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Summary
Summary
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
The astonishing story of a unique missionary project--and the America it embodied--from award-winning historian John Demos.
Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and "civilization." Its core element was a special school for "heathen youth" drawn from all parts of the earth, including the Pacific Islands, China, India, and, increasingly, the native nations of North America. If all went well, graduates would return to join similar projects in their respective homelands. For some years, the school prospered, indeed became quite famous. However, when two Cherokee students courted and married local women, public resolve--and fundamental ideals--were put to a severe test.
The Heathen School follows the progress, and the demise, of this first true melting pot through the lives of individual students: among them, Henry Obookiah, a young Hawaiian who ran away from home and worked as a seaman in the China Trade before ending up in New Engl∧ John Ridge, son of a powerful Cherokee chief and subsequently a leader in the process of Indian "removal"; and Elias Boudinot, editor of the first newspaper published by and for Native Americans. From its birth as a beacon of hope for universal "salvation," the heathen school descends into bitter controversy, as American racial attitudes harden and intensify. Instead of encouraging reconciliation, the school exposes the limits of tolerance and sets off a chain of events that will culminate tragically in the Trail of Tears.
In The Heathen School , John Demos marshals his deep empathy and feel for the textures of history to tell a moving story of families and communities--and to probe the very roots of American identity.
Author Notes
John Demos is the Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. His previous books include The Unredeemed Captive, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Entertaining Satan, which won the Bancroft Prize. He lives in Tyringham, MA.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Demos, a Yale historian and master of micro-history (Bancroft and Parkman Prize winner for Unredeemed Captive), turns his attention here to a well-intentioned 1820s effort to create a Connecticut school to Christianize "heathens" (mostly Indians and Hawaiians) and send them forth to missionize. The sad, sometimes tragic, results could have been anticipated. Some of the young male students, two Cherokees foremost, became enamored of town daughters. The consequences, perhaps inevitably, were instances of racism, clerical fear, an overall public hubbub, leading to the school's collapse. But not before two long and apparently successful marriages between the Cherokees and the towngirls were conducted. Those Indians eventually became noted leaders during their tribe's searing dispossession and exile westward-of their "ethnic cleansing"-wherein one of them was murdered by a fellow tribesman. Demos tells this tale with scarcely hidden feeling. His research is characteristically prodigious, his writing disarming, and his story captivating and of national resonance. However, his first-person usage (a recent minor fashion among historians) intrudes on that story, and strange typographical mannerisms (long passages in small typeface) blemish a marvelous story that needed no such embellishments. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A chronicle of a school ordinarily interests few beyond those connected with it. This work is an exception. The Foreign Mission School of Cornwall, Connecticut, founded in the 1820s, represents a focal point for several cultural trends, including Christian evangelism, native-white relations, and even celebrity. Demos opens with a man who impressed Protestant eminences in New England. Hawaiian Henry Obookiah was a convert to Christianity whose memoir was immensely popular. His example beckoned the possibility of converting whole peoples, and so, under Congregational Church aegis, the heathen school was founded to train natives to be missionaries to their people. Demos discovers from letters and newspapers that the school ran into controversy (and a decline in donations) when two Cherokee students proposed to two young white women. Demos' description of the social convulsions that ensued renders intimate insight into attitudes of the period. The school disbanded, and the couples went to Georgia to be swept up in the Cherokee removal of the 1830s. A poignant, well-researched historical vignette of how changing the world weighs on the individual shoulders bearing the task.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2014 Booklist
Choice Review
The Foreign Mission School, familiarly tagged the "Heathen School," was founded in 1816 in the Connecticut town of Cornwall to train students from the non-Christian world as missionaries and teachers. It was not very successful, especially since the school closed in 1826 when two local young women outraged Cornwall by marrying Cherokee students, both of whom eventually became Cherokee leaders. The story of these courtships and the two couples' consequent lives is a major part of the book. Demos (emer., Yale; The Unredeemed Captive, 1994) uses the story to analyze important events and themes in US history and culture. Racism is a prominent part of the ambivalent relationship of the US to foreign worlds. American traditions of humanitarian generosity often coincide with imperialism and xenophobia. The Heathen School was a microcosm of this conflict. Its story is also a vehicle for Demos to explore Christian missionization, Cherokee removal, and the Old China Trade. Along with the big story, Demos conveys the intimate details of school life, students' lives, and the Cornwall community. This readable, captivating tale is also an excellent work of scholarship. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All public library and university collections. R. Berleant-Schiller emerita, University of Connecticut
