Holy Waters: Religious Contests and Commitments

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HOLY WATERS:

RELIGIOUS CONTESTS AND COMMITMENTS

IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY, 1780–1830

Christine Alice Croxall

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

Summer 2016

HOLY WATERS:

RELIGIOUS CONTESTS AND COMMITMENTS

IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY, 1780–1830

Christine Alice Croxall

Approved: ______Arwen P. Mohun, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of History

Approved: ______George H. Watson, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Approved: ______Ann L. Ardis, Ph.D. Senior Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Christine Leigh Heyrman, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Anne M. Boylan, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Peter Kolchin, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Daniel K. Richter, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Mississippi River first hooked me when I chose to read The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn for a fifth grade book report, and though I did not comprehend much of

Twain’s humor and social criticism, my ten-year-old self loved to imagine life aboard

Huck and Jim’s raft. Writing this dissertation a few decades later has entailed less dangerous, though still quite engaging, adventures of travel, research, and intellectual encounter. Fortunately, I have had many companions and guides along the way.

Christine Heyrman has been a tireless mentor and advocate throughout my time at the University of Delaware. I cannot praise her highly enough for her support, wisdom, and wit, or for the myriad ways she steered this project away from untold disasters. And though I know she did not plan it this way, her most recent book, American Apostles, appeared precisely at the moment when I needed to be reminded of how historians can write gripping, elegant prose. Anne Boylan and Peter Kolchin provided coaching, bountiful encouragement, and endless rounds of reference letters. I am grateful for their intellectual rigor and constructive guidance. Dan Richter, who observed my earliest fumbling efforts to articulate my ideas as a new grad student and who, nonetheless, kindly agreed to read this work in its final stages, has been an exemplar of generosity. I could not ask for a more insightful, gracious dissertation committee.

Meeting Tangi Villerbu early in the writing process was amazingly fortuitous. He directed me toward key archives in France and the Mississippi River Valley, schooled me

in Catholicism, and connected me with other scholars who work on the region. Most of all, he was a steady, resourceful conversation partner as I sorted through my ideas. For his friendship and for his mentoring I am immensely grateful.

I received an astonishing amount of support to conduct research for this project.

With gratitude I acknowledge grant and fellowship funding from the American

Antiquarian Society, the American Historical Association, the Clement Library at the

University of Michigan, the Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame, the Filson

Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the King V. Hostick Scholarship at the

Illinois State Historical Society, the John S. McIllhenny Library Research Fellowship at

Louisiana State University, the Newberry Library, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf

South at Tulane University, and the Lynn E. May, Jr. Study Grant at the Southern Baptist

Historical Library and Archives. At the University of Delaware I received additional research and writing support through the History Department and the Office of Graduate and Professional Education, including a Global Research Travel Award that enabled me to conduct research in France.

Librarians and archivists have been essential collaborators as I have researched and honed this dissertation. I appreciate their patience, insights, and openhandedness, and acknowledge especially Ashley Cataldo at the American Antiquarian Society, Rena

Schergen at the Archives of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Morgen MacIntosh Hodgetts at

DePaul University’s Special Collections, Tara Laver at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library,

Daniel Hammer at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Noémie Marijon at Bibliothèque du séminaire provincial de Lyon - Saint Irénée, Odile Lolom at Archives des Œuvres

Pontificales Missionnaires, and Tricia Pyne and Alison Foley at the Associated Archives

of St. Mary’s Seminary & University. The archivists at the Society of the Sacred Heart charmed me with their genuine interest in my work, their frank explanations of Catholic terminology, and their hospitality. My deep thanks to Lyn Osiek, Mary Louise Gavan, and Michael Pera in St. Louis; Mary Blish in New Orleans; and Margaret Phelan and

Federica Palumbo in Rome.

Thanks to the Peter R. D'Agostino Research Travel Grant, I had the privilege of spending two weeks studying and visiting archives in Rome through the American

Catholicism in a World Made Small: Transnational Approaches to U.S. Catholic History seminar in June 2014, sponsored by the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center. A

Consortium Fellowship from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the

University of Pennsylvania in 2014–2015 supported my writing and brought me in contact with a delightful array of scholars who challenged and heartened me.

I gratefully acknowledge Steve Marti’s guidance in map-making, and translation help from Maxime Dagenais, Nathan Marvin, Claire Parfait, José Sanchez, and Tangi

Villerbu, though I take full responsibility for any errors. In the History Department office at the University of Delaware, Diane Clark, Pat Orendorf, and Doug Tobias helped me navigate all manner of bureaucratic messiness.

I have been blessed to have a great crowd of fellow travelers on this dissertation- writing journey. For their warm encouragement, commiseration, and sparkling ideas, I thank Jeffery Appelhans, Nicole Belolan, Julie Fisher, Brendan Gillis, Alyce Graham,

Chris Graham, Sarah Gronningsater, Amanda Guidotti, Sonia Hazard, Amy Kohout, Asli

Menevse, Max Mishler, Carolyn Roberts, Rachel Trocchio, Rachel Walker, Jamin Wells,

Nate Wiewora, Jim Woytek, and the Historians are Writers! group at Cornell University.

I am also grateful to Jim Brophy, Luca Codignola, Jeff Cowie, Rebecca Dolch, David

Freidenreich, Jennifer Orleans, John Pritchard, Larry Rasmussen, Aaron Sachs, David

Silverman, and Hal Taussig for sharing their support, wisdom, and good cheer. For hospitality and conviviality during my research trips and conferences, my thanks to Diana and Marlin Anthony, Lisa Bandel, Julia Bloch, Marshall Curry and Elizabeth Martin,

Paul Delnero, Brian Dixon, Rufus Fowler and Sarah Noble, Kipp and Cathy Gilmore-

Clough, Eleanor Harrison and Peter Bregman, Jessica Linker, Lily Santoro, Kristen

Green Wiewora, and Brandon Woods. Calvary UMC in West Philadelphia, Forest Home

Chapel in Ithaca, and Communitas de Jubilate have nourished my soul in innumerable ways.

My family of (mostly) engineering-types adjusted to my becoming a historian. I thank them for their care, support, and inquisitiveness through a process that seemed both endless and odd to them. I have dedicated this dissertation to my two grandmothers: my mother’s mother, Ruth King Myers, who passed away during my first semester as a Ph.D. student, and my father’s mother, Faith Wayne Pearson. These two strong, loving women have been tremendous role models for me.

Breno Barlach, Alana Staiti, and Josi Ward buoyed me during the final year of writing. Their friendship is priceless to me. Jarrett Anthony has sustained me throughout my time in graduate school on both material and metaphysical levels. I thank him for his excitement about my work when my own energy flagged and his faith in me. I learn from him daily. I am blessed to share my life with someone of such integrity, intellectual curiosity, passion, and empathy.

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For Faith and in memory of Ruth

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... xi ABSTRACT ...... xiv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

1 “A SLIGHT SPARK OF THE FAITH": CHRISTIAN FRAGILITY IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY, 1780–1812 ...... 19

2 A TEXTUAL INVASION...... 63

3 MISSIONARY ENCOUNTERS ...... 110

4 A CRUCIFIX FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE GREAT SPIRIT ...... 180

5 CHURCH AND STATE IN LEAGUE: PROTESTANT MISSIONS TO NATIVE AMERICANS ...... 232

6 AFRICANS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS APPREHENDING THE FAITH...... 302

EPILOGUE ...... 360

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 367

Appendix

PERMISSIONS ...... 409

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Catholic Parishes in Lower Louisiana, 1795 ...... 36

2. Catholic Parishes in Upper Louisiana, 1795...... 45

3. Mississippi River Valley Points of Reference, 1820s ...... 135

4. Native American Missions, 1819–1830 ...... 214

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAB Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore, Maryland

AASL Archives of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archives, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Microfilm

AJCP Archbishop John Carroll Papers, at AAB

APF Archives de l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi, Les Archives des Œuvres Pontificales Missionnaires, Lyon, France

APRSC Chantal Paisant, ed., Les années pionnières, 1818–1823: lettres et journaux des premières missionnaires du Sacré-Coeur aux États-Unis (Paris: Cerf, 2001).

BDC2 Madeleine-Sophie Barat and Philippine Duchesne, Correspondence: Second Part: North America (1818–1852), 3 vols., ed. Jeanne de Charry, trans. Barbara Hogg, Joan Sweetman, April O'Leary, and Mary Coke (Rome, Lyon, 1989–1999).

CAMM JB Cain Archive of Mississippi Methodism, Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi

CANO Catholic Church, Archdiocese of New Orleans (La.) Collection: Manuscripts, at UNDA

CMNT Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary Collection: Manuscripts, at UNDA

DBPF “Correspondence of Bishop Du Bourg with Propaganda Fide,” published in installments in SLCHR

DRMA DeAndreis-Rosati Memorial Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

FMFDA Felix De Andreis and John E. Rybolt, Frontier Missionary: Felix De Andreis, 1778–1820: Correspondence and Historical Writings, ed. Nathaniel Michaud, Vincentian Studies Institute Monographs 3 (Chicago: Vincentian Studies Institute, 2005), http://via.library.depaul.edu/vincentian_ebooks/4.

GCHJ Journal de la Maison du Sacré Coeur de Jésus, Grand Cóteau, 1821, translated by Katharine Townsend, Box 2, Community, Grand Coteau Collection, at SSCSL

JCP John Carroll, The John Carroll Papers, ed. Thomas O’Brien Hanley, 3 vols. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

JFMP John Francis McDermott Papers, Louisa H. Bowen University Archives and Special Collections, Lovejoy Library, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, Illinois

MASL Catholic Church, Archdiocese of St. Louis (Mo.) Collection: Microfilm, at UNDA

MDAH Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi

MPC Missouri Province Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives, St. Louis, Missouri

MSCP Missionary Society of Connecticut Papers, 1759–1948, Microfilm, Congregational Library and Archives, Boston, Massachusetts

MSVY Charles Leon Souvay Collection: Microfilm, at UNDA

NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC

PDJ Philippine Duchesne, Journal de la Société du Sacré Coeur 1o à St. Charles 2d à S. Ferdinand 3o à St. Louis 4o partie de la Louisiane, de 1818 à 1840, English Translation [known as Mother Duchesne’s Journal, Abridged, 1818–1840], Box 2, St. Charles Collection, at SSCSL

PHS Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

RACHSP Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia

SBHLA Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee

SHL Stephen Hempstead Letterbook, in SHP

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SHP Stephen Hempstead Papers, Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis, Missouri

SLAPRM St. Louis Archdiocesan Parish Records Microfilm, at St. Louis County Library, St. Louis, Missouri

SLCHR St. Louis Catholic Historical Review

SRM Louis Houck, The Spanish Regime in Missouri: A Collection of Papers and Documents Relating to Upper Louisiana Principally within the Present Limits of Missouri during the Dominion of Spain, from the Archives of the Indies at Seville, Etc., Translated from the Original Spanish into English, and Including Also Some Papers Concerning the Supposed Grant to Col. George Morgan at the Mouth of the Ohio, Found in the Congressional Library, 2 vols. (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 1909).

SSCSL Society of the Sacred Heart, U.S. Province Archives, St. Louis, Missouri

UNDA University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Indiana

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ABSTRACT

“Holy Waters” is a historical study of the Christianization of the Mississippi River

Valley between 1780 and 1830. The geographic scope encompasses the swath of settlements, towns, villages, and hunting grounds along the Mississippi River from its confluence with the Missouri River near St. Louis to where it empties into the Gulf of

Mexico below New Orleans. In this region Native American disinterest and Catholic institutional presence and ritual practice thwarted and complicated Protestant efforts to impose evangelicalism, while Anglo-American, nominally Protestant demographic gains destabilized Catholic dominance. When Protestants from New England and Catholics from Europe established rival missions in a competition for souls, Mississippi Valley inhabitants—whites, Africans and African Americans, and Native Americans—rejected their doctrinal rigidity in favor of religious flexibility. By highlighting Catholic and animist vitality and exposing the intense and complicated contest for religious dominance in the region, “Holy Waters” challenges the narrative of inevitable Protestant evangelical victory and expands the story of American religious history.

In the decades surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, Protestant and Catholic leaders vied with each other to inject their religious worldviews and habits into the

Mississippi River Valley. The fervor of the Second Great Awakening alone could not, and did not, sacralize the region. Catholic and Protestant organizations in Europe and the northeast U.S. dumped massive resources into the missionizing project. The missionaries

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they placed on the ground fed back tales of moral depravity and religious ignorance to pull on the heartstrings of the lay faithful from Hartford to Bordeaux. Organizational leaders leveraged the missionaries’ depictions of spiritual destitution to secure funds, religious objects and texts, and personnel, which they funneled back into the Mississippi

River Valley.

Catholic and evangelical Protestant missionaries were equally skilled, and equally opportunistic, in penning accounts of their ministrations designed to compel generosity back home. Less obvious in the missionaries’ and their backers’ reports to donors were the myriad ways that those who lived in the Mississippi River Valley undermined, stalled, redirected, and amended the proselytizers’ schemes, opting for religious flexibility, and often religious laxity, over doctrinal purity. Many of the inhabitants of the region cultivated a religious suppleness that enabled them to embrace part, but not all, of their religious purveyors’ messages, as well as to incorporate rather than reject alternate forms of Christianity. This pragmatic ecumenism was not grounded in enlightened notions of tolerance and religious liberty, nor was it based on a liberal theology that all paths lead to God. Rather, it was a practical project, hammered out in daily living. For some, religious flexibility aided economic pursuits or strengthened social ties. For others, it offered access to educational benefits. For still others, curiosity and spiritual hunger drove religious expansiveness.

INTRODUCTION

The Mississippi River, majestic and fearful, braided its course through woodlands of black oak, hickory, cedar, cypress, and honey locust. Pelicans, eagles, vultures, owls, bullfrogs, wolves, alligators, and bears—creatures of mythic narratives and bedtime stories—rambled and nested along its banks and in its turgid waters. From its confluence with the Missouri a few miles above St. Louis, past the golden and amber ridges of

Chickasaw Bluffs, to New Orleans, the river wove through flat, low prairies, fertile and flood-prone. “Intricate mazes of innumerable islands” populated its channels. In the late eighteenth century, its rapid current bore boats carrying corn, tobacco, whiskey, flour, beer, furs, skins, and cotton. A handful of European and American settlements and villages dotted its banks from St. Louis to New Madrid, a small village a few dozen miles below the mouth of the Ohio River. The land between New Madrid and Natchez, to one

European’s eye, was “almost wholly a wild and pathless wilderness”—the villages and hunting grounds of American Indian groups. “Scattered improvements” below Natchez bled into a more thickly settled area between Pointe Coupée and New Orleans, the residents having cleared and cultivated the land for tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar, and indigo. Plantations popping up in this region fronted the Mississippi’s banks in narrow strips stretching back one hundred acres, each with a cluster of slave cabins or hovels.

From Baton Rouge to New Orleans the levee guarding the low land from the river played host to orange and lemon trees, which shared their distinctive fragrance with residents and travelers alike.

The river itself could be menacing. It coiled and turned, twisting its broad stream in all directions, undermining and eroding its banks and sweeping away anything constructed or planted atop. Sawyers and planters—trees fallen into the current that either wedged sideways and rocked up and down, or rooted themselves to the bottom— threatened to skewer or gash watercraft navigating its brisk current. The river’s eddies and channels could pull boats into side streams, stall them in back-flowing waters, or fling them against islands or cliffs. In stormy weather the river was fierce, compelling respect and awe from those who lived along its banks or traveled its waters.1

1 13 March, 3 April 1789, Israel Shreve Journal, Israel Shreve Collection, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Thomas S. Teas, “A Trading Trip to Natchez and New Orleans, 1822: Diary of Thomas S. Teas,” ed. Julia Ideson and Sanford W. Higginbotham, Journal of Southern History 7, no. 3 (1941): 385–86, 390; Nicolas Finiels, An Account of Upper Louisiana, trans. Carl J. Ekberg (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 48; Samuel S. Forman, Narrative of a Journey down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789–90, ed. Lyman Draper (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1888), 52; Benjamin Harding, A Tour through the Western Country, A.D. 1818 & 1819 (New-London: Printed by Samuel Green, for the author, 1819), 16; W. Bullock, Sketch of a Journey through the Western States of North America, from New Orleans, by the Mississippi, Ohio, City of Cincinnati and Falls of Niagara, to New York, in 1827 / By W. Bullock ... With a description of the new and flourishing city of Cincinnati, by Messrs. B. Drake and E. D. Mansfield. And a selection from various authors, on the present condition and future prospects of the settlers, in the fertile and populous state of Ohio, containing information useful to persons desirous of settling in America (London: John Miller, 1827), xiv; Francis Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 & 1797 (London: Baily Brothers, 1856), 266–270, 291, 295–297; Thomas Rodney, A Journey through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory, ed. by Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 170–182; Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage through the States of New-York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and through the Territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and New-Orleans; Performed in the Years 1807 and 1808; Including a Tour of Nearly Six Thousand Miles. With Maps and Plates 2 vols. (New-York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 2:47–49, 54, 75, 102, 104; Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America Containing a Succinct Account of Its Soil, Climate, Natural History, Population, Agriculture, Manners, and Customs..., 3rd edn (London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1797), 245–255.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Mississippi River served as a border between nations and empires, but it also was a channel of communication and transportation, carrying goods, soldiers, explorers, missionaries, migrants, and produce to, through, and out of the region. Between 1780 and 1830 Spain, Britain, France, and the

United States, as well as the Choctaws, Osages, Quapaws, Chickasaws, and other indigenous groups staked, defended, and forfeited various claims to the region. While these geopolitical machinations unfolded, European, African, Euro-American, and Native

American inhabitants moved within the region and adjusted to newcomers, who brought divergent worldviews, cosmologies, and religious agendas, as well as material goods, unfamiliar economic and political practices, and human chattel. The era was one of rapid transformation. In 1780 the Mississippi Valley was a sparsely populated, French and

Native American cultural zone sustained by a frontier exchange economy. By 1830 the region was a booming cotton kingdom, dominated by Anglo-American planters, small- scale farmers and enslaved African-descended laborers.2

2 Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 39–68; Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 77–104; John Reda, “From Subjects to Citizens: Two Pierres and the French Influence on the Transformation of the Illinois Country,” in French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, ed. Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 159–81; Sonia Toudji, “Change and Continuity: French and Indian Alliance in the Mississippi Valley after the Treaty of 1763,” in Une Amérique française, 1760–1860: dynamiques du corridor créole, ed. Guillaume Teasdale and Tangi Villerbu (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015), 205–28. On the material culture of the encounter between French and indigenous people in the region, and how apparel in particular captured the process of racialization that unfolded in the eighteenth century, see Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

The valley through which this grand and formidable artery flowed was the arena for a continental contest at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the land mass of the United States, triggered anxieties about how the new regions with their polyglot inhabitants would be incorporated into the American nation.

Native American groups resisted Anglo-American encroachment on their land, some opting to lay aside tribal differences for Tecumseh’s Pan-Indian movement. Spurred by the emerging market economy, the nation’s dependence on an enslaved labor force deepened and broadened, prodding reflection by some about the place of slavery in a republic of liberty and raising questions for many about slavery’s extension into the western territories. Hungry for land and opportunity, a cavalcade of emigrants— established planters with their enslaved black laborers, merchants, ambitious but penniless younger sons, conmen, and farming families—ventured the river routes and wagon paths to the Mississippi Valley, where they encountered European, Native

American, Creole, West Indian, African, Anglo-American and mixed communities whose inhabitants’ habits and worldviews differed from their own. As the nation tumbled beyond its eastern cradle, its expansionist energies generated social, economic, cultural, and political competition and conflict.3

3 The term Creole can be a slippery one. Throughout this study it signifies individuals born in the Mississippi River Valley whose parents were born elsewhere—primarily in Europe and Africa. On the political and economic significance of the Louisiana Purchase, see Jon Kulka, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds., A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005); Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (Charlottesville: 4

But the contest for dominion over the continent’s land and people also had a religious face. The Mississippi River Valley, far from Christian institutional centers, inhabited by an eclectic mix of races, nationalities, religious confessions, and language groups, posed a threat to eastern Anglo-America’s self-understanding as a Protestant nation. First, several Native American groups inhabited the region, most of them adhering to an animist spirituality that Christians of all stripes considered heathen.

Second, the Europeans who had settled along the river in the previous century, along with their descendents and their slaves, were overwhelmingly Catholic. France and Spain had funded and instituted Roman Catholicism in their respective North American colonies, including Upper and Lower Louisiana, with varying degrees of success, and Jesuit missionaries had made inroads among some Native American groups. The Catholic

University of Virginia Press, 2009). On Native American resistance to American territorial expansion, see Adam Joseph Jortner, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006); Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Tuete, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston, 1991); Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). On the expansion of slavery and its centrality to the American economy, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). On the encounters between the various European, Creole, African, and Indian inhabitants with the migrants from the eastern states, see Aron, American Confluence. On the persistence of French economic and cultural forms in the Mississippi River Valley, see Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Daniel Royot, Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007).

Church had a network of parishes and institutions stretching from New Orleans to St.

Louis, which were home to, as of 1814, more than a dozen priests and nearly as many women religious, and the Catholic renewal energies unleashed in backlash to the dechristianization process of the French Revolution were propelling more priests and nuns to the region. Third, profit, not piety, motivated the planters and merchants flooding into the Mississippi River Valley, and they gave little priority to cultivating religious practices or institutions in their new homeland. All three groups put in jeopardy easterners’ conception of America’s identity and destiny. Protestant leaders in particular fretted about what this unruly and heterodox population would mean for the soul of the nation.4

If those were the challenges that preoccupied Protestants eying the region, what worried Catholic leaders in Rome, Paris and Baltimore was the fragility of their own institutional presence in the Mississippi River Valley: they had far fewer priests on the ground than they needed to serve the existing Catholic population—both enslaved and free—and to evangelize the neighboring Native American groups. More terrifying yet was the menace of a Protestant demographic invasion. The American farming families, planters and tradesmen flocking to the valley were mostly Protestant, at least in name. As they moved into the area, their sheer numbers endangered Catholic dominance. Catholic

4 Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 227. For a discussion of the parallel processes of state formation further north in what would become the state of Wisconsin, see Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

administrators recognized that without decisive action, they would lose their edge in the region.5

Enslaved Africans and their descendents, focused on bare survival in a brutal slave system, had little power to influence the economic, territorial, and religious contests unfolding in the region. Free people of color held a unique position, especially in New

Orleans, with access to property and some elements of social belonging from the dominant white society, but without any formal political potency or religious authority.

For their part, the Native Americans who lived in the Mississippi River Valley had kinship and economic ties to the long-time European inhabitants, particularly the French and Creole residents, while they viewed the newcomers’ land greed as a threat. On the religious front, they were perplexed by and suspicious of the competing efforts to

Christianize them. Their own beliefs and practices were capacious enough to tolerate other religious expressions, and their cosmologies did not have an outward-focused, proselytizing agenda. Chickasaws, Osages, and other Native American groups incorporated strangers and war captives into their communities through a process of adoption, but they did not use religious conversion as a strategy of intercultural dominance.6

5 On the Catholic presence in the Mississippi River Valley, see Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); John R. Dichtl, Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses.

6 Kimberly S Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); DuVal, Native Ground, 128–163; Aron, American Confluence, 69–105; Gilbert C. Din and A. P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).

In the opening years of the nineteenth century Protestant and Catholic leaders vied with each other to inject their religious worldviews and habits into the Mississippi River

Valley. The fervor of the Second Great Awakening alone could not, and did not, sacralize the region. Religious enthusiasm whipped up by riveting preaching did not single- handedly drive the expansion of Christian institutional presence among the diverse populace. Catholic and Protestant organizations in Europe and the northeast U.S. dumped massive resources into the missionizing project. The missionaries they placed on the ground fed back tales of moral depravity and religious ignorance to pull on the heartstrings of the lay faithful from Hartford to Bordeaux. Organizational leaders leveraged the missionaries’ depictions of spiritual destitution to secure funds, religious objects and texts, and personnel, which they funneled back into the Mississippi River

Valley. They also amplified the threat of religious competition, warning that if material aid and personnel did not come quickly, the “heretics” (from the Catholic point of view) or the “papists” (from the Protestant point of view) would spread their noxious beliefs among the spiritually enfeebled populace.7

7 On the debate about how evangelical Christianity spread in the early United States, Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997). On early-nineteenth-century revivalism, Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). For an examination of encounters between Protestants, Catholics, and Native Americans in an earlier American borderland context—seventeenth-century Maine—see Laura M. Chmielewski, The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early 8

Catholic and evangelical Protestant missionaries were equally skilled, and equally opportunistic, in penning accounts of their ministrations designed to compel generosity back home. Less obvious in the missionaries’ and their backers’ reports to donors were the myriad ways that those who lived in the Mississippi River Valley undermined, stalled, redirected, and amended the proselytizers’ schemes, opting for religious flexibility, and often religious laxity, over doctrinal purity. The rhetoric of religious competition rallied European and east coast donors to the cause. But this Reformation-era trope concealed an important trend in the Mississippi River Valley, that of cross- confessional porosity, a kind of pragmatic ecumenism. Many of the inhabitants of the region who aligned themselves with particular sects did not evince a commitment to theological conformity, despite their proselytizers’ efforts. Instead, they cultivated a religious suppleness that enabled them to embrace part, but not all, of their religious purveyors’ messages, as well as to incorporate rather than reject alternate forms of

Christianity. This pragmatic ecumenism was not grounded in enlightened notions of tolerance and religious liberty, nor was it based on a liberal theology that all paths lead to

God. Rather, it was a practical project, hammered out in daily living. For some, religious flexibility aided economic pursuits or strengthened social ties. For others, it offered access to educational benefits. For still others, curiosity and spiritual hunger drove religious expansiveness.8

American Frontier (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

8 For an examination of the themes of tolerance and religious freedom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

What unfolds in the pages that follow is a historical study of the Christianization of the Mississippi River Valley between 1780 and 1830. The geographic scope encompasses the swath of settlements, towns, villages, and hunting grounds along the

Mississippi River from its confluence with the Missouri River near St. Louis to where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. In this region Native American disinterest and Catholic institutional presence and ritual practice thwarted and complicated Protestant efforts to impose evangelicalism, while Anglo-American, nominally Protestant demographic gains destabilized Catholic dominance. Protestants from New England and Catholics from Europe established rival missions in their contest for souls, only to find Mississippi Valley inhabitants rejecting doctrinal rigidity in favor of pragmatic religious flexibility.

Although historians have examined the social, economic, political, and territorial contests for the Mississippi River Valley, they know little about the religious conflicts and commitments in the region. Yet the Mississippi Valley’s religious development is of critical importance because the wrangling for spiritual dominance that unfolded there unsettles the reigning interpretation of American religion from the American Revolution through the Early Republic. The governing narrative is one of inevitable Protestant evangelical growth and triumph. In contrast, this study reveals the fierce and, by 1830, undecided contest for religious preeminence in the region, as Protestant, Catholic, and

Native American cosmologies and worldviews vied for the upper hand. Instead of unavoidable evangelical supremacy, a vigorous and complex struggle took shape between many groups to sacralize the Mississippi Valley.9

9 Two recent essay collections touch on the competing religious cultures of the 10

Apart from a cadre of ecclesiastical scholars, historians of early American religion have not attended adequately to the presence and significance of Catholic religiosity prior to the period of massive German and Irish immigration in the 1840s and forward, and few have considered how Catholic dominance in the Mississippi Valley catalyzed Protestant missionary efforts. This study is the first book-length assessment of the intertwining and competing Catholic and Protestant projects to institutionalize Christianity in the region.

By prioritizing practices, this study builds on other scholars’ efforts to uncover the religious worlds of laypeople. Faith is articulated in creeds, sermons, doctrines, and catechisms; it is embodied in daily habits, rituals, interpersonal interactions, art, sartorial choices, songs, postures, and tones of voice. In attending to these behaviors, the narrative that follows reveals how regular people—enslaved and free—enacted their religious identities and influenced the development of institutional Christianity in the Mississippi

River Valley.10

Mississippi River Valley at the turn of the nineteenth century. Michael Pasquier’s volume explores how ideas about and experiences of the Mississippi River at various points in America’s history have shaped both religious practices in the region and notions of national identity. Richard Callahan’s volume examines the religious ramifications of the Louisiana Purchase, both in the Mississippi Valley and further west. Both collections attend briefly to African Catholicism in the region, but otherwise do not examine Catholic practice in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Michael Pasquier, ed., Gods of the Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Richard J Callahan, New Territories, New Perspectives the Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008). For an articulation of the reigning evangelical thesis, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity; Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1993); John Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York, 1998).

10 Some recent explorations of Catholicism’s significance in early American history include Maura Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. S. Deborah Kang (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Margaret C. DePalma, Dialogue on the Frontier: Catholic and 11

In 1780 New Orleans was a fragile port town; St. Louis was a village of fewer than 1000 people. On paper Spain ruled the west side of the river, plus New Orleans,

Baton Rouge, and Natchez; Britain, then the United States, had nominal dominion over much of the east side, though the Anglophone military presence was limited, and there were few Euro-American settlers. The Choctaws and Chickasaws controlled much of the east side of the river between the confluence with the Ohio and Natchez. The Osages and

Quapaws dominated the land west of the Mississippi from the Missouri River to the

Arkansas River. As Catholic officials struggled to staff the string of parish churches in the region, Catholic parishioners sloughed off their religious duties and balked at priests’ efforts to police their behavior. Protestants, numerous in Natchez from prior British rule, slowly seeped into the Catholic realms, where Spanish authorities prohibited them to express their religion publicly. The geopolitical shuffling in the Mississippi River Valley, especially the Louisiana Purchase, overturned state-supported Catholicism and opened the region to American settlement and Protestant preaching, infusing the Mississippi

River Valley with new players and setting the stage for the rhetorical, if not literal, battle between Protestants and Catholics for the region.

The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812—intense tremblors centered in the

Mississippi Valley that reverberated as far as Boston and Charleston—focused national

Protestant Relations, 1793–1883 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On religious practices, habits, and behaviors, and the historiographic turn toward lived religion, see David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, 1997), viii-ix; Hall, David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989); Robert A Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

attention on the American interior. Within a year, northeastern Protestants launched a pair of missionaries to scope out the region and to win the hearts of the inhabitants. When the missionaries began disseminating thousands of bibles in French, English and Spanish in the Mississippi River Valley, Catholic leaders from New Orleans to St. Louis found themselves caught between their duty to suppress unauthorized scriptures and their desire to please the laity, including free and enslaved people of color as well as white folks, who scrambled for the free books. Protestant leaders also found their authority tested as inhabitants’ hunger for the proffered texts reached beyond spiritual concerns.

Catholic authorities in the early nineteenth century fretted about the souls in the

Mississippi River Valley, just as much as did Protestants. And Catholics, just like

Protestants, sought to sacralize the region. Faced with parallel financial and personnel challenges, Protestant and Catholic hierarchies employed overlapping strategies to extend their respective forms of Christianity over the eclectic population. Religious leaders used the budding religious press to circulate passionate appeals for help and engaged their collegial networks and organizational affiliations on the east coast (Protestants) and in

Europe (Catholics) to funnel resources—human, material (e.g. religious books, sacramental objects, church bells), and financial—to the Mississippi River Valley. Their pleas propelled faithful laypeople, especially lay women, to pray for and donate to the cause, and motivated scores of zealous believers to sign up for duty. When they arrived, these missionary recruits discovered that the objects of their proselytizing energies held their own ideas of faithfulness. Inhabitants in the Mississippi River Valley viewed the missionaries’ institutionalizing tactics with a mixture of gratitude, guardedness, indifference, and disdain, and pressed back against efforts to mold them into religious

obedience. Catholic and Protestant evangelists had to revise their religious agendas in response to residents’ spiritual prerogatives.

In the late 1810s and 1820s Christian leaders innovated in their mission appeals, turning to images of Native Americans to raise additional funds from religious donors and the U.S. government. Mission administrators tapped into European and Euro-

American anxiety and fascination about the indigenous American population, deploying depictions of heathenish Native Americans untouched by the Christian message to generate publicity and resources for evangelistic projects. The United States government cheered the cause, offering financial support through the Civilization Fund for religious groups engaged in educating and civilizing the Indians. Protestants and Catholics established a series of missions throughout the Mississippi River Valley to target

Chickasaws, Choctaws, Osages, Iowas, Cherokees, and other Native groups. The indigenous inhabitants reacted in diverse ways to these religious incursions. Some Native people were more interested in the schools the missionaries established than their chapels and churches. Others rejected the missionaries all together, preferring to continue their own religious habits rather than adhere to the white people’s faith. Those who did take on a Christian identity did not necessarily behave or practice in the ways the evangelists instructed. The missionaries and their backers learned that the idea of Christianizing

Native Americans could yield great interest and support, but actually transforming the majority of Native Americans into Christians was an illusive goal.

Through the 1820s the Protestants’ and Catholics’ Christianizing agenda and funding schemes prioritized white settlers and Native American groups. They overlooked two conspicuous segments of the Mississippi Valley population: free and enslaved black

people. From the early eighteenth century when enslaved Africans began arriving in the

Mississippi River Valley, the religious stipulations in the French and Spanish slave codes shaped their religious lives. Under the Code Noir slaves had to be baptized:

Christianization at its most institutional level. Some Africans and their descendents adopted and fused elements of Catholicism with African religious forms, remaking

Christianity on their own terms. By the early nineteenth century, thousands of enslaved and free people of color from St. Louis to New Orleans identified as Catholic. And the affiliation was not just skin deep. Black women and men agitated for access to Catholic rituals, sacraments, and personnel. They pressed priests and nuns to attend to their spiritual needs, co-opting resources not earmarked for them. Other enslaved and free people of color—especially those forced to migrate from the eastern states—pressed for religious belonging among the proliferating Protestant sects. Both Protestant and Catholic missionaries and their supporters ignored African-descended people when they organized and publicized their evangelistic activities, but in the face of black people’s religious initiative, they adjusted their plans and recalibrated to their unexpected audience.

The process of Christianization in the Mississippi River Valley was neither monolithic nor all-encompassing. Of the Euro-American population, plenty of free thinkers, deists, and indifferentists, not to mention agnostics or atheists, occupied the region, as well as small numbers of Jews. In the African and African-American population were faithful Muslims and practitioners of African religions, alongside those who blended and interwove African spirituality with elements of Christianity. Native

Americans for the most part adhered to animist beliefs and practices, though some

adopted and adapted Christian forms. The Mississippi River Valley held a panorama of religious commitments and behaviors.11

The Christianization that took place in the region involved not simply the attempt to transfer doctrines or beliefs, but also the infusion of Christian architecture, institutions, material culture, personnel, behaviors, and observances. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, a sizable portion of the population adopted certain Christian practices: church-going, bible reading, having infants baptized or being baptized as a youth or adult, celebrating the Lord’s Supper, confessing to a priest, singing hymns, conducting family worship, saying the rosary, praying, attending prayer meetings, tithing or making offerings to a church, evangelizing others, dispersing bibles or religious tracts, giving money to missionaries, creating home altars, saying novenas, engaging in self- mortification. Inhabitants also participated in a host of other activities that they interpreted as self-conscious acts of Christian charity, including attending to the sick, giving alms to the poor, caring for widows or orphans, and visiting the elderly, the infirm, and the imprisoned.12

By 1830 the various Christian sects had succeeded in funneling personnel, finances, and material objects westward to sacralize the Mississippi Valley. The

11 On the early presence of Jews in the Mississippi River Valley, see Walter Ehrlich, Zion in the Valley: The Jewish Community of St. Louis, vol, 1, 1807–1907 (Columbia, Mo.; London: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

12 Thomas Tweed’s definition of religions as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries” informs this study, pointing to the dynamic, embodied expression of religiosity—in this case, Christianity—in the Mississippi Valley, even when practitioners did not fulfill their spiritual leaders’ expectations. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 55.

Missionary Society of Connecticut alone sent more than thirty missionaries to Illinois,

Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Several of these men subsequently settled in the region to serve as pastors in some of the dozens of churches they helped establish.

In that same timeframe the Catholics expanded their religious ranks to well over one hundred personnel in 1830. Two bishops were consecrated to oversee the Mississippi

Valley parishes. They and their colleagues secured candlesticks, altar cloths, paintings of saints, communion vessels, crosses, relics, and bells to adorn their cathedrals and the dozens of parish churches and chapels. Thanks to the persuasive powers of the missionaries’ letters and reports circulated by the booming religious publication industry in Europe and the northeast of the United States, and the generosity of countless individuals, Catholics and evangelical Protestants extended and strengthened their institutional presence in the Mississippi River Valley. But a sacralized landscape did not necessarily mean a sanctified populace. Many of the inhabitants welcomed the missionaries and the structures of Christian community they brought, but not at the cost of their own pragmatic ecumenism. Resisting the expectation of doctrinal purity, those who lived in the settlements and towns along the Mississippi retained a religious flexibility that afforded them educational opportunities, economic and social networks, and avenues to spiritual care and devotional practice.13

13 Lists of missionaries, with birth and death dates, item 371, Reel 15, MSCP. The Presbyterian General Assembly and other Protestant missionary agencies sent others. Daniel Smith settled in Natchez in 1816; Sylvester Larned in New Orleans in 1818; Samuel Royce in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1819; Edward Hollister in Edwardsville, Illinois in 1822; Salmon Giddings in St. Louis in 1827. James Blythe, “Sketch of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Daniel Smith” in Robert Bishop, An Outline of the History of the Church in the State of Kentucky (Lexington: T. T. Skillman, 1824), 200–205; Journal of Elias Cornelius, 9 Feb 1818, printed in B. B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1833), 100–101; Samuel Royce to Abel Flint, 31 17

May 1819, Reel 9, MSCP; Edward Hollister to Abel Flint, 30 March 1822, folder 1, box 17, JFMP; Giddings to Horace Hooker, 20 Jun 1827, folder 6, box 15, JFMP. The Catholic personnel included ordained priests, professed women religious, and coadjutor brothers, as well novices and aspirants in the religious orders.

Chapter 1

"A SLIGHT SPARK OF THE FAITH": CHRISTIAN FRAGILITY IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY, 1780–1812

Francis Baily knew how to worship God. And he knew that the spectacle before his eyes was far from pleasing to the Christian deity. In 1797 the young Englishman, cooling his heels in New Orleans, cast scornful glances upon the Corpus Christi procession in the blocks around the Catholic cathedral. On that mid-June morning, Baily sniffed excitement in the air, the “general bustle through the streets” auguring something momentous. Men, women, and children from all strata of society awaited the solemn march of the host—the consecrated bread transubstantiated into the body of Christ— through the streets. Soldiers cleared the way, making room for the procession, headed by an “ecclesiastical multitude” bearing “tapers, crosses, and all the instruments of idolatrous superstition.” The priests’ centerpiece was the “sacred treasure” on a bier bedecked with flowers. The bishop followed the host, shaded by a canopy. The Spanish governor and his entourage of city leaders and wealthy gentlemen marched behind the bishop, followed by more soldiers “to keep off the rabble.” Musicians accompanied the solemn train, mingling their melodies with the snap of priests’ robes fluttering in the wind and the pattering of hundreds of feet. The crowds lining the path knelt in reverence as the host approached and tossed flowers on the bishop when he passed. At each street corner the retinue halted, the bishop performed a few “ecclesiastical tricks” and

“scattered his blessings round upon the multitude” kneeling around him, and then the parade resumed its liturgical amble through the city streets back to the cathedral.

Baily stood aloof from the pageant at first, but then insinuated himself into the governor’s party, tagging along through the entire affair. He even deigned to remove his hat when the others knelt, grudgingly showing respect for a ceremony he neither believed in nor understood. The Englishman retained a contemptuous tone as he wrote about the procession, but he could not mask his fascination with what he observed. The spectacle had dazzled him. The Catholics of New Orleans put on a good show.1

Catholics had been demonstrating their religiosity in New Orleans for nearly eighty years before Baily gazed upon their rituals. The city was the headquarters for

Catholicism in the Mississippi River Valley, the site of the most concentrated ecclesiastical presence, including, at the close of the eighteenth century, a sitting bishop, a cathedral, a thriving Ursuline convent, a hospital, and a gaggle of priests. Granted, few city dwellers were models of piety and religious fervor. New Orleanians had a reputation for orienting themselves more toward the pleasures of this world than toward rewards in the world to come. On Sundays, as on all other days, they played, they fought, they danced, they drank, they lusted, they worked. Some built fortunes on the backs of others,

1 Francis Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 & 1797 (London: Baily Brothers, 1856), 314–317. An anonymous traveler’s account from 1799 describes a similar, though more modest, Catholic procession of the host in New Orleans during Lent: “I observed one day while standing in the street a little distance from me, a priest walking with hasty steps on the levee carrying the host, and three or four others carrying candles in lanthorns; these were followed by a file of musketeers with bayonets fixed. I was a little struck with surprise at this parade, and more so on seeing inhabitants kneeling down as it approached.” “Extracts of Notes of a voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, thence by sea to Philadelphia, in the year 1799,” as printed in Fortescue Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country: Through the States of Ohio and Kentucky, a Voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and a Trip Through the Mississippi Territory, and Part of West (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear & Eichbaum, 1810), 338–339.

who toiled in bondage and had to “pilfer & steal any thing they can lay their hands on by day or night” to survive.2 Travelers visiting the city habitually derided New Orleanians for their lax religiosity. “They disregard the Sabbath entirely; or, if they go to the

Catholic church, there not being any other, they go as to a spectacle, where fine women are to be seen, and where fine music is to be heard!” grumbled one visitor.3

But some New Orleanians did pray, expressing their devotion publicly at the

Catholic church on the town square, which, with the appointment of a bishop for New

Orleans, was elevated from a parish church to a cathedral in 1794. The large brick building, “plastered and painted in front, to give it the appearance of marble,” had a

“magnificent” altar adorned with paintings and sculpture of considerable taste,” drawing the eyes of the literate and illiterate alike to the sacred dramas they depicted.4 With music

2 D[aniel] Constable to James Constable, 17 March 1806, Box 1, American Travel Collection, William L. Clement Library, University of Michigan; Testimony of Joachin Portillo, 12 Aug 1795, IV 5 d 2, CANO, UNDA; Bishop Luis Peñalver y Cardenas, Statement, 13 Nov 1797, V 1 e, CANO, UNDA.

3 Thomas Ashe, Travels in America, Performed in 1806, for the Purpose of Exploring the Rivers Alleghany, Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi, and Ascertaining the Produce and Condition of Their Banks and Vicinity (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, Bridge- Street; by John Abraham, Clement’s Lane, 1808), 3:246. In a ploy to promote the authenticity of his own travel narrative, Ashe’s contemporary Christian Schultz accused Ashe of fabricating his travel account from what he read in a navigation guide, never having “travelled the route pretended to be described” in his published letters. A subsequent historian determined that Ashe’s account was based on his actual travels. See Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage through the States of New-York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and through the Territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and New-Orleans; Performed in the Years 1807 and 1808; Including a Tour of Nearly Six Thousand Miles. With Maps and Plates (New-York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 1:iv; Francis H. Herrick, “Thomas Ashe and the Authenticity of His Travels in America,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 13 (Jun., 1926): 50–57. For another account of New Orleanians’ practice of working and playing on the Sabbath, see “Extracts of Notes of a voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, 1799,” in Cuming, Sketches, 333.

4 Ashe, Travels in America, 3:247. After the original St. Louis Church burned in the New 21

from “a very fine organ” swirling and candles flickering, the worship service could be a

“sublime” experience even for the hard of heart.5 One traveler noted that when he visited the “elegantly ornamented” cathedral in 1799, boys’ and men’s voices mingled in a choral anthem introducing the sermon. Three priests conducted the worship service in

Latin. One of them preached in Spanish on the “sanctification of the Sabbath,” indicating to this traveler that the priests recognized city dwellers’ reputation for breaking the third commandment.6

The pious and impious alike who lived in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century had access to a full sensory experience at the Catholic cathedral, including not only incense, candles, church bells, and an organ, but also professional singers paid to intone the Mass settings.7 The city’s Catholic leadership could put on an impressive liturgical performance. But like the visitors, the priests complained that only a fraction of the people attended Mass on holy days. The number was even smaller on ordinary days.

Hardly anyone kept the Lenten or other obligatory fasts. Very few men humbled themselves in the confessional regularly, arguing that it was ridiculous to expose their

Orleans fire of 1788, a wealthy Spanish citizen bankrolled the construction of a new building, which was dedicated as St. Louis Cathedral at Christmas 1794, in time to receive the new bishop when he arrived the following year. Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans: [A.W. Hyatt Stationery Mfg.], 1939), 215–216, 224– 229.

5 Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage, 2:192–193.

6 “Extracts of Notes of a voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, 1799,” in Cuming, Sketches, 335.

7 On the choral ringers: A man named Arnaud filed a series of bills in 1788 and 1789 for singing at funerals. In one month he received twenty-two piastres for his services. Account #17, Oct 1788 - Nov 1789, IV 4 e, CANO, UNDA. The church funded three more singers in 1790. Francisco Gonzales, Series No. 18, receipts 1790, IV 4 g, CANO, UNDA.

own flaws.8 Not only did the faithful slack off on their religious duties, but they also defied the Church’s moral code. White New Orleanian men’s penchant for sexual liaisons outside the bounds of holy matrimony, and across racial lines, was legendary. One priest dared to accuse them from the pulpit of living worse than pagans.9

The pagans, in fact, were not far away. During the first several decades of the eighteenth century, Europeans and enslaved Africans established and populated small settlements on bayous and rivers in Lower Louisiana, and another cluster near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in Upper Louisiana. Throughout the region the newcomers encountered and accommodated themselves to a network of Native

American groups who claimed the territory. By 1780 the Choctaws and Chickasaws dominated the southeastern Mississippi Valley, the Quapaws and Osages reigned west of the river, and the Kaskaskias, Peorias, Kickapoos, and other Illini people held sway near the confluence of the Ohio with the Mississippi. A host of smaller groups—Houmas,

Tunicas, Chitimachas, among others—lived in villages in Lower Louisiana. In the aftermath of the American Revolution and the Northwest Indian War, Shawnees,

Delawares, and bands of Miamis, Pinkeshaws, and Kickapoos relocated to the west bank of the Mississippi near Ste. Genevieve. A portion of the indigenous population had adopted Catholicism through the evangelistic exertions of Jesuits, Recollects, and missionaries of the Parisian Séminaire des missions étrangèrs (Seminary of Foreign

Missions) from the 1670s to the 1760s. But the overwhelming majority of Native people held a cosmology by which they understood all living things to have a spiritual essence.

8 Testimony of Jaspar de Aranda, 13 Aug 1795, IV 5 d 2, CANO, UNDA.

9 Testimony of Joachin Portillo, 12 Aug 1795, IV 5 d 2, CANO, UNDA.

They oriented their ceremonies toward the Great Spirit, or Author of Life, and toward an array of lesser spiritual beings. Their religious traditions, origin stories, and spiritual practices—including visions, fasting, and identification with personal manitous— satisfied their religious cravings. Native Americans in the Mississippi River Valley were far more interested in accessing the trade goods the Europeans brought to the region and enlisting them in strategic alliances than they were in embracing the white people’s religious systems.10

10 Thomas Hutchins, An historical narrative and topographical description of Louisiana, and West-Florida: Comprehending the river Mississippi with its principal branches and settlements, and the rivers Pearl, Pascagoula, Mobille, Perdido, Escambia, Chacta- Hatcha, &c.: The climate, soil, and produce whether animal, vegetable, or mineral: With directions for sailing into all the bays, lakes, harbours and rivers on the north side of the Gulf of Mexico, and for navigating between the islands situated along that coast, and ascending the Mississippi River (Philadelphia: Robert Aitken, 1784), 39, 44–45, 55–56; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 58–59, 63–64, 92–95. On the Illini Indians’ adoption and adaptation of the Catholicism brought to them by Jesuit and Recollect missionaries and Foreign Mission seminarians, see Robert Michael Morrissey, “The Terms of Encounters: Language and Contested Visions of French Colonization in the Illinois Country, 1673–1702,” in French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, ed. Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 43–75; Tracy Neal Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529–1854 (New York: Edward Dunigan & Bro., 1855), 403–452. On Native American animism and religious practices in the Mississippi River Valley, see Leavelle, Catholic Calumet, 4–18, 84–91; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 40–41, 87; George Sabo, III, “New Traditions for a New World: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Native Americans in Arkansas,” in Jeannie M Whayne, et al., ed., Arkansas: A Narrative History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 53–66; Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 36–38. On Native people’s economic and political priorities, see Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 77–148; 24

Catholicism had a striking visible presence in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century. But the creed of the Spanish Empire, and of its French predecessor, had permeated the Mississippi River Valley only in swatches. Protestantism, barred from entry during the French era, and forbidden public expression in Spanish territory, was nearly invisible apart from the Natchez district. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Christianity, the faith of Europe and its colonies in North America, was attenuated in the Mississippi River Valley. It was not just that the region’s ecclesiastical structure was cut off from genuine sources of authority. The territory was remote from metropoles, rife with political instability, and inhabited by a sparse, eclectic settler population infused with Enlightenment political ideology. Could Christian faith and practice penetrate the soul of the region?

A different Francis may have been part of the squadron of clergy Francis Baily observed in the Corpus Christi procession that June day in 1797. Francis Lennan, or as he became known, Francisco, was born in Ireland in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

In his youth he had taken an opportunity to study at the Royal College of Irish Nobles at

Salamanca in Spain, a refuge for Irish Catholics seeking to pursue a religious vocation not available to them at home. There, Lennan had pledged himself to serve “His Royal

Majesty”—the Spanish Catholic monarch—“with faithfulness and loyalty.” That loyalty landed him in an unlikely place for an Irish lad in 1792: the Spanish colony of West

Florida. Granting a request from the colonial governor for Catholic clergy to minister to

English-speaking inhabitants, the Spanish government had instructed the bishop of

DuVal, Native Ground, 128–163.

Salamanca to send Irish priests to Louisiana and West Florida, which included the parishes west of the Mississippi River in present-day Louisiana and the southern swath of present-day Mississippi and Alabama. Lennan and five compatriots arrived in New

Orleans and were dispatched throughout the region. Lennan briefly served at a parish called Cole’s Creek, then one in Pensacola, before landing in Natchez, a town on the

Mississippi River, from whence he took periodic voyages downriver to New Orleans to consult with his superiors and purchase supplies.11

Lennan’s relocation to North America was one of countless treks, some voluntary, others forced, weaving threads between Europe, Africa, and the Mississippi River Valley in the late eighteenth century. Diverse bands of Francophones landed in the Mississippi

River Valley from the late seventeenth century onward. France populated its Louisiana colony with French and German settlers—adventures-turned-merchants and farmers who had migrated directly from Europe to the Gulf Coast, and from there, up the

Mississippi—and with enslaved Africans, brought primarily from Senegambia and West

Central Africa. In 1765 exiled Acadians arrived, a battered group of pastoralists seeking a new homeland after being ushered out of Canada. French Canadians filtered south along the “creole corridor” to Ste. Genevieve starting mid-century, and to St. Louis a few decades later. Other batches of Francophones—French-born planter aristocrats, mixed-

11 Order of Theodoro Tirso Henrique, 22 Sept 1792, IV 4 i, CANO, UNDA; Henrique Statement, 15 June 1793, IV 4 k, CANO, UNDA; Patrick Walsh to Estevan de Valoria, 11 Nov 1793, IV 4 m, CANO, UNDA; Patrick Walsh to Francisco Luis Héctor Carondolet, 7 July 1794, IV 4 o, CANO, UNDA; Francisco Lennan to Thomas Hassett, 31 July 1803, V 4 a, CANO, UNDA; Jack D. L. Holmes, “Father Francis Lennan and His Activities in Spanish Louisiana and West Florida,” Louisiana Studies 5, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 255–258; Gilbert Din, “The Irish Mission to West Florida,” Louisiana History 12, no. 4 (1971): 315–34; Elliott O’Donnell, The Irish Abroad, a Record of the Achievements of Wanderers from Ireland (London; New York: Sir I. Pitman & Sons, 1915), 250–254.

race planters, and both groups’ African slaves—fled to New Orleans from the revolutionary tumult in Saint-Domingue between 1792 and 1810. In the 1790s the French

Revolution cast more migrants across the globe, some of whom found themselves in the

Mississippi River Valley.12

The Seven Years’ War reconfigured the peopling of the Mississippi River Valley.

France lost the Mississippi Valley and the rest of its North American holdings, though

Francophone settlers continued to arrive. The Treaty of Paris cleaved the Mississippi

River Valley in two, with Britain taking the eastern portion and Spain claiming the western, plus New Orleans. The British mustered only a minimal military presence in the

Illinois Country—and virtually no civilians—but, using land grants as bait, managed by

1783 to populate the Natchez district downriver with twelve hundred slaves and five thousand British subjects, many from Scotland and Philadelphia. The Spanish, meanwhile, reopened the slave trade and brought thousands more Africans to Louisiana by way of Jamaica, Dominica, and Martinique. The Spanish were less successful than the

British at recruiting their own nationals to plant roots in their new holdings, though they

12 Glenn R. Conrad, “Potpourri Français: Varieties of French Settlers in Louisiana,” Revue de Louisiane/Louisiana Review 10, no. 1 (Summer 1981): 1–5; Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 40–41; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 56–95, 382–397; Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” Louisiana History 46, no. 2 (2005): 208; Le Glaunec, “‘Un Nègre nommè [sic] Lubin ne connaissant pas Sa Nation’: The Small World of Louisiana Slavery,” in Cecilé Vidal, ed., Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 112; John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770– 1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 175–206.

did welcome sixteen families from Málaga, a Spanish province, two thousand impoverished residents of the Canary Islands, and a few hundred Anglo-Americans.13

The American Revolution shuffled the map once again and opened the door to more settlers, particularly in the south. The United States took over most of the former

British holdings in the Mississippi River Valley. But Native Americans north of the Ohio

River, left out of the peace negotiations, banded together in a confederacy that warred against the nascent United States until the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. The warfare, and the boundary line between Indian territory and American territory established at

Greenville, inhibited, but did not cut off, American settlement in the Illinois Country.

Meanwhile, Spain claimed East and West Florida after the American Revolution, and the two nations both claimed the swatch north of the 31º parallel. Following the war, Spain sought to expel the British Protestant population from West Florida, but shifted its policy and allowed the settlers to remain if they pledged allegiance to the Spanish Crown and did not conduct Protestant worship publicly.14

13 Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 30–40; Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration, 194–230; Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire,” 183; Le Glaunec, “Small World of Louisiana Slavery,” 112; Sylvia L. Hilton, “Spanish Louisiana in Atlantic Contexts: Nexus of Imperial Transactions and International Relations,” in Vidal, Louisiana: Crossroads, 68–74; Gilbert C. Din, “Empires Too Far: The Demographic Limitations of Three Imperial Powers in the Eighteenth-Century Mississippi Valley,” Louisiana History 50, no. 3 (2009): 261–277; Sylvia L. Hilton, “Loyalty and Patriotism on North American Frontiers: Being and Becoming Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 1776–1803,” in Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands, 1760s– 1820s, ed. Gene Allen Smith and Sylvia L. Hilton (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 9.

14 Adam Joseph Jortner, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 47–71; Hilton, “Spanish Louisiana in Atlantic Contexts,” 71–80; Gilbert C. Din, “Proposals and Plans for Colonization in Spanish Louisiana, 1787–1790,” Louisiana History 11, no. 3 (1970): 197–213; Din, “Empires Too Far,” 277–292; Hilton, “Loyalty and Patriotism,” 8–11. 28

Protestantism had a rocky history in the region. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, France and Spain had exported their established religion, Roman

Catholicism, to their New World colonies. Under the French regime, the Code Noir of

1724 prohibited the exercise of all other religions in Louisiana and the Illinois. Any

Terminology for the geographic regions shifted along with the political boundaries. The French referred to the northern part of the Mississippi River Valley, on both sides of the river, as the Illinois and the southern part as Louisiana. After the Seven Years War, Spain used the term Lower Louisiana to denote the southern region west of the Mississippi, and Upper Louisiana, or Spanish Illinois, for the upriver region on the west bank, including Ste. Geneveive, St. Louis, and St. Charles. The term Illinois Country denoted the upriver region east of the Mississippi, including Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Prairie du Rocher, and Vincennes. The latter settlement, located about 150 from the Mississippi River, is generally not included in the present study. The Church of Rome gained access to the interior of North America through its alliance with Catholic monarchies in Europe. Through the many geopolitical shifts of the late eighteenth century, as empires jockeyed to claim the Mississippi Valley, Catholic authority over the region seesawed. In the French era the bishop of Quebec had jurisdiction over the whole of Louisiana. After France gave up its North American colonies following the Seven Years’ War, Quebec retained religious jurisdiction over the parishes in the Illinois Country, and Spain took ecclesiastical and civil control, though belatedly, over those in Lower Louisiana and Spanish Illinois. French New Orleanians rebuffed Spain’s first efforts to exert civil control of the city in the 1760s. Only when heavy-handed Alejandro O'Reilly arrived in 1769 with a strong show of arms did they succumb to Spanish sovereignty. O'Reilly brought news that the church in Louisiana would now operate under the authority of the diocese of Santiago, Cuba. The Spanish king, under the patronato real, retained power to nominate bishops and make ecclesiastical decisions in his domains. The pope, perhaps reluctantly, complied with the king’s wishes. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century the Spanish king and the Catholic hierarchy tightened their governance of the region west of the Mississippi. The bishop in Santiago, Cuba, administered the church in Louisiana from 1769 until 1785, when the monarch requested that an auxiliary bishop be sent to New Orleans. Two years later when the Vatican elevated Santiago to the status of archdiocese, the auxiliary bishop in Louisiana became subject to a new Spanish diocese, Havana. In 1793 King Charles IV decided to create a separate diocese for Louisiana and the Floridas, a plan the Holy See rubber-stamped. In 1795 New Orleans received its first diocesan bishop. Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 123, 167–168, 174–176; James M. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South: 1513–1900 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 180–184, 190–191; John Gilmary Shea, Life and Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop of Baltimore: Embracing the History of the Catholic Church in the United States. 1763–1815. (New York: J.G. Shea, 1888), 557–558, 567–568.

gatherings or assemblies of non-Catholic religious bodies were considered “illegal and seditious.”15 The Spanish initially maintained the prohibitions, but then, desperate for a settler population in the Mississippi Valley to buffer and protect their more valuable colonies to the west and south, eased the restrictions banning Protestants. In the late

1780s Spain overhauled its policies and opened Louisiana and West Florida to broader foreign immigration, offering free land to Protestant Anglo-Americans and other non-

Catholic Europeans in exchange for loyalty. The laws continued to ban non-Catholic preachers from entering the provinces. The officials’ assumption was that the migrants, forbidden to exercise their odious Protestant faith publicly and exposed to Catholic preaching and catechism, would shed their former practices and embrace the Catholic faith.16 To solidify Catholicism’s hold on the next generation, the Spanish rulers required

Protestant settlers to have their children baptized and catechized by Catholic priests like

Francisco Lennan.17

Juan Thomas may have been one such child. His mother Elizapett (Elizabeth?)

Perfil, had moved to Natchez from the Carolinas. The child’s father, Jorge Jose Thomas, may have been from the Natchez area—the baptismal record does not indicate his origin.

15 “Edit concernant les Negres Escalves a la Louisianne,” No. 23 in “French Manuscripts: Mississippi Valley, 1679–1769,” Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society 4 (1908): 77.

16 Peñalver to Jose Merlo, 26 Aug 1795, IV 5 b, CANO, UNDA; Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, vol. 3, The Spanish Domination (New York: William J. Widdleton, 1866), 387; Gilbert C. Din, “The Immigration Policy of Governor Esteban Miró in Spanish Louisiana,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (1969): 155–75. Spain continued to regulate Protestant settlement in West Florida, which remained a Spanish territory until the United States annexed it in 1812. The Spanish disputed the annexation until the Adams-Onís Treaty, effective in 1821.

17 Royal Instructions to Vicars and Pastors in Louisiana and Florida, 30 Nov 1792, IV 4 k, CANO, UNDA.

Lennan baptized baby Juan in the summer of 1793 at San Salvador church. During the next five years the priest baptized scores of people at the church, including several children born to parents from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North

Carolina, as well as a smattering from Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, England, Spain,

France, and Canada, and a host of children of enslaved and free black people. The priest watched the district expand, filling with American planters drawn to the generous land grants on which they could establish their cotton empire and their slaves, and a range of opportunists eager to maximize their profits, if not to nurture their faith. By 1796 the parish had 4556 inhabitants, only 203 of them Catholic.18

Incoming Protestants in Natchez and elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley knew, or soon discovered, that they were entering a Catholic zone. Even if the residents did not attend Mass regularly, the laws and precedents communicated the religious affiliation of the government. The landscape itself bolstered and reflected the region’s loyalty to

Rome. Catholic structures studded the banks of the Mississippi River, serving as navigation markers for all who floated, rowed, or poled through the region. Travelers routinely noted the church buildings in their diaries. “Got under way at daybreak—passed the Bayou—There is a village there, and a handsome church ... 18 miles below that is

18 Baptism of Juan Jose Thomas, 21 July 1793, Sacramental records from the Parish of San Salvador, Natchez, Mississippi, and the Parish of the Virgin Mary of Sorrows, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1788–1818), translated by Sarah J. Banks and Gail Buzhardt, MDAH; San Salvador Census, Natchez, 1 Apr 1796, IV 5 h, CANO, UNDA. On the expansion of the cotton empire, built on the backs of enslaved people, and recent reassessments of that empire’s role in driving the American economy, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).

Red Church.” In his navigation guide, Zadok Cramer inserted a recognizable symbol—a small building with an open door and a cross on top—to mark the many churches pilots could use as signposts on their journeys, visible, stable, reliable markers of space and points by which to judge one’s progress. Their presence, on the maps and on the banks, projected a certain Catholic strength and permanence.19

Guillermo Miller gazed at those churches as he traveled from his native

Pennsylvania to Rapides Parish southwest of Natchez before the Louisiana Purchase, but he could not have suspected how the faith they represented would make demands of him.

A merchant by trade and a Lutheran by confession, Miller had established a connection with Ursula Meillior, the daughter of a prominent family in the area. According to a royal act of 1793, Protestants in the Spanish colony could not marry Catholics unless they demonstrated a compelling reason, promised not to interfere with the faith of their spouse, and agreed to raise any children born to the union as Catholics. To sanctify his relationship with Meillior, Miller had to go through a lengthy process of vetting by church officials. He swore before witnesses that he would abide by the church’s strictures with regard to children and his fiancée’s faith. He also brought witnesses of his own to testify that if he did not marry Meillior, he would bring “dishonor” to her family. The frequency with which he visited the family home suggested a connection that, were it not

19 Thomas S. Teas, “A Trading Trip to Natchez and New Orleans, 1822: Diary of Thomas S. Teas,” ed. Julia Ideson and Sanford W. Higginbotham, Journal of Southern History 7 (1941): 391; Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage 2:163, 164; Zadok Cramer, The Navigator: Containing Directions for Navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers; with an Ample Account of These Much Admired Waters, from the Head of the Former to the Mouth of the Latter; and a Concise Description of Their Towns, Villages, Harbours, Settlements, &c. With Accurate Maps of the Ohio and Mississippi, to Which Is Added, an Appendix, Containing an Account of Louisiana, and of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, as Discovered by the Voyage under Captains Lewis and Clarke, 6th ed. (Pittsburgh: From the Press of Cramer & Spear, 1808), 123–127.

formalized by the Church, would ruin her reputation. Considering the family’s standing and Miller’s vows, the Catholic priest adjudicating the case granted the dispensation to allow the marriage.20

Spanish laws regulated whether Protestants could contract legal marriages, how they practiced their religion, and how they educated their children.21 Of particular concern to officials was Protestants’ nasty habit of violating the ban on public expression of their faith. A group of Baptists from South Carolina settled at Cole’s Creek near

Natchez during the American Revolution, about a dozen years before Francis Lennan served the Catholic parish there. As practicing Protestants, they were welcome in the

British-held region in 1780. But when Spain claimed jurisdiction after the American

Revolution, the South Carolinian migrants made themselves troublesome. Violating

Spanish law, the group organized a church. The Spanish authorities sought to suppress

20 Marriage dispensation proceedings, Guillermo Miller and Ursula Meillior, 21 June 1802, V 3 j, CANO, UNDA. Not all interfaith couples were so fortunate. Peñalver rebuffed Guillarmo Wikoff when he petitioned to marry Isavel Mather in 1800. Wikoff was a Protestant, Mather a Catholic. Born to Protestant parents, she had been educated in the Ursuline convent. The bishop did not consider their case worthy of a dispensation, even though Wikoff was willing to promise to raise their children as Catholics. Marriage dispensation proceedings, Guillarmo Wikoff and Isavel Mather, 22 Jan 1800, V 2 i, CANO, UNDA. Unlike their compatriots in colonial New Mexico, the priests adjudicating marriages in Spanish Louisiana appear not have fixated on limpieza de sangre—purity of blood—when blessing couples in the late eighteenth century. Religious mixing loomed as a more pernicious threat. On the “racial preoccupations of the nobility” further west, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 198–199, 211–212, quote from 211.

21 In his 1797 instructions to commandants, Gayoso, by this time the governor of the colony, explained the extent of toleration: “Liberty of conscience is not to be extended beyond the first generation; the children of the emigrant must become Catholics; and emigrants, not agreeing to this, must not be admitted, but expelled, even when they bring property with them. This is to be explained to settlers who do not profess the Catholic faith.” Translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana 3:387.

their religious activities, warning them to halt “their heretical psalm-singing, praying and preaching in public or they would be subjected to sundry pains and penalties.” When they persisted, the district governor had Richard Curtis Jr., the ringleader, arrested and threatened to banish him to the silver mines of Mexico. Daunted, Curtis acquiesced and halted his preaching, but later officiated at the wedding of his niece. Weddings will out, as he discovered. Curtis was forced to flee back to South Carolina. Spanish tolerance for

Protestants would not extend to their exercising public religious authority, especially in the Natchez area, where Protestants had numeric dominance.22

Francis Lennan and his five Irish colleagues were not the only new clergy to arrive among the scattered Catholic parishes of Louisiana in the late eighteenth century.

Successive Spanish governors appealed to authorities in Madrid for religious personnel to fill vacancies left by the Jesuits, who had departed in 1763 when their order was suppressed, to replace other French clergy returning to France during the cession, and to minister to and convert the Anglophone Protestant population. In 1770 the ranking

Capuchin—the only male religious order in the colony since the Jesuits’ suppression— informed the governor that he needed eighteen missionaries to fortify the Catholic

22 District governor Manuel Luis Gayoso de Lemos, quoted in Richard Aubrey McLemore, A History of Mississippi Baptists, 1780–1970 (n.p.: Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, 1971), 17. See also ibid., 12–18; T.M. Bond, “Introduction,” in Mississippi Baptist Association, A Republication of the Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association, from its Organization in 1806 to the Present Time (New Orleans, Hinton, 1849), 3–6; “Richard Curtis, Jr. (1756–1811) of Amite County, First Baptist Minister in Mississippi Territory,” Amite County: Mississippi, 1699–1865, vol. 2, The Churches: Minutes from the Original Books of the Baptist and Presbyterian Churches; Diaries and Autobiographies of Methodist Ministers; Association Records for the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches, and Other Data from Various Sources, Indexed, ed. Albert Eugene Casey (Birmingham, Ala.: Amite County Historical Fund, 1950), 480.

parishes in the Mississippi River Valley.23 Between 1772 and 1795 more than twenty

Spanish and Irish clergy arrived to minister in Lower Louisiana and the Floridas. Among these new recruits was the colorful, indefatigable Antonio de Sedella, who would feature prominently in New Orleans’ ecclesiastical history for the next five decades. The reinvigorated clergy corps established new parish churches at Donaldsonville, Opelousas,

Baton Rouge, and Plattenville in what would become the state of Louisiana, as well as

Lennan’s post at Natchez. In 1795 twenty-three Catholic parishes threaded through the

Spanish domains along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River, all but three of them arrayed from New Orleans to St. Louis.24 (Figure 1.)

More priests and more parish churches meant more regular opportunities for the inhabitants to engage with religious observances. Though any Catholic adherent could conduct private devotions, Catholicism was built around public practices regulated by the church hierarchy. Except in extreme circumstances, priests or bishops presided over each of the seven Catholic sacraments. They also conducted Mass, officiated at feast days and processions, instructed the neophytes, and visited the sick. In the absence of a priest,

23 Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 168, 180.

24 The parishes, as listed on a 1795 document, were: St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans; St. Charles [Borromeo], First German Coast, Les Allemands; St. John the Baptist, Second German Coast [Edgard]; St. James, Cabahanosse; Ascension, La Fourche [Donaldsonville]; Assumption de Valensuela [Plattenville]; St. Gabriel, Iberville; Dolores [Virgin Mary of Sorrows], Baton Rouge; St. Francis, Pointe Coupée; San Salvador, Natchez; Cole’s Creek, Villa Gayoso; St. Louis [in Spanish Illinois]; Ste. Genevieve [in Spanish Illinois]; St. Charles [in Spanish Illinois]; New Madrid; St. Bernard, New Galvez [Terre-aux-Boeufs]; St. Bernard, Galveston [aka Galveztown]; St. Martin, Attakapas; St. Landry, Opelousas; [St. John the Baptist], Natchitoches; Conception, Mobile; St. Michael, Pensacola; St. Augustine, [East] Florida. The other active Mississippi River Valley parishes in 1795 not included on the list (because they were in American territory) were: Immaculate Conception, Kaskaskia; Holy Family, Cahokia; St. Joseph, Prairie du Rocher. Parish Census List, 1795, IV 5 d, CANO, UNDA; Woods, Catholic Church in the American South, 178–187; Shea, John Carroll, 558.

1795 Lower Louisiana Lower Catholic Parishes in in Parishes Catholic Figure 1. Catholic Parishes in Lower Louisiana, 1795. Louisiana, Lower Parishes in 1. Catholic Figure

laypeople could fulfill few of their religious obligations. The influx of religious personnel to the Mississippi River Valley, in theory, expanded the laity’s opportunities to embrace their religious duties. Priests celebrated Mass at more locations and with greater frequency, and they were more available to baptize children and converts and to give last rites to the dying.

Even so, few of the faithful fulfilled their religious obligations. When the Cuban- born bishop Luis de Peñalver y Cardenas arrived in New Orleans in 1795, he conducted an initial assessment of the diocese, reporting widespread disregard for Catholic practice.

“Hardly three or four hundred” of the eleven thousand people in the diocese managed to

“comply with the precept of partaking at least once a year of the Lord’s supper,” he groaned.25 Congregants throughout the province refused to pay tithes to support their pastors.26 And churches were in ruins. Using the famous Spanish penchant for bureaucracy, and far more sticks than carrots, the new bishop tried to steer the sprawling diocese toward faithfulness. He required each pastor to submit an annual census listing the name, race, status (slave or free), gender, and age of each member of his parish; the population increase or decrease in the parish from the past year; the number of parishioners who had not fulfilled the annual Easter precept to confess and receive communion; the number of non-Catholics in the parish; and what the parish needed by way of upkeep and religious objects.27

25 Bishop Luis de Peñalver y Cardenas, 1 Nov 1795, excerpted and translated in Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:376–379; Shea, John Carroll, 571–575.

26 Baron Francisco Luis Hector Carondelet to Petro de Acuna, 24 Jan 1795, copy, IV 5 b, CANO, UNDA.

27 Peñalver to Pastor of St. Louis [Pierre Didier], 3 Sept 1795, IV 5 d, CANO, UNDA.

The news was not good. A priest serving in New Orleans complained that parents slacked off on their duty to catechize their children, parishioners acted insolently in church, and very few people observed the Lenten fast.28 The pastor of Ascension at

Bayou La Fourche cried that his church lacked everything.29 At Cabahanosse the pastor reported “debauchery” that was causing “such havoc” in the region. He blamed the misbehavior on a “lack of Christian and liberal education” that he could not rectify because the parishioners lived so far from the church.30 Father Sebastien Flavian

Besancon, a French Capuchin, griped that St. Charles church on the First German Coast was “absolutely abandoned” and that “great ignorance” reigned in the parish. Only eight of the adults had adhered to the Easter duties, out of a total population of 2232, an embarrassing showing, to say the least. But could the priest help it if his parishioners lived on the opposite side of the river from the church, and thus did not attend regularly?31

28 Testimony of Joachin Portillo, 12 Aug 1795, IV 5 d, CANO, UNDA.

29 Census of Assumption, La Fourche, Bernardo de Deva, 20 Jan 1796 [listed as 8 Feb 1796], IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA.

30 Census of Cabahanoce, Patrick Mangan, 9 Apr 1796, IV 5 h, CANO, UNDA.

31 Census of St. Charles, Father Sebastien Flavian [Besancon], 29 Dec 1795, IV 5 d 2, CANO, UNDA. [Besancon’s name also appears as “Besanson” in the manuscripts. He generally signed as “Flavian.”] Others joined Besancon in delivering unwelcome statistics to the bishop. Pedro de Zamora at the church in Opelousas reported even more dismal figures: of the 3657 souls in his parish, none had fulfilled their annual religious obligations. St. John the Baptist parish at the Second German Coast had fifty of 2048 confess and receive communion. At St. Martin’s in Attakapas, 230 of 1450 had passed the Easter litmus test. In Lennan’s Natchez parish, where the Protestants outnumbered the Catholics twenty to one thanks to the British ruling the region for twenty years and a steady American influx to the area, a whopping one fifth of the Catholics observed their religious duties. The other parishes’ censuses for 1796 and 1797 similarly indicated widespread disobedience to Church obligations. The one outlier and shining example of faithfulness was the church at Galveztown, where only five of 247 failed to meet their 38

Besancon must have winced when he read the bishop’s withering missive in response to the parish census, accusing the priest of indolence and warning that he would have to give account to God for his pathetic performance.32 The bishop wore out his hand writing letters blaming the priests for the “absolute irreligion” that suffused the parishes.33 Expecting civil authorities to back up the priests in enforcing church laws, he admonished clergy to notify the local commander when parishioners disobeyed—for instance, when slavemasters flouted the Church’s rules by forcing their slaves work on religious holidays. After all, the commander was “a Christian Vassal of a Catholic King,” who was obligated by royal laws to enforce ecclesiastical laws. The bishop’s directives must have sounded foolish to the priests, who understood that a commander could do

Easter obligations in 1797. The bishop congratulated the pastor for his diligence, but entreated him nonetheless to make every effort, including enlisting the help of the commandant, to reclaim “the five lost sheep.” Felix de Quintanar to Peñalver, 14 June 1797, Peñalver to Quintanar, 27 June 1797, V 1 a, CANO, UNDA; Census of St. Landry, Opelousas, 12 Jan 1796, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA; Census of St. John the Baptist, Second German Coast, Marino Brunete, 23 Sept 1795, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA; Miguel Bernardo Barriere to Peñalver, 11 June 1796, IV 5 j, CANO, UNDA; Francis Lennan to [Peñalver], 1 April 1796, IV 5 h, CANO, UDNA.

32 Sebastien Flavian [Besancon], Census of St. Charles, 29 Dec 1795, IV 5 d, CANO, UNDA; Luis Peñalver y Cardenas to Sebastien Flavian [Besancon], 8 Jan 1796, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA. Besancon tried to follow the bishop’s order to pursue his congregants at their homes since they would not show up at the church. His efforts prodded some toward faithfulness. The following year he reported 141 had fulfilled their Easter obligations. But the parishioners at St. Charles were displeased with the priest and tired of his gloomy affect. Bowing to their wishes, the bishop yanked Besancon back to New Orleans, appointing him assistant at the cathedral where he could keep an eye on him, and sent another to St. Charles. No statistical reports from his successor, Geronimo Blace, survive, though the new priest did echo Besancon’s frustrations about the church being inaccessible to the majority of the people, who lived across the river. Besancon, Census of St. Charles, 29 Dec 1795, IV 5 d; Besancon to Peñalver, 6 April 1797, IV 5 n; Peñalver to Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, 12 Dec 1797, V 1 e, CANO, UNDA; Geronimo [Jerome] Blace to Peñalver, 1798, V 2 a, CANO, UNDA.

33 Peñalver to Mariano Brunete, 16 Jan 1796, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA; Peñalver to Bernardo Limpach, 16 Jan 1796, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA.

little if his subjects did not fear him. And besides—as the priests also recognized—the commander himself may have been just as guilty as the others.34

The priests knew what the newly-arrived bishop had not yet learned: inhabitants of the Mississippi River Valley did not easily cow to authority, either civil or ecclesiastical. In other portions of the Spanish realm, subjects may have behaved— outwardly at least—according to dictates enforced by local deputies of the Church and the monarchy, but in Lower Louisiana the inhabitants were increasingly operating according to different rules. And no wonder. The promise of liberté, egalité, fraternité in revolutionary France, or life, liberty, and property in the new United States, had not been lost on these Spanish subjects. They had not yet thrown off the yoke of their oppressor, nor had they identified either the Church or the State as their enemy, but they were pressing against elements of authoritative rule. While the bishop threatened, scolded, shamed, and rebuked his priests for their parishioners’ poor religious performance, and counseled them to use the same tactics on their congregants, the clergymen knew that reproaching could take them only so far.

A year later the bishop himself was beginning to come to terms with the inhabitants’ religious laxity. He twice extended the time during which Catholics could fulfill their Easter duties, granting them from the first Sunday of Lent to the Sunday after

Pentecost—thirteen weeks—to confess and receive communion.35 “There remains in their bosoms but a slight spark of the faith instilled into them at the baptismal font,” he

34 Sebastien Flavian [Besancon], Census of St. Charles, 29 Dec 1795, IV 5 d, CANO, UNDA; Luis Peñalver y Cardenas to Sebastien Flavian [Besancon], 8 Jan 1796, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA; Peñalver to Felix de Quintanar, IV 5 f, CANO, UNDA.

35 Peñalver to the Faithful of New Orleans, 1 April 1796, IV 5 H, CANO, UNDA; Miguel Bernardo Barriere to Peñalver, 11 June 1796, IV 5 j, CANO, UNDA.

groused.36 By the bishop’s own admission, his myriad reforms produced “scarce fruit.”

He toured the diocese, visiting as many of the parishes as he could easily access. He harangued usurers.37 He reprimanded powerful elites whose religious irregularity was providing a bad example to others.38 He reorganized the clergy. But as the new century dawned, Peñalver had to acknowledge that “the freedom of religion” tolerated in his diocese altered the playing field.39 For political and economic reasons, the Spanish monarch allowed Protestants to dwell in the Catholic colony, but their presence gave the lapsed Catholics license “to live without any religion at all.”40 The inhabitants read books

“written against religion and the State ... with impunity.” Freemasonry was thriving, its top positions held by prominent military and civil leaders.41 “His Majesty possesses their bodies and not their souls. Rebellion is in their hearts, and their minds are imbued with the maxims of democracy.”42 The diocese teetered on the brink of apostasy. “The parishes which were religiously disposed are losing their faith and their old customs; the

36 Peñalver, 1 Nov 1795, excerpted and translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:377.

37 Edict of Peñalver, 30 May 1801, V 2 m, CANO, UNDA.

38 Peñalver Statement, 7 Jan 1796, IV 5 l, CANO, UNDA.

39 Peñalver Statement, 4 Oct 1796, IV 5 l, CANO, UNDA; Peñalver to Miguel Andino, 23 May 1800, draft, V 2 i, CANO, UNDA.

40 Peñalver, 1 Nov 1795, excerpted and translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:376.

41 Peñalver, 1 Nov 1795, excerpted and translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:377–378; Peñalver, 1799, excerpted and translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:407.

42 Peñalver, 1 Nov 1795, excerpted and translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:377. 41

number of those Christians who receive the sacrament at Easter decreases; and the people turn a deaf ear to the admonitions of their clergy.”43

Then in 1801 Peñalver received the welcome news that he had been elevated to the position of archbishop of Guatemala. He left Thomas Hassett, an Irish clergyman who had been serving as a canon of the cathedral—akin to a member of an executive council—since 1795, as the administrator of the diocese.44 Hassett tried to keep up with the deluge of paperwork, granting dispensations for marriages, appointing pastors to parishes, and dealing with all manner of bureaucratic minutiae for the diocese.45 His prayers for relief found no answer. Rome appointed a new bishop to the diocese, but when word spread of the Treaty of San Ildefonso—by which Spain transferred Louisiana to France—Catholic officials redirected the appointee to a diocese in Spain. The United

States’ purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 multiplied Hassett’s burdens. Spanish nuns and clergy, and those who had pledged loyalty to Spain—Lennan among them— intended to leave with the Spanish officials after the transfer.46 Who would serve the parishes, and who would be in charge?

43 Peñalver, 1799, excerpted and translated in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:408; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 233–242.

