Experience Mayhew's Indian Converts

Up until this point I have had little to say about the Wampanoag Indians, but they bear more than just a mention in Algonkian Church History. The Wampanoags were a community of Christian Algonkians that was established long before King Philip's War and lasted long after the Stockbridge Indians left Massachusetts.


In 1727, Experience Mayhew's collection of Native biographies came out under the title Indian Converts, or Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard, in New-England.

A new scholarly edition of Mayhew's book came out recently with an introduction by Laura Leibman, a professor of English and Humanities at Reed College.

Thanks to somebody at Reed College (probably the librarians), many digital images, several study guides, and more are available online as the Indian Converts Collection.

Here's a few links to images and other resources in the Reed College Indian Converts Collection:

Chapel at Gay Head
Sampson's Hill Meeting House
South Mashapee School

A small number of grammar school students had the opportunity to pursue further education at the Harvard Indian College.

Is it possible that some Indians who claimed to be Christians were just "playing along" in order to get something from the whites? Many certainly did. It is easier to understand those kinds of issues in light of the Reed College Indian Converts Collection's study guide on magistrates and guardians.

There is also an important study guide on "Island Christianity."

God Is Red: A Native View of Religion - or Should it be "One Native's View of Religion"?

Vine Deloria's God is Red: A Native View of Religion is essentially an opposing viewpoint to Algonkian Church History. Nevertheless, both can still be (and in my opinion are) "good reads."

In God is Red and his other books, I have to wonder if Deloria is attacking Christianity per se or is he only attacking the beliefs and practices of certain white American Christians. Deloria paints with broad strokes, which also raises the question of whether he actually thinks that he can speak for all Native Americans. Perhaps he made a conscious decision to employ a more powerful all-emcompassing rhetoric, and realized there might be exceptions to the rules he was laying out.

But are the Stockbridge Mohicans and their missionaries, the Brothertown Indians, the praying Indians of the 1600's, and many other Christian Indians merely exceptions to Vine Deloria's rules? Academics should consider that question when they read Deloria.

The Role of the Lost Tribes Theory in Promoting Missions

Right: the Pilgrims make a treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags.



As you may recall, many whites and at least some Indians once believed that Algonkian Indians were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Something that James De Jong's As the Waters Cover the Sea does well is to explain what that "lost tribes theory" did for missions to those Indians. One might say that it motivated whites to support mission work. Many believed that the conversion of Native Americans would lead to the Chilead, or Millennium (a one-thousand-year period in which Christ would reign over a peaceful earth).

"...many leading Puritans in England and America wrote and endorsed missionary propaganda in the 1640's and 1650's. Their support was predicated on the belief that through missions, the glorious gospel day would dawn. It should be noted that this faith was based on many Old and New Testament passages of hope and not on a few select verses" De Jong, page 55.

Those verses included Psalm 72:8, Isaiah 49:6, Matthew 24:14, Mark 16:15, and Revelations 21:21.

However, as you may recall, things went downhill with King Philip's War in 1676. By that time, the lost tribes theory was not as widely believed. De Jong says (page 64) that scholars had a variety of ideas about the origin of the American Indians at that time.

I know of at least one person who believes in the Lost Tribes Theory to this very day.

The Peak of Christianity Among Indians in New England

In an article posted to the website of The New Yorker magazine, Jill Lepore named the "Massachusetts Psalter" (see its title page above) as one of "The Top Ten Books of 1709." Lepore explains that the psalter is a "book of psalms, translated into Algonquian, and set into type by a Nipmuck Indian named James Printer."


Daniel Gookin was a missionary in the 1600's. According to his reports, there were over 1400 "praying Indians" on Martha's Vineyard and another 1100 Native Christians in Massachusetts Bay in 1674 (Historical Collections of Indians in New England, 1792, cited on page 46 of De Jong's As the Waters Cover the Sea).

Gookin somehow estimated a total of 3600 Christian Indians in Massachusetts at that time. However, historian Alden Vaughan reviewed a number of documents, including Gookin's, and estimated that 2500 was a more accurate number. Furthermore, according to Vaughan, one out of every five Indians in New England in 1674 was a Christian.

De Jong explains why Algonkian Christianity never reached higher numbers than that:

Early in the summer of 1675, for motives still being debated by historians, the Wampanoag sachem known as King Philip and his allies from three other Indian tribes attacked the colonists and their Indian allies. In a savage, year-long war in which an estimated five thousand Indians and ten percent of colonial forces were killed. Over thirty years of mission work was damaged irreparably..... Hundreds of Christian Indians were killed in the war and countless others died from hunger and exposure suffered on Deer Island in Boston Bay, onto which they had been herded by apprehensive colonists. Only four of the fourteen towns survived the conflict (pages 46-47).

