Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University History Dissertations Department of History 8-8-2007 Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An Unusual Story of Redemption Gnimbin Albert Ouattara Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_diss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Ouattara, Gnimbin Albert, "Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An Unusual Story of Redemption." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2007. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_diss/5 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AFRICANS, CHEROKEES, AND THE ABCFM MISSIONARIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AN UNUSUAL STORY OF REDEMPTION By Gnimbin Albert Ouattara Under the Direction of Charles G. Steffen ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An Unusual Story of Redemption,” assesses the experience of American missionaries in the Cherokee nation and in Western Africa during the nineteenth century. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded in 1810, was the first successful foreign missionary society in the U.S., and its campaign among the Cherokees served as springboard for its activities in “Western Africa”—Liberia, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and South Africa. Although the Cherokees and the West Africans were two different peoples, the ABCFM used the same method to Christianize them: the Lancasterian method with which the missionaries planned to “civilize” the Cherokees and West Africans before Christianizing them. Scholars such as William McLoughlin and Theda Purdue studied the missionary perspective and the Cherokee perspective as separate entities and convincingly maintained that the Cherokees embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program partly to relieve the pressures on their lands and partly to adapt to the cultural pressures of their times. However, as my dissertation argues, the conversion story of the Cherokees takes a different turn if told simultaneously from the missionary and the Cherokee perspectives. Regarding the West African experience, authors such as Lamin Sanneh and Richard Gray have recently exposed the missionary and African sides of the stories with new questions that had been waiting to be asked for a long time. My dissertation, taking a unique comparative perspective, reveals first that West Africans did not face the same pressures as those faced by the Cherokees, yet, they still embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program, though with a lesser sense of urgency and with more assertiveness than did the Cherokees despite the white missionaries’ racism. More importantly, by way of a method I call parallel agency, my dissertation offers a revisionist interpretation of the history of missions, which has traditionally emphasized the power of the white missionaries by calling into question the very assumption that the white missionaries had significantly more power than did their Cherokee and African converts. INDEX WORDS: Liberia, Gaboon, American Colonization Society, Cherokees, Five Civilized Tribes, Brainerd, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Rev. John Leighton Wilson, Jane Bayard Wilson, Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury, Sarah Bowdoin Varnum. AFRICANS, CHEROKEES, AND THE ABCFM MISSIONARIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AN UNUSUAL STORY OF REDEMPTION By Gnimbin Albert Ouattara A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2007 Copyright by Gnimbin Albert Ouattara 2007 Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An Unusual Story of Redemption by Gnimbin Albert Ouattara Major Professor: Charles G. Steffen Committee: Mohammed H. Ali Wayne J. Urban Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University August 2007 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS More people deserve thanks than I can mention here. I would like to thank my parents and grandparents for raising me with dignity. My brother Ouattara Klinnan Paul was my support during these five years in the United States away from home. I am grateful to the U.S. government and Georgia State University for allowing me to study Africa and democracy under the prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Much of the credit for this manuscript goes to my advisor, Professor Charles G. Steffen, who made the writing of this dissertation a joyful and intellectually inspiring process. I can now call myself a historian in his image. My teaching mentor and committee member, Dr. Mohammad H. Ali, has guided and inspired my passion for African history. My work in the United States would never have taken the educative turn it took without my encounter in 2001 of Professor Wayne J. Urban (University of Alabama), who at the time was teaching History of American Education at Georgia State University. Dr. Duane J. Corpis, now professor of Early Modern Europe at Cornell University, was my teaching mentor and the committee member who guided and inspired my investigation of the complicated intersection of religion, politics and culture when he was at Georgia State University. To all of them, I express my utmost admiration and respect. Words are not enough to translate my gratitude to Dr. Hugh D. Hudson, Jr., chair of the History Department, for his diligent efforts to rehabilitate me legally, emotionally and financially during my immigration trouble. Related to this matter, I must thank all the members of the History Department who lent me their financial and emotional support v including Ms. Paula Sorrell, Business Manager of the Department, and Mrs. Carolyn Whiters, Administrative Coordinator of the Department. My appreciation also goes to Dr. Douglas Podoll, Ms. Saundra Grimes, and Mrs. Heather Housley for their assistance in this matter and other immigration issues. I have to thank my fellow graduate students, particularly Dr. Robert Woodrum without whose assistance both on and off-campus I would have given up on Lichtenstein’s Walter Reuther and many more challenges in the U.S. I express my appreciation to my Ivorian community in general for providing much-needed emotional support and to my fellow Ivorians and Fulbrighters Diarrassouba Sidiki, Abou Bamba, and Konate Siendou in particular for cheering me up during these turbulent years. Finally, I express my sincere gratitude to Ms. Nancy Condon, my editor, and to all those persons whose names cannot appear here but whose help was invaluable during the process of writing this dissertation. I hope you all take pride in seeing this dissertation finally come to completion. I trust you will always stand by me in my career as a historian. vi Nam Myoho Rengue Kyo. To my father, mother, grandfather and grandmother that did not live to see me grow. Na tolo, na nienlen, ye fangui! To my little Phammon. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT………………………………………………………….. iv CHAPTER INTRODUCTION…………………………………………….... 1 Native Christianization: Three Independent Powers?............. 1 1. THE IMPACT OF ABCFM MISSIONARIES, CHEROKEES AND WEST AFRICANS’ CONCEPTS OF POWER IN THE PROCESS OF CHRISTIANIZATION…………...………..…… 20 The Establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions………………………………..………. 20 Missionary and Cherokee Concepts of Power…………………………………….….…………… 31 Missionary and West African Concepts of Power….………. 46 Conclusion………………………………………………….. 54 2. MISSIONARY, CHEROKEE AND WEST AFRICAN POWER RELATIONSHIP IN THE CONVERSION PROCESS…………………......…...…………. 56 The ABCFM Missionary Strategies in Converting Cherokees…………………………………………………… 56 Parallel Cherokee Agency in their Conversion Process……………………………………..…... 65 The ABCFM Strategies in Converting West Africans…………………………………….................. 74 Parallel West African Agency in their Conversion Process……………………………………. 84 Conclusion………………………………………………….. 90 3. GENDER AND MISSIONS……………………...……………... 92 viii ABCFM Missionary Concept of Gender Relations in 1810 and 1834……………………………………….…… 96 Cherokee Conception of Gender Relations in 1817………………………………………...………..…… 123 West African Concept of Gender Relations in 1833……….. 143 Conclusion………………………………………………….. 154 4. MISSIONARY EDUCATION AMONG THE CHEROKEES AND THE WEST AFRICANS……………...….…………..…… 155 The ABCFM Missionary Policy of Civilization before Christianization………………………………....….. 155 Formal Education Policy of the ABCFM among the Cherokees………………………………………...….….. 167 Formal Education Policy of the ABCFM among the West Africans………………………………....… 185 Conclusion………………………………………………….. 209 5. RELIGIOUS COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE ABCFM MISSIONARIES AND THE CHEROKEES AND WEST AFRICANS………………………………….……. 211 The ABCFM Missionaries’ Concept of Communication of the Gospel………………………………………….…...... 211 Qualitative Content Analysis……………………………...... 244 Quantitative Content Analysis……………………………… 256 Conclusion………………………………………………...... 265 DISSERTATION CONCLUSION……..……………………...…………………… 268 BIBLIOGRAPHY..……………………………..………………………………....... 274 APPENDIX A: What is a Clause?.............................................................................. 309 APPENDIX B: