A political romance

Secret commissions, secret prisons, secret deliberations, secret e-mails, even secret public records—secrecy, it seems, is all the rage in executive circles today. With skill and steadfastness, the George W. Bush administration has, in large measure, successfully resisted the efforts of Congress and the courts to compel the release of information related to the internal workings of the executive branch. In inquiries dating to the earliest months of the administration’s first term and increasing in tempo until the present-day—rows over Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, the “torture memo,” “Plamegate,” the Department of Justice firings, and even more torture memos, just to name a few highlights—the executive branch has consistently and earnestly asserted its right to keep silent, sometimes making a defense out of the venerable doctrine of “separation of powers,” other times in the name of “the ability of the president and vice president to receive unvarnished advice.” Indeed, despite the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in U.S. v. Nixon that “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality . . . can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity,” as well as more recent judicial decisions condemning certain secrecy policies as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law,” the administration has not been deterred. It is, unfortunately, impossible to judge just how much the secret has organized the internal operation of the current president. The number of documents classified as confidential, per executive order, remains secret.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that this official reticence has aroused intense suspicion. After all, as Walter Cronkite observed, “you keep secrets from people when you don’t want them to know the truth.” Yet the persistence of the secret as the Bush administration’s central organizational strategy, despite constant threats of investigation by Congress and the press, might suggest something more at work than the practical logistics of hiding embarrassing facts. Looking at the president’s almost reflexive reliance on “confidence” as the yardstick of patriotic commitment—confidence in Donald Rumsfeld, in Alberto Gonzales, in Dick Cheney and his staff—reveals another level of motivation, another modality of patriotism, another political tradition embedded in the secret. For it was in the supreme value of men’s “sacred confidence” (from con fides, “with trust”) that an early national generation of big-government conservatives asserted themselves, declaring to an often distrustful populace that men’s secrets were not only defensible but constituted the very measure of the virtuous man. In the energetic vindications of secret societies that erupted after the Revolution; in the closed doors of the 1787 Constitutional Convention; and in the contractual agreements between men, which constituted the only positive right of citizenship until the twentieth century—the partisans of men’s confidence unfolded a vision of the patriotic republic in the intimate spaces between men. To be sure, their audacious claims jarred mightily with the prevailing understandings of secrecy as particularly unmanly and effeminate—cultural notions of the secret that played a pivotal role in uniting revolutionaries in self-consciously manly purpose; it should be no wonder, then, that an emerging anti-federalist opposition would pounce on the delegates to the cloistered Philadelphia convention as debased, fleshy, weak, and womanly, “harpies of power . . . inebriated with the lust of dominion.” And indeed, the unmanly, sexually inverting secret echoes in some of Bush’s more creative critics, finding in Bush’s Skull and Bones Society days the origin of a lifelong effort to obfuscate his alleged schoolboy predilections for homoerotic Satan worship. But for the persistent advocates of disciplined diffidence, the secret did not unman men or even isolate them. It made them, almost incomprehensibly to many, republican men, realizing a manly virtue in the simple and transparent capacity of one man to assess another, to “look into his eyes”—as George W. Bush assessed Vladimir Putin at their first private meeting—and “get a sense of his soul.”

"Master Giving the Grand Masonic Word on the Five Points of Fellowship." From Malcolm C. Duncan, Duncan's Masonic Ritual and Monitor: or Guide To The Three Symbolic Degrees of the Ancient York Rite . . . ," 3rd ed. (New York, [1866?]). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “Master Giving the Grand Masonic Word on the Five Points of Fellowship.” From Malcolm C. Duncan, Duncan’s Masonic Ritual and Monitor: or Guide To The Three Symbolic Degrees of the Ancient York Rite . . . ,” 3rd ed. (New York, [1866?]). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

To be sure, it was no simple task to rehabilitate men’s secrets in the wake of the Revolution. After all, the terrifying possibilities of an unmanning and “mysterious privacy” had been so compelling to the opponents of the aristocratic order and so politically mandatory that even one so self-consciously privileged as John Adams could see in men’s secret pleasures all the “levities, and fopperies, which are the real antidotes to all great, manly, and warlike virtues.” Take, for example, the difficulties faced by the august Society of the Cincinnati. An openly closed band of Revolutionary officers, who took their name from the Roman general famous for beating his sword into a ploughshare, the Cincinnati incited nationwide censure for what appeared as secluded, aristocratic privilege. Certainly the society’s proclivities for luxurious balls, their open consort with the most fashionable women, and their infuriating practice of limiting new members to first-born sons put them in the worst possible light for an early national cultural landscape still enamored with the fantasy of a simple and virtuous republic. And as crypto-aristocrats, a swelling opposition concluded, they were hardly men at all. To Mercy Otis Warren, sister of arch-Whig James Otis and one of the premier chroniclers of the Revolutionary era, the Cincinnati “follow[ed] the fantastic fopperies of foreign nations and . . . the distinctions acquired by titles, instead of the real honor which is the result of virtue.” They were “flattering themselves,” she later confided, or at least the “younger Class particularly the students at Law and the youth of fortune & pleasure.” Rage against these womanly pretenders erupted in mass meetings from Maine to South Carolina, an extended campaign of street politics punctuated by periodic petitions seeking the abolition (or at least supervision) of the order. Some American Cincinnati of esteem kept their distance from the erupting conflagration; George Washington himself, though accepting appointment as the Cincinnati’s first president, carefully steered clear of meetings and his fellow officers. He understood, perhaps better than most, the unsettling calculus of secrecy and manhood that defined the political culture of the Revolution. For the Cincinnati, however, even the association with Revolutionary heroes could not save their society from withering and persistent attacks from across the emerging United States.

If the Cincinnati failed to realize the great political weight of dark and unmanning secrecy, however, the committed membership of the Free and Accepted Order of Masons did not. Their attention bore considerable fruit, stabilizing the secret society for a period of unprecedented growth in the first decades of the Constitutional republic. Claiming lineage back to the First Temple in Jerusalem, though actually of 1720s origin, Masonry included many of the Cincinnati in their ranks. But these men represented only a tiny fraction of the overall membership scattered in lodges throughout the United States. Disclaiming the self-conscious elitism of the Cincinnati and asserting a relative openness of entrance into their secret brotherhood, Masons were a conspicuous presence in almost every sizable locality in the nation. Masonic lodges were filled with congressmen and senators, assemblymen and sheriffs, assessors, trustees, and constables to such a degree that some even accused the secret society of rigging entire state elections. And, in a moment as famous as it was poetic, the arcane symbols of the secret order were carved into the very founding institutions of the United States, quite literally in the case of the cornerstone of the United States Capitol building. Where the Cincinnati failed to successfully navigate the landscape of manhood and secrecy, Freemasonry proliferated. For the Masonic secret was not effeminate at all. It was, the fictive brothers told themselves and their critics, manly and patriotic, embodying the highest possibilities of the fraternal republic in the tight spaces that opened up between secretive men.

Disavowing the exclusivity and the affectations of the Cincinnati, Masons made no secret of their mysterious secrets—the secret name of God, some claimed, or the secret handshake, or the keys to the secret iconography. Indeed it was almost beside the point, the exact content of the secret. It was, instead, the secret itself that lay at the heart of the fraternal relationship. “The secret is,” wrote one committed Mason in defense of his order’s honor, “to fasten those bonds which ought to unite mankind.” This was, to the otherwise anonymous Benjamin Gleason, a “peculiar privilege”—not a privilege of secret power and sanguine indulgence but of simple fraternity, of fictive consanguinity, of the “appellation brother.” The advocates of manly secrets could hardly keep to themselves the fraternal joy that they felt in their bosom. One Pennsylvania Mason declared in assembly “for that strength which . . . is . . . a Band of Union among Brethren, and a Source of Comfort in our own Hearts.” In almost every Masonic account of the era the language is open, proud, ubiquitous. It is a language of love and tenderness that gave shape to that which could not be exposed, those most mysterious, most secret, most inexpressible spaces of intimate existence at the heart of confidential manhood. No wonder there were no women here. But of course this is much the point of the fraternity, of any fraternity. The secrecy of brotherhood made brothers; men achieved their highest emotional possibility in republican secrecy.

