Pride,” Brainerd recounted, “also discover’d

itself in various Instances; and in one or two an unbecoming Ambition of being Teachers of

others.”189 This “unbecoming Ambition,” however, was rather an attempt on the part of

Indian neophytes to apply selected elements of Christian doctrine or ritual to the socio-

historical realities of Native American experience in a colonial world.

Scholars like Gregory Dowd and Alfred Cave have noted how native revitalization

movements among Indians borrowed selectively from both indigenous traditions as well as

Christian cosmologies.190 Papunhunk, for example, was a Munsee spiritual leader who, along

188 Charles Chauncy, All ations of the Earth blessed in Christ, the Seed of Abraham. A Sermon Preached

at Boston, At The Ordination of the Rev. Mr. Joseph Bowman, To The Work of the Gospel-Ministry, More

Especially Among the Mohawk-Indians, on the Western Borders of ew-England. August 31. 1762

(Boston: John Draper, 1762), 34-35.

189 David Brainerd, An Abridgment of Mr. David Brainerd’s Journal among the Indians. Or, the Rise and

Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace among a umber of the Indians. In the Provinces of ew-Jersey

and Pensylvania (London: John Oswald, 1748), 108. On the other hand, Brainerd also noted that there

were native revivalists among his potential converts who either used Christianity or could have been

Christians in the making. When Brainerd was confronted by a zealous reformer during his mission to

Pennsylvania in the 1740s, he was initially struck by the “pontifical garb” of his bear costume that failed to

distinguish him as a “human Creature.” But after discoursing with the reformer about Christianity,

Brainerd eventually concluded that this reformer actually possessed “something in his Temper and

Disposition that look’d more like true Religion than any thing I ever observed amongst other Heathens.”

See David Brainerd, Mirabilia Dei inter Indicos, or the Rise and Progress Of a Remarkable Work of Grace

Amongst a umber of the Indians In the Provinces of ew-Jersey and Pennsylvania, Justly Represented in

A Journal Kept by Order of the Honourable Society (in Scotland) for Propagating Christian Knowledge.

With some General Remarks (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1746), 54-56; and Cave, Prophets of the

Great Spirit, 11-14.

190 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The orth American Indian Struggle For Unity, 1745-

1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also Anthony F.C. Wallace,

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with several colleagues, preached to a community of Indians on the Susquehanna River in

1752. Although his message was nativist – he deplored the use of liquor, demanded that the

English continue fair gift exchanges, and was infuriated by the loss of Indian land – he also

borrowed from his Quaker contemporaries by proclaiming himself an avid pacifist.191

Moravian missionary John Heckewelder recalled an Indian preacher working around Cayuga

in New York in the early 1760s. This preacher proclaimed that the “Great Spirit” had chosen

him to not only point out the sins of Native Americans, but also to communicate how Indians

could redeem themselves and regain the favor of the Great One. The Cayuga revivalist

employed a map within a book of deerskin to make his message clear. The map was actually

a sacred geographical outline of Indian lands, where Indians were blocked into their lands by

an evil spirit restricting them from accessing “the heavenly regions.”192 Calling it “the great

Book or Writing,” the Cayuga preacher held up the book and its contents during his orations,

urging his listeners to abstain from drinking liquor, repent for their sins, and return to the old

ways. The preacher even suggested that each Indian family create and preserve a book just

like the one he was using in his sermons.193 This emphasis on the repentance for sin and the

reference to a sacred text as a source of spiritual revelation, combined with the experience of

“Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologist 58 No. 2 (April 1956): 264-281; Wallace, The

Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Knopf: 1969); and Alfred A. Cave, Prophets of the Great

Spirit: ative American Revitalization Movements in Eastern orth America (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 2006).

191 Merritt, At the Crossroads, 126-127.

192 John Heckewelder, “An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs, of The Indian Nations, Who

Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States,” in Transactions of the Historical & Literary

Committee of the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, For Promoting Useful Knowledge

Vol. I (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1819), 289. Heckewelder also noted that Wangomend, another

Indian prophet, argued that he had actually been to heaven and discovered that there were in fact three

heavens, one for Indians, one for whites, and one for blacks. See Heckewelder’s discussion of Wangomend

from 290-292.

193 He even offered to make the book himself for a small fee.

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sermonizing oratory; all of these elements illustrate how native revitalization movements

fused indigenous traditions with Christian idioms, cosmologies, and practices.194

The Cayuga preacher’s use of a sacred text is remarkable for two reasons. First,

many literate blacks within the African diaspora had a parallel experience with literacy.

Often invoking the trope of the “talking book” in their autobiographies, black Atlantic writers

believed that literacy was a sacred power which granted them access to divine revelations

that illiterate persons did not possess. It was in this way that many Africans believed that

books, like the preacher’s deerskin book, could help them navigate the complicated pitfalls of

racial oppression within a framework of indigenized Christianity.195 Secondly, it is

supremely ironic this preacher employed, and indeed embraced, an idea of sacred texts while

Samuel Niles was doing just the opposite. Niles, who had been exposed to and trained within

institutionalized Congregationalism, rejected the book as the only source of spiritual

authority and instead incorporated his own memories, dreams, and visions into a broad

understanding of revelation. The Cayuga preacher, who lacked any formal Christian training,

embraced the book as a sacred text from which Indians could direct their spiritual and

temporal lives. The problematics surrounding literacy and text as spiritual authority thus

reveal the myriad ways in which separatist preachers and native revivalists blurred the

“boundaries of religious practice” by selectively translating elements of Christianity into their

own indigenous frameworks.196 For Protestant ministers throughout the Atlantic, this rise of

194 Heckewelder, “An Account of the History Manners, and Customs, of the Indian Nations,” 287-290.

Also see Heckewelder’s larger discussion of “Preachers and Prophets” from the mid-eighteenth century to

the early nineteenth century on pages 286-295.

195 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews, Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave arratives

From the Enlightenment, 1772-1815 (Washington, D.C. Civitas, 1998), 1-29; and Lambert, “‘I Saw the

Book Talk’”: 185-198.

196 Jane T. Merritt, Kinship, Community, and Practicing Culture: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in

Pennsylvania, 1700-1763 (PhD Diss., University of Washington, 1995), 50-51.

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native preachers was both an opportunity and a problem. Although white ministers depended

upon and sought to cultivate indigenous spiritual leaders, they had little control over how

these preachers would use Christianity to craft their own messages of salvation and

redemption. The cases of Samuel Niles and the Cayuga preacher thus demonstrate not only

how Christianity became indigenized, but also how Indians detached Christianity from its

Western moorings and appropriated it for their own political, cultural, and spiritual agendas.

The Moravian missions of the 1730s, Anglican efforts in the 1740s, and the

controversies within southeastern New England Indian churches in the middle of the

eighteenth century appear, on the surface, to have little in common. But the rise of Afro-

Moravianism in the Danish Caribbean, the creation and collapse of the Charleston Negro

School, and the increase of separatism among Indian congregations all resulted from and

promulgated a larger, transatlantic period of revival that offered new ways for blacks and

Indians to appropriate and translate Christianity. Even when the evangelical revivals of

Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield did not touch these missions directly, they still

coincided with several major shifts in missionary policy.

These changes were threefold. The first change was about scale. This period

witnessed a veritable explosion in the use of black and Indian evangelists in Protestant

missions throughout the Atlantic from 1735 onwards. While there were already dozens of

Puritan Indian preachers in New England villages by that time, the only other denomination

to follow their lead was the Anglicans, and they failed in their efforts to cultivate a royal

Indian pastorate in the first half of the eighteenth century. By the third quarter of that

century, however, we find New England preachers not only continuing to lead their

congregations, but also creating new ones, as Samuel Niles did. Anglicans began using

Mohawk teachers in their missions to the Iroquois, David Brainerd allowed his interpreter to

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continue to preach in the Delaware Valley when his own services were over, another Indian

named Good Peter began taking up the task of preaching to his fellow Oneidas, and Indian

revivalists like the Cayuga preacher incorporated elements of Christianity into their own

nativist critique of Indian historical experiences. Perhaps most importantly, Eleazar

Wheelock began Moor’s Charity School in the 1750s, an institution which would train

dozens of Indians to serve as missionaries to other Indians on the New York frontier.197 By

the middle of the eighteenth century there were also Afro-Moravian national helpers in the

Danish and English Caribbean missions, slave teachers in Charleston as well as throughout

Virginia, and an Anglican African beginning his mission on Africa’s Gold Coast.

This leads to the second major shift in missionary policy: while no denomination had

considered training blacks for evangelical positions in the early eighteenth century, by the

1760s that policy had changed dramatically, as there were black preachers in the Caribbean,

American south, and West Africa. And yet, Moravians and Anglicans understood that the

rise of an elite black preacher class in a slave society also threatened to subvert the precarious

social hierarchies upon which racial slavery was built. Thirdly, the threat of Indian

separatism, while always a concern, became ever more immediate during this period of

evangelical revivalism. Not only did Indians begin to break away from mainstream

Protestant churches in the middle of the century, they also embraced new forms of Indian

spiritual leadership that offered both explicit and implicit critiques of traditional secular and

spiritual power. Indeed, Amerindian preachers who exhorted against dispossession,

alcoholism, and the waning spiritual condition of their fellow Indians effectively blurred the

boundaries between nativist revitalization and Christian revivalism. As such, black and

Indian preachers all found unique ways to participate in the revivalism of the eighteenth

197 This is discussed in later chapters.

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century, even as they translated evangelical Christianity to fight their own secular and

spiritual battles.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A BLACK AMOG BLACKS:

AFRICAS AD EMPIRE I PHILIP QUAQUE’S CAPE COAST MISSIO

The two Anglican missionaries who became correspondents during the third quarter

of the eighteenth century seemed to have little in common. While one was stationed in the

idyllic town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the other was assigned to Cape Coast Castle,

West Africa’s brutal and notorious slave trading fort. Nevertheless, the men became fast

friends when the New Englander wrote to his colleague across the Atlantic to inquire about

the progress that the gospel had been making in Africa since his arrival there in the 1760s.

As two employees of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG),

they could certainly relate to one another’s problems.1 They lamented the slow spread of the

gospel in Africa, expressed disappointment at the state of religion in America, and

complained bitterly about the constant need for more books, stationery, and other supplies.

They signed their letters in the most affectionate of ways and their wives even exchanged

polite greetings through their husbands. Unfortunately, the American Revolution did to this

relationship what it did to so many other ties that seemed to bind.

While the missionary in Africa was a clear supporter of the British empire, the

minister in Newburyport seemed less fervent about his own loyalty. In the spring of 1775 he

wrote to his friend in Africa to complain of the bitter injustices that the American colonists

1 The SPG was founded in 1701, three years after the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)

was created. Both were originated by Thomas Bray. While the SPCK was designed to operate schools and

distribute books, the SPG actively employed missionaries throughout the world.

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faced under the yoke of the tyrannical British. He appropriated the revolutionary rhetoric of

the age and argued that American colonists were verging fast towards oppression and, of

course, slavery. Expecting an empathetic response, the Massachusetts man instead received a

harsh scolding by the missionary in Africa for his protests. His friend wrote back, “In your

Epistle You seem to lament bitterly of your Mother Country for Universal Liberty. You,

upon whom the light of the Gospel flourishes and abound[s]…advancing daily towards the

seat of Bliss, find the Hardships of Bondage and Oppression! Good God can this be

possible!?” The African missionary was particularly irate at his colleague’s tired use of the

metaphor of slavery to explain the colonists’ relationship with the empire. As a missionary

on the Cape Coast, the Anglican had witnessed firsthand the horror and cruelty of the

transatlantic slave system. Naturally, he compared the “slavery” of the colonists to the actual

enslavement of people all around him. He asserted, “When I behold with Sorrowful sighing,

my poor abject Countrymen over whom You without the Bowels of Christian Love and Pity,

hold in cruel Bondage…I could wish that the Conviction of this Practice would spring first

from the Breast of us all, particularly you, since We know perfectly well the heinousness of

it.” 2 The African missionary was clearly drawing attention to that central paradox of liberty

and slavery in American history.3 He was also reminding his friend that the “oppression” of

the British empire could never compare to the oppression of actual, physical enslavement.

But the choice of “countrymen” for his description of Africans was not a rhetorical ruse, for

2 Philip Quaque to Edward Bass of Newburyport, 31 July 1775, in Philip Quaque, Letters of the Rev. Philip

Quaque of West Africa (East Ardsley, England: Micro Methods Ltd., 1980-1985).

3 For a more thorough discussion of the relationship between slavery and the ideology of freedom, see

Edmund Sears Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New

York: Norton, 1975); and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823

(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).

257

this missionary was Philip Quaque, an African who was born on the same slave-trading coast

he now hoped to convert.

In spite of the abundance of primary source material on African Anglican Philip

Quaque, he remains a fairly obscure figure.4 Kweku, as he was originally called, was born

into a prosperous family of Fetus, a group of Gold Coast Africans whose language fell within

the larger Akan dialect.5 He was sent from West Africa to England when he was a young

boy, tutored by an Anglican minister for over a decade, ordained as a deacon and then

missionary within the Anglican Church, and finally sent back to Africa in February of 1766.

He lived on the Cape Coast for half a century, writing over 40 letters – totaling nearly 200

pages – to the SPG from his home at Cape Coast Castle.6 Unlike sermons, tracts, or even

missionary accounts, Quaque’s letters were never meant for public eyes. Of course, he knew

that the letters would be added to the official SPG record, but since they are not public

4 The most important examinations of Quaque are Travis Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost:

Philip Quaque in London and Cape Coast, 1756-1816,” Journal of British Studies 48 No. 1 (January 2009):

29-50; Ty M. Reese, “‘Sheep in the Jaws of So Many Ravenous Wolves': the Slave Trade and Anglican

Missionary Activity at Cape Coast Castle, 1752-1816,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34 No. 3 (September

2004): 348-372; Margaret Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast” in Africa Remembered: /arratives by

West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1967); F.L. Bartels, “Philip Quaque, 1741-1816,” Transactions of the Gold Coast and Togoland

Historical Society I No. 5 (1955); and Frank J. Klingberg, “Philip Quaque: Pioneer Native Missionary on

the Gold Coast, 1765-1816,” The Journal of /egro Education 8 No. 4 (October 1939): 666-672. Bartels

and Priestly both offer standard chronological examinations of Quaque, though Priestly’s contribution

includes transcriptions of some of Quaque’s letters. Klingberg and Reese, however, focus on the

contribution that Quaque made to West African education. Glasson’s recent article is perhaps the most

impressive, for it situates Quaque into larger transatlantic conversations about Methodism and slavery.

There is also a brief discussion of Quaque in Daniel C. Littlefield, “‘Almost an Englishman’: Eighteenth-

Century Anglo-African Identities,” in Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, eds. Robert

Olwell and Alan Tully (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 70-94. Ty Reese and

Vincent Carretta are currently editing a collection of Quaque’s letters and writings.

5 They lived in what is now modern-day Ghana. Quaque’s last name (actually Kweku in Fetu) meant born

on a Wednesday.

6 The letters are available under two different titles. The first is Philip Quaque, Letters of the Rev. Philip

Quaque of West Africa (East Ardsley, England: Micro Methods Ltd., 1980-1985). The second is Philip

Quaque, The Letters of Philip Quaque, 1766-1811 (East Ardsley, England: E.P. Microform, 1970s). There

are only a handful of libraries that own these microforms, and the originals are housed at the Rhodes House

Library, Oxford University. Although there is no notable difference in content or format between the two

letter collections, I have used the first one throughout. They are simply referred to as Quaque Letters.

258

documents per se, they avoid the rhetorical and formulaic devices of most published

missionary writings and reveal a candid, and often critical, analysis of his mission. Even

when he dressed his letters in the language of Christian humility, Quaque still used them as

an opportunity to formulate and articulate his relationship with the empire he was trying to

improve and the indigenous peoples he was hoping to save. Philip Quaque’s mission to the

Cape Coast therefore offers a rare opportunity to examine how native missionaries

conceptualized their relationships with empire and other native peoples while simultaneously

carving out a place for indigenous Christians within a larger sacred history.

American Missions, African Bodies

The origins of Philip Quaque’s mission reside in both African and American

missionary history. The first few chapters of this dissertation have discussed how King

Philip’s War and its aftermath had, by the end of the seventeenth century, taken away much

of the Puritan zeal to Christianize Native Americans. Back in England, however, several

Anglican organizations were created to spread the gospel in the ever-expanding British

empire, the most important being the SPG, which was founded in 1701.7 Although the SPG

was primarily concerned with improving the piety and practice of English settlers throughout

the world, the state of native peoples and slaves increasingly fell under their purview. They

established a mission among the New York Mohawks as early as 1704 and were traversing

that frontier just as the Puritans had in New England a generation earlier.8 Furthermore, as

7 The SPG was founded in 1701 and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was officially

established around 1698. While the SPCK was designed to establish schools and disseminate religious

texts throughout the world, the SPG served as the missionary arm of the Anglican Church. Both were

founded by Thomas Bray.

8 This mission station, like so many other mission stations, was not a permanent one. It had missionaries

coming in and out of that region, and it was fairly peripatetic in terms of when it was actually in operation.

259

increasingly more African slaves were transported into the American colonies, SPG

missionaries also became interested in their collective spiritual fates. By the 1740s the SPG,

in addition to Moravians and other Protestant denominations, was much more active in

seeking out indigenous evangelists for their missions throughout the Atlantic.

One of the agents of this transformation was Thomas Thompson, a Cambridge-

educated Anglican missionary stationed in Monmouth County, New Jersey from 1745 to

1751.9 Whether he knew it or not, Thompson was working during a period of great change

for the Protestant missionary enterprise. The First Great Awakening evoked powerful

religious passions from New England to South Carolina.10 Puritans once again began

depending on native peoples in their missions, and Native Americans were even beginning to

form their own separate churches in New England and New York. Moravians had

established missions in Greenland, Pennsylvania, the Caribbean, and other places around the

world, employing “national helpers” in each of their evangelical enterprises.11 It was in this

decade that Samson Occom, the Mohegan preacher, commenced his famous missionary

career under Eleazar Wheelock. Not to be outdone in this veritable market of evangelical

options, the SPG also began using native agents much more frequently. They employed

native schoolmasters among the Mohawks in their frontier schools and even established a

“Negro School” in Charleston, South Carolina, where two slaves taught dozens of other

9 This Thomas Thompson should not be confused with another Thomas Thompson who had a mission in

South Carolina around the same time that the former Thompson was in New Jersey.

10 Historians have, of course, debated the extent (and naming) of the First Great Awakening. For the most

powerful attack on the traditional understanding of the Great Awakening as a monolithic event, see Jon

Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” The Journal of

American History 69 No. 2 (September 1982): 305-325; and Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith:

Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

11 See Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

260

slaves to disseminate the gospel among that colony’s black majority.12 Living in eastern New

Jersey during the 1740s, Thompson was quite aware of these major developments, as the

SPG annually printed their anniversary sermons with timely updates on missionary activity

throughout the Atlantic world. They then sent the sermons and yearly overviews to all of

their missionaries, creating an Atlantic-wide network of information that notified each

missionary of other evangelical activities, no matter how far away they were stationed.

For his own part, Thompson expressed a keen interest in the religious development of

both Indians and African slaves in New Jersey. In his Account of Two Missionary Voyages,

published in 1758, Thompson recalled his attempts to expose local slaves to Christian

doctrine as soon as he arrived in the colony. He instructed some of them after services on

Sundays and even held occasional meetings in his own home, using Lewis’s Exposition and

psalms as a way to introduce Christian precepts into slave culture.13 At the same time, the

students that Thompson and other Anglican teachers recruited were not from the rank and file

of slave society. Instead, Thompson drew from third generation, English-speaking, domestic

sectors of the slave population. There were two reasons for this. The first is fairly obvious:

teaching Christianity in a highly stratified slave society could be potentially dangerous, so

courting the most Anglicized slaves could help temper some of the more radical elements of

Christian theology. On the other hand, Protestant Christianity required a concrete

understanding of scripture, a fair amount of literary competency, and the ability to recite key

Christian texts. Protestant missionaries had always prided themselves on how seriously they

12 All of these developments have been discussed in previous chapters. For more on slavery in early South

Carolina, read Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: /egroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through

the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974).

13 Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural /orth: African Americans in Monmouth

County, /ew Jersey, 1665-1865 (Madison: Madison House, 1997), 70-71. For more on small farm slavery

in New Jersey, as well as the Anglican role in attempting to convert slaves, see Hodges, Slavery and

Freedom in the Rural /orth, 43-90.

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took conversion, especially in contrast to the ritual and casuistry that Jesuits and Franciscans

employed to “convert” hundreds of thousands of native peoples in the Americas. Baptism

and conversion were thus affairs of the utmost importance, demanding the intellect and

gravitas of an acculturated Afro-American. Circumscribed by both theology and the

educational conventions of a slave society, it is doubtful that Thompson made any major

impact on the spiritual transformation of New Jersey’s slaves.14

Either satisfied or completely disappointed with his progress, Thompson requested a

transfer to the West African coast in 1750, effectively becoming the first Anglican

missionary to spend a considerable amount of time on West Africa’s shores. He spent only a

few years there. Not surprisingly, he was an early advocate of the belief that American

missionary experience would be an appropriate model upon which to base future African

missions.15 The first Anglican missionary to plan a sustained evangelical trip to that region

of West Africa, Thompson acknowledged that the chances of failing and eventually perishing

in the white man’s grave were very high. Yet he still looked to the American historical past

for guidance, implicitly comparing Indian evangelical activities with his future African one.

He countered those who suggested that his African mission would probably fail by arguing

that the mission to Native Americans also had slow beginnings. Drawing upon missionary

history, Thompson recalled, “The Indian Mission in /orth America, which was begun about

the Year 1704, did not succeed at first.” After the introduction of new missionaries and

native catechists in the 1740s, however, Thompson could confidently claim that the New

14 Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural /orth, 68-71.

15 The Native American model for African missions is discussed in more detail in chapter 6 of this

dissertation. Also, Andrew Porter has correctly argued that American missions among both slaves and

Native Americans were the testing ground and crucible for later nineteenth century missions from Africa to

India. See Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas

Expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004).

262

York mission “has since flourished, and many of those Heathens have been added to the

Lord.”16 The fact that his missionary voyages to both New Jersey and Africa appear next to

each other in his Account also suggests the extent to which Thompson’s evangelical activities

in Africa might have seemed like a continuous, fluid expansion of his previous missionary

duties across the Atlantic. In his mind, as in the minds of many other missionaries, Native

Americans, African slaves, and Africans would all be central components in the spread of

Christian religion throughout the world, regardless of where they lived. Thompson sought to

test that hypothesis with an experiment on Africa’s Cape Coast.

In spite of the explicit comparisons and connections, most people acknowledged that

Africa and Africans were somehow quite different. In eighteenth century thought, there was

no place darker or more in need of Christian enlightening than Africa, and it was often

looked at as a white man’s grave. David Hume, who had little positive to say about Africa or

Africans, said that the continent was covered with “barren sands” and “sterile uncultivated

lands.” He believed the landscape and people there were “struck with one common curse”

and that the entire coast was filled with “unhappy negroes” and “wretched men.”17 In his

anniversary sermon for the SPG, Isaac Maddox paraphrased from previous descriptions of

Africa to describe the people there as “all without Exception crafty, villainous, and

fraudulent; being sure to slip no Opportunity of cheating an European, nor indeed one

another; They seem to be born and bred Villains.” Maddox continued by claiming these

16 Thomas Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages By the Appointment of the Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The One to /ew Jersey in /orth America, the Other from

America to the Coast of Guiney (London: Printed for Benj. Dod, at the Bible and Key in Ave-Mary-Lane,

near St. Paul’s., 1758), 86.

17 David Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq; The Philosopher and Historian, Written by Himself. To

Which Are Added, The Travels of a Philosopher, Containing Observations on the Manners and Arts of

Various /ations, in Africa and Asia (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778), 19.

263

people were characterized by innumerable “degenerate Vices,” the least not being “Sloth and

Idleness.”18

“Cape Coast Castle, Gold Coast, 1727.” A view of Cape Coast Castle based upon William

Smith’s A /ew Voyage to Guinea (originally published in 1704 but reprinted throughout the eighteenth

century) and found in Thomas Astley’s A /ew General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London: s.n.,

1745-47) at the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Image reference 2-605 as

shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the

University of Virginia Library.

For Christian missionaries, Africa was a desolate spiritual wasteland marked by a

vacuous absence of Christian religion. Scholars of legal history have recently outlined the

18 Isaac Maddox, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; at the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday the 15th of February, 1733; Being the

Day of their Anniversary Meeting (London: J. Downing, 1734), 25. Maddox is citing Bosman’s

Description of the Coast of Guinea, 117.

264

ways in which the British Atlantic world had multiple “zones of law” and “zones of

violence.” If this created a kind of “legal geography,” there was also a form of “sacred

geography” at work in Atlantic missionary enterprises.19 Christian missionaries considered

England and the expanding American settlements as zones of Protestant piety, where the light

of the gospel shined more brightly than anywhere else.20 The Native American borderlands

and the entire continent of Africa, on the other hand, were zones of intense irreligiosity, in

spite of the presence of both Roman Catholicism and Islam in many communities on Africa’s

coast.21 Africa, in particular, was a land of sin, brutality, and rampant crime. As Isaac

Maddox noted in his anniversary sermon, “Murder, Adultery, and Theft, here are accounted

no Sins.”22 When Thomas Thompson preached to English traders on the African coast in

1752, he reported that his audience was glad to hear the gospel, since the traders were “in that

melancholy State of Exile from true Religion.”23 Philip Quaque would also embrace this

rhetoric of Africa as an irreligious space, describing it as a “wicked and degenerate land,” a

19 Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic Circa

1772,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60 No. 3 (July 2003): 471-510.

20 For more on the idea of America as a sacred space, see John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic

World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 184-218; and

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2006). Cañizares-Esguerra argues that both Puritans and Catholics understood

the New World as a kind of sacred garden. They therefore employed biblical and agricultural tropes to

characterize their missionary work in this sacred landscape, an act that Cañizares-Esguerra calls “sacred

gardening.”

21 John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1483-

1750,” Journal of African History 25 No. 2 (April 1984): 147-67. Thomas Thompson discussed the

presence of Islamic teachers in West Africa, though Quaque makes no mention of Islam in his letters to the

SPG. See Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 30-32.

22 Maddox, A Sermon Preached, 25.

23 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 32.

265

“barren land,” a “strange place,” or even “these distant Clymes.”24 He complained to his

friends and colleagues throughout the Atlantic world about the lack of religion there, and the

overall “wretched state of Africa.”25 By all accounts, Africa was certainly a “religious

periphery.”26 If London was the “Jerusalem of England,” as itinerate preacher George

Whitefield once claimed, then Africa was certainly a modern-day Sodom or Gomorrah.27 In

fact, it was the very climate of Africa that marked it as distinctly different from missions

anywhere else in the world. Africa was understood as a sultry, hot, exotic place containing

climatic and epidemiological conditions that would wreak havoc on European bodies.

Thomas Thompson stayed in Africa for only four years before he departed in 1756 on

account of the climate and its impact on his health. The SPG readily acknowledged that “a

longer Stay in that Climate would deprive him of his Health, if not his Life,” and agreed to

reassign him to England. He hoped that some other missionary “with better Health” might be

able to succeed him after he left.28 Philip Quaque’s first wife and her wife’s friend who

24 All quotes except “strange place” taken from undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, in Quaque Letters.

It was probably written in the period from October 20th to the end of 1767. “Strange place” extracted from

Quaque to the SPG, 7 March 1767, in Quaque Letters.

25 Quaque to the SPG, 17 March 1773, in Quaque Letters.

26 Charles Cohen applied this term to the British North American mainland colonies, although the phrase is

perhaps even more appropriate for African missions. For Cohen’s discussion of North America as a

religious periphery, see Charles L. Cohen, “The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the

History of Christianity,” Church History 72 No. 3 (September 2003): 553-568.

27 Letter from George Whitefield to Robert Keen, 12 November 1766, in Whitefield, The Works of the

Reverend George Whitefield, M.A. Late of Pembroke-College, Oxford, And Chaplain to the Rt. Hon. the

Countess of Huntingdon. Containing All his Sermons and Tracts Which Have Been Already Published:

With a Select Collection of Letters, Written to His Most Intimate Friends, and Persons of Distinction, in

England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, from the Year 1734, to 1770, Including the Whole Period of His

Ministry. Also Some Other Pieces on Important Subjects, /ever Before Printed; Prepared by Himself for

the Press, To Which is Prefixed, An Account of his Life, Compiled from his Original Papers and Letters 6

vols (Volume III) (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771), 340.

28 Edmund Keene, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday

February 18, 1757 (London: E. Owen, 1757), 59-60.

266

accompanied them to Cape Coast (both of whom were English) probably should have

followed in Thompson’s footsteps, for they both experienced premature deaths in Africa.

Historians have long noted the vital role that ideas about the body played in cultural

encounters between Europeans and Native Americans.29 The same could be said for the

missionary encounter between Europeans and Africans. In fact, the African climate’s effect

on the body would serve as both a metaphor and physical marker of racial difference between

Europeans and Africans. William Bosman, an English traveler to West Africa at the

beginning of the eighteenth century, observed that the region’s sudden change from soaring

heat during the day to bone-chilling cold at night “occasions several contrary Effects in our

[English] bodies.” He also believed that West Africa’s mountain mists were to blame for

spreading infections across the peoples of the coast. This mist, Bosman complained, fell “too

thick on the Earth” and made it so that it was “almost impossible to escape the infection.”

Bosman even admitted that “our Bodies [are] more susceptible to it than the Natives.”30

Bosman and other English commentators after him perpetuated the not wholly incorrect idea

that West Africa was, for all intents and purposes, a white man’s grave. Anthony Benezet, a

leading abolitionist during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, explained that “Altho’

the extream Heat in many Parts of Guinea, is such, as is neither agreeable nor healthy to the

29 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” The

William and Mary Quarterly 41 No. 2 (April 1984): 213-240; and Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the

American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” The American Historical Review 87 No. 5 (December

1982): 1262-1289; Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-

American Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; and Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy

and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” The William and

Mary Quarterly 54 No. 1. (January 1997): 229-252.

30 William Bosman, A /ew and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the

Slave, and the Ivory Coasts. Containing a Geographical, Political and /atural History of the Kingdoms

and Countries: With a Particular Account of the Rise, Progress and Present Condition of all the European

Settlements upon that Coast; and the Just Measures for Improving the several Branches of the Guinea

Trade (London: James Knapton and Dan. Midwinter, 1705), 104-105.

267

Europeans, yet it is well suited to the Constitution of the /egroes.”31 As such, the bodies of

English missionaries would be particularly susceptible the climatological and

epidemiological hazards that the land contained. Native Africans would presumably not face

such challenges.

Although Africans had successfully adapted to this exotic climate, European

commentators nevertheless agreed that the climate had left its imprint on Africans’ faculties,

attributes, and behavioral patterns. Thomas Thompson suggested that even though Africans

on the coast were not completely savage, most were still “hot and choleric.” This choleric

nature produced in them a natural “Impetuosity in their Temper which makes them speak

their Words very quick.” Thompson then applied his body metaphor to African culture,

describing traditional African religions as a kind of “Deformity” that they had carried all their

lives and were visibly ashamed of.32 It was the African body itself that made the prospect of

establishing a native pastorate so appealing to Protestant missionary interests. The theory

was that native Africans could not only retain the language of their upbringing but also

survive the harsh disease environment, maintain strong constitutions in the exotic climate,

and endure the tolling physical labor that African missionary activity would necessarily

entail. Ironically, the same kind of logic that made African bodies appear destined for

31 Anthony Benezet, A Short Account Of that Part of Africa, Inhabited by the /egroes. With Respect to the

Fertility of the Country; the good Disposition of many of the /atives, and the Manner by which the Slave

Trade is carried on. Extracted from divers Authors, in order to shew the Iniquity of that Trade, and the

Falsity of the Arguments usually advanced in its Vindication. With Quotations from the Writings of several

Persons of /ote, viz. George Wallis, Francis Hutcheson, and James Foster, and a large Extract from a

Pamphlet, lately published in London, on the Subject of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: W. Dunlap, 1762),

15-16.

32 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 72, 56, and 84-85.

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perpetual slavery in tropical climes also gave promising young Africans access to Christian

spiritual authority.33

Thomas Thompson therefore had several good reasons to try to establish a native

pastorate in Africa. First, his deep knowledge of American missionary experiments clearly

demonstrated that native preachers could be more effective, especially in the borderlands,

than English ones. Secondly, African bodies seemed particularly well-adapted to a climate

and environment that would easily crush less sturdy European bodies. Finally, Thompson

was not the first to try to train an African pastorate. In fact, several Africans had already

been sent to Europe and trained up as missionaries to return to their own countries. The most

famous of these were Jacob Protten and James Capitein, both of whom were brought from

Africa, educated in continental Europe, and returned to their respective posts on the Gold

Coast and Elmina Castle just before the middle of the eighteenth century.34 Protten was a

Moravian missionary while Capitein was trained within the Dutch Reformed Church. In his

attempt to employ native missionaries, Thompson was building upon a securely poured

33 For a brief discussion of early modern theories on African bodies, see Joyce E. Chaplin, “Race,” in The

British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave

MacMillan, 2002), 159-160. For more on climate, disease, and African bodies in the justification of

slavery and the slave trade, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: /egroes in Colonial South Carolina From

1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974), 80-91; and Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology

and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly 83 No. 2 (June 1968): 190-216. For more on English

cultural attitudes towards Africans, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward

the /egro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1968).

34 Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast,” 100, ff. 3. Priestly suggests that Jacob Protten was born in

Accra, educated in Denmark and Saxony, and returned to the Gold Coast in 1737. Jacobus Eliza Capitein

(sometimes referred to as James) was educated in the Netherlands, ordained in the Dutch Reformed

Church, and returned to Elmina Castle in 1742. For more on Capitein, see David Nii Anum Kpobi, Saga of

a Slave: Jacobus Capitein of Holland and Elmina (Legon, Ghana: Cootek Ltd., 2001); K. K. Prah, Jacobus

Eliza Johannes Capitein, 1717-1747: A Critical Study of an Eighteenth Century African (Braamfontien:

Skotaville, 1989); David Nii Anum Kpobi, Mission in Chains: The Life, Theology, and Ministry of the Ex-

Slave Jacobus E.J. Capitein (1717-1747) (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 1993); Jacobus Elisa

Joannes Capitein, The Agony of Asar: A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes

Capitein, 1717-1747 trans. Grant Parker (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001); and Francis L. Bartels,

“Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein, 1717-1747,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana Vol. 4 Part

I (1959): 3-13

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foundation of American missionary history, early modern body theory, and West African

evangelical experience.35

As soon as Thompson arrived at Cape Coast Castle he attempted to instruct local

Africans in Christian precepts.36 Yet he did not do so indiscriminately. Not only did he

believe that the Africans on the coast were more civilized and better prepared to accept

Christian instruction, he also employed the time-honored policy of looking to the children

who came from elite indigenous families to form the backbone of his missionary experiment.

He initially hoped that four or even six Africans could be sent back to England for training,

and he even tried to extend his ambitious scheme to the Africans living near the slave castle

at Annamaboe. Although it is unclear whether Thompson was directly involved in the

project, two West Africans (John Aqua and George Sackee) were sent to England around

1753 for religious education and baptism.37 Neither panned out as missionaries. For various

reasons, Thompson had to settle for three: they were named William Cudjo, Cabinah, and

Philip Quaque.38 They were all sons of prominent African families, they were all under 12

years old, and they all set out together for England in 1754. Trained under several SPG

tutors, the boys fared well for the first few years, but Cabinah died soon after his smallpox

35 Useful summaries of African Christianities can be found in Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa:

1450-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Allo Isichei, A History of Christianity in

Africa: From Atniquity to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1995); and Bengt

Sundkler and Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2000); and Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism

in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1998), 1-34. Frederik Pedersen Svane (1710-1789) was another, lesser known African Moravian

missionary who operated on the Gold Coast. See Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost”: 33.

36 A comprehensive analysis of this region and its relationship to slavery can be found in William St. Clair,

The Door of /o Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York:

Bluebridge, 2007).

37 Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost”: 35.

38 Cabinah is also sometimes referred to as Thomas Caboro.

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inoculation and William Cudjo had apparently gone insane by 1764. While their African

families impatiently awaited the homecoming of their sons, family members were dying off.

By 1766, when Quaque returned to Africa, the SPG had concluded that William had no

family members left, did not possess the mental capacity for travel, and would not be going

home anytime soon. Taken from his home in Africa but hoping to return, William Cudjo

spent the rest of his life at St. Luke’s Hospital in England. When Quaque would return to

Africa, he would do so not with his African compatriots, but with an English wife, her

English friend, a bible, and a decade of Anglican training under his belt. He was a

transformed man.

The experience of being transported to and living in England had destroyed the

bodies and minds of Cudjo and Cabinah, Quaque’s African colleagues. Quaque found that he

too was not immune the epidemiological afflictions that ran rampant on Africa’s soil. Even

though his birth on the West African coast would have presumably made Quaque impervious

to native diseases, his first letters back to the SPG after his return to the coast revealed how

his frequent maladies impeded missionary work. After only half a year on the coast, he

lamented that, because of repeated sicknesses, “the state of my Constitution is very much

altered for the worse.” Disease was ruining his ability to even stand, let alone give to give

rousing sermons, and he was perplexed as to why he suffered so much like an Englishman.

He even concluded that “This Country is very destructive to the Health of many of the British

Constitutions, and tho’ myself being a Native by Birth, yet am not exempted from

undergoing the common fate equally with those who are not.”39 To make matters worse, a

wave of smallpox epidemics struck the slaving fort and surrounding area from 1769 to the

early 1770s, leaving hundreds of dead Africans and English traders in its wake. Quaque

39 Quaque to the SPG, 28 September 1766, in Quaque Letters.

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survived the smallpox only to be infected with some “tormenting and wasting Guinea

Worms.” Otherwise known as Dracunculiasis, Guinea worms were a parasitic worm that

would enter a human’s body if they drank still and infected water. The worms would then

remain in the body for up to a year, becoming as long as three feet and eventually exiting the

body, often through the legs or the feet. Quaque understood that the worm could literally

paralyze himself and his mission, and he admitted he was “very timorous about this Disorder,

as many have been known to lose the use of their Limbs by it, and many others become a

Cripple.”40 The worms probably caused Quaque a “grievous pain,” as they had done to so

many other victims.41 But, luckily for Quaque, the worms quietly exited his body before

doing any serious damage to either his body or his mission.

Contrary to contemporary discourses concerning the imperviousness of the African

body to African diseases, Philip Quaque was indeed affected by the harsh African climate.

But just as bodies were susceptible to climate, some early modern theorists also suggested

that climates themselves were quite malleable. Interestingly, in 1778 Quaque connected a

temporary rise in religious sentiment with climate change. When he wrote to the SPG in the

summer of that year, he noted that the frequency and sincerity of devotion was greater in the

past three months than he could ever remember. He then bragged about “how widely

different the Climate appears to be to what it was a few Years ago,” arguing that this

“amazing Alteration” had been felt by every English settler and every African native. The

implication was that, just as the climate could shape African and European bodies, the

40 Quaque to the SPG, 6 February 1771, in Quaque Letters.

41 Bosman, A /ew and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 109. Bosman recorded that some

victims of guinea worms had nine or ten of them at once, which left them “inexpressibly tormented.”

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introduction of civilized Christianity might also ameliorate the African climate.42 In

Quaque’s view, the transformation of Africa from a land of death to a Christian land was

therefore marked not only by changes in the religious sentiment of the people, but also in the

climate itself. Embracing the idea that the advance of human civilization could alter climate,

Quaque pointed to climate as proof that Christianity was on the advance among his people.

While early modern ideas about the climate, the body, and disease accentuated the

differences between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans, they also demonstrated the

necessity of native evangelists. Just as American missionaries relied upon Native American

preachers because of their perceived ability to endure the harsh lifestyle in the wilderness, so

too did African bodies became a central advantage to using native African evangelists. The

body thus became a physical and metaphorical apparatus for identifying physical differences,

even as those very differences opened a window for black missionaries to be employed as

evangelists to other Africans.

“A Black Among Blacks”

Even if Philip Quaque was immune to African diseases (he was not) and even if he

retained his native tongue to speak fluently in indigenous African languages (he did not), he

still would have faced immense challenges in attempting to convert indigenous Africans.

Although he spent nearly half a century on the Cape Coast, the success of his mission was

slim at best. By the time he was writing to his friend in New England in 1775, he could only

boast of 52 baptisms over almost a decade of work, and that included European and mulatto

42 Scholars working within the history of science have examined this relationship between early modern

discourses of English expansion and ideas about climate change. See Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the

American Climate in the Early Colonial Period”: 1262-1289; as well as selections from James Delbourgo

and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008).

273

children.43 Quaque had always doubted whether his unique position as an African preacher

on the Cape Coast would make any difference in the religious temperament of Africa’s

population. He constantly complained about the irreligion of the English traders and officials

in the castle and was even more shocked by the idolatrous customs of native Africans.44 He

even wrote to the SPG that his failure to generate any spiritual transformation often made

him wish that he had been sent somewhere else. He was beginning to understand that,

instead of using his identity to his advantage, to his “great Sorrow and Astonishment [he had]

found it quite the reverse.” He eventually became certain that “Something more than a

Human effort must work that effectual Cure of their Bigotry and Superstition.”45 The SPG

agreed that Quaque produced less than stellar results, lamenting that “It was natural for the

Society to hope for better fruits from the ministry of a Black among Blacks…this has not

been the case.”46 Although we can certainly debate the long-range impact of Quaque’s

mission, there are other important questions at stake.47 There were perhaps hundreds of

native teachers, catechists, and missionaries throughout the early modern Atlantic, but very

few written records illuminate exactly how they perceived non-Christian native peoples and

43 C.P. Groves, The Planting of Christianity in Africa: Volume One to 1840 (London: Lutterworth Press,

1948), 176.

44 In nearly 200 pages of letters, Quaque never once acknowledges that he remembers any of these customs

from his childhood.

45 Quaque to the SPG, 12 June 1780, in Quaque Letters.

46 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Records of the Society for the Propagation of

the Gospel (East Ardsley, Yorkshire: Micro Methods, 1964), SPG Journal, Volume 22, 165.

47 The actual impact of Protestant evangelical activity on West Africa is difficult to surmise, but their

success was certainly less than they expected. At the same time, Protestant and Catholic missionaries

introduced some Christian aspects into African culture, like Black Christmas, which happened around the

time of the annual yam festival. See Wood and Frey, Come Shouting To Zion, 30.

274

positioned themselves between European and indigenous cultures.48 Quaque’s letters to the

SPG therefore offer historians a remarkable opportunity to assess how neophytes attempted

to convert other peoples, how they perceived the indigenous peoples they were trying to save,

and how they fabricated a unique identity in the process.

