English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 175-183

By Hilary E. Wyss

As rigid and unforgiving as the boarding schools established for the education of Native Americans could be, the intellectuals who engaged with these schools—including Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, and Montauketts David and Jacob Fowler in the eighteenth century, and Cherokees Catharine and David Brown in the nineteenth—became passionate advocates for Native community as a political and cultural force. From handwriting exercises to Cherokee Syllabary texts, Native students negotiated a variety of pedagogical practices and technologies, using their hard-won literacy skills for their own purposes. By examining the materials of literacy—primers, spellers, ink, paper, and instructional manuals—as well as the products of literacy—letters, journals, confessions, reports, and translations—English Letters and Indian Literacies explores the ways boarding schools were, for better or worse, a radical experiment in cross-cultural communication.

Focusing on schools established by New England missionaries, first in southern New England and later among the Cherokees, Hilary E. Wyss explores both the ways this missionary culture attempted to shape and define Native literacy and the Native response to their efforts. She examines the tropes of "readerly" Indians—passive and grateful recipients of an English cultural model—and "writerly" Indians—those fluent in the colonial culture but also committed to Native community as a political and cultural concern—to develop a theory of literacy and literate practice that complicates and enriches the study of Native self-expression. Wyss's literary readings of archival sources, published works, and correspondence incorporate methods from gender studies, the history of the book, indigenous intellectual history, and transatlantic American studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9780812206036

Book preview

English Letters and Indian Literacies

English Letters

and Indian Literacies

Reading, Writing, and New England

Missionary Schools, 1750–1830

Hilary E. Wyss

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wyss, Hilary E.

English letters and Indian literacies : reading, writing, and New England missionary schools, 1750–1830 / Hilary E. Wyss.—1st ed.

p. cm. — (Haney Foundation series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4413-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Indians of North America—Education—New England. 2. Indians of North America—New England—Intellectual life. 3. Indians of North America—Missions—New England. 4. Written communications—New England—History. 5. Literacy—New England—History. I. Title. II Series: Haney Foundation series.

E78.N5W97 2012

371.829'97—dc23                2011049638

To James, Anna, and Cameron

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Technologies of Literacy

1. Narratives and Counternarratives: Producing Readerly Indians in Eighteenth-Century New England

2. The Writerly Worlds of Joseph Johnson

3. Brainerd’s Missionary Legacy: Death and the Writing of Cherokee Salvation

4. The Foreign Mission School and the Writerly Indian

After Words: Native Literacy and Autonomy

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Preface

Early Native American studies have blossomed in recent decades, and it has been a privilege to engage with this field at such an exciting moment. Ten or fifteen years ago extraordinary work on Native Americans in colonial New England was emerging from history and anthropology departments, including Jean O’Brien’s Dispossession by Degrees (1998), Daniel Mandell’s Behind the Frontier (1996), Colin Calloway’s The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), Karen Ordhal Kupperman’s Indians and English (2000), Gregory Dowd’s A Spirited Resistance (1992), and of course Jill Lepore’s The Name of War (1998). Kevin McBride, Kathleen Bragdon, and William Simmons, all in anthropology departments, were also doing exciting work on early Native materials.¹ However, with the exception of critical work on Native American autobiography by Arnold Krupat, David Brumble, David Murray, and Hertha Wong, work in English departments was focused almost exclusively on Native novels and poetry and translations of Native oratory, all in the context of twentieth-century literary production.² As scholar Craig Womack has recently pointed out, this was a literary and cultural moment in which it seemed that nobody was interested in discussing the writing of Native Americans from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.³ My own book, Writing Indians (2000), was an attempt to integrate what I came to understand as a rich and extraordinarily underappreciated body of material into a cultural-studies model in which scholars in English departments all over the country turned their attention to material culture or nontraditional, extraliterary texts, using the tools and strategies of English departments—close reading, theoretical modes of analysis, and attention to linguistic and structural features of expression. My goal in Writing Indians was to maintain a sense of what I as a literary scholar and close analytic reader of texts had to offer works that had already received significant attention from history and anthropology departments but that were largely unknown in English departments.

