THE CHARITY HALL MISSION: AN 1820S BOARDING SCHOOL FOR NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN IN THE CHICKASAW NATION
By
MATTHEW P. ROONEY
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2021
© 2021 Matthew P. Rooney
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank first of all The Chickasaw Nation for supporting my research project both financially and spiritually. Having the Chickasaw Explorers participate in the archaeological field excavations was an experience that I hope will become more common in research projects where the ancestors of living peoples are involved. In particular, I thank Dr. Brad R. Lieb,
Director of Chickasaw Nation Archaeology and Field Studies, who introduced me to the site of
Charity Hall, worked as a liaison with the landowner, and facilitated the project with tools and labor. I thank the landowner, A.G. Doss, who graciously allowed us to return year after year to his property and gave us open access to perform the fieldwork we deemed necessary to delineate and understand the site. Mr. Doss was very accommodating, always agreeing to sit with us to talk about the modern history of the site as well as to identify objects that were foreign to us but familiar to him. I also thank the Wenner Gren Foundation for funding one of the three field seasons, and crew members Tara Skipton, Domenique Sorresso, Dr. Mark Donop, Caleb Hutson,
Gabe Griffin, and Bryce Krumcke for their excellent work. I thank Sorresso additionally for assisting in the initial laboratory cleaning and sorting of artifacts, and Skipton for also participating in laboratory cleaning, sorting, and analysis, as well as her work transcribing a selection of the Reverend Bell’s letters. I also thank Nicolas Delsol for analyzing and quantifying the faunal assemblage recovered from Charity Hall.
I thank Dr. Lindsay Bloch, collections manager for the Ceramic Technology Laboratory and Florida Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, for helping me identify specific historical artifact types, especially ceramics and buttons. I also thank Ann S. Cordell, former manager of the Ceramic Technology Laboratory, for helping me identify various clay and stone artifacts. I thank Mitch Caver and Rufus Ward, local historians who provided invaluable
3 assistance with retrieving primary-source documents related to Charity Hall. Caver, for instance, tracked down the field notes from the 1834 land survey, and Ward furnished copies of missionary journals as well as made his personal collection and expertise of tableware available for comparison to objects I recovered from Charity Hall. I here also thank Susan Knight Gore,
Archivist of the Historical Foundation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, who welcomed me to her archive and furnished me with every primary-source document she could find that had some relation to the Chickasaws or Choctaws. I also thank Wayne Knox, Director of the Amory
Regional Museum in Monroe County, Mississippi, who provided me with important secondary sources penned by local authors and had discussions with me about the history of Cotton Gin
Port. I also thank the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida for awarding me a four-year graduate fellowship as well as an additional year of funding through research and teaching assistantships. I could not have performed any of this work without their financial support.
Next I thank my dissertation committee. Dr. James M. Davidson gave me a primer on nineteenth-century artifacts and had discussions with me about how to interpret what I found at
Charity Hall. Dr. Jon F. Sensbach sat with me early on to review the historical mission literature and provided me with recommendations on research directions regarding my historical research.
Dr. Kenneth E. Sassaman served as a great champion of my initial acceptance into the graduate program at the University of Florida and asked insightful questions about my research that encouraged me to dig deeper and more thoroughly into my sources. Finally, I thank my committee chair, Dr. Charles R. Cobb, about whom I cannot write enough glowing words to encapsulate what his patience and guidance have done for my development as a scholar. Charlie provided me with this research project, various avenues of funding, and many critical but
4 generous words to push me to make this dissertation the strongest and most meaningful work I have ever produced. He is a fountain of knowledge and inspiration that took me in many theoretical directions I did not expect and to literature and ideas that I probably never would have combined on my own.
On the personal side, I thank the host of new friends I made while living in the City of
High Springs throughout the duration of this research project. I also thank the many virtual friends that I have made over these years, who together with those I made locally helped keep me sane and focused on my goals. I thank my former wife Crystal Wheeler and her husband Troy
Wheeler for facilitating my journey through graduate school and ensuring that my children were safe and cared for during the times when they were not with me. I thank my children, Erin
Rooney and Quinlan Rooney, for giving me the love and impetus and drive to be the best person
I can be. Finally, I thank my late father Peter Rooney and my mother Dr. Dana R. Hicks for providing me with early guidance and inspiration and encouragement to contribute something meaningful to this world. My mother in particular has served as a great inspiration to me and provided me with both the emotional and financial support I needed to survive during my development as a scholar.
5 TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 3
LIST OF TABLES ...... 8
LIST OF FIGURES ...... 10
ABSTRACT ...... 12
CHAPTER
1 AMONG THE “TAWNY SONS OF THE WOODS” ...... 14
Colonial Missionscapes ...... 18 Materiality of Civilization ...... 23 Dissertation Organization ...... 25
2 COLONIALISM, MATERIALITY, AND NETWORKS ...... 27
Materiality as a Theory of Material Culture ...... 31 Networks and Scale ...... 39 Materiality of “Civilization” and Conversion ...... 44 My Theoretical Approach to Charity Hall ...... 48
3 FACING EAST FROM CHICKASAW COUNTRY...... 50
Mississippian Chiefdoms ...... 51 Europeans, War, and Disease ...... 56 The Indian Slave and Fur Trade ...... 59 The Chickasaws ...... 65
4 A CHRONOLOGICAL OVERVIEW OF CHARITY HALL ...... 85
The Primary-Source Documents ...... 85 The Foundation of Charity Hall (1819-1823) ...... 92 Charity Hall in Full Operation (1824-1827) ...... 105 The Defunding and Closing of Charity Hall (1828-1832) ...... 120
5 READING CHARITY HALL: HISTORICAL RESULTS ...... 132
Structures, Finances, and People ...... 135 General Notes on Everyday Life ...... 146 Addressing the Research Questions ...... 157
6 DIGGING CHARITY HALL: FIELD METHODS AND RESULTS ...... 160
Archaeological Field Methods ...... 160 General Field Results ...... 171
6 Block 1 Locality Investigations ...... 179 Block 2 Locality Investigations ...... 184 Block 3 Locality Investigations ...... 186 Block 4 Locality Investigations ...... 192 Non-Block Localities ...... 196 Proposed Historical Site Layout ...... 201
7 MEASURING CHARITY HALL: LABORATORY METHODS AND RESULTS ...... 204
Ceramic Artifacts ...... 204 Nail Artifacts ...... 213 Glass Artifacts ...... 218 Brick and Burned Clay Artifacts ...... 220 Other Nineteenth Century Artifacts ...... 222 Faunal Assemblage ...... 230 Lithic Artifacts ...... 233 Materials and Global Capitalism ...... 235
8 THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONSCAPE ...... 236
The 1820s Mission ...... 236 The Chickasaw and Choctaw Missionscape ...... 242 Comparison with Nineteenth-Century Homesteads ...... 246 Was Charity Hall a Success? ...... 253 How the Missionaries “Civilized” Indians ...... 257 Future Research ...... 261
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 265
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 292
7 LIST OF TABLES Table page
4-1 A summary of the primary-source materials...... 86
4-2 Expenditures and receipts between October 1828 and May 1829...... 122
4-3 Expenditures and receipts between May 1829 and May 1830...... 129
5-1 Charity Hall building summary...... 136
5-2 Charity Hall annual funding summary...... 140
5-3 Charity Hall personnel...... 142
5-4 Charity Hall students...... 144
5-5 Number of students by term and year...... 145
6-1 Artifacts by context and per square meter...... 174
6-2 Tableware decorations by context ...... 176
6-3 Tableware decorations within contexts...... 176
6-4 Tableware vessel form by context...... 176
6-5 Complete machine cut nail pennyweights by locality ...... 181
6-6 Block 1 locality artifacts...... 183
6-7 Block 2 locality artifacts...... 187
6-8 Block 3 locality artifacts...... 191
6-9 Block 4 locality artifacts...... 194
6-10 Northwest locality artifacts...... 198
6-11 Northeast locality artifacts...... 198
6-12 Pine Plantation locality artifacts...... 199
6-13 Southeast locality artifacts...... 200
7-1 Summary of ceramic artifacts...... 205
7-2 Summary of tableware vessel categories...... 206
7-3 Estimated ceramic vessel base diameters (mm)...... 207
8 7-4 Estimated ceramic vessel rim diameters (mm)...... 207
7-5 Tableware sherds by decoration genre...... 209
7-6 Stylistic element frequencies on tableware sherds...... 210
7-7 Summary of nail artifacts...... 214
7-8 Machine cut nail measurements...... 216
7-9 Summary of glass artifacts...... 218
7-10 Glass shard thickness (mm) ...... 219
7-11 Summary of clothing artifacts...... 224
7-12 Summary of faunal assemblage...... 232
7-13 Summary of lithic artifacts...... 234
8-1 Charity Hall artifact assemblage comparison...... 247
9 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page
1-1 The Civilization Fund Act of 1819 ...... 16
1-2 Mission Stations in the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation...... 19
3-1 Towns of the Mississippian World ...... 53
3-2 Thomas Nairne’s Route ...... 74
3-3 Chickasaw Lands in 1783 ...... 82
4-1 Memorandum of Charity Hall donations delivered May 20, 1825 ...... 114
4-2 Deed of sale for Bell's Ferry Boat and Service ...... 118
4-3 Bell’s list of expenditures and receipts between May 1829 and May 1830 ...... 128
5-1 Map of 1834 Survey Notes for Township 13 Range 7 East ...... 133
5-2 Two pages of Bell’s 1832 report to Elbert Herring ...... 139
6-1 Charity Hall Contour Map ...... 161
6-2 Charity Hall Soil Map ...... 162
6-3 Map of 2018 Excavations ...... 164
6-4 Map of 2019 Excavations ...... 165
6-5 Map of 2020 Excavations ...... 168
6-6 Photograph of a Block 4 Feature ...... 170
6-7 Overview of Excavated Test Units ...... 172
6-8 Refined earthenware sherd distribution ...... 175
6-9 Brick and burned clay artifact distribution ...... 178
6-10 Cut nail artifact distribution ...... 180
6-11 Block 1 Locality Map ...... 182
6-12 Block 2 Locality Map ...... 185
6-13 Block 3 Locality Map ...... 188
6-14 Block 3 Feature Schematic ...... 189
10 6-15 Block 4 Locality Map ...... 193
6-16 Block 4 Feature Schematic ...... 195
6-17 Non-Block Localities Map ...... 197
6-18 Historical Layout Schematic of Charity Hall...... 202
7-1 Transfer Printed Ceramic Sherd ...... 211
7-2 Hand-painted Chinese Porcelain sherd with house motif ...... 211
7-3 Polychrome refined earthenware sherd ...... 212
7-4 Coarse earthenware sherd; possible cheese strainer fragment ...... 213
7-5 Machine Cut Nail Pennyweight Frequency Distribution ...... 217
7-6 UID metal artifact with square cut nail insertion ...... 217
7-7 Thickness of Bricks...... 221
7-8 Metal Kettle Fragment ...... 223
7-9 Metal Knife Blade Fragment ...... 223
7-10 Amethyst Glass Button Fragment ...... 225
7-11 Copper-Plated Button Fragment ...... 225
7-12 Square Clothing Buckle Frame ...... 227
7-13 Slate Artifacts...... 228
7-14 Coarse earthenware marble ...... 229
7-15 Field photo of metal harness fragment with ceramic tableware sherd...... 231
7-16 An unidentified metal hardware fragment ...... 231
7-17 Dalton scraper lithic tool ...... 234
11 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
THE CHARITY HALL MISSION: AN 1820S BOARDING SCHOOL FOR NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN IN THE CHICKASAW NATION
By Matthew P. Rooney May 2021 Chair: Charles R. Cobb Major: Anthropology
This study focuses primarily on the historical and archaeological investigations of
Charity Hall, a Christian mission school that operated within the Chickasaw Nation in northeastern Mississippi between 1820 and 1830. This school and others during this time were funded by the United States government through the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, so I argue that these stations served as outposts for American colonialism before the federal government shifted its Indian policy to one of removal. Additionally, I argue that it is impossible to adequately understand the operation of individual mission schools apart from their networks, which I theorize here as “missionscapes.” The historic component also, therefore, focuses on a broader missionscape that encompassed both the Chickasaw Nation and the neighboring Choctaw Nation during the 1820s and 1830s. More precisely, the historical and archaeological data marshalled here are presented to answer my primary research question: what material tools and practices did missionaries use to “civilize” Native American children and their families prior to Indian removal?
One of the chief ways that Chickasaw and Choctaw children were being “civilized” by the missionaries at Charity Hall was through the use of material culture. Their lives were regimented around an alien work schedule, they were clothed in materials procured by charitable
12 societies, and they sat around a dinner table with ceramic and metal implements produced in faraway places, some coming all the way from east Asia. The pastors used practical mastery of both educational and mechanical “arts” to civilize the children in accordance with the wishes of the United States government. Here processes of practice and materiality took on a colonial character due to their being encouraged and enforced in a context where the balance of power was shifting from the Indians to the Americans. The American elites found the Christian missionaries to be ready-made agents to “civilize” Indians and spread political influence internally within both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation. The mission experience, however, ultimately proved to be too costly and slow and therefore paved the way for the removal policies of the 1830s and the abandonment of the “civilization” project altogether.
13 CHAPTER 1 AMONG THE “TAWNY SONS OF THE WOODS”
On Monday, September 11, 1820, two parties entered into contract at the home of Major
Levi “Ittawamba Minko” Colbert, which was located on the western bank of the Tombigbee
River, immediately west of the burgeoning frontier town of Cotton Gin Port. Cotton Gin Port was an important crossroads and trading hub located in the northeastern corner of what three years prior had been admitted to the United States as the State of Mississippi. The land on the west side of the Tombigbee River at this juncture, however, was officially recognized as part of the Chickasaw Nation, and Levi Colbert was one of the Chickasaws’ principal chiefs. Levi and his younger brother George were sons of James Logan Colbert, an American with Scottish ancestry, and Minta Hoye, a Chickasaw woman. The Colbert children grew up bilingual, which led to Levi and George becoming leading figures in the US military and prominent interpreters and negotiators with agents of the federal government. In 1818, they notoriously negotiated with
Andrew Jackson to receive financial compensation in exchange for Chickasaw lands in
Tennessee and Kentucky, and the two brothers would later help negotiate the cession of the remainder of Chickasaw lands east of the Mississippi River in 1832.
The contract signed in September of 1820 at the home of Major Colbert of the Chickasaw
Nation, however, was less earth shattering for the Chickasaws than the treaties that ceded their land to the US government. The first party to the contract consisted of the Reverend Samuel
King, the Reverend James Stewart, and the Reverend Robert Bell—three representatives of the
Board of Missions of the Cumberland Synod of the Presbyterian Church. Since 1818, these three pastors had led a “committee to inquire into the state of religion,” which was tasked with securing locations for missions among the Chickasaws and Choctaws located to the south of their headquarters in Tennessee (Cumberland Synod 1819:155). The Cumberland Board had initially
14 approached the Choctaw Nation, located immediately south of the Chickasaw Nation, and were promised money and land for a mission by Colonel John Pitchlynn, a Choctaw chief, but they were beaten to the location by the Reverend Cyrus Kingsbury, famously known as the “Father of the Missions” in Indian territory (Mize 2009). Meanwhile, the Reverend Samuel King along with fellow Cumberland Synod Reverend William Moore had successfully converted several
Chickasaws to Christianity, including an Indian man who said that “the good Spirit blessed him before he heard the gospel, and when he heard it preached, he knew it was the same thing the good Spirit told him of when he was a young man” (Cumberland Synod 1819:160-161).
King, Stewart, and Bell, as part of the 1820 contract (Board of Missions 1854b:89), agreed to teach the people of the Chickasaw Nation “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and a
Knowledge of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts” and that those who came to them for instruction would be boarded and clothed “gratis,” provided they were not able to clothe or board themselves. The Cumberland Synod representatives also promised that they would not take any more land than would be necessary for this operation and that any buildings or cultivated land developed by the mission would revert to the Chickasaws should the institution cease operation.
The agreement was initially signed by Levi Colbert, who subsequently secured the signatures of several other Chickasaw leaders, including Starko Cooley, who was then King of the Nation;
Tisho Mongo; and Appa Suntubba. Within two months, the Reverend Robert Bell and his family arrived at the “uncultivated place” that would become their new home and mission school for both Chickasaw and Choctaw children, dubbing it “Charity Hall,” on Saturday, November 4,
1820.
15
Figure 1-1. The Civilization Fund Act of 1819 (U.S. Congress 1846)
Charity Hall was one of the first religious mission schools to be established using funding provided by what has become known as “The Civilization Fund Act” of 1819 (Figure 1-1). This congressional act was the latest in a series of legislative moves designed to exert control and influence over the vast areas possessed by indigenous peoples then dwelling on the frontiers of the newly founded United States (Atkinson 2004:180). In 1790, the federal congress had passed
The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, which required those who wished to trade with the Indians to be licensed, with criminal punishment for those who traded with them illegally. The enforcement of the 1790 legislation led to the appointment of Indian agents—federal representatives who oversaw interactions between Americans and the Indian nations. Some of their duties included “protecting” Indian rights to their own land by restricting the entrance of non-Indians, denying the right of private individuals or local governments to acquire Indian land, and regulating Indian trade. They were also tasked with promoting “civilization” and education among the Indians so that they might be incorporated into American society (Atkinson
16 2004:180). The 1819 act, which was facilitated by the Indian agents who made up the Office of
Indian Trade, promised $10,000 to religious denominations to introduce among Indians “the habits and arts of civilization,” and this resulted in a flourishing of new schools introduced throughout the southeast.
Prior to 1819, only a small number of mission schools had been established throughout the southeastern United States, including a Moravian school established by the Reverend John
Gambold in Georgia in 1805 and a Presbyterian school established by the Reverend Gideon
Blackburn in Tennessee around the same time (Atkinson 2004:217). A “western” education during this time was essentially limited to the individual families who had greater connections to the Americans: Levi’s younger brother James had been sent to Pensacola where he learned to read and Bwrite with his father’s attorney and was baptized, and Piominko (a prominent
Chickasaw leader and diplomat) similarly had his daughter educated in Nashville at the expense of the U.S. Department of War (Atkinson 2004:217). Prior to the 1819 act being passed, between the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation, there were no schools in existence. Within just six years a total of four newly-constructed mission schools were in active operation within the
Chickasaw Nation, with a fifth school for Chickasaws located not far to the east in present-day
Colbert County, Alabama (Atkinson 2004:219). All of these schools, including Charity Hall, served as networks and “civilizing” centers to convert the “tawny sons of the woods”
(Cumberland Synod 1819:156) into ideal American citizens. Charity Hall is notable for having educated two leading members of the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation—Daughtery
Winchester Colbert and Peter Pitchlynn, respectively (see Chapter 8).
In this dissertation, I argue that Charity Hall served as an outpost for American colonialism within the Chickasaw Nation. The school was located just south and west of Cotton
17 Gin Port, about one mile away from the western bank of the Tombigbee River, still at that time firmly within the boundaries of the Chickasaw Nation. Charity Hall was the only mission school erected by the Cumberland Synod within either the Chickasaw Nation or the Choctaw Nation, but it was situated among several other missions that operated first under the Synod of Georgia and South Carolina and later under the umbrella of the American Missionary Board (Figure 1-2).
The school was operated by the Reverend Robert Bell and his wife for a decade before it was closed in the face of Indian removal during the 1830s.
Colonial Missionscapes
On Thursday, October 11, 1827, at the Mayhew Mission in the Choctaw Nation, there was held what had become an annual “meeting of the association of Missionaries in the Choctaw
& Chickesaw nations” (Tombeckbee Presbytery 1899:17), which was attended by several missionaries, including the Reverend Robert Bell of Charity Hall. Over the next three days, each missionary gave a report on the status of the school they represented, and a committee was formed to oversee the study of language preparation and the printing of books in the Choctaw language, an effort embroiled in controversy with the United States government. Thomas L.
McKenney, who was the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (established in 1824), wrote to the missionaries on April 10, 1826 that “The plan of teaching Indians to read in their own language is not the best way to proceed with them” (Tombeckbee Presbytery 1899:18). Those who worked under the American Missionary Board complied with the wishes of the federal government implied in McKenny’s letter by teaching “in English first,” but continued to privately fund the preparation of books, teaching, and preaching in the Choctaw language.
It is evident that the missionaries operating within the boundaries of the Chickasaw
Nation and the Choctaw Nation, whether they worked under the American Missionary Board or
18
Figure 1-2. Mission Stations in the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation
19 the Cumberland Missionary Board, were in close communication and considered their missions to be part of a larger joint operation to convert both indigenous groups to Christianity. This network was not limited merely to northern Mississippi. In the minutes of the annual meeting in
1825 can be found a vote to “invite the Cherokee Brethren who reside in the Arkansas Territory to meet with us” (Tombeckbee Presbytery 1899:7). A letter written by the Reverend Bell in 1825 mentioned that the Monroe Mission, also located in the Chickasaw Nation, received 12 barrels of
Cincinnati flour from two congregations located in Ohio (Meacham 2007:66), showing that they were in regular communication. All of the missions among the Chickasaws and Choctaws accepted funding from the federal government, some of these missions received funding from their respective host Nations, and all of them solicited donations from members of their congregations both locally and nationally.
It is impossible to adequately understand the operation of these individual mission schools without contextualizing them in what I will henceforth call “missionscapes.” While
Charity Hall was situated on what one might consider the American “frontier,” the Reverend
Bell and his family were by no means alone in a sea of Native peoples. They were able to utilize resources and contacts throughout the region to carry out their operation, and all of these represented nodes on a larger missionscape. These included mission schools like those at Caney
Creek, Eliot, Martyn, Mayhew, and Monroe. Other nodes were represented by various denominational church congregations in nearby American settlements, such as Cotton Gin Port, where the Reverend Robert Bell and other school administrators frequently gave sermons on
Sundays. Bell mentioned in one letter that he traveled to Florence, Alabama to retrieve donations collected and sent to Charity Hall by their congregations in Tennessee and Kentucky. He also noted that the administrators of the Monroe Mission similarly retrieved donated goods at the
20 same location. Bell’s letters repeatedly implied that he paid regular visits to a treasury office to collect his monthly allotment of federal funds for Charity Hall’s operation. While many of these offices and trading hubs were not exclusively dealing with the “civilization” of Indians, they were part of the larger missionscape utilized for this purpose.
A similar conception was applied a few years ago by Hauser (2015:601) to plantations in
Colonial Dominica during the late eighteenth century. He explained that “British observers envisioned Dominica as a colonial enterprise, poised to augment the sugar holdings of other overseas territories in their Caribbean empire.” Hauser (2015:602) argued that plantations should be studied and understood as “nodes” in assemblages of networks rather than isolated institutions simply defined by size and time period. Panich and some of his collaborators (Panich et al. 2018;
Panich and Schneider 2014, 2015; Schneider and Panich 2019) have applied an “indigenous landscape” approach to colonial Catholic missions over the past decade that they use to foreground indigenous persistence and to move beyond the idea that Native societies were all simply in decline.
Just as such networks shaped material practices within indigenous landscapes and plantation systems, so too did the missionscape built around the Chickasaws and Choctaws serve as an outpost for colonialism, whether or not the individual missionaries recognized their institutions and networks as such. They followed the dictates of the Office of Indian Trade, which was later converted by John C. Calhoun (U.S. Secretary of War and later U.S. Vice
President) into the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Religion in general has served historically as a moral agent used to reinforce and dictate behavior and beliefs to populations of people, and it was overtly used in this way by the federal government and its missionary agents between 1820 and 1830, after which the program became obsolete due to a federal policy shift to Indian
21 removal. Not only did the missionaries erect schools and teach Indian children how to live in a
“civilized” manner, they also solicited and were invited into the homes of major indigenous families to give sermons and provide more personal religious instruction. According to the
Reverend Bell, this proselytization was not limited to religion but was also intended to influence the politics of Chickasaw leaders. In a letter written in 1829 to McKenney, the Reverend Bell reported that he had “several times conversed with Major Levi Colbert…on the subject of their removal over the Mississippi [River]” and that his objective was to convince Colbert that removal was not only necessary but “the only means that can secure their future Presperity & happiness” (Meacham 2007:115-116). Bell’s letters to McKenney and other federal agents frequently took on a conspiratorial tone such as this when political questions were raised.
A primary feature of missionscapes, therefore, was that they were colonial in nature and existed to promote the interests of the developing American bourgeoisie. In a global world where
American production was in competition with that of other nation states such as Great Britain and France, the American elites found it necessary to exert more direct influence over the resources in their immediate vicinity, particularly natural resources long controlled by indigenous peoples. Prior to 1829, the general attitude toward Indians was that of “civilization” and accommodation, primarily due to the fact that they still posed a serious military threat to a vulnerable new nation following the Revolutionary War. However, by the time Andrew Jackson came into the presidency that year and the economic position of indigenous peoples had been eroded by decades of inroads being made through various treaties and the acclimation of many
Indian leaders into American society, the federal government found itself in a much more dominant position in relation to Indian nations. It was under the administration of Jackson and
Calhoun that the “civilization” tactic was abandoned in favor of removal (Atkinson 2004:224).
22 This also sounded the death knell for mission schools and missionscapes. They became obsolete forms—as far as American colonialism was concerned—that disappeared along with any massively organized physical presence of Indians east of the Mississippi River, only to be replaced with new Indian schools of a very different character later in the nineteenth century.
Materiality of Civilization
This thought brings me to the purpose of this dissertation. It is not enough to know that missionaries were “civilizing” Indians and converting them into Americans. It is equally important to understand how missionaries were “civilizing” Indians and converting them into
Americans who could be successful in a developing capitalist system. Such an understanding cannot be acquired without an examination of how the civilizing effort was carried out materially in the physical world. The missionaries could not simply tell the Indians how to live; they had to show them. This meant developing a habitus of civilization that included showing them how to eat in a civilized way, how to farm in a civilized way, and how to dress in a civilized way. It meant showing them how to establish a daily, regimented routine. It meant showing them how to act out appropriate gender roles and breaking with their matrilineal kinship systems. Boys needed to be taught to farm in a civilized way and raise cattle while girls needed to be taught how to sew and become homemakers. It meant changing the Indian diet from eating deer and
“wild” resources to eating meat from cows and domestic plants and animals. Even the traditional teaching of mathematics and writing was impossible without teaching them how to use instruments like slate pencils and tablets. Hauser (2015:601) argued that within the physical strata of Dominica lay an archaeological horizon associated with the plantation system of the late eighteenth century, and the same can be said of the missionscape of northeastern Mississippi,
23 part of which also survives as an archaeological horizon consisting of material culture and spatial landscape arrangements.
This materialist conception of understanding reality and history has its roots in the philosophy of Karl Marx (1978:4), who insisted: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Over the past 30 years, many archaeologists have utilized and developed theories of materiality, drawing on the ideas of Marx as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger (Gosden 1994; Dant 1999). The concept of habitus and the theory of practice, both developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1970; 1977), have also played an important role in elaborating a theory of material culture and materiality for archaeologists, and is especially useful in understanding the material component of “civilizing” Indian children. Bourdieu (1977) wrote in particular that practical mastery is transmitted in practice and that it is through a dialectical relationship between the body and space that structures and the world are embodied.
The Reverend Robert Bell and his compatriots participating in the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape used practical mastery of both educational and mechanical “arts” to civilize
Chickasaw and Choctaw children in accordance with the wishes of the United States government. Here the processes of practice and materiality took on a colonial character when they were encouraged and enforced in a context where the balance of power was shifting from the Indians to the Euro-Americans.
Very little of this materiality can be grasped through the written documents that only vaguely hint at the physical circumstances of life at Charity Hall, and this means that archaeological methods and analysis in conjunction with historical research must be used to develop an adequate understanding of how 1820s mission schools operated to civilize Indian
24 children. More precisely, the historical and archaeological data marshaled in this dissertation are presented to answer the primary question: what material tools and practices did missionaries use to civilize Native American children and their families prior to Indian removal? The answer at which I arrived is that they used what most readers of this dissertation will rightly consider to be the mundane, unremarkable objects and activities that any American living on the 1820s frontier would have used in their day-to-day lives. The characterization of the ceramic assemblage shows that the students were able to use the newest tableware to practice their dining etiquette, and the lack of wild animal remains present in the faunal assemblage shows that they were limited to consuming meat from domesticated animals. The presence of slate tablet and pencil fragments shows what type of educational tools the children were utilizing to practice their writing and arithmetic, and the presence of a clay marble shows that they still found time to play (with or without permission). Overall this study works on two levels: (1) a focus on daily practices at
Charity Hall, and (2) how these articulate with those of the larger missionscape—at this point only gleaned through history.
Dissertation Organization
In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, I begin dealing with the theoretical concepts of colonialism and materiality. These include colonialism as it has been understood and utilized by archaeologists over time as well as discussion of the philosophical origins of materiality and examples of their use by archaeologists. Chapter 2 also ties these theoretical concepts to the historiography of missions and how these places served as outposts for American colonialism.
Chapter 3 lays out the history of colonialism in the southeastern United States with a particular focus on the interactions of the Chickasaws with the European powers and later the American states. In chapters 4 and 5 I elaborate on the historical data collected during the research process,
25 including a chronological overview of the events of Charity Hall and a discussion of the apparent methods used to “civilize” the children. These are followed by chapters 6 and 7—two archaeological data chapters—that discuss the spatial distribution of artifacts and the laboratory measurements and types of artifacts more specifically. Chapter 8 will bring together all of the historic and archaeological evidence to show how Charity Hall was part of a larger missionscape and answer the research questions that I have elaborated here more fully as well as provide a springboard for future research.
26 CHAPTER 2 COLONIALISM, MATERIALITY, AND NETWORKS
Wolf (1982:xxv) famously suggested that anthropology needed to discover “history” in order to “account for the ways in which the social system of the modern world came into being.”
He (1982:4) wrote that so-called primitive peoples—people “without history”—were not isolated groups, neither from the external world nor from each other. Wolf and several of his co-thinkers
(Leacock 1982, Mintz 1985, Nash 1981) elaborated the idea that human societies have never been contained in bounded systems and that anthropologists needed to develop new theories of cultural forms. Things, behaviors, and ideas play a demonstrable role in the management of human interaction, and researchers must therefore understand “more precisely how cultural forms work to mediate social relationships among particular populations” (Wolf 1982:19). One of the prerequisites for this was problematizing the historical conception of “the West” as a society and “civilization” independent of other societies and civilizations. Wolf (1982:6-7) argued that such a formulation creates a false model of reality: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The solution for these theorists was that anthropologists and sociologists should use Marxist theory to first trace the growth of the world market and the course of capitalist development and then relate that history to processes that affect the lives of local populations.
The early pioneers of historical archaeology took up this call, explicitly theorizing
“historical archaeology as the study of European expansion throughout the world” (Leone
1995:251; see also Orser 1996). Even prior to Wolf’s magnum opus, archaeologists such as
Schuyler (1970) were calling for “historic sites archaeology” to study the processes of European expansion, exploration, and colonialization. This led historical archaeologists to consider what is perhaps the most important question that has developed in the practice of historical archaeology
27 over the past fifty years: who are its subjects? Much of the research emerging from this field, therefore, has dealt with (a) how indigenous peoples around the world have responded to
European “contact” and colonialism and (b) how such encounters have influenced the development of postcolonial contexts (Lightfoot 1995:199).
Lightfoot (1995:200) explained that the social environment of most North American colonies was considerably complex, typically involving multiple local Native populations,
European peoples of varied nationalities and backgrounds, and many “other” peoples of color.
The Charity Hall mission in the Chickasaw Nation was not an exception. The school was administered by Euro-American missionaries on behalf of the Cumberland Synod in a missionscape dominated by schools operated by other synods and religious denominations. The genetics of the children who attended the school were not homogenous. The children carried with them Chickasaw, Choctaw, and British-American blood. Workers who were employed at the school were frequently British-American, but some were African-Americans who may have been formerly or currently enslaved to Chickasaw families. Lightfoot (1995:201) described such settlements as “pluralistic entrepôts” where considerable social interaction took place, including the stimulation of selective cultural exchange and accommodation of architectural styles, material goods, methods of craft production, subsistence pursuits, diet, dress, and ceremonial practices. He (1995:201) insisted that the study of such multi-ethnic interactions in colonial settings is critical for understanding the composition and development of modern cultures.
Lightfoot (1995) used the blanket phrase “culture contact studies” to describe his approach, but some archaeologists have recognized a problem in labeling such archaeological contexts simply as “culture contact” situations. Silliman (2005:56) explained that, although archaeological research in North America’s so-called “contact period” blossomed beginning in
28 the 1980s and particularly after the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act by the U.S. Congress, the uncritical use of culture contact terminology for clearly colonial contexts downplays the severity of such interactions. According to Silliman
(2005:56), there existed radically different levels of political power in the structure of relationships. He (2005:56) insisted upon rethinking the metaphor of “contact” in North
American archaeology, which “structures not only our concepts and interpretations of the interactions and settlers but also the mental image formed by our audiences and collaborators when we narrate those histories.” Silliman (2005:58) explained that “contact” can range “from amicable to hostile, extensive to minor, long term to short duration, or ancient to recent.” In his
(2005:57) own research, he found that referring to his context as merely “contact” seemed to downplay the violence of the colonial frontier. These included the labor forced on indigenous people, the presence of nonindigenous groups in the general region for several decades, and the ensuing material, cultural, and political entanglements.
The same can be said about some of the history that has been written and published to date about the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape of the 1820s. Some scholars have attempted to provide a pluralistic understanding of this missionscape, but there still remains the
“contact” mentality that is missing the nuance of power stratification. Pickett (2015:64), for instance, who wrote about the mission school at Monroe, suggested that “mission churches became spaces for reciprocal, multiethnic interaction, ecclesiastical equality, and mutual edification.” If one steps back and looks at the greater context, following Wolf’s (1982:21) suggestion that local situations should be connected to the greater course of capitalist development, one can see that such a perspective downplays the relationships of power and the violence that existed on this colonial frontier. Between 1805 and 1818, then General Andrew
29 Jackson and other treaty commissioners acting on behalf of the United States government used threats, economic coercion, and bribery to acquire nearly 20 million acres of Indian land (Satz
1979:53). These tactics resulted in multiple land cessions by the Chickasaws in the years 1805,
1816, and 1818—the third consisting of 10,700 square miles—about one-fourth of what is today the State of Tennessee (Satz 1979:53). The establishment of Charity Hall on the western bank of the Tombigbee River sat near the new boundary between the Chickasaw Nation and the State of
Mississippi, which was only established three years prior, in 1817 (Elliott and Wells 2003:64). A large portion of the funding used to keep Charity Hall and the surrounding mission schools in operation was provided by the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, which served as part of the United
States government’s effort to erase Native peoples as separate political groups and draw them into American society. Charity Hall administrator Robert Bell himself wrote in multiple letters to the US Department of War that he and his teachers were constantly impressing upon the
Chickasaw children “the friendly views of the government towards them.” Following Silliman
(2005:57), these are examples of explicit and implicit features that differentiate mere contact from colonialism. Phrases such as “culture contact” and “ecclesiastical equality” therefore give a false impression of the social character of the missionscape and the mission schools.
Cobb (2005:564) also theorized about colonialism, arguing that its processes cannot be fully comprehended until complexity and diversity are projected back in time. He (2005:570) argued that “traditional” societies in the Mississippian World, prior to the entrance of European colonialism into North America, did not “laconically” experience processes of flux and movement that were simply accelerated by the intrusion of mercantilism and capitalism.
Modernization and globalization, according to Cobb (2005:570), have a considerable history. It is therefore necessary to adopt a “deep historical anthropology” that extends before the entering
30 of Europeans into the western hemisphere in order to clarify the emergence of “modernisms,” as opposed to modernism, and “capitalisms,” as opposed to capitalism (Cobb 2005:571). The
Native North Americans who were removed from their lands during the 1830s, including the
Chickasaws, played a major role in the development of the United States both politically and economically (Cobb 2005:571). The nature of indigenous participation in these historical events was predicated by a long history with Europeans, dating back to the 1500s, and the preceding history of regional Southeastern interactions (Cobb 2005:571). This means considering Charity
Hall as only one episode in a longer string of historical events spanning centuries that cannot be considered in a static or isolated fashion.
Materiality as a Theory of Material Culture
The largest barrier to historicizing “people without history,” according to Lightfoot
(1995:201), is that most colonial accounts were written from the perspectives of Europeans and their ancestors who documented little about their interactions with local Native men, women, and children. “Ethnohistorical research often provides little or highly selective information on the pluralistic laboring class in colonial settings” (Lightfoot 1995:201). This is particularly true for
Charity Hall, about which most of the history has been gleaned from letters to and from the missionaries who operated it. These generally provide favorable reports on progress provided to solicit greater funding for the operation of the school—whether from the federal government or their own church congregations—and therefore include little if anything about the day-to-day struggles that missionaries may have faced in “civilizing” their charges. This is where archaeological data have the capacity to provide insights into the lifeways and interactions of such poorly documented peoples of the past (Lightfoot 1995:201). However, for archaeology and
31 material culture to serve as a source of history for the peoples in question, it is necessary first to elaborate a theory of material culture.
In recent years, archaeologists have helped foster a theory of “materiality,” which is a theory of “embodied” subjects and the ways that bodies sense, feel, and know their being (Spyer
2006:125). Bodies are not ideal forms but are things entangled and enmeshed in material worlds of differing characters and compositions (Spyer 2006:125). Beginning with this understanding, it follows that bodies, or people, coexist with materials, which become embodied extensions of the senses (Spyer 2006:125). A “phenomenal field” emerges through lived experience to produce a system of “self-other-things” (Dant 2005:93). For example, the phenomenal field of a Chickasaw student at Charity Hall might have included other people (fellow Indian students, Presbyterian teachers, white and black workers), material objects (books, writing tablets, farming equipment), and a material environment (trumpet sounds, livestock smells, agricultural fields). Knowledge of the world emerges through bodily engagement with it (Dant 2005:97), and objects are assimilated within the actions and intentions of the body (Dant 2005:98). Anthropologists have used this line of thinking to recognize that cultures are “hybrid amalgams” of human and nonhuman phenomena (Strathern 1996:519), and it is by recovering and interpreting nonhuman phenomena and giving these “agency” that archaeologists can provide crucial information about the past.
Material Agency in Archaeology
The prominence of materiality in anthropology and archaeology was one of the outcomes of the struggle to define agency and its use in the discipline, which began in the 1980s and picked up steam during the 1990s (Appadurai 1986, 2006; Carrier 2006; Dobres and Robb 2000;
Hicks 2010; Hoskins 2006; Keane 2006; Pauketat 2001; Weiner 1985). However, according to
32 Robb (2010:494), it was Marxism that first introduced the idea that humans did not simply act in accordance with their “fixed” nature. Marx (1818-1883) was the one who first put human action and consciousness systematically into relation with social context, writing: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1978:4). In anthropological terms, human nature is relational. People develop their capacity for acting through participating in social relations, and this process has two outcomes: (1) it produces an economic product, and (2) it shapes consciousness (Robb 2010:494-495). Despite these words of Marx being penned in 1859, it was not until over a century had passed that archaeologists began to take up the implications of his philosophical perspective and apply these to their theories of material culture (McGuire 1992;
Maurer 2006; Woodward 2007). Even then, agency and practice theory were generally derived from the ideas of Bourdieu (1977, 1990) and Giddens (1979, 1984), who were critiquing structuralism (Robb 2010:495).
Early use of agency in archaeology (Blanton et al. 1996; Earle 1997, 2002; Feinman
1995; Flannery 1999; Hayden 1995), prior to its application to material culture, was generally used to explain the individual person’s ability to “effect” his or her will or intention. However, this conception was premised on the idea that people’s motivations somehow originated outside of culture and were therefore something universal to all humans (Robb 2010:496). It does not answer questions such as: from where do such motivations come, or what are their limits?
Postprocessual archaeologists responded to this by drawing on a dialectic model of agency—one that focuses not on an individual’s ability to affect others but on the socially reproductive quality of action (Robb 2010:497). Actors act according to culturally specific structures rather than universal motivations, and their behavior articulates with the real world through their actions
33 (Robb 2010:498). It follows, therefore, that agency is not a characteristic of individuals but of relationships (Robb 2010:499).
One of the problems with theorizing agency, according to Robb (2015:166), is that the major agency theorists (Boivin 2004, 2008; DeMarrais et al. 1996; Ingold 2000, 2007; Latour
2005; Meskell 2005; Miller 2001, 2005, 2010) tend to deal with “deep” theory and philosophical problems, such as embodiment and phenomenology, which leaves out most everyday material culture. In order to account for such things, archaeologists need to consider how these things take part in the unfolding flow of action (Robb 2015:167). One can do this by showing how specific objects illustrate the roles described by deep theory and philosophy, but this frequently prevents an understanding of the form, material characteristics, and history of the objects in question
(Robb 2015:176). Robb (2015:177) suggested that archaeologists should rather ask: “what do objects do, and how do they accomplish it?” When considering the material assemblage recovered from Charity Hall, one can ask questions about what a ceramic tableware platter or a log cabin “did.” Even if one precludes that such materials do not “do” anything outside the realm of human relations and intentionality, objects certainly played a part in “civilizing” Chickasaw and Choctaw children. Before answering such questions, however, it is important to review the deep theory and philosophy that underlies the use of materiality in archaeology.
Materiality in Archaeology
The present body of literature that uses materiality was developed by researchers who drew on the ideas of several prominent philosophers and anthropologists, including Husserl
(1859-1938), Heidegger (1889-1976), and Bourdieu (1930-2002). Husserl was a leading theorist on phenomenology, which is the study of how things are perceived and how they present themselves to the senses. Husserl argued that experience consists of concrete matter for the
34 senses, opposing those who perceived it as consciousness shaped by language (Gosden
1994:103). His call for a return to “the things themselves” referred to things as they are present in consciousness rather than independent things hidden from view in the outside world (Harman
2009:18). A few fragments of slate recovered from Charity Hall were not just pieces of a writing tablet of a certain shape and weight. The tablets in question were used for specific activities, and individual tablets may have been owned by specific individuals. Borrowing the names of actual
Charity Hall students, Charity Colbert’s writing tablet, if she had one, was not the same as Peter
Pitchlynn’s writing tablet. These tablets could have shifted between use as tools used for education to tools used for recreation. Husserl would have argued that these tablets were far more than bundles of physical qualities.
Heidegger argued that theoretical constructions arise from everyday life, which can then provide the context needed to see the broader background of intelligibility. This means turning the focus away from knowledge and toward being. By looking at things humans normally take for granted and by bringing attention to things that are normally forgotten or considered trivial— such as hammers and door knobs—Heidegger was able to show how knowledge of the mundane world is generated (Gosden 1994:108-109). One way that Heidegger elaborated this idea was through his twin concepts of zuhandenheit, “readiness-at-hand,” and vorhandenheit, “presence- at-hand,” which describe two different ways that people perceive things (Harman 2009:18).
Heidegger argued that the most frequent mode of dealing with things is not through consciousness but in taking them for granted through every day use. Such things are “zuhanden” and remain concealed so long as they function properly. When they break or stop working the way people want them to, they are then noticed and become “vorhanden” (Harman 2009:18-19).
It follows that zuhandenheit and vorhandenheit are not two different types of entities but two
35 different modes between which all entities oscillate. This means that while a hidden object might be brought into consciousness, it is impossible in principle to make the withdrawn reality fully reveal its secrets. There will always be some depth to the world that never becomes fully present to human perception (Harman 2009:19). For example, tragically on May 27, 1828, a tree at
Charity Hall fell down on top of little Silva Porter, a current student at the school, killing her.
This and most of the trees were likely perceived as “zuhanden” before May 27, there to provide shade and perhaps utility, but after Silva’s death, it is possible that this and all of the trees at
Charity Hall became “vorhanden”—menaces to be feared and perhaps pruned or cut down to prevent further accidents.
Bourdieu developed a general theory of social action around the idea of habitus which, like Heidegger’s body of theory, focused on practical action rather than the then-dominant post- structuralist interest in discourse (Gosden 1994:115). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, a system of dispositions and structuring structures, is not consciously mastered but built up from experience
(Gosden 1994:117). Habitus describes a build-up of past practice within the human organism that it unconsciously uses to guide its future practice (Gosden 1994:117). In his early work, Bourdieu
(1970) applied his ideas about habitus to gender and how its practice is reflected in the Kabyle houses of northern Algeria. He explained that these houses contained internal divisions that contrasted low and dark feminine parts with high and light masculine parts (Bourdieu 1970:155).
Bourdieu framed this as embodied practice, where oppositions between the house as a whole mirrored those that existed throughout the occupants’ perceived universe, particularly the dichotomy between public and private life (Bourdieu 1970:157-158). It is not yet clear whether a male-female dichotomy existed spatially at Charity Hall, but historic evidence shows that male students were given a different practical education (carpentry, blacksmithing, agriculture, and
36 animal husbandry) than female students (sewing, weaving, knitting, and household management), suggesting that Charity Hall to some extent had “gendered” places whether this was intentionally planned or not. Bourdieu (1977) suggested that practical mastery is transmitted in practice without attaining a level of public discourse and that it is the dialectical relationship between the body and space that structures the world. The practical education given to students at Charity Hall therefore would have altered and structured the school itself.
