The Heathen School

by John Demos

  58. These arrangements are summarized in The Panoplist and Missionary Magazine, vol. 13 (1817), 339. See also The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 2 (1817–18), 487.

  59. The information and quoted passages in this paragraph are taken from “Rev. Edwin Welles Dwight’s Life,” Springfield Republican, January 23, 1910 (photocopy), and “Sketch of Edwin Welles Dwight,” Berkshire Courier, January 31, 1907 (photocopy), both in FMS Archive, folder 31. See also Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, vol. 6 (New Haven, CT, 1912), 247–49.

  60. Edwin W. Dwight to Abigail Welles Dwight, April 1, 1817, Dwight Collection, vol. 11, 75, Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA.

  INTERLUDE Hawaii

  1. The name Opukaha’ia is said to mean “stomach slashed open” or “disemboweled.” According to long-standing tradition, a “high chiefess of the family” had died in childbirth, and “her husband saved the baby by opening his wife’s stomach to remove the child.” Then, “in honor of this unusual birth … he was named Opukaha’ia because of the cutting of the stomach.… The two births occurred around the same time.” Although this account is somewhat confusing as written, it appears that Opukaha’ia was not the child actually born in such an unusual way, but, rather, a relative. The story appeared first in a Hawaiian translation of Edwin W. Dwight’s Memoirs of Henry Obookiah and is included in Wayne H. Brumaghim, “The Life and Legacy of Heneri Opukaha’ia, Hawaii’s Prodigal Son” (M.A. thesis, University of Hawaii, 2011), 33–34. For elaborate genealogical tracings of Opukaha’ia’s past and present kin, see ibid., 19–36. His ancestors included “the progenitor of a great family of chiefs from Hilo, Hawaii,” the “principal chief of the Ka’u district on Hawaii island,” and other figures of importance; in short, they were not “commoners” (as stated in the Memoirs). Most of his (collateral) descendants would derive from one of his uncles (his mother’s older brother). There was much intermarriage with white settlers; the result today is a large kin group of mixed race, including some of the island’s most prominent families.

  2. William Ellis, A Narrative of an 1823 Tour Through Hawaii, or Owhyhee, with Remarks on the History, Traditions, Manners, Customs, and Language of the Inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands (New York, 1825; reprint, Honolulu, HI, 2004), 200–201.

  3. Ibid.

  4. On the environment and settlement patterns of the Ka’u district, see Ross Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief: The Ancient History of Hawaii Island (Honolulu, 2000), 24–25, 45–46. On traditional Hawaiian house forms, see David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, trans. Nathaniel B. Emerson, 2d ed. (Honolulu, 1951), chapter 23; Glen Grant, Ancient Hawaiian Civilization (Honolulu, 1999), chapter 6; Patrick Vinton Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks: An Introduction to Hawaiian Archaeology and Prehistory (Honolulu, 1985), 4, 252, 259–65. For a period description of housing, see Ellis, A Narrative of an 1823 Tour Through Hawaii, 313–20. On heiau construction, see Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, 259–65.

  5. On land distribution and farming practices, see Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, chapter 9; Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapter 39; Grant, Ancient Hawaiian Civilization, chapter 10; Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1985), 154–55. On labor use, see Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, 289–90. On local trails and communication, see ibid., 266–70.

  6. On food and diet, see Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapters 14–15; Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief, 34–40. On fishing, see Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapter 40; Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, chapter 8.

  7. On many aspects of traditional Hawaiian religious belief and practice, see Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice. See also Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapter 23; Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief, 59–62. On ritual sacrifice, see Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, chapter 2.

  8. On kapu, see Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 85–95, 124–27; Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapter 11. On social gradation, see Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapter 18; Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief, 50–59; Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, 6–7, 294–95; Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 147–48.

  9. On gender segregation, see Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 111–24, and Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, chapter 11.

  10. There is a large literature describing, and interpreting, Cook’s murder. See, for example, Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven, CT, 2003), 409–16.

  11. James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, 4 vols. (London, 1784), vol. 3, 152–53.

  12. E. W. Dwight, Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, a Native of the Sandwich Isles, Who Died at Cornwall, Connecticut, February 17, 1818, Aged 26 (New Haven, CT, 1818), 5.

  13. Cook and King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 152–53; John Ledyard, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, ed. John Kenneth Munford (Corvallis, OR, 1963), 110.

  14. Dwight, Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, 9, 45.

  CHAPTER THREE American Mission: The World Savers

  1. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, 1957); Marjorie Richards, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1969). See also Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought (Cambridge, 1985), preface. The best short summary of the world-saving theme in American history is Bernd Engler, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding, “Transformations in Millennial Thought in America, 1630–1860,” in Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630–1860 ed. Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding (Tubingen, 2002).

  2. Louis B. Wright, The Dream of Prosperity in Colonial America (New York, 1965); Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York, 1979); J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, 1970), chapter 1; Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years (New York, 1952); Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man (London, 1965); Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana, IL, 1961).