Quaque considered himself a central figure in the spiritual battle against what he

perceived to be superstitious fetishes in the form of traditional African customs. Although he

was born in Africa, his time in England was formative, as he also conceived of England and

the people residing there as models of Christian piety, charity, and obedience. He described

Old England as “that blessed Christian country” and took pride in his several years of English

language, education, and training.49 By contrast, Quaque characterized his native Africa as a

“barren country” full of “Desolate Parts” and inhabited primarily by “poor, Superstitious and

Idolatrous People.”50 These Africans, Quaque believed, were “poor unthinking and

lamentable Creatures” who lived in a barren religious landscape marked by avaricious vice,

gross paganism, and wicked idolatry.51 In spite of his reservations about African religion,

however, Quaque held fast to the policy that he could never compel his audiences to convert,

48 Perhaps the largest collections of texts written by native missionaries were the writings of the Indians

who attended Eleazar Wheelock’s charity school in Connecticut in the 1750s and 1760s. For edited

versions of these Indians’ writings, see James Dow McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians

(Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932); Joseph Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian

Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776, ed. Laura J. Murray (Amherst, MA: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1998); and Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan:

Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century /ative America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2006).

49 Quaque to the SPG, 19 March 1774, Quaque Letters. Other Black Atlantic writers held much more

ambivalent views of England and its people. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, for example, changed

his mind several times on the piety and decency of English people. See James Albert Ukawsaw

Gronniosaw, “A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw

Gronniosaw An African Prince, as Related by Himself, in Pioneers of the Black Atlantic, ed. Henry Louis

Gates, Jr. and William L. Andrews (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), 48-52.

50 Quaque to the SPG, 6 August 1782 and 19 August 1771, in Quaque Letters.

51 Quaque to the SPG, 7 March 1767, in Quaque Letters.

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no matter how “poor” they appeared. This was a policy that the SPG expressed all

throughout the Atlantic world. Just two years after Quaque arrived in Africa William Knox

suggested in a pamphlet that “if any success be expected from among the Indians, it must be

founded on this principle, that nothing is to be pressed upon them; their own desires must

move foremost, and those will always carry them to ask, as much as they can receive.”52

Protestant missionaries truly believed that forced conversions were an underhanded strategy,

for Christianity implied free will, and it would have been theologically irresponsible to

impose conversions on anyone. Native peoples had the freedom to seek their salvation just as

they had the freedom to reject it.

Although conversion was a matter of free will, native missionaries still perceived

themselves as instruments that God used to bring about spiritual transformations. Quaque

considered himself as such, and he often followed the strategies and methods used by his

predecessor, Thomas Thompson. Like Thompson, Quaque believed that if he were to

convert the West African coastal peoples, he had to start with their Cabosheers, or local

rulers. Convincing the Cabosheers and other local penyins (elders) to convert would

represent a major spiritual victory and vindication for Quaque. These Alpha Africans were

the most respected people in Cape Coast society and their conversion could produce a trickle-

down effect, resulting in the spiritual salvation of hundreds of thousands of souls. The stakes

were high. Cudjo Cabosheer, in particular, was a popular, amiable, and well-respected leader

on the Cape Coast in the 1760s and 1770s. Quaque personally witnessed a testament to

Cudjo’s popularity when upwards of one million people paid their respects to the coastal

52 William Knox, Three Tracts Respecting the Conversion and Instruction of the Free Indians, and /egroe

Slaves in the Colonies. Addressed to the Venerable Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts

(London: s.n., 1768), 15.

276

leader when he died in 1777.53 Quaque probably expected him to embrace Christianity fairly

easily, for he was a relation of Quaque, he was the one who sent Quaque to England in the

first place, he had his own children sent there earlier, he supported the creation of a Christian

school for local African children, and he even let Quaque preach in his own home.54 Instead,

the Cabosheer viewed Christianity as a tool of diplomacy. In fact, Thompson had earlier

described the Cabosheer as very conversant in English and possessing “a good Knowledge of

many Things relating to the Government and Affairs in England.”55 It is quite possible that

all of his gestures were actually diplomatic maneuvers designed to gain favor with English

officials and advance his commercial interests. In fact, Andrew Porter has suggested that

many indigenous peoples, throughout all of the Christian mission experience, accepted

Christian schooling while rejecting Christianity itself. Porter claims that they did this

because they “found via English a flexible entrée to international commerce, which they were

able to turn to their advantage.”56 When Quaque pushed the Cabosheer on conversion, the

latter could only slyly respond that he was “too old to enter into Covenant with God.”

Quaque simply retorted that “if you willingly become so, by your good example, no doubt

53 Quaque to the SPG, 17 January 1778, in Quaque Letters. Thomas Thompson, in his Account of Two

Missionary Voyages, suggests that the real “king” in that part of Africa not Cudjo Cabosheer, but his little

brother, named Amrah Coffi. The Cabosheer was initially offered the kingship but he declined it.

54 There is much confusion about the relationship between Quaque and the Cabosheer. While some sources

say that the Cabosheer was Quaque’s father, it is most likely that Quaque was either a grandson or a distant

relative. Margaret Priestly suggests that Quaque referred to Cudjo as “nana,” meaning grandfather or chief.

See Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast,” 106.

55 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 34.

56 Andrew Porter, “Church History, History of Christianity, Religious History: Some Reflections on British

Missionary Enterprise Since the Late Eighteenth Century,” Church History 71 No. 2 (September 2002):

579.

277

but that all your Subjects will in all probability become so too.”57 Cudjo Cabosheer never did

take the bait and Quaque had to find other ways to preach to Africa’s black population.

After being rebuffed by Cudjo, Quaque sought to preach on his own. Although he

was a “native African” he followed many of the missionary models that he learned during his

training and that were most likely already employed by Thomas Thompson years before.

Both Thompson and Quaque acknowledged that Africans had some notion of a deity, for they

did have a word for God: Yangcúmpong. One converted African even told Thompson that he

believed he was “Yangcúmpong’s Man.”58 And yet, the tenacity of African idolatry and

barbarity often made both missionaries doubtful of any future success. Quaque scoffed at

traditional African funerary customs, arguing that they demonstrated the “Depravity and

Obduracy” of the “Apish” Africans.59 He marveled at what he perceived to be the idolatrous

practices of Africans, constantly railing against the fetishism that he witnessed all around

him: sacrifices to goddesses, congregating at sacred rocks, and sacrificing fish as a way to

contain disease. Whether Quaque knew it or not, Cape Coast Africans were experiencing

major social, demographic, and cultural changes. As Margaret Priestly has noted, the recent

aggression of the Ashanti, coupled with migratory movements of Fanti peoples into the Cape

Coast area, ensured that Fetu natives like Quaque’s family and others would begin to absorb

some elements of Akan culture into their own local, indigenized traditions. What Quaque

was witnessing was therefore not a static state of primordial religion, but rather a complex

synthesis of various cultural elements from several African groups.60 Quaque never made

57 Quaque to the SPG, 28 September 1766, Quaque Letters.

58 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 44.

59 Quaque to the SPG, 17 January 1778, in Quaque Letters.

60 Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast”,103.

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that distinction, and he constantly asserted that all indigenous religious customs, practices,

and beliefs were childish and barbaric.

At a large Christian service in the fall of 1767, Quaque adopted Thompson’s tactic of

attacking “their absurd Notions.” He reported to the SPG that, during his sermon, he

“exposed and ridiculed greatly the folly of their Idolatrous and Superstitious Customs of

adoring Fetishes.” Quaque said the audience was impressed, but one of the local penyins

later told him that Christianity was not for them because “they were but Black Men, and the

only Means or Books afforded by Him to them is their Fetishes.”61 In a rather brilliant

rhetorical gesture, this penyin identified “books” as a kind of fetish, downplaying the

relationship between literacy and religious salvation and tacitly implying that the Bible, too,

was a kind of fetish. Whether Quaque caught onto this gibe or not, it nevertheless reflected

many Africans’ resistance to Quaque’s Christian message. They had their own systems of

thought and religion that satisfied their needs. Many saw no reason to change them.

But Quaque was not completely inflexible. Indeed, his strategies in that 1767 service

also demonstrate the ways that he tried to negotiate his way into the hearts and minds of the

Africans on the coast. At previous services he noted that some of the local Africans would

hear him patiently and attentively, only to bask in the pleasures of hard liquor immediately

after he had finished speaking. While Quaque might have been flattered that they offered to

drink “upon my Head” – meaning they would drink to his health – he was initially disturbed

by such excessive use of liquor. At the same time, Quaque understood that the exchange of

rum was central to the slave trading economy of the Cape Coast and that there was little he

could do to root out drinking among the coastal population. So instead of pointing out the

consumption of liquor as yet another one of their many horrific sins, Quaque actually began

61 Undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, probably written in the fall of 1767, in Quaque Letters. See

footnote 13.

279

using it as a temptation for Africans to come to his religious services. He admitted that he

gave a group of Africans “a flask of Liquor, thinking that that might be the means of enticing

them over to it, and told them that now they must not neglect my coming, whenever I

officiate in Town.” While Quaque’s bribe might have been morally suspect, he believed he

was cleverly exploiting existing social conventions of a community that was fundamentally

rooted in exchange. He supplemented his liquor bribe with the singing of the psalms, a

standard missionary tactic designed to introduce indigenous communities to biblical

knowledge. It apparently had a moving effect on the audience. Since coastal inhabitants

were “fond of Music,” they “hearkened to [the psalms] with due Attention, and expressed a

Great Veneration” towards them.62 For all native missionaries throughout the Atlantic world,

the psalms could serve as a possible gateway through which indigenous peoples might gain

access to revealed religion. Psalms were therefore just as convenient to have on hand as any

fiery sermon, bible, or catechism.

Preaching to Africans also generated certain theological and ecclesiastical

conundrums. Thomas Thompson found this out when he tried to preach on a Sunday, but

everyone was out fishing. After asking around, he learned that Cape Coast residents took

Tuesday off instead of Sunday, leaving him with a theological (not to mention logistical)

problem that he never really resolved.63 When Philip Quaque went to baptize two small

infants, he was unable to find suitable sponsors for the children. He wrote back to the SPG

and wondered if West Africa’s visible lack of professing Anglicans would make it

permissible for him to baptize them without sponsors, or even to have “heathen” parents step

62 Undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, probably written in the fall of 1767, in Quaque Letters. See

footnote 13.

63 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 36-37.

280

in as sponsors.64 Traditional models of ecclesiastical policy were thus often questioned and

challenged, though rarely abandoned.

In spite of the many disparaging remarks that Quaque made about native Africans

and the mulattoes living on the coast – he found the mulatto population to be elitist, haughty,

and profane – he nevertheless hoped to place Africans into a larger sacred history of

Christianity by comparing them to the Israelites, Egyptians, and even the English

themselves.65 In one letter to the SPG he reminded his benefactors that “England formerly

[was] much troubled with Idols and false Notions, till at length the Son of God…came down

from Heaven, and revealed his Ways to them.” God then “made some Pastors and Teachers,

who [knew] much more of this Will and were to be sent One by One into different Parts, to

instruct and bring over the Ignorant, that they also might know Him and his Will and so

believe in Him, by the forsaking and throwing aside of their Fetishes and false Notions.”66

Quaque even cited one African tradition of a man’s brother inheriting his property and

identity – including his wife and family – when the man dies. This custom seemed to be “the

established system thro’ out the whole African Country.” Quaque compared the practice to a

similar question posed to Jesus by the Sadducees in the 22nd chapter of the book of

Matthew.67 In doing so, Quaque was not only positioning himself as a spiritual descendent of

Christ, but also describing Africans as latter-day Sadducees who could eventually be

64 Quaque to the SPG, 28 September 1766, in Quaque Letters.

65 Colin Kidd has recently argued that, in spite of some radical Enlightened thinkers to establish races as

innately and irrevocably separate (including having separate origins) most early modern theologians

continued to believe in the fundamental unity of the human race and the redeemability of the world’s

indigenous peoples. See Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic

World, 1600-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79-120.

66 Undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, probably written in the fall of 1767, in Quaque Letters. See

footnote 13.

67 Quaque had mistakenly argued that this was taken from the 22nd chapter from the Book of Mark. This

might have been disturbing to his Anglican supporters, since Mark did not even have 22 chapters.

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converted and redeemed. By comparing Africa to Christianity’s primitive churches, Quaque

reminded his English backers that, despite the great obstacles there, Africa and Africans

could be redeemed. In this way Quaque espoused a kind of benevolent evangelicalism that

would avoid the essentializing tendencies of contemporary racial discourses while chalking

religious differences up to culture. In other words, Africans were not inherently savage,

barbaric, or superstitious. Their culture had made them so. This is perhaps why Quaque had

also established and taught in several different schools by the end of his career, hoping to

compel future native missionaries to carry on the work he had been doing for decades.68

Quaque constantly sought to carve out a narrative space for Africans by consistently arguing

that they were not natural barbarians, but rather Christians in the making. In this sense

Quaque was articulating what historian James Sidbury has called an “affiliative”

interpretation of African identity. Quaque perceived Africans as divided, disparate, and at an

early stage in human cultural development, but he nevertheless envisioned a day in which

evangelical Christianity would bind them together and shape their collective destiny as a

nation.69

“Hybridity” and “syncretism” have recently become critical concepts in historical and

theoretical discourse. Scholars have called upon these models to conceptualize cultural

interactions and translations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans during the

early modern period. These models help explain how indigenous peoples could appropriate

some aspects of Western European culture (especially religion, forms of trade, and military

68 Ty Reese has adequately covered the nature and impact of Quaque’s educational efforts. See Reese,

“‘Sheep in the Jaws of So Many Ravenous Wolves,'”: 348-372. Interestingly, one of the schools that

sprang up was run by a group of Englishmen known as the “Torridzonian Society,” once again revealing

the early modern English obsession with climates, bodies, and Aristotelian geography. Quaque was hired

to teach in their school.

69 Sidbury traces the distinction between “affiliative” (identity based upon a conscious affiliation) and

“filiative” (identity based upon a shared family or kinship lineage) in Sidbury, Becoming African in

America: Race and /ation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

282

techniques) while simultaneously fusing them with their own traditions, cosmologies, and

practices. On the surface, it would seem as if native missionaries were hybrid creatures par

excellence, human embodiments of the meeting of Western and indigenous cultures. Quaque

certainly revealed some of this hybridity by choosing to marry a local African girl after his

English wife died.70 He even acted as “interim chief” for a group of Africans during an

itinerant preaching tour at Dixcove Fort to the north.71 Even though Philip Quaque still

considered himself an African, his identity was first and foremost as a Christian. Literary

scholar and postcolonial theorist Edward Said explained that, when European commentators

encountered and wrote about new and exotic peoples, they were not just objectively

describing what they saw, but actually creating their own oppositional identities based upon

their perception of what constituted “otherness.” Europeans who wrote about other peoples,

Said argued, were implicitly writing about, and defining, themselves.72 Through his own

writings to the SPG and his correspondents in the American colonies, Philip Quaque engaged

in the very same narrative project as European colonizers.

Quaque’s identity as a Christian trumped his identity as an African. As such, he often

tried to distance himself from other Africans in order to preserve his identity as a pious

Christian.73 In doing so, he railed against the inherently “avaricious disposition of the

Blacks” and was personally pained by the fact that even his relatives took his advice only

70 However, Quaque actually reported in his letters that he did this to squash any controversies resulting

from romantic jealousies. Marrying an African girl could both solidify ties with the local population and

essentially take him off the market of bachelors on the coast.

71 Quaque to Edward Bass of Newburyport, 31 July 1775, Quaque Letters.

72 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

73 As noted earlier, there is an excellent discussion of Quaque’s identity in Littlefield, “Almost an

Englishman,” 70-94.

283

when it came to worldly – not spiritual – matters.74 Probably expecting a significant amount

of deference from his potential African neophytes, Quaque was irate that they “foolishly”

regarded him “in no other Light than as one of themselves.”75 Although Quaque’s skin color

identified him as an African, his training had firmly established him as highly educated

member of the English clerical class. When he was training in England he probably had a

regimen fairly similar to the training of other SPG missionaries, which demanded that he

demonstrate a superior knowledge of “Greek, Latin, Scriptural and Church history, the Bible,

the Prayer Book, the Creeds, and the Thirty-nine Articles.” He might have even dabbled in a

bit of Hebrew.76 In spite of his academic pedigree, Africans as well as English traders and

governors still perceived Quaque as an African. They gave him very little attention, much

less respect. Caught between the English who rebuked him and the Africans who ignored

him, Quaque could only write, near the end of his life, that “a Prophet has not honor in his

own Country.”77 In assailing African customs while simultaneously offering their

practitioners a central place in future Christian history, Quaque staked out a spiritual middle

ground that was situated uncomfortably between African and English worlds.78 As Quaque

found out, it was lonely in the middle.

74 Quaque to the SPG, 13 October 1811, Quaque Letters.

75 Quaque to the SPG, 12 June 1780, Quaque Letters.

76 Alfred W. Newcombe, “The Appointment and Instruction of S.P.G. Missionaries,” Church History 5 No.

4 (December 1936): 347.

77 Quaque to the SPG, 13 October 1811, Quaque Letters.

78 See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,

1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) for more on the concept of a “middle ground”

in American history.

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Religion Versus Empire?

In a recent book published for the Oxford History of the British Empire, Norman

Etherington argued that “The greatest difficulty faced by those who have tried to argue that

Christian missions were a form of cultural imperialism has been the overwhelming evidence

that the agents of conversion were local people, not foreign missionaries. None of them were

coerced into believing and very few were paid.”79 Etherington went on to discuss examples

from nineteenth century India and South Africa, but we have seen that he might have also

applied this model to Protestant missions all over the Atlantic in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries. Indigenous actors were central to missionary work throughout nearly

every Protestant mission, and the case for eighteenth century Africa was certainly no

different. Given the centrality of native agents to Protestant missionary work, the

relationship between missions and empire needs to be reexamined.

Nevertheless, historians have often ignored the experiences, attitudes, and impact of

indigenous actors, at all levels, in the history of missions. While earlier church historians

espoused a kind of hagiographical approach to English missionaries, later critics would

describe them as rapacious imperialists or, in the words of historian David Silverman, as

“ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.”80 British

historian Brian Stanley agrees. He fears that “the belief that ‘the Bible and the flag’ went

79 Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.

80 David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity

in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 No. 2 (April 2005): 144. In

this quote Silverman is assessing the historiographical interpretation of missionaries, not arguing that they

were in fact ideological shock troops. For more on Silverman’s work on indigenous Christianity on

Martha’s Vineyard, see Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among

the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

For a recent study of the hagiographic interpretation of native converts, see Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint:

Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Finally, for a classic

example of the imperialistic interpretation of New England missions, see Francis Jennings, The Invasion of

America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1975).

285

hand in hand in the history of Western imperial expansion is fast becoming established as

one of the unquestionable orthodoxies of general historical knowledge.”81 Although both

approaches (missionaries as saints versus missionaries as imperialists) have dominated most

narratives of religious interaction, neither of them place native missionaries center stage in

their attempt to assess the relationship between evangelical activities and imperial ones. The

precise social position, location, and periodization of Quaque’s mission to Cape Coast afford

historians a tremendous opportunity to examine the relationship between missions and

empire. As an African Anglican, Quaque had a unique perspective on the British empire; a

perspective that both defies easy categorization and demands further inquiry.

The correspondence between Quaque and Edward Bass with which this chapter

opened suggests that the former clearly supported the British crown. But exactly what that

meant to Quaque is not as clear. In The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, historian

David Armitage argues that, from about the 1730s on, the British began a self-conscious

process of fashioning a global imperial identity. Britons, Armitage claims, took great

satisfaction in the fact that their empire was not an empire of conquest or force. Instead, it

was an empire of liberty, and Armitage suggests that the British proudly characterized their

growing empire as “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free.”82 According to Britain’s

81 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the /ineteenth

and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1990), 12. Both the missionaries-as-saints and

missionaries-as-imperialists approaches to Protestant missions leave little room for indigenous Christians.

In the first interpretation, Anglo-American missionary activity was emphasized to glorify and memorialize

the philanthropic efforts of a more “civilized” people. On the other hand, the newer scholarship

emphasizes resistance, often violent, to Christian missions. In both accounts native Christians and the

indigenous Christianities they create are rarely taken seriously.

82 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2000), 8. See also Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the

American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1-34. Linda Colley

emphasizes Protestantism as the central component of the formation of British imperial identity. See

Colley, Britons: Forging the /ation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For the best study of

Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” see Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American

/ationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

286

empire builders, these four characteristics – Protestantism, commercialism, maritime

strength, and freedom – made the British empire the most distinctive and exceptional in

human history. Indeed, historians of American foreign relations, led by figures like Walter

LaFeber, have demonstrated that “empire” could be defined broadly, including not only

territorial control but also much more subtle economic, cultural, and social influences.83

Armitage’s four characteristics can thus serve as a framework to help conceptualize

Quaque’s relationship with the British empire, especially his relationship with missionary

societies, slave traders, and military and political officials. This African missionary was

certainly no “shock troop” for colonial invasion, but rather a complex human being who had

an ambiguous, and sometimes exasperatingly complex, perspective on the connections

between missionary evangelism and empire-building.84

There is no doubt that Quaque was a Protestant imperialist. We have already

witnessed the various ways in which he disparaged local indigenous beliefs and practices and

sang the praises of English Protestantism. But the relationship between Quaque and the

home institution that backed him (the SPG) was also a rather tenuous one. In fact, presuming

that missionaries were imperialists is to also assume that the relationships between these

missionaries, the organizations that funded them, and the nation-state were clear and

symbiotic. This was certainly not the case in seventeenth century Puritan New England,

eighteenth century New York, or the Moravian Caribbean missions. Not surprisingly, it was

83 See Walter LaFeber, The /ew Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press); Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic

and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the

/ew Global Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999). For more on how Austrians appropriated

American culture after World War Two, read Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonisation and the Cold War:

The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

84 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation”: 144.

287

also not the case with Quaque’s mission in Africa. The SPG was, after all, an independent

entity. Parliament had approved its charter but had no official means of directing the

institution, which relied mainly upon the benevolence of private fundraising. Neither did the

SPG have an established line of communication with the Lords of the Committee of Privy

Council for Trade, the group which oversaw most imperial matters. Though members of the

Privy Council were certainly aware of some of the SPG’s activities, they never received an

official report from that organization until they asked for one in 1788. By that time the SPG

had already sent out over 300 missionaries since its inception in 1701.

The relationship between the SPG and Quaque himself was similarly patchy. In spite

of the time, effort, and money the SPG poured into Quaque’s education and training in

England, his supporters rarely corresponded with him. Quaque complained bitterly about this

fact and noted that he has “not embraced that Kindness, nay, not so much as a Line from my

Worthy Benefactors since my Residence on the Coast.” He even went so far as to imply that

the SPG’s silence was a reflection of either Quaque’s African origin or the second-class

status that an African mission had compared to the missions in the Americas. He protested

that “Many Brethren in America I suppose often enjoy that secret Consolation, which

doubtless must refresh them greatly, and prompt them on with more rigour, whereas I that is

situated in a Bypath of Misprision, must of Consequence want that Assistance more than

most Missionaries.”85 Missionaries from all over the Atlantic world would often return

thanks for letters from their home institutions, indicating how heartening it was to have a

piece of news and a little encouragement from the metropole. Quaque would eventually

receive more letters from the SPG, but the relationship between himself and his benefactors

soured anyways. He still complained of their infrequent correspondence, blamed the SPG for

85 Quaque to the SPG, 8 March 1772, in Quaque Letters.

288

placing him in the “lamentable Situation I now enjoy,” asked for raises that were not granted,

and even had a request for his children to be educated by them rejected.86 He might have also

found out that, while the SPG paid his predecessor Thomas Thompson 70 pounds per year,

Quaque only received 50 pounds from the SPG for his work.

The SPG was not entirely satisfied with Quaque either, and relations between the

organization and its missionary got progressively worse from the moment of Quaque’s arrival

in 1766. By the end of the 1780s, the SPG even accused him of “paying more attention to

purposes of trade than of Religion,” a rash accusation that had little evidentiary basis.87

There were two main reasons for the tension between Quaque and the SPG. The first was

that, upon his arrival at the Cape Coast, it was apparent that Quaque did not retain any

fluency in his native African tongue. This is not surprising. The most formative years of his

life were spent in English schools, learning English culture and language, with only one or

two classmates at the time. The SPG was thus disappointed that, in some ways, their African

missionary became too English during his acculturation in London. But there were practical

concerns as well. The language barrier not only hampered basic communication but also

hindered the dissemination of gospel truths. If Quaque could not speak the language, the

SPG had forfeited the major benefit of investing so much money to train him in the first

place. He, in effect, became like Thomas Thompson before him, who complained constantly

about “the strange kind of Jargon” that he found among the various residents of West

Africa.88 Thompson relied on an interpreter, a local African Frederick Adoy, because the

language barrier was, in Thompson’s words, “a Disadvantage, not to be compounded at any

86 Quaque to the SPG, 15 April 1769, in Quaque Letters.

87 Dr. Morice to the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade, February 1788, in Quaque Letters.

88 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 71.

289

Rate.”89 Adoy probably sensed opportunity when Quaque arrived, for he not only served as

Quaque’s interpreter, he also aggressively set out to acquire a consistent salary for his

translational services, suggesting that he would “not spend his Breath any more in vain” if he

did not get some sort of monetary compensation for his skills.90 One time he even forced

Quaque to cut a sermon short because he was tired. All of these incidents and reports placed

the SPG in a fairly powerless position, and they did not mince words when they tersely urged

Quaque “to indeavor to recover his own language.”91

The SPG was also concerned about Philip Quaque leaving his mission post to journey

to other regions of the African coast as an itinerant preacher. This was a dangerous

proposition for Quaque, for even though the SPG was a missionary organization, most of the

organization’s “missionaries” were, by the 1770s, operating within well-established parishes

in the American colonies. The church-based community was a central component of any

Anglican endeavor, and simply wandering around the African coast would not please the

folks back home.92 He asked the SPG for permission to go up to Senegal in the spring of

1772, arguing that “I freely and gladly would embrace the Opportunity of being more

Serviceable at Senegal to my fellow Creatures there, than I do here amongst my own

89 Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, 69.

90 Quaque to the SPG, 15 April 1769, Quaque Letters.

91 SPG Records, SPG Journal, Volume 18, 267. Mark Thompson has suggested to me that Quaque’s loss

of language might have been a self-conscious way to fashion a new, English Christian identity. Although it

made him less valuable as a missionary, he might have intentionally lost his language to make him more

English than African.

92 This very issue, in fact, led to a heated debate in the presses over the role and conduct of the SPG. Many

American ministers believed that the preponderance of parishes in American towns and cities belied the

fact that the SPG was trying to establish an Anglican bishop in the Americas. They protested that the SPG

should be more focused on converting Native Americans and black slaves than in trying to establish

Anglican authority in settlements where Christian religion had already flourished.

290

Kindred.”93 Quaque was trying to escape from the very place where he grew up, but when he

was denied a Chaplainship at Senegal, he had to give up. For four months in the winter of

1772/1773 Quaque was in Accra. He also spent eight months at Dixcove Fort from 1774 to

1775. He would later return briefly to a few of these places, but the evidence suggests that

the SPG was uneasy about Quaque’s wanderings. Dixcove, for example, had a sizeable

Dutch population, and it offered Quaque a chance to compare Dutch evangelical tactics with

those of the Cape Coast. He concluded that the Dutch method of teaching native children,

exposing them to Christian doctrine, attending hours of devotion, and other practices were

“worthy of Imitation.”94 Conversely, the Dutch were apparently impressed with Quaque, for

they attended his services when he journeyed up there. A Dutch governor even sent him a

letter of thanks with a small gratuity for his preaching.95 When Quaque proudly reported to

the SPG this international/interdenominational exchange, the SPG simply recommended “that

Mr. Quaque be directed for the future not to absent himself for so long from the Cape Coast

without the Leave of the Society.”96 Although the SPG tried to find a better position for him,

Quaque would be stationed there until his death in 1816. In spite of the SPG’s warnings, he

spent many of those years traversing the African coast anyways. The SPG expected Quaque

to be a stationary, obedient, African-speaking preacher. He was none of those things. These

mutual frustrations expose a systemic problem with the interpretation that Protestant

93 Quaque to the SPG, 10 April 1772, in Quaque Letters.

94 Quaque to the SPG, 17 March 1773, in Quaque Letters.

95 Quaque to the SPG, 11 September 1779, Quaque Letters.

96 SPG Records, SPG Journal, Volume 21, 31. The tension between itinerancy and parish-based preaching

was palpable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries:

Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1994).

291

missionaries were the foot soldiers for colonial invasion: religion and empire certainly could

not be symbiotic if the agents within those relationships were constantly at odds.

“Dix Cove Fort, Gold Coast, 1727.” This image of Dixcove Fort, taken from William Smith’s

Thirty Different Drafts of Guinea (London: s.n., 1727?) shows the south side of Dixcove Fort, where Philip

Quaque spent several months as an itinerant preacher among the English, Dutch, and African people there.

Image reference mariners 19, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation

for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

If Quaque was frustrated with the organization that nominally supported him, he

became irate and scornful towards the commercial dimension of the British empire. The

foundation of Britain’s commercial power in Africa was, of course, the transatlantic slave

trade, and here is where Quaque was at his most anti-imperialistic.97 One of the ironies of

Quaque’s position is that the African Committee – a group of slave-trading merchants with

major political sway at Whitehall – actually paid half of his salary to serve as chaplain of

their garrison. Quaque, an African by birth, was being paid by African slave traders to act as

their collective spiritual compass. Another paradox was that Cudjo Cabosheer, Quaque’s

powerful uncle who sent him to England in the first place, was directly involved in the slave

97 The most nuanced analysis of Quaque’s anti-slavery position can be found in Glasson, “Missionaries,

Methodists, and a Ghost”: 41-50.

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trade. Travis Glasson has recently found that Quaque’s wife was a slave, and Quaque also

purchased another old female slave in 1785, benefited from the labors of a “Chapel servant”

living at Cape Coast Castle, and engaged in more than a few administrative duties that kept

the wheels of the Gold Coast slave trade moving.98 Thus, when Quaque took on the slave

trade, he was biting both the Anglican and African hands that fed him his entire life. Yet his

letters contain compelling stories of slave uprisings, brutal attacks on native peoples, and

beleaguered slave forts under siege. Interestingly, only a few times did Quaque argue against

slavery on the basis of his own racial identification as an African. He understood that

merchants would ignore his pleas because of his distinctive identity. Some prominent

merchants even refused to attend divine services with him because they, according to

Quaque, “would never come to Cape Coast to be Subservient to, and to sit under the Nose of

a Black Boy to hear Him pointing or laying out their faults before them.”99 Instead, Quaque

began to attack slavery as wholly inconsistent with Christian principles, hoping to insulate his

arguments – and probably himself – from race-based rebuttals.

Quaque envisioned a Christian empire where race would not matter, and he despised

the “upstarts” who objected to his own preaching because of some “Distinction of Colours

and Place of Nativity.” He clearly understood that his unique position as an African could

obviously hamper and obfuscate his anti-slavery position. Instead, he extolled the values and

unity of what he called “the Christian Race” and attacked the slave trade from the outside,

arguing that it impeded the propagation of revealed religion and kept Africa in perpetual

98 Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost”: 43-46; and St. Clair, The Door of /o Return, 219.

99 Undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, probably dated from October 20th, 1767 to the end of that year,

in Quaque Letters. It is likely that Quaque’s own kin, if not his immediate family, were directly or

indirectly involved in the slave trade, though Quaque never mentioned this in his letters. For a compelling

narrative of the experiences of two slave-trading African princes, see Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of

Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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darkness.100 He complained that the “cursed slave trade” was the only thing stopping a

successful mission and regretted that “the stir of religion and its everlasting recompense is

not so much in vogue as the vicious practice of purchasing flesh and blood like oxens in

market places.”101 By using Christian theology as a basis for anti-slavery, Quaque was

hoping to distance his arguments from his own personal identity while simultaneously

formulating anti-slavery rhetoric that was being used at the same time in England. Quaque

thus passionately asserted that the expansion of the Kingdom of God was being hindered by a

desire for material wealth at the expense of countless African souls.

The African missionary further attacked the merchants by employing a rhetorical

strategy that would be used by later abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Beecher

Stowe: he contended that even the most pious of Christians could be transformed into savage

beasts when they participated in the slave trade. He reported to the SPG that English slave

traders forfeited their rights to even call themselves Christians because, “by their Behaviour

they seem as if they have changed the good Seeds sown, by the stain which they now

shamefully cast upon the Profession wherewith they were called; by Corruptions of Morals

and the Inhuman Practice and the love of Mammon which they hold in great Esteem.”102 As

noted earlier, part of the problem was that Africa was often characterized as a zone of

100 Quaque to the SPG, 6 February 1771, in Quaque Letters. The very concept of a “Christian Race” –

rather than biological races – was central to early modern theological discourses on ethnological

differences between people. See Kidd, The Forging of Races, 54-78. Also, William Shenstone wrote an

anti-slavery poem that used the same language (“What fate reserv’d me for this Christian race? O race

more polish’d, more severe than they!”). See Granville Sharp, An essay on slavery, proving from Scripture

its inconsistency with humanity and religion; in answer to a late publication, entitled, “The African trade

for /egro slaves shewn to be consistent with principles of humanity, and with the laws of revealed

religion.” (Burlington, N.J., 1773), 27.

101 Quaque to Samuel Johnson, 5 April 1769, in Herbert and Carol Schneider, eds., Samuel Johnson,

President of King’s College: His Career and Writings Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press,

1929), 429; Quaque to Samuel Johnson, dated November 26, 1767, in Schneider, eds., Samuel Johnson,

President of King’s College, 425.

102 Undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, in Quaque Letters. See footnote 13.

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irreligion. Conventional moral and religious standards and behaviors that would be

customary in England were much shakier on African ground, and once civilized Englishmen

came to Africa, the threat of their degenerating into immoral and barbarous slave traders was

heightened. Only two years after Quaque’s arrival he made this connection, reporting that “It

is astonishing for a refined Mind to reflect upon some inhuman Actions which are done in the

wildest or the most savagest Part of Africa.”103 He was referring not only to what he

perceived as savage local customs but also to the practice of slave kidnapping and trading.

Quaque also noted that merchants and official government agents often refused to come to

holy services because they could not, in good conscience, do so on one day and then trade

slaves the next. This became their usual excuse for not attending holy services. Like most

missionaries before and after him, Quaque understood that the example of the English who

lived nearest to indigenous peoples would be a major factor in the development of Christian

missions. If they refused to attend divine service, there was little chance that Quaque could

transform the religious sensibilities of the Africans he was trying to evangelize.

Quaque’s renunciation the merchants and the slave trade they promulgated placed

him at one end of an ideological divide within the eighteenth century British Atlantic. From

the 1760s on, British intellectuals became ever more concerned about the morality of the

slave trade and its standing as a national sin. The leaders of this movement were usually

Methodists and black Atlantic writers – such as Olauduh Equiano – who had close

connections with other evangelical characters throughout the Atlantic world. Indeed, one

scholar has recently argued, quite persuasively, that Quaque’s London education placed him

at the center of Methodist evangelical activity, and as such his anti-slavery stance was

informed just as much by transatlantic Methodist evangelism as it was by his own identity as

103 Quaque to the SPG, 5 September 1768, Quaque Letters.

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an African. But historians should be cautious of painting Anglicans universally as defenders

of the slave trade and Methodists as its attackers. Some of the most staunch and conservative

Anglicans certainly defended the slave trade, and their ownership of slaves in plantations and

towns around the Atlantic world gave them a reason. But, at the same time, there were also

Anglicans who were virulently anti-slavery and anti-Methodist. William Warburton, for

example, was renowned for defending the Anglican Church against Methodism, but he was

also decidedly opposed to the transatlantic slave trade. On the very same month that Quaque

first arrived home to Africa, Warburton took the opportunity of an anniversary sermon to

proclaim that it was deplorable to speak of Africans as property. In fact, Warburton argued,

Africans were “endowed with all our Faculties, possessing all our qualities but that of

colour.” Treating “our BRETHREN” with such unChristian brutality, Warburton implored,

“shocks all the feelings of humanity, and the dictates of common sense.” The Anglican then

concluded that, since Africans were fundamentally equal to their English brothers, “nothing

is more certain in itself, and apparent to all, than that the infamous traffic for Slaves, directly

infringes both divine and human law. /ature created Man, free: and Grace invites him to

assert this freedom.”104 Quaque’s anti-slavery stance might have certainly been influenced

by Methodist evangelism, but it should be remembered that Methodists were not alone in

beginning to critique the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, for there were a handful of

Anglicans who were beginning to do the very same thing.

104 William Warburton, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on

Friday February 21, 1766 (London: E. Owen, 1766), 25-26. Warburton’s attack on Methodism can be

found in Warburton, The Doctrine of Grace: Or, the Office and Operations of the Holy Spirit Vindictated

From the Insults of Infidelity, and the Abuses of Fanaticism:…in Three Books (London: A. Millar, and J.

and R. Tonson, 1763). Not surprisingly, Warburton’s attacks resulted in even more vitriolic responses from

Methodist leaders that devastated Warburton’s popularity.

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Ironically, the very man who started Quaque’s career as an African missionary would

position himself at the opposite end of the spectrum as a fierce defender of the transatlantic

slave trade. In 1772 – the same year of Britain’s famous Somerset case – former New Jersey

and African missionary Thomas Thompson published a tract entitled The African Trade for

/egro Slaves, Shewn to be Consistent With Principles of Humanity, and With the Laws of

Revealed Religion.105 A former slaveowner himself, Thompson relied on scripture, property

rights, and a tired characterization of Africans as pagans to conclude that slave trading was

“not contrary to the law of nature” and was “as vindicable as any species of trade

whatever.”106 While Thompson suggested that his motives were intellectual only, he

dedicated the tract to none other than the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, the joint

stock company in charge of protecting and maintaining the African slave trade. Thompson

thus provided a religious defense of the transatlantic slave trade, a trade which knit the British

empire together, served as the commercial backbone of imperial power, and infuriated his

African protégé.

Thompson’s publication had a long-term consequence. It influenced one

philanthropist to respond just a year later with An Essay on Slavery, which aggressively

attacked the institution and declared that it was completely inconsistent with Christian

principles. The author’s name was Granville Sharp, and though Sharp had been fighting

105 The case of James Somerset was a landmark case where a slave sued for his freedom in an English

court. Although he won, and although the case was widely interpreted as declaring slavery illegal in

England, the decision was actually not as sweeping as many contemporaries believed. For more on the

case and its importance in transatlantic abolitionism, see Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall:

The Landmarks Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005); and

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999), 469-522.

106 Thomas Thompson, The African Trade for /egro Slaves, Shewn to be Consistent With Principles of

Humanity, and With the Laws of Revealed Religion (Canterbury: Simmons and Kirkby, 1772), 15 and 12.

Thompson probably had at least one slave, including Phoebe, a “wench” whom he baptized during his

tenure in New Jersey. See Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural /orth, 70.

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slavery in Britain for years – he had been quite active in the Somerset case that year –

Thompson’s pamphlet compelled him to publish one of his first attacks on the slave trade. In

it, he described Thompson’s conclusions as “totally false” and replete with poor

argumentation.107 Instead, Sharp envisioned an empire that looked strikingly similar to the

one that Quaque had proposed: an empire of universal Christian benevolence where religion,

rather than race, was the true marker of humanity. Sharp asserted that “the glorious system

of the gospel destroys all narrow, national partiality; and makes us citizens of the world, by

obliging us to profess universal benevolence: but more especially are we bound, as

Christians, to commiserate and assist to the utmost of our power all persons in distress, or

captivity.”108 For both Quaque and Sharp, Christianity had less to do with one’s identity as

an Englishmen or African and more to do with one’s identity as a Christian brother in an

expansive, global community of benevolent believers. Slavery was therefore inherently

contrary to the very Christian principles upon which the British empire prided itself.109

Although Quaque never published any anti-slavery tract, and although his mentor

seems to have had the more audible voice in the struggle over Christianity and slavery,

Quaque still influenced the anti-slavery debate to a significant degree. Alexander

Falconbridge, who wrote a scathing critique of the transatlantic slave trade, actually spoke

with Quaque when he was at the Cape Coast, and he incorporated the information that

Quaque relayed into his published and private denunciations of the trade. A British Naval

Officer called to testify about the horrors of slavery in the early 1790s also reported that he

107 Sharp, An Essay on Slavery, 19.

108 Sharp, An Essay on Slavery, 22-23.

109 Sharp would eventually become the leading figure in the British abolitionist movement, a movement

that would culminate in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. For more on the end of the British

transatlantic slave trade, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

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learned about the disruption that the trade caused from Philip Quaque personally.110 While

Quaque has never been as celebrated as the more popular Olauduh Equiano or Ottobah

Cugoano, his impact on the slavery debate (though indirect) was certainly significant. In the

end, Quaque’s assault on the transatlantic slave trade conveniently addresses Armitage’s

fourth characteristic of the British empire: Quaque and Granville alike would have agreed

that the British empire could never be “free” if it was an empire of slaves.

Quaque thus embraced the theory of a Protestant empire but despised the commercial

aspect of Britain’s imperial growth. Yet his stance on a maritime empire in Africa was

perhaps the most ambivalent aspect of his ideology. An eighteenth century maritime empire,

of course, included the commercial strength and vast wealth that maritime commercialism

accrued. It would have also included the naval resources, personnel, as well as a series of

forts to function as the empire’s skeletal system and protect imperial interests abroad.

Quaque firmly believed that British military resources could be used to spread the gospel, not

necessarily to bombard natives into submission, but to stop rival religions from competing

with the British for the hearts and minds of Africans. The British Navy, in particular, could

be tremendously helpful in both maintaining order and reminding English merchants and

traders that even though they were in Africa they were still Christians. The presence of the

British military could help transform this African space into a sacred one. Quaque said so

himself when he noted that he preached to virtually no one in 1770 until “the Time when His

Majesty’s Ship Phoenix and the Hound Sloop of War lay in Cape Coast Castle Road, which

afforded Me an Opportunity on Sunday before Easter of Expatiating the little Talent I have

by reading of Prayers.”111 It was in this respect that Quaque actually welcomed a military

110 Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost”: 48-49.