44 Peñalver, proclamation, 15 Oct 1801, V 3 d, CANO, UNDA; Certification of Thomas Hassett, 7 Sept 1795, IV 5 b, CANO, UNDA; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 245–246. Peñalver also appointed Hassett as his vicar general in 1796, an administrative role of second in command. Peñalver, statement, 4 Oct 1796, IV 5 l, CANO, UNDA; Luis de Quintanilla, proceedings, 8 Oct 1796, IV 5 l, CANO, UNDA; Divorce proceedings, Francisca Bingue and Juan Faisan, 31 Jan 1798, V 1 g, CANO, UNDA.

45 On Hassett’s mounds of paperwork, see correspondence in files V 3 e, V 3 h, V 3 j, V 3 n, V 3 o, V 4 a, and V 4 b, CANO, UNDA.

46 Francisco Lennan to Thomas Hassett, 31 July 1803, V 4 a, CANO, UNDA. A Franciscan, Francisco Poro y Peinado, was consecrated as the new bishop of Louisiana to replace Peñalver, but before he could travel to his new station, Rome learned of the 42

The Catholic laity in the parishes upriver were asking similar questions. As in

Lower Louisiana, Catholic governance and jurisdiction jostled in the Illinois Country

(east of the Mississippi River) and Upper Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River) in the late eighteenth century. In the 1780s and 1790s the Catholic authorities in New Orleans governed the parishes of Upper Louisiana, including St. Louis, St. Charles, a few dozen miles up the Missouri River from St. Louis, and Ste. Genevieve, sixty miles down the

Mississippi River from St. Louis, though the distance diminished their power.47 The parishes east of the Mississippi in Illinois Country had even less oversight. When the

Americans won their war of independence, Rome appointed American-born priest John

Carroll as prefect apostolic for the United States, giving him authority over the Catholic

Church in the nascent American nation. But because the pope did not spell out to the bishop of Quebec Carroll’s superintendency of the western regions, the ecclesiastical status of the Illinois Country remained murky. Considering himself duly authorized,

Carroll appointed a deputy under the title vicar general to the Illinois Catholics, only to impending transfer of the region from Spain to France, and sent Peinado to Spain instead. Woods, History of the Catholic Church, 194; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 249–253. Lennan had transferred to New Feliciana in Spanish-held West Florida in 1798 when the Americans took over governance of Natchez. He later served at Pointe Coupée, Bayou Sara, and Baton Rouge. Jack D. L. Holmes, “Father Francis Lennan,” 263–265. Sixteen Ursuline nuns fled New Orleans for Cuba in 1803. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 227.

47 In 1795 Bishop Peñalver appointed priest James Maxwell, who was serving at Ste. Genevieve, as the “vicar forane” for the parishes in Spanish Illinois, giving him authority to manage matrimonial, civil, and criminal cases, and to collect fees. Peñalver y Cardenas, 11 Sept 1795, copy, IV 5 b, CANO, UNDA. Peñalver complained that his great distance from the parishes in Spanish Illinois forced him to resort to “extraordinary measures” in order to govern. Luis Peñalver y Cardenas to John Carroll, 12 Apr 1799, 2 F8, AJCP, AAB.

find another priest, sent by his colleague in Quebec, had been exercising the same function for nineteen years. Not until 1791 did the Holy See finally clarify Carroll’s jurisdiction over the Northwest Territory, including the Illinois parishes.48

For the residents in those parishes, which Catholic bishop had authority over their region was less important than who would bless their marriages, baptize their children, and bury their dead. With all the geopolitical tumult, not to mention warfare, priests were a rare commodity. The few scattered parishes—Vincennes on the Wabash River in present-day Indiana, Cahokia, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Prairie du Rocher, forty miles south of Cahokia, and Kaskaskia, a dozen miles below Prairie du Rocher— bruised by their unwitting role in the American Revolution, limped along in the 1780s with minimal clergy coverage.49

48 Bernard Limpach to Antonio de Sedella, 24 Apr 1787, IV 4 c, CANO, UNDA; John Carroll to Jean-François Hubert, 5 May 1788, printed in Shea, John Carroll, 466–467; Cardinal Antonelli for Propaganda Fide, 29 Jan 1791, in Lionel St. G. Lindsay, ed., “Correspondence between the Sees of Quebec and Baltimore,” RACHSP 18 (1907): 162; John Carroll to Jean-François Hubert, 20 Jan 1792, ibid., 160–162; Joseph P. Donnelly, Pierre Gibault, Missionary 1737–1802 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971), 109– 110; Charles Edward O'Neill, “'A Quarter Marked by Sundry Peculiarities": New Orleans, Lay Trustees, and Père Antoine,” Catholic Historical Review 76, no. 2 (Apr. 1990): 246–247; Mary Doris Mulvey, French Catholic Missionaries in the Present United States (1604–1791), Studies in American Church History 23 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1936), 118; John Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis: In Its Various Stages of Development from A.D. 1673 to A.D. 1928 (St. Louis, Mo.: Blackwell Wielandy, 1928), 1:210; Shea, John Carroll, 187–190, 465–469.

49 John Carroll to James Emery, 11 March 1791, JCP 1:498–499. On priest Pierre Gibault’s role in facilitating George Rogers Clark’s peaceful takeover of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes during the American Revolution, see Shea, John Carroll, 187– 190; Donnelly, Pierre Gibault, 72–85. On the rough treatment the inhabitants of Kaskaskia received from their Virginian occupiers during and after the conflict, see Bradley J Birzer, “French Imperial Remnants on the Middle Ground: The Strange Case of August de La Balme and Charles Beaubien,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 93, no. 2 (2000): 138–140; Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration, 232–233.

1795 tholicParishes in Upper Louisiana Upper Ca

Figure 2. Catholic Parishes in Upper Louisiana, 1795. Upper Louisiana, Parishes in 2. Catholic Figure

Carroll consolidated his mandate over Catholicism in the United States in 1790 when he was consecrated bishop of the newly created American diocese headquartered in

Baltimore. Once he had confirmed his jurisdiction of the Illinois Country, the new bishop began to dispatch priests to serve the desolate western parishes. But the residents’ distaste for Catholic discipline and the proximity of better-paying parishes in Spanish Illinois conspired to sap Carroll’s recruits. From the clergy’s point of view, the laity’s irreligion in the Illinois Country was legendary. French priest Gabriel Richard called the residents of Kaskaskia “the worst of all the Illinois Country.” The residents’ inattention to spiritual matters shocked the priest. “Very few people go to Mass even on Sundays. Intemperance, debauchery, laziness reign supreme there.” From Cahokia, a French parish dating back to the late seventeenth century near the mounds of a medieval Indian civilization, Michel

Levadoux begged the bishop to set clear policies on a number of practical issues so that he and his colleagues might battle “the abuses that perpetuate in this country despite all our instructions.” Topping his list was the obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days. Levadoux also wanted the bishop to clarify the policy on abstaining from eating meat once a week, fasting during Lent, sending children for catechism before their first communion, and approaching the sacraments of confession and eucharist at Easter.50

50 John Carroll to Pierre Gibault, 23 Jan 1792, JCP 2:8–9; Gabriel Richard to John Carroll, 24 Jan 1796, 7 B 1, AJCP, AAB; Michel Levadoux to John Carroll, 15 Apr 1796, 4 Y 4, AJCP, AAB; John Carroll to Michael Levadoux, 15 Sept 1796, JCP 2:187. Catholics in this era were expected to attend Mass every Sunday and on the panoply of feast days, including the Nativity, the Circumcision, the Epiphany, Ascension, Corpus Christi, the Annunciation, and All Saints, among others—provided a priest was present to celebrate the Eucharist. John J. O’Gorman, “Canada’s Patron Saint,” Catholic Historical Review 13, no. 4 (1928): 653–54.

The priests Carroll appointed grumbled that their parishioners resisted their leadership, refused to pay their tithes, and balked at the clergymen’s efforts to discipline wayward members. In the face of such resistance, it was all too easy to slip across the

Mississippi River to Spanish country, where the king bankrolled the clergy. Canadian- born Pierre Gibault, momentarily out of favor with Bishop Carroll, sneaked to the

Spanish shore in the early 1790s, where the Spanish Catholic auxiliary bishop in New

Orleans gladly put him to work at New Madrid and the Arkansas Post. Gibault received an annual salary from the Spanish Crown of $600, far more than he could hope to receive from the poor parishes in the Illinois Country. Charles Leander Lusson likewise abandoned his duties in Illinois and made way to St. Charles, up the Missouri River from

St. Louis, where he served with the blessing of the Spanish bishop, to whom he had represented his move as a transfer approved by Carroll.51 Jean Antoine Le Dru opted to leave his “ungrateful” Kaskaskia parish for St. Louis, a change “incomparably more advantageous” to him.52 Pierre Janin, a French priest who served that notorious parish a

51 Charles L. Lusson to John Carroll, 5 June 1805, 5 B 3, AJCP, AAB; John Carroll to Luis Peñalver, 17 Oct 1798, JCP 2:246–247; Carroll to Peñalver, 17 Oct 1799, JCP 2:291–292; Donnelly, Gibault, 129–139; Shea, John Carroll, 459–460, 471–472; 482– 484; Nathan Elliot Marvin, “‘A Thousand Prejudices’: French Habitants and Catholic Missionaries in the Making of the Old Northwest, 1795–1805,” in Une Amérique française, 1760–1860: dynamiques du corridor créole, ed. Guillaume Teasdale and Tangi Villerbu (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015), 113–114, 127–140; Tangi Villerbu, “Negotiating Religious and National Identities in the Early Republic: Catholic Settlers and European Missionaries in Vincennes, Indiana, 1804–1834,” Ohio Valley History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 22–40. On Lusson: Bishop Peñalver in New Orleans commissioned James Maxwell, serving at Ste. Genevieve, to secure a priest “from the American side” of the Mississippi to serve either at St. Charles or St. Ferdinand in Florissant. Maxwell succeeded in recruiting Lusson with a promise of “a better living” of 30 pesos a month. Peñalver to Maxwell, 23 Sept 1797, Charles Leander Lusson to John Carroll, 6 May 1798, Maxwell to Peñalver, 9 May 1798, all in Proceedings for Lusson to be pastor of St. Charles, Missouri, 2 July 1798, V 1 i, CANO, UNDA.

52 Jean Antoine Le Dru to Antonio de Sedella, 1790 March 27, IV 4 g, CANO, UNDA. 47

handful of years later, likewise crossed to Spanish territory with the encouragement of the

Spanish district governor.53

The Spanish ecclesiastical leaders in New Orleans dismissed allegations that they had an outright campaign to lure clergy from the American side of the river. But they could not deny that impoverished priests under appointment of the Baltimore bishop found their way into the Spanish parishes. In 1795 the Spanish governor in New Orleans lobbied for priests in Louisiana to receive thirty pesos a month from royal coffers, and those in the distant parishes up the Mississippi River, where shipping costs kept food and clothing prices high, to receive forty each month.54 In the case of Charles Lusson, Bishop

Peñalver acknowledged that he had given orders to Maxwell, his proxy, “that if a Priest of good morals, capacity and with authentick documents should present himself he might receive and place him in the Parish of St. Charles or St. Ferdinand.” But Peñalver insisted that he did not condone Maxwell enticing anyone, including Lusson, to “abandon his

Parish” on the American side.55

53 Gabriel Richard to John Carroll, 24 Jan 1796, 7 B 1, AJCP, AAB; Jean-François Rivet to John Carroll, 2 May 1796, 8B-D1, AJCP, AAB; Rivet to Carroll, 2 May 1796, 8B-D2, AJCP, AAB. The behavior of the Kaskaskia residents toward him was not the only motivation for Janin to consider “accepting bread on the other side.” The U.S. government, who had promised to fund priests serving the Kaskaskia Indians, had not yet paid him the promised stipend of $200. Janin served at the Arkansas Post and then at St. Louis until the Louisiana Purchase. He returned to Lower Louisiana, ministering at St. John the Baptist Church in Edgard, Louisiana through the 1810s. Luis [Peñalver] to Baron [Francisco Luis Hector] Carondelet, 31 May 1796, IV 5 j, CANO, UNDA; Charles L. Lusson to John Carroll, 5 June 1805, 5 B 3, AJCP, AAB; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 253; Frederick John Easterly, The Life of Rt. Rev. Joseph Rosati, C.M., First Bishop of St. Louis, 1789–1843, Studies in American Church History 33 (New York: AMS Press, 1974), 47. Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, 1:213–214.

54 Francisco Luis Hector Carondelet to Pedro de Acuna, 24 Jan 1795, IV 5 b 2, CANO, UNDA.

55 Luis Peñalver y Cardenas to John Carroll, 12 Apr 1799, 2 F8, AJCP, AAB. The bishop 48

Other geopolitical shifts in the late 1790s churned Catholics in the Illinois parishes. With Great Britain withdrawing from the western Great Lakes region after the

Jay Treaty, Bishop Carroll inherited another cluster of parishes to staff. He appointed

Levadoux, who had been serving the Illinois parishes, to Detroit in 1796. Levadoux’s departure left Richard in charge of Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Prairie du Rocher, which, by his own admission, he could attend “very imperfectly.”56 But then Richard, too, went north under Carroll’s direction. Between these authorized departures and the “stampede of the religious” clergy to the Spanish territory—the defections of Lusson, Le Dru, Janin, and the others—Jean-François Rivet “trembled” at his church in Vincennes, that he was the only priest in the entire Illinois Country. He made a summer visit to the other parishes, “to remedy the best I can the disorders which pollute in the absence of pastors.”

But what could one priest do for parishes more than 150 miles away, when he had plenty of trouble handling the “disobedient” people of Vincennes?57

The tumult generated by clergymen’s departures, whether sanctioned or unauthorized, hit observant Catholics the hardest. “These perpetual changes disconcert and absolutely disgust the faithful,” Rivet sighed. Without a clergyman on hand, they could not fulfill the basic obligations of their religious practice. Abandoned by their priest, the churchwardens at Cahokia begged Rivet to become their pastor. When he

protested too much. Maxwell had not been passively waiting for a qualified cleric to knock on his door. The priest told Peñalver he had been searching for a cleric from the United States to serve at the vacant parishes. Diego [James] Maxwell to Peñalver, 1 March 1798, V 1 i, CANO, UNDA.

56 Gabriel Richard to John Carroll, 23 March 1797, 7 B 3, AJCP, AAB.

57 Jean-François Rivet to John Carroll, 1 June 1798, 8B-E3, 12 March 1799, 8B-E4, AJCP, AAB.

demurred, explaining that he could go only where the bishop sent him, they appealed directly to Carroll for “spiritual succor.” The wardens asked Carroll to send “another priest who is more faithful to your commands and more exemplary for his flock” than

Lusson had been.58 Finally in 1799 the Olivier brothers, Jean and Donatien, arrived from

France as refugees from the revolutionary tumult.59 The parishioners at Cahokia received

Jean Olivier enthusiastically, promising to pay him in grain at a value of $350 per year.

Olivier knew better than to trust their pledges—the most wealthy would “pay only what he wants and the least that he can,” which would keep Olivier in poverty. But suffering is what he expected. He only hoped he would be able to kindle their faith, which had grown lukewarm in the absence of a priest.60 His brother Donatien committed himself to the parishes at Prairie du Rocher and Kaskaskia, “an ungrateful vine covered with brambles and thorns.” He did not know how he would live on the little they provided, especially as he had to pay sixty dollars for a horse, “though old and very lean,” to travel between the two parishes.61

The Olivier brothers were at one of the lower rungs of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, appointed to parishes on the fringe of a colony, itself far from both the metropole and the Holy See. As priests under vows, they were enmeshed in a powerful, wealthy, global institution that transcended national borders and pursued its spiritual mission through worldly means. But at the far end of the Church’s tentacles, its power

58 Jean-François Rivet to John Carroll, 1 June 1798, 8B-E3, AJCP, AAB; Cahokia Church Wardens to John Carroll, 15 July 1798, 11A D2, AJCP, AAB.

59 Rivet to Carroll, 12 March 1799, 8B-E4, AJCP, AAB.

60 Jean Olivier to John Carroll, 22 April 1799, 6 B 1, AJCP, AAB.

61 Donatien Olivier to John Carroll, 20 May 1799, 6 B 2, AJCP, AAB.

was mediated by local circumstances. The Catholic residents in Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and

Prairie du Rocher wanted priests, but they did not want strict disciplinarians, and they expected the clergy to adjust to their culinary habits and economic conditions. The

Olivier brothers were stymied, expecting that the parishioners would accept their authority on which religious duties were required.62 Jean found himself “in the midst of a people who, despite my care and my work, neglects its salvation.” Their “faith and devotion” did not match that of his former congregants in Nantes. Not just the men, but the women, too, “rarely come to Mass on Sundays,” excusing themselves because “they have no shoes” or because they have to take care of their children.63

Self-denial was a constant sticking point. The clergy considered abstinence and fasting as central facets of faithful observance—particularly eliminating meat during

Lent, and on other key holy days. But the residents’ lifestyle inhibited regular fasting.

They were accustomed to eating meat whenever they had access to it. Illinois residents were incredulous when the Oliviers demanded that they forgo such nutrition and pleasure. The priests, for their part, thought the inhabitants “nourished themselves on almost nothing but meat, like Indians.”64 Donatien begged Carroll to lift the fasting

62 On French Catholic communities’ resistance to Carroll’s jurisdiction and his appointees’ efforts to align the parishes in the Illinois Country with Catholic discipline and American priorities, see Marvin, “‘A Thousand Prejudices,’” 113–140.

63 Jean Olivier to Carroll, 28 Sept 1801, 6 B 3, AJCP, AAB.

64 Jean Olivier to Carroll, 28 Sept 1801, 6 B 3, AJCP, AAB; Jean Olivier to John Carroll, 22 April 1799, 6 B 1, AJCP, AAB. For Carroll’s instructions on the feast and fast days, see Carroll to Pierre Gibault, 5 May 1788, JCP 1:306–07.

obligation for the diocese. Otherwise, the priest was bound to refuse absolution to those who did not obey.65

When the pastor in St. Louis died, the inhabitants there tried to offer the post to the Olivier brothers, but these “truly apostolic men” refused.66 Donatien reported that if they measured by how little satisfaction they received from their parishioners on both the temporal and spiritual plane, they would have already decided to “shake the dust from their habits” and seek another home. Who would not be enticed to consider serving in the

Spanish country, where the government covered the material concerns and the priest had liberty “to apply himself solely to his ministry and the meditation on spiritual things"?67

No, the Olivier brothers would not be tempted to cross the Mississippi. But they would hear the siren song of France. Those faithful parishioners who served as a reproach to the lax inhabitants of the Illinois Country were calling them back to Nantes, where the political situation had shifted. Their priestly colleagues back in France echoed the invitation. Jean sent Carroll his resignation not three years after he arrived at Cahokia, and hurried off to New Orleans to catch a ship home.68 Donatien planned to skip town as well, but before he could make a move and before Jean’s ship departed, Britain declared war on France in 1803. Jean stayed in New Orleans, an unintentional defector to the

Spanish diocese. Donatien stayed rooted in thankless Kaskaskia, where “drinking, ... balls and dances” kept the people away from Mass. The priest wished the people felt some

65 Donatien Oliver to Carroll, 10 Oct 1803, 6 B 5, AJCP, AAB.

66 Rivet to Carroll, 26 March 1800, 8B-E5, AJCP, AAB.

67 Donatien Olivier to Carroll, 16 August 1801, 6 A 8, AJCP, AAB.

68 Jean Olivier to Carroll, 20 Dec 1802, 6 A 9, AJCP, AAB.

remorse for their inattention to religious obligations, but they considered themselves faithful. Yet they “infringe on the precepts of the church without any scruples.” Few of the men fulfilled their Easter duties, and none had gone to confession.69

From New Orleans Jean Olivier signaled a clergy emergency. With the Louisiana

Purchase in 1803, the priests loyal to Spain vacated the Louisiana diocese. Not only on the southern stretch of the river, but also in St. Louis, the clergy “followed the Spanish flag” when the military and civil leaders withdrew. The bishop had already left. “The greatest part of the priests who labored in this diocese” decamped from Lower Louisiana, and eight more were about to set sail. Jean Olivier decided to stay in New Orleans, to aid the anemic church there. Only one priest, the sickly James Maxwell at Ste. Genevieve, stayed put in Upper Louisiana. East of the Mississippi Donatien was left to cover all the parishes in the Illinois Country, including Vincennes. Four far-flung churches for one aging and isolated priest who wished he had gone south with his brother!70

69 Donatien Oliver to Carroll, 10 Oct 1803, 6 B 5, AJCP, AAB.

70 Jean Olivier to Carroll, 12 Sept 1804, 6 A 10, AJCP, AAB; Donatien Olivier to Carroll, 20 April 1805, 6 B 6, AJCP, AAB; Donatien Olivier to Carroll, 12 Dec 1805, 6 A 11, AJCP, AAB; Donatien Olivier to Carroll 8 June 1806, 6 B 7, AJCP, AAB; Stephen T. Badin to Cardinal Braschi, 7 June 1805, no. 167, Finabar Kenneally, United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1966), 1:29; Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis 1:203; Ida M. Schaff, “Henri Pratte: Missouri’s First Native Born Priest,” St. Louis Catholic Historical Review 5, no. 2–3 (July 1923): 131n4. Lusson and Janin made it as far as New Orleans, where they were diverted from their plan to “enjoy the benefits that the proclamation of the king offered us,” and accepted appointments to serve in (Lusson) or near (Janin) New Orleans. Lusson to Carroll, 5 June 1805, 5 B 3, AJCP, AAB. Francis Lennan also stayed, though he had signaled his intention to go wherever the Spanish monarch needed him. He served at various parishes in Louisiana in the first decade of the nineteenth century, before going to Pensacola. Francisco Lennan to Thomas Hassett, 31 July 1803, V 4 a, CANO, UNDA; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 283–284.

The Louisiana Purchase opened the Mississippi River Valley to unrestricted

American settlement, including all manner of “heretics” loathsome to the Catholic personnel trying to fortify their sagging parishes and stabilize religious observance in the region. Protestants in the southwest corner of present-day state of Mississippi had a head start, having been under American jurisdiction since 1798.71 A cluster of five Baptist churches established in the first years of the new century gathered to form the Mississippi

Baptist Association in 1806. By 1810 the association had eleven member churches.

Presbyterians organized two churches in 1807—one called Salem in Washington, a few miles northeast of Natchez, and another on Bayou Pierre. The following year they established Bethany Presbyterian Church in what is now Amite County.72 Methodists had entered the field in 1799, constituting a preaching circuit in the Natchez District the following year and recruiting eighty members. By 1805 the Methodists had sixteen preaching stations in the region and had begun to hold their signature camp meetings.73

71 Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795–1796, by which Spain handed over Natchez and granted American boats navigation of the Mississippi down to New Orleans, opened the way for this settlement, though Spanish forces did not withdraw from Natchez until 1798. Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2003), 57–58, 179–194.

72 The Mississippi Baptist Association minutes indicate ten churches sent delegates to the annual meeting in 1810. Bethel Church, one of the founding members of the association, was not represented that year. The church sent delegates the following year. Mississippi Baptist Association, Republication of the Minutes, 12, 21; “James Smylie, the Presbytery of Mississippi...,” Amite County: Mississippi, 1699–1865, 2:171.

73 John G. Jones, A Complete History of Methodism as Connected with the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Written at the Unanimous Request of the Conference (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South. Smith & Lamar, Agents, 1908) 1:19, 24–59, 122–130; “Methodism in the Amite County Area, 1799–1866,” Amite County: Mississippi, 1699–1865, 2:502–503.

Protestants also made inroads west of the Mississippi River. Joseph Willis, a mixed-race man who had gained his freedom through an act of the South Carolina legislature, visited Louisiana and preached southwest of Baton Rouge in 1804. He later settled in Bayou Chicot, below Alexandria, where he organized one of the first Baptist churches in Louisiana in 1812.74 Eccentric Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow ventured briefly into the Attakapas region of Louisiana in 1804. Two years later another Methodist braved the swamps, mosquitoes, and spiritual ignorance of the region to establish a regular preaching circuit around Opelousas, near where Willis was ministering to

Baptists. Even in New Orleans, the sectarians had the audacity to promulgate their fallacious gospel. “Methodist rascals are beginning their infernal mission in this city, public preaching etc.,” one Catholic partisan warned Bishop Carroll in 1804. But they failed to organize a stable Methodist presence in the city, where elites did not want to be associated with their ranting, enthusiastic religious gatherings. Perhaps more palatable to the Catholic establishment and the emerging Anglo-American merchant class was the

74 House Journal, 1 Dec 1787, The State Records of North Carolina, Published under the Supervision of the Trustees of the Public Libraries, by Order of the General Assembly, ed. Walter Clark (Goldsboro, N.C.: Nash Brothers, 1905), 20:178, https://archive.org/details/cu31924032284105; Senate Journal, 29 Nov 1797, ibid., 20:343; “An Act to Emancipate Certain Persons therein mentioned,” in Walter Clark, State Records of North Carolina, 24: 929–930; Mississippi Baptist Association, Republication of the Minutes, 29; W. E. Paxton, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana: From the Earliest Times to the Present (St. Louis: C.R. Barnes, 1888), 139–155, 175, 182, 197, 214, https://archive.org/details/cu31924029452038; William Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists from 1804 to 1914 (Nashville, Tenn.: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1915), 17–20, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/hicks/menu.html; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 134; Janet Cornelius, Slave Missions, 26–27; John T. Christian, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana (Shreveport: The Executive Board of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, 1923), 50–51; Leah Townsend, South Carolina Baptists, 1670–1805 (Florence, S.C.: Florence Printing, 1935), 214–217; Glen Lee Greene, House upon a Rock: About Southern Baptists in Louisiana (Alexandria: Executive Board of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, 1973), 51–56, 325–326.

arrival of Philander Chase, a clergyman from New Hampshire who left his church in

Poughkeepsie, New York to serve the first Protestant Episcopal Church in New Orleans in 1805.75

Upriver in present-day Missouri Protestants from the upper South began settling in clusters during the Spanish era. After the Americans took jurisdiction the settlers started to hold public religious meetings. Baptists, many migrating from Kentucky, formed two churches within twenty miles of Cape Girardeau in present-day southeastern

Missouri by 1806, and another two near St. Louis in the next three years. Methodists organized a class—a group of Methodists who gathered regularly to pray and share their religious experiences—along Coldwater Creek, a handful of miles above St. Louis, in

1805. Four years later the Methodists had established four circuits near St. Charles, St.

Louis, and Cape Girardeau, and boasted more than five hundred members.76

75 Philander Chase to John Reade, 12 Dec 1805, MSS338, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana; Philander Chase to the Wardens & Vestrymen of the Protestant Episcopal Church of New Orleans, 23 Nov 1805, Folder 2, Box 1, New Orleans: Christ Church – correspondence, 1805–1842, Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana Memorial Archives, MSS 558 B, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Francis Bodkin to John Carroll, 2 Feb 1804, 1 T9, AJCP, AAB; John G. Jones, Mississippi Conference 1:125, 133–153.

76 R. S. Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri, Embracing an Account of the Organization and Growth of Baptist Churches and Associations; Biographical Sketches of Ministers of the Gospel and Other Prominent Members of the Denomination; the Founding of Baptist Institutions, Periodicals, &c. (St. Louis: Scammell, 1882), 37–38, 53–54; Frank C Tucker, The Methodist Church in Missouri, 1798–1939: A Brief History (Nashville: Parthenon, 1966), 14–32; W.S. Woodward, Annals of Methodism in Missouri, Containing an Outline of the Ministerial Life of More than One Thousand Preachers, and Sketches of More than Three Hundred, Also Sketches of Charges, Churches and Laymen from the Beginning in 1806 to the Centennial Year, 1884, Containing Seventy-Eight Years of History (Columbia, MO: E.W. Stephens, 1893), xlii, 23–27, https://archive.org/stream/annalsofmethodis00wood#page/n5/mode/2up.

The Protestants skirted St. Louis itself, a town that competed in the early 1800s with New Orleans for a reputation for vice, wickedness, and godlessness. When the stationed Catholic priest departed with the Spanish officials after the Louisiana Purchase, the Catholic residents adjusted to sporadic parade of clergymen visiting from other parishes. A priest apparently lacking appropriate credentials from a bishop negotiated a contract with the parish in 1806. In addition to a subscription of $330, Thomas Flynn would receive four dollars for each adult burial, two for burying a child, three for conducing High Mass, and five for performing each wedding. Despite the generous terms, Flynn wandered off after a year, leaving the parish again without a priest.77 When

Trappist monk Marie Joseph Dunand arrived in 1808, he judged the residents’ religiosity lamentable. “They are fat on Good Friday”—a day reserved for fasting—“like the day of

Easter.” Most distressing to the austere Trappist was the residents’ flouting of the

Catholic ban on freemasonry. During Dunand’s stay in St. Louis, the masons assembled at the Catholic church for a Masonic ritual, led by a Protestant who sat in the priest’s chair to “spread his errors.” Despite his judgment, the priest was powerless to stop them.78

77 Flynn must have pocketed a sizable sum, having performed eleven weddings and buried thirty-nine people during his thirteen months of service. Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis 1: 216–217.

78 Marie Joseph Dunand to John Carroll, [2 July 1810?], 8A-J1, AJCP, AAB. See also Marie Joseph Dunand to Dom Augustine, 1823, translated by Ella M. E. Flick, “Epistle or Diary of the Reverend Father Marie Joseph Durand [sic],” RACHSP 26 (1915): 333, 334. Dunand wrote this account of his arrival in St. Louis more than a dozen years after the fact. He dated his trip to 1806, but the scholarly consensus is that he arrived in 1808. Dunand was the vanguard of a Trappist group relocating from Kentucky to Florissant, a village a handful of miles of the Missouri River from St. Louis. His Trappist brothers joined him there in May 1809. But their stay was a brief one. They moved across the Mississippi to Cahokia that fall, where they established their community on the mounds the Middle Mississippian civilization had constructed eight centuries earlier. For a few 57

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Methodists and Baptists— conspicuous in the Natchez region—inserted their religious practices into a few rural settlements west of the Mississippi River. Their meager presence was an irritating reminder to Catholic leaders that the ground had shifted under them. No longer was the

Catholic Church the established religion in the region. The Mississippi River Valley, with its network of fragile parish churches, uncooperative parishioners, and oddball clerics, had been swallowed into the American polity. Freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, ruled. Priests no longer had the security of a salary paid by His Royal Majesty, nor did they have the strong arm of the state as the muscle enforcing their religious dictates.

And then the earth really did shift. “This morning we experienced a considerable shock of an Earthquake, and at 7 o’clock one much smaller,” former territorial governor

Winthrop Sargent, living near Natchez, wrote in his diary in December 1811. A monk living in Trappist community near Cahokia reported “an almost constant earthquake, from the night of December 15 to 16, to this day, February 18,” had startled the residents into attending church. Thankfully, no one was killed in his community, though the monk himself was “very nearly crushed by a chimney.” Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget in years the superior of the community provided pastoral care to the parishes of Cahokia and, occasionally, St. Louis, while the Trappist brothers educated boys and operated a watch-making shop at the mounds. Then the crops failed. Poverty drove the community to abandon their western outpost—known still as “Monks Mound”—and return east. Dunand alone stayed in the Mississippi River Valley. Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis 1: 220–227; Gilbert J. Garraghan, “The Trappists of Monks Mound,” Illinois Catholic Historical Review 8, no. 2 (Oct 1925): 106–136. On the Mississippian moundbuilding civilization headquartered at Cahokia, see Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed., The Settling of North America: The Atlas of the Great Migrations into North America from the Ice Age to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 26.

Bardstown, Kentucky, was more blasé in his journal: “Another earthquake at 3:30 am. … lasted four minutes.”79

The sequence of powerful earthquakes and hundreds of tremors and aftershocks in the winter of 1811–1812 wreaked havoc in the Mississippi Valley. “Everywhere nature itself seemed tottering on the verge of destruction,” lamented one observer. The earth cracked, cratered, uplifted, or subsided in various locations. Trees thrashed and split.

Streams and lakes that had been pressed upward by the tremors dried out, while in other places new lakes formed. “Strong current[s] of air issu[ing] from the bowels of the earth” spewed sticks, mud, coal-like material, and sand as high as thirty feet in the air from fissures geologists call sandblows. Churned by the quakes and the resultant “yawning gulphs” and craters, the Mississippi River roiled, flooded its banks, and temporarily reversed its course. Fissures under the river created temporary sandbars and falls, which, in combination with the long-submerged trees that thrust up out of the river and the caving banks, rendered the river unnavigable.80

79 Winthrop Sargent, Diary entry, 16 December 1811, P-28, reel 2, microfilm edition, Winthrop Sargent Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Dom Urbain Guillet to Bishop Plessis, 18 February 1812, Archives de l’Archevêché de Québec, 7 CM, Etats- Unis, vol. 3:127, accessed at http://www.abbaye-tamie.com/histoire/histoire-de- citeaux/documents-trappistes/trappistes-amerique-1794–1815/presentation-de- documents-d-archives-1804–1815/vue, 27 March 2013 (translation mine, with help from Claire Paifait); Benedict Joseph Flaget diary, 1812, 10/44, Archdiocese of Louisville Records, UNDA.

80 [William Leigh Pierce], An Account of the Great Earthquakes, in the Western States, Particularly on the Mississippi River; December 16–23, 1811. Collected from Facts (Newburyport: Herald Office, Thomas & Whipple, 1812), 4, 6, 7; James McBride, “A Letter from James McBride Regarding the Earthquake of 1811–1812,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 72, no. 4 (1974): 400, 401; William Shaler to Samuel L. Mitchill, 23 March 1812, in Samuel L. Mitchill, “A Detailed Narrative of the Earthquakes Which Occurred on the 16th Day of December, 1811, and Agitated the Parts of North America That Lie Between the Atlantic Ocean and Louisiana; and Also a Particular Account of the Other Quakings of the Earth Occasionally Felt from That Time 59

The earthquakes and the flooding they spawned devastated the towns of New

Madrid and La Petite Prairie, in present-day southeastern Missouri. The severe shaking

“entirely prostrated or nearly overturned, and wrecked in a miserable manner” Little

Prairie’s houses, while the flooding carved new river fronts in both towns, as streets, buildings, and boat launches gave way to the ravaging waters. Part of Little Prairie’s cemetery sank into the river, exposing coffins—Roman Catholic, with crosses marking each grave—along the bank. The town’s residents, fearing that the “the whole country

[was] sinking,” rushed from their homes after the first quake and fled to the surrounding to the 23d and 30th of January, and the 7th and 16th of February, 1812, and Subsequently to the 18th of December, 1813, and Which Shook the Country from Detroit and the Lakes to New-Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. Compiled Chiefly at Washington, in the District of Columbia,” Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York 1 (25 March 1815), 301. The three largest shocks, centering around 8.0 on the Richter scale, occurred at 2:15 AM on December 16, 1811, 9:00 AM on January 23, 1812, and 3:45 AM on February 7, 1812. The US Geological Survey uses a range from 7.0 to 8.1 in their modeling of the quakes. Significant earthquake activity continued through March 1812, with minor tremors reverberating through December 1812. Mark D. Petersen et al., Documentation for the 2008 Update of the United States National Seismic Hazard Maps: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2008–1128, (Reston, Virginia: US Geological Survey, 2008), 11, http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2008/1128/, accessed 22 March 2012; Arch C. Johnston and Eugene S. Schweig, “The Enigma of the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–1812,” Annual Review of the Earth and Planetary Sciences 24 (1996): 349. The first comprehensive geological study of the New Madrid earthquakes, published on the quakes’ centennial, is Myron L. Fuller, The New Madrid Earthquake, United States Geological Survey Bulletin 494 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912). See also Otto W. Nuttli, “The Mississippi Valley Earthquakes of 1811 and 1812: Intensities, Ground Motion and Magnitudes,” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 63, no. 1 (Feb 1973): 227–248. For more recent scientific findings, incorporating the theories of plate tectonics, see Johnston and Schweig, “Enigma of the New Madrid Earthquakes,” 339–384; Petersen et al., U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2008–1128, 10–13. For preliminary findings of prehistoric earthquakes in the same area, see Lois Wingerson, “In Search of Ancient Earthquakes,” Archaeology 59, no. 1 (2006): 30–35. For the most recent historical scholarship on the social and cultural significance of the New Madrid Earthquakes, see Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jonathan Todd Hancock, “A World Convulsed: Earthquakes, Authority, and the Making of Nations in the War of 1812 Era” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2013).

“hills or swamps.” New Madrid’s inhabitants did likewise. As the earth rocked, buckled and sank, the people grabbed what they could of their belongings and headed for higher ground.81

Centered in the Mississippi River Valley, the quakes reverberated throughout the eastern United States. Residents in Detroit, Quebec, Boston, Washington, Richmond, and

Charleston felt the tremors, saw the toppled chimneys, heard the plates crash from the cupboards and the church bells chime, and pondered the origins of the shaking. The New-

York Gazette announced the news: “A shock of an Earthquake was felt at Jamaica, L. I.

[Long Island] a little after 9 o’clock on Thursday evening.” While inhabitants along the

Mississippi River cleaned up the mess, reconstructed their houses, and tried to return to normal life, the reading public all along the east coast digested the delayed news of the severe devastation in the American interior. Newspapers from Portland, Maine to

Charleston, South Carolina, ran articles conveying tumult and destruction at New Madrid and elsewhere on the river.82

81 McBride, “Letter,” 400; James Fletcher, Letter excerpted as “Earthquake. Nashville, Jan. 21, 1812,” Carthage Gazette [Tennessee], (8 February 1812); “Extract of a letter from a gentleman on his way to New Orleans, to a friend in Lexington, Kentucky, dated the 20th of December [1811],” in An Account of the Earthquakes Which Occurred in the United States, North America, on the 16th of December, 1811, the 23d of January, and the 7th of February, 1812 with the Inferior Shocks Considered as Appendages to the Former. To Which Is Annexed, Miscellaneous Articles of a Similar Nature; and a Sketch of the Theory of Earthquakes in General, Including Information Respecting Some of the Most Remarkable Eruptions and Concussions of Preceding Periods (Philadelphia: Robert Smith, Jun., 1812), 26. See also Pierce, An Account of the Great Earthquakes, 11; Godfrey Lesieur’s account, as excerpted in Firmin Rozier, Rozier’s History of the Early Settlement of the Mississippi Valley (St. Louis: G.A. Pierrot, 1890), 205; Lyman C. Draper, ed., “Personal Narrative of Col. John Shaw, of Marquette, County, Wisconsin,” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 2 (1856): 202.

82 New-York Gazette & General Advertiser, 25 Jan 1812; Fuller, New Madrid Earthquake, 17. For a sample of dissemination of news of the earthquakes’ destruction in the Mississippi River Valley appearing in eastern newspapers, consider this example. A 61

A chance geological event brought the unstable Mississippi River Valley—with its eclectic population and diverse religious practices—to the attention of an east coast audience. But the earthquake was just the beginning.

letter by William Leigh Pierce, “To the Editor of the New-York Evening Post. Big Prairie, (on the Mississippi, 761 miles from N. Orleans,) Dec. 25th, 1811,” appeared in part or whole in the following periodicals: New York Commercial Advertiser, 12 Feb 1812; New-York Spectator, 15 Feb 1812; Alexandria (VA) Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political, 25 Feb 1812; Elizabethtown, New-Jersey Journal, 25 Feb 1812; Orange County (NY) Patriot; or, the Spirit of Seventy-Six, 25 Feb 1812; Boston Weekly Messenger, 28 Feb 1812; Cooperstown Federalist, 29 Feb 1812; Otsego (NY) Herald, 29 Feb 1812.

Chapter 2

A TEXTUAL INVASION

When two Protestant missionaries from New England approached Father Antonio de Sedella with a proposal to hand out free bibles in New Orleans in 1813, the popular priest assented with gusto and flung himself into their service. An unlikely comrade in the crusade to distribute Protestant texts along the creole corridor, the priest shocked the missionaries not only by affirming that he would allow their bibles to flow among his congregants, but also by promising to assist in the process, thereby flouting Catholic policy and precedent. Dumbfounded by this unexpected opening, the missionaries questioned whether other priests in the region were likely to be as supportive. Father

Antonio responded, “How can you doubt it? It is for their interest to circulate the

Scriptures.”1

Not all Catholic priests would have concurred. The dominant Christian sect in the region, the Catholic Church had an estimated 60,000 adherents scattered unevenly along

1 John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel J. Mills, A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals (Hartford: P.B. Gleason and Co. Printers, 1814), 51. On the identification of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Valley as a creole corridor, see Guillaume Teasdale and Tangi Villerbu, eds., Une Amérique française, 1760–1860: dynamiques du corridor créole (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015); Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 26–45.

the Mississippi River, perhaps thirty percent of the total population in 1810.2 Most of these Catholics were French-speaking: French, Canadian, and French Caribbean migrants and refugees; free and enslaved francophone people of color; and white Creoles born in the region.3 The Catholic hierarchy’s primary goal in the Mississippi River Valley was not to distribute bibles, but to extend and strengthen Catholicism by recruiting clergy, shoring up existing churches, establishing new ones, providing rites and sacraments for the laity, educating the young, catechizing those new to the faith, and drawing outsiders into the church. Christian scriptures, and in particular the Protestant version of the scriptures, were not only unnecessary, but also potentially dangerous for these projects.

But then, Sedella had never been one to align himself with official goals. Indeed, he was as infuriating and unpredictable to his superiors as he was beloved by his flock.

The Spanish Capuchin, known best as Père Antoine, was pastor of New Orleans’

Cathedral of St. Louis for a span of nearly five decades at the turn of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long ministry, he weathered a series of political storms and seemed to thrive on conflict. Born Francis Antonio Ildefonso Moreno y Arze in Sedella,

Spain, he arrived in January 1781 with a group of Spanish Capuchins recruited to flesh

2 William DuBourg, the ranking Catholic official in the diocese of Louisiana (which included St. Louis at the time), reported a Catholic population exceeding 60,000 in 1814. According to 1810 census data recorded by Protestant missionaries John Schermerhorn and Samuel Mills, the Mississippi Valley (including Louisiana, the Mississippi Territory, the Missouri Territory, and two western counties of the Illinois Territory) had just over 200,000 inhabitants. William DuBourg to Bishop John Carroll, [Nov. 1814?], as cited in Annabelle M. Melville, Louis William DuBourg: Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, Bishop of Montauban, and Archbishop of Besançon, 1766–1833 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986), 1:308; Schermerhorn and Mills, Correct View, 29–35.

3 Peter J. Kastor, “Louisiana Purchase and Territorial Period,” in KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, ed. David Johnson (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010), last modified 17 Sept 2014, http://www.knowla.org/entry/535/.

out the clerical ranks in Louisiana. Sedella directed the Charity Hospital before becoming the bishop’s assistant vicar general and the pastor of New Orleans’ parish church

(confusingly called St. Louis). In 1790 Governor Estaban Miró secretly arrested and deported Sedella to Cádiz. The trigger and excuse was Sedella’s refusal to comply with an agreement to leave the colony after Auxiliary Bishop for Louisiana Cyril de

Barcelona—Sedella’s immediate superior—accused him of mismanaging finances, neglecting his duties, and failing to observe church policies regarding marriages, but the underlying issue was Sedella’s appointment as Commissary of the Holy Office of the

Inquisition in Louisiana. He had received the appointment in 1786; it had been suspended by the auxiliary bishop, then nullified by the king at the beginning of 1788, because of fears that Inquisition actions in Louisiana would damage the stability of the colony, most of whose residents were neither Spanish nor supportive of the Holy Office. The following year, as French revolutionaries began to tear down the pillars of the ancien régime and circulate radical pamphlets and books, the Inquisition sought to eliminate the threat of revolutionary texts throughout the Spanish Empire. Sedella received a direct order from the Spanish Tribunal, dated December 1789, that trumped the previous nullification and authorized him as Inquisition Commissary to hunt for and confiscate subversive print matter in New Orleans. Sedella showed the order to Governor Miró in April 1790 and demanded access to troops to carry out his inquisitorial duties. Apprehensive that

Sedella’s activities would wreak economic and political havoc in Louisiana by both frightening away potential non-Spanish—especially American—immigrants and radicalizing the existing, predominantly French inhabitants to follow their compatriots

into open rebellion, the governor opted to spirit the friar away to Spain, using the auxiliary bishop’s complaints as the public pretext.4

By 1795 Sedella was back in New Orleans, restored to his post as pastor of St.

Louis (now the cathedral) by order of the king of Spain to Louisiana’s first resident bishop, Luis Peñalver y Cardenas.5 As the nineteenth century dawned, Peñalver was promoted to Archbishop of Guatemala; his successor never arrived, leaving a vacuum in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of New Orleans. Perhaps sensing an opportunity, Sedella stayed in the city as rule passed from Spain to France to the United States, steadily cultivating the affection and loyalty of his parishioners. He would rely on that loyalty in

1805 when he found himself embroiled in another controversy. Frustrated by the behavior of two of his assistants at the cathedral and the lack of response from Patrick

Walsh, who was acting on tenuous grounds as vicar general, Sedella resigned his post and made plans to return to Spain. Walsh accepted the resignation and appointed himself pastor of the cathedral, in response to which Sedella withdrew his resignation. As word of the dispute spread through the city, Walsh accused Sedella of stirring the populace up against him and suspended him from pastoral duties. Sedella countered that Walsh did not have the authority to issue a suspension. New Orleanians rallied to defend their beloved Père Antoine; at a mass meeting in the cathedral they disregarded the suspension

4 Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans: [A.W. Hyatt Stationery Mfg.], 1939), 209–212; Michael J. Curley, Church and State in the Spanish Floridas (1783–1822), vol. 30, Studies in American Church History (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1940), 120–129; Richard E. Greenleaf, “The Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana, 1762–1800” New Mexico Historical Review 50, no. 1 (January 1975): 51–57.

5 Curley, Church and State in the Spanish Floridas, 154–157; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 227–228.

and elected Sedella as pastor, defying canon law.6 Walsh declared Sedella and any priests who sided with him schismatic, and any ecclesiastical functions or sacraments they performed invalid. Convinced that Walsh had no jurisdiction for such pronouncements,

Sedella and his supporters ignored Walsh’s censures and continued on with regular parish life at the cathedral. Walsh appealed to Rome. Propaganda Fide, the Catholic body in

Rome that regulated church affairs in non-Catholic nations, informed Walsh that his faculties as vicar general had expired; the officials also handed authority over the New

Orleans diocese to Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore until a bishop could be appointed to the vacant see in Louisiana. Walsh died the next summer. Carroll, eleven hundred miles away, empowered a series of proxies to regain the cathedral and bring order to New

Orleans, but Sedella and the church wardens (called marguilliers) refused to recognize their authority.7

6 In Catholic polity, bishops appointed pastors; congregations had no power to elect their clerical leaders. Catholic historian Roger Baudier, whose disdain for Sedella is boundless, argues the laity of New Orleans sided with Sedella because he was lax about discipline and tolerant of their misbehavior and defiance of Catholic laws. Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 255–263. A more charitable explanation would be that the parishioners backed Sedella because they knew him; he had ministered to them for years, baptizing their children, marrying them, burying their loved ones. Sedella played on his congregants’ loyalty by casting Walsh as an illegitimate, power-grabbing usurper and himself as the faithful pastor. It is not clear whether national identities and loyalties played a role in the conflict between the Spanish priest, his Irish supervisor, and the predominantly French and Creole citizens.

7 Manuscript copy of pamphlet, 30 April 1805, New Orleans, no. 161, Finabar Kenneally, United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1966), 28; Annabelle M. Melville, “John Carroll and Louisiana, 1803–1815,” Catholic Historical Review 64, no. 3 (July 1, 1978): 407–412; Curley, Church and State in the Spanish Floridas, 295–307; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 255–263; Charles Edwards O’Neill, “‘A Quarter Marked by Sundry Peculiarities’: New Orleans, Lay Trustees, and Père Antoine,” Catholic Historical Review 76, no. 2 (April 1, 1990): 235–277; James M. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South: 1513–1900 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 175–177, 194–196; Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French 67

Schismatic or hero, Sedella continued to dominate the ecclesiastical scene in New

Orleans though the first three decades of the nineteenth century. He must have been gratified when Protestant missionaries John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel J. Mills approached him first before visiting Archbishop Carroll’s most recent appointee, William

DuBourg, in March 1813.8 Schermerhorn and Mills had heard that Sedella “has greater influence with those of his order than even [DuBourg], who has lately arrived from

Baltimore.” If they could win Sedella’s favor, informants told the missionaries, then

“much might be done towards distributing the Scriptures among the French Catholics.”9

The tip proved accurate: upon hearing the missionaries’ pitch, Sedella immediately pledged his support and approved the translation they offered. As the bible project unfolded over the next few years, Sedella continued to offer his assistance, promising to distribute French New Testaments not just to any takers, but specifically to “those persons, who could be sure to read them through,” signaling his recognition of the

Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 78–83; Stanley Faye, ed., “The Schism of 1805 in New Orleans,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1939): 98–141; Clarence Wyatt Bishpam, “Fray Antonio de Sedella,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 2, no. 1 (January 1919): 24–37. On the Ursuline nuns’ alignment with Walsh in the controversy, see Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 229– 233.

8 In 1808 the diocese of Baltimore was elevated to the status of archdiocese, and along with it, Carroll became archbishop, overseeing four suffragans—Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Bardstown, Kentucky.

9 Schermerhorn and Mills, Correct View, 51. Carroll had appointed DuBourg as his apostolic administrator in New Orleans in the fall of 1812. The title carried more authority than that of vicar general. Unfamiliar with Catholic organizational structure and terminology, Schermerhorn and Mills thought that DuBourg was already a bishop; they referred to him in their writings as Bishop DuBourg.

missionaries’ concern that recipients absorb the spiritual value of the gift.10 In 1815 the missionaries expanded the scope of their project to include Spanish scriptures. In addition to the Spanish who had settled in places like Bayou La Fourche and Natchitoches on the

Red River during the decades of Spanish rule, the bustling port of New Orleans had constant communication with various Spanish and formerly-Spanish domains in the

Floridas, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Eying the embattled and disintegrating Spanish empire to their south, a vast, nominally Catholic mission field ripe for the picking, the missionaries calculated that New Orleans could serve as an entrepôt for Spanish scriptures to be distributed to Spanish-speakers throughout Mexico, Cuba, and beyond. Again Sedella, a Spaniard by birth, was eager to collaborate. If the missionaries would furnish him with Spanish texts, he vowed to distribute them within his local networks and more broadly to Havana and Campeache.11 Sedella’s steady backing garnered him special notice in the 1815 report of the Louisiana Bible Society, an organization the missionaries established to disseminate the scriptures locally. “The reverend father Antonio de Sedilla [sic],” secretary Alfred Hennen wrote, “… has taken an active part in aiding the circulation of the New Testament among the Catholics: the countenance given by him to the views of the society is of the highest importance from the great influence which he has among his parishioners.”12

10 Samuel J. Mills and Daniel Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour Through That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains: Performed Under the Direction of the Massachusetts Missionary Society (Andover [Mass.]: Printed by Flagg and Gould, 1815), 36, 39.

11 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 39.

12 Report of the Board of Managers of the Louisiana Bible Society, Read and Approved the 20th April 1815 (New Orleans: Printed by Godwin B. Cotten, 1815), 8. [Hereafter Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1815.] 69

Why did Sedella favor the Protestants’ bible project? Perhaps he truly believed that the laity should have access to the scriptures to aid their spiritual development.

Perhaps he wanted to take advantage of the offer of free texts in the print-scarce town

(though his history as agent of the Inquisition, sent to hunt out revolutionary print material, suggests that he would be more suspicious of the danger of Protestant print).

Perhaps he thought that by supplying his parishioners with bibles, he would bolster his own popularity among them. Perhaps he saw the invitation as a networking opportunity, a chance to build his reputation among the Anglo-American Protestants who had begun entering the region after the Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps he wanted an opportunity to demonstrate his power and independence to DuBourg, whom he refused to acknowledge as his superior. More than likely, he knew that his support for the Protestant bible efforts would rankle Catholic authorities from Baltimore to New Orleans, and perhaps that was all the motivation he needed.

In his unqualified support for the Protestant bible program, Sedella was the outlier. Other Catholic leaders in the Mississippi Valley found themselves caught by triangulating forces. From one side they observed the pesky Protestant missionaries with their cartloads of bibles, forerunners of a larger, more troubling influx of Anglo-

American Protestant immigrants, some with African American slaves, poised to sweep into the region and threaten Catholic dominance. The priests were hemmed in on another side by their vows of obedience to their church and its regulations, which dictated that

Catholics should steer clear of any unauthorized religious print. But they were also caught on a third side by pressure from the laity, who had a surprising appetite for the missionaries’ freebies. Women and men of various ages, races, and religious creeds in the

region pressed for copies of the scriptures. Would the Catholic laity abandon the church and join with the Protestants if the leaders refused to condone the texts? In the face of the laity’s hunger, the leaders adjusted their stance, accommodating some Protestant print in order to maintain Catholic authority in the Mississippi River Valley.

Printed copies of the Christian scriptures were a rare commodity in the

Mississippi River Valley at the turn of the nineteenth century, in part because the region did not supply itself. The printing and publishing industry flourishing in Europe and along the east coast of the United States was still in its infancy along the river. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, the only printers permitted to print, publish, and sell books in

New Orleans were those appointed by the Crown.13 The series of men tapped as imprimeurs du Roi in the colonial era focused primarily on printing official edicts and legal notices.14 In the territorial period new printers set up shop and expanded the range of print material; debates about land use, freemason pamphlets, and educational texts competed with municipal and legislative documents in printers’ queues.15 A handful of

13 The bulk of extant colonial New Orleans print dates from the Spanish period, although one printer, Denis Braud, was authorized under the earlier French regime. Braud petitioned Louis XV for permission to establish a printing office in New Orleans in 1762; he had received his commission as the king’s printer by the summer of 1764. Florence M. Jumonville, “Frenchmen at Heart: New Orleans Printers and Their Imprints, 1764–1803,” Louisiana History 32, no. 3 (July 1991), 282–283; Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, vol. 2, The French Domination, 4th ed. (New Orleans: F.F. Hansell, 1903), 109.

14 One such directive, printed in 1765, banished the Capuchin friar Père Hilaire de Genvéaux from Louisiana and banned a catechism he had edited. The catechism, Catéchisme pour la Province de la Loüisianne, does not survive; it may have been the first book printed in New Orleans. Jumonville, “Frenchmen at Heart,” 291.

15 Jumonville, “Frenchmen at Heart,” 279–310; John M. Goudeau, “Booksellers and Printers in New Orleans, 1764–1885,” Journal of Library History 5, no. 1 (January 1970): 5–19. 71

religious documents appeared prior to 1812, but no bibles or New Testaments.16 The towns of St. Louis and Natchez lagged behind New Orleans in print culture. A printer in

Natchez, Mississippi, printed territorial laws and a refutation of Thomas Paine in the late

1790s; thereafter almanacs, legislative acts, and political news dominate the list of known imprints from early Mississippi.17 St. Louis did not boast any printers in the colonial period. The first newspaper printed in the city appeared in 1808. Books and other publications followed in subsequent years, but not until the late 1810s did printers churn

16 Apart from Catholic leaders’ participation in the debates about how the city should use the batture (a strip of land adjacent to the Mississippi River), four religiously-oriented publications from New Orleans have survived from the territorial period: An amateur poet signing the name Damon published six stanzas to welcome the Episcopal priest Rev. Philander Chase to his new congregation in New Orleans in 1805; an anonymous editor published a late-seventeenth century anti-deist text by Charles Leslie; an anonymous Catholic author penned a pamphlet critiquing the new marriage and divorce laws in Louisiana; and the Catholic Church published a French catechism. See Damon, “Verses on the Arrival of the Rev. Philander Chase, in New Orleans, Nov. 17, 1805” (New Orleans, 1805), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.02400700; Charles Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists (New-Orleans: Printed by Bradford and Anderson, 1807); Louisiana Catholic, Appel à la Constitution des États-Unis à la Sagesse et à la Religion des prochains Legislateurs (Nouvelle-Orleans: De l’imprimerie de Jean Renard imprimeur de la ville et paroisse d’Orléans, 1807); Catechisme imprimé par l’ordre du dernier Concile Provincial dA̕vignon, pour être seul enseigné dans les Dioceses de la Province (Nouvelle-Orleans: Chez la Veuve Roche, 1811). See also Florence M. Jumonville, Bibliography of New Orleans Imprints, 1764–1864 (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1989), 21–62.

17 Charles S. Sydnor, “The Beginning of Printing in Mississippi,” The Journal of Southern History 1, no. 1 (February 1935): 49–55; survey of publications printed in Natchez listed in Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639–1800, and Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801–1819, conducted by author.

out religious materials.18 It would take another twenty years before a Mississippi River printer would produce the Christian scriptures.19

Lacking local production, residents of the Mississippi corridor in the early 1800s depended on trade and immigration to deliver bibles to the region. Occasionally merchants would advertise a shipment of bibles, as when Jacob Philipson plugged “a few

German and English Bibles, Testaments, Hymn Books, etc.” in the Missouri Gazette in

November 1808.20 But such shipments were scarce; visitors and inhabitants alike lamented that they could not find bibles to purchase.21 More common were the bibles brought by families moving to the region. After seventeen-year-old Catharine Andrews married Joseph Wilkinson in Williamsburg, Virginia, in July 1807, the two emigrated westward, settling in Natchez by the time their first child was born in 1808. Among the belongings they carted with them was a large King James bible that had been printed in

18 Eleanora A. Baer, “Books, Newspapers, and Libraries in Pioneer St. Louis, 1808– 1842,” Missouri Historical Review 56, no. 4 (July 1962): 347–360.

19 A bible with Apocrypha was published jointly in New York and St. Louis in 1837. In 1850 a Cone-Wyckoff version of the New Testament was likewise published in New York and New Orleans. According to the preeminent bibliographic catalog of English- language bible publications in the U.S., no English-language bibles or New Testaments were printed exclusively in a Mississippi River town prior to the mid-twentieth century. See Margaret Hills, The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible & the New Testament Published in America, 1777–1957 (New York: American Bible Society and the New York Public Library, 1961), 147, 212.

20 As cited in Baer, “Books, Newspapers, and Libraries in Pioneer St. Louis,” 355.

21 Samuel J. Mills and John F. Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies in the United States ([Philadelphia]: By order of the Philadelphia Bible Society, 1813), 13; Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 50; Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 25–29.

Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1803.22 But the presence of family bibles did little to increase the number of available texts in the Mississippi Valley. Families kept such treasured heirlooms, passing them down through generations of descendents, rather than selling them or giving them away to non-kin.

The dearth of bibles was everywhere evident. Many inhabitants lived “1000 or

1500 miles from any place where the Bible is printed.”23 Two observers reported that they could not find a single bible or New Testament among the more than forty French families in New Madrid.24 Kaskaskia residents had “not more than four or five” bibles in a population of over eighty families.25 An oft-told anecdote exposed the scriptural scarcity in Louisiana. When administrative authority over New Orleans transferred from the French to the Americans after the Louisiana Purchase, no one could find a bible upon which to administer the oath of office. After a long search, one of the Catholic priests offered a Latin Vulgate for the purpose.26

22 Wilkinson Family Bible, Manuscripts Collection 839, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118.

23 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 14. Bible printing edged westward at a much slower rate than the tide of emigration. A Lancaster, Pennsylvania printer had produced New Testaments in the 1790s, but halted before the turn of the century. A printer in Pittsburgh began printing New Testaments in 1815. For full bibles, Philadelphia remained the westernmost (and southernmost) source until 1806, when a Baltimore printer edged in on the business. Not until 1819 did a full bible appear west of the Alleghenies, published in Lexington by William G. Hunt. See Hills, English Bible in America, 1–60.

24 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 26.

25 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 11.

26 Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 13.

The Catholic leaders were neither ignorant of nor satisfied by the shortage of religious texts in the region. After Bishop Benoît-Joseph Flaget, stationed in Bardstown,

Kentucky, completed a seven-month tour of the western portions of his diocese along the

Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, he wrote to a French Catholic bookseller in Lyon,

France, complaining that “the poor people are absolutely without religious books although quite a number know how to read.”27 Appealing to the bookseller’s business savvy, he speculated that he would have been able to sell two hundred copies of the

Manuel du Chrétien—a Catholic handbook of faith that included the Psalms, the complete New Testament, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, a bevy of prayers, and the Mass—at two piastres (two dollars) a piece, and equivalent numbers of other religious texts, had he but had them on hand. The bishop had more than financial gain on his mind; he believed that the religious texts would provide “a very great benefit” for the recipients. When he returned home to Bardstown, Kentucky, grieving for his bookless flock, he placed an order for seven hundred volumes of appropriate, condoned Catholic publications to begin to outfit his diocese.28 But even such largess, when spread over the vast region, would do little to quench the inhabitants’ spiritual thirst.29

27 The French-born Sulpician priest Benedict (Benoît) Joseph Flaget had come to Baltimore during the French Revolution. He served in Vincennes, Cuba, and at the seminary in Georgetown before being consecrated as the first bishop of Kentucky by Archbishop Carroll in November 1810. He arrived in his diocese in June 1811. His domain included Kentucky, Tennessee, the Indiana and Illinois territories, and, until DuBourg was consecrated bishop of Louisiana in 1815, upper Louisiana. Woods, History of the Catholic Church, 171–172.

28 Flaget to Rusand, 27 January 1815, Catholic Church, Archdiocese of Louisville Manuscripts 11/08, UNDA. Flaget’s order included one hundred each of a small catechism, the French New Testament, the Manuel du Chrétien, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, a book on the fundamentals of faith, and two other steady sellers. Rusand, both a bookseller and a printer, must have been delighted to receive Flaget’s letter, as his family had printed all but one of the texts Flaget ordered: Catéchisme de 75

Little wonder, then, that the missionaries’ scheme to distribute bibles and New

Testaments for free in the region sparked such interest. People with no money to buy the scriptures, people with resources who could not find a copy to purchase, and people with no prospects of inheriting a family bible, could thus obtain a rare treat. But those who had donated and hauled the texts to Louisiana considered the bibles much more than a treat: the scriptures were “a lamp to their feet, and a light to their path,” “the bread of life,” and

God’s “own truth.”30 From their perspective, the bible was the essential source for

toutes les églises catholiques de l'Empire français: Imprimé par ordre de Son A. E. Mgr le Cardinal Fesch, Archevêque de Lyon, Vienne et Embrun, Primat des Gaules, etc. (Lyon: Chez Rusand, imprimeur-libraire, 1806); Manuel du chrétien: Contenant les Psaumes, le Nouveau Testament, et l'Imitation de Jésus-Christ (Lyon: Chez Rusand, 1812); Thomas à Kempis, L'Imitation de Jesus-Christ: Traduction nouvelle. Avec une Pratique et une Prière à la fin de chaque Chapitre, la Messe et les Vêpres des Dimanches, trans. Jérôme de Gonnelieu (n.p.:[Mathieu-Placide Rusand], 1809); Jacques Guisain, Les Sages entretiens d'une âme qui désire sincèrement son salut... [Par l'abbé J. Guisain.] Nouvelle édition (Lyon : Rusand, 1810); Barthélemy Baudrand, L'âme élevée à Dieu, par les réflexions et les sentiments pour chaque jour du moi (Lyon: chez la Veuve Rusand, 1789); Aymé, Les fondements de la foi mis à la portée de toutes sortes de personnes (Paris: Onfroy; Lyon: Rusand, 1807). Rusand probably supplied the New Testaments from other printers, as it appears that his own press did not print the full French bible until 1819 and the New Testament until 1824. I am grateful to Tangi Villerbu for bringing the Flaget-Rusand correspondence to my attention.

29 Catholic priests bemoaning the lack of texts among their parishioners did not deny themselves the pleasures of religious print; they drew on their European, Canadian, and east-coast connections to funnel select titles westward. For instance, Pierre Gibault, a Canadian-born priest who served in the Mississippi River towns of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Ste. Genevieve, and New Madrid, had a library of over 240 books when he died in 1802. French-born Jean-François Rivet left over a hundred titles upon his death in Vincennes in 1804. Flaget himself hauled part of the library of St. Mary's, a Sulpician seminary in Baltimore, with him to Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1811. Joseph P. Donnelly, Pierre Gibault, Missionary 1737–1802 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971), 151; Tangi Villerbu, “Vincennes (Indiana), 1795–1804: convertir ou conserver? Le travail du père Rivet,” in Pierre Ragon, ed., Nouveaux chrétiens, nouvelles chrétientés dans les Amériques, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Nanterre, Presses Universitaires de Paris-Ouest, 2014), 291–292; Melville, Louis William DuBourg, 1: 221–232.

30 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 25 (paraphrasing Psalm 119:105); Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 13; John 76

spiritual sustenance, the fundamental path connecting the worthless sinner to the righteous, loving God. And in their eyes the Mississippi Valley was brimming with worthless sinners—rough and tumble pioneer types who neglected the religious training they had received in their youth; Native Americans and free and enslaved Africans whose religious commitments were often unorthodox and always suspect; and French and

Creole Catholics who had only dim, twisted notions of Christian truths. Who could deny that the Mississippi River needed the “Word of Life”?31

Propelled by such zeal, Schermerhorn and Mills, as well as another young man,

Daniel Smith, initiated the Protestant bible distribution scheme in the Mississippi

Valley.32 The three Andover Seminary graduates staged a series of missionary journeys to the western and southern areas of the United States between 1812 and 1816, sponsored by the Massachusetts and Connecticut Missionary Societies.33 Schermerhorn and Mills

B. Romeyn, “Second Report of the New-York Bible Society, for 1811,” The Christian’s Magazine: Designed to Promote Knowledge and Influence of Evangelical Truth and Order 4, no. 12 (1 Dec 1811), 693.

31 “The Annual Report of the New-York Bible Society,” Christian’s Magazine 4, no. 1 (1 Jan 1811), 48.

32 For biographical details, see Gardiner Spring, Memoirs of the Rev. Samuel J. Mills, Late Missionary to the South Western Section of the Untied States (New York: New-York Evangelical Missionary Society, 1820); Thomas C. Richards, Samuel J. Mills: Missionary, Pathfinder, Pioneer and Promoter (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1906); Richard A. Schermerhorn, Schermerhorn Genealogy and Family Chronicles (New York: Tobias A. Wright, 1914; facsimile repr., Salem, Mass.: Higginson Book, [2006?]), 94–96; James Blythe, “Sketch of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Daniel Smith” in Robert Bishop, An Outline of the History of the Church in the State of Kentucky, During a Period of Forty Years; Containing the Memoirs of Rev. David Rice, and Sketches of the Origin and Present State of Particular Churches, and of the Lives and Labours of a Number of Men who were Eminent and Useful in Their Day (Lexington: T. T. Skillman, 1824), 184–209.

33 Both missionary societies were Congregationalist. Through the Plan of Union of 1801, Congregationalists and Presbyterians had articulated a collaborative mission strategy for the west and had authorized churches to utilize pastors from either denomination. Samuel 77

commenced the first voyage in May 1812, visiting Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, and

Nashville, then hitching a ride with General Andrew Jackson and 1500 troops along the

Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Natchez. They then took a flat-bottomed boat to New

Orleans, where they tarried until April 1813, returning east through Athens, Georgia and then northward. Mills launched westward again in the summer of 1814, with young

Smith in tow; the duo revisited many of the sites of the previous journey. They also trekked through the southern Indiana and Illinois territories, and stopped in St. Louis.

Smith returned solo by sea for a third venture between October 1815 and June 1816, honing in on Louisiana and the Mississippi Territory.34 During their travels and upon their return east, the three circulated missives of their findings—descriptions of spiritual ignorance and depravity—and of their efforts to spread the Christian message and

Christian practices.35

C. Pearson, “From Church to Denomination: American Congregationalism in the Nineteenth Century,” Church History 38, no. 1 (March 1, 1969): 67–87.

34 Smith’s solo excursion was cosponsored by the Massachusetts Missionary Society and the Committee of Missions of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. The latter group appointed Smith “to labour as a missionary three months in Natchez.” Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Missions, The First Report of the Board of Missions, to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, for 1817 (Philadelphia: Printed by John W. Scott, 1817), 23. See also “Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society [May 1816],” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 12, no. 7 (July 1816): 324–328.

35 The budding missionary press circulated these letters. See, for example, “A Letter from Samuel J. Mills, Jr. to the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 6, no. 7 (July 1813): 268– 273. The missionaries published reports of the first two trips, compiling the letters they had written en route to the directors of the various missionary and bible societies who supported their efforts. See Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View; Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour. The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America and the Philadelphia Bible Society funded the publication of two additional reports based on findings from Schermerhorn and Mills’s initial missionary journey: John F. Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the 78

Assigned to evaluate “the religious state” of the region, the missionaries spent much of their time establishing bible societies, a new phenomenon on the American landscape.36 Emulating their British co-religionists, who had instituted the British and

Foreign Bible Society in 1804, Protestant Philadelphians had launched the first bible society in the United States in 1808.37 The organization’s mission was to distribute the bible to those “who are unable or not disposed to purchase it.”38 By 1812 similar groups that had sprouted up along the east coast had distributed more than ten thousand

Protestant bibles and New Testaments to the scripturally destitute in their midst.39

Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America. Report Respecting the Indians Inhabiting the Western Parts of the United States, ([Boston], 1814), discussed in chapter 5 below; and Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies.

36 “Religious Intelligence. Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society [May 1813],” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 9, no. 1 (June 1813): 39; “Letter from Mr. Mills,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 9, no. 5 (September 1813): 233–237.

37 “Religious Intelligence. Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the British and Foreign Bible Society,” The Christian Monitor 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1814): 15–18. For a history of bible societies in the United States, see Peter J Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). On the British group see Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

38 “Bible Society,” The Evangelical Intelligencer 2, no. 12 (December 1808): 591.

39 This figure is based on data compiled from the following annual reports: “Charleston Bible Society: First Report of the Managers of the Bible Society of Charleston, So. Carolina,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 4, no. 9 (September 1811): 350–353; “Connecticut Bible Society,” Christian’s Magazine 4, no. 10 (October 1, 1811): 559; “Domestic: The Annual Report of the New-York Bible Society,” Christian’s Magazine 4, no. 1 (January 1, 1811): 45–48; “New-York Bible Society,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 3, no. 1 (January 1810): 30–31; “Religious Intelligence. First Report of the Bible Society of Philadelphia,” The Evangelical Intelligencer 3, no. 6 (May 1809): 233–238; John B. Romeyn, “Second Report of the New-York Bible Society, for 1811,” Christian’s 79

Ferrying the model westward, the three missionaries labored to establish and then shore up bible societies in the principal town of each state or territory: Marietta (Ohio),

Vincennes (Indiana Territory), Lexington, St. Louis, Nashville, Natchez and New

Orleans. The new bible societies were designed to receive copies of the scriptures, either through purchase or donation from eastern bible societies, and disseminate them to the local population. The missionaries offered the Constitution of the Bible Society of Ohio, which they had helped frame early in their trip on the model of the Philadelphia and

Connecticut Bible Society constitutions, as a template to ensure that westerners’ institutions aligned with easterners’ wishes.40

The missionaries themselves also distributed religious publications. Riding on the exuberant eastern response to the initial western foray, Smith and Mills hauled 700

English bibles, 5,000 French New Testaments, 15,000 religious tracts, fifty copies of

Harriet Newell’s memoirs, and a “large quantity of sermons and pamphlets on a variety of religious subjects” on their missionary tour—freight enough to require a “light waggon

Magazine 4, no. 12 (December 1, 1811): 689–693; “The Second Report of the Bible Society, Established at Philadelphia; Read before the Society at Their Annual Meeting, May, 1810,” Christian’s Magazine 3, no. 7 (July 1, 1810): 404–409; “The Third Report of the Bible Society of Philadelphia, Read before the Society, May 1, A.D. 1811,” Christian’s Magazine 4, no. 7 (July 1, 1811): 400–406.

40 Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 3, 9; Schermerhorn and Mills, Correct View, 48–50; “Ohio Bible Society: Address, Constitution, and Subscription-Proposal,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 5, no. 12 (December 1812): 473–476; “Bible Society [Constitution of the Philadelphia Bible Society],” The Evangelical Intelligencer 2, no. 12 (December 1808): 590–593; “Constitution of the Connecticut Bible Society,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 2, no. 5 (May 1809): 172– 173.

[sic]” for the overland portion of the trip.41 They gave most of these materials to preachers they encountered and to the budding bible societies, to be disseminated through local networks. On occasion they doled out texts directly to the populace, as when they gave a bible to an enslaved man on the Mississippi River above Natchez “who seemed to love religion.”42

In addition to settled inhabitants, Mills, Smith and Schermerhorn sought avenues to supply transients in the region, including soldiers and river travelers. Smith placed a supply of bibles at the customhouse in New Orleans “to be distributed among the vessels that should clear out from the port.” The customs officials assured the missionary that they would offer bibles to every captain when they gave him his customs paperwork. The captain of the steamboat operating between New Orleans and Natchez agreed to set up a location on his boat “for the reception of books or tracts of different kinds, for the use of the passengers.”43

During their 1814–1815 journey, while Smith spent some weeks in Natchez, strengthening the nascent bible society and the Presbyterian congregation, Mills traveled

41 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 6. The French New Testaments had been printed expressly for this purpose by the Bible Society of Philadelphia. The missionaries did not take copies of the full Protestant French bible perhaps because none had yet been printed in the U.S. by the time of their departure. On Harriet Newell, one of the first missionaries deployed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who died in 1812 during her first year of service and whose memoir became a steady seller among mission-minded Protestants in the nineteenth century, see Mary Kelley, “'Pen and Ink Communion': Evangelical Reading and Writing in Antebellum America,” New England Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Dec. 2011): 564–568.

42 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 27.

43 “Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society [28 May 1816],” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 12, no. 7 (July 1816): 327.

ahead to New Orleans.44 There he began to distribute English bibles and French New

Testaments. The city and its environs were overrun with troops—American and British soldiers wounded in or sick from the Louisiana campaign and the Battle of New Orleans;

British soldiers captured in battle; American soldiers on alert for the next engagement; and idle soldiers waiting to be sent home.45 Mills viewed these soldiers as a ripe missionary field. His journal from February and March 1815 details his treks to army barracks, military hospitals, and the prison, and the warm reception he received from soldiers eager to get their hands on the free bibles he offered. The imprisoned British soldiers, “apparently pious men,” gladly accepted the books, since many of them had left their own copies onboard ship.46 Wounded American and British soldiers at the United

States Hospital likewise “expressed an earnest desire to be possessed of the sacred

Scriptures,” as did those at the Navy Hospital and the Charity Hospital. Mills was less than sanguine about the prospects for these soldiers, many of whom he expected to die soon. As occasion allowed, he prayed with the suffering men, preached and read aloud to them, and sang religious songs with them. Their looming mortality motivated his

44 After Smith’s visit, the Natchez Presbyterians petitioned the Massachusetts Missionary Society for a missionary to be stationed in their town, and they specifically named Smith as their preferred choice. Smith heeded the call and returned to the town in the fall of 1815 for a few months. He returned again in 1816 as the called pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Natchez. Daniel Smith, “Extract of a Letter from the Rev. Daniel Smith, to His Friend in This Place, Dated Natchez, April 29, 1816,” The Weekly Recorder; a Newspaper Conveying Important Intelligence and Other Useful Matter Under the Three General Heads of Theology, Literature, and National Affairs 2, no. 44 (June 7, 1816): 346; Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Missions, First Report, 1817, 23.

45 News of the peace signed at Ghent in December 1814 did not reach New Orleans until mid-February.

46 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 30–31.

ministrations and, he thought, their receptivity to the bibles.47 The following winter

Smith delivered another 200 bibles to the chaplain of the army in New Orleans, who took them into the garrison where there were thousands of soldiers. The soldiers crowded around the chaplain “eagerly asking for a copy of the Scriptures. They were so very importunate that is was even difficult to exercise any discretion in the distribution.”48

The missionaries’ plan to launch bible societies and distribute scriptures in the western states and territories catalyzed the populace. State and territorial leaders embraced the bible society projects, as did Catholic priests—at least initially.49 Such

Catholic approbation took the missionaries aback. Despite their ecumenical rhetoric,

Schermerhorn, Mills and Smith viewed Catholics with deep suspicion.50 Steeped in the

47 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 31.

48 “Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society [28 May 1816],” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 12, no. 7 (July 1816): 327.

49 In the span of two days in St. Louis Mills and Smith raised nearly $300 from subscribers, one of whom was Missouri Territory Governor William Clark. David Holmes, governor of the Mississippi Territory, became the first president of the Mississippi Bible Society in Natchez in 1813. Schermerhorn and Mills garnered donations of $100 for the Tennessee Bible Society from military officers accompanying General Jackson to New Orleans. A dozen state legislators in New Orleans signed onto a circular advertising the organizing meeting of the Louisiana Bible Society. Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 11–12; Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 6; Schermerhorn and Mills, Correct View, 50.

50 Smith wrote to an acquaintance in January 1815, celebrating the ecumenical spirit of the bible society projects: “It was truly astonishing to see the readiness of all classes to favour the measure [of initiating bible societies in the west]. Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, Infidels and Nothingists – all subscribed.” Daniel Smith, “Religious Intelligence. [Extract of a Letter from Daniel Smith Jan 12, 1815],” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 8, no. 3 (March 1815), 102.

Reformed tradition, they saw Catholicism as misguided at best, idolatrous at worst.51

Their visits to settlements confirmed their notions that the Catholic faithful were anything but. In the villages along the river above New Orleans Schermerhorn and Mills judged the predominantly French Catholic population to be “entirely ignorant of divine things, and … taught only to attend mass, and count their beads.”52 The missionaries believed priests willfully kept their flocks in spiritual darkness by forbidding them access to the scriptures. The young men expected Catholic leaders to resist their efforts to introduce copies of the bible amidst the Catholic laity.

Like many American and British Protestants of the era, Mills, Schermerhorn and

Smith held a distorted understanding of Catholic religiosity and the Catholic use of scriptures. They did not recognize how the rhythms of the liturgical calendar and the rituals of the church bred and nurtured Catholic religious life. In Catholic teaching, sacraments, not the independent reading of the bible, connected the person with God’s grace.53 Four of the Catholic sacraments marked life milestones: birth/baptism,

51 On American Protestants’ suspicion of Catholics’ beliefs, practices, and fidelity to the nation, see Chris Beneke, “The ‘Catholic Spirit Prevailing in Our Country’: America’s Moderate Religious Revolution,” in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 265–285; Francis Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Ray Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938). For a discussion of the deep roots of anti-Catholic sentiment in colonial America, see Owen Stanwood, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations in Early America,” in Beneke and Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice, 218– 240.

52 Schermerhorn and Mills, Correct View, 34.

53 D[aniel] J. Kennedy, “Sacraments,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic 84

adolescence/confirmation, adulthood/marriage, and death/extreme unction. The pairing of two other sacraments, penance and communion, helped govern behavior.54 Catholic practice centered on the Mass, in which the priest ritually reenacted Jesus’ final meal with his disciples. The cycle of saints’ feasts, holy days, processions and other celebrations further connected the faithful with the divine. In addition to corporate worship the laity were encouraged to engage in private devotional habits, such as fasting, prayer, and saying the rosary.

The bible interwove through all the elements of Catholic practice. The priests read bible passages at every Mass, typically from the New Testament. The congregation or the choir intoned Psalms and hymns based on biblical stories and poetry. Each ceremony and rite of the church, and each aspect of private devotional practice, was saturated with scriptural language. Biblical quotes even dotted priests’ private correspondence.55 But the bible as a printed text was not the focal point of worship or devotional life. As one French priest in Maryland explained to a wayward parishioner, “The Word of God is not that paper, print and English or Latin language, or greek or hebrew which strikes only the

Church, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), 13:296–300.

54 In nineteenth century Catholic practice, the laity received communion only a few times a year—usually at Christmas and Easter—and only after they had completed the process of confession and absolution. Ann Taves, “Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 54, no. 4 (Dec. 1985): 482–495. On the shift in the early twentieth century to more frequent communion, see Margaret M. McGuinness, “Night and Day: Eucharistic Adoration in the United States, 1900–1969,” U.S. Catholic Historian 19, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 21–34.

55 See, for instance, Jean David, coadjutor bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky, quoting long passages from Ezekiel in Latin in his letter to Joseph Rosati, who had just learned of his appointment as bishop of Louisiana. Jean David to [Joseph Rosati], 5 Dec 1826, RG 01 B 04.3 a, Box A7, Bishop Joseph Rosati Collection, AASL.

outward senses—it is the meaning, truth & grace contained and which the apostles and the church after them, were sent to teach, our Lord being with them to the End of times.”

