by Sarah Vowell
Then Henry came down with typhoid fever and died.
He took ill in January of 1818, just months after the school opened. Bedridden for weeks before his death, he confided in one of the Hawaiian students, “It is a good thing to be sick, Sandwich—we all must die—and ’tis no matter where we are.” Confident in his salvation, he was not afraid. Still, he did lament, “Oh! How I want to see Hawaii! But I think I never shall. God will do right. He knows what is best.”
On February 17, 1818, his friends gathered around his bed and before he died he told them, “Aloha ‘oe—my love be with you.”
“We thought surely this is he who shall comfort Owhyee,” the Reverend Lyman Beecher bemoaned in his funeral sermon for Henry. “We bury with his dust in the grave all our high raised hopes of his future activity in the cause of Christ.”
His tombstone in the Cornwall Cemetery is inscribed:
In Memory of Henry Obookiah a native of Owhyee. His arrival in this country gave rise to the Foreign mission school, of which he was a worthy member. He was once an Idolater, and was designed for a Pagan Priest; but by the grace of God and by the prayers and instructions of pious friends, he became a Christian. He was eminent for piety and missionary Zeal. When almost prepared to return to his native Isle to preach the Gospel, God took to himself. In his last sickness, he wept and prayed for Owhyee, but was submissive. He died without fear with a heavenly smile on his countenance and glory in his soul. Feb. 17, 1818; aged 26
In 1993, relatives of Henry Obookiah had his remains reburied at Napo‘opo‘o in Kealakekua Bay, down the road from the remains of his uncle’s temple. It’s hard to beat the view from his new resting place. But the Litchfield Hills have their charms, especially in the spring, when the countryside is all lilting greenery with the occasional jonquil in bloom.
One April, I had to do a reading in Western Massachusetts so on the way I stopped in Cornwall to see Obookiah’s original tomb. There in the village cemetery among the monuments for Yankees with names like Martha, Harriet, and Luther, Obookiah’s weathered marker still stands on a gentle slope near the road. The inscription is hard to make out. The centuries have blackened the lettering and the surface of the stone is covered in little trinkets and offerings—corroding coins, strings of shells, a broken coffee mug from Kamehameha Middle School in Kapalama. I’m guessing the Kamehameha mug from Oahu is probably just a memento left there by a well-meaning Hawaiian sixth-grader unaware that Obookiah came to New England in the first place because some of Kamehameha’s soldiers stabbed his mom and dad.
The building that housed the Foreign Mission School is long gone, but in front of the Lutheran church that’s there now a little plaque is fixed to a boulder. It brags that between 1817 and 1826 it “trained young men of many races to act as Christian missionaries among their peoples.”
Henry Obookiah wasn’t my only reason for detouring here. Cornwall has ties to an episode from my own Cherokee family’s history. Among the hundred or so students from Asia, Greece, and Polynesia who studied at Cornwall, American Indian boys were sent there from southeastern tribes such as the Choctaw and the Cherokee.
I spent weeks on end camped out in archives in Honolulu. And though I’m never more at home than when I’m looking stuff up, I was often envious of locals, the men and women who would come to the Hawaii State Archives to locate an ancestor’s grave, the missionary descendants hanging around the Mission Houses Museum archives, poring over the paper trail their forebears left behind. So while paging through one of the page-turners the ABCFM published—compilations of reports from its missions around the globe in places that used to be called Palestine and Ceylon—it was stirring to come across a name I’ve been hearing my entire life: Elias Boudinot, a Cherokee teenager who, the ABCFM reports, renamed himself after a New Jersey congressman who has “the welfare of our Indians at heart.”
Born with the name Buck Watie, Elias Boudinot arrived at the Cornwall school a few months after Obookiah’s death. Boudinot and his fellow student and cousin, John Ridge, were caught between the opposing worlds of white and Indian society. They managed to get themselves burned in effigy in Connecticut and then assassinated in Indian Territory by fellow Cherokees.