111 Quaque to the SPG, 12 April 1770, in Quaque Letters.

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empire, and he explained to the SPG how “far more Advantageous it would be could this

Settlement be more immediately under His Majesty’s Protection.” As if he was not definitive

enough, Quaque clarified by stating, “I mean a Military Establishment.”112

At the same time, Quaque also recognized that the business of running a military

empire could impede the progress of the gospel in West Africa. In the spring of 1777 a ship

dubbed the Weazle docked, unloaded all the supplies necessary for the defense of the fort,

distributed arrears to different servants, and put the region in such a state of commotion that

the “hurry and confusion of Business together, have at present conspired to obliterate the

thoughts of that incumbent Duty and Service in Public.”113 When an African rebellion broke

out over a decade later, Quaque refused to defend the slave fort at Annamaboe. He simply

explained that bearing arms against other Africans would be “highly inconsistent and

injurious to my Profession.”114 He was booted out of Cape Coast Castle for expressing such

convictions. If a military establishment could help Christianity gain a footing in Africa, it

could just as easily distract Englishmen from their daily spiritual obligations and generate

tensions with native Africans. Quaque was therefore torn between the evangelical

advantages of having a military establishment in Africa and the spiritual costs associated with

maintaining it.

For Quaque, the major problem with the British empire was that, in spite of its

nominal identification as a Protestant kingdom, several governors in charge of Cape Coast

Castle could not have cared less about religion. It was for this reason that Quaque had a

tense relationship with the governors and garrison of the Castle. He complained of the

112 Quaque to the SPG, 5 September 1769, in Quaque Letters.

113 Quaque to the SPG, 11 April 1777, in Quaque Letters.

114 Quaque to the SPG, 21 July 1792, in Quaque Letters.

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soldiers’ taking too many wives, their lack of public worship, and their participation in the

slave trade. Quaque assumed that, if the governors of the Castle were more religiously

devoted, the Anglicans could make real and meaningful changes in the African spiritual

landscape. Instead, he charged that most of the governors were only concerned with “love of

gain and Ambition,” rather than the souls of black folk.115 He was also personally insulted

that the governors rarely invited him to dinner. He recalled that he experienced “very

disrespectful treatment from the Officers of the Fort” and became increasingly concerned

when he discovered that one of the governors was a “very rank Presbyterian born and

bred.”116 One governor kicked Quaque out of the Fort when they needed more space for

other soldiers. Quaque accused another of making “a ridicule of religion, and a future state,

as a trick and cheat, and that he never knew any one to chuse to go to heaven when he could

live upon earth.”117 Quaque developed a vicious rivalry with another of the governors, who

allegedly claimed that “Clergymen have no Business in these Parts, unless come to be

starved.” Quaque retaliated by telling his superiors that “The present Governor would have

no more to do with Prayers, while he can purchase Slaves at a cheap rate, unless upon

Extraordinary days to shew Me off.”118 When this governor died from a horrible disease in

1770, Quaque admitted to his benefactors that “since now my Enemy is taken out of my way,

I am therefore in great hopes of seeing better Days.”119 There was no love lost between

115 Quaque to the SPG, 19 August 1771, in Quaque Letters.

116 SPG Records, SPG Journal, Volume 18, 266. Quaque to the SPG, 28 September 1766, in Quaque

Letters.

117 SPG Records, SPG Journal, Volume 18, 337.

118 Undated letter from Quaque to the SPG, probably written in the fall of 1767, in Quaque Letters. See

footnote 13.

119 Quaque to the SPG, 27 September 1770, in Quaque Letters.

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Quaque and the imperial governors who, according to the African missionary, put the slave

trade before the truths of revealed religion.

To return to David Armitage’s concept of the British empire as “Protestant,

commercial, maritime, and free,” it is clear that Quaque wanted the empire to be more

Protestant than it really was, less commercial than it had been (especially with respect to the

slave trade), more militarily aggressive if it resulted in better conditions under which to

spread the gospel, and, of course, free – which meant no slaves. The problem was that

Quaque was living on the west coast of Africa in the eighteenth century, when the British

empire was, in Quaque’s view, decadent, corrupt, and certainly not living up to its duty to

propagate the gospel in foreign parts. Quaque was thus neither a champion of traditional

indigenous rights nor a blind follower of the British empire. Instead, he was a Christian

African struggling with his own distinctive identity while simultaneously formulating,

through his letters, a conception of empire founded upon an expansive and universal

Christian brotherhood. Unfortunately for him, the British empire was not that empire.

Inside the courtyard of the notorious Cape Coast Castle is a small cemetery reserved

for important English officials who governed at the Cape Coast. Placed next to tablets

commemorating the legacy of English governors, military officials, and brokers, there is a

tablet reserved for Philip Quaque which reads: “Philip Quarco, 1741-1816.”120 While

African Anglicans have honored his memory as a testimony to the determination of Christian

missionary work, his real legacy was much more ambiguous. Philip Quaque’s entire life

story, unearthed by the dozens of letters he left behind, highlights the liminal space in which

native missionaries operated, a space filled with complexity, ambiguity, and tension. As an

120 There is also a tablet that says “Rev Philip Quaque died 17 Oct 1816,” at Christ Church Cathedral on the

Cape Coast.

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African evangelizing other Africans, Quaque was a walking paradox: a literate, English

speaking, well educated African preaching in a place where the very denial of African

intelligence helped justify the slave trade that surrounded him.

Christian missions often became an exercise in futility, and for Quaque this was no

different. Yet his relationship with Africans and his ideological conceptualization of the

British empire expose the contradictions and uncertainties that characterized the use of native

missionaries. In Quaque’s view, the kingdom of God did not acknowledge the geopolitical or

military boundaries drawn up by secular empires. Instead, the Kingdom that indigenous

missionaries envisioned was an inclusive one, an expansive one; an empire that cared not for

material or national gain, but for the souls of the millions of indigenous peoples throughout

the world. These high expectations, coupled with the minimal results, left many native

evangelists disillusioned. As British historian Andrew Porter said for the nineteenth century,

missionaries’ “engagement with empire more often than not took the form of bitter

experience,” leaving their “relationship with empire as deeply ambiguous at best.”121

Examining native missionaries like Philip Quaque restores that ambiguity and demonstrates

that the relationships between missionaries and their potential neophytes, and between

religion and empire, were much more fragile and tenuous than we have previously

acknowledged.

121 Porter, Religion Versus Empire?, 12-13.

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CHAPTER FIVE

ATIVE EVAGELISTS, MOHAWKS, AD OEIDAS

I THE PRE-REVOLUTIOARY IROQUOIA BORDERLADS

There may have been no better symbol of English civility and gentility in the

eighteenth century than tea. Critically important for the British imperial economy, essential

to the networking of socialites and politicos, and the commodity of choice for Bostonian

protestors to dump overboard, tea was universally understood as vital to the constitutions of

English bodies and essential to the conduct of social life. This explains why, in February of

1765, one missionary stationed among the Oneida Indians in southern New York complained

bitterly about his lack of it. Writing to a colleague to beg him for more tea, coffee, and a new

shirt, the evangelist revealed that the Indian family he lived with had depleted most of these

supplies during the frigid winter. His shirt had even wasted away because it had gone too

long without a good, vigorous wash.1 While this evangelist was stationed at Onaquaga, an

Oneida town that had actively invited Christian missionaries to settle there, his colleague had

ingratiated himself among a group of Seneca Indians who were much less amenable to the

idea of Christian missionaries than their Oneida cousins. Stuck among what he dubbed “the

most savage and barbarous” Indians on the North American continent, the Seneca missionary

was infuriated by the first missionary’s complaints. Although his colleague at Onaquaga was

universally renowned for his “polished manners,” the Seneca missionary nevertheless

1 Joseph Woodby (Woolley) to Samuel Kirkland, 11 February 1765, in Samuel Kirkland, The Journals of

Samuel Kirkland: 18th-century Missionary to the Iroquois, Government Agent, Father of Hamilton College,

ed. Walter Pilkington (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College, 1980), 17.

304

advised him to make use of the innumerable natural materials that the wilderness afforded to

make his greatly desired tea.2 These included “pine buds, sassafras bows & the bark of the

root spice wood,” and “chips from the heart of the sugar maple.” “These are more friendly to

our constitution,” the Seneca missionary observed, “than foreign teas & all more so to the

natives.” As for the deteriorating clothes, he added that his friend should procure a leather

shirt and have “Indian breeches” made for him. “Disgrace or no disgrace,” he assured his

colleague, “I expect to do it shortly for myself.”3 Most Christian missionaries experienced

this universal temptation to “go native” and adopt the foods, material comforts, clothing, and

lifeways of their charges. The Seneca missionary was actually endorsing it. What made this

interchange between missionaries unique was that the man who directed his colleague to go

native was an Anglo-American preacher named Samuel Kirkland. What made it even more

peculiar was that his colleague was Joseph Woolley, an Indian evangelist. Here is an

exceptional case where an English missionary insisted that a native one go native.4

While we do not have a record of Joseph Woolley’s response, he must have

considered Kirkland’s suggestion with some trepidation. After all, he was a graduate of

Moor’s Charity School, an educational institution in Lebanon, Connecticut operated by the

famous Eleazar Wheelock. Wheelock’s “Grand Design” was to “purge all the Indian out” of

his students and employ them as native preachers among the Iroquois in the 1760s.5 Trained

2 .B. O’Callaghan, ed., The Documentary History of the State of *ew-York Vol. IV (Albany: Charles Van

Benthuysen, 1851), 218.

3 Kirkland to Woolley, 31 March 1765, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 18-19.

4 Woolley was a Delaware Indian trained at Eleazar Wheelock’s Charity School in the late 1750s and

1760s. A compelling narrative of Kirkland’s missionary work, set against his relationship with Mohawk

warrior and diplomat Joseph Brant, can be found in Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers

and the *orthern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

5 Quoted in James Axtell, “Dr. Wheelock’s Little Red School,” in *atives and *ewcomers: The Cultural

Origins of *orth America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 180.

305

in husbandry and agriculture, indoctrinated in scripture, and fluent in Latin, Greek, and

Hebrew, Woolley’s education at Wheelock’s school – as well as his identity as a Delaware

Indian – set him apart from the Indians he was trying to convert. Woolley was not the only

Native American to experience this tension, for there were a handful of other Montauk,

Mohegan, and Delaware Indians who took up residence at Wheelock’s school, received a

classical education, and were then sent out to open the door for the gospelization of the most

powerful Indian nation in North America. Caught between two cultures, Woolley and other

native preachers from Wheelock’s school constantly struggled with this perpetual identity

crisis while simultaneously hoping to change the identities of the people to whom they

preached.

As the most famous and best recorded effort in the history of eighteenth century

Protestant missions, the Wheelock program has been combed over by historians, literary

scholars, and others. This scholarship can be divided into three distinct but overlapping

tendencies. First, historians like James Axtell have focused extensively on the institutional

history of Wheelock’s school, especially the way in which it served (or, in Axtell’s argument,

did not serve) as a foundation for Dartmouth College.6 Literary scholars, on the other hand,

have examined the writings of Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson (Wheelock’s most

famous pupils) to reveal how they used Christian evangelism to forge a distinct Native

American literary tradition.7 Finally, recent years have seen a growing interest in Indian

6 Axtell takes issue with the assumption that Dartmouth College was a natural extension of Moor’s Charity

School, and argues that Wheelock’s imperious nature and undisguised racism made him break completely

with the idea of native preachers in the late 1760s. See James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of

Cultures in Colonial *orth America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 204-215; and Axtell, “Dr.

Wheelock’s Little Red School,” 174-188.

7 Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and *ative American

Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of

Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century *ative America, ed. Joanna

Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Joseph Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian Brethren:

The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776, ed. Laura J. Murray (Amherst, MA: University of

306

communities after the American Revolution, and the effort by Wheelock’s Indians to

purchase Oneida lands and build a settlement in upstate New York (known as the

Brothertown movement) has been the subject of several articles, dissertation chapters, and

even a forthcoming monograph.8 And yet, as important as all of these studies are to our

understanding of this native missionary program, the actual mission to the Iroquois Indians –

the raison d’etre of Wheelock’s school – has often been neglected.9

The purpose of this chapter is to recover these Iroquois missions by examining three

major problems. First, this dissertation has already demonstrated that Wheelock’s effort to

use Indian preachers was never as original as he claimed. Indeed, the Iroquois mission was

less a result of his own personal ingenuity than a product of the end of the Seven Years’ War,

existing practices of using native preachers in Iroquoia, and the material and spiritual

concerns of the Oneida Indians. Secondly, this chapter explores the relationship between the

Christian preachers and their Iroquois audiences. Just as literacy bestowed upon some native

preachers certain cultural advantages, it also gives us the ability to track their movements,

attitudes, and evangelical efforts, as these preachers left nearly ninety letters that document

their work among the Oneidas. These letters highlight the unique ways in which preachers

like Woolley translated Christianity, perceived of other Indians, and situated themselves as

Massachusetts Press, 1998); Laura J. Warner, “What Did Christianity Do for Joseph Johnson? A Mohegan

Preacher and His Community,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, Robert Blair St.

George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

8 Drew Lopenzina, “The Whole Wilderness Shall Blossom as the Rose”: Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson,

and the Question of Native Settlement on Cooper’s Frontier,” American Quarterly 58 No. 4 (December

2006): 1119-1145; Linford D. Fisher, “‘Traditionary Religion’: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of

Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776” (PhD Diss, Harvard University, 2008): 330-392;

Thomas Commuck, “Sketch of the Brothertown Indians,” Wisconsin Historical Collections 4 (1859): 291-

298; and David J. Silverman’s forthcoming book on the intertribal migration to Brothertown, New York.

9 There are a few exceptions. General summaries of the Iroquois mission can be found in William DeLoss

Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of *ew England (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1899), 82-

118; Margaret Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 (Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 1988), 233-257; and Fisher, “‘Traditionary Religion’”: 267-329.

307

both Indian and Christian. Thirdly, the letters also illuminate the many conflicts between

native preachers and their superiors, native preachers and Oneida Indians, and the conflicts

among native preachers themselves. These conflicts undermined the mission as a whole and

cast doubt on the propriety of native preachers. And yet, Wheelock’s failures did not

necessarily end the native missionary enterprise. In fact, Wheelock’s mismanagement of this

affair only reinforced other missionaries’ belief that native peoples would be central to

indigenous Christianization within the Atlantic world and beyond.10

The Open Door Policy

Protestant missionaries viewed 1763 as a seminal year in the sacred history of

Christianity. The French were officially defeated in the Seven Years’ War, leaving Canada,

the Great Lakes Region, and the Mississippi Valley in the hands of the British and their

colonial allies. English divines understood this change in fortune as a sign from God himself,

one that offered Protestantism a unique opportunity to spread the light of Christianity where

pagan darkness and Catholic foppery once ruled. The metaphor of the open door was

employed ad infinitum to characterize the providential prospects that the fall of the French

accrued to Protestantism. An Anglican divine named Edmund Keene had argued as early as

1757 that the war of the 1750s and early 60s gave the English a “Prospect of seeing an

10 This chapter relies heavily on published anthologies produced by Joanna Brooks, Laura J. Murray, and

James Dow McCallum, which are nearly total in their comprehensive coverage of the letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians. For the manuscript versions of their letters, and for the letters of other missionaries

involved in this mission, see Dartmouth College Library, Microfilm Edition of the Papers of Eleazar

Wheelock Together With the Early Archives of Dartmouth College & Moor’s Indian Charity School, and

the Records of the Town of Hanover, *ew Hampshire Through the Year 1779 (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth

College Library, 1971); and the accompanying guide, Dartmouth College Library, A Guide to the Microfilm

Edition of the Papers of Eleazar Wheelock: Together With the Early Archives of Dartmouth College &

Moor’s Indian Charity School, and the Records of the Town of Hanover, *ew Hampshire Through the Year

1779 (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Library, 1971).

308

effectual Door opened to introduce Missionaries into [Indian] Castles.”11 Samuel Buell

reported that “a glorious door” was opening for the propagation of the gospel to the Iroquois

by the end of 1763.12 Eleazar Wheelock also observed that there was a “door opening for a

hundred Missionaries…and perhaps for ten Times that Number” to go among the Indians

now that the French were gone.13 Gideon Hawley called the moment a “very fine opening”

and Thomas Newton (an Anglican) declared that “a wide field is opened to us by the late

treaty of peace.”14 Another Anglican minister in the American colonies observed in 1762

that he and his Protestant colleagues should not miss the incredible potential for Christian

evangelization that now lay before them. “The War being now happily concluded in that

Country,” he declared, “there will, in a short Time, be the best Opportunity of propagating

the Gospel among the heathen Natives of that Part of the World, that was ever offered.”15

This appeared to be a crucial moment in Christian history. Protestant ministers had long been

11 Edmund Keene, A Sermon Preach’d before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday

February 18, 1757 (London: E. Owen, 1757), 48. By “castles” Keene actually means Iroquois settlements.

12 Quoted in Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of *ew England, 85.

13 Eleazar Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful *arrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present

State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763),

23. Wheelock uses the metaphor of the open door again on 44 when he notes, “This was the opening a

Door which never had been opened for such a Purpose to these Nations.”

14 Gideon Hawley to Andrew Oliver, 20 May 1761, in Gideon Hawley Letters, 1754-1807, Mss Collections

of the Massachusetts Historical Society (typescript edition); and Thomas Newton, On the Imperfect

Reception of the Gospel. A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on

Friday February 17, 1769 (London: E. Owen, 1769), 28.

15 John Hume, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on Friday

February 19, 1762 (London: E. Owen, 1762), 45. This quote is actually taken from a Mr. Beach, an

Anglican missionary stationed in the colonies. The best analysis of the importance of 1763 is Colin G.

Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of *orth America (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2006).

309

fantasizing about the conversion of the Iroquois nation, and in 1763 the door seemed open for

them to do it.

But the persistence of French Catholicism, as well as French Catholics, loomed large.

The Jesuits had made inroads into Iroquoian villages during the seventeenth century, and

Protestant ministers feared and even envied their limited successes. They believed that the

Indians of Iroquoia were “infected with the roman catholic religion” and “deeply tinctured

with romish superstition.”16 Although the Treaty of Paris had officially ousted the French

and their missionaries out of the Indian borderlands, many Catholic evangelists consciously

decided to ignore the pact. “We Expect one of the French Ministers here this season,” one

Mohegan missionary reported to Eleazar Wheelock in the spring of 1768, “for which Reason

I don’t love to leave the Indians.”17 Native preachers, as well as their white counterparts,

were therefore viewed as weapons in the fight against stubborn French sympathies and even

more stubborn French preachers. For their own part, Iroquoian Indians were highly selective

of the Christian missionaries they brought into their lands before and after the war, and they

understood the ways in which missionary influence could generate inter- and intra-tribal

16 Journal of Samuel Kirkland, 20 June 1774, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 94; and

Charles Chauncy, All *ations of the Earth blessed in Christ, the Seed of Abraham. A Sermon Preached at

Boston, At The Ordination of the Rev. Mr. Joseph Bowman, To The Work of the Gospel-Ministry, More

Especially Among the Mohawk-Indians, on the Western Borders of *ew-England. August 31. 1762

(Boston: John Draper, 1762), 28. The Mohawks came to depend significantly on ministers for their

articulation of Iroquoian Christianity. For early Protestant efforts among the Mohawks, see Daniel K.

Richter, “‘Some of Them…Would Always Have a Minister with Them”: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683-

1719,” American Indian Quarterly 16 No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 471-484.

17 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 2 May 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 70-

72. John Witherspoon, an agent for the SSPCK and a later tutor for two African missionaries in training,

also suggested that preaching to Iroquois Indians would help detach them from the “fraudulent nation” of

the French and ally them more strongly with the English. See John Witherspoon, The absolute *ecessity of

Salvation through Christ, A Sermon, Preached Before the Society in Scotland for propagating Christian

Knowledge, In the High Church of Edinburgh, On Monday, January 2. 1758. To which is subjoined, A

short Account of the present State of the Society (Edinburgh: W. Miller, 1758), 41.

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divisions along kinship lines.18 And yet, the unique circumstances of the Iroquois at the end

of 1763 (discussed below) necessitated that they invite Christian missionaries into their

homes, lands, and lives, thus holding that metaphorical door open for native preachers.

English divines and Native Americans both understood Christianity as a fundamental

component of diplomacy, and Eleazar Wheelock pushed his sponsors to think of the

diplomatic and security benefits of his native missionary program.19 Wheelock informed Sir

William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs and arguably the most powerful British

official in North America, that indigenous missionaries might “guard [the Iroquois] against

the influence of Jesuits; be an antidote to their idolatrous and savage practices; attach them to

the English interest, and induce them to a cordial subjection to the crown of Britain, and it is

to be hoped, to a subjection to the king of Zion.”20 One of Wheelock’s colleagues even

declared that “20 Missionaries among the Indians would be better to keep them in peace than

5000 Men under Arms.”21 While Wheelock’s plan was fundamentally evangelical in nature,

18 Daniel Richter, “Iroquois versus Iroquois: Jesuit Missions in Village Politics, 1642-1686,” Ethnohistory

32 No. 1 (Winter 1985): 1-16. For Jesuit use of martial imagery to communicate Christianity among the

Iroquois, see John Steckley, “The Warrior and the Lineage: Jesuit Use of Iroquoian Images to

Communicate Christianity,” Ethnohistory 39 No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 478-509.

19 This partially explains why English missionaries were often hired by imperial and colonial institutions as

diplomats. Christian Frederick Post, a Moravian missionary, was hired by Pennsylvania to perform a

diplomatic mission in 1758, and Samuel Kirkland was recommended by the American commissioners to be

a diplomat to the Iroquois at the onset of the American Revolution. See Journal of Christian Frederick

Post, 1758, in Mss collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Ms 519); and Calloway, The

American Revolution in Indian Country, 121, respectively.

20 Eleazar Wheelock to Sir William Johnson, June 1761, in David McClure, Memoirs of the Rev. Eleazar

Wheelock, D.D. Founder and President of Dartmouth College and Moor’s Charity School; With a

Summary History of the College and School: To Which are Added, Copious Extracts from Dr. Wheelock’s

Correspondence (Newburyport, M.A.: Edward Little & Co., 1811), 227. The same argument on the

centrality of missionaries to Indian diplomacy can be found in Samuel Hopkins, An Address to the People

of *ew-England. Representing The Very Great Importance of Attaching the Indians to Their Interest; *ot

Only By Treating Them Justly and Kindly; But By Using Proper Endeavours to Settle Christianity Among

Them (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1757).

21 Letter from Nathaniel Whitaker to Eleazar Wheelock, 16 July 1765, in Leon Burr Richardson, ed., An

Indian Preacher in England: Being Letters and Diaries Relating to the Mission of the Reverend Samson

Occom and the Reverend *athaniel Whitaker to Collect Funds in England for the Benefit of Eleazar

311

he also believed that he could drum up support for his native missionary program by

appealing to the anxieties of English policymakers and frontier settlers. He even suggested

that procuring Iroquois students would be another safeguard against the ravages of the

frontier, as Indian parents would be reluctant to attack English settlements if they knew their

children lived among them.22 As Wheelock began selling his native missionary plan, he

began to fuse military and evangelical rhetoric to attract a wide swath of donors and

supporters.

Wheelock’s charity school has been well-documented by other scholars, so there is

no need to repeat it in depth here.23 A Yale graduate who trained a Mohegan preacher named

Samson Occom in the 1740s, Wheelock tried his hand with other Indian pupils after

witnessing Occom’s miraculous transformation from pagan Indian to respected preacher. He

established a school in Lebanon, Connecticut and named it after its most generous donor.

Moor’s Charity School, as it was eventually called, brought in dozens of Delaware,

Mohegan, Montauk, Narragansett, and other Algonquian Indians in the 1750s and actively

recruited Iroquois Indians in the 1760s. The goal was to train these students in classical

languages, civility, agriculture, husbandry, and scripture, and then to use them as instruments

for the conversion of other Indians. As he told the nations of Iroquois beyond his borders,

Wheelock’s Indian Charity School, From Which Grew Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth

College Publications, 1933), 40. The provenance of this quote is confusing. It was actually said by Mr.

Ells (a minister in Stonington, Connecticut), who was hoping that Sir William Johnson would say the same

to the English court in order to drum up money and support for Wheelock’s plan. Wheelock also hoped to

create an Indian community of native Christians in Pennsylvania and New York, a program that was highly

suspected by General Amherst, Sir William Johnson, and other influential figures. They believed, probably

correctly, that Wheelock would only use his Indian community to open up white settlement. For more on

this scheme, see McClure, Memoirs of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, 232-236.

22 Eleazar Wheelock to the Earl of Dartmouth, 4 September 1766, in Richardson, ed., An Indian Preacher

in England.

23 James Dow McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock (New York: Arno Press, 1969); Axtell, The Invasion Within,

205-214; and Axtell, “Dr. Wheelock’s Little Red School,” 174-188.

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Wheelock’s primary objective was for the Iroquois students to return home, “and in their own

language teach their brothers, sisters, and friends the way of Salvation Jesus Christ.”24

Wheelock also sold his native missionary scheme as a fundamentally innovative and path-

breaking method for spreading the gospel. He extolled “the Newness of the Thing” and later

hagiographers would cultivate a cult of personality that laid the creation of a native pastorate

at his feet, suggesting that the idea for a native school was “his and his alone.”25 “Five years

ago,” Wheelock boasted in 1767, “nobody thought of a Probability of introducing a

Schoolmaster into these Parts.”26 Wheelock, his supporters, and even later historians

perpetuated his reputation as an originator and innovator who introduced the use of native

preachers in early America.

This reputation, however, is undeserved. Native evangelists had always been central

to the Protestant missionary enterprise, and Wheelock was actually building off of an older,

transatlantic tradition of using indigenous preachers. He was, after all, a Berkeley Scholar at

Yale, and his school in Lebanon looked strikingly similar to the one that Berkeley envisioned

for Bermuda: a seminary of learning located far away from the vices of English settlers and

Indian savages alike. The Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK),

the Edinburgh-based Presbyterian organization that initially lent tremendous support to

Wheelock’s plan, did not agree that Wheelock’s design was his and his alone. In 1767 they

24 Eleazar Wheelock’s Address to the Sachems and Chiefs of the Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, and other

Nations and tribes of Indians, in Callaghan, ed., The Documentary History of the State of *ew-York, Vol.

IV., 224.

25 Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the *arrative of the State, &c. of the Indian Charity-School, at

Lebanon, in Connecticut;: From *ov. 27th, 1762, to Sept. 3d, 1765 (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper,

1765), 19; and Richardson, An Indian Preacher in England, 12.

26 Nathaniel Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian Charity-School in Lebanon in Connecticut, *ew

England: Founded and Carried on by That faithful Servant of God, The Rev. Mr. Eleazar Wheelock

(London: J. and W. Oliver, 1767), 52.

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claimed that Wheelock’s program was “begun and carried on with the same spirit with which

the late Reverend and eminent Professor Frank founded the present famous orphan-house at

Hall in Germany, so it hath been blessed with many suchlike remarkable smiles from

Heaven.”27 Francke’s program, discussed briefly in a previous chapter, influenced Puritan

missionary efforts in New England, George Whitefield’s orphan schools in the Lowcountry,

native evangelical programs in India, and countless other Protestant missionary efforts. Like

Isaac Newton before him, Wheelock stood on the shoulders of giants. Yet he never conceded

that he was not the first to introduce native preachers into transatlantic missionary practice.

In fact, Wheelock was not even the first to introduce native missionaries into

Iroquoia, for the Indians of New York had a long tradition of using local Christian preachers

among them. It should be recalled that the early 1740s was a period of extraordinary change

in Anglican missionary policies. Anglicans’ earlier experiments with native royalty had little

effect, and growing religious competition from Methodists, Presbyterians, and Moravians

compelled them to begin using black slaves as teachers in the Carolinas. By the 1750s they

were even training West Africans – like Philip Quaque – for Anglican missionary work. The

Iroquois Indians were also part of this larger development, as Anglicans began employing

native schoolmasters, catechists, and readers in their Mohawk missions in the 1740s.28 The

earlier mission by William Andrews (from 1712 to 1719) was a failure, but in the 1740s

Anglican missionaries from Albany began to return to the Mohawk “castles” of

27 The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, Recommendation By The Society in

Scotland for propagating Christian Knowledge, In favour of the Academy established by Mr Eleazar

Wheelock, of Lebanon, in Connecticut, in *ew England, For the education of Indian Missionaries

(Edinburgh: s.n., 1767), 2.

28 See William B. Hart, “Mohawk Schoolmasters and Catechists in Mid-Eighteenth Century Iroquoia: An

Experiment in Fostering Literacy and Religious Exchange,” in The Language Encounter in the Americas,

1492-1800, ed. Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000); and Hart, For

the Good of Our Souls: Mohawk Authority, Accommodation, and Resistance to Protestant Evangelism,

1700-1780 (PhD Diss., Brown University, 1998), 213-246.

314

Tiononderoge (The Lower Castle near Fort Hunter) and Canajoharie (The Upper Castle),

hoping to cultivate native Christians among the 500 or so Mohawks who lived there in the

1740s and 50s.29 Henry Barclay, the Anglican missionary stationed in Albany, petitioned the

SPG to fund native schoolmasters at these two castles. By 1742 a Mohawk named Daniel

was teaching at Canajoharie and Cornelius (apparently a Sachem) was teaching at

Tiononderoge. Barclay’s choices, at first, appeared to be good ones. He reported that

Cornelius was “very faithful and diligent” in his teaching, and that Daniel was also very

successful.30 Because Barclay exercised only an itinerant presence among the Mohawks,

Daniel and Cornelius were often left to their own devices, and both of them had leave to join

the Mohawks when they went on their seasonal hunts. But their jobs were not simply

educational in nature, for even schoolmasters were charged with teaching students the

fundamental principles of Christianity. Barclay reported that Cornelius, the schoolmaster at

Tiononderoge, “reads prayers in my Absence, and is much Beloved by his Countrymen.”31

Native preachers like Daniel and Cornelius exercised and exhibited some of the spiritual

authority that absent English missionaries possessed.

In spite of its early successes and Cornelius’ alleged affection from his Mohawk

brothers, the use of native schoolmasters among the Mohawks also produced its quarrels.

First, one anti-English and anti-Christian Mohawk manipulated some of the tensions inherent

29 They were distinguished as “lower” and “upper” by virtue of their location on New York’s Mohawk

River.

30 Henry Barclay to the SPG, 17 November 1742, in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign

Parts, Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (East Ardsley, Yorkshire: Micro Methods,

1964), Letter Series B (hereafter referred to as SPG Records). Cornelius’ prayer groups are also reported in

John Gilbert, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; On Friday

February 17, 1743-44 (London: J. and H. Pemberton, 1744), 46.

31 Henry Barclay to the SPG, 4 November 1743, in SPG Records Letter Series B.

315

in using native missionaries. Cornelius and Daniel were both paid 7 pounds, 10 shillings

annually for their services, but the anti-English Mohawk told Cornelius that he had heard that

the SPG was actually paying him twenty pounds per year. The rest of the money, the

Mohawk declared, was being pocketed by Barclay, the English preacher.32 Other Iroquois

Indians opined that Barclay was “in League with the Devil, who was the Author of all the

Books” that the SPG had given them. The Mohawks at Tiononderoge did not believe this

story, but the ones at Canajoharie did, and by March of 1745, the Upper Castle was “all in a

Flame” over Barclay’s alleged fidelity to Satan.33 When John Ogilvie, an Anglican minister

working among the Mohawks in the 1750s, tried to train another Mohawk as a Christian

missionary, his parents took him home, “as they said, [because] he might learn to despise his

own Nation.”34 These episodes demonstrate how precarious the use of native missionaries in

Iroquoia actually was, and white evangelists had to walk very gingerly among the Iroquois in

the middle of the eighteenth century. In fact, Barclay’s reputation never recovered from his

rumored allegiance to Satan. Cornelius and Daniel quit their teaching jobs in 1746 and

Barclay followed soon after, taking a much less taxing post as a church rector.35

Anglicans and Iroquois seemed to have short memories, for by 1750 another

Anglican missionary (John Ogilvie) was cultivating another corps of native preachers at

Tiononderoge and Canajoharie. This time the Anglican relied upon Abraham, an older

Mohawk sachem and brother to Hendrick, the native preacher famous for being one of the

32 Henry Barclay to the SPG, 4 June 1744, in SPG Records Letter Series B.

33 Henry Barclay to the SPG, 12 March 1745, in SPG Records, Letter Series B.

34 Thomas Hayter, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on Friday

February 21, 1755 (London: Edward Owen, 1755), 49.

35 William B. Hart suggests that Cornelius and Daniel quite because of a dispute over unused funds. See

Hart, “Mohawk Schoolmasters and Catechists in Mid-Eighteenth Century Iroquoia”: 247.

316

Four Indian Kings who secured a diplomatic alliance with the British in the early 1710s.

Ogilvie reported in 1750 that Abraham was an active force in preventing drunkenness,

reading morning prayers, visiting other Indian nations, rejecting religious offers from French

Jesuits, and keeping up “divine service among the aged people & children whilst the others

are in the woods.”36 Jonathan Edwards even reported that Abraham was a “remarkable man;

a man of great solidity, prudence, devotion, and strict conversation.” Edwards concluded that

Abraham acted “very much as a person endowed with the simplicity, humanity, self-denial

and zeal of a true Christian.” Abraham must have been quite the catch, for Edwards actively

recruited Abraham and his Christian Mohawk allies to train them at his community at

Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Anglicans, of course, suspected this move from the New

Light minister and instead offered Abraham five pounds sterling to be a reader in the

Mohawk congregation. Although Abraham toyed with the idea of going to Stockbridge, it

never came to fruition.37 Instead, Old Abraham spent the last of his days reading and

teaching his fellow Mohawks, following his brothers and cousins on the warpath during the

French and Indian War, performing “Divine Service every morning and evening” during that

war, and training his son, Paulus, to do the same.38

When the SPG was debating whether to give Paulus a teaching position, they

admitted in 1750 that offering him the salaried post would “much engage his uncle Hendrick,

36 John Ogilvie to the SPG, 27 July 1750, quoted in John Wolfe Lydekker, The Faithful Mohawks (New

York: The MacMillan Company, 1938), 67.

37 “A Letter from Rev. Jonathan Edwards, to Hon. Thomas Hubbard, Esq. of Boston, Relating to the Indian

School at Stockbridge.” 31 August 1751, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First

Series, Vol. X (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1809), 143-151.

38 SPG Journal from 27 December 1755, quoted in Lydekker, The Faithful Mohawks, 83.

317

who we are all sensible has been of the most material Service during the late War.”39 Like

his uncle, Paulus also had military and political clout. He fought alongside his fellow

Mohawks during the French and Indian War and eventually took the sachemship at

Canajoharie when Hendrick and Abraham died in 1755 and 1756, respectively. In the

meantime, Paulus taught about 40 children each day to read and write, instructed them in the

Christian psalms, and even “read Prayers” in Ogilvie’s absence.40 He probably had the help

of an Anglican catechism after 1763, but he had little support from spelling books, for a

colleague of his noted that he taught Mohawk children the alphabet “by means only of little

manuscript scraps of paper.”41 In short, Paulus took up the mantle of indigenous Christian

leadership that Abraham left when he died in 1756. He would remain a lay reader throughout

and after the American Revolution, when he migrated with some of his fellow Mohawks to

Ontario. When Daniel Claus published a primer for the Christian education of Canadian

Indians in 1786, he included an engraving of Paulus teaching young Indians on the inside

cover.42

39 John Ogilvie to the SPG, 27 July 1750, quoted in Lydekker, The Faithful Mohakws, 68-69. Paulus

should not be confused with Petrus Paulus, another Mohawk reader who was appointed schoolmaster in

1750 but died severl years later.

40 Keene, A Sermon Preach’d, 47; and Robert Hay Drummond, A Sermon Preached before the

Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting In

the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow; on Friday February 15, 1754 (London: E. Owen, 1754), 54.

41 “Memoir of the Rev. John Stuart, D.D. The Last Missionary to the Mohawks,” in O’Callaghan, ed., The

Documentary History of the State of *ew-York, 314; Church of England, The Morning and Evening Prayer.

The Litany, and Church Catechism. *e Orhoengene neoni Yogaraskhagh Yondereanayendaghkwa, *e Ene

*iyoh Raodeweyena, neoni Onoghfadogeaghtige Yondadderighwanondoentha. (Boston: Richard and

Samuel Draper, 1763.

42 Daniel Claus, A Primer for the Use of the Mohawk Children: to Acquire the Spelling and Reading of

Their Own, As Well As to Get Acquainted With the English Tongue; Which for That Purpose Is Put on the

Opposite Page (London: Printed by C. Buckton, 1786).

318

The conversion of the Mohawks was never viewed as an end in itself. In fact, the

Mohawks occupied the eastern side of the Iroquoian “longhouse” of New York, and

missionaries imagined Mohawk evangelists spreading westward to their Iroquoian brothers:

the Oneidas, Tuscaroras (after the Tuscarora wars of the 1710s), Onandagas, Cayugas, and

Senecas. Even though historians have become accustomed to using these monikers to

distinguish between Iroquoian groups, there was a tremendous amount of overlap,

interconnection, and entanglement among them. Onaquaga, an “Oneida” town situated on

the Susquehanna River in southern New York, was actually comprised of Oneidas,

Shawnees, Delawares, Tuscaroras, Mohawks, and other ethnogenetic groups.43 Joseph Brant,

43 Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 61; and Ezra Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and

Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 1755-1794 : With a Selection From His Correspondence,

Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 165. The two most

319

the prominent Iroquois leader, was a Mohawk from Canajoharie who also owned land at

Onaquaga.44 Brant was not the only one to cross the permeable boundaries between Mohawk

and Oneida, for the similarity of dialect and their geographic proximity ensured that other

Iroquois travelers would work to knit these communities together.45 Missionaries hoped they

could exploit these itinerant tendencies as a tool to expose Indians west of Mohawk territory

to the fundamentals of Christianity. In 1751 Abraham, the Mohawk lay preacher, reported to

Jonathan Edwards that the Mohawks were not the only ones interested in hearing the word of

the Gospel. There were other, “considerable men,” Abraham reported, “of the nation of the

Oneiyutas, in other places, and also some of the Tuscarores, that are religiously disposed.”46

These “considerable men” were probably Good Peter, Isaac Dakayenensere, and Deacon

Thomas, leaders of Oneida communities and later Protestant evangelists.47

Good Peter was an Oneida Indian of the eel clan.48 A man of considerable import in

his own right, he embraced a call to Christian evangelism after a series of New Light

comprehensive studies of Onaquaga are in Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 108-

128; and Marjory Barnum Hinman, Onaquaga: Early Missionary Outpost, 1748-1777 (Windsor, NY: Old

Onaquaga Historical Society, 1968). Calloway calls Onaquaga “Oquaga,” and the town went by as many

as 62 different names.

44 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 115.

45 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 9-10; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground, 4.

46 “A Letter from Rev. Jonathan Edwards to Hon. Thomas Hubbard, Esq. of Boston, Relating to the Indian

School at Stockbridge,” 31 August 1751, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First

Series, Vol. X (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1809), 146.

47 “Good Peter” was also known as Domine Peter, Peter the Priest, Petrus the Minister, and especially

Gwedelhes Agwerondongwas. See Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of *ew England, 83 ff.

48 Each Iroquois nation was divided into distinct clans; the most common being wolf, bear, and turtle. See

Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 11-15.

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preachers visited his town of Onaquaga in the late 1740s.49 “Occasion’d partly by the death

of his father, and by a blessing on the means of grace,” one missionary explained, Peter had

his conversion experience in 1754 at the age of 21. English missionaries undoubtedly viewed

Peter’s sudden “conversion” as divine providence, but Peter might have understood it as a

change in his ever-evolving identity as an Oneida. A young adult coping with the death of

his father, Peter might have seen his turn to Christian Indian, and even Christian evangelist,

as a rite of passage, assuming a new adult identity along with a new name. 50 Gideon

Hawley, one of the most active English preachers at Onaquaga, left the village in 1756. Peter

then took up the mantle of Christian evangelism that Hawley left behind. He learned to read

the Mohawk bible, conducted itinerant missionary trips to other Iroquois Indians, and (with

Isaac), “constantly led the people in the publick worship of God, ever since they have been

destitute of a missionary.”51 Elisha Gunn, who bore witness to some of Peter’s sermons,

reported to Hawley that he “preaches excellently well.”52 But, like other native preachers

before and after him, Peter was no pawn. When English officials built a fort in his town in

1756, he urged them to take it down because it disturbed their peace and upset the Oneidas’

practice of Christianity. “Some of our Warriors are foolish & some of our Brothers soldiers

don’t fear God,” Peter explained, so the destruction of the fort would hopefully remind his

49 There was a mission station at Onaquaga from 1748 to about 1777. See Calloway, The American

Revolution in Indian Country, 112.

50 Gideon Hawley to Andrew Oliver, 20 May 1761, in Gideon Hawley Letters, 1754-1807, in Mss.

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (typescript version).

51 Gideon Hawley to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 November 1761, in Gratz Collection, Chaplains of the French

and Indian War and the Revolution, Case 8, Box 26, Mss Collections of the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania.

52 Gideon Hawley to Andrew Oliver, 20 May 1761, in Gideon Hawley Letters, 1754-1807, in Mss.

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (typescript version).

321

brothers and cousins to pay more attention to their spiritual lives than their martial ones.53

Paradoxically, Peter also made a name for himself as a warrior and scout for the English

during the Seven Years War, hoping to purge the French and their Catholic influences out of

Iroquoia.54 He also understood the financial benefits of his cultural skills. While a group of

Indians were collectively paid 15 shillings for assisting Gideon Hawley in returning from

Onaquaga, Peter alone was paid 12 shillings and 2 dollars for doing the same thing.55

Membership in Christ’s kingdom certainly had its privileges.

53 Quoted in Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 114.

54 Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American

Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 44.

55 Gideon Hawley to Andrew Oliver, 10 October 1765, in Gideon Hawley Letters, 1754-1807, in Mss.

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (typescript version).

322

Indian missionaries were not motivated solely by money, and it would be difficult to

overestimate the importance of Oneida preachers like Good Peter, Isaac Dakayenensere, and

Deacon Thomas to sustaining Christian evangelical efforts in the absence of English

missionaries. Isaac, for example, reported that as soon as he had his conversion experience,

he “made it my Business…to learn letters, and as much of the Christian religion as I possibly

could, and have endeavored all in my power to spread it amongst our people.”56 Isaac and

Peter oversaw religious services at Onaquaga while Deacon Thomas led Christian meetings

around Kanonwalohale in the 1750s and 60s, frequently preaching “with the Appearance of

great Affection and Zeal...for an Hour and a half.”57 These Oneida preachers even scouted

out evangelical opportunities among their Iroquois cousins. In 1765, for example, Good

Peter told Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland that a mission to the Senecas at that time

was a “bold if not hazardous enterprise,” since they were still riled up from the Indian

uprisings of the previous years. Kirkland ignored Peter’s advice and, predictably, his mission

eventually failed.58 Oneida preachers were fully aware of their centrality to Christian

missions and even pushed for more ecclesiastical authority. The Indians at Onaquaga, for

example, assured Gideon Hawley that they “need no further instruction, and were Isaac or

Peter ordained, they would be contented without an English missionary.”59 Neither Oneida

56 Quoted in Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 52.

57 Journal of Ralph Wheelock for 27 Sunday March 1768, in Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the

*arrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon in Connecticut, *ew England : Founded and Carried

on by The Rev. Dr. Eleazar Wheelock ; With an Appendix, Containing the Declaration of the Trustees of

That Charity; A List of the *ames of the Subscribers; An Account of Monies Received and Paid; Together

with Dr. Wheelock's Annual Account of his Receipts and Disbursements (London: J. and W. Oliver, 1769),

48. Deacons had ceremonial functions in Iroquoian society just as they did in Christian churches. See

Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 340 ff 44.

58 Journal of Samuel Kirkland for 28 March 1765, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 3.

59 Gideon Hawley to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 November 1761, in Gratz Collection, Chaplains of the French

and Indian War and the Revolution, Case 8, Box 26, Mss Collections of the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania.

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preachers were officially ordained, but their power as cultural brokers and Christian

missionaries only grew as the Oneidas and the English became more dependent upon them to

navigate the tempestuous waters of Christian missionary work among the Iroquois.

As the author of one study has recently remarked, Oneida preachers like Good Peter,

Isaac, and Deacon Thomas had the ability to “conceive and relate Christian precepts in

Oneida terms to aid nation members in grasping basic concepts. Whenever they spoke to

friends and relatives, these Oneidas were especially effective in transferring biblical

teachings and images into established Oneida constructions of reality.”60 They even did

damage control when English ministers floundered, and they embraced opportunities to do a

little preaching of their own. When Samuel Kirkland used the word “Karoughyage” (Oneida

for Heaven) for “Kanonwalohale” (the major Oneida town) in one of his sermons, Deacon

Thomas stepped in to clarify Kirkland’s meaning. “Brethren,” Thomas reportedly told his

fellow Oneidas, “don’t take Offence at what our Father has said; you see his Mind is so much

in Heaven, that he speaks it when he thinks nothing of it.” Thomas then immediately gave

what Kirkland dubbed a “lively, judicious and affecting Exhortation upon the Nature and

Properties of a spiritual Mind.” Kirkland remembered Thomas’ intercession as a seminal

moment in his mission to the Oneida, for he was in the midst of trying to get the town of Old

Oneida (a traditional, anti-Christian town) to congregate with those at Kanonwalohale (a

larger, more missionary-friendly settlement). The chiefs of Old Oneida met with Kirkland

sometime later and entered into a long discourse, with Thomas witnessing the event. The

Oneida chiefs then finished their discourse and awaited Kirkland’s reply. But “before I had

time to utter a Word by way of reply,” Kirkland recalled, “Thomas…desired to speak a few

Words, and gave a most judicious and striking Exhortation.” Far from feeling upstaged,

60 Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 62.

324

Kirkland seemed impressed, and reported that tears flowed quickly from the eyes of many

Oneida chiefs. He even proclaimed that he had “never heard Words flow more easy, or with

greater Propriety, from any Man in my life.”61 Although Kirkland might have envied Deacon

Thomas’ effortless ability to speak to the Oneidas, he never complained about the Oneida

preacher overshadowing him. Instead, Kirkland probably realized that Thomas was a

priceless cultural asset, even if he had the tendency to speak on Kirkland’s behalf and engage

in long, extemporaneous exhortations.

The Oneidas at Kanonwalohale, Onaquaga, and other towns possessed their own need

for assistance, their own agendas for inviting Christian missionaries into their lives, and even

their own “open door” metaphor.62 They viewed the Mohawks as elder brothers, but also as

keepers of the “eastern door” of their Iroquoian longhouse, whereas the Senecas guarded the

“western door.”63 They actively recruited Christian missionaries to help them deal with the

cataclysmic problems they faced in the wake of the Seven Years War. The warrior class had

increased its power among the Oneidas throughout the eighteenth century, and the traditional

leadership of older sachems and even Oneida women was constantly being challenged. The

warriors looked to English missionaries as a way to secure diplomatic allegiances with the

east and strengthen their own position in Iroquois society. Furthermore, the Oneidas were in

the midst of a fundamental change in their lifeways, as they were moving out of larger

61 Extracts from a letter from Samuel Kirkland, 12 April 1768, in Wheelock, A Continuation of the

*arrative of the Indian Charity-School, 56-59.

62 For more on the Oneida historical landscape before, during, and after these missions, see Glatthaar and

Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies, 7-99; Jack Campisi and Laurence M. Hauptman, eds., The Oneida Indian

Experience: Two Perspectives (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988). The best study of Onaquaga,

one of the most important Oneida towns, can be found in Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in

Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in *ative American Communities (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1995), 108-128.

63 Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 18.

325

longhouses and into smaller homes, characterized less by extended kinship networks and

more by nuclear families.64 The accoutrements of English “civilization” had also altered

their material culture. By the 1760s the Oneidas were cooking in metal kettles and frying

pans, eating their foods from pewter plates, sporting English silver broaches, and looking in

glass mirrors as they combed their hair.65 The Oneidas embraced their reputation as outposts

of English culture. While one English commentator called Onaquaga “the finest Indian town

I ever saw,” Samuel Kirkland dubbed the Oneidas there “the most civilized Indians” in

Iroquoia.66

But “civilization” had its discontents. Encroaching settlers carried not only an

insatiable thirst for land, but also destructive vermin and diseases that wreaked havoc upon

their crops and bodies. In the first years of the 1760s the Iroquois suffered from smallpox,

vermin infestations, premature frosts, and failed crops.67 One of the Oneida chiefs warned

David Fowler, a Montauk Indian on a Christian mission in the spring of 1765, that “some of

the Indians would starve to Death this Summer. Some of them have almost consumed all

their Corn already.”68 As English colonial settlers hunted in Iroquoian lands and fished on

Iroquoian rivers, meat and fish were depleted precipitously, and Oneidas complained that

64 Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 36.

65 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 12; and Francis W. Halsey, ed., A Tour of Four

Great Rivers: The Hudson, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Delaware in 1769, Being the Journal of Richard

Smith of Burlington, *ew Jersey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 68.

66 Quoted in Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 124; and Journal of Samuel Kirkland,

31 March 1765, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 18.

67 Taylor, The Divided Ground, 53.

68 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 24 June 1765, in Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian Charity-

School, 40.

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they could not find fowl, beast, or fish within 70 miles of their settlements.69 This partially

explains why Oneidas understood the introduction of agriculture and Christianity as “spiritual

food” and asked Protestant ministers to help them “uphold our Bodies, our lives, lest our

souls should unexpectedly leave both you and us, before we have time to set them in the right

way.”70 The Oneidas had no intention of ceding their lands and understood the precarious

position they would be put in once they accepted English missionaries. “We would have you

Understand Brethren,” the Oneidas proclaimed to Wheelock and his colleagues, “that we

have no thoughts of selling our Land to any that come to live among us; for if we should sell

a little Land to any, by & by they would want to buy a little more & so our Land would go by

Inches till we should have none to live upon.”71 The Oneidas at the small village of Jeningo

wanted a Christian missionary, but they utterly refused to have an English one settle among

them. They therefore requested that Samuel Ashpo, a Mohegan preacher trained at

Wheelock’s charity school, initiate a mission there.72 The Mohawks at Canajoharie followed

suit, expressing a strong preference for their own English-trained Philip Jonathan over a

Euro-American teacher named Jacob Oel.73 Native preachers would, in their eyes, provide

the best of both worlds. Theoretically, they would introduce Indians to the saving graces of

Christianity while providing material relief. Because native preachers lacked the avaricious

69 Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 62.

70 Quoted in Taylor, The Divided Ground, 55-56.

71 Isaac Dakayenensere and Adam Waonwanoron to Eleazar Wheelock, 31 July 1765, in James Dow

McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications,

1932), 79-80.

72 See Eleazar Wheelock to Gideon Hawley, 10 June 1761, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 35-36; and “Recommendation of Samuel Ashpo, 29 July 1762,” in Ibid., 37-38.

73 Hart, “Mohawk Schoolmasters and Catechists in Mid-Eighteenth Century Iroquoia”: 246.

327

impulses that discredited white missionaries, they were also expected to protect the very

lands that English settlers eyed so jealously.

While Christianity’s association with English colonization definitely marred it in the

eyes of some Iroquois Indians, others viewed Christianity as a weapon to combat the novel

historical, epidemiological, territorial, and spiritual dilemmas they faced in the eighteenth

century. First, if husbandry and agriculture accompanied Christianity, as Wheelock and other

Protestants claimed it would, then the starving Oneidas supported it. Furthermore, literacy

and education were beginning to be viewed as cultural weapons, as tools for gaining access to

English power and authority as well as the word of God himself. Baptism, for example, was

not simply an arcane formality, but an important moment for securing the protection of an

all-powerful God and gaining access to a kind of preventative medicine.74 Even if Iroquoian

traditional religion and Christianity were not completely compatible – the Trinity, afterlife,

and original sin were usually alien concepts for indigenous peoples – there were many other

areas of religious overlap. Iroquois Indians and Christians both believed that God had

created the earth, that good and evil were active forces in peoples’ everyday lives, that lesser

deities (like Christ) were also active in peoples’ lives, that thanksgiving and charity would

improve one’s standing with spiritual forces, and that martial imagery was appropriate for

understanding the battle between good and evil.75 The Oneidas were therefore not “passive

recipients,” but “demanding catalysts” for Protestant missionary work in the 1760s.76 When

74 Hart, “Mohawk Schoolmasters and Catechists in Mid-Eighteenth Century Iroquoia”: 233-236; and 245-

246.

75 Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 59.

76 Taylor, The Divided Ground, 55. The Oneidas had a long history of employing outside spiritual helpers

to meliorate their temporal problems. When they discovered the threat of a group of pro-French western

Indians invading their territory sometime in the seventeenth century, they apparently elevated a French

Jesuit to the status of hereditary sachem in order to ward off the attack. See Glatthaar and Martin,

Forgotten Allies, 39.

328

they asked for help from Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, the Iroquois knew what they were

getting into. Indeed, Wheelock’s Indians traveled to the same places where Mohawk and

Oneida native preachers had already been working: the Mohawk “castles” of Tiononderoge

and Canajoharie, the Oneida towns of Kanonwalohale, Old Oneida, and Onaquaga, as well as

smaller settlements like Cherry Valley, Lake Utsage, and Jeningo. In short, the Moor

Indians’ missions were designed to cultivate already well cultivated ground. Native

preachers among the Iroquois were not unique, unheard of, or exceptional, but important and

long standing threads in the fabric of eighteenth century Iroquoian society and culture.

Indians Among Indians

There was, however, one aspect of Wheelock’s program that was unique: this was the

first time that Amerindians from one linguistic and cultural group were being used to

proselytize other indigenous groups and, in that sense, Wheelock’s Indians were not really

“native” at all. Instead, they were Indians but outsiders, lying in a mercurial and liminal

space between Indian and English, Iroquois and Algonquian, Western and indigenous.

Fortunately for historians, their frequent letters back to Wheelock describe their missions,

their attempts to maintain their unique identity as Christian Indians and, most importantly,

their efforts to use Christian evangelism to remold Iroquoian society in the 1760s. While

these letters were certainly predictable and formulaic – Laura J. Murray rightly notes that

they were “exercises in penmanship and epistolary styles” that “rehearsed religious

discourses” and “practiced a rhetoric of politeness and humility” – they were also pragmatic,

revealing the subtle ways in which indigenous peoples tried to convert neighboring

indigenous peoples in the pre-Revolutionary borderlands. 77 Like Philip Quaque’s letters

77 Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 13.

329

detailing his mission in West Africa, the letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian missionaries

provide a rare glimpse into the native missionary mind and illuminate the ways in which

Native Americans functioned as evangelical agents during the eighteenth century.

The most important thing to note about these Moor Indians is that they were certainly

not alone, for Wheelock and his benefactors envisioned using native preachers alongside

English ones like Samuel Kirkland, Ralph Wheelock, and Theophilus Chamberlain. In their

role as assistants, they often worked in conjunction with local Oneida Christians to protect

English missionaries, who were much more suspect than their Indian colleagues. Samuel

Kirkland, for example, had a volatile relationship with the Oneidas in the 1760s; some days

he was embraced as a father, other days he was kicked out of his hosts’ homes because of his

battle against Indian drinking. When Kirkland confiscated some rum from an Indian named

Jau-na-whau-na-gea, the Oneida demanded payment for his loss. Kirkland refused, and Jau-

na-whau-na-gea approached the missionary and threatened to “gripe” him “upon the throat.”

Kirkland wrestled his adversary to the ground and then called for Mohegan missionary

Joseph Johnson to “assist in binding him.” Jau-na-whau-na-gea’s wife ran to the scene and

tried to pry Johnson and Kirkland off her husband by hitting and biting them “like a Dog.”78

Kirkland and Johnson released Jau-na-whau-na-gea, but the English missionary was so

fearful of retribution that he wisely fled into the woods. In the ensuing days, Deacon Thomas

discovered more rum among the Oneidas, apprehended it, and destroyed it while Kirkland

was in exile. Kirkland returned within a few days and resumed his normal pattern of

78 Extracts from the letters of Samuel Kirkland, in Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the *arrative of

the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon in Connecticut, *ew England : Founded and Carried on by The

Rev. Dr. Eleazar Wheelock ; With an Appendix, Containing the Declaration of the Trustees of That Charity

; A List of the *ames of the Subscribers; An Account of Monies Received and Paid; Together with Dr.

Wheelock's Annual Account of his Receipts and Disbursements (London: J. and W. Oliver, 1769), 37-38.

Kirkland was wise to call Johnson, who actually had a reputation for wrestling. Only a year before he

began his mission among the Oneidas, Johnson was reprimanded for fighting with a white student named

Eleazar Sweetland, throwing him down and holding him there for about 15 minutes. See Joseph Johnson to

Eleazar Wheelock, 6 September 1764, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 59-60.

330

preaching, having apparently won this important battle against Indian vices. Although the

threat of violence was ever-present for white missionaries, Joseph Johnson’s physicality and

Thomas’ crusade against rum helped legitimize and, in some senses indigenize, Kirkland’s

work among the Oneidas.79 It is doubtful that Kirkland would have survived this encounter

without the help of either native evangelist.

Native preachers were among the Oneidas to stop their excessive drinking and protect

English missionaries, but they were certainly not just the muscle of the operation. The most

basic duty expected of the Moor Indians was to keep school regularly among their Mohawk

and Oneida charges, teaching them the fundamentals of Christianity as well as the basics of

language, the alphabet, and spelling.80 Schooling was a vital element of Christian spirituality,

for it gave Christians access to sacred texts and religious truths that were unavailable to non-

literate peoples. As such, native missionaries took schooling very seriously. Joseph

Woolley, the tea-drinking Delaware preacher at Onaquaga, reported to Wheelock that “I hope

Sir, I shall be enabled to walk before my School as it becometh, & teach them those Things

that I ought which I wish, Long & Pray for.”81 A list of David Fowler’s books suggests that

the entrance into all things spiritual was literacy, for he had 40 copies of spelling books at his

mission at Kanonwalohale. He also had catechisms, discourses on the lord’s supper, and

other sacred texts, but the small and cheap spelling books were the foundation of his

Iroquoian educational program.82 Other native preachers did not have the resources that

79 Journal of Samuel Kirkland, 28 October 1769, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 58. This

episode is also recounted in Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 63-65.

80 The best analysis of this educational project is still Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies,

233-257.

81 Joseph Woolley to Eleazar Wheelock, 17 September 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 270-271.

82 List of David Fowler’s Books, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 93.

331

Fowler had. Moses, a Mohawk teacher at an Iroquois community near Lake Utsage, had few

books, taught his classes in “nothing but an open Barrack,” and had his students sit around a

“Bark Table” while he led classes.83 In spite of their material wants on the borderlands,

native preachers nevertheless pushed indigenous education as a way to better deal with

English colonialism as well as gain access to divine revelation.

Iroquois students and parents, on the other hand, were ambivalent about literacy and

schooling. While many saw the spiritual and temporal power that literacy could accrue,

others believed that schooling was not the main benefit of having Christian missionaries.

They constantly asked for help with agriculture and frequently requested Christian ministers,

but schoolteachers were less in demand. They therefore kept school very irregularly, and

native schoolmasters complained bitterly about their inability to draw students on a daily

basis. Montauk missionary David Fowler reported in May of 1765 that Iroquois Indians

never sent their children to school because they “had too much work to do” and because

Fowler came too early in the season. “I can’t get but one Boy here,” Fowler complained,

because all the boys had gone to their seasonal hunt.84 Fowler was not alone in his

frustration. Hezekiah Calvin, a Delaware Indian sent to open a school among the Mohawks

at Fort Hunter (near Tiononderoge, or the Lower Mohawk Castle), said that the Indians were

“very loth to send their children” to Calvin’s School. They would “make excuses,” Calvin

complained, “that they had work for [the children] to do.” Calvin knew how to respond to

what he perceived as blatant Iroquois laggardness. He threatened to leave the Indian

settlement because, as he put it, he had no one to teach. The very next day the Mohawks sent

83 Extracts of a Letter from Titus Smith, 3 August 1765, from Nathaniel Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the

Indian Charity-School in Lebanon in Connecticut, *ew England: Founded and Carried on by That faithful

Servant of God, The Rev. Mr. Eleazar Wheelock (London: J. and W. Oliver, 1766), 45.

84 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 May 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 90-91.

332

five students to Calvin’s school, hoping to keep him there and maintain the cultural and

diplomatic link between themselves and the ministers to the east.85

What kept most students out of the schools were the seasonal hunts that formed a

central part of the Iroquoian subsistence economy, especially when vermin and premature

frosts destroyed their agricultural harvests.86 In fact, Iroquoian hunting patterns proved to be

one of the most ironic aspects of native missionary work in New York: while the Iroquois

demanded Christian missionaries, in part, to help solve their famine crises, missionary work

was severely hampered by the Iroquois’ frequent absences during their long, seasonal hunts.

As the plentitude of game dramatically decreased in the eighteenth century, hunts had

become more time consuming and less successful than ever before, thus keeping Iroquoian

children (especially young boys and men) out of native missionary schools. Algonquian

preachers complained constantly about these noticeable absences. David Fowler’s class at

Kanonwalohale, for example, was doing exceedingly well in the spring of 1765, so much so

that he bragged to Eleazar Wheelock that he “never saw Children exceed these in learing

[sic].” The problem, however, was that most of his children accompanied their parents on the

lengthy spring hunts. “They are often/always roving about from Place to Place,” Fowler

complained, “to get something to live upon. Provision is very scarce with them.”87 One year

later Hezekiah Calvin noticed that his Mohawk students at Fort Hunter were absent because

the adults “are going out to hunt & that they must needs take their Children with them that

85 Hezekiah Calvin to Eleazar Wheelock, 11 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 49-51.

86 Iroquois Indians relied upon a cycle of subsistence patterns. They would hunt in the fall and the spring,

they had semi-annual fishing excursions, and they grew corn and other sedentary crops. See Glatthaar and

Martin, Forgotten Allies, 20-23.

87 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 15 June 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 93-95. The “often/always” appears so because, in the manuscript version and in McCallum’s

transcription, the word “often” actually appears directly above “always.”

333

they cant leave their Children alone &c &c.”88 One year after that, Joseph Johnson lamented

that all his students were absent because they were off to “fetch some flesh from the

Hunters.”89 Iroquois hunting patterns undoubtedly hampered Indian educational efforts in

New York.

Unlike English missionaries, however, native preachers were less daunted by the

prospect of accompanying Indians on these seasonal hunts. This was obviously true for

Oneida preachers like Good Peter and Deacon Thomas, the latter of which was hoping to go

on a spring hunt in 1768 to help pay off a personal debt.90 In fact, for most Native American

societies, hunting was understood not only as a subsistence strategy, but also an opportunity

to demonstrate masculinity, cultivate group cohesion, and contribute to the welfare of the

community.91 As such, native preachers often took the opportunity to accompany the

Iroquois on their seasonal hunts, hoping to strengthen cultural bonds while simultaneously

carrying on some semblance of Christian education among them. During his missionary trip

to the Oneidas in the spring of 1762, for example, Samson Occom was forced to “wander

about after” his students because they were scattered around, trying to find food.92 Joseph

Johnson, another Mohegan and Occom’s son-in-law, had no other choice when his students

went on the hunt in May of 1768. The ones who remained in his Oneida town during the

88 Hezekiah Calvin to Eleazar Wheelock, 11 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 51.

89 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 10 November 1767, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian

Brethren, 63-65.

90 Journal of Ralph Wheelock with Allyn Marther in Wheelock, A Continuation of the *arrative of the

Indian Charity-School, 47.

91 Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 22-23.

92 Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 19 July 1762, in The American Colonial Clergy Section of the

Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 24, Mss. Collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

334

hunt, Johnson recalled, were “hardly worth staying for.”93 Native preachers thus seemed

much more opportunistic than English ones in their attempt to use the hunt as a chance to

prove their mettle, procure some food, and connect with the very people whose souls they

were trying to save.

In spite of their willingness to join the Iroquois on their seasonal hunts, the eastern

Algonquian Indians who comprised a large share of Wheelock’s missionary corps

nevertheless emphasized agriculture, rather than hunting, as the true path to living like

Christians.94 No one exemplified these attitudes better than David Fowler, the Montauk

Indian who oversaw a school and worked alongside Samuel Kirkland at the Oneida town of

Kanonwalohale in the mid-1760s. When Wheelock introduced Fowler to the Iroquois, he

declared that the Montauk would not only be a missionary, but also a weapon against the

periodic famines and starvation that plagued Iroquoian society in the eighteenth century. “I

hope you will help him to get a house,” Wheelock wrote to the Iroquois, “and let him have

some of your land to plant and sow.” Besides instructing schoolchildren, Fowler was

expected to “help and instruct you in managing husbandry; with which you must learn if you

expect God will increase your number, and build you up, and make you his people.”95 The

Oneidas complied and promised Fowler free but temporary use of their lands as well as some

help in clearing and fencing them in. The Iroquois understood this as an experimental move

that could provide some relief from the temporal problems they were facing. Fowler

93 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 2 May 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian Brethren, 70-

72.

94 Although Wheelock trained more Iroquois than Algonquian Indians, most of the missionaries working in

the 1760s were Algonquian Indians. Iroquois attendance at Wheelock’s school was often short-lived and

sporadic.

95 “Address to the Sachems and Chiefs of the Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, and other Nations and tribes of

Indians,” 29 April 1765, in O’Callaghan, ed., The Documentary History of the State of *ew-York Vol. IV,

224-225.

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understood his agreement with the Oneidas as a precious opportunity to transform the

economic, religious, and social culture of the native peoples of New York. Well before

Fowler had cultivated any crops on his lands, he proclaimed – perhaps prematurely – that his

Indian neophytes “see now that they would live better if they cultivate their Lands than they

do now by Hunting & fishing.”96 Native preachers also viewed the males’ neglect of the

fields as a marker of laziness. Fowler dubbed Oneida Indian men the “laziest Crew I ever

saw in all my Days” because the women farmed while the men slept late and took care of the

children. When he brought his wife Hannah to Oneida, Fowler hoped his “other Rib” would

serve as a model for Iroquois women and persuade Indian men to take to the plow while their

women stayed in the homes.97 In urging Iroquois Indians to embrace sedentary agriculture

and transform gender roles, native preachers both repeated and transformed some of the

narratives of civilization that characterized English missionary discourses.

If agriculture was one marker of difference between the Moor Indians and the

Iroquois of New York, language was another obvious point of dissimilarity. As noted earlier,

Wheelock’s program was original only in that the Indian preachers traveling to Iroquoia in

the 1760s were usually not Iroquois. There were therefore dramatic linguistic differences

between Wheelock’s Indian missionaries and the people they were trying to convert. This is

not to say that the Moor Indians lacked linguistic skills: they could speak their own languages

and English, as well as Latin and Greek. But their inability to speak the Iroquoian dialect

made them ineffective and more socially isolated than they ever might have imagined. When

Joseph Woolley relayed his troubles in speaking to his students at Onaquaga, Samuel

96 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 24 June 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 96.

97 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 15 June 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 94.

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Kirkland sharply rebuked him, noting that Wheelock depended much on Woolley’s

“proficiency in the Indian language.” Urging him to labor harder to learn the Oneida tongue,

Kirkland curtly reminded Woolley that “A faithful Missionary’s life is no lazy one.”98 David

Fowler, a much better scholar than Woolley, also admitted that he could “say very little” to

his students and greatly needed an interpreter.99 Hezekiah Calvin expressed dismay at his

inability to communicate sacred truths to the Iroquois, going so far as to call himself a “dumb

stump that has no tongue to use.”100 Calvin might have been too hard on himself, for the

problem was not only in translating words into indigenous languages, but actually translating

Christian concepts into native ones. David Brainerd, a missionary in Pennsylvania in the

1740s, felt the pain of this problem acutely and observed that there were no Indian words for

concepts like “Lord, Saviour, Salvation, Sinner, Justice, Condemnation, Faith, Repentance,

Justification, Adoption, Sanctification, Grace, Glory, Heaven, with scores of the like

importance.” While Brainerd complained about the “defectiveness” of indigenous languages,

native peoples also suspected the English language itself as a source of social and cultural

problems.101 Iroquois Indians were understandably reluctant to send their children to learn

under native preachers who spoke the same tongue as the English traders and settlers who

constantly sought to deceive them.

98 Journal of Samuel Kirkland, 31 March 1765, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 19.

99 Extracts of Letters from David Fowler, 24 June 1765, in Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian

Charity-School, 40.

100 Hezekiah Calvin to Eleazar Wheelock, 14 August 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 58.

101 David Brainerd, Mirabilia Dei inter Indicos, or the Rise and Progress Of a Remarkable Work of Grace

Amongst a *umber of the Indians In the Provinces of *ew-Jersey and Pennsylvania, Justly Represented in

A Journal Kept by Order of the Honourable Society (in Scotland) for Propagating Christian Knowledge.

With some General Remarks (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1746), 228.

337

In spite of these linguistic differences, or perhaps because of them, native preachers

pursued other ways to ingratiate themselves into the hearts and minds of the Iroquois.

Oratory was one way to do that. An English contemporary noted that, among Indians,

“Orators are in the highest Esteem.” “To be able to speak well in public,” he continued, “is

the shortest and most infallible Road to Honour and Influence among” the Indians.102

Warriors might have taken issue with this argument, but the fact remained that what we

would now call “public speaking skills” were prized by Iroquois Indians. The Moor Indians

also embraced the sacred power of oratory in their own work. When Jacob Woolley wrote to

Eleazar Wheelock in the winter of 1761, he complained that writing was but a “silent

language” that could not convey exactly what he had to say as if they were conversing with

one another face to face.103 Samson Occom, reputed for his “good voice,” was another native

preacher who embraced oratory over literacy, even if it was a matter of necessity.104 Nearly

blinded by years of intense reading and study, Occom often preached extemporaneously to

Indian congregations from Iroquoia to Long Island. Occom complained that the sacred texts

produced by Anglo-Americans were too often “written in a high and refined language…in a

very high and lofty style.” Occom’s preaching, by contrast, was universally celebrated as

powerful but plain, clear but eloquent, moving and articulate. Occom said that his oratorical

style was “common, plain, every day talk,” so simple that children, blacks, and especially

102 Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian Charity-School, 7. This quote is not Whitaker’s own words,

but actually quoted from someone else.

103 Jacob Woolley to Eleazar Wheelock, 14 December 1761, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 251. David Fowler, one of Wheelock’s most celebrated students, encountered the

same problem. When trying to articulate some of the Oneidas customs, Fowler admitted, “I can’t express

myself by writing as I could by talking.” See Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 May 1765, in McCallum,

The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 90-91.

104 Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2006), 191.

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Indians could understand him. He employed common phrases, metaphors, and incidents

from everyday life in his preaching to Iroquois in New York, Mohegans in Connecticut, and

Montauks on Long Island.105 The Moor Indians’ training gave them a chance to situate

themselves as eloquent orators who wielded the power of speech and speaking, even if their

audiences did not always understand what they were saying. Although Wheelock’s training

did not prepare its native missionaries to speak Iroquoian, it certainly trained them how to

speak among this so-called “nation of orators.”106

This aural self-presentation by the Moor Indians accompanied a visual representation,

and clothing constituted an important medium whereby native preachers actively represented

themselves as powerful cultural intermediaries. Part of this had to do with personal security,

as native preachers changed their dress depending upon their location in English or Indian

country.107 But, like oratory, it was believed that Iroquois Indians respected and understood

clothing as a marker of social distinction and value. Hendrick, the Mohawk lay preacher of

the early eighteenth century, was – at least in dress – reported to be barely distinguishable

from an English gentleman. When Joseph Brant arrived at Wheelock’s school in

105 Samson Occom, A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian; Who Was Executed at

*ew-Haven, on the Second of September, 1772; For the Murder of Mr. Moses Cook, Late of Waterbury, on

the 7th of December, 1771. Preached at the Desire of Said Paul. By Samson Occom, Minister of the

Gospel, and Missionary to the Indians (New Haven: T. and S. Green, 1772), 3. See also Vaughan,

Transatlantic Encounters, 193. Not all native preachers were as confident in their oratorical skills: Samuel

Ashpo admitted that the first time he preached to the Oneida Indians at Jeningo, he was filled with “Fear

and Trembling.” See Samuel Ashpo to Eleazar Wheelock, 22 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of

Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 45.

106 New York State, Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six

*ations of Indians in 1779: With Records of Centennial Celebrations (New York: Knapp, Peck and

Thomson, Printers, 1887), 459. For more on Indian and African American oratory, including the oratorical

skills of Occom, see Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early

America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 75-110; and Carolyn Eastman, A *ation

of Speechifiers: Print, Oratory, and the Making of a Gendered American Public, 1780-1830 (forthcoming).

107 Eleazar Wheelock to Andrew Gifford, 16 July 1764, in McClure, Memoirs of the Rev. Eleazar

Wheelock, 251.

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Connecticut, for example, everyone knew he was from a “Family of Distinction” because he

was “considerably cloathed.”108 This emphasis on status in clothing also explains why David

Fowler was quick to lend fellow missionary Joseph Woolley his shirt when he discovered

that his colleague was “almost nacked.”109 Nudity was a symptom of poverty, and native

preachers could never appear wanting if they hoped to convert the thousands of Iroquois who

expected Christianity to ameliorate their own poverty.

Some indigenous evangelists even expressed a choice preference for certain colored

clothes. Fowler, for example, asked in January of 1766 for some “blue Broadcloth and that

which is good.”110 Fowler repeated this request before he returned to Wheelock’s school

later that spring. He planned to stay at Wheelock’s home for a week or so “to shed my Skin”

and admitted that his clothes were so worn that he, like Woolley before him, was almost

naked. Again, he wrote to Wheelock and demanded, “I want all my Cloaths to be blue and

that which is good.”111 While Fowler’s obsession with high quality, blue clothes might seem

peculiar, it is possible that he was hoping to use his clothing as a reminder of his status as a

Christian preacher. George R. Hamell has argued that eastern woodland Indians revered

anything with a blue or blue-green hue because they believed that the translucent quality of

these colors reflected their status as visual intermediaries between the natural and

108 Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful *arrative, 39.

109 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 May 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 91.

110 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 21 January 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 100.

111 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 13 May 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 102.

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supernatural worlds.112 By aggressively demanding that he be outfitted in blue vestments,

Fowler might have been seeking to remind his Iroquois audiences that he was an Indian of

impressive power, a spiritual medium who exhibited a masterful awareness of and access to

the natural and supernatural worlds around them. By asking for “good” cloth, Fowler was

also hoping to remind his audiences that he was indeed an Indian of temporal worth as well.

If this seems like too tenuous a connection, it is worth noting that Paulus, the Mohawk

catechist, was reported in 1755 to be “splendidly arrayed in a suit of light blue, made in an

antique mode, and trimmed with silver lace.”113 Like Paulus before him, Fowler might have

been seeking to tap into Iroquoian understandings of the translucence of certain colors as well

as the magnitude of clothing as a marker of social standing in indigenous societies.

The records of these missions also give us a sense of how native evangelists spoke,

what messages they emphasized, and which rhetorical devices they used when preaching to

Iroquois Indians in the 1760s. Oneida preachers like Good Peter and Deacon Thomas were

particularly adept at describing Christian spiritualities with Oneida concepts and

cosmologies. Good Peter, for example, called the Christian God “the great God, who created

all things.” In explaining Christ’s divinity, Peter assured his Oneida audiences that God

“walked on earth with men, and had the form of a man, but He was all the while the same

Great Spirit; He had only thrown his blanket around Him.” By describing God as a kind of

all-powerful shape-shifter, Peter explained to his Oneida brethren that God was both human

and divine, an active and ever-present force in their world.114 Peter, Isaac, and Thomas had

the benefit of being Oneida insiders, but the Moor Indians had no such advantage and often

112 George R. Hamell, “The Iroquois and the World’s Rim: Speculations on Color, Culture, and Contact,”

American Indian Quarterly 6 No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 464 ff. 7.

113 Lydekker, The Faithful Mohawks, 81.

114 Quoted in Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 62.

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acknowledged their precarious position as Indian Christians among other Indians. When

Occom preached to the Iroquois, he complained little about “Indian fopperies, and manner of

dress,” and reproached them only for their use of painting as bodily decoration. Instead,

Occom sought to “strike at the root of evil, and insist on heart religion.”115 Although “heart

religion” is a wonderfully vague description of Occom’s preaching, he probably urged his

listeners to embrace charity, humility, and a solemn reflection on their own humanity and

spiritual frailty. Like other eastern Algonquian preachers, Occom preached very delicately

and trod very carefully when trying to transform Iroquois Indians into devout Christians.

Other native preachers emphasized the fire and brimstone approach of the First Great

Awakening, advising their Indian audiences to not only acknowledge their sins, but also to

consider the punishments they would face if they continued to live in pagan darkness. While

we do not have records of Joseph Johnson’s preaching to the Oneidas, his later sermons

among other Indian groups are instructive for this purpose. All people, Johnson proclaimed,

were “children of wrath” and were destined to descend into a hell that “burns with

unquenchable fire and brimstone.” Christ’s power could save Indians from this terrible fate,

and Johnson cunningly described Christ as a kind of spiritual physician who could defend

Indians against the diseases of evil.116 Sometimes this fire and brimstone approach worked

effectively. In 1767 one of the Oneida preachers – probably Peter, Thomas, or Isaac –

encouraged his audience to recognize the evils of drinking and the perils of ignoring their

Christian missionaries. “Brethren I think we are poor miserable Creatures,” the Oneida

115 Gideon Hawley to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 November 1761, in Chaplains of the French and Indian War

and the Revolution, Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 26, Mss. Collections of the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania.

116 Joseph Johnson to Moses Paul, 29 March 1772, in Johnson, Letter from J---h J----n, one of the Mohegan

Tribe of Indians, to his Countryman, Moses Paul, under Sentence of Death, in *ew-Haven Goal (New

London: Timothy Green, 1772), 2-7.

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speaker declared. He then proclaimed that the only way to rise above their spiritual poverty

was to confess their sins and find ways to enhance “the Glory of God.”117 At the same time,

Oneida audiences often found the constant talk of sin, wrath, fire, and brimstone to be a bit

much. One Indian complained to an English missionary that he was completely content until

Christians introduced the concept of sin into his life. When he fell on hard times, he accused

an English missionary of being “the cause of it, by your continual talk of sin, sin, sin, as tho’

there was nothing else in the World.” The Oneida concluded that the missionary was “a

Plague to me, you give me all this trouble.”118 Sin was an alien concept for most eastern

woodland Indians, so it was difficult for native missionaries to shoehorn it into existing

Iroquoian cosmologies. When native preachers taught their students about, or discoursed

with their neighbors on the subject of, sin, it had the potential to backfire and make already

unstable cultural relations increasingly more volatile.

Native preachers emphasized the eternal punishments of hell, but they also outlined

the everlasting rewards of living a pious Christian life. Samuel Ashpo exemplified this

tendency, and frequently spoke to the Oneidas of the glories of the “upper World.” In other

sermons among other Indians, Ashpo asked his audiences to “set their mind heavenward,”

and think of the eternal blessings they would receive once they were accepted into heaven.

Avoiding the thorny issue of original sin in his sermons, Ashpo spoke to Indians “chiefly

about the latter Day” and encouraged his listeners to prepare for the coming of Christ, the day

when every man had to give an account of their lives, actions, and deeds.119 Influenced by

117 Samuel Kirkland to Eleazar Wheelock, 9 September 1767, in Wheelock, A Continuation of the

*arrative of the Indian Charity-School, 24-25.

118 Quoted in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian Brethren, 62.

119 Samuel Ashpo to Eleazar Wheelock, 22 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 45; and “An Account of Certain Exhortations,” November 1771, Ibid., 142.

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English ministers, Oneida preachers, and Algonquian evangelists like Samuel Ashpo, Oneida

Indians began transforming their varying ideas about heaven, and not all of them were in tune

with what English missionaries had envisioned. Many listened carefully to their

missionaries’ words but did not understand the complicated subtleties of Christian theology.

Samuel Kirkland observed in 1773, for example, that Oneida Indians had “conceived a

notion, that an external good behaviour with learning the Decalogue as to repeat it without

Book, was all the divine law intended or required” for them to obtain “eternal life.” If this

was truly the case, the Oneidas themselves were not the only ones to blame, for English and

Indian preachers alike emphasized rote memorization in their schools and preached the

doctrine of exemplary living in their sermons.

The Oneidas also came to believe that, in order to be absolved of their sins, all they

had to do was confess or undergo another baptism, which would wash away their misdeeds.

Moreover, Samuel Kirkland complained, loud and boisterous Indian feasts became an

“essential part” of these baptisms. What Kirkland may not have realized was that name-

changing was a frequent and important ceremony in eastern woodland Indian society, a rite

of passage that was embraced and celebrated by the entire community. Samson Occom

reported that Long Island’s Montauk Indians, for example, understood name-changing as a

central component of life’s cyclical development, a celebration performed not only by the

newly named Indian but also by the entire community. “They used to make great dances or

frolicks,” Occom reported, and the Montauks “made great preparations for these dances, of

wampum, beads, jewels, dishes, and cloathing, and liquor.” Naming was so common among

them that it was not unusual for Indians to “name their children two or three times over by

different names, and at different times, and old people very often gave new names to

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themselves.”120 The celebratory nature of Indian name changing explains why Kirkland

watched as Iroquois Indians “dance and frolic” after a baptism, where the newly baptized

candidate took “part in the songs, and walk[ed] in the dance.”121 Baptism was a definitively

Christian sacrament, but it could be situated relatively easily into eastern woodland Indians’

traditions of name-changing as a central moment of personal development. Oneida Indians

thus embraced some aspects of Christian evangelism, especially the ones that were most

easily incorporated into their own religious worldviews. At the same time, native preachers

like Samson Occom and Good Peter – who both experienced their own name changes in

years prior – were active participants in helping Oneidas and other eastern woodland Indians

translate Christianity on their own terms and into their own cultural vernacular. Baptisms

and name changing were vital to this process of religious translation.

Songs were central to these expressions of Iroquoian spirituality, and native preachers

actively tried to use song as a medium through which to communicate Christian messages. In

spite of the differences in their preaching styles, native preachers all used Christian psalms

and hymns to try to engage Iroquoian audiences and tap into indigenous traditions of orality,

song-singing, and community-building. “Psalmody,” a Presbyterian missionary in

Pennsylvania once observed, “is exceeding pleasing to the Indians,” and the short structure of

the psalms was particularly suited for integration into Iroquoian song culture .122 One

120 “A Letter From Rev. John Devotion of Saybrook, to the Rev. Dr. Stiles, Inclosing, Mr. Occum’s

Account of the Montauk Indians,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, Vol.

X (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1809), 108.

121 Journal of Samuel Kirkland, 9 October 1773, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 80-81; and

Axtell, The Invasion Within, 168.

122 Charles Beatty, The Journal of a Two Months Tour : With a View of Promoting Religion Among the

Frontier Inhabitants of Pennsylvania, and of Introducing Christianity Among the Indians to the Westward

of the Alegh-geny Mountains ; to Which Are Added, Remarks on the Language and Customs of Some

Particular Tribes Among the Indians, With a Brief Account of the Various Attempts That Have Been Made

to Civilize and Convert Them, From the First Settlement of *ew England to This Day (London: William

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commentator noted that Indians’ songs were sung “in short parts” and “in short lines or

sentences.”123 Psalms and hymns, more than any other sacred text, were therefore easily

adaptable to the Iroquoian cultural and ritual landscape. Good Peter and Isaac, who preached

at several Oneida towns before the Moor Indians arrived, carried with them “no other book

but the Psalms” when they undertook itinerant missionary trips to their neighbors.124 Eleazar

Wheelock’s school had a renowned reputation for producing not only able missionaries, but

excellent singers. It is no surprise that the native preachers who situated themselves among

the Iroquois also turned to psalms and hymns as a way to attract indigenous audiences to

Christianity.125 David and Jacob Fowler both boasted that their singing schools were

successful, and that their Iroquoian students could sing “many Tunes with all three Parts.”126

When Wheelock sent David Fowler a packet of new books, three of them were exclusively

Davenhill, 1768), 54. For more on orality, music, and song in Iroquoian culture, see Richard Cullen Rath,

How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 30-38 and 151-165.

123 John Heckewelder, “An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs, of The Indian Nations, Who

Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States,” in Transactions of the Historical & Literary

Committee of the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, For Promoting Useful Knowledge

Vol. I (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1819), 203. English missionaries also believed that, due to the

prevailing stereotype of African musicality, blacks should also be introduced to the psalms as an entrée into

Christian evangelism. William Knox, for example, proclaimed that that “The Negroes in general have an

ear for musick, and might without much trouble be taught to sing hymns, which would be the pleasantest

method of instructing them, and bringing them speedily to offer praise to God. They should be taught short

prayers for morning and evening, and grace to say at meals.” See William Knox, Three Tracts Respecting

the Conversion and Instruction of the Free Indians, and *egroe Slaves in the Colonies. Addressed to the

Venerable Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: s.n., 1768), 39.

124 “An Account of the Missionaries and Schoolmasters Employed Among the Remote Nations of Indians,”

in Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian Charity-School, 30. Peter and Isaac also had a few passages

from scripture and some prayers in Oneida, but the book of psalms was the only sacred text they carried

with them.

125 John Smith to a Friend, 18 May 1764, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 73-75;

and Joanna Brooks, “Six Hymns by Samson Occom,” Early American Literature 38 No. 1 (2003): 67-87.

While Watts’ hymns were certainly becoming more popular among evangelical circles in the 1720s and

afterwards, they never did completely replace psalmody as a form of sacred music. Instead, native

missionaries used psalms and hymns simultaneously to attract Indian audiences.