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: "Come Over and Help Us"

As James De Jong and other authors have observed, the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (see above) depicted an Indian who was saying "come over and help us." I will not bother to repeat what others have observed that that statement may represent in terms of ethnocentricity. Instead, I want to point out, as De Jong does (on page 32 of As the Waters Cover the Sea), that "come over and help us" is a Biblically inspired statement. It comes from Acts 16:9:

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: There stood a man of Macedonia and prayed him, saying 'Come over to Macedonia and help us.'

The point is not whether or not the American Indians ever asked for missionaries, instead, the point is that the Massachusetts Bay Colony was incorporated under the pretense of helping the native Algonkian-speaking people, or at least it was founded under the pretense of converting those natives to the Christian religion.

Although there were exceptions (notably John Eliot's work and the towns of "praying Indians"), the tone that was set in colonial New England was more about improving the whites' standard of living than about mission work. Here's what Patrick Frazier said about this topic:

Converting the American natives to Christianity had ostensibly been the principal aim of the Massachusetts Bay settlement, according to the charter of 1628. A century later some believed that this aim had been forgotten. Solomon Stoddard, a respected clergyman, suggested in 1723 that recent epidemics, Indian wars, and Indian alliances with the French might be signs of God's anger with the English for failing to spread the gospel among the natives (The Mohicans of Stockbridge, page 18).

James De Jong's "As the Waters Cover the Sea"

One aspect of Algonkian church history that we've largely neglected so far is called missiology. Missiology is the study of church missions. I consider missiology to be a problematic area of study for two reasons: 1)things that were written about Christian missions in early America were almost always written by whites who had certain biases or prejudices and 2)on the other hand, the current conventional wisdom (not discouraged by academic historians) is to dismiss the early American missionaries as ethnocentric if not downright pernicious.

Unfortunately, there were pernicious missionaries, but let us not forget that many of the explorers, traders, and government officials were also pernicious. White culture as a whole, not the Christian church specifically, is what American Indian nations crumbled under. And if you've been reading this blog regularly, you're probably aware that missionaries did do things for Indians that benefited them in this world.

Fortunately I've been able to find an excellent book which addresses some aspects of early American missiology, As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millenial Expectations in the Rise of Anglo-American Missions, 1640-1810, by James De Jong. As the title suggests, the book is about how the world view of American whites motivated their mission work. In one of my earliest posts, I briefly discussed millenialism and its role in the first Algonkian missions. De Jong's book takes that into much greater depth and we'll consider it thoroughly in the coming posts.

Reformation Heritage Books has this to say about As the Waters Cover the Sea:

James De Jong’s dissertation sure-footedly guides us through the complex relation of millennial expectations and Anglo-American missiology from the Puritan age to the beginning of the nineteenth century. He shows how millennial hopes varied throughout this period from an Adventist type of premillennialism to a low-keyed postmillennialism. Nevertheless, De Jong concludes that these anticipations often balance themselves out somewhere between other-worldly and secularized hopes and between the temporal and eternal aspects of salvation. This balance enabled believers to engage in mission work confidently yet realistically, setting a viable pattern for us to follow today as we continue to look to Christ in hope, drawing our vision of humanity and missiology from His word.

Death of the Tribal Church: Keeping the Faith

Conclusion of the Death of the Tribal Church Series
A series of posts about the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans

I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History, 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"
IV. Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?
V. Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?
VI. The ABCFM Pulls out of Stockbridge
VII. The Citizen Party Makes a Request
VII. Jeremiah Slingerland Keeps on Preaching

Today's post: Keeping the Faith




This 1878 map shows the Stockbridge Reservation shrunk to 1/4 its original size. Contrary to what some say, the shrinking of this reservation cannot entirely be blamed on the Congressman/Lumber Barron Philetus Sawyer. The Indian party leaders who made closed-room deals with Sawyer (Jeremiah Slingerland as much as anybody) are also responsible.