In attending to the spiritual starvation of Asians and Polynesians, the ABCFM did not neglect the savages here at home. In 1816, the board asked for and received funding from President Madison’s secretary of war (who had the purview of Indian affairs) to build a mission house and a school in the Cherokee Nation in Tennessee. The goal there, according to one of the ABCFM annual reports, was “gradually, with divine blessing to make the whole tribe English in their habits, and Christian in their religion.”
After the Foreign Mission School was founded in Cornwall, the tribe picked a few boys from among its most prominent families and sent them north. On the way to Connecticut, after visiting former president Jefferson at Monticello and current president Monroe in Washington, Buck Watie spent a night in Burlington, New Jersey, at the home of a member of the board, Congressman Elias Boudinot. Boudinot was so taken with the boy he offered him a scholarship, and in return Watie took the old man’s name, enrolling at the Cornwall school as Elias Boudinot, a name he would hang on to the rest of his life.
Boudinot and Ridge were the school’s new Obookiahs. The administration trotted them out before the town, had them write sugary thank-you notes to whites who donated money to the school. But, like Obookiah, John Ridge got sick. Then he fell in love with the teenage daughter of the Cornwall family who nursed him back to health, Sarah Northup. Then he married her. Cornwall, heretofore proud of the school’s multicultural mandate, drew the line at miscegenation. A newspaper attacked the marriage as the devious product of “missionary machinery,” proposing that the Indian should be “hung” and the “girl ought to be publicly whipped.” Then, just as the school was trying to smooth things over with the town, Elias Boudinot proposed marriage to another local white girl, Harriet Gold. Cornwall was once again on fire; this time townspeople burned effigies of Harriet and Elias, with Harriet’s own brother lighting the match. Saddened, the secretary of the ABCFM asked, “Can it be pretended, at this age of the world that a small variance of complexion is to present an insuperable barrier to matrimonial connexions?” Hell, yes! was Cornwall’s answer. The school, already becoming obsolete since the missions abroad were in full swing, couldn’t survive another scandal. It shut its doors that year, 1826.
Boudinot and Ridge returned home to the Cherokee Nation with their fair-skinned brides. Boudinot founded and edited the Cherokee Phoenix, the tribe’s bilingual English/Cherokee newspaper. He collaborated on a translation of the Bible into Cherokee with the ABCFM’s missionary, Samuel Worcester. The ABCFM leadership in general, and Worcester in particular, were vocal in support of the Cherokees’ struggle to fend off the intentions of the federal government, egged on by the state of Georgia, to remove the tribe from their land. ABCFM secretary Jeremiah Evarts made numerous trips to lobby for the tribe in Washington, D.C., and Worcester lent his name to the landmark Supreme Court decision Worcester v. Georgia. This ruling of the Marshall Court confirmed that the state of Georgia had no jurisdiction over the tribe, an independent nation within the borders of the United States. Too bad the administration of Andrew Jackson refused to execute the ruling and started drawing up plans to evict the tribe across the Mississippi.
John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Boudinot’s brother Stand Watie, along with a hundred or so other Cherokee, saw the inevitability of removal to the West and decided the tribe should at least be paid for their homeland. This cabal met in secret and, with no authority whatsoever, signed the Treaty of New Echota, authorizing the United States to move the tribe in exchange for $5 million and land in what is now Oklahoma. The rest of the tribe protested, sending to Washington a petition signed by nearly all sixteen thousand members of the tribe denouncing the treaty as illegal, but to no avail.
In 1838, the U.S. Army ejected the Cherokee from their homes and rounded t
hem up. One of the places where soldiers gathered the detainees was Ross’s Landing on the Tennessee River, site of that first ABCFM mission the federal government paid for back in 1816. The army marched them across the country at gunpoint in what came to be known as the Trail of Tears, a quarter of the tribe dying along the way.
Standing in that churchyard in Cornwall, looking at the boulder with the little plaque about the Foreign Mission School where Boudinot and Ridge were students, reminded me of when I went to the old Cherokee capital in Georgia and stood on the site of Boudinot’s house, where he and his coconspirators signed the Treaty of New Echota. I think I understand Boudinot’s motives a little better now. Who would be more inclined to cut his tribe’s losses and try and put the Mississippi River between himself and whites than a man who had been burned in effigy by Christian townspeople?
