A Milestone - Algonkian Church History's 300th post

A lot of Algonkian Church History posts lead readers to other sites or to books or other resources.
But today - with our 300th post - Algonkian Church History is honoring itself!

According to Google, ACH has received over 80,000 page views since it began on November 5th, 2008. As the creator of almost all of the posts, I've been surprised when some posts are viewed by many - while others that I've worked hard on are seen by only a few.

Anyway, here's a list of some ACH posts that were popular, and others that deserve special mention:

Most Viewed Posts:

3rd Place: Occom's Short Narrative of My Life (1735 views to date)

2nd Place: Bury My Heart at the Monastery: The Menominee Takeover of the Novitiate
This well-illustrated post includes links to relevant sites. The standoff between a dissident faction of Menominees and the federal government was probably the most newsworthy event for Wisconsin Indians in the 1970's. The post now has 2039 views.

1st Place: The High Point of Stockbridge Calvinism
Don't get me wrong, this was not a bad post, but I suspect that it has received 2405 views partly by accident. Many web surfers undoubtedly came to this post by clicking on the symbol you see below on Google images:

Least Viewed Post:

NPR Asks Who Is an Indian? The once-broken link to the NPR segment now works. And, as before, this post is graced with a photo of a reader of this blog, Darren Kroenke.



Most Humorous Post:

Who Taught the Stockbridge Indians to Moon? This one needs no introduction.



Most Controversial Post:

Racial Identity Among the New York Indians: Chris Geherin Looks at "New Guinea"
I was thrown out of an online community after this post appeared. Even now, some people who self-identify as Indians are not willing to accept that they may also have some African blood. Get over it!



Most Viewed Series of Posts:

The New York Indian Removal Series Thanks to a link from the New York History blog, this series of twenty posts had a reasonably large audience.

High Price for Hopkins' Historical Memoirs'

 

You can see that this book has a long title. 

 

Historical Memoirs, Relating to the Housatunnuk Indians: Or, An Account of the Methods Used, and Pains Taken, for the Propagation of the Gospel Among that Heathenish Tribe, and the Successes Thereof, Under the Ministry of the Late Reverned Mr. John Sergeant: Together, With the Character of that Eminently Worthy Missionary; and an Address to the People of this Country, Representing the very Great Importance of Attaching the Indians to their Interest, not only by Treating them Justly and Kindly, but by Using Proper Endeavors to Settle Christianity Among them. 

 

 

Perhaps you can see that it was published in 1753. That is four years after John Sergeant, the first missionary to the Housatonic Mohicans (eventually known as the Stockbridge Mohicans) died.

 

It is a very important book, partly because the author, Samuel Hopkins, had access to John Sergeant's journals which were later lost. The book also contains descriptions of things like maple syrup that white people don't seem to have been aware of before that point. The Indians boiled it down into a kind of sugar.

 

I got a chance to read a legitimate copy of this old book at the Wisconsin State Historical Society ten years ago. As I turned the pages it was literally falling apart - that is what happens with a book that is more than two hundred years old.

 

Anyway, a copy of this book brought $5,856 in a 2010 auction.

 

Sounds like an awful lot, until you realize that it was purchased for $10,500 in 2001! 

Roger Williams and the Naragansetts

The American Indian Studies Program at Cal State University has done us the service of creating "Indians of North America - The Native American Experience." Their collection of historical images features a few that are relevant to Algonkian Church History.

The Naragansett name has come up in my previous posts because some of the genetic makeup of the Stockbridge and especially the Brothertown Indians comes from the Naragansett Nation.

Here is Cal Tech's description of the above engraving (property of the Library of Congress):

London-born Roger Williams (c.1603-1683) was an American Puritan leader and founder of Rhode Island. Banished from Massachusetts in 1636 for his separatist ideas, he set out with a few followers and went to Rhode Island. There he befriended the Narragansett Indians and bought land from them to settle on, naming the town Providence. Williams firmly believed in treating the Indians justly and humanely; he encouraged his fellow colonists to pay the Indians fairly for their land. In 1643, he published a dictionary of the Algonquian language, an endeavor which helped further friendly relations between the settlers and the Narragansetts. Providence
became a safe haven for many people, among them Quakers, Baptists, and Jews, who fled the religious persecution of the New England settlements.

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.

Death of the Tribal Church: Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?

The Death of the Tribal Church Series:
I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"

Today's post:
Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?



After the act of 1843 was passed, frontier businessman Daniel Whitney and other whites eagerly bought up pieces of what had been the Stockbridge Reservation from Indians who had "acquired the rights of citizenship."