126 Jacob Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 28 November 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 117.

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about sacred music.127 While Joseph Johnson could not keep his younger students in the day

school, the singing school he ran every evening was characterized by “very full meetings.”128

Iroquois Indians accepted Christian songs much more readily than they did Christian

education.

No native preacher was as ardent in his devotion to psalmody and hymnody as

Samson Occom. Occom believed that singing was not just a leisurely pastime, but a critical

ingredient of Christian spirituality. He thought it was the “Duty of Christians to learn the

Songs of Zion, according to good Method or Rule; but the People ought not to be contented

127 Eleazar Wheelock to David Fowler, 17 December 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 111-112.

128 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 10 February 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian

Brethren, 66-68.

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with the outward Form of Singing, but should seek after the inward Part.” Not only did these

songs of Zion comfort those with spiritual anxiety, Occom declared, they would also prove to

be very “destructive to the Kingdom of Satan.”129 This explains why Occom wrote

handmade songbooks and even published original hymns in 1774.130 Even if indigenous

audiences failed to embrace written texts as sacred truths, they still embraced the psalms as

vessels of sacred knowledge and instruments of group cohesion.

And yet, Occom’s distinction between inward and outward singing underscores the

danger of singing, especially its potential for profane superficiality. English and Indian

preachers like Occom understood singing as a serious task, one that demanded

contemplation, reflection, and gravitas more than it did a good voice. John Witherspoon, an

agent for Wheelock’s missionary program, president of the College of New Jersey, and later

tutor of two African evangelists, agreed that music was not to be taken lightly. Music was

one of the “fine arts,” Witherspoon opined, but when it was applied for the purposes of

“amusement only,” music immediately becomes “wholly contemptible.” Singing without

religious purpose was “a disgraceful calling” that was “not consistent with the character of a

gentleman.”131 Other observers agreed and noted that Iroquoian singing was not indicative of

a serious turn towards Christianity, but rather showed that they only embraced the more

zealous and extreme of evangelical Christianity’s elements. Sir William Johnson, who

initially supported Wheelock’s native missionary program, declared that the Iroquois Indians

had not made much progress in Christian knowledge since Wheelock’s Indians began their

129 Samson Occom, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs: Intended for the Edification of

Sincere Christians, of All Denominations (New London: Timothy Green, 1774), 3.

130 Brooks, “Six Hymns by Samson Occom”: 69; and Occom, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual

Songs.

131 Papers of John Witherspoon, 1758-1783, Box 1, page 48, Mss. Collections of the Library of Congress;

Call Number MMC-2604 and Control Number: MM81046185.

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cultural offensive. “Their whole time,” Johnson complained, was spent “in Singing psalms

amongst the Country people.” Johnson believed that this not only caused the Iroquois to

neglect their hunting and public affairs, but also forced them to imbibe “an air of the most

Enthusiastical Cant” along with “Belchings of the Spirit.” Instead of transforming them into

truly pious Christians, Johnson believed that native preachers and their psalm singing only

left Iroquois Indians with zealous religious enthusiasm and “a Sett of Gloomy Ideas.”132

Singing could be evidence of sincere Christian piety as well as proof of excessive, rapturous

zeal.

Through their oratory and self-representation, preaching and teaching, and through

their participation in seasonal hunts and employment of sacred music, the Moor Indians tried

to plant the seeds of Iroquoian Christianity in the years before the American Revolution. The

conflicts that erupted from their mission, however, would eventually cause it to fail.

Conflict in the Iroquoian Borderlands

The eastern Algonquian Indians who embarked for New York in the 1760s “existed

uncomfortably between cultural categories.”133 In Iroquoian society but not from it,

markedly distinct from their own people by virtue of their education, and unique in their

access to Christian spiritual authority, native preachers constantly struggled to define and

redefine their missionary work, their potential converts, and themselves, and their letters back

to Eleazar Wheelock expose the challenges and conflicts that this native missionary project

generated. The intermingling of ambitious Indian preachers, imperious English supervisors,

and cunning Oneida audiences catalyzed a host of conflicts, many more than any other

132 Quoted in Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 68.

133 Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian Brethren, 58.

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Protestant missionary effort before it. Although these conflicts catalyzed the downfall of

Wheelock’s program, they did little to dissuade other Protestant ministers from recruiting,

training, and employing indigenous missionaries.

While missions have certainly been characterized by physical violence and cultural

conflict, it should be remembered that there were important opportunities for conversation,

negotiation, and even mutual accommodation between the Moor Indians and their Iroquois

audiences. The Moor Indians were certainly not coerced into traveling to Iroquoia and, in

spite of their misgivings about Iroquoian culture (discussed below), they truly looked upon

their New York neighbors as Christians in the making, future brothers who might share in the

glories of the gospel. David Fowler admitted that the main goal of his teaching was in

“Spreading the Gospel among the Pagans,” whom he considered to be “my brethren.”134

When Hezekiah Calvin contemplated leaving the missionary life behind, the only thing that

made him hesitate was his neglect of his Mohawk friends. “The state and condition of my

Friends & fellow Brethren would be hovering in my mind daily,” Calvin admitted, “so that I

was almost ready to conclude to spend my life amongst them…if I could but have it in my

Mind that I should be likely of doing them any good.” He concluded that “I should be very

glad…to see my Brethren become Christians and live like Christians.”135 Joseph Woolley

also expressed a sentimental concern for the plight of Iroquoian souls. Three months after he

arrived at his mission at Onaquaga, Woolley declared that “My Soul seems to be more and

more upon the perishing Pagans in these Woods: I long for the Conversion of their Souls, and

134 David Fowler’s Confession, 20 November 1764, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 87; and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 2 December 1766, in Ibid., 106.

135 Hezekiah Calvin to Eleazar Wheelock, 14 August 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 57.

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that they may come to the Knowledge of our Lord Jesus, and be saved.”136 Joseph Johnson

entreated God to “make me a blessing to the Children which he has committed to my charge”

while Samson Occom felt “a General Concern…riveted in my Heart, for my Poor

Brethren…Both for their Bodies and Souls.”137 When Occom undertook a long and taxing

fundraising trip to the British Isles, he claimed he did so not to boost his reputation or

cosmopolitanism. Instead, as he said, he went “purely for the poor Indians.”138 These native

preachers were not avaricious and self aggrandizing imperialists, and they believed that they

truly cared about the lives and souls of their Indian brethren on the borderlands.

But the line between altruistic beneficence and condescending pity was extremely

thin in the eighteenth century, especially in missionary discourses.139 As much as native

preachers saw the Iroquois and other Indians as their “brethren,” they also recognized that

their unique position as indigenous evangelists had elevated them in English eyes. Some

native preachers attributed their elevated status to their own intellectual acuity while others

gave the glory to God. David Fowler praised and thanked God because he “distinguished me

from many of my poor Brethren, in setting me up to be their Instructor.”140 David’s brother,

Jacob, thanked Wheelock (instead of God) for “his goodness to chuse me out from my stupid

136 Extract of a Letter from Joseph Woolley, July 1765, in Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian

Charity-School, 41.

137 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 10 November 1767, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian

Brethren, 63-65; and Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 10 February 1767, in Richardson, ed., An

Indian Preacher in England, 221-222.

138 Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 24 July 1771, in Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson

Occom, Mohegan, 98-100.

139 Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, *ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

140 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 2 December 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 106.

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Brethren and to bring me into his School.”141 Jacob Woolley, a young Delaware Indian who

left the College of New Jersey because of his perpetual tantrums, was completely humiliated

by and ashamed of his behavior. If he was a normal Indian, Woolley implied, his actions

might have been understandable. But Woolley was ashamed because “of the peculiar

Obligations I am under to God & Man, by whose Goodness & their Charity I have been so

distinguished from all my Nation.”142 Native missionaries’ sense of elevated status derived

partly from Wheelock himself, who described non-Christian Indians in the lowest of terms.

He called them “poor stupid creatures” at the “level of brutal Creation.”143 Their children

were “little savage wretches” who lived in “little despicable bark huts.”144 Wheelock viewed

Indians as a whole as “poor, greasy, lousy, half starved creatures,” and “the most ignorant,

sordid, and miserable of the human Race.”145 While Wheelock’s son dubbed Indians “a

Swarm of tawny Immortals,” another missionary described them as “little tawny

Wretches.”146 Native preachers certainly imbibed some of Wheelock’s invective against non-

141 Jacob Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 31 January 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 117.

142 Jacob Woolley’s Confession, 25 July 1763, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians,

254.

143 Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the *arrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon, in

Connecticut; From the Year 1768, to the Incorporation of it with Dartmouth-College, And Removal and

Settlement of it in Hanover, In the Province of *ew-Hampshire, 1771 (Hartford: Ebenezer Watson, 1771),

22; and Taylor, The Divided Ground, 49.

144 Eleazar Wheelock to Lord Dartmouth, 22 December 1768, in McClure, Memoirs of the Rev. Eleazar

Wheelock, D.D., 282; and Eleazar Wheelock to the Warkmans Sisters, 17 August 1768, in Ibid., 279.

145 Eleazar Wheelock to the Warmans Sisters, 17 August 1768, 279; and Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the

Indian Charity-School (1767), 53.

146 Eleazar Wheelock to the Earl of Dartmouth, 8 October 1767, from Ralph Wheelock’s Journal for 13

September 1767, in Wheelock, A Continuation of the *arrative of the Indian Charity-School (1769), 32;

and Samuel Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 27 October 1766, in Ibid., 7.

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Christian Indians and harnessed it to forge their own identity as Christian Indians whose

souls had presumably been saved.

These missionary discourses frequently sounded like racialized commentaries, and

native preachers developed a host of examples to demonstrate that their Iroquoian neophytes

were widely different from themselves. Some of this was subtle and nuanced. Samson

Occom, for example, rejected the Anglo-American assumption that Indian bodies were

particularly well-suited for evangelical work on the frontier. After several weeks in Iroquoia

in 1762, he admitted that the “Climet and the way that I am obliged to Live here, will never

suit my Constitution.”147 In these few words Occom differentiated himself from his Indian

hosts while simultaneously staking claim to English bodily civility. As Occom’s letter

reveals, the material comforts they lacked also played into this rhetoric, for native preachers

frequently complained that they lived like dogs, ate the poorest of foods, verged on the edge

of starvation, and were ensconced in unbelievable material poverty when in Iroquoia.148

Joseph Woolley was also appalled by the way in which Indians neglected a famous Delaware

chief named Squash Cutter, who had died from the smallpox. “This poor man was left

destitute by all his Friend, & Relations, had nobody to tend him,” Woolly recalled, and he

was “sorry & greaved [sic] to see in the Indians so much Brutality, that they caired [sic] no

more for each other than the Beasts do.”149 When native preachers became frustrated at the

147 Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 19 July 1762, in Case 8, Box 24 of the Gratz Collection

(American Colonial Clergy) at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

148 See David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 May 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 90-91; Fowler to Wheelock, 15 June 1765, in Ibid., 93-95; and Joseph Johnson to Eleazar

Wheelock, 10 February 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian Brethren, 66-68.

149 Joseph Woolley to Eleazar Wheelock, 6 July 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 267. Woolley’s example probably speaks to Indians awareness about the transmission of

smallpox. They left Squash Cutter alone because they understood the devastating ways in which smallpox

could be communicated to other Indians. When Woolley suffered from his own fatal illness in late 1765,

he used probably remembered Squash Cutter’s death, as he took refuge in an English interpreter’s house,

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ineffectiveness of their evangelical labors, they often blamed the stubborn nature of the

Iroquois Indians for their failures. Hezekiah Calvin had hoped to do some good “among

these Savages,” but their refusal to embrace Christianity (at least along Calvin’s lines), forced

him to conclude that nothing could be done for them, for “Indians will be Indians.”150 Joseph

Johnson – the same man who called an Iroquois student at Wheelock’s school an “Indian

Devil” – took it one step further by equating Iroquoian recalcitrance with demographic

extinction.151 Replicating an argument he heard many times from Wheelock, Johnson

declared that, “if the Indians now Refuse the Offered Gospel it will be wonder if God don’t in

his anger cut them off from his Earth.”152 Johnson’s extinction trope also dovetailed with

missionary discourses concerning the land: civilized Christians were destined to spread light

into places of darkness while uncivilized indigenous peoples were destined to retreat before

it. When Indian preachers described the Iroquoian landscape, they often called upon biblical

allusions of non-Christian lands as a wilderness, a dessert, and as “the Gall of Bitterness and

the bond of Iniquity.”153 Moor Indians thus described Iroquoia as a barren country destitute

of any religious light at exactly the same time that Anglican Philip Quaque was saying the

same thing about West Africa. When David Fowler beat his Iroquois students so badly that it

made “their Hands to Swell very much,” his actions were a violent manifestation of the

rather than among the Onaquaga residents he was trying to convert. See Elisha Gunn to Eleazar Wheelock,

14 January 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians.

150 Hezekiah Calvin to Eleazar Wheelock, 11 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 49-51.

151 David McClure to Eleazar Wheelock, 25 September 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 76-77.

152 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 20 April 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian Brethren,

68-69.

153 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 December 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 65-66; and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 24 June 1765, in McCallum, The

Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 97.

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religious, geographic, racial, and discursive tensions that plagued the relationship between

Moor Indians and their Iroquois hosts.154

Although these discourses appear overtly racist, pity, rather than racism, was at their

core. As Laura Stevens has recently argued, pity was a powerful discursive tool, for it helped

colonizers craft imperial identities while defining them as distinct from the colonial “other.”

While the objects of colonization were objects to be pitied, colonial subjects fabricated their

own imperial identities based upon their pity of another group. To be pitied was, in short, to

lack power. Conversely, to pity another person was to possess power.155 Pity therefore gave

eastern Algonquian evangelists a rhetorical device with which they could distinguish

themselves from their Iroquoian neophytes. Like their imperious English colleagues, native

preachers dolled out pity, not received it. David Fowler described his Oneida hosts, for

example, as “lazy and sordid Wretches.” “But,” he clarified, “they are to be pitied, not

frown’d.”156 Fowler had hoped that he could help these “poor creatures” cleanse their souls

and “weaken the strong Holds of Satan in this Place.”157 Joseph Woolley explained in 1765

that “My heart feels sorry for the poor Indians, that they know no more about our crucified

Saviour.”158 Fowler, Woolley, and other Moor Indians’ efforts to bestow pity not only gave

154 Joseph Woolley to Eleazar Wheelock, 6 July 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 268. Wheelock’s school was renowned for its strict corporeal punishment, so it is little surprsise

that Wheelock’s students employed that disciplinary model in their own schools. In fact, Hezekiah Calvin

even confessed that he often found himself “a thrashing them continually” for every mistake that his

students made. Interesting, Calvin reported that the Indians believed he was not severe enough. See Calvin

to Eleazar Wheelock, 11 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 49-51.

155 Stevens, The Poor Indians.

156 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 24 June 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock, 96.

157 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 21 January 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock,

99.

158 Joseph Woolley to Eleazar Wheelock, July 1765, in Whitaker, A Brief *arrative of the Indian Charity-

School (1766), 41. For their own part, Oneida Indians also used the concept of pity to stake a claim on

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native preachers a chance to define the other indigenous “other,” it also afforded them the

opportunity to simultaneously work out and articulate their own unique identities as Christian

Indian preachers among non-Christian Indians. For native preachers, pity was a sacred

marker of difference, not necessarily a racial one.

In his sermon to an Indian who had been sentenced to death for murder, Samson

Occom clarified what he and his evangelist colleagues meant when they described other

Indians as pitiable beasts in the wilderness. For Occom, the distinction was not ultimately a

racial one, but one delineated by the sacred workings of god’s grace. “Sin,” not race or

culture, Occom implied, “has made him [man] beastly and devilish.” In fact, the sinful man

was not even on the level of beasts, for he was “sunk beneath the beasts, and is worse than

the ravenous beasts of the wilderness.”159 Occom’s wilderness was less a physical place and

more of a metaphorical space characterized by an absence of Christian revelation and a

dominion of Satanic power. Even though the Indian murderer to whom Occom preached was

a “poor miserable object” who had lived in “folly and madness, and enormous wickedness,”

he was ultimately redeemable.160 He was not to be pitied because he was an Indian, but

rather because he was not a Christian and thus had no access to divine forgiveness for his

wickedness. Occom had come to this conclusion about race and pity well before he gave this

sermon in 1774. About 13 years prior, during his first missionary trip to the Iroquois, Occom

traveled across Indian and English lands. One thing that Occom took note of was the

their rightful place in the power relationship between ministers and Iroquois. In the spring of 1772, a

council of Iroquois Indians responded to the assertion that Eleazar Wheelock cared deeply for their souls.

They proclaimed that “We pity him [Wheelock] on account of his great distance from the Indian country,”

and were not willing to send their children to his new school in New Hampshire. See David Avery’s

Address to the Indians, and Their Answers, Spring 1772, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 283.

159 Occom, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, 10.

160 Occom, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, 4.

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appalling lack of religious devotion from so-called English Christians. “I have thought there

was no Heathen but the wild Indians,” Occom recorded in his travel journal, “but I think now

there is some English Heathen.” He believed that these English non-Christians were “worse

than ye Savage Heathens of the wilderness” because they had the light of the gospel all

around them (in ministers, churches, and sacred texts), but neglected to embrace its saving

power.161 For Occom and other native preachers, the distinctions they noticed between

indigenous peoples and themselves seemed overtly racial. In the end, however, they

ultimately believed that these distinctions were superficial, able to be immediately lifted

through the repentance of the sinner and the grace of God. While Europeans and Americans

were beginning to think of racial differences as immutable, natural, and biological, native

preachers believed that these differences were wholly conditional upon the sentiment of the

sinner and the benevolence of the almighty. Native preachers pitied non-Christian Indians

partly because it helped them work out their own thorny identity crises, but also partly

because they truly believed that their neighbors and brethren could never share in the eternal

glories of the afterlife if they continued to live and sin as they did.

The relationship between the Iroquois Indians and the eastern Algonquian

missionaries was no one-way street. Native preachers depended upon the approval of Oneida

Indians, so the rapport between evangelists and traditional leaders was absolutely crucial to

the development of this missionary project. Samson Occom’s first trip to the Oneidas in

1761 may not have been a rousing evangelical success, but he did win the respect and

affection of Oneida leaders. They told him that they were “glad from the inside of our Hearts

that you are come here to teach the right way of God” and presented him with a ceremonial

161 Journal of Samson Occom, 14 June 1761, in Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of *ew

England, 87-88.

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wampum belt before he departed.162 When Samuel Kirkland introduced Delaware Indian

Joseph Woolley as schoolteacher to the Oneidas at Onaquaga, the Indians widely approved

and promised to adopt him into their tribe.163 After Woolley died suddenly later that year,

Peter, Thomas, Isaac, and other Christian Oneida leaders wrote to Wheelock to declare that

his former pupil was a “very Sober Man, a very good Teacher,” and that Woolley

“understood ye Book well.” “We fear,” the Oneidas concluded, “there are none will equal

his place.”164 There were also opportunities for collaboration between existing Oneida

preachers and the Moor Indians. David Fowler, for example, relied upon the logistical and

spiritual assistance of Deacon Thomas during his mission to Kanonwalohale, so much so that

Fowler proclaimed that Thomas had “done me more Service than all the Town.”165 If

established native preachers like Good Peter, Isaac, and Deacon Thomas felt threatened or

overshadowed by their eastern Algonquian counterparts, they rarely showed it, for they often

showered the Moor Indians with compliments and supported them in ways that were

indispensable to their missions.

At the same time, the Oneidas were very discerning and particular in their

expectations for native missionaries and were especially quick to show disapproval if their

guests brought shame upon themselves or their calling. Samuel Ashpo, whom the Jeningo

Oneidas requested for a preacher in the first years of the 1760s, was accused several times of

162 Eleazar Wheelock to George Whitefield, 25 November 1761, in Love, Samson Occom and the Christian

Indians of *ew England, 92-94. See also Gideon Hawley to Eleazar Wheelock, 19 September 1761, in

Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 22, Mss. Collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

163 Journal of Samuel Kirkland, 28 March 1765, in Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 3.

164 Lament for Joseph Woolley, 29 December 1765, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 272-273.

165 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 21 January 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 100.

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“Drinking Strong Drink to Excess, & of Quarrellg, Indecent, unChristian behaviour,” during

and after his mission.166 The Oneida Indians in that small town were infuriated with Ashpo’s

behavior, which discredited both Ashpo in particular and Wheelock’s program in general.

Hezekiah Calvin had a difficult time trying to cultivate amicable relationships with his

Mohawk hosts at Fort Hunter. Part of this might have been due to his imperious nature and

his inability to heed certain Mohawk social mores. The Mohawks were appalled that Calvin

refused to eat their food, greet them when entering their homes, or move out of the way of

others. For his own part, Calvin believed that the Mohawks “think that I am their

Servant.”167 The coup de gras for Calvin’s reputation was when he got drunk and threw a

rampage among his Mohawk charges. Calvin later chalked his misbehavior up to the fact

that he was in love. Although love may have made Calvin do crazy things, his social

isolation and insecurity about his spiritual authority among the Mohawks also contributed to

his fall.168

The Oneidas tolerated some missteps by their missionaries, but Ashpo’s and Calvin’s

problems paled in comparison to the outbursts that Joseph Johnson instigated in the spring of

1768. Around that time, as he was teaching among the Oneidas, Johnson began exhibiting a

remarkable lack of social and sexual restraint; he and another Indian drank three gallons of

wine, destroyed household furniture, hired prostitutes (and bought them valuable trinkets),

166 Suspension of Samuel Ashpo by the Connecticut Board of Correspondents, 1 July 1767, in McCallum,

The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, 45-46. This might explain why, in late 1761, Gideon Hawley

reported that, in spite of Ashpo’s proximity to that settlement, he had “no influence” at Onaquaga. See

Gideon Hawley to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 November 1761, in Chaplains of the French and Indian War and

the Revolution, Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 22, Mss. Collections of the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania.

167 Hezekiah Calvin to Eleazar Wheelock, 11 August 1766, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 49

168 Samuel Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 12 February 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 52; Hezekiah Calvin to Wheelock, 11 August 1766, in Ibid., 49-51; and Calvin to

Wheelock, March 1768, in Ibid., 62-63.

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and wasted provisions. Summarizing the incident later, Kirkland reported that Johnson

“turn’d pagan for about a week – painted, sung, --danc’d – drank & whor’d it, wh some of

the savage Indians he cou’d find.”169 Although one scholar has recently suggested that

Johnson’s erratic behavior was “probably more in keeping with a general inclination on

Johnson’s part to involve himself in the daily living routines of the community,” Johnson’s

conduct was anything but routine for native preachers or ordinary Iroquois.170 Johnson even

later admitted that his actions were completely inexcusable, writing to Wheelock later that

year and apologizing for indulging in “Brutish Ease whilst in the wilderness.” His fall, he

explained, was not an attempt to gain favor with the Indians, but was instead “Occasioned by

the temptation of the Devil.”171

What made the entire scenario even more problematic was that Johnson’s

debaucheries were “taken Notice of by the Indians.” As word leaked that one of the arbiters

of Christian morality lost all sense of it, Johnson’s reputation became shattered. Deacon

Thomas implored Johnson to salvage his character by making a public Confession, “as is

their Custom.” In an illuminating role reversal, the Oneidas demanded that Johnson – the

Christian missionary – make a public confession of his sins. Johnson later explained that,

after his confession, the Oneidas agreed to “Bury in Oblivion” everything that had happened

and to act as it “never happened so.”172 In spite of their promise to forget his misdeeds, the

169 Samuel Kirkland to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 December 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian

Brethren, 77-78.

170 Drew Lopenzina, “The Whole Wilderness Shall Blossom as the Rose”: Samson Occom, Joseph

Johnson, and the Question of Native Settlement on Cooper’s Frontier,” American Quarterly 58 No. 4

(December 2006): 135-136.

171 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 28 December 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian

Brethren, 74-77.

172 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 28 December 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian

Brethren, 74-77.

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Oneidas and Mohawks continued to look upon Joseph Johnson unfavorably and suspiciously,

and he left his missionary post later that year in complete dishonor. “His name stinks,”

Samuel Kirkland reported, “from Kanajohare to Fort-Stanwix.” Kirkland declared that even

the road that connected Iroquoian communities in northern New York “smells very strong of

his pride, falsehood, & diabolical Conduct.”173 Christian missions – and especially these

native missions – were delicate affairs, and Johnson’s erratic behavior did irreparable damage

to the Moor Indians’ objectives.

It was no coincidence that Oneida Indians began expressing a guarded suspicion of

the Moor Indians at about this same time. In February of 1769, the Oneidas removed their

children from Wheelock’s school in Connecticut, partly because of Johnson’s missteps and

partly because they had heard how draconian of a disciplinarian Wheelock could be.174

Iroquois Indians traditionally treated outsiders, even enemy captives, with a great deal of

kindness and even respect, and they expected Wheelock and other educators to reciprocate

that relationship.175 A council of Indians at Onandaga, where the Iroquois council fire was

based, told Wheelock’s son that his father could learn much from the French Jesuits: “They

don’t speak roughly, nor do they for every little mistake take up a club & flog them.”176 This

may have appeared like a sudden turn in attitude, but the Oneidas had always had their

suspicions about Wheelock’s program. Sir William Johnson reported that Iroquois Indians

“despise” the Moor Indians because they appeared impoverished and constantly complained

173 Samuel Kirkland to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 December 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian

Brethren, 77-78.

174 Johnson, To Do Good to MY Indian Brethren, 59. Wheelock had, by this time, developed a notable

reputation for beating, whipping, and humiliating his students into obedience. By the end of that year,

Wheelock’s enrollment dropped from 20 students to only 3.

175 Axtell, *atives and *ewcomers, 202-210.

176 Quoted in Axtell, The Invasion Within, 209.

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about their loss of land in the east.177 After Johnson’s fall, Kirkland earnestly warned

Wheelock not to send any more of his revered Indian preachers. “It wont be acceptable to ye

ppl here,” Kirkland explained. Kirkland even begged Wheelock to keep native preachers out

of Iroquoia “until there is good evidence to believe ye Indian Devil & evil spirit is gone out

of him.”178 The Moor Indians were gradually developing a reputation as rabble rousers and

intruders who had clearly worn out their welcome. Perhaps they wore out their necessity,

too. One historian has reported that after the arrival of the Moor Indians, the Oneidas began

their own school, where boys and young men learned outside of the institutional framework

of the missionary schools.179 The Oneidas had invited Algonquian preachers into their homes,

lives, and lands as a way to secure their futures, but the Moor Indians completely

disappointed them.

To make things even more problematic, the intercultural conflicts were not just

between the Moor Indians and their Iroquois audiences, but also between Indian missionaries

and white ones, native missionaries and each other, and Moor Indians and Wheelock. David

Fowler, for example, labored to establish his own authority as a teacher even as white

ministers sought to boss him around. He complained that white missionary Samuel Kirkland,

Fowler’s colleague and housemate, thought he was better than indigenous evangelists and

could “order us about where and how he pleased.” It got so bad that Fowler demanded

Kirkland never speak his name again, and he warned Wheelock not to give any preacher

enough authority to order Indians about. “He can’t order me,” Fowler quipped, “nor no

Missionary that shall come into these Parts. As I am an Instructor I am able to act for myself,

177 Quoted in Taylor, The Divided Ground, 59.

178 Samuel Kirkland to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 December 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian

Brethren, 77-78.

179 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 117.

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without having a master over me.”180 Joseph Johnson had a similar encounter with Kirkland

when the white missionary ordered Johnson to gather some firewood. Johnson refused,

sparking a heated quarrel about their relative authority in the borderlands.181 Even native

preachers had petty rivalries with one another, like when Samson Occom demanded that

Samuel Ashpo, another Indian preacher who had different political allegiances than Occom,

not be allowed to enter Wheelock’s school. Occom complained about Ashpo’s “irregular

steps” and sought to bar him from exercising the same spiritual authority that he himself

wielded.182 Even the indigenous Oneida preachers who were already well established on the

borderlands experienced some of these tensions and conflicts. When the Revolutionary crisis

began to heat up, the Iroquois sometimes declared their allegiances based upon religious

preferences: many of the Anglicized warriors (like Joseph Brant) sided with the Anglicans

and the English, while some Christian Oneidas (who were friends with Kirkland) sided with

the New Lights and the colonists. Isaac had hoped to join the former while Good Peter opted

to ally himself with the latter.183

The most problematic conflict that developed in the late 1760s was not between the

Moor Indians and the Oneidas, but between the Moor Indians and their benefactor, Eleazar

Wheelock. Wheelock’s domineering comportment and inconsistent support led many of his

former students to believe that they were only pawns in his effort to amass personal power

180 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 17 March 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 108-109.

181 Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, 29 December 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indians, 65-66.

182 Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 12 May 1762, in Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson

Occom, Mohegan, 69; and Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 9 November 1762, in American Colonial

Clergy, Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 24, Mss. Collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

183 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 117. See also Taylor, The Divided Ground.

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and influence. David Fowler, ever willing to speak his mind, strongly believed that

Wheelock had not supported him as faithfully as he could have during his mission to the

Oneida. He even contrasted his own intellect, successful training, and evangelical abilities

with those of other Indian missionaries. Fowler protested that Wheelock spent too much time

codling them while ignoring him. “I think it very strange,” he complained to Wheelock, “that

one who has done most should be forgotten.” “All those which have been sent into those

parts have not done any thing worth mentioning. All what they have done is only roving

abroad and making the Indians angry,” Fowler quipped.184 Wheelock did not take Fowler’s

comments seriously, but instead attributed them to intrinsic Indian vices. For Wheelock,

Indians were particularly susceptible to three distinct but overlapping sins: wandering, pride,

and drunkenness. In Wheelock’s mind, Fowler was clearly guilty of pride. But he was not

the only one. From the late 1760s to the early 1770s, Wheelock recounted innumerable

instances when the best of these native preachers (Jacob Woolley, Samson Occom, Hezekiah

Calvin, and Joseph Johnson) got drunk, ran away, “turned pagan,” became apostates,

exhibited excessive pride, and brought shame upon Wheelock, his school, and his native

missionary program. The origins of these falls lay not only in the anxieties and challenges

that native missionaries faced, but also in the racial stereotyping that Wheelock had absorbed

and expressed throughout his career. Wheelock had astronomically high expectations for his

Indian pupils, and the stresses of undergoing grueling missions to the Iroquoian borderlands

often caused ruptures in the relationships between all parties involved.

Wheelock’s program was in trouble by the late 1760s. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix,

which extended English jurisdiction westward and into Mohawk and Oneida lands, infuriated

Indians and rightfully caused them to suspect Wheelock and any other English or allied

184 David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 February 1767, in McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s

Indians, 107-108.

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Indians who professed a desire to help them.185 At the same time, Wheelock’s Indians were

dying, leaving missionary service, or engaging in such astonishing bouts of “apostasy” that it

made him question whether Indians were even capable of missionary work. Wheelock

confided to George Whitefield in the spring of 1769 that his missionary experiment had gone

horribly wrong, and the only practical course was to turn away from training unreliable and

vice-ridden Indians and towards more dependable and trustworthy English preachers. “I am

convinced,” Wheelock conceded, “that God does not design that Indians shall have the lead

in the Affair at present.”186 Although Samson Occom and another English minister had

recently raised over 12,000 pounds for Wheelock’s native missionary program, Wheelock

used the funds to build an elite seminary for white missionaries. The result was Dartmouth

College, an institution that graduated only three Indians from 1770 to 1800 and only nine in

the nineteenth century.187 Wheelock also turned his attention to training English missionaries

for the conversion of Canadian Indians, rather than Iroquois ones. As for the Iroquois

Indians that he earlier professed to care so much about, Wheelock believed that their

rejection of God’s offer of salvation practically sealed their fate. They shared the same

destiny as that of the native missionary program initially designed to help them, as Wheelock

believed they were simply destined to waste away “like a morning dew.”188

185 Peter Marshall, “Sir William Johnson and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1768,” Journal of American

Studies 1 (1967): 149-179; Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 69-75.

186 Eleazar Wheelock to George Whitefield, 24 April 1769, in Richardson, ed., An Indian Preacher in

England, 353.

187 The story of Wheelock’s failure can be found in Axtell, The Invasion Within, 210-217; and Axtell,

*atives and *ewcomers, 183-188.

188 Wheelock, A Continuation of the *arrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon, in Connecticut,

22.

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Protestant ministers around the Atlantic world understood the fall of the French in

1763 as a providential moment in the history of Christianity. The door seemed open for the

Iroquois to finally be exposed to the saving light of divine grace, and Eleazar Wheelock sold

his native missionary program as a fundamentally innovative and original proposal for

sending Christianity into those parts. Native preachers, however, had longstanding

experiences in Iroquoia, from Mohawk schoolmasters like Abraham and Paulus to the

existing Christian leadership of Good Peter, Isaac, and Deacon Thomas among the Oneidas.

When eastern Algonquian Indians entered Iroquoia in the 1760s, they were certainly not

entering a Christian terra nullius, but rather a religious landscape that had already been well

trodden by indigenous Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian evangelists. Their methods of

instruction and self-representation, their embrace of oratory and employment of the psalms,

their willingness to join Indians on the hunt and their preaching styles and messages all

reveal how this unique group of Indians tried to spread Christianity among a neighboring

group of Indians. Indeed, if anything was original about Wheelock’s program, it was the fact

that this was the first and most aggressive attempt to use one Native American group to

convert another. The conflicts that naturally erupted from these missions, combined with

changes in the Iroquoian historical landscape and frequent lapses by native missionaries

themselves, brought an end to this ambitious evangelical design. Even the man who

professed to love the Iroquois and care for their souls turned his back on them when he

opened a school for white missionaries in New Hampshire. In doing so, Wheelock admitted

that his native missionary program had been an abysmal failure.

Although Wheelock was immensely powerful, eminent, and influential, few ministers

actually supported his turn away from native preachers in the late 1760s. Scottish

missionaries, Samuel Kirkland, Samson Occom, other Algonquian preachers, Christian

Iroquois leaders, and other divines throughout the Atlantic world universally proclaimed that

366

Wheelock’s move was unfounded, irregular, and wholly wrongheaded. They generally

agreed that Wheelock’s motives were impure, and that he was hoping only to boost his own

reputation at the expense of the native preachers he claimed to patronize. Furthermore, the

failure of the Moor Indians did little to stop other Protestant missionary groups from

cultivating native preachers in other places and at other times. Anglicans still employed

native evangelists like Paulus in their Iroquoian missions, Samuel Kirkland still worked with

Good Peter and Deacon Thomas to spread the gospel among the Oneidas, the SSPCK still

employed native preachers in their missions well after the failure of Wheelock’s program,

and even Wheelock’s native preachers returned to Oneida in the 1780s to establish an Indian

community that would serve as a base for future native missionary work. Wheelock’s

program had not succeeded, but for most ministers the idea of using native missionaries was

never in doubt. In fact, later ministers would refer to Wheelock’s program as a model for

planning other missionary efforts in other places. When two ministers from Newport, Rhode

Island began pushing for a native mission to Africa in the early 1770s, the inescapable legacy

of the Moor Indian mission to the Iroquois loomed large in their minds.

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CHAPTER SIX

THE QUAMIE PROJECT:

AFRO-CHRISTIA EVAGELISM AD IDIA MISSIOS I THE

REVOLUTIOARY BRITISH ATLATIC

John Quamine was once again on a merchant vessel, hoping and praying that he

survived the “severe storm,” “high Wind,” and “very dangerous gale” that threw the ship

violently in and out of the tempestuous New England waters.1 As he tried to avoid getting

sick during his turbulent ride in November of 1774, Quamine must have contemplated what

he was leaving behind in Newport, Rhode Island. Indeed, the past few years witnessed

several dramatic life changes for Quamine and his growing family: he married a woman

named Duchess, had a son named Charles, and bought his way out of slavery through a

winning lottery ticket. Another, equally important change was his recent embrace of

Protestant Christianity and his successful application to become a member of Newport’s First

Congregational Church. This decision actually explained why he was on the ship in the first

place. Quamine and his companion, Bristol Yamma, were being sent to the College of New

Jersey for training as African missionaries under the tutelage of John Witherspoon.

Witherspoon was not only the president of the college (soon to be Princeton) but also widely

recognized as one of the leading divines in the Protestant Atlantic world. The headiness of

the entire scenario must have caused Quamine some trepidation, for he and Yamma had little

academic training and seemed ill-prepared to be tutored by one of the brightest minds in the

1 Diary entry for 22 November 1774 in Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D.,

President of Yale College, ed. Franklin Dexter Bowditch, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribners’s Sons,

1901), 486.

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colonies. Yet Quamine’s anxieties might have also been caused by the memories of the last

time he was aboard a merchant vessel, for it is highly probable that the last time he was on

such a ship he was about to become one of the millions of slaves who were transported from

Africa to the Americas during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Although Quamine’s

wealthy African father had secured safe passage for his son to be educated in the American

colonies in the 1750s, a conniving merchant sold him into slavery as soon as he got the

chance. Quamine’s rocky ride thus tells us more about the seemingly redemptive qualities of

evangelical Christianity than about his personal relationship with the sea.2 The first time he

encountered such a vessel it was his vehicle to slavery. The second time he boarded one it

was as an African missionary-in-training, having his way paid to be educated by one of the

most celebrated theologians of his time.3

While scholars have long been aware of this experiment to send two Christianized

West Africans back to their homeland as preachers, none have inscribed it into the larger

history of indigenous evangelical work. In fact, only one historian has given it serious

treatment, and that was nearly three decades ago.4 Despite the recent explosion in black

2 For more on people of African descent and their relationship with the sea, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black

Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

3 For a brief biography of Quamine (sometimes referred to as Quamino) and his wife, see Edward E.

Andrews, “John Quamino” and “Duchess Quamino,” in The African American "ational Biography

(London: Oxford University Press, 2006-08). The exact timing of Quamine’s enslavement is still unclear.

4 See Joseph A. Conforti’s chapter on “The Conversion of Africa,” in Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the

"ew Divinity movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in "ew England Between the

Great Awakenings (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1981), 142-158. In this chapter Conforti

situates the Quamine Project within Hopkins’ evolving ideas about Christian destiny, disinterested

benevolence, and anti-slavery. I do not contradict Conforti’s work, but rather complicate it by locating the

Quamine Project within a larger, transatlantic debate about the use of indigenous missionaries and by

placing the two Africans themselves center stage within this dialogue. For brief summaries of this African

mission, see James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New

York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 21-22; and Archibald Alexander, A History of Colonization on the

Western Coast of Africa (Philadelphia: William S. Martien, 1846), 48-59. The project is also mentioned

briefly in Lamin O. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 46.

369

Atlantic studies, the Quamine Project remains an overlooked episode in the history of cultural

encounter between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.5 Part of this neglect is certainly

because the mission never even began, for the tumult of the American Revolution cut off

communication networks, left Newport devastated, and forced the two Africans to find ways

to support their families that did not involve missionary work. Furthermore, and in a

tragically fitting end to this story, Quamine lost his life aboard a ship in 1779 while trying to

earn money for his struggling family as a privateer. In spite of its neglect by later historians,

this African mission was somewhat of a cause célèbre in its own day, not only because

Quamine and Yamma were the first two Africans to be trained at any colonial college, but

also because of the list of luminaries involved in the project.6 These included divines such as

Ezra Stiles, Samuel Hopkins, and John Erskine, famous notables like Anthony Benezet, John

Witherspoon, and Elias Boudinot (the latter two were signers of the Declaration of

Independence), Africans Phillis Wheatley and Philip Quaque, and Indian missionaries like

Eleazar Wheelock, Samson Occom, and David McClure. This African mission was unlike

any before it, if only because of the wide swath of ecumenical support it garnered from all

corners of the Protestant Atlantic missionary community. The Quamine Project was

therefore not just the brainchild of one minister, but rather involved Indians and Englishmen,

enslaved Africans as well as slaveholders, Radical New Lights, moderate Presbyterians,

Anglicans, and Old Light Congregationalists. Anglicans and Dissenters certainly had their

doctrinal differences, but when it came to the evangelization of non-Christians, they often

seized upon opportunities to create cross-denominational networks of funding and

5 I make the same argument for Philip Quaque’s mission to West Africa from 1766 to 1816, which I discuss

in the fourth chapter of this dissertation.

6 It is important to note that Quamine and Yamma never officially matriculated to the college. They were

instead personally tutored by the college president, making them an unconventional addition to the campus.

370

correspondence. In fact, the records of the Quamine Project read somewhat like a “Who’s

Who” in early modern missions and race relations.

The transatlantic popularity of the enterprise is not the only reason why Quamine and

Yamma’s story deserves further attention. Although the two evangelists never set sail for

Africa, this episode nevertheless illuminates several important points regarding the

development of indigenous evangelical enterprises in the eighteenth century British Atlantic.

The first is that Africans themselves were the creators of this mission, and this chapter

situates the spiritual transformation of Quamine (as well as Yamma) in both transatlantic

changes in Afro-Christianity as well as in the local exigencies of Christian revivalism in

Newport. While historians have traditionally viewed Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles as the

progenitors of the African mission, the evidence instead suggests that Quamine and Yamma

had already conceived of the idea well before Hopkins approached Stiles about it in the

spring of 1773. These two Africans therefore had a more authorial role in originating this

mission than scholars have previously acknowledged. They were not just participants in this

project; they were its founders. Secondly and equally important is the degree to which the

African mission was influenced by Native American missionary history. It is no coincidence

that Quamine and Yamma were selected for this experiment just as the failure of Eleazar

Wheelock’s Indian preachers seemed all too clear.7 The Quamine Project was therefore not

only an effort to Christianize Africa; it was an attempt to redeem the failed Protestant

missionary enterprise by learning from the lessons of previous Indian missions and avoiding

the same mistakes. As such, this African mission was unequivocally and universally

understood as a logical extension of Christian missions to Native Americans. John

Quamine’s failed mission thus illustrates the ways in which both Afro-Christian evangelism

7 The mission to the Iroquois by eastern Indians trained at Wheelock’s school is discussed in depth in a

previous chapter of my dissertation.

371

and Indian missionary history became equally vital to the development of African missions in

the Revolutionary British Atlantic.

Afro-Christian Evangelism in ewport

John Quamine’s biography reads very similarly to those produced by black Atlantic

writers of the same era, including Olauduh Equiano, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw,

and Phillis Wheatley.8 Quamine was born into a Fante family around 1743. He later told

Ezra Stiles that his father was a “rich man” who lived at Annamaboe, one of West Africa’s

most notorious slave-trading ports on the Gold Coast.9 Bristol Yamma, by contrast, was an

Ashanti who lived further inland within the African interior.10 According to the account that

Quamine later gave Stiles, he was sent by his wealthy father (who might have been a slave

trader or broker) to the American colonies to receive an education in the mid to late 1750s.