There was more to the liberation of the secret than a proud brother’s tender affections, however. In the eyes of the openly diffident, the reconstructed secret echoed with all the political strategies of the friends of the Constitution. After all, fraternal confidence bound “every party . . . to perform all he promised,” unfolding not as the absence of republican ideals but instead as contractual relationship. And, in this light, the fraternal contract reserved for men alone (in most cases) the privilege of entering into that sacred “obligation of contract,” which no power on earth, said Article One, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, could ever “impair.” (It would be good to remember here the preeminence of this “contract clause” in federal rights adjudication, stretching from the first Supreme Court invalidation of state law in the 1792 case Champion and Dickason v. Casey to become “for 150 years,” as one scholar has suggested, “the quintessential instance of individual rights.”) The value of men’s transcendent words defined not only manhood itself; it constituted the republic, or at least the republic in the eyes of the Madisonian partisans of “private rights.” True enough, though Masons asserted the potential of the secret word to make all strangers into brothers, only the more select could actually utter the inexpressible words; politicians, ministers, successful merchants—these men dominated the order. But this is precisely the point. For the slippage between private property and republican manhood underscored the entire project of reconstructing the secret in the image of men’s intimate exchanges. Property and propriety, succor and sociability come together to create a dream of republican liberation written in the vocabularies of friendship and trust, the foundational ethic for a rights order written in the rule of contract. This is the open secret, the secret of fraternal intimacy.

The world of fraternal secrecy, then, did not isolate men, as critics of the Bush administration suggest when they point out “Bush’s bubble” to describe his domain of the alienated and confidential. It brought men together in the pure and naked truth of men’s confidence. In this compact lay much of what men of ambition had already asserted—that “knowledge, as well as pleasure, must be conveyed by the intimate communication of a personal acquaintance, when the misleading luster of personal deeds is dispersed by free conversation, and nothing intervenes to prevent a clear view of men’s real character, properties, and temper.” (“I looked into his eyes,” to repeat Bush’s account of his meeting with Putin, “and got a sense of his soul.”) But the work of masculinizing secrecy also demanded, it seemed, that the vestiges of women’s effeminizing presence be fully and completely eradicated from the secret. Masonic men thus led a relentless campaign to reconstitute the existence of women under the transcendent domain of fraternal secrecy. After all, warned one 1790s defender of men’s sacred secrets, “A more amiable and more victorious invader of our secrets [than inquisitive men] is woman. Armed with beauty, she attacks us by endearment. Unequal to this charming encounter, we surrender our whole souls to be ransacked by her eager curiosity.” Such a view was commonplace, another writer opined without reservation, announcing the consensus opinion among his colleagues. “The evil,” this anonymous scribe penned in 1796, “is said to be more prevalent among the ladies”—a state of affairs that seemed to explain fully why “so many of the sex are averse to their Husbands being freemasons, as their curiosity . . . cannot be satisfied.” Other men were secretive, but only the Masonic secret had value. Even women could agree, or at least one could. “Were our sex admitted into the society, it would counteract the grand design, as we have generally too great a proportion of those delicate feelings, for our own happiness.” Insatiable and burdened with a riotous excess of uncontainable desire, all of these familiar echoes of Eve and the “forbidden apple” make their appearance, just as they did in anxious talk about the power of women to undo the works of men. Yet where earlier generations of fearful men may have burned insolent witches as the symbol of secret and unknowable terrors, the patriotically retiring displaced women entirely from the heart of the secret.

This is not to say that women disappeared from the Masonic imagination, as they have not disappeared from Bush’s domain of confidence. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice remains a central figure, and Harriet Miers has been associated with the executive’s secret circle. It is just that, for men to associate their own virtuous patriotism with secrecy, women’s own secrets had to be stripped of their unnerving sensuality. In parable and second-hand story and outright admonition, Freemason journals swelled with tales of coquettes, of “beauteous ideot[s]” prattling their insipid, “trickling nonsense.” On this point, one might suspect, most American men would publicly agree. Benjamin Rush, consummate Whig and Mason, made quite clear the republican fear of fashionable women. “The first marks we shall perceive of our declension, will appear among our women,” the famous Pennsylvanian wrote in 1785. He continued, “Their idleness, ignorance, and profligacy will be the harbingers of our ruin. Then will the character and performance of a buffoon in the theater, be the subject of more conversation and praise than the patriot or the minister of the gospel.” As late as the 1840s, Masons thus gathered to denounce women’s “trifling accomplishments,” those “flimsy, airy, trifling, and unprofitable acquirements” of the coquette. After all, as one brother addressed his fellows, “the music of the churn, the Herculean wield of the mop, and the rattling of the dishes are far nobler employments for a young lady, than kicking up her heals at the sound of the merry viol, murdering the French language, of thrumming on the piano.” Sometimes the reformulation of women’s secrets was tantamount to de-sexing them. Secretary of State Rice, for one, has been the unhappy recipient of this sort of criticism. But only with the fearful specter of women’s own pleasures excised from the space of fraternal intimacies, it seems, could secrecy unfold as a central modality of men’s republican liberation.

"Wm. Morgan." From an original picture by A. Cooley (1829). Frontispiece, Elder David Bernard, Light on Masonry: A Collection of All the Most Important Documents on the Subject of Speculative Free Masonry . . ." (Utica, N.Y., 1829). — “Wm. Morgan.” From an original picture by A. Cooley (1829). Frontispiece, Elder David Bernard, Light on Masonry: A Collection of All the Most Important Documents on the Subject of Speculative Free Masonry . . .” (Utica, N.Y., 1829).

In this light, then, the confidence that George W. Bush has shown in his advisors might suggest something other than poor judgment. It might also suggest that the profusion of official claims of confidentiality may appear as assertions of trust, of patriotism, of resolute manhood. To be sure, secrecy’s suspicious opposition should be expected to recoil at such a novel political calculus. Attacks on the manliness of the secretive, after all, remained a staple of early republican oppositional discourse well into the nineteenth century. The sensational 1826 death of apostate Mason William Morgan was only the most famous opportunity to bring the light of publicity on the secretive Masons huddled “till past midnight, in the orgies of the lodge-room.” And such visions of perversion are not completely a thing of the past. To wit: those convinced of George W. Bush’s overwhelming need to hide his expertise in the homoerotic Satan worship of his Skull and Bones days—a thesis distinct from one forwarded by other critics who decry the president’s impulse to obfuscate his own part in the “pedophilia, drug trafficking and consumption, child pornography, bestiality, mind control, rape, torture, satanic rituals and human sacrifices” of a global “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy. But the point of the reconstructed secret was not about fear, suspicion, or inverted sexuality. For the partisans of the enigmatic, the secret is about being politically born again in the presence of a brother, about resolve and faithfulness, about being a man.

I hope for still more placards and tours, signs and questions along the trails that can point to the places where the culture and politics of the Civil War intersect directly with the battlefield narratives—and where the politics and culture of Civil War memorialization can be engaged. In the meantime, standing on the battlefield with smartphone in hand allows the visitor to have this fuller engagement with the history of Civil War memorialization and its cultural resonances. In the remainder of this essay, I analyze three battlefield markers, at times willfully ignoring the intent of these Civil War memorials in order to engage new perspectives on the Civil War through stories of subtraction, addition, and new questions in Civil War memory.

Appomattox: Editing History Before Wikipedia

Let us start at the end. The battle over the memory of the Civil War did not wait for the fighting to cease, but Appomattox is an appropriately symbolic place to consider how the war’s fights continued in words after the guns fell silent.

In a grove just west of Appomattox Courthouse, next to a small cemetery where Confederate veterans are buried, a metal plaque with raised letters calmly explains the conclusion of the Civil War. It dates from 1893. “Here on Sunday April 9, 1865 after four years of heroic struggle in defense of principles believed fundamental to the existence of our government Lee surrendered 9000 men the remnant of an army still unconquered in spirit to 118000 men under Grant,” it reads—or, rather, it once read. When it was moved to this site, the final line was chipped off, so it now reads only, “… an army still unconquered in spirit.” And therein lie two stories, one imaginative and one far more prosaic.