The Stockbridge Mohicans' bitter inter-tribal politics alienated Cutting Marsh and Jeremiah Slingerland from each other. The partisanship went back at least as far as 1843 when the tribe's citizen party succeeded in getting the United States Congress to declare all Stockbridges citizens of the United States. This essentially dissolved the tribal government and turned the reservation into private allottments. While leaders of the Indian party worked to nullify the act of 1843, members of both parties went ahead and proceeded to sell land. In 1846 the Indian party - of which Jeremiah Slingerland became a member - succeeded in getting the act of 1843 overturned. Something about the act of 1846 (which overturned the act of 1843) disturbed Cutting Marsh.

Although the Indian Party sold land and gave warantee deeds unconditionally [under the] act of 1843[,] still in the act of 1846 they got a clause inserted declaring all land sales under the former act null and void. They now suppose that all the lands they have sold have come back without compensation to the purchasers of any kind; and the leading man in the party I understand is determined they shouldn't be paid anything in return... I am very much tried upon the subject. And Mr. S[lingerland,] speaking of the subject[,] called them in my presence 'the supposed claims of white men' (letter from Marsh to Treat, 6/21/1847, ABCFM Papers).

In addition to the fallout from Slingerland's political activities, Marsh had other concerns. According to Marsh's brand of Christianity, pride was a great sin and he didn't like the praise and attention that he believed was lavished upon Slingerland for being a well-educated Indian. Marsh complained to the ABCFM that "Good people of the East have flattered [Slingerland]" with the result that Slingerland had "become a man of too much consequence" (letter from Marsh to Greene 9/13/1847, ABCFM Papers). On the same day that Marsh wrote those words, the tribal government - members of Slingerland's Indian Party - wrote their own letter to the ABCFM, asking that Slingerland be appointed in Marsh's place. The tribal leaders were careful to praise both men, but in noting that Slingerland was "now thirty-one years old," they may have hoped to cast doubt on Marsh's claims that Slingerland needed more experience before he could exhibit good judgement (letter from tribal leaders to the ABCFM, 9/13/1847).

A List of the Ministers Who Have Cared for the Spiritual Needs of the Stockbridge Indians

The image below is from the Winnebago Presbytery's website. The design at the right appears to be their logo.

The title of this post is taken verbatim from an entry in the records of the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church (it can be obtained on microfilm from the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia). Anyway, here's the list produced about as close to verbatim as I can get (unfortunately, the right edge has been cut off so dates of death are not visible on my photocopy):

1. Oct. 1734 to (illegible) Rev. John Sergeant b.1710 [ordained] Aug 31, 1735

2. Aug. 1749 to July 1751 Mr. Timothy Woodbridge [was the schoolteacher (for many years), but deserves credit for caring for the spiritual interests of the Stockbridge Indians nonetheless (especially after John Sergeant's early death).]

3. July 1751 to 1758 Rev. Jonathan Edwards

4. Nov. 1758 to 1775 Rev. Stephen West, D.D. b.1735 [?] [ordained] June 13, 1709[?]

5. 1775 to 1824 Rev. John Sergeant, jr b. 1781 [date of ordination not given]

[Unfortunately, Samson Occum is not mentioned in the document]

6. July 1827 to March 1829 Rev. Jesse Miner b. 1781 [died in present-day Wisconsin, 1829]

7. May 1, 1830 to 1848 Rev. Cutting Marsh [born 1800]

8. 1848 [1845 is arguably more accurate] to 1884 Rev. Jeremiah Slingerland [died 1884]

9. Oct 1888 to Oct 1888 Rev. A.W. Williams

10. April 1889 to April 1891 Rev. Thomas Knox Fisher

11. July 1891 to Feb 1892 Rev. Thomas Haug

----------------------- Services discontinued ----------------------------

12. July 1910 to Dec. 1917 Rev. Charles Kilpatrick

13. July 1, 1921 Rev. J.A McGreaham

14. May 1926 [Rev.] F.G. Westfall - Ordained at Caro, Michigan, June 15, 1897 by Flint Presbytery

15. Sept. 6, 1930 Rev. David Hillegas

16. Nov. 1, 1935 - Rev. Louis J. Albert

Of course there were ministers from other denominations in this period of time, but - with the exception of Samson Occom - this is an accurate record of the succession of the Calvinist ministers that served the Stockbridge Mohicans from 1734 to 1891 and then again from 1910 to about 1937.

The historian of the group appears to be Rev. Kilpatrick, who accompanied William Dick, one of the elders of his church, on a trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Entries after Kilpatrick's time were recorded by each succeeding minister.

