One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  The hunting party’s behavior was frightening enough that the women and children ran from their homes, keeping to the relative safety of the woods while the drunken men scratched through cold fireplaces in search of scraps of food. Left in the care of such masters, the village dogs yelped with hunger.

  Handsome Lake’s half-brother, Cornplanter, watched with dismay as the ruffians added chaos to the plight of his long-suffering village. The ranking sachem of the region, Cornplanter was a chief whose power came not only from his long career as a warrior and protector of his people but from his status among the leaders of the former colonies—most of whom knew Jenuchshadego simply as Cornplanter’s Town, for it had only recently been established on a tract of land given to him by the new American government.

  Already faced with the daunting challenge of holding together what remained of his people, Cornplanter was so incensed by his brother’s behavior that he may have pursued the harshest possible penalty against him, as he often did for the purpose of keeping peace in the village. Only weeks before, when Cornplanter suspected a woman of being a witch responsible for the death of an infant, he had ordered her stabbed to death in broad daylight. Instead of taking similar measures now, however, he looked for a solution to what he had come to see as a bigger problem than a few drunks making mischief.

  Though he had fought on the side of the British during the war, Cornplanter had since become an advocate of improving relations between his ancient people and the nascent nation rising around them. He was in many ways a natural bridge between the Seneca and the Americans. His own father had been a Dutchman, and though he was raised among his mother’s people, he maintained enough of a sense of connection that he used his Dutch family name—recorded alternately as Abeal or O’beal—throughout his life. He passed the name on to his sons.

  In his eagerness to improve relations between the United States and the remnants of the Six Nations, he had gone so far as to invite Quaker missionaries to live in the village, even allowing them to use a section of his own cabin for the purpose of teaching English to the Seneca children. It was a decision that would have implications reaching far beyond language—beginning with the immediate fate of Handsome Lake, but not ending there.

  The Quakers who had taken up residence in Jenuchshadego had been working in Iroquois country for years. Upon his arrival in the village, thirty-year-old Henry Simmons had felt comfortable enough with the beliefs and traditions of the Seneca that, when challenged to give an account of the origins of the world, he offered a version of Genesis that seemed to his interrogators nearly indistinguishable from their own stories of divine creation. With Adam and Eve standing in for the Sky Woman from whom all humanity sprang, he told of the birth of two brothers, one good and one evil, and explained that in his religion it was understood that the inclinations of these embattled siblings continued to rule human behavior. By the time Simmons was finished, it seemed to Cornplanter and the rest of his audience that Cain and Abel were simply other names for the twin sons of the Sky Woman—Flint, the bad son, and Sapling, the good—and that the Garden of Eden would fit quite naturally on the primordial turtle’s back.

  The Quakers had been invited to Jenuchshadego to teach the skills of “letters, pen, and tilling the field,” but of course they offered religious and moral instruction as well, often hidden within the pages of the books of spelling and grammar they brought with them from Philadelphia. The textbooks these missionary teachers distributed to the Seneca wasted no ink on reading lessons that did not also convey dire moral warnings. Whatever satisfaction children might have gained from learning to read, the first lesson from a Quaker primer of this period colored the accomplishment with dread:

  My son, do no ill.

  Go not in the way of bad men.

  For bad men go to the pit.

  When children could be persuaded to remain still long enough for their lessons (and this was no easy feat—Quaker teachers complained that young Seneca would often come and go from school as they pleased), they repeated such lines until they became part of the very air of the village, ringing out like mantras from Cornplanter’s cabin. Such rote learning was the norm in all early American schools, as was the moralistic approach to literacy. Whatever one thinks of this style of pedagogy, however, or of the ethics of using language instruction as a Trojan horse for faith, the Quaker teachers seem to have succeeded in introducing Christian elements to Iroquois culture in a way generations of previous missionary attempts had not.

  The Quakers’ success in Cornplanter’s Town may have been due to the influence of another of the missionaries. Halliday Jackson, Simmons’s junior by three years, was less experienced among the Iroquois, but he had a more influential career ahead. A quarter-century later, he would play a prominent role in an acrimonious split within the Society of Friends over its openness to individual interpretations of faith. His predisposition to personal religious sentiments was already apparent and would turn out to shape the outcome of the missionary endeavor.

  The movement Jackson would eventually join was sparked by the writings of Elias Hicks, a Rhode Island farmer turned preacher who stressed the importance of “immediate divine revelation” in the formation of religious life. This notion would have been uncontroversial to the earliest Quakers in America, who, after all, had risked the noose with their insistence that religion rested on an inner light available to all. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, many Quakers had become respectable citizens. There arose a divide between the largely affluent urban Quakers and much less well-off rural Quakers, who took up Hicks’s call as a necessary reinvigoration of the faith. While the “Hicksite” revival would not formally split the Friends until 1826, already there were rumblings about the true nature of divine revelation, and to whom it should be considered available.