The Word of God, in sum, transcended the marks on the page, and was conveyed to generations of Christians through the appointed leaders of the church. Catholic officials considered Protestant reformers guilty of shattering that continuity by “mangling and mistranslating the bible itself so as to make as many new bibles, as have been new translators.”56 In reaction to the textual innovations of the Protestant Reformation, the

Catholic Church authorized priests to control the laity’s access to the scriptures. The

Roman Catholic Council of Trent (1545–1563) had prohibited private interpretation of the bible and dictated that the scriptures must be understood in accordance with Catholic tradition. Later rulings clarified that under certain conditions laypeople could read the bible in the vernacular, but only with the permission of their priest or the bishop.57

Such limitations were inconceivable to the Protestant missionaries, who saw the bible as essential for faithful Christian practice. Buoyed by eastern funds, print material, and ecclesiastical authority, Schermerhorn, Mills and Smith sought to extend a biblically oriented, reform-minded, Protestant version of Christianity to the inhabitants along the

56 Simon Bruté to John Smith, 9 Sept 1821, CMNT II 3 o, UNDA.

57 The Council did not rule on vernacular translations, though it did dictate that the Latin Vulgate was the authorized version of the scriptures, normative for sermons, expositions, and liturgical readings. Subsequent Catholic policy held that all translations and editions had to be based on the Vulgate. Gerald P. Fogarty, “The Quest for a Catholic Vernacular Bible in America,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 163–167; A[nthony] J. Maas, “Hermeneutics,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 7:275; J[ohann] P[eter] Kirsch, “Council of Trent,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 15:32.

Mississippi River.58 They turned their misperception of Catholic scriptural policy to their own advantage, depicting Catholic inhabitants in the Mississippi Valley as ignorant and starving for scriptures, which their priests routinely denied them. Such images played on the sympathy and generosity of eastern Protestant audiences, who responded with more donations of money and texts.

To these easterners, the bible was the most crucial tool to connect an individual to

God. The bible for them was a potent object. They believed that the scriptures had the power to transform people, and to do so directly. The bible’s power did not reside in its materiality. Its physicality—its design, its size—was merely functional. The binding, paper, and the kind of ink mattered only insofar as they held the text together and made it readable. In fact eastern evangelicals chose to print the bible and the New Testaments on low-grade paper; such “impressions that combine cheapness with plainness” enabled them to get more copies into the hands of more people.59

They expressed concern for the materiality of the bibles insofar as these material elements aided or impeded the distribution and reading of the text. In their report to the

58 On the reform-oriented religion that gripped the northeast, see Charles Foster, An Errand of Mercy the Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Clifford Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P, 1960); Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); James Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier Missions and the Decline of Congregationalism, 1774–1818 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jonathan Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chaps. 9–10, 13–14; Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

59 “Constitution of the Connecticut Bible Society,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 2, no. 5 (May 1809): 172.

Massachusetts Missionary Society, Smith and Mills included a letter of gratitude and gentle critique from a Swiss settler in the Indiana Territory. Mr. Dufour wanted the missionaries to know that the ten French New Testaments he received and distributed not only had typographical errors, but also that the “binder had so folded the leaves in some of the copies, that some of the words, and even lines, were cut off.” The missionaries inserted an editorial footnote in their report, calling attention to these flaws and recommending that the Philadelphia Bible Society not prioritize economy above functionality in future printings.60

Materiality came into play also as a means to expand circulation. The eastern evangelicals recognized that bibles and New Testaments had value as physical objects separate from their power to transform. The finer the quality of the physical material, the more valuable the texts were on an exchange or commercial level. The managers of the

Philadelphia Bible Society leveraged that value to aid their bible distribution scheme by printing some bibles and New Testaments on nicer paper to be sold to raise funds for the gratuitous distribution of the cheaper texts.61 The managers also deployed that value

60 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 56.

61 While they were printing the 5000 copies of the French New Testament for the missionaries to take westward, the Philadelphia Bible Society ordered 1000 copies “to be printed on finer paper for sale.” “The Sixth Report of the Bible Society of Philadelphia, Read before the Society, May 4th, A.D. 1814,” The Almoner, A Periodical Religious Publication 1, no. 2 (July 1, 1814), 109. For a history of bible publishing in the United States, see Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). For a discussion of American bible societies’ organizational growth and economic strategies, such as producing cheap copies for gratuitous distribution and producing higher quality copies for sale, see David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 3.

when they gave Schermerhorn and Mills each “a compliment of a Bible in extra binding” for their efforts to promote bible societies on their missionary tour.62

A nicely bound bible made a suitable gift. But the cheaper bibles had just as much power to transform readers as the finer versions. The true power of the bible for the eastern evangelicals resided in the words themselves, not in the words’ physical container. Reading the scriptures had the potential to convict and convert the sinner. The text was potent in its readability. Indeed, the bible existed to be read. But the words were not magical. Rather, it was God’s spirit working in the reader that was efficacious. In the reading of the words the readers encountered the word of God. The doctrine of sola scriptura, a central tenet of the Reformation, held that the scriptures contained everything needful for salvation.63 The believer needed no other intermediary; scripture alone gave a person access to the divine. To facilitate such access, the bible societies’ constitutions mandated the use of scriptures printed “in the versions in common use among the

Protestants, without note or comment.”64 Translation mattered; the text needed to be in a

62 “The Sixth Report of the Bible Society of Philadelphia, Read before the Society, May 4th, A.D. 1814,” The Almoner, A Periodical Religious Publication 1, no. 2 (July 1, 1814), 109.

63 For a discussion of how the Reformation doctrines of sola scriptura, the priesthood of all believers, preparation for grace, and sanctification played out in the early American context, see Nord, Faith in Reading, chap. 1. Candy Gunther Brown explores how these doctrines coalesced in American evangelical textual practices. See Gunther Brown, Word in the World.

64 “Ohio Bible Society: Address, Constitution, and Subscription-Proposal,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 5, no. 12 (December 1812): 473. See also “Bible Society,” The Evangelical Intelligencer 2, no. 12 (December 1808): 590–593; “Constitution of the Connecticut Bible Society,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 2, no. 5 (May 1809): 172–173; “New-York Bible Society,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 3, no. 1 (January 1810): 30–31. The Missouri Bible Society’s constitution adopted the same wording, except that 89

language that its reader could understand. The text itself needed to be theologically correct, that is, thoroughly Protestant.65 And of course the text needed to be legible.66

What good was a bible if the reader couldn’t read it?

After they had won Sedella to the cause in the early months of 1813, Mills and

Schermerhorn approached William DuBourg, Archbishop Carroll’s new apostolic administrator for Louisiana.67 A native of Saint-Domingue but educated in France,

DuBourg had been in Louisiana just a few months, trying to sort out the disorder and insubordination that had reigned in the diocese since Bishop Peñalver’s departure more than a decade earlier.68 When the missionaries proposed to disseminate French

the Missouri group deleted the phrase “among the Protestants.” Mandating that they would only distribute “the version of the Bible in general use,” the organization elided Protestantism and Christianity. Instead of acknowledging that they were choosing to use a Protestant text over a Catholic text, or one Protestant text over a range of competing Protestant and Catholic texts, they referenced a supposed universal consensus. “The Missouri Bible Society,” Missouri Gazette & Illinois Advertiser, St. Louis (December 24, 1814).

65 The bible societies in the United States used the same versions as the British and Foreign Bible Society, the premiere scripture-disseminating organization. The King James Version was their standard in English. Hills, English Bible in America, xi-xx.

66 Certain donors understood, perhaps from personal experience, that “aged people and others whose sight is defective” could not read bibles with tiny print. A generous female donor in Boston gave fifty large octavo bibles to Mills and Smith, designating that they should be given specifically to people in the lower Mississippi Valley who needed larger print. “No. II,” Christian Herald 1, no. 16 (13 July 1816), 242; Daniel Smith to Stephen Hempstead, 12 Dec 1815, SHL, SHP.

67 For a thorough and celebratory biography of DuBourg, see Melville, Louis William DuBourg.

68 Prior to his appointment to Louisiana, DuBourg had served as president of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. Cognizant of DuBourg’s charisma and facility with English, French and Spanish languages, Carroll sent him to Louisiana in the fall of 1812, with recommendations to Rome that he become the sitting bishop there. Rome agreed, and 90

translations of the bible to the people within DuBourg’s jurisdiction, the priest granted that the region suffered a scriptural drought—he doubted the Catholics in New Orleans together had ten bibles—but, in accordance with Catholic policy, he explained that “a promiscuous reading of all the books of Scripture was uniformly viewed by the Catholic

Church as more likely to prove injurious than beneficial, particularly to the uninformed part of Christians.” He agreed that the New Testament on its own might be profitable, but only if it were the authorized version approved by the Roman Catholic Church.69 When

Mills and Schermerhorn presented him a copy of a French New Testament that had been printed in Paris, he gave it a cursory inspection and signaled his approval.70

DuBourg was consecrated bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana in September 1815, after the missionaries completed their second tour. Melville, Louis William DuBourg, 1:255– 272; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 264–269.

69 The standard vernacular bible for English-speaking Catholics from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth century was the Douai Bible (also spelled Douay). A translation from the Vulgate by Gregory Martin of the University of Douai at Rheims, the full Douai Bible first appeared in 1609. Londoner and Catholic leader Richard Challoner revised the Douai Bible twice in the mid-eighteenth century; his revisions retained the name “Douai.” Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey first published this Catholic text in 1790, and again in 1805, with his own minor revisions. Carey’s Duoai Bible was the first Catholic bible in English published in the United States. A printer in Boston produced a French translation of the New Testament from the Vulgate in 1810—probably the first authorized Catholic scriptures in French to be printed in the U.S. Hills, English Bible in America, xi-xx; Michael S. Carter, “‘Under the Benign Sun of Toleration’: Mathew Carey, the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789–1791,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 438–442. See also Fogarty, “Quest for a Catholic Vernacular Bible in America,” 166–167; Le Nouveau Testament de Notre Seigneur Jésus- Christ en Français, sur la Vulgate, trans. Isaac-Louis Le Maistre de Sacy (Boston: De l’imprimerie de J.T. Buckingham, 1810). For an account of bible publications in French, see Pierre Bogaert, Les Bibles en Français: Histoire Illustrée du Moyen Age à Nos Jours ([Turnhout, Belgique]: Brepols, 1991).

70 Quotes from DuBourg to Simon Bruté, 13 Sept 1814, Charles Leon Souvay Collection: Microfilm, Series 1, UNDA. See also Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 13. For Catholic interpretations of these encounters, see Charles L. Souvay, “Du Bourg and the Biblical Society (New Orleans, 1813),” SLCHR 2, no. 1 (January 1920): 18–25; [Martin I. J. Griffin], “A Bible Distribution 91

Not until after the missionaries left in early April did DuBourg discover his error.

They had given him a Protestant text, and he had unwittingly approved it. He had been duped. But it took a letter from his friend and fellow priest Simon Bruté in Maryland to make him realize the gravity of the situation. Bruté had heard about the bible project through the blossoming evangelical press, which had published letters and reports from the missionaries’ journey.71 Mills and Schermerhorn had returned east trumpeting the news that the Catholic leaders in New Orleans had blessed their scheme to put bibles—

Protestant bibles—into the hands of the French Catholic laity along the Mississippi River.

“[The priests] assured us they had not the least objection,” the missionaries cheered, “to the circulation of the Sacred Scriptures among their people.”72 They gave as an example

DuBourg’s eagerness for them to distribute in the Ursuline convent the sample copies of the French New Testament the missionaries had on hand.73

Among the Catholics of Louisiana,” American Catholic Historical Researches 20, no. 3 (July 1903): 123–125; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 243–246, 264–267; Melville, Louis William DuBourg, 1: 296–301.

71 DuBourg to Bruté, 13 Sept 1814, Souvay Collection, Series 1, UNDA.

72 Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 7–8.

73 Schermerhorn and Mills did not bring these texts with them on this initial journey; rather, they raided the supplies of Mr. Reis, a Baptist missionary they met and befriended in New Orleans. Reis had brought two dozen copies of the French scriptures to the city, but had only succeeded in distributing a few. Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 7–8. For the definitive study of the Ursuline community in New Orleans, see Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses.

Encouraged by the seemingly God-given opportunity, the fledgling Benevolent

Empire hustled to deliver texts.74 Mills and Schermerhorn recommended that the

Philadelphia Bible Society coordinate with other groups to print several thousand French

New Testaments for the Francophone population in Louisiana and elsewhere along the

Mississippi.75 The Philadelphians took up the call, producing five thousand copies for gratuitous distribution with funds donated by various northeastern organizations and individuals, and another one thousand copies on “finer paper,” to be sold.76 Upon hearing the missionaries’ request the following year for Spanish New Testaments for the region,

74 On the Benevolent Empire, see Foster, Errand of Mercy; Donald G. Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: A Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 23–43; Gunther Brown, Word in the World.

75 Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 14. These were most likely the first Protestant French scriptures to be printed in the United States. The copies that circulated earlier had been sent to the U.S. from the British and Foreign Bible Society. After reading Schermerhorn and Mills’s missionary report, the New York Bible Society managers had also planned to print French New Testaments, but when they learned of the Philadelphians’ scheme, they switched to printing the full French Protestant bible, a much larger undertaking. By December 1814, the New Yorkers had printed only up to “the first book of Samuel;” they completed the print run in 1815 and sent a portion on to New Orleans. Six hundred copies had been distributed in the city by January 1816. “The New York Bible Society,” Religious Remembrancer (25 February 1815): 101; John E. Caldwell, “Fourth Report of the New-York Bible Society, Adopted at Their Annual Meeting, Held on Monday, December 6th, 1813.” The Almoner, A Periodical Religious Publication 1, no. 1 (April 1814): 44; “Communication to the Editor of the Christian Herald.” Christian Herald 1, no. 6 (4 May 1816): 81.

76 The Bible Society of Philadelphia printed five hundred copies of the missionaries’ Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies in the United States, appended with an appeal for other societies to contribute. Donations flowed in from societies in Baltimore, Nassau Hall, New Hampshire, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina, and Massachusetts. “The Sixth Report of the Bible Society of Philadelphia, Read before the Society, May 4th, A.D. 1814,” The Almoner, A Periodical Religious Publication 1, no. 2 (July 1, 1814): 107–109, quote from 109; Mills and Schermerhorn, Communications Relative to the Progress of Bible Societies, 16. For a discussion of the lead role the Bible Society of Philadelphia played in bible publication and distribution in this era, see Nord, Faith in Reading, chap. 3.

the Philadelphians bolted to action again, placing an order with the British and Foreign

Bible Society for 300 Spanish-language New Testaments, to be sent directly to New

Orleans.77 Ever generous, the British society augmented the order to one thousand, and added 500 French New Testaments and a hundred French bibles gratis.78 These arrived in

January 1816. Another thousand Spanish New Testaments arrived in 1817.79

Female and male inhabitants across the religious, ethnic, racial and linguistic spectrum pressed for copies of the free publications. The missionaries’ accounts suggest that Mississippi River dwellers approached the Protestant books with a mixture of caution, curiosity and acquisitiveness. As the French New Testaments circulated in New

Orleans, some Catholics questioned DuBourg about whether they were allowed to read the text. One woman showed him her copy of the New Testament and asked anxiously what it was and whether he recommended it. He explained to her that it was “a Protestant version” of the scriptures, “as Calvin would have translated it.” Mortified, she implored him to keep it. He replied that she could have the book if she “read it with care.” He warned her that, because it was a Protestant translation, it might have things “contrary to the Catholic faith.”80

77 “Eighth Annual Report of the Bible Society of Philadelphia,” Evangelical Repository, no. 5 (May 1, 1816): 18. The Philadelphia organization did not have plates yet to produce Spanish texts in-house; they thus relied on their British partners.

78 “By the Kindness of an Esteemed Christian Friend… London. October 2d, 1815,” Religious Remembrancer (6 January 1816): 73; “Communications to the Editor,” Christian Herald (22 April 1816): 81.

79 “The Bible Cause,” Religious Remembrancer, no. 51 (August 16, 1817): 204.

80 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 37.

“Miss J.,” a nun, also approached DuBourg, agitated because of just such a disparity. She had noticed a phrase printed in the First Epistle of John in the French New

Testament circulated by the missionaries that contradicted her understanding of the sacrament of confession.81 The priest explained to the nun that the comment was not scriptural, but had been inserted in the text by the translator. DuBourg related this story to

Mills, scolding the missionary for distributing scriptures with such theologically laden explanations and comments.82

Some Spanish speakers, too, registered concern. The upbeat report of the

Louisiana Bible Society could not entirely erase the inhabitants’ wariness in approaching these novel texts. The bible society managers admitted that recipients of the Spanish New

Testaments expressed “some scruples about reading them.” Spanish-speakers wondered whether the Protestant scriptures contradicted Catholic tradition. In question was

Matthew 1:25: “Y no la conoció que parió á su hijo primogénito: y llamó su nombre

Jesus.” This verse seemed to undermine the Catholic doctrine of Mary’s perpetual

81 The perplexing gloss preceded the first chapter of 1 John: “La parole de vie, la communion avec Christ, et la confession de nos péchés á Dieu.” “The word of life, communion with Christ, and the confession of our sins to God.” The nun wondered how priests, to whom she had been taught to confess, fit into this equation. The scriptural text itself was more vague regarding to whom a person must confess his/her sins: “Si nous confessons nos péchés, il est fidèle et juste pour nous les pardoner, et pour nous purifier de toute iniquité” (1 John 1:9). See Le Nouveau Testament de Notre Seigneur Jésus- Christ. Impremé sur l’Édition de Paris, de l’Année 1805. Revue et corrigée avec soin d’après le texte Grec (Philadelphie: Imprimé par J. Bouvier aux frais de la Societé de Philadelphie pour l’impression de la Bible, 1814). This phrasing is quite similar to that of the approved Catholic translation in French, published in Boston in 1810: “Mais si nous confessons nos péchés, il est fidèle et juste pour nous les remettre, et pour nous purifier de toute iniquité.” Nouveau Testament, trans. de Sacy (Boston: De l’imprimerie de J. T. Buckingham, 1810). In neither case does the scriptural text provide an indirect object to the verb confesser.

82 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 37.

virginity. According to the Protestant bible society report, their anxiety vanished after

Sedella assured Spanish readers that the verse had been translated correctly.83

While some people expressed concern about the unauthorized scriptures’ potential to disrupt their faith, others reached eagerly for the free books. An “aged black woman” was one such enthusiast. In February 1815, the woman joined the crowd thronging the

Louisiana Bible Society’s distribution site to get a copy of the scriptures. Before granting her the treasure, the bible society manager asked the woman to prove she could read. She could, she claimed, but not without her spectacles, which she had neglected to bring.

Disbelieving her ability, the manager sought to turn her away, to which she retorted, “'If I get a book by a falsehood it will not be deceiving you, but God.”84

The woman was not alone. Many people of color, both enslaved and free, desired the scriptures. An enslaved woman whose mistress had confiscated and burned her bible applied for and gratefully received a replacement. A group of free men of color who defended the city during the Battle of New Orleans requested bibles. The Louisiana Bible

Society noted that “the free people of colour are generally desirous to have their children taught to read; consequently, from among that class, numerous applications have been

83 Second Report of the Board of Managers of the Louisiana Bible Society, Read and Approved the 21st May, 1816 (New Orleans: P. K. Wagner, 1816), 8 [hereafter Second Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1816]. I have not yet located a copy of the Spanish New Testament that the Louisiana Bible Society circulated in 1815–1816. The quoted verse is taken from the edition published by the American Bible Society in 1819. The verse is identical in a publication from 1817. See El Nuevo Testamento de nuestro Señor Jesu Cristo, Traducido de la Biblia Vulgata Latina en Español por el Rmo. P. Felipe Scio de S. Miquel, Obispo Electo de Segovia. Reimpresso Literal y Diligentemente, conforme a la segunda edicion hecha en Madrid, Año de 1797, Revista ye Corregida por su Mismo Traductor (Nueva York: Edición estereotipa por Elihu White a costa de la Sociedad Americana de la Biblia, 1819); El Nuevo Testamento de nuestro señor y redentor Jesu Cristo. Nuevo edicion, cuidadosamente corregida ([United States?], 1817).

84 Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1815, 8.

made for Bibles.” The missionaries touted the higher than expected literacy rate among this population: “a much greater proportion of [the people of color], both old and young, could read intelligibly, than has generally been supposed.”85

Indeed, literacy more than theology seems to have driven the demand for scriptures among all races and tongues. Amidst the tumult of the War of 1812, New

Orleans was starved for print material in general. Mills arrived in the city to distribute the burden of hundreds of English bibles and thousands of French New Testaments less than five weeks after the United States’ victory in the Battle of New Orleans.86 Given “the exorbitant price of school books, and the pressure of the war,” parents were delighted with the prospect of receiving a free text that their children could use in school. “Heads of families” who applied for bibles identified “the instruction of children” as their principal concern in securing bibles. Not just parents, but teachers also approached the distributors “with lists of students who would profit from a copy” of the New Testament.

Parents unable to pass the literacy test leveraged their children’s educational potential to acquire the text: they promised the distributors that their children “would read it for them.”87

85 Second Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1816, 6, 10; Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 38. The surprising literacy rates among people of color may have been largely thanks to the Ursulines, who had been catechizing enslaved people for generations. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 160–194.

86 Smith remained in Natchez for another month, joining Mills in New Orleans in early March. The French New Testaments arrived in New Orleans ahead of Mills, in December 1814, but the war impeded immediate distribution. “Owing to the disturbed situation of the country at that time invaded, none of them were distributed until about the 10th of February,” when Mills arrived. Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1815, 7.

87 Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1815, 6–7; Second Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1816, 6, 8; Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 36.

Still others considered the book as an heirloom or treasured object for future generations. Mills and Smith reported that a portion of those who applied to receive the

New Testament wanted the text “for a son or a daughter,” while another portion “were anxious to obtain a copy for each of their children.” An elderly Catholic woman explained to one of the bible society managers in New Orleans that, when she was little, her father had had a special book “which he used to keep in a private manner.” She surmised that it was a bible, and she cherished the idea of owning “such a book as her father used to have.”88

DuBourg had never imagined the textual flood his consent would trigger, nor the fervent desire the books would unleash among the populace. Embarrassed by his error in approving an unauthorized text, and chastened by Bruté’s letter, he vowed that he “would never depart” from the Catholic policy regarding scriptures.89 Farther north, Bishop

Flaget signaled a similar stance. When Mills and Smith met with him in November 1814 in Prairie du Rocher, a town on the east side of the Mississippi south of St. Louis, Flaget

“heartily approved” of distributing scriptures among his flock, and committed himself to aid the process “with only this reserve, that he must first examine the translation.”90

88 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 37, 38.

89 DuBourg to Bruté, 13 Sept 1814, Souvay Collection, Series 1, UNDA.

90 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 11. See also “Religious Intelligence. Extract of a letter from Mr. Daniel Smith, now, in company with Mr. Mills, on a Missionary Tour in the Southwestern parts of the United States, dated Lexington, Ky Dec. 5, 1814, to a gentleman in this place” The Advisor: or, Vermont Evangelical Magazine 7, no. 1 (Jan/Feb 1815): 67.

DuBourg, Flaget, and the other Catholic clergy in the Mississippi River Valley were in a bind. Their colleagues and superiors in Baltimore were scrutinizing their behavior, holding them accountable to Catholic scriptural policies. Protestant missionaries were flooding the region with unauthorized texts. And the inhabitants, recognizing the educational, material, and perhaps spiritual, value of the missionaries’ gifts, were scrambling to get their own copies. How could Catholic leaders placate the laity’s desire for religious print material without undermining their church’s teachings?

Some opted for rigidity. “Two parish priests, in two parishes, have opposed the circulation of the Bible among their parishioners,” lamented the Louisiana Bible Society in its 1816 report. One priest “preached to his congregation against the evil of reading” the Protestant texts, and “exhorted them, if they would escape from heresy, to have nothing to do with such books.”91 Another sought to “take away the Bibles and testaments from the Catholicks [sic] and burn them.”92 But such strictures threatened either to push the laity’s reading habits underground, where priests would not be able to guide or reprimand, or to push the laity out of the church all together. A Protestant reported that a local Catholic priest resisted the circulation of two hundred French New

Testaments in St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve. According to the Protestant informant, the

Catholic laypeople learned to hide their books from the priest, who refused sacramental

91 Second Louisiana Bible Society Report, 1816, 7–8.

92 Salmon Giddings to Abel Flint, 20 Apr 1816, photostat copy, folder 6, box 15, JFMP. See also Timothy Flint to Abel Flint, 2 July 1816, Letters to Abel Flint, Hartford, Connecticut, from Timothy Flint and Salmon Giddings: typescript copies, 1814–1822, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. 99

ministry to those who flaunted their disobedience of his policy; “common people had been forbidden the privilege of confessing, because they had Testaments by them.”93

In contrast, DuBourg experimented with unofficial tolerance. When Mills and

Smith brought the thousands of French New Testaments to New Orleans in the spring of

1815, DuBourg adjusted to the facts on the ground and softened his policy. He did not openly approve of the unauthorized Protestant texts, nor would he aid in their distribution. But neither did he impede his flock from accessing and reading them.94 The

Ursuline nuns in New Orleans followed suit. They did not give Protestant bibles to their students in the convent school, but if parents supplied their own children, the nuns did not object to the pupils reading these texts.95 But this path had its own pitfalls. While the relaxed rules pleased the print-hungry laity, such tolerance courted censure from religious superiors on the east coast and in Europe, who well understood the danger of acquiescing to pressure for unregulated access to Protestant scriptures.

A more feasible solution to the Catholic leaders’ quandary lay in a separate, and seemingly flimsy, Protestant print form: the religious tract. Ephemeral, non-sectarian, and theologically and socially palatable to the Catholic clergy, tracts had the potential to satisfy the laity’s reading desires without thwarting Catholic statutes.

Bibles and tracts were distinct vessels for the evangelical project. Tracts differed from Christian scriptures both in physical terms and in their contents and the aims of their

93 “Communication to the Editor of the Christian Herald,” Christian Herald 1, no. 6 (May 4, 1816): 84.

94 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 37.

95 Alfred Hennen, “Extract of a Letter to the Corresponding Secretary of the New-York Bible Society, dated New-Orleans, June 4, 1816,” Christian Herald 1, no. 17 (July 20, 1816): 257–259.

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publishers and distributers. The English bible printed by the Bible Society of Philadelphia in 1812 was over 800 pages long. The French New Testament printed by the same organization in 1814 was 300 pages. These were hefty volumes requiring significant investment to produce and to transport. The tracts were completely ephemeral in comparison. The fifty tracts in the New England Tract Society’s first print run averaged twelve pages each; the longest was sixty pages, and many were four pages. But length was only part of the story. Christians of all persuasions considered the scriptures to be something of permanence, a book to keep. Even the cheaply printed versions presented themselves as durable. They were, after all, books. The tracts were slight and insubstantial—just a few pages of print—rendering them both easier to transport and easier to discard.

The contents and aims of these two types of Christian publications also differed markedly. Even in its multitude of translations and editions, the bible was considered a coherent, stable, timeless text. Its very antiquity and its use by Jews and Christians in corporate and private religious services over the centuries, conjoined with the understanding that the text was the word of God, gave the scriptures a status above other texts. The bible was a book to be respected, revered, treasured. Christian tracts, in contrast, were useful, but not permanent. They contained merely human words painting brief, accessible stories designed to prompt religious feeling. The tracts’ value lay in their ability to provoke a response, but the words were in no way sacred or permanent.

Christian tracts printed by the New England Tract Society and other such groups were intended to be “simple, serious, practical; intelligible to the wayfaring man, and the tenant of the cottage.” In the minds of their authors, publishers, and promoters, the tracts

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were to be void of jargon and heady theological discourses. Such “learned criticism, discussions in polemic theology, and even articles of religious intelligence” might intimidate or bore potential readers. Nor were they to tap into sectarian debates; they were to contain “nothing to recommend one denomination of Christians, or to throw odium on another; nothing of the acrimony of contending parties against those that differ from them; but pure christianity [sic].” Easy to read, noncontroversial, and enticing, tracts were “designed for promiscuous and, to a great extent, gratuitous dispersion among those, who otherwise would scarcely read any thing.”96

Such pronouncements notwithstanding, the authors wrote pieces that reflected their Protestant assumptions. The tracts’ anecdotes and moral tales emphasized bible reading, the efficacy of preaching, and the links between grace and faith—core Protestant tenets. In the Mississippi Valley context Mills self-consciously sought tracts that mirrored his Protestant commitments: “These tracts should teach the doctrines of the reformation

& particularly inculcate the duty of a strict observation of the Sabbath as holy time & the religious education of children.”97 But even as the publications endorsed a Protestant version of Christianity and highlighted Protestant priorities, they refrained from any theological or doctrinal specificity that might alienate Catholic readers. They also

96 Jedediah Morse, “Second Annual Report Of the Executive Committee of the New England Tract Society, May 27, 1816,” Recorder 1, no. 25 (June 19, 1816): 98; “To the Friends of Religion in New England,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 10, no. 5 (May 1814): 233.

97 Observations upon the state of the religious information possessed by the inhabitants we passed after we left Nashville until we arrived at Natchez, Letters and Journal of Samuel J. Mills, 1812–1814, 4, typed transcript, Williams College Archives and Special Collections, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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avoided criticizing Catholic doctrines or practices. The tracts inculcated Christian axioms that aimed to be acceptable across a broad range of theological perspectives.98

In addition to religious principles, the tracts that circulated in the Mississippi

River Valley underwrote certain social principles. Three of the most popular—The

Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, The Dairyman’s Daughter, and The Negro Servant— contained brief stories of elites encountering and admiring faithful commoners in pastoral, British settings.99 Paratextual notes and the authorial voice present the narratives as authentic, based on “real life and circumstances” [emphasis in original].100 The

98 The tracts the missionaries brought to the Mississippi River Valley in the 1810s consisted primarily of narratives of exemplary Christian lives and didactic essays borrowed from the Religious Tract Society in London. The following decade the American Tract Society, which formed from the merger of societies in New England and New York in 1825, innovated with imagery, incorporating woodcuts to grab readers’ attention. Over the next several decades the organization augmented their stock with a range of other offerings, many of them short tracts with eye-catching pictures promoting evangelical tenants and practices. David Morgan, Protestants & Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51–57, 118–120; David Paul Nord, “Systematic Benevolence: Religious Publishing and the Marketplace in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” in Communication and Change in American Religious History, ed. Leonard Sweet (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 239–69; Nord, Faith in Reading, chpts 3–4. Thanks to Anne Boylan and Sonia Hazard for illuminating this point.

99 The claim of popularity is based on the missionaries’ and their correspondents’ multiple laudatory citations of and requests for these three. No other tracts received such specific praise. The New England Tract Society published these and other tracts as stand- alone pieces as well as in compilations. For example, Legh Richmond’s The Dairyman’s Daughter: Extracted from an authentic and interesting Narrative, Communicated by a Clergyman of the Church of England, and Hannah More’s The Shepherd of Salisbury- Plain appeared in New England Tract Society, Tracts Published by the New England Tract Society, vol. 1 (Andover, Mass.: Flagg and Gould, 1814), 147–170, 171–194, respectively. The following year the organization published its first edition of Richmond’s other popular track. See Richmond, The Negro Servant, an Authentic and Interesting Narrative, Communicated by a Clergyman of the Church of England (Andover, Mass: Printed for the New England Tract Society by Flagg and Gould, 1815).

100 Richmond, Dairyman’s Daughter, 147.

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narratives center on the eponymous characters of low status who turn away from pride and ignorance toward a life of dedicated Christian practice and humble, virtuous industry.

Conversion in these tracts is a matter of the heart, not a challenge to existing social structures: the African slave-turned-servant remains a servant; the shepherd, dairyman, and their wives and children continue their daily toil. Their Christian identity enables them not to escape their lot, but to thrive with gratitude in their poverty and servitude.

The Protestant missionaries distributed thousands of tracts throughout the

Mississippi Valley in the 1810s. The New England Tract Society, formed just a few months before Mills and Smith launched westward in 1814, outfitted their missionary journey.101 Even before the New England society had official constituted itself, the leaders had gambled by publishing thousands of copies of fifty different tracts.102 They bestowed fifteen thousand of their stock on Mills and Smith, gratis. Smith hauled another eight thousand tracts westward and southward on his 1815–1816 solo tour.103 The young men could not hope to distribute such bounty through face-to-face encounters alone.

Instead, they developed a system to disperse the materials. They gave “a complete set of the Tracts,” as well as copies of a range of sermons, to each Protestant pastor they

101 On the founding of this organization, see Elizabeth Twaddell, “The American Tract Society, 1814–1860,” Church History 15, no. 2 (June 1946): 116–132; Nord, Faith in Reading, 52–56.

102 American Tract Society, Proceedings of the First Ten Years of the American Tract Society Instituted at Boston, 1814: To Which Is Added a Brief View of the Principle Religious Tract Societies Throughout the World ([Andover, Mass.]: Printed for the American Tract Society by Flagg and Gould, 1824), http://archive.org/details/proceedingsfirs02socigoog, 24–25.

103 Daniel Smith, “Distribution of Tracts,” Recorder 1, no. 43 (October 22, 1816): 170.

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encountered on their trip.104 They also sent packets of tracts to “faithful and judicious men” in towns and settlements along their route, to be disseminated and shared locally.105

As with the bibles, the missionaries learned that motives other than spiritual yearning drove some of the demand for tracts: “Such publications are so scarce in this country, that attention is secured to them by that powerful principle—the love of novelty,” confessed peddler William Harris in Ste. Genevieve to Mills and Smith.106

Even so, they trusted that the “winged messengers of salvation” were doing deeper spiritual work.107 A few readers gave them encouraging feedback. Harris was so impressed by the tracts’ utility in answering “that question which sometimes occurs, viz.

What shall I do to be saved,” that he enclosed twenty dollars in his letter for the New

England Tract Society to support the circulation of more tracts.108 A Mississippi preacher extolled the virtue of tracts to enlighten the faithful, even in the absence of a pastor.

“Where I preached last Sunday; the people meet every sabbath; - and when destitute of preaching they profess to have been edified by the reading of the Tracts.”109 A

Presbyterian elder from Pine Ridge in the Mississippi Territory reported that he gave two tracts—The Negro Servant and The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain—to a black man he

104 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 41.

105 Smith, “Distribution of Tracts,” Recorder, 170.

106 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 20.

107 Smith, “Distribution of Tracts,” Recorder, 170.

108 William Harris to “dear Friend,” 26 March 1815, in Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 54.

109 Smith, “Distribution of Tracts,” Recorder, 170. 105

encountered praying in the woods one day. The Presbyterian later discovered that the grateful recipient made a habit of reading the tracts to “wicked negroes” each Sunday.110

Banking on the tracts’ readability and appeal, Mills and Smith received assurances that the ones they distributed found their way into the hands of many readers.

Smith sent Presbyterian layman Stephen Hempstead of St. Louis a large supply of tracts, with the instruction to keep one set for himself and “distribute the remainder. I should like to have them scattered as much as possible; and placed in the hands of persons who will take an interest in circulating them.”111 Hempstead dutifully sent a portion to Robert

Stevenson, another lay Presbyterian in a settlement some seventy-five miles from St.

Louis. Stevenson confirmed receipt of the materials and promised to “distribute [them] agreeable to your direction.”112 Earlier that year Mills and Smith had also sent “a bundle of Religious Tracts” to Presbyterian pastor William Dickey at Salem in Livingston

County, Kentucky, about seventy miles east of the Mississippi. Dickey neither knew the missionaries nor expected the package, but he gladly read and handed out the tracts, reporting back to the missionaries that he had instructed the recipients “to read them over and over, and then hand them to their neighbours.”113 The peddler William Harris

110 As excerpted in Smith, “Distribution of Tracts,” Recorder, 170.

111 Daniel Smith to Stephen Hempstead, 12 Dec 1815, SHL, SHP.

112 Robert Stevenson to Stephen Hempstead, 24 March 1816, SHL, SHP.

113 “Extract of a letter, from Rev. William Dickey, to Mr. Mills, April 1, 1815,” in Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 53.

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confirmed that the tracts the missionaries gifted to the people of New Madrid had been

“lent from one to another.”114

Publishers and missionaries trusted that the tracts’ stories and messages would be translatable, or at least recognizable, beyond the Anglo-Protestant setting. And in the

Mississippi River Valley their trust was well placed. Catholic nuns soon discovered the tracts’ potential to satisfy the laity’s appetite for religious print. Of course the nuns first had to test the novel publications to insure they were compatible with Catholic teaching.

When Smith and his New Orleans colleague Alfred Hennen delivered a supply of English and French tracts to the Ursuline convent in New Orleans, Miss J., “an American lady who has lately taken the veil” (and most likely the same nun who had questioned

DuBourg regarding the Protestant New Testaments), told Smith that she would “read them all—but if she found any thing in them hostile to her church, she should certainly burn them.”115 She found no cause for a bonfire. In fact, Smith reported that she was so impressed by the tracts, she asked for more copies of The Dairyman’s Daughter, The

Negro Servant, and The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain to use in the convent’s school. Some

114 William Harris to “dear Friend,” 26 March 1815, in Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 54.

115 The French tracts had come from a British society, as the American organizations were not yet printing tracts in other languages. Miss J was most likely Sister Ste. Angèle Johnston, formerly known as Susan Johnston, an American convert from Baltimore who was a novice in the Ursuline convent in 1815. As one of the few native-English-speaking sisters, she would have been a likely choice to represent the Ursulines in their interactions with the Protestant missionaries. Johnston’s linguistic ability also helped her play a key role in nursing sick soldiers following the Battle of New Orleans. See Jane Frances Heaney, A Century of Pioneering: A History of the Ursuline Nuns in New Orleans (1727– 1827), ed. Mary Ethel Booker Siefken ([New Orleans]: Ursuline Sisters of New Orleans, 1993), 238–239.

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French nuns also “spoke of them in terms of the most decided approbation.”116 In St.

Louis, too, Catholics reportedly welcomed the tracts Mills and Smith delivered.117

The missionaries rejoiced at the tracts’ pan-Christian reception; they “have been approved, so far as we can learn, by all denominations.”118 The reality was that religious tracts flew under the radar of Catholic policy. The Catholic Church had no specific rules banning their existence. As long as the content of the tracts did not undermine the authority of the Church or contradict Catholic teaching, the tracts could circulate among the Catholic laity without comment or intervention by the clergy. And that is exactly what transpired. While the nuns discussed and approved some tracts, the Catholic clergy remained officially mum about them, offering neither condemnation nor endorsement, but privately they must have been relieved. For the evanescent publications just might sate the diverse, proactive, surprisingly literate and print-hungry inhabitants without offending the Catholic superiors’ scruples.

Priests, bishops and nuns from St. Louis to New Orleans were caught between the popular clamor for religious texts and their own desire to supply their flocks and students with spiritual sustenance on one side, their vows of obedience to the Roman Catholic

Church and its policies on another side, and the deluge of Anglo-American Protestant immigrants with their pushy missionaries and their hoards of books on a third side. If keeping the laity in the Catholic fold was their goal, then tracts were one pathway.

Inoffensive content wrapped in a flimsy, impermanent package rendered tracts

116 Smith, “Distribution of Tracts,” Recorder, 170.

117 Salmon Giddings to Abel Flint, 20 Apr 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

118 Mills and Smith, Report of a Missionary Tour, 20.

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unobjectionable, and even useful. Engaging moral tales, edifying stories of faithful, industrious commoners, submissive servants, and beneficent elites, the tracts reinforced social and religious hierarchies. And whereas Protestant bibles and testaments triggered questions of authority, authenticity, and validity, the tracts were too insubstantial to regulate. Best of all, they were eminently readable—exactly what the laity wanted.

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Chapter 3

MISSIONARY ENCOUNTERS

In the summer and fall of 1814, two preachers held a series of religious revivals along the Mississippi River, starting in St. Louis, a town famed more for its “billiards and gaming, drunkenness, fighting, violence, and rapine” than for its spiritual pursuits.1 “The first days were the least promising,” recorded one of the preachers in his recollections of their efforts. But their perseverance paid off: “The grace of God, however, finished by touching hearts, and the rich harvest that we gathered made us forget all the labors.”

After their success in St. Louis, the evangelists visited the nearby villages of St. Charles,

Portage des Sioux, and Florissant, at each place finding receptive souls. They then ventured to the Illinois shore, proclaiming their gospel in Cahokia, Prairie du Rocher, and

Kaskaskia, before re-crossing the Mississippi for an extended revival in Ste. Genevieve, sixty-five miles downriver from St. Louis. “There also the Lord made His word to fructify. Eyes were opened to error; remarkable conversions were made.” In his memoir,

1 Thomas Ashe, Travels in America, Performed in 1806, for the Purpose of Exploring the Rivers Alleghany, Monongahela, Ohio and Mississippi and Ascertaining the Produce and Condition of Their Banks and Vicinity (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, Bridge- Street; by John Abraham, Clement’s Lane, 1808), 3:122. On the reliability of Ashe’s account, see Francis H. Herrick, “Thomas Ashe and the Authenticity of His Travels in America,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 13, no. 1 (Jun., 1926): 50–57.

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penned a few decades later, one of the preachers trumpeted how the divine hand had led a wayward population to the path of righteousness.2

Religious revivals in the American hinterlands were far from unusual in the early decades of the nineteenth century.3 But these particular preachers did not measure the success of their Mississippi River escapades in terms of ecstatic utterances or occupants of the anxious bench, nor in terms of the number of bibles distributed. Rather, the “proof” of the changes “made in hearts is that the women gave their necklaces and earrings to be melted into crosses and rosaries.”4 In a reversal of the Israelites’ dalliance with the golden calf, the women of Ste. Genevieve willingly sacrificed their jewelry to make

Catholic devotional objects. The preachers were Benedict Joseph Flaget, a Catholic

2 Benedict Joseph Flaget, Memoir Presented to His Eminence Cardinal Fransoni, Prefect of the Propaganda, [1836], translated transcript [hereafter cited as Flaget, Memoir, 1836], 3, Francis P. Clark Collection 12/04, UNDA.

3 On religious revivalism among Protestants in the early American South, see Randy J. Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 16–40; Donald G Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 46–54. See also Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind ([Lexington]: University Press of Kentucky, 1972); Charles A. Johnson, The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955). On women’s active leadership roles in revivals, see Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For an assessment of anti-revivalism, see James D. Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 65–106, doi:10.2307/4141423.

4 Flaget, Memoir, 1836, 3.

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bishop, and Donatien Olivier, a Catholic priest, both hailing from France; their auditors in the “missions”—the term the preachers used to describe the revival-type gatherings they held in each town—were for the most part French and Creole families who identified as

Catholic.5 For these participants crosses and rosaries, not bibles and tracts, were the authentic artifacts and symbols of grace.

Catholics were as invested in sacralizing the Mississippi River Valley as evangelical Protestants were in the early years of the nineteenth century. Catholic authorities, sizing up the region previously ruled by Catholic monarchs and now in the hands of the officially secular but Protestant-identified United States, saw great need for an infusion of Catholic religiosity. With the evangelical Protestants, they identified the

Mississippi Valley as a mission zone. Across the doctrinal spectrum, Christian leaders considered the region’s growing, eclectic population to be in spiritual danger because of the dearth of religious institutions and structures, and because of the presence of religious competitors. Each branch of Christianity that turned its focus westward envisioned saturating the area with proper teaching and doctrine, clearing the path for a Church

5 Born, educated, ordained a priest, and inducted into the Society of Saint Sulpice in France, Benedict Joseph Flaget fled from the revolutionary tumult to Baltimore in 1792. Bishop John Carroll immediately appointed him to the Catholic mission of Vincennes on the Wabash River in the Indiana Territory. He returned east in 1795 and taught at Georgetown for a few years, then traveled to Havana on a doomed effort to found a Sulpician college. In 1801 he was back in Baltimore, teaching at St. Mary’s Seminary; seven years later the pope appointed him as the first bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky. His jurisdiction stretched from the southern border of Tennessee to Detroit, and from eastern border of Kentucky to the settlements along the Mississippi River. After a trip to Europe, Flaget arrived in his new diocese in 1811. He confined his labors to Kentucky for the first few years, then embarked on a tour of the western portions of his diocese in 1814, during which he held the series of missions described above. Flaget, Memoir, 1836, 3; M. J. Spalding, Sketches of the Life, Times and Character of the Rt. Rev. Benedict Joseph Flaget, First Bishop of Louisville (Louisville, Ky.: Webb & Levering, 1852).

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Triumphant to draw the wayward inhabitants into spiritual order, disciplined obedience, and faithful practice.

Their theological differences did not alter their common plight. Evangelical

Protestants and Catholics intent on injecting their brand of Christian truth into the

Mississippi Valley faced similar challenges and resorted to similar solutions. To

Christianize the region, they needed resources: people, money, sacred items. To garner these, the sects simplified the complex process of institution-building, synthesizing their work into tidy shorthand for fundraising letters and recruitment sermons: give generously, they argued, so that our hard-working and devout missionaries can bring the light of the gospel to the lost and convert the heathens and the heretics. They deployed tropes of religious competition to ratchet up donors’ emotions and make the case for immediate action. Their appeals worked. Catholics and Protestants provided extensive funding for the religious projects in the region: money enough to build and adorn churches and religious schools, and to provide transportation and start-up costs for new religious personnel. Scores of idealistic, pious, ambitious, or deluded recruits tromped, paddled, and wandered their way across hundreds of miles, many crossing the Atlantic

Ocean first, to serve as missionaries, priests, preachers, and teachers—God’s foot soldiers.

When they arrived, these evangelists found that the rhetoric of the recruitment appeals did not match the reality of the mission field. They encountered a diverse populace firmly committed to a variety of religious priorities. The inhabitants—French,

Spanish, German, Creole, African, African-American, Native American, Anglo-

American—did not consider themselves lost, and they had their own ideas about what

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kind of religious institutions they wanted (or didn’t want) and how they expected their spiritual leaders to behave. If they hoped to succeed in Christianizing the Mississippi

River Valley, the missionaries had to learn to adjust their own agendas and methods to accommodate the residents’ spiritual demands.

From the Catholic hierarchy’s point of view, the Mississippi River Valley needed authorized leaders on the ground tasked with overseeing the project of religious expansion. New Orleans lost its bishop, Luis Peñalver y Cárdenas, in 1801 when he was promoted out of the diocese. The uncertainty generated by the impending transfer of the territory from Spain to France and then to the United States scuttled his replacement’s arrival and drove away some of the priests then serving in the region. When the United

States gained civil jurisdiction over the western side of the Mississippi River as well as

New Orleans in 1803, the Spanish Crown forfeited the administration of the Diocese of

Louisiana.6 Ecclesiastical authority over the bishop-less region did not pass to the United

States, a secular nation, but instead reverted to the Sacred Congregation of the

Propagation of the Faith, known as Propaganda Fide—the Catholic body in Rome charged with administering Catholic affairs in non-Catholic countries.

6 On the patronato real, through which the Spanish king trumped the Holy See in exercising control over the spiritual affairs in the Spanish Empire, including establishing the diocese, nominating the bishop, and designating the canons of the Cathedral of St. Louis in New Orleans—priests appointed to assist the bishop in governance—in the 1790s, see Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans: [A.W. Hyatt Stationery Mfg.], 1939), 223, 228; John Gilmary Shea, Life and Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop of Baltimore. Embracing the History of the Catholic Church in the United States. 1763–1815. (New York: J.G. Shea, 1888), 567– 568; Woods, History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 190–191.

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Propaganda Fide’s task, half a continent and an ocean away, was to find a suitable candidate for the role of bishop of the diocese of Louisiana, which covered the whole

Louisiana Purchase area—a cleric skilled at institution-building who would be acceptable both to the inhabitants and to the political powerbrokers in Washington. Propaganda

Fide’s regular practice was to elevate someone from the local, in this case, American, clergy rather than utilizing a missionary from afar.7 But with so few American-born priests, none of them prepared to handle the unwieldy Mississippi Valley, Rome’s choices were constrained.8 Further complicating the process, Catholic leaders in the

United States and Rome remained uncertain about whether and when the American political administration might intervene in Catholic matters, especially given the political tumult in Europe.9 Would the president balk at Rome appointing a foreign-born bishop, with potentially questionable loyalties, in New Orleans?10 Though according to the

Constitution, American politicians had no official say over religious affairs, even those directed from foreign lands, the Catholic hierarchy hesitated to test the policy.

7 Luca Codignola, “Roman Catholic Conservatism in a New North Atlantic World, 1760– 1829,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 64, no. 4 (October 2007): 730, 740. Codignola argues that though present-day historians of American Catholicism contend that Roman bureaucrats ignored the needs of the American church in the early nineteen century, in fact, Propaganda Fide officials devoted remarkable attention to administering affairs in the United States while also juggling the vast mission arenas of Asia, Africa, and non-Catholic European countries.

8 John Carroll to Michele di Pietro, 17 Jun 1807, JCP 3:27–28.

9 Propaganda Fide to John Carroll, 21 Apr 1804, no. 1345, Finabar Kenneally, United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1971), 221.

10 In a letter to Propaganda Fide, Carroll reported that a U.S. official had hinted that the government would be opposed to a British, French, or Spanish priest being named to the See of Louisiana. J. Carroll to Propaganda Fide, 17 Jun 1807, no. 1525, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 5:256. 115

Communications between Rome, Baltimore, and New Orleans moved at a snail’s pace. While Propaganda Fide searched for talented and politically viable candidate, Pope

Pius VII gave Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore temporary authority over the diocese in

1805.11 Perched eleven hundred miles away, Carroll deputized Jean Baptiste Olivier as his vicar general for the region, the French priest who, with his brother Donatien, had served the Illinois parishes in the late 1790s.12 Carroll considered Olivier trustworthy, though feared his advanced age and frailty would thwart his ability to bring order to ecclesiastical affairs in New Orleans in shambles from the Sedella-Walsh conflict.13

The bishop’s premonitions were fulfilled. As Antonio de Sedella had fought

Walsh’s authority, so too the “artful Spanish Friar” and his supporters questioned

Olivier’s credentials and refused to heed his dictates.14 With the backing of the church trustees, Sedella maintained control of the cathedral, and Olivier was stuck celebrating

11 Propaganda Fide to John Carroll, 20 Sept 1805, no. 1365, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 3:224; John Carroll to Anthony Garnier, 24 April 1807, JCP 3:17–18; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 260.

12 Jean Baptiste Olivier to John Carroll, 28 Feb 1807, 6 B 9, AJCP, AAB; John Carroll to Michele di Pietro, 17 June 1807, JCP 3:28; Annabelle M. Melville, “John Carroll and Louisiana, 1803–1815,” Catholic Historical Review 64, no. 3 (July 1, 1978): 413–414. Catholics’ hesitance to make leadership decisions that might trouble American political leaders is evident in Carroll’s appointment of Olivier. Carroll tested the waters with Secretary of State James Madison, inquiring whether the president would approve of Carroll appointing a French priest to a position of authority in Louisiana. Madison responded that Jefferson considered the decision entirely Carroll's; civil authorities had no power to approve or recommend regarding religious matters. John Carroll to James Madison, 17 Nov 1806, JCP 2:534–536; James Madison to Bishop Carroll, 20 Nov 1806, in E. I. Devitt, ed., “Letters from the Archiepiscopal Archives at Baltimore, 1787–1815,” RACHSP 20 (1909): 63–64; Madison to Carroll, private letter, 20 Nov 1806, ibid., 64–65; Melville, “John Carroll and Louisiana,” 412.

13 John Carroll to Anthony Garnier, 24 April 1807, JCP 3:17–18. For an account of the Sedella-Walsh controversy, see chapter 2 of this dissertation.

14 John Carroll to James Madison, 17 Nov 1806, JCP 2:535.

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Mass at the Ursuline chapel.15 In response to the town’s resistance, the pope empowered

Carroll to appoint an apostolic administrator, a role that carried more authority than vicar general.16 Carroll eventually selected William Louis Valentin DuBourg and sent him to

New Orleans in 1812 with instructions to gain control of the cathedral and bring order to

Louisiana Catholicism.17 If he made progress, Carroll planned to recommend DuBourg as bishop.18 Carroll judged that DuBourg was well suited for the post. “His splendid talents, and knowledge of the English, French and Spanish languages are great means afforded him to produce, in that mixed population, a reform most ardently wished for,” Carroll gushed to the archbishop of Quebec.19 Even Protestants admired his skill. “The Rev. Dr.

15 John Carroll to Antonio de Sedella, 14 March 1808, no. 120, Thomas W. Spalding, ed., John Carroll Recovered: Abstracts of Letters and Other Documents Not Found in the John Carroll Papers (Baltimore, Md.: Cathedral Foundation Press, 2000), 120–121.

16 Propaganda Fide recommended Charles Nerinckx, a Belgian priest who had been laboring in Kentucky, for the role, but gave Carroll discretion to choose a replacement should he refuse (which he did). Atti of Particular Congration, 4 March 1808, no. 1529, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 5:257; Apostolic Brief, copy, 5 Apr 1808, no. 1480, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 5:247–248; John Carroll to John Peemans, 2 Feb 1809, no. 130, Spalding, John Carroll Recovered, 130; John Carroll to John Peemans, 5 Sept 1809, JCP 3:96–97; John Carroll to Pius VII, 17 Dec 1810, JCP 3:135– 136.

17 Carroll’s nomination of DuBourg, 12 Aug 1812, no. 201, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 1:34, Authentication of Louis DuBourg’s Episcopacy, 28 Aug 1812, JCP 3:191; Jean Baptiste Olivier to Carroll, 5 Dec 1812, 6 A 15, AJCP, AAB.

18 When he set out for New Orleans, DuBourg already knew of Carroll’s intention that he become the bishop. He frequently reminded Carroll in his letters how ill-equipped he was for the job. DuBourg to Carroll, 29 Feb 1813, 3 E 7, AJCP, AAB [either DuBourg misdated his letter or generations of archivists and historians have misread his handwriting; 1813 was not a leap year]; DuBourg to Carroll, 29 Apr 1813, 3 E 8, AJCP, AAB.

19 John Carroll to Michele di Pietro, 1812, JCP 3:170–171; John Carroll to Ambrose Marechal, 12 Feb. 1812, JCP 3:175; Authentication of Louis DuBourg’s Episcopacy, 18 Aug 1812, JCP 3:191–192; John Carroll to Propaganda Fide, 24 Feb 1815, no. 194, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 1:33; John Carroll to Lorenzo Litta, 17 July 1815, 117

Dubourg,” wrote Congregationalist missionary Timothy Flint, “has a fine form, the most dignified manner, graceful gesture, and the deep and mellow tones of an organ.”20

DuBourg’s language skill, appealing public persona, and commitment to building

Catholicism in the Mississippi River Valley would indeed generate a reform in religion, though not always in the ways that he or his superiors intended or imagined.

Despite the efforts by the pope, Propaganda Fide, and Carroll to impose their will, the Catholic residents of New Orleans held the reins of ecclesiastical affairs in the city through the 1810s. They tolerated DuBourg at first, but turned against him when he accused one of Sedella’s assistant priests of scandalous behavior in 1814. The priest, according to DuBourg, lived openly “with a negro wench and her two mulatto boys, by the latter of whom he suffered himself to be called Papa.” After DuBourg suspended the priest, a “cabal” formed, including the mayor and “several of the most distinguished inhabitants,” to bring charges against DuBourg for defamation. His opponents secured depositions from prostitutes to undermine DuBourg’s character. A Justice of the Peace intervened, working out a deal whereby the accused priest changed his domestic arrangements to suit DuBourg’s sense of propriety and provided documentation clearing

JCP 3:345; John Carroll to Lorenzo Litta, 10 Oct 1815, JCP 3:363; John Carroll to Joseph-Octave Plessis, 2 March 1814 ("indispensibly and urgently"), JCP 3:263.

20 With a dig at the content of Catholicism, Flint continued: “From him Protestant ministers might learn how manner will recommend indifferent matter.” Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi, from Pittsburg and the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Florida to the Spanish Frontier: In a Series of Letters to the Rev. James Flint, of Salem, Massachusetts (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1826), 350.

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himself of the children’s paternity, in exchange for which DuBourg reinstated him.21

DuBourg had won a small victory, but had gained no fans.

DuBourg’s opponents next turned to the technique of intimidation. They spread rumors among the Bonapartist populace that DuBourg planned to preach a pro-Bourbon sermon in the New Orleans cathedral on June 19—and this at a moment when news of the vicissitudes of the Napoleonic wars was reaching Louisiana. After a series of defeats, culminating in the loss of Paris in March 1814, Napoleon was forced to abdicate the throne and was exiled, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored. The French population in New Orleans, which was overwhelmingly supportive of Napoleon, learned of the fall of Paris on June 13.22 Riled up to defend their political idol, crowds gathered to hurl insults at the apostolic administrator. DuBourg heard that many were “armed with stones to pelt” him, and the mayor reportedly signaled that he had six men on hand to throw the priest out of the pulpit if he dared to enter it. With violence looming against his person,

DuBourg fled New Orleans to his niece’s house some sixty miles away until the political situation stabilized. From this vantage point, he lamented to Carroll about Sedella’s control of the city: “You may be assured, Sir, that as long as a certain individual lives, particularly under such a government as ours, a Bishop has nothing to do in N[ew]

O[rleans].”23

21 DuBourg to Carroll, 2 July 1814, 3 E 10, AJCP, AAB.

22 The city’s papers announced, and lamented, Napoleon’s abdication and exile on July 4. Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, “The American Press and the Fall of Napoleon in 1814,” ed. Beatrice F. Hyslop, trans. Elsie M. Fugett, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98, no. 5 (1954): 361, 365.

23 DuBourg to Carroll, 2 July 1814, 3 E 10, AJCP, AAB.

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The following winter DuBourg scored his own victory through an alliance with

General Andrew Jackson.24 The two savvy politicos staged an elaborate ceremony at the cathedral to celebrate Jackson’s triumph at the Battle of New Orleans. A carefully constructed theatrical event designed both to shape the narrative of the American victory over the British and to bolster Jackson’s and DuBourg’s own standing, the celebration gave DuBourg temporary access to a space previously denied him and a public display of his preeminence, but it did not yield him the favor of town’s leaders.25

Ever resourceful, Sedella’s supporters took a new tack when DuBourg departed in

May 1815 on a recruitment trip to Europe, during which he expected to be made the bishop of Louisiana.26 DuBourg had left Louis Sibourd, a French priest allied to

DuBourg, in charge as vicar general, a passing of the torch Sedella questioned but

24 Arsène Lacarrière Latour, Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 1814–15: With an Atlas, trans. H.P. Nugent (Philadelphia: Published by John Conrad, J. Maxwell, printer, 1816), Appendix, lxxi, lxxiii; Annabelle M. Melville, Louis William Dubourg: Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, Bishop of Montauban, and Archbishop of Besançon, 1766–1833, vol. 1, Schoolman, 1766–1818 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986), 315–319; Henry Churchill Semple, The Ursulines in New Orleans and Our Lady of Prompt Succor: A Record of Two Centuries, 1727–1925 (New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1925), 74. See also Richard Henry Clarke, Lives of the Deceased Bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York: P. O’Shea, 1872), 1:218–220, http://www.archive.org/details/livesofdeceasedb01clariala.

25 The two men, the ranking spiritual and military leader in the region, had joined forces earlier in the conflict. As British troops neared the city in December 1814, DuBourg had drafted a mandate calling for public prayers and extensive devotions for the safety of the populace. Devotional exercises included three days of public prayers in two locations, the Blessed Sacrament being exposed throughout the Masses, and the Misere and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin being chanted. Jackson had approved of DuBourg’s mandate, sending words of gratitude with his permission to have the statement printed and circulated. Following his victory, Jackson sent a letter to DuBourg, giving credit to “the signal interposition of Heaven” for his success, and requesting that the prelate organize a “service of public thanksgiving to be performed in the cathedral.” Latour, Historical Memoir, Appendix, lxviii; Melville, DuBourg, 1:312–313.

26 DuBourg to Carroll, [Nov 1814?], 3 E 11, AJCP, AAB.

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tolerated as long as he did not have to honor it publicly.27 But the priest and lay leaders of the church were not at all pleased with the possibility of having DuBourg as their resident bishop. After DuBourg had been elevated to his new position, Propaganda Fide sent a letter directly to Sedella, urging him to recognize the bishop’s authority and to aid him.28

But from such a distance, the admonitions carried little weight. When the news of

DuBourg’s elevation reached them from Rome, the marguilliers (church trustees) moved to consolidate their power. They petitioned the U.S. Congress to become a corporation in order to secure local control over congregational matters rather than fall under the

“jurisdiction of the pope, bishop, [or] vicar general.”29 They forwarded a similar petition to the state legislature, pursuing “absolute authority” over the temporal matters of the church.30 While in Europe, DuBourg received reports of their actions from Sibourd. The new bishop feared that their efforts would cripple his authority in New Orleans and

27 Charles L. Souvay’s translations of the five letters DuBourg and Sedella exchanged discussing DuBourg’s appointment of Sibourd appear in Souvay, “A Centennial of the Church in St. Louis (1818–1918),” Catholic Historical Review 4, no. 1 (April 1918): 55– 59; no. 199, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 1:34; Louis Sibourd to John Carroll, 27 Apr 1815, 7 R 6, AJCP, AAB; Louis Sibourd to John Carroll, 3 Nov 1815, 7 R 7, AJCP, AAB.

28 Propaganda Fide to Antonio de Sedella, 23 Dec 1815, no. 1402, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 3:230.

29 Louis Sibourd to John Carroll, 10 Dec 1815, 7 R 9, AJCP, AAB. Carroll had died the week before, but the news of his passing had not yet reached New Orleans when Sibourd penned this letter. Carroll’s successor, Leonard Neale, received Sibourd’s missive, but dismissed the concern after checking with a Louisiana senator, who assured him that Congress had not received the petition. Melville, DuBourg, 1:369.

30 DuBourg to Felix De Andreis, 24 Apr 1816, Box 1, Folder 7, RG 1 A 3, Bishop Louis DuBourg Collection, AASL. On the issue of trusteeism in the early nineteenth century, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property Before the Civil War,” Faculty Scholarship, Paper 1390 (2014), http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1390, 347–355.

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jeopardize not only “the respect due to the Episcopal dignity, but the vital interests of religion as well.”31

The lay people’s legislative activism compelled DuBourg to take a drastic step.

Worried for his own safety and for the order and organizational integrity of the Church should the trustees’ efforts prove successful, he opted out of New Orleans all together.32

Instead of returning to Louisiana, where most of the Catholic populace of the diocese lived, and where the previous bishops had been installed, he decided to place his residence six hundred miles upriver (thirteen hundred miles by boat), in the much smaller, and he hoped more cooperative, town of St. Louis.33 In making the case to Rome for this startling and significant shift, DuBourg argued that not only would he avoid inevitable schism, but he would also be able to establish a seminary and primary

31 Louis William DuBourg to Cardinal Dunagni, 24 June 1816, translated in Souvay, “Centennial,” 65, see also no. 221, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 1:36. Though the federal petition never materialized, the state petition passed in the Louisiana legislature, incorporating the congregation and instituting the election of six wardens to administer the “estates and revenues” of the New Orleans church. The state act was amended in 1822 to double the number of wardens and to set their term at two years. Acts Passed at the Second Session of the Fifth Legislature of the State of Louisiana: Begun and Held in the City of New-Orleans, on Monday the Seventh Day of January, in the Year of Our Lord, One (New Orleans: Printed by J.C. de St. Romes, State Printer, 1822), 64– 67, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008568317; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 269.

32 DuBourg to Felix De Andreis, 24 Apr 1816, Box 1, Folder 7, RG 1 A 3, Bishop Louis DuBourg Collection, AASL.

33 DuBourg to Dunagni, 24 June 1816, Souvay, “Centennial,” 65; DuBourg to Dugnani, 11 Apr 1816, translated in Souvay, “Centennial,” 63–64, see also no. 219, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 1:36. According to the most popular river navigation guide of the day, St. Louis was 1287 miles by water, and about 600 by land, from New Orleans. Zadok Cramer, The Navigator: Containing Directions for Navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers..., 6th ed. (Pittsburgh: From the Press of Cramer & Spear, 1808), 84, 87, 125. See also DuBourg to Cardinal Fontana, 3 May 1821, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 2, no. 2–3 (April-July 1920): 139.

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schools—necessary components for the expansion of Catholic life in the diocese—more easily in the northern town. St. Louis had “pure and healthy” air, cheap real estate, and

“untainted” morals, a much better environment in which to introduce unseasoned missionaries and build educational institutions, compared to New Orleans.34 His positive spin did not mask the real reason for his decision. In private correspondence DuBourg named the power struggle with Sedella and the marguilliers as the root of the relocation, calling Sedella “a schismatic,” “a violent enemy of authority,” and a “devil” who was seducing “the ignorant people ... by his clever intrigues.”35 Noting the bishop’s authority to relocate his residence anywhere within the boundaries of the diocese, Rome approved

DuBourg’s plan.36

The insubordinate New Orleanians succeeded in deflecting the Catholic hierarchy from their city, and the reshuffling they provoked delayed the bishop’s arrival in his diocese. DuBourg elected to linger in France while Bishop Flaget, from the neighboring diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky, readied St. Louis to receive him. All told, relocating the episcopal residence stalled DuBourg in Europe for more than a year. He had departed

New Orleans for Rome in May of 1815. Despite Propaganda Fide’s urging that he take charge of his diocese immediately, he did not reach St. Louis until January 1818.37

34 DuBourg to Dugnani, 11 Apr 1816, translated in Souvay, “Centennial,” 63–64.

35 DuBourg to Felix De Andreis, [24 April 1816], Letter 13, FMFDA, 74–75; also see Melville, DuBourg, 1:367–377.

36 Litta to DuBourg, 24 May 1816, excerpted in Melville, DuBourg 1:373; Propaganda Fide to DuBourg, 17 Aug 1816, no. 1419, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 3:232; Souvay, “Centennial,” 64.

37 Propaganda Fide to DuBourg, 17 Aug 1816, no. 1419, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 5:232; Propaganda Fide to DuBourg, 23 Nov 1816, no. 1425, Kenneally, Propaganda Fide Archives 5:233; Souvay, “Centennial,” 74–75. 123

"Tell it not in Gath. Publish it not in the Streets of Ashelon. That a territory in the

U.S. containing more than 25 thousand inhabitants hath not a Presbyterian minister or

Society in it – I must intreat [sic] you for myself, for my family, and my Brethern [sic] in this country, far separated from our native land and from the Churchs [sic] of Christ, and live from year to year without injoying [sic] the Ordinances of the Gospels.”Thus St.

Louis resident Stephen Hempstead begged the chairman of the Massachusetts Bible

Society to take action on behalf of the leaderless Presbyterian flock in the Missouri

Territory.38 As the Catholic hierarchy flailed in exerting authority over ecclesiastical affairs in the Mississippi River Valley, evangelical Protestants, particularly the

Congregationalists and Presbyterians, wrangled with more basic institutional deficits. To say they had a clergy shortage in the region is an understatement. In 1813 the

Presbyterians and Congregationalists had a total of four preachers in the entire

Mississippi River Valley, all clustered in the Mississippi Territory. Louisiana and the

Arkansas, Illinois, and Missouri Territories, along with the western portions of Kentucky and Tennessee, had no Presbyterian or Congregationalist pastors whatsoever.39 Emigrants

38 Stephen Hempstead to William Channing, 27 June 1815, draft copy, SHL, SHP. On Channing’s role in the Massachusetts Bible Society, see Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 194–196. Channing was the nephew of Hempstead’s former pastor, Henry Channing, of New London, Connecticut. Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, s.v. “William Ellery Channing,” by Frank Carpenter, posted 22 Jan. 2004, http://uudb.org/articles/williamellerychanning.html. Samuel Mills had instructed Hempstead to write to Channing to report on the distribution of the bibles the Massachusetts Bible Society had sent to St. Louis. Samuel J. Mills to Stephen Hempstead, 15 Sept 1814, SHL, SHP.

39 John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel J. Mills, A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals (Hartford: P.B. Gleason and Co. Printers, 1814), 28–35. 124

from the eastern states accustomed to weekly Sabbath services and regular access to clergy registered the scarcity of religious infrastructure in the western territories, complaining in letters to loved ones back east of the dearth of clergy, the absence of religious stability, and the lack of “stated religious worship.”40

These complaints spanned across confessional bounds. Catholics, Presbyterians,

Congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists—the Christian sects most focused on missionizing the Mississippi River Valley—shared a personnel problem. To extend their respective sets of religious teachings and practices, they needed laborers: missionaries, preachers, pastors, catechizers and teachers—men (and women) set apart, trained, licensed, and authorized to proclaim the faith and perform religious sacraments. The

Methodists and Baptists were more agile, and more permissive, in their recruiting tactics than their counterparts. Whereas Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics expected their prospective clergy to undergo years of schooling, the Baptists and

Methodists promoted unlettered but talented and eager young men from within local congregations directly into roles of leadership, testing their mettle in the pulpit of their home church before sending them out to other pulpits. If they proved effective, the

Methodist conference or Baptist congregation would license, then ordain, them as preachers.41

40 E[dward] Hempstead to Stephen Hempstead [Sr.], 30 Jan 1811, SHL, SHP; Stephen Hempstead, Sr. to John Schermerhorn, [1813], draft copy, SHL, SHP.

41 For example, James Philip Edward emigrated from Kentucky to the Cape Girardeau area in the Missouri Territory and began preaching in the early 1800s. Bethel Baptist Church ordained him in 1812. From that church he branched out in ministry to settlements to the south. R. S. Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri, Embracing an Account of the Organization and Growth of Baptist Churches and Associations; Biographical Sketches of Ministers of the Gospel and Other Prominent Members of the Denomination; the Founding of Baptist Institutions, Periodicals, &c. (St. Louis: 125

In addition to this internal recruitment and authorization model, the Methodists developed a circuit system, whereby preachers travelled around to preaching stations in defined circuits to preach to local clusters of Methodists. As Methodist laypeople emigrated westward, the preachers identified new preaching stations and extended the circuits to incorporate them, enabling Methodism to spread without significant institutional infrastructure. Baptists were even more flexible and adaptable to the conditions of emigration. With complete independence on the congregational level,

Baptist laypeople could establish a church and license one of their own to preach wherever they gathered a core of like-minded people together. The group need not be large: as few as eight or ten Baptists could—and often did—constitute a church. Both sects augmented these grassroots growth techniques with missionaries deployed from eastern states to gain a foothold in the Mississippi River Valley. For instance in 1799 the

Methodist bishop Francis Asbury appointed Tobias Gibson, a preacher from South

Carolina, as a missionary to the Natchez region, newly under American jurisdiction.

Gibson had family connections in Natchez, which softened his landing there and gave

Scammell, 1882), 63–64. This is not to say that educated men were prohibited from serving as preachers, but learned leaders had to fight against a strong strain of anti- intellectualism in both sects. The Methodist attitude toward education, captured in the 1812 book of doctrine and discipline, prioritized evangelism over book-learning: “gaining knowledge is a good thing, but saving souls is a better.” Methodist Episcopal Church, The Doctrine and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 15th ed. (New- York: Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, for the Methodist Connection in the United States, 1812), 61–62. Some Baptists in Mississippi who considered schooling a priority organized an education society in 1818 “to assist pious, evangelical young men, called to the work of the gospel ministry, in receiving a literary and theological education.” Mississippi Baptist Association, A Republication of the Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association from Its Organization in 1806 to the Present Time (New Orleans: Printed by Hinton, 1849), 64. On the impact of different ordination requirements between Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists in the South, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997), 82–83.

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him a ready audience.42 By 1815 twenty-seven Methodist preachers traveling through twenty-one circuits in four districts cared for over four thousand souls in Methodist societies and congregations in the Mississippi River Valley, while Baptists had constituted at least forty churches and three associations.43 The sects continued to extend their institutional footprint with more missionaries in the late 1810s and 1820s.

42 John G. Jones, A Complete History of Methodism as Connected with the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Written at the Unanimous Request of the Conference (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South. Smith & Lamar, Agents, 1908), 1:23–29. In the late 1810s the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions and the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society funded at least five missionaries to serve the Mississippi River Valley, including John Mason Peck and James Welch in the St. Louis area, James Ranaldson in Mississippi and Louisiana, Benjamin Davis [also spelled Davies] in New Orleans, and Samuel Eastman in Natchez. “Third Annual Report of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions,” American Baptist Magazine, and Missionary Intelligencer 1, no. 5 (September 1817): 174–175; “Rev. Mr. Ranaldson to one of the Editors,” American Baptist Magazine, and Missionary Intelligencer 1, no. 7 (Jan 1818): 278; “Report of the Trustees of the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society,” American Baptist Magazine, and Missionary Intelligencer 1, no. 4 (July 1817): 145; “From Mr. Samuel Eastman to the Corresp. Secretary,” American Baptist Magazine, and Missionary Intelligencer 2:5 (Sept 1819): 176. On Baptist licensing and ordination, see Myron D. Dillow, Harvesttime on the Prairie: A History of Baptists in Illinois, 1796–1996 (Franklin, Tenn.: Providence House Publishers, 1996), 77–78.

43 The four Methodist districts in the Mississippi River Valley in 1815 were the Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisiana districts, all in the Tennessee Conference. Included in these figures is the Vincennes circuit along the Wabash River, the border between the present-day states of Indiana and Illinois. Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1815 (New-York: Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, for the Methodist Connexion in the United States, 1815), 22, 31–32. On Baptist churches and associations in the region, see John T. Christian, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana (Shreveport: The Executive Board of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, 1923), 49–51; Dillow, Harvesttime on the Prairie, 30, 40, 79, 84–92, 111–118; Richard Aubrey McLemore, A History of Mississippi Baptists, 1780–1970 (n.p.: Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, 1971), 12, 30–31, 52–63; Duncan, History of the Baptists, 37–38, 52– 58; W. E. Paxton, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana: From the Earliest Times to the Present (St. Louis: C.R. Barnes, 1888), 38, 143.

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Different expectations for men of the cloth constrained the Congregationalists,

Presbyterians, and Catholics. These sects required extensive formal education, often including the mastery of ancient languages, for their clergy.44 But with no seminaries in the Mississippi River Valley in the early nineteenth century, the groups could not yet generate a homegrown clergy corps to supply the region, nor could they rely on immigration to deliver the necessary leaders.45 Instead, they depended on targeted recruitment in their strongholds, the Presbyterians and Congregationalists drawing from the northeastern United States, the Catholics from France and the Italian states.

Importing clergy from the east was an expensive and time-consuming proposition.

Consider the case of Felix De Andreis. The Italian Lazarist met the new bishop of

Louisiana, Louis William DuBourg, in Rome in 1815. The bishop recruited De Andreis

44 Cumberland Presbyterians, a break-off sect from the main Presbyterian body, eliminated the educational requirement for their clergy. Most numerous in Kentucky, where they originated, the sect grew in a similar method to the Methodists and Baptists. Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 37–38.

45 The Catholics began to address this institutional lack in the late 1810s. The Congregation of the Mission, also known as the Lazarists, or the Vincentians, founded St. Mary’s of the Barrens Seminary in the Missouri Territory in 1818. Even so, the first local man to wend his way through the seminary and the Catholic ordination process, Joseph Paquin of New Madrid, was not ordained a priest until 1826. The second, Francis Regis of St. Louis, was ordained in 1828. Throughout the era the Catholic hierarchy depended on recruits from Europe to staff their mission efforts in the Mississippi River Valley. Neither the Presbyterians nor the Congregationalists established a seminary for clergy in the Mississippi River Valley before 1840. They relied on Princeton, Andover, Yale, and later, Western Seminary in Alleghenytown, Pennsylvania (established in 1827), Hanover Seminary in Indiana (established in 1830), and Lane Seminary in Cincinnati (running by 1832), to produce clergy for the west. “Catalogus Ordinationum - Diocesis Neo- Aurelianensis et Sancti- Ludovicensis,” MASL 3.3, UNDA; Guide to Lane Theological Seminary Records, PHS; William Warren Sweet, “The Rise of Theological Schools in America,” Church History 6, no. 3 (1937): 268. See also Richard J. Janet, “The Era of Boundlessness at St. Mary’s of the Barrens, 1818–1843: A Brief Historical Analysis,” Vincentian Heritage Journal 31, no. 2 (November 2012): 65–102; Stafford Poole, “The Founding of Missouri’s First College,” Missouri Historical Review 65, no. 1 (Oct. 1970): 1–22. 128

and some of his confreres to establish a Lazarist seminary in DuBourg’s diocese.46 With the pope’s blessing for the mission, De Andreis and his band trekked to Bordeaux, gathering some other volunteers along the way. Thirteen missionaries, with De Andreis as their leader, sailed from Pauillac in June 1816.47 Their ocean voyage, like so many others of the era, was rather “uncomfortable,” particularly during a storm that sent

“mountains of water crashing against the ship.”48 When they landed in Baltimore, the troupe relied on the hospitality of the Sulpicians, a Catholic order devoted to training priests, who “put themselves to great trouble” to make the newcomers comfortable for more than a month as they organized the next segment of their trip.49 Thereafter they trekked, “partly on foot and partly in bad coaches, at huge expense and inconvenience,” to Pittsburgh, where they stalled for five weeks waiting for the Ohio River to rise.50 Next they boarded a flatboat, cramped “like sardines in a barrel” for the 23-day voyage to

46 DuBourg’s diocese included the whole of the Louisiana Purchase. He also had responsibility for the Mississippi Territory and the settlements along the Illinois side of the Mississippi River near St. Louis; he administered the former as vicar general for the archbishop of Baltimore and the latter under an agreement with the bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky. Frederick John Easterly, The Life of Rt. Rev. Joseph Rosati, C.M., First Bishop of St. Louis, 1789–1843 (New York: AMS Press, 1974), 64–70; John Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis: In Its Various Stages of Development from A.D. 1673 to A.D. 1928 (St. Louis, Mo.: Blackwell Wielandy, 1928), 1:253, 268–269.

47 Felix De Andreis, Important Notices Concerning the Mission of Louisiana in North America, 1815, FMFDA, 385–397.

48 Felix De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 28 July 1816, Letter 16, FMFDA, 86; Felix De Andreis to Bartolomeo Colucci, 26 Aug 1816, Letter 20, FMFDA, 94.

49 Felix De Andreis to Bartolomeo Colucci, 26 Aug 1816, Letter 20, FMFDA, 95.

50 Felix De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 22 Sept 1816, Letter 22, FMFDA, 106; Felix De Andreis to Simon Bruté, 5 Oct 1816, Letter 25, FMFDA, 115–117.

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Louisville.51 At Bardstown, forty miles from Louisville, the missionary band once again found hospitality among their colleagues: Bishop Flaget invited them to stay at his seminary until the winter passed and DuBourg arrived. But DuBourg was delayed in

Europe. When he eventually appeared in December 1817, De Andreis departed with him to establish the Lazarist house and seminary at a place called the Barrens, eighty miles southwest of St. Louis. The rest of the missionaries stayed at Bardstown, learning English and studying theology. They finally left in September 1818 for the last leg of their journey, arriving at the Barrens two years and three months after they had departed

Europe.52

Not all missionary relocations were so protracted, though many were plagued with difficulty and unexpected expense. Congregationalist missionary Timothy Flint moved his family from Connecticut to St. Louis, by way of Cincinnati, in 1815–1816, encountering various obstacles along the way, including a wagon wreck, a case of influenza, and a near drowning.53 After they reached finally St. Louis, the Missionary

Society of Connecticut, which was sponsoring Flint’s mission, voted to send Flint an extra $100, in addition to his standard missionary salary, “in consideration of the great expense to which he has been subjected on his mission.”54

51 Felix De Andreis to Françoise Victoire Fournier, 2 Dec 1816, Letter 29, FMFDA, 132.

52 Rosati to Nervi, 8 Dec 1818, Rosati to Genoa folder, Box 5, John Rybolt Personnel File, DRMA; Easterly, Life of Rosati, 56.

53 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 12, 26, Timothy Flint to Abel Flint, 2 July 1816, Letters to Abel Flint, Hartford, Connecticut, from Timothy Flint and Salmon Giddings, typescript copies, 1814–1822, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

54 Missionary Society of Connecticut Trustees minutes, draft copy, 7 Aug 1816, Reel 14, MSCP.

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When they landed in the Mississippi River Valley, recruits typically found lodging with their religious colleagues, or with local families, for the first few weeks, sometimes longer. Residents showed remarkable generosity to the incoming missionaries.