Kirkus Review
A carefully constructed studyfeaturing a chilling denouementof the disruptive effects of "civilizing" mission work among indigenous peoples. Demos (Emeritus, History/Yale Univ.; The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World, 2008, etc.) manages a sly, significant feat in this historical study/personal exploration. As part of a grandiose scheme to redeem and improve the status of "savages" such as American Indians, the early Americans devised a "heathen school" in Cornwall, Conn., for some of the exemplary members of various ethnic groups, beginning with five Pacific Islanders brought to the shores by trade ships. The Hawaiian native Henry Obookiah proved the most famous immigrant, having arrived around 1809, eager to be educated, Christianized and sheltered with Yale faculty. Eventually, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sponsored him, along with the other Hawaiians, for the Foreign Mission School, inaugurated in 1817. The school was run by philanthropic donations, and it taught a mix of English, arithmetic and geography, for the eventual purpose of conversion and evangelization. Gaining new students from some of the Indian nations, East Asia and elsewhere, the school helped undermine some of the stereotypes about the intelligence of "pagans" and served as a model experiment as well as a tourist attraction. However, the seeds of its success, namely assimilation and acculturation, also led to its downfall, as the "scholars" attracted white women partners and, thereby, scandal amid a deeply racist America. The two success stories, involving Cherokee scholars John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, both married white women and moved to the Cherokee Nation, gaining important leadership roles that, ultimately, steered the nation's fate toward removal and thereby invited the men's own violent demises. In "interludes" alternating with his historical narrative, Demos chronicles his visits to the places involvede.g., Hawaii, Cornwallin order to impart a personal commitment to this collective American tragedy. A slow-building saga that delivers a powerful final wallop.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Tantalizing glimpses of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions School in Cornwall, Connecticut, derisively known as the "heathen school," may be found in many books about the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Notable Native Americans such as Elias Boudinot and John Ridge were "civilized" there. Demos (Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History, Yale Univ.; The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America) provides a much-needed history of the school that identifies the lofty goals of its founders to educate bright people from around the world in order to return them, as Protestant missionaries, to their homes. Demos shows how the founders' dreams fell victim to racial bigotry within both the student body itself and in the greater Cornwall community. The school closed in the aftermath of the interracial marriages between Boudinot and Harriett Gold, and Ridge and Sarah Bird Northrup. Boudinot and Ridge subsequently returned to Georgia with their wives, became involved in Cherokee politics, and were signatories of the Treaty of New Echota (1835), which traded the Cherokee homeland in the East for land in present-day Oklahoma. VERDICT This brilliant work is highly recommended for all who study American history. They should read it with To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul.-John R. Burch, -Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
* CHAPTER SEVEN * American Tragedy: Renascence and Removal "Removal" lies at the heart of the story we commonly tell about Indians in the nineteenth century. At first glance, removal and the grand project of "civilizing" heathen peoples appear to be opposites. Yet on the deepest level, they were joined--were, indeed, different expressions of the same impulse. For the civilizing process imposed a complete renunciation of traditional lifeways; as such, it was another form, a cultural form, of removal. In the case of Indians, it meant essentially this: Let them become farmers instead of hunters, Christians instead of pagans, cultured in the manner of white people instead of "savage." Then maybe--just maybe--they can be absorbed into the national mainstream . However, by the 1820s and 1830s, many whites had already given up on that possibility--at best it seemed impractical; at worst, dangerous--and were coming to favor actual physical removal. Just drive them out, send them far away--across the Mississippi River at least--and leave them entirely to themselves. (And then let us have their land.) One way or another--through either kind of removal--the native presence would be finished; hence the increasingly prevalent trope of "the vanishing Indian." To be sure, this supposed "vanishing" was cause for regret, even guilt, among a certain portion of whites, mostly "benevolent" reformers on or near the East Coast. Farther inland, and especially among those living close to the frontier, neither regret nor guilt would be much in evidence. There, the prevalent attitude could be reduced to a single phrase: Be gone! That suggests another, much sharper term--drawn from our own twenty-first-century world--to replace the more neutral-sounding removal . In short, "ethnic cleansing." Removal--in the straightforward sense of relocation--had been part of American history from the settlement years onward. In its earliest phase, it was irregular, haphazard, ad hoc, and closely tied to warfare. Thus, in seventeenth-century Virginia, sporadic outbursts of violence (especially in 1622 and 1644) between white settlers and the so-called Powhatan Confederacy led to a treaty confining local Indians to a small