Today the terrain of English studies has changed dramatically, and Native American texts that were once only available in archives are now widely reprinted and essential reading in American literature anthologies. Furthermore, the ever-increasing importance of the intertwined fields of composition and rhetoric has paved the way for a more nuanced examination of literacy and its practices. Deborah Brandt, Harvey Graff, and others have developed a rich theoretical background for the study of literacy and its acquisition, in both a historical and a contemporary perspective.⁴ Scott Lyons has shaped that general context in terms of Native writing experiences, coining the term rhetorical sovereignty as a way of thinking through Native self-determination—both political and cultural—and written discourse. Through the work of these scholars it has become increasingly clear that literacy is a vexed terrain in which conflicting intentions and values attach to a set of skills loaded with moral, political, and economic freight; texts that help us recover some of those conflicts have become increasingly valued as objects of study.

Meanwhile, the field of literary studies has once and for all exploded the traditional canon, engaging enthusiastically with a wide array of extraliterary texts such as letters, diaries, and petitions while also engaging, with ever-increasing sophistication, the words and expressions of those previously passed over, such as men and women of color and the marginally literate. Scholarship in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of History of the Book reminds us that as scholars we lack a full sense of the complex rituals of power and exchange that form the base from which Native Americans participated in the colonial American world of New England, even as it uncovers the material and cultural nuances of books, readers, and literate practice more generally. Recent works by Eve Tavor Bannet, Phillip Round, Matthew Brown, Matt Cohen, and others have supplemented the more general resources in colonial American book history, such as Hugh Amory and David Hall’s first volume of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Patricia Cohen’s The Story of A, and E. Jennifer Monaghan’s Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, all of which situate the materiality of textual production in terms of the ideological basis of reading, writing, and culture.⁵ This engagement has taken place with a heretofore unimaginable intensity in the field of early American studies, with scholars like Joanna Brooks, Kristina Bross, Laura Stevens, Laura Murray, David Murray, Sandra Gustafson, Josh Bellin, Bernd Peyer, Gordon Sayre, and countless others in English departments across the country and even around the world taking on the work of examining the words and worlds of early Native American peoples and the missionaries who wanted to save them.⁶

History and religious studies have also participated in this surge of interest in early Native studies: the work of Maureen Konkle, Rachel Wheeler, David Silverman, Amy Den Ouden, and Michael Oberg have reimagined the ways in which academics can interpret and engage with Native communities; Laurel Ulrich and her work on gender and memory has helped us to understand ongoing representations of Native cultural traditions.⁷ Such scholars speak easily and comfortably to those of us in literary fields, and we share manuscripts and conference venues with a regularity once impossible when the boundaries between fields of study were more scrupulously maintained.

By far the most significant development for the field of early Native studies has been the engagement by Native scholars like Lisa Brooks, Jace Weaver, Robert Warrior, and Daniel Heath Justice with early Native writings. Standing on the shoulders of earlier scholars and critics like Paula Gunn Allen and Vine Deloria, Jr., these contemporary Native scholars look for ways to frame a Native literary theory, and remind us all to attend to the words of Native peoples in ways that are sensitive to the notion of Native community identity.⁸ Rather than imposing a set of outside assumptions, by listening to the words and actions of members of Native communities, we can come to understand words and worlds beyond certain colonialist assumptions. Such scholars have increasingly turned to texts hitherto ignored in the field of Native studies, revealing the complexities of texts written by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and political thinkers very much engaged in the process of understanding themselves as Native Americans, negotiating a brutalizing colonial system intent on undermining or ignoring that very identity. Scholars in Native studies programs have argued that reframing Native textual production through the words and ideas emerging from Native communities is a powerful corrective to some of the insularity of academic departments and that understanding Native voices from the past should in no way be considered only the domain of scholars and antiquarians.

The significance of Native community is most powerfully and emphatically felt in the ways in which Native culture and identity are experienced in New England today. Tribal recognition at the federal level has exploded since the 1990s, thanks in no small part to the commitment by Native peoples to understand and interpret their own histories. Language revitalization projects like that of Jessie Little Doe Fermino among the Wampanoags and Stephanie Fielding for the Mohegans have reached back to the work of John Eliot and others, and the sometimes abstract and arcane work of scholars of colonial texts has taken on a very real and transformative component as individuals reconstruct their tribal histories and languages from (among other evidence) colonial texts. The genealogical work of Will Ottery and others has helped shape the current Brothertown community in Wisconsin, as well as communities throughout New England, as increasing numbers of individuals come to understand their relationship to their tribal heritage in vibrant new ways. As scholars and community leaders reach out to each other, we are creating and recreating a past, present, and future that are all ripe with possibilities.⁹

My sense of this project and its value has changed significantly from the days in which my work on Writing Indians seemed a relatively abstract academic exercise. The collaborative and ongoing challenge to academics and tribal historians today is to recover a past and shape meaning from texts that are not always easily available to those who might be most interested in, and affected by, them. It is very much my hope that this current book honors that principle by both celebrating the lives and struggles of those Native peoples engaged in the schools, while acknowledging the sometimes brutal and often wrenching decisions through which individuals—Native and Anglo-American—came to terms with their place in the broader missionary culture of their own moments.