Reverend Slingerland's death appears to have devastated his Presbyterian congregation. The three Presbyterian ministers sent to serve the tribe between 1884 and 1907 stayed for an average of only about a year. But even before Slingerland's death, the era of a unified tribal church for the Stockbridge Mohicans had already passed. Led by Stephen Gardner, some of Slingerland's political opponents (citizen party families) already had a preference for Roman Catholicism. While their neighbors, the Menominees had a long association with the Catholics, many of the Stockbridges would insist on remaining Protestant. Among them were leaders like William C. Davids and Ed Sprague who sought out Lutheran ministers in the area in 1892, giving rise not only to Immanuel Mohican Lutheran Church, but also to a Lutheran boarding school. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, there was no going back to having one church for all of the Stockbridge Mohicans.

One hundred and twenty-five years after Jeremiah Slingerland's death, there is still a Presbyterian church on the reservation. While Presbyterianism has survived, Christianity as a whole has done better. Now over one hundred and sixty years after the ABCFM withdrew its support of the Stockbridge Mohicans' mission, my estimate is that church attendance on the reservation is comparable to national averages.


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This is the last of a series of seven posts.

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Some serious issues have been covered in this series of posts.
One is the issue of white mission societies being unwilling to promote or encourage independence from Indian churches.

I made it a point to stick to the facts:
But in this case much of what we know is "He said, she said" material. Many of the facts we have are rather subjective statements, the perceptions of Cutting Marsh and Jeremiah Slingerland. I don't think either was dishonest. What Marsh saw as a "riot," Slingerland saw as an event where "excitement prevailed" but there was "no fighting, save one."

Race, religion, culture, politics, personal ownership and thrift... these are just some of the controversial issues that this series of posts has touched on. Your comments are appreciated.

Death of the Tribal Church: Jeremiah Slingerland Keeps on Preaching

Death of the Tribal Church Series
A series of posts about the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans
I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History, 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"
IV. Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?
V. Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?
VI. The ABCFM Pulls out of Stockbridge
VII. The Citizen Party Makes a Request


VIII. Today's post:
Jeremiah Slingerland Keeps on Preaching




The Winnebago Presbytery today covers this area (northeast Wisconsin and adjoining counties). Meetings that had an impact on the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans were held at Neenah and Weyauwega. Also highlighted in purple is the location of the Stockbridge's Shawano County reservation.


The tribe had kept the faith without missionaries before and they would again in Shawano County. Informal worship services were held at the Slingerlands' home until Methodists came into the area and organized the first church on the new reservation in 1863 or 1864. Ironically, Jeremiah Slingerland, an unordained Indian preacher, essentially served as a missionary to whites in the frontier town of Shawano for four years. As of the summer of 1859 he was preaching either on the reservation or in Shawano every Sunday (letter from Slingerland to Electa Candy, 7/21/1859, John C. Adams Papers). The first white minister didn't arrive in Shawano until 1863 (booklet celebrating the 125th anniversary of the First Presbyterian Church in Shawano, page 1).

The Stockbridge Mohicans had a long history of Calvinist Christianity. All their missionaries right up to Cutting Marsh and Jeremiah Slingerland had been either Presbyterians or Congregationalists (and during these times there weren't major doctrinal differences between the two denominations). In his heart, Slingerland never was a Methodist, but because Methodists cooperated with Calvinists, he became licensed as a preacher of the Methodist Episcoal Church.

Then on January 31st, 1866, Slingerland traveled to the annual meeting of the Presbytery of Winnebago in Neenah. After being examined in "Experimental Religion, ancient languages, church history, and natural sciences," he was finally ordained a Presbyterian minister - more than twenty years after he graduated from the seminary (minutes of the Presbytery of Winnebago).

On August 28th, 1867, at a presbytery meeting in Weyauwega, Reverend Slingerland proposed that a Presbyterian church be organized for the Stockbridge Mohicans. The new Presbyterian church was given $200 in financial aid from the Presbyterian "Board of Domestic Missions" (minutes of the Presbytery of Winnebago). However, due to the continued partisan tribal politics and the lack of farmable land on the reservation, this new congregation was considerably smaller than previous congregations had been.

When Reverend Slingerland died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1884, the Presbytery of Winnebago eulogized him as

an intelligent , able, and devoted minister of Christ. The faithful servant of his tribe... watchful and efficient in their behalf.. [who] identified himself with their poverty and their wrongs, he has stood among them as a true shepherd leading them in the way of life (minutes of the Presbytery of Winnebago, 7/9/1884).

The series will continue.

Death of the Tribal Church: the Citizen Party Makes a Request

Death of the Tribal Church Series
A series of blogposts about the Stockbridge Mohicans and their relationship with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History, 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"
IV. Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?
V. Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?
VI. The ABCFM Pulls out of Stockbridge

VII: Today's post:
The Citizen Party Makes a Request




This modern-day Lenape elder is doing a switch dance. This isn't necessarily the same kind of dancing that the Munsees that came to the new Shawano County reservation were doing at that time.