Connecticut native Stephen Hempstead, a Congregationalist layman who had emigrated to the St. Louis area five years prior, housed Salmon Giddings from April 1816 through the following winter, between Giddings’s various missionary peregrinations through the region.55 Well-heeled Catholics volunteered a similar service. The Hamilton family in

Florissant hosted several young European priests in the late 1810s, providing not only shelter and hospitality, but also a laboratory for language immersion; the clerics benefitted by living with “a family where [English] was well spoken and where there would be no possibility of speaking any other language.”56

Catholic émigrés, who had to cover a much greater distance in immigrating, had an advantage over Presbyterian imports in finding hospitable lodging. As Catholic personnel and resources flowed into the Mississippi River Valley, various religious orders set up communities: Ursulines (New Orleans, 1727), Lazarists/Congregation of the

Mission (Barrens, Perryville, Missouri Territory, 1818), Religious of the Sacred Heart of

Jesus (St. Charles, Missouri Territory, 1818), Jesuits (Florissant, Missouri, 1823), Sisters of Loretto (Barrens, Perryville, Missouri, 1823), Daughters of Charity (St. Louis,

55 Salmon Giddings to Stephen Hempstead, 22 Aug 1816, SHL, SHP; Rockne McCarthy, “The Presbyterian Church Crosses the Mississippi: The Life and Ministry of Salmon Giddings” (Ph.D. Dissertation, St. Louis University, 1971), 49, 97–99, 105, 110. Hempstead offered the same hospitality to Timothy Flint and his family. Timothy Flint to Stephen Hempstead, 11 March 1816, 11 Nov 1816, SHL, SHP.

56 PDJ, 10 Sept 1819, SSCSL.

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Missouri, 1828).57 Catholic newcomers relied on these houses, particularly the female religious houses, as landing pads where they could find not only the basic necessities, but also friendly welcome, spiritual sustenance, and guidance regarding regional travel, foodways, and cultural practices. The Ursuline convent in New Orleans had been functioning as a waystation for Catholic missionaries and clerics for most of a century, and as Catholic administrators poured new resources into the region, they depended on

Ursuline hospitality. The sisters welcomed the five pioneers of the Society of the Sacred

Heart, a French order of nuns, for several weeks in 1818, provisioning them with cloth, food, and other material goods for their foundation in the St. Louis area.58 The Ursuline superior promised to show similar care for any subsequent arrivals.59 When the fledgling

Sacred Heart community relocated from St. Charles to Florissant the next year, Charles de la Croix, a Flemish priest, decamped from his abode and invited the nuns to use it until their own house was completed.60 The women passed the favor along: they fed and housed innumerable male clerics for brief and extended stints, including the Jesuits upon

57 Listed here are the religious orders’ original locations, and the date of their establishment, in the Mississippi River Valley. The orders, particularly those of women religious, expanded, relocated, and spread throughout the region, establishing various other houses which also offered hospitality to incoming Catholic missionaries. The term order is used in a broad sense, to include both those communities that had papal recognition and the congregations that operated with the approval of the diocesan bishop.

58 Philippine Duchesne to Sophie Barat, 7 June 1818, Letter 94, BDC2 1:53.

59 She kept her promise. Each group of Sacred Heart nuns who arrived from Europe and passed through New Orleans extolled Ursuline hospitality. GCHJ, 29 Apr 1822, SSCSL; Louise Callan, The Society of the Sacred Heart in North America (London: Longmans, Green, 1937), 126–128.

60 PDJ, 4 Sept 1819, SSCSL; Diary of the little house: Florissant of the Sacred Heart of Missouri, 28 Sept 1819, Letter 117, BDC2 1:175.

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their arrival in Florissant 1823.61 They also hosted other women religious. In November

1828 the Religious of the Sacred Heart “had the happiness of lodging ... in the sacristy” four Daughters of Charity who arrived from Maryland to take charge of the hospital in St.

Louis.62

Travel costs and temporary lodging were only part of the expense for establishing religious personnel in the Mississippi River Valley. Missionaries needed additional funds and material goods to sustain themselves and to outfit their missions. They counted on support from key elites in the region—the Protestants tapping Yankee emigrants like

Winthrop Sargent, former governor of the Mississippi Territory, and his family, who settled into a lucrative plantation life in Natchez and cultivated local and national connections valuable to northeastern Protestant missionaries; the Catholics relying on long-time residents like John Mullanphy and his family in St. Louis, who funded various

Catholic charitable and educational schemes. But the majority of inhabitants in the region had not been schooled in providing consistent financial support to maintain religious leaders or their programs; their occasional gifts were inadequate. Both Catholic and

Protestant missionaries relied on resources from the east to kick-start their Mississippi

River projects. They pleaded for both funds and material objects, including fabric and clothing—both ecclesiastical garments and every-day wear—books, pens, rosaries, altar coverings, communion ware, relics, food, and horses. Above all, they needed help. As

61 Reminiscences of Pioneer Life by Bro. Peter De Meyer, S.J., 1868, 25, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

62 PDJ, 4 Nov 1828, SSCSL.

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soon as Christian missionaries arrived in the Mississippi River Valley and realized the immensity of their task, they began calling for others to come join them.63

To secure recruits and the funds to transport them and establish their missions,

Catholics, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists wielded the written word. Through letters, reports, and memoirs, missionaries and their backers deployed tropes of religious competition to convey urgency and opportunity in the Mississippi River Valley. Like their sixteenth and seventeenth-century ancestors, these religious promoters relied on

Catholic-Protestant antagonism to sway supporters.64

The Schermerhorn, Mills, and Smith fact-finding missions through the

Mississippi River Valley in 1812–1815 were the first forays of eastern Presbyterians and

Congregationalists into the region. The Missionary Society of Connecticut printed 2000 copies of the report of Schermerhorn and Mills’s initial excursion in 1814 and distributed it broadly: four copies to each parish in Connecticut, a copy to each member of the

Connecticut legislature, and copies to all the other missionary societies in the U.S.65

63 Mullanphy loaned money to the Sacred Heart sisters when they arrived in the region and funded their convent, school, and orphanage in St. Louis. He also helped the Sisters of Charity start a hospital in the city. Duchesne to Barat, 31 Aug 1818, Letter 102, BDC2 1:99–100; Duchesne to Barat, 13 May 1827, Letter 219, BDC2 3:13; Duchesne to Barat, 18 May 1829, Letter 252, BDC2 3:114; PDJ, 9 Nov 1826, 2 May 1827, 16 Nov 1827, 15Apr1830, SSCSL; Gilbert J. Garraghan, The Jesuits of the Middle United States (New York: America Press, 1938), 1:275.

64 On similar letter-writing strategies of missionaries sent by the Connecticut Missionary Society to the Western Reserve (in present-day Ohio), see Amy DeRogatis, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 61–84.

65 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View; Missionary Society of Connecticut Trustees minutes, draft copy, 12 Jan 1814, Reel 14, MSCP.

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Mississippi River Valley Points of Reference 1820s

Figure 3. Mississippi River Valley Points of Reference, 1820s.

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Various religious periodicals also picked up the story and published excerpts of their letters and report.66 The missionaries’ account awakened New Englanders to their

Christian obligations to the “western country” and prompted institutional and individual responses.67 For the first time northeastern evangelicals considered the Mississippi River

Valley in the sphere of their spiritual concern: As the trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut phrased it, “The necessities of these destitute regions have not been hitherto felt by those who are desirous to devote themselves to the cause of missions; but they are now beginning to excite attention.”68 The organization, which had heretofore focused its attention on the northeast, expanded its geographic scope to include

“Kentucky, the Missouri Territory, particularly St. Louis and its vicinity, and the state of

Louisiana, particularly New Orleans and its vicinity.”69 The Presbyterian Synod of

Pittsburgh likewise adopted “vigorous measures for the education of promising young men, with a view of their becoming ministers of the gospel and missionaries” in response

66 “A Letter from Mr. Samuel J. Mills, Jr. to the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 6, no. 7 (July 1813): 268–73; “Letter from Mr. Mills,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 9, no. 5 (September 1813): 233–37; John F. Schermerhorn, “Extract of a Letter from Mr. John F. Schermerhorn to the Secretary of the Mass. Miss. Society,” The Adviser; Or, Vermont Evangelical Magazine 5, no. 8 (August 1813): 249–50; “Religious Intelligence. Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 10, no. 6 (June 1814): 281–85; “Massachusetts Missionary Society,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 10, no. 7 (July 1814): 328–30. See also “Means of Religious Instruction in the United States,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer, no. 8 (August 1813): 304–13.

67 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 3.

68 Board of Trustees Report to Missionary Society of Connecticut, 1814, Reel 15, MSCP.

69 The following year the organization added East and West Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory as missionary fields. Missionary Society of Connecticut Trustees minutes, draft copy, 12 Jan 1814, 2 Aug 1815, Reel 14, MSCP.

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to Schermerhorn and Mills’s report.70 The missions committee of the Presbyterian parent body—the General Assembly—sponsored Daniel Smith’s solo venture to the region in

1815–1816 and appointed six more missionaries to the Mississippi River Valley the following year.71

Young men studying for the ministry devoured the reports of missionaries’ exertions. After reading of Mills and Schermerhorn’s trip, Andover seminarian Salmon

Giddings wrote to the Missionary Society of Connecticut in 1814 to volunteer for missionary duty in the region.72 Elias Cornelius, studying under Dr. Beecher in

Connecticut, exhorted a friend in 1815 to embark on a mission in the style of Mills and

Smith.73 Cornelius followed his own advice, laboring as a missionary in New Orleans in

1817–1818.74

70 Missionary Society of Connecticut, Fifteenth Annual Account of the Missionary Labors Directed by the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut; Performed in the Year 1813: With a Statement of Receipts and Expenditures, and a List of Books Sent into the New Settlements for Gratuitous Distribution (Hartford: Peter B. Gleason, 1814), 18.

71 “Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 12, no. 7 (July 1816): 325; First Report of the Board of Missions for 1817, volume 3, Minutes 1812–1830, Standing Committee of Missions, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly, Box 3, Board of Domestic Missions Records, Presbyterian Church in the USA, PHS; Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly, Extracts from the Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: From A.D. 1812, to A.D. 1816, Inclusive. With a Copious Index (Philadelphia: Extracts Printed by Jane Aitken, and Index by J.W. Scott, 1817) 3:302–305.

72 Salmon Giddings to Abel Flint, 16 Apr 1814, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

73 B. B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1833), 41.

74 Elias Cornelius to Abel Flint, 10 May 1817, Reel 3, MSCP; Edwards, Memoir of Cornelius, 96–109. Cornelius double-dipped, serving not only as a missionary for the Missionary Society of Connecticut, but also as an agent for the American Board of 137

The reports that drew these men to the Mississippi Valley were part of a broader barrage of missionary epistles, accounts, and memoirs pummeling northeastern evangelicals in the era. Stories of the first American missionaries to India appeared alongside accounts of those in the Missouri Territory in publications such as Christian

Watchman, Christian Repository, and Christian Herald. Exciting tales of self-sacrifice, danger, hardship, and spiritual destitution pricked the consciences and hearts of more than a few seminarians.75 While studying at Andover in 1814, Sylvester Larned poured over the memoir of Harriet Newell, the first American Protestant missionary to die in the course of a foreign mission.76 With visions of Newell’s “disinterestedness [and] heroism” still glimmering in his mind, Larned accepted appointment by the Presbyterian General

Commissioners for Foreign Missions. On his way to New Orleans he raised money for the latter’s contemplated Indian missions. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1816 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, 1816), 4; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners, for Foreign Missions ... 1817 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, 1817), 20, 29; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1818 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, 1818), 3–4.

75 Seminarians not only consumed this literature; they also played a role in publishing it. Students at the Divinity College of Andover circulated a subscription in 1810 to print “a collection of letters relative to foreign missions.” See Proposals, by a number of the students in the divinity college at Andover, for publishing by subscription a collection of letters, relative to foreign missions: containing several of Melvill Horne’s “Letters on Missions” and Interesting Communications from Missionaries in Asia and Africa, interspersed with other extracts (Andover, Mass.? 1810), item 463809, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

76 Sylvester Larned to his sister, 3 May 1814, in Ralph Randolph Gurley, Life and Eloquence of the Rev. Sylvester Larned; First Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1844), 32–33. On Harriet and her husband Samuel Newell’s mission to India, and the links between American and British foreign missions, see Emily L. Conroy-Krutz, “‘Engaged in the Same Glorious Cause’: Anglo– American Connections in the American Missionary Entrance into India, 1790–1815,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 1 (2014): 21–44.

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Assembly to serve as a missionary in New Orleans three years later, where like Newell, he died young.77 Accounts of his death from yellow fever “excited in various parts of our country ... unusual interest” and prompted a recounting of his “life and character”— another missionary exemplar’s biography circulating to entice and fortify the next generation of volunteers.78

Memoirs, biographies and missionary reports stoked the flames of evangelical fervor, as did personal letters from the field of duty. Each successive wave of missionaries sent back impassioned appeals for more help. Salmon Giddings, who arrived in St. Louis in early 1816, crafted his letters to Connecticut to pack an emotional punch.79

If only the good people of New England could “witness the deplorable ignorance that prevails—the famine for the word of life which is in this wilderness,” they would surely

“contribute yet more bountifully of their worldly substance to confer on them that are ready to perish the Blessing of a preached gospel.”80 As news of the Protestant missions in the Mississippi River Valley spread, the religious workers balanced reports of modest success with descriptions of dire conditions and urgent appeals for assistance.

Presbyterian Joseph Bullen, reporting on the death of one missionary, called for others to come labor with him in Mississippi, a site of “extensive moral waste” that held great

77 Larned to his sister, 3 May 1814, in Gurley, Rev. Sylvester Larned, 33; Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Missions, First Report, 1817, 31; “Death of Rev. Sylvester Larned,” Religious Remembrancer, October 15, 1820.

78 “Miscellany: Memoir of the Rev. Sylvester Larned,” Christian Herald 7, no. 17 (6 Jan 1821), 513.

79 Giddings was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, but in his letters to the Missionary Society of Connecticut, referred to himself and his missionary efforts as Presbyterian.

80 Giddings to Abel Flint, 30 Dec 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

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spiritual potential.81 His Presbyterian colleague Orin Catlin likewise lamented the “moral wilderness” he faced, and entreated his colleagues to “send more missionaries, especially to Illinois.”Catlin resorted to another tactic to persuade his readers to dispatch volunteers: he poked their sectional and denominational pride. “No other free state in the Union is without a settled [Presbyterian] minister.”82

Not to be outdone, Catholic missionaries and pastors also turned eastward to galvanize support, though many of their appeals had to travel much further. Bishop

Flaget, stationed in Bardstown, Kentucky, wrote to Pope Pius VII in 1815, grieving that there were only three priests, one of whom was “very much enfeebled by his years,” to serve the Illinois and Missouri Territories. He begged that Jesuit missionaries be sent to attend not only to the Euro-American inhabitants, but also to the “numerous tribes of

Indians who inhabit these vast regions.”83 Flaget also reached out to Archbishop John

Carroll of Baltimore, explaining that Upper Louisiana required “at least eight or ten

81 Missionary Society of Connecticut, Twenty-Second Annual Narrative of Missions, Performed under the Direction of the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut; Principally in 1820: With an Account of Books Sent to the New Settlements, and a Statement of the Funds, for the Year 1820. (Hartford: Printed by Peter B. Gleason, 1821), 15.

82 Orin Catlin to Samuel Whittelsey, 5 June 1823, 18 Apr 1823, Reel 3, MSCP. The reference by both of these missionaries to the region as a moral wasteland may have been an indirect acknowledgment of unsanctioned sexual practices among the inhabitants. Salmon Giddings was more explicit in his assessment. He condemned the widespread tolerance of interracial, extramarital sex in the St. Louis area—in this case, white men having sexual contact with black and Native American women—concluding that “the state of morals is wretched.” Giddings to Abel Flint, 6 Jul 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

83 The Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, had been ushered out of North American in 1763 and suppressed by the pope from 1773 until 1814. Flaget was hoping to take advantage of their newly reinstated status and their historic experience as missionaries in the region. Joseph Benedict Flaget, “Bishop Flaget’s Report of the Diocese of Bardstown to Pius VII, April 10, 1815,” trans. V. F. O'Daniel, Catholic Historical Review 1, no. 3 (Oct. 1915): 317–319, quotes from 317 and 318.

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priests,” with an additional ten for the Indians, whom Flaget believed “would be willing to receive them.”He punctuated his appeal with an entreaty about the direness of the situation: “Pray, if you please,” he wrote, “that God may send me proper ministers to convert or support so many souls that run to perdition for want of assistance.”84 Felix De

Andreis, the Italian priest of the Congregation of the Mission who had such a protracted trip to St. Louis, echoed the crying demand for Catholic investment: “We need whole colonies of missionaries, with considerable financial resources, to make rapid progress in these immense regions.”85 On his way to serve in Baton Rouge, French recruit Antoine

Blanc repeated the refrain. “We feel every day, more and more, the need to be reinforced.”86 Women religious also begged, in more subdued language, for assistance for their work. Philippine Duchesne entreated her superior in Paris with characteristic restraint, “If the Lord inspires you to send more people, this would fulfill all our wishes and would be exceedingly useful.”87

Their pleas did not go unheard. Joseph Rosati, another Italian recruit who eventually became bishop of St. Louis, recounted in his memoir that, in response to the desperate letters he and De Andreis sent to Europe, their colleagues dispatched personnel: more than a dozen priests, novices and lay brothers of the Congregation of the Mission to

84 Flaget to Carroll, 10 Oct. 1814, 8A K5, AJCP, AAB.

85 De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 24 Feb. 1818, Letter 43, FMFDA, 193.

86 Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, 22 Feb 1820, Letter F02725, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF. Translation: C. Croxall.

87 Philippine Duchesne to Sophie Barat, [8 May 1820], Letter 127, BDC2 1:208. See also Jean Marie Odin, 2 Aug 1823, in Naina dos Santos, trans., “Letters Concerning Some Missions of the Mississippi Valley. A.D. 1818–1827,” RACHSP 14 (1903): 187, original manuscript: Odin, 2 Aug 1823, Annales de l'association de la propagation de la foi 1, no. 5 (March 1825): 68–77.

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serve in the Mississippi River Valley over the next decade.88 Their correspondents also sent material support, including “books, vestments, sacred vessels, paintings, images, material for habits, and money.”89 The women religious of France also aided their friends in the Mississippi Valley with funds and supplies as their mission project expanded. After the Religious of the Sacred Heart had established a school in the St. Louis area, their

French sisters answered their pleas by sending a piano, candle sticks, and seeds, and the promise of “what is needed for art: models, paint box, crayons.”The nuns in Grenoble pledged to send “silk and flowers,” those in Poitiers vowed to provide paper, and their sisters in Amiens, money.90

Augmenting the letter-writing strategy was the face-to-face appeal. Before

DuBourg departed New Orleans for Rome in 1815, he confided to Archbishop Carroll that he planned to “ransack all Catholic Europe” for “zealous ministers.”91 During his sojourn from 1815 to 1817, he convinced nearly five dozen priests and lay brothers and more than a dozen women religious to leave the comforts and familiarity of Ghent,

Milan, Paris, Rome, Grenoble, and Lyon for the rustic Catholic parishes and missions of

88 Joseph Rosati, “Recollections of the Establishment of the Congregation of the Mission in the United States,” pt. 4, trans. Stafford Poole, Vincentian Heritage Journal 4, no. 2 (Oct. 1983), 121; Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 5, Vincentian Heritage Journal 5, no. 1 (April 1984): 126–128; Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 6, Vincentian Heritage Journal 5, no. 2 (Oct. 1984): 133; Easterly, Life of Rosati, 58.

89 Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 4, 120–121; quote from 120.

90 Barat to Duchesne, 18 Apr 1819, Letter 112, BDC2 1:155. Duchesne recorded receiving the piano, candlesticks, and seeds, along with “some material for vestments” and a “supply of paper for books” the following year. PDJ, 17 March 1820, SSCSL.

91 DuBourg to Carroll, [Nov. 1814], 3 E11, AJCP, AAB.

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the Mississippi Valley.92 He also raised thousands of francs, secured passage for his recruits, acquired prized relics for his diocese’s churches, and arranged for the delivery of hundreds of Catholic devotional books.93 Later he dispatched other priests to recruit on his behalf: Angelo Inglesi in 1820, Philip Borgna in 1823, Antoine Blanc in 1824.94

In-person visits for recruitment and fundraising were most effective, but Catholics in the Mississippi Valley could not rely solely on expensive transatlantic voyages to meet their needs. Like the Protestants, they funneled their persuasive energies into letters and reports for publication. By the early 1820s French Catholics had formed a fundraising organization, Association de la propagation de la foi [or Society for the Propagation of the Faith], to collect and distribute financial support to Catholic missionaries in the

92 DuBourg to Carroll, 5 Oct 1815, 8A H6, AJCP, AAB; DuBourg to Carroll, 10 Nov 1815, 8A H7, AJCP, AAB; Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 3, Vincentian Heritage Journal 3, no. 1 (Jan 1982), 143, 153; Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 4, 129–133; Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 6, 117; Easterly, Life of Rosati, 15–58; Melville, Dubourg, 1:339– 345, 380–383, 404–405; Joseph Aloysius Griffin, The Contribution of Belgium to the Catholic Church in America, 1523–1857, Studies in American Church History 13 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1932), 131; Jane Frances Heaney, A Century of Pioneering: A History of the Ursuline Nuns in New Orleans, 1727–1827 ([New Orleans]: Ursuline Sisters of New Orleans, Louisiana, 1993), 426; Callan, Society of the Sacred Heart, 33–44.

93 For instance, DuBourg negotiated with his old friend, the bishop of Soissons, France, to arrange for a gift of 200 copies of the Journées du Chrétien to be forwarded to him. Joseph-Maxence Péronne, Vie de Mgr de Simony, évêque de Soissons et Laon (Soissons: Voyeux-Solin, 1849), 289–290 [Melville cites the 1861 edition, which has different pagination]; Melville, DuBourg, 1:379–380, 403. On the relics he collected, see Joseph Bartholomew Menochio to DuBourg, 17 May 1816, V 4 c 5, CANO, UNDA.

94 Portier to Cholleton, 24 Sept. 1820, Letter F02727, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF; DuBourg to Philip Borgna, 27 Feb 1823, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 3, no. 1–2 (Jan-Apr 1921): 123–128; DuBourg to Cholleton, 31 March 1824, Letter F02738, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF. On Inglesi’s precipitous rise and subsequent fall from grace, see F.G. Holweck, “Contribution to the ‘Inglesi Affair,’” SLCHR 5, no. 1 (Jan 1923):14–39.

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United States and around the globe.95 The organization’s publication, Annales de l'association de la propagation de la foi, like the various Protestant periodicals of the era and the Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, circulated news of the missionaries’ endeavors in various arenas, from China to Calcutta to Louisiana.96

Missionary priests in the Mississippi Valley took advantage of their French collegial networks to spread news of their work through this organ. When Jean Marie Odin completed his studies at Séminaire Saint-Irénée in Lyon, France, he sailed as a missionary to United States, sending letters from his station in Missouri to Saint-Irénée director Jean Cholleton, a key leader in the Association de la propagation de la foi.97

Cholleton fed Odin’s letters into the queue for publication in the Annales.98

95 Like the Protestant “mite societies,” the association collected weekly offerings from laypersons, particularly laywomen, for the missions. For the history of this organization, see Richard Drevet, “Laïques de France et missions catholiques au XIXème siecle: l’Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi, origines et développement lyonnais (1822–1922)” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2002); Edward J. Hickey, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith: Its Foundation, Organization, and Success (1822– 1922), Studies in American Church History 3 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1922); Melville, DuBourg, 1:380–381, 2:583–584. On the propagandistic uses of Catholic missionary literature in early America, particularly in regard to slavery, see Michael Pasquier, “‘Though Their Skin Remains Brown, I Hope Their Souls Will Soon Be White’: Slavery, French Missionaries, and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the American South, 1789–1865,” Church History 77, no. 2 (June 2008): 337–70.

96 The first issue was published in 1822.

97 Liste des Seminaristes entrées au Séminaire de Lyon depuis le 1er 9bre 1811, P1, Archives des Séminaire Provincial de Lyon–Saint-Irénée, Lyon, France; Hickey, Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 23.

98 For instance, Odin’s letter to Cholleton from October 1822 was edited and printed in the Annales in 1823. Odin to Cholleton, 21 Oct 1822, Letter F03653, F–83, Fonds de Lyon, APF; Annales de l'association de la propagation de la foi, recuil périodique: des lettres des évéques et des missionnaires des missions des deux mondes, et de tous les documens relatifs aux missions et a l'association de la propagation de la foi. Collection faisant suite a toutes les éditions des Lettres Édifiantes, Tome 1, No. 2–1823, 3rd ed. (Lyon: Chez L'Editeur des Annales, 1836): 50–54. Other priests who had studied at 144

DuBourg, too, aired his hopes and his diocese’s needs in the pages of the Annales.

In 1823, five years after the Congregation of the Mission had established their seminary in Missouri, DuBourg celebrated the piety and the potential of the institution. The enrolled students would be “excellent [priests] for the diocese, in the future; but we must first support all these people, and while realizing that this future is yet distant, we must not forget the present needs of souls.”He urged his French confreres to raise money for two purposes: to support the seminary in Missouri “so that it may, in time, meet its own expenses,” and, until the seminary produced an indigenous clergy, to send trained missionaries from Europe to care for the spiritual needs of the inhabitants.99 To his brother in Bordeaux DuBourg expressed his faith in his compatriots: “I know that when our brothers and sisters in France hear of our undertaking and our needs, they will come to our aid.”100

Saint-Irénée also sent news of their Mississippi River Valley missions to Cholleton. See the letters from Michel Portier, Antoine Blanc, and Jean-Baptiste Blanc in F–65, New- Orleans Correspondance 1818–1895, and F–83, Saint-Louis (Missouri) Correspondance 1822–1836, Fonds de Lyon, APF. News of the Mississippi River Valley missions appeared in other French publications as well. See, for instance, the report of Bishop DuBourg’s Louisiana successes in the Catholic royalist publication L’Ami de la religion et du Roi: journal ecclesiastique, politique et littéraire (Paris) 23 (1820): 235. Some religious societies and congregations published their own periodicals to disseminate missionary updates. The Congregation of the Mission began publishing a journal in 1834 that largely cribbed off the Annales of the Propagation of the Faith. For an index of articles in the first fifty volumes related to the American missions, see Congrégation de la Mission, Tables Générales: Chronologique et Alphabétique des Cinquante Premiers Volumes des Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission, 1834–1885 (Paris: Pillet et Dumoulin, 1886), 144–154, http://via.library.depaul.edu/annales/131.

99 DuBourg to Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 29 Jan 1823, in dos Santos, “Letters Concerning Some Missions,” 148.

100 DuBourg to Louis DuBourg, 17 March 1823, in dos Santos, “Letters Concerning Some Missions,” 153.

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Cognizant of the power of the printed word, the organizers of Protestant and

Catholic missions solicited news from the field that would serve as copy for recruitment and fundraising publicity. Methodist book agents wrote to William Winans, a pastor serving in Mississippi, requesting material to print in a Methodist periodical, especially

“accounts of the progress of Religion” in the area.101 Didier Petit, secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, requested that Bishop DuBourg “kindly write to us three or four times a year” all the “touching and edifying” events and the signs of the progress of Christianity in DuBourg’s diocese, which Petit could then “print and distribute” broadly. Such news, Petit pleaded, was “useful to our work,” for through it, readers could be “touched by the zeal of the missionaries and the new converts.”102 Likewise, when

Sophie Barat, Mother General of the Society of the Sacred Heart, wrote to inform

Philippine Duchesne in Missouri that their supporter Father Perreau had secured some funds for the Sacred Heart sisters and their Jesuit neighbors from the Society for the

Propagation of the Faith, she instructed Duchesne to write a newsy thank-you note to the donor. “Make sure to give him all the details you can collect about yourselves and [the

Jesuits]—describing what can be done for the salvation of souls. You have no idea how much these facts bring in, when they appear in print.”103 Heartfelt gratitude was necessary, but not sufficient. The nun needed to design her letter with unknown readers in mind, who might be swayed by her words to contribute to the cause.

101 William Winans to Nathan Bangs and Thomas Mason, Methodist Book Agents, 15 Jan 1824, letter book 3, folder 3, box 16, William Winans Papers, CAMM.

102 Didier Petit to [DuBourg], [1822], Letter 02728, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF.

103 Barat to Duchesne, 6 May 1828, Letter 237, BDC2 3:68.

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Some missionaries wanted a more realistic message to reach potential recruits.

Michael Portier, a Catholic deacon recruited by DuBourg and sent to New Orleans in

1818, exhorted Cholleton, the director of the seminary in Lyon, to present a clear picture of the extraordinary difficulties of the missionary life. “Say it, Mr. Cholleton, I conjure you by God, say to the future missionaries they must immolate themselves entirely in our lands! That one must expect all the inconveniences, that one must die a thousand times, that one must be prepared for rebuffs, almost as bad as death itself.”Portier wanted future missionaries to enter the field aware of the illnesses, the heartaches, the deprivations: “no consolations, [...] no friendship,” no opportunities to restore oneself, “except at the font of the tabernacle.”104 Martyrdom, Portier insinuated, may sound romantic in the seminary classroom, but the actual experience of missionary life is tedious, burdensome, lonely, and physically devastating. Not surprisingly, Portier’s harsh depiction of missionary life did not find its way into print. Cholleton chose not to heed the young man’s command; he edited out Portier’s dreary discouragement in the published version of the letter in the

Annales.105

As they have done in other eras, missionaries on the ground and their backers elsewhere used rhetoric of religious competition to drum up support. Catholics framed religious others in terms of both opportunity and menace. Flaget urged Catholic action in what was called the American Bottom, a fertile region on the Illinois side of the

104 Michel Portier to Fr. Cholleton, 15 Apr 1818, #2724, translation, Propagation of the Faith Collection, New Orleans, Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (Original: Letter F02724, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF).

105 Portier’s much abridged and tidied letter appears in Annales de la propagation de la foi 1, no. 5 (March 1825): 62–65.

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Mississippi across from St. Louis, where the American population “are for the most part heretics,” that is, Protestants, “and are generally without ministers of their own sects.” He speculated that they “could be brought into the Catholic faith with little difficulty” by missionaries fluent in English.”106 De Andreis was less sanguine. He reported to his superior in Rome that, although a major portion of the population was French or Creole in the Mississippi River Valley, and nominally Catholic, they had had so little religious instruction that their connection to the faith was tenuous at best; exacerbating their fragility, the American Protestant population was growing very rapidly, and threatened to overwhelm and absorb the Catholics into their “thousand various sects.”107 As he became more acquainted with the inhabitants, De Andreis clarified that the Americans rushing into the region had little religious investment. “The majority are Protestants, or, to say it better, are indifferentists who believe in nothing.” But he was hopeful about the enslaved people who were forced to migrate to the region with the Anglo-Americans; he found them more receptive to Catholic practices. “They are always anxious to be instructed and make their first communion, which many people, even the elderly, have not yet done.

And how many whites have not made it and do not even think of doing so.”108

A persistent theme in these accounts is the contrast between Protestant abundance and Catholic penury. Catholics lamented that Protestants in the Mississippi River Valley had east-coast supporters with deep pockets who bankrolled their missionary endeavors, while Catholic efforts languished for want of funds. Duchesne complained that

106 Flaget, “Bishop Flaget’s Report to Pius VII, 1815,” 317.

107 De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 24 Feb. 1818, Letter 43, FMFDA, 189.

108 De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, 26 June 1818, Letter 51, FMFDA, 221.

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“Catholics everywhere are very poor... the ‘pressure’ of poverty is never absent,” whereas the Protestant missionary societies had an annual budget of over a million francs. “How sad it is not to be able to go ahead when the work of the opposite camp advances with such success!”109

Catholic missionaries also leveraged competitors’ church construction projects to garner sympathy and support. In April 1818 De Andreis reported that he feared the

Baptists would be building a church near the Catholic cathedral then under construction in St. Louis.110 His fears proved correct. In June the Baptists “celebrated the laying of the cornerstone of their church, to be built directly across from ours.” De Andreis sniped that, though they were supposed to lay the actual stone, at the last hour they opted just to have the ceremony—which included a sermon and a collection of money—but not the stone- laying. “They say it was because they reflected that this event would violate the Sunday obligation.” The Baptists, perhaps stung by the Presbyterian critiques of their non- observance of the commandment to rest on the Sabbath, had become suddenly strict. In

De Andreis’s judgment, theirs was “a tardy scruple, and completely out of place!”111

Later that year he theologized on the two competing sects: “The demons are causing another temple for the heretics to rise directly behind ours, but the rod of Moses swallows up that of the sorcerers, and will force them to confess.”112

109 Duchesne to Barat, 10 June 1824, Letter 187, BDC2 2:172–173.

110 De Andreis to Bartolomeo Colucci, 27 April 1818, Letter 48, FMFDA, 210.

111 De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, 17 June 1818, Letter 50, FMFDA, 218.

112 De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 3 Sept 1818, Letter 53, FMFDA, 229.

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Whereas Catholics relied on the twin themes of opportunity and danger when representing their religious opponents, evangelical Protestants played on the theme of ignorance in their depictions of the Catholic residents of the Mississippi River Valley.

John Schermerhorn griped to his supporters that the inhabitants of Louisiana “are without schools, and of the French inhabitants not one in ten can read.”113 His colleague Samuel

Mills concurred that the French Catholics who lived along the river between New

Orleans and Natchez were “ignorant of almost every thing except what relates to the increase of their property.”114 The managers of the New York Bible Society deployed tropes of Catholic ignorance to raise money to print French Protestant bibles for the region, calling upon the “benevolent sympathies of Christians” to open their pocketbooks to aid those “ready to perish for lack of knowledge.”115

As a fundraising tool in the hands of zealous Protestants, accounts of Catholic ignorance played on readers’ sympathies and compassion. The moral logic was simple:

Support our missionaries as they toil to enlighten the hearts and minds of the Catholics who are moldering in spiritual darkness. A more blunt tool was derision. Some Protestant ministers depicted Catholicism “as an assemblage of absurd & contemptible doctrines.”116 Timothy Flint, a Congregationalist serving in St. Charles near St. Louis,

113 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 34.

114 “A Letter from Mr. Samuel J. Mills, Jr. to the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 6, no. 7 (July 1813): 271.

115 New York Bible Society, Fourth Report of the New-York Bible Society, adopted at their annual meeting held on Monday, December 6th, 1813 (New-York: J. Seymour, 1813), 10.

116 Peter De Smet, Biographical Sketch of Charles Felix VanQuickenborne, manuscript, Record Group Biographical, Charles VanQuickenborne, MPC. 150

resorted to disparaging the Catholic practices he witnessed. “Nothing can exceed the ridiculousness of the catholic mumery [sic], except it be the heedlessness, with which it is witnessed by the catholics [sic].”117 Such dismissive language appealed to Protestant readers’ sense of spiritual superiority. Catholic practices, these accounts insisted, are empty, meaningless charades; the slack-witted priests who perform the hollow rituals and the people who attend them mindlessly are deserving of scorn and pity. The implication of such mockery was that faithful Protestants should feel obligated to intervene to save the blind Catholics from their misguided ways.

The distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism was not the only theological division deployed to score rhetorical points and raise money for missions.

Intra-Protestant differences and tensions also fueled the missionary programs.

Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries framed the Methodists and Baptists in the Mississippi River Valley as ignorant but potent competitors in the contest for souls.

These denominations’ practice of authorizing uneducated men to preach rankled their learned coreligionists. Presbyterian layman Stephen Hempstead groused that he had

“uniformly found without education, and of small talent” the Baptist and Methodist preachers in the St. Louis area.118 Samuel Giddings observed that the ten Baptists preachers in the area around Kaskaskia were all “destitute of education,” and the Baptist preacher named Farrar he met in the Calaway settlement in southwest Missouri Territory

117 Timothy Flint to Abel Flint, 10 Oct 1816, Letters to Abel Flint, Hartford, Connecticut, from Timothy Flint and Salmon Giddings, typescript copies, 1814–1822, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

118 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 33.

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was “a man of small tallents [sic] of no learning & not respected by the people.”119

Schermerhorn and Mills complained that “learning, with [Baptists] as a body, is rather ridiculed than desired.”120

Baptist and Methodist preaching practices also came under the New Englanders’ fire. Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries depicted Methodist and Baptist preachers playing on the emotions and fears of their audiences, cajoling and berating to provoke a gut response. Baptist preachers’ intent with preaching, according to their detractors, was “to excite the passions; to terrify and raise into transports of joy, rather than to inform the mind, convince the understanding, convict the heart, and open the way of salvation through Jesus Christ.”121 They accused Methodists in the Mississippi River

Valley of preaching “mere rant & nonsense” in a style that “very much resembles that of the Baptists.”122 Orin Catlin pointed out that the “respectable & enlightened” folks he had met in Bellville, Illinois complained to him that they had “become tired & disgusted with so much ranting & disorder” from the Methodists.123 The New England missionaries intended their reading audience to associate these preaching tactics with those used in the

Kentucky and Tennessee revivals at the turn of the century. That period of “fanaticism and enthusiasm” had produced “a flood of error” in the regions of the revivals, and unless

Presbyterians and Congregationalists intervened by sending reliable, trained, judicious

119 Giddings to Abel Flint, 26 Aug 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

120 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 38.

121 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 39.

122 Giddings to Abel Flint, 26 Aug 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP; Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 41.

123 Orin Catlin to Samuel Whittelsey, 5 June 1823, 18 Apr 1823, Reel 3, MSCP.

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preachers, the tide of fanaticism and error threatened to swamp the Mississippi Valley as well.124

In conjunction with the theological threat of uneducated but zealous preachers leading inhabitants down the path of delusion and heterodoxy, Presbyterian and

Congregationalist missionaries emphasized the demographic danger posed by Methodists and Baptists. What these sects lacked in quality schooling and sermonic rigor they made up for in quantity: the Baptists and Methodists proliferated in the Mississippi River

Valley, while the Presbyterians and Congregationalists were just entering the field. The ubiquity and numerical strength of these competitors struck fear in the hearts of northeastern Presbyterians and Congregationalists.

On their initial trek through the region, Mills and Schermerhorn ascertained and recorded the number of Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian preachers, churches, and members in each state or territory, and where applicable, the number of Catholic priests.

They presented these figures in chart and narrative form in their compilation report. The figures told a compelling story: Presbyterians did not just lag behind their Protestant competitors; their clergy were absent, except in the Mississippi Territory, where they

124 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 40. But the New England missionaries themselves learned to adjust to the patterns and expectations of the region. Congregationalist Timothy Flint reported to his backers that he had changed his preaching style in response to prevailing practices. He no longer used a sermon manuscript or prepared preaching notes. “A frothy & turgid kind of ready eloquence is characteristic of every class of public speakers. I have broken over all early habits, & have triumphed over extreme reluctance, & against my own taste & feelings have become all things to the people, as far, as I possibly could.” Timothy Flint to Abel Flint, 2 July 1816, Letters to Abel Flint, Hartford, Connecticut, from Timothy Flint and Salmon Giddings, typescript copies, 1814–1822, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

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made weak showing.125 In their descriptive analysis, the missionaries attested to Baptist and Methodist growth at Presbyterian expense. With few Presbyterian churchmen in the region, the Presbyterian laity who emigrated there resorted to other sects for spiritual sustenance. Baptist and Methodist congregations readily absorbed this underserved population. The missionaries circulated layman Stephen Hempstead’s experience in St.

Louis as a cautionary tale. Hempstead had informed Schermerhorn and Mills that many of the Presbyterians he knew “joined either the Baptists or Methodists, rather than live any longer without the ordinances and worship of God.”126 The first wave of

Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries to enter the region frequently commented on how long the inhabitants had been waiting for the ministrations of appropriate clergy. Presbyterian missionary E.W. Gilbert encountered dire conditions in

Edwardsville, Illinois Territory: “Though the greater part [of the inhabitants] are

Methodists, there are many Presbyterians, who were rejoiced to see me. Some had not heard a Presbyterian preacher for 12 or 14 years, and some who were born in the country had never heard one in their lives.”127 The theme of Presbyterian laity famished for the ordinances of God turning in desperation to Methodist and Baptist societies, where they risked theological deviance, reverberated through the missionaries’ accounts.

Another strain in the northeastern missionary reports was the contentiousness of the competing Protestant sects. Methodists and Baptists fought amongst themselves, they

125 Schermerhorn and Mills also documented religious practices in Tennessee and Kentucky, but their statistics do not cover the region west of the Tennessee River, which was Chickasaw Country at the time.

126 Schermerhorn and Mills, A Correct View, 32.

127 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Missions, First Report, 1817, 22.

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had “inveterate prejudice” against each other, and they attacked the incoming

Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries.128 In the intramural skirmishes, the northeastern Reformed missionaries presented themselves as staying above the fray.

Baptist infighting was legendary and expected. The sect’s polity—extreme decentralization, with complete independence at the church level—and its prioritization of the Spirit’s direction lent themselves to splintering and schism, as church members or preachers who claimed divine guidance broke from existing congregations to start new churches. In the area around Kaskaskia, a Presbyterian missionary gloated that “the

Baptists are much divided among themselves & carry on war with each other.”129 From the New Englanders’ perspective, such Baptist infighting sprang from the sect’s disregard for education and consequent theological laxity.

With their centralized structure and hierarchical polity, Methodists were far less prone to schism on the local level. Instead, they directed their quarrelsomeness outward toward other sects, with Baptists as a primary target. Baptists considered Methodists

“fake prophets” trying “to get to Heaven by their works.”130 Methodist shot back that

Baptists were steeped in “Ignorance & Prejudice,” and at their camp meetings were “the most ill Behaved.”131 Theologically the two sects disagreed sharply—particularly on the issue of baptism, but also regarding free will—but on the level of practice they

128 Giddings to Abel Flint, 20 Apr 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

129 Giddings to Abel Flint, 26 Aug 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

130 Day Book of Rev. Thomas Griffin, 11, 12, typed transcript, M92, Thomas Griffin Papers, CAMM.

131 Diary of Samuel Sellers, 13 July 1814, 31 July 1814, manuscript, Folder 1, M02, Samuel Sellers Papers, CAMM.

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converged, at least in the minds of New Englander missionaries. Baptists and Methodists in the Mississippi River Valley both utilized a fiery, emotional preaching style and frenzied camp meeting spectacles to draw adherents. To distinguish themselves, the groups sniped at each other “in self defense.”132 But they also turned against the newcomers to the region.

Methodist and Baptist efforts to undermine their more educated Protestant opponents incensed and riled the Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries. In the

Missionary Society of Connecticut’s report of its initial efforts in the St. Louis area in

1816, the organization’s leaders lamented Methodist efforts to sabotage their missionaries’ work: “most of the preaching in all that region has been by travelling

Methodist preachers, who, as is common with such as have great zeal and little knowledge, had exerted themselves to excite prejudice against Ministers of the

Presbyterian order.”133 Salmon Giddings, sent by the Connecticut society, dotted his letters with complaints about how his religious rivals misrepresented him. When Baptists in St. Louis circulated a report depicting Giddings as unpopular and ineffective, he whined to his eastern funders that their statements were false, “injurious to religion, as well as unchristian.”134 Methodist bishop William McKendree, who visited and preached for the Methodist societies in the Missouri Territory in the summer of 1818, “did little

132 Giddings to Abel Flint, 26 Aug 1816, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

133 Missionary Society of Connecticut, Eighteenth Annual Narrative of Missionary Labors, Performed Under the Direction of the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut with a Statement of the Funds of the Society, and a List of Books Sent to the New Settlements, in the Year 1816 (Hartford [Conn.]: Printed by Peter B. Gleason, 1817), 11.

134 Giddings to Abel Flint, 14 Jan 1819, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

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else in his sermon,” reported Giddings, “than scold or whip the Presbyterians and

Presbyterian missionaries.”135 He also accused his foes of reprinting and circulating excerpts from his journals, adding unflattering commentary to turn his followers against him. Giddings understood these tactics to be a desperate attempt to undo his growing popularity. “I am sensible the Methodist [sic] preachers and many of the most zealous of them dread & fear me. The great proportion of their societies where I have been in the country are more attached to me than to their own preachers.”136 Timothy Flint complained that preachers of other sects seemed collaborative face-to-face, but then turned against him behind his back. “At one point you meet with a respectable Methodist, and begin to feel an attachment to the profession. He next meets you with harmony and co-operation on his lips, and the next thing which you hear, is, that you are charged with being a fierce Calvinist, and that you have preached that ‘hell is paved with infants’ skulls.’”137

The anti-Catholic strains in the Protestant reports and the anti-Protestant devices in the Catholic promotional literature, along with the intra-Protestant antagonism, resonated with their target constituencies, catapulting Mississippi River Valley missions onto the charitable agendas of faithful churchgoers throughout Europe and the United

States. Women were especially active givers. Though none of the sects focused on

Christianizing the Mississippi River Valley would ordain them, women across Europe

135 Giddings to Abel Flint, 23 July 1818, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

136 Giddings to Abel Flint, 6 Oct 1817, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

137 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 114.

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and the northeastern United States midwifed the Protestant and Catholic missionary projects through their generous pecuniary support, given to bring a Christian message to people they would never see.

The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the major Catholic mission fundraising organization of the early nineteenth century, formed through the labors of various networks of women. Inspired by Methodist and Anabaptist efforts in England, Pauline

Jaricot, the daughter of a major silk merchant, began organizing silk workers in Paris to support Catholic missions during the Bourbon Restoration. Two working women joined forces with Jaricot: a Miss Benege, a spooler from the parish of St. George, and Mary-

Magdelene Gillot, a silk worker from the parish of St. John. Together they inspired female workers, shopkeepers, and servants to give pennies each week for the charitable cause, as Protestant cent and mite societies did. Within three years working women had donated funds totaling 8,000 francs for the Seminary for Foreign Missions. At the same time, a wealthy widow in Lyon, Madame Petit, responding to requests from DuBourg, organized a network of elite women in the southeastern French city to support American missions. In 1822 these two female-founded associations merged into the Société de la

Propagation de la Foi. The organization expanded its focus to include missions around the globe and adopted Jaricot’s practice of collecting pennies from supporters each week.138 From 1822 to 1830, the Society sent nearly 170,000 francs (equivalent to

$34,000 in 1830, or $900,000 in 2016) to support Catholic missionaries in the Mississippi

138 Drevet, “Laïques de France et missions catholiques,” 34–36; John F. Laffey, “Roots of French Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Lyon,” French Historical Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 78. 158

River Valley.139 Women did not supply all of these funds, but by giving their sous faithfully, as well as their francs, they formed the backbone of the charitable behemoth.

In addition to aid from the Société de la Propagation de la Foi, Catholic missionaries in the Mississippi Valley depended on vital support from a range of Catholic laywomen, both in Europe and the United States. Women in France and the Italian states provided not only financial support, but also material goods, especially furnishings, decorations, paintings, and cloth to adorn the simple chapels and churches. Bowled over by DuBourg’s missionary pitch in Paris in 1817, one Italian countess prepared altar linens for the bishop to take to the nascent parishes in his diocese; another sent him money.140

American laywomen at the site of missionary endeavors also aided as they could.

Hospitality was not the purview of nuns alone; married and widowed women opened their houses to incoming missionaries. Sarah Shurtley Hayden, a widow who owned the

“best house” in the Barrens settlement in the Missouri Territory, invited a troupe of missionaries who had emigrated from Europe to stay at her home until their lodgings at the fledgling St. Mary’s Seminary—their ultimate destination—were completed. Five

139 The Society supported several Catholic sites in the Americas at this time, distributing money to missions in Alabama, Ohio, Maryland, South Carolina, New York, Boston, Kentucky, Michigan Territory, Nova Scotia, Hudson Bay, Curaçao, Surinam, and the Sandwich Islands. The organization also funded missionaries throughout Asia and the Levant in its first decade. Beginning in 1825, the Society’s Superior Council split their mission funds roughly in half between the American and the Asian/Levantine missions. For details, see Annales de la propagation de la foi 1, no. 3 (Jan 1824): 28–29; 1, no. 5 (March 1825): 9–13; 2, no. 8 (May 1826): 25–27; 2, no. 10 (Apr 1827):141–142; 2, no. 11 (Aug 1827): 231–233; 3, no. 14 (Jun 1828): 89–91; 3, no. 17 (May 1829): 383–384; 3, no. 18 (Sept. 1829): 487–488; 4, no. 21 (Jul 1830): 251–254; 4, no. 24 (April 1831): 605– 608.

140 Melville, DuBourg 1:395.

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years later she provided the same hospitality to the Sisters of Loretto when they arrived from Kentucky.141

Laywomen in the planter class in Louisiana gave funds and even land to build new Catholic churches and institutions. Catherine Jacob Cambre, a wealthy widow in

Edgard, Louisiana, and John James Haydel together sponsored the rebuilding of the St.

John the Baptist church after it had been washed away by the flooding Mississippi River.

Consecrated during Lent in 1822, the sizable new church sat 500 and had Romanesque architecture.142 The next year Madame Olinde donated land for a new church on False

River in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Antoine Blanc, the pastor, reported that the church was 80 feet long and 33 feet wide. The first Mass was celebrated on All Saints

Day.143

Protestant women also gave their pennies and dollars to support mission work, forming their own bible and missionary societies. Women in several upstate New York towns plowed their resources into bible printing. The Female Bible Societies of Geneva and Poughkeepsie, along with women’s associations in Aurora and Genoa, gave their entire budgets in 1814 to the project of printing French bibles for New Orleans and

141 Sarah Ann Shurtley was born in 1765 in Maryland, where she married Thomas Edward Riney. The two emigrated to Washington County, Kentucky. Thomas died in 1792. Sarah married Clement Hayden. The two emigrated to what is now Perry County, Missouri, where he died. Sarah married Joseph Manning in 1834. Sarah’s daughter had joined the Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky. Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 4, 111 (quote); Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 5, 128–129; 1823 Parish Census of St. Mary of the Barrens Congregation, Perry County, Missouri, transcribed by Donna Falloon, posted Oct. 1997, http://www.usgwarchives.net/mo/perry/perrycen.htm.

142 Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 287.

143 Annales de la propagation de la foi 2, no. 12 (Nov 1827): 358–359; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 284.

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Canada. Author Catharine Weller gave one hundred copies of her book, The Medley, to the New York Bible Society to sell, the proceeds of which she donated to the organization.144 Among their many labors, members of the Female Bible Society of

Philadelphia donated fifty bibles, “along with one of quarto size, for an aged pious man,” to missionary Gideon Blackburn for the settlements on the “South-Western frontier” in

1815. More than 550 women donated to the organization that year, most giving two- dollar contributions, a sizable amount in an era when agricultural workers in the U.S. earned less than ten dollars a month.145 The Ladies Cent Society of Vergennes, Vermont, contributed thirty dollars for Presbyterian Daniel Smith’s mission venture in Natchez in

1815.146 Male missionaries even used the reliability of women supporters to shame male supporters into more generous giving. Between his two missionary trips to the southwest,

Samuel Mills penned a letter to his friend in Cornish, New Hampshire, hailing the $17.43 contribution given by the women’s Cent Society, but noting he had received no funds from the men of the town. Deploying gender norms and expectations surrounding masculinity, Mills tweaked his friend for the comparative lack of male support. “If you

144 New York Bible Society, Fifth Report of the New-York Bible Society: Presented and read at the annual meeting of the society, held the 5th December, 1814 (New-York: J. Seymour, 1814), 6.

145 Female Bible Society of Philadelphia, The First Report of the Female Bible Society of Philadelphia. Read before the Society, March 22, 1815. With an Appendix, and a List of Subscribers and Benefactors (Philadelphia: Printed by order of the Society. William Fry, Printer, 1815), 7, 16–31; Donald R. Adams, “Some Evidence on English and American Wage Rates, 1790–1830,” Journal of Economic History 30, no. 3 (1970): 506.

146 “[Report of the Seventeenth] Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Missionary Society,” Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine, 12, no. 7 (July 1816): 326. 161

were all women in Cornish [th]is would answer. But as this is not the case I expect the men will show themselves in the next.”147

In their passionate appeals for financial donations, material aid, and recruits, the sects intent on Christianizing the Mississippi River Valley emphasized a simplistic formula: give money to fund our missionaries, who will bring Christian truth to a benighted region. But the laypeople who were the objects of the religious projects had their own visions for the spiritual development of the region. By their actions and inactions, they altered the pace and scope of the Christianizing efforts, reshuffling the evangelists’ priorities and agendas. Missionaries, pastors, and priests found themselves adjusting in myriad ways to the inhabitants’ indifference, predilections, and demands.

Some inhabitants’ zeal took the missionaries by surprise. Lay people’s fervor for religious services and personnel put pressure on denominational officials to shift scarce resources and personnel. When communities clamored for religious laborers, they pressed their own local needs to the top of church leaders’ agendas. As soon as Presbyterian missionaries Eliphalet Gilbert and Backus Wilbur arrived in Kaskaskia, a few of the inhabitants “made use of every means of detaining at least one of us in the Territory.”

Though the American Protestant population was small, the people were eager to have religious personnel planted in their community. Even territorial governor Ninian Edwards joined the campaign. He “offered to board us at his own table, and give 50 dollars a year beside, if either of us would remain.” The requests were so earnest and compelling that

147 Samuel J. Mills to James Ripley, 17 Nov 1813, Samuel J. Mills Papers, Williams College Archives & Special Collections, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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the missionaries “half promised” to return, even though their commissions had expired.148

Some of the Catholics in the Mississippi River Valley also yearned for spiritual succor, demanding that authorities respond to their cries for help. Members of the parish of St. Bernard in Louisiana, who had been without a pastor “for many years,” lamented that their elderly “die without spiritual help.” They urged the bishop to send a priest, for whom they promised an annual pension.149 Upon the death of their pastor of twenty years, the faithful of the parish of St. Martin in the Attakapas country of Louisiana sent a petition to the bishop, requesting not just that he name a replacement, but that he appoint the man of their choosing.150 Those in the northern part of the diocese had more basic needs. The Catholics in the new settlement of Galena, Illinois—about two hundred in number—had never had a priest. Desperate to nurture their “zeal for ... holy Religion,” they petitioned that the church hierarchy send them a clergyman to “administer to them

148 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Missions, First Report, 1817, 21–22, quotes from 22. Gilbert was appointed for a total of six months as a missionary to western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and the Illinois Territory; Wilbur was commissioned to serve the same region. The two apparently traveled together, a common practice among Presbyterian missionaries.

149 Petition, Paroisse St Bernard [to Rosati], 13 May 1827, RG 1 B 4.2, Petitions–Rosati 1826–1839, Bishop Joseph Rosati Collection, AASL. [Translation: C. Croxall.]

150 Gabriel Isabey, a Dominican friar who had served the church since the Americans took over the Louisiana Territory, died in the summer of 1823. Italian Marcel Borella, whom DuBourg had recruited from Milan, had been serving as Isabey’s assistant since about 1820, while also making regular visits to the parish of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel at Avoyelles, Louisiana. It was Borella whom the St. Martin parishioners requested become their regular pastor. The bishop honored their choice. Petition from the Parish of St. Martin to DuBourg, [1823], RG 1 A 7.3, Correspondence-Photocopies, Bishop Louis William DuBourg Collection, AASL. See also Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 252, 282–283, 292; Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 4, 129–132.

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the bread of Eternal life,” for whom they promised a “suitable provision.”151 They clarified their terms six months later, offering $500 per year to a priest who would preach to them in English.152

The Catholic folks in Edwardsville, Illinois, were more modest in their request, begging that a pastor come to them on a quarterly basis. They mentioned John Timon, of

“whose piety and eloquence” they had heard, as a possible candidate.153 Hailing from

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Timon—one of the few American-born clergy in the

Mississippi Valley—was an understandable pick to serve the American settlers in the town.154 Perhaps they assumed that by knowing their customs and their language, he could communicate more effectively and advocate for them better than a foreign-born priest. Other parishes highlighted their own fragility in their applications for aid. In their petition for a resident clergyman, those in Cahokia confessed that they were “unable to pay a priest an extravigant [sic] salary,” but could compensate one “on a plain scale.”155

151 Petition from Galena - Fever River [Illinois], 29 April 1827, MASL 22, UNDA.

152 Catholic Committee of Fever River, Galena Lead Mines, to Joseph Rosati, 15 Oct 1827, MASL 22, UNDA.

153 Petition from Catholics of Edwardsville, IL, to Joseph Rosati, 3 Jan 1828, MASL 22, UNDA.

154 Catalogus Ordinationum - Diocesis Neo-Aurelianensis et Sancti-Ludovicensis, MASL 3.3, UNDA. Timon was born in Conewago, Pennsylvania, in 1797. His father’s work as a merchant kept the family on the move. They settled in St. Louis in 1819. There Timon chose to study for the priesthood because of the influence of De Andreis; he attended St. Mary’s Seminary at the Barrens and was ordained by Rosati 23 Sept 1825. John Timon, “Barrens Memoir. By John Timon, C.M. (1861),” ed. John E. Rybolt, Vincentian Heritage Journal 22, no. 1 (April 2001): 46.

155 Petition from Catholics of Cahokia, IL, to Joseph Rosetta [Rosati], 27 Sept 1828, MASL 22, UNDA. Bishop Rosati tried to make arrangements for priests from St. Louis to attend the faithful of Cahokia and Edwardsville, at least on a rotating basis. The head pastor there resisted the bishop’s direction, citing the burden it would entail. “You desire 164

The Catholics on Sugar Creek in Illinois—emigrants from Kentucky to “the most fertile soil we ever saw”—conjured the parable of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine sheep to secure the one straying sheep. Worthy but lost, the residents begged for a priest to “Cheer

[their] drooping Spirrits [sic].”156

Local inhabitants championing the presence of religious leaders had specific ideas about how those leaders should exercise their ministry. Language was a particular sticking point for the Catholics in the region. Laypeople wanted to hear sermons in their own native tongue, but the available priests did not necessarily possess such linguistic talent. By 1816 the Catholics in Natchez—a town with a mixed French, Spanish, British,

American, and African population—had been “destitute of a Pastor for upwards of twenty years,” in consequence of which, many of the inhabitants’ children had never been baptized. Having found no assistance from an appeal to New Orleans, the community turned to the archbishop in Baltimore for aid. They were eager to secure pastoral care, but pointed in their expectations. Anglophone Catholics in the town demanded that the bishop send them “none but a man sufficiently acquainted with the

English language, and who can deliver an edifying and interesting discourse in that language, a circumstance upon which, in considerable degree, would depend the improvement of our zeal and increase of our number.” Upping the ante by tethering their

[...] that Mr. Loisel and Mr. Dussaussey should from time to time go to Edwardsville, to Kahos [Cahokia], to Vide Poche; this is a pretty mess; pardon, Monseigneur, but I see great difficulties in all this; before we commence this order of things we must know if we can keep it up; if we cannot carry it out, it is better not to start at all.” Edward Saulnier to Joseph Rosati, 29 July 1828, quoted in F. G. Holweck, “The Language Question in the Old Cathedral of St. Louis,” SLCHR 2, no. 1 (January 1920): 13.

156 Petition from Catholics of Sugar Creek, Sangamon County, Illinois, to Joseph Rosati, 9 Nov 1828, MASL 22, UNDA.

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own spiritual growth to the language facility of their priest, the Catholics of Natchez insisted that the Catholic hierarchy address their needs on their terms.157

The language issue roiled St. Louis in the 1820s. English-speaking Irish and

American parishioners chafed at the custom of the sermon at Sunday High Mass being delivered in French. Various priests had tried to mollify them by preaching in English at or after Vespers, at dusk, but the practice did not satisfy them. In 1826 a group of

Anglophones petitioned the bishop to instruct their pastor to preach every other sermon at

High Mass in English. They insisted that since most of the Americans did not understand

French, but most of the Francophones did understand English, and since most of the

Americans lived at a distance from town and could not stay until after Vespers, they never benefitted from the “explanations” of the faith. The petitioners contended that “a great apathy or total neglect in a number of lukewarm Catholics to the important duty of hearing Mass on Sundays” was due completely to this language problem.158

The bishop sought to pacify the disgruntled English-speakers, but wrung his hands that the issue was beyond his control. “French and Americans, Creole and Irish are

157 Daniel McGraw to Leonard Neale, 11 Nov 1816, 12 A-J1, Archbishop Leonard Neale, S.J., Papers, AAB. On the British colonization schemes for the Natchez District after the Seven Years War, see Robin F. A. Fabel, “An Eighteenth Colony: Dreams for Mississippi on the Eve of the Revolution,” Journal of Southern History 59, no. 4 (November 1993): 647–72. The Catholics in Natchez had been pastor-less since Francis (Fransico) Lennan had departed from the parish of San Salvador when the Americans took jurisdiction of the region in 1798. Jack D. L. Holmes, “Father Francis Lennan and His Activities in Spanish Louisiana and West Florida,” Louisiana Studies 5, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 263–265.

158 Petition from St. Louis Parishioners to DuBourg, June 1826, typed transcript, RG 01 A 5, Box 2, Souvay Transcripts, DuBourg Collection, AASL. DuBourg had since returned to Europe to resign his position. Joseph Rosati, his coadjutor, became acting bishop for the diocese. The petitioners forwarded their request to him. Patrick Quigley and Arthur Fleming to Joseph Rosati, 15 Aug 1826, RG 1 B 4.3, Correspondence, Rosati Collection, AASL.

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equally dear to us, because we think them equally entitled to the spiritual assistance which is in our power to afford them,” he consoled, but “we cannot give what is out of our power.” It was a personnel shortage, not a problem of willful neglect. He recommended praying “to the Lord of the harvest ... to send evangelical workmen,” and promised that his long-term solution was to “raise a national clergy who, knowing the languages spoken in the country, may be able to assist all their countrymen.”159 But such simpering did not satisfy the flock. They made their frustrations known each week by noisily leaving the Mass when the pastor began preaching in French, a practice that grieved the pastor, who complained to the bishop of their “irreverent behavior.”160 The

Catholic congregation at St. Ferdinand in Florissant also acted out during worship. When the bishop replaced their beloved pastor with a newcomer, the “choir refused to sing,” a significant affront in a liturgical tradition that prized music in religious services.161

Some inhabitants of means used their wealth to direct the course of missionaries and religious institutions, even against the wishes of denominational authorities. Charles and Mary Sentee Smith, emigrants from Maryland who had established a sizable plantation in Opelousas, Louisiana, provided the funds to build an “elegant church” in the nearby town of Grand Coteau. Charles died in 1819, before the church was completed.162

159 Joseph Rosati to St. Louis Cathedral Marguilliers, 1 Sept 1826, as printed in Holweck, “Language Question,” 11.

160 Edward Saulnier to Joseph Rosati, 29 July 1828, as printed in Holweck, “Language Question,” 13.

161 PDJ, 10 Apr 1820, SSCSL.

162 St. Charles Church Documents, in C.M. Widman, trans., “Outlines of History—St. Charles’ Church, Grand Coteau, La.” RACHSP 9, no. 3 (Sept. 1898): 347–349, quote from 348.

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Mary continued the project, despite losing part of her inheritance to Charles’ brothers; she funded at her own expense the construction and furnishing of the church and presbytery.163 Upon its dedication, the church was named St. Charles Borromeo, to honor its deceased patron.164 Mary Sentee Smith next invited the Society of the Sacred Heart of

Jesus to open a convent and school on her property. She promised to provide a house, land, furniture, and travel expenses for nuns recruited from Europe, as well as an enslaved family “for their service.”165 With the bishop’s consent, Philippine Duchesne, the superior of the Sacred Heart community in Florissant, Missouri, accepted the offer and sent two sisters south to establish the house in 1821.166 After the convent and associated school for girls were running smoothly, Mary Sentee Smith turned her attention to the education of boys. Having befriended Francis Cellini, the priest then serving the parish church, she proposed that his order, the Congregation of the Mission, establish a boarding school on land adjacent to the nuns’ property. She again offered to fund the construction and donate the property for this purpose.167 While communications inched along among Sentee Smith, Cellini, and Joseph Rosati, who was the superior of the order, the pious Catholic laywoman made an even more significant offer. Sentee

Smith announced that she would will all her property to the Congregation of the Mission,

163 GCHJ, 1–2, SSCSL.

164 St. Charles Church Documents, Widman, “St. Charles’ Church,” 349.

165 PDJ, 7 Jun 1821, SSCSL; Duchesne to Barat, [24 June 1821], Letter 138, BDC2 1:248.

166 GCHJ, 1, 1821, SSCSL. The house measured 56 by 50 meters and cost Sentee Smith $7000 to build. The property was 80 arpens. PDJ, 27 Feb 1830, 39–40, SSCSL.

167 Francis Cellini to ?, 27 Jan 1823, translated in “Diary of Bishop Rosati,” SLCHR 3, no. 4 (Oct 1921): 322n38.

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with the understanding that they provide her lodging and food for the remainder of her days. But when Bishop DuBourg got wind of the plan, he insisted that she designate her property for the diocese, instead of the religious order, and earmark one-tenth for the bishop.168 Sentee Smith resented the bishop’s presumptuousness. Rather than grant his request, she “by public deed made a donation of all her possession to Fr. Cellini” personally.169 Her decision ruffled more than a few feathers, but both the bishop and her extended family were powerless to undo her act.170

Even when they welcomed missionaries, pastors, and priests, the inhabitants did not automatically align themselves with the proselytizers’ spiritual agendas. Fewer still crossed confessional lines by converting. Eliphalet Gilbert, the Presbyterian who had

168 DuBourg to Rosati, 14 Nov [1823], typed transcript, RG 01 A 5, Box 2, Souvay Transcripts, DuBourg Collection, AASL.

169 Leo DeNeckere to Joseph Rosati, 8 Oct 1824, translated in “Diary of Bishop Rosati,” SLCHR 3, no. 4 (Oct 1921): 363n180.

170 DuBourg believed Cellini had taken advantage of the widow, influencing her to transfer her property to him, and had thus provoked a scandal in the neighborhood. The bishop removed Cellini from the parish and sought means to persuade the priest to annul the deed, but to no avail. DuBourg then resorted to maligning the priest to Propaganda Fide. Cellini himself believed he had been badly mistreated by the bishop. He left the diocese, but later returned, serving churches in the St. Louis area under Rosati, who had become bishop in the interim. Sentee Smith and Cellini continued their close association for the next 25 years. They died within hours of each other in 1849 in a house in St. Louis she had purchased. DuBourg to Mrs. Charles Smith, [no date], copied in Cellini to Rosati, 1 May 1825, typed transcript, RG 01 A 5, Box 2, Souvay Transcripts, DuBourg Collection, AASL; DuBourg to Peter Caprano, 26 Jan 1826, DBPF, SLCHR 3, no. 3 (July 1921): 197–198; Mary Sentee Smith to Chelini [Cellini], 19 Feb 1825, and Mary S. Smith to Rosati, 9 July 1827, MASL 22, UNDA; Rosati, “Recollections,” part 6, 115; Mary S. Smith to J. Timon, 18 Nov 1825, Vincentians Collection: Manuscripts, UNDA; Peter Richard Kenrick to Louis Tucker, 10 Jan 1849, printed in Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis 1:727–728. See also Melville, DuBourg 2:710–726; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 290.

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made such a splash in Kaskaskia, confessed that he and comrade Backus Wilbur had not managed to win any souls through their missionary exertions. Gilbert sought to paint their failure in the brightest terms: “If none were converted, many were made to respect religion, who had been open despisers; others were rendered thoughtful and anxious.”

Gilbert’s coreligionist Daniel Smith made similar, minimal gains in Natchez. After months of service, Smith boasted of increased attendance at Presbyterian prayer meetings and Sunday worship services, but he could point to only two instances of possible, not certain, conversion from his frequent family visits, one of which was on a deathbed. “The habits of the people,” he admitted, “were all averse to any thing like personal religion.”171 Catholic evangelists, too, were foiled. Jean-Marie Odin, a French Catholic priest who embarked on frequent missionary circuits to rural settlements in southeast

Missouri with colleague John Timon in the early 1820s, confided to his sister that the duo was routinely successful at drawing an audience, but not so adept at transforming

Protestant listeners into Catholic followers. “Whenever we go on a mission, we have a large number of heretics and even ministers who attend our instructions,” he wrote. “It’s necessary to have long lectures with them, in which it’s easy to convince them, or rather, to confuse them, but difficult to win them.”172 The residents who turned out when the

Catholic missionaries rode through town, like the Natchez inhabitants who indulged

Smith with his home visits, were perhaps looking for entertainment, spiritual insight, or

171 “Abstract of the First Report of the Board of Missions to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church—May, 1817,” Religious Remembrancer, 51 (16 Aug. 1817): 201.

172 (Abbé) Bony, “Vie de Monseigneur Jean-Marie Odin de La Congrégation de La Mission, Archevêque de La Nouvelle-Orléans, 1800–1870,” Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission 60 (1895): 584.

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an opportunity to learn something new; they tolerated the missionaries’ wordy lessons and earnest appeals, but resisted conversion.

Felix De Andreis fared slightly better. The much admired and pious priest had success converting a few Protestants in St. Louis, baptizing them on their deathbeds. But the healthy evaded him. De Andreis noted that some inhabitants appeared to be taken in by his message, but when it came time to commit, they dodged or demurred. “You can say to them whatever you want,” he grumbled to a colleague in Rome, “they answer: c'est tres vrai, c'est la pure verite ce que vous dites, c'est la verite meme: it is very true, you are right, you are perfectly right; but when they should draw the consequences, they resort to delay, to pretexts, and few are those who let themselves be drawn into the net.”173

Residents may have found comfort or hope in the attention the priest lavished on them, but they were unwilling to make any public profession or otherwise announce a new spiritual identity. They frustrated the ideal conversion trajectory, by which a person advanced from resistance to curiosity to inquiry to acceptance to catechesis to initiation.

De Andreis’ auditors stalled the process at the inquiring stage, soaking up his time without allowing themselves, in his terms, to be caught.

Even adherents could be cantankerous and demanding, frustrating the plans of their shepherds. John Timon, the sought-after American-born priest who accompanied

Jean-Marie Odin on his missionary peregrinations, reported that some of the inhabitants of New Madrid showed interest in the missionaries’ message, but complained about inconsistent priestly presence. “They say the time is too short for old sinners to hope to comply with their duties,” Timon reported to the bishop, “and they know nothing certain

173 Felix De Andreis to Fr. Giorgana, 1 Feb 1820, translated by Fr. Germovnik, Folder 9, Box 1, Felix De Andreis Personnel Files, DRMA.

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of the time when a priest may come or whether that priest may not be a strange one with whom they would have to begin over again.” Their grumbling spurred the missionaries to ask the bishop for a set timetable for missionary rounds that they could advertise to the residents, and the assurance that it would be they, and not others, who would be sent back to the town.174 While Catholic and Protestant missionary organizations prioritized coverage—placing religious leaders in all the communities—these residents emphasized relationships. They wanted reliable pastors who would show up on a regular basis, get to know them, and attend to their spiritual concerns.

Other communities were far less responsive to the religious personnel who descended upon them. When Congregationalist Timothy Flint arrived in St. Louis in

1816, locals welcomed him with enthusiasm. But by the following year he had lost favor.

The townspeople of Bonhomme, a settlement near St. Louis, soured on the missionary so much that they would pay him nothing if he preached. He generated a similar reaction in

St. Charles. “The people are against him,” his colleague, Salmon Giddings, confided to their sponsor back in Connecticut. “I fear he is imprudent.”175 Layman Stephen

Hempstead concurred that Flint gave “occasion for people to speak reproachfully” of him.176 Flint himself complained about the residents’ choosing the billiard room over the house of prayer on Sundays. He reported that he had threatened to present his neighbors in St. Charles to the grand jury for holding a ball on the sabbath, a threat for which he

174 John Timon to Joseph Rosati, 15 Oct 1826, Catholic Church, Archdiocese of Saint Louis (Mo.): Manuscripts 1/02.3, UNDA.

175 Salmon Giddings to Abel Flint, 6 Oct 1817, folder 6, box 15, JFMP.

176 Abel Flint to Stephen Hempstead, Sr., 30 Apr 1818, SHL, SHP.

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feared they would “attempt an outrage” against him.177 The Missionary Society of

Connecticut tried to handle the situation delicately; the corresponding secretary instructed

Giddings and Hempstead to “do that which you shall think will be best calculated to promote the cause of Christ.”178 When he reflected on the discord later, Flint blamed his trouble in the Missouri Territory on “trifling differences” between the parishioners about modes of worship and where the meeting house would be built, but his inveighing against the residents for their leisure activities on Sundays surely played a large part.179

Not surprisingly, Flint and his family welcomed the invitation to relocate a few years after they had arrived in the west. Delayed by illness, they departed in the spring of

1819 for the Arkansas Territory, with plans to go thereafter to Washington, near Natchez.

At the Arkansas Post courthouse Flint had a “polite, and seem[ingly] attentive” audience of Francophones whose sabbath practices mirrored those of the Missourians. They came to the Sunday meeting “arrayed in their ball-dresses, and went directly from worship to the ball.” Some folks would wander in from the nearby billiard room, listen “to a few sentences” of Flint’s sermon, then saunter back “to their billiards.” Whether Flint admonished the people of the Arkansas Post with the same fervor as he had those near St.

Louis, he did not record. He and his family left by year’s end. Flint credited another round of illness and the “tormenting” mosquitoes for dictating their retreat from this

177 Timothy Flint to Abel Flint, 3 Aug 1817, Letters to Abel Flint, Hartford, Connecticut, from Timothy Flint and Salmon Giddings, typescript copies, 1814–1822, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

178 Abel Flint to Stephen Hempstead, Sr., 30 Apr 1818, SHL, SHP.

179 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 113.

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second missionary station. Perhaps the inhabitants’ distaste for his ministrations played a role as well.180

Unlikeable or unpopular clergy did at times win over their audiences, but not without some bruises along the way. In 1819 Bishop DuBourg sent Hercules Brassac, whom he had recruited from Mende, France and had ordained at Ste. Genevieve the previous year, to the church of St. Charles of Opelousas in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.181

The young priest faced “calumnies, on the most delicate matters, evil constructions put on the most innocent of my actions,” and a “share of crosses, and tribulations.” For eight months he wrestled with the hostile congregation, comprised of “people of all nations,

Americans, french, irish, dutch, spaniards, Danes, Creoles.” Over time the priest and people found common ground. Brassac believed that their resistance was based in part on their ignorance; they had had little religious oversight. Because they were scattered at a distance from the church, their previous pastors had rarely visited them. Under Brassac’s steady presence, the lay people became “a little more anxious to learn their christian duties.” He noted that their highest priority was educating their children. He surmised that the desire for education would be the key to the spread of Christianity: “Religion gains more because they insist that the catechism may be the first book put in their children’s hands.”182 But their new-found religiosity did not encompass all that Brassac

180 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 215–216, 272–273.

181 Catalogus Ordinationum - Diocesis Neo-Aurelianensis et Sancti-Ludovicensis, MASL 3.3, UNDA.

182 Hercules Brassac to Joseph Rosati, 27 June 1820, MASL 8, UNDA; see also the transcription in Hercules Brassac, “Brassac’s Correspondence with the American Bishops (1818–1861),” ed. [Sebastian Gebhard] Messmer, Catholic Historical Review 3, no. 4 (January 1918): 450–451, doi:10.2307/25011536.

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hoped. By the following winter he was complaining to another priest that the congregation did not pay him a salary.183

While they may have welcomed missionaries, many inhabitants did not relish the idea of religious leaders policing their behavior. Even the clergy recognized the threat they faced if they pushed laypeople too far in the name of religious purity. By 1820

DuBourg had caved on enforcing strict adherence to Catholic discipline in New Orleans, lest he instigate a riot. Even though Sedella and the marguilliers had recently softened their resistance and submitted to the bishop’s authority, the populace in New Orleans was unaccustomed to the clergy holding them to strict standards.184 DuBourg informed

Propaganda Fide that he had instructed the three priests he sent to the cathedral in New

Orleans to continue the practice of allowing the coffins of deceased Catholics who were

Free Masons to be draped in the masonic insignia, even though to do so was a “flagrant infraction to the law of the Church.” DuBourg hoped that by honoring the local customs, the priests might win the esteem of the people and thus position themselves to “remedy

[...] this and many other evils” over time.185 The priests themselves shuddered at such tolerance of forbidden practices. One of those serving in New Orleans wondered aloud to a colleague in Rome, “Are we building up, or pulling down, Religion in this country? For if, besides winking at dances, theatrical spectacles, disregard of fasting and abstinence,

183 Hercules Brassac to Joseph Rosati, 24 Nov 1820, MASL 8, UNDA.

184 DuBourg to Cardinal Litta, Prefect of Propaganda Fide, 12 May 1819, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 1, no. 3 (Apr 1919): 194; DuBourg to Cardinal Fontana, St. Matthias Day [24 Feb] 1821, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 2, no. 2–3 (April-July 1920): 134–136.

185 DuBourg to Propaganda Fide, [20 April] 1820, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 3, no. 1–2 (1921): 111, 112. See also Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 278–279.

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we must also bend on matters of discipline on which the decency of exterior worship depends, what will become of our ministry?”186

Despite the moral quagmire his decision created for the priests, DuBourg’s strategy of accommodating the residents’ Masonry and other prohibited activities helped continue the thaw in hostilities between formerly antagonistic parties. The parishioners and townspeople, the church wardens, and Sedella warmed to him personally, such that, in 1823, eleven years after he had originally arrived in the city, and eight years after he had been appointed as their bishop, DuBourg finally moved the diocesan headquarters to

New Orleans.187 But the independent spirit of the Catholics there did not die. In fact, resistance to church authority spread to other areas in Louisiana, much to DuBourg’s dismay. In 1825 Reverend Segura, a Spanish priest ordained in France, arrived in New

Orleans. Because the newcomer did not have proper papers verifying his fitness to serve,

186 Martial to Billaud, 13 July 1822, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 3, no. 1–2 (Jan–April 1921): 111n5.

187 Other circumstances conspired to make the southern move both possible and necessary. That year DuBourg received word that Joseph Rosati, the superior of the Congregation of the Mission and head of St. Mary’s Seminary in Missouri, had been named as DuBourg’s coadjutor (assistant bishop), and that Propaganda Fide intended within three years to split the diocese into two parts—the southern part encompassing the state of Louisiana, the northern part encompassing Missouri and the Arkansas Territory— with DuBourg overseeing whichever part he chose, and Rosati becoming bishop of the other. DuBourg opted to move down to New Orleans in the spring of 1823, leaving Rosati to administer the northern part of the diocese from his post at St. Mary’s Seminary. Pope Leo XII followed through with bifurcation of the diocese, creating the diocese of St. Louis in July 1826, though by this time DuBourg was already back in France. Rosati administered both the New Orleans and St. Louis dioceses until Leo de Neckere was appointed bishop of New Orleans in 1830. DuBourg to Rosati, 10 May [1823], RG 1 A 3.1, DuBourg Collection, AASL; Propaganda Fide to DuBourg, 19 July 1823, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 3, no. 1–2 (Jan–Apr 1921): 135–136; entry for 4 Nov 1826, “Diary of Bishop Rosati–1826,” SLCHR 5, no. 1 (Jan 1823): 71; Charles L. Souvay, “Rosati’s Elevation to the See of St. Louis (1827),” Catholic Historical Review 3, no. 2 (July 1917): 165–186.

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DuBourg offered Segura hospitality, but did not give him a clergy appointment. Before documentation arrived from France, the wardens of St. Charles of Borromeo church in

Les Allemands (First German Coast), Louisiana, took Segura as their pastor and asked the bishop to confirm the appointment. Segura seconded the request. DuBourg refused, but Segura served the church anyhow, with the support of the churchwardens, for the next four years. DuBourg’s efforts to unseat the unauthorized priest yielded a print war that culminated, not in Segura’s removal, but in DuBourg’s resignation from the diocese. The insults and attacks lobbed at DuBourg outraged his family members in New Orleans.

Before his nephews or his brother could instigate a duel to protect his honor, he wrote to

Propaganda Fide to forfeit his See. Without telling any of his colleagues or parishioners, the bishop fled to Europe and begged the pope to accept his resignation. He never returned to Louisiana. The residents’ agenda for their own spiritual care in the end trumped the bishop’s authority and dashed his grand visions of his own effectiveness in the Mississippi River Valley.188

188 DuBourg to Peter Caprano, 17 Feb 1826, DBPF, SLCHR 3, no. 3 (July 1921): 204; Baudier, Catholic Church in Louisiana, 301–302; Mary Carmel, “Problems of William Louis DuBourg, Bishop of Louisiana, 1815–1826,” Louisiana History 4, no. 1 (Winter, 1963):69–70. Carmel identifies a host of secondary reasons for DuBourg’s resignation, including his perpetual financial troubles and his embarrassment over having ordained Inglesi, whose questionable behavior in Rome a few years later and subsequent participation in the ecclesiastical tumult in Philadelphia ruined his credibility among the church hierarchy. See Cardinal Consalvi to DuBourg, 11 Jan 1822, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 2, no. 4 (Oct 1920): 211–213; Holweck, “Inglesi Affair.” Added to these trials, DuBourg felt attacked even by his fellow bishops Flaget and David, who from Bardstown, Kentucky sided with Bishop Rosati instead of DuBourg in a disagreement about moving the seminary from Missouri to Louisiana. Souvay, “Rosati’s Elevation,” 165–86. Retirement eluded DuBourg. Upon his arrival in Europe in 1826, he took up the shepherd’s crook for the diocese of Montauban in France, and became archbishop of Besançon in 1833, the year of his death.

