The Heathen School

by John Demos

  World saving was always a many-sided project, but in this latest version one aspect stood out above all others: the spreading of “gospel truth” to peoples and places where it was not yet known. In short, missions had again become the fundamental concern, both for their own sake and as a precondition for the arrival of the millennium. An initial focus was “unchurched” settlers along the western frontier—together with their Indian neighbors. But then, in very short order, those horizons expanded dramatically. By the second decade of the new century, religious leaders were boldly vowing to convert all of “the world’s 600 million heathen.” (This widely accepted figure was the result of some necessarily loose, but not unthinking, calculation.) A quite representative sermon, published in 1820, declared: “The objects of missionary work … are chiefly savages…[who] must be elevated, purified, and enlightened…[and] converted, in order to make the kingdom come [italics in original].”18

  Indeed, the moment seemed uniquely propitious, for already “great preparation has been made.” For example: “The English language, which contains more of the elements of civilization and moral reformation than all others united…[is now]widely diffused.” And: “[H]eathen nations, to a great extent, are subjugated to Christian nations.” And: “[T]he right of mankind to govern themselves [sic] has begun to be understood,” a point which “our own country has had the honour of teaching.” And: “[L]ove to the Heathen and to Christ have increased brotherly love among Christians.” And: “Revivals of Religion have been greatly multiplied, particularly in our own happy country.” Finally, and most importantly: In the work ahead “the church in America … is pre-eminently qualified.… She alone is able to furnish in the requisite number the Missionaries of the Cross.… Her flag whitens every wave, and visits every shore. On her the Spirit of Life has been poured out; and thousands of her youth have been just called into the Kingdom of Christ.” Another sermon, by a different minister, condensed the missionary project into a single, supremely confident sentence: “Our object is to effect an entire moral revolution in the whole human race.” As a result, declared a third, future generations “would look upon us of the nineteenth century as the most enviable of the whole race, who have lived from Adam downward.”19

  Of course, it was one thing to announce such goals, and quite another to carry them into practice. But missionary organizing would develop in a remarkably vigorous way. In fact, as all parties conceded, British clergymen had already taken the first key steps by establishing a mission in India in 1792, and another, a few years later, in Ceylon. Their American counterparts were close behind. The earliest state-level “missionary society”—in effect, a support group—was begun in Connecticut in 1798. And soon thereafter similar organizations appeared in many local communities, as well. Another founding moment occurred in 1806 when a group of uncommonly pious students at Williams College gathered—supposedly behind a haystack, in the midst of a ferocious thunderstorm—to form a secret “brotherhood” dedicated solely to the cause of foreign missions. (This would subsequently be remembered, and mythologized, as the “Haystack Prayer Meeting.”) Then came the start of the organizations that would put actual missionaries into the field. The most important of these was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (with its predominantly Congregationalist ties), founded in 1810, with headquarters in Boston, and managed by a “prudential committee” composed mostly of eminent clergymen. Within two years, the ABCFM had dispatched missionaries to India; inside of a decade, its reach embraced Burma, Greece, Turkey, Argentina, and Palestine, as well as several different Native American groups. Similar missionary “boards”—of Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Episcopalians—took shape in the years immediately to follow.20

  Thus events seemed to be moving toward a glorious convergence. A long and rich tradition of world saving—and of preparation for “end times”—was steadily ripening; its fulfillment was almost in sight. In 1813, a Boston minister, Rev. Edward Dorr Griffin, preaching at the town of Sandwich, Massachusetts, put it this way: “If the church … is to rise from this day forth, where is it more likely to rise than in the United States, the most favored spot on this continent … And if in the United States, where rather than in New England? And if in New England, where rather than in Massachusetts, which has been blessed by the prayers of so long a succession of godly ancestors? And if in Massachusetts, on what ground rather than this, which among the first received the footsteps of the pilgrims?” Sandwich had been part of the original Plymouth Colony; thus Dorr’s allusion to “the footsteps of the pilgrims.” But if he had been speaking a few years later, the same rhetorical zoom lens—from the world, to the United States, to New England, and so on—might well have led him a hundred miles farther west, where, in the Connecticut village of Cornwall, the Foreign Mission School was about to open its doors.21

  It was a time—and a place—of intense interest, keen anticipation, and utterly surpassing hope.

