The Heathen School

by John Demos

  Harvey’s sermon was just an opener; there was much else to follow. Daggett offered an address on the necessity of “doing good” and his personal vocation “to be useful in this sphere of duty.” Like Harvey, he described the Mission School in the most exalted terms: “It is a work … which involves the highest interests of myriads of immortal beings—and which, in its effects and consequences, will endure when this earth and these heavens shall be no more.” Next in order came Governor Treadwell, whose role it was to complete, and formalize, the inauguration. With a direct—indeed literal—handoff to Daggett, he intoned, “I do … by the delivery of these keys into your care and keeping induct you into the office of Principal … with all the powers, prerogatives, privileges, and emoluments thereunto belonging.” Then Edwin Dwight, his duties as acting principal now at an end, delivered an “affectionate valedictory … to his pupils.”39

  Finally, the scholars themselves were reintroduced, in order to perform an impromptu skit of Christian salvation. Four of the Hawaiians spoke a “dialogue” in their own language, while two more sang “one of the rude, barbarous songs” of their homeland. At the same time, Thomas Hopoo began a “tender and animated apostrophe to the audience” on the plight of his “poor, ignorant countrymen.” Such grotesque “amusements” as these, he declared, are their “sublimest joys.” They know nothing of “that God who made the world.… They worship dumb idols, and chant their stupid hosannas to gods of wood and stone.” He went on “in this pathetic strain” for a full fifteen minutes; by the end, his listeners were completely undone. According to an eyewitness account, “every heart beat high with sympathetic emotions, and every eye was streaming.” (The same writer noted that “the exercises closed with a liberal contribution to the school”; purses as well as tear ducts had been opened.)40

  If the story of the Mission School is seen as rapid ascent followed by gradual, eventually precipitous, decline, then the inaugural moment of May 1818 may qualify as the summit. With a year of apparently successful work completed, with Obookiah’s death transmuted into glorious martyrdom, with public support on a strongly rising curve, the future seemed brighter than ever. And no dark shadows were as yet evident on the far horizon.

  For one thing, the school was growing, as more scholars arrived, and an informal but effective recruitment network was rounded into shape in missionary sites around the world. Of the dozen who had entered at the time of its opening (or just after), nine remained: six Hawaiians, Hopoo, Honoree, Kummooolah, Tamoree, Tennooe, and Sandwich; the two New Englanders, Ely and Ruggles; and the Abenaki Indian, Annance. The three no longer present were Obookiah and the two Bengalis, one of whom (Windall) had been dismissed for “incompetence,” the other (Johnson) for being “unhappily addicted to intemperance.” Johnson’s story, begun so auspiciously with his multiple rescues from piracy, his recovery from yellow fever, and his arrival at the school the year before hailed as “an important acquisition,” would end in a downward spiral of despair. After leaving Cornwall, he was briefly taken into the household of Judge Tapping Reeve in nearby Litchfield; from there, he wrote to Daggett to beg for readmission, avowing his undiminished hope “to get learning and go and teach my poor father and mother and all my poor countrymen.” He invoked the missionaries’ own language of special pleading: “I am a poor heathen. God brought me among you. I done wrong. I hope I never do so no more in this world.” But Daggett was unmoved. Months later, having parted from Judge Reeve, Johnson turned up as “a poor outcast wandering in the streets of New York”; after that, his trail would vanish altogether.41

  Meanwhile, there were eight new arrivals during the winter and spring of the New Year: a young man from Canton, brought by a merchant in the China Trade; a German Jew, recently convinced that “Jesus Christ, whom his ancestors crucified, is the true Messiah”; a mixed-race Pennsylvanian (part Delaware Indian, part white); two young Pacific Islanders, from Tahiti by way of New Zealand, Australia, India, England, and New York; a thirty-year-old man, born on the Malay Peninsula, but kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery in China, “purchased” there by an American consular agent, and brought to Rhode Island; another “youth of our own country” bent on missionary work; and a boy from the island of Timor (present-day Indonesia), most recently a house servant to a minister in Philadelphia. The yield from this group, for all its far-flung origins, would prove disappointing. Half were gone within months, for reasons that included “misconduct and disobedience,” a “frivolous…[and] obstinate” temperament, a lack of “the true missionary spirit,” and, in one case, a preference to be elsewhere. (This last was the Jewish man, a highly educated sort who left the school almost immediately in order to board in the home of a local minister, where he could exchange lessons in Hebrew for “instruction in divinity.”)42