Flags and gravestones stand as witnesses to the modern grappling with surrender. Confederate cemetery, Appomattox. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Surrenders are hard. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici noted in her study The Art of Surrender, there were no photographs taken of the surrender ceremony at Appomattox, at the end of “a much-photographed war.” This choice reflected the agonizing work of surrender, she argued, for signatures in surrender commit the losing side to disappear: one participates in a surrender as a commander or a representative, but the act of signing or submitting makes that which you command or represent dissolve. And so it is understandably difficult to memorialize the moment when the cause is given up, when the winners and losers receive their labels. One can understand how someone who celebrates the Confederate cause might not be comfortable with naming those victors in their memorial to those who surrendered.

The erasure’s incompleteness draws our attention to the edit. If the entire monument was removed, or the chipping away had been more complete, visitors would not even know something was missing. This complete erasure is common in many battles over the politics of history—the first battle in regaining such a memory is to be acknowledged as part of the historical scene.

The partially erased monument at Appomattox echoes others, and the causes they seek to hide or reveal. In 1973 in Santa Fe, an American Indian Movement activist chiseled the word “savage” off an 1868 Civil War monument “to the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with savage Indians.” He defended his action as an attempt to remove the “racism and character assassination” he saw in the word. A newer plaque argues that the use of the words “savage” and “rebel” on the monument reflect the “temper” of “a period of intense strife.” Such dueling plaques also now frame the Monument to the Faithful Slave erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Harpers Ferry in 1931. The erasure of letters on the Appomattox plaque might suggest, then, the raw emotion still attached to the Confederate surrender to Grant.

These battles over memory occur on the ground, but their most common modern site is Wikipedia, the online, completely editable encyclopedia. You can write whatever you want on the Internet; to tell your version of events in cyberspace is far easier than doing so inside a national battlefield park. But on Wikipedia, not just anything goes. Wikipedia, like any work seeking credible authority, has built-in standards to protect the accuracy of its pages and pass judgment on any changes. Despite being the work of mostly amateurs and enthusiasts, Wikipedia has become an increasingly accurate reference work—one where chiseled deletions, if meant to erase an accepted truth, would immediately be noticed and flagged for correction, or at least discussion.

Despite the possibility that the removed words at Appomattox were an act of vandalism fueled by a battle over Civil War memory, the truth is far less charged.

This plaque was placed on the site of the original courthouse by the United Daughters of the Confederacy soon after the building burned to the ground, in 1892. It was moved to its current location in preparation for the Civil War Centennial, when the Appomattox Courthouse buildings were reconstructed, in 1963-64. And as for the chiseling? The UDC numbers were way off—counting a very small Confederate force, and a far too large Union one—and so the last line was chiseled off “as a compromise between the National Park Service and the United Daughters of the Confederacy” in 1964, according to park curator Joseph Williams.

Here, as in Santa Fe, the editing of monuments brings us closer to the accepted truth. But the scar of that earlier, erroneous history remains.

Fredericksburg: Angels of the Battlefield

If the Appomattox case is about memory by subtraction, the sculpture at the base of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg demonstrates Civil War memory by addition. I toured Marye’s Heights soon after dawn one summer morning. The park was not yet technically open, but the warm light and the deserted hillside were irresistible. Birds fluttering around were all that disturbed the quiet, until I remarked aloud my surprise at this statue.

It is rather far down the road along the Stone Wall, and the statue is dramatically out of proportion with the site. An enclosure of low hedges creates a space for the monument alone, and visually cuts out some of its height when seen from a distance. The framing works much like that at the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, which is best comprehended from afar, its massive reality cordoned off by circles of hedge, concrete, more grass, and then a circular road. These choices may be intentional, as both sculptures are the work of the same artist, Felix de Weldon.

The arresting, almost erotic statue of the "Angel of the Battlefield" at Marye's Heights, Fredericksburg. Felix de Weldon, 1966. Photograph courtesy of the author. — The arresting, almost erotic statue of the “Angel of the Battlefield” at Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg. Felix de Weldon, 1966. Photograph courtesy of the author.

When I first saw this statue, I was struck by what I thought I saw: one Civil War soldier reaching down to kiss another, lying in his lap. Homosexuality had no such name in the middle of the nineteenth century, but there are many recorded homosocial and homosexual relationships, from the gold mines to the battlefields and beyond. After the battle of Fredericksburg, Walt Whitman came to Washington to find his brother, who had been injured there. Whitman then spent the war years in the hospitals, witnessing and caring for wounded Union soldiers. After the death of Erastus Haskins, who had played the fife for a New York regiment, Whitman wrote addressing the dead man: “Poor dear son, though you were not my son, I felt to love you as a son,…. So farewell, dear boy—it was my opportunity to be with you in your last rapid days of death—no chance as I have said to do anything particular, for nothing could be done—only you did not lay here & die among strangers without having one at hand who loved you dearly, & to whom you gave your dying kiss.” With Whitman’s emotions in mind, I approached the sculpture with an eye to how it added such a rarely spoken-about element to the battlefield tableau.

The statue was constructed in 1965 to commemorate the actions of Confederate soldier Richard Kirkland, remembered as the “Angel of the Battlefield” for risking his life to provide water and comfort to enemy soldiers in the no-man’s-land on the second day of the battle of Fredericksburg.

A debate has erupted regarding whether Kirkland actually did this, and the extent of his heroic acts. Commentators have called the most extensive version of the story, recounted by his commander in the 1880s, ” a Lost Cause fairy tale.” But the power and form of the statue exist separate from the facts. Indeed, the presence of this monument does far less to commemorate Kirkland’s actions than to highlight the nature of war memory at the time of the centennial, and to demonstrate how, as my twenty-first-century eyes had seen, a monument gathers a life of its own.

This centennial sculpture shows a man from the North and a man from the South locked in a life-giving embrace. As Nina Silber’s The Romance of Reunion and David Blight’s Race and Reunion suggest, the reunification narrative that dominated Civil War memory from the Jim Crow era until the triumph of the modern Civil Rights movement was about honoring the valor of white soldiers without much regard to which side they fought on. It steered clear of the role of slavery and the other causes of the war in order to celebrate moments that could bring the North and South together—whether a cross-sectional marriage, as was often depicted in literature, or a transcendent moment of humanitarian aid, as Kirkland displayed.

A closer look reveals that the soldiers are not lovers but enemies, men from opposite sides of the conflict—though they are brought together in an embrace. These moments may not be sexual, but they are intimate. The blood, the sweat, the close quarters of the battlefield creates intimacies, whether desired or not. And we react to their embrace much as we might to the famous embrace of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square, which has been recreated as a sculpture, John Seward Johnson II’s Unconditional Surrender.

The Union soldier’s eyes are mostly closed and his mouth begins to open, recalling the posture in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, expressing the extremities of pain—or joy. With the Kirkland figure arching all the way over the stricken Union soldier and their hands clasped, the physicality of the sculpted men combine with the emotional pull to create a sense of eroticism in the mind of the viewer.

Since the centennial years, scholars of war have re-acknowledged the visceral nature of battle, the intimacy and even sexuality that might be aroused by such encounters. Nineteenth-century men might not have spoken of such feelings and experiences, and they were not the intent of the centennial commemorations and statuary. But the visceral and the sexual allusions add to the emotional impact of this statue—and thereby add something of the full human experience to our memorializations of the Civil War.

Island Mound: History Re-Emerging

For the past 149 years, no one could tell the history of the Civil War without discussing Appomattox and Fredericksburg. But the events of the Battle of Island Mound are just now reemerging, and the plaques and statues commemorating the battle reflect this sense of discovery.

The story of the Island Mound memorials begins in October 1999, when Larry Delano Coleman, pastor of the Brooks Chapel A.M.E. Church of Butler, Missouri, held a memorial service for the eight men who died in the battle. Butler is the seat of Bates County but a very small city, with a population of around 4,200 today. When you exit the freeway into Butler, the signs direct you to the home of Robert Heinlein, the science-fiction author of Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers—literally a world away from the Civil War. That is not to say that the Civil War does not hang heavily in the area, as Bates is one of the counties that was targeted in General Thomas Ewing’s Order No. 11, which emptied a large swath of western Missouri in the effort to weed out Confederate sympathizers in August 1863. During the war, Butler found itself defended by such sympathizers in the state militia when “Kansas ruffians” set the town ablaze, in the back-and-forth of warfare along that border.