  • CHAPTER FOUR •

  “A seminary for the education of heathen youth”

  Cornwall in 1817 was a sprawling expanse of some twenty-seven square miles, backed into Connecticut’s most remote corner. Along its west flank flowed a large river, the Housatonic. The rest was a bumpy patchwork of hills, crags, and “cobbles,” little valleys and dales, marshland, brooks, and ponds—all encircling a broad L-shaped “plain” in the middle.1

  At this point, the town was three-quarters of a century old. Its “ancient” forests survived, albeit to a somewhat reduced extent. Especially conspicuous were several thick stands of pine that topped out at over one hundred feet aboveground. The wildlife native to the area was also reduced, though bounties might still be claimed for kills of wildcat and rattlesnake.

  Farmland predominated, most of it in irregular little plots scattered through at least a dozen different hamlets and neighborhoods. There was the Center, the Bridge, the East and West Villages, Yelping Hill (where coyotes once abounded), Swift’s Valley, the Barracks (the site years before of a small military encampment), Bear Swamp, Puffingham, Hardscrabble, and more. The names themselves evoked for residents bits and pieces of town history. The land’s yield included wheat, most importantly, but also corn, rye, hops, hemp, and garden crops of every variety. Cows and sheep grazed the upland meadows.

  At the same time, the town supported a surprising array of small-scale industries. A census from 1819 listed an iron forge, gin and cider distilleries, carding mills, gristmills, a woolens factory, and no fewer than twenty sawmills. (Logging had been, for many years, a major local enterprise.) Most of these operations were water-powered—hence their location near the numerous dams and falls that dotted the town’s streams.

  The inhabitants of early-nineteenth-century Cornwall numbered around sixteen hundred. Nearly all were of English stock; many could trace direct lines of descent from the earliest settlers, spanning three or four generations. The previous Indian population had largely disappeared from a combination of causes (disease, the pressure of white settlement, voluntary withdrawal), though a significant Indian community—the Schaticokes, housed in “sixteen wigwams”—could be found in the neighboring village of Kent. Native people did still visit Cornwall with some regularity, to work as day laborers or to show and sell their handcrafted baskets, mats, and brooms. Indeed, one or two Indian families remained as full-time residents. The most significant population change of this period was a growing outward migration, mostly of young folk headed west in search of more fertile land and a wider field of opportunity.

  Local governance followed the time-honored New England model, with annual town meetings to set policy, and day-to-day management in the hands of a small group of “select” officers. The focus was almost exclusively on matters of immediate, and parochial, concern: the building and upkeep of “highways” (dirt roads), of bridges, of the “commons” and other public properties; the appointment of committees to deal with special problems (as these might arise); church-related affai
rs; schools; and occasional disputes with the neighboring communities.

  Social experience had a similarly local flavor. There were endless rounds of visiting, often involving entire families. The weekly Sabbath began at sundown Saturday and continued through lengthy church services on Sunday. With Sunday evenings came a feeling of release and a chance for “merriment,” especially among the young. Funerals were solemn occasions, with long processions through the Center and church bells tolling the number of years the deceased had lived. “Sports” included summertime swimming at local water holes and boisterous winter sleighing parties. Thanksgiving and Independence Day (July 4) were the chief holidays. (Christmas remained a relatively muted affair, following Puritan traditions from long before.)

  Household gardens served purposes both practical and decorative. Flower beds featuring roses, tansy, myrtle, and lilies sat alongside rows of herbs, legumes, and berries. Fruits might be spread out on rooftops or hung on sidewalls to dry in the sun. Residents cut their own firewood and stacked it in enormous piles beside doorways. Rail fences separated individual house lots and served also to bound the town fields.