Introduction

Technologies of Literacy

Dr Bassett, Sir.

I will tell you now, that very soon I must be kill here, if I stay here any longer. This morning also Wheelock he came in our room to trouble us. He poll out our b[l]anket, then he spit on me then I spit on him too. and I told him not to do so. Then he come begin on me all the time then when I do to him something, then he begin mad at me and kick me sometimes, so I dont want to stay here, because by and by he might kill, or make me sick. He did make me sick little on my breast. That is reason I dont want to stay with him. . . . I am afraid at Wheelock that what his bad action. Crane also he dont like Wheelock because he tell lies too much, some boys I heard that Wheelock is too saucy. Sometime ago I heare Crane that Tarbel say he saucyest their is in Stockbridge. I believe it that Wheelock is saucyest anyone in Stockbridge Nation, because he saucy to me.

Rev. Amos Bassett, D.D.

I am your sincere friend

George Whitefield

of the Chippeway Nation

Written to the headmaster of the Cornwall Mission School in Connecticut by a young Ojibwe student in the mid-1820s, this letter is a dizzying spin through the broader issues of charity education at the center of this book. The student signs this letter as George Whitefield, a name undoubtedly given to him on his arrival at Cornwall in recognition of the British evangelical minister who had so irrevocably influenced missionary culture from the eighteenth century onward. The issue at hand is that Wheelock (another Native student at the mission school) has been harassing Whitefield, who now fears for his own safety. The Wheelock of this letter, a young Stockbridge boy, is named after another eighteenth-century figure, this one the founder of what is quite possibly the most famous Native American boarding school of the era. Both Wheelock and Whitefield, the letter makes clear, have reputations back home in their respective Native communities (Sometime ago I heare Crane that Tarbel say he saucyest there is in Stockbridge) but also in the pan-Indian community that is the boarding school, and each reputation influences the other (I believe it that Wheelock is saucyest anyone in Stockbridge Nation, because he saucy to me). But even as we understand that the letter refers to two adolescent boys, it is hard to shake the conviction that the letter applies as easily to the famous men whose names have been recycled in this school context and that the lofty religious debates of eighteenth-century divines like George Whitefield and Eleazar Wheelock of the Great Awakening might as well have involved the spitting and short-sheeting of boarding-school boys.

The problem at the heart of this letter seems to be that Wheelock’s behavior (spitting, kicking, verbal attacks) has elicited reciprocal bad behavior from Whitefield, and the situation has gotten so far out of control that Whitefield not only fears for his life but also feels that he must leave the school. Wheelock, it seems, is not above using whatever agency he has to either kill or sicken Whitefield. This language is suggestive; the fear is not of injury, as one might suspect of kicking, brawling youngsters, but rather of sickness; that is, there is just the slightest hint of spirit possession of a suspiciously nonchristian nature at this mission school.

The letter concludes with the assurance that this young boy is his schoolmaster’s sincere friend, certainly a conventional phrase with which to sign off a letter, but the language once again reflects the topsy-turvy nature of this letter: the boy is hardly the schoolmaster’s friend in this situation. Far from the kind of letter one friend writes to another, this missive is at once a plea for help from a superior and a challenge to him: without Bassett’s support this student will simply pack up and leave, and by doing so reveal the chaotic nature of the charity-school experience. A surveying map of Cornwall, Connecticut, stands as the other evidence of George Whitefield’s time at the mission school, a pairing that reinforces one of the more sordid aspects of missionary education: the association between the benevolent mission of Indian education and the sometimes brazen appropriations of land and resources that often accompanied such schools (Figure 1). Even as they wrote of their experience as Native people thrown into the often disorienting space of the boarding school, students at the Cornwall mission school were encouraged to document that space for the commodities it contained and land for its use value. Walls, fields, and other improvements had their own symbolic representation on surveying maps—the kinds of maps through which Indian charity schools recorded Indian spaces (and peoples) as commodified and valued within an English economic system.

Figure 1. This surveyor’s map of Cornwall was drawn by George Whitefield (Catitugegwhonhale), an Ojibwe student at the Foreign Mission School, when he was twelve years old. Collection of the Litchfield Historical Society.