  Even so, the current directing additional recruits to Cornwall continued its flow. And now it would embrace a major new venue. Indians of the American Southeast had become, in recent years, a particular focus of public attention—Choctaws, Creeks, and, most especially, Cherokees. Missionaries, among others, were moving into the traditional homelands of these important native peoples, with high hopes of achieving “glorious gains…[for] the cause of Christ.” Moravian clergy had been present in the region since the start of the century; among their projects was a small school for Cherokee children at a site called Spring Place, in north Georgia. The American Board would follow their example, opening a school of its own—named Brainerd, after a Protestant missionary of a half century earlier—in the spring of 1816. From these sources, the Foreign Mission School would draw a new group of scholars in the months and years just ahead.43

  In the Cherokee heartland there are, at first, doubts and resistance; the journey would be long, the destination unfamiliar. Parents must agree about their own children, and “most are not willing they should go so far away.” Indeed, when the idea is broached at Brainerd in the spring of 1818, “not a single full Cherokee … is willing to permit his son to go out and be educated among white people.” But the teachers there persist, and some of the pupils appear “anxious for an enlarged education.”

  Eventually, sometimes quite rapidly, the families come around. Then begins a period of testing and preparation. The teachers are responsible for selecting, from among their native charges, those best able to manage the rigors and “enlarged” opportunities of the Mission School. In doing so, they envision a kind of pyramid. Its base at the Brainerd mission will consist of young beginners, who can be allowed to live at home with their parents while obtaining from day classes at least the “rudiments” of knowledge. The next level will include “the more promising ones [who may be] removed at the proper time to the mission houses,” where the teachers themselves are lodged; this will enable a more concentrated mode of supervision. Finally, at the apex stand “some few of them,” eligible to go “to our Foreign Mission School at Cornwall, Con. for a more thorough training.” These will have to demonstrate both “promising talents” for academic work and “serious impressions” of religious faith. (In one notable instance, a young man’s qualifications include the following: “[H]e is in the habit of admonishing the vicious among his people on all proper occasions.… His labors have been blessed by the reformation of at least two drunkards.”)

  The system will be administered from afar by officers of the American Board. Ideally, the scholars sent north can be matched to school “openings.” Delays in securing the necessary “permission” must be avoided, lest a designated youth’s parents and clansmen take offense and “through pride refuse to let him go.” (Pride is regularly identified by missionaries as a stumbling block in all sorts of dealings with native people.) The entire process is fraught with chances for misunderstanding; more than a few of the initial decisions will later be reversed.

  The next step is arranging travel. Most of those selected are between the ages of twelve and seventeen and lack experience in negotiating the white people’s world; thus they require chaperones. Somet
imes they may leave in the company of an itinerant missionary bound for New England, or perhaps with a “gentleman … on his way to New York [and carrying] a satisfactory recommendation from the mayor of said city.” (Always in such matters, there must be careful vetting.) They will need cash, horses, and clothing sufficient for the journey; these, in turn, come either from parents or, if that source proves wanting, from government and missionary coffers.

  Finally, when all is in readiness, relatives and friends gather to bid the departing youths farewell. In a typical case (as described by a correspondent to the American Board), a local chief “gave them instructions respecting their conduct when at the school.” Later the same evening, “we had communion.” Next morning “Dr. D. [one Dempsey, the chaperone] and the three boys met a little after sunrise, and Brother G. [a minister, probably Rev. John Gambold, from the Moravian mission at Spring Place] commended them to God.… They departed after breakfast.”