Many scholars within the field of archaeology have drawn on these philosophical ideas to develop materiality as a body of theory in their work (Buchanan and Skousen 2015; Buchli 2006;
Domańska 2006; Joyce 2008; Olsen 2010, 2012; Schiffer 1999). One of the earliest scholars to implant object agency into archaeology was Kopytoff (1986:64), who opposed the economist perception that “commodities simply are.” He (1986:64) argued that commodities have more to them than production, circulation, and exchange. Their production is part of a cultural and cognitive process. Kopytoff (1986:65-66) suggested, therefore, that things have cultural biographies and actual life histories. Just as a person can be described using a biographical model assembled from life-history data, so too can objects (Kopytoff 1986:66). Archaeologists should therefore ask similar questions to those one asks about people: “Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life?’” and so on. In this way, Kopytoff (1986:67) argued, things can become more salient where they might otherwise remain obscure. However, he (1986:68) continued, it is important that all biographies be culturally informed, especially those of things that are culturally constructed and endowed with culturally specific meanings. Kopytoff’s ideas have since been expanded by other scholars to ask how meanings and values are accumulated and transformed (Gosden and Marshall 1999)
37 and how to extend biographies beyond the time of recovery by archaeologists (Joyce and
Gillespie 2015).
Another important contributor to the use of materiality in archaeology is Ingold
(1995:57), who, in his early attempts to find a satisfactory way of understanding relationships between people and their environments, explained that the conventional anthropological view is that human beings inhabit culturally constructed, significant worlds that are laid on continuous and undifferentiated physical terrains. He (1995:57) argued, conversely, that life “does not begin here or end there, but is always going on” (emphasis in original). He wrote that environments are never complete but are continually under construction, which causes problems for those who consider created environments, such as architecture, to be “built” or finished (Ingold 1995:57).
To address this problem, Ingold (1995:58) uses a combination of biology, ecological psychology, and phenomenology, including the ideas of Heidegger, to replace traditional anthropology’s
“building” perspective with a “dwelling” perspective. Building becomes a process that is continually occurring, and the “final form” is merely a moment in the feature’s lifespan that has been cut out from a larger flow of activity (Ingold 1995:78).
A third major contributor to materiality theory in archaeology is Carl Knappett (2004:43), who discussed the codependent relationship between mind and matter and how this conception opposes the notion that mind precedes matter or that mind finds some “materialization” in the latter. A person’s essence cannot be uploaded, stored, and downloaded unaltered. Information must always be instantiated in order for it to exist, and such information can never remain unaffected by the medium in which it finds itself (Knappett 2004:43). Therefore, information is situated and embodied, and it is accessible depending on agents and situations (Knappett
2004:44). Knappett (2004:45-46) used the concept of “affordances” to help explain the
38 codependency of mind and matter. Affordances have three key aspects: relationality, transparency, and sociality. The affordance of an object, first, is a relational property between object and agent—the affordance is not independent (Knappett 2004:46). For example, a chair may have the affordance of sitting, but this affordance may not be available to everyone due to intrinsic physical constraints on the part of certain people. Additional affordances may also emerge under some circumstances, such as the chair’s capacity for propping open a door.
(Knappett 2004:46). This also speaks to the transparency of affordances, namely that the affordances may or may not be clear to prospective agents based on their having requisite cultural knowledge (Knappett 2004:46). Affordances are, thirdly, social, because they very often involve more than one human agent. These people may be involved in joint activities which allows them to see joint affordances, or these may arise in contest when agents in different situations perceive different affordances within the same object (Knappett 2004:47).
Networks and Scale
If one is to understand materiality, however, one must also understand the connections that material things and places have with other material things and places. As noted previously, the missionscape concept elaborated here for the first time draws on the idea that Charity Hall was one node on a larger “network” or “assemblage” of mission-related places. Hauser
(2015:602) applied this concept to British plantations in Colonial Dominica during the late eighteenth century, arguing that an archaeological horizon exists across the physical strata associated with that time period. Network analysis has entered into archaeological research primarily through Actor Network Theory (Latour 2005) and the concept of entanglement
(Hodder 2012), but has best been elaborated by Knappett (2011), who argued that network analysis should map relations rather than institutions. Latour (2005) was more focused on
39 critiquing western ontologies and mapping out relations between humans and non-humans. The word “social,” he (2005:1) argued, should not be used unless the user first designates what is already bundled together. In other words, the context must be given for the “social” network in question. Knappett (2011:10) took this further by explaining that the relationships in such networks are inherently spatial and work at multiple scales. Thus, Charity Hall needs to be contextualized within its missionscape, which had a definite relationship to the U.S. government and therefore to global capitalism as it was developing at that time. Even though it was the only school operating at the behest of the Cumberland Synod in Mississippi, it cannot be adequately understood outside of its network of relations with other schools and colonial institutions.
Harris (2017:127) suggested that the concept of “assemblage” is a powerful tool that allows researchers to reconceptualize the world at multiple scales, from the atomic to the galactic. Put simply, assemblages can be defined as “compositions that act.” The Charity Hall
“assemblage,” for instance, acted upon the Chickasaw and Choctaw children in attendance to civilize them and their kin through religious conversion and practical instruction in European-
American ways of life. Charity Hall was part of a larger “assemblage” which included more than a dozen other mission schools across both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation that sought to civilize and influence the political life of that larger group of indigenous people as a whole. Regardless of the scale, these assemblages must be understood as dialectical processes that cannot be described at one particular moment (Harris 2017:129). This conception was borrowed from the scholarship of Deleuze and Guatteri (2004:97-98), who argued that assemblages contain both material and “expressive” elements—which include non-physical components such as signs, gestures, and symbols. The assemblages that were acting upon the
40 Chickasaws and Choctaws, whether in the individual schools or in the missionscape as a whole, would therefore be recognized as being made up of both material things and practices.
The issue of scale is critical in archaeological analysis since “radically different types of processes operate at different scales” (Harris 2017:128). A person can be understood as an assemblage of bones, flesh, cultural dispositions, and memories, but an assemblage of “people” may also include houses, animals, and institutions. Assemblages themselves are made up of other assemblages (Harris 2017:129). If assemblages are processes, Charity Hall can be understood as a sub-process of the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape, which was itself a sub-process of the whole “civilization” endeavor. Understanding the day-to-day lives of Indian children at mission schools such as Charity Hall therefore provides a view into the practice of “civilization” that can be compared with the study of other nodes on the same missionscape as well as those on more distant missionscapes.
Scale has been taken up more critically by cultural geographers over the past 20 years
(Marton et al. 2005, Woodward et al. 2012), who problematize hierarchical conceptions of scale—both vertical and horizontal—and favor an approach that “flattens” scale completely.
They argue (Marston et al. 2005:422) that levels of scale suggest a “God’s Eye” view or a transcendent position for the researcher that not only reproduces pre-configured accounts of social life but also undermines the researcher’s reflexivity. A flat ontology for scale, they argue, consists of self-organizing systems or “onto-genesis,” where the dynamic properties of matter produce a multiplicity of complex relations. These relations are actualized as temporary—often mobile—“sites” and sometimes lead to the creation of new events, entities, orders, and practices
(Marston et al. 2005:422-423). In the case of the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape, the individual missions should not be seen as nested within the missionscape, which was in turn
41 nested in a larger network of missions across the American frontier. Instead, the missionscape and the individual mission schools should be understood as self-organizing systems that produced complex relations. The schools may have been nodes in a network or parts of an assemblage, but they were more defined by their dynamic properties than governed by administrators looking down from above.
These “dynamic properties” were heavily influenced by the agency of the Chickasaws and the Choctaws. Over the past decade, Panich and some of his collaborators (Panich et al.
2018; Panich and Schneider 2014, 2015; Schneider and Panich 2019) have developed an
“indigenous landscape” approach that they use to foreground indigenous persistence and to move beyond the idea that Native societies were all simply in decline. To do this, they (2015:48) examined how indigenous people “organized and used space at mission establishments, along with the shifting frontiers between Native homelands and colonial hinterlands, and in areas outside of direct colonial control.” Armed with this perspective, the scholars argued against the idea that Spanish colonial missions in California were tightly-controlled social spaces and showed that European hegemony was far from complete and was actually negotiated. This is arguably even more true for my research area—the historic Chickasaw Nation and the historic
Choctaw Nation—due to the fact that these regions were at the time of the Charity Hall missionscape recognized as sovereign territories by the United States government. Native peoples living in central California during the Spanish mission era, Panich and Schneider (2015) argue, exercised a considerable degree of control over their organization and use of space, but in the case of the Chickasaws and Charity Hall, the former had absolute control over the space used for the mission school, which was in their own territory. It was the Reverend Robert Bell and the
Cumberland Synod who had to negotiate and find ways to use space within the sovereign realm
42 of the Chickasaws. The same was true for every one of the Christian mission schools established throughout the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation. This 1820s missionscape represented the last gasp of a time when Americans in the region lived alongside Indian territories before the federal government swept in during the 1830s and took direct control of the Southeast in its entirety through coercion and threat of military force.
This landscape approach elaborated by Panich and Schneider (2015), as well as my own missionscape approach, calls for an examination of how the various actors and societies constructed, organized, and inhabited space. The location of Charity Hall, for instance, was selected and used partially due to the fact that Levi Colbert was drawn spiritually to the
Cumberland Synod and wanted a school built on his personal allotment of land that his own children could attend, but it was probably also convenient for the missionaries who could cross over into Cotton Gin Port very easily to conduct business and receive support from individual
Americans, Christian congregations, and the federal government. It appears that several of the schools on the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape similarly had mixed-race Indian patrons, such as Henry Love for the Chickasaw Martyn mission school (Winter 1997:18) and John
Pitchlynn for the Choctaw Elliot mission school (Board of Missions 1854a:64-65). The Reverend
Stuart, who directed the Monroe mission, noted in his journal in 1834 that William Colbert
(Levi’s older brother) was an elder in their church, and Pontotoc County records show that the land on which the Monroe church stood was donated by William himself (Braden 1958:228-
229). This shows how Native peoples exercised autonomy differently even when they were in the same or related ethnolinguistic or political groups (Panich and Schneider 2015:49). Rather than trying to concentrate disbursed indigenous communities as was done by the Spanish in central California (Lightfoot 2005; Wade 2008), the missionaries in Mississippi used the strategy
43 of incorporating their missions into existing indigenous communities, echoing what was done by
Franciscans in La Florida two centuries earlier (McEwan 1991; Saunders 1998; Scarry and
McEwan 1995) and New Mexico (Lycett 2014).
Materiality of “Civilization” and Conversion
Virtually all missionaries across the Americas were forced to confront myriad Native cultures and practices as they sought to foist their ideals under a paradigm of “civilizing” and converting. Both within missions proper and in outside contexts, missionaries and other
European agents used material culture to try to get Native peoples to engage in European ways as a show of faith. For instance, English Puritans in southern New England used dress and adornment in their efforts to exorcise “heathenism” from local indigenous groups. Once Native
Americans were colonized, according to Puritan ideals, they were expected to mimic the English in clothing, mannerisms, and dress without “hybridity,” which was a danger to the colonial hierarchy (Loren 2013:152). For these New Englanders, clothing and adornment was understood as honoring and healing both body and spirit. The moral soul and physical body were inseparable, and “godliness” was manifested by the human body (Loren 2013:152-153). The
“somber” dress of the Puritans avoided the “wily beguiles” of high fashion and protected the boundaries between body and soul that were susceptible to temptation by the devil. One’s spiritual state meant nothing unless it was visibly manifested in dress, speech, sexual activities, and comportment (Loren 2013:153). Native Americans were therefore required to wear
European clothing and thereby move closer to being Christian (Loren 2013:153). This appears to also have been the case at Charity Hall and other contemporary mission schools (see Chapter 8).
Spanish Catholics also viewed indigenous dress as a barrier to conversion. Artistic depictions of the Tunica of the time show both Native Americans and Africans wearing loose
44 and unstructured clothing and carrying primarily objects of Native American manufacture rather than European. These depictions presented indigenous people as sharply different from French colonists and priests who wore ready-made and fitted clothing (Loren 2017:103). This contributed to drawing sharp divisions between “sophisticated” Europeans and “uncovered” indigenous peoples (Loren 2017:103-104). One specific material adornment item used to
Christianize and “civilize” indigenous peoples was the crucifix. Jesuit priests in French
Louisiana during the eighteenth century made use of crucifixes to allow individual indigenous persons to visually display evidence of their conversion through adornment (Loren 2017:102).
Historical documents indicate that this distribution of religious artifacts was an integral part of the Jesuit strategy to convert indigenous peoples through the consumption of material items.
Crucifixes were devotional items worn as necklaces and attached to clothing that were intended to be tangible reminders of both faith and religious duty. Such items can be distinguished from
“trade goods” since they were gifts from the missionaries and priests directly to those they converted (Loren 2017:102).
Another tactic was to establish “Praying Indian” communities by introducing meeting houses in the midst of Indian villages. This was done in Connecticut and Massachusetts by
English missionary John Eliot beginning in 1650, and his efforts included not only Native peoples but also Jews and Muslims (Mrozowksi et al. 2015:126). However, such meeting houses did not always work as the Europeans intended and sometimes undermined the efforts of the missions to Christianize Native peoples. Archaeologists have found that Eliot’s New England meeting houses were in reality hybridizations as evidenced by the recovery of ritual items such as quartz crystals at foundation corners of remaining structures. These suggest a “hybridized” reality in which the spiritual power of the quartz was woven into the construction of a building
45 that may have incorporated elements of English construction practices. Archaeologists therefore argue that if this structure and others like it were used as places of teaching for these pious communities, the presence of Native ritual items suggests that the lessons were additionally steeped in older “traditional” forms of spirituality that may reach back thousands of years into the past (Mrozowski et al. 2015:129).
Franciscan friars among the Inka peoples of the Colca Valley in what is today southern
Peru also used the erection of European structures within indigenous communities in their efforts to civilize indigenous people beginning in the 1540s. These friars established a series of
“doctrinas” or doctrinal settlements which often included chapels deliberately situated on the eastern side of a site’s central plaza, directly opposite important Inka structures (Wernke
2007:162). The location and physicality of the chapels suggests an attempt by the Franciscans to appropriate simultaneously local Andean conceptions of landscape and the Inka architectural idiom of conquest. The local populace would have interpreted this as a visual expression of conquest that was constantly visible to the inhabitants, since doorways in the housing sector all faced the chapel (Wernke 2007:165). This Inkan example is an instance where Europeans used space as a civilizing tool, which shows that space, as well as objects, has a sort of materiality in its makeup. In French Caribbean colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuit missionaries also used space in this fashion through the building of mission plantations as a form of social control. Materially, they manipulated the layout of their spaces to exercise control over enslaved laborers by maximizing efficiency and surveillance (Lenik 2011:51). Mission outposts were constructed in prominent, visible locations, often on coasts, and were designed to attract the gaze by presenting visual markers of their identity as Catholic missions (Lenik 2011:54-55).
Parish churches, private chapels, and crosses were all intentionally located near the central
46 complex of many sites, and some featured gardens that may have served aesthetic or provisioning purposes. The Jesuits’ intentional manipulation of architecture and monuments differed from the efforts of secular planters who used similar manipulations to display wealth and influence (Lenik 2011:65).
It should come as no surprise that European missionaries also made great attempts to shift the material practices of Native peoples regarding death and the afterlife. The Spanish engendered change by encouraging indigenous peoples in the Maya region during the sixteenth century to adopt Christian burial practices, which served as one tactic in the larger effort to gain power and appropriate wealth during the sixteenth century (Graham et al. 2013:161). The Maya continued to carry out rituals that had been part of their cultures for centuries, but associated caching behavior underwent significant change in terms of ritual space and cache contents. Such caches were carefully and deliberately deposited within sacred spaces in churches or on the axis of church stairs. Evidence of lasting change has been found in the continuing of this practice even in one case where a church itself had collapsed (Graham et al. 2013:164). One of the key indicators is burial position, where individuals began to be buried supine with head to the west, facing east. The arms typically met somewhere over the torso and were often crossed over the chest. This was quite different from earlier, pre-colonial burial practices, which were more variable. Typically, individuals were interred seated, sometimes in large jars; flexed; or face down with legs bent back at the knees. As with the Chickasaws, the burying of individuals beneath floors of dwellings or public buildings was common and represented a practice of indigenous peoples “living with” the dead (Graham et al. 2013:173) that Europeans and later
European-Americans considered “heathenish” and sought to eradicate.
47 As one can see, what constituted civilizing and conversation and its materialization varied by epoch and denominational order. In this dissertation I focus on the materiality of conversion as expressed in a period when becoming a capitalist was a sign of both economic and spiritual success. By the time one reaches the final chapter of this work, they will find that the children were inculcated into a materialized habitus of capitalism, which included the use of formal dining implements, participating in a regimented work day, and developing techniques for farming and domestic life that lined up with the ideology of burgeoning capitalism.
My Theoretical Approach to Charity Hall
Following Wolf’s (1982:5) argument about problematizing the historical conception of
“the West,” this dissertation seeks to show how the local—the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape—is related to this historical development of global capitalism. This means problematizing the idea that mission schools like Charity Hall were simple “contact” spaces for
“mutual edification” (Pickett 2015:64). Despite the fact that Charity Hall was located within the
Chickasaw Nation, the mission had the financial support and political guidance of the United
States government, lending it the character of a colonial operation that worked to exert power and influence over the Indians, especially their leaders, through the process of “civilization” and religious conversion. Some understanding of this process can be found in the historical sources, but since the federal government and their missionary agents required a physical presence and practical training to meet their goals, so too must I, as a scholar, study the physicality—the materiality—of Charity Hall to uncover how “civilization” in the 1820s was implemented.
This requires critical use of the theories outlined in this chapter as they have been developed and used by archaeologists over the past 20 years. My archaeological investigations began when I uncovered material objects from Charity Hall and asked what they “did” (Robb
48 2015:177) to further the civilization process. The objects in question became subjects that consisted of more than just a sum of physical qualities. They were colonial things that became enmeshed (Knappett 2011:185) in the overall dwelling (Dant 1999:61-62) or habitus (Bourdieu
1970) of the Chickasaw and Choctaw students. The archaeological assemblage and the historic data compiled in this dissertation provide insight into the sub-process (Harris 2017) of
“civilization” that occurred in northeastern Mississippi, understood as a map of relations rather than institutions (Knappett 2011). This Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape was a self- organizing system with dynamic properties of matter that produced complex relations (Marston et al. 2004:422-423)—relations limited by indigenous persistence in an indigenous landscape
(Panich and Schneider 2015). The missionaries involved used many material approaches in their civilizing efforts. They provided European-style clothing to the children to help exorcise their heathenism (Loren 2013), they organized campfire meetings that established the Mississippi equivalent of praying communities within Chickasaw and Choctaw territories, and they constructed schools and chapels near the homes of important chiefs that served as not only places of worship but physical landscape markers of civilization (Lenik 2011).
49 CHAPTER 3 FACING EAST FROM CHICKASAW COUNTRY
In his book Facing East from Indian Country, historian Daniel Richter (2001:2) wrote that “freedom and unfreedom, expansion and dispossession” entwined to create the story of the
United States. Positioning himself on the Mississippi River in the heart of St. Louis, he (2001:2) argued that “trends that played themselves out west of the Mississippi grew from three hundred years’ experience in the east.” Throughout most of the time making up that experience, beginning in the sixteenth century, “the vast majority of eastern North America was neither
English nor French nor Spanish territory. It was, clearly, Indian country” (Richter 2001:2-3). The emergence of the Euro-American United States from this Indian country, therefore, “is a problem to be explained, not an inevitable process to be traced” (Richter 2001:7-8). This requires that history be reoriented from the “master narrative” of westward-facing invasion and conquest toward an eastward-facing view of the past from Indian country (Richter 2001:8). With this reorientation, “Native Americans appear in the foreground, and Europeans enter from distant shores. North America becomes the ‘old world’ and Western Europe the ‘new,’ Cahokia becomes the center and Plymouth Rock the periphery” (Richter 2001:8).
The chief issue elaborated by Richter (2001:8-9) is that reexamining history from this eastward perspective—from the Native American perspective of the day—is impossible due to the lack of historical documents and the fact that most Native peoples did not record their thoughts or even their languages for modern study. Richter’s (2001:9) suggestion is that scholars should attempt to uncover new information by examining old documents in fresh ways and to reorient perspectives on the continent’s past. As a historical archaeologist, my research does not just require reviewing primary-source documents with a new pair of glasses but literally uncovering material culture that I can study and present in tandem with what written records
50 exist and, in this way, shed light on how Native Americans lived in the past. Even if these Native children or their parents had recorded their thoughts, which is what Richter prioritizes, there is a different type of knowledge to be gained through an understanding of their daily use of materials.
In this chapter, I provide an overview of both historical and archaeological scholarship on
Native American life in what is today the southeastern United States, with a particular eye on the
Chickasaw experience. This begins with sources providing insight into life prior to the arrival of
Europeans on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, continue with a review of the upheaval that took place within Indian country throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then narrow its focus on the lives of the Chickasaws in the eighteenth century. This will set the stage for the establishment of Christian missions as agencies of American colonialism in the early 1800s.
Mississippian Chiefdoms
Before launching into a review of the interactions Europeans had with indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, it is important to evaluate what the Indian world was like prior to the arrival of European colonialism. “Mississippian” is an archaeological adjective that is generally used to describe a culture that existed among the peoples of the American Southeast and lower
Midwest (Figure 3-1) during a time period that extends over several centuries. The time span varies in the literature, beginning between A.D. 900 and 1000 and ending between A.D. 1500 and 1700 (Beck 2013:27; Cobb 2003:63; Ethridge 2009:3). The term was first used by William
H. Holmes in his ceramic studies for the Bureau of Ethnology during the late nineteenth century
(Holmes 1884, 1886, 1903), and Mississippian complexes were originally defined by criteria such as the presence of shell-tempered pottery, mound building, large towns, and maize agriculture (Cobb 2003:63). Over time, Mississippian archaeologists began to draw on historical documents to supplement what they were finding archaeologically to connect ethnohistorically
51 known peoples to the remains of these Mississippian polities (Griffin 1985; Smith 1986;
Steponaitus 1986). Regardless of the specific time boundaries or material markers, this
Mississippian organization of peoples was made possible by a global climatic warming trend that lasted from approximately A.D. 900 to 1350 (Richter 2001:5). This “Medieval Optimum” consisted of an increase of a few degrees in annual average temperature that not only allowed
Native North Americans to take up agriculture on a more massive scale but also allowed Norse adventurers to colonize Greenland and Newfoundland (Richter 2001:5).
Mississippian peoples were organized into what some archaeologists label “chiefdoms,”
(Ethridge 2009; Fried 1967; Service 1971), but the term has come up against criticism over the last two decades for being antiquated and racist (Kehoe 2004; Pauketat 2007). Some scholars propose replacement terms such as “kingdom,” “civilization,” and “nation,” but these too seem problematic as does any attempt to create blanket terms for historically distinct peoples.
Whatever scholars wish to call their social organization, Mississippian peoples during this time period organized their lives around flat-topped, pyramidal earthen temple mounds that served as the centers of large towns. These earthen-temple mounds typically featured large plazas at their feet and were often surrounded by several smaller mounds. Neighborhoods of “common” people lived around the town center; the top elite lineage lived on top of the temple mound; and “lesser” people of elite lineages resided on the smaller mounds (Anderson 1994; Blitz and Lorenz 2006;
Dye and Cox 1990; Ethridge 2009; King 2003; Knight and Steponaitis 1998; Lewis and Stout
1998; Pauketat 2004). While it is currently not known how powerful the elites became, archaeologists generally agree that they constituted a centralized political body. The commoners living around the city centers developed farming villages that provided the foundation of the
Mississippian economy, which was based on intensive corn agriculture. These people farmed,
52
Figure 3-1. Towns of the Mississippian World (Cobb 2003:64; adapted from Payne and Scarry 1998)
53 fished, hunted, and gathered food and other materials necessary for daily life. They were largely self-sufficient in that they could sustain themselves using resources available within their own boundaries (Beck 2003; Blitz 1999; Butler and Welch 2006; Emerson 1997; King 2003, 2006;
Knight 1990; Pauketat 1991; Pauketat and Barker 1992; Pollack 2004; Scarry and Maxham
2002).
The development of Mississippian societies was inextricably linked to the growing significance of maize agriculture across most of the region between A.D. 500 and 1000 (Beck
2013:32; Riley et al. 1994). Maize offered benefits that other, more traditional, starchy seed crops did not: higher yield harvests and a much higher caloric value. These benefits were important during this time period due to increasing population across much of eastern North
America and decreasing amounts of territories for gathering. By concentrating on maize production, farmers could intensify food production within smaller catchment zones despite the higher investment of clearing and maintaining maize fields. Maize could also be stored for long periods, which resulted in greater incentive being placed on producing surplus (Beck 2013:32;
Milner 2004). It was this link between labor and surplus that instigated the formation of chiefdoms after A.D. 1000: competition for productive agricultural lands intensified at the same time that competition for labor required to clear, plant, and harvest such fields also intensified.
Communities that claimed desirable locations actively sought out new people to join their groups—which further contributed to surpluses (Beck 2013:33).
Despite the commonalities between Mississippian-era peoples, the different societies varied in size and complexity and emerged with somewhat startling rapidity. Rather than trying to uncover the reasons underlying this burst of social complexity, Cobb (2003:64-65) developed a comparative perspective on complexity between Mississippian polities and argued that such an
54 approach would, in the long-term, facilitate efforts to better understand the origins of
Mississippian complexity. His barometer of complexity consisted of (1) the scale of
Mississippian chiefdoms, (2) settlement systems and landscape, (3) organization of labor, (4) mortuary ritual and ideology, (5) tribute and feasting, and (6) political and economic change. His conclusion was that there was not necessarily a continuum from benign redistribution to control over the means of production that fits neatly into a package of neo-evolutionary complexity.
Various polities engaged in a variety of hegemonic practices where commoners willingly engaged in systems of exploitation, but authority within the polities was probably not unimpeachable (Cobb 2003:78).
Archaeologists tend to divide the Mississippian Period into three sub-periods: Early
Mississippian, (A.D. 900-1200), Middle Mississippian (A.D. 1200-1500), and Late Mississippian
(A.D. 1500-1700). The largest of all Mississippian mound complexes, Cahokia in southern
Illinois (Emerson 1997; Milner 1998; Pauketat 1991, 2004), was occupied during the Early
Mississippian. It covered six square miles and boasted a population of around 20,000 people who over a hundred mounds of various sizes. The most well-known Middle Mississippian sites are
Moundville in western Alabama (Knight and Steponaitis 1998) and Etowah in northwestern
Georgia (King 2003), but there were also large mound complexes throughout the central
Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and most of the mid-South. The Late
Mississippian period overlapped with the arrival of Europeans in North America. Some of the indigenous towns located in the Tombigbee region—where Charity Hall was established— named in the Soto accounts when Europeans first came into the interior were Chicaza,
Sacchuma, and Talapatica. On the east side of the Tombigbee River, in what is today central
Alabama, were towns named Apafalaya, Zabusta, Taliepacana, and Piachi—all part of the
55 Tascaloosa province. South of Tascaloosa was the province of Mabila, and far to the south, on the gulf coast below Chicaza and Mabila, were the peoples associated with what archaeologists call the “Pensacola Culture” (Ethridge 2010:12-13; Hudson 1976). It should be noted that many of these villages and mound centers were established on landscapes already occupied by humans for at least 14,000 years, some of whom had already constructed mounds as places of regional interaction.
Europeans, War, and Disease
Europeans came into the American South in early sixteenth century, but colonization did not begin for a few decades. During the opening decades of the sixteenth century, the expeditions of several Spanish conquistadors, including those of Juan Ponce de León (1513-1514, 1521) and
Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón (1521, 1525-1526), ended in failure but provided valuable intelligence for Hernando de Soto, who launched his own expedition in 1539 (Beck et al. 2006; Hudson
1997, 2005). Much of the archaeological work performed on this “protohistorical” period has combined archaeological evidence with written records surviving the expeditions of Soto (1539-
1542), Tristán de Luna y Arellano (1559-1561), and Juan Pardo (1566-1568), with an eye towards reconstructing the American Southeast at the time of European contact (Blakely and
Mathews 1990; Boyd and Schroedl 1987; Ewen 1998; Hudson et al. 1985; Knight 2009; Morse and Morse 1990; Widmer 1998).
Soto and his army encountered many chiefdoms during his expedition across the
American Southeast, including one led by a powerful chief whom the Spanish referred to as
Coosa who had built an alliance of several chiefdoms that spanned what is today east Tennessee, east Alabama, and north Georgia (Smith 2000). Soto and his army of 600 men depended on the food stores of Native peoples as they passed through the Southeast and also came into conflict
56 with several Native polities. Ethridge (2009:8) argued that the direct military assault of the
Spanish may have precipitated the collapse of most of the existing southern chiefdoms, including
Napituca in northern Florida; Anlico in Arkansas; Tascalusa in Alabama; and, perhaps most notably for this work, Chicaza in Mississippi, from which the Chickasaw Nation today claims ancestry. Whether Soto’s military assault had a dramatic impact or not, it is likely that his presence upset the balance of power in some complex and paramount chiefdoms. Records from the expedition (Hudson 1997) describe instances where leaders of simple chiefdoms challenged and defied the authority of chiefs under whose power they had fallen with the enlisted help of
Soto. In this way, previously less influential leaders could bolster their authority and challenge more powerful chiefs. Political changes like this would not have been uncommon prior to
European contact, but the passage of the Soto expedition through a large swath of the
Mississippian world likely made the normal readjustments and recovery more complicated and difficult (Ethridge 2009:8-9).
Over the next century after Soto’s expedition failed, Mississippian peoples experienced little direct interaction with Europeans, but they still dealt with the consequences of the European presence on their continent in the form of Old-World diseases, including smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, and influenza. Scholars debate the numerical extent of Native depopulation, but they agree, nonetheless, that contact between Native peoples in the Americas and Europeans created an epidemiological tragedy of monumental proportions (Betts 2006; Kelton 2002, 2007;
Vehik 1989, 1995). Without such a calamity, European conquest and colonization would have been much more difficult if not impossible. The disease component of this “Columbian exchange” was therefore a mediated process through which colonialism heightened Native vulnerability to infection and mortality and created conditions in which new diseases could
57 spread and produce extremely high fatality rates. This suggests that while the dissemination of germs to Natives was a biological catastrophe, it depended entirely on nonbiological processes of colonialism. Across the American Southeast, English-inspired commerce in Native slaves was the element of colonialism most responsible for making indigenous peoples across the region more vulnerable to new diseases (Crosby 1986; Kelton 2007; Watts 1997).
Human population numbers within the American Southeast prior to European contact are highly contended but are typically estimated to have been between 1.3 and four million people.
By 1685, the Native population in the Southeast had dropped to about 200,000—a loss of between 85 and 95 percent (Dobyns 1983; Hudson 1997; Saunt 2004; Waselkov et al. 2006).
Despite the existence of a large body of scholarship on the time after “Old and New World contact,” there is still considerable uncertainty about the magnitude, timing, and causes of the profound transformation that took place across the sociopolitical systems and population sizes in the Americas. It is generally accepted however, that by A.D. 1700 the loss of people in eastern
North America was so great that it was apparent to contemporary observers (Milner et al.
2001:9). Milner and colleagues (2001) presented three maps showing the distribution of human population across the Eastern Woodlands of North America according to extant archaeological data during the early years of each of the following centuries: the 1400s, 1500s, and 1600s.
Despite uneven and often inadequate spatial coverage, the maps show crude approximations of regional population distributions. The authors do not give specific population numbers due to the fact that they are analyzing sites and not people, but the amount of area highlighted on each map showing heavily occupied places is staggeringly lower on the map representing the early 1600s when compared with the first two maps. By cursory glance it appears that the occupied areas are only one quarter or lower of those occupied during earlier centuries.
58 It is an indisputable fact that disease reduced the human population of the American
Southeast by a drastic amount, but it is important to recognize that the disease did not work alone and that non-epidemiological factors played a role in the spread of this large-scale pandemic.
This is perhaps easier to understand today, as this dissertation is being written during the coronavirus pandemic—a pandemic that has spread quickly and killed hundreds of thousands of people due not only to biological factors but those of a social and political nature. The deadly spread of COVID-19 has increased due to refusal of major governments to shut down workplaces and schools and allow their populations to quarantine until a vaccine could be developed. As the movement of people today has facilitated a greater spread of the disease and increased mortality, so too did diseases following the arrival of Europeans in North America rely on protohistoric population movements that resulted in abandoned communities and collapsed polities (Kelton 2007; Milner et al. 2001). The spread of infectious and deadly diseases played a key role in the coalescence of various communities between 1540 and 1670, including the historic polities known as the Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Chickasaws in the American
Southeast.
The Indian Slave and Fur Trade
It was this period of coalescence between 1540 and 1670 that produced new political and social orders that are more familiar to the modern reader: Cherokees (Marcoux 2010; Miles
2012; Rodning 1999; Schroedl 2000; Smith 1992), Creeks (Braund 1996; Foster 2007; Knight and Steponaitis 1994), Catawbas (Davis and Riggs 2004; Fitts 2017), Choctaws (Galloway 1994,
1995), and others (Barnett 2007; Bowne 2005; Brain et al. 1988; Brown 1985; DePratter 1994;
Gallivan 2003; Hantman 2001; Neitzel 1983; Potter 1993; Waselkov 1989, 1992, 1993, 1998;
Worth 2004). Such Indian groups formed either out of scattered refugee populations or around
59 the remnants of Mississippian societies. Both experiences represented the traumatic abandonment of homes, ancestors’ graves, and significant monuments that provided spiritual support. The Native peoples in the Southeast found themselves constructing new communities, clearing new fields, and erecting new dwellings. They were also required to learn about new lands and territories in order to procure and cultivate food, including new hunting territories, fertile fields, and fruitful areas for gathering nuts and berries. Social and cultural mainstays like language, religion, and political structures all had to be renegotiated (Saunt 2004:131-132).
While European contact with Native American societies initiated profound cultural change during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Native peoples continued to make conscious decisions about how to live in the world. Colonial endeavors did not automatically induce change in Native cultural systems; the European powers did not preside over Native polities as historically dominant agents (Lapham 2005:1). By the time that England established the colony of South Carolina in 1670 (Crane 1928:3), Native Americans living in the American
Southeast were still in the midst of vast political, social, and cultural changes that had begun in the fifteenth century. However, Native peoples maintained superior military power due to their size in numbers compared to European colonists and their knowledge of the local terrain, which forced Europeans to depend on Indian allies to defend their colonies and conduct military campaigns. Particular Native groups not only secured these colonies against external foes; they provided the economic basis for each colony’s survival (Axtell 1981; Usner 1992; White 1991).
According to Gallay (2002:4), “Indians fed the colonists, worked for them, and exchanged valuable commodities that the Europeans sold to other parts of the world to gain the capital needed to construct plantations.” The Native peoples could have destroyed these colonies, but they chose not to under the perception that they would gain less by conquest than they would
60 through trading and raiding. Native peoples engaged in warfare, rather, to prove their valor, obtain captives and spoils, and achieve vengeance against enemies.
These ideals and the need to maintain alliances meant that protecting the new English colonies seemed more viable than militarily defeating the Europeans as opponents. The English empire traded goods of superior quality to those offered by France and Spain, and they also had the imperial connections to consume all of the commodities that Natives could procure, including
Indian slaves. It was this British plantation system, which developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that led to the creation of the plantation economy that became the “Old
South” in the nineteenth century (Klein 1990). It is therefore important to recognize the importance of Native American societies to the plantation system, which found it necessary to drive and control Indian labor. Between 1670 and 1715 the trade in Indian slaves was one of the most important factors—if not the most important factor—affecting the American Southeast.
While the Mississippian World was already much changed over the course of the century following Soto’s entrada, the slave trade forced further migrations and realignments and existed on such a vast scale that more Indians were being exported out of Charles Town than Africans were being exported in during these years (Braund 1993; Gallay 2002; Lauber 1913; Nash 1974;
Wright 1981).
Prior to the American and French revolutions, slavery was not a moral issue to most people, including to Native Americans living in the Southeast. Europeans, Africans, and Native
Americans during the late seventeenth century all understood enslavement to be a legitimate fate for both individuals and groups (Gallay 2002:8). However, for Native peoples, slavery had minimal economic significance and served more as a matter of status for those who owned slaves. It was a statement of debasement and “otherness” for the slave. The Europeans, on the
61 other hand, were less interested in debasement and wanted to reap the financial rewards of slave labor. The Indian slave trade, therefore, differed from the situation typically existing in the
American Southeast prior to the arrival of British colonialism—it was an integral part and the result of the English empire’s colonial system. It introduced Indians to the international market economy and made the profits to be had by enslaving one’s neighbors an important factor in addition to elevated status (Klein 1990). Capturing other Native Americans meant getting better access to European trade goods, which slowly replaced items with similar functions in the lives of Native peoples. Indians still hunted and processed animal pelts and captured human beings in raids but on an increasing scale that had not been seen heretofore. This resulted in a growing dependency of Indians on European trade goods (Braund 1993; Gallay 2002:8-9). The chief slavers of the Southeast during this time were the Occaneechis in the southern Piedmont region
(Davis et al. 1998), the Westos who settled around Jamestown in Virginia and later around
Charles Town in South Carolina (Bowne 2005), and the Chickasaws who were then in modern- day Tennessee and Mississippi (Johnson et al. 2008).
Commercial slaving during this time would have resembled Mississippian warfare in method and practice (Dye 2002; Boyd et al. 1951; Worth 1995). One tactic was for small groups of men to conceal themselves in the woods outside of vulnerable towns and snatch people when the opportunity presented itself. At other times, larger raids were conducted by groups who would attack towns against defending warriors. In some cases, once a town’s defense was broken, the raiders would lay siege until they had captured or killed the entire population.
Records show that most captives were women and children and that the very old and very young were often killed. Captives designated for trade with Europeans were kept in holding pens before being taken to port towns, which required them to be capable of marching long distances. Native
62 slaves captured in the Southeast were sold and shipped to the West Indies, South America, New
England, French Canada, and French Louisiana. They were used as domestic servants, concubines, urban laborers, and small-scale agricultural laborers (Alchon 2003; Dye 2012;
Ethridge 2009; Everett 2010; Ramsey 2001; Usner 1992).
It is difficult to estimate how many Indian slaves were taken from the Southeast during this time, and the exact number of Natives living in the region during that period is also unknown. Wood’s (2006) estimate placed the entire population at nearly 199,400 in 1685 and at
90,100 in 1715, which shows a 54-percent loss to which slaving would have contributed. Gallay
(2002:299) estimated that as many as 51,000 Southern Native Americans were sold in the British slave trade between 1670 and 1715, which averages out to approximately 1,133 each year.
Whatever the numbers, it is apparent that commercial trade in captive laborers intensified warfare and shifted pre-European-contact motivations for war from revenge and retaliation toward fulfilling commercial interests. This was exacerbated by the incoming trade in arms, which the Natives who were slave raiding were able to obtain in greater quantities (Johnson et al.
2008:4).
In addition to slave raiding, Native peoples like the Chickasaws also took part heavily in the deerskin trade, which further brought them into the orbit of developing world capitalism. By the mid-eighteenth century, deerskins produced nearly one-third the returns of South Carolina’s staple crop, rice, and they exceeded in value the combined returns from indigo, cattle, beef, pork, lumber, and naval stores (Crane 1928:110). Deerskins were taken to England, where they were most commonly fashioned into men’s breeches, but they were also converted into gloves, footwear, harnesses, saddles, and book covers. Between 1698 and 1715, roughly 30,000 skins were being shipped out from Charleston annually. By 1758, that number had tripled. The
63 deerskin trade peaked in the 1760s, when about 400,000 skins were being exported annually from Atlantic and Gulf ports (Braund 1996; Saunt 2004; Usner 1992). Saunt (2004:133) speculated that if the average Native hunter harvested 30 skins per year, this meant that roughly
13,000 Indian men were involved in the trade. This does not include the labor of other family members, such as wives or other female relatives who may have processed and prepared the skins for export. Such processing included scraping the skins clean, stretching them on racks, soaking them in a solution of water and deer brains, and pounding them until they were soft and supple.
Lapham (2005:138) demonstrated in her research that Native participation in the seventeenth-century deerskin trade, at least in the Appalachian Highlands of southwestern
Virginia, initially altered their social relations and political systems. Deer exploitation and venison consumption increased, hunting strategies became more selective toward competitive exchange, and carcass skinning became more detailed with a focus on preserving maximum hide size. Additionally, the manufacture of hide-working tools increased, and nonlocal materials show a marked increase in the quantities obtained. Aside from demonstrating that archaeological data have much to illuminate on socioeconomic exchange, these provide evidence that economic activities were intensified in order to produce surpluses, which could be converted into nonlocal, socially valued goods. This activity increasingly brought Natives into regular direct contact with
European colonial settlements. Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, it was not common for
European-Americans to travel past the haven of their colonial settlements, meaning that colonial merchants were relatively immobile. Native Americans either had to bring their deerskins and slaves to colonial settlements or trade with other Native groups who lived closer to such settlements.
64 These efforts drew the Chickasaws and other Native peoples into transatlantic trade commerce as critical agents who ensured that the commercial vitality of the trade survived into the eighteenth century (Lapham 2005:138-149). Anecdotal evidence of particular Chickasaw- related slave raids survived, including one 1713 account that a party of Chickasaw, Yazoo, and
Natchez combined to raid the Chaoüachas, who lived south of New Orleans. The slavers purportedly killed their grand chief and carried off his wife and ten others. In 1702, the Choctaw claimed that they had lost five hundred people to Chickasaw enslavers and that a further 1,800 were killed during raids. When the Chickasaws were confronted with these claims, they did not deny that they were true (Gallay 2002:296-297).
The Chickasaws
I will now focus more specifically on the Chickasaw experience following the arrival of
Europeans in the Western Hemisphere as it has been elaborated through history and archaeology.
The earliest written documents that describe the Chickasaws come from the Soto expedition, which met with Indians warriors on December 14, 1540 near the river of Chicaza (Ethridge
2010:11). This river is known today as the Tombigbee River, which serves as an eastern border to Charity Hall, and the Indians who lived in the town of Chicaza are claimed by today’s
Chickasaws as their ancestors. There are three primary-source accounts that describe Soto’s meeting with the people of Chicaza (Clayton et al. 1993). The first, written by the “Gentleman of
Elvas” (first published in Portugal in 1557), describes the initial meeting with the Chicaza people in 1540:
He reached a river where some Indians on the other side tried to forbid him crossing. In two days another piragua [a type of canoe] was made. When it was finished, the governor [Soto] ordered an Indian to announce to the cacique [Indian leader] that he should desire his friendship and should await him peacefully. But the Indians on the other side of the river
65 killed him in his [Soto’s] sight, and immediately went away uttering loud cries. (Elvas 1993:105)
Soto and his people visited Chicaza the next day, on December 17, which Elvas
(1993:105) described as “a small town of twenty houses.” He (1993:105) described the land as
“well peopled” and “fertile and abounding in maize.” Soto captured several Indians outside of
Chicaza, one of whom was “greatly esteemed” by the cacique, and used them as hostages to barter with the Indian leader. The cacique brought along two other caciques named Alimamu and Nicalasa, and these leaders offered friendship as well as one hundred and fifty rabbits, clothing, blankets, and skins. According to Elvas (1993:106), the cacique of Chicaza visited Soto frequently, sometimes answering the summons of the “governor” who would send a horse for him. However, this was largely due to the fact that the Spanish were staying in a town supplied by the chief. During one visit, the cacique asked for Soto’s military aid to attack one of his vassals in nearby Saquechuma who had withheld tribute, a ruse designed to split Soto’s force and make it easier to attack. The cacique gathered 200 Indians armed with bows and arrows, and these accompanied Soto to Saquechuma along with thirty of his mounted soldiers and eight of his foot soldiers. The Spanish were taken to an abandoned town, which the Indians then set aflame, but the Indians did not attack, according to Elvas (1993:106), “since the men taken by the governor were very watchful and prudent.”