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DuBourg wasn’t the only bishop to be stymied and redirected by the laity in the region. Bishop Flaget, the triumphant missionary whose story opened this chapter, ran up against similar willfulness. Flaget fashioned his account of those 1814 missions from St.

Louis to Ste. Genevieve in 1836, in a memoir he wrote for the pope, who had requested a report on Flaget’s diocese for the previous twenty-five years.189 In drafting this memoir

Flaget relied on, diverged from, and embellished the diary he had kept during the journey.190 The tone of the 1814 diary is less victorious than the 1836 memoir, and the story is, predictably, more tedious. Perhaps most telling, though, is how Flaget corralled the laity in his later memoir; instead of describing the people he encountered as active agents in their own religious formation who shaped Flaget’s revival methods and daily agenda, as he had in the diary, he transformed them into objects of his paternal care and willing recipients of his God-given gifts. The men and women of Ste. Genevieve are a case in point. A few days after his arrival in that town, Flaget lamented in his diary that the men “did not stir themselves” for the services he was providing.191 Their indifference forced the bishop to resort to hosting a male-only event one evening; only after they had compelled this special consideration did the men of the village begin to attend to Flaget’s

189 Flaget, Memoir, 1836, 1.

190 Benedict Joseph Flaget, Diary, 1814, Archives of the Archdiocese of Louisville. Flaget engaged in the typical practices of simplification and elision in transforming the detailed diary into a celebratory report. One example is the question of Flaget’s companion during the missionary tour. The diary indicates that Olivier accompanied him for certain, but not all, segments of the journey; two other priests, Father Savine and Father Marie Joseph Dunand, assisted him elsewhere. In the memoir Flaget collapsed his various helpers into the person of Olivier.

191 Entry for 24 Sept., Flaget, Diary, 1814.

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presence and message.192 The women evinced an opposite response: their enthusiasm set his agenda. His diary attests to the women’s fervent desire for crosses and rosaries and their initiative in sanctifying these religious objects. In late October he recorded, “Blessed

20 crosses and several rosaries. It’s wonderful to see the eagerness of these young ladies to get these two objects.”193 The female faithful of Ste. Genevieve pressed Flaget into their service, co-opting his sacramental authority to provide and bless the material objects they deemed necessary for their own religious priorities. Absent are his memoir’s contrite women being persuaded by the inspiring man of God to fork over their golden ornaments; rather, the Ste. Genevieve women persuaded the bishop to do their bidding.

192 See entry for 27 Sept., Flaget, Diary, 1814.

193 Entry for 25 Oct., Flaget, Diary, 1814.

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Chapter 4

A CRUCIFIX FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE GREAT SPIRIT

Fleeing back to Europe was only a fantasy for him during the many long years that Louis William Valentine DuBourg orchestrated Catholic outreach to the Indians. In

1815, as soon as he wrapped his fingers around his new crosier—the shepherd’s crook marking his elevation as bishop of Louisiana—DuBourg began plotting missions to the

Native people in the Mississippi River Valley. He needed religious personnel for his vast new diocese, and what better way to secure them than to dangle the prospect of “training

... Indian youths ... in the arts of civilisation"? And he knew his audience. European

Catholics, riding a wave of religious revival following the purges and exigencies of the

French Revolution, were flush with zeal for spreading Catholic practices within Europe and abroad.1 The reinstatement of the Jesuits in 1814 was both a sign of this religious renewal and a catalyst for missionary efforts.2 DuBourg conjured tales of the Black

1 Sarah Ann Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42.

2 After two centuries of exponential growth, the Jesuits lost political favor in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. Critics viewed the powerful order, with its hundreds of colleges and dozens of seminaries spread throughout Europe and its vast missions in Asia and the Americas, as corrupt and dangerous. Portugal was the first nation to suppress the order. France and Spain followed suit. The pope officially suppressed the Society in 1773, though the Jesuits had already been expelled from North America a decade earlier. The political tide turned after the French Revolution, but the reinstatement stalled during the Napoleonic Wars. Pope Pius the VII gave approval for the universal restoration of the order in July 1814. Daniel Hechenberger, “The Jesuits: History and Impact: From Their Origins Prior to the Baroque Crisis to Their Role in the Illinois Country,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 100, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 85–109; Jonathan Wright, 180

Robes befriending and converting indigenous people a century past to spur a new generation of European Catholic missionaries to take up their cross. Within two weeks of becoming bishop, the enterprising prelate had sown seeds in Rome for two different

Indian missions in his diocese: one for a group of Camaldolese monks to plant themselves in West Florida to educate Native children, the other for a batch of Jesuits to settle in the St. Louis area, open a college, and “in the course of a few years, extend themselves thro' the neighbouring country for the benefit of both the native Indians and civilized inhabitants.”3

The Camaldolese project evaporated before DuBourg returned to the United

States, and he failed at that time to secure the Jesuits (though he would recruit other

Jesuits a few years later). But DuBourg did succeed with the Vincentians, also known as

Lazarists, or members of the Congregation of the Mission, and with a smattering of other clerics, many of whom relished the prospect of missionizing Native peoples. Naïve and sincere, though ill-informed, the first batch of Vincentians DuBourg recruited traveled to the Mississippi River Valley from Europe under the impression that they could and should convert the indigenous people. En route to the mission field, Felix De Andreis, the leader of the Vincentian group, envisioned devoting himself wholly “to the conversion of the Indians” once he had established a seminary for his order. Not yet versed in the diversity of Native people in the region, he planned to “translate the catechism into the

Indian language”—as if there were only one—and then “start out, in nomine Domini ["in

“The Suppression and Restoration,” in Thomas Worcester, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 263–277.

3 DuBourg to John Carroll, 5 Oct 1815, 8A H6, AJCP, AAB.

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the name of the Lord"], along the Mississippi and the Missouri [...] to evangelize these poor people.”4

As they encountered Native people in the Mississippi River Valley, De Andreis, the dreamer, and DuBourg, the schemer, both reported back to their European colleagues and superiors about the prospects for Christianizing the various groups, and the need for more missionaries. When he baptized two young Indian boys in the spring of 1818, De

Andreis could not help but see portents of great things. The priest imagined sending at least one of the boys, then aged five or six, to Rome to be educated at the College of

Propaganda Fide, in order to be formed into a missionary. “That would bind these remote regions to the center of Christianity with a tangible link that would have its own advantages in the future,” he confided to his superior.5 But until the indigenous people were equipped to Christianize one another, it was up to the Europeans and Euro-

Americans to do the job. De Andreis requested prayers for “the conversion of so many souls of Indians, heretics, unbelievers and nominal Catholics, who pierce our hearts with knife cuts without our being able to help.”6 Meanwhile, DuBourg exaggerated, if not misrepresented, the potential for successful Native missions. “How touched you would be,” he gushed to his friend in Europe, “if you could see the frequent deputations which I receive from [the Indians], the religious respect which they testify to me, and the urgent

4 Felix De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 5 Jan 1817, Letter 31, FMFDA, 141.

5 De Andreis to Bartolomeo Colucci, 27 April 1818, Letter 48, FMFDA, 207–208; see also De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, 20 April 1818, Letter 47, FMFDA, 203–204. De Andreis later changed his mind about sending the boys after receiving a discouraging reply to his enthusiastic letter. De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 26 April 1819, Letter 65, FMFDA, 280.

6 De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 3 Sept 1818, Letter 53, FMFDA, 233–234.

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prayers which they address to me, to be their father, to visit them, and to give them men of God.”7

With similar grandiose ambition, mission agents John Schermerhorn and Samuel

Mills visualized the possibilities of Protestant missions to Native Americans when they embarked on their tour of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys in 1812–1813. In addition to their assignments from the missionary societies of Massachusetts and

Connecticut and the Philadelphia Bible Society, the pair had a commission from the

Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America.

Founded in 1787, the organization initially focused its efforts on the Indian populations in the northeast. But by the early 1810s its field of service in New England had dwindled, as the Native Americans in the region were, from the organization’s point of view, “almost extinct.”8 Turning its eyes westward, the society fixed upon the prospect of

“disseminat[ing] christian knowledge among more distant tribes.”9 Deputizing

7 DuBourg, to a friend in Europe, [1818?], in Naina dos Santos, trans., “Letters Concerning Some Missions of the Mississippi Valley. A.D. 1818–1827,” RACHSP 14, no. 2 (June 1903): 141–142.

8 John F. Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America. Report Respecting the Indians Inhabiting the Western Parts of the United States ([Boston], 1814), 1.

9 Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 45–48, quote from 48. Shortly after the society’s founding, it had received a bequest from John Alford designated for Native American missions. By 1795 Alford’s gift produced an annual income of $352. Although the Society had a thriving ministry to “others” in New England—uneducated white people—the Alford funds were “confined entirely to the Indians.” Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America, A brief Account of the present State, Income, Expenditures, &c. of the Society for propagating the Gospel among the Indians, and others, in North-America (Boston, 1795), 1.

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Schermerhorn and Mills, the society charged the young men with procuring “exact information” on the state of Native American peoples west and south of New England,

“with particular reference to future missions, whenever they might be judged practicable and expedient.”10

In their yearlong jaunt, the pair gathered details from informants on the ground, from their own observations, and from the published and manuscript writings of explorers and naturalists Pike, Carver, McKenzie, and du Pratz, among others.11 When they returned to New England, they compiled their evidence in a forty-five-page report, which the society published.12 They identified more than eighty distinct indigenous groups situated from the Alleghenies to the Pacific Ocean, excepting Spanish regions— only a small fraction of which they had encountered. For each they indicated where the

10 Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 1.

11 Their sources included Zebulon Montgomery Pike, An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and through the Western Parts of Louisiana, to the Sources of the Arkansas, Kans, La Platte, and Pierre Jaun Rivers ... and a Tour through the Interior Part of New Spain ... (Philadelphia: C. & A. Conrad, 1810); Jonathan Carver, Travels through the Interior Parts of North-America, in the Years 1766,1767, and 1768 (London: Printed for the author, and sold by J. Walter, 1778); Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in the Years 1789 and 1793: With a Preliminary Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Fur Trade of That Country: Illustrated with Maps (London; Edinburgh: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies ; W. Creech, 1801); Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina: Containing a Description of the Countries That Lye on Both Sides of the River Missisipi: [sic] with an Account of the Settlements ... Translated from the French ... by M. Le Page Du Pratz ; with Some Notes and Observations ... In Two Volumes. ... (London: Printed for T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1763); as well as manuscripts from Judge Breckenridge of Pointe Coupee, Louisiana and George C. Sibley of Fort Osage.

12 [John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel Mills] to Abiel Holmes, [1813], manuscript report, 101–102, Andover Theological Seminary Archives, Special Collections, Trask Library, Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, Massachusetts; Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel.

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tribe originated, where the members dwelled currently, the group’s language, the number of “souls”—that is, the total number of people in the tribe—and, where available, the estimated number of “warriors,” as well as the amount of money the tribe received annually from the U.S. government.

An impressive document despite its inaccuracies and biases, the report conveyed the diversity, range, strength, and texture of Native America to an east-coast audience eager to quantify, categorize, and contain, if not understand, the continent’s original inhabitants. Where their experiences or sources informed them, Schermerhorn and Mills included reflections on the cultural practices and religious prospects among the indigenous groups. A few had encountered Christian missionizing, according to their report. The agents rejoiced that Presbyterians, Moravians, and Quakers had made some inroads among the Wyandots, Miamis, Weas, Cherokees, and Chickasaws. More tepid was the news that the “Iroquoise Chippeways” near mouth of Ottawa River, “have two

Catholick priests among them, and are at least christened Indians.”13

Like the other reports the duo composed documenting their observations,

Schermerhorn and Mills crafted their account of Indians in the American interior to catalyze evangelical action. Most useful to northeastern Protestant associations, they included recommendations for where to establish, and not to establish, future missions.

To invest in converting the indigenous people in Louisiana would be to cast seeds on barren ground, according to Schermerhorn and Mills, because they were contaminated

“by the vices of the whites.”14 More fruitful ground was among the Cherokees,

13 Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 4, 7, 11, 13–16.

14 Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 21.

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Choctaws, and Chickasaws, who had “already made great progress in agriculture and civilization.”15 Since the Presbyterians had already begun work among the Cherokees,

Schermerhorn and Mills suggested that the Society for Propagating the Gospel focus on the latter two groups, where they saw exciting potential. The Choctaws were “panting for instruction,” and the Chickasaws were “by no means unfriendly to missions.”16 The clincher was that the government agents working with both groups had indicated they would support educational endeavors by missionary groups.17 Precisely the fertile soil the missionaries had been instructed to find.

Native Americans occupied a central place in the imaginations of the Protestant and Catholic leaders who envisioned Christianizing the Mississippi River Valley. In the early nineteenth century religious organizers keen on securing resources seized on this discovery: Indigenous people, bereft of the gospel, unaware of the saving power of God in Jesus Christ, were the perfect publicity tool to power missions in the region. The general population in east-coast cities and towns and in Europe knew little about the

Mississippi River Valley other than that it was inhabited by Native peoples. Mission administrators tapped into European and Euro-American ignorance, anxiety, and fascination about this indigenous population, deploying depictions of heathenish Native

Americans untouched by the Christian message to raise funds and generate publicity for missions.

15 Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 20.

16 Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 18, 15–16.

17 Not so the Creeks, whose agent was “opposed to the spread of the gospel among them.” Schermerhorn, Report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, 19.

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Catholic and Protestant promoters engaged in the Christianization of Native people copied from each other’s playbooks as they planned and carried out their missions in the region. Both used a potent combination of sympathy and distortion to raise resources from their respective bases. Both turned to the U.S. government for material aid and legitimacy. Both sustained their mission programs by sending reports to their supporters exaggerating their progress. And both got sidetracked from their

Christianizing goals by the government’s civilization program.

But their strategies and programs for Indian missions were not identical. Far from it. The Calvinist Protestants committed to converting the Native people in the lower

Mississippi River Valley were methodical. Based on Schermerhorn and Mills’s recommendations and other findings, they identified specific groups in the region to target—Choctaws, Chickasaws, and western Cherokees—groups who had been dealing with white settlers for decades. They then recruited personnel and deployed them to build mission stations in the respective Indian nations, where missionaries would teach Indian children in schools and preach to the adults. Their goal was to overwrite Indian habits and practices with white ones—white people’s clothing and manners, English language and literacy, and American-style farming (with the appropriate, gendered division of labor)— in order to pave the way for the indigenous people to embrace Protestant Christianity.

The Catholics’ process of Christianization was far more organic, if not haphazard.

Relying on precedent and reputation to secure access to Native people, Catholics did not so much target a specific Native group. Instead, they envisioned converting the whole region. After years of piecemeal efforts, they built a base of operations near St. Louis, from which they planned to deploy missionaries to Native groups throughout the trans-

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Mississippi West—groups who had had little contact with whites. Their goal was to embed Catholic religious workers, fluent in indigenous languages, within Native communities to cultivate Catholic practices. They did not intend to erase Indian ways immediately, but to initiate spiritual transformation by overlaying Catholicism upon

Indianness.

European Catholics and evangelically-minded American Protestants who signed up to serve as missionaries agreed that Native people in the American interior needed

Christ. The indigenous people they encountered—and did not encounter—would test their faith, shape their agendas, and reconfigure their thinking in ways they could not have imagined.

DuBourg was not the only Catholic who knew how to play up Jesuit precedent.

Many of the Catholic missionaries, priests, and nuns who encountered Native Americans in the Mississippi River Valley in the late 1810s and early 1820s boasted that the indigenous people were predisposed to Catholicism over Protestantism because of their memories of and traditions about the Jesuit fathers who had conducted missions in the

Illinois Country from 1675 to 1763.18 From southeastern Missouri Jean-Baptiste Blanc crowed, “The Protestants have tried several times, but in vain, to establish themselves among the savages. Not seeing their black robes, they told them that they were not their fathers.” According to Blanc, the Indians accused the Protestant missionaries of not

18 On the respect the Native inhabitants retained for the Black Robes, a tradition passed down from fathers to children, see Annales de la propagation de la foi, 1, no. 1 (1822): 34–35. For an overview of the early Catholic missions in the Illinois Country missions, see Hechenberger, “The Jesuits: History and Impact,” 92–101; Gilbert J. Garraghan, The Jesuits of the Middle United States (New York: America Press, 1938), 1:1–8.

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knowing “the path to the Great Spirit.”19 That the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus sisters reported a similar experience suggests the trope of Indians rejecting the Protestants because of fond memories of Jesuits had become a staple of Catholic lore. On their initial trip to the St. Louis area from France, the Sacred Heart nuns stopped at Kaskaskia, site of the most successful eighteenth century Catholic mission to Illinois Country Indians.

Among the indigenous people they encountered there they noticed “a feeling of veneration and [...] some lingering relics of the doctrine they were taught” by previous

Jesuit missionaries. The Native people reported that Protestants had sent missionaries to

“instruct” them in the faith. The nuns imagined the dialog of the Indians rejecting the

Protestant preachers: “‘Who are you?’ say the Natives, ‘you have a wife and the black- robed ones have no wives.’”20 De Andreis confirmed that the Indians he encountered maintained “that the true Fathers of Prayer”—an Indian term for priests—“have no wives and children like Protestant ministers do, but devote themselves wholly to God and to the good of souls.”21

Catholic newcomers also noted that various Native American groups retained

Catholic practices from earlier missionizing efforts. After his tour of the St. Louis area,

Bishop Flaget reported to the pope that some of the Native Americans he encountered had “still some external traces of the faith,” but he doubted the sincerity of internal

19 Jean-Baptiste Blanc to [Mr. Nachary], 12 April 1823, Annales de la propagation de la foi 2, no. 12 (Nov 1827): 353–354; the original letter is F03657, F–83, Fonds de Lyon, APF.

20 Entry for 17 Aug 1818, Dairy of the Voyage of Mother Duchesne and her companions from New Orleans to Saint Louis, Letter 100, BDC2 1:87.

21 De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 24 Feb. 1818, Letter 43, FMFDA, 189.

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commitment.22 Jean-Marie Odin heard rumors that the Shawnees and Delawares who lived on the Castor River in southeast Missouri in the early 1820s “never buried their dead without a cross on the tomb.” The Christian symbol also figured in Shawnee and

Delaware seasonal rituals. At their spring and fall religious ceremonies, when the “old man who speaks to the Great Spirit” led the prayers for a successful hunt and a bountiful crop, he “always holds in his hand a cross.”23 The Sacred Heart nuns reported that an

Algonquin family who came to the convent in Florissant requested that the Catholics baptize their child. The family also sought funerary services for other children. “They brought with them wrapped in skins, two others who were dead, they wanted them buried in holy ground.”24

The indigenous inhabitants of the Mississippi River Valley passed down not just

Catholic practices and admiration for priests, but also material objects from the Jesuit era.

The Sacred Heart nuns recounted that the Indians in Kaskaskia wore crosses and had them blessed. But the newly arrived women religious questioned the depth of the Indians’ religious commitment.25 Respect for the Black Robes and appreciation for Catholic material culture did not necessarily translate into faithful Catholic practice. De Andreis in

St. Louis fretted that, though some Native people had “a strong reverence for priests,”

22 Benedict Joseph Flaget, “Bishop Flaget’s Report of the Diocese of Bardstown to Pius VII, April 10, 1815,” trans. V. F. O'Daniel, Catholic Historical Review 1, no. 3 (Oct. 1915): 318.

23 Jean-Marie Odin to Cholleton, 8 Nov 1824, translation, Box 7, John Rybolt Personnel File, DRMA, translated from Annales de la Propagation de la Foi 2, no. 12 (Nov 1827): 374–389; Original: Letter F03662, F–83, Fonds de Lyon, APF.

24 PDJ, 25 May 1824, SSCSL.

25 Dairy of the Voyage of Mother Duchesne and her companions from New Orleans to Saint Louis, 17 Aug 1818, Letter 100, BDC2 1:87–88.

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they evinced “a great indifference to the Christian religion, which they deem to be only for us, not for them.”26

Building on both the reputation and publicizing practices of the Black Robes, the

Catholic missionaries in the Mississippi River Valley transmitted news of their initial encounters with Native Americans to readers and donors in Europe. DuBourg’s embellished reports sprinkled the pages of the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, whose editor knew good copy when he saw it. Interspersed with other newsworthy, if fabricated, items, including a harrowing tale about a nine-year-old Spanish boy who barely escaped being eaten after being fattened up by Indians up the Missouri, the editor printed an encouraging account about DuBourg’s encounter with the Osages.27 DuBourg reported having received a visit from seven Osage warriors, who invited him to come to their homeland in the autumn. “I dare not refuse,” he wrote, adding that he intended for two of the leading Euro-American inhabitants who held great influence among the

Osages to accompany him. Mindful of the custom of gift-giving, the bishop gave each of the visiting warriors a crucifix and a medal, and “tried to make them understand that the crucifix was the image of the Son of the Great Spirit, who came to earth, and who died in torments to make peace for us with his Father.” He held no confidence that his on-the-fly

26 De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 3 Sept 1818, Letter 53, FMFDA, 233.

27 The story about the Spanish boy escaping cannibalism appears in Annales de la Propagation de la Foi 1, no. 1 (1822): 34. The editor of this first issue gathered and reprinted pieces from other publications. This same story of the Spanish boy appeared in the document Angelo Inglesi brought to Europe for publication in 1820, and in the enlarged edition two years later: Notice Sur L’état Actuel de La Mission de La Louisiane (Paris: Adrien Le Clerc, 1820), 48; Notice sur l’état actuel de la mission de la Louisiane. Nouvelle édition à laquelle on a ajouté de nouveaux détails (Lyon: Chez Rusand, 1822), 50–51.

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theological translations hit the mark, but he hoped the proposed trip—the first Catholic mission to the Osages under his watch—would prove productive. “My God! What consolation it would be for me to provide help for the salvation of these poor people!”28

What the Osages likely meant as a political gesture that signified their own power and confidence as a nation—welcoming the new spiritual leader, inviting him in peace to their turf, and accepting the trinkets he offered them—DuBourg read as an evangelistic opportunity. Such were the misunderstandings that saturated Indian-American relations throughout the region. The Osages were not the only indigenous group to recognize the value of establishing a relationship with the bishop, a man of spiritual and worldly power.

The Sauks, too, sent a delegation of twenty “with their chief to make a formal visit” to

DuBourg, to whom they gave “signs of great reverence and respect.”29

In their letters and reports, the Catholic missionaries in the Mississippi River

Valley did their best to wrap their minds around and explain to their supporters and colleagues in Paris, Rome, and Ghent the Native people’s spirituality. But they could only see the indigenous practices through the lens of Catholic dogma. “They have a kind of natural religion,” De Andreis expounded, “or rather, superstition.”30 The Indians he encountered in St. Louis believed in a supreme being “whom in their language they call

28 Annales de la propagation de la foi, 1, no. 1 (1822): 38–39. The original letter was written probably in 1820. Perhaps in preparation for DuBourg’s planned journey, De Andreis had hoped to spend the summer of 1820 with the Osages “to learn their language, translate the shorter catechism, and begin to make some converts. The bishop judged the project premature, however, because the number of priests is still too small for us to be away for a long time from the flock.” De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 4 Sept 1820, Letter 84, FMFDA, 366.

29 De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, 26 Feb 1818, Letter 44, FMFDA, 195.

30 De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 3 Sept 1818, Letter 53, FMFDA, 233.

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Chissemenetu, which means 'Lord of Life'; to him they address their prayers and offer the first fumes of their pipes.” Overlooking the violent devotional practices within his own religious tradition, and his own personal embrace of pain and self-denial as a pathway pleasing to God, De Andreis judged the Indians’ self-mortification rituals brutal. “To please God they treat themselves sometimes most cruelly; indeed their whole religion consists in these practices, some of which are too horrible to relate.”31

The linguistic divide exacerbated the theological chasm between Catholicism and

Native American religious practices. De Andreis and the other missionaries in the early

31 De Andreis to Carlo Domenico Sicardi, 24 Feb. 1818, Letter 43, FMFDA, 189. For De Andreis’s celebration of physical suffering as redemptive, consider this poem he wrote, in English, in 1819: When soul’s salvation is at stake every thing is sweet for God’s sake; and when a man has chosen for God to be half dead has nothing more to dread! Let him be burn’d or frozen let him be drown’d or slain his happiness increases at every pain. FMFDA, 221n459. See also De Andreis’s theology of suffering, as articulated in a letter to a colleague in Italy: “Whenever external problems are not joined with internal ones, they are tolerable and even sometimes pleasant; but when the nails of the cross pierce both body and soul, then the poor Adam is destroyed and human strength is really exhausted. The divine is then made more clearly visible than ever.” De Andreis to Carlo Saverio De Petris, Letter 72, FMFDA, 316. The Vincentians were not as extreme in their self-mortification practices as other orders. The Sisters of Loretto, founded in Kentucky in 1812 by Belgian priest Charles Nerickx, engaged in harsh practices that endangered their lives, including “going barefooted in the snow, the rain, the mud, etc.” and “sleeping with all their clothes, which in summer, are soaked with sweat, and in winter are often bordered with a band of ice.” Within eleven years, more than twenty had died of tuberculosis, all under the age of thirty. Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati, 11 Sept 1824, in Augustin C. Wand and M. Lilliana Owens, eds., Documents: Nerinckx—Kentucky— Loretto, 1804–1851, in Archives Propaganda Fide, Rome (St. Louis, Mo.: Mary Loretto Press, 1972), 237; see also Flaget to “Most Eminent Father” [Propaganda Fide], 8 Feb [1825?], ibid., 57–60. On Nerinckx’s reputation for self-mortification, see Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 50–51, 72–73. 193

nineteenth century did not understand the languages of the Native peoples they sought to convert. They relied on interpreters, who stumbled in trying to transmit Catholic doctrine into Native idioms, leading the missionaries to conclude “their impoverished tongue lacks any term corresponding to ideas of religion, conscience, law, sin, etc.”32 The Catholic theological scaffolding, constructed through the centuries, teetered in the New World context. A constant complaint among the priests was that the Indians focused on “the needs of daily life” and did not grasp notions of “the future life” or what happened after death, nor did they concern themselves with other abstractions so central to Catholic doctrine.33 “These poor people remain incapable of forming even one idea of spiritual, eternal and divine things.”34

At times De Andreis and his colleagues glimpsed how indigenous people compared their own lives to those of Europeans and Euro-Americans. “They believe themselves as happy in their wild life, and compassionately judge those who live in civilized society as slaves.”35 But, steeped in Eurocentric cultural chauvinism, the missionaries failed to understand the critique. They merely reflected back their own sense of pity for the Native Americans’ unenlightened state. “As for the Indians, God knows when the moment designated by Providence will come,” Joseph Rosati sighed to his friend in Baltimore.36 Jean-Marie Odin concurred. Stationed at the new Catholic

32 De Andreis to Filippo Giriodi, 2 Jan 1820, Letter 75, FMFDA, 327.

33 De Andreis to Filippo Giriodi, 2 Jan 1820, Letter 75, FMFDA, 327; De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 4 Feb 1819, Letter 59, FMFDA, 261.

34 De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 4 Feb 1819, Letter 59, FMFDA, 260.

35 De Andreis to Filippo Giriodi, 2 Jan 1820, Letter 75, FMFDA, 327.

36 Joseph Rosati to Simon Bruté, 24 Jan 1822, CMNT II 3 o, UNDA. 194

seminary at the Barrens in Missouri, Odin and his fellow priests traded with the

Shawnees who encamped nearby. “They give us their best game. We give them in return bread and some objects of devotion. I love these poor savages,” he wrote to his sister.

“They are so good, so grateful when they are treated humanely. We must pray very much for their conversion.”37

Catholics consolidated their disparate Native American proselytizing impulses in the early 1820s, funneling their missionary resources into a new joint project between the

Jesuits and the Religious of the Sacred Heart in the St. Louis area. But they continued to extend their ministrations to Native peoples at other places in the Mississippi Valley as circumstances permitted. When Odin, a French priest, travelled with John Timon, a young American seminarian, on a mission circuit through southeast Missouri and the

Arkansas Territory, he leapt at the chance to celebrate the Mass in a Quapaw village on the south bank of the Arkansas River. A chief named Sarasin had invited them, sending his sons to accompany them across the river. Odin and Timon “decorated a little rustic altar,” then explained, through an interpreter what the ceremony meant, promising “to recommend them to the Great Spirit” during the ritual. Odin then celebrated “the holy sacrifice,” flooded with compassion for “all these good savages” who, he feared, would probably never have “the happiness to know the true religion.” The Quapaws observed the ritual respectfully, copying the unfamiliar postures and watching the drama unfold at the altar. They knelt when the priest knelt, though their untrained knees “could not for a

37 (Abbé) Bony, “Vie de Monseigneur Jean-Marie Odin de La Congrégation de La Mission, Archevêque de La Nouvelle-Orléans, 1800–1870,” Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission 60 (1895): 584.

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long time bear the hardness of the ground.” After the ceremony, Odin gave them “some images,” perhaps prayer cards with pictures of Jesus, Mary, or the saints.38

The Quapaws then gave the Catholic missionaries a tour of their sacred spaces in the village, including the “sanctuary of the dead,” a place normally off-limits for visitors.

Sarasin had explained Quapaw cosmology to the visitors the previous night, over a meal, and the traditions reverberated as they saw the repository. The Quapaw origin story the missionaries chronicled began with a flood. Led by a god garbed in white, the Quapaws emerged from an abyss and came to a cold land in the north. From that place they traveled south, battling various other groups, until they settled on the Arkansas River.

The missionaries also recorded their understanding of the framework of Quapaw religion and some of their rituals. The Quapaws “adore as the first and greatest of the gods” the

Great Spirit, known also as the Master of Life. They also revered the white eagle. They believed in an afterlife for the soul, where good Indians went to a land “where the deer and the bears are plentiful, fat, and easy to kill,” and the bad Indians landed in a place where the game was “rare, skinny, and difficult to reach.” Their worship practices included offering the first fruits of their crops—corn and melons—to the Master of Life.

In this ceremony they cut the corn and melons into pieces and placed them, along with a chopped up dog, on a mat. The old men then began to dance, and young girls, worked into a frenzy, jumped on the offering mat, then were thrown into the river by the men.39

38 Jean-Marie Odin to Cholleton, 8 Nov 1824, translation, Box 7, Rybolt Personnel File, DRMA; John Timon, “Barrens Memoir. By John Timon, C.M. (1861),” ed. John E. Rybolt, Vincentian Heritage Journal 22, no. 1 (April 2001): 58.

39 Odin to Cholleton, 8 Nov 1824, translation, Box 7, Rybolt Personnel File, DRMA.

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Finding resonances with Catholic doctrines and traditions—God, heaven, hell, purgatory, Noah and the flood—the missionaries hoped the Quapaws would embrace

Catholicism. They perceived interest on the part of Sarasin and some of their other interlocutors. “They want to have absolutely a black robe,” Odin rejoiced, “to learn to pray, agriculture, and civilization.” The Quapaws asked Odin to advocate for them to “the father of the black robes,” and promised that they would take care of the holy man sent to them. “He will not die of starvation in his cabin.”40 What Odin took as longing for

Catholic ministrations the Quapaw may have understood quite differently. For generations the Quapaws had welcomed Catholic missionaries and priests in their villages in order to incorporate them—and the French community more broadly—into their economic framework grounded in gift-giving. Sarasin’s hospitality toward Odin and

Timon may have been aimed to win the spiritual leaders’ confidence and friendship, and thereby gain access to spiritual and material goods, a strategy his predecessors had followed successfully.41

In 1820 Angelo Inglesi, an Italian-Count-turned-priest who had wowed Bishop

DuBourg with a heady mixture of panache and devotion, embarked from New Orleans back to Europe, from whence he had come a few short years earlier. DuBourg was sending his darling on a fund-raising and recruitment tour to generate more resources for

40 Timon, “Barrens Memoir,” 58; Odin to Cholleton, 8 Nov 1824, translation, Box 7, Rybolt Personnel File, DRMA.

41 Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 85–87. For an account of Vincentian missions west of the Mississippi River throughout the nineteenth century, see John E. Rybolt, “Vincentian Missions among Native Americans,” Vincentian Heritage Journal 10, no. 2 (October 1989): 150–79.

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Catholic ministrations in the Mississippi River Valley. Packed in Inglesi’s satchel was a document DuBourg had written, detailing the successes and prospects in his vast diocese.

Prior to his fall from grace, Inglesi had Notice sur l'etat actuel de la mission de la

Louisiane published in Paris in 1820 and reprinted in Turin and Lyon a few years later.42

Part status report, part donor appeal, the Notice’s sixty-plus pages drip with DuBourg’s eagerness to prove himself and to establish both the viability and the great needs of his diocese. Wrapping up the booklet is a reprint of a Mandemant, a circular DuBourg originally sent throughout his diocese to drum up support for a proposed Osage mission.43 The elite European audience must have been titillated by his optimism, and by the news of the Osages’ invitation for the missionaries to come. “The day is finally at hand,” he raved, “which, by opening the door of the Indian nations, must crown the wishes that we have not ceased to form for their salvation.” To saturate the trip to the

Osage homeland with God’s favor, the bishop asked his priests to recite at the daily Mass a special collect as well as “the beautiful prayer of St. Francis Xavier,” a copy of which

42 L’Ami de la religion et du Roi: journal ecclesiastique, politique et littéraire (Paris) 26, no. 669 (6 Jan 1821): 247; Notice Sur L’état Actuel de La Mission de La Louisiane, Dernière éd. à laquelle on a ajouté de nouveau détails (Turin: H. Marietti, 1822), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbfr.0020; Notice sur l’état actuel de la mission de la Louisiane. Nouvelle édition à laquelle on a ajouté de nouveaux détails (Lyon: Chez Rusand, 1822). Caught in a compromising position with a married woman in Rome, Inglesi managed to deliver both funds and new missionary recruits for the diocese before losing DuBourg’s esteem. Cardinal Consalvi to DuBourg, 11 Jan 1822, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 2, no. 4 (Oct 1920): 211–213; F.G. Holweck, “Contribution to the ‘Inglesi Affair,’” SLCHR 5, no. 1 (Jan 1923): 14–39; Annabelle M. Melville, Louis William Dubourg: Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, Bishop of Montauban, and Archbishop of Besançon, 1766– 1833 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986), 2:572–601.

43 The Mandement is dated, St. Louis, 15 Oct 1820. 198

DuBourg enclosed in Latin, French and English, to be distributed “to all persons who are interested in the progress of the faith.”44

DuBourg’s high hopes for the Osage visit did not materialize in the way he had envisioned. He originally planned to depart for the Osage villages, with his faithful terrier

De Andreis in tow, in the summer of 1820, but then postponed the trip because of personnel shortages.45 After De Andreis’s fatal illness that fall, the personnel crisis deepened. DuBourg handed the Osage mission project off to Flemish priest Charles de la

Croix, confessor to the Sacred Heart sisters. De la Croix made two trips up the Missouri

River in the spring and summer of 1822, where the Osages received him with signs of respect.46 He baptized several mixed-race and Osage children, distributed crosses “to all the chiefs,” and even managed to speak in front of a “great council,” decked out “in surplice and stole,” and holding a crucifix, a striking ensemble sure to impress his Native audience.47 The two Presbyterian missionaries from nearby Harmony Mission may have

44 Notice Sur L’état Actuel de La Mission de La Louisiane (Paris: Adrien Le Clerc, 1820), 55–57.

45 De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, [July 1820], Letter 82, FMFDA, 361; De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 4 Sept 1820, Letter 84, FMFDA, 366.

46 Michaud to Grand-Vicar of Diocese of Chambéry, [no date, delivered in July 1823], printed in Annales de la propagation de la foi 1, no. 5 (March 1825): 53–57; John Rothensteiner, “Early Missionary Efforts among the Indians in the Diocese of St. Louis,” SLCHR 2 (1920): 64–66; Philippine Duchesne to Sophie Barat, 30 Oct 1822, Letter 163, BDC2 2:72. Michaud mistakenly dates these two missionary journeys in 1821. Gilbert J. Garraghan’s overwhelming evidence points to 1822. See de la Croix’s letters, translated and transcribed in Garraghan, Saint Ferdinand de Florissant: The Story of an Ancient Parish (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1923), 174–183. See also Joseph Rosati to Simon Bruté, 11 Jun 1822, CMNT II 3 o, UNDA.

47 Michaud to Grand-Vicar, 57; Jean-Marie Odin to Cholleton, 21 Oct 1822, Letter F03653, F–83, Fonds de Lyon, APF [this letter appeared in print in Annales de la propagation de la foi 1, no. 2 (1823): 50–54]; De la Croix to Joseph Rosati, 4 Nov 1822, translated in Garraghan, Saint Ferdinand, 182. 199

been less bedazzled, though they did store his vestments and altar equipment when he departed.48

De la Croix had made a solid start, even if he had failed to build the church he intended in the Osage village. Still, news of his voyages, circulating in the Catholic missionary journal Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, trumpeted among a European reading audience Catholics’ dedication to rescuing Native Americans from eternal damnation. For those more motivated by gloomier tones, Jean-Marie Odin’s assessment may have struck a chord. Odin, then a priest-in-training at the new Catholic seminary St.

Mary’s of the Barrens Seminary in southeastern Missouri, lamented the dearth of trained missionary priests in the Mississippi River Valley. Without these, he mused, “how will we be able to fly to the rescue of the poor Indians? Yet all these souls have been bought with the blood of God!”49 DuBourg sang the same tune to the powers in Rome, adding a jarring note of Protestant competition. The “great work” of securing missionaries for

Native Americans required prompt attention, he urged them. “Do manfully gird your loins to do it! If you do not, I am afraid the Protestant missionaries will wrest from us this so desirable palm of victory.”50 As they had been during his sojourn in Europe five years prior, the Society of Jesus, in particular, was on DuBourg’s radar for this vital work.

Though the Catholic hierarchy agreed that Jesuits would be the perfect personnel for such missions, they wrung their hands when the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, protesting a

48 Garraghan, Saint Ferdinand, 182.

49 Jean-Marie Odin to [?], 2 Aug 1823, printed in Annales de la propagation de la foi, 1, no. 5 (March 1825): 73.

50 DuBourg to Cardinal Fontana, St. Matthias Day [24 Feb] 1821, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 2, no. 2–3 (April-July 1920): 136. The Protestant threat looming in his letter was Harmony Mission on the Osage River in western Missouri, planted by the United Foreign Missionary Society in 1821. 200

“scarcity of laborers,” prohibited the order from taking on “this noble work.”51 DuBourg would have to find the means on his own.

The bishop was equal to the challenge, almost. A man with an enterprising bent and an expansive vision, DuBourg initiated dozens of projects in the Mississippi River

Valley—church buildings, schools, colleges, houses for male and female religious. He scrambled and hustled for money during his entire tenure in the United States to pay for these projects. And he usually fell short. Despite his fund-raising savvy and his business scheming, his charitable and money-making sources did not satisfy his needs. The bishop was constantly indebted to creditors, to his family, to his supporters, to merchants. His affable personality and charm, not to mention his title, gave him ready access to credit and good will. He was less successful at paying off what he owed. His subordinates and successors in Baltimore, St. Louis, and New Orleans had to clean up the many financial messes his outsized ambition created.

Money was at the heart of all of DuBourg’s plans, and of many of his disappointments. Educated in France before the Revolution, he had absorbed the beliefs and practices of the ancien régime. In particular he was accustomed to government support of religion. After fleeing the revolutionary tumult in France, he settled in

Baltimore, where his experiences running a college shattered any expectations that the

United States government would aid his endeavors. But still, in the well-heeled mid-

Atlantic, he had access to many wealthy families, not to mention clerics with deep pockets and good connections, who understood that Catholic institutions needed their

51 Cardinal Fontana to DuBourg, 2 Jun 1821, 23 Jun 1821, translated in DBPF, SLCHR 2, no. 2–3 (April-July 1920): 143–145, quote from 145.

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generous support.52 Not so in the Mississippi River Valley. Until quite recently, the western side of the river, where the bulk of the European and American population lived, had been under Spanish dominion. A Catholic nation, Spain funded its clergy and missionaries, as had France before it. The Catholic population in the region was accustomed to royal funds flowing to their bishops and priests, even if only in dribs and drabs. Added to that now outdated cultural expectation, the occupants, particularly north of the lucrative cotton region, were not particularly wealthy, and they had no established practices of donating significant funds to establish or sustain Catholic institutions or personnel. Many mistakenly believed that the Catholic hierarchy and the religious orders in their region, the Jesuits in particular, had plenty of money. DuBourg faced the constant challenge of disabusing them of this belief, training the Catholic inhabitants through persuasion and shame to aid their prelate and his many projects.

But Mississippi River Valley inhabitants’ ignorance of and resistance to

American-style charitable giving for religious causes were not the only issues. There was

DuBourg himself. The man simply could not contain his enthusiasm and aspiration.

Everywhere he looked, he saw opportunities. He threw himself at each one, failing to count the cost and consider whether he had human and financial means to bring it to completion. Or, perhaps he did consider the cost, but he lacked the skill to do such accounting accurately.

Enter the Civilization Fund. No federal money flowed to religious causes in the

United States. Except when it did. In the early years of nationhood, the US government

52 For a glimpse of DuBourg’s flush eastern networks, see Garraghan, Jesuits 1:70.

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had supported Christian missionaries engaged in Indian education on a piecemeal basis.53

George Washington’s secretary of state Henry Knox initiated the first official civilization effort, designed to promote Indian agriculture instead of hunting, to introduce them to

Christianity, and to replace notions of communal land ownership with ideals of private property.54 By the end of the 1810s, government officials were ready to formalize and systematize their relationship with Christian organizations to promote Indian civilization.

In the midst of grappling over whether to admit Missouri into the Union as a free or slave state, Congress passed “An act making provision for the civilization of the Indian tribes,

53 For instance, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn instructed the Cherokee Indian Agent Return J. Meigs to build a schoolhouse and provide aid to Presbyterian Gideon Blackburn for his mission to the Cherokees in 1803. The government also promised educational resources to Native American groups in treaties, as when William Henry Harrison promised $3000 over ten years to the Delawares for agricultural and domestic instruction in exchange for a swath of land. In the midst of the Louisiana Purchase negotiations, the Kaskaskias secured seven years of government aid to support a Roman Catholic priest, at $100 per year, who would perform his religious duties as well as teach children to read. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 1:146–147; Ronald Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education, 1815–1838,” History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 397–399; Robert M. Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground: The Indian Land Cession Treaties of William Henry Harrison,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 420; Alice C. Fletcher, Indian Education and Civilization: A Report Prepared in Answer to Senate Resolution of February 23, 1885, 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate, Ex. Doc. 95 (Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1888), 162. For a survey of governmental support for Christian missionary engagement with Native peoples at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Martha Letitia Edwards, “Government Patronage of Indian Missions, 1789– 1832” (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1916), 15–67.

54 John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 133–135. On how both the federal presence—in terms of Indian agencies, interpreters, and factories—and the civilization program both expanded under Thomas Jefferson’s administration, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 206–240, 277–317.

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adjoining the frontier settlements” in early 1819.55 Purportedly designed to protect

“against the further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes,” the Civilization Act authorized the president to:

employ capable persons of good moral character, to instruct [the Indian tribes adjoining the frontier settlements of the United States] in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and performing such other duties as may be enjoined, according to such instructions and rules as the president may give and prescribe for the regulation of their conduct, in the discharge of their duties.56

The act set aside $10,000 annually to fund such purposes.57

55 The Senate first considered the Indian Civilization bill on 19 Feb 1819, and passed it on 1 March 1819; the House concurred on 2 March 1819; the president signed the bill on 3 March 1819. Congress was in the midst of a heated debate about Missouri. On 13 February 1819, New York Representative James Tallmadge, Jr., had introduced an amendment to the legislation to admit Missouri as a state, which would have limited the extension of slavery and provided for gradual emancipation. The House passed the bill with the Tallmadge Amendment on 16 Feb 1819. The Senate took up the bill, but rejected the amendment, and sent it back to the House. On 2 March 1819, the same day it passed the Civilization Act, the House reaffirmed the Tallmadge Amendment and sent the bill back to the Senate. The Senate stood its ground and volleyed their unamended bill back to the House, which once again confirmed the amendment. With such an impasse, the bill failed. Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, Being the Second Session of the Fifteenth Congress, Begun and Held in the City of Washington, November 16, 1818, and in the Forty-Third Year of the Sovereignty of the Said United States (Washington: Printed by E. De Krafft, 1818 [i.e. 1819]), 288, 289, 323; Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, at the Second Session of the Fifteenth Congress in the Forty-Third Year of the Independence of the United States. (Washington: Ptd. by E. DeKrafft, 1818 [i.e. 1819]), 339, 351; The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States: With an Appendix, Containing Important State Papers and Public Documents, and All the Laws of a Public Nature; with a Copious Index. Fifteenth Congress, Second Session: November 16, 1818, to March 3, 1819, Inclusive. Compiled from Authentic Materials (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1855), 1166, 1170–1217, 1433–1438.

56 Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845, vol. 3, 15th Congress, 2nd Session (Boston: C.C. Little and J. Brown, 1845), 516–517.

57 Peters, Public Statutes at Large 3, 15th Congress, 2nd Session, 517. On the Civilization Act and funds, see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1780–1834 (Cambridge: 204

The implementation of the Civilization Act and Fund fell to the secretary of war,

John C. Calhoun, in the early years.58 Prior to his starring role as a nullification theorist, the young Calhoun had served for seven years in Congress as a representative from South

Carolina—elected at age twenty-eight—before being tapped by Monroe for service in the war department. A native of the Carolina backcountry who had Presbyterian roots,

Calhoun was an astute administrator and proslavery advocate with grand visions for his own political future and dim views of the capacities of Indians to govern themselves.59

To manage the government’s civilization program, he circulated increasingly detailed policies and procedures, informing missionaries in the field and leaders of missionary organizations about how to access, dispense, and account for the funds. He clarified that the government monies could not be directed toward teaching literacy and arithmetic alone; instead, “the plan of education” had to extend to “practical knowledge” for both boys and girls.60 The government would cover up to two-thirds of the construction expenses for school buildings, but would not make payment until after the construction

Harvard University Press, 1962), 219–224; Prucha, Great Father, 1:145–158; Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–61; Fletcher, Indian Education, 161–165.

58 Indian affairs remained under the umbrella of the War Department until 1849. In that year the Department of the Interior was created, and what had become known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was located under its jurisdiction, which shifted the federal government’s handling of Indians from the military to the civil arm of government. Fletcher, Indian Education, 107–108.

59 For a readable biography highlighting the connections between Calhoun’s personal life and his public career, see Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993).

60 John C. Calhoun to Samuel Worcester, 3 Sept 1819, M15: Letters Sent by the Secretary of War Relating to Indian Affairs, 1800–1824, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA; Circular on Civilization of Indians, Department of War, 3 Sept 1819, M15, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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had begun. To guard against fraud, the agent of Indian affairs for the tribe or area where the school was being built had to certify the “facts” of such construction projects.61

Enmeshing the missionaries and their sponsoring organizations in the project of

American domination, Calhoun instructed the staff of such missionary schools not only to

“set a good example of sobriety, industry & honesty,” but also to convey a particular version of American-Indian relations and the value of cooperation and quiescence.

Schoolteachers were “to impress on the minds of the Indians, the friendly and benevolent views of the government toward them, and the advantage to them in yielding to the policies of the government, and cooperating with it, in such measures as it may deem necessary for their civilization and happiness.”62

Back in 1815, when DuBourg seized on Native American missions as a way to draw personnel and resources to his new diocese, he had begun to fantasize about securing federal aid. Like his Protestant competitors, the enterprising bishop envisioned conjoining his religious goals to his adopted country’s political goals, and thus reaping the benefit of government support for Indian missions. From Rome, weeks after his ordination, DuBourg asked Archbishop John Carroll in Baltimore to inform President

James Madison of his plans. Citing the government’s promise to support “any zealous minister who would dedicate himself to that laborious and perilous undertaking,”

DuBourg expressed his hope that the president would give land and monetary aid to his

61 Circular on Regulations for the civilization of Indians, Department of War, 29 Feb 1820, M15, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA; see also American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 2 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 273.

62 Circular on Regulations for the civilization of Indians, Department of War, 29 Feb 1820, M15, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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proposed missions. He instructed Carroll to present “the matter as a seminary of

Preachers for the poor Indians, and of teachers for their children.”63

He would have to wait several years before he found attentive ears in Washington.

When he caught wind of the government’s Civilization Fund, he saw it as manna from heaven. In early 1823 he traveled from St. Louis to Washington to assess the prospects for government support for Catholic missions.64 The bishop was right to be curious: the government had only supplied dollars from the Civilization Fund to Protestant projects.

Would Catholics qualify for these grants? A consummate politician himself, DuBourg insinuated that Catholics were indeed the best qualified and the most experienced at

Indian missions. He suggested to Calhoun that, whatever methods the government saw fit to use on the “Eastern tribes,” such were unlikely to succeed among “the Western and far remote ones.” Instead, he suggested that “the work of civilisation should commence with humanising them by the kind doctrines of Christianity, instilled into their minds, not by the doubtful and tedious process of books, but by familiar conversations, striking representations, and by the pious lives of their spiritual teachers.” Catholicism, not book- bound Protestantism, was the avenue to reach the heart of the Native people: a traditional

Catholicism mediated by “men, disenthralled from all family cares, abstracted from every

63 DuBourg to John Carroll, 10 Nov 1815, 8A H7, AJCP, AAB. When he learned of Carroll’s death, DuBourg repeated his request to the new archbishop, Leonard Neale, adding that Catholic missionaries Jean-François Rivet and Gabriel Richard had previously received such government aid for their Indian missions in the Illinois Country and Detroit, respectively. DuBourg to Leonard Neale, 5 Feb 1816, Archbishop Leonard Neale Papers, AAB.

64 Another concern prompted the trip to Washington: securing clear title for the Ursuline property in New Orleans, which the sisters intended to give to the diocese when they moved to their new convent downriver, beyond the city limits. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 242–244, 256–257; Melville, DuBourg 2:618–619.

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earthly enjoyment, inured to fatigue and self-denial, living in the flesh as if strangers to all sensual inclinations.” Such men—committed missionaries under vows, unmarried, set apart for this work—“are well calculated to strike the man of nature as a supernatural species of beings, entitled to his almost implicit belief.” The “unremitting charity” of such missionaries, DuBourg envisioned, “will easily subdue the ferocity of their hearts, and by degrees assimilate their inclinations to those of their fellow Christians.” It was, after all, the Catholics, not the Protestants, who could boast of successful Indian missions in earlier eras.65

Charmed by the reference to successful Catholic precedent, and perhaps mindful that the government should not play favorites to the Protestants, Calhoun promised the bishop $200 per missionary per year, for up to three missionaries, to serve among the

“remote tribes” beyond the Osages and the line of U.S. military posts. Calhoun also explained that the government would “contribute towards the expense of the buildings (of which an estimate must be submitted to this Department) which it may be necessary to erect for the accommodation of the Missionaries, in the proportion mentioned in the regulations.”66 DuBourg countered by requesting support for four missionaries, designated to serve the three posts Calhoun had identified: Council Bluffs, River St.

Pierre, and Prairie du Chien.67 Calhoun agreed, but immediately DuBourg enlarged, and in fact completely revised, his request once again. Instead of sending missionaries

65 Louis William DuBourg to John C. Calhoun, 17 Feb 1823, M271: Letters Received by the Office of the Secretary of War Relating to Indian Affairs, 1800–1823, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

66 John C. Calhoun to Louis William DuBourg, 20 Feb 1823, M15, Roll 5, RG 75, NARA.

67 DuBourg to Calhoun, 10 March 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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straight away to those distant posts, he proposed establishing a “nursery of missionaries” in Florissant, Missouri, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. At this seminary fledgling missionaries would train for service, imbibing the language, customs, and manners of the Native peoples. Aiding their learning would be “Indian youths of the most important tribes,” housed and educated in the seminary. A handful of “young

Clergymen” and two superiors were readying themselves to establish this institution.

DuBourg pledged that within two years this seminary would generate “five or six” missionaries who would then be dispatched to the designated posts. Other recruits would take their place at the seminary, and the whole process would continue. Instead of just sending missionaries, DuBourg proposed planting a missionary generator, which would populate the whole western territory with suitable missionaries in just a few short years.

Breathlessly, he begged that the secretary of war up the government’s commitment to

$1000 annually.68 Calhoun welcomed the new plan, but he stood firm on the financial package, and insisted that the government could make no advances or payments until the establishment “has actually commenced its operations, with a suitable number of Indian youths, of which fact, and the number of pupils, the certificate of Gen'l Clark will be the proper evidence.”69

68 DuBourg to Calhoun, 17 March 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

69 Calhoun to DuBourg, 21 March 1823, M15, Roll 5, RG 75, NARA. Ever on the lookout for ways to promote the fiscal outlook of his projects, DuBourg had pressed Calhoun to start the clock for the government’s payments as soon as the missionaries departed Maryland for Florissant. He even deputized a French diplomat to give Calhoun “official notice of the day of their [the missionaries'] departure.” DuBourg to Calhoun, 21 March 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA; DuBourg to de Menou, 25 March 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA; Count de Menou to John C. Calhoun, 28 Apr 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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Securing the missionaries DuBourg advertised to Calhoun was in fact his other task in the east. He undertook a series of negotiations with the Jesuit Superior in

Maryland, persuading him to take on the Catholic missions to Native Americans in

Missouri.70 At last, the order DuBourg had been praying and pining for had agreed to locate in his diocese.71 The Jesuit Superior appointed two Belgian priests, five Belgian novices, and three lay brothers—one Dutch, one American, and one Belgian—from the novitiate at White Marsh, for the mission.72 He also arranged for Tom and Polly, Moises and Nancy, and Isaac and Succy, three enslaved couples, to relocate with the religious crew.73 The Concordat DuBourg and the Jesuit Superior signed stipulated that the Jesuits would control not only the missions along the Missouri River, but also “all the churches,

70 DuBourg explained to his brother that the Jesuits, facing a financial crisis, had contemplated closing their novitiate. The promise of government funding persuaded them to ally with DuBourg. DuBourg to his brother, 17 March 1823, in dos Santos, “Letters Concerning Some Missions,” 152. The letter was originally published as DuBourg à son frère, 17 March 1823, Annales de la propagation de la foi 1, no. 5 (March 1825): 37–41. See also Garraghan, Jesuits 1:50–52.

71 For DuBourg’s previous attempts to secure Jesuits for his diocese, see Garraghan, Jesuits 1:40–45. On Baltimore archbishop Ambrose Maréchal’s resistance to the plan, see Ambrose Maréchal to Robert Gradwell, 24 Jun 1823, 9 [Sept or Aug] 1823, Document 195, Thomas Hughes, ed., History of the Society of Jesus in North America: Colonial and Federal. Documents. Vol. 1, Pt. 2, Nos. 141–224 (1605–1838) (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 1018–1021.

72 Novices, in this case, were Jesuits-priests-in-training. Lay brothers, also known as coadjutor brothers, were second-tier members of the order. They performed manual and skilled labor to support the community, but had no priestly responsibilities. The Belgians had been recruited for American missions by Charles Nerinckx, a Belgian priest serving in Kentucky, during his two European fund-raising trips in 1816–1817 and 1820–1821. Gilbert J. Garraghan, “St. Regis Seminary,” Catholic Historical Review 4, no. 4 (January 1919): 456; Garraghan, Jesuits, 1:12–15.

73 Certificate of Slave Transfer from Adam Marshall, agent of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland, to Rev. Charles F. VanQuickenborne, Washington, D.C., 10 Apr 1823, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

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chapels, colleges & seminaries of learning already erected and which shall hereafter be erected.” The Jesuits promised to establish a seminary to prepare missionaries, and within two years to send at least four missionaries to the “Indian Settlements.” DuBourg pledged to transfer a 350-acre tract of land in Florissant to the Jesuits, and promised to pass along any money he secured from the government for the missions.74

The leader of the migrating Jesuit troupe, Charles Felix VanQuickenborne, detailed his plan for the Catholic mission for the War Department, an elaboration of

DuBourg’s proposal. The school would be composed of two institutions: a Jesuit seminary for boys, to be established on the farm the bishop had offered to give them when the missionaries arrived, and the Sacred Heart convent school for girls, which had been operating in the town of Florissant, Missouri, since 1819. In addition to educating the children of local Euro-Americans, each would receive six to ten Indian children, enrolling them at the age of nine or ten at the oldest. The children would follow a course of study of four to six years, “during which everything should be taught them, according to the regulations issued at the department of war.” A year or two after these educational

74 Concordat of Jesuits with Bp DuBourg, 19 March 1823, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC. The farm was actually smaller, in the order of 212 acres. Garraghan, Jesuits 1:63n45. For a detailed analysis of all the negotiations, including reprints of many primary documents, see Garraghan, Jesuits 1:55–72. Understanding that the produce from his donated farm and the government funds combined would not cover all of the expenses of the proposed seminary, DuBourg counted on divine help. “Providence will supply the rest,” he wrote to the Jesuit Father General in Rome. But either he did not explain the financial gap to the Jesuits in Maryland, or in their zeal for embarking on the mission they failed to hear him. In explaining the plan to the archbishop, the Maryland superior’s proxy indicated that the “United States would defray” the expenses of the mission. After signing the Concordat, the Jesuits quickly learned that DuBourg had no travel money for them. They would have to beg throughout the east coast before departing. DuBourg à Fortis, jour de Pâques [29 March] 1823, Benedict Fenwick to Maréchal, 13 March 1823, DuBourg à Van Quickenborne, St. jour de Pâques [29 Mar] 1823, translated in Garraghan, Jesuits 1:60, 68, 70.

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projects commenced, two of the missionaries, who had by this time learned the indigenous language of the target Indian nation, would “go to them; stay with them; gain their confidence and endeavour to prevail upon those that are best disposed, to come to a tract of land designated & granted by government for that purpose, there to live after the manner of civilised nations.” This mission settlement—VanQuickenborne called it a

“civilising establishment”—would be the locus of the project, where the Indians would learn agriculture and live under U.S. law. One or two missionaries would reside there, and another would stay “with the remainder of the tribe still wandering,” recruiting from this population additional numbers to send to the mission settlement. Some of the Indian students graduating from the mission schools at Florissant, preferably in married pairs, would be sent to the mission settlement “and by their example encourage the new beginners.” Once the majority of the nation had been brought to the settlement, the missionaries would start the process over with another nation.75

Ambitious and naïve, the plan mimicked, but diverged from its Protestant counterparts. The Protestant missions were conceived as all-in-one establishments: educational, agricultural, spiritual complexes planted within Native communities designed to mold Indian children into Euro-American habits and to draw Indian adults into the orb of Protestant preaching. The Catholic schools would be planted in a Euro-

American settlement—Florissant—and would educate a limited number of Indian children, who would act as both pupils and instructors, familiarizing the Catholic missionaries with “their habits and language,” and preparing to serve “as guides,

75 VanQuickenborne, Some views on the manner of Civilizing the Indian tribes on the Missouri, [1823], M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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interpreters and aides to the missionaries when they are sent to the scattered tribes.”76

The focus would be on readying missionaries with the necessary skills and knowledge to live among the Native people and to usher them into agriculturally-based settlements.

The Catholics envisioned a triangle of activity—school, wilderness, remote settlement— with a steady circulation of players between the nodes. The assumption was that Native

Americans would be wowed by Catholic missionaries’ spiritual power and would be persuaded to abandon their wilderness ways and follow them.

The Jesuits launched their school for Indian boys, later called St. Regis Seminary, in May 1824.77 (Figure 4.) In November Indian agent William Clark certified that the

Jesuit establishment at Florissant was up and running, with five students: two Sauks and three Iowas.78 In his own report VanQuickenborne poured it on thick. The children had responded well; he had “strong hopes that they will become virtuous and industrious citizens warmly attached to the government that has over them such benevolent views.”79

But funding was a problem. Nothing had yet arrived from federal coffers. Government officials clarified that an enrollment of five was not what they had in mind; they expected more for their money. The Jesuit seminary had to have at least eight Indian students in order to receive the full $800 allowance, to be paid quarterly. Until they had eight, the

76 DuBourg to his brother, 17 March 1823, in dos Santos, “Letters Concerning Some Missions,” 152.

77 PDJ, May 1824, SSCSL.

78 William Clark, Certificate, 22 Nov 1824, M234: Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1880, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

79 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to John C. Calhoun, 21 Nov 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

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Native American Missions 1819–1830

Figure 4. Native American Missions, 1819–1830.

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government would pay “the most that has ever been allowed for this purpose”—$100 per enrolled Indian student.80 Before this assurance arrived, DuBourg resorted to sending pesky missives to Calhoun, warning that the missionaries were on the brink of bankruptcy, “And yet after better than two years since their arrival in Missouri, they have not been able to obtain a single Dollar from Government.”81 DuBourg also enlisted

Missouri Senator Thomas Benton to pressure Calhoun to make good on the promise to support the Catholic missionary enterprise.82 The tactics worked. Government funds started flowing to Florissant in the summer of 1825, and increased to $800 after Clark certified the Catholics had “more than eight Indian children.”83

The girls’ school operated by the Society of the Sacred Heart in Florissant was unique among the projects under the umbrella of the Civilization Fund. Women religious had not historically had opportunities to engage in missions to “heathens.” Instead, they stayed within their convents, praying, sewing altar cloths and vestments, preparing banners, and channeling their resources to their male counterparts who trotted the globe.

But as boundaries shifted and softened after the French Revolution, active women’s orders formed and pressed for expansive roles in education, nursing, and ministering to the poor, not only within France, but around the world. The Society of the Sacred Heart emerged as one of the leading women’s orders to embrace this expanded sense of

80 Thomas L. McKenney to Charles Felix VanQuickenborne, 28 Jan 1825, M21: Letters Sent by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1881, Roll 1, RG 75, NARA.

81 DuBourg to John C. Calhoun, 12 Feb 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

82 Thomas Benton (Senator), to John C. Calhoun, 27 Feb 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

83 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to James Barbour, 15 Sept 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA; William Clark, Certificate, 15 Sept 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

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women’s missionary role.84 Indian missions had been a driver of the Sacred Heart enterprise in the United States from the beginning. Philippine Duchesne had pleaded with her superior to allow her come to DuBourg’s diocese on the grounds of evangelizing

Indians. She traced her missionary impulse to the stories she heard as a child from a

Jesuit who had served as a missionary to Native Americans in Louisiana in the mid- eighteenth century, and considered herself endowed with a special vocation for such missions herself.85

Nearly a year after the Jesuits opened St. Regis, Duchesne rejoiced that her community had started a school—distinct from their current boarding school for elite

American and Creole girls—to educate a “young Indian girl and a half-breed.”86 A female institution, the school promoted the education of girls not as a consequence of who showed up, but by design. While all the Protestant schools supported by government grants in the Mississippi River Valley targeted both boys and girls, but privileged boys in their reports and resources, the Sacred Heart nuns focused only on girls.87 An Irish woman who had joined the convent, Mary Ann O'Connor, served as the girls’ teacher.

Her English language skill, “her age—she is about forty—and her solid virtue make her

84 Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 2–7. On the Society of the Sacred Heart’s flexible cloister, see Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 38.

85 Duchesne to Barat, [Jan or Feb 1818], Letter 83, BDC2 1:7; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 41.

86 PDJ, 6 Apr 1825, SSCSL.

87 The one exception to this rule was by accident, not by design, at the American Board’s mission school in the Chickasaw Nation called Tockshish. In 1827 the school superintendent reported that, because the enrolled pupils were almost all female, the missionaries had decided to focus on female education. The girls learned needlework, reading, grammar, and math. Reports of the Schools in the Chick'a Nation, in Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 11 Oct 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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the best person for this work.” O'Connor and the Indian and mixed-race girls lived in a separate building from the rest of the school, in deference to the racial prejudices of the white families whose daughters boarded at the convent. O'Connor’s first students adored her, perhaps identifying her as a surrogate mother figure. They “call her Mammy and run and jump about wherever she takes them.”88

Within a few months the female Indian school had grown to six students, and by the end of 1826 ten girls were enrolled, nearly as many as the Jesuits’ Indian student population.89 Though he included the girls’ school in his annual report to the government,

VanQuickenborne understood the government grant to be designated specifically for the

Jesuit school. The Sacred Heart community received none of the funds.90 Considering the

Sacred Heart sisters’ work to civilize Indian girls to be as worthy of government funding as the Jesuits’ labor, Philippine Duchesne planned to petition the War Department for

“salaries of four mistresses” plus “some help” with constructions costs for the building housing the teacher and students.91 She knew that “such a concession for girls would be exceptional and there is not much hope; but no efforts must be neglected in this work of

88 Duchesne to Barat, 23 Apr 1825, Letter 197, BDC2 2:234; Duchesne to Barat, 15 Jan 1841, Letter 321, BDC2 3:335. On how the nuns conformed to the custom of the country regarding racial segregation, see Duchense to Barat, 15 Feb 1819, Letter 109, BDC2 1:133–138; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 53–59.

89 VanQuickenborne claimed 25 total students between the two schools in his annual report for that year. Duchesne to Barat, 8 June 1825, Letter 198, BDC2 2:239–240; PDJ, 25 Dec 1825, SSCSL; State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1826, Roll 773, M234, RG 75, NARA.

90 The nuns operated the school through their own meager means, and through charitable donations. As Duchesne had anticipated when she agreed to open the school, she would have to “rely on Providence at first; food costs little, lodgings we have already, and we will beg for clothes.” Duchesne to Barat, 10 Jun 1824, Letter 187, BDC2 2:171.

91 Duchesne to Barat, 8 Jun 1825, Letter 198, BDC2 2:239.

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such importance.”92 But VanQuickenborne silenced her, warning that her letter might jeopardize his own efforts, since, “according to the Government, the [Jesuit] Superior is supposed to look after both boys and girls as is usual in all schools of this type.”93

Not for the first time, the Catholics engaged in contortions to fit themselves into a

Protestant model. In this case the Jesuit superior represented himself as having oversight over an institution he in reality did not control. The Society of the Sacred Heart was a distinct institution, operated by women, answerable to their superior in France, and accountable to the local bishop. The neighboring Jesuit superior had no say in their temporal operations, and only had spiritual authority because appointed by the bishop to be their confessor.94

Despite his silencing of Duchesne, VanQuickenborne did advocate on behalf of the Sacred Heart school, explaining that the sisters had a capacity for forty to sixty Indian students if they had support from the government. He also schooled the secretary of war on the sexual and religious habits of the western territories. Most of the metís had French

Canadian Catholic fathers, he argued, who preferred to have their children educated within their own religious community rather than by Protestants. Icing on the cake was this tidbit: The Sacred Heart convent was located just two miles from the Jesuit school, close enough, but not too close, to promote matches between the students. What could be

92 Duchesne to Barat, 10 Jun 1824, Letter 187, BDC2 2:171–172.

93 Duchesne to Barat, 3 Jul 1825, Letter 199, BDC2 2:244. 94 On the role of gender in determining power in Catholic institutions, as it played out in the complex relationship between VanQuickenborne and Duchesne, see Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 78–79.

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more pleasing to the government than educated, civilized, Christianized Indians marrying each other?95

Alas, the War Department considered the annual payment of $800—one of its larger grants—to be more than sufficient for the pair of Catholic institutions. So much so that instead of doubling, the government cut the grant in half in 1827.96

VanQuickenborne protested. The Catholic schools in Florissant had 23 students now, and expected six additional Native youths—“most of them sons of chiefs”—to join imminently.97 But the government kept the allowance at $400, where it would remain through 1830.98

With or without government dollars, the Jesuits and the Sacred Heart nuns continued to educate and evangelize the Indian children entrusted to their care, the majority of them métis. In addition to teaching them basic literacy, the nuns schooled the girls in female barnyard labor, including caring for “the cows, the poultry yard, [and] the

95 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to James Barbour, 15 June 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA; Peter de Meyer, Reminiscences of Pioneer Life by Bro. Peter De Meyer, S.J., 1868, 25, typed transcription by Martin J. Bredick, 2005, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

96 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to James Barbour, 3 Oct 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

97 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to James Barbour, 6 Oct 1828, State of the Indian School at Florissant, 6 Oct 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

98 Report on Indian Affairs, 1828, in Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the years 1826–1839 ([Washington: Government Printing Office, 1828]), 83–84, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.AnnRep2639, accessed 5 Oct 2015; Report on Indian Affairs, 1829, in Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the years 1826–1839, 176–177; Report on Indian Affairs, 1830, in Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the years 1826–1839, 166–168.

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garden.”99 The boys, too, were slated to learn “the mechanical arts,” including carpentry and blacksmithing, when they were old enough.100 Until then they performed at least four hours a day of manual labor, tending the corn and wheat fields, gathering firewood, and hoeing potatoes.101 The children also endured catechism instruction. The questions drummed into their ears, the rote responses, all had a rhythm that stirred some of the young pupils. Two of the male students were baptized within the school’s first year. They paraded—and were paraded—through town in the Corpus Christi procession, visible signs of the schools’ Christianizing potential.102 DuBourg, as he passed through town on

99 Duchesne to Barat, 23 Apr 1825, Letter 197, BDC2 2:234. In 1823 Duchesne reported that her community had “eight good cows” producing milk, “eggs from 60 chickens,” and “produce from our garden—100 bushels of potatoes and many other things.” Duchesne to Barat, 4 Jan 1823, Letter 165, BDC2 2:102. On how these French nuns navigated the racial politics of their new American home, see Duchesne to Barat, 8 Dec 1818, Letter 104, BDC2 1:108–109; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 53–64. Indian women’s labor helped to sustain the Sacred Heart schools in the coming years. In 1827 the nuns established their fourth house (convent and school combined) in the Mississippi River Valley, this one in St. Louis proper. Duchesne took with her for this new institution Julie Courtemouche, a “halfbreed to do outside work.” PDJ, 2 May 1827, SSCSL. Julie’s female relative (perhaps a daughter?), the “orphan” Justine Courtemouche, died a few days after Julie departed from Florissant. Julie Courtemouche may have been Julie Courtemanche, born 9 Apr 1813, daughter of Bartelemy Courtemanche and Angelique laMarch. The child’s older sister Marie was her godmother when she was baptized in February 1814 at St. Ferdinand’s church in Florissant. PDJ, 13 May 1827, SSCSL; Florissant, MO, St. Ferdinand’s Baptisms, 1792–1857, reel 167, SLAPRM.

100 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to John C. Calhoun, 21 Nov 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

101 VanQuickenborne to Dzierozynski, 1824, translated in Garraghan, “St. Regis,” 471– 472. Peter de Meyer, Reminiscences, 27, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

102 The whole town turned out for the spectacle of the Corpus Christi festivities. The procession began at 11:00 in the morning, culminating at an altar in a field. “The children of the village carried the triumphal arch of the Blessed Virgin and the militia accompanied the procession.” PDJ, 5 June 1825, SSCSL.

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his way to Europe, baptized six more children—three girls, three boys—in 1826.103

When the Jesuit superior from Maryland visited the schools in 1827, he proudly reported that some of the Indian boys sang in the choir at the St. Ignatius Day service. When asked, “Who made you? Who redeemed you? Who sanctified you?” the girls trotted off the answers to the catechism “with childlike simplicity,” beguiling the superior.104

Both boys and girls demonstrated their book learning in annual end-of-year examinations. The best students received prizes.105 But these success stories, pleasing to donors both local and abroad, did not account for the children’s full experience. The schools were places of separation, violence, and deprivation. When the Iowa boys first arrived, they were agitated and inconsolable as their families left them. That night they ran away, covering five miles before they were caught.106 They continued to distress their keepers: “In the beginning we had to watch them like wild hares; they were weeping the whole day.” Unaccustomed to the rigors of agricultural labors, the children were bewildered by what was expected of them. “They all wept when the hoe was put into their hand for the first time.”107 Eating with forks and knives, saying “their prayers in

103 PDJ, 30 Apr 1826, SSCSL.

104 Dzierozynski, Historia Missionis Missourianae, translated in Garraghan, Jesuits 1:165.

105 PDJ, 16 Jun 1825, Jan 1826, 29 Apr 1827, SSCSL; Dzierozynski, Historia Missionis Missourianae, translated in Garraghan, Jesuits 1:165.

106 Garraghan, “St. Regis,” 459–460.

107 VanQuickenborne to Dzierozynski, 1824, translated in Garraghan, “St. Regis,” 471– 472. In addition to resisting the drudgery of farm labor, the boys may have been reacting to the gendered implications of the Jesuits’ program, crying when the priests emasculated them by forcing them to do what they considered women’s work. Daniel K. Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of 221

english,” sitting for long stretches in uncomfortable school desks, wearing itchy clothes—all of it must have been disorienting and troubling to the children.108

Most distressing to their guardians, the children at first refused to comply with

European expectations regarding the body. “They want to remain naked, sleep on the ground, do nothing, and they are very sensual,” Duchesne reported of the boys. That sensuality threatened the rigid, body-denying philosophy that undergirded both schools.

The religious had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; they held their wards to the same standards, both because the children lived with them—house rules applied to one and all—and because they were Indians. Self-mastery was central to the civilizing agenda. It would not do for the Indian children to lift their cloths when “they considered they had not been given enough meat” to show the other students “that the skin of their stomachs was not fully stretched.”109 Or to pull off “their pantalons [sic], & put a piece of blanket on their backs” when their families visited.110 Such behavior—exposing bodies, complaining, questioning the beneficence of their providers—might spread to

the Early Republic, 19 (1999), 601–628; Margaret Scarry and John Scarry, “Native American ‘Garden Agriculture’ in Southeastern North America,” World Archaeology 37, no. 2 (2005): 261–62, doi:10.1080/00438243500095199.

108 De Meyer, Reminiscences, 27, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC. The nuns, at least, were dimly aware of how unfamiliar the rigors and postures of schoolwork were to the children. Duchesne indicated that, to compensate, O'Connor and the Indian girls performed all the outdoor chores. “We leave these occupations for her as these Indian children could not bear a sedentary life.” Duchesne to Barat, 23 Apr 1825, Letter 197, BDC2 2:234.

109 Duchesne to Barat, 25 July 1824, Letter 188, BDC2 2:179.

110 De Meyer, Reminscences, 28–29, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

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other children, undermining the nuns’ and priests’ authority and imperiling the whole project.

To force the children to master their sensual desires, the priests resorted to corporal punishment. When an Osage boy committed what the Jesuits considered “a serious breach of the moral law,” VanQuickenborne whipped the child.111 It was not an isolated incident. The superior earned a reputation for being “unnecessarily severe in his treatment of the boys” and of working them “too strenuously in the fields.”112 Violence and danger threatened the children also from the spiritual realm. In one of her many pleas to her mother house in France for material aid, Duchesne asked for biblical and theological images to use in religious instruction. “Please send me brightly colored pictures for the Indians, especially frightening ones of death of sinners and of hell.”113 In case the children had not absorbed the notion through the catechism, here was eternal torment—the go-to motivator for Christians of all stripes—on display. Perhaps the father of two of the boys, an “Indian Chief” who communicated through an interpreter to

Duchesne, had a presentiment of what lay in store for his sons. “Mothers,” he said to the nuns, “I leave you my children, pray for them every day to the God you worship, and have pity on them.”114

111 The whipping was so severe that one of the priests-in-training feared the event would jeopardize Osage-Jesuit relations. Garraghan, Jesuits 1:165.

112 Garraghan, Jesuits 1:165.

113 Duchesne to Barat, 14 Sept 1825, Letter 202, BDC2 2:258. 114 Duchesne to Barat, 25 July 1824, Letter 188, BDC2 2:179.

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But prayers were not enough to protect the children, much less to make the schools thrive. Between 1825 and 1830, St. Regis Seminary and the Sacred Heart Indian school together averaged twenty-one Indian students annually, according to

VanQuickenborne’s yearly reports—hardly an impressive figure given the capacity each had touted in their applications for aid.115 Though the schools’ directors contended that funding was the limiting factor inhibiting the institutions’ growth, getting children through the front door and keeping them there were also significant problems. Access to

Indian children had been a challenge from the get-go. Florissant, fifteen miles from St.

Louis, was surrounded by Euro-American settlers. No Indian groups dwelled in the immediate vicinity.116 The Jesuits, newcomers to the region, were yet to establish trusting relationships with the Indian communities at a distance.117 Despite DuBourg’s highly publicized encounters with Indian delegations visiting St. Louis, the chiefs did not hand

115 The numbers VanQuickenborne submitted on his concise annual reports are: 1825, 24; 1826, 25; 1827, 25; 1828, 23; 1829, 15; 1830, 14. State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1 Oct 1825, M234, Roll 772, State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1 Oct 1826, M234, Roll 773, State of the Indian School at Florissant, Oct 1827, M234, Roll 773, State of the Indian School at Florissant, Oct 1828, M234, Roll 773, State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1829, M234, Roll 774, State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1830, M234, Roll 774, RG 75, NARA.

116 Philippine Duchesne à Madame Thérèse Maillucheau, 16 Dec 1818, Letter 54, APRSC, 220–222. Indians and metís dotted the population of St. Louis and Florissant, but these were not the targets of the Catholic missionizing imaginary. The Sacred Heart and Jesuit communities had their sights set on the independent Indian nations, not those who had already acculturated to town life. For an account of the Catholic practices of St. Louis’s Indian population, see Sharon Person, Standing up for Indians: Baptism Registers as an Untapped Source for Multicultural Relations in St. Louis, 1766–1821 (Naperville, Ill.: The Center for French Colonial Studies, Inc., 2010).

117 Even though they preceded their Jesuit neighbors by five years and had been planted in the region for most of a decade, the Religious of the Sacred Heart, because of their cloister, also lacked the connections that would have facilitated school growth.

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over their children to the Black Robes readily. It took the advocacy of William Clark, superintendent of Indian affairs in the region, to funnel pupils to Florissant.118

Of those who did arrive, many did not stay. Although VanQuickenborne repeatedly signaled the children’s “very satisfactory” conduct, the turnover rate was high.

At least one child died in the Catholics’ care.119 The Jesuit school educated thirty boys total during its eight years of existence. Twenty of these were metís children, most likely with Indian mothers and white fathers. The other ten students had two Indian parents.

These ten came from five different tribes. All ten left before completing their studies:

Eight were removed from the school by their parents; two were expelled for misbehavior.120 Existing records do not indicate precise retention rates for the metís boys, though VanQuickenborne’s annual reports to the government suggest a fluid student body.121 His concise commentary emphasizing achievement among those who departed— as in 1826, “of the eight pupils who left the institution it can be strictly said

118 Clark was instrumental in recruiting boys for the school. VanQuickenborne to Francis Neale, 12 Dec 1823, translated in Garraghan, “St. Regis,” 458–459. On Clark’s commitment to the Jesuit project, see entry for 21 May 1824, “Diary of Bishop Rosati,” SCLHR 3 (1921):328–329.

119 State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1827, Roll 773, M234, RG 75, NARA.

120 Garraghan, “St. Regis,”477n53.

121 VanQuickenborne did not differentiate between Indian and metís children in his annual report to the government, nor did he consistently indicate gender. His recordkeeping was haphazard at best. Like other school superintendents, he filled in and submitted a preprinted form each October. The categories on the form include: “No. of Scholars,” “The No. who have completed their course, and left the institution, since 1st Oct last,” and “The No. enrolled since 1st Oct last.” In theory, these categories would have captured a full picture of new enrollment, retention, and completion. But VanQuickenborne made no effort to reconcile his figures on each form with the previous year’s figures, rendering the data suggestive, but not definitive.