  However divisive Jackson would later be among his co-religionists, there was no dissent among the Quakers at Cornplanter’s Town. They were united by a common practical purpose that included an admirable restraint when it came to the question of conversion. As a result, the changes they brought were more subtle than the blanket Christianization of native cultures to which other missionaries aspired. As in Jackson’s later advocacy for a movement stressing immediate divine revelation, the personal nature of religious experience was proclaimed as paramount. And like Simmons’s own remaking of Genesis in the image of the Iroquois creation myth, the faith that began to grow in Jenuchshadego was not a replacement but a hybrid.

  The significance of this hybrid faith began to show itself when Cornplanter ruled on how best to deal with the drunken hunting party’s return. After consultation with the sobriety-preaching Quakers, he moved to forbid whisky and other spirits from the village.

  Never very healthy, and now well past the prime of life at the age of sixty-four, the rebuked Handsome Lake soon fell into a sickness that had all the markings of alcohol withdrawal. He became so tortured by a constant craving for drink that he soon was unable to walk. He fell into a bed in a room within the same large cabin Cornplanter had allowed the Quakers to use for their lessons, and he remained there for days. When his grown daughter came to his side to care for him, she saw that he had been reduced to “yellow skin and dried bones.”

  Beyond his physical symptoms, it was believed that he was suffering a spiritual malady. As his ordeal was remembered in the tribe’s oral tradition, “some strong power” held him and would not allow him to recover. He called to the Great Ruler to give him strength, but even as he prayed, he considered “how evil and loathsome” he had become. In his delirium, he intoned the chants of his people—the Death Chant, the Women’s Song, the Harvest Song—and as he sang, he wondered if whisky was the cause not only of his own illness but of the straits in which his people now found themselves. As the days passed, he meditated on the rising and setting of the sun, the stars he could see when staring up through the chimney beside his bed, and the birds he could hear singing in the morning.

  One such morning,
as Handsome Lake’s daughter and her husband were working outside the cabin, they heard a shout from within. “Niio!” the sick man called. “So be it!” When they ran inside to check on him, it seemed the inevitable end of a ruined man’s days had finally come.

  Cornplanter, along with other family members, friends, and Henry Simmons, soon arrived at the cabin to mark Handsome Lake’s passing. When they touched his body, however, they detected some heat in it. As they moved their hands over his skin, the warmth seemed to spread from his core to his limbs. Silently, they all sat at the feet of the dead man, watching and praying for his breath to return.

  It was near noon when his eyes opened, the sun high above the village on the day in June that marked the yearly Strawberry Harvest Festival.

  Handsome Lake’s nephew asked, “My uncle, are you feeling well?”

  At first the born-again man’s lips moved without making a sound, but then he found his voice.

  “Never have I seen such wondrous visions!” he said.

  The visions Handsome Lake went on to describe served as the basis for a new religious movement—not Mormonism; not yet.

  As they were recorded in the journals of Henry Simmons and Halliday Jackson, and later passed down by Seneca oral tradition, they were in many ways an elaboration of the blending of conventional Quaker morality, Hicksite openness to individual revelation, and Iroquois mythology that had already begun to be developed in the village. Now, however, this compound faith had found a story, and a prophet, all its own.

  As the suddenly revived sachem recounted, during his illness he had seen himself step into a “clear swept space,” and there he met three otherworldly men “clothed in fine clean raiment.” Both familiar and exotic, they were dressed as if they had been sent on an important mission, and carried blooming branches, symbols of the rebirth for which all the Iroquois hoped.

  “Their cheeks were painted red and it seemed that they had been painted the day before,” Handsome Lake said. “Only a few feathers were in their bonnets. All three were alike and all seemed middle aged. Never before have I seen such handsome commanding men and they had in one hand bows and arrows as canes. Now in their other hands were huckleberry bushes and the berries were of every color.”

  The angelic figures approached him, and one of them spoke. “He who created the world at the beginning employed us to come to earth. Our visit now is not the only one we have made. He commanded us saying, ‘Go once more down upon the earth and this time visit him who thinks of me. He is grateful for my creations, moreover he wishes to rise from sickness and walk in health upon the earth. Go you and help him to recover.’ ”

  Following this initial recitation of his visionary experience, Handsome Lake remained physically weak, but he had what seems to have been a miraculous spiritual recovery. Though a hereditary chief of his people, he had before this never been very influential, always overshadowed by his brother Cornplanter. Now, however, it seemed Handsome Lake’s time had come. Throughout the seventeen years that followed, until his death in 1816, he had a series of visions, in which his own resurrection came to stand for that of his people as a whole. He traveled out of Jenuchshadego, now not to hunt or drink but to preach his message back in the homeland of the Seneca, to the Indians living on reservations in western New York.

  Some speculated that this new prophet was a secret Christian, surreptitiously recasting the Bible in native terms. Another possible inspiration for his revelation might have been the Quakers’ religiously themed reading lessons, repeated endlessly from the makeshift school that occupied another section of the cabin in which he had convalesced. No matter their source, the visions he described spoke deeply to those who heard them.