Puritan Ideals and the Stockbridge Mohicans in the 1830's

I'm not certain, but my guess is that by the 1830's, a dance among the young New York Indians in Wisconsin Territory, would look as "civilized" as this dance held by "Negro" firefighters in Charleston, South Carolina around that same time (sketch by William Waud).


I think that on one hand, the Puritans may have had some beliefs that made them feel good, but, on the other hand, some of the things they considered sinful tend to be regarded as good clean fun nowadays. And so we've come to equate the Puritans with prudishness. That is basically what this post is about.

One story related by Rev. Cutting Marsh (in a letter to the ABCFM, July 8, 1833), illustrates how the leaders of the Stockbridge Mohicans had internalized what we today might refer to as 'Puritan ideals.' Marsh's own biases, of course are also made clear.

Marsh felt that "dancing parties, or what white people call balls," were a "relic of paganism." He noted that such parties were popular among the young people in the winter of 1833, but in the spring, one of the tribe's political leaders "took the constable, proceeded to the house, ordered them to disperse, which they did forthwith, and broke their violin." Marsh reported that the next time a dancing party was held "the violin shared the same fate and the young people were sent home."

Did you notice that Marsh himself was not involved in banishing the parties? By the 1830's, strict Calvinsm, or "Puritanism," was internalized among tribal leaders to the point where they chose to stop the dancing themselves.

The High Point of Stockbridge Calvinism

Calvinism has long embodied many denominations. But, together, those denominations continue to share this common symbol.








A photo of the Rev. Cutting Marsh, Missionary to the Stockbridge Mohicans, 1830-1848. Although (as Roger Nichols noted) Marsh tended to be "stern and stubborn," he experienced a sort of honeymoon period with the tribe before political conflict compromised the whole situation.


By the time Rev. Cutting Marsh enters the scene, the Stockbridge Mohicans had been a Christian nation for nearly one hundred years. This, of course, does not mean that all members of the tribe were pious, or even baptized, but if you've read enough of my posts, you can at least understand why I say they were a Christian nation, not merely "Christianized" or "missionized."

While the Stockbridge mission as a whole was supported by the largely Congregational ABCFM, Marsh identified himself as a Presbyterian, and his salary was contributed by the Scottish Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Based on Marsh's ongoing reports to the ABCFM, and his annual reports to the Scottish mission society, I consider Marsh's first six years or so to represent the high point of Calvinism among the Stockbridge Mohicans.

Here are the benchmarks noted in Marsh's letter to the ABCFM of July 8, 1833:

• Out of a nation of roughly 250 people, Marsh reported that weekly church attendance ranged between 100 and 150 persons.
• Marsh stated that of those who attended his worship services, none of them "violate the Sabbath by attending to secular concerns or indulging in amusements of any kind" on Sundays.
• Marsh observed that the Stockbridge Mohicans were hospitable, kind, peaceful, not revengeful, ready to forgive and respectful, both to the aged and to "superiors;" [those traits, of course, are Indian values, but they are also Christian values].

And here's what Marsh wrote in his 1831 report to the SSPCK:

"...the sabbath here is generally observed, all kinds of labour are suspended & many of them observe it with great strictness. And when I arrived at the place of worship, which is not large, I found it filled with decently clad, and apparently devout worshippers. There is on the Sab. a very general attendance at meeting, & better order and more stillness I have seldom witnessed in assemblies of white people than uniformly prevail here. The singing is conducted wholly by themselves and they are very fond of it, have excellent natural voices & would excel provided they had suitable instruction in the art."

The Stockbridge Bible and the John Sergeant Memorial Church

The image below illustrates how thoroughly complex the various splits and reconciliations within the Presbyterian church have been. The point of showing them here is to illustrate that the Presbyterian church is not a single body, but rather a group of denominations. The Stockbridge Mohicans were served by many Calvinist ministers, probably most of them claimed to be Presbyterians (the ABCFM, however, was a predominantly Congregational organization). Click on the diagram to enlarge it.


In telling the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans, I haven't reached the point where the tribe comes to feel they are not being served by Calvinist church bodies (more specifically the Presbyterians), and move on to Roman Catholic and/or Lutheran churches. That happened at the end of the 1800's, I referred to it in my last post as "a low ebb" in "organized Christianity."

Despite some activity with other denominations at the end of the 1800's, there were still Stockbridge Indians who continued to identify themselves as Presbyterians, remaining loyal to Calvinist roots that stretched back to the ministry of John Sergeant [Sr.] (1734-1749).

The following account is excerpted from my paper that appeared in the Spring, 2007 issue of The Book Collector.