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only of one that he completed his course, the others having completed it nearly”—did little to conceal the schools’ downward spiral.122

To her superior in France Duchesne offered a broader analysis of the shifting geopolitical situation that limited the Catholic educators’ access to and retention of Indian children. “By buying their territory,” the U.S. government “pushes them out of the

Federation States.” The Native people “are forced to live in too restricted an area,” endangering their hunting-based subsistence lifestyle. Their relocation also stirred up inter-Indian animosity. “The tribes, thus herded together, make war on each other and destroy themselves.” Duchesne argued that Missouri’s anti-Indian policy was directly responsible for eroding enrollment in the schools. “Beginning this year”—1826—“they are no longer allowed to hunt in the State of Missouri, so the parents of several of our

Indian children have come to take the boys away from the Jesuits and the girls from us; we have no means of keeping them here.”123 The government had settled a handful of treaties between 1823 and 1825 with the Iowas, Sauks and Foxes, Kansa, Osages, and

122 State of the Indian School at Florissant, 1826, Roll 773, M234, RG 75, NARA.

123 Duchesne to Barat, 15 Jun 1826, Letter 208, BDC2 2:274–275. On eastern tribes being shunted west of the Mississippi by the U.S. government, prompting violent resistance by the Osages, see Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 203–205. Like other Europeans and Americans, Duchesne overlooked the mixed practices of her Indian neighbors. She painted them as mobile hunters, driven from place to place by the movement of their prey, “their sole means of subsistence.” But the Osages and other Indian peoples in the Mississippi and Missouri River Valleys also planted and harvested crops of beans, pumpkins, and corn. Their agricultural methods and land usage did not align with Euro-American methods, rendering them erasable. The logic of American expansion onto Indian lands was in fact based on erasing such settled agricultural practices in the discourses about Indians, and on the actual land itself. See Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer,’” 601–628; Jane Mt. Pleasant, “The Paradox of Plows and Productivity: An Agronomic Comparison of Cereal Grain Production under Iroquois Hoe Culture and European Plow Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Agricultural History 85, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 460–92. 226

Shawnees for removal, the Indian groups exchanging their land in Missouri for tracts west of the state line.124 Duchesne registered the impact of those removals on the modest

Catholic school ventures: The Indian parents withdrew their children because of the distance between Florissant and their new homes. “All they say is that as they can no longer come to see their children, it is impossible to live so far away from them.”125 One of the Jesuit brothers reminisced about the schools’ demise in similar terms. The children’s fathers, “chiefs of different tribes,” had passed through Florissant en route to

Washington to “transact business with the President of the United States for their nations.” On their way back from this journey, “they called again, and took their boys along with them; and that was the end of our Indian School.”126

VanQuickenborne did not acknowledge or explain the decline of the schools in his reports to the War Department. Instead in 1829 he resuscitated the scheme he had outlined earlier to wed the Jesuits’ interests with the government’s vision of Indian civilization, proposing to President Andrew Jackson that the Jesuits would purchase “six or seven thousand acres of land” in Missouri, on which to settle the Native Americans who had been educated at the Catholic institutions in Florissant. The Catholics would serve as matchmakers, connecting the boys and girls who, “after being married, would go thither to settle upon a tract of 25 acres.” This land would be a gift, “fee simple, with some restrictions.” The settlers would apply for U.S. citizenship and would “adopt the english language.” Two Jesuits would be placed in the settlement to serve as their pastors.

124 Aron, American Confluence, 209–216.

125 Duchesne to Barat, 15 Jun 1826, Letter 208, BDC2 2:275.

126 De Meyer, Reminiscences, 28–29, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

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After Jackson had “verbally approved the plan,” VanQuickenborne wrote to the secretary of war to solicit government assistance.127

He reiterated his request the next year, but this time he came clean about the schools’ status. Enrollment at the schools had tanked. By the end of 1830 only two students remained.128 VanQuickenborne informed the government that he had “ceased to admit Indian pupils,” acknowledging that the current project was insufficient to meet the needs of civilizing the Native people. With remarkable and belated candor he explained that the educational experiment at Florissant had not worked. “I am convinced that the youth of the aborigines stand in need of as much, perhaps more, assistance after they have left the school than when they actually enjoy its advantages.” Ever hopeful, and ever conniving to receive federal aid, VanQuickenborne reminded the secretary of war of his proposal from the prior year. He had since visited a few Osage villages, proposing his plan “in full council with the approbation of the agent.” The Osages, in the Jesuit’s telling, “unanimously expressed a most ardent wish to see it put into execution.” Could the government please redirect the allowance “hitherto given to the school” to the new establishment, once it was up and running, he asked.129

127 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to John H. Eaton, 4 Oct 1829, M234, Roll 774, RG 75, NARA. For an elaboration of his plan, targeting his donor base in France, see VanQuickenborne to R. P. Ros-- [name truncated], 10 March 1829, printed in “Mission du Missouri,” Annales de la propagation de la foi 4, no. 23 (Jan 1831): 572–589. On the government’s noncommittal response, see VanQuickenborne to [DuBourg], 20 Nov 1829, printed in “Mission du Missouri,” Annales de la propagation de la foi 4, no. 23 (Jan 1831): 590–593.

128 State of the Indian School at Florissant, 30 Dec 1830, Roll 774, M234, RG 75, NARA.

129 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to John H. Eaton, 30 Dec 1830, M234, Roll 774, RG 75, NARA. Others, at least in hindsight, saw the end coming. One of Jesuits serving under VanQuickenborne reported to their superior in Maryland that the “Indian College 228

The Jesuits and Sacred Heart nuns had failed in their initial attempt to Catholicize the Indian nations west of the Mississippi River by instructing a select group of children to be the civilizing yeast for the rest. The school model, adapted from Protestant examples, and designed to garner government support, did not work in their context.

Planted at a great distance from the Indian nations’ strongholds, at a moment when most of the target audience was removing even further west, the schools did not secure a privileged place in the Osage, Iowa, Sauk, Fox, Kansa, Shawnee, or Delaware imaginations. Though many of these indigenous groups expressed positive associations with the Black Robes, they could not feature leaving their children in schools so far away.130

As their reports to the U.S. government intimated, the Jesuits gradually shifted to a different strategy to Christianize the indigenous people along the Missouri River and elsewhere in the western territories. Rather than bringing the children east, the missionaries would go west and work within the Native groups, as their predecessors had in previous generations. Such intentions had been woven throughout their earlier plans— the triangular nodes of school, wilderness, and civilizing settlement, with schools as the

has definitely ceased to be. I am surprised, not that it ended, but that it continued as long as it did. Didn’t I predict that it would avail nothing towards the conversion of the Indians?” Verhaegen to Dzierozynski, 20 Aug 1830, translated in Garraghan, Jesuits 1:167n41.

130 The students’ experience of violence, forced labor, and cultural disorientation at the schools may have contributed to their parents’ decision not to allow their children to remain at or return to the schools, though evidence of such remains illusive.

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starting point—though they had done little to realize this model.131 Now, as they observed the Indian schools in Florissant declining, the Catholics invested in the latter two nodes. By 1826 the Jesuits had established friendly relations with the Sauks, the

Kansas, and the Shawnees, all of whom invited them to send missionaries among their people.132 VanQuickenborne found inroads among the Osages the following year.133 But continuing personnel and funding shortages delayed these efforts. Finally in 1836 the

Jesuits planted a mission to the Kickapoos near Fort Leavenworth, in 1838 they established a mission for the Potawatomis at Council Bluffs, and in 1841 they collaborated with the Sacred Heart sisters on a new mission to the Potawatomis at Sugar

Creek.134 The U.S. government aided these, and later, Catholic missions through direct grants and by allocating funds from treaty annuities designated for education.

It was at Sugar Creek that Philippine Duchesne, now in her seventies, fulfilled her hope of engaging in Indian missions. “At last we are in the land where we have so longed to be,” she scrawled in a letter to Barat when she arrived at the mission. Ignorant of their

131 On the failure of both Bishop Dubourg and the Jesuits to fulfill the Concordat of 1823, by which the Jesuits promised to cultivate missionaries at the seminary and send them westward to the Native groups in 1825, see Garraghan, Jesuits 1:138–146.

132 Charles Felix VanQuickenborne to Ant. Kolhmann [Kohlmann], 21 Jan 1826, Gilbert J. Garraghan Papers, Institute of Jesuit History, Record Group Special Collections, MPC.

133 In 1827 Joseph Rosati reported to his colleague in Maryland that VanQuickenborne had visited the Osages, who expressed a desire for a priest. Rosati to Bruté, 6 Oct 1827, CMNT II 3 o, UNDA. See also Duchesne to Barat, 13 May 1827, Letter 219, BDC2 3:14.

134 The Jesuits established the Sugar Creek mission in the late 1830s near the confluence of the Saline Creek and Sugar Creek for Potawatomis forcibly removed from Indiana, and opened a boys’ school there with government money in 1840; the religious of the Sacred Heart joined them the following year. On the Jesuits’ Kickapoo mission, see Garraghan, Jesuits 1:386–418; on the Potawatomi mission at Council Bluffs, see Garraghan, Jesuits 1:425–446; on Sugar Creek mission, see Garraghan, Jesuits 2:188–219.

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language, Duchesne could not teach the Indian girls, but instead devoted herself to prayer and domestic chores. The presence of the elderly missionary was inspiring enough— perhaps not for the Potawatomis, but for the audience back in France. Barat sent her a small gift of funds donated by “a poor netmaker and his sister, a dressmaker,” faithful

French Catholics who, compelled by the vision of the Sacred Heart sisters converting the

Native Americans, offered their meager resources. The superior had one request of

Duchesne: “Get the native children to pray for us all.”135

135 Duchesne spent 1841–1842 at the mission. Duchesne to Barat, [July 1841], Letter 324, BDC2 3:341–342; Barat to Duchesne, 23 Aug 1841, Letter 325, BDC2 3:343–344; Duchesne to Barat, 28 Feb 1842, Letter 327, BDC2 3:346–349; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 84–94.

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Chapter 5

CHURCH AND STATE IN LEAGUE:

PROTESTANT MISSIONS TO NATIVE AMERICANS

Like their Catholic competitors, Protestant leaders discovered that narratives of missionaries launching into the wilderness to bring the gospel to Native people could elicit generous monetary support from faithful church folk. But the underlying motivations differed between the two groups. The Catholic donor base was in Europe, where stories of Indian missions played on nostalgia for the apostolic adventures of previous centuries. For Protestant patrons, anxiety about American territorial expansion in the present, not wistfulness for a glorious—if fabled—past, powered the mission program. In the early nineteenth century the American economy was reconfiguring itself toward slave-grown cotton. But Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees held the land on which cotton thrived best, and the federal government was having trouble restraining white southerners from swarming into these Indians’ territories. In addition, with the Louisiana Purchase the United States had taken dominion over vast new regions west of the Mississippi River populated by other Native peoples. Northeastern Protestants were uneasy about what their nation’s rapid expansion into southern and western Indian regions augured. How would these Native peoples be incorporated into the national polity? How might the federal government diminish the potential for violent

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confrontations between Indians and white settlers? Would the Native people keep their land?

The missionaries’ civilizing and Christianizing agenda offered a solution to the thorny problem of what to do about these Indian groups. The vision of acculturating

Native peoples to Euro-American habits and Protestant Christian religiosity not only satisfied Protestants’ compunctions about spreading the gospel, but it also relieved their anxieties. If pious missionaries could teach Native people to be Americans and to be

Protestant Christians, then the Indians would no longer be a threat and an obstacle to

American territorial and economic priorities. Donors and supporters grasped at the promise that missionaries could transform Indians from ignorant heathens who were dependent on hunting, into educated, biblically-literate, pious, settled farmers. By teaching them to plant crops, to raise livestock, to spin wool, to build American-style houses, and to pray, missionaries would overwrite their Indianness with Americanness, removing the hindrance they posed to American expansion. With such hopes Presbyterian and Congregationalist laypeople emptied their pockets into offering plates when mission agents came to town, announcing plans for schools and religious instruction for Indians.1

Unlike their Catholic competitors, Protestant mission boosters had little history of constructive Native American missions in the Mississippi Valley upon which they could build—no lore of selfless missionaries in special garb risking life and limb to baptize and

1 For similar dynamics of Protestant missionaries collaborating with federal agents to impose Euro-American customs and Protestant Christianity on Native peoples in Wisconsin a few decades later, see Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 168–210.

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catechize the indigenous population. Nor did they have a reputation for intercultural bridging. What they did have were organizational wizards who learned how to stoke the flames of evangelical zeal that fueled—and funded—missionary projects. The American

Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, formed from the upsurge in missionary fervor among New Divinity adherents at Andover Seminary in 1810, initially focused on promulgating Christianity “among the heathen” in Asia.2 Within a few years they broadened their scope to include Native American missions, but like the Society for

Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America, the organization hit the skids during the war years.3 With the conflict subsiding in 1815, the American

Board voted to send a scout to St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, and other areas in the

Mississippi River Valley “to ascertain and report [...] what measures are most eligible for diffusing the light and benefits of Christianity among the Aborigines in the western and

2 John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 24. On New Divinity, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam (New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 22–28.

3 Tecumseh’s war and the War of 1812 destabilized the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys and thwarted Protestant evangelization intentions. In its annual report in 1814 the Society for Propagating the Gospel summarized Schermerhorn’s recommendations to missionize the Choctaws and Chickasaws, but demurred from committing to immediate action, citing the “present perturbed condition of the country” as a reason for deferral. Schermerhorn’s report, according to Society, was “very copious and satisfactory, and may, at some future period, be of great practical utility.” Appendix in Elijah Parish, A Sermon Preached at Boston, November 3, 1814, before the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America (Boston: Printed by Nathaniel Willis for S.T. Armstrong, 1814), 34. In 1813 the American Board’s prudential committee reported that the ongoing conflict between the United States, Britain, and various Native groups had scuttled their planned mission to the Iroquois. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ...1813 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, no. 50, Cornhill, 1813), 16, 25.

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southern parts of our country.”4 But one of the two missionaries tapped for this duty became ill, prompting the American Board to reassign the pair to the mission in Ceylon and to suspend the contemplated western mission. In its place the organization proposed an “experiment” in the southern part of the country east of the Mississippi. Drawing on

Schermerhorn and Mills’s findings, the American Board suggested establishing schools at different stations among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees, so that within a handful of years these groups “would become English in their language, Christian in their religion, and civilized in their general habits and manners.”5

The American Board’s explicit goal was to assimilate the Native Americans into

Euro-American habits and manners, in terms of language, gender roles, and religion.

Instead of translating the bible into Native languages, the Board prioritized teaching

Indian children to read and write in English, on the theory that, “assimilated in language, they will more readily become assimilated in habits and manners to their white neighbors.”6 The organization was candid in its efforts to eradicate Native cultural practices and to introduce Euro-American habits in their place. To do so, the American

Board established a policy of separating Native children from their families. “To form the young Indians to the habits of civilized life, as well as to impart to them the knowledge of

4 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners, for Foreign Missions, 1815 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, no. 50, Cornhill, 1815), 5.

5 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1815, 11–13.

6 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1816 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, 1816), 11–12.

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Christianity, it is necessary to take them from their connexions, and place them entirely under the direction and influence of their instructors.”7

The American Board appointed Cyrus Kingsbury as its first missionary to Native

Americans, commissioning him to open a mission among the Cherokees in 1816.

Securing patronage from secretary of war, who directed the government agent for the

Cherokees to build a schoolhouse, to “furnish two ploughs, six hoes, and as many axes” to teach the boys agriculture, and to provide a loom and six each of spinning wheels and pairs of cards to teach the girls spinning, sewing, and weaving, Kingsbury launched into the Cherokee territory and established what became known as Brainerd Mission—named after eighteenth-century missionary paragon David Brainerd—at present-day

Chattanooga, Tennessee.8 Other missionaries joined him—ordained clergy, along with their wives and children, augmented later by skilled tradesmen—and together the

“mission family” operated a school for children, a Sabbath school for people of color, and a farm to supply the mission’s growing population.9

Kingsbury’s detailed reports to the American Board, printed and circulated through the Panoplist and other evangelical journals, hooked the northeastern Protestant

7 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners, for Foreign Missions, 1817 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, no. 50, Cornhill, 1817), 15.

8 Letter from the Secretary of War, quoted in American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1816, 10; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1817, 15.

9 Cyrus Kingsbury to ABCFM, 30 June 1817, excerpted in American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1817, 16–17.

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audience and generated an outpouring of donations and a new batch of volunteers.10 Most useful for the Board’s purposes was the story of Catharine Brown. A Native young woman, an eager student, a pious convert, a Christian devoted to evangelizing her people,

Brown did what all the best Catholic saints did—she died young, leaving a spotless reputation and ample evidence of her faith as an inspiration to others. Born around 1800,

Brown learned English and the rudiments of reading from encounters with Anglophones in her childhood. To further her education, she trekked one hundred miles from her family’s home near Creek Path, one of the Lower Towns in what is now northeast

Alabama, in 1817 to attend the mission school at Brainerd. Within a few months she could read the bible. By the following January she had imbibed enough Christian teaching to ask to be baptized—the first Cherokee convert for the American Board missionaries. Her younger brother David entered the school the following year and, with her steady proselytizing, in May 1820 also converted, as did another brother named John.

Their father, impressed by his children’s educational attainments, collaborated with other

Cherokees to enlist the missionaries to establish another school in Creek Path. Brown served briefly as the female teacher at the school. Her parents converted and were

10 The American Board also employed agents to raise funds for Indian missions. Elias Cornelius served in this capacity. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1816, 4; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1817, 20–29; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1818 (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, no. 50, Cornhill, 1818), 3–4. On news of Kingsbury’s work circulating in the northeastern evangelical press, see, for instance, “Mission and School among the Cherokees,” Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine 13, no. 8 (Aug 1817): 384; “American Indians,” Christian Messenger 1, no. 8 (28 Jun 1817): 113. On the new recruits who stepped forward for missionary duty, see American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1817, 19–20.

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baptized in 1822. She went to live with them later that year, and soon became ill. She died a good Christian death in July 1823 of tuberculosis.11

Rufus Anderson, a rising star in the American Board, authored Brown’s memoir, which appeared less than two years after her death and had a lively publication history throughout the nineteenth century.12 But news of Brown’s conversion and piety had circulated long before her demise. Like their Catholic colleagues, the Protestant missionaries in the Cherokee Nation grasped at and publicized every scrap of evidence of their advances, including the spiritual progress of Brown. They cheered when the young woman acknowledged her own sinfulness a few months after she entered Brainerd

11 “Mission among the Cherokees: Extracts from the Journal Kept at Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 17, no. 2 (Feb 1821): 44; Rufus Anderson, Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation. (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1825), https://archive.org/details/memoircatharine00andegoog. For biographical details, an analysis of Catharine Brown as a literary figure, and a compilation of her letters and the memoir and play written about her, see Catharine Brown, Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823, ed. Theresa Strouth Gaul (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). For locations of the various mission stations in the Cherokee Nation, see Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips, eds., The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), xiii.

12 Anderson, Memoir of Catharine Brown. In 1825 two editions of Anderson’s memoir of Brown appeared in Boston and New York, and others cropped up in Glasgow and London. A third American edition rolled out in 1827 in Cincinnati, and another in York, Pennsylvania. The following year saw reprints in London, Boston, and New York. The American Sunday School Union in Philadelphia published the memoir in 1831, 1832, 1838, 1855, and 1900, amidst other scattered editions. See worldcat.org for publication data. A version of the memoir also appeared as “Biography: Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation,” Missionary Herald 21, no. 7 (July 1825): 193–200; “Indians Susceptible of Improvement: The Conclusion of the ‘Memoir of Catharine Brown,’” Missionary Herald 21, no. 3 (March 1825): 88–89. For an astute analysis of Brown and other female Cherokee students’ pro-Cherokee use of English- language literacy and Christian conversion, see M. Amanda Moulder, “Cherokee Practice, Missionary Intentions: Literacy Learning among Early Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Women,” College Composition and Communication 63, no. 1 (September 2011): 75–97.

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school.13 By the following spring they boasted that she was serving as an interpreter for the religious exercises on Sundays and in informal conversations between missionaries and Cherokees.14 She even initiated evening prayers with the other female students, unbidden by the missionary staff.15 Fulfilling expectations for a pious Christian woman snatched from heathenism, she fretted for the spiritual state of her family and for the

Cherokees at large.16 The evangelical press in the northeast was delighted to print letters

Brown wrote to her brother David and the missionaries she had encountered, testifying to her religious sincerity.17 Brown’s standing was so great as to warrant a missionary couple naming their infant daughter after her, not even two years after her conversion.18 Odes,

13 “Extract of a letter from Messrs. Kingsbury, Hall and Williams, to the Rev. Dr. Worcester, dated Chickamaugah, Nov. 25, 1817,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14, no. 1 (Jan 1818): 42–43.

14 Jeremiah Evarts to Samuel Worcester, 23 May 1818, printed in Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14, no. 7 (Jul 1818): 343; “Mission at Brainerd in the Cherokee Nation,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14, no. 8 (Aug 1818): 385.

15 Jeremiah Evarts to Samuel Worcester, 23 May 1818, printed in Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14, no. 7 (Jul 1818): 344.

16 Theda Perdue points out that few Cherokee women could match Catharine Brown’s example of gendered Christian piety, and that fewer still had any intention to try. Instead, they preferred to retain their Cherokee practices, cosmology, and worldview. Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 169–170.

17 See, for instance, Catharine Brown to David Brown, 21 Feb 1821, printed in Missionary Herald 17, no. 8 (Aug 1821): 258–159; Catharine Brown to Mrs. Chamberlain, 1 Nov 1818, printed in Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 15, no. 7 (July 1819): 317; Catharine Brown to Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain, 12 Dec 1818, printed in Panopolist, and Missionary Herald 15, no. 4 (Apr 1819): 170–171.

18 Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain named their daughter, baptized at the mission church at Brainerd, 8 Aug 1819, Catharine Brown Chamberlain. “Journal of the Mission at Brainerd,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 16, no. 2 (Feb 1820): 83.

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poems, and encomia accompanied notices of her death.19 In Catharine Brown the emerging Protestant mission juggernaut had its first Native saint, one whose conversion, exemplary life, and pious death demonstrated the viability and necessity of their

Christianizing agenda.20

The initial success at Brainerd—26 children attending their school, a few dozen pupils at the Sabbath school, plus converts like the Brown siblings—and the enthusiastic response of donors, who gave $27,000 in 1817, emboldened the American Board to expand its efforts westward to the southern Native groups settled in the Mississippi River

Valley, for which it sought additional aid from the federal government.21 The government complied, John C. Calhoun promising “the same patronage” for the organization’s proposed projects among the Choctaws and Chickasaws as it had afforded

Kingsbury among the Cherokees.22 But this patronage came with some strings.

Recognizing the potential political value of the American Board’s constituency, the secretary of war angled to enlist the evangelicals’ support for the government’s removal

19 “Obituary: Miss Catharine Brown,” Religious Intelligencer 8, no. 13 (30 Aug 1823): 208; “Poetry: Catharine’s Grave,” Guardian, or Youth’s Religious Instructor 6, no. 2 (1 Feb 1824): 71–72; B.J., “Lines on the Death of Catharine Brown of the Cherokee Nation,” Christian Spectator 5, no. 2 (1 Dec 1823): 650.

20 On the earlier Catholic equivalent—Kateri Tekakwitha—see Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For an assessment of Catharine Brown’s role in evangelizing other Cherokees, see Tracey A Birdwell, “Cherokee Reckonings Native Preachers, Protestant Missionaries, and the Shaping of an American Indian Religious Culture, 1801–1838” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Delaware, 2012), 97–109, 242–243.

21 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1817, 16, 18, 22.

22 John C. Calhoun to Elias Cornelius, 25 July 1817, M15, Roll 4, Record Group 75, NARA.

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priorities. Already Andrew Jackson and other U.S. negotiators had pressured Cherokee leaders to sign a treaty by which Cherokees would either move west of the Mississippi

River or remain in the east on 640-acre allotments and forfeit their tribal nationality to become citizens of the states where they resided.23 Calhoun urged the American Board to back the government’s agenda by establishing schools in the Arkansas Territory, which the government intended to be “the permanent home of the Cherokees.”24

Before they reached the western Cherokees, the American Board first made inroads among the Choctaws, in present-day Mississippi and southwestern Alabama.

Board leaders tapped Kingsbury to plant the new mission, named Elliot, on the

Yalobusha River in present-day northwestern Mississippi.25 Over the next several years

Kingsbury and his colleagues expanded their outreach, establishing nine schools for the

Choctaws by 1825.26 Some of these received funding not only from the U.S. government and the American Board, but also from the Choctaws themselves, who earmarked

23 William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 206–216, 228–238. On women’s leadership in resisting the Cherokee Treaty of 1817 and the removal project, see Tiya Miles, “‘Circular Reasoning’: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2009): 221–43.

24 John C. Calhoun to Jeremiah Evarts and Elias Cornelius, 18 July 1818, M15, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

25 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1818, 23–24.

26 By 1825 the American Board had established schools at Elliot, Mayhew, Bethel, Emmaus, Mooshoolatubbee's, Juzon's, Goshen, I-ik-hun-nuh, and Captain Harrison's. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1825 (Boston: Printed for the Board by Crocker and Brewster, 1825), 53–64. 241

portions of their federal annuities for the educational benefits the missionaries promised.27

After jumpstarting the Choctaw venture, the American Board fulfilled the wishes of the secretary of war to insert missionaries and schools among the western Cherokees.

As whites crowded them in their homeland in the southeast, a small number of Cherokees had begun moving west of the Mississippi River for better access to game in the 1780s and 1790s. The Spanish and Quapaws welcomed them as a buffer between their respective peoples and the Osages. The migrating Cherokees settled primarily along the

St. Francis River in present-day northeastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri. After the Louisiana Purchase, the Jefferson administration continued to promote voluntary relocation of eastern Indians westward, offering—but not necessarily delivering—various incentives in exchange for land cessions. Indian agent Return J. Meigs exploited rifts between Cherokee groups to spur these cessions. Lower Town Cherokee leader

Tolontiskee led a group of twelve hundred Cherokees west in 1809, where they joined the earlier immigrants on the St. Francis. But the tumult and destruction of the New Madrid

27 As scholars have analyzed the relationship between the missionaries and the Choctaws, this chapter focuses on the lesser-studied encounters between the Chickasaws, the western Cherokees, and the Protestant missionaries. On Choctaws, see Clara Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Sylvester Johnson, “Religion and American Empire in Mississippi, 1790– 1833,” in Michael Pasquier, ed., Gods of the Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 36–55; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 46–76. On the Eastern Cherokees’ interactions with Christian beliefs and practices, see William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); William G. McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794–1870: Essays on Acculturation and Cultural Persistence, ed. Walter H. Conser, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). For a brief treatment of the Chickasaws’ encounters with missionaries, see Amanda L. Paige, Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield, Chickasaw Removal (Ada, Okla.: Chickasaw Press, 2010), 3–21.

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earthquakes a few years later drove them further south and west, where they united with other Cherokees between the White and Arkansas rivers, in present-day Arkansas. Their removal generated conflict not only with the Old Nation—the Cherokees in the eastern homeland—but also with the Osages, who resisted them as intruders.28

When a large group of Cherokees agreed by treaty to move west of the

Mississippi River in the summer of 1817, their leaders framed the migration as a beneficial relocation, at least in their correspondence with the U.S. government. “It affords us satisfaction to know that we are going to a country where the climate is mild like the land of our nativity, where the cold will not bear hard on us & where there is an abundance of cane for our Cattle in the winter and where the Buffaloe, the Deer, the Bear

& the Beaver invite our young warriors to the chase. All these are now almost gone in this Country.” They reassured the feds that, as they gained access to better hunting grounds, they would not shed the agrarian practices they had absorbed from whites.

“Father, you must not think that by removing we shall return to the savage life. You have learned us to be herdsmen and cultivaters, and to spin & weave ... by means of schools.”

As a sign of their commitment to continue these civilizing trends, the leaders asked for

28 Osage-Cherokee tensions erupted in cycles of violence in the late 1810s and 1820s. Gregory D. Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 47–49; Charles Russell Logan, “The Promised Land”: The Cherokees, Arkansas and Removal, 1794– 1839 (Little Rock: Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, 1997), 5–13; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 56–57, 162–163, 170, 206–259; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 198–200, 208–226.

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missionary schools and teachers in their new home, signaling that they understood the government’s priorities.29

The federal government counted nearly 5,300 Cherokees who opted to emigrate, though the Cherokees themselves numbered the emigrants at 3,500, with 12,500 electing to stay in their natal land.30 The move was laden with disappointments and frustrations.

The emigrants complained that the government had not provided promised food provisions, and what corn the government did send was charged unjustly to the Cherokee annuity.31 The division of the Cherokees also generated rancor and distrust. Those who stayed in the Old Nation accused the government of giving preferential treatment to the ones who left. Those who removed charged the government with not paying their portion of the annuity. Most pressingly, they complained about the government’s inaction in the present war between the Osages and the western Cherokees, bemoaning that the government failed to protect them from their neighbors, whom the Cherokees claimed

29 John Jolly to John C. Calhoun, copy, 29 Jan 1818, M271, Roll 2, RG 75, NARA. Elias Cornelius, agent for the American Board, had discussed the prospect of schools for the Arkansas Cherokees in November 1817 when he encountered a group of them on his way from Natchez to New Orleans. They responded favorably to his suggestion. Jeremiah Evarts, a leading figure in the American Board, reiterated the possibility of schools to the Cherokees who were planning to remove, during his southern tour in May 1818. Head chief Tolantiskee sent a cordial and encouraging reply, consenting to the educational program and promising to treat the missionary teachers well. B. B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1833), 90–91; E. C. Tracy, Memoir of the Life of Jeremiah Evarts (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1845), 125; Tolantiskee to Jeremiah Evarts, 10 June 1818, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

30 C. Hicks, on behalf of Cherokee Delegation, 17 Feb 1819, M271, Roll 2, RG 75, NARA.

31 Chiefs of the Arkansas Cherokees to James Monroe, 17 March 1821, M271, Roll 3, RG 75, NARA. A delegation of Arkansas Cherokees later thanked the president for “blotting out” the $555.75 charge for corn, for which they “never expected he would demand payment.” Black Fox, John M. Lamore, Walter Webber and James Rogers to John C. Calhoun, 26 Feb 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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“most inhumanly murdered, butchered, and plundered” the newcomers.32 (Missionaries among the Osages countered that the Cherokees were the aggressors in this “war of extermination.”)33 The treaty of peace between the two nations in 1822 dampened such complaints, but did not remove the impression that the government had not treated them fairly.34

In cooperation with the government’s removal strategy, the American Board sent missionary superintendents Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to establish a school among the Arkansas Cherokees.35 The pair built the first mission station—named

Dwight, in memory of Timothy Dwight, the late president of Yale and well-known mission advocate—on Illinois Creek (or Bayou), just north of the Arkansas River, two hundred miles from the Arkansas Post, in present-day northwestern Arkansas. Finney and

32 Chiefs of the Arkansas Cherokees to James Monroe, 17 March 1821, M271, Roll 3, RG 75, NARA.

33 William Vaill to John C. Calhoun, 30 Oct 1821, M271, Roll 3, RG 75, NARA.

34 James Miller to John C. Calhoun, 27 Sept 1822, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

35 A native of Vermont, Cephas Washburn was a Congregationalist who was licensed to preach first in his home state, then in Georgia under appointment of the Savannah Missionary Society. He was ordained as a missionary American Board and was sent to the Arkansas Cherokees in 1819. He served there until 1840, then settled with his family in Arkansas, where he preached, taught, and organized churches until his death in 1860. Alfred Finney, another Congregationalist from Vermont, studied at Dartmouth and briefly at Andover Seminary prior to being licensed to preach. He married Washburn’s sister Susanna. Finney and Washburn together offered themselves (and their wives) for missionary service. Finney was ordained an American Board missionary in 1818. He accompanied Washburn to the Cherokees’ western country, where he died in 1829. Cephas Washburn to Jeremiah Evarts, 2 July 1829, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Cephas Washburn, Reminiscences of the Indians (Richmond, [1869?]; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971), 9–15, 51–55; Gavin Struthers, Memoirs of American Missionaries. With an Introductory Essay by ... Gavin Struthers. And a Dissertation on the Consolations of a Missionary by the Rev. Levi Parsons (Glasgow: John Reid, 1834), 193–194.

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Washburn visited the American Board’s schools at Brainard and Elliot in the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations on their way to the Arkansas Territory, to glean wisdom and gather advice. They started building the new mission station in August 1820. They intended to follow the plan adopted by other schools of boarding the children with the mission family, “that they may be constantly under our watch, care, and direction”—that is, that the missionaries might suppress Cherokee wardrobe, behavior, and language and instill bourgeois American habits.36 In January 1822 they opened the school, and gleefully reported fifty students in attendance by the following October.37

By 1823 the school was running at capacity, with sixty students. The missionaries expressed confidence in the feasibility of their project and the overall goal of the civilization strategy: nothing but limited resources stood in the way of “raising” the

Cherokees, “although now in darkness and ignorance, to a state of society as happy, as enlightened and as moral as any part of the United States or any part of the Christian world.”38 Optimistic, glowing, upbeat, Finney and Washburn’s annual reports repeatedly intoned how Dwight embodied the aims and methods of the government’s civilization program.

Some of the Cherokee spokesmen appeared to share their optimism. Like other indigenous people facing the government’s campaign to assimilate and remove them, western Cherokee leaders strategically embraced the language of civilization to garner

36 Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to John C. Calhoun, Sept 1821, M271, Roll 3, RG 75, NARA; Dwight Journal, 31 March 1821, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

37 Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to John C. Calhoun, 1 Oct 1822, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

38 Finney and Washburn to Calhoun, Oct 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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trust and goodwill. “We the Cherokees on the Arkansas,” they claimed, “are resolved to

... do all we can for the promotion of the civilization, virtue & religion among our people.” They requested that the government promote the work of the missionaries in their midst, who would provide them many “benefits” and usher them along the path of progress, a path whose salutary endpoint they glimpsed. “We fondly hope that the time is not far distant, when we the Cherokees shall enjoy all the blessings of civilization, and live under the happy government of these United States.”39 Masked by this agreeable language were other intentions, less pleasing to the U.S. government. Some Cherokee leaders calculated that literacy would enable the rising generation to resist American encroachment on Cherokee lands. They hoped to use the white people’s tools to protect

Cherokee territory and culture.40

The American Board engaged in its own public relations campaign to promote its agenda. As they had done with Catharine Brown, the leaders cherry-picked stories of student success at the mission school to tweak potential donors and undermine critics.

Samuel Worcester, a full Cherokee, had entered the school “lazy, stubborn, and vicious,” but had since become disciplined, studious, and “serious” about religious matters.41 The

39 Black Fox, John M. Lamore, Walter Webber and James Rogers to John C. Calhoun, 11 March 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

40 Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, 2nd ed. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015), 88–89; Adriane M. Strenk, “Tradition and Transformation: Shoe Boots and the Creation of a Cherokee Culture” (Masters Thesis, University of Kentucky, 1993), 44.

41 Untitled, undated account of Dwight students and their accomplishments, labeled item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Dwight journal, 22 Dec 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; “Arkansas Mission,” Missionary Herald 21, no. 6 (June 1825): 176. This Cherokee may have been named after the first corresponding secretary of the American Board, who died in 1821, and whose nephew of the same name became a missionary to the Cherokees in the Old Nation. The Cherokee Samuel Worcester joined Dwight Church 247

first student baptized into the Christian faith at Dwight, John Thornton, was exemplary not only for his budding faith but also because he had ambitious to be a physician.42

Catharine Radcliffe demonstrated mastery of bourgois gender ideals. Not only did she make rapid progress in the typical academic subjects, she was “very dexterous and tasteful in the use of her needle.” Her personal traits—“unblameable” in her conduct,

“respectful, ... kind, open, conciliating,” modest, reserved—rivaled “any female of any nation.”43

Jane Hicks was the best of all. Jane, age nine, entered the school at Dwight when it first opened. Though her progress in reading and writing, as well as geography, was steady enough, earning her the reputation of a “good scholar,” it was in theological matters that Jane stood out. On one occasion Washburn, attacking what he saw as a standard article of faith for the western Cherokees, lectured the students about the “the folly of believing in the existence & fearing the power & malice of witches.” Jane was all ears. Braving scorn and condescending correction, she approached Washburn after class and voiced her own experience: “‘Mr. W said she, I see’d a witch in Mamma’s tatoe patch.’” Washburn, probably donning his most patronizing tone, had an extended conversation on “how easy it was for her to be deceived on the subject.” His logic, his in 1825. A few years later, having “yielded to temptation,” he was placed under ecclesiastical discipline. Minutes [undated—internal evidence suggests late 1827/early 1828], item 89, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Dwight students, item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

42 Dwight journal, 15 Aug 1824, 7 Nov 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Dwight students, item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; “Cherokees of the Arkansas,” Missionary Herald 21, no. 2 (Feb 1825): 49; “Arkansas Mission,” Missionary Herald 21, no. 6 (June 1825): 175.

43 Dwight students, item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; “Cherokees of the Arkansas,” Missionary Herald 25, no. 3 (March 1829): 87.

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authority, his persuasive words, his standing as a learned man, her own fear, bundled together, dismantled the child’s belief. Her cosmology fractured, the girl thereafter absorbed the Christian teachings the missionaries pounded into the students. But she was a sickly child, and could not attend school regularly. The missionaries lamented that Jane had not lived longer nor had more opportunities to imbibe their catechism. What she had learned, she taught to her mother, a “capricious and passionate” woman who, through

Jane’s ministrations, converted. Though Jane herself never made a public profession of faith, the missionaries trusted that at her death at age thirteen, she was “indeed with

Christ.”44

Jane notwithstanding, all was not rosy in the schools. Like the Iowa and Osage children who attended the Catholic schools in Florissant, many of the western Cherokee students resisted the strictures of the Protestants’ school. Unaccustomed to corporal punishment and harsh discipline, a Cherokee boy who had been an exemplary student ran away after being accused of a “slight misdemenor [sic].”45 A week later another boy fled after being “corrected,” reporting to his mother that he had not deserved the punishment.

“Highly incensed,” the mother “sent for his clothes & said he should return” to Dwight no more.46 Other students absented themselves from school even without the pretext of unjust treatment, sometimes with their parents’ approval and aid.47 Parents even initiated

44 Untitled, undated account of Dwight students and their accomplishments, labeled item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; “Cherokees of the Arkansas,” Missionary Herald 25, no. 3 (March 1829): 87–88.

45 Dwight Journal, 21 May 1822, 30 Sept 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

46 Dwight Journal, 28 May 1822, 3 June 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

47 Speech of Cephas Washburn before Cherokee council, 4 July 1822, copy, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM. 249

removals. Richard Rogers’s father pulled him from the school “in a peak [pique] of passion.”48

The close living quarters created other complications. In the winter of 1823–1824 the Dwight missionary staff expelled several older girls and boys because of “a painful occurrence of misconduct.”49 Their crime? The superintendent did not elaborate, but the age of the students and the severity of the punishment suggest something of a sexual nature. The superintendents were particularly touchy about such issues. The previous summer one of the girls accused a male student of “very improper conduct toward her.”

In a move men have been employing since Potiphar’s wife accused Joseph, the boy professed he had rebuffed the girl’s unwanted advances, and the (male) superintendents believed him. The girl “left the school in a rage,” traveling twenty miles to her brother’s house for safety and solace. In solidarity the girl’s sister-in-law withdrew her own child from Dwight in protest the next day.50

Parents also withdrew students in reaction to the teachers’ corporal punishment practices. In the mid-1820s two recent missionary recruits, Cynthia Thrall and George

Weed, took over the teaching duties of the girls’ and boys’ classes, respectively. But the assignments backfired. Thrall’s disciplinary methods and teaching style set the girls on edge. They registered their dissatisfaction in unidentified ways that generated, according to Cephas Washburn, “not a little embarrassment and inconvenience” throughout the mission. The boys’ situation was even more intolerable. They disliked Weed from the

48 Dwight students, item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

49 Finney to Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

50 Dwight Journal, 13–14 June 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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start, and on further acquaintance, their dislike had transformed into “a slavish dread and fixed hatred.” When he first shouldered the teaching duties, Weed had punished a teenaged boy “with so much severity, that the boy ran away.” The student’s mother, an ardent supporter of the school’s discipline and methods, was so shocked by the treatment of her child, she refused to send him back to school. Washburn himself, in a confidential letter to the American Board, acknowledged that Weed had been “unreasonably” cruel.

“Not less than fifty stripes were given with so great force, that the arm, which inflicted them was lame for several days afterwards. The marks on the back & legs of the boy were visible for more than a month.” Washburn begged the American Board to send another man to run the school.51

As Cherokee parents adjusted to the missionaries’ rules and regulations at

Dwight, and the missionaries found suitable teachers, the children attended more regularly, though they did not necessarily behave in accordance with the teachers’ expectations.52 Manual labor was a constant sticking point. The missionaries begged the

Cherokee leaders, meeting in council, to promote the school’s civilization agenda by embracing the work component of the curriculum. “It is a fundamental principle of the school that we should teach all that we receive to labor on the farm, in the shop, & in the family.”53 Such labor served a dual purpose. Children’s toil helped provide materially for the mission station and all its occupants, while also building the children’s character.

How else would students learn the “habits of industry, temperance, & sobriety & general

51 Washburn to Evarts, 27 July 1826, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

52 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

53 Speech of Alfred Finney before Cherokee council, 4 Jul 1822, copy, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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good conduct” necessary for functioning in the white world than by daily doses of physical work?54 Chopping wood and carrying water, in other words, could build character.

The children’s physical labor required competent supervision. Yet, the missionaries assigned to superintend Dwight did not have managerial skills or training to run the facility or direct the hired and volunteer workers effectively. The superintendents were young pastors, equipped to preach, not to operate a complex business.55 Their inexperience translated into countless errors, accidents, and blunders of mismanagement.

Often the school children were not well supervised during their daily hours of planting, gardening, harvesting, hauling, tending the livestock, hoeing, chopping, fetching, sewing, knitting, mending, cleaning, and cooking.56 These activities carried intrinsic risks, as one

54 Speech of Cephas Washburn before Cherokee council, 4 July 1822, copy, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

55 Dwight was a diversified economic operation, requiring a cadre of skilled and unskilled workers to operate and maintain its farm, blacksmith shop, carpenter shop, grist and saw mills, common kitchen, and sprawling physical plant, consisting of twenty-six buildings and an array of outbuildings in 1824. Plot Map of Dwight, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. Staffing issues and personnel conflicts plagued the mission station throughout the 1820s, much of it centering around the defensive and thin-skinned Alfred Finney. Censured by the American Board for mismanaging resources, Finney shed his duties as co-superintendent and moved his family away from the station, to the site of Dwight’s mills, in 1826. He continued to preach among the Cherokees, but illness and anxiety about the Board’s treatment of him limited his effectiveness. He died in 1829, convinced that he had been misunderstood and unjustly accused. Finney to Evarts, 6 Jul 1827; Finney to Evarts, 29 Jul 1827; Finney to Evarts, 7 July 1828; Finney to Evarts, 21 Apr 1828; Finney to Evarts, 8 Oct 1828; Washburn to Evarts, 18 Jul 1826, Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1826; Washburn to Evarts, 28 May 1828; Washburn to Evarts, 18 June 1828; Washburn to Evarts, 27 Sept 1828; Washburn to Evarts, 2 July 1829, all from ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

56 On their best days the missionaries recognized how dependent they were on the children’s labor, as when one noted: “The boys of the school are a great help to us in getting in our crops. They with one of the brethren after school this evening planted not 252

Cherokee boy painfully learned. Another student accidently struck him with an ax while cutting wood, severing the boy’s muscle above the elbow.57 The missionaries could not afford many such accidents without stoking parents’ fears and wrecking their school’s reputation.

Slave misconduct, interracial sex, absconding—the stuff of trashy novels—also threatened the school’s cachet among the western Cherokees. Desperate for workers as their institution expanded, the missionaries hired the labor of a “highly recommended” enslaved man for a year. For five months the man was “steady” and “well-behaved.” But then, one warm night in June, the enslaved man sneaked into the room of “one of the larger girls.” When the missionaries confronted him, he denied the crime and absconded before they could haul him to his master's. Though he professed innocence to the missionaries, “he made his boast to others that this was not the first instance, nor this the only girl, with whom he had had intercourse.” Even taking into consideration nineteenth- century connotations for “intercourse,” such a rendezvous between a black man and an

Indian girl in the wee dark hours could only mean trouble. When they interviewed the girl in question, the missionaries determined that “she was inclined toward him”—that is, the encounter was consensual. So they sent her packing, fearful that her dismissal “might raise a cry against us from her friends and connections,” but duty-bound to purge the mission station of miscreants.58

less than four and a half acres.” Dwight Journal, 19 March 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

57 Dwight Journal, 13 May 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

58 Dwight Journal, 6–13 June 1822, ABC 18.3.1, Reel 736, ABCFM; Alfred Finney, Cephas Washburn, James Orr, and Jacob Hitchcock to Jeremiah Evarts, 27 Jul 1822, ABC 18.3.1, Reel 736, ABCFM. 253

But the scandal and intrigue did not stop there. A white hired man who had been with the mission since its founding, and who held some unidentified grudge, took the occasion to retaliate. The missionaries reported that the man spread rumors insinuating

“that we paid no kind of attention to the morals & general deportment of the children in the school,” and painting mission family as “most flagrantly immoral.” The Cherokee leaders called the missionaries before their council to account for the mission, expressing alarm for the safety of their children. “All who had daughters at school were determined to come & take them away.” But Finney and Washburn were up to the task. The missionaries offered “a cool, candid & impartial statement of facts,” which restored “their confidence in us.” They carted the white laborer before the council and compelled him to retract his earlier accusations, then they fired him. When the Cherokees in the neighborhood caught the enslaved man and returned him to Dwight, the missionaries delivered him back to his master, who passed him to the Cherokee council to be punished

“according to their law.” The lesson the missionaries took away was to be more cautious about whom they employed.59

Had they paused to reflect, what they might have gleaned was that they were operating on a complicated racial terrain, to which they added their own assumptions and prejudices. Like other southeastern Native groups, the Cherokees had taken up the practice of racial slavery from their white southern neighbors in the eighteenth century.

59 “This we trust is the end of hiring slaves at Dwight,” the chastened missionaries reported to the American Board. They passed a resolution at their annual missionary meeting prohibiting hiring slaves, “except in cases of great necessity.” Dwight Journal, 6–13 June 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 21 Nov 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM. The missionaries fired another hired man—this one a white man with a Cherokee family—for conducting himself in ways similar to the enslaved man. Alfred Finney, Cephas Washburn, James Orr, and Jacob Hitchcock to Jeremiah Evarts, 27 Jul 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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When they moved westward, the Arkansas Cherokees brought enslaved Africans and

African Americans with them. They also brought notions of racial hierarchy and racialized behavior, absorbed and adjusted from white conceptions to fit Cherokee frameworks. For Cherokees, Indianness instead of whiteness topped the racial pyramid, but they agreed with white Americans that blackness was at the bottom. Adding gender to the mix complicated the calculus. Primed with expectations about Indians’ moral laxity, the white missionaries had no trouble believing that the female Cherokee student was a willing partner in the sexual escapade with the black man. Had she been a white student, they would have jumped to different conclusions. The Cherokee parents reacted otherwise—they presumed that their innocent daughters were in danger of being victims, not accomplices, of black male sexual desire. The Cherokees and white missionaries agreed that the female students were at risk, but the nature of that risk they disputed.60

The missionaries also confronted Cherokee conceptions of racial hierarchy as they pressed their labor agenda. Enslaved black people performed the manual labor on the farms and plantations along the Arkansas River among the Cherokee families who had accumulated the most wealth.61 In adopting white southern labor practices, some

60 For parallel developments among the Choctaws and Chickasaws, see Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 30–35. On the shift from nebulous to strict racialized categories among the Cherokees at the end of the eighteenth century, the consequent shift in practices of slaveholding, and the links between these developments and the U.S. government’s civilization program, see Miles, Ties That Bind, 33–36. For other recent scholarship on slavery within Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, see Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory from Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

61 On Cherokees’ embrace of white slaveholders’ labor practices, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 31–32. 255

Cherokees also internalized concomitant racialist associations. Attuned to the links among race, status, and toil, Cherokee parents resisted Dwight’s labor policy because they believed “it will make negros [sic] of their children to require them to work a part of the time.”62 In an ironic twist one parent used the Cherokees’ association of manual labor with enslavement to enforce discipline. The father of a student who ran away from the school “sent him into the field & obliged him work with his negroes till he should be willing to return to school.” Chastened, the boy opted to return to Dwight, where “he had to labor but a small part of the time,” instead of being “made a negro slave at home.”63

The missionaries struggled to retrain the Cherokee families to embrace toil as a positive good for their children, instead of rejecting it as symbol of racialized enslavement.

Racialized thinking not only dictated how Cherokee families responded to

Dwight’s labor regime, it also saturated parents’ expectations about how their children would be treated. The groups who moved west included some Cherokees who had intermarried with whites. Euro-American men had for generations moved into the southeastern Indian nations to make strategic marriage alliances with elite Native women in order to gain land and access to trade networks. Their children, benefitting from their mothers’ social standing and their fathers’ linguistic skill and economic and political connections, often embraced farming and gained status as mediators and political leaders.

As Cherokee communities faced mounting pressure to acclimate to the encroaching bourgeois American culture, mixed-ancestry couples and white men who married

Cherokee women gravitated toward the mission schools more quickly than full

62 Alfred Finney, Cephas Washburn, James Orr, Jacob Hitchcock to Jeremiah Evarts, 27 Jul 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

63 Dwight Journal, 3 June 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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Cherokees, for whom the language and assimilationist goals were less familiar.64 For some mixed families the mission schools offered an opportunity to reinforce the acculturation processes taking place within the home.65 White fathers of mixed-race children brought assumptions about how their own whiteness, and the benefits thereof, should accrue to their offspring through the educational program. Two such men complained to the missionaries at Dwight a year after the school opened, “sour and dissatisfied because no distinction was made between their children and the children of

Indians as they called them.”66 These men expected the white missionaries to see and treat their children differently than the other children.

By 1825 at least 4,000 Cherokees—more than one fifth of the nation—lived beyond the Mississippi River.67 A few dozen families settled on the Mulberry River, some sixty miles northwest of Dwight—too far to send their children easily—approached

64 Perdue, Cherokee Women, 143; James W. Parins, Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820–1906 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 48–49; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 33, 67–70; Smithers, Cherokee Diaspora, 31, 40–42. For intermarriage among the Chickasaws, see Don Martini, Chickasaw Empire: The Story of the Colbert Family (Ripley, Misss. [sic]: D. Martini, 1986), 1–12. Similar dynamics unfolded among the Osages, Iowas, and other groups whom the Catholic missionaries at Florissant were trying to reach. European men had married elite Native women from these nations in previous generations. The majority of the children in the Indian schools at Florissant were métis, whose parents sought Euro-American education as a way to advance their children’s prospects in a rapidly changing world.

65 The missionaries tried to capitalize on these commitments to acculturation, particularly among the leading Cherokee families. See Washburn to Evarts, 27 Sept 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

66 Dwight Journal, 14 May 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

67 McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 120n38.

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the missionaries about opening a local school in their neighborhood.68 They did not want another facility like Dwight—a sprawling boarding school, farm, and mechanic complex—with its expansive footprint, large staff, and unmanageable budget.69 They just wanted a modest school with a reliable teacher. The Mulberry residents voted to use their own funds to construct the buildings—a schoolhouse and teacher’s house—and to provide board for the students and the teacher, if the American Board would send them a qualified instructor. Their neighbors at a settlement called Cropland’s made a similar request.70 Here were western Cherokees devoting their own resources to secure educational access for their children, on their terms.

The western Cherokees also dealt with the spiritual component of the missionaries’ agenda on their own terms. From the missionaries’ perspective, the

Cherokees’ religious state was dreary and dire. “They have a comfortless, barbarous life

& have not one ray of light to cheer the tomb, not one beam of faith to illuminate

68 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 12 Aug 1824; David Greene and Cyrus Kingsbury to Evarts, 21 April 1828; Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1824, all from ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

69 Their American Board sponsors frequently chided the Dwight missionaries for runaway expenses, including mounting labor costs for hired workers, unnecessary buildings, and mismanaged resources. The Dwight missionaries themselves recognized that their facility vastly exceeded its budget. The Board opted to change the personnel structure at its flagship mission at Brainerd in 1824, disbursing half the staff to smaller mission stations and reorienting the remaining personnel toward the priorities of education and religious instruction. The missionaries at Dwight, some four hundred miles away, felt the ripples of the Board’s actions. See Finney to Evarts, 3 Aug 1825; Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1826; Washburn to Evarts, 28 May 1828; Washburn to Evarts, 27 Sept 1828; David Greene and Cyrus Kingsbury to Evarts, 21 April 1828, all from ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1824 (Boston: Printed for the board by Crocker and Brewster, 1824), 45–51.

70 Washburn to Evarts, 12 Oct 1827 ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Cephas Washburn to Peter B. Porter, 1 Oct 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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eternity.”71 To brighten these dismal prospects, Washburn and Finney organized a church at Dwight, designed to be the basis for evangelizing the Cherokees in the immediate neighborhood and throughout the western region. The founding members were the mission staff.72 They held weekly religious services open to anyone who wanted to attend. When Cherokee adults, curious about what their children were learning about the white people’s religion from the “beloved Book,” showed up on Sundays, the missionaries hosted extra meetings for them to introduce basic Christian concepts and doctrines.73 They also scurried to find interpreters, who were essential to their outreach both at Dwight and in the surrounding settlements.74 Finney and Washburn split the evangelical work. On Sundays one would preach at Dwight while the other rode out to nearby Cherokee villages. For the first few years their aim was to familiarize the western

Cherokees with key bible stories: “the creation, apostacy [sic], deluge, calling of

Abraham, general dispensations of divine providence to the children of Israel, the

71 Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to Jeremiah Evarts, 10 Jan 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

72 Dwight Journal, 12 Apr 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM. In addition to missionary superintendents Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn and their wives, the staff in 1822 included: farmer James Orr and his wife; Jacob Hitchcock, who alternately served as steward and teacher, and his wife Nancy Brown Hitchcock; Asa Hitchcock, shoemaker/mechanic; and Miss Ellen Stetson, teacher.

73 Dwight Journal, 6 Oct 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

74 Dwight Journal, 5 Jan 1823, 30 Aug 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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incarnation, life, sufferings, & death of Christ & their blessed design & effects.”75 They then hoped to press on to more advanced theological terrain.

As the station settled into a regular rhythm, the missionaries ramped up their spiritual program, dedicating Sunday evenings to extra catechetical instruction for the children and any adults who happened to be present.76 To translate their incremental success to their northeastern supporters, the missionaries cited recognizable milestones:

Like any good New England Congregationalist or mid-Atlantic Presbyterian child, the

Cherokee children “are all able to answer correctly most of the questions in Emerson’s

Doctrinal Catechism.”77 To the secretary of war Washburn boasted that together, the school’s fifty students had memorized about 35,000 verses of scripture, hymns, and answers to catechism questions.78

The rote memorization at school had its limits, as did the sermons pitched through interpreters at the Cherokee settlements. “As yet,” the missionaries admitted in the spring of 1823, “we are unable to communicate the glad tidings of the conversion of any, to our

75 Dwight Journal, 15 Dec 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 18 Jul 1826, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

76 Dwight Journal, 24 Nov 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM. They formed a Sabbath School in late 1825, auxiliary to the American Sunday School Union. Washburn to Evarts, 18 Jul 1826, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

77 Dwight Journal, 27 Apr 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM. The catechism was Joseph Emerson’s The Evangelical Primer Containing a Minor Doctrinal Catechism, and a Minor Historical Catechism: To Which Is Added the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism: With Short Explanatory Notes and Copious Scripture Proofs and Illustrations; for the Use of Families and Schools, first published in 1809 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. It was reprinted frequently in the early nineteenth century and became a steady seller among New Divinity adherents. Joseph Conforti, “Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards,” Religion and American Culture 3, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 73.

78 Cephas Washburn to James Barbour, 1 Oct 1826, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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patrons & the Christian community.”79 From the founding of Dwight Mission Church, more than two years passed before they recruited their first two Cherokee members:

Achy Hicks, the mother of Jane Hicks, and Betsy Looney, the half-sister of Catharine and

David Brown. Both women had children in the school, a critical detail that confirmed to the missionaries that their educational strategy was correct—the school could be a means of evangelizing adults, if not the children themselves.80 A few months later they reveled in the triumphant news of their next convert, Tahneh, whom they dubbed Naomi, the first full Cherokee to embrace their Christian message.81

Why did these women appropriate Protestant Christianity? The missionaries’ religion may have offered them spiritual power or solace that they otherwise had trouble attaining. Church membership certainly gave them access to an influential social network, consisting of well-connected Cherokee converts in the Old Nation and white missionaries with potent ties and resources in the northeast. For Betsy Looney, embracing

Christianity brought her in line with her family. By 1824 her mother, stepfather, four siblings, and a sister-in-law had all become professing Christians among the eastern

Cherokees.82 That she was baptized and joined Dwight’s church shortly after several of

79 Washburn to Evarts, 30 April 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

80 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

81 Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1824; Account of Naomi; Dwight Journal, 12 July 1824, 15 Aug 1824, 22 Aug 1824, 5 Sept 1824, all from ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. The missionary press picked up the story of Tahneh. See “Cherokees of the Arkansas,” Missionary Herald 21, no. 2 (Feb 1825): 48–50; “Arkansas Mission: Journal at Dwight,” Religious Intelligencer 10, no. 12 (20 Aug 1825): 181–182; “Cherokees of the Arkansas,” Religious Intelligencer 13, no. 20 (11 Oct 1828): 310–311.

82 Betsy Looney was the daughter of Sarah Brown and a man named Webber. John, Catharine, and David Brown—all converts—were her half-siblings through her mother. Their half-sister Susan also converted, as did John’s wife, Susannah. Rufus Anderson, 261

them relocated to the Arkansas region was not accidental.83 Tahneh’s and Achy Hicks’s spiritual motivations are less obvious. The missionaries credited Hicks’s conversion to her daughter Jane’s influence while Hicks was grieving the death of an infant.84 For

Tahneh, an intellectual struggle instead of grief brought her to the threshold of a new religiosity. Born some five decades earlier, Tahneh had moved west with her husband, the son of headman John Jolly, in 1818. She first encountered the missionaries’ preaching in 1823, invited by a neighbor, Mrs. L (possibly Betsy Looney). As their strange teachings became more familiar to her, Tahneh resisted the implications of their Calvinist dogma. “Her mind is greatly perplexed with some of the doctrines of the gospel,” the missionaries recorded in their daily journal. “In vain has she tried to reconcile the sinner’s entire helplessness & dependence with his moral freedom & his duty to use the means of grace. It is obvious that her heart is hostile to these truths.” From there Tahneh followed—in the missionaries’ telling—a well-worn path from opposition, through despair and a sense of being lost, to submission and acceptance, and arriving finally at hope. She died eight months after her baptism, the first church member buried at

Dwight.85

Memoir of Catharine Brown, 10–12, 94; “Mission among the Cherokees: Extracts from the Journal kept at Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 17, no. 3 (March 1821): 73. See also Birdwell, “Cherokee Reckonings,” 63–64.

83 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

84 Dwight students, item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

85 Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Account of Naomi, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; “Cherokees of the Arkansas: Biographical Notice of a Cherokee Woman,” Religious Intelligencer 13, no. 20 (11 Oct 1828): 310–311.

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Augmenting the theological and social benefits, the promise of health care may have motivated these women’s and other Cherokees’ spiritual decisions. The missionaries stocked medicines, and, when George Weed arrived, they had a medical professional on staff.86 Both Tahneh and Achy Hicks found medical treatment and aid for themselves and, in Tahneh’s case, for her adult son, among the missionaries. “Sister Hicks, whose health has been feeble for some time, came to stay with us for a season for the purpose of receiving medicine,” the missionaries noted in their daily journal in 1825, suggesting that such arrangements were routine.87 Tahneh had her son, who was dying of pulmonary consumption, brought to Dwight, “that he may receive christian instruction & consolation while he lives, & christian burial after his decease.”88 The occupants at Dwight, including his mother, attended to his body and soul for three weeks, until his death.89 Tahneh herself received the same care during her own decline and death later that month.90

Few Cherokees enjoyed such rewards. When the missionaries first met Tahneh, she lived at Point Remove, one of the settlements the missionaries visited regularly. The

86 Dwight Journal, 16 Apr 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 17 Aug 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. George Weed had “attended two courses of medical lectures” and had practiced medicine “both in city and country,” prior to embarking for the west. In February 1828 Marcus Palmer, another doctor who had been a missionary at an Osage mission called Union, switched places with Weed. Palmer established the school at Mulberry, from which he could still respond to medical crises at Dwight. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1825, 65; Marcus Palmer to Jeremiah Evarts, 1 Sept 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

87 Dwight Journal, 2 Feb 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. John Brown, Catharine and David’s father, also came to Dwight for medical aid. Dwight Journal, 31 Aug 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

88 Dwight Journal, 16 Feb 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

89 Dwight Journal, 6 March 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

90 Dwight Journal, 20 March, 31 March 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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inhabitants of several of the other settlements rarely if ever encountered Dwight or its occupants. Those who did just as readily expressed indifference as curiosity about the

Christianity the missionaries presented. Washburn, who traveled more frequently than

Finney, faced indirect rejection on various occasions. On one of his evangelical jaunts, he tried to engage through an interpreter with some old men in a village on the topic of the

“future state,” that is, what happens after death. Brushing the visitors off, the men “said they were like the sun away down (pointing to but just above the horizon) and it was too late for them to think about such things.”91 On another occasion Washburn set out for a village with his interpreter for an appointment to preach, but a messenger from the village chief met them on the way, “informing him that his people were all drinking, & desiring that the appointment might be postponed.”92 Inebriated Cherokees were not his ideal audience, nor were those who considered themselves too old to take on new teachings.

Others, too, dismissed Washburn and his message because they did not want to adopt moral code that for evangelical Protestants went hand-in-hand with true faith. As he summed up in his annual report to the U.S. government, “many neglect and even oppose the Gospel. Some, because it reproves their immoralities; some, because it opposes their ambitions & selfish schemes.”93

The missionaries hoped that David Brown would transform Cherokee indifference and opposition into faithfulness. The younger brother of exemplary Cherokee convert

91 Dwight Journal, 25 Sept 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

92 Dwight Journal, 6 Oct 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

93 Cephas Washburn to James Barbour, 1 Oct 1826, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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Catharine Brown, David had lived for a few years among the Arkansas Cherokees as a youngster in the 1810s before returning to the Old Nation and attending Brainerd school, where he impressed the staff with his piety and potential. “David Brown appears very anxious to acquire an education, preparatory to becoming a minister of the Gospel,” they cheered in the Brainerd mission journal.94 When Washburn and Finney passed through the Cherokee homeland on their way to establish Dwight, they met David, who expressed his support for the missionaries’ western endeavor. Brown sent letters with the missionaries to his and Catharine’s half-brother, Walter Webber, “one of the chiefs of the emigrant Cherokees,” and to other leading Cherokee men, promoting the mission and school program.95 He was exactly the kind of insider they needed.

Then he launched on his own journey. With blessings from the Brainerd missionaries, Brown traveled to New England in 1820 to study for two years at the

Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, an American Board-funded institution to train indigenous converts for missionary service among their people.96 He then pursued theological studies at Andover Seminary for another year—not long enough to be ordained, but enough to make high-powered friends and develop his own

94 “Journal of the Mission at Brainerd,” Panopolist, and Missionary Herald 16, no. 4 (Apr 1820): 184.

95 Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to Samuel Worcester, 12 Jan 1820, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

96 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1820 (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1820), 39; Demos, Heathen School, 99–102, 164–171.

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understanding of how Christianity could help his people.97 While in New England,

Brown worked with philologist John Pickering to prepare a Cherokee grammar text. He also traveled in the northeast delivering an address about Cherokee beliefs and the prospects for missionary labor among them.98 On a trip to Washington, he promoted the mission schools to his half-brother, Walter Webber, who was visiting the city with a

Cherokee delegation from the Arkansas region.99 Brown became their scribe, writing to the secretary of war on behalf of the Arkansas Cherokee chiefs to convey their approbation of the missionaries’ labor.100

97 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1823 (Boston: Printed for the Board by Crocker & Brewster, 1823), 77.

98 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1823, 131. Dedicated to Cherokee literacy, Brown had collaborated with missionary Daniel Butrick on a Cherokee spelling book when he was still a teen. The missionaries at Brainerd ordered a print run of 600 copies of the text, for use in the mission schools. “Journal of the Mission at Brainerd, Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 16, no. 3 (March 1820): 123–124; “Journal of the Mission at Brainerd,” Panopolist, and Missionary Herald 16, no. 4 (Apr 1820): 184. Butrick, unlike most of the other missionaries of the American Board, devoted himself to learning the Cherokee language. With Baptist and Moravian missionary collaborators, he developed a written alphabet for the Cherokee language based on an augmented and modified roman alphabet, and by 1822 had begun translating portions of the bible into Cherokee. Parins, Literacy and Intellectual Life, 27–31; Sean P. Harvey, Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 121–122. Brown’s address apparently existed in manuscript form only until published later in the century: Dewi Brown, “Address of Dewi Brown, a Cherokee Indian,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 12 (1871–1873): 30–38. A copy of the original manuscript of this address, entitled Address in favor of the aboriginal inhabitants of America, ca. 1823, is held at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. S-162.

99 Walter Webber to Evarts, 3 March 1823; David Brown to Evarts, 3 March 1823; David Brown to Evarts, 7 March 1823, all from ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

100 David Brown to Evarts, 26 April 1823, letter fragment, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Black Fox, John M. Lamore, Walter Webber and James Rogers to John C. Calhoun, 11 March 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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Meanwhile, Brown’s parents Yau-nu-gung-yah-ski and Tsa-luh—known to the missionaries as John and Sarah—had converted and joined the Creek Path church in the

Old Nation, then emigrated and settled with the Arkansas Cherokees.101 When Brown joined them in the spring of 1824, the Dwight missionaries hoped he would become a savior to his people.102 “At first he will act as Interpreter, & pursue theological studies, untill [sic] he shall be qualified to act as a minister of the gospel & missionary to his brethren.”103 Though his Cherokee was a little rusty from “his long absence from his people,” the young man soon began to fulfill the missionaries’ sanguine hopes.104 For a few weeks in 1824 Brown preached and expounded on Christianity in Cherokee and

English.105 The missionaries envisioned Brown as a tool of divine grace. “He has it in his

101 The Brainerd records indicate that John Brown and son Edward had relocated to Arkansas in 1822, though Catharine Brown’s memoirist indicates the family did not move until after Catharine’s death. The Dwight records indicate that many of Catharine and David’s relatives had already arrived in Arkansas by the summer of 1822. John and Sarah Brown had settled into their new home on the Illinois Creek a few miles from Dwight by April 1824. An Edward Brown, reported to be slightly younger than Catharine and David’s half-brother, is listed in the Dwight school records as having entered in Oct 1822; he was a slow but accurate scholar who “promises to make a useful man.” Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 24 Jan 1818, 10 July 1818, 71, 448n8, 459n62; Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to Jeremiah Evarts, 7 Sept 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 12 Aug 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Dwight students, item 15, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1821 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, no. 50, Cornhill, 1821), 54; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1822 (Boston: Printed for the Board by Crocker and Brewster, no. 50, Cornhill, 1822), 49; Anderson, Memoir of Catharine Brown, 10–12.

102 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 30 Jun 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

103 Finney and Washburn to J.C. Calhoun, 1 Oct 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

104 Dwight Journal, 11 July 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

105 Dwight Journal, 17 July, 15 Aug 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. 267

power, by the blessing of God,” they reflected, “to effect more good than a host of foreign missionaries.”106

But Brown was a Cherokee first, and a Christian second. As he toured the region preaching in the summer of 1824, he labored to organize the governance of the Arkansas branch of the Cherokee Nation on a representative model.107 When he was elected as the secretary of the Arkansas Cherokees’ government, his loyalties to Cherokee sovereignty came to the fore. Brown used his literacy in English and Cherokee in his role, revising and copying the laws passed by the Grand Council.108 For a few years Brown split his time between the Old Nation and the Arkansas Cherokees, pushing forward both his

Christian and his political agendas.109 As he straddled the two Cherokee regions, he worked to translate the four gospels of the New Testament into the Cherokee language, a project that distracted him from being able to “ride much among his people” and

“promote the spiritual interests of his countrymen.”110 By 1826 he was back in the Old

106 Dwight Journal, 15 Aug 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

107 Dwight Journal, 19 July, 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

108 Dwight Journal, 13 Sept 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. On how David Brown negotiated his Cherokee identity, his political commitments, and his Christian faith, see Hilary E. Wyss, English Letters and Indian Literacies Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 158–189.

109 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 21 Nov 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

110 Two competing forms of Cherokee writing had emerged by the mid 1820s to supplant Buttrick’s alphabet: John Pickering’s orthography, and the syllabary created by Sequoya, also known as George Guess or Gist, using roman and other characters to render the eighty-six syllables of the Cherokee language. Though mixed-blood Cherokees like Brown who already knew English hesitated to adopt it, Sequoya’s version triumphed. Those who spoke the Cherokee language could learn the system quickly and could begin communicating through writing in a matter of days. Communications flourished among Cherokees of all social classes and ages. By the late 1820s the missionary agencies had 268

Nation, where he planned to settle permanently. He asked the American Board to sponsor him as a missionary and translator there, dictating the terms under which he would operate—he would live independently on his own plantation, not with the other missionaries. Brown warned that without fiscal support from the American Board, he would have to forfeit his evangelical ambitions and instead go into “mercantile business” to support his family.111 The threat backfired. The organization chose not to sponsor the politically engaged Cherokee convert whose allegiance to their agenda and support for their cooperation with the federal government they doubted.112 In the later 1820s Brown faded from the American Board’s reports on missionary labors.113 His death at Creek

also adopted Sequoya’s syllabary. David Brown’s career as a translator spanned this transition. In 1825 he was translating the gospel of Matthew into Cherokee from Greek and English sources using Pickering’s orthography. By the next year he was translating religious texts using Sequoya’s syllabary. He and his father-in-law, George Lowrey, reportedly completed a full translation of the four gospels using the syllabary. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report 1825, 51–52; Washburn, Dwight, to Evarts, 13 Dec 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; David Brown to Evarts, 29 Sept 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 739, ABCFM; “Cherokee Newspaper,” Missionary Herald 24, no. 4 (Apr 1828), 133–134; “The New Testament in Cherokee,” Recorder and Telegraph 10, no. 28 (8 Jul 1825): 112; Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 396; Smithers, Cherokee Diaspora, 76–82; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 350–354; Parins, Literacy and Intellectual Life, 31–41.

111 David Brown to Evarts, 11 July 1826, ABC 18.3.1, reel 739, ABCFM; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1826 (Boston: printed for the board by Crocker and Brewster, no. 50, Cornhill, 1826), 56–57.

112 Brown was named one of the leaders of the western Cherokees’ delegation to Washington in 1827–1828, whose goal was to protect their territory in Arkansas from white encroachment. Robert Paul Markham, “The Arkansas Cherokees: 1817–1828” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1972), 183.

113 In 1827 David Brown received brief mention in reference to his father John’s death at Dwight: the senior Brown was “known to the Christian public as an exemplary and consistent Christian, and as the father of Catharine and John Brown, jun. who had previously departed in faith, and of David Brown, who survives for the benefit, as we trust, of his countrymen.” The “as we trust” may capture the Board’s lack of trust in 269

Path, his family’s original home, in 1829 ended any hope of Brown fulfilling the great destiny the missionaries had foreseen.114

David Brown did not usher his people into Protestant faithfulness. The process of orienting the majority of Cherokees toward Christianity would take several more years.

By the late 1820s the missionaries had regular preaching appointments sprinkled throughout the western Cherokee territory, at Dwight, Lower and Upper Point Remove,

Looney's, Astoluttuh's, the mouth of Piney Creek, and Chisholm's, with occasional engagements at Spadre and Mulberry.115 They repeatedly broadcast a narrative of

Cherokees’ eagerness to receive religious instruction.116 Washburn tried to leverage

Cherokee interest to gain additional mission personnel. “Here the field is open, white to the harvest, & the calls for preaching much greater than Mr. F [Finney] & myself can possibly satisfy.” But in reality such willingness to entertain the evangelists was confined to particular settlements. Cherokees prevented the missionaries from preaching at other

David Brown’s ultimate usefulness for them. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1827 (Boston: Printed by Crocker and Brewster, no. 47 Washington Street, 1827), 125–126.

114 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ... 1830 (Boston: Printed for the Board by Crocker and Brewster, 1830), 73–74. On the Dwight missionaries’ outsized expectations, and subsequent disappointment at Brown’s path, see Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to Jeremiah Evarts, 10 Jan 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1826, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

115 Minutes, item 89, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

116 David Greene and Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, 21 April 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 20 Sept 1827, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. See also Washburn to Evarts, 18 Jul 1826; Washburn to Evarts, 17 Sept 1826; Washburn to Evarts, 5 May 1827, all from ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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key locations. Until his death in 1824, a chief named Takatoka, who held sway over a village a handful of miles up the Illinois Creek from Dwight, opposed the mission and its school, actively barring “the people of his village with their children from instruction to the extent of his influence.”117 When Finney proposed moving to Spadre to dedicate himself fulltime to evangelizing, the Cherokee council voted unanimously against his proposal. They also forbade the missionaries from moving elsewhere in the Cherokee domain for the same purpose.118 At the largest Cherokee settlement, near Cropland's, the missionaries had no entrée at all. They had never even visited, must less preached, in the most populous village.119

By early 1828 a whopping sixteen people had joined Dwight Mission Church besides the mission family, eleven of these by profession of faith, and five by letter of transfer from churches in the Old Nation. Two of the sixteen had died, and one was under ecclesiastical discipline, which Washburn feared would “end in his excommunication.”

Two others had received censure from the church, and had reformed.120 The next year the missionaries glumly signaled they had no new converts. Worse yet, they feared

117 Alfred Finney to Jeremiah Evarts, 12 Aug 1824, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Markham, “Arkansas Cherokees,” 110–112, 122. The Dwight missionaries spelled this man’s name in various ways, including Ta-kau-to-baugh and Ta-kan-to-caugh.

118 Washburn to Evarts, 10 July 1825, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 18 Jul 1826, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

119 Minutes, item 89, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

120 Minutes, item 89, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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regression among the professing Cherokees. “Some of the native converts give anxiety lest they should turn back & walk no more with the Lord.”121

Western Cherokees did not rush to embrace the religious message proclaimed by the Dwight missionaries. But many of them did accept other elements of American culture. Cherokees along the Arkansas River and its tributaries were shifting toward

Anglo-American agricultural practices and building styles. Their houses increasingly had floors made of planks instead of dirt. Like other southerners, they purchased African- descended slaves, who raised vegetables in gardens and corn and cotton for sale. The western Cherokees kept livestock: cattle, horses, hogs, sheep, poultry. They built fences around their property. Many had adopted American dress: pantaloons and hats replacing leggings and handkerchiefs. Within their homes they used dishes, flatware, cups and saucers like refined white folks. “Their style of living is good,” Washburn reported,

“generally much better than that of missionaries among them.”122 Though they evaded the religious program, many of the western Cherokees acclimated to the economic, social, and material elements of American “civilization.”123

121 Minutes from Indian Missionary Presbytery, held at Dwight, 3 Nov 1829, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

122 Minutes, item 89, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

123 Bethel Saler posits that Wisconsin Indians responded to similar missionizing efforts in the 1830s and 1840s in three broad categories. “Vernacular” Native people incorporated some elements of Christianity within their primarily Native orientation. “Christian” Indians embraced their proselytizers’ messages and identified themselves as members of a broader Christian community. “Traditional” Native people opposed the missionaries and their messages, and worked to resist the cultural and religious innovations they introduced. The western Cherokees evinced a similar breadth of response to the Dwight missionaries. By 1830, many of the Cherokees who had contact with the missionaries fell in the vernacular category. They listened to Christian preaching on occasion, sent their children to the missionaries’ schools, and adopted Euro-American farming practices, but did not join the church. Unaccounted for in Saler’s schema is the large group—perhaps 272

While the Arkansas Cherokee mission project unfolded west of the Mississippi

River, a different group of Protestants labored to educate and Christianize on the east side. The Chickasaws, situated in present-day western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern

Mississippi, and northwestern Alabama, had encountered Protestant evangelism a generation earlier. The Missionary Society of New York, established in 1796, had sent missionary Joseph Bullen to the Chickasaw Indians in Western Georgia in 1799, the first

Protestant effort among the tribe. Despite early glowing reports of a multiracial worshiping community, including Chickasaws, their African American slaves, and the white missionaries, the project stalled after a few years. The sponsoring organization suspended the mission in 1804.124

In 1821 a Presbyterian organization, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary

Society of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, appealed for government aid for a new effort for the Chickasaws. The group established a mission station and school called

Monroe near the Chickasaw agency, in what is now northern Mississippi. They intended to follow the Lancasterian model of education, by which advanced students taught younger ones. In addition to regular school subjects of “reading, writing, and arithmetic,” and the practical arts of agriculture, spinning, and sewing, the missionaries projected providing “religious instruction as may tend to impress upon their minds the necessity of the majority—of western Cherokees who had little or no contact with the Christian missionaries. See Saler, Settlers’ Empire, 190–198, 208–210.

124 Committee Minutes, vol. 1, 22, Minutes 1802–1807, Standing Committee of Missions, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly, PHS; R. Pierce Beaver, ed., Pioneers in Mission: The Early Missionary Ordination Sermons, Charges, and Instructions. A Source Book on the Rise of American Missions to the Heathen (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1966), 235–237.

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a virtuous well ordered life.”125 Calhoun approved the project and allocated $500 per year for tuition, as well as construction costs.126

Eight missionaries—two ordained clergy, a carpenter, a farmer, and these men’s wives—volunteered to teach, feed, manage, and house Chickasaw children.127 Like those working in the schools for western Cherokee children, the Presbyterian missionaries found the Chickasaw students resistant to the manual labor program and the rigors of sitting indoors, studying a religious book filled with strange stories. Many squirmed and acted out; some fled to their families.128 To maintain order and solidify their supremacy over their pupils, the missionaries concocted a behavioral accounting system, modeled on similar systems in northeastern Sunday schools, to reward children who observed the rules and to punish the “idle.” On Monday mornings the teachers doled out numbered

“tickets” to each child according to their conduct from the preceding week, including “the sabbath.” Those who behaved the best received a 4 ticket, and so on down to a 0 ticket for the “inattentive.” The teachers logged the tickets in an account book and credited each child with 6 1/4 cents times the number on the ticket. When the children earned enough, they could trade in their tickets for clothing and schoolbooks. Linking Protestant ideals of self-control with basic provisions for school children seemed a stroke of genius to the

125 Thomas C. Stuart to John C. Calhoun, 28 March 1821, M271, Roll 3, RG 75, NARA.

126 John C. Calhoun to T. Charlton Henry, 28 April 1823, M15, Roll 5, RG 75, NARA. See also John C. Calhoun to T.C. Henry, 15 May 1823, M15, Roll 5, RG 75, NARA.

127 State of the Indian School at Monroe, [1824], M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA; Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 27 Sept 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

128 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 10 Sept 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA. 274

missionaries. “These arrangements promote industry among them, and entirely preclude the necessity of using the rod,” assured the school superintendent.129

The missionaries expanded their program in 1824 by building a second school called Tockshish, on a creek of the same name, a few miles south of the Monroe station.130 These schools were the means, not the end, for the Presbyterians. Their primary goal was the conversion of Chickasaws to evangelical Christianity. They constructed the mission stations as self-sustaining economic projects to prepare Indian children to embrace the gospel. Complementary to its educational aims, each station was designed to be a religious base, from which its ordained preacher would missionize the adult Chickasaws in the immediate vicinity and, ideally, throughout the Nation.

The schools provided the initial contact between the missionaries and the families in the area. As the children learned to read—first from spellers, then from the New

Testament—their parents encountered Christianity obliquely. At least, that was the missionaries’ hope. The evangelists also hosted weekly Sabbath services in the schoolhouse and welcomed all to join them. Like the western Cherokees, the Chickasaws did not rush to embrace the religious frameworks and practices offered them. But the

Presbyterians persevered, gathering a church in June 1823 comprised of seven white

129 Thomas C. Stuart to John C. Calhoun, 1 Oct 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA. On similar ticket-based reward systems in early-nineteenth-century Sunday schools, see Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 40–49.

130 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 27 Sept 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA; T. Charlton Henry to John C. Calhoun, 4 Nov 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA; Certificate of Benjamin F. Smith, 14 Dec 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA. The missionaries continued to rely on a combination of government support, Presbyterian funds, and private donations. Reports of the Schools in the Chick'a Nation, in Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 11 Oct 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA; Thomas C. Stuart to John C. Calhoun, 1 Oct 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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members from the mission family and one enslaved African American woman, Dinah, with Thomas Stuart, the mission superintendent, designated as the supply pastor. Finally, in December 1824, the first Chickasaw, Mrs. Tennessee Bynum, gave “satisfactory evidence of a work of grace” and joined the congregation. Eighteen months later the next

Chickasaw joined—Molsey Colbert, daughter of a leading Chickasaw family whose patriarch was a Scottish man.131

Meanwhile, some of the Chickasaw headmen embraced the utility of the missionaries’ educational aims. A group of Chickasaw leaders expressed their new alignment to President Monroe, the school’s namesake. “The missionaries and the good people of So. Carolina and Georgia have commiserated our condition, and have come to help us,” they touted to the president. “But we have many children and their means are comparitively [sic] small. We are anxious that all our children should become civilized.”132 Signaling their acceptance of the government’s and the Presbyterians’ educational agenda, they met in council and voted to devote the whole of their annuity for

1821, plus an additional $2500 a year for the duration of their annuity, “for the support of

131 Thomas C. Stuart to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; R. Milton Winter, ed., “A Record of the Church Session at Monroe, Chickasaw Nation (1823– 1842),” Sept. 2008, http://www.standrewpresbytery.org/monroe-mission-records-1823– 1842/attachments/Monroe_Mission_Records.pdf. Molsey Colbert’s name appears also as Molly and Molcy in the records. Her father, James Colbert, was the son of James Logan Colbert, a Scottish immigrant whom the Chickasaws adopted, and his third wife, who was half Chickasaw and half white. Guy B. Braden, “The Colberts and the Chickasaw Nation,” pt. 1, Tennessee Historical Quarterly 17, no. 3 (September 1958): 223, 234.