As the winter passed, relations deteriorated further between Chicaza and Soto. Elvas
(1993:106) wrote that the “governor” gave pork to the Indians during one of their visits, and that after this the Indians became accustomed to it and would return regularly to steal meat from the
Spanish camp. This resulted in the capture of three Indians, two of whom Soto had shot full of arrows and the third returned to the cacique with his hands cut off. When March arrived, Soto
66 demanded that the cacique supply him with 200 tamemes (Indian laborers) to take with him as he made plans to depart Chicaza (Elvas 1993:107), and this resulted in a famous night attack on
March 4, 1541. According to Elvas (1993:107-108):
The Indians came at the quarter of the modorra [second watch] in four companies, each company coming from a different direction. As soon as they were perceived, they beat a drum and with loud cries rushed forward, and so rapidly that they arrived at the same time as the spies who had carelessly gone out a distance from the camp; and when they were perceived by those who were within the town, half the houses were burning from the fire which they had kindled. That night, three horsemen were by chance at watch, two of whom were of low degree, the most worthless of the camp, and the other was the governor’s nephew, who until then had been considered a good man. There he proved himself as cowardly as each one of them, for they all fled, and the Indians not finding any resistance came and set fire to the town and awaited the Christians outside behind the doors, who came out of the houses without having time to arm themselves; and as they rose, maddened by the noise and blinded by the smoke and flame of the fire, they did not know where they were going nor did they succeed in getting their arms or in putting saddle on horse; neither did they see the Indians who were shooting at them. Many of the horses were burned in their stables, and those which could break their halters freed themselves. The confusion and rout were of such a nature that each one fled wherever it seemed safest, without any one resisting the Indians.
Elvas (1993:107) related that Soto himself mounted his horse to attack the Indians but was knocked down from his saddle which in the tumult had not been fastened to the horse properly. There was only one Indian casualty that night, one whom Soto himself pierced with a lance before he fell. The Spanish settlement was consumed by fire, including saddles and weapons, but the Chicaza Indians did not return to finish the rout (Elvas 1993:107-108). Soto and his entourage moved a half league away to toward the stronghold on Alimamu, where he set up a forge to replace their lost weapons, and the Chizaza Indians attacked them again Tuesday,
March 15. This time, the Spanish were more diligent and took advantage of the flat lands to push the Indians back. However, the Indians escaped after a friar in Soto’s camp sounded an alarm,
67 forcing the armed soldiers to return to check on their home base. Soto and his people left Chicaza on April 25, according to the Elvas account (1993:108).
The second account, that of Luys Hernández de Biedma, generally agrees with that of
Elvas, but adds some detail. He (1993:236) wrote, for example, that the gifts initially brought to
Soto from the cacique specifically included “little dogs and hides of deer.” He also explained that, during the famous night attack of March 4, fire to torch the houses was brought in little jars
(ollillas) so that they would not be noticed or seen until it was too late. During the second attack of March 15, Biedma (1993:237) wrote that the Indians “made a very strong barricade of poles in the middle of the road, and about three hundred Indians placed themselves there, with determination to die before they relinquished it.” He gives a little more detail about the battle itself before relating that after capturing some of the Indians, “we found out from them that they had done that only with the intent of proving themselves against us, and for no other purpose”
(Biedma 1993:237-238). The third account, written by Rodrigo Rangel (1993), does not provide many if any new objective facts, but does embellish a little on the role played by Soto in the night attack of March 4, 1851. Here, Soto is much wiser and more prescient to the Chicaza attack, stating publicly, “This night is a night full of Indians; I will sleep armed and my horse saddled” (Rangel 1993:297). The story still ends the same way, however, with Soto being thrown from his saddle upon piercing the first Indian he came upon with a lance.
From Chicaza to Chickasaw
While these are the earliest written accounts from the European perspective, the
Chickasaws’ own origin and migration story has been written down by several different authors over the course of three centuries, and their accounts vary. This has been the result of the diverse locations in which they were written; the personal sentiments, cultural values, and religious
68 beliefs of the authors; language barriers; and the fact that newer accounts may have been influenced by older reports (Mack 2018:2). A standard account given in the mid-twentieth century by a Chickasaw elder described primordial Chickasaw ancestors living “somewhere in the west, who under duress sought guidance from Ubabeneli, “The Creator of all things” (Mack
2018:3). Ubabaneli “made sacred” a long pole which would direct the proto-Chickasaws to “a new home where they could find peace and happiness.” Each night, these ancestors would place the pole upright in the ground, and each morning, “the long pole was closely inspected and found to be leaning toward the east,” indicating the direction in which the people should continue to travel. After several such days of travel, the people “came upon a scene beyond their imagination. It was a great river the likes of which they had never seen before, and the unexpected sight overwhelmed them” (Mack 2018:3-4). This site was the Sakti Lhafa’ Okhina, the serrated cliffs of the Chickasaw Bluffs over the Mississippi River. After crossing the river,
“the sacred long pole stood straight as an arrow,” which signaled that “at last they had found their new homeland and that their long journey was at an end” (Mack 2018:4).
There exists archaeological evidence for human habitation of the territory that became
Chickasaw country since at least 6000 BC. Both the Chickasaws and the Choctaws have origin myths like the one described here, including a trans-Mississippi River location for an earlier home (Atkinson 2004:1). It is therefore possible that both Native groups met and amalgamated with other pre-existing societies in the region. Whatever their previous condition, the
Chickasaws came to be a new ethnic identity that occupied a subregion in what is today northern
Mississippi and southwestern Tennessee (Gallay 2002:14). Galloway (1994:393) argued that the
Choctaws “were the inheritors of a multiethnic protohistoric confederacy” due to the fact that they continuously added other Native groups to their numbers throughout the region. This was
69 also very true for the Chickasaws, who had a system in place for negotiating the entry of other
Native peoples into their group (Johnson et al. 2008:7). Some of the major groups that joined with the Chickasaws to make a single Nation were the Yazoo, Koroa, Chackchiuma, Ofogoula, and Tapoussa (Atkinson 2004:14; Du Pratz 1947:300; Nairne 1988:48).
For the first half century following Soto’s entrada, the people calling this subregion home lived in scattered small towns and farmsteads in the uplands of the Black Prairie (Rafferty 2003).
They stopped building mounds, which Ethridge (2010:75) argued signaled a decline in their hierarchical political order. Corn remained an important part of their diet, but this was supplemented with wild plant and animal foods. This shift in diet accompanied movement onto small bluffs overlooking small streams, which provided better access to wild game, such as bison, and good friable soils (Johnson 1997; Johnson and Lehman 1996; Johnson et al. 1994a,
1994b). It was during this time that the Chickasaws and other people in the Southeast were dealing with their first exposures to “Old World” diseases as well as other instabilities brought about by their encounters with Soto. French explorers who paddled down the Mississippi River
130 years after Soto’s entrada encountered none of the polities that the earlier Spanish conquistadors had met. By the 1650s, the Chickasaws had moved out of the river bottoms of the
Tombigbee River to the immediate area around present-day Tupelo, Mississippi, where they remained until Indian removal in the 1830s (Cegielski and Lieb 2011; Johnson et al. 2008).
Encounter with La Salle
DuVal (2006:2-3) related an episode that took place between two French explorers traveling south from Canada and the Quapaw Indians in 1673, where the latter manipulated the
French into turning back and not interacting with their rivals to the south. Instead, the two explorers conveyed the Quapaws’ accounting of the lands to their superiors, rather than
70 witnessing it firsthand. DuVal (2006:2) argued that the “Quapaws were purposefully shaping the newcomers’ understandings of the North American mid-continent and the people who lived there.” In much of the Southeast, including northeastern Mississippi, Indians had more power and were able to determine the form and content of intercultural relations between Natives and
Europeans (DuVal 2006:4). It was especially important for groups who preferred to maintain their own sovereign identities to have a heavy hand in setting the terms of engagement with neighboring peoples (DuVal 2006:5).
It was French explorers like these who provided the first written descriptions of
Chickasaws since Soto’s interactions with the Chicaza over a century earlier. The Lower
Mississippi Valley was an important strategic location for both the French and British, who were competing with each other over resources. French control of the region meant the ability to utilize the Mississippi River to move between their northern and projected southern settlements and to deter the British from expanding their influence westward (Stubbs 1982:41). In 1682,
Nicolas de La Salle voyaged from French Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi River, and between February 24 and March 6 of that year he and his entourage encountered the Chickasaws near present-day Memphis (La Salle 2003:97). At this time, La Salle stopped for ten days in the area to build Fort Prudhomme on the Chickasaw Bluffs before continuing down the river, stopping for food and supplies and to meet with Indians along the way. It was during this part of the journey that he came into contact with the Chickasaws (Stubbs 1982:42). Eight different accounts have been compiled by Stubbs (1982) who lays out the Chickasaw encounter in full.
Sometime in late February, a member of the expedition, gunsmith Pierre Prudhomme, became lost while hunting. The expedition party immediately began searching for him, and found evidence of Indians in the area. Two of the accounts claim that Indians themselves were
71 seen in the woods, and a third records that the search party found a recently vacated wooden lodge (Stubbs 1982:42-43). Signs of Indians in the area induced La Salle to construct a fort, and he named it after the missing gunsmith. Two of the accounts describe the French capturing two
Chickasaw Indians and taking them back to the fort, where they admitted that their village was two days’ travel away (Stubbs 1982:43). La Salle and half of his expedition party set out the next day with the two captured Chickasaws, looking to find their villages and perhaps news of the missing gunsmith. After traveling for two days, the French were informed that the villages were actually still another three to four days journey, so they allowed one of the captured Chickasaws to continue on alone laden with presents from La Salle while the other was brought back to the fort. The plan was to meet the Chickasaw elders further down the river, but the accounts make clear that they never met any additional Chickasaws, perhaps due to missing the meeting place entirely. The remaining Chickasaw captive, according to one narrative, chose to depart later and return to his village (Stubbs 1982:43-44). Based on information found in the accounts, Stubbs
(1982:45) estimated that the location of the Chickasaw villages at that time were either just south of present-day Tupelo, Mississippi or else farther south in present-day Clay County.
The La Salle sources give some clues about political relations in the area, at least in 1684.
The Chickasaws and the Arkansas were apparently constantly at war, which was still true in
1737 when French Lieutenant Alexandre De Batz copied a map drawn by a Chickasaw war chief that indicated as much. The accounts suggest that the Chickasaws were friendly with the Natchez
Indians, which also seemed to be the case in 1731, when the Natchez sought refuge among the
Chickasaws after being driven from their land by the French (Stubbs 1982:46). Stubbs highlights the fact that the Chickasaws appeared to have the freedom to range between at least 120 and 150 miles from their villages in northeast Mississippi and that they had frequent access to the
72 Mississippi River. This freedom of movement was also observed by the French in 1721, when the Chickasaws became a major threat to their shipping efforts on the river (Stubbs 1982:46-47).
Stubbs (1982:47) suggested that Chickasaw business so far to the south was related to slave- raiding activities, which was corroborated by the presence of a Choctaw slave in New England before 1700. One of the La Salle accounts observed two Chickasaw-Chakchiuma raiding parties in 1702 who had an Illinois Indian with them who was probably a slave (Lauber 1913; Stubbs
1987:47).
It is not clear how much direct contact occurred between Chickasaws and Europeans prior to their brush with La Salle. One of La Salle’s men, Henri de Tonti, four years later, in
1686, traveled down the Mississippi River from Illinois and described “gun-toting Chickasaw raiders” (Galloway 1995:175; Johnson et al. 2008:5), which suggests that they probably had already been armed by the British. It is known that the Chickasaws had interactions around this time with the British slaver Henry Woodward, who began building relationships with Indians in central Alabama starting in 1685 (Bowne 2005:82-85; Crane 1928:17; Galloway 1995:170-173;
Johnson et al. 2008:6). During this period, Creek Indians controlled trade along the Tombigbee
River, and it is reasonable to assume that the Chickasaws became involved in trade with South
Carolina through these groups. Further records of British-Chickasaw relations include one in
1692, when the British sent an agent to the Chickasaws and another in 1698 when two Carolina traders, Thomas Welch and Anthony Dodsworth, journeyed to Chickasaw territory to build direct relationships and trade (Atkinson 2004:25; Crane 1919:382; Gallay 2002:103, 155-164; Johnson et al. 2008:6). The Chickasaws’ negotiations with the British and their regional advantage allowed them to become armed with European guns, and this led to accounts of Chickasaw slave raiding by 1700 (Johnson 2008:6; Morgan 1997).
73
Figure 3-2. Thomas Nairne’s Route (Nairne 1988:5)
Thomas Nairne’s Journals
Another vital primary-source document which provides hints at Chickasaw life in the past is the journal of Thomas Nairne (1988), who visited the Chickasaws on a “diplomatic mission” and wrote general recommendations about managing indigenous groups as the Indian Agent of
South Carolina in 1708 (Figure 3-2). Nairne was later killed by Indians in South Carolina, and the British failed to put his recommendations into action, but his plans were realized later by the
United States of America following the Revolutionary War. On April 12, 1708, Nairne (1988:36) wrote a letter to Ralph Izard, which gave an account of the “Customs, Humers, and Present State of the Chicasaws.” He wrote that the Chickasaws numbered about 700 men divided among eight villages overseen by a chief named Hollatchatroe. Nairne reported that the Chickasaws were friendly to “all Indians subject to the Government of Carolina,” and counted the Chachumees and Yassaws (to the south and west) as their enemies. Above all, the Chickasaws “have most
74 bickering with the Chactaws who live 60 Miles south of them” (Nairne 1988:37). The
Chickasaws apparently also had difficulties with the “Paywallies (or Illinoies) whome they call
Currus.” According to Nairne, this was because “the Chicasaws are no Watter people, know nothing what belonges to Canoes,” and that raiders could therefore escape pursuit by river. As for the Chickasaw demeanor, Nairne wrote, “The Chicasaws are arrogant and conseited, high minded touchy as tinder a small matter puts them out of temper are great pretenders to Honor, and Cannot bear the least affront of One another” (Nairne 1988:37-38). Nairne suggested that these negative qualities had been worsened by the fact that they were provided with guns, which gave them a tremendous advantage over their neighbors.
Regarding social organization, Nairne (1988:38) wrote that each Chickasaw village had a chief, each of whom was subordinated to Hollatchatroe, but that their authority had been eroded due to power moving to the Indian warriors who maintained more direct relationships with the
British crown. This was further facilitated by the fact that Hollatchatroe, whom Nairne referred to as the King, was limited in power only to matters relating to peace. King Hollatchatroe was obligated to:
…oppose all projects of Distroying, was Vigorously to harangue the Warriers, to keep firme the Treaties of Peace with their Freinds and Neighbours, was not so much as to be present at the Execution of an enemy, and might save hime let the desire of revenge be ever so great. (Nairne 1988:38)
The king’s duties included things like ensuring that the women kept up with their agricultural work, “making plenty of Corn that there may be no want.” Nairne (1988:38-39) discussed one particular chief, Fattalamee, who turned away from his duties and engaged in slave catching, since it “was much more profitable than formall harranguing.” Scholars today discuss a leadership dichotomy present in both Choctaw and Chickasaw societies at the turn of the
75 eighteenth century consisting of red (war) and white (peace) moieties who had differing responsibilities and authority (Galloway 2006; Johnson et al. 2008:3)
Nairne took a lot of time to describe Chickasaw ceremonies, including that which took place when it was time for a chief to be replaced (by his sister’s son):
The chiefs of the other Villages with their assistance come to Hollatchahoe to make a Bower, sing 3 Dayes and nights. An officer who waits without carryes them in necessarys but no others see or disturb them. Dureing these 4 Dayes the warriors are busied preparing a Cabin or chair of state of white wood and rubbed over with Chalk to put him in mind of peace. The 4th Day in the morning they bring out the intended king and his son whome they place on the Chair which the warriors lift with a shout and carry to the Creek in a hole whereof the bearers plunge themselves king and all three [times?] wash him well, and Returne with him to his house. The people in the road throw Corn stalks on him to denote plenty, the rest of the Day is spent dancing. At night every one departs his own way. (Nairne 1988:39)
Nairne (1988:39) also described some of the social systems put in place to control behavior in Chickasaw society. They had laws about murder and theft of property, and they put
“witches, Conjurers, and rain makers to Death by consent.” He wrote (1988:39-40) that such figures gain great esteem, which makes them arrogant, and that they “strive to make every body
Dread and stand in Aw of them, by pretending to bewitch all their oposers, or to hinder any rain from falling, and so sterve them all.” Nairne explained that in these cases the Chickasaws would gather together one or two people from each family and capture the offending person, after which they all would have a hand in the killing.
Chickasaws in the Eighteenth Century
As a result of their relationships with Great Britain, Chickasaw towns became centralized depots for slaving operations. The British and the Chickasaws came together in expeditions against the Choctaws in the south and the Arkansas in the north while also attacking the Tunica and Taensa peoples around the Mississippi River. The Chickasaws also protected British traders
76 who lived among them, not tolerating French attempts to apprehend the traders and end the slaving operations (Gallay 2002:129-130; Iberville 1981:110). The French therefore attempted to lure the Chickasaws into an alliance, knowing that the British base in Charles Town was too distant to sustain their traders without the Chickasaws to host them, but the British threatened to induce other allies to attack the Chickasaws if they joined the French (Gallay 2002:130-131;
Iberville 1981:133). The Chickasaws tenuously courted both the French and British during the opening years of the eighteenth century, but this ended with the outbreak of the Natchez War in
1729, when the Chickasaws fell out with the French (Gallay 2002:143, 340). They also developed and broke relationships with other Native peoples in the Southeast, including the
Creeks, Choctaws, Natchez, and Yazoo at different times and under different circumstances
(Gallay 2002:149-150). While the Chickasaws had powerful warriors and were able to wreak havoc on small tribes located in their vicinity, their smaller numbers meant that they could never exert the dominancy that groups like the Iroquois or the Creeks exercised over larger regions
(Gallay 2002:171).
The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War between France and Britain in 1754 initiated events that resulted in tremendous consequences for Chickasaws and other Southeastern Indians.
Britain had previously been “haphazard” with its Indian policy, but now with its North American colonies in danger, it recognized the need for a unified approach (Jacob 1967; Saunt 2004:138).
By 1756, the empire had divided eastern North America into northern and southern districts, each with their own superintendent of Indian affairs. These superintendents regulated trade by licensing traders and fixing prices, and they also negotiated treaties with several Indian nations.
It was this British model that was adapted by the federal United States government after the
Revolutionary War, and that was carried through until Indian removal in the 1830s. The 1763
77 Peace of Paris, which formally ended the Seven Years’ War, reshaped European relationships with Indians in the Southeast. Spain ceded Florida to Britain, and France turned Louisiana over to Spain. With France largely out of the picture, British superintendents were in a better position to dictate terms to Southeast Indians, and this soon resulted in an expansion of British colonies into Indian country (Siebert 1932; Saunt 2004:138). Without France to supply Indians with arms and trade goods, the latter soon lost their leverage to turn back British settlers. The Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees all made significant land cessions between 1763 and
1773. By 1775, the Native population of the Southeast had dropped to about 56,000 (DeVorsey
1966; Saunt 2004:138; Wood 2006).
During the war, especially between 1755 and 1758, the Chickasaws faced particular hardships as they weathered several raids from Choctaws in the south, which resulted in the deaths of Chickasaw warriors and the capture of Chickasaw women and children on an annual basis. The trader Jerome Courtonne reported one instance of seeing 1,000 Choctaws carrying four French flags in their attacks on three different locations, which also resulted in fires burning down Chickasaw homes (Atkinson 2004:83; McDowell 1958). The Chickasaws retaliated while also making appeals to the governor of South Carolina as well as displaced Chickasaws who had taken up residence in both Georgia and South Carolina. They also appealed to the Cherokees, who were allies of the British, who responded by sending warriors to assist the Chickasaws. The
British traders also supported the Chickasaws by helping them receive aid, including a large cache of weapons and ammunition from the governor of South Carolina. It is likely that they did this because they had so much to lose financially if the Chickasaws fell (Atkinson 2004:86-87;
Lipscomb and Olsberg 1977; McDowell 1958).
78 The Account of James Adair
In 1775 there appeared a book written by British trader James Adair, who first went among the Chickasaws and Choctaws in 1744 (Atkinson 2004:56, 89; Johnson et al. 2008:8). He lived among the Indians and maintained trade relationships with them for more than two decades, answering to the British crown and instigating conflicts among the Indians against the
French (Atkinson 2004:80-83; Galloway 1982; Lipscomb and Olsberg 1977). Adair’s book included detailed observations of several Indian groups (Catawba, Cherokee, Muskogee,
Choctaw, and Chickasaw) during that time period, including descriptions of their social divisions, religious practices, and political history with the Europeans. In his (1775:352)
“Account of the Chikkasah Nation,” he described “four large contiguous settlements, which lay nearly in the form of three parts of a square.” Adair went into great detail about the resources and diet of Chickasaws during his time among them:
To the North West, the Mississippi lands are covered with filberts, which are sweet, and thin- shelled, as the scaly bark hiccory-nuts. Hazel-nuts are very plenty, but the Indians seldom eat them. Black haws grow here in clusters, free from prickles: and pissimmons, of which they make very pleasant bread, barbicuing it in the woods. There is a sort of fine plums in a few places, large, and well-tasted; and, if transplanted, they would become better. The honey- locusts are pods about a span-long, and almost two inches broad, containing a row of large seed on one side, and a tough sweet substance on the other. The tree is large, and full of long thorns; which forces the wild beasts to wait till they fall off, before they can gather that part of their harvest.—The trees grow in wet sour land, and are plenty, and the timber is very durable. Where there is no pitch-pine, the Indians use this, or the sassafras, for posts to their houses; as they last for generations, and the worms never take them. Chinquapins are very plenty, of the taste of chesnuts, but much less in size. There are several sorts of very wholesome and pleasant-tasted ground nuts, which few of our colonists know any thing of. In wet land, there is an aromatic red spice, and a sort of cinnamon, which the natives seldom use. The Yopon, or Cuffeena, is very plenty, as far as the salt air reaches over the low lands. (Adair 1775:360-361)
79 Adair (1775:363) also discussed the “industry” of the Chickasaws, explaining that this extended no farther than to support a “plain simple life.” He related, however, that “most of them are of late grown fond of the ornaments of life, of raising live stock, and using a greater industry than formerly, to increase wealth.” Adair attributed this to the “long intercourse” between the
British and Chickasaws, the former of whom had been living among the Chickasaws as traders for many years. He also spoke of their “civilization,” some of which foreshadowed the policies that led to the 1819 Civilization Fund Act: “Such a disposition, is a great advance towards their being civilized; which, certainly must be effected, before we can reasonably expect to be able to bring them to the true principles of christianity” (Adair 1775:363).
The American Revolution
During the American Revolution, the British sought to reaffirm and strengthen their alliance with the Chickasaws, seeing them as important battle-hardened allies who they would not wish to face alongside the Americans. British alliances with Indian groups such as the
Chickasaws and Choctaws ensured that the American-British conflicts were confined to the eastern coasts (Atkinson 2004:100; Calloway 1995:222). However, as the war continued, the
British found that their Chickasaw allies had a “lack of enthusiasm,” due to fear that Chickasaw aggression against the Americans would result in retaliation against their villages. Atkinson
(2004:103-104) argued that the Chickasaws were likely influenced by the traders with whom they interacted on a regular basis and who were often American-born and had little affection for the British empire. Another reason may have been that there was no special affront by the
Americans against the Chickasaws and therefore no reason for revenge. In a letter written in the summer of 1778, the Chickasaw Paya Mattaha wrote of their chief that “it was with the utmost difficulty he could place in the light of enemies those men whom from his earliest infancy he had
80 been taught to consider his dearest friends, whom he had assisted and defended upon many occasions at the risk of his life” (Atkinson 2004:104; Calloway 1995:224). Despite this, some in the Chickasaw Nation did serve the British, including James Colbert, who fathered a large number of mixed-blood children, many of whom would go on to be chiefs in the decades prior to
Indian removal, including Levi Colbert, who supported Charity Hall (Atkinson 2004:105;
Calloway 1995:225). Some of the Chickasaws, led by Colbert, raided both American and
Spanish settlements in the region following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, but by
1783 even Colbert found that the Chickasaws could not be enemies of the Americans if they expected to survive. During that year, Virginia commissioner John Donne visited the Chickasaw
Nation to begin establishing new American trade relationships to replace the British ones
(Atkinson 2004:119).
The Virginia-Chickasaw Treaty was concluded in November of 1783, affirming peace and stipulating that all prisoners held by the Chickasaws were to be released. The Chickasaws were also obligated to expel all non-Indians from the Nation who were openly hostile to the
United States. This initial treaty established that the northeastern Chickasaw land boundary
(Figure 3-3) ran along the Tennessee-Cumberland divide from the Ohio River to the Duck River and that cession of land was off the table (Atkinson 2004:122-123; Calloway 1995:232, 234). In
1786, the Chickasaws signed the Treaty of Hopewell with the United States government, which allowed the latter to establish a trading post on Chickasaw lands (Atkinson 2004:129; Kappler
1904). This was the first of a series of treaties with the United States that would slowly cede
Chickasaw land to the Americans, contrary to the stipulation of the Virginia-Chickasaw Treaty that prohibited land cessions. In 1801, the Chickasaws signed the Treaty of Chickasaw Bluffs, which allowed Americans official right-of-passage through Chickasaw territories. This was
81
Figure 3-3. Chickasaw Lands in 1783 (Gibson 1971:5)
82 accompanied by the establishment of a post road from Nashville to Natchez as well as wayside inns or “stands” for the accommodation of travelers (Atkinson 2004:189-190; Kappler 1904:55-
56). Under pressure to settle a debt that the Chickasaws owed to trading houses and individual traders in the amount of nearly $50,000, Chickasaw leaders next signed the Treaty of Chickasaw
Nation in 1805, which ceded their claim to disputed land in northern Alabama (Atkinson
2004:195-196; Kappler 1904:79-80).
On September 20, 1816, Andrew Jackson and two other American commissioners obtained the Treaty of the Chickasaw Council House, which ceded to the United States all remaining land claimed by the Chickasaws on the east and north side of the Tennessee River and on the south side east of a line surveyed by General John Coffee. The United States agreed to pay the Chickasaws $12,000 per year for ten years, and the eastern Chickasaw boundary south of
Tennessee was established in present-day northwest Alabama and northeast Mississippi, running from the mouth of Caney Creek to its source and south from Gaines’ Trace to Cotton Gin Port
(Atkinson 2004:205-206; Kappler 1904:135-137). Two years later, in 1818, the Chickasaw leaders again signed a cession treaty with Andrew Jackson that gave the northern portion of
Tennessee and Kentucky that was still in their possession to the United States government in exchange for $20,000 per year for 15 years (Atkinson 2004:209; Kappler 1904:174-177). Land reserves were made for both George and Levi Colbert in addition to presents of cash, which
Atkinson (2004:207) argues served as a bribe. It was in the aftermath of these major land cessions that missionaries began approaching the Chickasaws about building mission schools.
By the nineteenth century, the ethnic demography of the Chickasaw Nation had become quite different. During the eighteenth century, it became somewhat common for runaway black slaves to find refuge among the Chickasaws. Additionally, white traders and other men brought
83 black slaves into the Chickasaw Nation, which were bought by some of the mixed-blood (British and Indian) Chickasaws to work on their farms. James Colbert, a white trader and resident of the
Chickasaw Nation since boyhood, claimed to have owned 150 slaves in 1782. Atkinson
(2004:24) wrote that while most Chickasaw-owned slaves were owned by mixed-race (British and Chickasaw) Indians, a sizable number of “full-bloods” owned at least one or two apiece.
Records dating from the 1830s, on the eve of Indian removal, show that at least 1,156 slaves were owned by the Chickasaws, and that the black population of the Chickasaw Nation was
6,380 (Atkinson 2004:23-24; Doran 1978:337-342; Jeltz 1948:25-30).
These changes that had occurred among the Chickasaws and the Choctaws by the 1800s set up the next chapter, which begins to showcase the historic data that I have collected concerning Charity Hall. Many of the Chickasaw and Choctaw chiefs, particularly those of multiracial descent, sponsored particular missionaries to establish schools on their personal property. Additionally, both Native groups made donations of thousands of dollars to construct schools and chapels. In the case of these two indigenous groups, at least, it seems that they agreed with the need for “civilization” and welcomed the opportunity to have their children trained and educated in the way of the Europeans and Americans.
84 CHAPTER 4 A CHRONOLOGICAL OVERVIEW OF CHARITY HALL
A necessary step in investigating Charity Hall was to perform historic research on whatever primary source materials could be found that connect to the school or the people who operated it (Table 4-1). These not only gave names and dates to people and events, but also helped me make decisions about how to investigate the site archaeologically. Here I provide a critical review of the primary source documents followed by a chronological narrative of the school’s life divided into three parts, which includes reports on the number of students who attended annually, the make-up of the Mission family who administered the school on any given year, and funding provided by the U.S. government. In the Chapter 5 I continue to review the primary-source data to draw conclusions that answer my research questions.
The Primary-Source Documents
The Missionary Papers of the Reverend Robert Bell
One year after the death of the Reverend Robert Bell (1770-1853), there appeared a regular column in a monthly publication entitled The Cumberland Presbyterian Missionary, published by the Board of Missions of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Lebanon,
Tennessee. The editors contacted the Reverend John Haynes, who was Bell’s son-in-law, asking him to send along “anything in reference to the Mission School established by the C. P. Church in the Chickasaw nation, in the year 1820, known by the name of Charity-hall” (Board of
Missions 1854a:60). The editors soon received a parcel containing “a Port-folio of canvass, divided into different apartments, labeled as follows, to wit: expenditures and donation. Letters to Corresponding Secretaries. Letters to the Missionary Board. Letters to the War Department.
Letters from the War Department” (Board of Missions 1854a:60). The Cumberland journal was just established that year, in 1854, to serve as a news source on the church’s missionary
85 Table 4-1. A summary of the primary-source materials. Title Citation Description The Reverend Robert Bell, 1770- Meacham 2007 Letters collected and transcribed by Bell's 1853 descendant Missionary Papers of Rev. Robert Board of Missions Series of articles in missionary journal that Bell 1854 reprint assorted letters written by various authors and part of the Charity Hall journal Charity Hall: An Early Chickasaw Foreman 1933 Reprints and discusses letters on file with The School Office of Indian Affairs Minutes, 1810-1828 Synod of Minutes recorded by the Synod of Cumberland Cumberland 1828 Minutes, 1829-1846 General Assembly Minutes recorded by the General Assembly of 1992 the Cumberland Presbyterian Church Annotated Minutes of the Tombigbee Winter 2007 Minutes recorded by the Tombigbee Presbytery Presbytery, Vol. I (1825-1838)
The Missionary Herald ABCFM (multiple Missionary journal published by the American years) Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Deed Records Monroe County Records of major property sales transactions recorded in Monroe County, Mississippi Charity Hall Monument Presbytery of Bell The stone monument placed on the site to mark 1919 the centenary of the founding of Charity Hall Field Notes of The Interior Section Bell 1834 Survey notes of the township where Charity Hall Lines of Fractional Township 13 was located for the Chickasaw cession of lands Range 7 East
operations but also to provide spiritual inspiration and garner financial support for the work abroad. They (1854a:60) wrote in the third issue, where the column on Bell first appears, that
“We are thus particular hoping our brethren may imitate the example of Father Bell.”
In addition to the letters found in this portfolio, the editors of The Cumberland also included several other important primary source documents, including a letter from John
Pitchlynn, a Choctaw chief who wrote about the Indian desire for mission schools (Board of
Missions 1854a:64-66), the actual “Article of Agreement” between the missionaries and the
Chickasaws that allowed for the founding of Charity Hall (Board of Missions 1854b:89), and
86 excerpts from The Journal of the Missionary School, a publication that reproduced the daily journal of Charity Hall in 1823. The editors explain that this latter publication was “established by the Cumberland Missionary Board in the Choctaw Nation, from first of June, 1823” (Board of
Missions 1854c:132), but I have been unable to find the original journal nor any other references to it at this time. It is not clear how long this journal was published nor what else was included in it besides the day-to-day entries from Charity Hall. Not including Pitchlynn’s letter, the editors transcribed a total of 13 letters from Bell’s portfolio, primarily due to their content and how relevant these were to their operations in 1854.
The Meacham Connection
The largest source of historical data comes from a document that compiles all of the letters from the portfolio that was originally received by The Cumberland journal editors in
1854. The document was compiled and transcribed by Katharine Miller Meacham, who is a descendant of Bell and included some preliminary discussion about how the letters from the portfolio came into her possession. Meacham (2007) explained that the Reverend Robert Bell was a “forebear” in her mother’s family and that the letters were mailed in 1934 by E.T.
Winston, who was a writer for the Pontotoc Progress (a publication in Pontotoc, Mississippi, where the Reverend Robert Bell lived after the closing of Charity Hall until his death in 1853), to
Mary Utopia Rothrock, who was then the head librarian of the Tennessee Valley Authority and also Meacham’s aunt. The original parcel sent from Winston to Rothrock included 44 letters written by Bell, in addition to miscellaneous letters in manuscript as well as reports to the missionary board and lists of contributors to the school. Meacham (2007) apparently spent many years transcribing the letters into her document, which she then furnished to the Chickasaw
Nation, writing: “I hope that your reading will find you empathizing with those who cared about
87 the Indians and with the Chickasaw who were driven from their Nation to go on the Trail of
Tears.”
While it does appear that part of Meacham’s intention was to justify the participation of her ancestor in the “civilization” of Indians prior to their forced removal from Mississippi, she does very painstakingly include every detail possible, including mundane information only of interest to archaeologists, such as dimensions of buildings and materials used in their construction, which was often left out of transcriptions that appeared in The Cumberland. The document includes transcriptions of 62 letters, all either sent by or to the Reverend Robert Bell, including all 13 of those transcribed in The Cumberland.
The Office of Indian Affairs
A third important source of historical material comes from an article written by Carolyn
Thomas Foreman (1933) and published in The Chronicles of Oklahoma, the official journal of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Foreman provided an overview of the history of Charity Hall based on historical letters made available by the Office of Indian Affairs, which was established in 1824 by John C. Calhoun and received reports from the Reverend Robert Bell on the status of
Charity Hall at regular intervals. Foreman’s analysis included six letters, one of which was not included in Bell’s portfolio because it was a letter written in 1825 by the Reverend Robert
Donnell, President of the Cumberland Missionary Board, to the Secretary of Indian Affairs
Thomas McKinney (Foreman 1933:917-919). Although the transcriptions of the other five letters are already present in the two previously discussed sources, these transcriptions come from the other side of the exchange rather than copies made by Bell of his own letters. The overlap in all three transcription sources is useful, especially for the final lengthy accounting letter in 1832
88 (Foreman 1933:920-926; Meacham 2007:126-130), due to the fact that Bell’s handwriting can be difficult to read and understand.
Other Primary Sources and Source Criticism
Other primary sources referenced in this dissertation include minutes taken by the
Cumberland Presbyterian Church (General Assembly 1992; Synod of Cumberland 1828; 1879).
These give some description of the committees established to oversee mission work among the
Chickasaws, including the operation of Charity Hall, as well as committees that oversaw the ceasing of mission operations when Indian removal was impending. Minutes recorded by the
Tombigbee Presbytery (Winter 2007) provide insight into the larger missionscape operation, as their meetings included missionaries from many of the schools operating in both the Chickasaw
Nation and the Choctaw Nation. For this purpose I also perused issues of The Missionary
Herald, published by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), an organization that oversaw mission schools in the Choctaw Nation and was later given oversight of the schools operating within the Chickasaw Nation (except for Charity Hall). I visited the chancery office of Monroe County in November of 2019 and found several deed records that have connections to Charity Hall, including the sale of Bell’s ferry service across the Tombigbee
River in 1826 as well as Chickasaw land cession deeds for the township where Charity Hall was located. The stone monument physically placed on the site, even though it has very few words, does serve as a primary source that gives a brief history of the school and the commemoration that was performed on its centenary. Finally, the field notes taken by Deputy Surveyor James H.
Bell in 1834 describe the township where Charity Hall was located, including the location of
Bell’s agricultural fields, places where roads crossed township lines in the vicinity, and the location of Levi Colbert’s earlier property and agricultural fields.
89 Primary source documents should of course not be considered objective data to be used uncritically. Questions that should be asked of particular sources are things like: Who made them? Under what conditions were they made? Who were they made for? Why were they made?
Authors of letters were of course writing to convey information but usually they were also trying to convince their recipients of something, whether it was justification for actions or arguments about why certain resources were necessary. This means that certain information was probably omitted or even misrepresented, even if in only small ways. For instance, Bell often wrote to the
Department of War and to the Cumberland Missionary Board about the progress of his students in glowing terms. From time to time, he would mention that some students left the school because they found the work too cumbersome, but the overall discussion of student progress tends toward the positive. Bell had to put this view forward so that the recipients of his letters and whomever those people influenced would continue to support Charity Hall, especially with resources both financial and material.
Another problem to be considered is that the creators of primary source documents only included information that they thought was pertinent to their purpose or to whomever they expected to read the documents. This is true not only of letters but of the Charity Hall journal and the minutes recorded by various governing bodies. The journal tends to include more revealing information about day-to-day activities as well as what happened on certain days of the week, but there is undoubtedly missing information about mundane activities that the authors assumed any reader of the time would understand without direct mention. For instance, the journal mentions several times that the Charity Hall pastors traveled to Cotton Gin Port to give sermons to a congregation, but they never mention what the congregation was called. This is
90 because those who had an interest in reading the journal at that time were probably already aware of what congregations existed in Cotton Gin Port.
One of the most frustrating missing pieces of information for me as an archaeologist is the spatial layout of Charity Hall. Bell records in various places how many acres the school occupied, the number of buildings and their materials, but nowhere does he mention how the buildings were arranged or how they were juxtaposed to one another on the site. This of course was not relevant to the Department of War or the Cumberland Missionary Board. The minutes- type source materials are especially light on detail. These would at times include copies of reports given by speakers, but rarely was there any discussion recorded concerning resolutions.
The course of an entire day-long or even weekend-long discussion is sometimes summed up in just one page or within just a few lines, even though there were undoubtedly hours of debate on specific topics. The same goes for the deed records and the 1834 survey notes, both of which recorded very specific information deemed important by governmental bodies of the time in which they were written.
Finally, one must also consider the curation and presentation of primary source materials.
Similar questions to those asked about the authors should also be asked of publishers and curators. What organization or individual made these materials available? What was their purpose in providing access to the materials? What materials might be missing, whether intentional or not? The Journal of the Missionary School and The Missionary Herald in particular have to be used very critically, since these were reprinting documents with an eye toward promoting and justifying their present-day missions. In the former, the Reverend Bell was additionally being held up as a model figure to be admired and emulated. They therefore only included information that furthered this goal. The Meacham collection is a little closer to
91 being objective, given that she appears to have transcribed every letter that still exists, but one should still consider what may be missing. Did Bell keep copies of every letter that he wrote? It is possible that he did not, whether he was working in haste or did not want a copy to be found.
The minutes recorded by the various bodies of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church also may be missing information. Many of them are internal documents that exist for members of the organization to have a record of what happened in the past, but their recorders and the leading figures who chaired the assemblies at which the minutes were taken held sway over what was discussed and what was written down.
Ultimately, the primary-source materials are full of the subjectivity of humans throughout. This does not undermine their great value, especially because what is presented says something about all of the people involved (including myself writing this dissertation with specific research questions to answer), but the data I present in these two chapters dealing with the history must be viewed in this critical light.
The Foundation of Charity Hall (1819-1823)
Before the Cumberland Presbyterians approached the Chickasaws about building a mission school on their land, they first solicited the Choctaw Nation to the south. On August 11,
1819, Colonel John Pitchlynn, a chief of the Choctaw Nation, wrote a letter to Cumberland
Presbyterian pastors Samuel King and William Moore, who had apparently visited the Choctaw
Nation previously in order to negotiate the location of a mission school (Board of Missions
1854a:63). Pitchlynn was a significant figure for both the Choctaw Nation and the United States government, due to the fact that he was appointed by George Washington to serve as the official interpreter between the two nations. Like Levi Colbert, he was of British and Native American descent but was raised among the Choctaw people. It appears that the relationship between
92 Pitchlynn and the Cumberland fathers was a positive one and that the Choctaws were eager to have missionaries establish schools in their territory. Pitchlynn wrote:
At the grand Council of the Nation held in July, the people individually contributed between $1500 and $2000 to the institution under the superintendence of the Rev. Mr. Kingsbury [Elliot Mission]. At a Council held on the sixth inst., at Meshulatubees by the chiefs and warriors of the Northwestern District, they appropriated $2000 a year for 17 years, for the use of Schools:—and I am of opinion the two other Districts will adopt the same measures. The money thus appropriated is the dividend of this District of the annuity granted by Gen. Coffee’s Treaty. This, my dear sirs, looks like the Indians were not going longer to depend on the Government for those things which they find they can provide themselves. I esteem the proposal of Government for an exchange of lands, the most fortunate circumstance in the history of the nation. And I am confident it will do more towards their civilization, than ten Schools established by Government; inasmuch as it has called forth the latent powers of the mind. They have thought and deliberated on the means best to pursue. They knew if they went west of the great River, that they might remain savages for a century. A majority of them have tasted a little of civilization, and from their intercourse with white people they found when they compared their situations, that civilization was far preferable to their state. They also found that without the education of their children, they could not live neighbors to white people. (Board of Missions 1854a:64-65)
At this time, Pitchlynn and the Choctaws were still eager to have the Cumberland fathers establish a school. He wrote that the Choctaws “have everything in the monied way ready for you” (Board of Missions 1854a:65). However, events transpired a little differently, and Pitchlynn ended up working instead with the Reverend Cyrus Kingsbury, who worked for the ABCFM and had already established the Elliot mission within the Choctaw Nation in 1818, to establish the
Mayhew mission (ABCFM 1820:174-176). This forced the Cumberland Presbyterians to turn their attention instead to the Chickasaw Nation. Nevertheless, it appears that the Pitchlynn family and other Choctaws maintained close ties with the Cumberland Presbyterians and Charity Hall.
Included in the Reverend Bell’s final list of students who had attended his academy were
Alexander, Peter, and Silas “Pitchlyn” (Rooney 2019:51), and in the Charity Hall journal entry
93 for June 2, 1823, it was recorded that “Mr. James Pitchland [Pitchlynn], a half breed Choctaw, who has a son under our care at this place, has visited the school and appears highly pleased with our plan and mode of giving instruction” (Board of Missions 1854c:132). It is not clear why the
Pitchlynns would enroll some of their children at Charity Hall when they were simultaneously working to establish the Mayhew mission in their own backyard. I can only speculate that the three Pitchlynn children were already being educated by Bell and the other Cumberland pastors prior to the establishment of Mayhew and simply stayed where they were.
Sometime in 1818 or 1819, the Cumberland Synod had appointed a “committee to inquire into the state of religion,” which had as one of its tasks securing locations for missions among the Indians. On Wednesday, October 12, 1819, this committee reported to the Cumberland
Synod, and its list of members recorded in the minutes for that meeting were Finis Ewing,
William Barnett, Hugh Kirkpatrick, Thomas Calhoon, Robert Bell, and Robert Donnell. Several letters directed to the moderator informed the Synod that several societies had been formed “the object of which was to raise funds to establish schools for literary and religious instruction of the
Chickasaw and Choctaw nations of Indians” (Cumberland Synod 1819:155). Their report included a description of a Chickasaw man whom they had been educating since the previous winter and whom they had successfully converted:
Amongst the most impressive of such calls, we have from the tawny sons of the woods in the South, one of whom has recently given satisfactory evidence that he has obtained “the one thing needful;” and he has been admitted to the sealing ordinances of God’s house. This Indian man was brought from the Chickasaw nation of Indians last winter by brothers King and Moore, two of our missionaries, who has been going to school from brother King’s, and has made almost unparalleled progress in his education. A few weeks since, we trust, he found “him of whom Moses and the prophets did write.” Your committee anticipate great good which may result to his nation from the circumstances of his conversion and education, especially if it please the great Head of the Church to call him to the work of the ministry.
94 From the great increase of candidates in the several Presbyteries, we trust that white men and red men will be amply supplied with the word of eternal life. (Cumberland Synod 1819:156)
The next day, on Thursday, October 13, the Synod heard a similar account from the same committee about a new Choctaw convert:
A few of the tawny sons of the South have made a profession of religion, one of whom said, “The good Spirit blessed him before he heard the gospel, and when he heard it preached, he knew it was the same thing the good Spirit told him of when he was a young man.” Another very noted character of the Choctaw nation and his son lately professed religion, and were baptized straightway by one of the aforesaid missionaries. We hope that great good will result from those instances of conversion, and the utility of a missionary school established in the Chickasaw nation under your patronage. (Cumberland Synod 1819:160-161)
The school referenced in the first passage, operated by the Reverend King, is likely the same school that appears in an account given in May 1820 by two missionaries who visited
Mississippi from the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia. The two pastors, Thomas C. Stuart and David Humphreys, set out that May looking to establish a mission among the Indians east of the Mississippi (Winter 1997:22). After being rejected by the Creeks, they set out for the
Chickasaw Nation, and in late May, they arrived at the home of Chickasaw leader Levi Colbert near Cotton Gin Port on the Tombigbee River. According to historian Robert Milton Winter
(1997:22), here they found a school, already known as “Charity Hall,” operated by Cumberland
Presbyterian missionaries Samuel King and Robert Bell, which had been opened the preceding year. “The visitors found children learning to spell, with more advanced youngsters reading the
New Testament, and two ‘scholars’ studying English grammar” (Winter 1997:22). This snapshot apparently took place prior to the official establishment of Charity Hall later in 1820, where Bell served as the sole superintendent. Moore and King remained friends of the school and communicated regularly with Bell, but must have moved on to other ventures. It is not clear
95 whether the school operating at Colbert’s house described here in 1819 and early 1820 was actually called Charity Hall at that time or whether Winter was applying the name of the later-to- be established school to this earlier account. It is also possible that the three Pitchlynn children were among the scholars observed by Stuart and Humphreys, if my earlier speculation is correct.