Eighteenth-century divine George Whitefield speaks from the grave here in the guise of a twelve-year-old boy, while Eleazar Wheelock acts out his rage and frustration at recalcitrant Indian boys by spitting and kicking at them. The nineteenth century thus reimagines the struggles of the eighteenth and in the process brings to light the issues of personal agency, institutional momentum, and networks of community that shape English literacy education produced by the missionary societies of New England.

The story of Native education in English literacy is primarily available to scholars through print culture—a record overwhelmingly controlled and dominated by colonial figures implicated in very particular ways in the events of Native history. Recent scholarship has sharply questioned the biases of this record and has usefully challenged all of us to look beyond the texts through which Native literacy is documented and recorded.¹ Yet we can see from the above letter that this print record still has much to tell us. Put simply, words, names, and ideas all have contexts, and understanding those contexts considerably enriches those words that are still available to us. Private letters, published journals, personal confessions, formal reports, as well as books, ledgers, and court documents form a surprisingly rich and detailed picture of a world in which English education was made available to Native peoples under often brutal circumstances. Certainly missionary voices dominate. It is helpful to recall, however, that Native people became missionaries—as well as teachers and students—within these schools. Allegiances were complicated, and texts often tell more than the words they contain when understood as markers of affiliation and coercion, respect and fear, love and obligation.

Furthermore, by attending to the technologies of literacy—the purchases of ink, paper, penknives, and a myriad of other objects through which texts were produced, exchanged, saved, lost, and forgotten—we can begin to see the multiple ways that power is negotiated in the Native boarding schools of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—all of which, for better or worse, functioned as radical experiments in cross-cultural communication. The texts that remain are a powerful testimonial to the ways those experiments came about as well as what came of them.

By focusing on schools driven by the Congregationalist New England missionary culture as it developed and shifted from Puritanism through the evangelicalism of the second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, this book explores the ways this missionary culture, based in New England and spanning roughly a century, attempted to shape and define Native literacy through boarding schools. Such boarding schools, really an eighteenth-century innovation of charity education, shifted the way missionaries interacted with their Native students. Situated in the Northeast, and in the nineteenth century the Southeast as well, such schools significantly predated the more notorious boarding schools for Native Americans of the late nineteenth century. The early boarding schools, with their uneasy relationship to government policy and religious benevolence, could be, like their later counterparts, rigid and unforgiving institutions; yet they provided an avenue through which Natives could use their hard-won literacy skills for their own purposes, to forge alliances and build their own communities.

Early Native American use of English-language literacy can perhaps best be understood through what Laurel Ulrich has described in a different context as the weaving together of alternative structures of identity. Ulrich uses the analogy of weaving checked fabric to describe the gender dynamic of small New England towns. Community, she argues, was produced not only by the clear delineation of the (masculine) public and (feminine) private (which she compares to the dark and light of a checkered fabric) but also by the cooperation of men and women and their implicit understandings of the ways in which their worlds intersected. In her analogy the places in which the light and dark threads overlap produce a third color that combines the two.² According to Ulrich, the social web takes shape through the literal weaving together of warp and weft, and each combination helps shape and define others. Modern scholars are left without a clear impression of much of what composes the checkered fabric, however, because of the limitations of the documentary record, which emphasizes one shading over another and at times completely ignores the ways in which each overlaps with the other.

Native writing produces the same field of conflicting intentions and assumptions or, in Ulrich’s analogy, contrasting colored squares through which the desires and needs of missionaries and Indians are made apparent, with the Indian square the one that is least accessible using public documents. Yet it is the third category—the blended colors of the checked fabric that contains the unintended consequences, unspoken assumptions, and overlapping needs—that complicates the narrative considerably. Examining Native texts in all their variety recovers a myriad of overlapping needs and desires shaping Indian education. More significantly, by understanding individual actions as alternate textualities we can start to uncover a variety of narratives. Through this third category we can understand Native texts as fields of conflict and contestation rather than the result of the imposition of something foreign, something European on an indigenous population unfamiliar with its value.