The Battle of Island Mound, on October 29, 1862, emerged from one of these raids. Kansas Senator James Lane commanded the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, a unit composed of escaped slaves from Arkansas and Missouri, to fight for freedom in western Missouri. The skirmish at Island Mound has a claim to fame as the first engagement between African American soldiers and Confederate-aligned troops. That these opposing men were Missourians, fighting off an invasion from another Union state, demonstrates how fluid and complex the mix of allegiances were in Missouri, a state claimed throughout the war by both the Union and the Confederacy.

The statue of an African American soldier on the town square in Butler, Missouri, represents the emerging memory of the Battle of Island Mound, about a quarter-mile away. Joel Randell, First Kansas Volunteer Colored Infantry. Photograph courtesy of the author.

At the 1999 meeting, Coleman raised enough money to commission a sculpture of an armed black soldier, rising up into the fight, by the sculptor Joel Randell of Oklahoma. The Island Mound statue rises on a granite block in the courthouse square at the center of Butler, about a quarter of a mile from the battle site. There, a collection of signs installed by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources describes the path of the battle, and the plaque concludes, “Here, their bravery and determination helped our nation better understand the founding fathers’ words ‘all men are created equal.’ Here, on October 27, 2012, we memorialize their victory and the American freedoms they fought for so bravely.”

The plaque sits on a stout granite obelisk, on a small plaza with a park bench. The site looks mostly like an empty field—common enough among the preserved battlefields, but making it that much harder to conjure up the scene. As another of the Island Mound signs declares, “There are still many questions about the Battle of Island Mound, the Toothman farm and Fort Africa. Artifacts and other evidence provide clues that help to tell the story about what really happened at this site,” and some of that archaeological work is ongoing.

Island Mound memorializes African American memories of the Civil War—highlighting not only the fighting of African American troops without reference to their white commanders, but also the growing acceptance of the centrality of slavery to the causes of the war, and the ways that the war would lead to emancipation for those held in loyal slave states such as Missouri as well as in the Confederacy. We have come a long way from the kneeling slave memorials that Kirk Savage analyzed.

Since there are so few actual photographs of African American soldiers, I find a certain homogeneity in the sculptures and memorials that exist: the same weapons and the same uniforms (which simply reflect Army order), but also the same facial expressions, the same postures, and some of the same facial features as well. Are the faces in The Spirit of Freedom (1992-98), by Ed Hamilton, at the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C., or Randell’s work, based on individuals, or merely “types”?

The first memorial to African American troops was Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief sculpture dedicated to the commander of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment, Robert Gould Shaw, on Boston Common, unveiled in 1897. The soldiers there, modeled from local members of the African American community, have individualized expressions as they march in profile in the background, behind their commander Robert Gould Shaw, who is front and center. Similarly, Ed Dwight’s Founder’s Memorial (2007) at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, draws upon images of the early soldier-scholars of that institution.

The movie Glory (1989), about the 54th Massachusetts, brought the African American soldiers’ Civil War experience to prominence in American memory. And its iconography—a resolute Denzel Washington and a confident Morgan Freeman—overwhelms the soldiers these new memorials seek to recall. Perhaps we simply do not have enough images of these soldiers, nor the mental clues—Lincoln’s long face, Sherman’s haughty look, Grant’s rounded visage—to instantly connect us to any good likeness. Anonymous white faces front so many local Civil War monuments, but somehow the anonymity of these black figures offends me more.

For the moment, a visit to Island Mound provides the chance to see both history being recovered and the memory of the site being shaped. It may take until the Civil War bicentennial to understand what the sesquicentennial emphasized, but this effort to include more of the war’s participants, and to tell the story of smaller battlefields farther west than Gettysburg, demonstrates how the public memory and the new history of the Civil War is changing.

Appomattox, Fredericksburg, Island Mound—what are we to make of these three case studies? What is at stake in these readings and misreadings, these edits and additions? Every site tells its local story, but these memorials also become a window into the larger questions of the Civil War era regarding cause and consequences; the role of slavery; the geography of the war; and the participants in the conflict. Then there are the historical, political, and social circumstances of the memorial makers, and their agenda in these commemorations.

Effective war memorials engage eternal questions about human life and meaning-making. What is praised, and what is hidden? Who is included, and who is left out? Which human experiences are celebrated, and which are not? As we view memorials and battlefields, our views of courage, morality, and violence come into play. So do our thoughts about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, about region and nation and destiny.

From the battlefield plaque to the Internet, from a descendant’s pilgrimage to a tourist’s vacation, a casual engagement with Civil War memorials is impossible. Memorials and battlefields ask for a response, and we give it, whether in a devotional, critical, or playful manner. Walking these grounds we are never far from the analytical and political questions that drive a national interest in the Civil War and its legacies for the United States. As we engage these memorials, we shape them with our own personal civil wars, our visions of the nation. And, during the sesquicentennial, we can share our personal civil wars with the world.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Joseph Williams and Ernest Price of the National Park Service for information about the Appomattox plaque.

On whaling and the Charles W. Morgan in the nineteenth century: Most of the Morgan‘s logbooks and papers have been made digitally available by Mystic Seaport’s G. W. Blunt White Library. The log of the first voyage was kept by mate James C. Osborn, who recorded an impressive “List of Books that I have read on the Voyage” on its 185th page. Nelson Cole Haley’s Whale Hunt: the Narrative of a Voyage (New York, 1948) describes his cruise in Morgan from 1849-1853; Haley’s journal was printed nearly a century after the voyage. J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (London, 1846) is perhaps the best-known nineteenth-century whaling narrative other than Moby-Dick. For a good overview of the industry published recently, see Eric Jay Dolin’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York, 2008).

On the 38th Voyage itself: Mystic Seaport has done a terrific job in documenting the undertaking through their 38th Voyage portal, which includes links to historical and digital collections, social media sites, and news reports. The ship’s “Stowaway,” Ryan Leighton, kept a particularly compelling blog. Several fellow voyagers have themselves posted narratives online: see the accounts of Michelle Moon, Charles Foy, John Bryant, Robert K. Wallace, and Lesley Walker. I have assembled a photo narrative of my experience; a longer account of my response to the time I spent asea was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (August 3, 2014).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Hester Blum is associate professor of English at Penn State University and vice president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008) and the editor of William Ray’s Barbary narrative, Horrors of Slavery (2008). Blum is writing a book about oceanic studies and the literary cultures of polar exploration called “The News at the Ends of the Earth.”

The SPGNA, American Indians, and the Turn to Foreign Missions in the Early Republic

Hazelnuts. That’s what the girl at the door was selling. But why? Surely that question must have crossed the minds of white inhabitants in Norwich, Connecticut, when a young Indian girl presented her rather unusual wares. In the early 1840s, this Mohegan girl trekked the five miles from the Mohegan reservation north along the Thames River to Norwich, Connecticut, to sell her goods, likely from a basket that she had woven. Such peddling attempts by Natives were commonplace in the nineteenth century, but this particular girl had a special purpose. She was selling hazelnuts in order to collect an offering for the “American Board”—that is, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded by New England Congregationalists in 1810. Apparently the white minister of the Mohegan church, Anson Gleason, had visited her parents’ home at Mohegan to solicit donations for the ABCFM and, lacking any money to offer, the daughter instead went into the forest and collected hazelnuts to sell in order to raise funds for “Foreign Missions.” This Mohegan girl wasn’t alone, however, in her fundraising efforts; her family often contributed half a dollar per year to the ABCFM collection, and the mixed white and Indian congregation at the Mohegan Church contributed an annual average of twenty-five dollars between 1836 and 1841.

Hazelnut-bearing North American Native youth as financial supporter of U.S. Protestant foreign missions? If this surprises us, it is perhaps because we haven’t fully understood the continuities and changes within the larger history of missions in North America at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the most basic level, this episode hints at an essential continuity between prior colonial evangelization efforts by Euro-Americans among the indigenous populations of North America and the early-nineteenth century shift toward “foreign” or global missions. During the colonial period, the Mohegans and other New England Natives had repeatedly been evangelized by missionary societies based in the British Isles. The Mohegan Church (and the accompanying school) in the 1840s was a direct legacy of this colonial-era evangelization. And yet, in the opening years of the early republic (1783-1810), a slow shift was taking place, one that increasingly caused the eyes and prayers of Americans to look toward “foreign” fields of missionary service, however defined. And—as in prior eras of evangelistic activity—Native Americans were important to these efforts, in terms of providing historical models and ongoing inspiration and, in some cases, becoming participants and partners in supporting global missionary activity.