132 Chiefs and Headsmen of the Chickasaw Nation to the President of the U.S., 29 Apr 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

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schools in the Nation.”133 Music to the government’s ears: the Chickasaws earmarked their own funds toward education. The president cheered their decision and prophesized the material and spiritual blessings that would accrue to the Chickasaws for their decision. Not only would the missionaries teach their children to read, write, and

“cypher,” they would also “guide you in your moral & religious course. They will take with them the will of the great Spirit, and explain it to you; and if you open your ears and listen well to it, & follow it in all things, it will make you happy in this world & the next also.”134

But all was not happy. The Chickasaw initiative ignited a power struggle between the missionaries and the government agent, with both sides claiming to represent the wishes of the Indians. The Chickasaws themselves were not united in thought and action, though the men called chiefs and headmen claimed authority to speak for the entire nation. These leaders played the missionaries and the government agent against each other. Government officials in Washington tried to mediate the conflict from afar, but only succeeded in confusing matters and delaying funds.

Instead of directing their money toward the missionary organizations already working in their midst, the Chickasaws planned to hand it over to Benjamin Smith, the government agent, empowering him to “invite such good white men and their families into our territory, as may in your opinion be suitable persons by their example for our

133 Benjamin F. Smith to John C. Calhoun, 29 Apr 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA. The amount the Chickasaws set aside annually was $3000, $500 of which was to support a blacksmith shop. David Greene, Report on Caney Creek & Martyn, received 29 Apr 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

134 James Monroe, by Thomas L. McKenney to the Chiefs and Head Men of the Chickasaw Nation, 24 May 1824, M21, Roll 1, RG 75, NARA.

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advancement.”135 Spurned, Thomas C. Stuart, the head Presbyterian missionary at the

Monroe station, tattled to Calhoun that Smith had convinced the Chickasaw leaders to redirect their funds to Smith instead of to Stuart, as they had originally decided to do.

Stuart balked at Smith’s ideas about pedagogy and content, arguing to the secretary of war that the agent was ill-suited for the role of managing an educational program. If

Smith had his way, “the holy scriptures are to be excluded; Voltaire, Hume and others substituted in their steads, and balls, dancing schools, etc. introduced for the amusement of his pupils.” Such indulgences, Stuart feared, would attract Chickasaw youth, erode the attendance at his more strict school, and scuttle all his good efforts. Worse still, Smith’s irreligious pedagogy threatened to shape Chickasaws into rationalists, not pious

Christians. To head off such a disaster, Stuart entreated Calhoun to intervene and place the vast Chickasaw resources in the hands of a missionary society—his or another.136

By the fall of 1824 the Chickasaws were still debating how to handle their funds.

Sensing the government’s strong interest in the civilization program, the leaders sought to use the money they set aside for education as leverage to secure their land. “They wish to obtain from the gov’t some assurance that they will be allowed to remain in peaceable possession of their present territory, before they allow any part of their funds to be applied,” Stuart informed the superintendent of Indian affairs.137 When they visited

Washington, a Chickasaw delegation pressed the secretary of war on the question of land.

135 Chickasaw Chiefs to Benjamin F. Smith, 28 Apr 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

136 Thomas C. Stuart to John C. Calhoun, 24 April 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

137 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 27 Sept 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

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Calhoun replied that the state of Alabama had no intention to purchase Chickasaw territory, though the state of Mississippi would be interested in buying “but a very small portion of your lands, which it is believed are not settled by the Indians,” to constitute a few new counties. He also urged the Chickasaws to embrace the civilization agenda. “It is impossible,” the secretary informed them, “that you can retain your possessions, without an entire change in your manner of life. You must change from the savage, to the civilized state.”138

The Chickasaw leaders ultimately decided that Stuart, the missionary, would handle their educational funds.139 They selected the sites for two new schools to be built with their annuity—one at Caney Creek in the northeast of the territory, near the present- day Mississippi-Alabama border, and the other, named Martyn, at Pigeon Roost (known as Paaka Noosa to the Chickasaws), in present-day Marshall County, Mississippi.140

With the Chickasaw leaders’ blessing the missionaries broke ground for the new mission stations in 1825.141 But because government officials misunderstood the Chickasaws’ financial intentions, they withheld the promised funds, and the missionaries found themselves deeply in debt for the construction costs of the new schools.142 William C.

138 John C. Calhoun to Chickasaw Delegation, 9 Dec 1824, M21, Roll 1, RG 75, NARA.

139 David Greene, Report on Caney Creek & Martyn [Feb 1828], ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

140 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 10 Sept 1825, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA; David Greene, Report on Martyn [Feb 1828], ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

141 Benjamin F. Smith to Thomas L. McKenney, 20 Jan 1826, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

142 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 9 Jan 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA; Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 25 March 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA; Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 10 May 1827, M234, Roll 279

Blair, the missionary appointed to the Martyn station, wrote to McKenney in 1827, indignant that the missions had received neither the Chickasaw annuity funds nor the promised government allowance. “Now is it so? Is this business so vast, so complicated that it must be forever involved in mystery?” the piqued missionary vented.143

Apparently it was. Superintendent of Indiana Affairs Thomas McKenney had to make a trip to the Chickasaw agency to sort out the mess.144

Weary of endless stream of anxious letters from the missionaries, the Presbyterian sponsors of the Chickasaw mission, the Mission Society of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, took the opportunity in 1827 to bow out of the business. They handed the four mission stations, their assets, debts, improvements, and personnel off to the

American Board, which had emerged as the lead missionary agency in accessing the

Civilization Fund.145 By 1824 the American Board had built more than ten schools to

773, RG 75, NARA; Levi Colbert and Samuel Sealey to Thomas L. McKenney, 11 May 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA. The organization sponsoring Stuart reported in January 1826 that the Chickasaws had set aside $35,000 of their annuity for education, $5000 of which was designated for building the schools, and the rest to go into a fund, the interest of which was to pay for teachers and expenses for the schools. The funds, according to the Presbyterians were “to be appropriated through the Rev. Thomas C. Stuart [...] subject, at all times, to the inspection of the Agent of Indian Affairs.” The Chickasaws later decided not to set up an endowment, but instead to draw the money directly each year from their annuity to support the schools. The $5000 designated for construction costs got lost in the mix. Missionary Society of the Synod of South-Carolina & Georgia, Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Missionary Society of the Synod of South-Carolina & Georgia, January, 1826 (Charleston: W. Riley, 1826), 3. David Greene, Report on Caney Creek & Martyn [Feb 1828], ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

143 W.C. Blair to Thomas L. McKenney, 2 July 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

144 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 8 Jan 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

145 Jeremiah Evarts to Thomas L. McKenney, 18 Aug 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA. 280

serve the Cherokees and Choctaws, staffed by “eighty-seven individuals, forty-seven men and forty women, in the prime of life, voluntarily employed, without hope of personal emolument, in the benevolent work of enlightening & reforming the natives.”146 Two years later the American Board reported that, in a decade of labor, they had expended nearly $180,000 for Choctaw and Cherokee missions on both sides of the Mississippi

River, exclusive of government funds.147 Smaller organizations could not compete with the group’s extensive funding base, organizational structure, and political access, and opted in the mid-1820s to merge with the powerhouse. The United Foreign Missionary

Society took this course in June 1826, transferring its Osage mission stations—Union in the Arkansas Territory and Harmony in western Missouri—to the American Board.148

Likewise the Western Missionary Society, which ran a mission for the Ottowas on the

Maumee River (also called Miami of the Lake) in northwestern Ohio, folded itself into the American Board.149

146 Jeremiah Evarts to John C. Calhoun, 3 Feb 1824, M234, Roll 772, RG 75, NARA.

147 The exact figure of Native American mission expenditures by the American Board for 1817–1826 was $178,997.13. Jeremiah Evarts to James Barbour, 31 Jan 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

148 Also transferred were Seneca and Tuscarora missions in New York and a mission to the Mackinac at Michilimackinac. Jeremiah Evarts to James Barbour, 30 Jan 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

149 Henry Hill to James Barbour, 6 Apr 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA. Still independent in the greater Mississippi River region in 1830 were the Cumberland Presbyterian mission for Chickasaws called Charity Hall, a Methodist mission to the Potawatomis, which had not received federal aid, and the Catholic efforts in the St. Louis area. Other mission organizations continued to receive government funds to operate missions further east or north: the Baptist General Convention had missions among the Potawatomis and Ottawas in the Michigan Territory, among the Creeks and Cherokees in the southeast, and among the Senecas and Oneidas in New York; the Methodists had missions among the Wyandots in Ohio and the Creeks in their territory; the Protestant Episcopal Church ran an Oneida mission in New York; and the Moravians had missions 281

When the Presbyterians transferred the Chickasaw missions to the American

Board, the financial woes at last diminished, perhaps because the organization, based now in Boston, had steady communication with and access to Washington and an established routine for securing and funneling the government’s funds to the respective mission stations.150 The government released the portion of the Chickasaw annuity designated for the schools at Caney Creek and Pigeon Roost to the American Board’s treasurer, who then transmitted it to the missionaries, bypassing the Chickasaw agent.151

The missionaries held to their course through the organizational takeover. With the fiscal problems resolved, they had much to celebrate. They now had four schools operating in the Chickasaw Nation, which in 1827 had a total of 85 students and 24 staff.152 More exciting yet, beginning in April 1827 they experienced what they termed a

“season of refreshing.” The revival spread north from the neighboring Choctaw Nation to those in the Chickasaw Nation who gathered for a “quarterly communion”—a celebration of the Lord’s Supper held four times per year. Kindled to a “deep searching of the heart” to the Cherokees in their territory. Report on Indian Affairs, 1829, in Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the years 1826–1839 ([Washington: Government Printing Office, 1828]), http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.AnnRep2639, accessed 5 Oct 2015, 176–177.

150 The American Board’s treasurer sent quarterly letters to the Secretary of War, for instance, July 1828: “Sir, I have taken the liberty to draw on you this day in favor of Mr. John Kennedy for five hundred & fifty dollars, being the allowance of the Government for the second quarter of the present year for the Schools at the following stations.” Henry Hill to Peter B. Porter, 12 July 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

151 Henry Hill to Peter B. Porter, 16 July 1828, 18 Aug 1828, 13 Oct 1828 M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

152 State of the Indian School at Monroe, Tockshish, Cane Creek, and Martyn, 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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by the dynamic preaching of visiting missionaries, “anxious enquirers” seeking assurance and “gospel hope” attended prayer meetings throughout the summer. Signs of their budding faith electrified the missionaries, who sustained a steady rhythm of preaching events to bolster the neophytes, awaken the curious, convict the wayward, and captivate the bored. By the following summer the missionaries had admitted forty-two new members to Monroe Church—two transferring from other churches, the rest on profession of faith. Worship attendance swelled beyond the capacity of the schoolhouse, meriting building a church. Stuart asked the government to foot the bill, which he estimated to be $500.153

When the daughter of Captain Sealey, “the principal chief of this part of the nation,” converted in early 1828, the missionaries hoped it would start a chain reaction among the Native people. But the spiritual rallying did not touch all inhabitants equally.

The majority of those who attended the preaching sessions were not Chickasaws, but

“black people”—the enslaved laborers of the Chickasaws, whose presence had been all but invisible in the missionaries’ reports until their interest in and embrace of Christianity rendered them noteworthy. Of those Native people who did participate, most were of mixed parentage. “Few or none of full Chickasaws” found themselves drawn to the exercises. The same trends carried into the church. Two-thirds of the new members were black. Eight white men and women joined, and six Native people. Three of these were

153 Stuart to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Winter, “Record of the Church Session at Monroe;” Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 8 Jan 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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from the powerful Colbert family, another was married to a white man, and one was a mixed-blood interpreter.154

The revival continued with fluctuating intensity into the summer of 1829. In their account of it, the missionaries highlighted, not the racial patterns and differences, but the disparity between the “professed followers” of Christ and the “poor perishing.” The camp meeting the missionaries hosted in July, “designed principally for the Indians,” drew a diverse and engaged audience, including white settlers, Chickasaws, Chickasaw headmen, enslaved Africans, missionaries in the nearby Choctaw Nation, and Choctaw converts. A Choctaw convert named Tahoka, a special star of the event, “exhorted and prayed with the greatest fervency” at the communion exercises on Sunday morning. As the uninitiated gazed at the “memorials of Christ’s suffering and death,” nearly one hundred people received the sacrament. On Monday morning the assembly closed with a spectacle of concern that enacted the gap between true believers and all the rest. Those

“in an anxious state” had gathered at special seats—known typically as the anxious bench—in front of the pulpit during the preaching. After the sermonizing, as the audience sang a Choctaw hymn, the anxious folks—the majority enslaved black people—formed a line. The church members formed a separate line, with the missionaries at the head and

Captain Sealey and the warriors at the tail. Like winners and losers after a T-ball game,

154 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 8 Jan 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA; Reports of the Schools in the Chick'a Nation, in Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 11 Oct 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA; David Greene, Report on Munro [Monroe], 26 Feb 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Stuart to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Winter, “Record of the Church Session at Monroe.” A full discussion of the Chickasaws’ African American slaves’ embrace of Christianity is in chapter 6 of this dissertation.

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the two teams slid by each other. “Our church passed down the long line of the anxious, taking each one by the hand in token of our sympathy.”155

Whether these face-to-face encounters between saints and sinners evoked encouragement, conviction, or disdain, the missionaries considered the event an enormous success. They were quick to assure their supporters at the American Board— and all the pious who would read their account in the Missionary Herald—that everyone behaved properly. At this particular camp meeting and throughout the revival, the participants had shown commendable restraint and decorum. The preachers had stirred souls, but not passions. There had been “no extravagant” displays, nor bodily excesses:

“no noise, no excitement of animal feeling.” Those touched by the spirit behaved appropriately. No shrieking Methodists or fainting Baptists here, the participants demonstrated their self-mastery with solemnity befitting proper Presbyterians.156

These tales of decorously conducted, appropriately reserved revival played well to the northern audience, reassuring donors that the missionaries had neither “gone native” nor adopted the ranting methods of their theologically lax, enthusiasm-driven Protestant competitors. Less triumphant were their accounts of outreach to the Chickasaws beyond the neighborhood of the mission stations. In fact the missionaries only infrequently sallied forth, so burdened were they with providing religious instruction at the stations and running the business end of the operations—securing provisions, writing letters to

155 Holmes to Evarts, 18 July 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

156 Thomas C. Stuart to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Holmes to Evarts, 18 July 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM. An edited version of Holmes’s letter appeared in Missionary Herald 25, no. 12 (Dec 1829): 386–387. Stuart’s account from 1828 appeared as “Chickasaws—Monroe,” Missionary Herald 24, no. 9 (Sept 1828): 283–284.

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supporters, overseeing the school and farm, dealing with students’ parents, keeping good relations with the headmen. Who had time to itinerate to the distant villages and settlements, conveying spiritual lessons to strangers? And who had the linguistic skill to make any progress?

Hugh Wilson, the missionary at Caney Creek, and his Princeton classmate

William Blair at Martyn wished they did.157 Wilson chafed under the yoke of superintending his remote mission post in the northeast of the Chickasaw Nation. No one in the region spoke any English, rendering the missionary powerless. “Although I am surrounded by immortal beings who know nothing of the only way of salvation, I have no opportunity of giving them any information on the subject,” he complained.158 Longing to devote himself completely to the spiritual needs of the Chickasaws, he was particularly

“desirous that something should be done to bring the Gospel more directly in contact with the full Indians.”159 He asked the American Board leaders whether he could dedicate his time exclusively to language training, in preparation for such outreach.160 But the organization could not spare the missionary’s daily labor. Wilson would have to make due with whatever scraps of the language he could pick up through his regular duties.

Ninety miles west at Martyn station William Blair likewise resigned himself to squeezing his linguistic training between the other responsibilities that bloated his schedule:

157 For biographical sketches of Wilson, Blair, James Holmes, and Thomas C. Stuart, see Biographical Vertical File, RG 414, PHS.

158 Hugh Wilson to Evarts, 1 Jan 1829, excerpted in Missionary Herald 25, no. 5 (May 1829): 151.

159 David Greene, Report on Caney Creek & Martyn [Feb 1828], ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

160 Hugh Wilson to Evarts, 1 Jan 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

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preaching every Sunday, sometimes twice; attending “either prayer or anxious meeting” on Sunday afternoon, as well as “prayer meetings” on Wednesdays and Saturdays; superintending the farm; operating the school Monday through Friday; and attending “to all the pecuniary concerns &c of the station.” Miraculously in the midst of all this, he reported, “I still continue to devote some time & attention to the Indian language.”161

But not enough to carry on a basic conversation in Chickasaw, much less preach the gospel. Instead of immersing themselves in the Chickasaw language, the missionaries resorted to hiring interpreters for their Sabbath services and religious instruction classes at the mission stations, when they could find people with appropriate skills. Interpreters were not a luxury, the missionaries explained to their funders; they were a necessity for any real communication with most of the Chickasaws. Stuart petitioned the American

Board for extra funds for what would amount to a staff interpreter who would be present to handle all manner of communications. “Had I a good one constantly with me, I could have many ... precious opportunities of feeding the lambs of the flock...”—that is, encouraging Chickasaw converts—“besides preaching.”162

To reach Chickasaws beyond their neighborhoods, the missionaries arranged for interpreters to accompany them on preaching and teaching tours, when they could secure

161 David Greene, Report on Martyn [Feb 1828], ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; W.C. Blair, Memphis, to David Green, 22 June 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

162 David Greene, Report on Munro [Monroe], 26 Feb 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; James Holmes to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Holmes to Evarts, 10 March 1830, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Thomas C. Stuart to Evarts, 18 Nov 1830, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM; Hugh Wilson to David Greene, 27 Sept 1831, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM; Hugh Wilson to Evarts, 9 July 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Wilson to Evarts, 17 July 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Stuart to Henry Hill, 5 Jan 1831, ABC 18.5.7, reel 785, ABCFM; Stuart, to Hill, 21 Jul 1831, ABC 18.5.7, reel 785, ABCFM.

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such services. Their first efforts were at settlements within a short distance from the stations. Blair planned to visit two villages of full Chickasaws within eight miles of

Martyn to provide “religious instruction” whenever he was able to “procure the aid of an interpreter.” The inhabitants of one of these villages in particular had a reputation for being “remarkably sober and industrious”—perfect targets for his Christianizing intentions. James Holmes, a missionary at Tockshish station, traveled on Sundays with an interpreter to a village six miles away “to instruct the Chickasaws.”163

And what of the Chickasaws further afield? For the missionaries encounters with

“full Chickasaws” were the lifeblood of their missionary vocation. They had abandoned the comforts and security of home, they had forfeited promising careers in town churches, they had drawn their wives to strange lands, they had placed the health of their families—including their newborn children—at risk, they had sacrificed common luxuries and suffered countless indignities, to cast their lot among an Indian nation whose language they did not know. Propelled by a sense of calling, a desire to enlighten, a commitment to extend “the light of the glorious gospel ... to every wigwam in this land of moral darkness,” these men had pledged themselves to missionary work.164 They longed for more opportunities to connect directly with Chickasaws who had not yet heard their

Christian message.

On the rare occasion when they did manage to venture deeper into the Nation, the missionaries found hospitality. Interest in their religious message, though, was spotty.

163 David Greene, Report on Martyn [Feb 1828], ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; James Holmes to Evarts, 7 Apr 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Stuart to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

164 Stuart, Monroe, to Evarts, 22 May 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

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When Holmes and an interpreter journeyed for nearly two weeks in the northern part of

Chickasaw country, “where the gospel had never before been preached,” he was pleased that “with scarcely an exception,” the Chickasaws “received us kindly.” The silences surrounding this remark in his letter to the American Board resound. Holmes elaborated neither on the scarce exceptions—were they chased off by some disgruntled auditors? threatened with violence?—nor on the Chickasaws’ level of curiosity about his teachings.

If they had been riveted, sympathetic, or even quarrelsome, Holmes would have spilled the details. His reticence suggests indifference or even apathy on their part.165Anson

Gleason, a missionary among the Choctaws who subbed in among the Chickasaws while

Stuart and Holmes were both ill, was more forthcoming with examples of the Indians’ distaste for his teachings as he and his interpreter traveled among them. He reported that

“some would listen with fixed attention, while others would laugh and make light” of his religious exertions. One man averse to the meddling Christian berated Gleason for visiting his house. Another man sought to prevent his neighbors from gathering to hear

Gleason’s message, and made clear “that he had rather I would depart without troubling him on the subject.”166

Disdain and disregard for Christianity hovered not just in the distant settlements, but also in the vicinity of the mission stations. A group of Chickasaws antagonistic to the missionaries’ efforts scheduled a “ball play” at the same time as the Presbyterians’ communion service at Monroe in the fall of 1829. The competing event diverted not only prospective converts but also a handful of those who were thought to have been

165 Holmes to Evarts, 1 Feb 1830, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

166 “Chickasaws: Extract of a Letter from Mr. Anson Gleason, Dated at Tokshish, Sept. 28th, 1830,” Missionary Herald 26, no. 12 (Dec 1830): 382–383, quotes from 383.

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“seriously impressed” during the revival meeting in July, exposing the flimsiness of their supposed spiritual transformation. That, at least, was the missionaries’ take. The

Chickasaws themselves may have understood their exploration of Christian practice and subsequent prioritizing of an Indian game over that practice on very different terms. The ball play trumped the Christian ritual for them perhaps because of its deep cultural roots.

Chickasaws and other Native groups prized the ball play as a communal experience.

According to an eighteenth-century observer, the southeastern Indians prepared for the ball play through specific rituals of self-denial: the women danced and sang prayers throughout the night preceding the game, while the men stayed awake fasting. In the game itself—think lacrosse—the players demonstrated both prowess and self-control, masking whatever pain or frustration they felt with a veneer of even-temperedness. What the missionaries took to be heathenish sport, the Chickasaws likely cherished as a complex, meaningful tradition that fostered something akin to Christian self-discipline.167

Their attendance at the ball play may not have signified a rejection of Christianity, but an embrace of other forms of rigor.168

167 Hugh Wilson to Evarts, 29 Sept 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Joseph Adams to James Holmes [Oct 1829], excerpted in James Holmes to Evarts, 3 Nov 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; James Adair, The History of the American Indians Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Missisippi [sic] ... (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1775), 399–401, https://archive.org/details/historyofamerica00adairich; James R. Atkinson, ed., “A Narrative Based on an Interview with Malcolm McGee by Lyman C. Draper,” Journal of Mississippi History 66, no. 1 (2004): 67; John Reed Swanton, Chickasaw Society and Religion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 70–71.

168 Missionaries Finney and Washburn also had to compete with ball plays—those scenes of “idleness, vice & profligacy,” or athletic competition and communal affirmation, depending on one’s perspective—among the western Cherokees. Even the Cherokees who knew the commandment to keep the Sabbath opted to attend the ball play in May 1822 instead of Dwight’s church service. Dwight Journal, 26 May 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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The same may have been true for a Chickasaw woman “thought certainly to be a christian.” When she rejected the path the missionaries had staked out for her, deciding

“to give up her religion,” the missionaries read her act as betrayal. The woman herself may have considered Christianity to be a portion, but not the entirety, of her spiritual wardrobe, something she could put on and take off at will instead of a permanent uniform. Other Chickasaws displayed more decided aversion to the religion of the white folks. Alcohol loosened the tongues of some unfriendly to the cause, even to the point of blasphemy. “When drunk they revile Christians,” one of the missionaries lamented to a colleague. “Some have said - come to me I am Christ.”169

Chickasaw inconstancy, indifference, and outright hostility toward Christianity dampened the moods of the mission personnel and extinguished the flames of revival.

Stuart reiterated his fears in various letters, bemoaning that the “season of refreshing” had passed, and in its place “a death like stupor” had descended. The church a Monroe was, he groaned, “in a very lifeless, stupid state, and sinners are growing bold in sin.”170 A similar lethargy permeated the schools. Having learned to read in the New Testament, the students expressed “indifference” to embrace and “practice the religious instructions” they had been given.171

169 Hugh Wilson to Evarts, 29 Sept 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Joseph Adams to James Holmes [Oct 1829], excerpted in James Holmes to Evarts, 3 Nov 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

170 Thomas C. Stuart to Evarts, 17 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Stuart to David Greene, 21 July 1831, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM.

171 Reports of the Schools in the Chick'a Nation, in Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 11 Oct 1827, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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The missionaries were reluctant to acknowledge the unsavory truth that the

Chickasaws were not warming to Christianity. By the end of 1830, after a decade of missionary labor, after the revival, after various missionary ventures into the heart of the

Nation, at most thirty Native people had joined the missionaries’ church, from a population of about 4,000 Chickasaws.172 While some of the leading mixed-blood

Chickasaw families had welcomed the missionaries and their educational resources, many Chickasaws were wary, and the bulk of the Nation may have had no interaction with them at all.

Stuart could not hide the fact that the Chickasaws he encountered distrusted the missionaries, particularly as government officials began pushing for removal. “Some prejudices exist amongst the common people against us,” he admitted. “We are viewed with a jealous eye.” Worse yet, the Chickasaws conflated the missionaries’ intentions with the U.S. government’s goals, believing that the Presbyterians were trying to

“prepare the way for the final occupation of their [the Chickasaws'] country by the white

172 Stuart to Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Holmes to Evarts, 2 Dec 1828, ABC 18.4.8, Reel 781, ABCFM; Holmes to Evarts, 3 Nov 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Winter, “Record of the Church Session at Monroe;” Guy B. Braden, “The Colberts and the Chickasaw Nation,” pt. 2, Tennessee Historical Quarterly 17, no. 4 (Dec 1958): 322. The church session records do not consistently indicate the race of new members, but an analysis of the record-keeping patterns of the church session, cross- referenced with the letters the missionaries wrote to the American Board, provides clarity on the race of all but nine of the 113 members. Three assumptions guided the analysis of these sources: (1) Members with an English or African first name and no surname are presumed to have been black unless otherwise indicated; (2) members with a first name in an apparently Native language (e.g. Ishtimayi, Tushkaiahoki, Tuppeha, and Pohaiki) and no surname are presumed to have been Native; (3) all missionaries sent to the region under the direction of the Presbytery of South Carolina and Georgia, and later the American Board, are presumed to have been white. For similar figures, see Paige, Bumpers, and Littlefield, Chickasaw Removal, 15.

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people.”173 A disheartening assessment for missionaries who considered themselves committed to Chickasaw sovereignty and success.

The federal government’s Indian removal agenda wreaked havoc on the American

Board’s missions to the Chickasaws. In 1827 Thomas McKenney, the superintendent of

Indian affairs, had visited the Chickasaws to propose a land swap. The Chickasaw council agreed to send a deputation west of the Mississippi to scout out possible sites, but returned unimpressed, rejecting the recommended resettlement land as inconveniently situated and lacking sufficient timber and water sources. But the subsequent administration of Andrew Jackson continued to push, confident that white southerners’ land greed would trump Indian sovereignty in a political showdown. The Chickasaws, despite how the press represented them, were unanimously opposed to removal and

“indignant” at the government’s efforts to strong-arm them. For their part, the evangelists concurred. Removed from their homelands, the Chickasaws would resort to “idleness & vagrancy,” the missionaries feared, squandering the do-gooders’ years of effort.

As it had for other Indian groups, Chickasaw resistance eroded in the face of legislative maneuvers designed to dismantle their sovereignty. The states of Mississippi and Alabama enacted statues to abolish tribal law, terminate Chickasaw governance, and extend state laws over the Chickasaws. When Jackson refused to interfere to protect them according to previous treaties, the Chickasaw leaders acquiesced with a treaty at Franklin,

Tennessee, in 1830, in which they agreed to remove if suitable land could be found for them west of the Mississippi. A second exploring delegation returned with a request for

173 Thomas C. Stuart to Thomas L. McKenney, 2 Oct 1828, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

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land in Mexico, between the Sabine and Red Rivers—land the U.S. government had no authority to grant. Instead the government compelled the Chickasaws to treat with the

Choctaws, who had already secured land west of the Mississippi. The two groups inability to come to an agreement invalidated the treaty and threw the Chickasaws’ future into question.174

The Chickasaws’ interest in Christianity, feeble as it was, nearly evaporated amidst the tumult and indeterminacy surrounding removal. “The church is suffering dreadfully from the intense anxiety which all feel for their temporal concerns,” Holmes confessed.175 Uncertain of where they would be living, how they would support and care for their families, and whether they would be able to maintain their possessions and their way of life, the Chickasaws had no energy to devote to spiritual explorations in the white folks’ religion. Those connected to Monroe Church neglected their religious duties.176

More troubling still was the overt antagonism Christians faced. Some Chickasaws lashed out at signs of accommodation with white culture, linking the religious incursions of the missionaries to the territorial incursions of the white settlers pressing in on them. In the vicinity of Monroe Church, “professors of religion are threatened with severe punishment

174 Hugh Wilson to Evarts, 19 Sept 1830; Holmes to Evarts, 8 Nov 1830; Holmes to David Greene, 1 July 1831; James Holmes to Greene, 24 Dec 1831, all from ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM; James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People the Chickasaw Indians to Removal (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 226–228; Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 154– 158.

175 Holmes to Greene, 8 Dec 1832, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, excerpted in Missionary Herald 29, no. 4 (Apr 1832): 133; see also Holmes to David Greene, 24 Dec 1831, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM.

176 Stuart to Hill, 13 Oct 1831, ABC 18.5.7, reel 785, ABCFM.

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& even death, if they persist in their attendance on the means of grace.”177 The son of one

Chickasaw woman who had joined the church at Monroe was so enraged by his mother’s religious choice that he “entered her house, spoiled all her furniture, beat her off into the woods, and vowed her death.”178

Intemperance also enervated the missionary cause.179 The erasure of Chickasaw legal frameworks by Mississippi and Alabama invalidated Chickasaw laws forbidding the alcohol trade. Unscrupulous whites rushed into the vacuum, carting barrels of whiskey into the Nation.180 Drunkenness swept the region, imperiling not only the Christianizing process, but also family stability and community wellbeing. The missionaries pinpointed the problem: “Shame on the white man!!! who not only manufactures and vends the

Poison, but disannuls the law of the Red man, which prohibit its use.”181 The problem became so heinous that some Chickasaws in the far western section of the territory organized a temperance society, but their voluntary efforts to abstain personally could do little to stem the tide of liquor flooding Chickasaw lands. Temperance organizing, one missionary complained, “drags somewhat heavily -- it is uphill work.”182

177 Holmes to Evarts, 11 Aug 1830, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

178 “Chickasaws: Extract of a Letter from Mr. Anson Gleason, Dated at Tokshish, Sept. 28th, 1830,” Missionary Herald 26, no. 12 (Dec 1830): 382–383, quotes from 383.

179 W. C. Blair to Evarts, 24 Nov 1830, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM; Holmes to David Greene, 1 July 1831, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM.

180 Holmes to Evarts, 8 Nov 1830, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

181 Stuart to Hill, 13 Oct 1831, ABC 18.5.7, reel 785, ABCFM, emphasis in original; Stuart to Evarts, 18 Nov 1830, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM; Holmes to Greene, 1 July 1831, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM.

182 Blair to Evarts, 9 July 1830, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; James Holmes to David Greene, 24 Dec 1831, ABC 18.4.4, reel 779, ABCFM.

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The educational agenda also suffered in the midst of the removal machinations.

As the Chickasaw leaders sent delegation after delegation to plead their cause in

Washington, the Presbyterian schools in the Chickasaw homeland sputtered. Monroe school closed in 1829.183 Wilson and Holmes petitioned to close Martyn and Caney

Creek and to relocate the students to Tipton County, Tennessee, in the winter of 1832–

1833.184 Tockshish fizzled out in 1834.185 These closures coincided with the final throes of negotiations to dispossess the Chickasaws. In May 1830 President Jackson signed the

Indian Removal Act.186 Between October 1832 and May 1834 the U.S. government and the Chickasaws hammered out terms for removal, but it would take until January 1837 for the Chickasaws to secure land from the Choctaws for their relocation. Removal proper began in June of that year, and dragged on for more than a decade. Ultimately about 4500 Chickasaws with over a thousand slaves departed for the west.187

183 Robert Bell, a Cumberland Presbyterian who ran a school for Chickasaws called Charity Hall, suspended his project in 1830. Carolyn Thomas Foreman, “Charity Hall: An Early Chickasaw School,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 11, no. 3 (Sept 1933): 926.

184 Holmes to Hill, June 1833, ABC 18.5.7, reel 785, ABCFM; “Mission to the Chickasaws,” Missionary Herald 29, no. 12 (Dec 1833): 462.

185 Stuart to Hill, 6 Nov 1834, ABC 18.5.7, reel 785, ABCFM.

186 Within two months, the government ceased supplying funds for schools east of the Mississippi River for the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws moving westward. Scolding the government for its abrupt policy shift, the American Board’s leaders expressed “regret that the government should have thought it necessary to withdraw any support form the schools east of the Mississippi, till the Indians should actually have removed with their children.” Samuel S. Hamilton to Cyrus Kingsbury, 30 Jun 1830, M234, Roll 774, RG 75, NARA; Samuel S. Hamilton to Thomas Henderson, 13 Nov 1830, M234, Roll 774, RG 75, NARA; Jeremiah Evarts to John H. Eaton, 8 July 1830, M234, Roll 773, RG 75, NARA.

187 Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People, 228–235; Gibson, Chickasaws, 158–183.

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Removal looked a little different for the western Cherokees. They had already removed once, from the Old Nation to west of the Mississippi River, but the federal government had never confirmed their ownership of a portion of their western domain called Lovely’s Purchase. With white settlers crowding in, Cherokee delegates— including David Brown—traveled to Washington in 1827–1828 to press for clear title and federal protections for their western land. President John Quincy Adams, an advocate of white settler interests, and his secretary of war Samuel Barbour, had other ideas. They wore down the delegation with threats and promises. Fearing forced removal with no concessions, the delegation finally agreed to a land swap: they would forfeit all Cherokee land in the Arkansas Territory in exchange for seven million acres in present-day

Oklahoma, plus a one-time payment of $50,000. From the signing of the agreement, the

Cherokees had fourteen months to remove.188

What would become of the western Cherokees’ advances, the missionaries cried, when they were shoved further west? Like the Chickasaws, the few Cherokees who had embraced the missionaries’ religion lost their taste for Christian practices in the shadow of removal.189 Cephas Washburn, worried that Dwight’s modest membership would seep away in the shuffle, staunchly opposed the removal plan.190 But as he digested the terms

188 Fearing for their lives for having capitulated to the government’s demands, the delegates retreated to the Old Nation rather than to the Arkansas region when they left Washington. Washburn to Evarts, 18 June 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Markham, “Arkansas Cherokees,” 182–190; Logan, Promised Land, 20–21; Berlin B. Chapman, “How the Cherokees Acquired the Outlet,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 15, no. 1 (March 1937): 30–35.

189 Washburn to Evarts, 27 Sept 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

190 Washburn to Evarts, 28 May 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 18 June 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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of the agreement and the government agent’s smooth explanations, the missionary did an about-face. He explained his change of heart to his sponsors. This time, he intoned, the government would fulfill its promises and protect the western Cherokees in their new homeland from the two conditions most damaging to the missions, “the influence and intercourse of surrounding whites & the introduction of whiskey into the country.” Best of all, the government had set aside funds to pay the missionaries for their school buildings, and the Cherokee council accepted the missionaries’ proposal to transfer the mission stations and schools to their new homeland.191 The missionaries hoped for continuity, not rupture, as the objects of their evangelism relocated.

As the Cherokees filtered westward, the missionaries constructed their new

Dwight station on the Salaison (Sallisaw) Creek, a dozen miles up from the Arkansas

River, near Marble City in present-day eastern Oklahoma.192 The school opened in the spring of 1830.193 They also constructed a school called Fairfield for former Mulberry residents, seventeen miles north of the new Dwight.194 But Washburn was wrong about the removal buffering the western Cherokees from dangerous influences. Rather than diminishing, alcohol use soared. “There has been more drunkenness in the nation during the last six months, than for the whol [sic] of six years preceeding [sic],” he lamented in

191 Washburn to Evarts, 3 Jul 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 9 Dec 1829, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 5 July 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Minutes from Missionary Convention, 2–7 Nov 1829, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

192 Washburn to Evarts, 6 Dec 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Betty Payne and Oscar Payne, Dwight: A Brief History of Old Dwight Cherokee Mission, 1820–1953 (Tulsa [Okla.]: Dwight Presbyterian Mission, 1954), 1, 7.

193 Washburn to Evarts, 11 March 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

194 Marcus Palmer to Jeremiah Evarts, Nov 1829, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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1830. Knavish white merchants and traders, keen to strip the Cherokees of the cash the government paid them for improvements on their former lands, were the culprits. The flood of whiskey generated a “horrid train of evils” in the Cherokee communities:

“gambling, fighting, debauchery, murder.”195

To battle the toxin and its collateral damage, a group of western Cherokees bested the Chickasaws by forming gendered, Indian-led temperance societies. Within six months they had more than fifty members between the two groups—perhaps triple the number of

Cherokees who had joined the missionaries’ church—all pledging total abstinence. In an emotional scene reminiscent of a new convert’s profession of faith, recounting the transformation from hopeless sinner to hopeful saint, the men who joined the temperance society spoke publicly of the turmoil alcohol had caused them and the teetotaling path they intended to tread. “‘You see these scars on my hands, my face & my heart,’”

Washburn recorded one man to have confessed. “‘I rec’d not these in defense of my country, nor in doing good. They are brands of my shame. I got them by drunkenness.

But now,’ he said, while tears ran down his cheeks, ‘I hope to drink no more, & to expose my life & my limbs only in doing good.’” Another man asked the society members hold him accountable: “‘when you see me going where I may be tempted, you must help me to flee.’” The women formed their own temperance group that not only required their members to abstain from alcohol, but also to steer clear of events where others were drinking. To demonstrate their resolve, they censured and suspended a woman who

195 Washburn to Evarts, 5 July 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Marcus Palmer to Jeremiah Evarts, 15 July 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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attended a dance, a place “of revelry & vice.”196 The Cherokee women embraced a portion of the missionaries’ agenda in order to bring stability and safety to their homes.

Catholics and Protestants used Cherokees, Chickasaws, Osages, Iowas, and other

Native groups in the Mississippi River Valley in their publicity to raise funds and recruit volunteers for missions in the region. The compelling accounts of missionaries interacting with indigenous children and adults generated an outpouring of support from the faithful. Christians from Europe and the northeastern states gave money and volunteered for duty. Men and women who signed up as missionaries for the Indians imagined themselves enlightening heathen savages with the gospel. The United States government aided their efforts with financial support through the Civilization Fund for programs to educate and civilize the Indians.

But things did not go as they hoped. Many missions sputtered or failed after a few years. The projects that did take root could not boast great success. The indigenous inhabitants responded in a variety of ways to the missionaries’ layered agendas. A few

Native people embraced the evangelists’ religious messages, appropriating Christianity on their own terms. A greater number were more interested in the educational opportunities than the missionaries’ chapels and churches, seeing literacy variously as a vehicle to preserve their own lands and cultures or as a pathway to prosperity for their children. Many rejected the missionaries outright, choosing to sustain their own religious

196 Washburn, Dwight, to Evarts, 1 Sept 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 743, ABCFM; Marcus Palmer to Evarts, 15 July 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM; Washburn to Evarts, 22 Dec 1830, ABC 18.3.1, reel 743, ABCFM.

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traditions rather than to accept Christianity. Most did not ever cross paths with those sent to teach and civilize them.

Collaborating with the U.S. government, the missionaries discovered, entailed risks and distractions. To keep the federal money flowing, missionaries had to sustain schools and farms where the children could learn literacy, agricultural practices, and domestic arts. The mission schools, stations, and plantations the Christian organizations established were expensive and cumbersome. Civilization, it turned out, was a costly endeavor both in terms of human and financial resources.197 The missionaries themselves wanted flexibility, mobility, adventure, self-sacrifice. They longed to circulate in the heart of the Native nations to introduce their evangelizing message and religious practices to people who had not yet encountered Christianity. But they found themselves saddled to institutions whose maintenance sapped their zeal. To top it off, the government muscled through its removal agenda, which convulsed the Indian nations, undermined the missionaries’ schools, and sabotaged their efforts to raise the Native people “now in darkness and ignorance, to a state of society as happy, as enlightened and as moral as any part of the United States or any part of the Christian world.”198

197 The American Board grappled with the issue of mission drift after David Greene and Cyrus Kingsbury reported back from their 1828 tour among all the stations in the Mississippi River Valley. “Missions among the Indians,” Missionary Herald 24, no. 7 (July 1828): 216–217, quote from 217.

198 Finney and Washburn to Calhoun, Oct 1823, M271, Roll 4, RG 75, NARA.

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Chapter 6

AFRICANS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS APPREHENDING FAITH

The chill in the air and overcast skies may have dampened their spirits that

Monday in late March 1815, but Steve and the other enslaved people who toiled on

Stephen Hempstead’s farm near St. Louis would not let the weather stop them. They made the most of the Easter holiday—a day off from their regular toil of carting rails and building fence. They honored the tradition that Catholics had followed in the Mississippi

River Valley for generations, ceasing work on Sundays and church feast days. Easter

Monday was a cherished reprieve for them, a day set aside to visit relatives enslaved by other people, to attend church, to care for their own private affairs, perhaps to drink and dance, away from the watchful eye of the Revolutionary War veteran-turned farmer and slavemaster who had purchased their bodies and commanded their labor. Hempstead recorded their observance succinctly in his daily dairy: “A cloudy chilly day wind N. I home work about the house. the Negroes keeping Easter.”1

1 Stephen Hempstead Diary, 27 March 1815, book 8, box 2, SHP. An edited transcript of Hempstead’s diary was printed serially in nine parts. See Stephen S. Hempstead, Sr., “Diary of a Yankee Farmer in Missouri, 1811–1814: I at Home [Part 1],” ed. Dana O. Jensen, Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 13, no. 1 (Oct. 1956): 30–56; “Diary of a Yankee Farmer in Missouri, 1815–1816: I at Home [Part 2],” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 13, no. 3 (Apr. 1957): 283–317; “Diary of a Yankee Farmer in Missouri, 1817–1818: I at Home, Part 3, Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 14, no. 1 (Oct. 1957): 59–96; “Diary of a Yankee Farmer in Missouri, 1819: I at Home, Part 4, Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 14, no. 3 (Apr. 1958): 272–288; “I at Home, Part 5: Diary of a Yankee Farmer in Missouri, 1820,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 15, no. 1 (Oct. 1958): 38–48; “I at Home, Part 6: Diary of a Yankee Farmer in 302

Stephen Hempstead, Sr. was the patriarch of a large family from New London,

Connecticut. To capitalize on the economic opportunity of the western lands, the family immigrated in waves to Upper Louisiana between 1804 and 1813, the middle sons leading the way.2 Though they had not been slaveholders upon their departure from

Connecticut, the Hempstead family took up the practice when they arrived in the St.

Louis area, purchasing, selling, and loaning one another slaves with regularity.3 Their

Missouri, 1822,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 15, no. 3 (Apr. 1959): 224– 247; “I at Home, Part 7 [1823, 1826],” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 22, no. 1 (Oct. 1965): 61–94; “I at Home, Part 8 [1827–1828],” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 22, no. 2, part 1 (Jan. 1966): 180–206; “I at Home, Part 9 [1829– 1831], Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 22, no. 4, part 1 (Jul. 1966): 410–445. As needed, these will be cited as “I at Home,” part number: page number. 2 Stephen Hempstead, Sr. to Thomas Hempstead, 19 Feb 1811, Box 1, SHP. Son Edward, trained as a lawyer, moved to St. Louis in 1804. Stephen Jr. arrived in 1808 and became a merchant. Charles, who launched into a law career under Edward’s tutelage and later owned a lead-mining business, and the rambunctious teenaged Thomas, arrived next. Stephen Hempstead, Sr., and wife Mary “concluded to remove” to the region in the spring of 1811, bringing along their widowed daughter Mary Keeney with her young son, and their teenage children Susan and William. Their remaining daughter Sarah, her husband Elijah Beebe, and their two little ones arrived in 1813. The oldest son Joseph, his wife, and four sons brought up the rear, landing in St. Louis in between the late 1810s and 1829. Hempstead diary, 12 Oct 1829, SHP. Biographical details about the Hempstead family may be found in Hempstead, “I at Home,” 1:30n3–5; 1:31n 6, 8; 1:32n12; 1:33n14; 1:35n35; 2:283; 2:291n42. Stephen Hempstead, Senior’s older brother William, his wife, and many of their children and grandchildren also made the trek from Connecticut, arriving in 1819. Hempstead diary, 3 Aug 1819, SHP.

3 The census of New London, Connecticut for 1810 indicates that the Stephen Hempstead household (prior to their migration west) contained neither slaves nor free people of color, though slavery was not yet extinct in the town. Thirteen of the 3182 inhabitants (not including non-taxed Indians) of New London in 1810 were enslaved, and 147 were free people of color. United States Census Office, Population Schedules of the Third Census of the United States, 1810, Connecticut (Washington: National Archives and Records Service, 1961), microcopy 252, roll 3, https://archive.org/details/populationschedu0003unix. The 1800 census likewise indicates that the Stephen Hempstead household had neither slaves nor free people of color. At that time the town had 141 free people of color and 54 slaves. United States Census Office, Population Schedules of the Second Census of the United States, 1800, Connecticut (Washington: National Archives and Records Service, 1960), microcopy 32, roll 3, https://archive.org/details/populationsc18000003unit. 303

reliance upon, if not their cavalier acceptance of, the institution of slavery is not surprising. Like many other transplanted Yankees in the early nineteenth century, the

Hempsteads acclimated to the economic structures of their new environs without noticeable ethical qualms, blithely accepting human chattel as a condition of their own financial stability and success. Nor is Stephen Hempstead, Senior’s treatment of his enslaved workers, including his habit of observing the sabbath by requiring no work on

Sundays, or his practice of granting Christmas and New Years holidays, unusual.4 He was merely conforming to well-worn traditions.5 What is unexpected in the Hempsteads’ relationship with their slaves is not only that Stephen Hempstead showed no interest in proselytizing his bondpeople, but also that he actively supported their Catholic observances.

A faithful Congregationalist-turned-Presbyterian in the Mississippi Valley,

Hempstead did not celebrate Anglican or Catholic holy days.6 Like his Puritan ancestors,

4 For instance, Hempstead noted on New Years Day, 1814: “The Negroes keeping New Year with their comrades at my farm[.] I give them a pig to roast &c &c.” Hempstead diary, 1 Jan 1814, SHP. See also Hempstead diary entries for 26 Dec 1814, 1 Jan 1816, 25 Dec 1816, 1 Jan 1817, 25 Dec 1817, SHP. For his Sabbath observance, see his diary entry for 4 June 1831: “I will not alow [sic] any One to work on the Sabbath on my Plantation.”

5 On the ubiquity of the practice of slaveholders granting enslaved people Sundays, Christmas Day, and New Years Day, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 566–584.

6 Hempstead typically attended religious worship—what he called “meeting”—on Easter Sunday, but made no mention of the holiday. It was just a regular Sunday to him. See for instance his comments on Easter Sunday 1817. In both his daily diary and his religious/church diary Hempstead noted the Sunday meeting being well attended, but he did not indicate why. “A pleasant day I attended meeting at St. Louis. Mr Giddings Preached to a full audience from Ps 50:2 Out of Zion the perfection of Beauty, God hath Shined.” Entry for 6 April 1817, Book 4, Stephen Hempstead Church Records, SHP. See also Hempstead diary, 6 April 1817, SHP.

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he rejected the annual cycle of religious rites earlier Christians had adapted from pagan agricultural holidays, Easter foremost among them.7 Christmas for the Hempsteads was a family affair, not a solemn religious occasion.8 In his detailed accounts of his religious observances and daily habits, Stephen Hempstead did not signal the event’s religious import, nor did he mention going to any religious assembly for Christmas. He and his wife would gather with their available children at one home or another for a meal.9 Easter went absolutely unremarked in both his daily diary and his religious diary.10 As he did on most Sundays, Hempstead attended religious services on Easter, but he did not differentiate the day from any other Sunday. Yet he routinely gave his slaves not only

Christmas day, but also Easter Monday and the day after Pentecost off from labor, as in

1814, when he noted in his daily diary, “The Negroes have Holyday,” and in 1820, “all

7 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 101.

8 On Presbyterian and Puritan discomfort with both riotous and religious Christmas festivities, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995), 175–182. Schmidt contends that in the 1820s and 1830s non-liturgical American Christians began to embrace Christmas as a gift-giving, family-centered holiday; this shift did not happen with regard to Easter until after 1860. Schmidt, Consumer Rites, chpts. 3–4.

9 For instance, for Christmas 1816 Hempstead and his wife dined at his daughter and son- in-law Susan and Henry Gratiot’s house with four of their other children and one daughter-in-law. Hempstead diary, 25 Dec 1816, SHP.

10 Claim is based on a reading of his religious diary entries for Easter Sunday, 1810 - 1820 (some years missing) and his daily dairy, 1813 - 1831 (some years missing).

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the Negroes keeping Easter.”11 The majority of years he kept his daily diary (1813 to

1831, the year he died), Hempstead granted one or both holidays.12

How did the enslaved people on the Hempstead farm celebrate Easter and

Pentecost, and what did these holidays mean to them? Stephen Hempstead’s diary does not reveal the interior religious commitments of Hempstead’s slaves, nor does it document whether they pressed him to honor the practice of ceasing work on these holidays because they found the religious content—the resurrection of Jesus and the arrival of the Holy Spirit among Jesus’ followers—meaningful, because they wanted a day off from labor, or some combination of the two. But his daily scrawls help illumine how these particular enslaved people framed and asserted their religious identity in this particular household. That Stephen Hempstead did not, or could not, force his enslaved workers to labor on holidays that meant nothing to him hints at both the strength of these enslaved people’s association and identification with Catholic liturgical rhythms and their own religious (and recreational) initiative.

Enslaved and free people of African descent in the Mississippi River Valley embraced Christian practices in the early nineteenth century at rates that at times equaled

11 Hempstead diary, 29 May 1814, 2 April 1820, SHP.

12 Hempstead recorded giving some or all of his slaves Easter holiday in 1815, 1816, 1817, 1820, 1823, 1827, and 1829, and Pentecost Monday 1814, 1817, 1820, and 1827. The daily diary is missing for 1821, 1824, 1825, and part of 1826, and in various other years Hempstead did not record entries for the given Mondays. On a few occasions Hempstead did cajole the enslaved people to labor on the Catholic holidays. For instance, in 1819 Hempstead and his slaves butchered three hogs on Easter Monday. Butchering was often a time-sensitive activity, which may explain their laboring, though the timber gathering they did on Easter Monday in 1818 would have been less so. Hempstead diary, 12 April 1819, 23 March 1818, SHP.

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or surpassed white people’s adherence. Their religious avidity is surprising not only because of the constraints under which they lived—particularly those who were enslaved—but also because no Christian sect prioritized their evangelism. In their fundraising schemes and publicity efforts, the Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists, and

Methodists overlooked people of African descent in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. White families bereft of bibles, Euro-Americans who had sloughed off Catholic observances, Indian children ignorant of the story of Jesus, Native American adults who had never considered eternity—these were the objects of the missionaries’ care and attention. The promoters of Christian missions in the Mississippi River Valley did not choose to highlight the spiritual plight of Africans and African Americans.

Nor did they provide designated resources for outreach to enslaved and free people of color. Catholics had an ongoing commitment to sustain the Catholic practices of people of African descent in the region, but allotted no special funds or personnel to meet this goal. Protestants had no program whatsoever targeting Africans and African

Americans. Despite this organizational neglect, Africans and their descendents apprehended Christian instruction, Christian worship, and Christian theology. By their interest, they compelled attention and ministrations from the spiritual troops sent to attend to others. Both free and enslaved African-descended people sought the spiritual, social, and educational power Christianity offered, even if in mediated form, to them. The missionaries, preachers, nuns, and priests found themselves and their agendas at times co- opted by these least powerful constituents.13

13 On Catholic outreach to people of African descent throughout the South in the antebellum era, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 111– 307

People of African descent took religious matters into their own hands. They attended camp meetings and joined churches, infusing these assemblies with elements of

African religiosity. They sought baptism for their children and stood as godparents to others’ children, honoring African traditions of women and men preparing girls and boys, respectively, for religious initiation. But they also reached past the white religious leaders who preached submission. African-descended Christians in the Mississippi River Valley elevated their own as preachers. They created independent black congregations, and they chose to sidestep the white religious structures, carving out for themselves separate safe places of worship. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Black Christianity—both in Protestant and Catholic forms—burst beyond the control of white leaders.

African slavery—and enslaved Africans—arrived in the Mississippi River Valley by way of the Gulf of Mexico.14 In 1717 the French Crown granted John Law’s

113; Randall M. Miller, “Slaves and Southern Catholicism,” in Masters & Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870, ed. John B. Boles (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1988), 127–52.

14 French Canadian missionaries and fur traders who established settlements in Upper Louisiana at the turn of the eighteenth century did not bring African slaves to the region from Canada, where shipping patterns conspired with economic and political factors to keep the African presence miniscule until the mid-eighteenth century. The newcomers did, however, import the practice of enslaving Native Americans. By 1708, 80 of the 278 people recorded in the French colonial census of Louisiana were enslaved Indians. Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 146; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill; Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012), 152–153, 174–177, 343; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 1–23; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro- Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 3

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Company of the West a monopoly on the economic and political development of the colony of Louisiana, which encompassed French posts and settlements on the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi River to the Illinois River. To transform the nascent colony into an economic engine, the company, which later was incorporated into the Company of the

Indies, shipped thousands of European settlers and enslaved West Africans to the Gulf

Coast.15 Almost six thousand Africans landed in Louisiana between 1719 and 1731, the majority from Senegal.16 Thereafter slave imports from Africa stalled. After 1731 the only recorded slave ship to arrive in Louisiana during the French colonial era docked in

1743.17 Following the Seven Years’ War the Spanish reopened the African slave trade to

15 These were not the first Africans to arrive in the colony of Louisiana. Governor Jean- Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville tried to finagle a deal with French colonists in the Caribbean in 1706 to exchange Indian slaves for African slaves at a rate of 2:1, a project officials in France roundly rejected. His successor, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, reported that Bienville and an associate smuggled some slaves from Havana in 1709. By the early 1710s a colonial official recorded the presence of twenty Africans in Louisiana. Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, Historical Journal of the Settlement of the French in Louisiana, ed. Glenn R. Conrad, trans. Joan Cain and Virginia Koenig (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1971), 88; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 57–58. Prior to the introduction of Africans to the region, French colonists and officials promoted Indian slavery.

16 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 56–95, 382–397; William Foley, The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 15; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 32–41. Disease, malnutrition, dangerous working conditions, and despair took their toll on this population. The censuses of 1731 and 1732 list 3600 black slaves, adults and children, for Lower Louisiana. See Charles R. Maduell, The Census Tables for the French Colony of Louisiana from 1699 through 1732 (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co, 1972), 113, 123. See also Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 41.

17 Le St. Ursin departed La Rochelle in March, arrived in Gorée in May, departed the next month, and landed 190 slaves in Louisiana in August. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, appendix A, 396–397. See also Paul LaChance, “The Louisiana Purchase in the Demographic Perspective of Its Time,” in Peter J. Kastor and 309

Louisiana, primarily by way of Jamaica, then Havana; arrivals peaked in the late 1780s.

Spanish authorities in Louisiana constrained the trade in the early 1790s, then prohibited it altogether in 1796, because of fears of slave insurrection. They overturned this policy in 1800 under pressure from slaveholders who had lost many of their slaves to smallpox, and in recognition of the morphing agricultural labor demands as planters switched from indigo and rice to sugar and cotton.18 After the Louisiana Purchase American officials reestablished the ban on the foreign slave trade, but in 1805 opened a loophole by which inhabitants of Louisiana could import African slaves who had previously entered another

U.S. port. For instance, slavers that docked first in Charleston, which allowed the African slave trade, could then clear for New Orleans. The 1808 total ban on the foreign slave trade closed this loophole, though entrepreneurial ship captains and merchants evaded the law, smuggling yet more African slaves to the Mississippi Valley.19 All told, an

François Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 153.

18 Rumors of a slave conspiracy at Pointe Coupée in 1795 fueled the restrictions of the following year. The policy in 1800 allowed the importation of slaves from Africa, but prohibited those from the French colonies in the West Indies, where revolutionary ideas were feared to have taken root in enslaved people’s minds. Jack D. L. Holmes, “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 1795,” Louisiana History 11, no. 4 (1970): 357; Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” Louisiana History 46, no. 2 (2005): 188– 197; Le Glaunec, “‘Un Nègre nommè [sic] Lubin ne connaissant pas Sa Nation’: The Small World of Louisiana Slavery,” in Cecilé Vidal, ed., Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 112; Paul F. Lachance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society in the Americas 1, no. 2 (June 1979): 162–97. See also John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 175–206.

19 See for instance the notice of 17 “Negroes and one Mulatto” smuggled as slaves from Havana to the Mississippi River in the summer of 1825. Louisiana Journal (St. Francisville), 27 Aug 1825, as printed in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., Plantation and Frontier 310

estimated 30,000 - 35,000 enslaved people of African descent landed in what would become the state of Louisiana in the French, Spanish, and territorial U.S. periods (1717–

1812).20 In addition, more than 3,200 enslaved people and 3,100 free people of color arrived in waves as Haitian refugees expelled from Cuba in 1809 and 1810.21 British, then Anglo-American planters who pushed westward from the southern colonies and states brought additional bondpeople to the region. The trickle from such migrations turned into a flood in the early nineteenth century with the rise of King Cotton.

Mississippi Territory’s enslaved population expanded nearly five-fold between 1800 and

1810, doubling the next decade, and doubling again by 1830. Louisiana’s enslaved population ballooned at a similar rate, while the free population of color increased more modestly.22

Documents, 1649–1863: Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial & Ante-Bellum South, A Documentary Series of American Industrial Society (Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark, 1909), 2:53. On the legal loophole by which African slaves entered the New Orleans market during the ban, see Lachance, “Politics of Fear,” 180–181; Le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations and Slave Control in Spanish and Early American New Orleans,” in Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 214–218.

20 This figure is derived from two sources: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 60; and Le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations and Slave Control,” 209. It includes 4,000 enslaved people imported through the coastal domestic trade between 1808 and 1812. Le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations and Slave Control,” 209

21 Paul F. Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration and Impact,” Louisiana History 29, no. 2 (April 1988): 111.

22 The census figures for Mississippi (territory, then state) are: 3489 slaves in 1800, 17,088 in 1810, 32,814 in 1820, and 65,659 in 1830. The number of free people of color in Mississippi grew from 182 in 1800 to 519 in 1830. Louisiana’s figures: 34,660 slaves and 7,585 free people of color in 1810, 69,064 slaves and 10,476 free in 1820, and 109,588 slaves and 16,710 free in 1830. Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum 311

The enslaved African population grew much slower upriver. Most of the enslaved people of African descent who arrived in the Mississippi River Valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, either by way of forced migration from the southern colonies or through the African slave trade, toiled on plantations in Lower

Louisiana between Natchez and the Gulf. A small portion made an additional trek up the

Mississippi River, where inhabitants had been relying on enslaved Indian labor.23 The pattern of upriver slave sales began early. Philippe Renault imported African slaves from

Lower Louisiana to work in mines in the Illinois Country in the 1720s.24 The Jesuits also relied on African slave labor for their farms in Kaskaskia.25 In 1732 Europeans held 165 slaves of African descent and nearly 120 Indian slaves in the Illinois Country, including the settlements of Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Fort de Chartres.26 Twenty years later the

South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 293–295. On Spanish legal innovations that spurred the growth of the New Orleans free black population at the end of the eighteenth century, see Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727–1852,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2002): 434–435.

23 Daniel H. Usner, “From African Captivity to American Slavery: The Introduction of Black Laborers to Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 20, no. 1 (January 1, 1979): 31. On the Company of the Indies’ ban on the Indian slave trade in 1720, and Indian slavery’s ambiguous status in Lower Louisiana thereafter, see Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 238–241. For a comparison of the slave systems in eighteenth-century Upper and Lower Louisiana, see Cécile Vidal, “Africains et Europeéns au pays des Illinois durant la periode française (1699–1765),” French Colonial History 3, no. 1 (2003): 51– 68.

24 The Illinois Country, encompassing the middle section of the Mississippi Valley, was transferred from the Province of Canada to the Province of Louisiana in 1717; thereafter the region was also known as Upper Louisiana.

25 Usner, “From African Captivity to American Slavery,” 28; Foley, Genesis of Missouri, 114; Ekberg, French Roots, 146–153.

26 “Census of Illinois 1732,” recapitulated in Margaret Cross Norton, ed., Illinois Census Returns: 1810, 1818, Statistical Series, Vol 2 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical 312

number of enslaved Africans had nearly tripled to 446, while the number of enslaved

Indians crept up to 149.27 Thereafter the presence of Indian slaves in official documents is a shadowy one. The French generally counted the number of enslaved Native

Americans separately from African slaves in their eighteenth-century censuses. The

Spanish outlawed the enslavement of Indians in the Louisiana Province in 1769. Though the practice of Indian slavery persisted, census-takers usually did not track enslaved

Indians as a separate category. Instead, they lumped Native American slaves and slaves of African descent together. The Spanish racial categorization on Louisiana censuses at times parsed lighter- (pardos) and darker- (morenos) skinned people, terminology that reinforced the association of slavery with African descent. Indian slaves simply disappeared in Spanish census records.28

By the end of the eighteenth century the number of enslaved people in Upper

Louisiana and the Illinois Country hovered around one thousand, with nearly three hundred free people of color.29 After the War of 1812 the population of enslaved people

Society, 1935), xxii-xxv. A different recapitulation of this data indicates there were 168 African-descended slaves. See Maduell, Census Tables for the French Colony of Louisiana, 57–60. Renault and the Jesuits were the largest slaveholders in 1732; each held 22 Africans in bondage. Ekberg, French Roots, 150.

27 “Distribution of Population, Illinois Country, 1752,” in Ekberg, French Roots, 152.

28 Louis Houck, The Spanish Regime in Missouri: A Collection of Papers and Documents ... (Chicago, Ill.: R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 1909), 1:249–250; Stephen Webre, “The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana, 1769–1803,” Louisiana History 25, no. 2 (1984): 118–122; Paul LaChance, “The Louisiana Purchase in the Demographic Perspective of Its Time,” in Kastor and Weil, Empires of the Imagination, 144–145.

29 The statistics for Spanish Illinois (west of the Mississippi River) in 1799 were 883 slaves and 197 free persons of color. In 1800 in the Illinois Country (east of the river), Randolph County, home of Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher, reported 107 enslaved people and 34 free people of color; St. Clair County, which included Cahokia, reported no slaves and 42 free persons. “Statement of the Population of the Settlements of Upper 313

of color in the Missouri Territory would skyrocket from three thousand to ten thousand, thanks to forced migration with Anglo-American settlers and trade with eastern states, which began to shift the cultural balance.30 But in the early years of the nineteenth century, the enslaved people in and around St. Louis—including the enslaved people on

Hempstead’s farm—were primarily the descendents of the African and Indian slaves whom the French and Spanish had brought to the region in the previous century, and who had negotiated their identities in a Catholic milieu.

The enslaved people in the Mississippi River Valley in the eighteenth century inherited and intertwined the religious habits and commitments of their ancestors with other religious traditions they encountered in the their new homeland. Gwendolyn Midlo

Hall calculates that two-thirds of the Africans brought to the Mississippi Valley during the French colonial period were from Senegambia. Nearly a third originated in the Bight of Benin. A small portion were from Kongo and Angola. Religious practices varied between and within these geographic regions. Traditional African religious forms,

Louisiana, with the Births, Marriages, Deaths, Stock, and Production of the Year 1799,” Appendix to an Account of Louisiana, Being an Abstract of Documents in the Offices of the Departments of State, and of the Treasury (Philadelphia: Printed by T. & G. Palmer, 1803), lxxxviii, http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm/ref/collection/lapur/id/25252; Norton, Illinois Census Returns, 1810, 1818, xxviii-xxix.

30 Migration patterns in Missouri differed from those in Louisiana and Mississippi. In the southern Mississippi River Valley, Anglo-American planters had been filtering into the area around Natchez since the 1780s. The organization of the Mississippi Territory in 1798 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 prompted a steady flow to the region that subsided during the War of 1812 and resumed in 1815. In the Missouri Territory the flood of westward migration did not begin until after the War of 1812. The specific figures are 3,011 enslaved people in Missouri in 1810, 10,222 in 1820, and 25,091 in 1830. Donnie D. Bellamy, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Missouri, 1820–1860,” Missouri Historical Review 67, no. 2 (Jan 1973): 200. See also Charles Lowery, “The Great Migration to the Mississippi Territory, 1798–1819,” Mississippi History Now, posted Nov 2000, http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/169/the-great-migration-to-the- mississippi-territory-1798–1819.

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including animism—a belief that all creatures and elements of nature are endowed with a spiritual essence—predominated in West Africa. Islam had penetrated Senegambia earlier in the millennium. The Muslim kingdom of Mali consolidated Islam’s influence in

Senegambia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Portuguese missionaries brought

Catholicism to Kongo and Angola in the sixteenth century. Senegambians living on the coast may also have encountered French Catholicism from traders, sailors, and administrators. Each African who arrived in the Mississippi River Valley carried a dense religious heritage. Historians debate the extent to which African religious systems survived among the enslaved population on North American shores, but evidence of the persistence of religious beliefs, practices, and identities abounds.31

31 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 92, 97; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 34–35, 159; Jon F. Sensbach, “'The Singing of the Mississippi': The River and Religions of the Black Atlantic,” in Michael Pasquier, ed., Gods of the Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 20–23. For critiques of Hall’s figures, see François G. Richard, “Thinking through ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms’: Historical Archaeology in Senegal and the Material Contours of the African Atlantic,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 17, no. 1 (March 2013): 61. On Islam in Senegambia, see Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 4–6, 18–30, 203. On the textured animist cosmology of the Bamana, a predominant Senegambian ethnic group, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 45–55. On the use of the term Bamana instead of Bambara, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 96–100. On the Christianization of Kongo, see Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a critical review of Heywood and Thornton’s Christianization thesis, see Francisco Bethencourt, “Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the Kongolese,” Portuguese Studies 27, no. 1 (Jan. 2011): 60–69; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). On coastal Senegambians encountering Catholicism, see Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 419–421. For the debate about the survival of African religious systems, see Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper, 1941); Sidney Wilfred Mintz, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 315

Perhaps the best-known example of Muslim identity transported to the Mississippi

River Valley is that of Abd-al Rahman Ibrahima, the son of a royal family in the African interior who had been captured in military conflict and sold into slavery. Trained in

Islamic textual study, Abd-al Rahman was literate in Arabic when he arrived as a slave on Thomas Foster’s plantation in the Natchez District in 1788. Prince, as he became known, first tried to negotiate for freedom, then fled, and finally adjusted to his status as a bondman. He became Foster’s driver, and married Isabella, a slave who had been sold west from South Carolina. Isabella was a practicing Baptist, and Abd-al Rahman attended church and consented to rearing the couple’s children as Christians. In the late 1820s a white man recognized him from an earlier encounter in Africa and began to press for

Abd-al Rahman’s liberation. When the case garnered national publicity, Foster agreed to terms to free Prince. Thereafter in published accounts and in public appearances sponsored by the American Colonization Society, Abd-al Rahman deftly promoted the

Christianization of Africa as a means to secure money for his family’s liberation and transportation to Liberia. Once back on African shores, Abd-al Rahman affirmed his

Muslim faith. He died shortly thereafter. His wife, two sons, and several grandchildren started life over in their new context.32

1992); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), chpt. 5; Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chpt. 2; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 244–251.

32 Charles Sydnor, “The Biography of a Slave,” South Atlantic Quarterly 36 (Jan. 1937): 59–73; Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves, 30th Anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford, 2007); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,” American Historical Review, 93, no. 5 (Dec., 1988): 1228–1252; Allan D. Austin, ed., African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New York: Garland, 1984), chpt. 3; Timothy Ryan Buckner, “Constructing Identities on the Frontier of 316

Abd-al Rahman engaged in an elegant religious dance to make meaning, build connections, and work toward freedom. He selectively embraced Christianity on the plantation, perhaps as a means of shoring up his family life with Isabella and their children. In Natchez the couple could access Baptist worship and preaching, but Muslim practices and texts were unavailable to them. Abd-al Rahman may have considered

Christian formation to be an avenue by which to give his children not only access to spiritual power and solace, but also a recognizable and useful cultural identity.

Affiliations and associations, especially for enslaved people, could carry a variety of interpersonal and material benefits. He himself played on such associations when he toured the northeast promoting colonization. Pitching himself as a Christian missionary to

Africa, Abd-al Rahman raised enough money to purchase the freedom of some of his family members. But even while he two-stepped a Christian persona in front of soft- hearted and deep-pocketed benefactors like the Tappan brothers, he maintained his

Muslim identity by narrating his story, in which his ability to read and write Arabic set him apart and confirmed his status as a prince, not a slave.33 His return to Africa was the final stage on which he reasserted his connection with Islam.

Abd-al Rahman’s story is exceptional, but it points to the presence of other

Muslims, including his countryman Samba, who navigated the shattering experience of the Middle Passage and transferred some strands of their religiosity—like naming practices—to their new home in the Mississippi River Valley. Other accounts testify to

Slavery, Natchez, Mississippi, 1760–1860” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2005), chpt 2; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 71–87; Sensbach, “‘Singing of the Mississippi,’” 17–18. See also Thomas S. Teas, “A Trading Trip to Natchez and New Orleans, 1822: Diary of Thomas S. Teas,” ed. Julia Ideson and Sanford W. Higginbotham, Journal of Southern History 7, no. 3 (1941): 378–99. 33 Buckner, “Constructing Identities,” 86–96.

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practitioners of traditional African religions carrying ritual acts and religious material culture into the region. For instance, a French commentator complained about African slaves in Lower Louisiana relying on charms, “which they called gris-gris.” Such charms were typical in West Africa among both Muslims—who filled their amulets with verses from the Qu'ran and other Arabic texts—and practitioners of traditional African religions—who used the charms to balance harmful and helpful spiritual powers.34 Ring shouts—communal customs originating in West Africa and West Central Africa to honor ancestors, in which participants circled counterclockwise and prayed, sang, clapped, danced, stomped, and shouted—migrated to the Mississippi River Valley, startling whites and providing slaves from various locales in Africa with a shared ceremonial lexicon.35

Africans expressed their musical and religious traditions through dancing, drumming, singing, and playing instruments throughout the Mississippi River Valley, most visibly on Sundays in New Orleans’ Congo Square, where their practices earned a rebuke from the Catholic bishop in the 1780s. Despite ecclesiastical and civil efforts to stifle these practices, Africans and their descendents persisted in gathering at Congo Square through the first half of the nineteenth century.36

34 Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane ... (Paris, 1758), 1:334. For more on the survival of African charm practices and Muslim naming practices in Louisiana, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 162–167; Sensbach, “‘Singing of the Mississippi,’” 23–24

35 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 250, 264–272; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11–17, 24–25; Matt Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,” Black Music Research Journal 31, no. 1 (2011): 291–304.

36 Celestin M. Chambon, In and around the Old St. Louis Cathedral of New Orleans (New Orleans: Philippe’s Printery, 1908), 33; Freddi Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enslaved and free people of 318

In the late eighteenth century enslaved people’s ritual and cultural practices came into direct conflict with the Spanish regime’s notions of maintaining an orderly community. The Spanish lieutenant governor in St. Louis issued a series of ordinances in the 1780s to remind enslaved inhabitants and their masters of the limits the government placed on slaves’ movement and self-expression. One ordinance condemned “the criminal indulgence of some masters who are too little solicitous for their authority and for the public welfare,” and reiterated the ban on enslaved people “hold[ing] any assembly at night, in the cabins or elsewhere.”37 The ordinance further prohibited enslaved people from leaving their cabins at night without their owners’ permission and receiving unauthorized nocturnal visits from other slaves. The Spanish leaders also forbade slaves’ dancing. Distinctive, flashy clothing registered as a threat to Spanish authority. A separate ordinance censured the sartorial expression of both Indians and

Africans, who “dress themselves in barbarous fashion, adorning themselves with vermilion and many feathers which render them unrecognizable, especially in the

color who landed in the Missisisppi Valley by way of Saint-Domingue and other West Indian islands also brought vodou practices, which scholars link to practices from Dahomey in West Africa, to the region. Paul Christopher Johnson, “Vodou Purchase: The Louisiana Purchase in the Caribbean World,” in New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase, ed. Richard J Callahan (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 146–67; John Stewart, “Spirituality and Resistance among African-Creoles,” in Callahan, ed,. New Territories, New Perspectives, 168–202; Sensbach, “‘Singing of the Mississippi,’” 27.

37 “Local Ordinances for St. Louis and General Ordinances Published by Lieutenant- Governor Don Francisco Cruzat from Oct. 7, 1780 to Nov. 24, 1787,” ordinance dated 12 Aug 1781, in Houck, Spanish Regime in Missouri, 1:244. 319

woods.” The lieutenant governor insisted that the non-white populace dress in “our usage and custom” both in town and “when they go into the woods or fields.”38

These prohibitions highlight Spanish fears of slave uprisings, a legitimate concern for enslavers that the proximity of the black revolution in Saint-Domingue starting in

1791 only heightened. In Louisiana itself a series of slave conspiracies, and rumors of the same, kept the planter class on edge. In 1795 enslaved people in Pointe Coupée conspired to seize the freedoms they heard others had claimed in Saint-Domingue or had been granted in France. The organizers planned to mass at the church doors on Easter Sunday as a show of force. After slaveowners discovered the plot, officials executed twenty-three slaves and imprisoned at least thirty others. In response the governor updated laws policing both slaves’ behavior and slave masters’ responsibilities to hold their property in check.39

Such policies and prohibitions call attention to how enslaved and free people of color, of both African and Native descent, expressed religious and social commitments.

Dancing, visiting one another at night, gathering together in assemblies, wearing elaborate costumes—these were practices that reverberated with spiritual significance as well as subversive potential. And the spiritual and subversive were intimately intertwined. Spanish authorities sought to limit communication among enslaved people

38 Ibid., ordinance dated 15 Aug 1781, Houck, Spanish Regime in Missouri, 1:245.

39 Gilbert C. Din, “Carondelet, the Cabildo, and Slaves: Louisiana in 1795,” Louisiana History 38, no. 1 (1997): 5–28; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The 1795 Slave Conspiracy in Pointe Coupée: Impact of the French Revolution,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 15 (1992): 130–41. Earlier in the decade Mina slaves from the Bight of Benin had planned an insurrection at Pointe Coupée. Their plot was exposed, though the seventeen slaves arrested managed to escape punishment. Ulysses S. Ricard, “The Pointe Coupée Slave Conspiracy of 1791,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 15 (1992): 116–29.

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and manifestations of cultural distinctiveness because they recognized that spiritual and social intercourse could breed disorder, insubordination, and insurrection.40

In part out of genuine concern for the souls of their slaves, but also, and probably more significantly, to provide extra forms of social control, Europeans who administrated the region in the eighteenth century sought to reshape the religious lives of the enslaved population by imposing Christian belief and practice. French, then Spanish, officials decreed that all inhabitants of the colony of Louisiana adhere to Roman Catholicism. The

Code Noir of 1724 dictated that all slaves—those born in the colony and those imported—be instructed and baptized in the Catholic religion. Inhabitants who failed to provide such spiritual instruction were subject to a fine. Slaveholders were beholden to observe Sundays and feast days by ceasing to work their slaves on these holy days. They also were obligated to provide a proper Catholic burial in consecrated ground for their baptized slaves.41

40 That the ordinances rebuked slaveholders for their “criminal indulgence” suggests that not all white inhabitants felt the same level of threat. The prohibitions against slaves’ freedom of movement and assembly persisted into the American period. The Louisiana Black Code of 1806 prohibited assemblies of enslaved people owned by different masters. Louis Moreau Lislet, A General Digest of the Acts of the Legislature of Louisiana Passed from the Year 1804 to 1827, Inclusive and in Force at This Last Period: With an Appendix and General Index, vol. 1 (New-Orleans [La.]: Printed by B. Levy, bookseller and stationer, 1828), 102, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/Sabin?af=RN&ae=CY110553164&srchtp=a&ste=14 .

41 “Edit concernant les Negres Escalves a la Louisianne,” No. 23 in “French Manuscripts: Mississippi Valley, 1679–1769,” Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society 4 (1908): 76–79. A decree issued by the Spanish Crown in 1789 had similar aims: the king ordered that every plantation host a chaplain to instruct the enslaved people in Catholicism. Predictably, the planters resisted such efforts, claiming that there were not enough priests available for such purposes, and even if there had been, the planters, who were heavily indebted, would not be able to remunerate them for their services nor provide adequate accommodations. Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, vol. 3, The Spanish Domination (New York: Redfield, 1854), 301–302; John Gilmary Shea, Life and 321

Though local leaders’ anticlericalism, inhabitants’ lax religiosity, and the shortage of Catholic priests may have conspired to limit its sway, Catholicism took root among the enslaved population in the form of sacramental practice.42 The priests at the parish church in New Orleans routinely baptized at least one hundred enslaved infants and adults each year between 1744 and 1781. Thereafter the figures climb to over two hundred annual slave baptisms.43 Ursuline nuns and a women’s lay confraternity called the Children of Mary led the effort in New Orleans to catechize and prepare enslaved girls and women for baptism. In accord with West African traditions of mothers initiating their daughters into religious rites, baptized African women in New Orleans continued

Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop of Baltimore. Embracing the History of the Catholic Church in the United States. 1763–1815. (New York: J.G. Shea, 1888), 562–563.

42 In Lower Louisiana French attorneys general, especially three-decade veteran François Fleuriau (1722–1752), had a habit of ignoring the religious regulations of the Code Noir. Carl A. Brasseaux, “The Administration of Slave Regulations in French Louisiana, 1724– 1766,” Louisiana History 21, no. 2 (1980): 148. Some enslaved people may have brought Catholic practices with them from previous encounters with missionaries in Africa. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles.

43 Paul Lachance, “The Louisiana Purchase in Demographic Perspective,” 154–155. The rhythms of the slave trade—of when ships arrived in New Orleans, and the decades when they did not—shaped the religious lives of the enslaved population in the lower Mississippi Valley. The hiatus in slave imports in the mid-eighteenth century limited the exposure of rising generations of Creole slaves—those born in the New World—to traditional African religious forms, because few new African-born slaves arrived to reinvigorate those practices. More present to the Creoles, especially those in New Orleans, would have been the Catholicism practiced more or less faithfully by their masters and, increasingly, by the other enslaved people around them. When slave imports restarted later in the century, the newly arriving Africans may have infused the rural enslaved population with traditional religious habits, but their impact in New Orleans would have been checked by the prominence by then of Catholicism among the city’s people of color. Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 431–432.

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the baptismal practices for their American-born daughters.44 Thanks to the women’s diligence, when Spanish administrators took over the province in 1766, a majority of the slaves in New Orleans had been baptized.45 The residents of Upper Louisiana were even more disciplined about Catholic sacramental practices. The Jesuit missionaries in the eighteenth century touted their spiritual care of bondpeople, reporting that they provided regular catechetical instruction on Sundays to prepare enslaved people to receive the church’s sacraments.46 Based on a study of the Illinois Country parish records, Carl

Ekberg has argued that “virtually every slave child” in the region was baptized into the

Catholic faith in the French colonial period.47 Between the founding of the parish in the

1760s and 1818, Catholic priests in St. Louis baptized 582 people of African ancestry and buried 362.48

44 These women’s religious initiative tipped the baptismal statistics for enslaved people in the 1730s toward females, even though males outnumbered females three to two in the enslaved population. Enslaved females continued to dominate the baptismal statistics through the eighteenth century. Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 416–424.

45 Clark and Gould contend that women’s catechetical activism among the first generation of enslaved Africans in New Orleans translated into heightened participation in Catholic practices among both men and women by mid-century, as the girls who had been baptized as babies found sexual partners whom they led into the church. Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans,” 423; Sensbach, “‘Singing of the Mississippi,’” 24.