  While Handsome Lake’s experience became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption, the new religion was not limited to his own apparent death and resurrection. As a subsequent vision later recorded, he also offered a thoroughly reimagined creation myth, riffing on Christian stories to create new connections and meanings, much as the Quaker missionary Simmons had done, but in reverse. His Genesis was less concerned with the creation of the earth, however, than with the origins of the circumstances that had brought the Iroquois to this low point in their history.

  The first published version of the Code of Handsome Lake included a section bluntly named: “How the White Race came to America.” It tells the story of a pious man who discovers a hidden text that reveals long-forgotten religious secrets. In this book, Handsome Lake’s scripture relates,

  He read of a great man who had been a prophet and the son of the Great Ruler. He had been born on the earth and the white men to whom he preached killed him. Now moreover the prophet had promised to return and become the King. In three days he was to come and then in forty to start his kingdom. This did not happen as his followers had expected and so they despaired. Then said one chief follower, “Surely he will come again sometime, we must watch for him.”

  It is, at first, a rough refashioning of the Christian Gospel, complete with the three days of Christ’s death and resurrection and the forty days between his appearance to the apostles and his ascension to heaven. As the story progresses, however, it becomes entwined with another story. The man who discovered the hidden text seeks out this son of the Great Ruler, and is convinced he has found him when he arrives at a golden castle. Inside, a figure he believes to be the one he is looking for proposes to send him on a quest.

  “Across the ocean that lies toward the sunset is another world and a great country and a people whom you have never seen,” he says. “Those people are virtuous, they have no unnatural evil habits and they are honest. A great reward is yours if you will help me. Here are five things that men and women enjoy; take them to these people and make them as white men are.”

  It is only as he departs that the seeker realizes the man in the castle was not the son of the Great Ruler but an impostor—a twin, perhaps. When he opens the bundle of five objects he has been given and finds enticements to drunkenness, idleness, sickness, and greed (“a flask of rum, a pack of playing cards, a handful of coins, a violin and a decayed leg bone”), he concludes that the man in the castle does not want to help those people on the other side of the ocean but to destroy them. Unwilling to complete this task himself, he passes the objects along to one who is prepared to do so. In the religion of Handsome Lake, Christopher Columbus himself becomes the serpent bringing forbidden fruit to the garden.

  Primarily intended as a moral refocusing of his people, Handsome Lake’s vision was also a rebuke, in religious terms, of the entire European endeavor in America. By incorporating elements of biblical imagery into a story of his own, he suggests that the God Christians worshipped, the one whose objects and ideas Columbus and those that followed carried with them across the ocean, was an impostor—the evil twin of Iroquois lore. Simultaneously, the vision was also a brazen appropriation of Christian self-understanding. Handsome Lake not only introduced new elements to Iroquois belief, he reaffirmed the traditional religion of the longhouse, complete with its savior Dekanawida. In Handsome Lake’s teachings, this savior now seemed all the more like a Christ that belonged exclusively to the native peoples of America.

  During his lifetime, Handsome Lake’s movement seemed at first to grow slowly. He was, for years, as ridiculed as many an aspiring prophet before him had been. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1816, he had seen the small spark of his vision spread like a fire. Formed of a hybrid of Christian morality and Seneca stories that may have been as old as or older than the Gospel the Quaker missionaries preached, the Code of Handsome Lake inspired a spiritual revival among the Iroquois at just the moment when it seemed their way of life was destined to disappear from the earth. Though undeniably influenced by missionaries, Handsome Lake went on to become, for a time, their greatest rival for the souls of Native Americans. He supplanted Cornplanter as the voice of their people and even earned the praise of the American president, Thomas Jefferson, who called him “brother�
� and urged all Indians to follow his example.

  “I am happy to learn you have been so far favored by the Divine spirit as to be made sensible of those things which are for your good and that of your people,” Jefferson wrote to Handsome Lake in 1802, “and particularly that you and they see the ruinous effects which the abuse of spirituous liquors have produced upon them.” Jefferson made this new prophet seem not just the Iroquois leader but their Luther:

  Go on then, brother, in the great reformation you have undertaken. Persuade our red brethren then to be sober, and to cultivate their lands; and their women to spin and weave for their families. You will soon see your women and children well fed and clothed, your men living happily in peace and plenty, and your numbers increasing from year to year. It will be a great glory to you to have been the instrument of so happy a change, and your children’s children, from generation to generation, will repeat your name with love and gratitude forever.

  That a new religious movement should have arisen in this time and place within the remnants of the Iroquois Confederacy is not surprising. Not only was there great need for rejuvenation among the people, there was also, perhaps, something in the air.

  The mass of Handsome Lake’s followers lived primarily in western New York. For centuries, this had been the Seneca heartland, but today it is more often remembered as the “Burned-Over District”—so called by the revivalist Charles Finney in 1876 because, in his estimation, so many in the region had been converted to new forms of evangelical Christianity that there was no one left for the fires of conversion to consume. While rarely considered a part of this groundswell in popular devotion, the Handsome Lake phenomenon in fact ought to be viewed as the Native American branch of the Second Great Awakening, the period from roughly 1790 to 1830 when membership in a variety of newly birthed sects and denominations exploded, spread, and took root across the country.