At the center of much of this early national activity was a missionary society that in itself embodied and facilitated these transitions: the Society for Propagating the Gospel among Indians and Others in North America (SPGNA). Founded in 1787, it was the first missionary society in the new United States, predating the better-known ABCFM (1810) and even the New York Missionary Society (1796). In many ways, the SPGNA spanned an older colonial world and an emerging internationally minded early American republic. Its founding revealed the deeply politicized nature of such ongoing Indian evangelization in the early republic and the eventual turn toward global missions. The SPGNA also embodied the three primary (and overlapping) missionary impulses of the early nineteenth century: Native, domestic, and foreign. Precisely because it fills this strange void, the SPGNA is often overlooked in the history of Christian missions and missionary efforts (whether domestic or foreign) in the United States. Its members and founders—drawn from the elite of New England society—were humanitarians who hoped to spread literacy, education, and their particular brand of activistic Congregationalism to all corners of the North American continent, and even beyond.

Although the SPGNA officially limited its scope to North America, its members clearly saw their missionary organization as part of a grand unfolding Protestant evangelistic drama that included domestic works of literacy and education right alongside missionary efforts in more remote locales around the globe. The sermons, publications, and foci of the SPGNA suggest that “foreign” missions did not necessarily mean “overseas.” Instead of a sharp division between “domestic” missions and “foreign” missions, the SPGNA’s records suggest that, from the perspective of 1787 or even 1800, much of the western regions of the North American continent were just as “foreign” as destinations like Africa or India. In short, this essay suggests that the notion of “foreign” was an unstable and constantly changing category. By the 1790s, there was a continuum of foreignness envisioned by East Coast humanitarians, one that started in the central and western portions of North America and ended in the more remote portions of the globe. The SPGNA, while often overlooked, served as a transitional missionary society, bridging an older, colonial Native-focused missionary effort and an emerging globally centered movement that had as its goal nothing less than the evangelization of the entire world.

One of the repeated themes from the reports and published sermons on the SPGNA in its first twenty years of operation was the intense difficulty—near impossibility—of successful Indian Christianization

The Society for Propagating the Gospel among Indians and Others in North America (or The Society with the Long Name, as later generations called it) had at least two origins. The most immediate and formal beginning was in in 1787, when the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK; founded in Scotland in 1708) contacted a few leading ministers and philanthropists in Boston with a request. The SSPCK was in charge of some funds that were technically reserved for North American missions and, following American independence, its leaders felt that the money should be administered by individuals or an organization based in the United States. The money, in fact, was largely the result of an enormously successful fundraising trip undertaken by the famous Mohegan Presbyterian minister Samson Occom. Between 1766 and 1768, Occom toured the British Isles, raking in over 12,000 pounds in contributions toward the evangelization and education of North American Natives. When Occom’s sponsor, Eleazar Wheelock, used much of the money to found Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1770, the SSPCK overseers of some of the funds declined to give Wheelock unrestricted access to the rest of it, since they—like Occom and others—disagreed with Wheelock’s use of the funds.

This unexpected offer of funds from the SSPCK caused Massachusetts ministers and humanitarian-minded civic leaders to spring into action. In 1787, they petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature for a charter, which was given on November 19, 1787, for a “Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians and Others in North America.” Largely Congregational, the SPGNA preceded the early revivals of the so-called Second Great Awakening in the 1790s. As such, it is not simply an example of a typical early nineteenth-century “evangelical” missionary or reform society (as perhaps with the founding of the ABCFM), but it did later benefit from and draw participation from revival-minded individuals. The SPGNA over time seemingly diverged theologically from the ABCFM and other conservative Protestant “evangelical” missionary societies. During the controversies over Unitarianism (the belief that only God the Father is fully God) and the ensuing church splits within Congregationalism, the SPGNA decided to draw equally from Unitarian and Trinitarian Congregational churches for its membership, a move that caused later commentators to assert that it had turned Unitarian, which was not entirely true.

"Norwich City, from the South," taken from History of Norwich, Connecticut, from its settlement in 1660 to January 1845, by Miss F.M. Caulkins (Norwich, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — “Norwich City, from the South,” taken from History of Norwich, Connecticut, from its settlement in 1660 to January 1845, by Miss F.M. Caulkins (Norwich, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But the SPGNA was also rooted in the colonial period. In 1762, New England humanitarians had tried to incorporate their own missionary society, “The Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians in North America.” Although the Massachusetts governor and legislature approved its formation, the Board of Trade and Plantation in London revoked its corporate charter in 1763, largely under pressure from the Anglican archbishop and King George III, who argued it would interfere with the Anglican SPG’s own missionary efforts in North America. This rejection would not quickly be forgotten. John Adams mentioned the interference of the SPG in his 1765 essay, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” and nearly 140 years later, in 1898, one SPGNA official suggested that perhaps this unilateral denial should have been mentioned in the Declaration of Independence: “He hath forbidden us to form societies for the conversion of the Indians.” The continuities between 1762 and 1787 were clear: the name of the society only changed slightly, and seven of the proposed original 1762 founding society members were listed among the twenty-one founding members of the 1787 society.

Studies of American foreign missions have often supposed a sharp beginning in the U.S. with the founding of the ABCFM in 1810. But American Protestant missionary efforts were deeply embedded in a proximate colonial past and usually trailed missionary efforts out of England. (And to be sure, Protestant missionary efforts lagged far behind Catholic ones for centuries.) That is to say, American missionary societies in the early republic are best understood as being intimately connected to both the colonial period and to European missionary efforts, particularly those in England and Germany. From the perspective of people on the ground, and from the longer vantage point of the historian, the ABCFM was simply yet another Protestant missionary society for work in “foreign” fields. In the years prior to the American Revolution, several main missionary societies were formed and operated out of the British Isles. These included: the New England Company (1649; rechartered in 1662; Independent/Congregationalist); the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (1698; Anglican); the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701; Anglican); and the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (1708; Presbyterian).

Consequently, Anglo-American men and women were no strangers to “foreign missions,” even in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Stories of Catholic missionaries circulated throughout the Atlantic, often involving caricatured methods used by Jesuits and Franciscans in the Americas to Christianize indigenous populations. English Protestants might have been critical of such activity (as conducted by Catholics), but they were nonetheless incredibly aware of it. Roger Williams, for example, in his Christenings Make Not Christians (1645), articulated (and criticized) a widely held caricature of global Catholic missions as falsely baptizing tens of thousands of Natives, a critique Cotton Mather and others repeated well into the eighteenth century.

But more positive models of global missionary efforts also circulated in the early eighteenth century. In the 1710s, missionary-minded Protestants in America and England eagerly read reports of the evangelistic efforts by pietistic Lutherans in the Danish colony of Tranquebar on the eastern coast of the sub-continent of India. Reports of the missionary successes there first circulated in 1709 as Propagation of the Gospel in the East: being an account of the success of two Danish missionaries, lately sent to the East-Indies, for the conversion of the heathens in Malabar, with several subsequent editions through 1718. Copies ofPropagation of the Gospel in the East reached Cotton Mather, the prolific, busybody Boston minister whose own correspondence included a far-flung range of European intellectuals. Mather promptly began corresponding with the author, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg. In 1718, John Ernest Grundler, another missionary in Tranquebar, sent Mather a Tamil New Testament.

Mohegan Church, Uncasville, Connecticut. Photograph by the author.

These foreign Protestant missionary efforts left a deep impression on Mather. When he was asked to preach a sermon before the NEC commissioners in 1720, Mather used a strategy that SPGNA sermons exhibited a century later: placing the evangelization of New England Natives alongside global Protestant efforts. While putting into print an admiring account of the efforts of John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew in New England, Mather included a description of the progress of the gospel in Tranquebar. His conviction that they were two parallel movements accomplishing the same goal must have been strengthened by actually holding in his hands the 1663 translation by John Eliot of the entire Bible into Massachusett/Wôpanâak and the 1715 Tamil New Testament from the opposite side of the globe. Mather celebrated this global Protestant missionary effort as the “glorious design of propagating our holy religion, in the Eastern as well as the Western, Indies.” English ministers and magistrates kept tabs on and participated in more general Protestant missionary activity in the eighteenth century, including the NEC, the SSPCK, the Anglican SPG, the Moravians, and the efforts of other smaller evangelistically minded denominations, such as early Methodism. These missionary societies and denominations employed hundreds of individuals over the century before the American Revolution, some of which (the SPG and Moravians especially) served in global contexts, outside of English-speaking regions.