46 John Thomas Gillard, The Catholic Church and the American Negro; Being an Investigation of the Past and Present Activities of the Catholic Church in Behalf of the 12,000,000 Negroes in the United States, with an Examination of the Difficulties Which Affect the Work of the Colored Missions (Baltimore: St. Joseph’s Society Press, 1929; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), 17–18.

47 Ekberg, French Roots, 148.

48 J. Thomas Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Day: Including Biographical Sketches of Representative Men (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts, 1883), 1:171. 323

Baptism of course does not equate with belief, nor does it necessarily indicate an abandonment of other, non-Christian forms of religiosity. But ritual practices carry meaning for the participants. They can signify access to spiritual power, comfort, and belonging, and they can indicate bonds of influence and affiliation.49 And such practices over time may generate or spur belief.50 Consider the story of Harietta, a free woman of color in Natchez. A steady presence in San Salvador Church in the late eighteenth century, when the Spanish still controlled the town, Harietta stood as godmother to three children baptized by priest Francisco Lennan. The first two were “legitimate” daughters of enslaved couples whose marriages had been solemnized in the church. The third was the son of an enslaved woman and an unidentified man. In all three cases white men served as the children’s godfathers. As a free woman, Harietta made her own choices about how and whether to promote Catholicism among other people of color; no slave master could compel her to perform ritual functions in the church. That she opted to stand repeatedly as a godmother for enslaved children suggests that she found spiritual and social blessings in Catholic practice.51

49 For instance, the desire by free people of color in New Orleans to access the benefits of Euro-American culture and patronage solidified and bolstered their attachment to Catholic practices, through which they sought to prove their worth to whites. Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 139–140.

50 Clark and Gould make this point regarding the early generations of African women who encountered and engaged in Catholic rituals in New Orleans: “factors operating within both the European and the African communities supported the growth of religious practice among enslaved women and paved the way for belief to follow.” Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 422.

51 Sacramental records from the Parish of San Salvador, Natchez, Mississippi, and the Parish of the Virgin Mary of Sorrows, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1788–1818), translated by Sarah J. Banks and Gail Buzhardt, MDAH.

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Priests increasingly relied on the piety of women of color to propagate the faith.

White men and women who were not married to each other typically stood as godparents for children born to enslaved women in Natchez in 1790s. Harietta, Elisabeth, another free woman of color, and Genovasa, a mixed-race slave, offered an alternative to this pattern. Together these three women sponsored seven baptisms for children of color in

Natchez between May 1796 and February 1798. Their participation indicates an internalized commitment to Catholicism and a willingness to spread its teachings to future generations. The church regulated who could serve as godparent. Francisco

Lennan and his college Juan Brady considered these women members in good standing who had fulfilled their sacramental duties—they had proven themselves more than nominal Catholics. In sponsoring the children for baptism, the woman committed themselves to spiritual parenting and the priests acknowledged their fitness for the role.

The woman may also have catechized the children’s mothers in preparation for the ceremony, introducing basic Catholic doctrine and explaining the ritual’s meaning.

Harietta, Elisabeth, Genovasa, and other women of color who served as godmothers were not only recipients of Catholic sacraments, but purveyors of Catholic practices.52

Black people outside of the main towns—St. Louis, New Orleans, Natchez, Ste.

Genevieve, New Madrid—who had embraced Catholicism had little opportunity to

52 Elisabeth, also spelled Elizabeth, appeared as the godmother for three children. Only in one case was she described as a free black woman. For the other two records, her first name only is listed. Genovasa, who was owned by Mrs. Bauzon, was godmother for one child. The record book lists godparents for thirty-seven people of color who received the sacrament of baptism. Another five, all slaves of Juan O'Connon, were baptized in a private ceremony with no godparents. Sacramental records from the Parish of San Salvador, MDAH. For a similar analysis of women of color godparenting in New Orleans, see Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 409–448.

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nurture their religiosity through authorized Catholic means in the late eighteenth century.

The shortage of priests left some parish churches with no vicars to care for the basic spiritual needs of the inhabitants. In the regions of rapid growth the Catholic Church had not yet established parishes. Exacerbating the situation, slave masters routinely shirked their obligation to offer catechetical instruction to their slaves.53 At St. Charles Church on the German Coast, a few dozen miles upriver from New Orleans, proportionately more people of color—enslaved and free—received the sacrament of baptism than whites in

1794. But the priest fretted that slaveowners flouted the Code Noir by forcing the enslaved to labor on Sundays and church feast days and failing to provide religious instruction for their slaves prior to baptism.54 What the priest could not see was how the enslaved people may have been teaching Catholicism—albeit in unsanctioned forms—to one another, conveying the meanings they made of the rituals, images, and stories.

By the early nineteenth century a new generation of enslaved and free Catholics of color had come of age with little attention from the church hierarchy beyond baptism.

The church had abandoned its responsibility to legitimize marriages for people of African descent. When Bishop Flaget toured through the towns in Upper Louisiana in 1814–1815, he provided speedy “instructions,” then legitimized several such marriages, commenting

53 Testimony of Jaspar de Aranda to Bishop Peñalver y Cárdenas, 13 Aug 1795, IV–5-d- 2, CANO, UNDA; testimony of Joaquin Portillo to Bishop Peñalver y Cárdenas, 12 Aug 1795, IV–5-d-2, CANO, UNDA. Patrick Walsh gave a different story, claiming that the Spanish fulfilled their obligation to teach children and slaves Catholic doctrine. Testimony of Patrick Walsh to Bishop Peñalver y Cárdenas, 12 Aug 1795, IV–5-d-2, CANO, UNDA.

54 Sebastien Flavian [Besancon], Census of St. Charles, 29 Dec 1795, IV–5-d-2, CANO, UNDA.

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that the practice was “a thing that, to them, had been almost unknown in the country.”55

Downriver the pattern of neglect persisted. At the Catholic church in Opelousas,

Louisiana, the rate of baptism between 1819 and 1830 was roughly equivalent—513 white people baptized, 504 black people baptized—but the rate of church marriage gaped.

Five black couples, only one of which was enslaved, succeeded in having their marriages recognized by the church, while 139 white couples received the church’s blessing for their marriages.56 Slave masters had economic reasons for not wanting their slaves to marry in the church, fearing that they would not be allowed to separate spouses united before God. Jean-Marie Odin, a priest in Missouri, griped that most French and Creole masters “do not want to hear about instructing their slaves, of having them marry; often they do not even allow them to go to church.”57

Placing blame everywhere but on their own shoulders, priests argued they could not hope to care for the spiritual needs of the vast enslaved population in the cotton- and sugar-growing regions. In 1823 Antoine Blanc estimated he had four thousand enslaved people in his parish of Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, and another twelve hundred free people, spread out over an area of more than two hundred miles. The “great majority”

55 Benedict Joseph Flaget, Memoir Presented to His Eminence Cardinal Fransoni, Prefect of the Propaganda, [1836], translated transcript, 3, Francis P. Clark Collection 12/04, UNDA.

56 St. Charles Parish Statistics, 1819–1898, in C.M. Widman, trans., “Outlines of History—St. Charles’ Church, Grand Coteau, La.” RACHSP 9, no. 3 (Sept. 1898): 351.

57 Jean-Marie Odin to [Cholleton?], 2 Aug 1823, printed in Annales de la Propagation de la Foi 1, no. 5 (March 1825):68–77, quote from 73–74, translation C. Croxall. For a different translation, see Naina dos Santos, trans., “Letters Concerning Some Missions of the Mississippi Valley. A.D. 1818–1827,” RACHSP 14 (1903): 189. On the precipitous decrease in enslaved people’s marriages in the Catholic Church after 1800, see Emily Clark, “Atlantic Alliances: Marriage among People of African Descent in New Orleans,” in Vidal, Louisiana: Crossroads, 168.

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were Catholic. Enslaved mothers had their children baptized, but, “regrettably, most of the time this is the only benefit they receive from religion.”58 A few priests tried to reach the disengaged. A mixture of guilt and zeal prodded Italian recruits Bigeschi and

Vallezano out of their tidy new brick churches in Donaldsonville and Plattenville,

Louisiana, to care for the elderly, mothers with children, and “domestics”—those who could not attend weekly Mass—along Bayou La Fourche. These Catholic priests set up mission stations in different parts of their parishes, which they visited on a regular basis to hear confessions, provide catechetical instruction, and celebrate the Mass. When they could get away, enslaved people may have attended these midweek services.59

As more Catholic missionaries arrived in the region, they found their attention and agendas adjusted by the people of color who demanded their ministrations. The

Catholics of African descent in the towns had more opportunities to access the incoming religious personnel than those in rural areas. People of color who lived near the Sacred

Heart convent in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, availed themselves of the sights, smells, and sounds of the nuns’ Christmas observances. “Several black men and women” received communion at the Christmas service in 1822, where they witnessed “a Crèche tastefully fixed up in the chapel.”60 In St. Louis the newly arrived European priests were surprised by the commitment of people of color to secure Catholic nourishment. Felix De Andreis

58 Antoine Blanc to Cousin, 17 Nov 1823, Letter F02735, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF.

59 Joseph Rosati, “Recollections of the Establishment of the Congregation of the Mission in the United States,” pt 5., trans. Stafford Poole, Vincentian Heritage Journal 5, no. 1 (April 1984): 113.

60 GCHJ, 25 Dec 1822, SSCSL.

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began offering weekly catechism classes for people of color a few months after he arrived. But that was not enough for them. A group formed “a kind of congregation” that met each evening, compelling the priest to attend to them daily, not weekly.61 Their passion encouraged the young missionary. Compared to the white people, whose laxity depressed him, the enslaved people demonstrated authentic piety and commitment. “I am very consoled to see the poor blacks. They did not even know what religion was, to say nothing of Christianity. They have become full of fervor and are eager for instruction, for the sacraments, and to edify their masters and friends.”62 A decade later the Religious of the Sacred Heart held classes each Sunday after Mass in St. Louis for women of color who demanded religious instruction.63

The future bishop of Alabama, Michael Portier, found himself similarly pressed into service for the people of color in New Orleans. They formed a congregation, with a core group of twelve “who are fervent, like angels.” These leaders introduced

Catholicism to other people of African descent, teaching them to pray and instructing and catechizing them in the faith. Eager for knowledge and spiritual provisions, the Catholic neophytes—sixty in number—obliged Portier to meet with them nightly, to read the gospel and explain it to them. They also assembled faithfully each Sunday for Mass.

Their piety shaped New Orleans Catholicism. As they sang, knelt, prayed, and queued to receive the bread of communion, people of African descent ensured that the priests

61 De Andreis to Stephen Badin, [May 1818], Letter 49, FMFDA, 214–215; De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, 17 June 1818, Letter 50, FMFDA, 215–216.

62 De Andreis to Francesco Antonio Baccari, 3 Sept 1818, Letter 53, FMFDA, 228. See also De Andreis to Joseph Rosati, 26 June 1818, Letter 51, FMFDA, 221.

63 Duchesne to Barat, 23 March 1828, Letter 234, BDC2 3:61.

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recognized and responded to their presence. White lay Catholics, too, could not help but notice the spiritual vitality and commitment of these siblings in Christ, with whom they shared the sacred spaces, rituals, and priestly attention. Portier himself acknowledged that the people of color insisting on his attention were his “consolation.”64

Consolation, but also chattel. The religious institutions the Catholics founded in the Mississippi River Valley ran on enslaved labor. The Ursulines, Jesuits, Vincentians, and other orders owned slaves, and they periodically hired the labor of other people’s slaves.65 Bishop DuBourg himself purchased slaves for personal use. He asked the

64 Portier to Cholleton, Sept 1820, F02726, F–65, Fonds de Lyon, APF; Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 443. Clark and Gould argue that the young people of color Portier discusses were “undoubtedly female.” The original French source indicates otherwise. Portier refers to the dozen leaders as “fervent,” not “fervente,” indicating that they were a mixed gender or male group, not female-only. The sixty who surround him nightly were also either mixed group or male—he uses the masculine instead of the feminine version of the third person plural personal subject pronoun, “ils,” instead of “elles.” Clark and Gould may have been relying on an English translation of this letter, held at the Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, in which the gender is ambiguous, instead of the original: Portier to Cholleton, Sept 1820, #2726, translation, Propagation of the Faith Collection, New Orleans, Archdiocese Archives of New Orleans. As Clark and Gould point out, the women of color in New Orleans persuaded another Catholic missionary to respond to their spiritual and educational agendas in the 1820s. Sister Ste. Marthe Frontiere arrived in Louisiana in 1817 from France, where as a Hospitalier sister she had attended to the poor and the infirm. In New Orleans she taught in the Ursuline school for half a dozen years, then devoted herself to educating enslaved and free women of color. She established a school for African-descended girls, as well as a convent, in 1824. Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 441–442.

65 For an example of the Vincentians’ regular practice of paying others for the labor of enslaved people, see receipt dated 14 June 1827 signed by Valentine Underwood, Folder 9, Bills/Receipts 1827, Box 88, Saint Mary’s of the Barrens, Perryville, Missouri, DRMA. On the Vincentians as slaveholders, see receipt signed by Benjamin Wilson dated 13 March 1828, Folder 10, Bills/Receipts 1828, Box 88, Saint Mary’s of the Barrens, Perryville, Missouri, DRMA; John Timon to Joseph Rosati, 6 Sept 1830, Catholic Church, Archdiocese of Saint Louis (Mo.): Manuscripts 1/02.15, UNDA. See also Folder 1, Bills/Receipts: Negro Workers, Box 88, Saint Mary’s of the Barrens, 330

religious orders in his diocese to share enslaved laborers as needed.66 Adding to the priests’ stock, pious (or impious) Catholic laypeople bequeathed slaves to their spiritual leaders.67 In the early nineteenth century Catholic leaders accepted slavery as an institution. Enmeshed in layers of religious hierarchy and pledged to a lifetime of submission to the authority of others, they did not question the ethics of buying, selling, owning, and benefitting from the labor of human chattel.68

The slaves of Catholic leaders lived in a precarious position. Bound to those who held the keys to both their material and spiritual well-being, the enslaved people had

Perryville, Missouri, DRMA. On Bishop Joseph Rosati’s caginess about acknowledging the Vincentians’ reliance on enslaved women to do their cooking and laundry—not because of their status as slaves, but because they were women in a male religious house—see Rosati, “Recollections,” pt. 4, Vincentian Heritage Journal 4, no. 2 (Oct. 1983), 133n12. For a list of slaves owned by the Vincentians at their St. Mary’s Seminary in Missouri in the 1830s, a reconstruction of the seminary’s slave families, and an accounting of slave hiring practices, see Stafford Poole and Douglas J. Slawson, Church and Slave in Perry County, Missouri, 1818–1865 (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1986), 158–165, 212–222. On Ursulines as slaveowners, see Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 161–162. In Florissant the Religious of the Sacred Heart sought to hire a married enslaved woman to cook for them. Duchesne to Barat, 23 Apr 1825, Letter 197, BDC2 2:235–236; Answers to the Permissions Requested, 6 Aug 1825, Appended to Barat to Duchesne, 4 Aug 1825, Letter 200, BDC2 2:251. For more examples of Catholic leaders’ slaveholding practices, see Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 170–173.

66 In 1823 DuBourg requested the Jesuits send a slave named Harry and his family to the Vincentians, who were in “absolute need.” DuBourg to A.B. Anduze, 7 June 1823, RG 1 A 3.3, Bishop Louis William DuBourg Collection, AASL.

67 Will of Luis Romero, 3 Sept 1829, New Orleans, Folder 1, Bills/Receipts: Negro Workers, Box 88, Saint Mary’s of the Barrens, Perryville, Missouri, DRMA.

68 On Catholic theological understandings of slavery in the antebellum era, see Poole and Slawson, Church and Slave in Perry County, 53–58; Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 167–178.

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ready access to sacramental care and religious instruction. Unlike enslaved Catholics who belonged to other masters, those who belonged to priests and nuns could easily attend

Mass, receive catechetical instruction, have their children baptized, observe and participate in religious feast days, processions, and rituals, enter consecrated spaces, gaze on religious artwork, and touch—and probably clean—religious objects. At the same time, they risked more than physical punishment if they did not behave in accordance with their enslavers’ wishes. Not only might their owners withdraw the benefits of these religious opportunities, but they could also threaten eternal punishment. Catholic slaves of Catholic leaders had to tread carefully to protect their bodies and souls.69

Twenty-six-year-old Rachel may have felt these dual pressures intensely. In 1822

Bishop DuBourg purchased Rachel for $454 from Cornelius Rhodes in Perry County,

Missouri. Joseph Rosati, who perhaps knew Rachel through his role running the

Vincentian seminary in Perry County, vouched to DuBourg that the enslaved woman was

“a person of good constitution, intelligent, submissive, and of good morals.” She also had laudable religious habits. But these would win her few points with her new owner.

Pleased though he was with Rachel’s religiosity, DuBourg explained his priorities lay elsewhere, with her stout health and obedience. The bishop apparently cared less about

Rachel’s soul than he did about her body—her usefulness as a slave, her acquiescence to his will, her vendibility. He was even willing to use her as collateral for a loan to fund his journey back to France, placing her at the whim of his creditors, who probably cared even

69 On the Ursulines’ promotion of catechesis and sacramental marriage among their slaves, and the slaves’ godparenting practices, see Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 161–194.

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less about her spiritual state.70 The three enslaved couples the Jesuits brought with them to Missouri faced similar challenges. Under the terms of their transfer from the Maryland

Jesuits to Charles Felix VanQuickenborne, who was the head of the Missouri-bound missionary band, Tom and Polly, Moises and Nancy, and Isaac and Suny had to be compliant and virtuous if they hoped to preserve their enslaver’s good graces.

VanQuickenborne had explicit permission to “govern & dispose of said slaves as he thinks proper, and to sell any or all of them to humane & Christian Masters who will purchase them for their own use, should they at any time become refractory or their conduct grievously immoral.”71

Some enslaved people were able to leverage their placement in Catholic religious communities to advance their own familial goals. When the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus expanded from their base near St. Louis to open a convent and school in Grand

Coteau, some sixty miles west of Baton Rouge, they adopted the practice of slave ownership.72 At some point in the next eight years they purchased Mélite, an enslaved woman. Cognizant of the opportunities and risks entailed in her position, Mélite parlayed

70 DuBourg to Joseph Rosati, 28 Aug 1822, RG 1 A 5, DuBourg Collection, AASL; Receipt signed by Cornelius Rhodes, 10 Sept 1822, photocopy, RG 1 A3, Folder 11, Correspondence, Photocopies from Archdiocese of New Orleans Archives, DuBourg Collection, AASL. DuBourg’s colleague Joseph Rosati had purchased an eight-year-old boy from Rhodes for the Vincentian seminary in 1821. Poole and Slawson, Church and Slave in Perry County, 159–160.

71 Transfer of Slaves by Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland, Adam Marshall, Agent, to Fr. Van Quickenborne, 10 April 1823, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC. See also Concordat of Jesuits with Bp DuBourg, 19 March 1823, Record Group History of the Missouri Province, MPC.

72 As part of the enticement to draw them to her neighborhood, their benefactress Mary Smith offered them the gift of an enslaved family. Philippine Duchesne to Sophie Barat, 24 June 1821, L97, APRSC, 366.

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her religious observance to secure the companionship of her husband. In June 1829

Mélite presented herself for baptism. The next month, the Sacred Heart nuns purchased sixty-year-old “Martin, a good old negro, husband of Mélite.” The following month

Martin was baptized. The same day the couple was “legitimately married in the church.”73 Later that year, an enslaved man named Frank succeeded in a similar campaign. He convinced the convent’s superior to buy his wife, Jenny, and her two children. The nuns considered the purchase an act of mercy “to alleviate their lot.”74

Enslaved people expected that the Catholic women religious would honor the marriage bond by keeping such couples together.

A more challenging test was whether such religious orders could make room for people of color to join them, not as enslaved workers, but as peers in their spiritual endeavors. Like other French religious orders, the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus maintained two separate ranks in their convents. Choir nuns taught in the schools and ran the houses, while the coadjutrix (or converse) nuns did the cooking, cleaning, and manual labor. The system did not translate well to the American context. Absorbing the racial and class politics of their new homeland, the coadjutrix nuns resented their low status. On the Sacred Heart sisters’ arrival in New Orleans in 1818, before they had settled in their own house in Missouri, coadjutrix sister Catherine Lamarre refused to work alongside the

73 GCHJ, 26 June 1829, 20 July 1829, 15 Aug 1829, SSCSL; deed of sale, 20 July 1829, Packet 3, Folder A, Box 13, Legal and Financial, Grand Coteau Collection, SSCSL.

74 GCHJ, 8 Dec 1829, SSCSL. Frank may have been the 22-year-old slave by that name the nuns purchased in July 1823 for $550. Packet 3, Folder A, Box 13, Legal and Financial, Grand Coteau Collection, SSCSL.

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Ursulines’ slave women to do the laundry.75 Superior Philippine Duchesne chastised her for bigotry. The enslaved women were equal in the sight of God, the nun counseled.

“They had the same soul [as Lamarre], they were redeemed by the same blood, received in the same Church.”76

For the first few years in her role supervising the Sacred Heart convent near St.

Louis, Duchesne struggled to uphold that universalist vision, even as she privately voiced her own racism.77 Could the school she and her sisters founded accept black girls as students along side white girls? Could their convent recruit women of color to join their ranks? Or would American white supremacy dictate other choices? She knew that, if they accepted females of African ancestry, they would have to separate them from the white girls and women, who “do not want to associate with them.” But she also knew that “God has his people everywhere.”78 Sophie Barat, Duchesne’s superior in France, advised her to postpone her hopes for a multiracial house. “Do not make the foolish mistake of mixing the whites with the blacks or you will have no more pupils. And the same for your novices: no one would come to you if you were to receive black novices.”79 Duchesne

75 Philippine Duchesne to Sophie Barat, 7 June 1818, Letter 94, BDC2 1:57; Sarah Ann Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 53–55.

76 Philippine Duchesne to Sophie Barat, 7 June 1818, L31, APRSC, 141–142, translation C. Croxall; Letter 94, BDC2 1:57.

77 “In spite of my repugnance towards the blacks, we shall perhaps be obliged to hire them,” she confessed to Barat, because the Sacred Heart nuns were having trouble holding onto their free white male servants. Duchesne to Barat, 1 Dec 1822, Letter 164, BDC2 2:77. On Catholics’ reputation for racial inclusivity, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 111.

78 Duchesne to Barat, 7 June 1818, L31, APRSC, 140.

79 Barat to Duchesne, 5 Nov 1818, Letter 107, BDC2 1:122. 335

countered with an idea for a third tier, a track for free women of color who wanted to dedicate themselves to a religious life whom she suggested calling “commissionaire sisters.” Preserving racial separation spatially—these women would be kept apart from the white sisters—and in rank, Duchesne hoped, would be enough to satisfy the racial and status needs of the white women, and allow women of color to pursue a religious vocation, if only in the capacity of third-class servants. Barat ignored the proposal, perhaps hoping that Duchesne’s idealism would pass.80 The Vincentians, too, struggled with how and whether to draw men of color into their religious community. They needed to recruit what they called lay brothers—men dedicated to manual labor and domestic cares for the religious community. The obvious group to tap was free men of color. But if black men joined, then “no white man will ever want to be associated with them.”81

Ultimately Catholics of African descent who wanted to pursue a spiritual vocation within the church opted to create new paths for themselves and other people of color, since the regular avenues were blocked for them. Henriette Delille, a free woman of color descended from a line of women in New Orleans who embraced and promoted

Catholicism, not only joined a confraternity dedicated to catechizing people of color in the 1820s, but she soon took leadership of the confraternity and broadened its mission to include charity toward the sick and impoverished. Delille chose to devote herself fully to a religious vocation. In the early 1840s she and two friends formed a religious order and

80 Duchesne to Barat, [15] Nov 1819, L69, APRSC, 283.

81 Felix De Andreis to Antonio Baccari, 23 Sept 1819, Letter 70a, FMFDA, 302. On the structural and theological barriers to enslaved men becoming Catholic priests, see Randall M. Miller, “Slaves and Southern Catholicism,” 143–144.

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later took sacred vows for what became the Sisters of the Holy Family, one of the first black Catholic orders in the United States.82

Delille was exceptional in pioneering a Catholic religious order, but her connection to Catholicism was not. Like other people of African descent in the

Mississippi River Valley, she had embraced the religious practices into which her forebears had been inducted, perhaps unwillingly, in the eighteenth century. Similarly, many of the enslaved people the Hempstead family acquired upon their arrival in the St.

Louis area were likely the descendents of slaves who had been baptized into the Catholic faith in the French or Spanish periods. Pierre, Steve, Lucy, George, and Frank themselves may have been baptized in one of the regional Catholic churches. For instance, Pierre may have been the thirty-five-year-old man of the same name, a slave who then belonged to Mr. Robidoux, baptized in Florissant in September 1800, or the child named Pierre, born to Maria, a slave belonging to Antoine Vincent Boaÿ, baptized in 1793 in St.

Louis.83 Frank may have been François, born to a female slave of Gregoire Sarpy, baptized 17 Oct 1792 in St. Louis.84 Without bills of sale confirming the Hempstead slaves’ previous owners, such suppositions cannot be confirmed. But the slender

82 Tracy Fessenden, “The Sisters of the Holy Family and the Veil of Race,” Religion and American Culture 10, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 190; Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism,” 443–446.

83 Entry for 14 Sept 1800, Florissant - St. Ferdinand Baptisms 1792–1857, SLAPRM, reel 167 [p. 14]; entry for 28 Jul 1793, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms, 1769–1804, SLAPRM, reel 171 [p. 62].

84 Entry for 17 Oct 1792, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms, 1769–1804, SLAPRM, reel 171 [p. 59].

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evidence is tantalizing, and verifies that a portion of the enslaved population in the St.

Louis area retained Catholic ties and rituals of belonging.

Pierre and his daughter Louise were among that number. While Pierre belonged to

Stephen Hempstead, a Protestant Yankee newcomer making a name for himself in the town, his daughter belonged to Madame LeComte, a twice-widowed French Canadian woman who had lived in St. Louis since at least the 1770s, and who owned many

Catholic slaves.85 Louise may have been the infant Louise baptized in the Catholic church by Marie Joseph Dunand in June 1809, daughter of Claire, a slave of Auguste

Chouteau.86 If so, she was sold by Chouteau to his neighbor Lecomte at some point in her youth.87 In 1823, at 13 or 14, she died. That Louise was buried in the Catholic cemetery

85 The enslaved people with Catholic affiliations owned by Madame Lecomte (and her husband Guillaume, while he was alive) include Celine, baptized 19 May 1784, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms 1769–1804, SLAPRM, reel 171 [p. 20]; Marie Louise and her daughter Helene, baptized 18 Feb 1786, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms 1769–1804, SLAPRM, reel 171 [p. 26]; the mother of an stillborn child interred 9 Feb 1810, St. Louis Old Cathedral Burials 1781–1832, SLAPRM, reel 175 [p. 75]; the mother of an infant girl interred 8 Sept 1811, St. Louis Old Cathedral Burials 1781–1832, SLAPRM, reel 175 [p. 79]; Angelique, buried 15 Nov 1816, St. Louis Old Cathedral Burials 1781–1832, SLAPRM, reel 175 [p. 97]; Pierre, baptized 28 June 1818, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms 1814–1823, SLAPRM, reel 172 [p. 47]; Julie and her son Antoine, who was baptized 27 Jun 1820, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms 1814–1823, SLAPRM, reel 172 [p. 83]; two-year-old Celestine Agathè, buried 16 March 1824, St. Louis Old Cathedral Burials 1781–1832, SLAPRM, reel 175 [p. 136]; and six-year-old Pierre, buried 23 Apr 1824, St. Louis Old Cathedral Burials 1781–1832, SLAPRM, reel 175 [p. 136], among others. For details on Madame Lecomte’s family and marriages, see William Primm, “History of St. Louis,” ed. William Clark Breckenridge, Missouri Historical Society Collections 4, no. 2 (1913): 164n5.

86 Entry for 1 Jun 1809, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms, 1806–1814, SLAPRM, reel 171, [p. 32].

87 According to a listing from 1804, Auguste Chouteau owned the entire plot of block 34 in St. Louis, upon which he had a stone dwelling; Guillaume Herbert Lecomte had a stone house on the northeast quarter of block 35, across rue de la Tour from Chouteau’s property. Both Chouteau and Lecomte owned other properties as well. Scharf, History of St. Louis, 1:145–148. 338

with a Catholic funeral by the resident priest, Father Saulnier, indicates that she identified with the Church and that others acknowledged her connection to Catholic practice. Pierre, who may have had some influence over his daughter’s religious formation and expressed his opinion about her final resting place, gained Stephen Hempstead’s permission to attend his daughter’s funeral.88

Not all of Hempstead’s slaves had a connection with Catholic practice. A woman named Louisa Hempstead, who had been born in 1801, died in 1857 in St. Louis and was buried in the Wesleyan Cemetery. She was listed on the cemetery roll as a “free slave,” perhaps indicating that she had purchased her freedom from the Hempstead family at some point prior to her death.89 Her burial in the Wesleyan graveyard suggests that she was affiliated with the Centenary Methodist Church, which owned the cemetery. If so,

Louisa was not alone. A third to a half of the members of Centenary were African

Americans.90

88 Entry for 11 Sept 1823, St. Louis Old Cathedral Burials, 1781–1832, SLAPRM, reel 175 [p. 134]; Hempstead diary, 11 Sept 1823, SHP.

89 Gloria E. Dettleff, “List of Colored Persons in Wesleyan Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri, 1847–1868,” St. Louis County Library, 2008, http://www.slcl.org/content/wesleyan-cemetery-saint-louis-missouri-list-colored-persons- wesleyan-cemetery-st-louis-misso; “Louisa Hempstead (1801 - 1857) - Find A Grave Memorial,” accessed 11 December 2014, http://www.findagrave.com/cgi- bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=64030829&ref=acom.

90 Gloria E. Dettleff, “About Wesleyan Cemetery and Its Records,” St. Louis County Library, 2008, http://www.slcl.org/content/about-wesleyan-cemetery-and-its-records. Another Hempstead bondsperson, Jack Hubard, also appears to have avoided an affiliation with Catholicism, or, perhaps, to have had no religious affiliation whatsoever. Before he ran away in 1820, Hubard labored on at least two Easter Mondays while Hempstead’s other slaves were keeping the Catholic holiday. His diverging behavior suggests that Hubard did not prioritize Catholic practices. It also suggests that Hempstead was aware of the religious differences between his slaves; he knew which enslaved people he could compel to work, and which ones he had to grant space for religious observances. Hempstead diary, 27 March 1815, 7 April 1817, SHP. 339

Louise, Pierre’s Catholic daughter, and Louisa, the Methodist—two women of

African descent who sealed their religious commitments in their deaths—represent two strands of Christianity that intertwined in the lives of people of color in the Mississippi

River Valley. Just as enslaved and free people of color appropriated Catholicism and spurred its purveyors to respond to their spiritual demands, so too they adopted and adapted various Protestant forms, carving out space for themselves in the agendas of

Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian missionaries sent to evangelize others.91

Enslaved and free people of color in the eastern states had limited access to and engagement with Protestantism in the eighteenth century. The revivalism following the

American Revolution accelerated the encounter, but did not touch the majority of black people. By 1800 perhaps five percent of southerners of African ancestry had joined

Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches as members, though perhaps twice or three times as many worshipped in those churches.92 Intersecting with this incremental

91 On white Protestants’ limited evangelism among enslaved people before 1830, see Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 39–41; Randy J. Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 68; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions, 28, 47.

92 Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997), 46, 264–265; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 149; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 253–254; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877, 10th Anniversary ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 143–148. On the distinction between church membership and adherence, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 265. In the early nineteenth century the proportion of the black population who adhered to evangelical Protestantism would mushroom. By the mid-1830s more than a quarter of adults of African descent in the South attended Protestant churches. Heyrman, Southern Cross, 265.

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Christianization was a different kind of expansion—that of slave-grown cotton. The explosion of the cotton economy powered a massive relocation of the country’s inhabitants, as white planters and slave dealers forcibly removed enslaved laborers from the Upper South to the cotton plantations of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.93 As people of African descent trekked westward, some of them brought Protestant Christian commitments and practices with them.94

Consider Isabella, Abd-al Rahman’s wife. A Baptist from South Carolina, she found herself uprooted and transported to a plantation near Natchez with her two-year-old child, Limerick. She retained her Baptist practices, introduced her Muslim husband to

Christianity, and raised the five children they had together in the church. Son Simon even became a Baptist preacher.95 Betsey Madison had a similar story. Born into slavery in

Virginia in the 1760s, she converted to Christianity after the deaths of one of her children and her enslaved husband. Her owner sold her in the 1790s to a planter near Natchez, tearing her away from her second husband. Betsey’s new master was severe and demanding. She labored daily, including Sundays, to avoid his whippings. When that

93 For the recent reassessment of slavery’s role in driving the American economy, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).

94 On enslaved people transferring membership from Baptists fellowships in the Upper South to Baptist churches in Mississippi and Louisiana, see Larry M. James, “Biracial Fellowship in Antebellum Baptist Churches,” in Boles, Masters & Slaves, 42–47. On the forced migration of slaves to the Lower Mississippi Valley to sustain the cotton empire, and the intersections of slavery’s expansion and the rise of evangelical Protestantism, see Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told, 1–37, 198–207.

95 Timothy Ryan Buckner, “Constructing Identities on the Frontier of Slavery,” 76, 91.

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man died, another man inherited Betsey and the other slaves on the plantation. Soon after, she was sold again and taken to New Orleans. There Betsey, now in her fifties, managed to hire her time and purchase her freedom for $250. In the early 1820s Betsey herself purchased an enslaved woman, Fanny, a “sister in Christ” from Virginia. Betsey shortly thereafter married Rueben Madison, who had also been born into slavery in Virginia and had converted to Protestantism. He had purchased his freedom prior to landing in New

Orleans. Betsey, Reuben, and Fanny built a house together, where they hosted worship services each Sunday. Harassed for their religious assemblies, they paid a soldier to stand guard at their door to ensure the worshippers’ safety. To secure “religious privileges unmolested,” the trio decided to move north. They landed in New York in 1825, where

Betsey and Reuben manumitted Fanny.96

Isabella, Betsey, Fanny, and Reuben had all arrived in the Mississippi River

Valley with Protestant habits and identities. Indeed, people of African descent had been active in spreading Protestantism’s reach in the region since the turn of the century. An enslaved couple had been founding members of the first Methodist society in the

Mississippi Territory in 1799, in Washington, near Natchez.97 A black man named Bill

96 Abigail Mott, Interview with Reuben and Betsey Madison, 1827, John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 185–188. In his autobiography, African-born former slave John Joseph recounts his reverse trajectory, from a childhood in New Orleans to a young adulthood on a corn and rice plantation in South Carolina, where he converted from an African animist belief system to Protestant Christianity. John Joseph, The Life and Sufferings of John Joseph, a Native of Ashantee, in Western Africa... (Wellington: Printed for John Joseph by J. Greedy, 1848), 6, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjoseph/.

97 John G. Jones, A Complete History of Methodism as Connected with the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Written at the Unanimous Request of the Conference (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South. Smith & Lamar, Agents, 1908), 2:239. 342

shared that same honor for Hephzibah Baptist Church of Christ, organized in 1813 in

East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana.98 An enslaved man presented himself for communion at the first Presbyterian celebration of the sacrament in St. Louis and gave an offering. His piety impressed the missionary conducting the service enough to land in his memoirs ten years later.99 As members and communicants, Africans and African Americans accessed and promoted Protestantism in the region.100

But this was not white people’s faith. As they had elsewhere in the United States, people of African descent wove elements of African religiosity into their expression of

Protestant Christianity in the Mississippi River Valley. The physicality of African spiritual practices found a home in the worship styles people of color developed and handed down to their children, including dancing, stomping, clapping, rhythmic preaching, and shouting. Such bodily displays disturbed some white observers. Stephen

98 Hephzibah Baptist Church of Christ Records, typed transcript, vol. 1, 1813–1840, G-11 / M, Merritt M. Shilg Memorial Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; W.E. Paxton, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana, from the Earliest Times to the Present (St. Louis: C.R. Barns, 1888), 38–42.

99 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1826), 112.

100 Such access was far from guaranteed. Many enslaved people on plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi were barred by their enslavers from attending worship or observing the Sabbath. Henry Watson, a man who later escaped slavery, spent six years toiling on a plantation near Vicksburg. His master would not tolerate his enslaved people enacting religiosity on Sundays. “There was never such a thing as a slave going to meeting, or hearing the word of God in any form.” Another former slave on a Vicksburg plantation, William J. Anderson, recounted how his master “desecrated” the Sabbath. Anderson had purchased a bible with his only dollar. His master took the bible, tore it up, and whipped Anderson for reading it. “We had no preaching or meeting at all—nothing but whipping and driving both night and day—sometimes nearly all day Sunday.” Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Published by Bela Marsh, 1848), 17, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/watson/; William J. Anderson, Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-four Years a Slave ... (Chicago: Daily Tribune Book and Job Printing Office, 1857), 16, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/andersonw/.

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Hempstead registered his distaste for the full-bodied exhibition of one black Methodist woman’s religious feeling. She had “been in the habeit [sic] for Several years past of

Hollowing and making a noise & falling down in the meeting.”101 Hempstead was a

Congregationalist-turned-Presbyterian, with little indulgence for ecstatic spectacles.

Other white Protestants showed more tolerance. In the freer worship forms of

Methodists and Baptists, people of African ancestry found room for their incarnational spirituality. At Sister Keary’s house near Pickneyville, Mississippi, a preacher named

Renneau preached from John 9:25 to some white folks “and a considerable number of

Blacks.” After the sermon those assembled joined in “singing, prayer and some noise.”102

Methodist camp meetings were notorious for “much feeling and much noise” among mixed audiences.103 Such interracial gatherings—the norm for Methodists in the 1810s and early 1820s—produced a stream of black converts. Three decades after preachers began holding meetings and organizing Methodist societies in the lower Mississippi

Valley, the ratio of African-descended Methodists to white Methodists in Mississippi and

Louisiana was two to five. But the denomination itself did not engage in programmatic outreach to the enslaved population in the Mississippi River Valley until 1829, when the

Mississippi Conference passed a resolution directing its missionary society to send

101 Hempstead diary, 15 April 1828, SHP. On how people of African descent fused traditional African religiosity and European Christian practices into a syncretic African Christianity, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 49–52; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 252–254; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 64–75; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions, 12–14. On the weakness of Catholic-African syncretism in the United States as compared to Brazil and the Caribbean, see Randall M. Miller, “Slaves and Southern Catholicism,” 141–143.

102 William Winans journal, 14 June 1823, typescript, William Winans Papers, CAMM.

103 Winans journal, 26 June 1823, William Winans Papers, CAMM.

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missionaries “to the people of color in our own country.” The Methodist mission to enslaved people in the South would ultimately eclipse all the other denominations’ efforts in the antebellum era—the Methodists fielded more than three hundred missionaries to target slaves—but in the early nineteenth century, enslaved and free black people found their own way into Methodist camp meetings, societies, and churches.104

Complicating Methodism’s appeal for people of African descent was the growing alignment between preachers and slaveholders. John Wesley, the sect’s founder, famously opposed slavery in the 1770s and urged an anti-slavery stance on his followers.

After the American Revolution, Methodists in the United States banned slaveholders from membership in their churches, but softened their stance quickly for fear of losing

104 The exact figures for the Mississippi, Washington, and Louisiana districts of the Methodists’ Mississippi Conference are 4329 white members and 1717 black members in 1829. The conference report also indicates 400 Indian members in the “Chahta Mission.” The figures are much smaller for Illinois, Arkansas, and Missouri: ten percent of Missouri and Arkansas Methodists were black, but only one percent of those in Illinois (that is, the Illinois District of the Illinois Conference). Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, for the Years 1829–1839, vol. 2 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1840), 8–10, 15–16, https://archive.org/details/13680353.688.emory.edu; John G. Jones, Mississippi Conference, 2:239–241, quote from 241; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 47–50. Former slave John Early found his way into a Methodist church in St. Louis in the late 1820s. Hearing a Methodist preacher deliver a sermon that seemed aimed specifically at him, Early felt convicted, “a poor sinner.” After three days of prayer, he experienced forgiveness and redemption. In response to what he called “God’s goodness,” Early consecrated his life to God’s service. “I united with the church without delay and was baptized around the holy altar of the same church in which I was convicted.” He hosted prayer meetings, led singing at worship, and superintended the Sunday school. In 1833 he received a license as an exhorter in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He then transferred to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which had just organized a congregation in St. Louis. He eventually was ordained as an elder in this denomination. Sarah J. W. Early, Life and Labors of Rev. Jordan W. Early, One of the Pioneers of African Methodism in the West and South (Nashville: Publishing House A.M.E. Church Sunday School Union, 1894), 16–18, 22, 46, 56, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/early/.

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members and offending potential converts.105 In the Mississippi River Valley Methodist preachers not only condoned slavery, but profited directly from it. Methodist pastor

William Winans in Amite County, Mississippi acquired slaves through marriage.

Adjusting his previous opposition to slavery to accommodate his new standing as slave master, he defended the institution on biblical grounds and argued that he and other believers treated their slaves well. To his brother in Ohio, who pestered him on the subject, he boasted that a Christian slaveowner “does real service to those negros [sic] whom he purchases from unbelieving masters.”106 His own slaves may have seen things quite differently, resenting his policing of their less-than-pious pursuits. When he returned home from a preaching tour one New Year’s Day, Winans griped in his journal that “the black people had behaved in my absence very improperly, particularly in spending the Christmas holy days in frolic and dissipation.”107 Not only his sanctimoniousness, but also Winans’ cruelty undercut his religious message. Though a

Methodist preacher, Winans was a typical slave master. In between preaching circuits, he whipped his slaves for insubordination and misbehavior. Joe, for instance, whom Winans

105 Christine A. Croxall, “Change of Heart, Change of Life: John Wesley’s Antislavery Conversion as a Resource for Twenty-First Century White Antiracism Work” (Master’s Thesis, Union Theological Seminary, 2002), 40–45.

106 William Winans to Obadiah Winans, 14 April 1820; William Winans to S. Winans (his mother), 14 Aug 1820; William Winans to Obadiah Winans, 14 Oct 1820, all from folder 1, letter book 1, box 16, MS1, William Winans Papers, CAMM. Randy Sparks, drawing from Winans’s autobiography and journal, suggests that the Methodist was “troubled” by slavery. Winans’s manuscript letters reveal a confident slaveholder invested in defending the institution. Randy J. Sparks, “Religion in Amite County, Mississippi, 1800–1861,” in Boles, Masters & Slaves, 64–65. On Methodism’s shifting stance on slavery, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 92–93.

107 Winans journal, 1 Jan 1821, William Winans Papers, CAMM. 346

accused of stealing and “who under the lash owned the theft” but later withdrew his confession, may have been reluctant to ally with Winans or his God.108

White Baptists in the region, like their Methodist colleagues, welcomed people of

African descent into their fellowship, but did nothing programmatically to reach out to this population. One of the white Baptist leaders in Natchez acknowledged that his sect had not prioritized evangelism to the enslaved population. “We have swarms of negroes who are entirely neglected,” he reported to the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. “Some have the opportunity of hearing the gospel ... the largest part have not.”109 The Baptists also made similar compromises as the Methodists. At the Mississippi Baptist Association meeting in 1808, delegates pondered how to deal with church members “whose treatment to their slaves is unscriptural.” Their action? The pastors who constituted the association decided they were obligated to take note of members who mistreat their slaves “and deal

108 Winans journal, 17 May 1823, William Winans Papers, CAMM. James Smylie, another Amite County resident and Presbyterian pastor, joined Winans in using scriptures to prop up the institution in the late 1820s. Sparks, “Religion in Amite County, Mississippi,” 68. An earlier generation of evangelical clergy made different choices. Tobias Gibson, the first Methodist missionary sent to Mississippi in 1799, inherited slaves at his family’s plantation in South Carolina. Prior to his trek westward, he manumitted his slaves. John G. Jones, Mississippi Conference 1:105–106. Though they may not have owned slaves themselves, some Methodist preachers further north collaborated with slaveholders. Former slave Henry Watson recounts in his autobiography his encounter with Methodism in St. Louis. He was able to attend Sunday afternoon services, where a white minister preached the doctrine of submission. The Methodist’s enslaved auditors “are made to believe that God made them slaves, that they are always to remain slaves, and bear with patience and humility the unjust punishment they receive on earth, that it may be to their glory hereafter.” Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, 31.

109 Unknown author, Natchez, Mississippi Territory, to Luther Rice, 6 April 1817, letter written on the copy of Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association; Convened at Clear Creek Church, Adams County, Mississippi Territory, October 19, 1816 (Natchez: Andrew Marschalk, 1816), microfilm reel 370, Baptist Pamphlets vol. 5, SBHLA.

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with them in brotherly love, according to the rules of the gospel.”110 They did not condemn slavery or forbid their members or their pastors from owning slaves.

Despite white Baptists’ alliance with slaveowners’ interests and neglect of the spiritual wellbeing of people of color, people of African descent sought Baptist fellowship in interracial churches. Rebecca, an enslaved woman, joined Jerusalem Baptist

Church in Amite County, Mississippi, by recounting her experience of salvation in 1821.

Over the next few years, several other enslaved people joined the church, including Ned,

Andison, Fill, Israel, Siller, and Chany. They accessed the same worship privileges as white members, and were equally subject to church discipline. Israel, for instance, found himself “excluded” from the privileges of the church for insolence.111 Hephzibah Baptist

Church in Louisiana also welcomed—and disciplined—members of African descent.

Two black women and one enslaved man joined in 1814 by relating their conversion experience, constituting fifteen percent of the new membership that year, a figure that persisted. By 1830 the church had received 149 members, 22 of whom were black men and women. White members of Hephzibah were twice as likely to behave in ways that earned them church censure. Only two of the black members received church discipline, compared to 26 white members. The church excommunicated an enslaved man named

Jack for keeping silent about an intended murder and “pretend[ing] to witchcraft,” and excluded Bill for theft. White members received discipline for drunkenness, improper conduct, suing church members, profanity, and abusive language. In keeping with the

110 Mississippi Baptist Association, A Republication of the Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association from Its Organization in 1806 to the Present Time (New Orleans: Printed by Hinton, 1849), 13, viewed on microfilm reel 453, SBHLA.

111 Entries for April 1821–June 1826, Baptist Church of Christ at Jerusalem Amite County, Mississippi, Church Record, Z 1043, Roll 36114, MDAH.

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Mississippi Baptist Association’s policy, the church punished two white men for their treatment of black people, but then restored them after they acknowledged their behavior.

William West “made his Concession to the Church” for whipping a black church member in 1820. Daniel Edds confessed that he had abused his slaves in March 1823. Two months later he had regained the benefits of church fellowship.112

When they could, people of African descent banded together to form their own congregations. An “African Church” joined the Mississippi Baptist Association in 1810.

Though the church did not initially send delegates to the association’s annual meetings— how could slaves secure such extensive time away from their labors?—the African group did submit a letter for the body’s consideration in 1814, complaining that their owners obstructed their gatherings. Bowing to white slaveowners’ dominance, the association recommended that the Africans “use their utmost diligence in obeying their masters.”

They enjoined the enslaved people to secure written permission from their masters prior to meeting, and to set a regular meeting time and place—second Sundays, at Josiah

Flower’s saw mill on Bayou Pierre. The association also requested that those preachers available to visit the African church on such occasions send notification in advance.113

The next year the association reiterated its wishes that available preachers “attend with the members of the African church as often as they can make it convenient.” The meeting

112 Hephzibah Baptist Church of Christ Records, typed transcript, vol. 1, 1813–1840, G- 11 / M, Merritt M. Shilg Memorial Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

113 Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association; Convened at Shiloh Church, Wilkinson County, October 15th, 1814 (Natchez: Isler & J. M’Curdy, 1814), 4, microfilm reel 370, Baptist Pamphlets v. 5, SBHLA; Mississippi Baptist Associaiton, Republication of the Minutes, 21–36.

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location had moved—the African congregation now met at the building of the Bayou

Pierre church, a white congregation.114

Gathering together to worship, to sing, to pray, to hear preaching, and to associate with others satisfied at least some of the enslaved and free people’s spiritual and social needs. In 1814 the African church reported fifty members, half of whom had been baptized and joined within the past year.115 The following year the statistics were more detailed. Another twenty-one had joined by baptism—the second highest growth rate of the twenty-six churches in the association. The church excommunicated five members for misconduct, the specifics of which are lost to history.116 Another congregation of

African-descended Baptists had formed by 1819, though the white-led Mississippi

Baptist Association refused to admit this second church into its membership until

114 Hezekiah Harmon, who had served as a delegate from Bayou Pierre church in 1811, and Levi Thompson, represented the African church in the association’s 1815 meeting, the first time the church sent delegates to the three-day gathering. Harmon returned the following year, joined by Elisha Flower, and William Cox and S. Goodwin represented the next. Cox returned in 1818, with E. Tharpe. Flower and W. Breazeale appeared in 1819. Josiah Flower, who hosted the meetings of the African church at his mill in 1814, was an ordained Baptist minister. He was tapped to preach the first of three sermons on the Sunday of the association’s 1816 and 1820 meetings. Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association; Convened at Sarepta Church, Jefferson County, Mississippi Territory, October 14, 1815 (Natchez: P. Isler, 1815), 4–5, microfilm reel 370, Baptist Pamphlets vol. 5, SBHLA; Mississippi Baptist Association, Republication of the Minutes, 50, 57, 60, 66, 72, 85.

115 Another new member had joined that year by letter of transfer. Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association, 1814, 2.

116 Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association, 1815, 2. This African church vanished from the association’s annual minutes in the 1820s. The congregation may have been one of several that broke off to form other Baptist associations in 1819 and 1820, or it may have changed its name. Mississippi Baptist Association, Republication of the Minutes, 70, 75.

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delegates appeared to give “satisfactory account of their faith.”117

In the wake of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, slaveowners and politicians in

Mississippi viewed independent black congregations as a threat to their mastery. When former governor George Poindexter consolidated the state’s slave code in 1822, he introduced severe restrictions on how people of African descent could worship.118 The

Mississippi Baptist Association registered its dissatisfaction by petitioning the

117 This second African church does not reappear in the association’s minutes. Mississippi Baptist Association, Republication of the Minutes, 70. In addition and conjunction with these African congregations, several African and African American preachers proclaimed their version of the gospel in the Mississippi River Valley. Joseph Willis, a free man of color, preached the first Baptist sermon in Louisiana and founded several Baptist churches there. John Berry Meachum helped with a black Sunday school in St. Louis before being ordained and leading the Baptist African Church in that town. Methodists licensed black men as exhorters in Louisiana. Even the Presbyterians licensed a free man of color to preach in Missouri. Paxton, History of the Baptists of Louisiana, 139–155, 175, 182, 197, 214; William Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists from 1804 to 1914 (Nashville, Tenn.: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1915), 17–20, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/hicks/menu.html; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 134; Janet Cornelius, Slave Missions, 26–27, 133; John T. Christian, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana (Shreveport: The Executive Board of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, 1923), 50–51; Rufus Babcock, ed., Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason Peck D.D., Edited from his Journals and Correspondence (American Baptist Publication Society: Philadelphia, 1864), 90, 93–94, 159–161; Roger D. Bridges, ed., “John Mason Peck on Illinois Slavery,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 75, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 181; Winans journal, 19 July 1823, typescript, William Winans Papers, CAMM; David Greene and Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, 21 April 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

118 Approved 18 June 1822, the code forbade groups of slaves larger than five from gathering “at any place of public resort, or at any meeting house, or houses, in the night,” or meeting at a school to learn to read and write, either day or night. The code allowed slaves to go to church, even if more than five black people were present, but only if they had written permission from their masters, the worship service occurred between sunrise and sunset, and an ordained or licensced white minister conducted the service. Black-led religious gatherings were prohibited. Laws of the State of Mississippi Passed at the Fifth Adjourned Session, June 1822, Mississippi B2, reel 2, William Sumner Jenkins, ed., Records of the States of the United States of America. A Microform Compilation ([Washington, D.C.]: Library of Congress Photoduplication Service, 1949), 183–184, 202, quote from 183.

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Mississippi legislature to repeal the portion of the law that “deprives the African churches, under the patronage of this Association, of their religious privileges.”119

Methodist William Winans, echoing the Baptists’ dismay, joined the campaign to restore the “stripped” religious freedoms.120 The state legislature responded by revising the code in January 1823 in ways that satisfied the white preachers, but not the black worshippers.

Enslaved and free people of color were prohibited from gathering in groups larger than five, except for “religious worship: Provided, That such worship be conducted by a regularly ordained or licensed white minister, or attended by at least two discreet and reputable white persons, appointed by some regular church, or religious society.” No longer would the state tolerate black-only worship.121 In neighboring Louisiana the black

Baptist church in New Orleans suffered similar restrictions. In 1827 authorities in the city

119 Mississippi Baptist Association, Republication of the Minutes, 87.

120 William Winans to John Collins, 7 May 1823, folder 3, letter book 3, box 16, MS1, William Winans Papers, CAMM; Sparks, “Religion in Amite County, Mississippi,” 61– 67; Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, 69–71.

121 The Revised Code of the Laws of Mississippi in Which Are Comprised All Such Acts of the General Assembly of a Public Nature as Were in Force at the End of the Year 1823: With a General Index (Natchez: Printed by F. Baker, 1824), 190, http://books.google.com/books?id=Ah5GAQAAIAAJ. Prior to the Denmark Vesey conspiracy and the Nat Turner revolt, slaveholders were wary of the liberatory potential of slaves accessing Christian teaching, but they had yet to enforce controls systematically to mediate and limit such access. See Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 255–263; Douglas Ambrose, “Religion and Slavery,” in Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 390. On the scholarly debate on whether Vesey had indeed plotted insurrection, or if the court trying Vesey and others for this supposed crime created the conspiracy through its proceedings, see Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (October 2001): 915–976; “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, Part 2,” William and Mary Quarterly 59 (January 2002): 135–202; Robert L. Paquette and Douglas R. Egerton, “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 105, no. 1 (January 2004): 8–48.

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silenced their pastor, Asa Goldsbury, citing a law against preaching by people of color.122

Presbyterians were even more limited in their ministrations to people of color than the Baptists and Methodists. On occasion Presbyterian missionaries preached to groups of

Africans and African Americans, but more by happenstance than by design. For the five weeks that Presbyterian missionaries Elias Cornelius and Sylvester Larned were both stationed in New Orleans in 1817, Cornelius graciously ceded the choice preaching gig— the nascent white congregation—to Larned and busied himself preaching “in the hospitals, in the jail, to seamen, and to a congregation of two hundred Africans.”123 A group of black folks in St. Charles, Missouri, recruited Edward Hollister, a visiting missionary, to attend to them when his horse died, stranding him in their village for a night. He “gave an exhortation” to them, smug that “some of them were much affected.”

But Presbyterians neither promoted a mission program for enslaved or free people of

African descent in the region nor committed funds for their religious instruction.124

Africans and their descendents found ways to siphon Presbyterian and

Congregational mission resources, despite the institutional inactivity. When they first started holding religious services at Dwight in 1821, the missionaries to the Cherokees along the Arkansas River had unexpected company. They had come to “publish the glad

122 Paxton, History of the Baptists of Louisiana, 120–121.

123 Twentieth Annual Narrative of Missionary Labours, Performed in Various Parts of the United States, Under the Direction of the Trustees of the Missionary Society of Connecticut: To which is Subjoined, a Statement of the Funds of the Society for the Year 1818, and a List of Books Sent to the New Settlements (Hartford: Peter B. Gleason, 1819), 15.

124 E. Hollister to Abel Flint, 30 June 1821, folder 1, box 17, JFMP.

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tidings of the gospel to sinners now enveloped in the thick mists of heathen darkness”— to Native Americans. But it was people of African descent, more than Cherokees, who constituted their congregation. A “goodly number” of black slaves attended the Protestant gatherings each week, sometimes from a distance of a dozen miles. Some of these enslaved people may have encountered Christian teaching prior to their arrival among the

Cherokees, among the Baptist and Methodist camp meetings in the eastern states. If so, they renewed their association with the faith at Dwight. The missionaries quickly came to rely on their presence, expressing disappointment one week because “A frolic of the

Blacks last evening has entirely vacated their seat today in our place 'where prayer is wont to be made.' A few whites only attended meeting.”125 Enslaved people sought out

Christian community, but not at the expense of other forms of connection and sociality.

In 1822 the people of African ancestry attending services at Dwight convinced the missionaries to pay particular attention to their spiritual formation. After worship on the first Sunday of January, “a meeting was held with the Blacks for their special instruction,” the first in a sporadic series of classes. The enslaved people of the

Chickasaws pressed for similar religious care. The missionaries serving the Monroe and

Tockshish stations hosted two religious classes each week, “one for the Chickasaws and the other for the black people.” People of African ancestry flocked to the Sabbath services hosted at Monroe, regularly constituting more than half of the congregation.

More than the missionaries’ Chickasaw audience, enslaved people embraced the message and joined the church, demonstrating “satisfactory evidence of a change of heart.” Eighty percent of the church members in the spring of 1828 were African and African American,

125 Dwight journal, 13 May 1821, 29 July 1821, 16 Sept 1821, 23 Sept 1821, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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excluding the missionary family. Enslaved women enacted their faith at an additional weekly women’s prayer group, uniting their supplications with those of a few Chickasaw women and the white missionary women.126

The Chickasaws’ and western Cherokees’ slaves not only embraced the missionaries’ Christian message, they also actively spread that message to others, serving as evangelists to their kin and their owners. Perhaps seeking the promise of eternal safety in a world that was anything but secure, enslaved parents sought the sacrament of baptism for their offspring. More than half of the children baptized at Monroe between

1823 and 1830 were the sons and daughters of African and African American members.127 Slaves also influenced their masters. When an enslaved man who belonged to a mixed-race Cherokee couple converted in 1823, his transformation kindled his enslavers’ spiritual curiosity. They became “very thoughtful and inquiring” about the

Protestant message of salvation the man conveyed to them.128

An enslaved woman named Dinah joined Monroe Church the day it was constituted. Her owner, James Gunn, was a Virginian by birth and loyalist during the

American Revolution who had found refuge among the Chickasaws after the war,

126 Dwight journal, 6 Jan 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM; James Holmes to Jeremiah Evarts, 18 July 1829, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; David Greene, Report on Munro [sic], 26 Feb 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Thomas Stuart to Jeremiah Evarts, 1 July 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; James Holmes to Jeremiah Evarts, 13 Oct 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM. James Holmes to Jeremiah Evarts, 7 Apr 1828, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM.

127 Baptismal statistics derived from R. Milton Winter, ed., “A Record of the Church Session at Monroe, Chickasaw Nation (1823–1842),” accessed 8 Sept 2015, http://www.standrewpresbytery.org/monroe-mission-records-1823– 1842/attachments/Monroe_Mission_Records.pdf. This figure excludes the baptisms of the missionaries’ ten children.

128 Dwight journal, 7 Jul 1823, ABC 18.3.1, reel 781, ABCFM.

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establishing a plantation near Pontotoc. Dinah may have been the daughter of William, a man enslaved by Gunn whom Joseph Bullen, an early Presbyterian missionary to the area, baptized in 1800, along with William’s four children. After the baptisms, Bullen visited the family to instruct them, finding the children “teachable.” That Dinah was not baptized the day she joined the church in 1823 indicates that she had already been baptized. After her entrance into Monroe Church, Dinah was responsible for bringing others into the fold. She had her three children, Chloe, William, and Lucy, baptized a few months after she joined. Her husband Abram was baptized and joined the church the next year, and the couple’s next two children, Patsy and Byinton, received the sacrament of baptism when they were born. Another enslaved woman who belonged to James Gunn’s estate—Gunn had died in the mid-1820s—joined the church in 1825, perhaps through

Dinah’s ministrations.129

Fluent in both English and Chickasaw, Dinah also proclaimed Christianity to the

Native people. Missionary Thomas Stuart employed her as an interpreter for several years.130 Marcus Palmer, a missionary among the Cherokees, benefitted from the linguistic knowledge of “one of Col. Webber’s colored people,” who served as Palmer’s interpreter during Sabbath services.131 Enslaved people like Dinah and this unnamed

129 Dawson A. Phelps, ed., “Excerpts from the Journal of the Reverend Joseph Bullen, 1799 and 1800,” Journal of Mississippi History 17, no. 4 (October 1955): 271n40, 276; Winter, “Record of the Church Session at Monroe,” 6n4, 6n7, 6n10, 6n13.

130 Letter of T.C. Stuart, 24 June 1861, printed in E. T. Winston, “Father” Stuart and the Monroe Mission (Meridian, Miss.: Tell Farmer, 1927), 72; Daniel F. Littlefield, The Chickasaw Freedmen: A People without a Country (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 8.

131 David Greene and Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, 21 April 1828, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM.

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slave had long familiarity with Native Americans interpersonally, as well as with their language and their culture. Better than the white missionaries, enslaved Christians could convey religious ideas and stories in idioms the Native people recognized. But Dinah’s status as an interpreter did not place her on equal footing with either the white man whose words she translated or the Chickasaws who listened to her presentation of the gospel.

People of African descent held in bondage among the western Cherokees and Chickasaws were still chattel, subject to the will and whip of their masters. Their standing as church members and the missionaries’ reliance on them as intermediaries did not change their enslaved status.132

The missionaries’ acceptance of black religious activism had definite limits. An enslaved man who had joined the mission church among the Chickasaws had a habit of hosting a weekly prayer meeting in his cabin for a small group of black people. In the

132 Nor did the missionaries press for their emancipation. The Presbyterian missionaries among the Chickasaws and American Board missionaries among the western Cherokees kept silent on the subject of slavery. Unlike their colleagues among the Choctaws, these missionaries did not challenge the institution publicly or publish critiques of the Chickasaws’ and Cherokees’ growing dependence on slaveholding. Alfred Finney, a missionary among the Cherokees, even purchased a slave himself. Cephas Washburn to Jeremiah Evarts, 27 Oct 1828, and 29 Oct 1829, ABC 18.3.1, reel 740, ABCFM. In his autobiography, former slave William Wells Brown describes a Presbyterian minister named Sloane who pandered to Brown’s owners. “When they wanted singing, he sung; when they wanted praying, he prayed; when they wanted a story told, he told a story. Instead of his teaching my master theology, my master taught theology to him.” William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: The Anti-slavery Office, 1847), 34–35, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brown47/. On other American Board missionaries’ anti-slavery stance, see Barbara Krauthamer, “Missionaries, Slaves, and Indians: Fragmented Colonial Exchanges in the Early American South,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 137–56; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 46–76; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, 2nd ed. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015), 92–97.

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winter of 1829–1830 Chickasaws started attending the meeting. One evening the crowd numbered fifty-five, almost half of whom were Chickasaws. Enslaved people ran the meeting. One literate enslaved person read scriptures. The group sang hymns and prayed together. But no one preached. The missionaries had restricted such privileges to themselves alone, conveying their safeguarding of religious authority to their sponsors in

Boston. “I have thought it expedient to discourage lay preaching in our slaves on account of their ignorance and for other reasons,” missionary James Holmes explained to

American Board corresponding secretary Jeremiah Evarts. Lest any donor become queasy with fear that people of African descent might press the biblical message of liberation towards their own ends, the missionaries curtailed their role. Only licensed or ordained white men would publically “preach the gospel” and “keep the ordinances.”133

Enslaved and free people of African descent took advantage of slender openings and modest opportunities to access Christian teaching, preaching, sacraments, and practices. Without institutional support, without donors, without publicity campaigns, without significant encouragement, black people in the Mississippi River Valley attained social and spiritual dividends within Christian communities. They passed their Protestant and Catholic practices to their children, ensuring that future generations of African

Americans would be able to avail themselves of comfort, confidence, and hope in the body of Christ. White missionaries and preachers could take little credit for the spread of

Christian practices among people of color. The least powerful, most marginalized people

133 James Holmes to Jeremiah Evarts, 1 Feb 1830, ABC 18.4.8, reel 781, ABCFM; Alfred Finney, Cephas Washburn, James Orr, Jacob Hitchcock to Jeremiah Evarts, 27 Jul 1822, ABC 18.3.1, reel 736, ABCFM.

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in the Mississippi River Valley apprehended Christianity without their help. The “least of these,” in terms of Matthew 25:40, did it for themselves.

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EPILOGUE

Lyman Beecher sounded an alarm in 1835, the year after an anti-Catholic mob burned the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, outside of Boston. Swiping the title from a colleague’s fund-raising sermon for Chickasaw missions a decade prior, Beecher presented his Plea for the West to a similar donor audience. His immediate goal was to raise money to build a chapel, secure a library, and endow a professorship in “Sacred

Rhetoric” for Lane Seminary, the institution in Cincinnati that had wooed him to leave snug Boston. But his larger aim was to rally northeastern Protestants to pay attention to the West—the Alleghenies to the Rockies, the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Watch out, he cried, for these lands are filling up with foreigners who are “unacquainted with our institutions, unaccustomed to self-government, inaccessible to education, and easily accessible to prepossession, and inveterate credulity, and intrigue.”

European immigrants were rushing into the region, ground troops in a cultural war by which the despotic governments of Catholic Europe hoped to overthrow

American liberties, Beecher warned. Soon the newcomers, bound together in a sinister voting block directed by Rome, would have sufficient numbers to “decide our elections, perplex our policy, inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, and throw down our free institutions.” Not only that, donors in Europe were pouring money into

Catholic schools in the United States that lured Protestant children with low or free tuition. The solution, Beecher sermonized, was for the U.S. government to “check the

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influx of immigrant paupers” and for the nation as a whole to invest in “literary and religious” institutions to cultivate the moral and intellectual capacity in the inhabitants.

“If we do not provide the schools which are requisite for the cheap and effectual education of the children of the nation, it is perfectly certain that the Catholic powers of

Europe intend to make up our deficiency.”1

Beecher was late to the contest, though his standing as one of the era’s best preachers, and the pithy title of his appeal, have earned him credit for bringing the West into the purview of eastern Protestants. He amplified and elaborated arguments his colleagues had been making for two decades. Remember Mills and Schermerhorn, decrying Catholic ignorance and the lack of Protestant preachers and churches along the

Mississippi River? But Beecher’s tack was also novel. Reacting to increasing immigration, he imagined a self-conscious plot by European governments—Austria foremost among them—to wreck America.

The inhabitants of the Mississippi River Valley must have scratched their heads when they read his grumpy, paranoid assessment. What they saw around them was a vibrant, diverse, dynamic place with plenty of religious structures and organizations.

From St. Louis to New Orleans, Christians had been on a building frenzy, erecting churches, establishing Christian institutions, and expanding their personnel. St. Louis alone had eight churches, a hospital, an orphan asylum, several primary schools, a

1 Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith, 1835), 32, 33, 49, 59, 157, 164. T. Charlton Henry, a Presbyterian pastor who headed up fundraising for the Chickasaw missions in the mid-1820s, may have inspired Beecher’s title. See T. Charlton Henry, A Plea for the West: A Sermon Preached before the Missionary Society of the Synod of South-Carolina & Georgia in Augusta, November 21, 1824 (Charleston, S.C.: Printed by W. Riley, 1824). On the mob action in Charlestown, see Jeanne Hamilton, “The Nunnery as Menace: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 35–65.

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convent, a female academy, and a college in 1837. The Baptists in Illinois boasted thirteen associations, about 120 churches, eighty preachers, and roughly 3,500 members in 1831. Methodists in Louisiana had 3,775 members and fifteen preaching circuits in

1834. Even Arkansas, still a territory in the early 1830s, had nine Methodist preachers circulating and ten missionaries posted among the Creeks and Cherokees; two Catholic parishes; twenty-seven Baptist churches; and at least five Presbyterian churches and a school to train Cumberland Presbyterian pastors. Even as the majority of inhabitants opted out of strict Christian observance, they could not ignore the proliferation of

Christian institutions in their midst.2

The Christians’ collective institutional footprint in the Mississippi River Valley both undermined and reinforced Beecher’s message. Here was a region, neither vacant of religious and educational resources nor teetering on the edge of political chaos, but blossoming. The institutions Beecher was calling for already existed and were mushrooming. But then again, not all the Christians sacralizing the landscape along the

Mississippi River were Beecher’s kind of people. The Baptists and Methodists were tolerable, if misguided and rowdy. But it was the Catholics, those minions of Rome, who

2 W. G. Lyford, The Western Address Directory: Containing the Cards of Merchants, Manufacturers, and Other Business Men ... (Baltimore: Printed by J. Robinson, 1837), 399, https://archive.org/details/westernaddressdi00lyfo; John Mason Peck, A Guide for Emigrants Containing Sketches of Illinois, Missouri and the Adjacent Parts (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1831), 258; Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, for the Years 1829–1839, vol. 2 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1840), 225–226, 238– 239; Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Eastern Arkansas, Comprising a Condensed History of the State, a Number of Biographies of Distinguished Citizens of the Same, a Brief Descriptive History of Each of the Counties. (St. Louis: Goodspeed, 1890), 99–101; James Sterling Rogers, History of Arkansas Baptists (Little Rock: Exec. Board of Arkansas Baptist State Convention, 1948), 1–2; The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, s.v. “Presbyterians,” by Mary B. Lysobey, accessed 30 April 2016, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/.

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struck fear in his Presbyterian heart. Irish and German Catholics were flooding into the nation, the tide of emigration washing them westward faster than the institutions of civil society could keep up. Beecher worried about what the newcomers—with their vast numbers and their questionable political training—might do to Protestant dominance.

The residents of the Mississippi River Valley glimpsed no such catastrophe on the horizon. Why should they? First of all, Protestants did not, nor had they ever, dominated the region. The Mississippi River Valley held an eclectic mix of people with varying religious identities and levels of commitment. When Beecher wrote his alarmist tract, no one form of Christianity commanded the allegiance of the majority of the populace.

Catholics and evangelical Protestants vied with each other and with small but growing groups of liturgical Protestants, including Episcopalians and Lutherans, and other

Protestant-based groups like the Mormons and the Unitarians, for the attention of the inhabitants, most of whom showed a remarkable capacity to evade expectations of both denominational loyalty and strict adherence.

Second, the residents had every reason to believe they would make room for the newcomers. They had already developed skills to navigate the religious, racial, and ethnic complexity of the region. And they had learned to manage the deluge of missionaries sent to corral them toward faithfulness. Inhabitants had cultivated habits of religious flexibility that enabled them to select pieces of what their proseltytizers offered and meld these with other elements of religiosity (and irreligiosity) to satisfy their spiritual or existential longings.

The religious spaciousness in the region took many forms. Enslaved people gathered in brush arbors for unsanctioned religious services that intertwined Christian

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and traditional African forms. Catholics read Protestant bibles. Protestants sent their daughters to convent schools, even though they knew the girls risked not only converting to Catholicism, but also taking the veil. Nuns bowed to pressure from parents to soften their policies and release Protestant students from studying the Catholic catechism.

People of all different sects had their children baptized by whichever religious authority happened to be available. They also donated funds to build churches for faiths they did not profess. Protestants invited Catholic priests over for dinner, asking them to say a

Catholic blessing over the meal. Catholics acknowledged that “members of the other religious sects can be saved.” Chickasaws and western Cherokees attended Christian preaching services, but not if they conflicted with their ball plays. This religious flexibility seeped into households, where parents blessed their children’s interfaith marriages, husbands and wives lived in peace by attending separate churches, and some masters even tolerated the religious priorities of their slaves.3

3 Felix De Andreis to Fr. Giorgana, 1 Feb 1820, translated, Folder 9, Box 1, Felix De Andreis Personnel File, DRMA; Jean-Marie Odin to Cholleton, 8 Nov 1824, translation, Box 7, John Rybolt Personnel File, DRMA, based on Annales de la Propagation de la Foi 2, no. 12 (Nov 1827): 374–389 (Original: Letter F03662, F–83, Fonds de Lyon, APF); Barat to Duchesne, 14 Feb 1830, Letter 263, BDC2 3:166; Duchesne to Barat, 28 Aug 1819, Letter 115, BDC2 1:165; “Subscriptions for the Lot, College Hill, D.C.,” Latter Day Luminary 4, no. 6 (June 1823), 207; Van Quickenborn to Bishop of Montauban, 20 Nov 1829, Letter 2759, translated, Propagation of the Faith Collection, New Orleans, Archives of Archdiocese of New Orleans; Bishop Dubourg’s Cathedral Account Book, MASL 1.3, UNDA; Louis Sibourd to John Carroll, 12 Feb 1812, 7 R 4, AJCP, AAB; Louis Sibourd to John Carroll, 22 Feb 1812, 7 R 5, AJCP, AAB; Hempstead diary, 6 Oct 1816, 12 May 1826, SHP; Paul C. Schulte, The Catholic Heritage of Saint Louis: A History of the Old Cathedral Parish, St. Louis, Mo. (St. Louis, Mo: [Printed by the Catholic Herald], 1934), 107. William Clark, governor of the Missouri Territory and an Episcopalian by birth, and his wife Julia Hancock Clark, asked Bishop Flaget to baptize their children. Flaget complied, and even served as godfather to the three Clark children. Entry for 8 Aug 1814, St. Louis Old Cathedral Baptisms, 1814– 1832, SLAPRM, reel 172, [p. 3–4]. The other two Clark children were born later. Jerome 364

Consider the pragmatic ecumenism of Stephen Hempstead. The Connecticut

Yankee established a farm on the outskirts of St. Louis in 1811, then threw himself into the project of securing a Presbyterian clergyman and forming a Presbyterian church in the city. Every Protestant missionary who served in the region over the ensuing two decades found hospitality under Hempstead’s roof. He tirelessly promoted Presbyterian practice among his neighbors and secured support for the same from the Connecticut Missionary

Society and other eastern institutions. But he also bought Catholic slaves, whose religious holidays he honored; he recognized the marriages of four of his children to Catholics; and he attended various Catholic ceremonies, including his grandchildren’s baptisms, his neighbors’ weddings, his friends’ funerals, and, in 1813, Easter Mass with his daughter- in-law.4

Hempstead accepted Catholic institutions and practices. Doing so bolstered his status as a prominent and well-heeled settler and cemented his connections with established Creole Catholic elites. Other inhabitants, including Hempstead’s own children, were more proactive in their embrace of competing religious expressions and behaviors. One of Hempstead’s daughters confided her flexible theology, borne out of her interfaith friendships and marriage, to her brother: “My Situation is different perhaps from others[,] or the love I have for so many dear friends that are Catholick give me more

O. Steffen, “Clark, William,” American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000, accessed 29 Jan 29 2015, http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-00185.html.

4 Hempstead diary, 11 Feb 1813, 18 Apr 1813, 10 Jul 1815, 27 Jun 1816, 29 Dec 1816, 21 Apr 1817, 19 Oct 1817, 8 March 1818, 24 June 1818, 5 Aug 1818, 5 Oct 1818, 25 Dec 1818, 26 May 1820, 13 and 14 Aug 1820, 4 Jul 1826, 15 Jul 1826, 17 Jul 1826, 25 Feb 1829, SHP; S[tephen] Hempstead to Mary Lisa, 31 Dec 1818, Box 1, SHP.

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charity for the profession than many[,] but I can not condemn them[,] in fact we have no right to condemn one another if we follow Christ Examples.”5

The missionaries themselves adjusted grudgingly to the elastic spiritual priorities of the residents. Some of them even reconsidered their programs and goals in light of their encounters with inhabitants. Congregationalist missionary Timothy Flint opined,

“The wisdom and expediency of missionary efforts must be tested, not by theory, but experience, by careful scrutiny of what has been the actual result of these great labours of love.”6 Flint identified a gap between the hopeful visions of evangelizing the region and the limited successes, the missteps, and the outright failures he, his colleagues, and his competitors experienced. The grand claims in the missions’ fund-raising appeals did not match the reality Flint and other evangelists faced, a reality not of conquest, but of give- and-take between missionaries and inhabitants. Though they rarely admitted as much to their sponsors back east, those sent to the Mississippi River Valley to generate holiness learned to accommodate the residents’ religious priorities and their pragmatic habits of spiritual flexibility.

5 Susan [Hempstead] Gratiot to William Hempstead, 30 Jun 1835, in Florence Gratiot Bale, “A Packet of Old Letters,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 11, no. 2 (December 1927): 163–164.

6 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 146.

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Appendix

PERMISSIONS

Correspondence with Frédéric Mantienne of Les Indes Savantes to secure permission to include chapter two of this dissertation, material that Les Indes Savantes had published in an edited volume. The citation for the published material is:

Christine Alice Croxall, “La Parole de Vie? Protestant Print along the Creole Corridor in the 1810s,” in Une Amérique française, 1760-1860: dynamiques du corridor créole, ed.

Guillaume Teasdale and Tangi Villerbu (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015), 61–88.

Christine Croxall

Droits 6 messages

Christine Croxall Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 12:31 AM To: [email protected] Cc: Tangi Villerbu Bonjour Monsieur, Tangi Villerbu a correspondu avec vous au sujet de ma demande. Je voudrais demander la permission d'inclure dans ma thèse de l'essai j'ai écrit que vous avez publié dans le volume du corridor de creole. L'essai est intitulé "La Parole de Vie ? Protestant Print along the Creole Corridor in the 1810s." Ce serait une grande aide pour obtenir la permission de vous à cet effet. En vous remerciant de votre aide, Monsieur, je vous prie de croire à mes sentiments distingués. Cordialement, Christine Croxall

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------Forwarded message ------From: "Christine Croxall" Date: Jul 19, 2016 9:51 AM Subject: Permission pour "La Parole de Vie ? Protestant Print along the Creole Corridor in the 1810s" To: , Cc: Madame/Monsieur, Je demande la permission d'inclure dans ma thèse un chapitre que j'ai écrit dans un livre publié par les Indes Savantes, Une Amérique française 1760-1860 : dynamiques du corridor créole. Mon université exige que j'obtienne la permission du détenteur des droits d'auteur pour les documents publiés, même pour le matériel que j'ai moi-même écrit Cordialement, Christine Croxall -- Christine Croxall Doctoral Candidate Department of History University of Delaware [email protected]

Frederic Mantienne Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 9:48 AM To: Christine Croxall Bonjour,

Pas de problème de notre côté.

Cordialement Le 25 juil. 2016 à 06:31, Christine Croxall a écrit :

Bonjour Monsieur, Tangi Villerbu a correspondu avec vous au sujet de ma demande. Je voudrais demander la permission d'inclure dans ma thèse de l'essai j'ai écrit que vous avez publié dans le volume du corridor de creole. L'essai est intitulé "La Parole de Vie ? Protestant Print along the Creole Corridor in the 1810s." Ce serait une grande aide pour obtenir la permission de vous à cet effet. En vous remerciant de votre aide, Monsieur, je vous prie de croire à mes sentiments distingués. Cordialement, Christine Croxall ------Forwarded message ------From: "Christine Croxall" Date: Jul 19, 2016 9:51 AM Subject: Permission pour "La Parole de Vie ? Protestant Print along the Creole Corridor in the 1810s" To: , Cc: Madame/Monsieur,

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Je demande la permission d'inclure dans ma thèse un chapitre que j'ai écrit dans un livre publié par les Indes Savantes, Une Amérique française 1760-1860 : dynamiques du corridor créole. Mon université exige que j'obtienne la permission du détenteur des droits d'auteur pour les documents publiés, même pour le matériel que j'ai moi-même écrit Cordialement, Christine Croxall -- Christine Croxall Doctoral Candidate Department of History University of Delaware [email protected]

Frederic Mantienne Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 10:06 AM To: Christine Croxall Bonjour,

Pas de problème de notre côté.

Cordialement Le 25 juil. 2016 à 06:31, Christine Croxall a écrit :

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corridor créole. Mon université exige que j'obtienne la permission du détenteur des droits d'auteur pour les documents publiés, même pour le matériel que j'ai moi-même écrit Cordialement, Christine Croxall -- Christine Croxall Doctoral Candidate Department of History University of Delaware [email protected]

Christine Croxall Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 11:04 AM To: Mary Martin Dr. Martin, I finally received a response directly from the French publisher--a very brief affirmative response. Is it necessary to include this exchange in my dissertation as an appendix? Or would it be more appropriate to explain in my acknowledgments that I received permission? Many thanks, Christine [Quoted text hidden]

Martin, Mary J. Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 11:47 AM To: "Croxall, Christine Alice" Please place the message you have in an appendix.

Mary Martin, Ed.D. Associate Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education University of Delaware 234 Hullihen Hall Newark, DE 19716 302-831-8916

From: Christine Croxall [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 11:04 AM To: Martin, Mary J. Subject: Fwd: Re: Droits [Quoted text hidden]

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Christine Croxall Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 9:28 AM To: Frederic Mantienne Bonjour,

Merci pour votre aide.

Cordialement [Quoted text hidden]

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