AN INDIAN PREACHER IN ENGLAND
Latest Volume of Dartmouth College Publications
AN INDIAN PREACHER IN ENG-LAND. Being letters and diaries relating to the mission of the Reverend Samson Occom and the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker to collect funds in England for the benefit of Eleazar Wheelock's Indian Charity School from which grew Dartmouth College. Edited from the Originals by Leon Burr Richardson. Dartmouth College Manuscript Series Number Two. Published by Dartmouth College Publications, Hanover, N. H., 1933.
By the Spring o£ 1764 Eleazar Wheelock's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, had been struggling along for ten years. "Struggling" is the right word, for while Wheelock had been wholly successful in maintaining the school with a yearly attendance of from fifteen to twenty of the "tawney brethren," he was plainly out of pocket, and his "Grand Design" was ready for what the present day publicist vulgarly calls high-pressure salesmanship.
George Whitefield, the puissant English divine, was then upon one of his many tours of America. He had worked hard for Wheelock in New York and elsewhere in the collection of subscriptions for the Indian school, and it was probably he who first suggested to Wheelock that a tour to England, properly conducted, would be fruitful. The Mohegan Indian, Samson Occom, whom Wheelock had taken under his care in the winter of 1743, was admirably fit to the purpose. Occom, brought to Wheelock's door by his mother when a boy of twenty, had been the most docile of pupils. In turn he had become schoolmaster, ordained minister, and itinerant missionary. Just lately he had been remarkably successful in a series of missions to the Oneidas of central New York. So it is no wonder that on March 30th of this year, 1764, Charles Jeffrey Smith should write to Wheelock: "When the Indian War is a little abated, would it not be best to send Mr. Occum with another Person home a begging? an Indian minister in England might get a Bushel of Money for the School . . . ." England was still home to the Colonists, and England had money.
Occom, then, was the man o£ the hour. The difficulty was: who to send with him? At first Whitefield himself thought of taking Occom, and at another time Whitefield urged Wheelock to accompany the Indian. Other possibilities were John Brainerd and Charles Jeffrey Smith, but the choice finally fell upon the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker, pastor of the church at Norwich. Whitaker, to say the least, was no negative choice. A man of erratic temperament, contentious and charming at once, he was forever restlessly seeking new fields for his talents. He was wild to go, as his stumblingly eager letters to Wheelock testify.
The upshot was that Occom and Whitaker sailed from Boston for England on December 23, 1765, armed with formidable credentials and recommendations. (These were shortly to be printed in London as part of the third of Wheelock's Narratives, which told the story of the school and its missions.) They were well prepared, their only worry being the ominous hostility of the Boston Board (representing the Company for Propagation of the Gospel in New England) whose differences with Wheelock were growing. Part of their passage money, incidentally, was paid by the Boston patriot, John Hancock.
They were in England and Scotland for two years, and when they returned in the Spring of 1768, they had secured for Wheelock's school net proceeds of eleven thousand pounds. This was the money which founded Dartmouth College, although by one of the frequent ironies of history, such an achievement was not then even remotely contemplated by the leaders arid contributors of the project. There was, it must be plain, no deliberate disallocation of funds. Wheelock put the English money to the use for which it was intended—the support of the Indian Charity School, which continued to exist for some years after the college was founded. Without this backing, however, it is exceedingly doubtful if Wheelock's mind and courage would have leapt to the audacity of founding a college for whites in the New Hampshire wilderness, nor for that matter, would he have secured a charter from Governor Wentworth. Samson Occom was appalled by the outcome of his efforts. "As for my part," he wrote to his master on July 24, 1771, "I went purely for the poor Indians. .... I am very jealous that instead of your Semenary Becoming alma Mater, she will be too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees " It is clear that the relentless process of History was too much for one lonely and embittered Indian,—as indeed it has been too much for the whole redskin race.
In "An Indian Preacher in England," Professor Leon Burr Richardson presents the documents of the Occom-Whitaker expedition. Here we read the many letters of the leaders—Whitefield, Wheelock, Whitaker, Occom—and the English diary of Occom, so tantalizingly incomplete. To organize this material and steer a coherent way hrough its intricacies, to identify places and names, many of them profoundly obscure, by succinct and unobtrusive footnotes, to keep the narrative unimpeded by overdocumentation,—in a word, to make a beginning, a middle, and an end out of the formidable collection in the archives was no mean task, a task calling for luminous scholarship, for patience, and—not least—for a sense of humor and proportion. Dr. Richardson supplies these qualities. His editing is admirable.
One turns the pages of this book with growing excitement, and the narrative becomes, not merely the record of a campaign for funds—that all too common activity of human kind, but a record of personal revelation. More than one hundred and fifty years have passed since the enterprise of Whitaker and Occom, and from such a vantage point, we can afford to smile a little at some of the aspects of this round unvarnished tale.
The tortured syntax of these earnest men!—their fantastic metaphors and fulsome ejaculations! (The reviewer, occupied at present with the examination of Occom's literary remains, entertains, not without delight, the notion that Occom the Indian wrote a more understandable English than the college graduates who sponsored him.) .... The air of intrigue which surrounded the expedition, the jealousy between sects, and the rumor, spread by the Boston Board, that Wheelock was representing Occom as a Mohawk but lately brought out of gross paganism The shocked naivete of Occom confronted by the glitter of the great city: "the Sight of the Nobility put me in mind of Dives and the Rich Gluton, and the poor reminded me of Lazarus—o Lord God Amighty let not my Eyes be Dazled with the glitering Toys of this World, but let me be fixt and my Soul Long after Jx Who is the only Pearl of great Price." .... The temerity of Whitaker in taking for himself the task of inoculating Occom for smallpox, and his well nigh incredible project, with one John Bradney, for going into the business of inoculating, up and down England. .... The imprudent scheme of Whitaker and Nathaniel Eells for remitting the proceeds of the English fund in the form of goods upon which they themselves might reap a gain, a project which brought down upon them the sharp disapproval of the English Trust and the consequent embarrassment of Wheelock The loneliness of Occom which invested every line he wrote home, and the bland patronage of Whitaker writing at intervals that "Occom behaves well," as though he had a strange creature on a tether All this gives savor and body to the book.
At the end Occom and Whitaker must have disagreed, for we hear of them working apart from one another, and apparently they returned on different boats. In reviewing the record, one concludes that the book is properly titled. The English venture was a personal victory for Occom, and it was for him, rather than Whitaker, that the English Trustees retained a warm regard. Yet Whitaker, too, had his points. Without his energy, his sense for seizing the main chance, his alertness to outwit his adversaries, the subscription list could never have attained its very respectable length.
Arrived home again, Occom fell upon dark days. He differed bitterly with Wheelock upon the disposition of the funds, he found himself without a job, and he took lamentably to drink. Like many another, he felt the harshness of being cast off from those whom he had served. He was unresponsive to Wheelock's further schemes for his services. But he was yet to be a Moses to his own people, leading them out of Mohegan to a new land, and Wheelock, at Hanover, was to build greatly with the money that Occom and Whitaker had so strenuously collected.