[Jamison] Sote Quinney and other leaders got to know white Presbyterian ministers in the area who came in to preside over funerals. On Sunday, September 29th, 1907, the Assistant Superintendent of the Presbyterian church's Wisconsin Synod visited and preached to the Stockbridge [Mohicans]. the scripture lessons were read from the Stockbridge Bible for the first time in [many] years. finally, at the end of the service, a petition to start a new church was placed on top of the revered Bible. Forty-five adults signed the petition, some of the older ones with tears in their eyes (Putnam, Christian Religion, pages 5-6, and Earl North, in the Interior, 234-235).

On reading of the establishment of the new congregation in a church newspaper [North's 1908 article], a few of the descendants of John Sergeant, the first missionary to the Stockbridges, offered to provide financial support. the rest of Sergeant's descendants were also asked to contribute, and the church became known as the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church (letter from Charles Kilpatrick to the descendants of John Sergeant, August 15, 1911, in the John C. Adams Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin). Sote Quinney was an elder of the Sergeant Memorial Church from its beginning until his death (Jameson [Sote] Quinney is repeatedly mentioned as a church elder in the papers of the John Sergeant Memorial Church which are kept at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, PA).

In the fall of 1915, Quinney was given a free trip to the Presbyterian synod meeting in Milwaukee for the purpose of showing off the Stockbridge Bible (entry in the church records, October, 3, 1915). He brought the two volumes in an oak chest, possibly the same oak chest that was used to transport the Bible since the tribe left Massachusetts (Milwaukee Sentinel, October 10, 1915, an image of that article is in my previous post).

Scott's Family Bible

Do you remember that the Stockbridge Mohicans attempted to settle at Indiana's White River before they came to what is now Wisconsin?

Do you remember that John Metoxen was the leader of the band that left New Stockbridge, New York in 1818 and settled at Wisconsin's Fox River in 1822?

Do you remember that they worshipped with a white congregation at a stop along the way?

Some have called Metoxen's band the Stockbridge Christian Party. Although no missionary traveled with them, they still kept the Sabbath in the old Calvinist way. On Sunday mornings, John Metoxen would read from Scott's Family Bible. I was able to find photos of the six-volume set online. (Use this link if you want to buy a copy in good condition, for less than $600.)

On page 129 of An American Bible, Paul Gutjahr tells us that Scott's Family Bible was "immensely popular" and "helped shore up Calvinist Orthodoxy."

To Live Upon Hope

The seventh post in Algonkian Church History was about Rachel Wheeler's PhD. thesis, Living Upon Hope. This, my 107th post, is about her 2008 book with a slightly different title.

To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth Century Northeast (Cornell University Press), is written for a more academic audience than this blog, but if you like Algonkian Church History, there's a good chance that you'll also like Wheeler's book.

Wheeler succeeds in showing the contrast between the Moravian Mohicans and their neighboring tribesmen, the Calvinist Mohicans at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Remarkably, the two types of mission communities were so different that the nature of what was recorded for posterity didn't allow Wheeler to make direct comparisons.

The Moravian Mohicans at Shekomeko practiced a syncretic religion, as Wheeler states on page 95:

Delaware, Shawnee, and Seneca prophets inspired new religious movements that often blended rejection of European goods and the creation of a pan-Indian identity. Adaptation of European-style agriculture and Christianity was another option, as exemplified by the Mohicans of Stockbridge. Somewhere in between was the path chosen by Abraham and Johannes and other Indians of Shekomeko, who found in the blood of Jesus a new source of spiritual power, or manitou, which could be deployed to address the problems brought with colonialism.

They Left on the Sabbath

New York Indian Removal, Part XV:
They Left on the Sabbath

Andrew Jackson's plans to remove all Indians westward were not abandoned by his successor, Martin Van Buren.


The treaty of 1839 may have been written up in good faith. Half of the reservation was sold to the U.S. because Thomas Hendricks and Robert Konkapot had convinced federal officials that about half of the tribe wanted to remove to the Little Osage River in what is now Kansas. Instead we have reports that "70 or 80" Stockbridge Mohicans separated from the tribe (Jones, 106). James Oberly (page 67) also quotes Cutting Marsh as saying that the remaining Canadian Munsees went with them (but it is not clear where he gets that quote).

Although the federal government did a miserable job of implementing the treaty of 1839, the emigrants appear to have added to the problem by ignoring instructions to wait until the treaty was approved by the president and ratified by the Senate. Oberly describes the result:

Unfortunately the Emigrants lacked enough money and supplies to reach their destination.... At St. Louis they became public charity cases and had to be rescued by the U.S. Indian agent there.