The Reverend Robert Bell, who became the chief administrator of Charity Hall, was born
December 16, 1770, and his wife—referred to as Mrs. Bell in every primary source document— was named Grizzell McCutcheon. Bell was licensed to preach in 1804 and was formally ordained in 1810 (McDonnold 1888:91). He was a pupil of the first Cumberland school, which was opened in Craighead’s church (later Cumberland College) in Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended alongside his long-time collaborators Finis Ewing and Samuel King (McDonnold
1888:6). McDonnold (1888:17) noted that he had an autobiographical manuscript written by Bell in his possession, where he found that Bell took issue with the doctrine of reprobation—a doctrine that holds that if an individual rejects the gospel, God will in turn reject and curse that person. Opposition to this doctrine among others was what led to the Cumberland Presbytery organizing independently of the rest of the Presbyterian Church after 1810. Most notable was their repudiation of predestination—the doctrine that God has already chosen those whom he intends to save. Soon after Bell was licensed to preach, he took to the circuit, since there was immense pressure to preach in the “destitute” regions, and it was this practice that brought him closer to the Chickasaws (McDonnold 1888:134).
After the encounter with Stuart and Humphreys, the Reverend Bell opened a school for both Euro-American and Indian children on the east side of the Tombigbee River during the summer of 1820. However, the Choctaw and Chickasaw people felt that it was too “sickly” on the east side of the river, and this resulted in a decline of Indian children in attendance (Board of
96 Missions 1854b:89). After teaching for three weeks, Bell apparently dismissed the white children he had been teaching in order to secure the attendance of the Indians. He met with the Reverend
King and a man named James Stewart in the Chickasaw Nation at the home of Major Levi
Colbert to enter into a contract with the chiefs for a mission school. The contract was signed by
Bell, Stewart, King, and Colbert on September 11, 1820, and Colbert further secured the signatures of other Chickasaw chiefs in October of the same year. Here follows the contract:
Article of Agreement between Samuel King, Jas. Stewart, and Robert Bell, Missionaries and the Chiefs of the Chickasaw Nation—viz: Article 1st. We, the said Samuel King, James Stewart, and Robert Bell on the part of the Board of the Cumberland Missionary School Society, do promise to teach the people of said Nation, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and a Knowledge of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. Also, that those who resort to them for instruction shall be boarded and clothed gratis, provided they are not able to clothe themselves. Art 2d. We promise that we will not take any more land than will be necessary for the support of the institution. And should we leave the institution, our houses, and the land which we have occupied, shall revert to the Indians. Art. 3d. We, the Chiefs of the Chickasaw Nation, on the part of the said Nation do permit said School and Missionaries into our Nation to teach our young people. Art. 4th. We do hereby bind ourselves to allow said Society as much land as may be necessary for the support of their Missionaries. Which land they shall hold as long as they continue to teach our children.
Sept. 11, 1820 Signed in behalf of the Board, Robert Bell, James Stewart, Samuel King.
Starko Cooley, King of the Nation. Tisho Mongo, Appa Suntubba, Samuel Sealey,
97 Wm. McGelbra, James Colbert, Levi Colbert.
(Board of Missions 1854b:89)
After the contract was signed by all parties, Bell and his family arrived at the
“uncultivated place” selected for the establishment of Charity Hall on November 4, 1820. He preliminarily began schooling on November 13 at the home of Levi Colbert until a temporary school house could be built in the place selected. This structure was erected, and school commenced at that establishment on December 4, 1820 with 15 students, a number that increased to 30 over the next two or three months (Board of Missions 1854b:90). It is not directly stated how large a role was played by the Chickasaws in the selection of the site, but it is likely that they at least played a role if they were not the ultimate deciding authority on the matter, especially given that it was on Levi Colbert’s property. Accounts of the establishment of the
Mayhew mission in the Choctaw Nation (ABCFM 1820:174-176) and later the Caney Creek mission in the Chickasaw Nation (ABCFM 1829c:151) state that the Indian chiefs in both cases were the ones who decided the locations where the schools should be built.
By early 1821 the Reverend Robert Bell was making regular communication with John
C. Calhoun, who was then the U.S. Secretary of War. In a letter dated April 19, 1821, Bell related to Calhoun that he had obtained permission from the Chickasaw chiefs the previous
October to establish Charity Hall one mile from the Tombigbee River and two miles south of
“Colbert’s Old Cotton Ginn,” and that he had been teaching there since November 13, 1820
(Meacham 2007:18). According to this letter, there was to be two male teachers and one female teacher (Mrs. Bell); to instruct the girls in sewing, spinning, and weaving; and mechanics to teach the boys various “arts.” It is not clear at this point who the second male teacher besides
98 Bell would be. This could have been Samuel King, who Stuart and Humphries reported was running the school with Bell at its opening, but there are no other documents that corroborate this statement that another pastor was helping Bell operate Charity Hall until the arrival of John C.
Smith in 1823.
Bell had financial difficulty running Charity Hall from the very beginning. In a letter written by the Reverend Moore to the Reverend Bell on April 5, 1820, prior to the school opening, the former instructed the latter to “get the houses built by the aids of whites and Indians in that part of the country” and to “receive children who can pay their own board until our funds increase” (Board of Missions 1854d:150). In Bell’s letter to Calhoun the following April, he explained that he had raised $800 in a few neighborhoods, and that they expected to receive
$1,200 during the first year (Meacham 2007:18). Whether this $1,200 was the amount he expected from the U.S. government or fundraising is not clear. It would be a further three years until Bell saw any of the federal funding he was promised by Calhoun through the Civilization
Fund Act, and many of his letters to government agents are focused on defraying the expenses for the buildings at Charity Hall. It appears that the Reverend Stuart, who was simultaneously establishing the Monroe mission within the Chickasaw Nation to the west, was having similar hardships. Someone wrote in the Mayhew journal on July 26, 1821 that Stuart visited them for a day and that:
This dear brother has been laboring almost alone for some time, under many discouragements. He has experienced much inconvenience from the want of funds, and of proper assistance to carry on the work of the farm, and to put forward the necessary buildings. (ABCFM 1822:82)
In October of 1821, Bell was forced to turn his attention away from education and toward the procurement of provisions and funds to carry the school into full operation and complete the
99 necessary building of the establishment. He therefore ended the term early, on October 1, and did not resume until February 1822 (Meacham 2007:30). This is further evidence that Bell did not receive help from another pastor operating the school, who could have continued educating the children in his absence. In a letter from Bell to Calhoun written February 21, 1822, he related that he had not yet received the funds promised by the government in a letter he had received that past June, and that this was especially frustrating since the Reverend Stuart, who had since established Monroe Mission, had already received his remittance from the government
(Meacham 2007:22).
Several of the students who attended Charity Hall in 1821 did not return in 1822, due to there being insufficient funds to clothe and board them gratis (Board of Missions 1854b:90).
Additionally, three other students who had made “considerable progress” and who wished “to be entirely among the white people” went to Tennessee to finish their education (Board of Missions
1854b:90). It was common at that time for Indian children, especially the children of Chickasaw and Choctaw chiefs to go live with American families in bigger cities so that they could be better immersed in Euro-American customs and the English language. The Cumberland Presbytery was then and is still today headquartered in Tennessee, which meant that this was a prime location to send the more advanced students who wished to continue their education beyond what the pastors could do in the mission schools. It later became the common practice of the school at
Caney Creek to place enrolled students among different families in Giles County, Tennessee, where they could attend school and, “having no associates speaking their own language, would be compelled to learn to speak English” (ABCFM 1829c:151). Regarding federal remuneration,
Calhoun wrote to Bell stating that he had not received the appropriate “certificate respecting the commencement of buildings” at Charity Hall that was needed to defray the costs of their
100 construction. In an April 9, 1822 response, Bell explained that a federal agent, Mr. Maulburn, had assured Bell a year prior that the buildings had been certified but that he would return to the agent and get the matter certified yet again (Meacham 2007:20). This was now 17 months after the first building was erected at Charity Hall in December 1820.
At the end of September 1822, Bell was again compelled to close the school and leave his family in order to “procure pork by donations in the State of Tennessee, and drive it to the establishment.” This was necessary because he had as yet no one present to take his place while he was absent (Board of Missions 1854b:90). In October, the Board held their annual meeting and appointed the Reverend John C. Smith to be an assistant teacher at Charity Hall. However,
Smith and his family did not arrive at Charity Hall until January 18, 1823 (Board of Missions
1854b:90-91). In the meantime, Bell wrote to Calhoun on October 21, 1822, “scarcity of money has induced the Board to adopt the method of receiving donations in produce, such as live pork, cattle, and linens” (Foreman 1933:913).
One of the main characteristics of life at Charity Hall that stands out, especially during its opening years, was the struggle to obtain adequate funding for the establishment’s operation.
Bell frequently penned letters voicing the displeasure he harbored for the lack of financial support from his brethren in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Many of his letters during
1823 consist of beratements of Board members and complaints that he was being ignored far away from the Synod’s headquarters:
…the embarrassed situation of the Directors of this institution, for the lack of funds, has greatly impeded the progress of its usefulness. The scarcity and depreciation of money, and the opposition of many professors of Christianity, have occasioned tardiness among its friends and some of the members of the Board, so that exertions have not been used to obtain funds to defray the necessary expense of the establishment. (Board of Missions 1854b:92)
101 This lack of funds meant that Bell frequently had to turn down requests to take additional students into Charity Hall. On June 4, 1823, when the aforementioned James Pitchlynn visited to request that they board a second of his sons, the Charity Hall journal recorded, “…we were obliged to turn him off, and with hearts full of regret inform him that we were compelled to circumscribe our wishes for the want of funds to furnish the necessary supplies for his support”
(Board of Missions 1854c:132). This Pitchlynn had promised a donation of two cows and calves, which he nevertheless did deliver to the establishment the following week (Board of Missions
1854c:133).
Just days earlier, Bell responded to a letter written by a man named M. Massey, the secretary of a newly formed “benevolent” society at the Marr’s Hill Church in Giles County,
Tennessee, which had passed a resolution to aid Charity Hall financially and wanted more
“intelligence,” such as the number of students, their progress, expense of education per student,
Bell’s personal compensation, and his views on the missionary cause (Board of Missions
1854d:151). This may have been the beginning of a longer relationship between the missionaries to the Chickasaws and the Marr’s Hill Church. As I wrote earlier, the administrator of the school at Caney Creek would later send his students to live among families in the same county. Bell responded with the requested information on May 30, stating:
The number of students under our care at this time is 28—but their number in my opinion might be five times as many, did the state of our funds admit of taking them in, as we have been under the necessity of turning many away that have applied for admission into the school, and a principal Chief has informed me that if word were to go out into some parts of the Nation that we would receive all that come, they would come in crowds. (Board of Missions 1854d:151)
102 It is possible that this chief Bell referred to was the very same Pitchlynn who visited a few days later on June 4. That same day, according to the school journal, Bell set out for a tour of Tennessee and Kentucky to raise funds and did not return until after the school vacation started that August (Board of Missions 1854c). It is possible that Bell’s tour included a stop at the Marr’s Hill Church in Giles County, Tennessee, due to the fact that Charity Hall received a letter from Bell a little over two weeks later reporting that he had found some success. The letter was sent from Limestone, Alabama, showing that Bell had also stopped in this locality. He used this opportunity to also complain that the only thing lacking was “the indefatigable exertions of the principal members of the Board” (Board of Missions 1854c:134).
Throughout the opening years of Charity Hall’s operation, Bell continued to have a difficult time arranging to receive payment of the funds appropriated under the Civilization Fund
Act by the Department of War that was designated for Charity Hall. It was not until June 14,
1823, as described in this journal entry, that they received, for the first time, word that any money was being set aside for Charity Hall:
June 14th.—Received a letter this day from the sub. Agency of this Nation, informing us that the Government had appropriated for the present year the sum of four hundred dollars to the use of this school, for the purpose of defraying the expense of tuition—and that the sum of five hundred dollars had been remitted to the agency of this Nation more than twelve months ago, for the purpose of paying the expense of building, &c.; of which this is the first information we have had respecting this remittance, in consequence of the long absence of the agent; and that the balance for expenses of buildings will be remitted on the certificate of the agent of the completion of the buildings, &c. They have long since been completed, and a certificate from the sub. Agency obtained to this effect, but has not yet been forwarded to the department. We humbly trust that this assistance, when once obtained, will enable us to carry on the work of God in bringing a number more of these poor destitute heathen to the light and knowledge of the gospel, that otherwise would remain perhaps to die in ignorance and superstition. (Board of Missions 1854c:133)
103 Three days later, on June 17, this agent visited Charity Hall and stayed overnight. The journal entry for that day reads: “We were visited to-day for the first time by Mr. Malbone, the sub. Agent for this Nation, who appears to be agreeable disappointed in finding the buildings and other preparations more convenient and commodious than he expected to find them” (Board of
Missions 1854c:134). It is possible that “Malbone” is the same agent as “Maulburn” referred to in an earlier letter. Whether he was Malbone or Maulburn, it is not clear why he would be disappointed to find the school doing better than he expected. It might be that he was expecting fewer buildings to have been erected since Bell had been requesting money to defray the costs of their construction, which would be surprising since it had now been nearly three years since their construction began. It does, however, seem to be the case that many of the schools took several years to establish all of the buildings required.
Bell gave reports on the Charity Hall property and belongings to Calhoun in his October
21, 1822 letter and the Cumberland Missionary Board in a quarterly report written on September
15, 1823. In 1822 he wrote that the property was valued at $1,700 and consisted of 22 or 23 acres of improved land with crops, cattle, farming utensils, and buildings, which were about three fourths finished at that time (Foreman 1933:913). A year later, in his 1823 quarterly report, he stated:
…the crop at this place will amount to 1000 bushels of corn, between 50 and 100 dollars worth of cotton perhaps 200 bushels of potatoes. We have one acre and a half of turnips growing. There are 46 and 47 acres of cleared land under good…and the buildings, have long since been completed. We have erected a tanyard which is now in operation & is highly pleasing to the Nation. (Meacham 2007:29)
This shows that the amount of land cleared for agriculture more than doubled and that the buildings were all completed between the close of the 1822 term and the close of the 1823 term,
104 which corroborates the June 17, 1823 diary entry that describes the response of Malbone to the finished state of the buildings. However, at the close of 1823, they were still lacking required tools and other supplies to provide the education desired to the Indian children (Meacham
2007:29). They still had not yet received any government funding at the close of 1823. Again, according to Bell’s September 15, 1823 report:
We have received official information that the Government has remitted to the Agent of this nation $500.00 on account of the buildings & $100.00 for tuition, but the agent has not paid any of that to me, nor has he been at the Agency or in the Nation to my knowledge since last fall. But a new agent is now appointed and I have no doubt we shall yet receive the amount. (Meacham 2007:29)
Charity Hall in Full Operation (1824-1827)
The beginning of 1824 saw some personnel changes at Charity Hall. In a March 3, 1824 letter to a newspaper columnist who was interested in publishing Bell’s missionary papers, Bell related that his son John Bell had left with his family in November 1823 and that the Reverend
Smith had left with his family on January 12, 1824 (Meacham 2007:33). A man named Andrew
Pickens and his family, consisting of eight people, began living at Charity Hall on December 10,
1823 (Meacham 2007:57). The March letter also mentioned the family of John Haynes, but neither Haynes nor Pickens were referred to as “Reverends,” and Bell additionally stated that he was now confined to the school, “so that I cannot perform any missionary tours, in order to procure funds for this institution as formerly” (Meacham 2007:33). Bell felt comfortable leaving
Charity Hall in the hands of the Reverend Smith during the previous summer, so it may be that
Haynes and Pickens were hired as laborers or agricultural teachers who did not engage in religious or academic instruction. It is worth noting that Bell’s son-in-law, as noted above, was
105 named John Haynes and was later referred to as a “Reverend” in 1854 (Board of Missions
1854a:63).
It appears that Bell finally received money from the U.S. government, in the amount of
$400, sometime during the beginning of 1824, more than three years after the school had initially been opened. Bell wrote in an April 6 letter to Calhoun that the money was “remitted to Major
Smith for me to be applied for the tuition of the School and a draft of $500 on you from Major
Smith to which sum came reasonable to our assistance at this establishment” (Meacham
2007:35). The $400 matches up with the amount Bell gave in the final accounting of the school in 1832, where he listed the amounts received from the U.S. government each year (Foreman
1933:921), but the $500 does not. It may be that this $500 was meant to cover the tuition for
1823, for which Bell would years later mention receiving. However, these amounts were apparently not nearly enough to cover all of the costs of the school. In his second quarterly report of 1824, written April 7, Bell explained to the Board that “farming utensils, kitchen and table furniture, and spelling books and paper for the students are necessarily required, so that the whole expense of the Establishment the present year cannot be far short of $1,500” (Meacham
2007:36).
One of the outlets for Bell’s frustration over the lack of funding was a series of letters sent out to various members of the Missionary Board complaining not only that he had received inadequate funding but had been largely ignored by his brethren up north. Responses to Bell’s cries for help began to flow in during the beginning of 1824. William Moore, who had been the first, along with Samuel King, to court the Chickasaws and the Choctaws back in 1819, responded on June 21, 1824, saying that he had recently obtained the counsel of four other
Cumberland ministers regarding the situation:
106
…after deliberating on the subject, [they] gave it as their opinion that, considering the state of the denomination and the many oppositions which it meets with in a strange land, it would be, in all probability, a fruitless attempt were we make exertions in behalf of the Institution; which concurs with my own, as far as I am able to judge. For the people in general appear to be hard run about money and many of them in debt, and the school being at a distance, and a subject in which the settlers of this new country, I think, feel but little interest, together with their remissness in supporting our preachers, all go to convince me that an attempt to raise money on that subject would rather strengthen the charges of some against us in a country where our denomination is but little known, and impede our progress as far as their influence could extend. … Therefore, although I think I would be willing to do all that I could, I cannot promise you any thing at the present, more than my best wishes for your success. (Board of Missions 1854d:152)
A little over one month later, Bell received a similar reply from the Reverend Thomas
Calhoon, promising little in the way of material aid but instead seeking to encourage Bell’s spirituality:
I would make some apology for not writing, but I have none I believe that would stand the test. I acknowledge my sin, for you did convict me in your last—will try to do better. I think you have been treated with neglect…[but] I am afraid that the brethren do not feel as much interested in the cause as would be desirable. May the Lord open the hearts of the people to do good, and support you and your dear companion under the severe fatigues of a mission life. (Board of Missions 1854d:152)
He received similar responses from the Reverend William Harris (Board of Missions
1854e:198) and the Reverend Hiram Hunter (Board of Missions 1854e:199-200). It is important to note that while Bell was struggling to obtain needed funding for the school, this was partially due to his own decision not to accept funding from the Chickasaw Nation. In 1824, a council of
Chickasaw leaders appropriated $5,000 from tribal funds to finance the construction of new schools and a further $2,500 per year to pay for operating expenses (Gibson 1971:111). The direction of these schools was given to the South Carolina-Georgia Synod missionaries, who
107 built three new schools: Tokshish, two miles north of Monroe, in 1824; Martyn, at Pigeon Roost, in 1825; and Caney Creek, on western Alabama Chickasaw lands, in 1826 (Gibson 1971:111).
The Reverend Bell, meanwhile, wrote to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun on October 1, 1824:
The Indians manifest the most friendly disposition toward this school and are anxious to have their children educated (especially the poor class) as far as my knowledge in this case extends, although they have not contributed anything to its support, except a few cows and calves. But I have made no application for any further assistance from them, and in consequence of the United States Agent expressing to me his wish that the Missionaries should not ask the Nation for any assistance, nor have any from them, lest they claim the direction of the schools. I did not attend their council last Spring, by which the appropriation was made for the education of their children, therefore no participation was committed to my care or management. (Meacham 2007:57)
A letter written by Levi Colbert to Bell dated September 25, 1822 shows that Bell was indeed offered financial assistance directly by the Chickasaw Nation before any money was appropriated for the other missions:
Friend and Brother of the Cumberland Missionary Board: I suppose you wish to know what the peoples of this Nation think of your missionary school, and what encouragement they seem disposed to give it. They talk favorably of the school, and are well satisfied with the manner in which it has been conducted. They wish it to be continued and carried into full operation, so that our poor people who are not able to board their children can have them educated. The more wealthy part of our Nation will give some assistance…I have talked to the chiefs in council two or three times, and have met but little opposition…We want our Nation to be enlightened, and to understand that gospel which you missionaries preach, and we wish all our good friends among the white people to pray for us. I am your sincere friend, Levi Colbert. (McDonnold 1888:137)
During the sick season of 1824, beginning in July, many of the occupants of Charity Hall came down with an inflammatory fever, which had lethal consequences for some of the school’s
108 residents. This may have been the Scarlet Fever, which was documented as a lethal epidemic in
Tours, France in 1824 by Bretonneau (Katz and Morens 1992:299), who likened what happened during that two-month period to a plague. Bell wrote about these events in the same letter to
Calhoun on October 1:
Since my last report to you until the summer, at which time notwithstanding the former healthiness of this place since our first settlement here we were visited with an inflammatory fever which has culminated in the death of Mr. Andrew Pickens and his daughter Miss Jane Pickens, instructor of the female students in sewing, spinning, etc. My son Robert Bell, Junior, also departed this life on the 15th of September. But an all wise and gracious Providence, in whose hands are the issues of life and death has in a good degree restored the surviving part of our families with health again. (Meacham 2007:57)
This fever apparently had far-ranging effects among the other schools in region. An accounting by the ABCFM of all of the missionaries who had administered their schools included the Reverend Samuel Moseley, who administered the Mayhew mission beginning in
1822, as having died in 1824 “in the field of his missionary labors” (ABCFM 1831a:4). Beyond these deaths, the sickness that struck Charity Hall also had wide-ranging economic effects on the establishment, since it afflicted many of the other laborers, including Mrs. Pickens and Mr. and
Mrs. Haynes (Meacham 2007:59). On the same day that he wrote his report to Calhoun, Bell wrote another letter to the Secretary of Indian Affairs, Thomas L. McKenney, where he lamented: “We have raised a valuable crop, perhaps not less than 300 barrels of corn, 10,000 weight of seed cotton, a good many peas and Irish sweet potatoes. etc. But on the account of the scarcity of hands, by reason of sickness and death, and the discontinuance of the school, it cannot all be saved” (Meacham 2007:59).
In a March 22, 1825 letter to Bell, William Barnett referred to the loss of the Charity Hall crops: “I was distressed to hear that, thro’ sickness, you had lost such a proportion of your
109 cotton, that your school could not have commenced sooner this year. But I was pleased to hear that you had got in a train of business again” (Board of Missions 1854f:229). Despite these losses, it appears that Bell was able to turn their hardships around and cultivate even more land, which the Reverend Robert Donnell, then president of the Cumberland Missionary Board, reported as having extended over “50 or 60 acres” in a March 11, 1825 letter to McKenney
(Foreman 1933:917). It appears that by this time more scholars, likely including Peter Pitchlynn
(see Chapter 8), had departed Charity Hall to attend universities in Tennessee and Alabama.
When Bell wrote to McKenney the following month, on April 7, he related that now there were a total of nine or ten who:
…have with my consent left the school and gone to Tennessee and Alabama states to finish their education, wishing entirely to be among the Whites. One of them is living with the Treasurer of the Cumberland Missionary Board, and will finish his education gratis. Daughtery Colbert who lives with you is another of that number. About the same number have long since left the school without my consent and without finishing this course. Some of them got in a notion of marrying, and some grew weary and others discouraged. (Meacham 2007:65).
On May 20, 1825, two members of a committee appointed by the Missionary Board of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the Reverend David Foster and the Reverend J. S. Guthrie, arrived at Charity Hall to begin an annual assessment of the school’s progress (Board of
Missions 1854d:148-150). Their report included a description of the physical property of Charity
Hall, including the locations where land was being tilled and farmed:
The establishment is situated on the western side of the Bigby river, and on the margin of the Low land, having an high eminence of tillable land on the south of the buildings; upon which is a field of thirty acres.—On the north of the buildings, there is another of about 23 acres in the low ground, forty-eight acres in corn, one acre in oats, four in cotton, three in potatoes, the rest in cabbage and other garden vegetables; and the whole in a good state of cultivation.
110 On the margin of the rising ground joining the buildings, there are a great many handsome small springs, free from marches near their sources, which supply plenty of water for the establishment. Near to one of these the tan yard is conveniently situated, the appurtenances of which is a bark mill and shade, currying-house and ten vats. It is supposed they would contain one hundred and sixty hides, which might be tanned with convenience. (Board of Missions 1854d:148-149)
This description of “tillable land” to the south of the buildings lines up with the presence of “Bell’s fields” later described in the 1834 land cession survey notes. In the same report, Foster and Guthrie also provide details of the cattle present at the establishment:
The stock of cattle consist of about twenty head, great and small, about one half wandered off for want of assistance to keep them together.—Large stocks of cattle may be raised here, with very little expense. We find neither horses nor wagon, beds nor furniture belonging to the Board, and the Mission family have used their private property for the use of the establishment, until it is nearly spent. (Board of Missions 1854d:149)
By May of 1825, it appears that the Reverend John C. Smith still had not been replaced at
Charity Hall. In the same 1825 report made by Foster and Guthrie, they described the “Mission family” as consisting of “Rev. Robert Bell, missionary; his wife, a black girl, two hirelings, exclusive of 20 scholars, which are maintained by the Board” (Board of Missions 1854d:149).
They wrote that a lack of a second administrator on the property was having a negative impact on both the operation of the school and the health of Bell and his wife: “Mr. and Mrs. Bell have more labor of different kinds belonging to the Mission, than can be done according to their bodily ability, or to the real profits of the establishment, and unless they have in future some assistance, their days must certainly be shortened” (Board of Missions 1854d:150). Foster and
Guthrie also reported on the Bells’ mental health following the death of their son as well as information about the latter’s funeral, which seems to have not have taken place until that
Sunday, May 22, 1825:
111
In addition to their former long train of difficulties, the loss of their beloved son, Robert, on last September, has been no little grief to them, nor is the loss sustained by the Board in consequence of his death at all inconsiderable; for he was a real friend to the institution, and always ready to assist in any thing that would tend to promote it. On Sabbath of the meeting, his funeral was preached at the request of his friends, as a token of respect for him, and as the means of impressing the living with a sense of their mortality, and the necessity of preparing for eternity. (Board of Missions 1854d:150)
Even though it appears that Charity Hall was faring better after it began receiving regular aid from the US government, Bell still relied heavily on donations of supplies to keep operations running. This was not only true of food but of clothing. In his second quarterly report to the missionary board, written May 4, 1825, Bell stated, with some apparent jealousy:
I was much disappointed in my expectations of getting cloth at Florence for the purpose of clothing them—11 ½ yards were all that was there, and that had been sent on last summer or fall. I was however gratified to find that 12 barrels of Cincinnati flour had just arrived there for the accommodation of our Missionary friends at Monroe Establishment from two congregations in Ohio State. Although you may reasonably judge that this instance of benevolence would insure my mortification, under the consideration of the neglect of my brethren relative to sending on the necessary article of cloth, so much of which has long since been promised by a number of societies, and thus lay me under the necessity of purchasing this article which could so easily have been sent on to me. (Meacham 2007:66)
In an apparent reply the following month, dated June 3, 1825, the Reverend John Barnett wrote to Bell and stated:
I have at length succeeded in collecting articles of cloth and clothing, so as to enable me to make a small shipment to you for the benefit of the school under your superintendence. The box contained 142 yards of linnen of different qualities, 3 shirts, one pair of pantaloons, 5 vests, and patterns, and 15 pairs of socks. The above articles amounted to $103.25, agreeably to the current mode of estimating such articles here. (Board of Missions 1854f:228)
112 In another response to Bell’s lamentations, dated July 13, 1825, the Reverend Harris told
Bell that he was surprised that the latter “had not received more cloth for the purpose of clothing those poor children whom the providence of God has put under the care of the Cumberland
Missionary Board, and through them has been committed to your care” (Board of Missions
1854f:227). He assured Bell in the same letter: “I think by the first or middle of September, I shall be able to send some hundred yard of cloth” (Board of Missions 1854f:227). Meanwhile,
Bell had actually received a large amount of cloth and clothing after he had sent out his May 4,
1825 letter. In a memorandum that appears to have accompanied David Foster when he visited
Charity Hall on May 20, there is evidence that he brought with him a collection of donations from several locations (Figure 4-1). It reads: “Memorandum of Money, Cloth and other articles, brought to Charity Hall missionary establishment, in the Chickasaw nation of Indians, By the
Rev. David Foster; and delivered to the Rev. Robert Bell superintendent of the mission: May
20th, 1825.”
The left side of the memorandum shows that Bell received from Tennessee a total of 96
½ yards of cloth valued at 40 cents per yard for a total of $38.60; a pair of socks valued at 50 cents; and ten testaments donated by the Cumberland Bible Society, valued at 37 ½ cents each or
$3.75 (the documents show fractions for half and quarter cents, which I maintain here in this dissertation). From Mooresville, Foster brought 16 yards of “check” valued at 20 cents each or
$3.20; four cotton shirts and two vests valued at $7.00; six spelling books valued at 25 cents each or $1.50; two calicos valued at $3.00 each or $6.00; and more checks and handkerchiefs valued at $5.00; bringing the total value of the Mooresville items to $22.70. Foster also listed a total of
$54.31 ¼ in cash as well as a collection from a place called “Gallitin” consisting of 65 yards of
113
Figure 4-1. Memorandum of Charity Hall donations delivered May 20, 1825
114 cloth of different kinds, estimated at $16.53 ¾. Combining all of these values together, Foster estimated that the entire collection of donations was valued at $136.40.
Despite the donations that arrived with Foster to the annual Board visit in May of 1825 and whatever else Bell may have received through his appeals to Barnett and Harris, there appears to have been a continuous lack of cloth into the following year. In a letter to the
Reverend Chapman written on April 3, 1826, which prefaced a scheduled visit by him to Charity
Hall the following month, Bell lamented, “I am out of cloth, and they [the Indian students] need clothing; perhaps you could bring some with you” (Board of Missions 1854e:202). It is not clear here whether Bell means that there was a real lack of clothing or whether he meant a lack of
“civilized” clothing appropriate for the school. Interestingly he was specific on what type of currency Chapman should bring with him, if he had money to spare, giving a little insight into the varying currencies of the time and their differing values across the region:
I also need some assistance on the score of money; should you have it in your power to procure any, bring it in Alabama, Mobile, or Tombigbee bills; these can be had from the brokers in Nashville on good terms, for other current money. They are equal to Tennessee money there, but much better here. Perhaps you will have to give a premium of one cent on the dollar in exchange between these and Tennessee money. Any other sort of Land Office money is good here, but may come higher there, and bring a premium in exchange. (Board of Missions 1854e:202)
Chapman also mentioned currency in his 1825 letter, writing “…please let me know if it would not be better to lay out what little money I may collect, for cloth, as the best country cloth can be had for fifty cents a yard in Commonwealth money, and that is the only sort of money I expect to receive” (Board of Missions 1854f:227). John Barnett’s letter of June 3, 1825 also mentioned currency problems. Writing from Caldwell County, Kentucky, he stated: “Such is the
115 depressed state of our currency, that our citizens are generally discouraged on all subjects of a charitable nature” (Board of Missions 1854f:228).
It appears that by this point in time Bell had set up a network for receiving supplies from his supporters to the north. In John Barnett’s June 3, 1825 letter, he mentioned:
I sent the box by my wagon to the Tennessee River, to an agent whom I appointed for that purpose, and directed him to forward it by the first opportunity to the care of Black and Webb, South Post, opposite Florence, accompanied by a letter instructing them to forward it to you, or write you immediately on the reception of it, advising you of its reception, &c. (Board of Missions 1854f:228)
Bell wrote similarly in an 1824 letter that he had arranged for Black and Webb to serve as his agents in Florence and in Southport opposite to Florence (Meacham 2007:30). One of the other activities that Bell was pursuing during these middle years of Charity Hall’s administration was the tan yard that he had erected to bring in additional income for the school. In William
Barnett’s letter of March 22, 1825, he wrote: “I flatter myself that agents appointed by the Board will do something considerable for the Institution; and I am persuaded if you can get a quantity of Hides, to tan on the shores, that if things be managed judiciously, the Tanyard will be some income to the Board” (Board of Missions 1854f:229-230).
By 1826, it appears that Bell was able to obtain his government funding much more smoothly. In a letter to McKenney written on February 20, Bell wrote that he had already received his draft of $400 and asked if he could have the school’s allowance provided quarterly rather than annually (Meacham 2007:78). This was apparently granted, because, about one month later, Bell wrote to McKenney again that he was informed by the local agent that he would receive payment “regularly, quarterly, hereafter, as the quarters respectively become due—which perfectly meets my wishes” (Meacham 2007:79).
116 Operations appear to have been carried through relatively steadily and smoothly during the next two years before events began precipitating the school’s closing, despite the occasional struggle with obtaining cloth or other supplies. On March 4, 1825, John C. Calhoun became Vice
President of the United States, which of course ended his tenure as Secretary of War. He was replaced in that capacity by James Barbour on March 7, whom Bell wrote to on October 1, 1826 due to a missing $100 quarterly payment. Generally, however, Bell reported to McKenney, who remained the Secretary of Indian Affairs (a position created by Calhoun without legislation in the
War Department in 1824) until Indian removal began in 1830. By that October in 1826, further personnel changes had been made at Charity Hall. Bell reported to McKenney:
Mr. Moore, Mr. Gray and Mr. Haynes and families have removed from the Establishment. Mr. Israel Pickens, Mrs. Pickens and their children, Mr. William Dodd a young man in the farm employ and myself and family are all the white persons living at the Establishment at present, but I expect a teacher and perhaps another small family in a short time. (Meacham 2007:85)
On May 15, 1826, a Robert Bell sold the deed to his ferry boat and landing to a Thomas
Mackadory in Monroe County for $2,000 (Figure 4-2). According to local historians, it was the
Reverend Robert Bell’s son John Bell who operated the ferry across the Tombigbee River at
Cotton Gin Port for many years (Elliott and Wells 2003:100). Later, in 1828, John Bell organized an inquiry at Cotton Gin Port into complaints made against Chickasaw agent Benjamin F. Smith, whom the Chickasaws accused of “failure to enforce laws and to protect them from theft.” John
Bell would later be appointed surveyor-general for the Chickasaw cession in the 1830s (Elliott and Wells 2003:100), but it is interesting that the Deputy Surveyor who signed his name to the field notes giving details on the township wherein Charity Hall was located clearly wrote “James
H. Bell.” This surveyor may have just been another Bell relation who became enmeshed in the
117
Figure 4-2. Deed of sale for Bell's Ferry Boat and Service
118 local political scene. Another local source corroborates that it was the Reverend Robert Bell’s son John “who was licensed to run the ferry at Cotton Gin Port” (Evans 1979:41). It seems possible, therefore, that the ferry operated by John was legally owned by his father Robert Bell, who was required to sign the deed of sale for his son. The only other known Robert Bell was
Robert Bell, Jr., who of course passed away in 1824. It does not appear that any of the $2,000 found its way into the Charity Hall operation.
Beginning in 1827, the funding provided by the U.S. government decreased dramatically.
While Charity Hall received an allowance of $400 each year from 1824 to 1826, in 1827 they only received $250, which came while greater debt was already accruing within Bell’s operation
(Meacham 2007:92). He wrote to the Board on July 30 of “expenditures of the present year, which I fear will exceed the receipts, not less than four or five hundred dollars. And this in addition to the arreayers last year will amount to seven and eight hundred dollars” (Meacham
2007:92). In November, Bell wrote of further economic hardship, due to a drought, in his quarterly report:
On account of the extreme drouth in this Country our crop was very light this year, but with good economy these may be enough for the use of the Establishment this year but none to spare. For which reason, and the difficulty of getting meal ground, and fresh meat saved, on account of the dry hot weather, I have not had the school in operation this fall, but have appointed it to commence on the 1st Monday in December. And have engaged Mr. Pickens to attend it till I return from Synod. (Meacham 2007:94)
Despite these problems, but perhaps in ignorance, the Cumberland Synod’s “committee to inquire into the state of religion in the churches under their care” reported in November 1827:
Your missionary school at Charity Hall, in the Chickasaw Nation of Indians, appears to be in prosperous condition. On the fourth Sabbath in May the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was administered at this place. It was well attended and most of the Indians manifested
119 seriousness and solemnity. Oh, that God would speedily give his Son for the inheritance of the heathen, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession! (Synod of Cumberland 1879:279)
The Defunding and Closing of Charity Hall (1828-1832)
The year 1828 opened for Charity Hall with a letter from the Department of War to
Robert Bell, dated January 17, notifying him that Thomas McKenney would be passing through the area as part of his “Tour of the Lakes” (Meacham 2007:104). McKenney’s initial tour was performed in 1826 about the Great Lakes up north and resulted in a volume published in 1827 describing some of the Indians there (McKenney 1827). Although it does not seem that any additional volumes were published on Mississippi, it appears that McKenney did pass through and stop at Charity Hall, since Bell refers to their meeting in a July 22, 1828 letter, mentioning that McKenney provided Bell with a copy of his 1827 book (Meacham 2007:101). It is not mentioned in the account, but by this time Daughtery Colbert, a former student at Charity Hall, had gone on to live and apprentice himself to McKenney, so it may be that he was also in the visiting party.
At this time, it appears that the financial problems mentioned by Bell in his 1827 letters were continuing to pile up and cause further distress. In a report to the Board written the following day, on July 23, 1828, Bell wrote, “We have had a good season, and our crop is promising so we have a prospect of Bread and meat for the ensuing year. But whether funds to defray past, present, and future Expenditures can be obtained is very doubtful to me” (Meacham
2007:102). Bell also described in an October letter to McKenney that they had lost one of the
Indian girls who attended Charity Hall, when a tree fell and killed her on May 27, 1828.
Meacham’s transcription is confused on the name of the girl in question, placing in brackets the names “(Silva? Bethesda Porter)” where the “sprightly” girl’s name should appear (Meacham
120 2007:107). Bell’s final accounting in 1832 lists two female students named Betsey Porter and
Silva Porter (Rooney 2019:51), and Bell marked that Silva was deceased, so it is likely that she was the one who was killed by the fallen tree.
Bell’s financial troubles may have been a harbinger of what was to come. Andrew
Jackson came into office as the seventh President of the United States on March 4, 1829, and his administration pursued Indian removal policy vigorously, which followed Jackson’s ideology that the existence of Indian tribes within sovereign states was not in the best interests of the state or national development (Satz 1979:87). John C. Calhoun, the former Secretary of War who had communicated with Bell and current Vice President of the United States, had been preparing for
Indian removal since 1824, requesting the creation of the “Arkansaw” Territory and Indian
Territory in a special message to the Senate on January 27, 1825. Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill would be passed by Congress in May 1830 (Satz 1979:56).
In October 1828, the Cumberland Synod passed a resolution to create a General
Assembly, and it was from this body that the Cumberland Missionary Board was to receive direction moving forward (Barrus et al. 1972:116). Bell therefore began stepping up his reporting on Charity Hall, being much more specific about expenditures and accounts standing in a May 5,
1829 report (Table 4-2). In this report, Bell explained his arrangement with the U.S. Department of Treasury on receiving his government drafts: “I am authorized to draw on the Government for
75 dollars at the expiration of each quarter of the year, which will be on the first of July, Oct. and
January next” (Meacham 2007:109). This meant that Bell was expecting to receive approximately $300 that year in total from the treasury department. Bell also reported on the livestock present at Charity Hall at the beginning of May 1829:
121 Table 4-2. Expenditures and receipts between October 1828 and May 1829. Expenditures Hire of hands $71.00 Horse bought $70.00 Boarding of hands $40.50 Salt $15.12 1/2 Smith work $2.87 1/2 Powder and lead $1.50 Receipts Charles & Joseph Mason of $1.00 Florence (donation) Draft on the Government $75.00 Beef cattle sold $36.00 Corn sold $35.00
There will also be several hundred weight of bacon to be disposed of, and I expect to raise the sufficiency of pork for the ensuing year. The Board has thirty head of cattle including ten young calves and an excellent yoke of oxen. I have been under the necessity of buying a horse for the use of the Establishment as above. (Meacham 2007:109)
One of the ways that the Missionary Board sought to make up for “the embarrassed state of their funds” was to limit the operation of Charity Hall in 1829 to only three months, “and that time to be in the Spring season, so as to have the aid of male students in the cultivation of the farm” (Meacham 2007:108). However, when school was appointed to commence on the first
Monday of March, none of the Indian students attended. Two students arrived in the middle of
April, but others put off attendance due to “their not having clothing to come in decency,” but
Bell speculated that “probably in addition…they dreaded the labor in the farm and the Nation is in great confusion under the prospect of having to leave their country” (Meacham 2007:108).
122 The first sign that Charity Hall’s operation would be disrupted by President Jackson’s policies came in a letter from Mr. William B. Lewis of the Second Auditor’s Office of the
Treasury Department in Washington, DC. On June 27, 1829, Lewis wrote to Bell:
I have to request that you transmit to this Office with the least possible delay, a statement accounting for the disbursements of the Funds remitted you for the Civilization of Indians, accompanied with the necessary evidence of its proper application; with a view to an adjustment of you’re a/c [account] in anticipation of the general statements of Indian Affairs to be laid before Congress at their next meeting. (Meacham 2007:110)
Bell did his best to reply to this letter, but appears to have been blindsided, stating in his
August 24 response that:
I had rested satisfied that my annual reports to the Secretary of War and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, together, with my returns on the forms sent to me from the Indians Department, were received as satisfactory evidence of the proper application of the funds remitted to me. (Meacham 2007:105)
He therefore provided the best overview possible and enclosed certificates of two
“disinterested” persons of respectability to vouch for his statements along with other documents he could procure. This August response serves as the earliest instance available where Bell summarized the federal money he had received throughout the school’s duration:
The following is a Statement of the funds received from the Government and the objects to which they were applied. For erecting buildings $933.33 1/3 were received to defray the expenditures of the completion of which buildings the United States Agent for this nation certified to the Secretary of War. For tuition in each of the years 1823, 1824, 1825, 1826 I received and drew Drafts on the Secretary of War for $400; and for tuition in the years 1827 and 1828 each, I drew for $250; and for this year I have drawn for two quarterly allowances of $75 each all of which have been applied to the defraying of the necessary expenditures of the school under my charge, which expenditures were incurred for tuition, Boarding and clothing the Indian students, for the hire of hands to clear and cultivate the farm, for cooking
123 and washing, for salt…farming utensils, kitchen and table furniture etc, etc. (Meacham 2007:106)
Bell also provided an explanation for why he did not receive any funds for the time he taught prior to January 1823:
We conformed to the regulations of the Government; but by some misunderstanding of my Reports to the Secretary of War, it was left out when allowances were made to other schools, perhaps, because I did not want for the buildings to be erected, but immediately (at my own expense) put up a cabin for my family to shelter in, and another for a school house, and proceeded to teach the Indian children who were boarded by their parents. (Meacham 2007:106)
This sheds some light on the interaction with Mr. Malbone in 1823, who visited Charity
Hall and was disappointed to find buildings already in place. Apparently Lewis was satisfied with Bell’s report, because he responded very succinctly to Bell a little over a month later on
October 7, 1829, writing, “Your a/c has been closed on the Books of this Office by passing to your credit Seventeen hundred Dollars for Disbursements at the Charity Hall School in the
Chickasaw Nation” (Meacham 2007:111). It is not clear whether this $1,700 was being given to
Charity Hall in 1829 or whether it was just a reconciliation to correct errors in the treasury department’s books. It does not appear that Bell was actually transmitted this large sum of money, since he complained in a December letter to McKenney about having his quarterly draft denied (Meacham 2007:118). In a later accounting in 1832, Bell stated that he did not receive any money in 1823 from the U.S. government, and if one is to tally the money reported here for the years 1824 through 1828, one finds that the sum is $1,700, so perhaps Lewis was only confirming what had been officially disbursed prior to 1829.