  The look of the whole was pleasant and prosperous, if not especially tidy. In springtime, mud was everywhere, and no one really minded. Offal might accumulate in roadways, to be cleaned up whenever nearby residents found the time. Housing, especially chimneys, would occasionally fall into disrepair. Outdoor privies conveyed an unmistakable odor into the adjacent air.

  Such was the “visible world” of early Cornwallites. But none of it matched the importance, in their minds, of the invisible one. God and Satan, angels and devils, plus legions of previously departed “souls”: These and related supernatural forces framed their lives. Organized religion, in its several Protestant guises, was a source of both deep consolation and recurrent “controversy.” In the late 1770s, the First Church (first in the sense of originating with the town’s founding) became bitterly divided. Months of wrangling and failed efforts at reconciliation led finally to a formal split, with a large group of “Separates” hiving off to form a second, and rival, spiritual community. The points at issue were partly doctrinal; the Separates espoused an especially strict, old-style version of Congregationalism. But personal enmities also figured in; the minister himself was a flash point. The separation would never be healed, for (as a town historian wrote later on) “the fighting spirit had been aroused.” Soon, in fact, there would be still more churches: Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal. Divided or not, Cornwall parishioners experienced a marked upsurge of faith just after the start of the new century, with major revivals coming in 1801, 1806–7, and 1811–12. Each time, a wave of excitement swept through the ranks of the several congregations. Long, emotionally charged Sabbath-day services, combined with midweek “lectures,” added scores of previously “unsaved” individuals to church membership rolls. The result was an increasingly straitlaced local atmosphere; one of the leading revival preachers would later claim, with evident pride, that social dancing had entirely disappeared from within the town’s limits.2

  Picture, then, the beginnings—in this place, at this time—of a unique evangelical and educational project designed to foster (as one supporter put it) “the ingathering of the heathen and the conversion of the ends of the earth.”3 Though its ambitions were grand—not to say grandiose—its outward appearance was modest enough.

  Picture its physical arrangements. The chief “Academy building,” a gift from the local citizenry, stood athwart the “green” in the town’s Center. This simple boxlike structure, twenty feet wide by forty long, held a gambrel roof, clapboard siding, a chimney, and a little bell tower on its east end. The inside included a large ground-floor classroom and an upstairs loft adaptable for use as sleeping quarters. Already more than thirty years old, the building was in need of repair; hence the sponsoring American Board was obliged to send $1,000 to put it into proper condition.4

  A second building, bought from a local resident and hard by the first, would become the boardinghouse. Here a steward would live and provide meals (along with other everyday “necessities”) to the school community. This, too, was a wood-framed structure, two stories high and with a “well-painted” exterior. Attached to it stood a barn and a cluster of outbuildings, on five acres of land suitable for cultivation.5

  The principal would need his own residence—hence the purchase of a third house, as yet just partially built, for $600. The agents proceeded to have it finished at a nearly equivalent additional cost. Also included in the initial layout were seventy-five acres of “arable” and a large plot of woodland about a mile and a half to the north; from the latter, the school might obtain timber for fuel, fencing, and occasional carpentry.6

  Picture, too, the arrival of the first group of “scholars” (as they were invariably called), all five of whom hailed from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). To the townsfolk, these young men must have seemed different in every possible way—appearance, mannerisms, body language, speech. Some had visited Cornwall the previous year while staying in nearby South Farms (Litchfield); Obookiah was already well known, indeed a celebrity. But to have the lot of them fully installed right in the town’s heart—walking the roadways, nodding to curious passersby, lingering by the town green—was a new experience. To be sure, it was one the townspeople had actively sought through a wide range of public and personal donations: from the Academy building itself, to cash gifts in varying amounts, to repeated offerings of construction materials, clothing, food, and labor. Cornwall had worked hard to meet competition from other nearby communities—all eager to become the chosen venue—and now it had succeeded.7