Writing from Stockbridge, Massachusetts fifteen years later, Electa Jones was getting her information about the Emigrant party second-hand from Chauncey Hall, an ABCFM schoolteacher. Furthermore, she had no sympathy for the Emigrant party, pointing out "it has been creditably reported that they started on the Sabbath"(emphasis is Jones', page 106). My response is that maybe Chauncey Hall never told Electa Jones that the Hendricks-Konkapot faction left Cutting Marsh's Calvinist (that is, Sabbath-observing) church and started their own Baptist church.....or, from a modern perspective, maybe Ms. Jones was too much of an ideologue to be writing history "creditably."

Those of the so-called Disaffected party who made it safely to the new reservation continued to worship in the Baptist way. Meanwhile, the payments promised in the treaty of 1839 didn't come until after "a tedious delay of between 2 & 3 years"(Cutting Marsh in Wisconsin Historical Collections, XV, page 180).

Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform

Parts of William G. McLoughlin's book, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (University of Chicago Press, 1978), have helped me to understand the nature of Algonkian church history and the broader movement of frontier Calvinism. In a previous post, I mentioned that a focus on Old Testament law encouraged a sense of guilt. Furthermore, that background of guilt and anxiety enhanced the conversion experience which Calvinists (Puritans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians) understood to be an outward sign that one was predestined for salvation. In fact, McLoughlin wrote that it was not unusual for a conversion experience to be "overwhelming in its power, transforming in its result, and ecstatic in the sense of relief it provided"(43, 63-65).

Well, if conversion experiences were really "all that" (and they certainly were for some people), there were people that felt so special for having their conversion experience that they didn't want to belong to a church which included those who might not be predestined for salvation. Those people became known as Separatists.

Anyway, you may be saying to yourself, "what does McLoughlin's book have to do with Algonkian church history? " A lot. McLoughlin explains that those who suffered more tensions and repressed rage against society were more deeply relieved by their conversion experiences and as a result, emotional conversions made frontier Calvinism popular among the poor, Black slaves, women, children, and Indians (page 75).

The Puritan Mind

We won't fully understand the "Red Puritans," until we understand the white ones. I will now quote from Herbert Wallace Schneider's The Puritan Mind (University of Michigan Press/Henry Holt, 1930) in order to set up posts yet to come.

According to Schneider, "The Puritans, searching the scriptures for texts relevant to their own particular needs, soon discovered the general similarity between them and the ancient Israelites. The Lord had obviously chosen them, as he had the children of Israel, to carry out his plans for the redemption of the world. They had been driven from their homes...for the sake of building a promised land..... The Puritans' constant preoccupation with the Old Testament and Mosaic law was...the natural turning for comfort and counsel to a people who seemed to have undergone a similar experience"(26).

He adds,"The belief in their divine election in a great work soon ceased to be a mere faith and came to be regarded as an empirical fact"(27).

The scrict laws that gave meaning and comfort to that culture also, of course, brought a sense of guilt to its members. This vague guilt was one of the key ingredients in the conversion experience, the outward sign that God had chosen an individual for salvation. More on that in future posts.

Schneider's comments clue us in also on the motivation of missions. This is not to say that missionaries and their supporters were not concerned about saving individual Native souls, nor to say that they didn't care about the Indians' temporal needs, but there was also something else. The conviction that God chose them for "a great work," came from Biblical passages related to the coming of the Millenium. Some thought the second coming of Christ would be brought about by the conversion of Native nations.

The New England Company

A quote from William Kellaway highlights the difference between the Moravians and the Puritans: he wrote that "Puritanism was no religion for the illiterate." As a result, the Indians that lived in Stockbridge, Massachsetts from the 1730's to the 1780's received a better education than most white children that lived in the colonies, or at least it was better than the education of frontier whites. (Although it was generally understood then that school was for boys, not girls, the school at Stockbridge [MA] was for boys and girls.)

Anyway, as I've said before, the Stockbridge Mohicans accepted Christianity voluntarily. More specifically, they accepted an offer from the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, men mostly from Boston who were doing the legwork for a philanthropic mission society in London known by a number of long names, but later known more simply as "The New England Company."

William Kellaway's The New England Company, 1647-1776: Missionary Society to the Indians, was written over a hundred years ago, then reprinted by Barnes and Noble in 1962. Early in the book, Kellaway explains the Puritan mission philosophy: "The idea of the heathen receiving the grace of God while still in a savage state was inconceivable to the Puritan mind"(8).

There was no such thing as "diversity" then like we know it today. By teaching Indians to live according to white ways, the British believed they were doing the Indians a great service. And although today we believe in "diversity," the reality then was that white settlers were moving into the area and there was already a lot less game in the forests...the fur trade had already changed the Mohican economy and other parts of their society by the time they accepted their first missionary.