part of the territory previously theirs. Farther north, in New England, a similar outcome followed the conclusion of the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip's War (1676). In Carolina, after defeat in a bloody conflict with colonists (1713), thousands of Tuscarora Indians migrated north to join the Iroquois Confederacy. As time passed, the transfer of lands and the movement of native peoples could also be accomplished peaceably, through a combination of formal purchase, negotiation, and government pressure. This was repeatedly the case, for example, in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, where Shawnees and Delawares ceded one large tract after another, by deed or treaty, before moving on to what is now eastern Ohio. In the 1740s and 1750s, the Ohio country itself became a scene of contest between colonists and native tribes--until the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) secured major Indian land cessions and established a new "line of settlement" roughly following the course of the Ohio River. Here, the Delaware (or Lenapi, as they originally called themselves) were directly involved once again. Indeed, the story of this particular group, spreading across many generations, was especially remarkable for serial removals. After relocating from Pennsylvania to Ohio, the Delaware would go on to Indiana (Treaty of Greenville, 1795), to Missouri (several more treaties, 1818-26), to Kansas (1829), and finally to Oklahoma (1850s and 1860s). One might well say that removal became central to their very identity. At the start of the nineteenth century, the vast territory obtained through the Louisiana Purchase appeared to open new avenues for removal. And the process itself became more organized, more systematic, with governmental authorities--at both federal and state levels--increasingly in charge. Thomas Jefferson, as president and prime mover for the Purchase, was especially active this way. In 1804, Congress formally authorized him to negotiate with "Indian tribes owning lands on the east side of the Mississippi [to] exchange lands [for] property of the United States on the west side." The results of such initiatives were profound. To the north, there began a complex process of relocating various tribes in the vicinity of the Great Lakes: Chippewa, Ottawa, Pottawattamie, Wyandotte, Menomenie, Winnebago, Sioux, Fox, Sac (among others). The overall direction of this movement was from the east side of the lakes (especially the Michigan Territory) to the west side (Wisconsin, which had also gained territorial status), and then to sites fully across the Mississippi. In the meantime, too, some native groups had moved to Wisconsin from much farther east--for example, Iroquois from upstate New York, and the Stockbridge (Massachusetts) Mahicans. But it was in the Southeast that removal would have its most dramatic enactments--and would most fully approximate ethnic cleansing. There, what were known as "the five civilized tribes"--Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee--remained relatively well entrenched into the early nineteenth century. However, a series of treaty-based land cessions, begun long before, had eaten away much of their territorial base. Then, in the 1830s, all five were subject to federally mandated relocation in the newly designated Indian Territory (what is today the state of Oklahoma). Some ten thousand Choctaws were forced from their homes in Mississippi between 1831 and 1833. The migration of the Chickasaw from southern Alabama was spread out over a longer period, roughly 1837-50. The Creek mounted a strong resistance, but even so they were driven out (also from Alabama) during a three-year stretch, starting in 1834. The Seminole fought removal with extreme tenacity, retreating from their original settlements along the coast of Florida to its swampy interior, from where they conducted sporadic guerilla warfare against federal troops, lasting well into the 1850s. Most were eventually put to flight or killed, but enough remained to support several reservations, which are part of Florida to the present day. And then, the Cherokees--the most famously removed group of all. Considered whole, theirs is a story of remarkable, but doomed, achievement. As such, it shadows, on a vastly grander scale, that of the Foreign Mission School--high hopes, valiant effort, leading to eventual tragic defeat. Indeed, by 1825, the Cherokees were widely considered "the most civilized tribe in America." This description included both a salute to all they had accomplished and the seeds of their destruction. "Civilization" remained the official goal. But success with the goal might under-mine other interests crucially important to whites. Success would mean accepting them, on equal terms and with equal rights. Success would mean competing with them for valuable resources. Success would mean including them as partners on the route to America's "manifest destiny." Was the country at large ready for all that? Excerpted from The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic by John Demos All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Prologue | p. 3 |
Part 1 Beginnings | |
Chapter 1 American Outreach: The China Trade | p. 9 |
Chapter 2 "Providence unquestionably cast them on our shores" | p. 16 |
Interlude: Hawaii | p. 44 |
Part 2 Ascent | |
Chapter 3 American Mission: The World Savers | p. 57 |
Chapter 4 "A seminary for the education of heathen youth" | p. 66 |
Interlude: Cornwall | p. 119 |
Part 3 Crisis | |
Chapter 5 American Paradox: The Indelible Color Line | p. 129 |
Chapter 6 "So much excitement and disgust throughout our country" | p. 143 |
Interlude: The Cherokee Nation | p. 196 |
Part 4 Finale | |
Chapter 7 American Tragedy: Renascence and Removal | p. 209 |
Chapter 8 "Even the stoutest hearts melt into tears" | p. 219 |
Epilogue | p. 266 |
Acknowledgments | p. 275 |
Notes | p. 279 |
Index | p. 319 |