124 At the close of 1829, Bell was still conducting the school as the only pastor. He had hired a Mr. William Dodd and a Mr. Samuel Dodd, who apparently served as the “disinterested” persons who wrote statements on his behalf to Lewis (Meacham 2007:111). Bell named them in an October 20, 1829 letter to McKenney along with a Mr. Samuel Rayburn who “occasionally assists me in teaching” (Meacham 2007:114). Bell also wrote extensively about the discussions he was having with the Chickasaws about their impending removal, particularly his private conversations with Levi Colbert:
I can assure you Sir, that I have not failed to use my influence to impress on the minds of the Indians whom I have had an opportunity of conversing the friendly views of the Government towards them. I have clearly seen with you ever since you met them in Council at major Colbert’s that their compliance with the Measures of Government on the subject of their removal over the Mississippi is the only means that can secure their future Presperity & happiness. On this subject I several times conversed with Major Levi Colbert and he seemed to agree with me on the propriety & necessity of their removal, and I cannot help thinking that he is impressed with this sentiment, but he is afraid of avowing it to his nation as there is considerable opposition to the measure altho, I believe, they are assured that they will have to remove or come under the laws of the Mississippi State, to which they cannot be reconciled. It appears to me that this matter has now come to such a Crisis that decisive matters on the part of the Government are necessary to prevent the impending evil that await them and secure to them a situation in which their future Presperity & happiness will be confirmed. (Meacham 2007:115-116)
By early 1830, it became clear that the Missionary Board was planning to close Charity
Hall. In a March 12 letter from Bell to McKenney, the former wrote:
It is probable that after this year, the Cumberland Missionary Board will Educate as many of the Indian Children in the white settlements as all the funds they can procure for that purpose will admit, and I think I am acquainted with many neighborhoods each of which would bear the expense of the Boarding & tuition of one or more, and I am induced to believe that some of the Indians themselves would bear a part of the expense, as they are extremely anxious to have their Children educated in that way. (Meacham 2007:121)
125 As in 1829, the Missionary Board decided to limit the school term in 1830 to three months, between January 20 and April 20, 1830. It appears that April 20, 1830 was the final day that Charity Hall would be operated as a school for Indian children. However, several of the children stayed on with the Bells at Charity Hall after the school ceased official operation. Bell wrote to the Board on May 1 that “several of the girls requested to be permitted to continue to live with us and one of the most reputable of the parents requested that his little son must live with us” (Meacham 2007:122). Some of the other children were placed with white families, at their request:
By some of them I have been solicited from year to year to procure places to live among the white people and go to school. I have promised three of the boys who have evidenced much solicitude on the subject to take them with me to the meeting of the Missionary Board. Their names are Christopher Columbus, Robert Donnell, and William Barnett. (Meacham 2007:122)
The meeting to which Bell took his young charges was likely the Second General
Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which took place between May 18 and May
24, 1830 in Princeton, Kentucky (General Assembly 1992:9, 12), and at which Robert Bell served as the commissioner representing “Bigby Presbytery” (General Assembly 1992:16). On the final day of the assembly, Monday, May 24, 1830, Bell reported on Charity Hall, and a resolution was made to address the debt incurred by the institution:
Resolved, that Rev. Robert Donnell, Isaac Shook, James B. Porter, James Farr, Carson P. Reed, John Morgan, and Robert Bell, be appointed a select and standing committee, to take charge of Charity Hall School, and so to manage it as not to involve the institution more deeply in debt, and to report their proceedings from time to time to the General Assembly; and, also, that they adopt the most successful measures to liquidate the old debt as transmitted to them. (General Assembly 1992:21)
126 In a letter written by Bell on October 1, 1830, he explained to an unknown recipient that he took the three boys mentioned above to Cumberland College in Princeton, which was another institution discussed by the General Assembly during their May meeting, and that the boys were taken under the care of three patrons, one of whom was the president of the college (Meacham
2007:123). Bell provided justification for removing his students to the college at Princeton in the same letter, which included poor conditions for maintaining agriculture at Charity Hall:
It is the present intention of the directors of this Institution to educate as many of the Indian children of this Nation among whites as they can obtain good plans of boarding for and funds they can obtain for that purpose will admit. This is the only practicable mode of educating them in their power until a new crop is raised this succeeding year as a drouth has been excessive in these parts and at this Establishment and we should not have the supply of bread nor could it be obtained on reasonable terms. We also think it the best mode of educating them especially when boarded in good families separate from each other so that they will be under the necessity of conversing in English. Many of them have solicited me to be placed in that situation. (Meacham 2007:123).
According to Bell, the Indians in general were too concerned with their removal from
Mississippi to voice any objections to the students attending Cumberland College. In his May 1,
1830 letter to the Cumberland Missionary Board, Bell included a document that laid out his expenditures and receipts for the year spanning between May 1829 to May 1830 (Figure 4-3 and
Table 4-3). Later, in his October 1, 1830 letter, he also spoke of two new hired hands not before appearing in any other written documents: Vernon and Watton Vann. The only two other occupants of Charity Hall that October were Mrs. Bell and one black woman (Meacham
2007:123). For this final year of Charity Hall’s operation, Bell was able to obtain $300 from the federal government. He received a letter on May 28, 1832 from Mr. Elbert Herring at the Office of Indian Affairs instructing him not to draw any or part of the sum allowed for the school after it is closed. However, according to Bell’s response, which fulfilled a request that he describe the
127
Figure 4-3. Bell’s list of expenditures and receipts between May 1829 and May 1830
128 Table 4-3. Expenditures and receipts between May 1829 and May 1830. Expenditures Hands to work in the farm $216.33 Hands to cook, wash, &c $60.00 Sugar + Coffee $36.08 Clothing $42.25 Smith work iron $14.50 Salt $19.00 Kitchen & Table furniture $5.00 Powder, lead, nails, $8.20 Thimbles, &c Beef $23.67 Tuition $104.16 Total $529.19 Receipts Donations in cloth $18.00 Cow hides $6.30 Money from government $225.00 One cow and calf sold $12.00 Yoke of oxen sold $40.00 Collected for Bacon $44.75 Boarding $20.00 Total $366.05 Balance due to Bell $163.14
condition of the school, operations had been suspended since 1830 (Meacham 2007:125), due to the fact that Cumberland College had put too much financial debt onto the Cumberland
Missionary Board coupled with the suspension of aid from the U.S. government and with the expenses relative to the removal of the Indians (Meacham 2007:130).
The other mission schools operating in the Chickasaw Nation were able to carry out their operations for a few additional years for various reasons. These schools—Monroe, Tockshish,
Martyn, and Caney Creek—were established by the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, which voted in December of 1827 to turn them over to the care of the ABCFM (1828a:56, 1828b:119).
129 Monroe and Tockshish were located two miles apart from each other and shared a single church, built on land donated by William Colbert, who served joined the congregation as an elder. These two schools were situated in the most populous part of the Chickasaw Nation, according to the
ABCFM (1828c:283), which wrote that there were more than 800 people living within 10 miles of the mission family of the Reverend Stuart. The Monroe school was forced to close temporarily in 1828 due to the ill health of Stuart and his family but later reopened with a smaller number of students (ABCFM 1829a:10). The Monroe mission school was liquidated in 1830 into the
Tockshish school, and its former administrator, the Reverend James Holmes, moved over to
Martyn in 1831 (ABCFM 1831b:44). Stuart continued to operate the mission school at Tockshish until 1836 (ABCFM 1836:22-23).
The Martyn mission school, which had been established in 1825 with the support of
Chickasaw leader Henry Love, was located 60 miles northwest of Monroe and was designed, along with Caney Creek, exclusively to be a boarding school. Caney Creek was established in northwestern Alabama, in a location selected by the Chickasaw chiefs where children would be forced to be boarded, since “there are few Indians nearer than 40 or 50 miles” (ABCFM
1829c:151). The Reverend Hugh Wilson, who administered Caney Creek, made it a practice to place his students in the homes of American families in both Tennessee and Alabama (ABCFM
1831c:351), and this continued until 1833. During that year, the Reverend Holmes and the
Reverend Wilson decided to break ties with the ABCFM and relocate both the Martyn school and the Caney Creek school to Tipton County Tennessee (ABCFM 1833:133). These missionaries did, however, see their schools survive in Mississippi long enough to witness the
Choctaw Trail of Tears. The Reverend Holmes wrote from the Martyn mission on Christmas Eve in 1831 about his observations of the migrating Choctaws:
130
About a month ago several hundred Choctaws spent a part of three days in sight of Martyn, on their way to their new country. Although the contractor seemed to do everything in his power to render their situation comfortable, there was still much unavoidable suffering. There were very aged persons and very young children in the company; many had nothing to shelter them from the storm by day or night. The weather was excessively cold, and yet a neighbor remarked to me a few days ago, that he had noticed particularly, and in his opinion, not one in ten of the women had even a moccason on their feet, and the great majority of these were walking. An interesting girl, who was formerly a scholar at Mayhew, sustained a compound fracture of the arm several days before they reached this place, and was brought thus far in a rough baggage-wagon. In compliance with our suggestion, a litter was made, and she was carried the remainder of the way to Memphis on mens’ shoulders. On her arrival there, a gangrene had proceeded so far, as to render it very doubtful in the opinion of a physician, whether an amputation would save her life. They, however, resolved to operate, and her right arm was taken off as near the shoulder as possible. Her parents were compelled to move over in two days, and she was left in the hospital.
A number of small companies have since passed, who were detained on the way by loss of horses and other causes. No provision could be made for them, and consequently they were, in some instances, very destitute. One party came to us and begged an ear of corn apiece, to relieve, for a season, their sufferings. Another party camped in the woods near us, about three weeks ago, and that night a storm of hail and sleet commenced, which was followed, in a day or two, with a heavy fall of snow. For more than two weeks there was continued freezing and colder weather than I have ever seen in this climate. During the whole of this time these suffering people were lying at their camp, without any shelter, and with very little provision. Much suffering was to be expected in the removal of the Choctaws, but if I am to judge from what I have seen and heard, the half was not anticipated. (ABCFM 1832:117-118)
The survival of these missions for several years longer than Charity Hall may be due to three factors: (1) their building of closer relationships with the ABCFM, (2) their establishment of church congregations within Chickasaw territory, and (3) their acceptance of Chickasaw money to fund their schools. All of these are subjects to be explored in future research that expands beyond Charity Hall into the broader missionscape.
131 CHAPTER 5 READING CHARITY HALL: HISTORICAL RESULTS
During the second quarter of 1834, the State of Mississippi sent out surveyors to meticulously describe and measure out parcels of land to be sold for the cession of Chickasaw lands, which was one of the final things to be done before the Chickasaw Nation removed itself to the west side of the Mississippi River. Charity Hall became part of what is still today
Township 13 Range 7 East in Monroe County, Mississippi (Figure 5-1), which was measured out and delineated in April 1834 by a survey team led by James H. Bell. It is not clear whether James had any relation to the Reverend Robert Bell, but since the latter’s son, John Bell, supposedly oversaw the entire survey, it seems probable that there was some familial connection. Whether or not this was the case, James Bell’s crew laid out a standard survey grid in line with what had been established in the late 1700s. The survey team used chains to create a sectional grid measurable in square miles, describing changes in land by numbers of chains and links. For instance, on the line due east between sections 6 and 7, they wrote that at chain 25 link 0 (exactly one quarter mile from the west boundary of the township) they entered a swamp. They then left a post at 40 chains and 3 links (about half a mile) as a halfway marker and another at chain 80 link
6 (about one mile) to denote the start of a new section (I used colored polygons to visualize these notes in Figure 5-1).
The Charity Hall stone monument is located within section 22, and there are notes that hint at the presence of the mission school, which had already been closed for four years in 1834.
The last letter written by the Reverend Robert Bell in 1832 shows that he was still occupying the property at the time, and it may be the case that he was still there in 1834, since the surveyors noted the presence of at least one of his agricultural fields. On the line measured due east
132
Figure 5-1. Map of 1834 Survey Notes for Township 13 Range 7 East
133 between sections 22 and 27 (to the south of Charity Hall), they record at chain 38 link 50 “Enter
R. Bells field” and at chain 52 link 40 “Leave field.” This line between the two sections sits right on top of modern-day Doss Drive, which is the southern boundary of the property wherein the
Charity Hall site is located today. The presence of Bell’s field about a quarter of a mile south of the stone monument is corroborated by the 1825 report of Foster and Guthrie (Board of Missions
1854d:148-150), who described a 30-acre field to the south of the school buildings. The width of the field measured here was 13 chains and 90 links or 917.4 feet (approximately 280 meters).
Other details of interest for the Charity Hall investigations were the indication of a
“wagon road” crossing the horizontal section boundary just north of Charity Hall, from southeast to northwest between sections 15 and 22, and then again crossing the line between sections 10 and 15, from southwest to northeast. When this is laid over modern satellite imagery (see Figure
5-1), one can see the bottom of a foothill line up almost exactly with the markings of the wagon road. North of the wagon road markers, blocking in the northwestern corner of section 10 was noted the presence of “Colberts Old field.” This is almost certainly an indicator of the location of
Levi Colbert’s house that he occupied until 1825, which was noted in letters as being located about two miles away from Charity Hall, and appears marked in the same vicinity in Jack
Elliott’s historic map (Elliott and Wells 2003:B). The 1834 survey notes also the presence of
“Cottongin road” crossing sections 4 and 3, just north of Colbert’s old house, moving toward the position of “Bell’s Ferry” as it was marked on the Chickasaw cession map in 1835 (Elliott and
Wells 2003:A).
In this chapter I present the historic data, such as this visualization of the 1834 survey notes, that can be quantified and marshaled to help answer my research questions as well as those that guided the three archaeological field seasons spent at the site of Charity Hall. This is
134 followed by some discussion of everyday life and practice at the school, based on the primary- source documents.
Structures, Finances, and People
Physical Building Structures
There were two instances where the Reverend Robert Bell described the buildings present at Charity Hall while it was in operation. In his September 29, 1832 letter to Mr. Elbert Herring at the Office of Indian Affairs, he gave a final accounting of the school, which included a list of buildings and how much they were valued in dollars (Foreman 1933:920-926; Meacham
2007:126-130). The second is a document that serves as a cover letter to Bell’s portfolio that made its way to Meacham (2007:9-11), where he describes the houses and their building materials. This cover document was partially reprinted in The Cumberland (Board of Missions
1854b:90-92), but the editors decided not to include the final paragraphs with the building descriptions, probably estimating them to be irrelevant to their readers. Meacham’s transcription of the 1832 letters lists the student cabins as being valued at $5 each, which contradicts what
Foreman found in the letters produced by the Indian Office—that they were valued at $50 each, which is certainly more believable.
All 11 of the buildings (Table 5-1) listed by Bell appear to have been log cabin structures, the largest of which had wooden plank floors and framed clapboard roofs. Nine of the buildings featured chimneys, only one of which was described as being made of “brick.” The remaining eight, which all belonged to dwelling houses and student cabins, were all made of “cat and clay”
(also known as mudcat and representative of a tradition of layering clay on the exterior and interior of wood scaffolding, not unlike wattle and daub). The brick chimney was located in the dining hall, which appears to have been the largest structure, and had two fireplaces attached to
135 Table 5-1. Charity Hall building summary. Building Qty Value Dimensions Materials Chimneys Dining room & 1 $400.00 55 feet by 20 Hewed logs, plank floor, One brick; two kitchen framed roof clapboard fireplaces nailed on Dwelling house 1 $200.00 26 feet by 18 Log floors and roof as Two cat and clay above, a plank partition Dwelling house 1 $150.00 20 feet quare Logs, floor, roof as above Two cat and clay School house 1 $100.00 Logs, floor roof as above Two cat and clay Band horse mill 1 $200.00 Student cabins 5 $250.00 18 feet square Logs ???down, cat tin One cat and clay roof, pyncheon floors each Smoke house 1 $30.00 18 feet square Logs and roof as above it. The student cabins, rather than having wooden plank floors, were described as having puncheon floors, which means that split logs were placed flat-side up. They also had tin roofs rather than framed clapboard. Bell explained in the 1832 letter that three of the student cabins, which they found were not really needed, were dismantled at some point and the materials were repurposed to build a stable (Meacham 2007:126). The stable is not mentioned anywhere else, nor does it appear in Bell’s final accounting of building structures.
Neither the horse band mill nor the smoke house had descriptions of floors, so it is likely that these just had dirt floors. The horse band mill also did not have a roof description, so it may have just been an open structure. Meacham’s (2007:11) cover letter transcription only includes the phrase “A horse to run with a band,” and the 1832 letter does not give dimensions, but it does list its value as $200, second only to the dining hall, the largest structure. Since this was a mill, it was probably a location where agricultural crops were processed and prepared for sale. The
Reverend Robert Bell wrote in one letter to Thomas McKenney in 1824: “We have raised a valuable crop, perhaps not less than 300 barrels of corn, 10,000 weight of seed cotton, a good many peas and Irish sweet potatoes, etc” (Meacham 2007:59). Bell included in his receipts for
136 1828-1829 that he bought one horse for $70 “for the use of the Establishment” (Meacham
2007:109). This horse, and perhaps an earlier one not mentioned, was likely used in part to power the mill by being attached to an apparatus and led in a circle to grind up grains into flour and meal. Whatever was not used to feed the occupants of Charity Hall would have been barreled and sold for profit. The tan yard is not discussed in Bell’s final accounting of the buildings, so there may have been no significant structure associated with it. Foster and Guthrie wrote in 1825 that the tanning yard was near one of the “small springs…on the margin of the rising ground joining the buildings.” They wrote that the tan yard included “a bark mill and shade, currying-house and ten vats” (Board of Missions 1854d:148-149). Bell only mentioned having fences enclosing the school one time, again in his 1832 letter, and only then to remark that they were in disrepair. It is likely that fences were used to keep cattle and livestock as well as wild animals away from food stores and crops, but this is unfortunately not discussed anywhere else in the primary-source documents, so specific locations are unknown.
Agricultural Fields
The number of acres that were “improved” for cultivation at Charity Hall changed over time. In 1822, the Reverend Bell wrote to the Cumberland Missionary Board that they had prepared “22 or 23 acres of improved land with crops, cattle, farming utensils, and buildings”
(Foreman 1933:913). It is not clear from this account how many acres were used for agriculture, but the following year, Bell told Secretary of War John Calhoun in a letter that they had expanded their operation to “46 and 47 acres of cleared land’ and that one and a half acres were being used to grow turnips (Meacham 2007:29). Two years later, in 1825, the Reverend Robert
Donnell wrote in a letter to Thomas McKenney that Charity Hall had been extended to cover 50 or 60 acres (Foreman 1933:917).
137 The most informative description came two months later in the annual report written by the Reverend David Foster and the Reverend J. S. Guthrie in 1825, who not only gave the number of acres with an inventory of specific crops but also the locations in relation to the buildings (see previous chapter). The crops listed included 48 acres in corn, one acre in oats, four acres in cotton, three acres in potatoes, and the rest in cabbage and other garden vegetables. This does not quite match up with the earlier statement mathematically, since these total 56 acres not including “the rest” of the garden vegetables. In Bell’s final accounting to Herring in 1832, he described the entire “farm” as consisting of between 50 and 60 acres, so it is probably safe to estimate that the number of acres in cultivation at the school’s peak was between 56 and 60.
Financial Data
Bell’s September 29, 1832 letter responding to Herring (Figure 5-2) included, in addition to the list of structures present at Charity Hall, an account of the monies he obtained during each year of the school’s operation, both from the U.S. government and from outside sources such as fundraising and tuition from parents who paid for their children to attend the school (Table 5-2).
His numbers show that Charity Hall received a total of $2,550 from the federal government over the course of seven years and raised a total of nearly $5,800 to supplement that income. This accounting of annual funding does not match up with the amounts given by Bell to the treasury department’s auditor in 1828, where he reported that he had only received $400 in 1826 and had additionally received $400 from the federal government in 1823. This also does not account for the $933.33 1/3 he reported then that he had received to defray building costs. Bell wrote here in his 1832 reply that there was $623 left in debt at the school’s closing for which he was held responsible to the school’s creditors. He mentioned the committee appointed at the Second
General Assembly that was appointed to settle the debt: “with whom I agreed to pay the debts for
138
Figure 5-2. Two pages of Bell’s 1832 report to Elbert Herring
139 Table 5-2. Charity Hall annual funding summary. Year Outside Federal Total 1821 $630.00 $630.00 1822 $608.00 $608.00 1823 $745.00 $745.00 1824 $1,094.00 $400.00 $1,494.00 1825 $928.00 $400.00 $1,328.00 1826 $272.25 $700.00 $972.25 1827 $581.09 $287.50 $868.59 1828 $423.04 $250.00 $673.04 1829 $375.50 $287.50 $663.00 1830 $142.19 $225.00 $367.19 Totals $5,799.07 $2,550.00 $8,349.07
the property belonging to the Board consisting of about thirty head of cattle young and old, a few hogs, one horse, a few farming utensils, and $75 due from the government” (Meacham
2007:127). In exchange, Bell was allowed personal use of the property for his own farming until the Board should decide to renew the school, which of course never happened.
The documents provide a little insight into how much the Cumberland missionaries were charging the Indian parents who could afford to pay to board their children. In his 1823 response to Massey, Bell estimated that the cost of educating a single student was between $40 and $50 per year. However, he was instructed by the Board to accept students whose parents boarded them for $30 per year, to more effectively use the hands employed to cook and otherwise take care of the establishment (Board of Missions 1854d:151-152). There is also evidence that Bell was given his own personal remuneration by the Cumberland Missionary Board, but the only time this appears to be documented is in his letter to Massey on May 30, 1823, when he stated that he was allowed $250 for the last year (Board of Missions 1854d:152).
140 Personnel and Students
Bell’s 1832 letter also included a list of teachers and hired hands who worked at the school each year (Table 5-3) as well as a list of the students who attended throughout the ten- year operation. His summary of the personnel matches up, for the most part, with the letters and other documents that make up the history, with two small exceptions. First, the Mr. Haynes who was working at Charity Hall in 1824 when the inflammatory fever killed Andrew Pickens and his daughter Jane is not listed anywhere. The second is the presence of Robert Molloy and John
Craig as teachers (Meacham 2007:128). The only other teacher that was referenced in other documents was John Smith, who managed the school while Bell was fundraising in 1823. The school year in 1828 only lasted for three months, so this would explain why Craig may not have made it into any of the other documents that have survived. However, Molloy is completely absent in documents relating to the establishment during 1825, a year during which there survive
13 letters that do not make reference to him. The only name that comes close would be that of
Mr. Moore, whom Bell did mention in a letter in 1825. Bell notes for each entry that the teachers were present “one at a time,” which seems to mean that they never taught together. It therefore appears that the stints of teaching by Smith, Molloy, and Craig were merely to substitute for Bell when he was not available, whether due to sickness or travel. Bell reported on pay for hired hands:
The pay for teachers…for White men or Black, from ten dollars to twelve and a half per month, for Black girls from five to eight dollars per months. White females employed were mostly those who had small families, their families were boarded for their attention to sewing, cooking, etc. and sometimes a small additional remuneration. There were other persons employed a few days at a time whom I have omitted, thinking it unnecessary. (Meacham 2007:130)
141 Table 5-3. Charity Hall personnel. Sewing and Cooking and Year Teaching Farming Spinning Washing 1821 Robert Bell Robert Bell, Mrs. Bell Mrs. Bell, students, and Katherine Bell Robert Bell, Jr. (daughter) 1822 Robert Bell Robert Bell, Mrs. Bell Mrs. Bell, students, and Katherine Bell Robert Bell, Jr. (daughter) 1823 John C. Smith James Barker, Mrs. Smith Mrs. Smith, Henry Reed, "black girl" John Pickard 1824 John C. Smith, Andrew Pickens, Miss Jane Mrs. Pickens, Robert Bell Benjamin Bell, Pickens Isza Pickens John Gilley, and John Tigert 1825 Robert Bell, William Dodd, Mrs. Gray, Mrs. Bell, Robert Molloy Edmond Carter, Mrs. Bell "black girl" "black man" 1826 Robert Bell William Dodd, Mrs. Pickens Mrs. Pickens, Israel Pickens, "black girl" "black man" 1827 Robert Bell William Dodd, Mrs. Pickens Mrs. Pickens, Samuel Dodd "black girl" 1828 John L. Craig Francis Mirer, Mrs. Pickens Mrs. Pickens, Samuel Dodd "black girl" 1829 Robert Bell William Dodd, Mrs. Bell Mrs. Bell, Samuel Dodd "black girl" 1830 Robert Bell Matthew Vernon, Mrs. Bell Mrs. Bell, David Vaugn "black girl"
It is interesting that Bell hired and paid black workers but did not find it necessary to give their names. It is possible that some or all of these were enslaved people, but there is no mention of their status as slave or free in any of the primary-source materials. There is also no statement within any of the other primary-source documents of the given names of any of the wives of the
142 workers, even Mrs. Bell. The only women named, Katherine Bell and Jane Pickens, were unmarried daughters of teachers or workers.
After listing all of the students who attended Charity Hall throughout its ten-year duration
(Table 5-4), Bell provided some general comments on their education and success:
The Branches of Knowledge taught in this school have been Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and English Grammar. Other branches would have been taught, could we have gotten the students to have proceeded further. Their attendance was for the most part very irregular, and frequently what they would learn while at school they would almost forget at home before they returned. Many of them apt to learn and amiable in this disposition, yet living at a distance from the school were loth to leave their parents and associated at home, and Indian parents are generally indulgent to their Children and seldom control them. However, twenty one of the list on the above could read well when they left this school, 14 boys and 7 girls. They could also write a good hand. Seven of the boys made considerable progress in arithmetic and several have made some progress in the English Grammar. The next twelve on the above list, 10 boys and 2 girls, could also read tolerably well, and could write a legible hand. Ten or eleven of the balance were reading but not so well, some of them were also writing. The rest had made various progress in spelling but some of them the most apt of any students that had been at school, had not long attended this school. Several others who came but a short time are not included in the above list. Several of the above list have since been at school among the whites, and have made further proficiency in their education. (Meacham 2007:130).
Several of the students were children of principal Chickasaw and Choctaw chiefs: Adam,
Alexander, Commodore, Abijah, and Daughtery Colbert were all children of Levi Colbert and his second wife Temusharhoctay, known as “Dollie;” Lewis, Charity, Phalishta “Pat,” Asa,
Charles, Lemuel, and Mariah Colbert were all children of Levi Colbert and his third wife Min-ta- ho-yea; Susan “Sukey,” George Jr., and Levica “Vicy” Colbert were all children of George
Colbert, Levi’s brother; and Alexander, Peter, and Silas Pitchlynn were all sons of Colonel John
Pitchlynn. Both Levi and George Colbert were Chickasaw chiefs, and John Pitchlynn was a
Choctaw chief, but I could not find information about the ethnicity of the mothers of the
143 Table 5-4. Charity Hall students. Male Students Female Students 1. Anderson, Silis 21. Ionochatuuba 1. Brown, Delila 2. Barnitt, Adam 22. James, Booker 2. Brown, Sytha 3. Barnitt, William 23. James, Davis 3. Burris, Margaret 4. Bell, Robert 24. James, Robinson 4. Burris, Ticky 5. Calhoon, Thomas 25. James, Wilson 5. Colbert, Acy 6. Colbert, Abijah 26. Jefferson, James 6. Colbert, Charity 7. Colbert, Adam 27. King, Samuel 7. Colbert, Mariah 8. Colbert, Alexander 28. Matubbee, Shehunah 8. Colbert, Phelistia 9. Colbert, Charles 29. Newton, Isaac 9. Colbert, Susan 10. Colbert, Commodore 30. Nowattah 10. Colbert, Vecy 11. Colbert, Daughtery 31. Perry, Rufus 11. Ewing, Molley 12. Colbert, George 32. Pettis, John 12. James, Lucy 13. Colbert, Lemual 33. Pitchlyn, Alexander 13. Jefferson, Jane 14. Colbert, Lewis 34. Pitchlyn, Peter 14. Jefferson, Nicey 15. Columbus, Christopher 35. Pitchlyn, Silas 15. Molley 16. Donnel, Robert 36. Porter, James 16. Pickens, Sally 17. Ewing, Finis 37. Putnam, Joseph 17. Porter, Betsey 18. Farr, James 38. Reed, James 18. Porter, Silva 19. Franklin, Benjamin 39. Smith, John 19. Smelt, Caroline 20. Iokatubba 40. Walker, James 20. Smith, Dorathy 41. Washington, George
students, so it is possible that any or all of these were both Chickasaw and Choctaw. Indeed, some of the Chickasaw Explorers who helped excavate the site in 2019 reported that they themselves had both Chickasaw and Choctaw ancestry. Of the students listed, Bell noted that five of them had already passed away at the time of his writing in 1832: Joseph Putnam, George
Colbert, John Smith, Dorathy Smith, and Silva Porter (who was killed by a falling tree at Charity
Hall in 1828). He then recommended to Mr. Herring five young male students “to your notice who are of sober habits and anxious for improvement” (Meacham 2007:130). These were
William Barnett, Robinson and Davis James, Christopher Columbus, and Robert Donnell.
144 Table 5-5. Number of students by term and year. Term Number of Students Start Finish Total Gratis Not Gratis Boys Girls 1820-11-13 1821-10-01 30; 24-28 2/3 1/3 1822-02-01 1822-09-30 21 1823-01-15 1823-08-06 29 14 15 1823-10-06 32 20 23 9 1825 30 1826 26 20 1827 26 20 18 8 1828 26 22 1829-04 1829-06 25 1830-01-20 1830-04-20 20 11 9
Bell mentioned several times in various letters how many students were enrolled during the given year, sometimes including information about how many were boarded “gratis” and how many there were of each gender, but he was inconsistent in how he provided this information. He also sometimes gave dates for the start and ending of school terms, but was again very inconsistent. I have nevertheless tried to compile all of this in a table (Table 5-5). The numbers of students each year range from 20 to 30, with between 14 and 22 boarded “gratis.” It therefore seems typical that between one third and one half of the students attending Charity Hall were being boarded at the cost of their families, although it is not clear how many students were actually staying at the school during any given year. There are mentions in some sources of students attending from home, especially during times of illness. As discussed earlier, Bell related that he had repurposed three of the five student cabins, leaving only two standing, and it seems questionable that they had between 10 and 15 students sleeping together in two 18 x 18 foot cabins. Even if one or two of the children were staying in the larger dwellings with the teachers, it is almost undoubtedly the case that some of the students, perhaps the children of Levi
Colbert who lived so close to the school, were attending from home. The ratio of boys to girls
145 during individual terms was typically two to one, although during the final term of 1830, nearly half of the students were girls. This ratio generally agrees with the overall number of students who passed through the doors of Charity Hall (see Table 5-4).
General Notes on Everyday Life
In their 1825 report to the Cumberland Missionary Board, Reverends Foster and Guthrie described an average day at Charity Hall:
About daylight the trumpet is blown, the signal for all to rise in half an hour; it is again blown that all may attend family worship in the dining room, within five minutes; as soon as worship is over Mr. Bell with his boys repairs to the field, until 8 or 9 o’clock, and Mrs. Bell with the girls to sewing or other employments; they are then all called to breakfast, where Mr. Bell is seated at the head of the table, the girls on one side and the boys on the other; from him portions are served to all at the table. When breakfast is over, they then repair to school until 12; after an hour’s refreshment, they are called by the trumpet to dinner; when this is over they repair to school until 4, when they break up and go to the field until night; they are then called to supper and worship. (Board of Missions 1854d:149-150)
Attendance and Conduct
Bell wrote in one of his reports that he had a difficult time getting students to be consistent with school attendance. In a journal entry for June 8, 1823, someone wrote:
Two of our scholars left the station to-day without leave, or any known cause; we suppose they have gone home to see their friends; they have been but a short time at school, and perhaps feel strongly attached to their own habits. (Board of Missions 1854c:133) Two days later, one of the boys was brought back by his mother, but the other does not seem to have ever returned (Board of Missions 1854c:133). It also appears that sickness prevented attendance in many cases. Every year between August and October, Charity Hall usually released the students for a vacation, “it being customary in other Indian schools in the
Southern Nations, to have a vacation in the sickly season of the year” (Board of Missions
146 1854b:91). However, upon the appointed time of resumption, not all of the students would return diligently. For example, a journal entry for Monday, June 16, 1823, reads:
Several of our scholars have been sent for, to go home to visit their sick parents and friends—but their peculiar anxiety to obtain an education, have and still continues to prompt them to constant attendance, excepting in cases of necessary absence, with the exception of but a few. (Board of Missions 1854c:134)
On June 24 1823, someone wrote, “two of our scholars were obliged to leave the school in consequence of having been taken sick. We greatly fear the approaching fall will be a sickly one, because of the uncommon overflowing of the waters, late in the spring, and the excessive heat, and rainy spring and summer” (Board of Missions 1854c:134). On July 1, 1823:
One of our female scholars has left us to-day, and it is probable will not return soon. She has been afflicted for some time with a severe pain in her ear, which renders her unfit for constant study. She is grown, and reads well, and writes a beautiful hand. Mr. Smith exhorted her to retain what she had learned, by applying herself to her books at home—and above all, remember the good advice she had received while with us. Under these exhortations she appeared remarkably serious, and took her leave. (Board of Missions 1854c:135)
Sometimes there were other reasons why students did not return to Charity Hall at the times appointed by Bell and the other teachers, including marriage. For example, Bell wrote on
October 6, 1823:
…much anxiety was manifested by some of the Indians for the appointed time to arrive, and within a few days after teaching was resumed, the greater part of them returned to school; it is probable, however, that seven of them have declined coming to their school any more. One young man of the seven has married— another who had made considerable advancement in Arithmetic has gone to the State of Tennessee. Two young women who could read and write well have gone, one to Florence, and the other to the Choctaw Nation. The reasons why the other 3 have not returned has not yet been ascertained. (Board of Missions 1854b:91)
147 There were, apparently, many students who abandoned their education at Charity Hall for various reasons, including the unwillingness to submit to discipline. By 1825, according to
Foster and Guthrie:
We are informed of about 20 who formerly came to this school, some pretty well grown, withdrew because they could not submit to discipline; others dreading the length of time to acquire education, quit school and married, and are conducting very well. From the long and frequent vacations occasioned by sickness and the want of provision and funds, others have gone and are still going to other schools, and are conducting respectfully. (Board of Missions 1854d:150)
In spite of attendance problems, Bell generally wrote positive remarks about the conduct, behavior, and progress of the young Indian scholars under his guidance:
They have generally been orderly and attentive to their studies, cheerful in performing the work assigned them, seriously attentive to moral and religious instructions. The children of the forest read distinctly in the oracles of God, give pertinent answers to questions proposed to them on the leading doctrines and duties of the Christian religion. They are orderly and seriously attentive in general to the above means of instruction, and the preaching of God’s word, which appears occasionally to have a softening effect upon their hearts. (Board of Missions 1854b:91)
In their 1825 report, Foster and Guthrie similarly wrote, “We observed no symptoms of quarreling among the scholars, nor of doing mischief to each other, though they are full of mirth and play—this we were informed was a general case” (Board of Missions 1854d:149). They also commented, in their observance of daily activity, that “Through the whole, the scholars appear under strict discipline, which they observe with promptness and cheerfulness, only that they seem a little slow to start to work in the morning, but when at work are brisk and cheerful”
(Board of Missions 1854d:150). Although there were no specific cases of disruption described at
148 Charity Hall, there was one student described by the Reverend Wilson at the Caney Creek school whom he had to dismiss:
One boy, who had been dismissed for bad conduct, sent three times requesting to be re- admitted to the school. I still refused: but at last he and his mother came, and I received him on condition, that he shall go to Tennessee and work for his living, until he gives me evidence that he will do better than he has done heretofore. He appeared pleased with the conditions, and is, upon the whole, doing well. (ABCFM 1829c:151)
Curriculum
Some of the documents provide hints and clues about how education was carried out at
Charity Hall. The report written by Foster and Guthrie in 1825 provides greater details concerning the organization of classes and the progress of students:
…we heard a small class of new beginners spell in two syllables, and a larger class spell in different places through the book; when words were given out the little fellows seemed ready to catch the sound and apply suitable letters, tho’ they very often mist spelling the word. In the larger class we observed some of them frequently miss in spelling; tho’ some who were most proficient never missed a single word through the whole, though the words were given out of different tables. The small class in the testament read imperfectly, though we think for the time they spent, they are in a good way of improvement. The next testament class read very well, yet all read too low. The class of English readers read very correctly. They all appeared to understand the key of Webster’s spelling book. Two are studying English grammar, who have begun to parse. It does not appear that they will probably improve in grammar, as fast as in spelling, reading, and writing. (Board of Missions 1854d:149)
The daily journal reproduced from the summer of 1823 shows that the school administrators were holding weekly exams on Fridays. On both Friday, June 20 and Friday, June
27, the author mentions these examinations:
June 27th.—According to our rules, we carried our scholars through our weekly examination this evening; sung some of the songs of Zion, and concluded with an exhortation to be
149 mindful of the Creator in the days of their youth, with some reflections on the importance of remembering the Sabbath day to keep it holy. (Board of Missions 1854c:134-135)
The regular Friday exam is referred to again in the Charity Hall journal on Friday, July
11, 1823, which reads: “Examined the school to-day as usual; improvements are still making in spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, and music” (Board of Missions 1854c:136). Two weeks later, on July 25, “The whole of the Mission family attended the examination this evening, and engaged with Mr. Smith, to aid the scholars in performing vocal music. One of the female scholars recited the last questions in the shorter catechism” (Board of Missions 1854c:136). A special examination was held on Wednesday, August 6, 1823, due to the fact that it was the last day before the fall vacation. The journal entry reads:
The afternoon we devoted entirely to the examination of the school in the different branches of learning in which they had severally been engaged in studying—to the singing of vocal music—the asking of a number of questions on the scriptures, and to the giving of them an exhortation on morality and religion; and finally united in prayer and thanksgiving for the kind arm which has supported us and the dear children under our care for the past year; invoked the blessings of God to still continue with us who remain at this station, and these dear children whilst at their respective homes at the close of the vacation, and prayed that the providence of God would bring us all again together to persevere in the work of Christ, in teaching and instruction these dear children. (Board of Missions 1854c:136-137)
Despite these advances, however, it does seem like the pastors felt they were making little progress on converting the Indians in wider numbers. In a journal entry for June 20, 1823, someone wrote, “We anticipate a time when the congregation of the heathen, instead of being engaged in their war songs, and superstitious dances, will be occupied in singing the songs of
Zion, and glory to God in the highest” (Board of Missions 1854c:134), showing that what would have been considered “traditional” practices were still very common in the Chickasaw Nation during the 1820s. The school administrators also struggled with overturning the “negative”
150 influence that non-Christian white people had upon the Indians. In the journal entry for June 24,
1823, someone wrote:
We are truly sorry that so many of the white people are in the habit of giving countenance to those superstitions, observations, and delusive feelings, in which these poor benighted heathen have been taught to believe.—Mr. Smith saw four white men on their way this evening, to see a dance among the Indians about five miles from this place, and some of them intoxicated, an example to be set before the Indians much to be deprecated. (Board of Missions 1854c:134)
Another reference to the poor example of local white people on the Indians comes in the 1825 report of Foster and Guthrie to the missionary board, where they wrote:
During preaching, many of the Indians seemed inattentive and restless, though not as much as many of the white people. The Indians view the white people as their superiors, and it is probable that their example has its influence with the Indians. (Board of Missions 1854d:148)
Bell noted something similar in his April 3, 1826 letter to the Reverend Chapman, where he wrote of local whites that “… the licentious manner of many of them have an unhappy influence on the minds of their heathen neighbors, and render the success of Missionary labors much more tardy amongst them” (Board of Missions 1854e:202).
Naming Children
It appears that the missionaries provided English names to the Indian children who did not already have them. Some of the names, such as Christopher Columbus, Isaac Newton, and
George Washington (see Table 5-4) were of course well-known historical figures, but the Charity
Hall administrators also named some children after friends and supporters of the school. In the
Charity Hall journal entry of June 8, 1823, which describes the two recently-enrolled students who left the school without leave, the writer explains, “We named one James Lowry, by whose
151 patronage and charity we expect to be aided in giving him an education. The other we called
Samuel King, a zealous friend of Missions” (Board of Missions 1854c:133). In a letter written by the Reverend Thomas Calhoon in 1824, he concluded by asking Bell to give his best love not only to Bell’s wife, but also to “that little Indian Calhoon. Tell him to be a good boy, learn his book, and he must learn to pray” (Board of Missions 1854d:153). Bell’s final accounting in 1832 named one of the boys to be recommended for further education as Robert Donnell, who was the head of the Cumberland Missionary Board, and in a March 22, 1825 letter, the Reverend William
Barnett wrote:
I was gratified to learn that you had not forgotten your old friend; but had (though undeservedly) perpetuated my name in your Mission-Family. Yes, it gives me secret pleasure to think that I am remembered, while so many who are more worthy of notice are passed by. I would, with great cheerfulness, have sent little William B. a suit ready-made up, but you did not write his age, and consequently I could not guess at his size, so as to have his clothes made; but I have sent some cloth by brother Guthrie. I wish you to give my compliments to Charity Colbert, and request her in my name to be good enough to make up my little boy’s clothes. (Board of Missions 1854c:134)
From this letter, it appears that naming the children after other pastors may have been a way to get individual support for the children, as if the child bearing the namesake was being somewhat “sponsored” by the pastor in question. There was also a student named after Robert
Bell himself on the final roster given at the school’s closing, as well as other students with familiar names belonging to Presbyterian pastors such as Finis Ewing and James Porter.
Community Interactions
Various documents, especially the 1823 journal entries, show that the missionaries operating Charity Hall were consistently courting various Indian families for new students and supplies. On June 23, 1823, the administrators of Charity Hall took in an Indian boy “by the
152 name David James, grand son of Major Levi Colberts—his brother, who is older than him, we have had for some time, and is very active in learning; he spells, reads and writes tolerably well, and is peculiarly agreeable” (Board of Missions 1854c:134). The journal that provided this information also noted the day prior that “Mr. Smith was prevented from filling his appointment to-day at Mr. James Wolf’s a half breed Indian, about three miles distant from this place” (Board of Missions 1854c:134), on the Sabbath of June 22.
While Bell may not have wanted to accept money from the Indians, he did not turn down supplies and gifts from individual Indians, usually the parents of children boarded at the school.
In the school’s journal entry for July 4, 1823, someone wrote, probably in reference to the
Pitchlynn visit described earlier:
An Indian man, who promised to assist us in boarding his little son, has this day brought us two cows and calves—a welcome present, for we are at present somewhat scarce of milk. This evidences the friendly disposition, and their anxiety to have their children brought up under a civilized people, and to be acquainted with the knowledge of the Scriptures and the christian religion. (Board of Missions 1854c:135)
In addition to operating Charity Hall and teaching Chickasaw students, Bell and the other pastors frequently proselytized among the general population on Sundays, both in Cotton Gin
Port and in the Chickasaw Nation. In the school’s journal entry for Sunday, June 1, 1823, someone wrote:
This day we have had the inestimable privilege of dispensing the word of life, both to the natives and whites. Mr. Bell crossed the river about five miles distant from this place, and preached to the white population, who appeared solicitous we should still continue to favor them with the ordinances of the gospel. Mr. Smith preached at Major Levi Colbert’s, principally to the whites. (Board of Missions 1854c:132)
153 Similarly, on Sunday, June 8, the Reverend Smith “preached in Cotton Gin Port,” and again on the following Sunday, June 15:
Mr. Smith, with most of the Mission family, crossed the river to preach to the white people, just on the margin of the christian land, where he had inestimable privilege of worshiping God, and inculcating the truths of the gospel to a respectable congregation. (Board of Missions 1854c:133-134)
On Sunday, July 6, “Smith preached today at Cotton Gin Port. In the evening, as usual, we held our social supplications at the ordinary place of worship, for the early conversion of the heathen, and the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom here on earth” (Board of Missions 1854c:135).
A similar entry is made for Sunday, July 20, which described Smith crossing the river to preach, an event that was followed in the evening with a prayer meeting. The Sunday journal entry of
July 13 reads:
Mr. Smith preached to-day about ten miles from this place, on the opposite side of the river, to a strange but very attentive congregation. The people talk of building a meeting house, and solicits our preaching to them every opportunity. We have appointed a sacramental meeting in this neighborhood the 1st Sabbath in September. (Board of Missions 1854c:136)
It therefore appears that it was customary for the pastors to take their families across the
Tombigbee River to preach and worship together with multiple congregations in Cotton Gin
Port. It is not clear whether the “Mission family” included the Indian children, just the immediate family of Smith, or another combination of the “whites” then living at Charity Hall. It is also not clear whether the “ordinary place” used for supplication “for the early conversion of the heathen” on Sunday evenings was in Cotton Gin Port or within the lands of the Chickasaw Nation.
However, in his first quarterly report of 1824, written January 20, the Reverend Bell wrote to
James Porter: “Such of this Nation as have had an opportunity of attending the preaching of
154 God’s word, have expressed their appreciation and their desires to have preaching continued in their houses” (Meacham 2007:30-31). This shows that the pastors were preaching within the homes of Chickasaw families upon request. Unlike the Chickasaw Monroe mission and the
Choctaw Elliot mission, which both formed formal congregations into which they recruited
Indian converts, the Charity Hall missionaries did not construct a formal church building. It appears that they used outside places, such as the Cotton Gin Port congregations and this
“supplication” space, but it is possible that they also conducted worship within the school building or the dining hall. There is, however, no documentary evidence that supports this.