  3. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968), chapter 1.

  4. Bloch, Visionary Republic, chapters 1–2; B. W. Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism (Leiden, 1988); James Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York, 1987); Katherine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (New York, 1979). See also Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley, 1949), chapters 2–4; David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York, 2011), chapter 3.

  5. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1956), chapter 1; J. F. Maclear, “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium in Early American Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 32 (1975): 3–32; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 97ff.; Cushing Strout, The New Heavens and the New Earth: Political Religion in America (New York, 1975); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI, 1978), especially introduction and chapter 4; Avihu Zakai, Exile and the Kingdom: History and the Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, 1992), especially chapter 1. To be sure, the idea of a central Puritan “errand” has been challenged; for counterviews, see Andrew Delbanco, “The Puritan Errand Re-viewed,” Journal of American Studies 18 (1984): 343–60; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “The Puritans’ ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly 59 (1986): 231–51. Perhaps the strongest contribution to this debate is Reiner Smolinski, “Israel Redivivus: The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typology in New England,” New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 357–95. It is Smolinski’s view that the “errand” was somewhat diffuse and disorganized during the first phase of New England history but
became sharper and more American-centered in the late seventeenth century; from then on it “played a central role in nurturing a uniquely American identity that came to full flower in the nineteenth century” (359). On this point, see also Oliver Scheiding, “Samuel Sewall and the Americanization of the Millennium,” in Millennial Thought in America, ed. Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding, 165–85.

  6. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702; reprint, ed. Thomas Robbins, 2 vols., Boston, 1853–55), vol. 1, 1. On declension, see Perry Miller, “Declension in a Bible Commonwealth,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 51 (1941): 37–94; Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, NJ, 1969).

  7. The Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors, quoted in Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT, 1977), 29; Samuel Finley, Christ Triumphing, and Satan Raging (Philadelphia, 1741), 26, quoted in Bloch, Visionary Republic, 16; Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revivals,” in The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT, 1972), 353–58, quoted in William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, 1987), 41.

  8. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 101; Bloch, Visionary Republic, 48; Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, 4.

  9. For an image of the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal, see John Demos, Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History, rev. ed. (Boston, 1991), 11. On the “praying towns,” see Richard Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA, 1999). See also Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 31 (1974): 27–54; Kristina Bross, “The Mission Upon a Hill: New England Evangelism, 1643–1653,” in Millennial Thought in America, ed. Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding, 133–64; Holstun, A Rational Millennium, chapter 3; Dane Morrison, A Praying People: Massachusetts Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690 (New York, 1995); Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln, NE, 1997). On eighteenth-century schools for Indians, see Margaret Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies (Albuquerque, 1988). On Indians at Harvard College, see Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1936).

  10. Hutchison, Errand to the World, 39ff. See also Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies.

  11. Judah Champion, A Brief View of the Distresses, Hardships, and Dangers Our Ancestors Encounter’d in Settling New England… (Hartford, 1770), 6, 28–29, quoted in Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, 79; Samuel Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoicing under Calamities and Afflictions (Boston, 1776), 38, quoted ibid., 88.

  12. Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Breckinridge, A Poem on the Rising Glory of America (Philadelphia, 1772), 25, quoted in Bloch, Visionary Republic, 71; John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1841), 82–83, quoted ibid., 94–95; John Adams, The Works of John Adams, ed. C. F. Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, 1850–56), vol. 3, 452, quoted ibid., 71; David Ramsay, Oration on the Advantages of American Independence (Charleston, SC, 1778), 17, quoted ibid., 84; New Jersey Journal (Chatham), March 29, 1780, quoted in Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979), 6. On the general theme of millennialism and the American Revolution, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 152–59; Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, chapter 4.

  13. The citations and quotations in this paragraph are taken from Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 103–12. On the life and career of Timothy Dwight, see Kenneth Silverman, Timothy Dwight (New York, 1969). Dwight’s poetic and patriotic writings can be found in A Selection of American Poetry, from Various Authors of Established Reputation (New York, 1794).

  14. See Bloch, Visionary Republic, 102–15,

  15. Ibid., 131ff., 154ff. See also Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, chapter 4.

  16. John A. Andrew III, Rebuilding the Christian Commonwealth: New England Congregationalists & Foreign Missions, 1800–1830 (Lexington, KY, 1976), chapter 1. On the impact of the Second Great Awakening in the general vicinity of the Foreign Mission School, see David W. Kling, A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792–1822 (University Park, PA, 1993). See also Paul William Harris, Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (New York, 1999), and John A. Andrew, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens, GA, 1992).

