by John Demos
79. Herman Daggett to George P. Tamoree, June 21, 1821, FMS Archive, folder 16. See also Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, May 18, 1821, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 125; The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 6 (1821–22), 607. Idols were a special focus of reports from the Hawaii mission. For example: “In the windward part of Owhyhee 102 idols were committed to the flames in one day”; see The Missionary Herald, vol. 19 (1823), 100.
80. The quoted sentences are from Rev. A. C. Thompson, Commemorative Address … at the Semi-Centenary of the Ordination of the First Missionaries to the Sandwich Islands (Boston, 1869), 29. Consider, too, the attitude of disgust implicit in the following comment by one of the missionaries upon the moment of his arrival in the islands. “A first sight of these degraded creatures was almost overwhelming: their naked figures, wild expression of countenance, their black hair streaming in the wind as they hurried their canoes over the water with all the eager action and muscular power of savages, their rapid and unintelligible exclamations, and whole exhibition of uncivilized nature, gave to them the appearance of being half-man and half-beast, and irresistibly pressed on the thoughts the query—can they be men?—can they be women?—do they not form a link in creation connecting man with the brute?” (Italics in original.) See Charles Samuel Stewart, A Residence in the Sandwich Islands (Boston, 1839), 70.
81. The quoted passages in this and the preceding paragraphs are from The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 5 (1820–1821), 770–72, and vol. 6 (1821–22), 17–20. See also The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 112, 169; George P. Tamoree to Herman Daggett, July 25, 1820, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 125.
82. The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 241. See also The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 122, and vol. 18 (1822), 324; The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 5 (1820–21), 726, and vol. 7 (1822–23), 310–11. At the time of Tennooe’s “defection,” Hiram Bingham sent him a very stern letter, officially severing his connection to the mission church. See Hiram Bingham to William Tennooe, July 23, 1820, Bingham Family Papers, Division of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
83. The Missionary Herald, vol. 17 (1821), 172, 247–49.
84. Ibid., vol. 18 (1822), 214; The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 5 (1820–21), 748.
85. John Prentice to Jeremiah Evarts, July 24, 1822, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 68. See also John Prentice to Jeremiah Evarts, September 18, 1820, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 66, and Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, May 7, 1821, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 124.
86. The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 7 (1822–23), 445–46.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 186–87; Rev. T. Blumhardt to Jeremiah Evarts, in The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 6 (1821–22), 603–4.
89. Semi-Annual Report of the Foreign Mission School (Litchfield, CT, June 1825), 5.
90. Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, May 18, 1822, and October 8, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, nos. 134, 112.
91. Ibid.; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, August 22, 1822, and August 6, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, nos. 139, 148. On the same topic, see also Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, July 21, 1823, and January 2, 1824, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, nos. 149, 154. Actual examples of such placement are noted in The Missionary Herald, vol. 18 (1822), 20.
92. Herman Daggett to Samuel Worcester, November 6, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 113; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, January 2, 1824, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 154; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, September 11, 1822, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 140; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, January 2, 1824, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 154; Herman Daggett to Samuel Worcester, August 5, 1820, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 116; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, August 22, 1822, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 139; John Prentice to Samuel Worcester, September 2, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, nos. 60–63.
93. Timothy Stone to Jeremiah Evarts, November 16, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 78; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, April 6, 1821, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 123; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, August 22, 1822, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 139; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, November 11, 1822, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 142; Timothy Stone to Jeremiah Evarts, November 16, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 78.
94. James Harvey to Jeremiah Evarts, July 26, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 38.
95. Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, October 7, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 111; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, June 5, 1821, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 126; Herman Daggett to Samuel Worcester, February 6, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 102; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, October 8, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 112; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, December 18, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 83; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, October 7, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 111; Herman Daggett to Samuel Worcester, August 5, 1820, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 116; George Whitefield to Rev. Amos Bassett, n.d., ms. archive, Litchfield County Historical Society, Litchfield, CT; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, November 11, 1822, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 142; Herman Daggett to Samuel Worcester, August 6, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 106.
96. Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, December 23, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 153; Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, February 3, 1824, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 143.
97. Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, April 8, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 103; Henry Hart to Jeremiah Evarts, March 25, 1820, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 86.
98. Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, July 21, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 149; Jonas Abrahams to Herman Daggett, with addendum by Daggett, February 11, 1823, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 144.