According to a statute passed by the Cherokee Council, signing away tribal land without authorization was literally a crime, punishable by death. Once the tribe got settled in the West, Boudinot and Ridge were executed. Harriet Gold Boudinot had already died from childbirth complications back in Georgia, so she didn’t see her husband jumped in the woods and stabbed in the back. But Cornwall’s Sarah Northup Ridge watched assassins drag John from their bed in the middle of the night. She witnessed each attacker stab her husband in their yard repeatedly. Then they all took turns trampling his corpse.
Somehow Stand Watie, Boudinot’s brother and fellow signer of the Treaty of New Echota, was not put to death. He went on to serve as a general in the Confederate Army in the Civil War. Watie was my great-great-grandfather’s commanding officer in the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles. His daughter, my great-grandmother Lena, attended the Cherokee Female Seminary. I have her diploma hanging above my desk. It’s dated July 1898, the month President McKinley signed the bill annexing Hawaii to the United States. The founders of the ABCFM would have frowned upon their missionaries’ offspring meddling in earthly political affairs in the Pacific, but there’s no doubt that Samuel Mills and Timothy Dwight would have been proud that yet another Indian kid graduated Bible school. And there shall be one fold.
WHEN HENRY OBOOKIAH died in 1818, the stonemason in Cornwall was probably still chiseling that longwinded remembrance on his tombstone the day Edwin Dwight began compiling Obookiah’s diary, letters, interviews, and his acquaintances’ recollections. Memoirs of Henry Obookiah was published in New Haven mere months after the deceased wished his friends a final aloha.
Henry’s death was to the Sandwich Islands mission what JFK’s assassination was to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ABCFM sent to churches a “special call . . . for immediate and liberal help,” dropping Obookiah’s name to solicit donations for this urgent but costly Pacific venture in light of the heavy burden of the board’s responsibilities among the Cherokee. “God loveth a cheerful giver,” they said.
The Memoirs became a minor bestseller among a certain type of northeastern killjoy. Divinity student Hiram Bingham read the book and made a pilgrimage to Cornwall, recalling, “There were consolations in the reflection that the dear youth had himself been plucked as a brand from the burning, and made a trophy of redeeming mercy.” Bingham added that Henry’s piety “would fan the missionary spirit and hasten the promulgation of the Gospel on the shores that gave him birth.” Bingham was soon spearheading the project. His future shipmate Lucy Thurston described the mission as “the noble enterprise of carrying the light to the poor benighted countrymen of Obookiah.” New York farmer Daniel Chamberlain happened upon the book and was so moved he sold his farm, donated the proceeds to the ABCFM, and packed up his wife and five children to set sail for Hawaii on a ship even people without five kids found claustrophobic.
At least Chamberlain had a wife. That was a deal-breaker for the ABCFM. At the last minute, the board decided that the mission’s six bachelors—ministers Bingham and Asa Thurston and their four assistants—should marry helpmates but quick. Stars of reality-TV matchmaking shows have known their betrotheds longer than the missionaries knew their wives before shoving off. Luckily, this frantic bride hunt scared up ladies so suited for the task it was like something out of a fairy tale, albeit a fairy tale in which happily ever after involves the married women doing more backbreaking chores than Cinderella suffered before she met her prince. “Each day has been filled up with hard work,” is how Mrs. Bingham will describe life in Honolulu.
Friends recommended a schoolteacher named Sybil Moseley to Hiram Bingham and “after I measured the lines of her face . . . with more than an artist’s carefulness,” he asked an ABCFM elder to arrange a meeting. Their wedding is what normal people refer to as a third date.
Like Obookiah, Sybil had lost both parents. “Alas where will the wide world afford a home for an orphan girl?” she had asked her diary in a youthful fit of despair, not suspecting that the answer would turn out to be the kingdom of the Kamehameha dynasty.