A new treaty made in 1856 was intended to bring together the Indian Party, the citizen Party, and other Indians, including Munsees, on some land purchased for them from the Menominees in what is now Shawano County, Wisconsin. Since the new reservation was purchased entirely with Indian party funds, much of the Indian party refused to move to the new reservation. However, Jeremiah and Sarah Slingerland made the move in February of 1857, while other Indian party leaders were still protesting (letter from Sarah Slingerland to J.N. Davidson, 9/19/1890, quoted in Davidson, page 55).

The citizen party was in power on the Shawano County reservation and within three weeks of Slingerland's arrival they sent a letter to the ABCFM in which they claimed their political troubles had finally been settled. They proceeded to ask that another missionary be sent.

The Munsee Indians still remain in darkness and ignorance - they worship the great Spirit by dancing. Our people here have had no regular teacher [of the gospel] for some time... and as their former missionaries have heretofore been sent by good white people of the east, they are led to look again that way, and...respectfully inquire [whether they will] again be favored by a minister or not (quoted from a 3/3/1857 letter from the Stockbridge Indians to the ABCFM, ABCFM Papers).

The letter itself, of course, tells us that the citizen party leaders wanted a minister. But some parts of the quote above, as well as the timing of the letter, suggests that the citizen party leaders didn't want Slingerland, a leader of the Indian party, to be their minister.

The ABCFM did not send a new missionary.



Additional sources used:
*John C. Adams Papers (State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin)
*Schafer's Domesday Book
*Oberly's A Nation of Statesmen.

Death of the Tribal Church: The ABCFM Pulls out of Stockbridge

The ABCFM Papers are kept here at Harvard University's Houghton Library. The Papers are available in microfilm via interlibrary loan. Refer to the ABCFM Papers finding aid for a list of reels of microfilm covering missions to many nations.

The Death of the Tribal Church Series:
I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History, 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"
IV. Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?
V. Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?

Today's post:
The ABCFM Pulls out of Stockbridge

Situated in Boston, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions didn't have the luxury of closely overseeing its missionaries in the field. In making decisions, it seems they had to rely heavily on the views of their missionaries. Several months before he left the Stockbridge Mohicans, Reverend Cutting Marsh was already advising the ABCFM about what he felt should be done after his departure. During Marsh's lame duck period the ABCFM also took the opportunity to have Marsh reconsider some of his recommendations.

Asked by the ABCFM "Ought [Jeremiah Slingerland] not be encouraged to go on preaching and keep the church together?" Marsh replied that he felt Slingerland should not be ordained for a number of reasons, one being that he continued to lack confidence in Slingerland's work and another being that Slingerland had been investigated by the Green Bay Indian Agent for asking to be paid for teaching "two schools at the same time" (letter from Marsh to Greene, 9/21/1848, ABCFM Papers).

Marsh was also asked about the mission property. He made it clear that his position had not changed since 1845 when he wrote that the ABCFM was "under no obligation whatever to the tribe for any of [the mission] property excepting fifteen acres of the soil" (letter from Marsh to Greene, 7/28/1845, ABCFM Papers).

And so the ABCFM decided to withdraw from the Stockbridge mission. Cutting Marsh and his family moved out of the mission house but Jeremiah Slingerland didn't move in. Nor was he ordained.




A modern satellite photo of Wisconsin's Lake Winnebago. The village of Stockbridge is on the east shore.



The treaty made on November 24th, 1848 promised the Indian party a number of payments for lost lands as well as money to start over and a new seventy-two section reservation (a section is equal to 640 acres, or one square mile). However, exactly where the Indian party would move was not specified. The Indian party never did come to an agreement with the federal government over where they would go. As years went by, many members of both the citizen party and the Indian party remained at Stockbridge on Lake Winnebago.

Jeremiah Slingerland continued his work as a schoolteacher - paid by government funds - and on the side he preached, farmed, and attended to Indian party politics. In 1853 he married a white woman named Sarah who was also a teacher. Town records show that white ministers O.P. Clinton and J.P. Jones as well as Slingerland were paid to preach between 1850 and 1857.


This series will continue.

Lion Miles Weighs in on the Language Issue

Lion Gardiner (pictured right) was a commander in the Pequot War. One of his descendants, Lion Miles, has been researching the history, culture, and language of Mohican Indians for at least the last seventeen years.