  The route followed will vary depending on the seasons and other circumstances. Sometimes they take ship from Charleston or Savannah; more often they go overland through North Carolina, Virginia, Mary-land, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. There may be stops along the way to meet with missionary supporters or leading public figures. One group detours somewhat from the usual route in order to visit expresidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, then goes on to Washington, D.C., for an audience with the current president, James Monroe. Others endure considerable hardship; bad roads and weather conditions, for example, can take a heavy toll. The time elapsed from start to finish may easily amount to several weeks. Some of the travelers reach Cornwall in a “state of sickness,” others “destitute” of goods and money. But whatever their experiences en route, arrival brings an abrupt change. Now, at long last, they can begin.44

  Between August and December 1818, nine southeastern Indians enrolled at the Mission School: seven Cherokees and two Choctaws. In age, in family background, in previous preparation—not to mention race, ethnicity, culture, and language—this group differed hugely from its predecessors. Indian boys, still years short of maturity, would henceforth be living and studying alongside fully adult men from the Pacific Islands (and elsewhere). If this put them at some disadvantage, in other respects they stood well ahead. Whereas virtually all the islanders had reached Cornwall after years of deprivation, and utterly devoid of material resources, the Indians were plucked straight from the topmost layer of their communities. Some had a white parent; indeed, every one was (to a degree) of mixed blood. Their fathers were politically prominent, including at least three “primary chiefs,” and were wealthy besides; several owned substantial plantations, raising cotton, grains, fruit, and other produce with the labor of gangs of their own black slaves. The same men operated taverns in major towns, ferryboat services across rivers, and stores that supplied hard goods to neighbors. They were said, moreover, to look the part of grandees; their houses were large (and mostly European in style), their clothes fine, their carriages opulent, their presence commanding. No wonder that some of their sons, upon arrival in Connecticut, were described as “appear[ing] to think much of themselves.” The families, including the sons, were partially or fully literate in English. And they had, by this time, gained considerable familiarity with Christian religious practice, up to and including full conversion. In all these ways, the new Indian scholars were fit—were primed—for entry into the Mission School.45

  The arrival of this Cherokee-Choctaw group would tilt the balance toward Indian scholars for good. Six more—three Oneidas, two from “the Stockbridge tribe,” and one Tuscarora Iroquois—would join the school in the opening months of 1819. Among the Cherokees, it now became a “popular thing to send their sons to the north for education”; a missionary leader worried lest they be led to believe that “all may come who please.” By the end of the year, with the school’s total enrollment having risen to thirty-two, “aboriginal Americans” had become a majority (seventeen). Both in Cornwall itself and farther afield, people began to refer sometimes to “the Indian School.”46

  The timing of this shift was ironic, for the same months brought renewed emphasis on plans for an actual mission to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). This, of course, had been in prospect from the start, but only now did practical arrangements begin. The American Board’s fund-raising operation would henceforth encourage donations directly for this purpose. Daggett, for his part, sought to promote the creation of books and primers “in the Owyhean language” to be used in island schools. And two of his Yankee charges, Ely and Ruggles, bent themselves to learning that language—presumably with the aid of their Hawaiian fellow scholars. Meanwhile, too, the latter seemed more and more “impatient to go on to Owhyhee.” When, in the fall of 1818, the board was unable to set a date of departure, they grew “quite uneasy”; Daggett worried that at least one of them—George “Prince” Tamoree—might abscond and find his own “opportunity to return home.”47

  As part of the same preparatory process, Daggett and the board searched for firsthand information on the islands. Although they remained confident in general terms—Hawaii was sure to make “a fine field for Christian charity,” with its “population … kindly disposed, desirous of civilization, and of excellent mental endowments”—they knew little about the everyday realities of living and working there. At one point, they heard from a certain “Mr. Dorman of New Haven…[who] spent 13 months” in the islands, visited with King Tamoree (ruler of Atoi, today’s Kaua’i, and father of the “Prince”), and learned something of local politics. He had, moreover, enjoyed “a great degree of hospitality by the natives, wherever he went”; however, “their moral state, he says, is truly distressing.”48