Among her papers, I found a copy of a speech Sybil gave to her female students five years before her marriage. She cautions the girls to avoid reading books “that will injure you, such as novels and the lighter kinds of poetry” and to never go a day without cracking open a Bible. “Cautioning [them] against pride,” she advises them to “dress with plainness, neatness, and modesty.” She adds, “Often when decorating our vile bodies, let us think, that ere long they will need nothing but a winding sheet, and shroud.” The whole lecture reads like a job application to be a preacher’s wife.
Lucy Goodale, a Massachusetts schoolteacher, writes her sister in September 1819 that their cousin popped round and talked her into marrying some friend of his and moving to Hawaii. I can just imagine getting a letter like this from my sister: You mean that place where Captain Cook got killed? “The gentleman proposed as the companion of my life is Mr. Thurston,” she writes.
Sybil Moseley, a motherless schoolmarm yearning to dress plain, has little to lose by throwing in her lot with pedantic adventurers hitting the high seas. Lucy Goodale, however, is a well-educated girl with a large and affectionate family. She’s a catch and she is loved. In her memoir, The Life and Times of Mrs. Lucy G. Thurston, she writes of going to her father’s house and talking through her dilemma with her parents, her uncle, her two brothers and their wives. They agree it’s her decision, which almost makes it worse—any family circa 1819 that trusts the judgment of a girl keen to join some Polynesian peace corps is probably worth sticking around.
Asa Thurston is invited to Lucy’s parents’ house to endure the scrutiny of her relatives and six of her friends. Amid the “free family sociality,” they all link arms and engage in an actual singalong. She recalls that, “introduced at sunset as strangers,” she and Thurston would “separate at midnight as interested friends.”
That Lucy would willingly exile herself from so much warmth and comfort says something about the depth of her ideals and her steely resolve to live them out. She writes that her friends and country are “dear to my heart” but life is fleeting and “the poor heathen are perishing” without salvation. “Who will give them the Bible, and tell them of a Savior?”
Might as well be her. A month later she left. Afterward, her sister Persis wrote a letter to the sisters-in-law, admitting “it requires all my philosophy, and all my piety” to make peace with the fact that “Lucy is gone, and I can see her face no more.”
To a godless heathen like me, there’s not much difference between Jehovah and Ku (except that once a year the Hawaiian god of war actually takes time off). But I can’t deny the guts of Lucy Thurston and the other brides. Nor do I question their good intentions. Sure, all missions are inherently patronizing to the host culture. That’s what a mission is—a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong. But it’s worth remembering that these women, and the men they married so recklessly, believed they were risking their own lives to spare strangers on the other side of the world from an eternity in hell.
It took extra courage for the wo
men to sign up for the Hawaiian mission. Aside from the universal trepidation of a long sea voyage and the prospect of adjusting to life in a foreign land, the wives had reasonable concerns about living under what Lucy Thurston feared would be “the iron law of kapus requiring men and women to eat separately.” She worried that “To break that law was death. It was death for woman to eat of various kinds of food, such as pork, bananas, cocoa-nuts, etc.”
The eating kapus were part of a larger religious, ethical, and legal system, the underlying order for the Hawaiian way of life. Still, who can fault the women for ignoring, say, the ecological ingenuity of the kapu system’s land management and obsessing about the severe punishment for certain snacks instead? They had heard tell of Obookiah’s aunt being thrown from a cliff for some ethical breach. What if making an innocent faux pas signed a lady’s death warrant? Plus, it’s hard enough to leave behind one’s friends, family, and country; a woman is supposed to give up bacon too?
Recent seminary graduates Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston were ordained in a Connecticut church a few weeks before shoving off. Reverend Heman Humphrey delivered a sermon in honor of the occasion entitled “The Promised Land,” a veritable synopsis of the mind-set of the missionaries and their elders. Humphrey cited Joshua 13:1, “And there remaineth yet much land to be possessed.” The world, he argued, “belongs to Christ.”
I spent enough time in churches when I was young to know that this has been standard Christian rhetoric for two thousand years. So routine that a reader who goes to Sunday school might just breeze past all the “subduing” and the “belongs” and the “possession” without even noticing it, not questioning the notion that Jesus holds title to the planet. But I can no longer read any faith’s Napoleonic saber rattling without picturing smoking rubble on cable news. I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I’d go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn’t want it.