Like so many Africans pulled into the transatlantic slave trade, Quamine was instead shipped

to Newport, Rhode Island and sold into slavery to Captain Benjamin Church, a comfortable

merchant.11

8 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and William L. Andrews, eds., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave

"arratives From the Enlightenment, 1772-1815 (Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1998); Phillis Wheatley, The

Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

9 Ezra Stiles, To the Public (Newport, RI: Solomon Southwick, 1776), 1. Although Stiles gets authorial

credit for this solicitation of funds, Hopkins and Stiles probably drafted the proposal together.

10 Samuel Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress of a proposal and attempt to send the gospel to

guinea, by educating, and sending two negroes there to attempt to christianize their brethren,” 22 March

1784, Mss. in the Gratz Collection (Eminent Clergymen), Case 8, Box 23 at the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania. Hopkins never published the narrative, but he was probably hoping to either publish it or

distribute it among his friends to drum up support for another African mission.

11 Richard C. Youngken, African Americans in "ewport: An Introduction to the Heritage of African

Americans in "ewport, Rhode Island 1700-1945 (Newport: Newport Historical Society, 1998), 49-50.

372

The Newport that Quamine encountered in the 1750s was arguably the most

religiously diverse town in the British Atlantic world.12 On the one hand, Rhode Island’s

historical embrace of religious toleration meant that Old Lights, New Lights, Baptists,

Sabbatarians, Anglicans, Moravians, Quakers, and Jews all mingled in its intersecting streets.

At the same time, the city’s deep harbor and proximity to both the town’s rum distilleries and

the labor-hungry farms along the fertile Narragansett Bay ensured that Newport would

become a major destination for West Indian and African slaves.13 By 1755 Newport’s 1200

blacks comprised nearly one-fifth of the town’s population, making Charleston, South

Carolina the only colonial city that had more Africans per capita.14 Like Quamine and

Yamma, African slaves who came directly to Newport were usually from the Ashanti, Fante,

Mandingo, Mende, or Ibo peoples of the Gold Coast, though some could have originated

from much further inland.15 The persistence of African traditions and culture, even in an

urban setting where there was not as much comparative social autonomy as in the Deep

12 The rest of this section might be considered what David Armitage has dubbed a “Cis-Atlantic History,”

or a history of a particular locale within an Atlantic historical context. See David Armitage, “Three

Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Armitage and Michael J.

Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11-26.

13 See Jay Coughtry, The "otorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); and Robert K. Fitts, Inventing "ew England’s Slave

Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century "arragansett, Rhode Island (New York: Garland

Publishers, 1998).

14 Account of the people in the colony of Rhode-Island, whites and blacks, together with the quantity of

arms and ammunition, in the hands of private persons. Compiled by Stephen Hopkins in 1755, reprinted in

1800. See also Lynn Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: "ewport and Providence in the

Eighteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); and Elaine Forman Crane, A

Dependent People: "ewport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University

Press, 1985), 76-83. For some important examples of early American urban history, see Clare Lyons, Sex

Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia,

1730-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Shane White, Somewhat More

Independent: The End of Slavery in "ew York City, 1770-1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press,

1991); and Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial "ew York City

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

15 Youngken, African Americans in "ewport, 5-10.

373

South, manifested itself in the ubiquity of African naming patterns (Quamine meant “born on

Saturday” among Akan-speaking peoples) and the perpetuation of African cultural rites,

coronation days, and funerary ceremonies.16 Quamine’s religious experience within Newport

would therefore contradict one scholar’s argument that Africans experienced a “spiritual

holocaust” when enslaved in the New World.17 Indeed, the opposite seemed to be true.

When Quamine set his foot on Newport’s Long Wharf for the first time, he was stepping into

a world where Protestants of all stripes, Jews, Africans, and Native Americans traded goods,

exchanged stories, tried to convert one another, and sought spiritual meaning for their lives.18

16 The persistence of African naming patterns can be found on the grave markings at “God’s Little Acre,”

Newport’s black burial ground. See Alden Gamaliel Beamen, Rhode Island Vital Records, "ew Series Vol.

11 Births 1590-1930 From "ewport Common Burial Ground Inscriptions (East Princeton, MA: Rhode

Island Families Association, 1985). For more on the historical archaeology of the cemetery, see James C.

Garman, “Viewing the Color Line Through the Material Culture of Death,” Historical Archaeology 28 No.

3 (1994): 74-93. For the persistence of African natural symbology and funerary rites, see Edward E.

Andrews, “‘Creatures of Mimic and Imitation’: Black Elections, The Liberty Tree, and the Politicization of

African Religious Space in Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island” Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007):

121-139. Also see Crane, A Dependent People, 76-83. For the persistence of African culture in the Deep

South, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake

and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

17 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press), 129-163. While Butler concedes that some African practices, including funerary rituals

and forms of magic and occultism, survived the middle passage, he argues that African religious systems

“as systems” effectively died in the transfer from Africa to the Americas.

18 For more on the interactions between English, Indians, and Africans in early New England, see John

Wood Sweet, Bodies Politics: "egotiating Race in the American "orth, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2003).

374

This map, published by Charles Blaskowitz in 1777, highlights not only the fine natural harbor

that Newport enjoyed, but also the remarkable density of religious institutions in a moderately sized port

town. Within this map alone Blaskowitz identified ten different houses of religious worship, including two

Congregational Churches, a Moravian and Friends’ meeting house, an Anglican church, a Jewish

Synagogue, and three Baptist as well as one Sabbatarian meeting house. Image courtesy of the Newport

Historical Society.

In fact, Quamine and Yamma may not have even been the first Africans trained for

missionary work to come out of Newport. Philip Quaque – an African Anglican missionary

stationed on the Cape Coast – reported in 1774 that he encountered an African who was

“stoled away from his Country when very young” and shipped to Newport in the 1720s. He

lived in that seaport for nearly 50 years as a slave to a Quaker named Samuel Collins. In

time this African became a “member or professor of Quakerism,” largely by virtue of his

master also being a Quaker. But, even as he was sitting in the segregated balconies of

Newport’s Quaker meeting house, confessing his sins publicly, searching for his own inner

light, and engaging in the outward performances of Quakerism, he was nevertheless drawn to

the remarkable religious pluralism of Newport. He became a faithful “Spectator” of the

375

Anglican Church, in particular, though the natural antipathy that Anglicans and Quakers

often expressed probably restricted him from joining the Anglican congregation there. His

master died in 1772, presumably freeing this slave upon his death.19 The newly freed slave

found his way back to Africa, sought baptism under Philip Quaque, and hoped to “become a

Proselyte of Christianity.” Although the documentary record of this African Quaker turned

Anglican disappears after Quaque’s mention of him, the story nevertheless anticipates the

ways in which transatlantic slavery, black participation in religious activity, and religious

pluralism in Newport formed the basis for transatlantic Afro-evangelism.20

Like the millions of Africans pulled into the vortex of the early modern slave system,

Quamine dealt with his plight by carving out a life for himself within the circumscribed

social boundaries of New England family slavery. Christianity eventually became a central

component of that life. John Thornton and others have rightly argued that slaves’ exposure to

Christianity only rarely began on the American side of the Atlantic, as they often had

encounters with Christianity, or at least with Christians, well before their slave ships hoisted

anchor.21 As a coastal African who was the son of a wealthy man at Annamaboe, there is no

doubt that Quamine had some interaction with the nominally Christian slave merchants who

plied their trade there. Quamine also approached Christianity in the same ways that other

Christian slaves did throughout the Atlantic world: not by erasing an African cultural past but

19 This would make sense, since the early 1770s witnessed Newport’s Quaker population moving to

prohibit slave-holding among their members.

20 Philip Quaque to the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 19 March 1774, in Philip Quaque,

Letters of the Rev. Philip Quaque of West Africa (East Ardsley, England: Micro Methods Ltd., 1980-1985)

(hereafter referred to as Quaque Letters. For Samuel Collins’ obituary, see Providence Gazette, 7 March

1772, Vol. IX Issue 426, page 3. Quaque’s mission to the Cape Coast is discussed in a previous chapter of

my dissertation.

21 John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 235-271.

376

by fitting Christianity into existing spiritualities and cosmologies.22 While there were

numerous ways that Quamine might have done this, the most obvious would have been to

situate God and Christ into an African framework. Africans were technically not

monotheistic. They did, however, believe in a supreme power, one that created and governed

the universe. More importantly, they also believed in a series of lesser divinities. Unlike the

supreme and powerful God, these divinities were very active in Africans’ spiritual and

temporal experiences.23 Many Afro-Christians understood Christ as one of these lesser

divinities; an intermediary between man, the lowest of spiritual beings, and God himself.

Quamine’s Christianity thus could have fit easily into a West African cosmological system.

While he would recognize the authority of an all-powerful Christian God, Quamine probably

approached that God through lesser divinities, especially Jesus Christ.

The physical experience of being enslaved might have only made Christ more

relevant and applicable to Quamine’s life. In Christ, slaves could identify with someone who

suffered as they did under the weight of oppression, violence, and death. For black slaves,

Christ’s suffering was not a passage from a text, but rather a lived episode of intense physical

suffering that paralleled their own personal experiences within the transatlantic slave system.

Quamine might have also applied stories from scripture to explain his own terrible fall into

this system. When Ezra Stiles asked him in 1773 which biblical texts he read the most, he

replied that he read John, Matthew, Romans, and Corinthians. Stiles then asked Quamine to

read out of the 10th book of John. “All who came before Christ,” the text reads, “were

22 I discuss this religious syncretism in much more detail in my third chapter, which deals with religious

revivalism among black Caribbean Moravians, Anglican slave teachers, and Christian Indian separatists.

23 Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the

American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1-

62; and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2004), 4-92.

377

thieves and robbers.” While a thief plunders, steals, slaughters, and destroys, Christ forever

remains the faithful shepherd, laying down his own life for his flock. As someone who not

only witnessed the theft of so many African bodies from his home at Annamaboe but actually

became one of those bodies himself, the story of Christ’s faithfulness in a world full of

duplicitous robbers would have had tremendous spiritual resonance for Quamine. This might

explain why, when Quamine changed his name from Quaum to John Quamine in the early

1770s – name changing was also a rite of passage that signaled a transformation of identity in

West African cultures – he fused his African name with that of the author of his favorite

gospel. Through his understanding of Christ, examination of the Book of John, and even his

eventual change of name, John Quamine became a physical embodiment of the fusion of

African cosmologies and Christian spiritualities.24

This was certainly not a spontaneous change. Although one scholar has argued that

Quamine had a conversion experience while within Samuel Hopkins’ First Congregational

Church (Hopkins took over in April of 1770), it is more likely that Quamine’s encounter with

Christianity was a long and protracted process that included many important episodes placed

within a larger trajectory of spiritual transformation.25 Quamine apparently “fell under

serious Impressions of Religion” in 1761 and by October of 1764 he had given a local

schoolteacher named Sarah Osborn an account of his Christian conversion.26 By 1765

Quamine had been baptized and admitted into the First Congregational Church. Bristol

24 Diary entry for 13 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 366. Ira Berlin and

Peter Wood have discussed name giving as a way to exercise physical and cultural control over slaves. See

the entries for “Naming” in the index of Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery

in "orth America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Wood, Black Majority: "egroes

in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 1996), 181-185.

25 Sweet, Bodies Politic, 331.

26 Diary entry for 13 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 366.

378

Yamma, his missionary colleague, followed suit three years later.27 In 1769 Quamine sank

his roots deeper into Newport’s black community by marrying “Duchess,” an African slave

four years his senior.28 Although they were members of the First Congregational, they had

their children baptized by Ezra Stiles, who headed the Second Congregational. Their infant

Charles was baptized in 1772, Violet in 1776, and Katharine in 1779.29 Although they were

slaves, Quamine and his wife expressed their spiritual autonomy by participating in the

Christian rituals of conversion, marriage, and baptism. For Quamine, these moments were

not arcane formalities, but rather important rituals that were vital to his family’s development

and understanding of Afro-Christianity.

None of these episodes were more important than the Newport Revival.30 Sarah

Osborn, the teacher who recorded Quamine’s first conversion narrative, was at the center of

this revival. She had been influenced by the preaching of George Whitefield, James

27 Diary entry for 13 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 366.

28 It is not clear whether this marriage took place within the institutional framework of Newport’s

Congregational churches. Duchess Quamino later became a ubiquitous figure in Newport’s social scene.

An accomplished baker and entrepreneur, she would use her baking skills to attain her freedom. Later

authors have even suggested that it was her personal influence that urged William Ellery Channing to

eventually become an abolitionist. Her grave marker can still be seen at Newport’s black burial ground.

See George Gibbs Channing, Early Recollections of "ewport, R.I., from the year 1793 to 1811. (Newport:

A.J. Ward, C.E. Hammet, Jr.; Boston, Mass., Nichols and Noyes, 1868), 170-171; and Youngken, African

Americans in "ewport, 49-50.

29 Diary entry for 26 January 1772 in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 207; Diary entry for

16 June 1776 in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. II, 16; Diary entry for 3 October 1779 in

Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. II, 376. Violet only lived to be 15 years old, and her burial

marker can still be seen in Newport’s black burial ground. The last baptism occurred on the same day that

Bristol Yamma and his wife had their two children baptized by Stiles.

30 Historian Jon Butler famously argued that the First Great Awakening, which scholars usually locate

around 1739 or 1740, was an “interpretive fiction” invented by later historians. Butler suggested that the

Great Awakening is best understood not as a single, monolithic revival, but rather as a series of religious

upheavals that had their own unique origins, courses, and outcomes. In this historiographical context, we

might view the Newport Revival as one of many Christian revivals that were persistently popping up

throughout colonial America in the eighteenth century. See Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and

Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” The Journal of American History 69 No. 2

(September 1982): 305-325. See also Erik Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-

Century "ew England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

379

Davenport, and Gilbert Tennent years before and began leading her own religious meetings

in her home in the mid-1760s.31 These were not religious services within the institutional

framework of the church, but rather interdenominational bible study sessions, where

participants met weekly to discuss passages from scripture and relate them to their own

spiritual longings, sufferings, and travails. While Osborn was painfully aware of the

gendered repercussions of holding meetings at her own home, her status as a well-established

and older woman helped guard against any potential accusations of her as a religious zealot

or upstart.32

Race was a problem, however, and the fact that Africans embraced Osborn’s teaching

made her both praiseworthy and dangerous. In fact, Africans initially approached Osborn to

request Christian instruction. As Osborn noted to a friend in 1765, there were “several

Ethiopians thotful who Having their Liberty to go where they like on Lords day Evenings

have ask’d Liberty to repair to our House for the benefit of family prayer reading etc.”33 In

spite of the resistance she might have received from the community, Osborn thought it her

Christian duty to lead these meetings. By the summer of 1766 she had 300 people – white

and black – attending her meetings. By the beginning of 1767 that number rose to 525,

literally filling her house with freedmen and slaves in search of spiritual elucidation.34 While

31 For an overview of Osborn’s role in the revival, see Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual

Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714-1796),” Church History 61 No. 4. (December 1992): 408-421. See also

Harry S. Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London,” The Journal

of American History 70 No. 3 (December 1983): 556-578. See also Samuel Hopkins, Memoirs of the Life

of Mrs. Sarah Osborn: Who Died at "ewport, Rhode Island, on the Second Day of August, 1796, in the

Eighty Third Year of Her Age (Catskill, N.Y.: N. Elliott, 1814).

32 The best account of Osborn’s concern about gender is in Mary Beth Norton, “My Resting Reaping

Times”: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her “Unfeminine” Activities, 1767,” Signs 2 No. 2 (Winter 1976):

515-529.

33 Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times”: 519.

34 Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times”: 519-520.

380

some members of the community accused her of keeping a “Negroe House,” she responded

that “I only read to them talk to them and sing a Psalm or Hymn with them, and then at Eight

o clock dismiss them by Name as upon List.”35 Her list of names, the highly structured

timing of the meetings, and the Africans’ promise that they remain orderly and would not

“come without the consent of their masters”; all of these tactics helped Osborn situate herself

as a benevolent teacher rather than a religious exhorter.36 Not surprisingly, two of the people

who soaked in such teachings every week were John Quamine and Bristol Yamma. If

Osborn dismissed her charges alphabetically, Quaum (as he was then called) and Yamma

would have been among the last to leave.

And yet the significance of the Newport Revival to the Quamine Project was not only

in Quamine and Yamma’s certain participation in it, but also their developing role as spiritual

advisors outside the circumscribed boundaries of Osborn’s weekly meetings. Although there

is no evidence to indicate that either African participated in extra-ecclesiastical exhorting,

Osborn revealed that some slaves had begun organizing their own religious meetings.37 She

observed that those who had families living in separate households (like John and Duchess

Quamine) sometimes held “secret prayer.” She further knew of “two or three of these

[Africans] Meeting privately together to read pray and converse.” Osborn even admitted

that, “now I Heard Last week they are drawing up into a Little society for prayer at one of

35 Sarah Osborn to Joseph Fish, 28 February – 7 March, 1767, in Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times”:

520 and 523. According to Rhode Island law, blacks could not be out later than 9pm, of which Osborn

surely would have been aware.

36 Hopkins, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn, 76.

37 Exhorting differed from leading private religious meetings simply because it was, by definition, a public

act.

381

their Houses on Thursday Nights. They dont know I know any thing about it.”38 Osborn’s

passage demonstrates several important points regarding African Christianity in Newport:

Afro-Christians were holding clandestine religious meetings and organizing themselves

around a core of black spiritual leaders. It is quite likely that Quamine or Yamma – or both –

directed these exercises well before they were hand-picked for missionary work. In other

words, these two African missionaries were participating in at least some form of Christian

evangelization years before they were recruited to continue it in Africa.

While the growing religious autonomy of Quamine, Yamma, and other black

Christians was pregnant with spiritual potential, others found it fundamentally problematic.

Joseph Fish, who was not only Osborn’s confidant but also the preacher at Stonington,

Connecticut, knew something about the dangerous and porous boundaries between

revivalism and separatism. When Osborn and Fish were writing, Fish was in the midst of an

ecclesiastical dispute between himself and Indian separate preachers in southern New

England. Samuel Niles, a Narragansett Indian charged with exhorting in another

congregation, had split off and formed his own independent church in years prior. Niles was

“ordained” by a committee of Native Americans, a move which was viewed by most

Protestants as somewhere between highly unorthodox to completely heretical. Worst still,

Niles could not even read. He was therefore dependent upon personal and direct revelation,

rather than biblical exegesis, for spiritual knowledge. Any minister worth his salt would have

easily seen the problem with an illiterate Indian preaching the gospel to other Indians. When

Fish admonished Osborn to be careful when preaching to blacks, he understood the separatist

tendencies that Christian Indians and Africans could embrace, appropriate, and employ to

38 Sarah Osborn to Joseph Fish, 28 February – 7 March, 1767, in Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times”:

524.

382

secure their own spiritual independence.39 While it could be liberating for blacks and

Indians, separatism also had the potential to be dangerously democratic.

This fear of separatism might also explain Ezra Stiles’ sudden interest in black

spirituality after 1770. That year, the same that Osborn’s Newport Revival died down, Stiles

began holding weekly religious meetings for blacks at his house.40 These meetings were

certainly smaller than Osborn’s, but he sometimes had 70 to 80 blacks in attendance, many

coming from outside the institutional bounds of his Second Congregational Church. Perhaps

Stiles was sincerely interested in the fate of Africans’ souls, or perhaps he was simply trying

to use his preaching as a form of social control. Some of his sermons definitely emphasized

the trope of the obedient slave, for on at least one occasion he expounded upon Ephesians 6,

which directed its listeners to be faithful servants to their masters. At the same time, Stiles’

recollection of his preaching among Newport’s blacks also revealed their own volition in

these spiritual exercises. One time in 1773, for example, they held their religious meeting at

“Brother Primus’s House” instead of Stiles’.41 It is highly probable that Quamine and

Yamma were present at these meetings; they had already begun the first stages of their

missionary training and Stiles probably assumed that any extra instruction, even practice in

leading bible study, would prepare them for their mission. By 1773, Quamine and Yamma

had been exposed to nearly a decade of extra-ecclesiastical Christian instruction from Sarah

39 For the correspondence between Osborn and Fish, see Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times”: 515-529;

and Barbara E. Lacey, “The Bonds of Friendship: Sarah Osborn of Newport and the Reverend Joseph Fish

of Stonington, 1743-1779” Rhode Island History 45 No. 4 (November 1986): 127-136; and Niles’ rise to

power, as well as the social and theological problems associated with his pastorate, is detailed in a previous

chapter. Fish’s fallout with Niles is catalogued extensively in Joseph Fish, Old Light on Separate Ways:

The "arragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 ed. William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons

(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982). See also Linford D. Fisher, “‘Traditionary

Religion’: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-

1776” (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2008), 210-266.

40 “House,” in Stiles’ understanding, could refer to both his home as well as his church.

41 Diary entry for 12 October 1773 in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 415.

383

Osborn and Ezra Stiles, not to mention the lessons they learned weekly at Hopkins’ First

Congregational Church. Chances are that, in their own clandestine and subaltern meetings,

they expressed some form of spiritual leadership for themselves. At the very least, their

religious experiences in Newport demonstrated to them the ways in which spiritual leadership

need not necessarily originate within the hierarchical structure of the church but rather could

be generated from below.

Given Quamine’s developing religious sensibilities, then, it might have been difficult

for him not to view the sudden stroke of fortune he experienced in 1773 as anything but

divine providence. In that year he and Yamma collaborated to purchase a lottery ticket.

When they actually won, Quamine purchased his freedom and Yamma used the winnings to

commence saving for his own. Such a seemingly miraculous turn of events, as well as the

recent spiritual transformation of these two Africans, demonstrated to Samuel Hopkins, Ezra

Stiles, Quamine, and Yamma that the two Africans were destined for greater things than

urban slavery in Newport.42 Only a few months later it became public knowledge that these

two exceptional men were to be groomed for a mission “back” to Africa. Former African

slaves, God now seemed to be smiling down on the two budding evangelists.

Quamine and Yamma might have interpreted the previous two decades of their lives

as a kind of “fortunate fall,” a literary device frequently employed by Christianized black

Atlantic writers of the eighteenth century. The fortunate fall explained the horrors of their

personal enslavement by suggesting that such trials were only part of God’s plan to bring

them to the saving grace of Christianity. The fortunate fall approach to black suffering

neither excused nor justified slavery, but instead offered a powerful explanatory device for

42 Stiles, To the Public, 1; Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress,” 2.

384

why bad things happened to good people.43 When James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw wrote

about his religious experiences within transatlantic slavery, he summarized his life as a

spiritual pilgrimage that hopefully ended in salvation. “As Pilgrims,” Gronniosaw

commented, “and very poor Pilgrims, we are traveling through many difficulties towards our

Heavenly Home, and waiting patiently for his gracious call, when the Lord shall deliver us

out of the evils of this present world and bring us to the Everlasting Glories of the world to

come.”44 Phillis Wheatley expressed similar sentiments in a letter to a black friend in

Newport. Wheatley wrote, “let us rejoice in and adore the wonders of God’s infinite Love in

bringing us from a land semblant of darkness itself, and where the divine light of revelation

(being obscur’d) is as darkness.”45 Perhaps the most eloquent articulation of the fortunate fall

approach to black enslavement was put into verse by Wheatley:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, "egros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.46

43 Anglican Protestants also believed that, even if slavery was an awful temporal condition, it was still a

“Blessing” that these “ignorant, rude, and unciviliz’d People” came to the Americas to receive Christian

instruction, since they could “hardly be more miserable in any Country than in their own.” See Thomas

Wilson, An Essay Towards An Instruction For The Indians; Explaining the most Essential Doctrines of

Christianity. Which may be of Use To such Christians, as have not well considered the Meaning of the

Religion they profess: Or, who profess to know God, but in Works do deny Him. In several short and plain

Dialogues. Together with Directions and Prayers for The Heathen World, Missionaries, Catechumens,

Private Persons, Families, of Parents, for their Children, for Sundays, &c. (London: J. Osborn, 1740), xx.

44 James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, “A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of

James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself,” in Gates, Jr. and Andrews,

eds., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic, 59.

45 Phillis Wheatley to Arbour Tanner, 19 May 1772, in Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley,

164.

46 Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Printed for A. Bell,

bookseller, Aldgate; and sold by Messrs. Cox and Berry, King-Street, Boston, 1773), 18. For a recent

385

Wheatley later told Samuel Hopkins that she supported the Quamine mission – which

she learned of via an integrated network of evangelical printing and correspondence –

precisely because of her own spiritual transformation within the transatlantic slave system.

She admitted that her heart expanded with joy to see “the thick cloud of ignorance dispersing

from the face of my benighted country. Europe and America have long been fed with the

heavenly provision, and I fear they loath it, while Africa is perishing with a spiritual famine.”

According to Wheatley, Quamine and Yamma were the instruments whom God had selected

to save the African race: “O that [Africans] could partake of the crumbs, the precious crumbs,

which fall from the table of these distinguished children of the kingdom.”47 While there is no

direct evidence to suggest that Quamine and Yamma actually believed in their own fortunate

fall, the evidence from other black Atlantic figures of similar ilk is illuminating.

Gronniosaw, Wheatley, Quamine, and Yamma all hailed from the West Coast of Africa, had

comparable experiences within Atlantic slavery, converted to Christianity, and understood

their lives as a spiritual journey with many travails. The fact that Quamine and Yamma lived

in such a religiously vibrant city also suggests that they might have imbibed this fortunate fall

theory, even if they did not articulate it themselves. 48

The fortunate fall device certainly could not justify slavery itself. As Samuel

Hopkins argued in 1776, enslaving Africans in order to Christianize them was a “direct and

analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s Christianity, see Jennifer J. Thorn, Phillis Wheatley: Gender, God, and Grief

(forthcoming). For another example of how evangelical Christianity “saved” two African brothers, see

Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2004).

47 Phillis Wheatley to Samuel Hopkins, 9 February 1774, in Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis

Wheatley, 175-176. This letter also appears in Stiles, To the Public, 5.

48 For more on the fortunate fall, see Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black

Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 1996); and Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University

of Georgia Press, 2005). Carretta argues persuasively that Olauduh Equiano was not born in West Africa,

but was actually born in the Carolinas.

386

gross violation of the laws of Christ.”49 And yet, Hopkins, Stiles, and other ministers,

including the two African missionaries, might have looked to African oppression as an

example of how God operated in mysterious ways. Perhaps, Hopkins mused, “all this past

and present evil, which the Africans have suffered by the slave trade and the slavery to which

so many of them have been reduced, may be the occasion of an overbalancing good.”50

Furthermore, the use of two African missionaries seemed a wholly appropriate way to begin

atoning for the sins of the slave traders. Hopkins and Stiles both spoke of missionary work as

a kind of early modern reparations program. This was certainly nothing new. Anglicans had

long been arguing for the conversion of black slaves as “the only righteous Recompence that

can be made them for their being forc’d from their native Country into a strange Land.”51

While Stiles suggested that sending two natives was “the best compensation we are able to

make the poor Africans,” Hopkins later observed that the native missionary project was “the

best and only compensation we can make.”52 At least for Hopkins and Stiles, there seemed no

better way to absolve Christians of the sins of slavery than to send some of Africa’s sons

back to their land of nativity to help their people share in the glories of God.

49 Samuel Hopkins, A Dialogue, Concerning the Slavery of the Africans: Shewing it to be the Duty and

Interest of the American Colonies to Emancipate All Their African Slaves: With an Address to the Owners

of Such Slaves: Dedicated to the Honorable Continental Congress (Norwich, C.T.: Judah P. Spooner,

1776), 13.

50 Samuel Hopkins, “Sermon Before the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, &C., 1793” in

Hopkins, The Works of Samuel Hopkins, D.D., First Pastor of the Church in Great Barrington, Mass.,

Afterwards Pastor of the First Congregational Church in "ewport, R.I.: With a Memoir of His Life and

Character Vol. I (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1854), 144. William Warburton expressed

similar sentiments about the SPG’s role in perpetuating slavery at their Codrington Plantation on Barbados.

He noted that, even though the trafficking of humans was evil and iniquitous, perhaps the placement of a

slave plantation in the Society’s hands made its members “the honoured Instruments of producing Good.”

See William Warburton, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on

Friday February 21, 1766 (London: E. Owen, 1766), 29.

51 Wilson, An Essay Towards An Instruction For The Indians, xix.

52 Stiles, To the Public, 3; Hopkins, Memoirs of the Life of Sarah Osborn, 79.

387

A Mission to Africans, by Africans

Every individual involved in the Quamine Project had been personally touched by

slavery. Quamine and Yamma were former slaves, Hopkins had a slave before he arrived in

Newport in 1770, Stiles owned one for 20 years before he became the president of Yale

College in 1778, and John Witherspoon possessed a slave at his death in 1794. Hopkins’

battles against slavery and the slave trade have been well documented, and Stiles also became

directly involved in anti-slavery campaigns after the American Revolution.53 For

Newporters, who depended on the transatlantic slave trade for their economic survival,

slavery was the “first wheel of commerce” that unfortunately transformed the idyllic port

town into what Hopkins called a “Tower of Slavery.”54 It is therefore no surprise that, for

Quamine and Yamma, slavery was at the core of their missionary impulse. The natural rights

and republican rhetoric that pervaded college campuses, taverns, and print culture in the

1760s and 70s only stoked this abolitionist fire, as blacks throughout the Americas began

53 Hopkins, A Dialogue, Concerning the Slavery of the Africans; Hopkins, A Discourse Upon the Slave-

Trade, and the Slavery of the Africans. Delivered in the Baptist Meeting-House At Providence, Before the

Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave-Trade, &c. At Their Annual Meeting, on May 17, 1793. By

Samuel Hopkins, D.D. Pastor of First Congregational Church in "ewport, and Member of Said Society

(Providence: J. Carter, 1793); See also Joseph A. Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity:

Theology, Ethics, and Social Reform in Eighteenth-Century New England,” The William and Mary

Quarterly 34 No. 4 (October 1977): 572-589; David S. Lovejoy, “Samuel Hopkins: Religion, Slavery, and

the Revolution,” The "ew England Quarterly 40 No. 2 (June 1967): 227-243; and Stanley K. Schultz, “The

Making of a Reformer: The Reverend Samuel Hopkins as an Eighteenth-Century Abolitionist,”

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115 No. 5 (October 15, 1971): 350-365. Hopkins

certainly inherited part of his anti-slavery positions from his spiritual mentor, Jonathan Edwards. For more

on Edwards’ views on slavery, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave

Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54 No. 4 (October 1997): 823-834. For more on Stiles’

relationship with his slave (named Newport) and his later abolitionism, see selections from Edmund S.

Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1962).

54 Campbell, Middle Passages, 18; and Samuel Hopkins to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 7 January

1789, in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Microfilm Reel 11, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

See also Crane, A Dependent People, 16-33.

388

appropriating the language of liberty for their own fight against slavery and racism.55 When

Quamine and Yamma returned from Princeton in the spring of 1776, the war had already

been going on for a year and the Declaration of Independence was only weeks away from

being proposed. In this milieu Quamine used his newfound literary ability to express thanks

to one of the colonies’ most ardent abolitionists: Moses Brown. Quamine wrote that he had

heard through several sources of Brown’s “noble and distinguished character, and boundless

benevolent engagements, with regard to the unforfeited rights [my italics], of the poor

unhappy Africans.” As “one of that nation,” and though an “utter stranger” to Brown,

Quamine wanted to present him “with gratitude and thanks…for all your ardent endeavours

for the speedy salvation of his poor enslaved country men.”56 Although Quamine’s letter to

Brown is brief, it is highly suggestive of both the natural rights and Christian redemptive

rhetoric that permeated evangelical circles in the 1770s.57 Perhaps Quamine anticipated that

he might have a major role to play in a historic transformation; not only would he bring

Christianity back to the land of his birth, but he might also employ his newfound cultural

skills to end African suffering within the transatlantic slave system.

55 See Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1991). See also Peter Thompson, Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life

in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and David W.

Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750-1800 (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

56 John Quamine to Moses Brown, 5 June 1776, in Mack Thompson, Moses Brown, Reluctant Reformer

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 105. The original text was at the Rhode Island

Historical Society in the Moses Brown Papers, Volume II, 59. However, I have since contacted the RIHS

and that particular manuscript appears to be missing. This correspondence is also mentioned in Philip

Sheldon Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 21; and Sweet,

Bodies Politic, 243.

57 While Quamine approved of Brown’s work, the feeling was probably not mutual. As a Quaker, Brown

argued that missionaries must have unique qualifications for evangelical work, and Brown suggested to

Samuel Hopkins that the two Africans did not fit those criteria. See Moses Brown to Samuel Hopkins (date

unknown), in Thompson, Moses Brown, Reluctant Reformer, 185-186. The letter can also be found in

Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 121-122.

389

Quamine’s Afro-Christian evangelism, belief in the fortunate fall theory, and fusion

of abolitionism and missionary work all suggest that he and Yamma were not just

participants in, but rather catalysts for, this African mission. While scholars have assumed

that Hopkins and Stiles were the originators of the project, Quamine and Yamma had been

discussing it amongst themselves well before Hopkins asked Stiles to help advertise the

mission in 1773. Conversion and missionary activity was not necessarily forced upon them;

indeed, the evidence suggests that they requested education, ministerial training, and the

opportunity to return to Africa as preachers. Ezra Stiles noted that the two Africans were

“not only willing, but very desirous to quit all worldly prospects and risque their lives, in

attempting to open a door for the propagation of christianity among their poor, ignorant,

perishing, heathen brethren.”58 Quamine also reported to Stiles that he began to learn to

write, on his own, in the winter of 1772/73.59 Stiles noted in his literary diary that, on April

12th of 1773, “Quaum came to see me to discourse upon the scheme of his becoming a

Minister.” “He tells me,” Stiles recalled, “that ever since he tasted the Grace of the Lord

Jesus he conceived a Thought and Earnest Desire or Wish that his Relations and Countrymen

in Africa might also come to the knowledge of and taste the same blessed Things.”60

Quamine and Yamma were not just instruments in the Quamine Project, and they were

certainly not pawns within this larger missionary enterprise. Instead, they were the

originators and co-authors of this ambitious evangelical experiment.

The best evidence for the two Africans’ authorship of this mission comes from a

manuscript produced by Samuel Hopkins in 1784, when he was trying to drum up support for

58 Stiles, To the Public, 2.

59 Diary entry for 13 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 366.

60 Diary entry for 13 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 366.

390

another African mission after this one had failed. Although Hopkins never published the

piece, it reveals that Quamine and Yamma had planned to pursue an African mission years

before Hopkins and Stiles jumped on board. Hopkins admitted that, before he arrived in

Newport, the two Africans “had talked of this matter between themselves.” “And,” Hopkins

recalled, “as the gospel had never been offered to their brethren in Guinea, they said to each

other, it would be agreeable to them to spend their lives in attempting to spread the

knowledge of salvation among that perishing people.”61 Hopkins took his Newport pulpit in

April of 1770 and the plan was officially underway in 1773. This means that Quamine and

Yamma had been conversing about and planning this African mission at least three years

before any white minister became involved. Although Hopkins and Stiles would be the ones

raising money for, and acting as the public faces of, this missionary experiment, the genesis

of this African mission lay in the two Africans’ themselves.

This is certainly not to say that Quamine and Yamma might not have had more

personal, temporal motives for pursuing a mission to West Africa. In fact, we might read

Quamine’s initial adoption of Christianity in the 1760s as a response to the problem of

racialized power struggles within New England family slavery. Quamine was a slave of the

Church family, who attended Ezra Stiles’ Second Congregational Church. When he decided

to join a church, Quamine opted for the First Congregational, a decision which would not

have produced the kind of conflicts that a conversion to Quakerism might, but nevertheless

belied a significant degree of spiritual autonomy. Although the two churches were affiliated,

the First Congregational had more of a New Light pedigree than the Second. Furthermore,

Stiles recorded that the Church family attended religious services only three times a year, so

Quamine’s masters were neither particularly active in their congregation nor showy in their

61 Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress,” 2.

391

piety.62 Quamine’s conversion therefore might have been a kind of power play. Slaves could

certainly resist by running away, poisoning their masters, or inciting rebellion. But they also

found more subtle, nuanced ways to upset and complicate the power dynamics of slavery.

Quamine’s admission into the First Congregational therefore might have been both an act of

surreptitious resistance as well as a mission statement to assert his rights to spiritual liberty.63

Quamine thus skillfully navigated the racial politics of conversion within a city founded upon

the very idea of religious freedom.

Yet Quamine’s conversion experience and participation in Newport’s Christian

culture do not explain why he volunteered for – and indeed, had long been planning – this

African mission. Although I have suggested he did so, in part, out of sincere evangelical

impulses, he might have also conceived of this mission as a way to renew contact with his

African family and rejuvenate his connections to an ancestral past. Just as Indians used a

network of native preachers to find information about and secure the safety of their families

during King Philip’s War, Quamine also relied upon a transatlantic network of

correspondence between native preachers, white ministers, Africans, and Americans to learn

about his family back in Annamaboe.64 The backbone of this network was Philip Quaque, a

Fetu African who had been ordained as an Anglican minister in England and sent “back” to

Cape Coast Castle as a missionary in 1766.65 While most victims of the African diaspora

62 Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 327. There is some evidence, however, that Benjamin

Church had been a deacon under a previous pastor.

63 Although we can never know exactly how common this strategy was, Quamine was certainly not the only

slave to do this. A slave of Andrew Le Mercier, a Huguenot clergyman in Boston, applied for membership

into the Anglican North Church instead of his master’s congregation. See Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith,

154.

64 Native preachers’ reliance upon evangelical networks during King Phillip’s War is discussed in the first

chapter of my dissertation.

65 Quaque is discussed in a previous chapter, but the most thorough published examinations of his life and

mission can be found in Travis Glasson, “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost: Philip Quaque in London

392

would never have had the chance to reunite with their families back home, their

correspondence with Quaque – mediated as it was through Samuel Hopkins – gave Quamine

and Yamma this unusual opportunity. When Quaque reported to Samuel Hopkins that

Quamine’s father (Coffee Yangoe) was dead, but that his mother (Mansa) and uncle (Eucone)

were both alive and well, Quamine must have felt some joy to know that his surviving family

waited impatiently for his return. Quaque even compared Quamine’s mother’s joy to

Joseph’s return to his father, Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. “The bowels of maternal

affection,” Quaque wrote, “seem ready to burst; and break forth in tears of joy.” He

continued, “The joy it kindled, on the occasion, in expectation of seeing once more the fruit

of her loins, before she with her grey hairs goes to the grave, throws her into ecstasies…in

rapture she breaks forth and says, ‘It is enough! My son is yet alive! I hope, by God’s

blessing, to see him before I die!’”66 Quamine’s wealthy uncle, who inherited his brother’s

property upon his death (per West African custom), told Quaque that “nothing shall be

wanting Conducive to make him and all about him Happy, and live Satisfactory amongst his

own Kindred.”67 Quaque even secretly suspected that Quamine’s missionary project was

and Cape Coast, 1756-1816,” Journal of British Studies Vol. 48 No. 1 (January 2009): 29-50; Ty M. Reese,

“‘Sheep in the Jaws of So Many Ravenous Wolves': the Slave Trade and Anglican Missionary Activity at

Cape Coast Castle, 1752-1816,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34 No. 3 (September 2004): 348-372;

Margaret Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast” in Africa Remembered: "arratives by West Africans

from the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); and

F.L. Bartels, “Philip Quaque, 1741-1816,” Transactions of the Gold Coast and Togoland Historical Society

I No. 5 (1955); and Frank J. Klingberg, “Philip Quaque: Pioneer Native Missionary on the Gold Coast,

1765-1816,” The Journal of "egro Education 8 No. 4 (October 1939): 666-672. Bartels and Priestly both

offer standard chronological examinations of Quaque, though Priestly’s selection includes transcriptions of

ten of Quaque’s letters. Klingberg and Reese, however, focus on the contribution that Quaque made to

West African education. There is also a brief discussion of Quaque in Daniel C. Littlefield, “‘Almost an

Englishman’: Eighteenth-Century Anglo-African Identities,” in Cultures and Identities in Colonial British

America, eds. Robert Olwell and Alan Tully (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 70-

94. Ty Reese and Vincent Carretta are currently engaged in editing and publishing the letters of Philip

Quaque, and that work is forthcoming.

66 Stiles, To the Public, 6. The biblical story that Quaque cited can be found in Genesis 45.

67 Philip Quaque to Samuel Hopkins, 30 September 1773, in Gratz Autograph Collection, Historical

Society of Pennsylvania.

393

designed only so that the latter might begin “seeking Shelter amongst his own Kindred.”68 At

the very least, these transatlantic missionary connections informed Quamine and his African

family about the state of each others’ welfare. At best, the African mission gave both

Quamine and Yamma an opportunity to return to their native land, be embraced as prodigal

sons, and live a life of comparative comfort and freedom. Not only did Quamine’s spiritual

transformation give him access to education and literacy, it also offered him the chance to

connect with his African family in a way that few black Atlantic slaves ever could. For

Quamine and Yamma, volunteering for the African mission could reap at least some temporal

rewards.

Stiles and Hopkins might have wondered if Quamine and Yamma were spinning a

kind of trickster tale by bankrolling their Christian conversion into secular opportunities, for

both ministers revealed the slightest of doubts about the Africans’ sincere conversion to

Christianity.69 While Stiles noted that the two of them were “hopefully converted,” Hopkins

later recalled that Yamma and Quamine “hopefully became real Christians.”70 Given the

magnitude of the mission, one could understand why Hopkins and Stiles were somewhat

circumspect when discussing the conversion and piety of their African recruits. Many

Protestants, especially after the First Great Awakening, understood that sincere conversions

were not simply used for admittance into a church, but were instead at the core of religious

experience. Conversion experiences formed the basis of all future spiritual activity, so it was

68 Philip Quaque to the SPG, 19 March 1774, in Quaque Letters.

69 For more on trickster tales in cultural history, see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other

Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

70 Stiles, To the Public, 1; Hopkins, “A Narrative of the Rise & Progress,” 1.

394

important that these two evangelists had undergone legitimate ones.71 At the same time,

Hopkins and Stiles understood the temporal advantages that missionary work could offer to

former slaves, so they tempered their grammar of conversion with “hopefully” in order to

guard themselves against the kind of backsliding that Eleazar Wheelock found in his own

Indians in years prior.72

This explains why Hopkins and Stiles attempted to insulate the African mission by

extolling their Africans as having “good character” and “good proficiency,” and that they

were “remarkably steady, discerning, and judicious.” 73 The advantages of these native

missionaries seemed obvious to the Newport ministers, especially since Quamine and

Yamma were originally part of “the same nation, and speak the same language” as their

future neophytes.74 Nevertheless, doubts about the efficacy of these two Africans persisted.