Use of the English Language
The letters and other documents also provide some insight into the methods developed and debated by the missionaries working with the Choctaws and Chickasaws. One of the arguments that some of the pastors began to make as they continued to develop their practice among the Indians, was that the ability to speak and understand English was crucial for religious conversion. In their 1825 report to the Missionary Board, the Reverend Foster and the Reverend
Guthrie wrote:
Upon the whole, your committee think the prospect of religion to be flattering about the establishment, and particularly so among the black people, who are much concerned about the state of their souls, through the Nation, as far as they had information. The black people generally can speak and understand English, and this your committee think to be the reason why they feel more interest about religion than the Indians. (Board of Missions 1854d:148)
Bell wrote something similar in his response to Massey in May of 1823, speaking about the Indian children: “Their capacity to receive instruction is nearly equal, if not entirely so, to the white people, and the most of them have made progress in acquiring their education as fast as is common among the whites; at least those of them who can talk English. Such as cannot talk
155 English do not progress as fast” (Board of Missions 1854d:151). After Charity Hall had closed,
Bell made it clear that he felt the students would be better educated by being separated entirely from their Native culture so that they could be totally inculcated within the English-speaking world, as noted in his October 1, 1830 letter quoted above. In this he may have been following the lead of the Reverend Wilson at the Caney Creek school, who as I discussed earlier made it a regular practice of boarding his students with Euro-American families.
As discussed earlier in this dissertation, the Reverend Cyrus Kingsbury and Indian Office
Agent Thomas McKinney did not agree on having a full education in English. While McKinney insisted on only using English to educate the Choctaws, Kingsbury and his colleagues worked hard to interpret the Bible and other educational works into the Choctaw language. Copies of the
Choctaw Bible as well as hymnals still survive in the hands of Mississippi Choctaws today.
There is also some evidence that the Chickasaws were being educated using these Choctaw manuscripts, although none of this is directly connected to Charity Hall. The Reverend Holmes, while he was still administering the Tockshish mission school, purportedly gave Choctaw translations of religious manuscripts to William H. Barr, a full-blooded Chickasaw who could not speak English:
We furnished him with the Choctaw translations, which he read with avidity, and which, under God, became the instruments in his conversion. He has taken a very decided stand in religious matters. This, in connexion with the fact that he is the nephew of the principal chief in our district, and will probably, if he survives him, be his successor in office, inspires the hope that he is raised up as an instrument of good to his people. (ABCFM 1829:301)
Holmes went on to relate that Barr and another Indian man regularly taught a Sabbath school in an Indian settlement a few miles away from Tockshish, “designed exclusively for the full
Indians, who are taught in their own language” (ABCFM 1829d:301).
156 Addressing the Research Questions
As I wrote in Chapter 1, the main purpose of this dissertation is to uncover what material tools and practices the missionaries used to “civilize” Native American children and their families prior to Indian removal. The history is especially crucial to understanding the practices of the missionaries and students at Charity Hall, particularly the organization of time around daily and weekly routines as well as seasonal activities and the duration of school terms. For this dissertation and my missionscape perspective, the history also provides vital evidence that the archaeological investigations in this specific case do not—evidence that many activities took place away from the main compound. These included giving sermons at the homes of individual
Indian families, camp fire meetings, and at churches in Cotton Gin Port; fundraising across several states including Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama; and participating in regional organization meetings of missionaries from across the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw
Nation. Additionally, the history shows that some students went on to continue their education by moving to more established American cities both to the north and on the Atlantic Coast. All of these activities were part of the practices used to civilize Indian children. Data on the curriculum are also vital to understanding the nature of education at the school. The archaeological investigations may show what tools were being used in that education, but their presence does not give insight into the subjects being taught or the progress that students made.
I also posed a question in my introduction regarding the quality of life of the missionaries and their students. This is perhaps better answered by the archaeological data that will follow in the next two chapters, but the history does provide details about the number of buildings and their quality. Nearly all of the structures contained fireplaces for keeping warm as well as cooking, and all of the log cabins had wooden floors so that their occupants had personal space
157 that was set above the plain earth. The primary-source documents also referred several times to the donations of cattle and pigs by generous Indian families, so it appears that the missionaries and students did not want for meat. Even during times when agricultural gains were sparse, as in the time after the particularly deadly sick season of 1824, Bell’s main concern in his letters was that they would not have enough surplus to sell rather than enough grain and vegetables to consume themselves. The main indicators that the quality of life at Charity Hall may have been on the poorer side is Bell’s consistent complaining about not having enough funds to board students and materials to clothe them. The lack of funds may not point to a poor quality of life due to the fact that it just meant they had to board fewer students, but Bell did report in 1832 that he was in debt, which had to at least take a psychological toll on him. The lack of cloth is something that Bell mentions a lot after 1825, so this may have just been a temporary problem due to negligence in keeping those materials stocked or it may have been due to turnover in students, with older students taking their clothing with them. It is not explicitly mentioned, but I assume that Bell only had to provide clothes for those he was boarding gratis, since the wealthier families like the Colberts and Pitchlynns who paid for their children to be boarded probably also provided their clothing.
The history also shows that the Chickasaws, especially the Colberts, likely still had great influence over the school, even if this is not elaborated outright by the missionaries in their letters and journals. The fact that the school was built on land loaned out by Levi Colbert and that his house was only two miles away (the students could have easily walked there within thirty minutes) shows that the students were not ripped away from their families and put into an isolated environment away from familiar surroundings. The Indian children were very much still at “home” in their own Nation, even if the missionaries were trying to inundate them with
158 American things and practices. Levi Colbert did support the school and was particularly drawn to the Cumberland Presbytery, so he probably had an amicable working relationship with the
Reverend Robert Bell, but it is possible that any disagreements they had may have been left out of primary-source materials. We did not make any archaeological discoveries that show resistance at the site of Charity Hall, so this also comes exclusively from the primary-source materials—particularly the journal which recorded attendance and discipline problems among the students.
This evaluation sets the stage for a presentation of the archaeological data in the following two chapters and a combined marshalling of conclusions about both materials and written words to answer my research questions more thoroughly.
159 CHAPTER 6 DIGGING CHARITY HALL: FIELD METHODS AND RESULTS
Here I discuss the archaeological field excavations that were performed at Charity Hall, focusing on how types of artifacts were distributed across the site spatially. I also include information about the general location and proposed layout of the mission. In Chapter 7 I discuss the laboratory methods and there provide more details about the specific artifact types and unique artifacts that were uncovered during the investigations.
Archaeological Field Methods
The site’s location on a toe slope or terrace remnant at the base of a bluff is between 200 and 240 feet (60-74 meters) above sea level (Figure 6-1). At its high point, southwest of the site, the landform reaches 317 feet (97 meters) above sea level. The main portion of the site sits on the slope southwest of a pine plantation; the latter is at a lower elevation that was likely flooded by the Tombigbee River seasonally during the early 19th century. The places where we excavated overlap two soil profiles as defined by the Natural Resources Conservation Service
(NRCS): a “sandy alluvial land,” which underlay the entire pine plantation and a small area northeast of the monument, and Ruston and Cuthbert soils underlying most of the site west and south of the monument (Figure 6-2). Ruston and Cuthbert are described as being present on 17 to
45 percent slopes at an elevation between 160 and 570 feet. The parent material of Ruston is loamy fluviomarine deposits, and the parent material of Cuthbert soils is loamy marine deposits.
The sandy alluvial land is described by the NRCS as “floodplains” and “not prime farmland,” which is interesting since the primary-source documents state that Charity Hall had agricultural land tilled to the north of the school, where this soil is now located. I include on my soil map here the pH levels of the soils—5.4 and 5.0 respectively—which will come into play in Chapter
7 when I discuss the preservation of bone artifacts on the site.
160
Figure 6-1. Charity Hall Contour Map
161
Figure 6-2. Charity Hall Soil Map
162 Archaeological investigations have thus far taken place over three sequential summers, from 2018 to 2020. In 2018, a pilot archaeological study (Figure 6-3) was conducted over the course of two weeks to identify the potential locations of structures and activity areas within the mission area. Investigations included a combination of metal detector survey (with all metal finds georeferenced with a high-precision, handheld GPS unit) and systematic shovel test pit
(STP) units placed along parallel transects 20 meters apart. This work revealed three important aspects of the site. First, the area that appeared to contain the core of the mission was found to be on the toe slope at the base of the bluff. This location appears to have been high enough to be protected from intermittent flooding while still being close enough to easily access the
Tombigbee River (a ferry was in regular operation a short distance to the northeast; see Chapter
5). Second, almost all of the artifacts appeared to be of early nineteenth-century vintage; although there were a few modern items encountered, the overall site appeared to have little modern disturbance. Finally, the combined metal detecting and STP strategy indicated that there were clusters of square-cut nails associated with items like ceramics—concentrations that I hypothesized were indicative of structures and/or activity areas related to the original mission.
The 2019 field work (Figure 6-4) began with a concentrated focus on locations with the highest density of artifacts identified in 2018. There was also further exploratory testing done in outlying areas of the site. Excavations began with the placing of test units on the two artifact- dense areas discovered in 2018. All test units were 1 x 1-meter in plan and were dug together in clusters hereafter referred to as “blocks.” Block 1 was placed approximately two meters to the east of the monument and consisted of test units 1-3. Block 2 began approximately 42 meters northwest of the monument and consisted of test units 4-7. After some metal detecting to the
163
Figure 6-3. Map of 2018 Excavations
164
Figure 6-4. Map of 2019 Excavations
165 south of the stream yielded positive hits, a third block was placed approximately 36 meters west of the monument and consisted of test units 8-15.
For each block, a datum was placed at the southwest corner of the starting unit, and all depths were measured below this datum. Test units were typically excavated by arbitrary 10- centimeter levels down to sterile subsoil. Block 1 reached 40 cmbd, Block 2 reached 20 cmbd, and the test units of Block 3 reached 35 cmbd. Each wall was profiled and photographed, and floor plans of individual levels were drawn and photographed where features appeared. Block
3 contained a trench-like feature that extended from northwest to southeast across the second level of several of the test units, so each was excavated down to the surface of the feature rather than to arbitrary 10-centimeter levels. The feature was then dug out separately, and a plan map was drawn with feature measurements included.
All three blocks yielded moderate numbers of early nineteenth-century artifacts, ranging from refined earthenware pottery to metal buckles. The Block 3 feature appeared to represent a timber sill which was once part of the foundation of a large structure. Its basin-like profile led us to believe that logs were cut in half, then placed exterior side down into the ground. This would have the effect of leaving the rounded side in the ground surface and the flat side up, which is consistent with the fact that this would have been weight-bearing sill. The 2019 field survey also included metal detection to the northwest and southeast of the 2018 survey area, in addition to a large area of the pine plantation to the north. A cluster of metal detector hits was recorded approximately 80 meters southeast of the monument, near a spring. Another cluster appeared between blocks two and three, and a third appeared to the west of the streams, approximately 70 meters northwest of the monument. There was also limited shovel testing performed approximately 23 meters east of the monument, on the opposite side of the dirt road.
166 Following the strategy used during the 2019 season, the 2020 investigations (Figure 6-5) focused on locations where clusters of artifacts had been identified through metal detecting. The season began with the excavation of 11 additional 1 x 1-meter and 1 x 0.5-meter test units at
Block 3 to better delineate the structural wall feature found in 2019. We determined that this wall was 8-9 meters (26-29 feet) long, and we also found a perpendicular wall to the southeast, meeting to form one corner of the structure. According to Bell’s documents (discussed in
Chapter 5), the only structure described that fits that size range was one of the dwelling houses, which was 26 by 18 feet in size. This potential identification is supported by the presence of a large number of brick or burned clay artifacts (which would have belonged to two cat-and-clay chimneys) as well as the largest density of tableware ceramic sherds, which would be consistent with the presence of Bell’s own dwelling, which probably saw the most use out of all of the structures on the site. It is also possible that the feature in Block 3 was the foundation of the schoolhouse, for which Bell never gave dimensions in his documents. This alternative suggestion is supported by the presence of slate writing tablet and pencil fragments. The presence of tableware ceramics, if this latter supposition is correct, could have been the result of the schoolhouse serving as an overflow dining hall, since Charity Hall regularly housed more than
30 people during school terms. However, similar slate fragments were also recovered from Block
4, so this alone is not an adequate indicator of the school house.
A new set of 1 x 1-meter units comprising Block 4 was placed approximately 40 meters northwest of the monument and 20 meters northeast of Block 2. The 31 units excavated there held more apparent structural wall features along with an ashy floor containing faunal remains.
We did not have time to follow out the length of the wall features, but faunal remains have not been recovered anywhere else on the site. We also recovered some tableware and utilitarian
167
Figure 6-5. Map of 2020 Excavations
168 ceramics, the latter of which strongly support this structure’s identification as the dining hall.
Four 1 x 1-meter test units were also placed 80 meters southeast of the monument where some positive metal detector hits were recorded, but those units were either sterile or held very few historic artifacts. Eight 1 x 1-meter test units were also placed in different locations around the monument in the vicinity of Block 1, but no consistent features were found. The season concluded by expanding our 2019 excavations at Block 2 with 12 more 1 x 1-meter test units.
During both the 2018 and 2019 field seasons, shovel tests were about 30 cm in diameter and excavated to sterile subsoil. Soil from all shovel tests and test units was passed through 1/4” hardware cloth and described by texture and Munsell color. An overall site datum was placed near the southwest corner of the monument, and a total station was used to place units on the site grid. Although a few nineteenth-century artifacts were found in pine plantation shovel tests in
2018, the 2019 metal detecting in this area yielded no further historical artifacts. All test units excavated in 2020 were dug as one level to sterile subsoil, approximately 20-30 centimeters below surface. Unit wall profiles were only drawn and photographed to document feature profiles where they appeared since the drawings from 2019 were deemed adequate to describe the site’s soil strata in general. Floor plans were also drawn and photographed to document features—all of which were foundational timbers (Figure 6-6). One 10-liter flotation sample was taken from the soft ashy floor layer of Block 4. The site as originally recorded in the Mississippi state site file was marked in an incorrect location, so the GPS points recorded are being used to submit a correction to the state office along with site forms containing the newly obtained information recorded in this and previously-written technical reports on our annual excavations.
169
Figure 6-6. Photograph of a Block 4 Feature
170 General Field Results
Based on the distribution of early-nineteenth century artifacts, the archaeological evidence shows that the core structural area of the Charity Hall site encompasses an area of at least 13,000 square meters (the full 60 acres, including agricultural land, described in primary- source documents were the equivalent of about 243,000 square meters). The west and east borders of the core are bounded by natural springs while the north boundary is demarcated by the pine plantation. The southern border is established by the bluffline. The Reverend Bell’s letters described eleven individual structures, but we have only recovered evidence to potentially identify four of them, represented by the four blocks (Figure 6-7). It is therefore possible that the site encompasses a larger area than that delineated by our shovel testing and metal detecting or else it is highly compact. I will provide a schematic overview of where all of the buildings may have been located at the end of this chapter.
The general soil profile that we recorded in the area consisted of a top humic layer of dark grayish brown sand (10YR4/2), underlain by a very pale brown fine sand (10YR7/4) A- horizon/plow zone. The B-horizon was typically a yellowish brown sandy clay (10YR5/6), characterized by a very low artifact density and was eventually sterile at 30-40 cm below surface.
It is known that the area around the monument was used by the current landowner’s father-in- law for cattle grazing, and he additionally may have tilled the land to better accommodate this.
Some modern fencing materials were recovered from metal detector hits on the north bank of the stream, which suggests that a fence may have been erected to keep the cattle confined between the stream and the pine plantation. The fact that lithic artifacts were recovered, particularly
Archaic projectile point types, suggests that Charity Hall sits on a much earlier Native American site.
171
Figure 6-7. Overview of Excavated Test Units
172 The total number of artifacts recovered during three years of field work was 8,101, but more than 6,700 of these were brick or burned clay fragments (Table 6-1). The 81 test units that were dug across all four blocks accounted for 7,693 of those artifacts. A total of 41 shovel tests accounted for 151 artifacts. Metal detecting resulted in 73 positive hits yielding 219 artifacts. All four of the blocks and their localities are discussed individually as representing structures and/or activity areas, but tableware ceramics, brick or burned clay fragments, and square cut nail artifacts were present in large enough quantities to allow for some initial discussion of their dispersal across the site.
The largest concentrations of tableware (refined earthenware and Chinese porcelain) ceramic sherds (Figure 6-8) were recovered around Block 3, to the southwest, and Block 4, to the north. There were still a consistent number of sherds found in units dug at Block 2, but Block 1 yielded very few. The presence of tableware sherds at Block 3 without faunal remains suggests that this may have served as Bell’s dwelling house, as I stated earlier—an area where food was probably consumed but not prepared. This is further supported by a lack of utilitarian ceramic sherds, which were recovered in higher quantities from Block 4 units. An analysis of tableware decorations by context (Table 6-2 and Table 6-3) shows that there were not any significant differences between the tableware ceramics recovered in each locality. The only potential exception is the relatively larger number of Chinese porcelain sherds recovered from Block 4, but the small number recovered (n=24) does not allow me to make any concrete claims about differences between the two structures based on this difference alone. Transfer printing was the most common tableware decoration found in nearly every locality, followed by hand painting and molded edges—many of which also frequently featured hand painting (notably blue and green shell-edged ceramics). The same can be said for tableware vessel forms (Table 6-4), which
173 Table 6-1. Artifacts by context and per square meter. ARTIFACTS BY CONTEXT (TU=TEST UNITS) Artifact Type B1TU % B2TU % B3TU % B4TU % STP % MD % Total % Tableware ceramic sherds 9 1.7% 85 15.9% 224 42.0% 204 38.3% 9 1.7% 2 0.4% 533 6.6% Utilitarian ceramic sherds 0 1 4.2% 3 12.5% 20 83.3% 0 0 24 0.3% Coarse earthen. ceramic sherds 3 6.4% 3 6.4% 3 6.4% 30 63.8% 8 17.0% 0 47 0.6% Nails and nail fragments 41 15.2% 29 10.8% 98 36.4% 27 10.0% 3 1.1% 71 26.4% 269 3.3% Lithics 84 32.3% 73 28.1% 5 1.9% 68 26.2% 25 9.6% 5 1.9% 260 3.2% Glass shards 5 8.3% 10 16.7% 33 55.0% 7 11.7% 4 6.7% 1 1.7% 60 0.7% Brick & burned clay fragments 202 3.0% 1246 18.5% 3267 48.5% 1842 27.3% 97 1.4% 87 1.3% 6741 83.2% Clothing artifacts 1 11.1% 1 11.1% 1 11.1% 2 22.2% 1 11.1% 3 33.3% 9 0.1% Other metal artifacts 12 10.5% 10 8.8% 24 21.1% 14 12.3% 4 3.5% 50 43.9% 114 1.4% Slate fragments 0 0 4 66.7% 2 33.3% 0 0 6 0.1% Faunal remains 0 0 0 38 100% 0 0 38 0.5% Total artifacts 357 1458 3662 2254 151 219 8101 FREQUENCY OF ARTIFACTS PER SQUARE METER Artifact Type B1TU Frequency B2TU Frequency B3TU Frequency B4TU Frequency Total Freq. Tableware ceramic sherds 9 0.82 85 5.31 224 11.79 204 6.58 533 6.92 Utilitarian ceramic sherds 0 0.00 1 0.06 3 0.16 20 0.65 24 0.31 Coarse earthen. ceramic sherds 3 0.27 3 0.19 3 0.16 30 0.97 47 0.61 Nails and nail fragments 41 3.73 29 1.81 98 5.16 27 0.87 269 3.49 Lithics 84 7.64 73 4.56 5 0.26 68 2.19 260 3.38 Glass shards 5 0.45 10 0.63 33 1.74 7 0.23 60 0.78 Brick & burned clay fragments 202 18.36 1246 77.88 3267 171.95 1842 59.42 6741 87.55 Clothing artifacts 1 0.09 1 0.06 1 0.05 2 0.06 9 0.12 Other metal artifacts 12 1.09 10 0.63 24 1.26 14 0.45 114 1.48 Slate fragments 0 0.00 0 0.00 4 0.21 2 0.06 6 0.08 Faunal remains 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 38 1.23 38 0.49 Square meters excavated 11 16 19 31 77
174
Figure 6-8. Refined earthenware sherd distribution
175 Table 6-2. Tableware decorations by context Genre B1 Freq % B2 Freq % B3 Freq % B4 Freq % Total Freq Handpainted 2 0.18 3% 7 0.44 11% 28 1.47 43% 28 0.90 43% 65 0.84 Handpainted Blue 0 0.00 0% 4 0.25 11% 21 1.11 57% 12 0.39 32% 37 0.48 Handpainted Brown 0 0.00 0% 0 0.00 0% 1 0.05 100% 0 0.00 0% 1 0.01 Polychrome, warm 2 0.18 7% 3 0.19 11% 6 0.32 22% 16 0.52 59% 27 0.35 Molded Edge 2 0.18 4% 11 0.69 22% 22 1.16 45% 14 0.45 29% 49 0.64 Green, molded 0 0.00 0% 0 0.00 0% 1 0.05 25% 3 0.10 75% 4 0.05 Molded Edge Decoration, other 0 0.00 0% 1 0.06 14% 5 0.26 71% 1 0.03 14% 7 0.09 Shell Edge, blue 1 0.09 5% 4 0.25 19% 9 0.47 43% 7 0.23 33% 21 0.27 Shell Edge, green 1 0.09 6% 6 0.38 35% 7 0.37 41% 3 0.10 18% 17 0.22 Transfer Print 1 0.09 1% 12 0.75 13% 45 2.37 48% 36 1.16 38% 94 1.22 Slipware, factory made 1 0.09 6% 2 0.13 12% 7 0.37 41% 7 0.23 41% 17 0.22 Porcelain, Chinese 0 0.00 0% 2 0.13 8% 6 0.32 25% 16 0.52 67% 24 0.31 Not Decorated 5 0.45 2% 47 2.94 19% 102 5.37 40% 98 3.16 39% 252 3.27 Square meters excavated 11 16 19 31 77
Table 6-3. Tableware decorations within contexts. Decoration B1 % B2 % B3 % B4 % Handpainted 2 18% 7 9% 28 13% 28 14% Molded Edge 2 18% 11 14% 22 10% 14 7% Transfer Print 1 9% 12 15% 45 21% 36 18% Slipware 1 9% 2 2% 7 3% 7 4% Porcelain 0 0% 2 2% 6 3% 16 8% Not Decorated 5 45% 47 58% 102 49% 98 49% Total 11 81 210 199
Table 6-4. Tableware vessel form by context.
176 were fairly consistent across each locality—flat vessel sherds made up at least three quarters of the assemblage within each block. This is one way that the mission school differs from excavated slave plantations, where archaeologists have found that there were more hollow vessel sherds associated with slave cabins and more flat vessel sherds associated with the landowner structures, due to differences in dining and diet (Davidson and Ibarrola 2016). According to primary-source documents, the children at Charity Hall ate at the same table as the missionaries, and this is supported here in the ceramic assemblage. More detailed ceramic decoration discussion appears in Chapter 7.
The presence of brick and burned clay fragments suggests the locations of chimneys, which were present in virtually every building on the site. The density map (Figure 6-9) shows their distribution by weight rather than count, and the largest weight of brick was found in the northwestern test units dug at Block 3. Large amounts were also recovered from the westernmost units dug at Block 4 and smaller amounts were recovered from Block 1 and Block 2. What is notable about the brick and burned clay assemblage is that the majority of fragments are very small. Only a handful of brick fragments were large enough to measure for a full-size estimate, but the fact that there was only one true brick chimney on the site, along with whatever other bricks may have been used for other purposes, shows that all of the whole bricks that once appeared on the site were either repurposed or stolen. It is not clear whether such bricks were taken by the Reverend Bell or the Chickasaws upon the school’s closing, repurposed by the new landowner who purchased the land from the Chickasaws, or stolen by brick robbers who may have turned them around for a profit. Bricks were relatively impervious commodities that were valuable throughout the nineteenth century. A newspaper account of the erection of the stone monument at the site in 1920 states that some bricks were found and used to make the foundation
177
Figure 6-9. Brick and burned clay artifact distribution
178 of the monument, which shows another potential disturbance to be taken into consideration, even though our probing in the immediate vicinity of the monument did not meet with resistance from any brick-like foundation.
Square cut nails were recovered from many localities on the site and were one of the primary indicators of structures we used for placing test units during the 2019 and 2020 field seasons (Figure 6-10). A total of 71 cut nails or cut nail fragments were recovered through metal detecting, three were found in shovel tests, and the remaining 195 appeared in test unit excavations. Complete cut nails were weighed and measured by length, which is here converted into the pennyweight system (Table 6-5). In the same way that the ceramic decorations do not appear to differ across localities, so too do the cut nail pennyweights appear to be fairly uniform across the site. A potential exception is the presence of shorter nails recovered in the Block 2 locality (all are between 2d and 5d), a potential indication of roofing, flooring, or furniture nails.
However, it is likely that there were also longer nails present that we did not recover in this area due to the limitations of our excavations. Nail lengths and types will be discussed more fully in
Chapter 7.
Block 1 Locality Investigations
The initial Block 1 test units (1-3) were placed close to the monument in 2019 due to a historic newspaper account (Moore 1925) that related that the monument was placed on top of a brick oven and that some of the bricks were used in the foundation. During the 2018 field season, many artifacts were recovered from positive shovel tests and metal detector hits in the nearby vicinity, which also informed the placement of test units here (Figure 6-11). Eight further test units (35, 36, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53) were dug in various locations to the north of the initial three units in 2020 in an effort to locate building features or a more significant assemblage of artifacts,
179
Figure 6-10. Cut nail artifact distribution
180 Table 6-5. Complete machine cut nail pennyweights by locality Penny weight B1 B2 B3 B4 NW SE 20d - - - - - 3 16d - - - 1 - - 9d - - 1 - - 2 8d 1 - 2 2 1 1 7d 1 - 2 1 - - 6d - - 3 - - 1 5d 1 2 - 1 - - 4d - 1 - - - - 3d 1 1 1 - - - 2d - 1 - 1 - - but these were similar in nature what was encountered in 2019. It may be that the newspaper account was incorrect or misinformed about the location of the brick oven in relation to the monument. Compared to other test units laid elsewhere on the site, the eleven test units that make up Block 1 yielded relatively few artifacts (Table 6-6).
Most artifacts recovered from Block 1 (aside from brick and burned clay) were lithic and metal. Interestingly, there are substantially more lithic artifacts in test units dug to the north of the stream—in Blocks 1, 2, and 4—than in the units dug to the south of the stream—in Block 3.
The three northern blocks yielded between two and eight lithic artifacts per square meter while
Block 3 yielded fewer than 0.25 per square meter (see Table 6-1). It may be that the area north of the stream was utilized more by the current landowner and his father-in-law for cattle grazing, which could have resulted in disturbances that brought older artifacts closer to the surface. It could also just be the case, however, that the area north of the modern stream was simply the center of the older Archaic occupation. The Block 1 locality yielded the second-most cut nail artifacts per square meter, which shows that there was likely a structure here, even though the
181
Figure 6-11. Block 1 Locality Map
182
Table 6-6. Block 1 locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware MD18-1 - - - 1 - - 2 - - - 3 MD18-2 ------1 - - 1 MD18-3 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-4 - - - 2 ------2 MD18-6 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-7 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-10 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-11 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-12 - - - 1 1 - - - - - 2 MD18-13 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-14 ------1 - 1 MD18-15 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-16 ------1 - 1 MD18-17 - - - 1 - - - - 1 - 2 MD18-18 - - - 3 ------3 MD20-1 ------2 - 2 MD20-3 - - - 1 - - - - 1 - 2 MD20-6 ------2 - - - 2 T1STP1 1 - 1 - 1 - - - - - 3 T1STP1.1 - - - - 2 1 2 - - - 5 T1STP1.2 ------5 1 - - 6 T1STP1.4 - - - - 1 - - - - - 1 T1STP1.5 - - - - 3 - 4 - - - 7 T1STP1.6 ------2 - - - 2 T1STP1.8 - - - - - 1 - - 1 - 2 T1STP1.10 - - 1 - 1 - - - - - 2 T1STP2 - - - - 1 - 2 - - - 3 T2STP1 - - - - 1 - - - - - 1 T7STP1 1 - - - - - 3 - - - 4 T7STP2 ------1 - - - 1 T7STP3 - - - 2 - - 2 - - - 4 T8STP7 1 - - - - - 2 - - - 3 STP Z-1 - - 1 - - - 5 - - - 6 STP Z-2 - - - 1 1 - 1 - - - 3 STP Z-3 ------2 - - - 2 TU1 1 - - 4 29 - 29 - - - 63 TU2 - - - 1 16 1 15 - 2 - 35 TU3 - - - 4 15 1 43 - 1 - 64 TU1-3 Baulks - - - - 10 - 9 - - - 19 TU35 2 - - 6 2 - 27 - - - 37 TU36 - - - 3 1 - 14 - 2 - 20 TU42 3 - - 16 1 - 26 - 1 - 47 TU45 2 - - 4 2 1 6 - 2 - 17 TU47 - - 1 2 4 - 13 - 1 - 21 TU49 - - 2 1 1 2 12 1 - - 19 TU51 1 - - - 1 - 6 - - - 8 TU53 - - - - 2 - 2 - 1 - 5 Total artifacts 12 0 6 54 96 7 235 2 17 0 429
183 overall percentage of brick or burned clay fragments is relatively lower (only three percent of the brick or burned clay recovered). The presence of tableware and utilitarian ceramic sherds was also smaller than at the other three blocks, all of which suggests that while a structure almost certainly existed at this location, our unit placement may have just been unlucky in terms of identifying structural features.
Our 2019 crew recovered one coarse earthenware sherd from a shovel test on the southeast side of the dirt path but still located within the Block 1 locality that may have been part of a cheese strainer or some other locally-made dairying vessel. Seven glass fragments were recovered from the Block 1 locality, and metal detector surveys carried out here additionally unearthed two brass clothing buttons, one square iron clothing buckle frame, one square harness buckle frame, a knife blade fragment, and multiple iron kettle fragments. Block 1 also yielded three lithic points. One appears to be a reworked Cave Springs or Hardin point while the other is similar in appearance to a Morrow Mountain point (Cameron 2020). One of the early shovel tests in the locality also yielded a Dalton scraper. These lithic tools are all terminal Paleoindian to
Middle Archaic types, which match up with the nature of the lithic assemblage recovered from other parts of the site.
Block 2 Locality Investigations
The initial Block 2 test units (4-7) were placed just west of a group of positive metal detector hits and shovel tests that were previously excavated in 2018 (Figure 6-12). An additional cluster of positive metal detector hits were recorded just southeast of these initial test units during the 2019 field season. Twelve additional test units (70-81) were dug alongside the initial four during the 2020 field season, in an effort to locate building features, but none were delineated. Nevertheless, many tableware ceramic sherds (n=85), square cut nails and fragments
184
Figure 6-12. Block 2 Locality Map
185 (n=29), glass shards (n=10), and brick or burned clay fragments (n=1,246) were recovered from the Block 2 locality, suggesting that a structure was located in the vicinity (Table 6-7). In addition to these, the Block 2 locality also yielded two clothing artifacts: an amethyst glass button and a D-shaped clothing buckle frame. Other metal artifacts included one square harness buckle frame fragment, one piece of lead shot, and an unidentified piece of metal hardware that looks like a handle. The lithics recovered from the Block 2 locality included multiple retouched flakes and blades, two stemmed points, two corner-notched points, one eared point, and a flaked scraper. All of these stone tools are consistent with the types recovered from Block 1.
If the Block 3 structure is a dwelling house and the Block 4 structure is the dining hall
(both to be discussed subsequently), it is logical to deduce that the Block 2 structure was one of the other residential dwellings due to the presence of tableware sherds, clothing artifacts, and a concentration of brick or burned clay fragments belonging to a chimney. Charity Hall was home to multiple missionaries and their accompanying families as well as paid farm laborers and teachers, so it is possible that their living quarters were located here. The structure at Block 2 may also have been the location of Bell’s own house. It is possible that the concentrations of nails found both to the northeast and southeast of the Block 2 test units represent one or two other dwellings or cabins that can be further investigated with more test units in the future.
Block 3 Locality Investigations
Eight test units (8-15) were excavated in the Block 3 locality in 2019 after several metal detector hits were recorded on the opposite side of the stream south of Block 2 (Figure 6-13). A foundation feature was delineated running southeast to northwest across the initial units, so an additional 11 test units (16-25, 27) were placed alongside the initial set in an effort to find the corners and at least one parallel wall of the structure. One corner was found in TU 16 to the
186
Table 6-7. Block 2 locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware MD18-20 ------1 - - 1 MD18-21 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-22 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-23 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-24 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-25 1 - - 1 ------2 MD18-26 - - - 1 - - 2 - - - 3 MD18-31 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-32 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-2 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-3 - - - 1 - 1 - - - - 2 MD19-4 - - - 1 1 - 3 - - - 5 MD19-5 ------1 - 1 MD19-6 - - - 2 - - 2 - - - 4 MD19-7 - - - 3 - - 26 - - - 29 MD19-8 ------1 - - - 1 MD19-11 - - - 1 - - 4 - - - 5 MD20-2 ------1 - 1 MD20-4 - - - 1 2 - 22 - - - 25 STPA 1 - - - - - 1 - - - 2 STPA1 - - 1 - 3 1 1 - - - 6 STPA2 - - - - 1 - 4 - - - 5 STPA3 1 - - - 1 - 20 - - - 22 STPA4 3 - - - - - 10 - - - 13 TU4 9 - - 12 8 1 119 - - - 149 TU5 6 - - 6 7 1 142 - 4 - 166 TU6 10 - - - 8 1 151 - 1 - 171 TU7 6 - - 3 14 - 156 1 2 - 182 TU4-7 Baulks - - - - 5 - 21 - - - 26 TU70 5 - - 1 2 - 87 - 2 - 97 TU71 5 - - - 2 1 73 - - - 81 TU72 6 - - - 3 - 22 - - - 31 TU73 1 - 2 3 2 - 40 - - - 48 TU74 3 - - - 1 - 13 - - - 17 TU75 6 - - - 3 - 22 - - - 31 TU76 1 - - - 4 - 85 - - - 90 TU77 7 - - 1 1 1 53 - - - 63 TU78 2 - - - 4 1 45 - 1 - 53 TU79 9 1 1 2 3 4 15 - - - 35 TU80 3 - - 1 1 - 15 - - - 20 TU81 5 - - - 1 - 26 - - - 32 Total artifacts 90 1 4 47 77 12 1181 2 12 0 1426
187
Figure 6-13. Block 3 Locality Map
188
Figure 6-14. Block 3 Feature Schematic southeast and we seemed to see the feature turn (based on the wall profiles) in TU 27 to the northwest, suggesting that the feature turned and continued to the northeast in both locations
(Figure 6-14). Unfortunately, we could not see a distinct end at the northwest corner due to a disturbance, just an observation that the feature stopped. Additionally, a very large tree today
189 grows in the area where the north and east corners of the Block 3 structure lead, so we were not able to delineate the entire base of the structure. As I have already discussed, the only structure described by Bell that fits what was measured in the test units is the dwelling house, which had a dimension of 26 by 18 feet. As I stated earlier, however, Bell never gave dimensions for the schoolhouse, and the presence of three slate writing tablet fragments and one slate pencil fragment suggest that it could have existed here. There were no faunal remains recovered here, which suggests that this was not the combined kitchen and dining hall.
Block 3 yielded the highest number of artifacts (n=3,664), and had the highest density of artifacts per square meter in nearly every category—the exceptions were utilitarian ceramic sherds and lithic artifacts (Table 6-8; see Table 6-1 for overall comparison). Block 3 yielded the largest number of tableware ceramic sherds per square meter (11.79) and the largest number of square cut nails and fragments per square meter (5.16), which makes sense when considering that if this was Bell’s dwelling, which would have been occupied all year, it probably produced more waste than the other structures, used by the children who only lived at the site seasonally. The same can be said for glass fragments per square meter (1.74), many of which were flat. Finally,
Block 3 yielded the largest number of brick or burned clay fragments per square meter (171.95), more than double the number that was recovered from each of the other blocks, which is notable given that many of the other structures, including the school house, had two cat-and-clay chimneys like the dwelling houses. Other artifacts recovered from the Block 3 locality were one circular wrought-iron harness buckle frame, a fragment of the head of a hoe blade, two pieces of lead shot, and a black molded glass clothing button. Only five lithic artifacts were recovered from the Block 3 locality, including a flaked perforator.
190
Table 6-8. Block 3 locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware MD19-9 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-12 - - - 9 1 - 7 - - - 17 MD19-13A - - - 1 ------1 MD19-13B 1 ------1 - 2 MD19-14 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-15 - - - 2 ------2 MD20-10 ------1 - 1 TU8 13 - - 7 1 3 334 - 4 - 362 TU9 19 - 1 6 - 2 215 - 6 - 249 TU10 21 - - 7 1 - 447 - 1 - 477 TU11 26 - - 9 - 5 346 - 3 - 389 TU12 9 - - 6 - 3 161 - - - 179 TU13 18 - - 15 - 4 208 - 2 - 247 Baulk 1 1 - - - - - 14 - - - 15 TU14 11 1 - 8 - 1 410 - - - 431 Baulk 4 ------11 - - - 11 TU15 8 - - 5 1 - 99 - - - 113 Baulk 5 1 - - - 1 - 15 - - - 17 Baulk 6 ------11 - - - 11 TU16 15 - - 2 - 3 68 - - 1 89 TU17 11 - - 1 - 1 114 - - - 127 TU18 12 1 - 3 - - 38 - 3 - 57 TU19 4 - - 1 - - 132 - 1 - 138 TU20 15 - - 3 - 4 29 - - 3 54 TU21 2 - - 5 - - 67 - - - 74 TU22 1 - - 6 - - 72 - - - 79 TU23 2 1 - 1 - 2 85 - 2 - 93 TU24 16 - - 5 - 4 79 1 2 - 107 TU25 3 - - - - - 42 - - - 45 TU27 16 - - 3 - 1 255 - - - 275 Total artifacts 225 3 1 107 5 33 3259 1 26 4 3664
191 Block 4 Locality Investigations
After a number of metal detector hits were recorded in the Block 4 locality at the beginning of the 2020 field season, 31 test units (26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 37, 39-41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50,
52, 54-69) were excavated in order to uncover structural features and artifacts (Figure 6-15;
Table 6-9). Block 4 units yielded fewer brick and burned clay fragments per square meter
(59.42) than were recovered at Block 2 (77.88) and Block 3 (171.95), but more than were found in Block 1 (18.36). If this was the dining hall, these are likely to be actual brick fragments. Like
Block 2, Block 4 yielded about half the number of tableware ceramic sherds per square meter
(6.58) than were recovered from Block 3 (11.79), but it yielded the highest number of utilitarian ceramic sherds per square meter of all the blocks. In fact, more than 80 percent of these sherds were recovered from Block 4, which, along with the collection of faunal remains, makes this structure, in my opinion, a stronger contender for the dining hall and kitchen, which would have made use of such storage containers. Block 4, however, yielded the lowest number of nail or nail fragments per square meter. Other artifacts recovered from the Block 4 locality included glass shards (n=7), two slate tablet fragments, two parts of a metal shoe buckle, several pieces of lead shot, and iron kettle fragments. The Block 4 locality also yielded several lithic artifacts (n=68), including one corner-notched point, two flaked scrapers, multiple retouched flakes, and core fragments.
Block 4 test units also contained linear wall features similar to the one uncovered in the
Block 3 test units (Figure 6-16). Two parallel features of approximately the same width (50 cm) were uncovered in the same orientation as the one found in Block 3: southeast to northwest. Both ran about four meters in length and had red clay-like soil on either side. The soil in the floor between the two parallel features was unusually soft and seemingly ashy. The contexts that
192
Figure 6-15. Block 4 Locality Map
193
Table 6-9. Block 4 locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate remains Faunal Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware MD18-27 - - - 4 ------4 MD19-24 ------1 - - 1 MD19-25 - - - 1 - - - - 1 - - 2 T8STP5 ------1 - 1 - - 2 TU26 7 1 - 2 1 2 100 2 - - - 115 TU28 5 - - 1 - - 48 - 1 - - 55 TU29 10 1 1 3 2 - 80 - 1 - 4 102 TU31 5 1 2 1 1 - 63 - 1 - - 74 TU33 23 - 1 - 3 - 55 - - - 6 88 TU37 5 1 - - 2 - 30 - - - 1 39 TU39 11 - 4 1 5 - 44 - - - 1 66 TU40 3 - - - - - 42 - 1 - 1 47 TU41 7 2 2 2 2 1 131 - - - 1 148 TU43 4 - 1 - 3 - 18 - - - - 26 TU44 4 - - - 1 - 56 - - - 1 62 TU46 8 4 6 - 2 - 109 - - - 2 131 Baulk 2 - 1 - - - - 14 - - - - 15 TU48 12 2 3 2 3 1 89 - - - - 112 Baulk 3 ------5 - - - - 5 TU50 6 - 1 2 3 - 109 - 2 - 5 128 TU52 7 - - - - - 19 - - - - 26 TU54 9 - 1 4 - - 109 - - - 1 124 TU55 4 2 2 - - - 15 - 2 - 2 27 TU56 5 - - 1 3 - 123 - 2 - - 134 Baulk 4 1 - - - 2 - 9 - 1 - - 13 TU57 19 - 4 - 7 - 240 - 2 - 1 273 Baulk 5 1 1 - 2 - 2 43 - 1 - 6 56 TU58 9 - - - - - 37 - - - 2 48 TU59 7 - - - 2 - 27 - - - 1 37 TU60 5 1 1 - 3 1 12 - - - - 23 TU61 6 - - - 2 - 39 - - - - 47 TU62 4 1 - 1 1 - 62 - - 1 1 71 TU63 - - - - 4 - 9 - - - - 13 TU64 5 - - 1 3 - 29 - - - - 38 TU65 2 - - 1 4 - 23 - - - - 30 TU66 6 - - - 3 - 3 - - 1 - 13 TU67 3 1 1 - 5 - 34 - - - 2 46 TU68 1 - 1 - 1 - 7 - - - - 10 TU69 - - - 1 - - 14 - - - - 15 Total artifacts 204 19 31 30 68 7 1848 2 17 2 38 2266
194
Figure 6-16. Block 4 Feature Schematic
yielded the highest number of faunal remains (TU29, TU33, TU50, and Baulk 5) all made up part of this soft floor between the two features, and support the suggestion that at least this part of the structure was the kitchen or at least a food preparation area. A 10-liter soil sample was collected from the base of TU46 to be put through a flotation process and analyzed by a
195 botanical specialist. The results were not illuminating but also did not contain any recent contaminants other than rootlets. These results along with the presence of wall features at both
Blocks 3 and 4 suggest that all of the features below Charity Hall’s artifact-horizon (about 30 cmbs) were not disturbed by more recent occupants of the site.
Non-Block Localities
Artifacts were recovered from the entire elevated flat at the base of the slope (Figure 6-
17). However, we did not have the time nor the money to perform a broad-scale excavation sampling scheme that included such low-artifact density areas. Northwest of Blocks 2 and 4, on the other side of the stream that emerges from the westernmost spring, seven positive hits were found with metal detectors that yielded artifacts potentially dating from the time of Charity Hall
(Table 6-10). These included one complete square cut nail, eight square cut nail fragments, and two iron kettle fragments. Northeast of the blocks but still outside of the pine plantation we recovered two square cut nail fragments through metal detecting and recorded three positive shovel tests that were part of the transects laid in 2018 (Table 6-11). These shovel tests yielded four brick fragments, one lithic flake, and one iron kettle fragment. The presence of square cut nails in these two localities (northwest and northeast) might indicate locations of the five student cabins, three of which were torn down and repurposed while the school was in use. Within the actual pine plantation, north of the stone monument and the Block 1 locality, there were a further five positive shovel tests recorded during the 2018 field season (Table 6-12). These yielded one refined earthenware ceramic sherd, one coarse earthenware ceramic sherd, eight lithic artifacts including two retouched flakes, one glass shard, and 12 brick or burned clay fragments.
To the southeast of the monument, on the opposite side of the dirt footpath (Table 6-13), two transects yielded eight positive shovel tests during the 2018 field season, and these contained
196
Figure 6-17. Non-Block Localities Map
197
Table 6-10. Northwest locality artifacts.