Readerly and Writerly Indians

White missionaries who longed for passive converts eager to consume religious texts carefully documented their attempts to mold such proselytes. To advance this process a coalition of Congregationalist Calvinists and Presbyterians associated themselves first with the New England Company, later the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG),³ and then eventually the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), all of which were well funded and politically powerful. The missionaries associated with these organizations, often acting under intense scrutiny from the British Isles, were in competition with efforts by Baptist, Methodist, Moravian, and even Catholic organizations. By emphasizing the teaching of reading rather than writing, missionaries could speak for Natives even as they assured benefactors of the success of their proselytizing. The missionary desire for a docile, passive Indian figure—a Readerly Indian—overlays this already unequal power dynamic with a gendered logic; reading was understood through much of the eighteenth century as the feminized first level of literacy and was a skill generally taught by women in the domestic space. Missionaries could thus maintain a particularly gendered fantasy of a passive, docile Native figure by reinforcing a skill set that did not require self-expression.⁴

But as missionaries recognized, even the most docile Indian reader must eventually signal his or her active acceptance of European literacy, and as Natives increasingly participated in the practice of writing, missionaries lost control over their message. The figure of the Writerly Indian emerges as not only a speaker and actor fluent in the cultures and conventions of colonial society but also one fully committed to Native community as an ongoing political and cultural concern. Over and over in the records there is a genuine astonishment on the part of white missionaries that Natives who controlled their own representation, Writerly Indians, had different notions of Christian experience, political autonomy, and personal identity than what missionaries had assumed.⁵ The term Writerly Indian as I use it in this study is indebted to the work of Scott Lyons, whose concept of rhetorical sovereignty suggests some of the meanings implicit in the Readerly-Writerly dichotomy. If a Readerly Indian is a construction of the missionary imagination, with all the passivity and acquiescence ready for appropriation, the Writerly figure has much more to do with that contested notion of sovereignty that is so central to contemporary Native American intellectual life. As Lyons writes, Sovereignty is the guiding story in our pursuit of self-determination, the general strategy by which we aim to best recover our losses from the ravages of colonization: our lands, our languages, our cultures, our self-respect. For indigenous people everywhere, sovereignty is an ideal principle, the beacon by which we seek the paths to agency and power and community renewal (Rhetorical 449). For Lyons, rhetorical sovereignty is the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires . . . to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse. (Rhetorical 449–50). Writerly Indians used written discourse to manage their own sovereignty in ways that often challenged, confused, or contradicted missionary desire. At times, however, that sovereignty meshed nicely with missionary goals. Either way, the Writerly Indian figure left evidence of a powerful commitment to the continued existence of Native communities, even in the face of sometimes overwhelming rhetorical and political challenges to that identity.

The texts produced by Indian writers have more recently come to shape and define much of our understanding of Native experience in the colonial period. Through Indian writers with their various communication networks we can begin to glimpse Ulrich’s third color, or the ways in which Native and missionary experience overlapped, contradicted, and helped shape each other’s ideas through their engagement with one another. Of course, individuals then and now are not defined by their abilities as readers and writers; they have a variety of skills and personal experiences that shaped their understanding of the world in ways that are not contained within these labels. Yet because Indian readers did not often record their reactions to missionary texts and ideas, missionaries were left to produce a passive, docile fantasy of the Readerly Indian to reinforce their own desires, while those Natives who did write, no matter what they wrote, fundamentally altered the relationship between missionary culture and Native people through the simple act of self-expression. Yet E. Jennifer Monaghan, the preeminent scholar of colonial literacy, usefully reminds us that putting too fine a point on the distinction between readerly and writerly abilities undercuts the revolutionary potential of both. She writes, The definitions of the two literacy skills implied in so many colonial sources—of reading as a receptive and passive skill, of writing as the repetitious copying of the work of others—were in fact undermined and contradicted by actual practice. . . . By the time of Thomas Paine, both reading and writing had emerged as potentially revolutionary practices, challenging every kind of religious and political orthodoxy.⁶ Cathy Davidson further reminds us of the revolutionary potential of young, predominantly female novel readers in the eighteenth century and the challenge they posed to ministerial control. Hardly passive and submissive, such readers shaped their own ideas and developed their own interpretive universe specifically through the act of reading. While readers as opposed to writers were perhaps more easily defined by others, we should bear in mind that the assumptions driving missionary characterizations of Indian readers only imperfectly reflected the experiences of those they encountered.

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Native American readers and writers engaged in a set of practices that connected them to a colonial world in very specific ways. While only the words of the writers are still available to us, both readers and writers made independent choices about the nature of that engagement. Modern Native scholars have repeatedly pointed out that attending to the words of Native writers broadens and complicates our notions of identity, race, and expression. Whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, when Native intellectuals speak, as Vine Deloria, Jr., famously wrote in We Talk, You Listen, it behooves the rest of us to listen. The challenge of colonial materials is that while writers are legible through the texts they leave behind, readers and their experiences are much more elusive.