Even Stiles admitted in 1773 that Quamine was “not communicative, and I am doubtful

whether he would be apt to teach.” Stiles further noted that Quamine needed “much

Improvement to qualify him for the Gospel Ministry.”75 Quamine might have become a

Christian teacher, but even Stiles doubted that the African evangelist had the aptitude to

become a fully ordained minister.

The most vociferous critics attacked the Quamine Project on both racial and

theological grounds. One of the plan’s biggest detractors was Boston’s Charles Chauncy, a

man whose reputation as an Old Light curmudgeon made it unclear whether the nickname

71 For more on conversion across temporal and spatial boundaries, see Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton,

eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and "ew (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003).

72 This problem is discussed in a previous chapter.

73 Stiles, To the Public, 1; Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress,” 1.

74 Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress,” 1.

75 Diary entry for 13 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 366.

395

“Old Brick” referred to his church building or himself.76 When Stiles and Hopkins published

a narrative of the mission and a request for donations in 1773, Chauncy and his Boston

ministers balked at sending in contributions. Chauncy explained that one of the reasons why

he and his colleagues failed to donate any funds to the training of the Afro-evangelists was

because there was little hope of success “unless they should go under the conduct of some

well pointed and well qualified white person.”77 But the biggest problem for Chauncy was

theological, not racial. It was well-known in religious circles that Samuel Hopkins was a

controversial figure, and not only because he was apparently “devoid of all the gifts of

oratory.”78 His system of divinity, which became known as Hopkinsianism, was an extension

of Jonathan Edwards’ radical theological system. One of Hopkins’ most contentious

arguments, for example, was that conversion must happen before one could pray for their

own salvation. In other words, sinners who had yet to convert could do nothing to save

themselves. This was a dangerous position for most Congregationalists, for many believed

that such a view would alienate congregants and push them out of the church.79 When

Hopkins was about to take his Newport pulpit in 1770, Chauncy told Stiles that Hopkins was

“a troublesome, conceited, obstinate man,” and that he knew of “no worse system of thot in

76 Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1980).

77 Charles Chauncy to Ezra Stiles, 1 October 1773, in Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 21, at the Historical

Society of Pennsylvania. The underlines are Chauncy’s, suggesting that he wished to emphasize this point

to Stiles.

78 Channing, Early Recollections of "ewport, R.I., 88.

79 Contemporary commentators suggested that this was precisely what happened when Hopkins was run out

of his Great Barrington Parish, and some noted that the same thing almost happened in Newport, as well.

For more on his divinity, see Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the "ew Divinity Movement; and Samuel

Hopkins, The System of Doctrines, Contained in Divine Revelation, Explained and Defended. Showing

Their Consistence and Connection With Each Other. To Which is Added, a Treatise on the Millennium

(Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793).

396

any pagan nation, in any age” than that preached by Hopkins.80 Another minister said

Hopkins’ ideas were “false, absurd, and dangerous, tending to overthrow all Religion natural

and revealed.”81 When Stiles asked Chauncy for money to support the African mission, the

Boston minister suggested that the Africans would be better off without Hopkins’ help. He

noted that Hopkins’ theology was “far more blasphemous than were ever ones broached

among the Pagans in every part of the World.”82 Chauncy sincerely hoped that Quamine and

Yamma would not get their education from Hopkins himself. If they did, and then set out to

propagate that system of theology among Africans, he was “fully of the opinion, the African

Negroes had much better continue [with their native traditions] as they are.” In Chauncy’s

view, going from African “paganism” to Hopkins’ system of divinity would “only exchange

bad for worse.”83

Stiles recognized that Chauncy’s complaints would be shared by other clergy, so he

assured his Boston friend that Hopkins had promised not to indoctrinate the Africans into his

system. Stiles also sarcastically noted that Quamine and Yamma had “as much probability of

their Learning the theory of Gravity or the intricate principia of the Newtonian system as of

80 Charles Chauncy to Ezra Stiles, 14 November 1769, in Ezra Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and

Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 1755-1794 : With a Selection From His Correspondence,

ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 450; Charles Chauncy to Ezra

Stiles, 20 December 1769, in Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles,

450.

81 Chauncy Whittelsey to Ezra Stiles, 26 February 1770, in Stiles, Letters and Papers of Ezra Stiles

President of Yale College 1778-1795 ed. Isabel M. Calder (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1933),

25.

82 Charles Chauncy to Ezra Stiles, 1 October 1773, in Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 21, at the Historical

Society of Pennsylvania.

83 Charles Chauncy to Ezra Stiles, 1 October 1773, in Gratz Collection, Case 8, Box 21, at the Historical

Society of Pennsylvania.

397

their making any kind of real proficiency in metaphysical erudition.”84 Quamine and

Yamma, Stiles conceded, were simply “not capable of being initiated into the metaphysical

subtleties” of Hopkins’ system. In this rare instance, assumptions about racial inferiority

ironically guarded the mission against Chauncy’s attacks. Certainly the Africans were

capable enough to merit supporting the mission, but Stiles believed they also lacked the

intellectual acuity to understand the complexities and nuances of Hopkins’ dangerous

theology.

That a conservative Old Light resisted the native missionary enterprise on racial and

theological grounds is not terribly surprising. That an African missionary stationed at Cape

Coast Castle would do the same thing is worth exploring. Although Philip Quaque was

happy to serve as Quamine and Yamma’s connection to information networks on the West

Coast of Africa, Quaque had serious reservations about the ethnic makeup and religious

sentiments of the future missionaries. When Hopkins initially sent Quaque a copy of To the

Public (their fundraising pamphlet), the Anglican missionary’s heart was moved “not a little”

to learn that there were “still Numbers of Africans, the supposed Race of Ham, able to

embrace Christianity were they in a country that yields that Light and Knowledge.”85

Quaque might have viewed Yamma and Quamine as kindred spirits, but he was nevertheless

wary about the institutional origins of this mission. When Quaque discovered that Hopkins

was not a Presbyterian but rather the minister of Newport’s First Congregational, he reported

to his Anglican benefactors that “it should be held in Everlasting scorn and Contempt by

unminded Men, that those Men whom [Hopkins] spoke of as having more than common

84 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, 8 December 1773, in Ezra Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale

University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Microfilm Reel 3.

85 Philip Quaque to Samuel Hopkins, 30 September 1773, in Gratz Autograph Collection (Philip Quaque) at

the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Philip Quaque to Samuel Hopkins, 19 May 1773, in Gratz

Collection (American Clergy), Case 9, Box 16, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

398

Knowledge in Theological Sciences prove at last to be Dissenters.”86 In spite of their shared

identity as African preachers, institutional and doctrinal boundaries between Anglicans and

Dissenters still tore Quamine and Quaque apart. From the moment that Quaque learned of

their theological leanings, he refused to help the project in any way besides gathering

information about Quamine’s family. In fact, he sternly warned Hopkins that “were they to

put their feet again on Afric’s Shore without the Support and Concurrent Testimony of both

the African Committee, and my Great Benefactors the Venerable Society, they bitterly would

rue the Day on which they with Reluctance parted with their happy Place of aboad [sic].”87

Without the consent and support of English merchants and Anglican benefactors, Quaque

believed, the Quamine Project would inevitably fail.

Interestingly, race was another reason why Quaque backed down from offering

Yamma and Quamine any assistance in their mission. When Quaque discovered that

Quamine was from Annamaboe and Yamma was an Ashanti, he articulated his vitriolic

hatred for those two African groups. “Those gentlemen,” he said of Quamine and Yamma,

“could not spring from a Race more Vicious, villainous, Revengeful, Malicious and none

more brutal and obdurate in their Dispositions, than the Natives of Annamaboe [and] the

adjacent Places on the interior parts of that Country.” Their “delight and practice,” Quaque

opined, was in “shedding of Blood and distressing their fellow Brethren by frequent

Disputes…merely to ruin their inferior Brethren.”88 Quaque was not only referring to the

86 Philip Quaque to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 19 March 1774, in Philip

Quaque, Letters of the Rev. Philip Quaque of West Africa (East Ardsley, England: Micro Methods Ltd.,

1980-1985).

87 Philip Quaque to Samuel Hopkins, 19 May 1773, in Gratz Collection (American Clergy), Case 9, Box

16, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Here Quaque is referring to the Society for the Propagation

of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), the Anglican missionary society for which Quaque worked.

88 Philip Quaque to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 19 March 1774, in

Quaque, Letters of the Rev. Philip Quaque of West Africa.

399

practice of slave trading, but also to the intense, brutal, and violent intertribal conflicts that

perennially devastated the Ashanti, Fante, and other Akan-speaking peoples of the Gold

Coast. As a Fetu and an Anglican, Quaque expressed his scorn towards a mission of Ashanti

and Fantee Dissenters coming to the Gold Coast. Drawing from his perception of other

Africans – especially Fantee and Ashanti – as impulsive, greedy, and bloodthirsty, Quaque

anticipated that the two evangelists would hastily succumb to their ethnic proclivities and

would “be enticed into many Vices and irregularities that they would find not so easily

Eradicated.”89 These “debaucheries” included the giving of exorbitant gifts to friends, the

allure of wealth and power, the spiritual backsliding that Quaque perceived all around him at

the Cape Coast, and the inevitable participation in the slave wars that had engulfed the region

for generations.90 While Quaque faintheartedly wished the Newporters the best of luck, he

conceded that Quamine and Yamma had little hope of success, especially without the

assistance of the Anglicans. As a proud Fetu and devout Anglican, Quaque could certainly

not allow a Fante and his Ashanti companion to establish a Dissenting mission only a few

miles from his own.

Although the resistance of Chauncy and Quaque came from very different sources –

an old Boston Congregationalist and an African Anglican stationed in the epicenter of the

slave trade – their complaints reveal much about the nature of the Quamine Project. First,

this was certainly a mission to Africans, by Africans, and the theological and racial reasons

for resistance only highlight that point. Detractors described Quamine and Yamma as

incapable, vulnerable to Hopkins’ system of divinity, as religious upstarts, or from the most

89 Philip Quaque to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 19 March 1774, in

Quaque, Letters of the Rev. Philip Quaque of West Africa.

90 Philip Quaque to Samuel Hopkins, 19 May 1773, in Gratz Collection (American Clergy), Case 9, Box

16, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

400

savage tribes in Africa. Furthermore, Quamine and Yamma took ownership of this mission,

conceiving of it from the beginning and acting as its most important participants. Their

motivations ranged from Afro-Christian evangelism and abolitionism to a desire to maintain

connections with Africa and see their families again. Yet despite the fact that Quamine and

Yamma were at the center of the mission, they certainly could not have organized it alone.

Instead, Hopkins and Stiles provided the fundraising, networking, and publishing force

behind the mission. When they did so, they relied upon a different missionary past – a

Native American missionary past – to understand, frame, and express the necessity for this

African mission.

“Two Eggs”: ative American Missions and the Black Atlantic

Although Native American and black Atlantic studies have developed as separate

historiographical fields, early modern Protestant missionaries were not so quick to embrace

such divisions. Indeed, the connections between Native American and African missions were

many, and they were rooted in social, racial, and theological understandings of the cultural

histories of blacks and Indians. Many ministers believed that, despite a few obvious cultural

differences between Africans and Indians (and even among Africans and Indians

themselves), they could still be uniformly categorized as savage gentiles awaiting their

conversion. John Witherspoon, for example, admitted that what struck him about the Indians

of North America were the same things that characterized other indigenous peoples

throughout the world: “gravity and sullenness of deportment, love of hunting and war – that

is to say, depredation; ferocity to their captives, laziness and aversion to habitual labor,

tyranny over the female sex, passive courage, and, if it may be called so, active cowardice,

401

and strong passions both of lasting gratitude and unextinguishable [sic] resentment.”91 If

Protestants could crack this cultural code and discover a way to convert Native Americans, it

was widely presumed that the same strategy might work for Africans and other non-

Christians throughout the globe. Anglican Thomas Bray articulated this theory when he

observed that “The Heathen in both Quarters of the World, Africa and America, seem to us as

like in Way of Living, and Sentiments of Religion, as two Eggs. And therefore we suppose,

the very same Method must be taken with both.”92 Protestant ministers assumed that any real

or perceived differences among indigenous peoples were, in the long run, simply superficial

in nature. They believed that Native Americans, Africans, Asians, and even Scottish

Highlanders possessed generally the same behavioral and cultural qualities. The history of

missions among one would certainly have a lot to say about success or failure among

others.93

It was not just white, Anglo-American missionaries who emphasized the historical

comparisons and deep entanglements between Africans, black slaves, and Indians during the

last few decades of the eighteenth century. John Marrant, a well-known black Atlantic writer

91 John Witherspoon, “A Description of the State of New-Jersey” in Witherspoon, The Miscellaneous

Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, D.D. L.L.D. Late President of the College of "ew-Jersey

(Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1803), 312.

92 Thomas Bray, Missionalia: Or, A Collection of Missionary Pieces Relating to the Conversion of the

Heathen; Both the African "egroes and American Indians (London: W. Roberts, 1727), 13. Interestingly

for Bray, this did not include the use of native missionaries, for (as discussed in a previous chapter) he

believed that natives were too unpredictable to be trusted with such an important charge.

93 Two scholars have recently examined the comparisons and entanglements between Native Americans

and Scottish Highlanders. See Margaret Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and "ative Americans: Indigenous

Education in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007);

and Colin G. Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters

in Scotland and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Donald E. Meek, “Scottish

Highlanders, North American Indians and the SSPCK: Some Cultural Perspectives,” Records of the

Scottish Church History Society 23 No. 3 (1989): 378-396. The important question of whether there was an

“Amerindian Atlantic” is taken up in Paul Cohen, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the

Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34 No. 4 (December 2008): 388-410.

402

who traveled along the eastern seaboard and became pastor of a black church in Nova Scotia,

counted his alleged “conversion” of the Cherokee King in the late 1760s among his most

treasured accomplishments.94 Less than two years later, but further north in New England, a

famous Mohegan preacher urged a woman in Boston to allow her slave to return to Africa as

a missionary. That slave was Phillis Wheatley, a black woman whose reputation as a poetess

was skyrocketing in the 1760s and 70s. Samson Occom, the minister who urged Wheatley to

become an African evangelist, asked her master, “Pray Madam, what harm would it be to

Send Phillis to her Native Country as a Female Preacher to her kindred?” The problem,

Occom anticipated, was not necessarily race but gender. “You know,” Occom implored, that

“Quaker Women are alow’d to preach, and why not others in an Extraordinary Case.”95 In

this way Occom revealed that Indian and African missions were much more connected that

scholars previously acknowledged. Indeed, when Samuel Hopkins asked Wheatley to be a

part of the Quamine Project only two years later, he was tapping into the evangelical

networks that knit people like Occom, Wheatley, Philip Quaque, Hopkins, and Quamine

together.

Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles may have had their own theological and political

agendas for supporting the Quamine Project, but both of them approached it via their

personal involvement in and understanding of Native American missionary history. When

the Stockbridge Indians sent a young Samuel Hopkins a “particular message” to ask him to

be their minister after John Sergeant died in 1749, he considered the position but then

94 For Marrant’s narrative among the Cherokee, see Gates, Jr. and Andrews, eds., Pioneers of the Black

Atlantic, 60-80.

95 Samson Occom to Susanna Wheatley, 5 March 1771, in Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson

Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century "ative America, ed. Joanna Brooks

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 97.

403

relented upon anticipating that his spiritual mentor (Jonathan Edwards) would take the post.96

In fact, Hopkins’ own family had been actively involved in narrating the story of the mission

to the Stockbridge Indians. The Samuel Hopkins who authored John Sergeant’s Historical

Memoirs of the Stockbridge Indians was more than the later Hopkins’ namesake; he was his

uncle.97 Instead of taking the post at Stockbridge, Hopkins remained the minister at

Housatonic (later known as Great Barrington), just a 30 minute ride from Stockbridge.98 He

resided within riding distance of this ambitious Indian civilization scheme for over a quarter

of a century before relocating to Newport in 1770. Throughout his career at Newport he

maintained a friendly correspondence with Stephen West (the later pastor at Stockbridge) and

Gideon Hawley, a missionary who had proselytized among the Iroquois of New York and

Mashpee of Cape Cod. Hopkins even suggested to Hawley in 1761 that the best way to

preach to Iroquois Indians would be to bring “some Mohawk boys” to New England “to be

educated in order to make interpreters or missionaries as they appear qualified.” Hopkins

discussed potential Iroquois missionaries so frequently it even compelled Hawley to observe

that he was very much “engaged” with Indian evangelization and seemed to have it “at Heart

96 Samuel Hopkins, Sketches of the Life of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D.D., Pastor of the First

Congregational Church in "ewport, Written by Himself, Interspersed with Marginal "otes Extracted From

His Private Diary; to Which is Added, a Dialogue, by the Same Hand, on the "ature and Extend of the

Christian Submission; Also, a Serious Address to Professing Christians, Closed by Dr. Hart’s Sermon at

his Funeral (Hartford: Stephen West, 1805), 53-54. For more on the problems and failures of the

Stockbridge mission see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial "orth

America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 196-204.

97 Samuel Hopkins, Historical memoirs, relating to the Housatunnuk Indians, or, An account of the

methods used, and pains taken, for the propagation of the gospel among that heathenish-tribe, and the

success thereof, under the ministry of the late Reverend Mr. John Sergeant : together with the character of

that eminently worthy missionary; and an address to the people of this country, representing the very great

importance of attaching the Indians to their interest, not only by treating them justly and kindly, but by

using proper endeavours to settle Christianity among them (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1753).

98 John Ferguson, Memoir of the Life and Character of Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D.D. Formerly Pastor of the

First Congregational Church in "ewport, Rhode Island,: With an Appendix (Boston: Leonard W. Kimball,

1830), 157.

404

in every letter he writes.”99 Hopkins therefore probably understood his own role in the later

Quamine Project as an extension of previous missionary work to the Indians.

Like Hopkins, Ezra Stiles was deeply interested in Native American missionary

work, but his interests were far more wide-ranging than Hopkins’. Indeed, Stiles was famous

for having an insatiable curiosity for anything that was “historical and curious,” including

everything from astronomy and geography to smallpox and silkworms. 100 Stiles grew

increasingly interested in Indian demography, ethnography, and missionary history

throughout the 1760s and 70s. This understanding of Native American history would serve

as a model for how he interpreted his role in the African mission. As soon as he graduated

from Yale College, Stiles, like Hopkins, was recruited for the ministerial position at

Stockbridge.101 Although he never took the job, he kept his eyes on the development of

Stockbridge for the rest of his life. He also revealed his interest in John Eliot’s seventeenth

century mission to the Indians when he copied Eliot’s narrative of the rise of Indian churches

in Massachusetts, a text which emphasized the role of indigenous Christian leaders in Indian

praying towns.102 During the spring of 1762 Stiles took a journey to several Indian

settlements in southern New England, stopping by the native Christian community of

99 Gideon Hawley to Andrew Oliver, 20 May 1761, in Gideon Hawley Letters, 1754-1807, Typescript

Version, Manuscript Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

100 Justus Forward to Ezra Stiles, 24 January 1792, in Stiles, Letters & Papers of Ezra Stiles, 111.

101 Morgan, Gentle Puritan, 136-139. Although he preached a few times to the Stockbridge Indians,

personal politics stopped him from taking the post. His father urged him not to take it because he did not

want his son getting embroiled in a theological controversy so soon out of college.

102 Ezra Stiles, “An Account of Indian Churches in New-England, in a Letter Written A.D. 1673, by Rev.

John Eliot, of Roxbury. Copied Under President Stiles’s Inspection from the Original MS. Letter in Mr.

Eliot’s Own Hand Writing, in the Library of the Mathers at Boston,” in Collections of the Massachusetts

Historical Society, First Series, Vol. X (Boston: Munro, Francis, and Parker, 1809).

“An Account of Indian Churches in New-England, in a Letter Written A.D. 1673, by Rev. John Eliot, of

Roxbury. Copied Under President Stiles’s Inspection from the Original MS. Letter in Mr. Eliot’s Own

Hand Writing, in the Library of the Mathers at Boston.”

405

Mashpee, noting its prevalence of Indian preachers, and establishing a long-standing

correspondence with Gideon Hawley.103 It might have been during this tour that Stiles

learned about Martha’s Vineyard’s Japhet Hannit, whom Stiles called “an excellent Indian

Minister.”104 In 1772, just a year before he became involved in the Quamine Project, Stiles

edited and republished a history of King Philip’s War, a conflict which devastated New

England and dramatically transformed the native missionary movement.105 Coincidentally,

John Quamine was actually a slave to the original author’s (Captain Benjamin Church)

namesake and grandson, Benjamin Church.106

Stiles also used his extensive contacts to keep in touch with Samson Occom, the

famous Mohegan preacher, who provided information about the demographic and religious

state of the Montauk Indians on Long Island.107 Eleazar Wheelock, David McClure, Samuel

Kirkland, and Carolina minister Elam Potter all sent Stiles information about Native

103 Stiles personally took down a narrative of the Potenummecut Indians during his travels, which noted

that John Ralph was their Indian minister. See Stiles, “An Account of the Potenummecut Indians. Taken

by Dr. Stiles, On the Spot, June 4, 1762,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First

Series, Vol. X. Hawley also made Stiles a copy of “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698. Copied for

Dr. Stiles, By Rev. Mr. Hawley, Missionary at Mashpee, From the Printed Account Published in 1698,” in

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, Vol. X. For Hawley’s description of the

leading Christian families at Mashpee, see Gideon Hawley to Ezra Stiles, 22 January 1771 in Stiles,

Extracts From the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, 499. Stiles also obtained a copy of

Hawley’s diary of missionary work among the Mashpee. Which can be found in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra

Stiles at Yale University, Microfilm Reel 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

104 Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, 302.

105 Benjamin Church, The entertaining history of King Philip’s war, which began in the month of June,

1675. As also of expeditions more lately made against the common enemy, and Indian rebels, in the eastern

parts of "ew-England: with some account of the divine providence towards Col. Benjamin Church: by

Thomas Church, esq. his son (Newport: Solomon Southwick, 1772). Although Stiles does not appear in the

citation information, he was the one to edit and republish the text.

106 Quamine’s master should not be confused with his son of the same name, who became an infamous

turncoat for the British during the American Revolution.

107 “A Letter From Rev. John Devotion of Saybrook, to the Rev. Dr. Stiles, Inclosing, Mr. Occum’s

Account of the Montauk Indians,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, Vol.

406

American natural symbols, demography, and spiritual beliefs.108 Stiles even made sketches

of Indian wigwams and drew maps that noted the locations of Indian tribes throughout New

England.109 He was also personally acquainted with Samuel Niles, the Narragansett

separatist preacher that Joseph Fish was thinking of when he warned Sarah Osborn to be

cautious while teaching Newport’s blacks. Stiles and Niles met a few times, but the most

memorable was in the spring of 1772, just a year before Stiles became involved in this

African missionary project. Stiles not only recorded the history of Niles’ strange path to

ministerial power in Narragansett, but also took the Indian preacher into his study, read him the

history of a Moravian mission to Greenland, and showed him a globe “To give him a better

Idea of Things.” He concluded the visit by giving his guest “An Account of the Sarepta

Brethren and the prospect of introducing Christianity among the Kalmuks and Tartars.”110

As Samuel Niles learned that day, Stiles was an early modern embodiment of the global

citizen. His efforts to expose the Narragansett Indian pastor to the histories of missions from

Greenland to Central Asia demonstrate that many early modern Protestants perceived

Christian missions as connected, if not contiguous, evangelical enterprises.

108 Eleazar Wheelock to Ezra Stiles, August 1771, in Stiles, Letters & Papers of Ezra Stiles; David

McClure to Ezra Stiles, 11 November 1771, in Stiles, Letters and Papers of Ezra Stiles, 36-37; Elam Potter

to Ezra Stiles, 12 September 1768, in Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra

Stiles, 552-553.

109 Ezra Stiles, Manuscript Map of Connecticut, 25 June 1767 at the Massachusetts Historical Society. This

map is a copy of an earlier 1638 map.

110 Diary entry for 8 May 1772, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 233. Stiles actually

believed that the Indians might have originated among the Kalmuks or Tartars. When he relayed this

hypothesis to the Indian preacher, Stiles recorded that “it pleased him.”

407

From his quiet study in Newport, Rhode Island Stiles researched the religious state of

affairs throughout the world by corresponding with other ministers in Mexico City, Surinam,

and even Russia.111 He knew about Catholic missionary efforts in China and Japan, as well

as the Danish mission to India, which relied significantly upon native preachers and teachers.

He took stock of Anglican missionaries stationed in Africa, Barbados, the Mosquito Shore

(Honduras), the Bahamas, and the Carolinas.112 He also believed that the Moravians, who

had missions throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, were the most successful missionary

force among Indians and Africans.113 By 1774 Stiles could confidently claim that he had

111 See Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University, Microfilm Reels 1-5 for more on his extensive

correspondence with people throughout the world. Most of these letters are written in Latin.

112 Diary entry for 30 June 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 393.

113 Ezra Stiles to John Rodgers, 25 April 1774, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University,

Microfilm Reel 3.

“Ezra Stiles,” by Samuel King, 1771. Ezra

Stiles fashioned himself not only a man of

letters, but also a man of the world; his library

collection included classical and Hebraic texts

alongside the history of China. Courtesy of

the Yale University Art Gallery.

408

studied “the history of almost all nations and empires on earth.”114 When he sat for his 1771

portrait for Samuel King, the image reflected the cosmopolitanism of its subject: the books in

the background included Livy, Newton, and Plato, as well as J.B. DuHalde’s The General

History of China. By the time Stiles became involved in the African project in 1773, his

correspondence with other missionaries throughout New England and the world, as well as

his own research into Indian missionary history, all demonstrated that there were native

missionaries on Martha’s Vineyard, in John Eliot’s praying towns, at Mashpee and along the

southeastern New England coast, in Narragansett, Iroquoia, Japan, China, India, the

Caribbean, and even Greenland. While the use of native ministers in Africa might have

seemed novel to some, Stiles’ studies into the demography, culture, and missionary history of

indigenous peoples throughout the world taught him otherwise.

When Stiles outlined his motivations for participating in the Quamine Project to

Charles Chauncy, he pointed to the failures of Protestant evangelical efforts among Indians as

a guiding lesson for how to continue this work. He noted in 1773 that for 20 years he had

“no hope” of converting Indians to Christianity. Nevertheless, he believed it was their

“bounden duty as Christians” to “spare no expence towards effectually carrying the Gospel”

to Indians and continuing to offer them saving grace, “till they shall have vanished & their

Nations shall all be swept off the Earth.” The next line in his letter to Chauncy moves

immediately to his reasons for participating in the African project, making both a textual and

literal connection between Indian and African evangelical work. He observed that Europe’s

merchants had been selling Africans for nearly 80 years, and that it was the duty of Protestant

ministers to convert Africans in order to compensate them for the “injury and injustice” they

114 Quoted in Francis Parsons, Six Men of Yale (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1939), 46.

409

had suffered at the hands of nominal Christians.115 For Stiles, at least, African missionary

work was directly connected to the failures of evangelical efforts among Indians. While

historian James T. Campbell has recently suggested that the 1773 African mission was, at

least for white Congregational ministers, “an attempt to restore to American Christianity the

severity and theological rigor of New England’s Puritan founders,” it was more than that. 116

Sending Quamine and Yamma to Africa would not only redeem the Puritan founders, but the

Protestant missionary enterprise as a whole. As an extension of Native American missionary

efforts, the Quamine Project might hopefully succeed where previous Indian missions had

failed.

In a period marked by intense theological bickering in the post-Great Awakening

world, the ecumenical support that the Quamine Project generated was remarkable. The

friendly collaboration of Stiles and Hopkins undoubtedly fueled this interdenominational

cooperation. The two men must have made strange partners; the former was the son of Isaac

Stiles (an Old Light minister) and the latter was the most notable student of Great Awakening

firebrand Jonathan Edwards. Yet when Hopkins first arrived in Newport in 1770, Stiles

vowed to “endeavour to live with him as a brother.”117 “I have a mind,” Stiles informed a

colleague, “that there should be one Instance on this Continent, where two Churches in the

same place and of the same denomination should live in harmony. In most Instances they

hate one another most heartily.”118 Stiles practiced what he preached, for he and Hopkins –

in spite of their institutional and doctrinal differences – became fast friends. Stiles delivered

115 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, 8 December 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I,

364.

116 Campbell, Middle Passages, 18.

117 Ezra Stiles to Noah Welles, 26 August 1769, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 20-21.

118 Ezra Stiles to John Hubbard, 26 August 1769, quoted in Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, 207.

410

Hopkins’ ordination ceremony and frequently attended his lectures.119 When Hopkins was

away or when he got a bloody nose, Stiles preached for him. When Stiles’ wife died, he

asked Hopkins to say a few words at the funeral.120 In spite of the doctrinal differences

between Stiles and Hopkins, they committed themselves to living in ecclesiastical harmony.

Their collaboration on the Quamine Project demonstrated and amplified that commitment.

The Quamine Project helped unite other missionaries throughout the Atlantic world,

for Protestant ministers of all stripes could agree that missionary work was central to the

health and vivacity of Christianity. Although they might have disagreed about the goals,

means, and nature of missions, they could easily rally behind a plan like the Quamine Project

because of its potential as a uniting force. In fact, when Stiles and Hopkins published To the

Public in 1773 and again in 1776, they relied upon an interconnected, transatlantic network

of Protestant ministers from England, Scotland, the Americas, and Africa to raise money for

the cause. The nominal and monetary support they received throughout the Atlantic world

demonstrated that indigenous missionary efforts could be a uniting force in an era of divisive

religious strife. They received money and support from one religious society of women in

Newport and from another in Boston. They opened letters of approbation from the

Presbyterian synod in New York. Stockbridge’s John Sergeant (the son of the first

missionary to that Indian town) informed Stiles that he was “much pleased with your Negro

Mission” and promised to donate to the experiment.121 They also received money from a

collection taken throughout Berkshire County, as well as from an organization called the

119 Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on Saving Knowledge: Delivered at the Instalment of the Reverend Samuel

Hopkins, A.M. Into the Pastoral Charge of the First Congregational Church in "ewport, Rhode-Island,

Wednesday, April 11, 1770 (Newport: Solomon Southwick, 1770).

120 Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 413,635, and 565.

121 John Sergeant to Ezra Stiles, 16 September 1773, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University,

Microfilm Reel 3.

411

North Association in Connecticut. Other Connecticut clergy supported the idea and

volunteered to train the aspiring African missionaries. Elias Boudinot, a powerful New

Jersey lawyer and politician who would later sign his name on the Declaration of

Independence, offered to board and tutor the two Africans. Hopkins and Stiles received five

pounds from a gentleman in London and Anthony Benezet agreed to help raise money for the

Africans’ education.122 While Philip Quaque’s letters expressed suspicion towards the

mission, they praised it just enough for Hopkins and Stiles to include parts of them in To the

Public, giving the entire affair an even more ecumenical luster. As Stiles summarized in a

letter to a colleague, this mission might, at the very least, temporarily bridge the doctrinal and

ecclesiastical divides that had historically torn the American religious community apart. “We

ought all to joyn,” Stiles concluded, “in carrying the glorious Gospel to the Heathen in all

parts of the Earth.”123 Most of the donations, of course, came from individuals and

organizations very much accustomed to supporting North American Indian missions. The

African mission was therefore an extension and expansion of previous missionary efforts

among Native Americans.

Nowhere was this clearer than within the halls of The Scottish Society for

Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), based in Edinburgh. The SSPCK contributed

their financial and moral support to the Quamine Project mainly because its members viewed

it through the lens of previous missionary work among Scottish Highlanders and American

122 John Witherspoon to Samuel Hopkins, 14 December 1773, in “Signers of the Declaration of

Independence Bound Manuscript Collection,” Volume 2, at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.

123 Ezra Stiles to John Sergeant, 15 July 1774, in The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University, Microfilm

Reel 3. Summaries of who donated what to the mission can be found in Stiles, To the Public; and Hopkins,

“A Narrative of the rise & progress.”

412

Indians.124 The SSPCK had long supported American missions; white evangelists like David

Brainerd and Samuel Kirkland were on their payroll and sent them periodic summaries of

their efforts. The members of the SSPCK – especially John Erskine, who was in touch with

Indian and African missionaries throughout the Atlantic world – certainly knew about Moses

Tatami, David Brainerd’s interpreter who became a part-time preacher when Brainerd went

home after delivering his sermons.125 In fact, the SSPCK agreed to pay for the education of

Tatami’s son, Peter, at the College of New Jersey in the 1750s – precisely the same place

where Quamine and Yamma were headed in 1774.126 The college’s board members were not

only trustees, for they also served as the Commissioners of Indian Affairs for the SSPCK. In

other words, the college’s trustees (along with the missionaries in the field) were the eyes and

ears of the Scottish missionary enterprise among Indians. They acted as a circuit of

information and even dispensed funds for the training of a native evangelical corps.127

Furthermore, they would have been aware of the ascension of Deacon Thomas, Isaac, and

Good Peter in Oneida, where SSPCK associate Samuel Kirkland was stationed for much of

124 The SSPCK donated £30 to support the initial education of Quamine and Yamma. For more on SSPCK

activities in America, see Frederick V. Mills, Sr., “The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian

Knowledge in British North America, 1730-1775,” Church History, Vol. 63 No. 1 (Mar., 1994): 15-30.

125 Moses’ spiritual transformation from apathetic interpreter to converted preacher can be found

throughout David Brainerd, Mirabilia Dei inter Indicos, or the Rise and Progress Of a Remarkable Work of

Grace Amongst a "umber of the Indians In the Provinces of "ew-Jersey and Pennsylvania, Justly

Represented in A Journal Kept by Order of the Honourable Society (in Scotland) for Propagating Christian

Knowledge. With some General Remarks (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1746).

126 Minutes of the General Meetings of the Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 22

November 1753, Records of the SSPCK in Edinburgh, RG GD95/1/4; 1 January 1736-15 November 1759.

See especially the minutes for 23 March 1749, 22 March 1750, and 22 November 1753. I would like to

thank John Grigg for sharing these research notes with me.

127 Mills, Sr., “The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in British North America,

1730-1775”: 15-30

413

the 1770s.128 The members of the SSPCK therefore not only knew of and supported

indigenous missionary efforts. In all likelihood they considered this African mission as a

logical extension of Native American missions of the eighteenth century, for they conceived

of Native American missions themselves as extensions of previous efforts to convert Scottish

Highlanders.129 In this way the SSPCK, like other Protestant groups, conceived of

missionary work as a linear, almost genealogical exercise, where each mission was directly

connected to all others. When an SSPCK member expressed “great satisfaction” that two

native missionaries were going to “extend the Mediator’s kingdom to those nations who

dwell, at present, in the habitations of cruelty, and in the land of the shadow of death,” he

could have been speaking equally about Highlanders, Indians, or Africans.130 Indian

missionary history was therefore central to the SSPCK’s participation in the Quamine

Project.

The most important model for the Quamine Project was the cadre of Indian preachers

who attended Eleazar Wheelock’s Charity School in the 1750s and 60s. The narratives that

Wheelock published annually, Samson Occom’s famous fundraising campaign in the British

Isles, and the fallout that ensued when Wheelock used those funds to create a college for

English children (rather than Indian ones) all made Protestant ministers painfully aware of

the accomplishments and failures of Wheelock’s program.131 But the direct connections

128 Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland: 18th-century Missionary to the Iroquois, Government Agent,

Father of Hamilton College, ed. Walter Pilkington (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College, 1980).

129 Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and "ative Americans.

130 Stiles, To the Public, 4.

131 As noted in a previous chapter in my dissertation, by the time that Wheelock had used the funds to

establish the school, he had become disillusioned with the thought of using native ministers. See Axtell,

The Invasion Within, 204-215; Axtell, "atives and "ewcomers: The Cultural Origins of "orth America

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174-188; and Leon Burr Richardson, ed., An Indian Preacher

in England: Being Letters and Diaries Relating to the Mission of the Reverend Samson Occom and the

Reverend "athaniel Whitaker to Collect Funds in England for the Benefit of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian

414

between the organizers of the Quamine Project and Wheelock’s Indian missionaries were

many. First, Wheelock was personally acquainted with John Witherspoon, who administered

funds to Wheelock on behalf of the SSPCK. One of Wheelock’s friends once reported that

Witherspoon had accepted to pay some unknown expense of Wheelock’s missionary plan,

noting that “In this affair, you are not a little indebted to the Connections & Influence of Dr.

Witherspoon who took the most prudent & affectual steps to serve your Interests.”

Whenever Wheelock’s missionaries were in need, his friend concluded, “they will draw on

the Doctor.”132 Witherspoon was thus actively involved in distributing funds for Wheelock’s

Indian missions well before he became engaged in the African one. When Ezra Stiles wrote

to Wheelock in 1767 to congratulate him for recently receiving the Doctor of Divinity from

the University of Edinburgh – an accolade which Stiles had been awarded two years earlier –

he took the opportunity to praise Wheelock’s school as a “noble Institution.” Stiles added

that Wheelock’s ambitious plan of training Native Americans as Christian missionaries was

“the almost only prospect of Christianizing the American Aboriginals.”133 Wheelock

returned the favor when the Quamine Project became public, sending Stiles and Hopkins

complimentary copies of his narrative of the Indian School and informing the Newport

ministers of his “approbation, and readiness to promote the design; so far as lies in [his]

power.”134 The most striking gesture of cooperation between Wheelock’s Indian missionary

Charity School, From Which Grew Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications,

1933).

132 Elihu Spencer to Eleazar Wheelock, 9 December 1772, in Gratz Collection (American Colonial Clergy),

Case 8, Box 24, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

133 Ezra Stiles to Eleazar Wheelock, 4 November 1767, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale

University, Microfilm Reel 2. For their divinity degrees, see Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and

Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, 454 and 469.

134 Diary entry for 12 October 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 415; Hopkins, “A

Narrative of the rise & progress of a proposal.”

415

program and the African one was when Wheelock volunteered to train Quamine and Yamma

himself at Dartmouth College.135

The Quamine Project even borrowed the missionary rhetoric that galvanized

Wheelock’s earlier Indian program. The open door, which was such a powerful rhetorical

tool for Wheelock’s Indian mission program, also found its way into the evangelical

discourses concerning Africa. While Wheelock believed that the 1760s witnessed “a Door

opening for a hundred Missionaries” in Iroquoia, Hopkins and others repeatedly used the

open door metaphor to describe potentiality of their African mission.136 Interestingly,

Hopkins even suggested that Quamine and Yamma actually employed that rhetoric

themselves when they assured him that “if a door should be opened for them to go, they

thought it was their duty, in such a case, to forsake wife and children, and go and preach the

gospel to the perishing heathen.”137 Perhaps this explains Hopkins’ analogous choice of title

for his history of the African mission. While Wheelock published A Plain and Faithful

"arrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity-

School at Lebanon, in Connecticut, Hopkins titled his “A Narrative of the rise & progress of

a proposal and attempt to send the gospel to guinea.” The actual, rhetorical, and literary

connections between Indian and African missionary projects also partially explain the rumor

135 Ruth L. Woodward and Wesley Frank Craven, Princetonians, 1784-1790: A Biographical Dictionary

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), l.

136 Eleazar Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful "arrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present

State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763),

23.

137 Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress of a proposal,” 3. See also The Society in Scotland for

Propagating Christian Knowledge, An Account of The Society in Scotland for propagating Christian

Knowledge. From its commencement, in 1709. In which is included, The present state of the Highlands

and Islands of Scotland with regard to Religion (Edinburgh: A. Murray and J. Cochrane, 1774), 18-19.

416

circulating in 1778 that Wheelock had hand-picked Ezra Stiles, rather than his own son, to be

president of Dartmouth College when he died.138

While the organizers of the Quamine Project were undoubtedly influenced by, and

had many connections to, Wheelock’s Indian missionary project, recent controversies

surrounding Indian missions also provided Quamine and others a model for how not to

organize a mission. In the late 1760s, Mohegan preacher Samson Occom and another

minister set out across the Atlantic to raise money for Wheelock’s native missionary

program. Like the Quamine Project, this experiment aroused the pity and philanthropy, as

well as the wallets, of hundreds of individuals, and Occom eventually collected an

astronomical £10,000 for the enterprise.139 However, when Wheelock used the funds to

establish Dartmouth College – designed mainly for English students rather than Indian ones –

donors became irate that they had freely given money to establish yet another white colonial

college. This entire scenario caused a public, messy, and controversial rift between

Wheelock and Occom as well as between Wheelock and Samuel Kirkland, his most effective

white missionary. The Newport ministers were fully aware of this imbroglio as they planned

their African mission only five years later. Stiles’ cousin, for example, was dismayed by

Wheelock’s transformation from Indian teacher to white elitist. Alluding to Wheelock’s

recent divinity degree, Stiles’ cousin complained that, “If the Intention of a Diploma is to

license a Man to give general Disgust, he has acted in Character completely.”140 Abhorred by

138 Diary entry for 21 March 1778, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. II, 265.

139 The best source is still Richardson, ed., An Indian Preacher in "ew England. For more on the

connections between missionary fundraising, pity, and philanthropy see Laura M. Stevens, The Poor

Indians: British Missionaries, "ative Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

140 John Devotion to Ezra Stiles, 15 October 1767, in Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and Other

Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, 469.

417

Wheelock’s turn against native preachers, Stiles remarked that Wheelock had “much of the

religious Politician in his Make.” He also called Wheelock a “very ambitious” and

“haughty” man who had only “small literary Furniture.” The funds that Occom helped raise,

Stiles noted, were intended mainly for the education of Indian preachers at the college. “Yet

the only Indian that has graduated there,” he protested, “was obliged to beg elsewhere

towards supporting him the last year of his College Residence.” Stiles concluded that it

would have “been better to have left the Funds in the Hands of the London Board,” rather

than to give it to Wheelock carte blanche.141 According to Stiles and other Protestants

throughout the Atlantic, Wheelock’s deception and ambition had wasted a very promising

native missionary project. Stiles and Hopkins would hope to keep the African mission an

interdenominational one, one that would avoid the pitfalls of Wheelock’s failures while

simultaneously learning from them.

When Stiles, Hopkins, Quamine, and Yamma collaborated to raise money for their

African mission, they had the failures of the Wheelock controversy fresh in their minds.

Stiles even quietly worried that the African mission might share the same fate as the Indian

one. Even if they had 30 or 40 black preachers, Stiles admitted to Hopkins, he feared the

mission “would be taken up by the public and secularized – as Dr. Wheelocks Indian

College, which has already almost lost sight of its original Design.”142 Donors would have

expressed the same fears about the potential of party politics, egos, and duplicitous

fundraising to ruin this native African mission, just as it had divided the Indian one. The

organizers of the Quamine Project assured potential donors that “Whatever shall be given to

this end, and put into the hands of the subscribers,” they would “engage faithfully to improve

141 Diary entry for 24 May 1779, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. II, 338. Here Stiles was

referring to Daniel Simon, the first Indian graduate of Dartmouth.