Tableware ceramic sherds ceramic Tableware
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian
Coarse earthen. ceramic sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse
Nails and nail fragments nail and Nails
Lithics
Glass sherds Glass
Brick & burned clay fragments clay burned & Brick
Clothing artifacts Clothing
Other metal artifacts metal Other Slate fragments Slate Context Artifacts Total MD18-28 ------2 - 2 MD18-29 - - - 5 ------5 MD18-30 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-16 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-18 ------1 - 1 MD19-19 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-21 - - - 1 ------1 Total artifacts 0 0 0 9 0 0 0 0 3 0 12
Table 6-11. Northeast locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware MD18-5 - - - 1 ------1 MD18-8 - - - 1 ------1 T1STP3 ------1 - - - 1 T3STP1 ------3 - - - 3 T4STP4 - - - - 1 - - - 2 - 3 Total artifacts 0 0 0 2 1 0 4 0 2 0 9
198
Table 6-12. Pine Plantation locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware T1STP5 1 ------1 T1STP6 ------1 - - - 1 T2STP4 - - - - 2 - 4 - - - 6 T2STP5 - - 1 - 3 - 1 - - - 5 T2STP6 - - - - 3 1 6 - - - 10 Total artifacts 1 0 1 0 8 1 12 0 0 0 23
10 brick or burned clay fragments and two coarse earthenware ceramic sherds. In 2019, a cluster of six positive metal detector hits near the easternmost spring yielded five complete square cut nails, one square cut nail fragment, and one square metal buckle frame. Further positive metal detector hits in 2020, which yielded one square cut nail fragment and a lead artifact, led to the excavation of four test units in the locality (30, 32, 34, 38). Unfortunately, these yielded a few historic artifacts and hit sterile subsoil within 15 centimeters. The artifacts yielded by these test units included 10 brick or burned clay fragments, three complete square cut nails, two square cut nail fragments, and one lithic flake. It is very interesting that a total of eight complete square cut nails were recovered from this portion of the site, since this represents one quarter of the complete nails recovered over all three years.
Even though the number of historic artifacts is relatively low when compared to the
Block areas, this was likely still some kind of activity area, even if there was no significant structure associated with it. Perhaps it was the location of the tanning yard, which Bell did not
199
Table 6-13. Southeast locality artifacts.
Utilitarian ceramic sherds ceramic Utilitarian sherds ceramic earthen. Coarse fragments nail and Nails Lithics sherds Glass fragments clay burned & Brick artifacts Clothing artifacts metal Other fragments Slate Artifacts Total Context sherds ceramic Tableware MD19-26 ------1 - - 1 MD19-27 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-28 - - - 2 ------2 MD19-29 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-30 - - - 1 ------1 MD19-31 - - - 1 ------1 MD20-7 ------1 - 1 MD20-9 - - - 1 ------1 T5STP1 - - 1 - - - 1 - - - 2 T5STP2 ------1 - - - 1 T5STP3 - - 1 ------1 T5STP4 ------2 - - - 2 T5STP5 ------1 - - - 1 T6STP2 ------3 - - - 3 T6STP4 ------1 - - - 1 T6STP5 ------1 - - - 1 TU30 - - - 4 - - 3 - - - 7 TU32 - - - 1 - - 2 - - - 3 TU34 - - - - 1 - 5 - - - 6 TU38 ------0 Total artifacts 0 0 2 12 1 0 20 1 1 0 37
list as a structure in any of his documents and which Foster and Guthrie described as being near one of the springs. Considering the fact that Charity Hall encompassed several dozen acres for farming, it may also be that this area had some importance to agricultural work or perhaps a
200 location to repair or build equipment. The cut nails could also have been used as part of a fence or some other activity not associated with architecture.
Proposed Historical Site Layout
Based on all of the data provided here, I have put together a map that includes my tentative reconstruction, subject to revision as additional data are brought to bear (Figure 6-18).
The features uncovered in Block 4 almost certainly belonged to the dining hall and kitchen, due to the presence of faunal remains and utilitarian ceramic sherds. The structure at Block 3, southwest of the stream, has one wall dimension which matches Bell’s description of one of the two dwellings, which could have been Bell’s own house due to the larger size and high density of artifacts in the vicinity. The presence of cut nail artifacts with fewer associated brick or burned clay fragments around the Block 1 locality could be evidence of the horse band mill or the tan yard. The same applies to the cluster of nails recovered near the easternmost spring, which I speculate was the tanning yard. A cluster of nails as well as the presence of brick and burned clay fragments and tableware ceramic sherds in the Block 2 locality point to the presence of the other dwelling house and the school house, both of which had cat-and-clay chimneys. The presence of cut nail artifacts on the west side of the site as well as to the north of the Block 1 locality could indicate student cabins or the smokehouse. Foster and Guthrie in 1825 noted 30 acres of “tillable land” to the south of the buildings, which were also marked on the 1834 survey as crossing what is today Doss Drive near what is today the landowner’s modern-day house (see
Figure 6-1), and another 23 acres “in the low ground” north of the buildings (probably within the pine plantation). Finally, the 1834 survey noted a wagon road crossing the section boundaries running north toward Levi Colbert’s house. This road almost certainly was used to travel not
201
Figure 6-18. Historical Layout Schematic of Charity Hall
202 only between the two properties but also to Bell’s Ferry and thereon to Cotton Gin Port. It is probably also the road used by other missionaries who visited the site on their way to Florence.
203 CHAPTER 7 MEASURING CHARITY HALL: LABORATORY METHODS AND RESULTS
Upon the conclusion of each of the three field seasons, all of the recovered artifacts were brought to the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) in Gainesville, Florida, to be cleaned, analyzed, and curated. Having discussed the recovery of artifacts spatially by category in the last chapter, I here provide a more detailed analysis of the artifacts within each category along with what their presence means for my research questions.
Ceramic Artifacts
Nearly 600 ceramic sherds were recovered from Charity Hall during all three field seasons (Table 7-1). The majority of these (n=533) were tableware sherds used for serving food in a formal dining setting, which was an important part of the “civilization” of the Chickasaw and Choctaw children who attended the school. The field crew recovered a total of 36
“utilitarian” ceramic sherds, including redware, coarse earthenware, and stoneware. The remaining 29 ceramic sherds were classified as “indigenous” coarse earthenware ceramics, which appear to be associated with an earlier site occupation, although Riggs (2017:21) argued that Catawba ware found at the Valley Towns Baptist Mission was used by Native cooks who worked at that mission, which was contemporaneous with Charity Hall. There is no evidence, however, that any indigenous people outside of the mission families and hired workers were cooking at Charity Hall.
Tableware
Most of the tableware sherds recovered from Charity Hall were either pearlware (n=346) or creamware (n=92), both of which are considered “refined earthenware.” There were an additional 65 sherds that were also identified as refined earthenware, but they did not have an adequately observable undecorated surface to allow for an appraisal of whether they were
204 Table 7-1. Summary of ceramic artifacts. Form / Ware Base Rim Body Total Tableware 52 105 376 533 Pearlware 42 68 236 346 Creamware 5 15 72 92 Unid. Refined Earthenware 0 17 48 65 Porcelain, Chinese 4 5 15 24 Whiteware 1 0 4 5 Ironstone/White Granite 0 0 1 1 Utilitarian 0 3 33 36 Redware 0 2 19 21 Coarse Earthenware 0 1 11 12 American Stoneware 0 0 3 3 Indigenous 0 1 28 29 Total 52 109 437 598
pearlware or creamware. Creamware is the older type, developed in 1762 by Josiah Wedgwood who marketed it to the British Queen Charlotte (wife of George III) and later to Catherine the
Great (Miller 2015). Creamware became common in North America after 1770 and remained popular through the 1840s, but it was most popularly produced around 1800. Beginning in the
1780s, producers of refined earthenware ceramics began adding a blue “China glaze” to their vessels in an effort to imitate Chinese porcelain (Miller and Hunter 2001). These are known today as pearlware ceramics and were also popular until the 1840s, when whiteware vessels that were fired at a higher temperature than what we called “refined earthenware” artifacts became more common. According to Noël Hume (1969:130), pearlware was the dominant tableware in the United States by 1810 but was on its way out of use during the 1820s. Only five whiteware sherds were recovered from Charity Hall and with the single ironstone sherd represent vessels that may have been acquired later in the life of the school or after its closing in 1830, as they
205 Table 7-2. Summary of tableware vessel categories. Ware Flat % Id. Hollow % Id. Total Id. Unid. Pearlware 248 83.50% 49 16.50% 297 49 Creamware 55 77.46% 16 22.54% 71 21 Unid. Refined Earthenware 27 64.29% 15 35.71% 42 23 Porcelain, Chinese 4 20.00% 16 80.00% 20 4 Whiteware 2 40.00% 3 60.00% 5 0 Ironstone/White Granite 0 0.00% 1 100.00% 1 0 Total 336 100 436 97
were more commonly used during the 1830s and 1840s. Also present were 24 Chinese porcelain sherds, showing that the mission family was able to get access to more expensive and higher- quality tableware for use in their “civilization” of Indian children. Most of these were recovered from Block 4, which I posited was the dining hall, supporting this hypothesis, but it is possible that these were personal items that belonged to Bell and his wife.
Of the 533 tableware sherds recovered from Charity Hall, 436 were able to be identified as either “flat” or “hollow” (Table 7-2). The majority of refined earthenware sherds (64 to 83 percent, depending on the ware) were identified as flat, meaning that they probably belonged to dinner plates, serving platters, or saucers, but many were also identified as coming from hollow vessels, such as bowls and cups. The majority of the Chinese porcelain sherds, on the other hand, mostly came from hollow vessels (80 percent). Where a base or rim length exceeded 20 mm, an estimate was made of the rim or base diameter represented by the ceramic sherds (Tables 7-3 and
7-4). Estimated base diameters range from 50 to 200 mm. The smallest of these, perhaps those smaller than 100 mm, probably belonged to cups, bowls, or saucers. The vessels with larger bases were likely plates or serving platters. The same applies to rim diameters, which ranged in diameter from 100 to 320 mm.
206 Table 7-3. Estimated ceramic vessel base diameters (mm). Base Est. Sherds (by ware) Length Diameter Decoration Pearlware 23 200 None Pearlware 37 180 None Pearlware 36 180 None Pearlware (two mended sherds) 35 180 None Pearlware 32 180 None Pearlware 20 180 None Pearlware 22 120 Transferprint Pearlware 21 120 None Pearlware 25 115 None Creamware 49 100 None Pearlware 20 100 None Pearlware 20 100 None Pearlware 39 90 None Pearlware 26 90 None Creamware 36 80 None Pearlware 28 60 Handpainted Blue Porcelain, Chinese 28 60 Handpainted Blue Pearlware 20 50 None Pearlware 20 50 Transfer Print Whiteware 20 50 None
Table 7-4. Estimated ceramic vessel rim diameters (mm). Est. Sherds (by ware) Rim Length Diameter Decoration Creamware 31 320 Shell Edge, green Redware 43 280 Folded Rim Redware 36 260 Folded Rim Pearlware 21 240 None Pearlware 33 230 Transfer Print Pearlware 30 200 Shell Edge, green Pearlware 24 190 Shell Edge, green Pearlware 21 180 Polychrome, warm Pearlware 21 140 Polychrome, warm Pearlware 34 110 Transfer Print Pearlware 28 100 Handpainted Blue
207 Decorations for all ceramic sherds were recorded, and in the case of tableware ceramics, this included recording the overall genre and location (Table 7-5) as well as individual stylistic elements (Table 7-6). I utilized the DAACS (Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative
Slavery) Ceramic Genre Appendix (Bates and Cooper 2018) and the DAACS Ceramic Pattern
Index (Bates 2018) and borrowed both genre and stylistic terminology from the general DAACS manuals. About half of the tableware sherds (n=274) had some kind of decoration, whether on the vessel interior (n=201), exterior (n=39), or both (n=26). For flat sherds, which came from platters or plates, I considered the top of the plate to be the interior, so none of those vessels would have had decorations on their exteriors. All of the vessels with exterior decorations, therefore, were hollow vessels such as cups or bowls that had decorations on the outside, and the same goes for vessels with decorations on both sides. There were eight remaining sherds which had decorations, but the poor preservation kept me from stating definitively where the decoration appeared.
The most common genre that appeared on tableware ceramics from Charity Hall was transfer printing (Figure 7-1), which resulted from affixing a printed pattern to either the interior or exterior of a ceramic vessel. Transfer printing occurred on 53 of the 346 pearlware sherds
(15.3%) but only 5 of the 92 creamware sherds (5.4%). The number of unidentified refined earthenware ceramic sherds with transfer printing on both sides is skewed due to the fact that the transfer prints obscured my ability to identify the wares of those individual sherds. The second- most common decoration genre was blue hand painting, which appeared almost exclusively on pearlware and Chinese porcelain sherds (Figure 7-2). The rest of the assemblage of tableware ceramics consisted of various molded-edge and shell-edged decorations as well as polychrome hand painting (Figure 7-3). A number of slipware sherds (n=21), including mochaware, were
208
Table 7-5. Tableware sherds by decoration genre.
Creamware U.Ref.Earthen. Ch. Porcelain, Whiteware Total Genre / Location Pearlware Handpainted Blue 34 1 0 19 1 55 Interior 18 1 0 14 1 34 Exterior 9 0 0 3 0 12 Both 6 0 0 2 0 8 Unidentifiable 1 0 0 0 0 1 Molded Edge 4 2 1 0 0 7 Interior 4 2 1 0 0 7 Polychrome, warm 26 2 0 0 0 28 Interior 22 0 0 0 0 22 Exterior 4 1 0 0 0 5 Both 0 1 0 0 0 1 Shell Edge, blue 16 2 3 0 0 21 Interior 16 2 3 0 0 21 Shell Edge, green 13 2 2 0 0 17 Interior 13 2 2 0 0 17 Slipware 12 2 7 0 0 21 Interior 6 0 0 0 0 6 Exterior 6 2 7 0 0 15 Both 0 0 0 0 0 0 Transfer Print 59 6 28 0 1 94 Interior 53 5 16 0 0 74 Exterior 3 0 0 0 1 4 Both 3 1 12 0 0 16 Unidentifiable 17 6 14 1 0 38 Interior 12 6 8 1 0 27 Exterior 3 0 0 0 0 3 Both 0 0 1 0 0 1 Unidentifiable 2 0 5 0 0 7 Total Decorated 177 21 54 20 2 274 Interior 140 16 29 15 1 201 Exterior 25 3 7 3 1 39 Both 9 2 13 2 0 26 Unidentifiable 3 0 5 0 0 8
209
Table 7-6. Stylistic element frequencies on tableware sherds.
Pearlware
Creamware
U.Ref.Earthen.
Porcelain, Ch. Porcelain,
Whiteware
Total
Pearlware
Creamware
U.Ref.Earthen.
Porcelain, Ch. Porcelain, Whiteware Genre / Stylistic Element Genre / Stylistic Element Total Handpainted Blue Shell Edge, blue Botanical Band, unid. 1 0 0 0 0 1 Shell Edge 01 0 0 1 0 0 1 Botanical, composite 1 0 0 0 0 1 Shell Edge 02 8 1 1 0 0 10 Botanical, unid. 15 0 0 4 0 19 Shell Edge 03 6 0 1 0 0 7 Dots 0 0 0 2 0 2 Shell Edge 06 0 1 0 0 0 1 Fish Roe, Unid. 1 0 0 0 0 1 Shell Edge 20 1 0 0 0 0 1 Geometric Band, unid. 2 0 0 1 0 3 Unidentifiable 1 0 0 0 0 1 Grass 0 0 0 1 0 1 Shell Edge, green Hatched Line Band 02 0 0 0 2 0 2 Shell Edge 02 4 0 1 0 0 5 Hatched Line Band 03 0 0 0 1 0 1 Shell Edge 03 7 1 1 0 0 9 House 0 0 0 1 0 1 Shell Edge 04 0 1 0 0 0 1 Plain Band 01 7 0 0 3 1 11 Unidentifiable 2 0 0 0 0 2 Plain Band 07 4 1 0 0 0 5 Slipware Solid 0 0 0 1 0 1 Cordoned 4 0 0 0 0 4 Trellis Band 03 0 0 0 1 0 1 Dendritic 1 1 1 0 0 3 Unidentifiable 8 0 0 8 0 16 Marbleized 2 0 0 0 0 2 Molded Edge Plain Band 01 2 0 0 0 0 2 Botanical Band, unid. 1 0 0 1 0 2 Plain Band 02 4 1 1 0 0 6 Molded Band 03 1 0 0 0 0 1 Solid 3 2 5 0 0 10 Molded Edge 04 0 2 1 0 0 3 Unidentifiable 0 0 2 0 0 2 Molded Edge 06 2 0 0 0 0 2 Transfer Print Polychrome, warm Arabian Camel 2 0 0 0 0 2 Botanical, composite 1 0 0 0 0 1 Pagoda 0 1 0 0 0 1 Botanical, unid. 12 0 0 0 0 12 Willow 4 0 0 0 0 4 Geometric Band, unid. 7 0 0 0 0 7 Unidentifiable 53 5 28 0 1 87 Plain Band 01 4 2 0 0 0 6 Unidentifiable Plain Band 04 7 0 0 0 0 7 Unidentifiable 17 6 14 1 0 38 Wavy Band, unid. 1 0 0 0 0 1 * Totals for each genre not given due to some sherds displaying Unidentifiable 1 1 0 0 0 2 multiple stylistic elements.
also recovered from Charity Hall, most of which featured exterior decorations (n=15) suggesting that they were hollow vessels. A number of ceramic sherds featured decorations that were either too damaged or too small to identify (n=38).
The individual stylistic elements and motifs show that there was a large assortment of ceramic tableware vessels present at Charity Hall. There are many instances where these
210
Figure 7-1. Transfer Printed Ceramic Sherd
Figure 7-2. Hand-painted Chinese Porcelain sherd with house motif
211
Figure 7-3. Polychrome refined earthenware sherd
elements overlap on singular vessels (for example, a plate rim with a plain band could also have featured botanical hand-painted elements), but overall this shows that they were able to furnish the Choctaw and Chickasaw children with a wide array of dining and serving vessels and used these to teach them how to dine in a “civilized” fashion. There were more than three different types of transfer printed vessels, four different molded edge types, at least eight different types of shell edge, and a variety of hand painting both in blue and polychrome.
Utilitarian Ceramics
I use the descriptor “utilitarian” to describe ceramic sherds that came from various types of storage or food production vessels (see Table 6-1). The largest number of utilitarian ceramic sherds are classified as redware (n=21), all of which have a dark yellowish brown lead glaze on both the interior and exterior surfaces. All of the redware sherds were recovered from the Block
212
Figure 7-4. Coarse earthenware sherd; possible cheese strainer fragment
4 locality, and may have belonged to just one or two individual vessels. Two redware rim sherds had very similar estimated rim diameters—280 mm and 260 mm—but the thickness is variable across all the sherds (mean 5.976, median 5.805, range 6.230; all in mm). Both rim sherds were folded. The remaining utilitarian sherds were either coarse earthenware or American stoneware.
One of the coarse earthenware sherds (Figure 7-4) is particularly interesting in that it has part of a hole that is reminiscent of a cheese strainer. We know from primary source documents that cattle were kept at Charity Hall, so it is possible that there was a dairying operation taking place.
Nail Artifacts
Field crews recovered 259 nail artifacts, 248 of which were identified as square cut nails, which were the dominant nail used during the 1820s. Prior to 1790, most nails used in North
213 Table 7-7. Summary of nail artifacts. Head and Total w/ Overall Manu. Tech Head Shank Complete Heads % Shank Total Machine Cut 4 123 32 159 - 89 248 Handmade Head 3 66 21 90 56.60% - 90 Machine-headed 0 12 6 18 11.32% - 18 Unid. Head 1 45 5 51 32.08% - 51 Wrought / Forged 0 0 0 0 - 3 3 Unidentifiable 3 2 0 5 - 3 8
America were “wrought,” but following the American Revolution, many cut nail manufactories were established in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and American producers began to outproduce their British counterparts (Nelson 1968:4). By 1800, nail machines were developed that allowed the production of square cut nails to become more widespread (Nelson 1968:5). This means that the cut nails used at Charity Hall could have been produced by a local manufacturer, such as one in Cotton Gin Port, or by some factory further away, on the Atlantic coast, for instance. Three of the other nail artifacts were identified as being mendable fragments of a single wrought iron spike, and the remaining eight nail artifacts were unidentifiable due to poor preservation (Table 7-7). The overall number of nail artifacts is quite small when compared to other contemporary sites (see comparison in Chapter 8), but this is to be expected since horizontal log cabins did not require large numbers of nails (Jurney 1987:83).
Among square cut nail artifacts, 159 had heads, and 108 of these heads were identifiable as being either handmade or machine-headed. More than half (n=90) of the heads found on cut nails were handmade, which makes sense since this type of head was very commonly produced until the 1830s. About 11 percent of the cut nails (n=18) were machine-headed, which was a type produced beginning in 1815 and into the late 1830s (Nelson 1968:7-8). Both types of cut nails
214 are known to have been irregular in length (Nelson 1968:8), and this is true of the assemblage of complete nails recovered from Charity Hall (Table 7-8; Figure 7-5).
While I do include pennyweight conversions here (as well as in Table 6-5), some scholars avoid using that system, arguing that it does not adequately show the entire range of nail size variation nor does it show slight differences in specific nails (Jurney 1987:83). More than one third of the complete cut nails were between 60 mm and 72 mm in length (n=13). Three of the longest nails were over 100 mm in length and were machine-headed, but there were also several shorter nails between 25 mm and 55 mm in length (n=15). Jurney (1987:87) documented that joist nails were commonly between 83 and 102 mm in length, so the longer nails present here could have been used for that purpose—securing a horizontal structural beam to redistribute weight. The nails closer to 60 mm could have been ceiling or flooring nails, according to
Jurney’s schema, and the ones around 50 mm in length could have been used to secure tin roofs
(Jurney 1987:87). The Reverend Bell noted that the student cabins all had tin roofs (see Chapter
5), so these nails could be indicators of student cabins. The nails on the shorter end of the spectrum—sometimes referred to as “lath” nails—were potentially used in furniture, but they have also been documented as being used in wooden roofs (Jurney 1987:87), such as the clapboard roofs described by Bell on other school structures. One metal artifact that I list as UID metal was recovered with an actual square cut lath nail still inserted into an aperture (Figure 7-6).
The size and weight of this metal object suggest that it was probably something cobbled together at the site and not something produced in a factory. The “modifications” of the nails which still had observable ends were various, and these included three longer nails with “pulled” ends, which may have been the result of the dismantling of three of the five student cabins. There were, however, not enough pulled nail artifacts to justify the placement of dismantled cabins in a
215 Table 7-8. Machine cut nail measurements. Head Type End Modification Length (mm) Pennyweight Weight (g) Machine-headed Point Bent 106.65 20d 15.0 Machine-headed Point Straight 106.54 20d 16.7 Machine-headed Point Straight 104.90 20d 15.3 Handmade Point Straight 94.00 16d 18.8 Handmade Flared out Bent 72.00 9d 5.7 Handmade Flared out Pulled 70.00 9d 5.2 Handmade Blunt Pulled 66.00 9d 5.8 Handmade Blunt Clinched 65.00 8d 2.7 Handmade Blunt Straight 64.57 8d 5.1 Handmade Blunt Straight 64.51 8d 4.7 Machine-headed Blunt Straight 64.34 8d 5.8 Machine-headed Point Straight 62.54 8d 12.1 Machine-headed Point Bent 62.54 8d 8.8 Handmade Blunt Straight 62.45 8d 5.8 Handmade Blunt Straight 60.34 7d 3.6 Handmade Blunt Straight 60.32 7d 3.8 Unidentifiable Blunt Pulled 60.00 7d 4.1 Unidentifiable Blunt Straight 54.53 7d 6.7 Handmade Point Straight 52.53 6d 2.8 Handmade Flared out Bent 52.00 6d 2.8 Handmade Blunt Straight 50.51 6d 3.1 Unidentifiable Blunt Straight 49.51 6d 2.8 Handmade Blunt Straight 45.55 5d 4.8 Handmade Blunt Clinched 45.00 5d 3.2 Unidentifiable Blunt Bent 43.00 5d 3.2 Handmade Blunt Straight 41.33 5d 2.8 Unidentifiable Blunt Clinched 39.00 4d 2.4 Handmade Blunt Bent 34.00 3d 1.7 Handmade Blunt Bent 33.30 3d 2.5 Handmade Blunt Straight 31.94 3d 1.7 Handmade Blunt Pulled 27.00 2d 2.2 Handmade Blunt Straight 26.61 2d 1.7 Missing Blunt Clinched N/A N/A N/A Missing Blunt Straight N/A N/A N/A Missing Blunt Straight N/A N/A N/A Missing Point Straight N/A N/A N/A Missing Point Straight N/A N/A N/A Missing Point Straight N/A N/A N/A
216
Figure 7-5. Machine Cut Nail Pennyweight Frequency Distribution
Figure 7-6. UID metal artifact with square cut nail insertion
217 Table 7-9. Summary of glass artifacts. Form / Color Base Wt. (g) Rim Wt. (g) Body Wt. (g) Total Wt. (g) Vessel 2 0.9 3 1.6 34 34.0 39 36.5 Colorless - - 2 0.9 11 6.0 13 6.9 White - - 1 0.7 12 13.9 13 14.6 Green / Olive Green - - - - 6 5.5 6 5.5 Light Green / Aqua 1 0.5 - - 3 6.4 4 6.9 Yellowish Brown - - - - 2 2.2 2 2.2 Rose 1 0.4 - - - - 1 0.4 Flat - - - - 21 7.7 21 7.7 Light Green / Aqua - - - - 13 4.3 13 4.3 White - - - - 4 1.6 4 1.6 Colorless - - - - 3 1.3 3 1.3 Green / Olive Green - - - - 1 0.5 1 0.5 Total 60 44.2
specific locality. The same can be said for the geographical distribution of the whole nail assemblage in general. I do not think the assemblage is robust enough to make confident speculation about the locations of specific buildings based on nail types alone.
Glass Artifacts
A total of 60 shards of glass were recovered across all three field seasons—21 of which were flat and 39 of which were hollow, the latter being indicative of vessels such as bottles, jars, and tableware (Table 7-9). The nineteenth century saw a major increase in the amount and variety of glass used in the United States. While there were only nine “glass houses” operating in the US in 1800, there were 108 in existence by 1837 (Lorrain 1968:35). This was in part due to the development of mass transportation systems like the invention of the steamboat in 1807 and later (after the closure of Charity Hall) a tremendous increase in the number of railroad lines
(Lorrain 1968:35). Another driver, especially of the production of glass vessels, was the discovery in 1810 that foods keep longer if bottled and cooked thoroughly (Lorrain 1968:38).
The most common method for producing bottles and tableware was “blowing.” Vessels could be
218 Table 7-10. Glass shard thickness (mm) Form / Color n mean median range Vessel 37 2.196 1.600 8.580 Colorless 13 1.838 1.390 2.910 White 12 2.208 1.415 8.310 Green / Olive Green 6 2.293 2.055 2.170 Light Green / Aqua 3 2.487 1.980 2.620 Yellowish Brown 2 3.210 3.210 1.000 Rose 1 3.210 3.210 N/A Flat 20 1.441 1.375 0.940 Light Green / Aqua 13 1.417 1.360 0.720 White 3 1.367 1.210 0.830 Colorless 3 1.443 1.390 0.420 Green / Olive Green 1 1.970 1.970 N/A
hand-blown, free-blown, or off-hand-blown (Lorrain 1968:35). Flat glass in 1800 was commonly produced using both “crown” and “cylinder” methods, which allowed glass to be produced in sheets (Lorrain 1968:37). The bottle glass shards recovered from Charity Hall came in various colors including white, green, light green, yellowish brown, and rose, but the largest number
(n=13) were colorless. The thickness of all vessel shards was measured (Table 7-10), and the colorless bottle shards were consistently among the thinnest, suggesting that they are fragments of medicine bottles (Fike 1987). Most of the fragments of the other vessels, however, were too small to allow for an estimation of their overall form.
The thickness of the flat glass shards was fairly uniform (thickness range was less than 1 mm), and the majority of the flat shards were of a light green color, although there were also present three white shards and three colorless. According to Wieland’s (2009) method of dating window glass shards based on thickness, the shards—if they did once belong to windows— would probably not have been produced until after 1845, long after Charity Hall closed and the
219 Chickasaw land was sold. This supposition, along with the fact that there are a tiny number of shards (n=20) relative to artifacts, suggests that this glass was not associated with windows or anything architectural. The flat glass almost certainly originated from special purpose objects: lanterns, picture frames, or mirrors. There were also clocks with glass panels produced during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which would have been important to the regimented nature of life at Charity Hall. It is also possible that some of the flat shards were fragments of medicine bottles, some of which had flat sides. It is probably the case that one particular flat shard that is darker green in color was once part of the flat side of a vessel. The bottle or vessel glass (n=37) was also quite scarce, but this was not entirely unpredictable, since there was no consumption of alcohol at Charity Hall. In fact, the missionaries had some success at convincing the Chickasaw leaders to banish alcohol altogether within the Chickasaw Nation toward the end of the 1820s (ABCFM 1829a:10), but this did not last long, especially once it became clear that the Chickasaws were going to be removed west of the Mississippi River, eroding much of the faith that they had acquired with the help of the pastors (ABCFM
1830c:383).
Brick and Burned Clay Artifacts
Bell wrote that the dining room had one brick chimney with two fireplaces, that the two dwelling houses and the school house each had two cat-and-clay chimneys apiece, and that each of the five original student cabins had a single cat-and-clay chimney (Meacham 2007:9-11).
Additionally, a newspaper account of the placing of the stone monument at the site on the centenary of the school’s founding (Moore 1925) stated that the monument was placed on top of a brick oven and that some of the bricks were used to build a foundation for the monument.
Unfortunately, it was not obvious during the lab analysis what the difference was between
220
Figure 7-7. Thickness of Bricks
“brick” and “cat-and-clay,” which is why the material is described as “brick and/or burned clay” throughout this dissertation. Some of the fired fragments are obviously red, but the variety and range of colors makes it impossible to divide them up cleanly into two distinct types. This is due to the fact that homemade brick is less distinctive from highly-fired industrial-made brick and that the overwhelming majority of artifacts were very small fragments with a maximum size measurement less than one centimeter.
Among the brick and burned clay artifacts, only eight were large enough and had three dimensions preserved that allowed for a thickness measurement to be taken (Figure 7-7). Five of these were between 30 mm and 40 mm thick, while the remaining three fell between 50 mm and
70 mm. Local historian Mitch Caver told me that Levi Colbert had a brick kiln at the later residence to which he removed after 1825 (several miles to the northwest), but it is not clear
221 whether one was also in operation at the older, nearby Colbert residence at the time when
Charity Hall was constructed. It is possible that these bricks, whether cat-and-clay or not, were produced in the Chickasaw Nation or Cotton Gin Port, or were perhaps brought in by boat on the
Tombigbee River. As I discussed in Chapter 6, the lack of whole bricks shows that these objects were either repurposed or stolen by brick robbers—a practice common throughout the nineteenth century.
Other Nineteenth Century Artifacts
A number of other artifacts were also recovered from Charity Hall which are not conducive to quantitative analysis. I therefore here present them based on “use” categories with the caveat that such artifacts may have had additional uses or meanings for those who came into contact with them.
Cooking and Dining
Aside from ceramic tableware and utilitarian vessel fragments, the crews also recovered eight metal kettle (Figure 7-8) and three utensil fragments from Charity Hall. All three of the utensil artifacts are fragments of knife blades, one of which still retains a pointed tang, but none of which retain their handles. The two blade fragments with missing tangs were recovered from test units in separate block localities and measure 18 mm in width. Both retain some sharpness on one side of the blade as well as pointed tips. The other was recovered through metal detecting and is 20 mm wide with a missing tip (Figure 7-9).
Clothing
Across all three field seasons, several clothing accessories were recovered (Table 7-11).
These artifacts include four clothing buttons—two glass molded (Figure 7-10) and the other two stamped metal (Figure 7-11). All four buttons are missing their shanks, and the two glass buttons
222
Figure 7-8. Metal Kettle Fragment
Figure 7-9. Metal Knife Blade Fragment
223 Table 7-11. Summary of clothing artifacts. Height Diameter Artifact Weight (g) (mm) (mm) Notes Stamped brass button 1.7 1.24 17.12 Missing shank; acanthus leaf ring and flower motifs on back Stamped brass button 0.8 1.96 16.43 Missing shank Amethyst glass button 0.4 2.74 10.53 Missing shank; engraved wheel /sun motif Black glass button 1 5.52 10.62 Missing shank; engraved wheel /sun motif Square buckle frame 7.5 - - Frame only D-shape buckle frame 12.4 - - Frame only Square buckle frame 11.8 - - Broken clasp fragment attached to frame Shoe buckle frame 5.7 - - D-shape; found in situ with tongue Shoe buckle tongue 5.2 - - Loop shaped; found in situ with frame
are missing the metal casings in which they would have been inlaid. One of the glass buttons is of amethyst color while the other is black. Glass buttons such as these were typically placed into casings with an extra backing layer of tin or quicksilver to help them reflect (Crummett and
Freeman 1939:79). One of the stamped buttons, when placed under a microscope, still has a somewhat discernable back stamp featuring five star or flower motifs in the center, surrounded by a ring of acanthus along the outer edge. Both metal buttons were plated with silver, which has now turned yellow. These buttons may have been surplus military and naval buttons that had no actual military significance and were used purely by civilians (Crummett and Freeman 1939:93).
Such buttons were produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by stamping ornamentation onto “blank” plates and then soldering on shanks with flux and blow torch
(Crummett and Freeman 1939:53-54). Both buttons match South’s (1964:115, 122) “Type 18” button, which he described as stamped brass. This type was characterized as slightly concave on the back with decorations such as wreathe motifs with front sides that were plain. South
(1964:122) dated this type of button to the years spanning 1800-1865, which encompasses the dates that Charity Hall was in operation.
224
Figure 7-10. Amethyst Glass Button Fragment
Figure 7-11. Copper-Plated Button Fragment
225 What is immediately surprising is the small size of the button assemblage, especially considering the fact that a significant part of the school’s everyday practice was teaching female students how to sew. There are several indicators in the primary-source documents that cloth was being brought to Charity Hall and that the women living there were making clothes for the children. One would therefore expect to find a larger number of buttons, especially those made of bone, which were the common buttons of that time. The glass buttons, in fact, are representative of more high-end types that were more decorative and not for practical everyday use, especially on a farm. One explanation for missing bone buttons could be soil acidity. The National
Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) soil survey (see Figure 6-2) shows that the soils where the test units were dug had a pH rating between 5.0 and 5.4, which they describe as being “very strongly acid.” The NRCS (Surabian 2012:4) states that bone preservation is generally “adverse” in soils that are pH 5.3 or less and that bone can deteriorate rapidly under such conditions, due to the dissolution of inorganic hydroxylapatite, which makes up 70 percent of bone. This would also explain the generally small faunal assemblage that was recovered from Charity Hall (which
I discuss later in this chapter). However, there were other items one would expect to find associated with sewing and tailoring activity that were also missing from our excavations—items such as scissor fragments, straight pins, and thimbles. It may just be the case that we were not fortunate with unit placement and have not yet uncovered a specific sewing activity area on the site.
Excavators also recovered five metal clothing buckle artifacts from Charity Hall (see
Table 7-11), including two fragments of a complete shoe buckle (tongue and frame) found intact in one of the test units at Block 4. The remaining three metal clothing buckle artifacts likely
226
Figure 7-12. Square Clothing Buckle Frame
belonged to suspenders or waist belts. One is a D-shape (oval-shaped) frame, while the other two are square-shaped frames. One of these still has a small clasp attached to one side (Figure 7-12).
Education
Six slate artifacts were recovered during the 2020 field season (Figure 7-13), five of which are flat writing tablet fragments. The sixth has an elongated square shape and may have served as part of a writing implement. There was no mention in any of the known primary-source documents of slate being used for education, but slate tablets and pencils were quite common beginning in the middle of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century (Davies 2005:63).
Writing slate tablets were typically 2.5 mm thick and machine polished, sometimes featuring drilled holes so that several could be bound together as a “book.” Standard sizes included 5 x 7, 6 x 9, 7 x 11, and 8 x 12 inches. The surface could be ruled with lines, divided into squares, or left
227
Figure 7-13. Slate Artifacts
blank. Some were wire bound or sat in a wooden frame. Others featured a felt strip or ribbon secured to the edge to protect the fingers from splinters. Pointed slate pencils were typically five and a half inches long and came in boxes of a dozen or 100 at a time. Some came with a lower half wrapped in paper printed with geometric designs while others were encased in cedar wood like modern lead pencils (Davies 2005:63-64). Unfortunately, none of the fragments recovered from Charity Hall show any evidence of encasing, printing, or decoration.
Recreation
Only one “true” recreational artifact was recovered from Charity Hall: a coarse earthenware marble that was not decorated or dyed (Figure 7-14). Toy ceramic marbles were made throughout the nineteenth century and were produced of earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. Common low-fired earthenware marbles, such as that recovered from Charity Hall,
228
Figure 7-14. Coarse earthenware marble
were known colloquially as “commies” and were manufactured well into the twentieth century
(Carskadden and Gartley 1990:56). During the 1840s, German manufacturers came to dominate the industry with the exportation of glass marbles, but poorer children continued to use
“commies” because they were inexpensive. They came in many colors—reds, tans, and grays— and some were painted or dyed (Carskadden and Gartley 1990:56). The marble that we recovered was probably handmade locally, due to the fact that it is unglazed and made of coarse earthenware.
I include here as well the presence of 16 individual lead shot artifacts. One would typically not consider shot to be “recreational” and more for hunting and food gathering, but I place it here because there was no presence of wild game animals in the faunal assemblage
229 collected from Charity Hall. If guns were not being used for hunting, it is possible that the children were practicing marksmanship. This line of argumentation may seem dubious, but consider the fact that the known Choctaw and Chickasaw champions of the mission schools,
Major Levi Colbert, Colonel Henry Love, and Colonel John Pitchlynn were all decorated military figures. There is no mention of marksmanship training in the primary-source documents, but there is also no mention of hunting or guns at all.
Metal Hardware
Artifacts recovered that fall into the “hardware” category include unidentified metal artifacts as well as animal harness fragments. As discussed earlier, a metal artifact was recovered with an inlaid square cut nail (see Figure 7-6). Three utilitarian animal harness buckles were also recovered from Charity Hall, which is no surprise since Bell mentioned purchasing a horse as well as the erecting of a horse band mill on the site, which was used to process grains (see
Chapter 5). All three buckle artifacts are frames—one circular (Figure 7-15) and the other two square. There were other metal artifacts that are yet to be identified. One appears to be a hoe blade head while two others are classified as unidentified (UID) metal hardware fragments
(Figure 7-16).
Faunal Assemblage
The faunal assemblage recovered from Charity Hall (Table 7-12) is smaller than one would expect since the history describes the school as having housed many animals as part of its operations, including cows, pigs, and horses. This could be due to the fact, as I outlined in the clothing artifact discussion, that the soils underlying Charity Hall are very acidic and could have caused the bone to deteriorate quickly, or it could just be the case that we did not place test units in locations where more faunal remains still survive. All of the animal remains that were
230
Figure 7-15. Field photo of metal harness fragment with ceramic tableware sherd
Figure 7-16. An unidentified metal hardware fragment
231 Table 7-12. Summary of faunal assemblage. Taxonomy Element Portion NISP Wt. (g) Bos taurus astragalus fragment 1 25.4 Bos taurus femur shaft 1 122.4 Caprine mandible fragment 1 10 Caprine phalanx proximal 1 0.8 Caprine radius fragment 1 1.5 Sus scrofa mandible fragment 1 6.4 Sus scrofa mandible fragment 1 14 Sus scrofa tibia distal 1 1.5 Mammal femur distal 1 0.8 Mammal fragment 24 12.3 Vertebrate fragment 5 0.5 Total 38 195.6
recovered came from Block 4, which I use as evidence to support its structure as the dining hall and kitchen, where food preparation took place. Most of the animal remains recovered belonged to mammals, but most were too small to be specifically identifiable. However, Nicolas Delsol, who analyzed the assemblage, identified two cow bones (bos taurus), three sheep or goat bones
(caprine), and three pig bones.
The sheep or goat bones were a big surprise since there was no mention of their presence in any of the primary-source documents. What is most important about these data, however, is that there are no “wild game” animals, such as deer, which would have appeared in great quantities where Chickasaws were living just a couple of decades earlier. One of the ways that the missionaries “civilized” the Chickasaws through materiality and practice was not only showing them how to dine with tableware ceramics and utensils but also prescribing what foods they should be eating. The children were consuming foods that were largely the result of their own labor and the labor of the farmers whom the Reverend Bell employed to teach techniques to the male students. The children were taught to farm and keep animals in the way of Europeans
232 rather than hunt and tend crops in the ways of their ancestors. It is not mentioned explicitly in any primary-source account that I can find, but this was probably an important facet of the civilization process since the spirituality of American Indians generally attributes power to specific animals, thereby conditioning the way they procured and consumed food. The whole dining experience, from the table to the implements to the food was all part of the practice of civilization.
Lithic Artifacts
In addition to nineteenth-century artifacts, a number of lithic artifacts (along with the
“indigenous” ceramics mentioned earlier) were recovered that point to the existence of an earlier occupation at the site. Excavations across the site only reached between 30 and 40 cmbs, so the lithic assemblage (Table 7-13) discussed should only be considered a preliminary examination of what could be future investigations into what appears to be an Archaic-period occupation. The total number of lithic artifacts recovered from Charity Hall was 260, and 39 of these (15 percent) can be classified as tools. Tools included here are retouched flakes, scrapers, perforators, points, cores, and a hammerstone. The remaining lithic artifacts are here classified as debitage and consist of both complete and broken flakes, flake fragments, and shatter. The points include five
Archaic points as well as one Paleoindian point. One of the flaked scrapers appears to be a
Dalton scraper, a known transitional Paleoindian type (Figure 7-17). Complete flakes were those that had both intact platforms and distal ends, broken flakes were those with platforms that were missing their distal ends, and flake fragments were those with missing platforms. Almost all of the lithics appear to be made out of Tuscaloosa Gravel, a pebble and cobble chert in the
Tuscaloosa group, which is naturally yellow but turns pink and red upon heat treating (Futato
1983:118). An exception is the Dalton scraper, which is not red or yellow in coloration.
233 Table 7-13. Summary of lithic artifacts. Category / Form Qty Tool 39 Flake, retouched 18 Flake, scraper 5 Flake, perforator 1 Point, corner notched 4 Point, stemmed 3 Point, triangular 2 Point, eared 1 Core 4 Hammerstone 1 Debitage 221 Flake, complete 48 Flake, broken 24 Flake, fragment 121 Shatter 28 Total 260
Figure 7-17. Dalton scraper lithic tool
234 Materials and Global Capitalism
As one can see from studying the assemblage of materials recovered from Charity Hall, many of the items were not produced locally but were imported from many faraway places— from New England to Europe to China. Native Americans had of course been using material objects produced from all around the world for centuries by the time Charity Hall was constructed, but changes in production and subsistence, particularly the emergence of capitalism as a world system based on the exploitation of wage labor throughout the nineteenth century, expanded their use and imbued it with new social connections. The Choctaw and Chickasaw children who attended Charity Hall were surrounded not only by religious and “civilization” practices but also materials that had been manufactured and transported by means of wage labor, providing them with a stronger link to that system of economy. The world was still in the early stages of being converted into a place where common people could only survive by trading their labor power for wages (Marx 1958:81). The Indians here were not being forced to trade their own labor power for wages (although I will discuss a paper reward system for children in use at the Monroe mission in Chapter 8), but they were being trained to live as the idealistic self- sufficient farmers that the growing American bourgeoisie needed to compete on the world stage as a developing power. The “civilization” process therefore meant placing Indian children in an environment where they could be surrounded by the latest technologies and materials.
235 CHAPTER 8 THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONSCAPE
The combined data from history and archaeology begin to give answers to the questions that I laid out in Chapter 1. These also show what a “mission” actually was during the 1820s in the American Southeast. From my colonial perspective, the Charity Hall mission was one of several outposts of American colonialism that was just one part of an overall scheme to exert control over the North American landmass and dominate its resources. This was a process that took place over many decades, and the 1820s missions are representative of a period when the
American elites were still in disagreement on how to deal with the Indian question. They found that Christian missionaries were ready-made agents to “civilize” the Indians and spread political influence internally within both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation. This civilization process required a physical presence and practical training to convert indigenous peoples into allies who could help the Americans compete for power on the world arena. The mission experience, however, proved to be too costly and slow and paved the way for the removal policies of the 1830s and an abandonment of the civilization project altogether.
The 1820s Mission
The home base of operations for the Charity Hall mission was an approximately 60-acre area on land belonging to Levi Colbert, which the Cumberland missionaries signed a contract to use in exchange for providing education to Chickasaw students. The Reverend Bell and his family erected several buildings, including two houses, five student cabins, a school house, and a dining hall. They also set up a smoke house and a tanning yard to help bring in extra funds for the operation of the school. They hired farmers to help keep agricultural lands and engage in animal husbandry so that they could teach the Indian children how to farm and raise domesticated animals in the European style. They barreled excess grains and products to sell
236 locally and ameliorate the cost of running the school. The buildings were all log cabins with fire places and wooden floors, some of which left behind soil features that survive today. The education included agricultural work and animal husbandry for the male students and lessons in sewing and homemaking for the female students. All of the children were brought together for formal dining with European and Asian ceramics, where they ate foods that they had cultivated with their own hands rather than drawing on “wild” resources. The female students likewise saw utility in their own labor as they helped create clothing for occupants of the establishment.
The more traditional education that included spelling and arithmetic saw the children divided up into groups based on proficiency, and the pastors conducted weekly examinations to guide their progress. They used slate writing tablets and pencils but may also have used paper.