In response to recent contributions of Shawn Stevens and Jeremy Mohawk, Lion Miles of Stockbridge, Massachusetts contributed an article to the current (November 15, 2009) issue of Mohican News. Most importantly, Miles announced that his Mohican dictionary is "nearly finished and I have sent a draft to the Arvid Miller Library, hoping that it will be examined by the Language and Culture board." He reported using written material from the following Indians: Hendrick Aupaumut, John Metoxen, John Konkapot, Jr., and the Moravian convert known as Tschoop, or Johannes. Miles also used material from the following whites: John Sergeant (which one he does not say), and Jonathan Edwards, representing the Stockbridges as well as the following whites who represent other Mohicans, perhaps all but the last one are Moravians: John Ettwein, John Jacob Schmick, Benjamin Smith Barton, John Heckewelder, and Thomas Jefferson.

Miles made it clear that in his opinion reviving the Mohican language would be a good thing, or at least "a worthy goal." Miles points out that the Munsees and the Mohicans really didn't live together until 1835 so common ancestors don't go back far enough for those who consider themselves Mohicans to be satisfied to call Munsee their own language.

Munsee words found themselves into Mohican later and many of them were quite different. For example, the word "anushiik" is Munsee for "thank you," but the Mohican word was "onewe." "Eagle" was "migisso" in Mohican but "wapalonna" in Munsee.

In Lion Miles' opinion, there is not enough evidence out there to re-create the Mohican language exactly but "there is material to come reasonably close."

Death of the Tribal Church: Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?

Death of The Tribal Church Series
A Series of Blogposts about the Stockbridge Mohicans and their relationship to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM)
I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History, 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"
IV. Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?



Today's post:
Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?


Although Jeremiah Slingerland was a Stockbridge Mohican, Cutting Marsh described him as the kind of man who might wear the same kind of clothes as the Englishmen in this drawing.



One of Cutting Marsh's biggest charges against Jeremiah Slingerland regarded his handling of money. Marsh felt that "if an Indian has money he will lay it out for anything he may fancy he needs....[and] I find Mr. S an Indian still in this respect"(letter from Marsh to Greene, 11/18/1847, ABCFM Papers). Slingerland had asked the ABCFM for money more than once and he had explained that he needed it to buy clothes. When asked about the matter Marsh opined

His complaint about clothes would appear strange to one who should have seen...his wardrobe, the genteel manner in which he dressed daily and on the Sabbath and especially the pile of clothes he would furnish Monday morning for the wash. Mrs. M[arsh] repeatedly remarked whilst he lived with us [that] she would rather do the washing and ironing of two common men than Mr. S[lingerland] (quoted from Marsh's letter to Greene of 11/11/1847, ABCFM Papers).

Given the opportunity to defend himself, Slingerland wrote,

Respecting my economical habits, I suppose I have not shown them to that degree I might have done. But Sir, I ask who does? Who is not conscious of greater indulgences than what he ought to have allowed upon himself? (quoted from Slingerland's letter to Greene of 2/9/1848, ABCFM Papers).

Although we know that racism prevented Native ministers of earlier generations from making a decent living, there is really no way for us to determine whether or not Slingerland received enough pay for his work or whether or not he was disciplined enough to budget it properly. From our modern perspective it is nobody's business how one spends one's own money, but Marsh believed that the repairs on the mission property that Slingerland would make "would amount to five times as much as they would under a white man's direction." Furthermore, Marsh predicted that the mission property, if turned over to Slingerland, would be mortgaged within five years in order to pay debts. Marsh went into further detail explaining why he felt this way, bout, once again, it is impossible for us to know with any certainty how fair or unfair his opinion of Slingerland's spending habits were (letter from Marsh to Greene, apparently undated, ABCFM Papers).

But when it came to budgeting, it wasn't just Slingerland that Marsh complained about to the ABCFM, it was the tribe as a whole:

I have long felt and others have said the same that the Stockbridges ought to do something themselves towards [financially] supporting he gospel. when they want to send a delegation to Washington[,] which has been often since I resided amongst them[,] they will always find a way to get the means. When they want to employ a lawyer[,] which they often do[,] they will raise enough money to pay him. And it has appeared to me that the gospel ought to be considered as being worth something as well as the services of lawyers (quoted from Marsh's letter to Greene of 10/18/1847, ABCFM Papers).

Marsh acknowledged that the Indians were poor. but he noted that the neighboring Brothertown Indians provided some of the financial support for their missionary (letter from Marsh to Greene, 4/12/1848, ABCFM Papers).