The American Revolution put an end to much of the British-sponsored missionary activity in North America, especially in New England. The SPG was not welcome in the United States (particularly after the acrimonious debates over the Anglican attempts to install an American bishop in the 1760s, and the perceived role of the SPG), and the NEC largely redirected its funds to Canada after the American Revolution, although a very small trickle of money continued to older missionary locations in New England and New York until 1796. Beginning in the early 1790s, British Protestants began turning their eyes toward other foreign lands, especially those in the East Indies. In 1792, English Baptists formed the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen, and in 1795, the non-denominational London Missionary Society was founded. William Carey, one of the first missionaries sponsored by the Particular Baptist Society and sent to Calcutta, India, was especially influenced by the writings of colonial North American missionaries to Natives, including David Brainerd and John Eliot.

But American independence also stimulated humanitarian activity and organization in the United States. Even as American Protestants kept tabs on English missionary developments, by 1800, dozens of states, towns, and denominations had pulled together domestic aid and missionary societies that worked among local and distant populations. The earliest ones (after the SPGNA) included the Society of the United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (founded by the Moravians and incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1788), the New York Missionary Society (1796), the Northern Missionary Society (1797), the Philadelphia Missionary Society (1798), the Missionary Society of Connecticut (1797), and the Massachusetts Missionary Society (1799). The SPGNA stood as the earliest of such missionary societies, prompted into action by a Scottish foreign missionary society and enacted by local humanitarians who had a long history of colonial evangelization of Native nations.

In North America, the public revival of missionary efforts to Native Americans through the SPGNA after the American Revolution was surprisingly politicized in a variety of ways. On the one hand, these early missionary societies valorized the prior generations of English missionaries in New England—John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew Sr., Daniel Gookin, David Brainerd—whom they largely saw as successful in their efforts. The wider public saw it differently, however. Many Americans in New England viewed past missionary efforts as a waste of time and resources. Consequently, early SPGNA public notices and announcements had a defensive tone and quality to them, as if they were trying to win over a highly skeptical public. An SPGNA notice in theIndependent Chronicle in 1791 stated that it was “well aware of the difficulties, which attend the gospeling the Indians, and the prejudices against the attempt, which the expenditure of vast sums in the ineffectual pursuit of this object, have excited in the public mind.” SPGNA leaders countered such pessimism by proposing a “hitherto unattempted” methodology, that of educating Indian children in religion, practical trades, and “the various arts of civilization and domestic life.” In fact, however, nothing about this plan was new at all, as the SPGNA leaders must surely have known. Schools had been central to Native evangelistic efforts in New England from the mid-seventeenth century and were ongoing in various Indian communities in New England and New York, even as this SPGNA notice was being printed. Perhaps to win over a greater following (and funding), the SPGNA also spent considerable time describing the planned practical outreach to poor rural whites in New England, a plan they implemented in subsequent years.

The original 1787 seal of the society, with the biblical and symbolic theme of evangelism as gathering in the harvest. Cover, "Handbook of the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, 1787-1964," Richard D. Pierce, ed. (Boston, 1964). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — The original 1787 seal of the society, with the biblical and symbolic theme of evangelism as gathering in the harvest. Cover, “Handbook of the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, 1787-1964,” Richard D. Pierce, ed. (Boston, 1964). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In fact, one of the repeated themes from the reports and published sermons on the SPGNA in its first twenty years of operation was the intense difficulty—near impossibility—of successful Indian Christianization. And in 1804, when John Lathrop preached the first annual sermon to the members and interested parties of the SPGNA, he was surprisingly frank: “Although the Society has given all the aid in its power, towards the support of Missionaries among the Indians, it cannot say, that much good hath resulted from that part of its labours,” he confessed. Still, such dour assessments were almost always countered by optimism, in part by looking at past successes of missionaries, and by thinking about current global efforts by other denominations and societies. SPGNA leaders also justified their ongoing efforts by saying that even if only one soul was saved, the efforts would be worthwhile: “If the value of one soul is far greater than of all the treasures and glories of the world, surely the salvation of one, and especially of a number, must be an ample recompense for all the arduous and expensive means, which have been employed for its accomplishment.”

Some New England observers disagreed with Indian evangelization for other reasons, however: they saw it as deeply hypocritical. As the eminent statesman Samuel Dexter Jr. wrote to Peter Thacher on June 14, 1788, just one year after the founding of the SPGNA, “[The Indians] are now, as they ever have been, deceived and defrauded by public bodies, as well as individuals. And, while things remain so, should national, or particular governments, whether European or American, call upon their people to pray for the conversion of the Indians, it would be mocking of Heaven; and if attempts should be made by any of them to effect it by sending missionaries, it would be as irrational as for a cruel planter in the West Indies to discourse to his African slaves of the merciful and benign Spirit of the religion of Christ.” Most Native leaders would have agreed, as 200 years of prior critique of white colonialism had made clear. But Dexter was a minority voice on the issue, and West Indian planters and American land speculators alike found evangelization to be a useful tool in accomplishing their goals. And, despite his doubts, Dexter himself signed on as a member of the SPGNA and personally contributed to its work.

This public re-engagement with Indian missions had political resonances in other ways as well. The very year of the SPGNA’s founding, 1787, was the same year the Northwest Ordinance was signed, which triggered a decade-long battle of resistance against U.S. westward expansion by a wide collection of Native nations on the western edges of the United States. Article Three of the Northwest Ordinance contained impossibly idealistic language regarding the treatment of Native Americans:

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorised by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.

Despite professions to the contrary, the Northwest Territory ended up being a massive land grab that involved the invasion of Indian lands and the conquest of sovereign Indian nations. But the federal government’s vision for Native Americans in these territories very much lined up with the missionary fantasies of instilling “Religion, morality and knowledge,” along with good government, schools, and education. SPGNA leaders were well aware of this larger continental context and even quoted from the Northwest Ordinance. And in their original petition to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1787, the founders of the SPGNA highlighted the political importance of Native missions. Of widespread concern was the fact that “the British are practicing every art to induce the Indians to retire from among us, into the more interior parts of the continent, that they may secure to themselves exclusively the benefits of the fur trade, and their alliance in any future rupture.” The SPGNA, then, would counter these devious British designs by more securely allying Native nations within the boundaries of the United States to U.S. interests.

Title page, A Discourse, delivered before the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, at their Anniversary Meeting in Boston, November 3, 1808, by Abiel Holmes, D.D., Minister of the First Church in Cambridge (Boston, 1808). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

All of this sheds light on why local governments and the U.S. federal government actively promoted and funded missionary efforts among Indian nations in the early republic, particularly more numerous western ones. Likely the very first instance of this was the SPGNA, which for the first decade or so of its existence received 150 pounds each year directly from the state government of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Governor John Hancock signed his name (less famously, perhaps, than to the Declaration of Independence) to a proclamation in 1788 calling on state residents to “contribute according to their abilities” to the SPGNA. Later SPGNA sermons called on the Massachusetts legislature to renew their funding for Indian missions. In subsequent decades, the SPGNA even appealed directly to the U.S. Congress for aid in the education of Indian children, as it did in February 1817. Similarly, the ABCFM, founded in 1810, received $2,500 from the U.S. federal government each year, a standing commitment that dried up only in the 1830s when ABCFM missionaries defied the 1830 Removal Act. Fascinatingly, the SPGNA’s political importance was symbolized in its very meeting spaces at times: in the Massachusetts Senate chamber on January 3, 1788, and in the Suffolk County courthouse in May of that year.