99. Herman Daggett to Jeremiah Evarts, May 7, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 103, and Herman Daggett to Samuel Worcester, February 6, 1819, ABC 12.1, vol. 2, no. 102; Semi-Annual Report of the Foreign Mission School (Litchfield, CT, June 1825), 6–7.
100. “An Indian School,” Hartford Courant, August 29, 1900.
INTERLUDE Cornwall
1. Personal conversation with Jeremy Brecher, March 23, 2011. I offer special thanks to Ben Gray, the current owner and occupant of what was formerly the Northrup residence, and Mary Sams, owner today of the former Gold house. Both gave me full access to these historically significant buildings.
CHAPTER FIVE American Paradox: The Indelible Color Line
1. Letter of John Rolfe to Sir Thomas Dale, in Lyon G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia (New York, 1907), 239–44. On Virginians claiming descent from the Rolfe-Pocahontas marriage, see Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, NC, 1973), 175; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1839 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964), 313–19.
2. On ethnocentric attitudes among early modern Englishmen, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), 3–43, 85–90.
3. On the “noble savage” concept, see Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, chapter 4; Robert E. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1979), 74–80. On colonists’ first impressions of Indian physique, see Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (New York, 2000), chapters 1–2; Alden Vaughan, Roots of American Racism (New York, 1995), chapter 1. On perceptions of Indians’ color, see Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, chapter 1; Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 2004), chapter 6; Kupperman, Indians and English, chapter 2; Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia, 2002), 37ff. On ideas about Indian governance, see Kupperman, Indians and English, chapters 1, 3; Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, chapter 2. On views of Indian religion, see Kupperman, Indians and English, chapter 4.
4. On colonists’ views of Indians as educable, see Kupperman, Indians and English, chapter 2; Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, chapters 1–2.
5. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 23–26; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 95ff. On “monogenesis” and colonists’ theories abou
t Indian origins, see Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 35–36, 39–40. See also Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA, 1936).
6. The comments by Byrd and Beverley are quoted in Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 177. The most careful studies of colonial attitudes toward racial intermarriage are David D. Smits, “ ‘We Are Not to Grow Wild’: Seventeenth-Century New England’s Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 13 (1987): 1–32; Smits, “ ‘Abominable Mixture’: Toward the Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 500 (1987): 157–92.
7. Colonists frequently noted Indian “nakedness,” a line of comment that seemingly reflected a sexual interest; see Kupperman, Indians and English, chapter 2. See also Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens, GA, 2003), 8ff., and June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993). For occasional examples of interracial sexual contact (and marriage), see Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 35–36, 81–82. See also Smits, “ ‘We Are Not to Grow Wild,’ ” 8–11, 15–17. The comment about settlers departing to “take up their abode with the Indians” is from J. H. Trumbull and C. J. Hoadly, eds., Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 15 vols. (Hartford, CT, 1850–90), vol. 1, 8, quoted in Smits, “ ‘We Are Not to Grow Wild,’ ” 16. On the life of Eunice Williams, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994).
8. On changing perceptions of Indians’ color, see Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, chapter 1; Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, chapter 6.
9. Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 48ff. There is some debate among historians as to when the term red applied to Indian skin color became a pejorative. For a summary of this, see Vaughn, Roots of American Racism, 158 n. 37.
10. The historical literature on frontier warfare, and its relation to Indian hating, is vast. See, for example, Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008); Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (New York, 2009); Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 265ff. The quote from Johnson can be found in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 20.
11. Thomas Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (Albuquerque, NM, 2005), chapters 1–2; Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, chapter 1; Richard Godbeer, “Eroticizing the Middle Ground: Anglo-Indian Sexual Relations Along the Eighteenth-Century Frontier,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York, 1999), 91–111. For firsthand observation, see John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Lefler (Chapel Hill, NC, 1967), 24ff.
12. See Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992).
13. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction; Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, chapter 1; Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 14–18. On Jefferson’s central role in the “civilization” policy, see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 223ff., 277ff. For a succinct summary of Secretary Knox’s program in his own words, see ibid., 168. See also Reginald Horsman, “The Indian Policy of an ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), 37–61; Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 142–44. On Indians as farmers, see Daniel Usner, “Iroquois Livelihood and Jeffersonian Agrarianism,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Hoxie, Hoffman, and Albert, 200–225.
14. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, chapter 5; Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 51ff., 74ff.; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 203ff. On the founding of schools, see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 277ff.; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 129ff.; Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers, 138–39. On missionary projects in the Southeast and elsewhere see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 188ff.; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 130–34.
15. The sentences quoted here, from the writings of Jefferson, can be found in Horsman, “The Indian Policy of an ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” 50; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 33; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 223.
16. On “amalgamation” (and the later creation of the word miscegenation), see Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 4; Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 75ff. The comments by Rush and Morse are quoted in Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 177. On Hawkins’s plan to promote intermarriage, see Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 76ff.
17. On Patrick Henry’s legislative proposal, see Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 175. On Knox’s idea of offering bounties, see Horsman, “The Indian Policy of an ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” 46. See also Robert E. Bieder, “Scientific Attitudes Toward Indian Mixed Bloods in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 8 (1980): 17–30.
18. On Jefferson’s defense of Indians, against European theories of American “degeneracy,” see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, chapter 3. (His comment to Chastellux is quoted on p. 77.) See also Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, chapters 3–4.
19. On the threat of extermination, see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 11ff.; Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers, 169ff.
20. On the perception of Indians as childlike, see Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 153; Richard White, “The Fictions of Patriarchy: Indians and Whites in the Early Republic,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Hoxie, Hoffman, and Albert, 83.
21. For a detailed account of Jefferson’s involvement in land speculation, see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, chapter 1. (Jefferson’s comment to Hawkins is quoted in Horsman, “The Indian Policy of an ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” 51.)
22. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, chapter 1; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, chapter 7; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981), chapter 6. The comment on “rancorous antipathy” is from John F. D. Smyth, A Tour of the United States of America, 2 vols. (London, 1784), vol. 1, 345–46, quoted in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 24.
23. The comment by McKenney is quoted in Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 19. For a rather critical appraisal of McKenney’s career as an Indian agent, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Norman, OK, 1980), 170ff. On the alleged propensity of Indians for violence (including the comments quoted here), see Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 189ff.
24. Colin G. Calloway, “The Continuing Revolution in Indian Country,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Hoxie, Hoffman, and Albert, 3–33; Horsman, “The Indian Policy of an ‘Empire for Liberty.’ ” See also Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 207ff.
25. See Laura Mielke, Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (Amherst, MA, 2008).
26. On these points, see Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers, chapter 5; Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 80ff.; Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 48–49; Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 56–57. For an especially authoritative discussion of “scientific racism,” see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, chapter 7. The passage on Indian inferiority is from Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana: or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia, 1839), 81–82, quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 127.
27. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 33ff. See also Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers, 170–72. The statement by President Monroe is quoted ibid., xx. The statement about a “mongrel population” is from “The Report of the Committee on the State of the Republic,” Augusta [GA] Chronicle and Advertiser, November 17, 1830, quoted in Watson W. Jennison, Cultivating Race: The Expansion of S
lavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington, KY, 2012), 208.
28. For useful overviews of Indians’ experience in early New England, see Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (Norman, OK, 2009); Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln, NE, 1996); William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, NH, 1986). See also the essays included in several anthologies: Robert S. Grumet, ed., Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816 (Amherst, MA, 1996); Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Charlottesville, VA, 2003); Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, NH, 1997); Peter Benes, ed., Algonkians of New England: Past and Present (Boston, 1993); Laurie Weinstein, ed., Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England (Westport, CT, 1994). For an extended history of a single group, see Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln, NE, 1997). On the governance of Indian “reserves” (and the role of white “guardians”), see, especially, Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 117–63.
29. On Indians’ work as whalemen and mariners, see Daniel Vickers, “The First Whalemen of Nantucket,” in After King Philip’s War, ed. Calloway, 90–113. On Indian women as healers, see Bunny McBride and Harald E. L. Prins, “Walking the Medicine Line: Molly Ockett, a Pigwacket Doctor,” Northeastern Indian Lives, ed. Grumet. On Indian basket making, see Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 31ff.; Nan Wolverton, “ ‘A Precarious Living’: Basket-Making and Related Crafts Among New England Indians,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Calloway and Salisbury, 341–68; and, most especially, Russell G. Handsman and Ann McMullen, A Key to the Language of Woodsplint Baskets (Washington, CT, 1987).