Native Missionary Education: A Brief History

For the Native peoples of New England the problems and possibilities of literacy, whether in English or in a Native language, unfolded in myriad ways, with legacies that are still felt today. From the earliest missionary efforts of the 1640s, Protestant missionaries in New England saw literacy and Christianity as an inseparable part of the cultural universe of Englishness. That is, for missionaries as well as the Natives they instructed, English literacy was attached to decisions about hair, dress, manners, religion, and a broad variety of cultural matters. For missionaries there seemed to be only two possible approaches to educating Native Americans: either uprooting Natives from all that was familiar and remaking them in the mold of Anglo-American social and cultural expectations or, conversely, re-creating those Anglo-American social and cultural mores in the heart of Indian country. Literacy was enmeshed in Englishness, and it was impossible for the early missionaries to untangle the two, even though initially literacy training was in the Massachusett language rather than in English. For Natives the question was far more vexed: was it possible to embrace literacy as a means of forwarding Native interests?⁷

The earliest educational attempts in the New England colonies were directed and supervised in the seventeenth century by John Eliot and Daniel Gookin, each of whom had different ideas about how best to accomplish the transformation of Indians into Englishmen. Both of these men, working through the New England Company, initially felt that the most effective way to educate Native people was to house them among upstanding English families who would teach not only reading and writing but English culture as well. However, the missionary John Eliot increasingly came to believe that the English were not their own best advocates, and there were too many negative influences in English communities to lead potential Native converts astray. For this reason Eliot established praying towns, or communities of Native Christians at a short distance from English communities; these towns had a series of regulations to control Indian ways, and each had within it not only a minister but also a teacher.⁸

The earliest phase of missionary work came to an end in 1676 with King Philip’s War. After this event and through the mid-eighteenth century most educational and missionary enterprises were of a smaller scale, with significantly less publicity attached to them. They were also increasingly fragmented in terms of denomination, with Baptists, Methodists, and Moravians making inroads into what had once been unified Congregationalist territory. Efforts by Congregationalist missionaries on Cape Cod and elsewhere met with some success, but other than the conversions on Martha’s Vineyard famously catalogued by Experience Mayhew in Indian Converts (1727), these did not garner the attention that Eliot’s attempts had received or that later eighteenth-century ventures would receive. While schoolteachers were sent to tribes throughout New England, none of these efforts included schools at which large groups of Native students lived together away from home.⁹ But in 1743 John Sergeant published a brief pamphlet that laid out his plans for an Indian boarding school. Sergeant was the minister and missionary of the town of Stockbridge, which was established in 1739 to serve as a buffer against the French and the Iroquois. An experiment in Christian conversion, Stockbridge started with four English families in residence to serve as models of right living for the mixed Housatonic and Mohican Indians of the area. John Sergeant’s sudden death in 1749 meant that he was never able to see his boarding-school plan come to fruition, although he had set the school in motion. In 1752 his widow married Joseph Dwight, and together they continued the boarding-school plans, this time less as a missionary venture and more as a money-making proposition. When Sergeant’s missionary replacement, Jonathan Edwards, arrived in 1751, he was horrified by the graft and corruption he saw attached to the school, and until 1754, when the school finally closed, Edwards found himself enmeshed in an angry, bitter dispute with the Dwight and the Williams clans, the extended family of Abigail Sergeant/Dwight. This embroilment stretched all the way to Boston and even to London with its accusations, petitions, and grievances.

Central to the possibilities the Dwights and Williamses saw for the school was cashing in on the charity money available for educating the Iroquois. To this end a number of Oneida and Mohawk students were enticed to the school. Their time in Stockbridge was short-lived, since the school was little more than a single small building falling rapidly into disrepair. However, their effect on the town was far more significant than this brief stay would suggest. By the end of the American Revolution, a war in which great numbers of Stockbridge Indians fought alongside the Americans, the white settlers of Stockbridge had almost completely displaced the Natives for whose benefit the town had initially been founded.¹⁰ Finding themselves without a land base, the Stockbridge Indians removed to upstate New York, settling on land received from the Oneidas with whom they had forged connections years earlier through the boarding school. Thus, instead of the Stockbridge Indians providing a model of stasis and civility for the Iroquois (as was the idea of the boarding school), the Stockbridge experience confirmed Mohawk and Oneida suspicions that the whites would bleed them dry. When the Stockbridge tribe members displaced themselves to upstate New York, it was