142 Diary entry for 8 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 364.

418

to this purpose only, and to promote the proposed mission, according to their best discretion;

and to be at all times ready to give an account to those who desire it, of all they shall receive,

and the manner in which it has been expended.”143 They sought to distance themselves from

the kind of deceitful fundraising that had characterized Wheelock’s plan. The final act of that

distancing was to reject Wheelock’s offer to train the two African missionaries at Dartmouth.

As Hopkins noted in February of 1774, Quamine and Yamma could enjoy free schooling and

cheap living in Newport while staying close to their families. Furthermore, they would not

be tempted to waste their time in teaching native languages to the young African boy that

Wheelock apparently had at his school in Hanover. Such collaboration between Wheelock

and the Newport ministers, Hopkins concluded, “cannot take place to any advantage.”144

Hopkins and Stiles were clearly distancing themselves from the duplicitous fundraising and

sour reputation that Wheelock had accrued in recent years. Indeed, by the time that Hopkins

wrote that letter, Quamine and Yamma had probably learned that they were heading to New

Jersey, rather than New Hampshire, for their training.

Although there were more prestigious colonial colleges that were closer to Newport,

the choice of the College of New Jersey as a site for Quamine and Yamma’s training made

perfect sense. By the early 1770s, the institution had built for itself a reputation as a

destination for the education and missionary training of Indians and Africans. Before his

death in 1764, Gilbert Tennent had received £200 from a man in Scotland for the education

of an Indian youth to be trained for “instructing his countrymen in the English language and

the Christian religion, or preaching the gospel to them.”145 It is unclear whether this ever

143 Stiles, To the Public, 2.

144 Samuel Hopkins to Levi Hart, 7 February 1774, in Hopkins, The Works of Samuel Hopkins, 132.

145 John Maclean, History of the College of "ew Jersey Vols. I and II (New York: Arno Press and the New

York Times, 1969), Vol. I, 372.

419

materialized, although the anonymous Scot would have been pleased when two Delaware

Indians named Jacob Woolley and Bartholemew Scott Calvin attended the college.146 While

Stiles had personally heard about Woolley’s education there, Witherspoon was actually

president by the time that Calvin began matriculating.147 As noted earlier, Peter Tatami was

the son of David Brainerd’s Indian interpreter, and the SSPCK offered some funds for his

education at the college. In addition, Princeton experienced a religious revival in the early

1770s, a fact which might have assured Stiles and Hopkins that the two Africans would not

suffer from any spiritual backsliding when they left Newport.148 Indeed, Witherspoon

publicly bragged that Princeton was not only “one of the healthiest places” in the Atlantic

world, but also that its distance away from licentious English traders, merchants, and conmen

virtually guaranteed that students would preserve their religious piety while avoiding the

temptation to be pulled into uncouth, worldly affairs.149 Finally, this was not the first plan for

African missionaries to attend the college. Twenty years before Quamine and Yamma

arrived at John Witherspoon’s doorstep, college president Samuel Davies devised a plan for

“some three or four young Africans, who still retained their native language, were pious, and

of good abilities, to be educated at the College of New Jersey for missionaries.”150 Although

the scheme failed to materialize, it nevertheless reflected how this college, rather than

146 Woodward and Carven, eds., Princetonians: 1784-1790, 1. These letters can be found in James Dow

McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications,

1932). Calvin was also known as Shawuskukhkung, or Wilted Grass. They attended at different times,

however; Woolley was there in the early 1760s and Calvin attended several years later.

147 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, 25 December 1761, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale

University, Microfilm Reel 1.

148 Maclean, History of the College of "ew Jersey, Vol. I, 390.

149 John Witherspoon, Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica, And Other West-India Islands, In Behalf of

the College of "ew-Jersey (Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford, 1772), 23 and 11.

150 Quoted in Maclean, History of the College of "ew Jersey, Vol. I, footnote to page 233.

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Harvard or Yale, had historically been understood as a training ground for both Indian and

African evangelists.

John Witherspoon’s prestige and reputation were the final reasons why he was asked

to prepare Quamine and Yamma for the rigors of the African mission. Although

Witherspoon did not have much missionary expertise, he was a ranking member of the

Presbyterian SSPCK (he gave the organization’s anniversary sermon in 1758) and had argued

for the necessity of Indian missions in his sermons. Witherspoon noted that there was not a

“more noble, a more important, or more necessary exercise of Christian charity, than

enabling the Society to carry on their useful and salutary schemes, especially to extend their

mission to the Indian tribes.”151 Ezra Stiles also assured his colleagues that Witherspoon was

not only of a “catholic, charitable spirit,” but was probably the finest theologian in all of the

colonial colleges.152 This “catholic spirit” might have simply been a euphemism to describe

Witherspoon’s lack of controversy in years prior. Unlike other Protestant theologians of his

time, Witherspoon had few enemies, and he seemed to be the perfect person to head an

ecumenical and widely collaborative effort like the Quamine Project. On the one hand, he

was generally against the teachings of Samuel Hopkins, so Old Lights like Charles Chauncy

might have breathed more easily knowing that Quamine and Yamma were not going to be

indoctrinated into the Hopkinsianism system.153 At the same time, the ascension of

151 John Witherspoon, The absolute "ecessity of Salvation through Christ, A Sermon, Preached Before the

Society in Scotland for propagating Christian Knowledge, In the High Church of Edinburgh, On Monday,

January 2. 1758. To which is subjoined, A short Account of the present State of the Society (Edinburgh: W.

Miller, 1758), 41. In this address Witherspoon argued that missionary work was not only necessarily for

the salvation of Indians’ souls, but also for the safety and security of the American colonies.

152 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, November 1768, quoted in L.H. Butterfield, ed., John Witherspoon

Comes to America: A Documentary Account Based Largely on "ew Materials (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1953), 82; Diary entry for 24 June 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol.

I, 390.

153 Diary entry for 8 April 1773, in Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Vol. I, 363.

421

Witherspoon and the recent popularity of his college gave it the opportunity to situate itself

as an anti-Anglican institution in a growing Anglican mid-Atlantic. While intense rivalries

between Anglicans and other American Protestant ministers heated up over the issue of an

American bishopric in the 1760s, the competition over Indian missions provided the

ammunition in a clerical cold war between Anglicans and Dissenters.154 Witherspoon’s

ecumenicalism could bridge the divides that tore Dissenting communities apart and unite

them against the growing aggressiveness of the Anglican Church. “Our Jersey College,”

reported a friend to Stiles in 1769, “is now talking as if she was soon to be the bulwark

against Episcopacy: I should rejoice to see her Pistols, like honest Teagues, grown up into

great Guns. The President is an active man, & a good Preacher; & has done much to procure

funds.”155 With Witherspoon at the helm, there was little chance that the African mission

would devolve into the rancorous type of conflict that Wheelock engineered years before.

The education of the two Africans was also influenced by changing perceptions of

how to properly train indigenous peoples for evangelical work. While Wheelock had

demanded that civilization, husbandry, familiarity with classical languages and texts, and

biblical erudition were all equally important, the organizers of the Quamine Project

approached African education with a much more practical eye. Ezra Stiles, for example, had

an organic view of the role of civilization in converting native peoples. He initially believed

that Indians had to be civilized before they could be converted, but by the late 1760s he had

154 See Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689-

1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

155 Francis Alison to Ezra Stiles, 1 August 1769, in Stiles, Extracts From the Itineraries and Other

Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, 435.

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changed his mind.156 This was for two reasons. The first is that he was influenced by the

writings of his colleague, Charles Chauncy, who argued in the early 1760s that missionaries

should not think themselves “obliged to convert measures to effect an alteration in that way

of civil life they have been used to for ages immemorial.” English civility and Christianity

were not necessarily dependent upon one another, for the history of civilization plans had

only shown that they resulted in the disruption of native lifeways and rarely made good

Christians.157 Quamine and Yamma would therefore miss the training regimen that

Wheelock put his Indians through, as they would never be trained in husbandry,

blacksmithing, agriculture, or any of these material arts. Theology, rather than civilization,

would be at the heart of their training. At the same time, Stiles’ research into Moravian

missions demonstrated in a very practical way that civilization need not accompany

conversion. After reading the history of the Moravian mission to Greenland, Stiles wrote to

Eleazar Wheelock to inform him of the implicit comparisons between the native peoples

there and those in New York. “Perhaps your missionaries,” Stiles suggested to Wheelock,

“might learn from these volumes more advantageously to address the Indians. Perhaps it is a

Mistake that Civilizing is necessary to Christianizing the Heathen. If the divine truth can find

admission into their hearts, the rest follows of course.”158 By the time of his involvement in

156 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, 25 December 1762, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale

University, Microfilm Reel 1. Stiles looked to the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and the mission of John

Sergeant to the Stockbridge Indians to draw his conclusions about the necessity of civilization.

157 Charles Chauncy, All "ations of the Earth blessed in Christ, the Seed of Abraham. A Sermon Preached

at Boston, At The Ordination of the Rev. Mr. Joseph Bowman, To The Work of the Gospel-Ministry, More

Especially Among the Mohawk-Indians, on the Western Borders of "ew-England. August 31. 1762

(Boston: John Draper, 1762), 26.

158 Ezra Stiles to Eleazar Wheelock, 26 January 1768, in Stiles, The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale

University, Microfilm Reel 2. The history that Stiles is referring to is David Cranz, The history of

Greenland: containing a description of the country, and its inhabitants: ... By David Crantz. Translated

from the High-Dutch, ... In two volumes (London: Printed for the Brethren's Society for the Furtherance of

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the Quamine Project, Stiles had rejected centuries of Protestant missionary assumptions by

arguing that civilization need not be a component of conversion. If Christian conversion

could come first, the rest would follow.

Quamine and Yamma’s training might have reflected this change in direction.

Wheelock’s Indian missionaries studied classical texts, learned Latin, Greek, and maybe even

Hebrew, and were constantly engaged in agriculture and husbandry. Students at the College

of New Jersey spent their first years studying Latin, Greek, rhetoric, geography, philosophy,

and mathematics. 159 It is likely that Witherspoon’s personal regimen for Quamine and

Yamma looked to, but differed significantly from, both educational models. The first major

difference was that, while Wheelock’s students complained bitterly about the harsh,

physical, and draconian punishment at the hands of their schoolmasters, Witherspoon was

proud of the fact that “no correction by stripes is permitted” at his college. Those who could

not be governed by reason and maintain control of their passions, Witherspoon argued, “are

reckoned unfit for residence in College.”160 This pedagogical stance, in addition to the fact

that his two students were former slaves, highlighted the problems involved with the

corporeal punishment of black students. Unlike Wheelock, Witherspoon never resorted to

such measures. Part of this could have been the missionaries’ age. By the time that Quamine

and Yamma arrived at Witherspoon’s doorstep, the missionaries were far from children, as

both were well over 30 years old. As Witherspoon observed in a sermon on religious

education, “You may bend a young twig and make it receive almost any form; but that which

the Gospel among the Heathen: and sold by J. Dodsley; T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt; and T. Cadell,

successor to A. Millar; W. Sandby; S. Bladon; E. and C. Dilly; and at all the Brethren's chapels, 1767). See

page 328, of course.

159 Witherspoon, Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica, 15-16.

160 Witherspoon, Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica, 18.

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has attained to maturity, and taken its ply, you will never bring into another shape than that

which it naturally bears.”161 As older men, rather than young children, the Africans’

education would have prepared them for the duties of their future evangelical calling rather

than expose them to classical texts or arm them with academic erudition. Their training

therefore would have been much more practical, even vocational. In the year and a half that

they spent with Witherspoon from November of 1774 to the spring of 1776, Quamine and

Yamma allegedly became “very good in reading and writing.” In addition to acquiring the

skills of literacy, they also gained “a pretty good notion of the Principles of the Christian

faith.”162 By 1776, the organizers of the mission could boast that Quamine and Yamma had

excelled so quickly in their studies that they were fully prepared to begin the African mission

they had been preparing for – and spearheading – for years.163 The timing, however, could

not have been worse. Just as Quamine and Yamma had successfully finished their training

under John Witherspoon, the American Revolution began to undo the years of work leading

up to this African mission. When John Quamine died aboard a privateer’s ship in 1779, the

Quamine Project effectively died with him.

We could point to nearly a dozen reasons why the Quamine Project failed. For one,

the American Revolution cut off most communication and interaction with Africa, during

which the slave trade reached a temporary nadir and some states even made it illegal.

Ironically, the organizers of the Quamine Project viewed this development as a mixed

161 John Witherspoon, A Sermon on the Religious Education of Children. Preached in the Old Presbyterian

Church in "ew-York, to a Very "umerous Audience, on the Evening of the Second Sabbath in May

(Elizabethtown: Shepard Kollock, 1789), 10.

162 Woodward and Craven, eds., Princetonians, l.

163 Stiles, To the Public, 5.

425

blessing. While most of the donors to and participants in the project abhorred the slave trade,

the transportation connections that the trade wrought would have made mobilizing African

missionaries much easier. When given the choice between having the slave trade and

Christian missions or losing both, some ministers preferred to accept the temporal evil of

slavery in order to accomplish what they thought was a greater spiritual good. Scottish

missionary John Erskine rejoiced to hear that Massachusetts was abolishing slavery in the

1780s, but admitted that he “shall be sorry if that otherwise desirable event shall hinder any

probable scheme of sending the Gospel to the natives of Africa.”164 Even some of the

organizers of the Quamine Project had their doubts about whether Quamine and Yamma

could ever hope to succeed. Ezra Stiles had admitted as early as 1773 that the project was a

“discouraging” enterprise and that “Success may be doubtful.”165 Quamine and Yamma’s

personal tutor came to agree with Stiles. By 1782, with the project fully behind him, John

Witherspoon reflected on the indigenous people trained at the College of New Jersey. He

noted that his educational experiences with Indians, in particular, demonstrated that they

would never attain a civilized life. Witherspoon concluded that “There have been some of

them educated at this college, as well as in New England; but seldom or never did they prove

either good or useful.”166 Although John Erskine and Samuel Hopkins would try to revive

the project in later years, hopes of a native mission to Africa faded as the American

Revolution began and participants like Stiles and Witherspoon succumbed to their own

doubts about indigenous missionary work.

164 John Erskine to Ezra Stiles, 15 June 1789, in Stiles, Letters & Papers of Ezra Stiles, 106.

165 Ezra Stiles to Charles Chauncy, 8 December 1773, in The Papers of Ezra Stiles at Yale University,

Microfilm Reel 3.

166 Woodward and Craven, Princetonians, li.

426

Although the Quamine Project ultimately died aboard a privateer’s ship, the failed

plan nevertheless illuminates several important themes in indigenous missionary work in the

eighteenth century British Atlantic. First, Afro-Christians were not simply participants in,

but rather organizers and initiators of, African missions. Fueled by local revivals, an anti-

slavery impulse, and wider spiritual transformations among people of African descent

throughout the Atlantic world, Quamine and Yamma’s mission was certainly a mission to

Africans, by Africans. While Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins were the public faces of the

project, it ultimately sprang from Quamine and Yamma themselves. Secondly, Native

American missionary history played a crucial role in how this African project was

understood, framed, and conducted. Although Native American and black Atlantic

historiographies have developed separately, Protestant missionaries of that era would not

have recognized these boundaries. Indeed, they thought of Indians and Africans as “two

eggs,” and that missionary work among the Indians would have much to say about native

evangelical preaching among Africans. The Quamine Project was particularly influenced by

Eleazar Wheelock’s native missionary program, which showed later evangelists the

opportunities and challenges associated with placing indigenous peoples at the center of the

Protestant missionary program. In sum, the Quamine Project was rooted in Afro-Christian

religious transformations within the Atlantic world as well as the history and challenges of

Native American missionary work. John Quamine and Bristol Yamma’s failed African

mission thus provides us with a much deeper understanding of religious interaction between

Anglo-Americans, Indians, and Africans in the eighteenth century British Atlantic. Like

countless indigenous missionaries before them, these two Africans never realized their

427

chance to return to Africa as prodigal sons and “preach the gospel to the people from which

they sprang.”167

167 Hopkins, “A Narrative of the rise & progress,” 1-2.

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COCLUSIO

ATIVE MISSIOARIES AD THE BRITISH ATLATIC

On the 11th day of March in 1779, a black Christian petitioned the Bishop of London

to ordain him as an Anglican minister in hopes of “returning” to Africa to spread the gospel

“amongst my countrymen.”1 Although his previous evangelical failures initially made him

reluctant to write this letter – he was unsuccessful at converting a Jamaican “prince” years

before, and his attempt to lead family prayer while a servant to a former English imperial

governor were wholly ineffectual – the black applicant was convinced by others to do so

anyways. The applicant’s letter outlined his missionary credentials carefully, explaining that

he was a faithful and orthodox adherent to the Anglican Church and vowing that his only

motive for requesting this unsolicited post was so that he “may be a means, under God, of

reforming his countrymen and persuading them to embrace the Christian religion.” He

explained that he was moved not only by a sincere Christian zeal, but also by the evangelical

successes that other nations, especially the Portuguese and the Dutch, had experienced after

training native Africans for missionary work. Both of those governments encouraged the rise

of a black ministerial corps in West Africa and, as the applicant noted, the new evangelists

they produced proved to be “more proper than European clergymen, [who were]

unacquainted with the language and customs of the country.”2 Governor MacNamara, the

1 Olauduh Equiano, The Interesting arrative of the Life of Olauduh Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The

African, Written By Himself (New York: W. Durell, 1791), 165.

2 Olauduh Equiano to the Bishop of London, 11 March 1779, in Equiano, The Interesting arrative, 166-

167.

429

man’s employer and one of the key figures who persuaded him to request Anglican

ordination, drafted a supporting letter that recalled the successes of other nations in West

Africa while simultaneously drawing upon his seven years of experience as governor in that

region. MacNamara even suggested that the Anglicans’ own history of using black ministers

should have been enough to convince the Bishop of London to ordain this son of Africa. He

boasted, for example, that he was personally acquainted with Philip Quaque, an African

Anglican stationed at the Cape Coast, whom he described as a “very respectable character.”3

MacNamara and the black applicant had, of course, said all the right things. They

emphasized evangelical competition with rival national powers, appealed to the successes

that those powers had in training an African ministerial elite, invoked Philip Quaque’s

missionary efforts on the Cape Coast, and outlined the linguistic and cultural advantages of

African preachers over European ones. And yet, the Bishop of London coolly responded that

he and the other Anglican Bishops were “not of opinion of sending a new missionary to

Africa.”4 The applicant’s name was Olauduh Equiano, and his effort to become an ordained

African missionary had failed.5

The denial of Equiano’s application might suggest that the Bishop of London had

simply rejected the petition outright because of the applicant’s race.6 Equiano’s identity as an

African certainly could have been a part of this equation, but so might have his ties to

3 Governor MacNamara to the Bishop of London, 11 March 1779, in Equiano, The Interesting arrative,

167.

4 Equiano, The Interesting arrative, 169.

5 The most comprehensive and deeply researched biography of Equiano is Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the

African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

6 Things might have gone differently had Equiano submitted his application earlier. The Bishop of London

to whom Equiano wrote was Robert Lowth, who had been appointed to the position only two years prior.

If Equiano and MacNamara had put in the application in 1776, for example, it might have received a more

favorable response, for the Bishop of London then was Richard Terrick, the same person who officiated

Philip Quaque’s ordination in 1766.

430

Methodists, his growing reputation as an anti-slavery crusader, the timing of the application

during the tumult of the American Revolution, as well as Equiano’s lack of formal training

under Anglican authority. While his comparison with Philip Quaque might have seemed apt,

Equiano and MacNamara were probably both unaware that Quaque spent a decade of his

most formative years under Anglican tutorship in England. One could not simply ask for

Anglican ordination and receive it, no matter how sincere, pious, or competent the candidate.

Anglicans believed that ordination, like conversion, was a long process, one that took years

of training, biblical study, practice, and preparation. Furthermore, Philip Quaque’s mission

to West Africa was far from a glorious success, so if Equiano was looking for a positive

black role model, he probably chose the wrong one. Finally, Anglicans never trusted black

preachers the way that Moravians trusted the national helpers of the Caribbean or how

Puritans and Presbyterians depended upon Native American preachers in New England and

Iroquoia. All these factors combined to make the rejection of Equiano’s application not

necessarily a question of race, and also not terribly surprising.

Olauduh Equiano’s failure to become an Anglican minister was, in some ways, not a

culmination of previous missionary history, but actually a rejection of it. The Anglicans

rebuffed Equiano for the reasons enumerated above, but it does not necessarily follow that

blacks were universally denied access to Christian spiritual authority. In fact, Anglicans had

used slave teachers and catechists in their missions, and they did ordain a few black ministers

– like Philip Quaque – during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Legions of early

modern Protestants had also welcomed, indeed cultivated, native preachers from the

beginning of their evangelical efforts in New England in the 1640s. Like Equiano, not all of

these evangelists were officially ordained, and many attempted to spread the gospel under

their own auspices. In highlighting his credentials to become an evangelist, Equiano revealed

his earlier attempts to propagate Christianity among Jamaicans, house servants, and others

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throughout the Atlantic world. When the Anglicans rejected Equiano for ministerial

ordination, they were rejecting someone who had years of missionary experience under his

belt. Like the black and Native American proselytes who came before him, Equiano did not

necessarily need official sanction to operate as a missionary. By cutting his missionary teeth

on Jamaican princes and black servants, Equiano had already been working as a Christian

evangelist well before this rejection.

Although Equiano’s effort to become an African missionary failed, his attempt neatly

encapsulates many of the themes that this dissertation has explored: the primacy of “native”

preachers in British missions, competition with other international powers, the entanglements

between Indian and African evangelical efforts, Atlantic-wide circuits of information and

correspondence that knit these groups together, and the rancorous debate over the place of

Indians and Africans in the future of Western Christendom. As we have seen, Native

Americans, enslaved blacks, and Africans were absolutely central to early modern Protestant

missionary activity from Puritan New England to Anglican South Carolina, the Moravian

Caribbean to the New York frontier, and even from West Africa to India. While the

conventional image of a missionary has been that of a white, middle-class Anglo-American

who was ignorant of the culture and peoples he was attempting to convert, the presence –

indeed, the astonishing ubiquity – of “native” preachers demands that we rethink the ways in

which native peoples not only encouraged Christian missions, but actually led, organized,

and directed them. While literary scholars and historians have acknowledged the historical

import of a few of these individuals, such as Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and Rebecca

Protten, these remarkable figures were just three examples of a much wider effort to employ

hundreds of Africans, Native Americans, black slaves, and subcontinental Asians in

Protestant evangelical enterprises. Missionaries, in other words, were usually not the white,

imperialistic, advance guard of Western colonialism that they have been made out to be.

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Instead, more often than not they were native peoples’ leaders, neighbors, family, and

friends.

The ability to tap into these networks of kin and country, as well as their fluency with

native tongues, made native preachers invaluable assets to Protestant missionary

organizations, and they were much more cost-effective than employing English missionaries,

who were generally reluctant to march into the white man’s graves of West Africa, the New

York frontier, and the slave quarters of the Carolinas. At the same time, Native American

and Africa bodies were vital to the development of native missionary discourses and

practices, for early modern divines believed that African and Indian bodies were particularly

well suited to the climatological and epidemiological environments of their missions and well

accustomed to the comparative material poverty and constant mobility of their charges.

Ironically, the same rhetoric that characterized Indians as wandering savages and Africans as

physically destined for slavery in tropical climes actually generated a space in which Indians

and Africans could gain access to spiritual authority as Christian preachers, catechists,

teachers, and evangelists.

But there was more than mere pragmatism at work, for Protestant missionaries were

simultaneously fueled by a sense of sacred genealogy as well as an almost pathological

obsession with comparing themselves to rival national powers. Protestant ministers certainly

believed that, even though indigenous peoples were barbaric, savage, and uncivilized, they

were fundamentally redeemable. In fact, the early history of Christian expansion throughout

the Mediterranean had provided a model for how unconverted gentiles might be brought

home (or “reduced”) to Christianity. Because the age of miracles was over and the gift of

tongues had ceased, native preachers were expected to be even more important to the

propagation of Christianity in the rapidly expanding Atlantic world than they were in the first

period of Christian expansion in the Mediterranean. Thus, through an articulation of sacred

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genealogy that traced all evangelists back to Christ himself, through ordination practices like

the laying on of hands, and through an understanding of early Christian history, Protestant

ministers carved out a rhetorical, theological, and operational space for native missionaries.

Protestants also looked to the efforts of other nations – especially the Spanish and the French

– as models for how to conduct their own missions. They simultaneously scoffed at and

envied the inflated conversion numbers that Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries published in

their reports, and they sought ways to match the armies of missionaries that Rome seemed to

be producing every year. Some ministers, such as the resolute George Berkeley, even

implied that Indian and African preachers might counterbalance the army of “regulars” that

Catholics sent out yearly to their missions.7 As such, native evangelists were not only

viewed as a potential scourge to barbaric religious practices; they were also understood as a

crucial wedge in the increasing competition between Protestants and Catholics in the early

modern Atlantic world.

Few groups were more sensitive to these tensions than the Puritan New Englanders

who initiated Christian missionary activity to the Massachusett Indians in the 1640s.

Although John Eliot has been universally heralded as the “Apostle to the Indians,”

seventeenth century New England actually contained dozens of “apostles,” and most of them

were Indians. They embraced some aspects of Christian evangelism for a wide variety of

reasons (spiritual power, monetary reward, or because their kin were doing the same), but

they were not forced into believing. Indeed, their choices during King Philip’s War and their

attempts to create sustained Christian communities in the wake of war demonstrate the

multivalent ways in which native peoples appropriated Christianity to fight their own

7 George Berkeley, A Proposal For the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, and For

Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity, By a College to be Erected in the Summer Islands,

Otherwise Called the Isles of Bermuda (Dublin: George Grierson, 1725), 12.

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spiritual, social, and physical battles. Puritans were not alone in their dependence upon

native evangelists, for Anglicans also employed indigenous preachers in their missions.

However, their excessive reliance on native royalty, in addition to their clumsy conduct

during sensitive imperial and Indian wars, often left those preachers ostracized and alienated.

Anglicans consequently failed to create a native preaching corps in the Americas by the

1740s. And yet, their virtual participation in successful indigenous evangelical activities in

India – as well as utopian schemes generated by divines like George Berkeley – kept native

missionaries on the Anglican agenda. The era of revivals forced Anglicans to make the

cultivation of native preachers a reality. Native missionary work began to spread to other

groups, including Moravians, and black slaves were suddenly being trained by Moravians

and even Anglicans for teaching and missionary posts. At the same time, this surge in

evangelical revivalism resulted in the splintering of Indian churches and congregations that

followed controversial, sometimes even illiterate, Indian preachers. In sum, the native

missionary program that began in New England had, by 1750, now involved blacks as well as

Indians, spread throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, and resulted in the gradual

indigenization of Christianity by the very people upon whom Protestant missionary efforts

depended.

Philip Quaque’s mission to the Cape Coast, the Algonquian Indians’ mission to the

Oneidas and Mohawks, and John Quamine’s failed mission to West Africa seem, on the

surface, to have little in common. And yet, these three case studies highlight the ways in

which indigenous preachers operated as evangelists and struggled with the problems of

empire and identity. Philip Quaque’s letters, for example, detail not only his failed mission

to West Africans, but also his efforts to situate Africans into a sacred genealogy of Christian

history even as he simultaneously described their religious practices as savage and barbaric.

At the same time, Quaque’s vision of empire leaves little doubt that the relationship between

435

missions and empire – at least from the perspective of native missionaries – was much more

tenuous and ambiguous than we have previously recognized. The question of the relationship

between native preachers and their charges was also a key problem in the eastern

Algonquians’ mission to the Oneida and Mohawk Indians in the 1760s. While Eleazar

Wheelock claimed his “grand design” was an innovative method for Iroquois conversion, he

was in fact tapping into a longer history of indigenous evangelical leadership. The problem,

however, was that the Indians who went to Iroquoia were not actually Iroquois. Even as they

embraced opportunities for mutual collaboration with the Iroquois, these missionaries’

relationships with their potential converts, as well as one another, was fraught with discord

and tension. The failure of Wheelock’s grand design was readily apparent to Protestant

missionaries throughout the Atlantic world, but it did not necessarily mean that native

evangelical work was abandoned. In fact, organizers of later African missions, especially the

failed Quamine Project of the mid-1770s, would use Native American missionary history as a

model to help navigate the dilemmas implicit in using native peoples as preachers. The

Quamine Project simultaneously attempted to address the concerns of race, transatlantic

slavery, and Christianity during a period of revival and revolution. As disparate as these case

studies are, they demonstrate the ways in which black and Native American missionaries

confronted the challenges of empire, carved out a space for native peoples throughout

Western Christendom, created identities for themselves while characterizing the problems

and futures of non-Christian native peoples, drew upon Atlantic-wide connections of

fundraising and correspondence to fuel their missions, and entangled Indian and African

missionary histories to ensure that neither was completely isolated from the other.

The chronological scope of this dissertation ends just as the American Revolution

began, but it is worthwhile to look forward and note that missionary history changed

dramatically in the decades after the American Revolution. Although there was some

436

continuity – the SPG still employed Paulus to catechize Mohawk children, though it was in

Ontario rather than New York – the revolutionary era created and coincided with some major

shifts in native missionary work. Organizations like the SPG began receiving increasing

competition from British-based Baptist and Methodist missionary organizations. The Baptist

Missionary Society (1792), London Missionary Society (1795), and Church Missionary

Society (1799) all began active missionary efforts within Britain’s second empire, spreading

out to Africa, India, and East Asia. One Anglican asked rhetorically in 1786, if Anglicans

treated the American Indian and “savage African” as “objects worthy of our attention; ought

not the same charitable disposition to animate our hopes and excite our zeal towards the

conversion of the Mahometan or the Gentoo?”8 As the American Revolution ended and as

the British empire reconstituted itself, British missionaries began to turn their eyes to the east.

At the same time, the voluntary and involuntary displacement of peoples during the

revolutionary era, the creation of the American nation-state, and the rapid rise of independent

black and Native American religious congregations gave native preachers an opportunity to

rip Christianity away from its Western moorings and form independent, Christian

communities. This was a process that was, of course, underway before the American

Revolution even began, for religious separatism was always a component of native

missionary work. Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled the American itinerant circuits

since the 1740s, but it was not until the 1760s and early 1770s that black preachers began to

appear among the Baptist and Methodist congregations of the south. When they did, they did

so in staggering numbers.9 Harry Hosier (Black Harry), Jacob Bishop, Moses Wilkinson,

8 Thomas Thurlow, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

in Foreign Parts; At Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, on Friday

February 17, 1786 (London: T. Harrison and S. Brooke, 1786), 23.

9 A summary of black churches before and after the Revolution can be found in Sylvia R. Frey and Betty

Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British

437

George Liele, and Andrew Bryan were notable black Christian leaders after the Revolution.

But there were also lesser-known figures, most of whom were or had been enslaved. These

included preachers by the names of Jupiter, Primus, Jem, Jacob, Simon, Lewis, and Martin.10

Not surprisingly, the number of black Baptists and Methodists in the south grew

exponentially when they had examples of black leadership, and this journey to an Afro-

Baptist and Afro-Methodist faith has been well documented by other scholars.11

This pattern held true for the mid-Atlantic, where black preachers like Richard Allen,

Absalom Jones, and Daniel Coker created independent congregations in Pennsylvania and

Delaware while simultaneously riding itinerant evangelical circuits to spread the gospel.

This was a push and pull process, as racist white clerical leaders often pushed black

congregants out of their churches just as a black spiritual leadership emerged to pull them in.

Black Methodist preachers were especially active in building their ranks. As Richard Allen

explained, Methodism was particularly appealing to blacks because the founders of these

churches were generally in opposition to slavery, they explained Christian doctrine through

emotional appeals, their camp meetings were ecstatic and revelatory, and (most importantly),

they cultivated black leadership more than any other denomination before them. Allen

observed in his autobiography that Methodism was suited perfectly for blacks because:

The plain and simple gospel suits best for any people, for the

unlearned can understand, and the learned are sure to

understand; and the reason that the Methodist is so successful in

the awakening and conversion of the coloured people, [is] the

Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave

Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

10 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 151-210. See also Albert J. Raboteau, “The Slave Church in the Era of the

American Revolution,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and

Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 193-213

11 Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 1979); Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African

Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998),

244-290; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion; and Raboteau, Slave Religion.

438

plain doctrine and having a good discipline…The Methodists

were the first people that brought glad tidings to the coloured

people. I feel thankful that ever I heard a Methodist preach. We

are beholden to the Methodists, under God, for the light of the

Gospel we enjoy; for all other denominations preached so high-

flown that we were not able to comprehend their doctrine. Sure

am I that reading sermons will never prove so beneficial to the

coloured people as spiritual or extempore preaching. I am well

convinced that the Methodist has proved beneficial to thousands

and ten times thousands. It is to be awfully feared that the

simplicity of the Gospel that was among them fifty years ago,

and that they conform more to the world and the fashions

thereof, they would fare very little better than the people of the

world.12

The collective labors of Allen, Jones, and other black preachers within the newly forming

United States generated an astronomical surge in the numbers of black adherents to

Methodist and Baptist Churches. In 1786 the Methodists counted 1,890 blacks among their

ranks, but by 1797 that number had grown to 12,215. By 1793 the Baptists counted around

18,000 black congregants, a number which grew to 40,000 by 1813.13 Black preachers and

religious leaders – both male and female – were absolutely crucial to the development of

independent Protestant congregations in post-Revolutionary black communities.

12 Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen. To Which is

Annexed The Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States in

America. Containing a arrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793: With an Address to

the People of Colour in the United States. Written by Himself, and Published by His Request (Philadelphia:

Martin & Boden, Printers, 1833), 16-17.

13 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 131.

439

At the same time that black preachers like Richard Allen were creating independent

Christian congregations, the diasporic experiences of Afro-Americans and Native Americans

also underlined the centrality of native preachers to constituting sustainable Christian

communities after the American Revolution. On the surface it would seem that the historical

trajectories of Christian Indians and Afro-Americans after the American Revolution were

entirely dissimilar. After all, Indians dealt with unique problems of dispossession, disease,

and involuntary migration while Afro-Americans confronted chattel slavery and

institutionalized racism. And yet, a quick comparison of the Indian migration to

Brothertown, New York and the creation of a black colony at Sierra Leone highlights some

remarkable similarities between the Native American and Afro-American preachers who

were on the move in the wake of revolution.

Just as Dunmore’s Proclamation allowed thousands of Afro-Americans to escape

slavery in the American South and migrate to Nova Scotia in the 1770s and 80s, Christian

Richard Allen’s portrait credits the

founder of the African Methodist

Episcopal Church for launching that

congregation not in 1816 – when the

denomination achieved official

recognition – but in 1779, when Allen

embraced Christianity and became a

black itinerant preacher. Courtesy of

the Library Company of Philadelphia.

440

Indians also considered using the fissures created by revolutionary activity to migrate away

from white colonial society.14 Joseph Johnson, a Mohegan preacher whose failed mission to

the Oneida Indians was catalogued in previous chapters, championed the idea of moving

eastern Algonquian Indians – particularly his own Mohegans – to land in within the territory

of New York’s Oneida Indians. The plan got underway in the 1770s, but the American

Revolution and Johnson’s premature death derailed it until the early 1780s. Samson Occom,

Johnson’s father-in-law, took the mantle of community building from Johnson and, like

William Cooper in Cooperstown, set about constructing a settlement on the post-

Revolutionary New York frontier.15 Eeyawquittoowauconnuck, or Brothertown, was

officially incorporated in November of 1785. It was about that same time, the early to mid

1780s, that black Christian leaders like David George, John Marrant, and Boston King began

creating independent black Christian congregations in Nova Scotia, away from the menace of

American racial slavery. Like their Native American counterparts in New York, the Nova

Scotians had a rough go of it at first. In spite of their newfound independence, their

14 The best analyses of these migrations are Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, The Slaves, and the

American Revolution (New York: Ecco, 2006); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway

Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006);

James St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in ova Scotia and Sierra

Leone, 1783-1870 (New York: Africana Pub. Co., 1976); and John N. Grant, “Black Immigrants into Nova

Scotia, 1776-1815,” The Journal of egro History 58 No. 3 (July 1973): 253-270.

15 Drew Lopenzina, “The Whole Wilderness Shall Blossom as the Rose”: Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson,

and the Question of Native Settlement on Cooper’s Frontier,” American Quarterly 58 No. 4 (December

2006): 1119-1145; and Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the

Early American Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). The best analyses of the Brothertown

migration are Linford D. Fisher, “‘Traditionary Religion’: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native

Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776” (PhD Diss, Harvard University, 2008): 330-392; Thomas

Commuck, “Sketch of the Brothertown Indians,” Wisconsin Historical Collections 4 (1859): 291-298; and

David J. Silverman’s forthcoming book on the intertribal migration to New York. For primary sources, see

also James Dow McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College

Publications, 1932), 155-172; Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan:

Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century ative America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2006), 285-412; and selections from Joseph Johnson, To Do Good To My Indian

Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776, ed. Laura J. Murray (Amherst, MA: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1998), 168-289.

441

possession of poor land, the explosion of white racism in Nova Scotia, their material poverty,

and unbearably cold winters forced them to consider other alternatives. When John Clarkson

asked the community’s black leaders for voluntary migrants to establish a colony in West

Africa for free blacks, they readily complied.

Both the Brothertown Movement and the creation of the colony of Sierra Leone were

fueled by discourses on race, human progress, Christianity, and civilization. Migration was

an answer to racism, only for Indians racism found its expression in dispossession and

territorial wars while for Afro-Americans it found its brutal articulation in racial slavery.

Establishing autonomous communities in New York and Africa was therefore a response to

the racialized power struggles of the revolutionary era. But both movements were more than

just a form of social escapism, for the founders of Brothertown as well as the religious

leaders of the Sierra Leone experiment saw in their own migration a providential opportunity

to redeem lost peoples, civilize the land, and bring Indians and Africans to Christ.

Agriculture and civilization schemes were central to both the Brothertown and Sierra Leone

migrations. So was missionary activity, as Native American and African migrants

understood their relocation as a key moment in the gospelization of the world. Not only

would they civilize Africans and Indians by introducing them to agriculture, civilized English

living, sedentary lifeways, and even the market economy, they would also use their newfound

status as God’s chosen people to spread the gospel to the darker corners of both continents.

Even the biblical texts that black preachers, diasporic Africans, and Brothertown

migrants employed were similar, for black and Indian preachers from Samson Occom to

David George and Absalom Jones all used the scriptural text and metaphor of Exodus to

explain their plight, articulate their identities as migrant Christians, and establish a space for

themselves within a sacred genealogy of Western Christianity. When Samson Occom

undertook his momentous trip from his Mohegan home to the budding community at

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Brothertown, he found himself constantly preaching from the book of Exodus along the

way.16 As Jim Sidbury has noted for the Sierra Leone migrants, they “all understood their

migration through the metaphor of an exodus to a promised land.”17 It was no coincidence

that one of the most dynamic of these evangelical leaders was a charismatic preacher named

Moses.18 Absalom Jones, one of Philadelphia’s key black leaders, preached a thanksgiving

sermon in 1808 to celebrate the official ending of the transatlantic slave trade. The starting

point for his sermon was, of course, the book of Exodus.19 The text of Exodus, as well as the

metaphorical meaning of it, became vital to Native American, Afro-American, and African

colonial discourses on Christianity, race, and the spiritual futures of indigenous peoples

during this crucial period of post-Revolutionary diasporas.20

Native American and Afro-American evangelists experienced unique conditions in

the wake of revolution, and this argument is certainly not intended to homogenize,

essentialize, or over-generalize about the complex historical contexts in which black and

Indian evangelists operated. And yet, their simultaneous attempts to create independent

Christian communities away from the problems of dispossession and racial slavery, their

understanding of those communities as missionary bases for future evangelization of others,

and even their invocation of scriptural texts like the book of Exodus to explain their plight;

all of these characteristics mark out similarities rather than differences. Most importantly, a

16 Journal entries for 30 September 1785 (in Journal 11) and 18 October 1785 (in Journal 12) in Occom,

The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 300 and 305.

17 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and ation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2007), 95.

18 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 146-150.

19 Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon, Preached January 1, 1808, in St. Thomas’s, or the African

Episcopal Church, Philadelphia: On Account of The Abolition of the African Slave trade. On That Day, by

the Congress of the United States (Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1808).

20 See also Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and ation in Early ineteenth-Century Black

America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

443

reliance upon native evangelical leadership, in the form of people like Boston King, Samson

Occom, David George, David Fowler, and Moses Wilkinson, became central to the

development of these communities and the people who sought their future in them. It was

therefore no coincidence that, when Paul Cuffee attended a Baptist meeting in Sierra Leone

in December of 1811, the meeting actually read a letter from the Oneida Indians “to good

satisfaction.” The very next day Cuffee delivered this letter to the Methodist congregation,

so that both Baptists and Methodists in West Africa might learn from it “for the improvement

of the people.”21 In spite of the vast distances and historical circumstances that separated

them, Oneida Indians and Sierra Leoneans recognized, through their epistolary relationship,

the common bonds that knit them together. By the end of the eighteenth century, Native

Americans, American blacks, and Sierra Leonean migrants had all wrested ecclesiastical and

spiritual authority from the clutches of white, Christian denominations. Their independent

congregations and communities spoke to the problems of a people in motion, a people in

exodus, just as their hopes for the conversion of Native Americans, Africans, and black

Americans outlined their visions for a shared Christian destiny.22

A historical phenomenon that involves hundreds of individuals and a multitude of

denominational groups working throughout the Atlantic world and beyond is difficult, if not

impossible, to summarize, for the British Atlantic world was not only a massive space filled

with dynamic and diverse characters; it was also an ever-changing one. The creation and

development of native missionaries, including their efforts to translate elements of

Christianity, their understanding of and experiences among the people they tried to convert,

21 Journal of Paul Cuffee for 1 December and 2 December 1811, in Sheldon H. Harris, Paul Cuffe: Black

America and the African Return (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 114-115.

22 For more on the idea of a shared African destiny, see Sidbury, Becoming African in America.

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and their relationships with empire, were all constantly in flux. Native preachers, whether

they were in Puritan New England, West Africa, the Caribbean, India, South Carolina, or the

New York frontier, were not passive victims of an imperial conspiracy. Instead, indigenous

evangelists were active and willing participants in Protestant missions who drew from

Christianity to frame new identities, amass spiritual power, preserve their cultures, and

protect their peoples during a period of unprecedented change. As such, native preachers

were critical to the development of cultural contact between Europeans, Africans, and Native

Americans during the most formative years of those encounters.

Prodigal sons; Indigenous missionaries in the British Atlantic world, 1640-1780.

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