On Sundays, the “mission family,” which may have included some or all of the students, would travel along with the pastors to the religious services of nearby congregations in Cotton Gin Port and campfire devotionals within the Chickasaw Nation. Some of the children came from more affluent families and were already accustomed to living in similar structures and using the types of items found at the school, such as Chinese porcelain and brick fireplaces. However, those students who were boarded gratis came from poorer families who could not afford tuition or
European-style clothing, so for these the experience of Charity Hall was probably much more shocking and different from those conditions to which they were formerly accustomed. These children were not only given clothing, shelter, and an education, but often they were also given
European names. Indian leaders such as Levi Colbert and John Pitchlynn insisted that the continued survival of their people alongside the newcomers of the American “frontier” depended on this process of “civilization” and encouraged it.
237 These data that provide insights into Charity Hall are consistent with those associated with other mission schools of the time period. Archaeologists who investigated the Valley Towns
Baptist Mission to the Cherokees in North Carolina (Riggs 2017) found concentrated clusters of pearlware fragments associated with fragments of lined writing slate and brick fragments.
Similar to those brick and burned clay fragments that we recovered from Charity Hall, Riggs
(2017:16) reported that most of the bricks were “defective, either warped from overfiring or substantially underfired,” suggesting that they were made locally. One major difference between the schools, however, is that Riggs (2017:20-21) recovered Catawba River Burnished pottery, which he interpreted as evidence that Catawba families residing near the mission were using their own vessels and that they may have been using these to cook for the mission. There is no evidence at Charity Hall that Indians were preparing meals nor was there a significant number of identifiable indigenous ceramics recovered from the site. Riggs (2017:13) also uncovered a brick-lined cellar that was likely used for dairying activity. We found no such feature at Charity
Hall, but something similar could still be present on the site for future field workers to discover It is also possible that the brick uncovered by those who erected the centenary monument was part of a such a cellar. The rest of the assemblage recovered from Valley Towns was similar to that of
Charity Hall, including food service and food preparation ceramics, faunal remains (mostly pig), clothing hardware, architectural hardware, and personal ornamentation items. They also recovered glass fragments, including fragments of medicine bottles (Riggs 2017:16).
To date there have been no other contemporaneous missions investigated archaeologically, but there are some that have been studied historically. The most important for this particular study is Pickett’s (2015) historical research on the nearby Monroe Mission, also located within the Chickasaw Nation. Unlike Charity Hall, Monroe actually established a
238 congregation and erected a mission church building, which was described as a “diminutive room
16 x 16 [feet, presumably], built of small poles” with a “dirt and stick chimney and a large open fireplace” and a single window—“a hole cut through logs and closed with a clapboard” (Pickett
2015:72). The Monroe mission school, also unlike Charity Hall, accepted thousands of dollars from the Chickasaws, and opened with fifty scholars, most of whom where boarded. Pickett
(2015:72) noted that Chickasaw leader Samuel Seeley came and spoke at the school often and enrolled his son. The congregation grew from eight members in 1820 to 123 individuals just prior to Indian removal. Its membership included 29 white people, 69 African Americans, and 25
Indians (Pickett 2015:73). As I noted in Chapter 2, the Monroe church was built on land donated by William Colbert, who served as an elder prior to removal.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that the Reverend Stuart, who established and administered both the Monroe mission school and later the Tockshish mission school, discussed in his letters was a practice of using a paper ticket system to reward behavior in a way that introduced a commodification of behavior and performance:
We have adopted a plan which has a very happy influence on the conduct of the children both in and out of the school. We have tickets, (which are nothing more than scraps of paper, marked No. 1, 2, 3, and 4,) with which we reward them on every Monday morning for the preceding week’s performance, taking their conduct on the Sabbath into consideration. These are valued at six and a fourth cents per No. and pass as current money among them. The highest No. is given for a week’s good attention to business. When any have been idle and inattentive, we present with No. 0, which is truly mortifying. In order to avoid imposition we keep an account book in which the sum due to each one for tickets is recorded; and when any one has earned the amount of a garment of clothing which he needs, he receives it in exchange for his tickets. In this way they clothe themselves, after receiving a change of raiment when they first enter the school. By this arrangement our female friends who are engaged in furnishing clothing for this establishment are doing more good than they are aware of…they promote industry and agriculture amongst our children, which are objects of great importance. The same plan is pursued in the school; we reward them according to their performance. With their school tickets they buy spelling books, Sunday-school hymn books,
239 and small cheap books. These arrangements entirely preclude the necessity of using the rod. (ABCFM 1824:131)
This is the strongest historical evidence that I have found to support my argument that these missionaries were not only teaching religion but were teaching the Indian children how to survive in a developing capitalist society. While there is no evidence of a practice such as this being utilized at Charity Hall, this does not necessarily mean that tactics such as these were not used.
The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees was another contemporaneous mission that was studied historically. Historian McClinton (2007:31-37) provided a snapshot of daily life at that mission school in 1814 that resembled that of Charity Hall very closely.
Children rose early in the morning and said prayers together. School began after breakfast and continued until the noonday meal. Classes were held in reading, writing, arithmetic, and grammar. The more advanced students also learning geography and were allowed to instruct younger children. The Springplace Mission had a library that McClinton speculated the children could access freely. The library included books on religion, science, orthography, grammar, geography, astronomy, and education. There is no mention of a library present at Charity Hall, but it is possible that books such as these were kept in the school house or in Bell’s private home.
Similar to the division of labor at Charity Hall, the Cherokee boys were taught to farm with horses and plows and the female students assisted the female missionaries in the kitchen, gardens, and in the pastors’ homes. The Cherokee children participated in catechism fortnightly and were required to learn the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, hymns, and Bible verses.
One small point of interest is that these Moravian missionaries would not accept tuition from
Indian parents unless they also provided clothing for their children. This may also have been the
240 case for the students who were boarded by their parents at Charity Hall, but no distinction is made by Bell in his letters about who received clothing and who did not (students boarded gratis or at their families’ expense). Interestingly, the Springplace missionaries gave each child their own personal plot of land for their own personal cultivation and development, which perhaps was used in a similar fashion to Stuart’s paper scrip money—to develop an orientation toward personal property and wealth needed to excel in a capitalist society.
Charity Hall and all of these mission schools, however, while they did exist as fenced-in compounds, cannot be defined just by the buildings and agricultural fields that they occupied.
The “mission” itself was to bring Christianity and education to the Indians, and this took place not only within the mission compound but in the surrounding area. Lightfoot and Danis (2018) discussed a “spatial-sonic” model for Franciscan missions in Alta California with four zones— mission quadrangle, proximal (within earshot), outlying hinterland, and international—radiating out from the mission bells of such establishments. For Charity Hall, I do not wish to place the formal mission compound at the center, but rather as one of many nodes on a larger missionscape. The “sonic” aspect elaborated by Lightfoot and Danis, however, does seem attractive, especially since one of the primary-source documents relates that each morning at
Charity Hall was greeted with a trumpet blast. However, rather than using the bell as a reminder to the Indians to be faithful Christians, the trumpet was used for regimentation of time and discipline. I do, however, think these ideas are akin to the missionscape concept that I am elaborating as well as the theoretical perspectives of Panich and Schneider (2015) that I discussed in Chapter 2. Here I will therefore provide a summary of the historic and archaeological data that serve as evidence for a Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape that included Charity Hall.
241 The Chickasaw and Choctaw Missionscape
I make the decision here to include both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation within the same missionscape due to the fact that the pastors at the various mission establishments across both regions appear to have met and coordinated their activity throughout the 1820s. The most direct evidence of this is the October 1827 meeting of the missionaries that I referenced in Chapter 1 (Tombeckbee Presbytery 1899:17). By the end of 1827, the missions operating throughout both Chickasaw and Choctaw lands under the purview of the Presbyterian
Synod of South Carolina and Georgia had been transferred to the care of the American
Missionary Board, and this body sought to organize all of the missions within the area, even those like Charity Hall that were under the supervision of independent boards. There are many recorded instances of the various pastors in the region working together to civilize the Indians.
On June 10, 1823, one of the teachers at the Monroe mission school, the Reverend Blair,
(who later went on to administer the Martyn mission school in 1827) visited Charity Hall and stayed overnight on his way to visit Florence (which I will deal with later) for supplies (Board of
Missions 1854c:133). Blair visited again one month later, on July 9, when, according to the school’s journal, he “gave of us a pertinent discourse, showing the great end we should have in view, and the encouraging promises of the word of God on our side” (Board of Missions
1854c:136). On July 17 of that same year, Presbyterian Reverend Hadden, from South Carolina, visited Charity Hall on his way to the Monroe mission. The Reverend William Barnett, in his
March 22, 1825, letter, mentioned, “I feel ardent to visit your school, and brother Steward’s
[Stuart’s]; and would like to preach to those poor Indians…Give my love to brother Moore, brother Steward, and all your Mission family” (Board of Missions 1854f:230).
242 As I mentioned in Chapter 4, the Reverend Stuart visited and spent a day at the Mayhew mission in the Choctaw Nation on July 26, 1821 (ABCFM 1822:82). This relationship was strengthened following the conversion of the Chickasaw schools (besides Charity Hall) to the supervision of the ABCFM at the end of 1827, but was already being consolidated throughout that year. On April 1, 1827, the Chickasaw Monroe Church was holding its quarterly communion, which was attended by the Reverend Cyrus Kingsbury, who was then administering the Choctaw Mayhew mission school, and Ansen Gleason, who was Kingsbury’s assistant superintendent (ABCFM 1828c:283). Later on, in 1830, Gleason would step in to administer the schools at both Monroe and Tockshish when Stuart and Holmes were ill (ABCFM 1830:382). In
October of 1828, the Reverend Blair, who by then was administering the Martyn mission, and the Reverend Cyrus Byington, who administered the Yok-nok-cha-ya mission in the southern part of the Choctaw Nation, attended a revival at the Monroe mission. Byington spent three days visiting Chickasaws in the area and holding meetings (ABCFM 1829b:31). Between July 3 and
6, 1829, an assembly was held at the Tockshish mission in the Chickasaw Nation, where “A large number of people assembled, some of whom had come from the distance of 60 miles,” including “several missionaries from the Choctaw nation, and two of the Choctaw converts”
(ABCFM 1829:301). There are many similar examples that could be cited throughout 1829 and
1830.
If I was to take up the model of Lightfoot and Danis (2018:281), the main Charity Hall compound would be the mission quadrangle and the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape on which these many pastors operated would make up the “proximal” zone. This is of course missing the sonic component, since these mission school nodes were too far apart for their occupants to literally hear each other, but this assemblage of missions serve as a net cast over
243 both nations for the purposes of civilization. One notable feature of this particular missionscape conglomeration is the bringing together of both Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples under one label. This is evidenced not only in the interactions of the pastors and their converts but even in the student makeup of Charity Hall, which included three of the children of the Choctaw leader
John Pitchlynn. As I noted in Chapter 5, a member of the Pitchlynn family visited Charity Hall during 1823, and this along with the accounts described above suggest that the Choctaw Indians moved freely about Chickasaw lands without hardship. This is something that would have been inconceivable just a century earlier when the two groups were constantly warring.
To continue with the model (Lightfoot and Danis 2018), there was also an “outlying hinterland” zone, which extended over several US states, including Tennessee, Kentucky, and
Alabama. The deed records that I perused in the Monroe County Chancery Office uncovered a deed for the selling of Bell’s Ferry, referenced in Chapter 5, which serves as evidence of more immediate economic activity in this outlying hinterland. It is possible that the excess agricultural goods that were barreled and sold by Bell to help defray the costs of Charity Hall were also sold in the market across the Tombigbee River in Cotton Gin Port or else some further away location.
This hinterland can be seen extending to Tennessee and Kentucky where the Cumberland
Presbytery had a greater presence. Bell remarked in his letters that he sent on some of the more advanced students to Tennessee to live entirely among Americans, and the letters of Peter
Pitchlynn, one of these students, corroborated this.
One of the more important locations seems to have been Giles County, Tennessee, where the Marr’s Hill Church was located. As discussed in Chapter 4, this church formed a “benevolent society” that reached out to Bell about providing resources for the operation of Charity Hall. It is probably not a coincidence that the Reverend Wilson of the Caney Creek school placed his
244 students with families in the same county just a few short years later. Another location mentioned multiple times is “Florence,” which probably refers to Florence, Alabama, located in the northwestern corner of that state. The Caney Creek school was located in the same vicinity, and it is also the location where Bell coordinated with Black and Webb to retrieve donations from supporting congregations and pastors. As I mentioned previously, the Reverend Blair used
Charity Hall as a resting place in his own travels to and from Florence, showing that it was an important hub for all of the pastors who worked in the Chickasaw Nation. It was also a location where some of Bell’s students were later boarded with families, and perhaps it was also the place where Bell irately observed his colleague receive several barrels of Cincinnati flour while his own mail box was nearly bare. A third important location, at least for the Cumberland
Presbyterians, was Princeton, Kentucky, where Bell brought three of his Indian students in 1830.
There they attended a conference of the Cumberland Presbytery and visited a college that the church had established. At least one of Bell’s students later boarded with the president of that college.
Finally, Lightfoot and Danis (2018) discussed a fourth “international” zone—spaces where colonial regimes reigned—which also existed around the Chickasaw and Choctaw missionscape. The Reverend Bell was consistently in communication with the Office of Indian
Affairs and Department of War in Washington, DC, and one of his students, Daughtery Colbert, actually moved to Washington to further his education during the mid-1820s (boarding with
Thomas McKenney himself). The inflammatory fever that struck Charity Hall and its occupants in 1824 can also be seen as a hallmark of the “international” component of the missionscape, drawing in diseases from faraway places—in this case perhaps the Scarlet Fever that was documented in France that same year (Katz and Morens 1992:299). The most important evidence
245 for these more far-reaching relations are of course the archaeological materials recovered during the three field seasons at Charity Hall. These included materials likely produced within the
United States (square cut nails), Europe (creamware and pearlware pottery), and as far away as
East Asia (Chinese porcelain pottery). As I wrote in Chapter 1 and Chapter 7, the Chickasaw and
Choctaw children were strengthening their direct relations with globally organized production and thereby the labor power of workers all over the globe.
Comparison with Nineteenth-Century Homesteads
Although I have already compared the material assemblage recovered from Charity Hall with that of the Valley Towns Baptist school, I here also compare what I found with three other contemporary contexts that were not Indian mission schools in an effort to show the extent to which the mission children were being inundated with European material goods as part of the
“civilization” effort. There is also the question of the relatively low quantity of material culture at Charity Hall and whether this was a function of austerity, the frontier setting, or the brief occupation of the site. I therefore first compare Charity Hall with Structure II of the Gowen
Farmstead (Weaver at al. 1993:68-82) located in the metropolitan area of Nashville, Tennessee.
The farmstead was occupied between 1786 and 1857, and Structure II was the main domicile—a
12.5 x 9-meter rectangular structure with a stone foundation and two stone chimneys. The artifact assemblage is made up of many of the same materials as what we recovered from Charity
Hall (Table 8-1) with some notable differences.
The number of tableware ceramic artifacts recovered from the Gowen cabin is nearly three times higher than that of Charity Hall. However, the difference mostly lies in the far higher numbers of whiteware and ironstone ceramic sherds, which came into greater use beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, after Charity Hall closed, suggesting that this was a function of the brief
246 Table 8-1. Charity Hall artifact assemblage comparison. Charity Gowen Bulow Chewkee Artifacts Hall % Cabin Cabin % askee % European tableware ceramics 509 1417 161 29 Creamware 92 18.07% 89 6.28% 4 2.48% 0 0.00% Pearlware 346 67.98% 229 16.16% 133 82.61% 2 6.90% Whiteware 5 0.98% 581 41.00% 0 0.00% 27 93.10% Ironstone/White Granite 1 0.20% 306 21.59% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% Unidentified 65 12.77% 212 14.96% 24 14.91% 0 0.00% European tableware decorations 254 49.90% 456 32.18% 107 46.93% 9 31.03% Handpainting 101 39.76% 19 4.17% 4 3.74% 5 55.56% Transfer print 94 37.01% 352 77.19% 63 58.88% 1 11.11% Slipware 21 8.27% 22 4.82% 34 31.78% 0 0.00% Molded 38 14.96% 63 13.82% 5 4.67% 3 33.33% Over-glaze 0 0.00% 0 0.00% 1 0.93% 0 0.00% Chinese porcelain ceramics 24 118 0 0 Utilitarian ceramics 36 80 67 3 Redware 21 58.33% 0 0.00% 11 16.42% 0 0.00% Yellow Ware 0 0.00% 16 20.00% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% Coarse earthenware 12 33.33% 41 51.25% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% Stoneware 3 8.33% 23 28.75% 56 83.58% 3 100.00% Glass shards 60 8290 391 2 Vessel 39 65.00% 1622 19.57% 382 97.70% 2 100.00% Flat 21 35.00% 6668 80.43% 9 2.30% 0 0.00% Nails 248 2602 2247 2 Machine cut nail fragments 216 87.10% 1659 63.76% 2138 95.15% 0 0.00% Whole machine cut nails 32 12.90% 757 29.09% 108 4.81% 0 0.00% Brass furniture tack 0 0.00% 4 0.15% 1 0.04% 2 100.00% Firearm / munition artifacts 8 5 53 1 Gunflints 0 0.00% 1 20.00% 2 3.77% 0 0.00% Percussion caps 0 0.00% 2 40.00% 8 15.09% 0 0.00% Lead drop shot 8 100.00% 0 0.00% 43 81.13% 1 100.00% Clothing 9 84 5 5 Bone buttons 0 0.00% 35 41.67% 2 40.00% 0 0.00% Metal buttons 2 22.22% 14 16.67% 1 20.00% 1 20.00% Glass buttons 2 22.22% 21 25.00% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% Glass beads 0 0.00% 0 0.00% 2 40.00% 4 80.00% Buckle artifacts 5 55.56% 3 3.57% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% Smoking paraphernalia 0 12 1 1 Slate writing artifacts 6 0 5 0 Kitchen utensils 3 15 0 0 Metal kettle fragments 8 0 0 1 Harness buckle fragments 3 0 4 2 Toy marbles 1 14 0 0 Faunal remains 38 2652 620 264 Pig 3 7.89% 427 16.10% 8 1.29% 2 0.76% Deer 0 0.00% 16 0.60% 13 2.10% 7 2.65% Sheep 3 7.89% 25 0.94% 0 0 Cattle 2 5.26% 139 5.24% 6 0.97% 0 0.00% Total mammal 33 86.84% 787 29.68% 180 29.03% 81 30.68% Chicken 0 0.00% 142 5.35% 9 1.45% 0 0.00% Total bird 0 0.00% 190 7.16% 175 28.23% 1 0.38% Total reptile 0 0.00% 3 0.11% 55 8.87% 9 3.41% Total fish 0 0.00% 0 0.00% 210 33.87% 173 65.53% Indigenous ceramics 29 8 71 456 Lithic artifacts 260 4071 16 N/A
247 occupation. This also carries over into the differences in decorated ceramics, where the majority of transfer-print decorations at Gowen were found on whiteware sherds. The presence of fewer
Chinese porcelain ceramic sherds at Charity Hall, however, may additionally be a function of austerity or the frontier setting. There is a dramatic difference in the number of glass artifacts recovered from each site. The disparity in flat glass is to be expected since the log cabins at
Charity hall did not have windows, but the number of kitchen vessel glass shards recovered from the Gowen cabin is more than seven times higher than what we recovered from Charity Hall.
This is arguably a function of the longer duration (Gowen was occupied for nearly seven decades while Charity Hall was in operation for only one decade), but it may also speak to a lack of alcohol consumption at Charity Hall. Nearly 80 percent of the vessel glass shards from Gowen were bottle artifacts, and approximately 33 percent of the identifiable bottle forms were liquor bottles. There were also several artifacts classified with smoking paraphernalia, which was also completely absent from Charity Hall due to its stature as a Christian mission.
Other notable differences include a higher number of nail artifacts at Gowen, which is partially a function of the brief occupation of Charity Hall but also due to the fact that the latter consisted primarily of log cabin structures which required few nails in their construction. A higher number of button artifacts were recovered from the Gowen cabin, which is probably due to a combination of factors including brief occupation, poor preservation of bone artifacts, and perhaps the placement of excavation units at Charity Hall. As I discussed in Chapter 7, it is strange that very few artifacts related to sewing and clothing were not recovered from Charity
Hall, considering the fact that part of the education for female students was in this type of activity. Further excavations may uncover a part of the site where this activity was concentrated.
248 The more robust faunal assemblage recovered from Gowen is also likely a function of the brief occupation as well as the poor preservation of bone at Charity Hall (see Chapter 7).
The second site to which I compare Charity Hall (see Table 8.1) is the Chewkeeaskee
Cabin Site, which was a removal-period Cherokee household occupied in North Carolina during the 1830s (Riggs 1999:365). The site consisted of one partially-floored 13-foot cabin with joists, a loft, and a wood chimney; 10 acres of bottom land in cultivation; and seven more acres upland in cultivation (Riggs 1999:369). The Chewkeeaskee family included six members, which was typical for Cherokee households during the 1830s, and owned no slaves. The archaeological investigations unearthed abundant inclusions of charcoal, fired and unfired daub leftover from a
“stick and clay” chimney, and 456 sherds of “aboriginal” Qualla-series ceramics (Riggs
1999:372). Archaeologists also uncovered an extramural subterranean storage facility, which they interpreted as being used to store non-native domestic tubers, such as Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, and turnips—all foods that Riggs (1999:376) argued were main staples of the Cherokee diet after 1750. Other artifacts attributed to “native technological traditions” recovered from the site were a bivalve shell scraper, a deer ulna awl, and a fragment of a carved chlorite schist tobacco pipe (Riggs 1999:386).
The “commercially manufactured” artifacts recovered from the Chewkeeaskee Cabin Site included 21 ceramic sherds, a cast brass button, a dark-green glass bottle, several glass beads, and one piece of lead shot. While some of these artifacts find counterparts at Charity Hall, the most noticeable difference is the ratio of refined earthenware and whiteware ceramics to indigenous ceramics (18:456; 4%-96%), which is virtually the polar opposite of what was recovered from Charity Hall (509:29; 95%-5%). Riggs (1999:392) noted that the European- produced ceramics were relatively accessible and inexpensive for local Cherokees, “who could
249 purchase plates at Hunter’s store for $.125 apiece and cups and saucers for $.0625 apiece.” He therefore attributes the lack of such artifacts recovered during the archaeological investigations to the fact that these wares saw infrequent use within the household and were thus not subject to high rates of breakage and replacement (Riggs 1999:392). It therefore appears that the Cherokees living in this particular household did not prefer to use European ceramics in their day-to-day lives, and more archaeological investigations into such households may show that this was a general trend among Native peoples of the time. This is one of the key differences with Charity
Hall that points to the inundation of Indian children with material goods. The Cherokees could choose to rely more on their own indigenous pottery rather than purchasing European-made tableware, but the Chickasaw and Choctaw children were required to dine with the mission family at a formal dinner table in a “civilized” fashion.
The faunal remains recovered from the Chewkeeaskee Cabin Site (see Table 8-1) are also quite different from the assemblage that was recovered from Charity Hall. There are some overlapping elements, such as the presence of pig bones, but there were also recovered several white-tailed deer bones (n=7), and Riggs (1999:395-396) speculated that most of the unidentified large and medium-sized mammal remains (n=30) were largely attributable to deer. As I discussed in Chapter 7, there were no faunal remains recovered from Charity Hall associated with “wild” game that required hunting. All of the identifiable bone belonged to domesticated animals. However, the presence of deer remains at the Gowen domicile (showing that European-
Americans also supplemented their diet with wild game) and my discussion about poor bone preservation may also contribute to the lack of such faunal elements from the assemblage recovered from Charity Hall. There were also many fish scale fragments recovered from the
Cherokee site, which are completely absent the Charity Hall faunal assemblage, showing that
250 such remains were either not recovered due to poor preservation but perhaps also the excavation and screening methods or else fish were not a staple of the mission school diet. Eggshell fragments were also completely absent from the Charity Hall assemblage, but again this could be due to the nature of the excavations and high acidity of the soil, which would have caused such items to decompose rapidly.
A third site to which I wish to compare Charity Hall (see Table 8-1) is one of the slave cabins excavated at the Bulow Plantation in Florida, which was founded in 1821 and destroyed in 1836, placing its duration at exactly the same time that Charity Hall was in operation
(Davidson and Ibarrola 2016). The artifact assemblage recovered from Bulow’s Cabin 1 is strikingly similar to what we found at Charity Hall with some key differences. The majority of ceramic artifacts recovered from both Cabin 1 and Charity Hall were European tableware sherds, but Cabin 1 yielded a larger ratio of such ceramics to utilitarian ceramic sherds (161:67; 71%-
29%) than we found at Charity Hall (509:36; 93%-7%). This is probably due to the fact the
African-American slaves at Bulow were given new ceramic dishes because their owner was a bachelor. He did not have a large family that could give the slaves their “hand-me-down” dishes.
The Bulow cabin assemblage, as is the case with Gowen, has a far higher number of machine-cut nails and glass vessel shards. Again, this is a function of the log cabin structures at Charity Hall, which required fewer nails in their construction, and the lack of alcohol consumption at the
Christian mission site. The vessel glass recovered from the Bulow cabin included fragments from wine bottles, spirit bottles, and drinking glass tumblers (Davidson and Ibarrola 2016:76).
Another type of artifact that was far more abundant at the slave cabin was one that includes firearms and munitions. Archaeologists at Bulow recovered gunflints and percussion caps, two items that were not present at all in the Charity Hall excavations, as well as 43 pieces of lead
251 shot—far more than the numbers recovered from Gowen, Chewkeaskee, and Charity Hall. These data along with those of the faunal assemblage which features a wider variety of “wild” game animals, shows that those occupying the slave cabin probably relied more on hunting and fishing to supplement their diet, whereas the mission family at Charity Hall seems to have been subsisting exclusively on meat from domesticated animals. Again, I cannot discount the possibility that this difference could be due to lack of preservation in the acidic soils at the mission school site.
The comparison of these four sites sheds some light on whether the relatively low number of artifacts at Charity Hall is a function of austerity, the frontier setting, or the brief occupation.
More research needs to be done to say so definitively, but it appears that the brief occupation is the main contributing factor of these three to the assemblage size of Charity Hall. The overall number of ceramic sherds (European-made and indigenous) from both Charity Hall (n=598) and
Chewkeeaskee (n=488), which had a similar occupation period, are similar, while the Gowen domicile, which had roughly three times as many (n=1623), was occupied more than three times longer. The lack of nails is primarily due to the nature of the Charity Hall structures, and the lack of bone artifacts and clothing artifacts is likely due to a combination of soil preservation and excavation unit placement. Further excavations at Charity Hall will hopefully ameliorate this disparity.
This comparison also contrasts the high exposure to European material goods that the children who attended Charity Hall received with the material lives of other Indian peoples who remained on their own independent farmsteads. One might expect that an Indian family living closer to the “civilized” centers of the Atlantic coast would have enjoyed better access to a greater wealth of European trade goods, but whether this was by choice or not, the Cherokee
252 family seemed to rely more on their indigenous ceramics and “wild” game meats, which they acquired through hunting and fishing. This seems to be an indication that the Cherokees and perhaps other Native peoples were making cultural choices about accepting or rejecting
European material culture while the children at Charity Hall—despite their “frontier” location— were being inundated by it. As I have argued from the very beginning of this dissertation, the exposure to European materiality was one of the primary ways that the pastors and the American government “civilized” the Indians.
Was Charity Hall a Success?
One of the major questions asked by my committee early on in the research process was one about success. Was the mission a success? I think that the answer varies depending on which stakeholder is being discussed as each had different “missions” when it came to Charity Hall. For the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation, I think the answer is yes. Colonel John
Pitchlynn, a Choctaw chief, was in favor of “civilization” and welcomed mission schools to help his people attain it. He wrote:
A majority of them have tasted a little of civilization, and from their intercourse with white people they found when they compared their situations, that civilization was far preferable to their state. They also found that without the education of their children, they could not live neighbors to white people. (Board of Missions 1854a:64-65)
In the article of agreement between the Board of the Cumberland Missionary School Society and the Chickasaw Nation, the former agreed to teach the Indian people “Reading, Writing,
Arithmetic, and a Knowledge of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts” (Board of Missions
1854b:89). For families like the Colberts and the Pitchlynns, one might measure success in terms of social standing in later decades.
253 The most notable of the Colbert students who attended Charity Hall was Daughtery
Winchester Colbert (1810-1880), who after attending Charity Hall relocated to Washington, DC, to be mentored by Thomas McKenney. This is referenced by Bell in an 1825 letter (Meacham
2007:65) as well as on Daughtery Colbert’s profile on the Chickasaw Nation web site (2020). He eventually returned to the Chickasaw Nation and went along with the removal in 1837, where he became a diplomat who worked to establish Chickasaw sovereignty, being especially passionate about formally separating the Chickasaws from the Choctaw Nation. This resulted in the June 2,
1855 treaty which reestablished the Chickasaw Nation as an autonomous entity and established its modern-day territory and borders in Oklahoma. Daughtery Winchester Colbert served as a member of the first Chickasaw Legislature in 1856 and was elected to be the second governor of the Nation in 1858 (Chickasaw Nation 2020a). The other Colberts who attended Charity Hall generally moved west to Oklahoma, although there is evidence that Adam Colbert, one of Levi’s sons, purchased land in Monroe County, Mississippi on April 11, 1836. Abijah Colbert, another of Levi’s sons, was mentioned in a 1937 Works Progress Administration interview with a
Chickasaw Indian who recounted a Chickasaw origin story to a field worker. Abijah was mentioned as one of three elders who passed on the origin story before dying at the age of 96
(Selfridge 1937:498). Levica “Vicy” Colbert, a Charity Hall student and niece of Levi, has been described as “the most colorful” of George Colbert’s children, “being educated and wealthy”
(Braden 1958:231).
Bell listed three Pitchlynn students as having attended Charity Hall, the most well-known being Peter Pitchlynn (1806-1881), who went on to become the Principal Chief of the Choctaw
Nation between 1864 and 1866 (Baird 1972; Barba 2020). As I have already written, it is curious that Peter’s father, Colonel John Pitchlynn, would send his three sons to Charity Hall since he
254 was already working with Cyrus Kingsbury in 1820 to established the Mayhew mission school near his own property. However, since he already seemed to have a relationship with the
Cumberland pastors prior to 1820 (see Chapter 4), it is possible that his three sons were already being educated in the Chickasaw Nation in those earlier years. In the same 1825 letter where Bell mentioned that Daughtery Colbert had gone to live with Thomas McKinney in Washington, he noted that nine or ten other students “have with my consent left the school and gone to
Tennessee and Alabama states to finish their education, wishing entirely to be among the
Whites” (Meacham 2007:65). Peter Pitchlynn was almost certainly one of these nine or ten scholars, since he is known to have traveled to Tennessee and Kentucky, where he in November
1825 helped enroll 21 Choctaw youths at Senator Richard M. Johnston’s Choctaw Academy
(Barba 2020:261). Peter wrote in a November 5, 1825 letter to James Barbour, who by then had become the Secretary of War: “I was educated in the bosom of our white brethren, in Tennessee, and I know how to apricate the inestimable blessings arising from an education among them”
(Pitchlynn 1825). Due to his education at Charity Hall and later in Tennessee, Peter was elected in 1830 to the National Council of Choctaw and served as an interpreter and liaison to the United
States federal government, which led to his later election as Principal Chief (Choctaw Nation
2020b).
For the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, I also say that Charity Hall was a success. As the Reverend Robert Bell wrote in his letters (see Chapters 4 and 5), many of his students went on to extend their education in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. Even after Indian removal, the Cumberland Synod continued to work with the Choctaws in Oklahoma, establishing the
Choctaw Presbytery Mission Synod in 1890, which still operates today. In general, both the
Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation today are largely Christian. The Choctaw Nation
255 produces a section of their web site called “Chaplain’s Corner” (Choctaw Nation 2020a), and the
Chickasaw Nation also state on their web site they believe in a supreme being, “whom we call
Aba’ Binni’li’ (Sitting or Dwelling Above) also called Inki Abu (Father Above) under Christian influence” (Chickasaw Nation 2020b). Each summer, when the Chickasaw Explorers are able to come participate in our archaeological investigations, they like to set aside one evening to cook a
“traditional” meal for us, and this has always been immediately preceded by a Christian prayer given by one of the leaders of the Chickasaw Explorer program. There were some pastors, however, who were very disheartened, especially around 1830 when the Indians began to be removed from their lands. This is perhaps best personified in the words of Ansem Gleason, assistant missionary at the Mayhew mission:
It is now an anxious time with the missionaries here, who have just begun to reap the precious harvest which has cost so many painful years of hard labor, and the loss of many beloved fellow-laborers. Oh that we could have been left unmolested in our delightful work till these tribes should have become the happy people of the Lord. Missionaries may follow them; but who would presumptuously take on himself the responsibility of sowing a field of grain to be reaped and gathered in some far distant clime. If these natives are shoved off, what will be done with us who have been standing here a long time between two hot fires. (ABCFM 1830:383)
For the United States federal government, including the Department of War and the
Office of Indian Affairs, I think Charity Hall and the whole mission “civilization” process of the
1820s was not a success. The 1819 Civilization Fund Act was passed by the US Congress to introduce among Indians “the habits and arts of civilization,” but ultimately the voices in favor of removing the Indians, foremost among them that of Andrew Jackson, won out and withdrew federal support for the civilization program. This section of the rising American bourgeoisie and its political representatives could no longer wait for Indian peoples to become civilized and
256 produce labor and resources to allow the United States to participate forcefully in world trade and later become the imperialist power necessary to secure American interests. It therefore became necessary to remove the Indians, including the Chickasaws, and put their land and resources at the disposal of Americans who did not require any kind of special education—an education that ultimately placed an extra financial burden on the federal state. This was also at least partially a response to the industrialization taking place in the North and the increasing contradiction between wage labor and slave labor that resulted in the calamity of the American
Civil War in the 1860s. For the southern slave holders to keep up with northern industry, they needed direct control over the land and resources that were being “squandered” by the Indians
(Ashworth 1995; Drinnon 1997; Remini 1990; Richter 2001).
How the Missionaries “Civilized” Indians
In Chapter 1, I stated that it was not enough to know that American missionaries were civilizing Native American Indians during the 1820s but how they were civilizing these Indians.
In Chapter 2 I wrote that the children who were enrolled in these mission schools were inculcated into a materialized habitus of capitalism. The historic and archaeological evidence marshalled in this dissertation show this process in operation within at least one mission school in northeastern Mississippi: Charity Hall. Churches organized missionary boards that sent representatives to court Indian chiefs who were (a) the most amenable to Christian instruction,
(b) already acquainted with the American political system through the military and through signing treaties, and (c) often of mixed-race ancestry. The Indian chiefs then donated their own personal land for the construction of the schools and enrolled many of their own children once these were underway. A large part of the administrators’ work was raising funds for their schools, especially prior to 1823 when the Civilization Fund Act money was finally deployed.
257 Some of the schools accepted large sums of money from the Indian Nations to construct their schools and board a larger number of students, but some, as was the case with Charity Hall, followed the dictates of the federal government more strictly and would not except Indian money.
The Indian children were subjected to a strict daily regimen that included waking at dawn to perform agricultural (for the boys) and domestic (for the girls) work; gathering in school houses to be educated in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and participating in formal dining using the latest wares and utensils to consume domesticated meats and grains. Boys were taught by hired agricultural workers how to farm in the American style and take care of domesticated animals, rather than hunting or capturing wild animals for food. Girls were forbidden from participating in agricultural work and were instead instructed on how to sew, take care of a home, and entertain guests. Students were divided into groups based on their reading and writing skills, and examinations were held on a weekly basis to follow their progress. Writing in particular was an important practice for “civilizing” Indians whose Native languages only existed orally. The more advanced (and probably more well-behaved) students were sent, if they wished, to live with American families and attend universities in other states, where they could be entirely surrounded by all of the “accoutrements” of civilized life, including more consistent use of the English language. The children were sent home to their families during times of illness but were instructed to keep the Sabbath. The pastors often visited Indian families or nearby congregations to give sermons on Sundays, and the children were taught not only to read and write Biblical verse but also to sing Christian hymns. Some were subjected to practices that commodified their behavior and performance.
258 Some of the children, coming from more affluent families, already had the appropriate
“civilized” attire to attend the school, but those Indian children who came from poorer families and were boarded gratis needed to have clothing made for them. This was done by the wives and daughters of the pastors, who used this to teach the Indian girls how to sew. Many of these poorer children also did not have English names, so the pastors provided these, naming them after historical figures such as explorers, scientists, and military figures, but also after their fellow pastors. Some of the children slept in log cabins constructed within the mission compounds, but some children appear to have stayed with their families and commuted to school. The pastors had a difficult time keeping some of the children in place and at times would lose children who were used to coming and going as they pleased for days at a time. The pastors also had difficulty raising some of the students at a consistent hour every morning, since they were not used to adhering to a tight schedule. The Reverend Bell commented on more than one occasion that some students ceased attendance because they found the work schedule too rigorous.
In this way, the missionaries, as agents of the US federal government, used all the materials at their disposal to change the habits and mood of the Indian children under their supervision. They were taught how to eat, sleep, dress, speak, write, work, worship, and think like “civilized” Americans. The missionaries met with varying success. There were certainly individuals, such as Peter Pitchlynn, who wanted to live entirely among the Americans and be separated from Chickasaw and Choctaw culture, but even he returned to Mississippi in the 1830s and considered his identity as a Choctaw Indian to be more important than his American identity.
Many other students abandoned the schools entirely. Some stopped attending so that they could get married, and others finished their education but generally remained Indians well into old age.
259 The result of the “civilization” process is that these Indian Nations assimilated American culture into their Indian identities in their own fashion. Just as the Chickasaws write on their web site that their religion is “influenced” by Christianity, I think it is safe to say that their general identity has been merely “influenced” by Americans. As Greer (2006) so eloquently put it,
Native cultures were not fixed and timeless, ready to crumble on first exposure to European (or in this case, American) civilizing efforts.
I wish to emphasize that little of this “everyday” activity cannot be seen in data obtained through primary source documents. An archaeological investigation and analysis was necessary to unearth the material methods that the missionaries used to “civilize” Native American children. Perhaps the strongest evidence for this is the everyday practice around food and dining.
The primary source documents mention in passing that the children sat at a formal dining table with the Reverend Bell in the evenings, but nothing is written about what they were eating or material culture they were using to dine. Eating and all of its associated activity is one of the most important aspects of what connects one’s identity to one’s family and culture. Everything from the way food is procured to how it is prepared to how it is eaten and with whom varies by groups of people around the globe. The archaeology shows that the Indian children were forced to raise domesticated cattle and hogs for their primary protein source rather than hunting for
“wild” meats and to eat food from refined earthenware flat dishes produced in Europe and China rather than locally made coarse earthenware bowls. This was an important part of the “habitus of civilization” that enveloped the everyday lives of Indian children at Charity Hall, in addition to hearing and using the English language and engaging in Christian religious practices such as praying throughout each day. Archaeology here is far more than a handmaiden to history and
260 rather provides important insights to the mobilization of the civilization process that would otherwise be unknown.
Future Research
The Charity Hall investigations outlined in this dissertation serve as a pilot study for a much broader research undertaking at multiple scales, especially when one considers the missionscape concept. I consider Charity Hall to be one node on a larger missionscape, and each of those nodes should also be investigated historically and archaeologically so that scholars can compare and contrast the experiences of Indian children across the area. These include investigating mission schools in both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation; mission schools that did accept Indian Nation funding, such as Monroe or Elliott; and contemporary secular schools that also accepted Indian students. Local historian Rufus Ward related to me during a personal conversation (socially-distanced with masks on his porch during the COVID-
19 pandemic in 2020) that one such secular school was located in what is today Columbus,
Mississippi and that it accepted Choctaw students who were allowed to wear their Native jewelry rather than being forced to completely adhere to a dress code. Mission schools farther away from this particular missionscape but still in operation during the 1820s should also be investigated historically and archaeologically to compare and contrast how the 1819 Civilization Fund Act was utilized in other localities. An interesting comparison could also be made between various missionary boards, as there were several in operation during the 1820s with schools around the
United States and indeed around the world. Finally, comparative studies should be done between
1820s mission schools and other mission contexts across space and time to find what tactics and ideologies their administrators may have agreed or disagreed upon and what conditions their students weathered.
261 Another future research direction should be to compare mission schools like Charity Hall with more contemporary non-mission contexts that are yet to be investigated. If one was to investigate the archaeology of a Chickasaw homestead occupied during the early nineteenth century, how similar would this assemblage be to that of Charity Hall? Would the home of Levi
Colbert have been more similar to Charity Hall than to that of one of the poorer families? How would Charity Hall compare to a contemporary non-Indian homestead, say one located near
Cotton Gin Port? Future research should also include further comparisons of these industrial mission schools of the 1820s to contemporary southern slave plantations. Did Indian children and African-American slaves use similar material goods, despite the tremendous difference in their status and social position? If a strong spatial orientation of structures can be unearthed at a mission school site, how similar or different was this to the layout of plantations with slave cabins? I have begun to answer these questions here, but a more robust sample is needed for comparison.
There is some additional research that can be performed on Charity Hall itself from sources that I have not exhausted. The centenary monument that was placed at the site was erected by the Presbyterian Church USA, due to the fact that the Cumberland Synod had temporarily united with the larger organization in the early twentieth century. The Cumberland
Presbyterian Church’s archive, unfortunately, does not have any records related to the erection of the monument, but these may exist in the PCUSA archive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Further investigation should also be made into the letters and writings of students like Peter Pitchlynn and Daughtery Colbert, who went on to successful political careers and may have written or been interviewed about their time at Charity Hall or the education they received. Additionally, there was a Works Progress Administration Indian-Pioneer Oral History project conducted in the
262 1930s that could be scoured for information about Chickasaws and Choctaws of the nineteenth century. There may be more information there about early education, religion, or perhaps the exploits of individual students.
Archaeologically, there were areas of the Charity Hall site that were not investigated thoroughly due to time and funding constraints. The cluster of square cut nails recovered to the southeast of the site, where I speculated that the tanning yard was located, should see more detailed excavations to better understand that locality’s use. Two similar locations are to the northwest of Block 2 and to the east of Block 4. We found strong evidence for only 3-4 structures, but there were many more than this. Perhaps more testing should be performed to the north and west of the pine plantation to see if the mission compound extended out farther than we anticipated. Closer analysis of the brick and burned clay fragments by a specialist may yield more decisive evidence for whether the chimneys in question were brick or cat-and-clay. A clay sample was taken from the site during the 2020 field season to be analyzed and tested to see if any of the pottery or bricks recovered were perhaps fired from clays drawn from the immediate vicinity of the school. Finally, the faunal assemblage collected to date is quite small, so more exploratory testing should be done to find a better sample. Primary-source documents suggest that the school was home to dozens of cattle and pigs, including those donated by Indian families, and I expect that there is more evidence of their presence and therefore food preparation or processing still unearthed at the site. The same can be said for artifacts associated with sewing and tailoring.
All of this future research should, if possible, be performed in collaboration with the
Chickasaw Nation, the Choctaw Nation, or whatever other Indian groups were involved with the schools in question. I was first introduced to Charity Hall by the Chickasaw Nation, and they
263 sent out the Chickasaw Explorers to participate in the 2019 field season. Some of the students who took part recognized names of their ancestors from the list of students sketched out by the
Reverend Bell, but even those who could not put their finger on a specific name found the experience valuable and saw the site as a place where their ancestors once lived and worked. At a panel that I organized at the 2019 meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference,
Chickasaw Nation Executive Historic Preservation Officer Kirk Perry, who was one of the discussants, related that they see the objects we recover as things belonging to their grandparents.
Now that I have uncovered evidence that Choctaw students also attended the school, they should perhaps also be involved in future Charity Hall research and should definitely be brought in for investigations of schools that were established within their own Nation, should they find it desirable. Archaeologists and historians should look for opportunities to investigate and publish their research together with Native peoples, involving them in every step of the process, including the publishing of scholarly journal articles and books. Their opinions and views on the history that we scholars illuminate are sometimes at odds with what we find in our data, but this should be welcomed, and their voices should be placed alongside ours.
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291 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Matthew P. Rooney was born in Santa Monica, California in 1983. After graduating from
Highland High School in Palmdale, California in 2001, Matthew entered the workforce for several years and during that time relocated to Tampa, Florida. There he attended Hillsborough
Community College and received an Associate in Arts from the Honors Institute (now the Dr.
Lydia R. Daniel Honors Program) in 2011. Matthew transferred to the University of South
Florida where he received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and a Bachelor of Arts in history in 2014. He was then accepted into the graduate program at University of South Florida, where he worked under Dr. Thomas J. Pluckhahn and received a Master of Arts in applied anthropology in 2016. Matthew was then accepted into the graduate program at University of
Florida, where he worked under Dr. Charles R. Cobb at the Florida Museum of Natural History and received a Doctor of Philosophy in anthropology in 2021.
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