  Then came an extraordinary opportunity in the person (literally) of one Archibald Campbell. Born and raised in Scotland, Campbell had, when still a boy of thirteen, gone to sea on a British merchantman. He had traveled to China, Japan, Siberia, several parts of northwestern North America, Brazil, and, finally, Hawaii, where he lived quite happily for over a year on the island of Oahu. (While there, he had, supposedly, “learned the native language.”) Along the way, he endured shipwreck, near starvation, capture by pirates, and the freezing, and subsequent amputation, of his feet following weeks of wintertime tramping in the Alaskan wilderness. Upon his return home, he authored a short but compelling account of these adventures, entitled A Journey Round the World Between 1806 and 1812; published in Edinburgh in 1816, and quickly reprinted four times in the United States, the book would bring him at least a modicum of fame. By 1818, Campbell turned up with his recently wedded wife in New York. There he underwent hospital treatment of some as-yet-unhealed surgical wounds, and began to plan a return to Hawaii; in fact, he still owned property on Oahu, granted to him years before by the king. Just then, he was put in contact with members of the American Board, who eagerly proposed his entering the Mission School. They hoped to derive important benefits from his firsthand knowledge of the islands; he, for his part, wished to study “divinity” and then to join the group that would open the mission there.49

  It was an ill-fated bargain; almost from the start, things went badly off track. Both Campbells were expected to provide “personal labor” in exchange for “a comfortable support.” Thus Mrs. Campbell “can wash & iron, &…do any kind of kitchen labor”; her husband, “if his legs should be well, can do many things.” But this was a vain hope. As events proved, Mr. Campbell, “being a cripple, can do no labour for the institution.” Moreover, “his knowledge of the Owhyhean language is very scanty and imperfect”; hence “he can be of no [future] use to us in the mission.” In other respects, he “appears to be a mere man of the world…[who] frankly acknowledges that he never prayed in his life.” Mrs. Campbell, too, seemed “a low-minded, frivolous, thoughtless person,” full of eccentric affectations; among the latter was her habit of “carrying about with her a cage of birds.” The couple occupied valuable space in the boardinghouse—the “only chamber … where there can be
a fire”—which meant that would-be scholars awaiting admission must be “deferred.” Worse yet was the effect on those currently enrolled. “Mr. Campbell is ingratiating himself into the favor of the Owhyheans & continually filling their minds with accounts of their native Islands”; this served only to distract them from “the great objects which we have in view” and sometimes to “unhinge” them more deeply.50

  These comments formed part of a long letter by one of the agents, ending with a proposal for “their removal from the establishment.” In fact, this is precisely what happened; in early December, the Campbells were sent packing. But by then the school had endured four months of a most bizarre turmoil—described, in one account, as a “paroxysm”—which appears to have left some residue. Daggett’s next report to the board sounded a new note of discouragement. “The School which before seemed to have a preponderance of piety has evidently put on a different appearance.” Many of the scholars had declined in “seriousness,” while a select few felt “grieved, and come to me expressing their fears that the School will not prosper.” Alas, the report concluded, “unsanctified nature will act like itself.” In a private letter from about the same time, Daggett said more: “levity and bickerings appear to prevail in the School more than I have ever observed them to do before.” As a result, a most unfortunate “down … tide” was running.51

  Still: With the Campbells gone, with new scholars arriving, with Hawaii looming ever larger on the school’s horizon, the stage was set for a bounce-back. By May, when the next examination day came around, morale had been largely restored. Most of the following year (1819) would be consumed by thoughts of the upcoming mission. If only it could be managed, this would bring the first real fulfillment of the founders’ overarching goal: native scholars, shorn of heathenism and full now of pious intent, returning to their homelands to spread God’s Word. As the mission planners looked ahead, they faced a variety of strategic questions. How, exactly, should they approach their task? With what methods and “instrumentalities”? Schools, they decided, would become their entry point, their “prime object,” for these were the most “popular, and inoffensive, means of effecting the ultimate good intended.” Teach the heathen children to read, to write, to count, and all else will follow, including an “effectual introduction to the Gospel.” In taking this position, they were simply reinstating the principle that had guided their efforts at Cornwall (and elsewhere) from the start: educating in the service of “evangelizing.”52