  Admittedly, some of this picturing is conjectural; few records have survived from the school’s earliest days. Even the timing is uncertain; apparently a start was made around the first of May.8 Was there a formal ceremony to mark the moment? Did local residents have a sense of triumph, perhaps even a kind of millennial hope? Or, alternatively, did they feel some doubt, some anxiety, about the strangers suddenly landed in their midst? (Maybe these were not alternatives, but coexisting opposites uneasily yoked together.)9

  Whatever the nature of local reaction, news of the school was spreading. The Hartford Courant (Connecticut’s leading newspaper) printed a brief account in early June: “We rejoice to learn that in this state there is … a Seminary for the education of heathen youth, at which there are twelve of this description from different countries.” Elsewhere, too, notice was taken. For example, far away on the opposite side of the state, a Ladies Education Society in the town of Hadlyme gathered “a collection” and then “appropriated [it] to the use of the Heathen School lately established at Cornwall.… The cheerful unanimity which pervaded the meeting seemed to evince that each one felt she was contributing for the emancipation of her fellow creatures from sottish ignorance and heathen idolatry.” This same spirit of “contribution” would set a pattern for pious folk all across New England—and beyond—in the months and years to come.10

  Rapidly, during the opening weeks, the roster of participants filled out. There was Dwight, the interim principal and chief instructor, and Henry Hart, newly appointed as steward and “farm superintendent.” Moreover, because the school’s agents (and main fund-raisers) were not locally based, the First Church minister, Rev. Timothy Stone, assumed the special role of “superintendent of donations,” Philo Swift, another local resident, became the treasurer, and Rev. James Harvey the official “accountant.” There was growth, too, within the ranks of the scholars. The original core group—Honoree, Hopoo, Obookiah, Tamoree, Tennooe—was quickly supplemented by two more Hawaiians: William Kummooolah, yet another refugee sailor from the China Trade, described as “a pleasant and lovely youth,” and George Nahemah-hama Sandwich, a resident of Enfield, Massachusetts, for a full decade before his Mission School acceptance, “a professor of religion” (i.e., a convert), and “a good farmer.” Also arriving at around the same time were a pair of “Yankee” New Englanders, James Ely, of
Lyme, Connecticut, and Samuel Ruggles, of Brookfield, Massachusetts; their goal was to prepare for missionary work overseas through up-close contact with “heathen” colleagues. (At first, they were taken only on trial, but when they demonstrated “great usefulness,” their status was soon upgraded. School leaders hoped that by modeling “exemplary behavior,” a smattering of local recruits might “exert a salutary influence” on their fellow students from overseas.) Another in this first cohort of scholars was Simon Annance, an Abenaki Indian from Canada. And yet another was a Bengali man named John Windall, who had “followed the seas in vessels of different nations” before turning up “somewhat advanced in life” at Cornwall. (His age by then was at least thirty.)11 Rounding out the group was one John Johnson, also a native of India. Johnson’s story, as recounted in the missionary press, made an extreme case of the zigzag dislocations that marked the course of many Mission School pupils prior to arrival.12

  He is born around the year 1800 in Calcutta. His father, a merchant there, is the mixed-race son of “an English gentleman” and “a Hindoo woman,” his mother “a Jewess of the race of black Jews.” (This means a line of native Bengalis, anciently converted to Judaism.) The father, having decided that young John must have an English education, sends him off to London; he is, at this point, perhaps twelve years old. The ship on which he travels is captured by an American privateer, retaken weeks later by a British frigate, and then “carried to Halifax [Nova Scotia].” After some refitting, it sets out again, but, amazingly, is soon captured for a third time—again by Americans—and sent on to New York. There the boy and ship’s crew are prepared for return to England in a prisoner exchange. (All this is happening in the midst of the War of 1812.)