  17. Julian Mellen, A Sermon Delivered Before His Excellency the Governor (Boston, 1797), quoted in Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, 156; Lyman Beecher, “A Plea for the West,” in God’s New Israel: Interpretations of America’s Destiny, ed. Conrad Cherry (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), quoted in Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, 173; Nathaniel Emmons, “God Never Forsakes His People,” in Works of Nathaniel Emmons, 6 vols. (Boston, 1826), vol. 5, 179–80, quoted in Hutchison, Errand to the World, 61.

  18. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1969); Andrew, From Revivals to Removal, chapters 1–2; Sereno Edwards Dwight, Thy Kingdom Come: A Sermon Delivered in the Old South Church, Boston, Before the Foreign Mission Society of Boston, and the Vicinity, January 3, 1820 (Boston, 1820), 7.

  19. Dwight, Thy Kingdom Come, 13–15, 27–28; Francis Wayland, The Moral Dignity of the Missionary Enterprise: A Sermon Delivered Before the Boston Baptist Foreign Missionary Society … November 4, 1823 (Boston, 1824), 20.

  20. Auxiliary Foreign Mission Society of Essex County, Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting, Held at Andover, April 14, 1830 (Salem, MA, 1831), quoted in Andrew, From Revivals to Removal, 150.

  21. Edward Dorr Griffin, A Sermon Preached October 20, 1813, at Sandwich, Massachusetts… (Boston, 1813), 33, quoted in Hutchison, Errand to the World, 56.

  CHAPTER FOUR “A seminary for the education of heathen youth”

  1. This and the following descriptive summary of Cornwall’s early history is based primarily on E. C. Starr, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut: A Typical New England Town (New Haven, CT, 1926).

  2. For a full account of Cornwall’s churches in these years, see ibid., chapter 3. On revivalism, see David W. Kling, A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792–1822 (University Park, PA, 1993).

  3. This language was attached to a particularly generous donation to the school. See The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 362.

  4. These arrangements are described in James Morris to Samuel Worcester, December 9, 1816, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 41. See also Morris to American Board, September 2, 1817, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 44. A typescript copy of the deed that conveyed the Academy property to the school is in FMS Archive, folder 18.

  5. James Morris to Samuel Worcester, December 9, 1816, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 41.

  6. Ibid. For a description of the school’s physical plant a few years later on (1820), see The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 2.

  7. James Morris reported that “sundry towns in this County offered more than two thousand dollars to have the School established in their town”; see Morris to Jedediah Morse, November 25, 1816, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 40. See also chapter 2.

  8. On plans to open the school “by the beginning of May,” see James Morris to Samuel Worcester, December 9, 1816, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 41.

  9. See ibid.

  10. Hartford Courant, May 13, 1817.

  11. The steward’s official duties were described as follows: “to superintend the business and prepare the food for the students … and [provide] washing and ordinary mending for each student”; see Report of the Visiting Committe
e to the Foreign Mission School, September 2, 1817, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 44. On the admission of Ruggles and Ely, “two young men of our own nation,” see ibid. and ms. letter, Herman Daggett to the American Board, September 1, 1818, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, nos. 96–97. For the descriptive comments on other students, see James Morris to Jeremiah Evarts, November 11, 1818, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 55 (Kummooolah); Herman Daggett to Rev. Walter Harris (extract), November 22, 1820, FMS Archive, folder 16 (Sandwich); Morris to Evarts, November 11, 1818, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 55 (Annance); Morris to Evarts (Windall).

  12. Johnson’s remarkable story is included in “Report of the Visiting Committee of the American Board…,” The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 2 (1817–18), 524.

  13. Henry Obookiah to Samuel Wells, June 16, 1817, Division of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

  14. The Missionary Spelling Book and Reader, Prepared at the Foreign Mission School, Cornwall, Conn., and Designed Especially for Its Use (Hartford, CT, 1822), 32–34.

  15. Extracts from the Report of the Agents of the Foreign Mission School, in The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 2 (1817–18), 522–25.

  16. Joseph Hawley to Samuel Worcester, October 12, 1816, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 10; The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 1 (1816–17), 494; The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 86.

  17. The following entries are selected somewhat randomly from archival records of the Mission School, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, and from the published volumes of The Religious Intelligencer and The Missionary Herald. See also a detailed summary of donations in the manuscript notes of the Cornwall historian E. C. Starr, FMS Archive, folder 10.

  18. The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 5 (1820–21), 575, 126.

  19. One of these sermons (from a few years later on) was criticized by an auditor for being “too long and diffuse.” The point, he said, “was not to be instructed in a whole system of theology, but to be interested and aroused on the subject which peculiarly characterizes the institution”; see The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 7 (1822–23), 365. For the description of the students’ part, see Mrs. Eunice (Wadsworth) Taylor, “Recollection,” in Starr, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut, 155. On the reactions of Gallaudet and Treadwell, see Hiram Bingham to Samuel Worcester, May 11, 1819, Bingham Family Papers, Division of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.