After the revolution, Americans looked two directions simultaneously: westward and globally in a growing spectrum of “foreign.” For the SPGNA, interest in Native Americans remained strong, but this interest shifted noticeably over time from local New England Native groups who were (wrongly) seen as largely invisible, unimportant, and dying out, to Native nations that were perceived to be larger, more militarily potent, less Christianized, and more important politically. In the early years of its existence, SPGNA efforts focused (somewhat selectively) on Natives in Maine, on Martha’s Vineyard, in Rhode Island, and in New York. In most cases, these were simply extensions of prior missionary outposts started in the colonial period under the NEC. The relative disdain for local Native groups can be felt even in the official sermons of the SPGNA. In 1808, Abiel Holmes addressed the members of the SPGNA and, after affirming the history of Native evangelization in New England by colonial missionaries, asserted that their focus should be elsewhere. “Where is the field of our labours?” Holmes queried, “Not in our neighbourhood, but in a distant wilderness.”

Even as early as 1814, SPGNA missionaries were sent to “Western Indians.” By 1843, the society deemed it “necessary to discontinue missions to the Indians of the Narragansett and other tribes, once flourishing but [then] rapidly disappearing in New England.” That same year, money was set aside to hire a Native preacher and to support a boarding school among the Cherokees in the southeast, indicating a more decisive turn to more remote Indian nations in North America (and, in some ways, more closely mirroring the work of the ABCFM among North American Natives). By 1883, SPGNA missionaries had served in distant regions such Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, western Canada, Washington State, and Dakota, among other places, in addition to East Coast locales.

In this way, international missionary societies seemingly envisioned the American Midwest and the western borderlands of North America as the outer fringes of “the world.” That is to say, the line between the global and the western U.S. was increasingly blurred. It is not surprising that American missionary societies should so easily conflate American Indian and foreign missions. After all, for most of the colonial period, North America was very much a foreign mission field for British missionaries, as the name of the Anglican SPG indicated (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts). Later observers noted this as well. In 1860, S. M. Worcester stated of early New England missions to Natives: “And now, what classifying or denominating term is it proper to apply to the missions of the first settlers of New England and their immediate descendants? Were not all these ‘foreign parts?’ Was it not all heathen ground, and so considered for a long period by Christians on both sides of the ‘900 league ocean?'”

Title page, The American Universal Geography, Or, A View of the Present State of All the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Republics in the Known World, and of the United States of America in Particular: In Two Parts, Vol. 1, by Jedidiah Morse (Boston, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

One person’s foreign is another person’s domestic, of course, but the notion of American Indians as belonging to a foreign “other” land was reinforced in the colonial period and aided in the blurring of lines by American independence between the North American west and the rest of the globe. To East Coast humanitarians in 1790 (as well as to soldiers who fought on the ground), the North American continent west of the Ohio River was an entirely foreign land, with large Native groups and sporadic outposts of Spanish, French, and English traders and old military forts. Even in the 1830s Sarah L. Huntington, who was then working among the Mohegans in Connecticut, noted to a friend regarding the views of the ABCFM, “You know all the Indians are regarded by that body as a foreign nation.”

In fact, the ways that East Coast humanitarians surveyed, described, and assessed the moral vacuity of international lands echoed the descriptions and language regarding the relatively unorganized and unsettled western regions of the North American continent. As Amy DeRogatis has argued in Moral Geography, cartographic enterprises and publications by missionary-minded New Englanders always contained within them normative assessments of morality or its apparent lack. Jedidiah Morse, in his popular The American Universal Geography, quoted the 1787 Northwest Ordinance regarding the need for religious and educational order to be brought to that vast territory: “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Morse might have found the culture and civilizations of China and India to be inherently more interesting than and superior to those of western Natives, but they were (in his view) still in need of the same religious salvation and moral uplift that only Christianity could bring.

Within SPGNA reports and activities, one can observe the distinct shift in missionary strategy toward global awareness that was soon replicated in the dozens upon dozens of various missionary societies, most particularly in the ABCFM after its founding in 1810. Although in the early years of the SPGNA global evangelistic efforts were not necessarily a pressing concern for Boston humanitarians, within two decades that had changed entirely. Starting in 1804, the SPGNA sponsored public annual sermons for members and a wider public that were intended to raise support for and interest in a wide variety of Protestant missionary efforts, of which the SPGNA was a part. In the first decade of these annual public sermons, two main themes stand out: first, an homage to colonial precedents for Native evangelization, and second, an effusive recognition of a far broader, global context for missionary efforts. Regarding a clear colonial heritage, Abiel Holmes’s sermon in 1808 lauded “The pious and successful labours of the Mayhews, the Bournes, and the Sergeants, of Wheelock, Brainard, Hawley, and Kirkland”—all colonial missionaries—along with the one who stood the tallest, John Eliot.

"Map of the World from the Best Authorities," engraved by Amos Doolittle (Boston, 1796). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — “Map of the World from the Best Authorities,” engraved by Amos Doolittle (Boston, 1796). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But the strongest theme of these early SPGNA sermons was global Christian missionary efforts, from the first century CE to the early nineteenth century. John Lathrop’s inaugural SPGNA sermon in 1804 placed the SPGNA in a longer heritage of Protestant missions (primarily in England and Scotland). He also connected the work of the SPGNA to the global efforts of these prior missionary societies, including work among Indians in the western regions of the U.S. (near the Mississippi) and Natives in Paraguay. This theme continued in 1805, when Levi Frisbie, the pastor of the First Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, preached a sermon before the SPGNA in which he declared that the New Testament command to “Go teach all nations; go preach the gospel to every creature,” extended “to the swarthy African, the plundering Arab, the roving Tartar, and the wandering Savage who traverses the wilds of America, from the desert plains of Patagonia to the dreary mountains of the frozen pole.”

Similarly, in 1810—the same year the ABCFM was formed—Jedidiah Morse delivered a lengthy address to the members of the SPGNA that captured this increasingly capacious vision for how the SPGNA fit into a much larger narrative of Christian history. Starting with the emergence of Christianity in the first century, Morse took his hearers and readers on a whirlwind tour of global Christian expansion up through his own day and age. Christian missionaries—and, notably, “Christian and civilized nations”—had slowly been spreading over formerly “Unknown Lands” in the Americas, spreading the light of “science and religion” over those “dark regions.” Tellingly, Morse placed the SPGNA into a seamless continuum of global missionary activity. For Morse, there was no sharp division between the North American continent and the rest of the world; in many senses, both were foreign fields of sorts. Morse seemed especially admiring of the Moravians, who were serving as missionaries in the Americas, the Caribbean, the West Indies, and other global locations. Within his own lifetime, Morse noted that missionaries were being sent out from Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Holland, and the United States to serve in foreign fields.

Perhaps more controversially, Morse believed that the proliferation of missionary societies between 1790 and 1810 indicated that God was “preparing the world for some grand revolution.” And what, in fact, would such a “grand revolution” look like? According to Morse, it would involve:

a more extensive commercial intercourse among the nations; by wards, conquests, and revolutions; by raising up a modern Alexander [the Great], to subjugate a large portion of the world; by an increase and diffusion of knowledge derived from travellers, and enterprises for discovery; especially by means of Missionaries, who are already scattered in every part of the world, and every day are increasing in number, and exploring some new region; not only learning the languages of the nations, but communicating the knowledge of their own; by all these and other means, which Divine providence may ordain, may not the English and French languages become to the world, what the Latin and Greek languages were before the Christian era?

Morse’s “grand revolution,” in other words, was nothing short of an anticipated program in cultural, religious, linguistic, and militaristic imperialism, emanating from the United States and western Europe. And it wasn’t just Morse’s idea. In an 1813 sermon before SPGNA members, Joshua Bates proposed as his central thesis (as the later published version indicated in all capitals): “THAT THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS DESIGNED ULTIMATELY TO PREVAIL THROUGH THE WHOLE WORLD, AND HAVE A GENERAL INFLUENCE ON THE CHARACTER AND CONDITION OF ALL MANKIND.”

Map, "New England by Ashur Adams," taken from A Compendious History of New England, Designed for Schools and Private Families, by Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and Rev. Elijah Parish, A.M. (Charlestown, Mass., 1804). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — Map, “New England by Ashur Adams,” taken from A Compendious History of New England, Designed for Schools and Private Families, by Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and Rev. Elijah Parish, A.M. (Charlestown, Mass., 1804). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But the SPGNA didn’t simply shift its efforts overseas in light of the spreading enthusiasm for global missions. Instead, they inserted themselves and their continental focus into the emerging global drama of Protestant missions, primarily by directly connecting world missionary effort and “domestic” missions like their own. Joshua Bates, in his 1813 SPGNA sermon, asserted that “the different immediate objects of missionary societies all unite in one grand object. Whether, therefore, you contribute, to send missionaries to heathen lands, or to supply the destitute with the preached gospel in our own country—whether you aid in translating the scriptures into other languages, or furnishing them for the poor, who speak our own language, you are still promoting the same glorious cause.” And Elijah Parish, in his 1814 SPGNA sermon, after giving a little mini-tour of the globe highlighting nations that do not “know God” (including Natives of Pacific islands, Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetans, along with the “sovereign Lama”), asserted: “Nor are we the only people engaged in this good work. All Christendom seems to be roused by the same impulse. From Petersburg to Calcutta, we hear the same strains of Christian benevolence.”

SPGNA leaders urged action, since they strongly believed that evangelization of North American Natives would contribute directly to the unfolding of a global divine plan. “The Gospel is now spreading with incredible rapidity, into the dark recesses of Europe,” Abiel Holmes told the SPGNA members in 1808, “traversing the immense regions of Asia; and penetrating even the inhospitable deserts of Africa. . . . . [H]ave we not just cause to expect an universal propagation of the Gospel? Yes: The time will come, and will not tarry, when the Pagan idolater shall cast his idols to the moles and to the bats; when the Indian Powows shall be silenced by the songs of Zion; when the Vedas of the Hindu, the Shasters of the Gentoo, and the Koran of the Mahometan, shall be exchanged for the HOLY BIBLE; when the religion of the Brahma, the Institutes of Menu, the rites of the Lama, the Zend of the Zoroaster, and even the laws of Confucius, shall be superseded by the glorious Gospel of the blessed God. The Lord will assuredly hasten it in his time.” By placing their own efforts alongside global missionary endeavors, SPGNA leaders inserted themselves into an imagined global evangelistic drama.

Broadside, "Commonwealth of Massachusetts," by John Hancock, esquire (Boston, 1788). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — Broadside, “Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” by John Hancock, esquire (Boston, 1788). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But this wasn’t simply a rhetorical stance. Although missionary efforts to Natives in the early republic have often been interpreted as separate from global, foreign missions, at many points they intersected, silently, intentionally, and importantly. In 1818, Jason Chater, a Baptist missionary sent out from England to Ceylon, sent his copy of the 1663 Indian Bible (translated by John Eliot and Native linguists into Massachusett/Wôpanâak) as a gift to the Society of Inquiry Respecting Missions at the Andover Theological Seminary.

Other examples abound, including the ABCFM-funded Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. Founded in 1816, its opening was inspired by the increasing number of Native Hawaiians that the China trade brought to New England coastal towns. The first class of students in 1817 included seven Hawaiians, two Bengalis, an Abenaki (New England) Indian, and two white New England youths who later were sent to Hawaii as missionaries. By early 1819, the student population included individuals from Canton, Tahiti, Malaysia, and Indonesia, along with a sizable population of Cherokees and Choctaws from the American southeast. Notably, however, six additional students were from the Iroquois Confederacy in New York: three Oneidas, two Stockbridge Natives, and one Tuscarora. SPGNA missionaries had served among the Iroquois for almost three decades by 1819 (particularly at New Stockbridge and with the Oneidas), and the NEC, SSPCK, and Eleazar Wheelock had promoted and sponsored schools and churches in Iroquoia for half a century before that. In particular, the two Stockbridge students at the Foreign Mission School in 1819 hailed from New Stockbridge, New York—precisely where SPGNA-sponsored missionaries had served for many years.

In other ways, too, these two histories and movements were connected. The Mohegan Church, which sits today on Mohegan lands next to the Thames River in south central Connecticut, was partially the result of an early 1830s campaign by Sarah L. Huntington and other interested individuals. Partially imposed upon and partially welcomed by the Mohegans (especially Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon and her daughter Lucy Tantaquidgeon Teecomwas), the little church building became an important symbol of the Mohegans’ civilization and Christianization—enough, at least, to stave off removal, by some accounts. In 1832—just after the official opening of the Mohegan Church—this little Indian chapel became a launching pad for global Protestant missions. In that year, a crowd gathered at the church for a commissioning and send-off sermon for a group of Protestant (white) missionaries under the auspices of the ABCFM heading to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). A small offering was collected of only several dollars, but it marked the beginning of Mohegan support of ABCFM missionaries, which led to the door-to-door sales of hazelnuts by a young Mohegan girl a decade later. And Sarah L. Huntington (Smith), who helped found the Mohegan Church in 1831, shortly thereafter departed as a missionary to Syria with her husband in 1833.

"The Reverend Samson Occom," lithographer unknown. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “The Reverend Samson Occom,” lithographer unknown. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

So closely intertwined were the missionary efforts to Natives and global indigenous peoples, in fact, that when Norwich, Connecticut, leaders recounted the missionaries sent out from their town in the 1840s, the list blended seamlessly from the missionaries to Native Americans (starting with Samuel Kirkland in 1766 to the Oneidas in New York) to western North America (Cherokee and Oregon), and finally, globally. Missionaries named farther down the list included ones sent to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Ceylon, Madira, Syria, Africa, and Singapore.

Although the important role of the SPGNA in galvanizing foreign missions has been overlooked in recent decades, this has not always been the case. In a 1937 sesquicentennial publication, George E. E. Lindquist noted that the SPGNA “may with apparent justice lay claim to be a forerunner of missionary organizations, established in the early part of the 19th century (several of which have celebrated their centennial in recent years). . . In fact, the modern missionary movement came into being, indirectly at least, as a result of the impetus furnished for the conversion of the North American Indians.” Twentieth-century commentators continued to see the SPGNA as the legacy of colonial missionaries, even as they recognized that the contexts had changed dramatically. In 1933, George Hinman published a study of missionary work among Natives for the SPGNA, in which he noted: “This psychology of a subjugated race constitutes one of the most serious obstacles in the way of the work by the government and the churches to bring the Indian into a homogenous American life. The problem is not as simple as it was when Roger Williams, and John Eliot and David Zeisberger began their work with the Indians.” Similarly, Lindquist’s sesquicentennial publication included reference to John Eliot and an image of Samson Occom.

Nineteenth-century global missionary societies—including the SPGNA—had self-consciously placed themselves as the spiritual descendants of colonial evangelistic efforts among Natives. But there was a deep irony in this claim to spiritual heritage, for even as these global efforts built upon early New England activities, the evangelistic project in New England was far from complete (as defined by whites, at least). In many ways, the turn to global missions was in fact spurred by the possibility of more productive prospects overseas than among the somewhat religiously recalcitrant Natives on the East Coast who were largely Christianized and had been repeatedly evangelized for almost two hundred years. The leaders of the ABCFM certainly understood this to be the case. In its second annual report, the ABCFM noted that although there were still “many millions” of unconverted Natives in North America, and the attempts to fully evangelize them “have been attended with so many discouragements,” the solution was to shift missionary efforts toward the “more promising field” of southern Asia without entirely giving up on Native evangelization. The SPNGA leaders agreed regarding the difficulty of Indian evangelization, although they never shifted their primary focus away from Native Americans. Instead, they placed their own work in a larger expanse of foreign and even global missions, even though they never actually sent their own missionaries to those more “more promising” global fields.

In the end, the idea of a Mohegan Christian Indian youth selling common hazelnuts to white Norwich residents to support global Christian missions may indeed be the completion of a full circle rather than an anomaly to be explained. The American Protestant turn to “foreign” missions was built on the back of a far longer history of Euro-American Protestant missions to North American Indians, and indeed, often in conjunction with Natives themselves. The SPGNA, as Lindquist noted, stood in between these two worlds—colonial and early republic, Native and global—and, indeed, facilitated the expansion of one into the other.

Frontispiece portrait of Mrs. Sarah Lanman (Huntington) Smith, painted by Samuel L. Waldo, engraved by John Sartain, taken from Memoir of Mrs. Sarah Lanman Smith, late of the mission in Syria, Under the Direction of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by Edward W. Hooker, pastor of the First Congregational Church, Bennington, VT (Boston, 1839). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Edward E. Andrews for his insightful comments on a previous draft of this essay, Nan Wolverton for her help with the selection of the images, and the staff at the Newberry Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, and the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum for their guidance and aid.

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