Pearl S. Buck asked the question in my title in a speech of the same name that she delivered in 1932, the year she published The Good Earth. Her answer was yes, but it was a very qualified. In her introduction, in the form of a litany of other questions, she lays out all the reasons why people have traditionally objected to supporting missions. It is a series derived from a decade or more of questioning the idea of missions herself. "'Don't you think it is really an insult to send out missionaries to foreign countries when we cannot live what we preach ourselves?' ... 'Don't you think we had better stay at home and attend to our own affairs and our own starving people before we give to other peoples?' ... 'I hear that missionaries are the ones who have stirred up all the trouble in the Orient.' ... 'Frankly I cannot give my money to a group of people to propagate religious and denominational ideas I no longer hold myself.' ... 'I am at sea in my own thinking about Christianity, and I prefer not to propagate what I am not sure about. Christianity has not worked very well in our own land.' ... 'I admire Jesus Christ, but I see nothing even of the idealism of Christianity any more in my own country, America. I cannot, therefore, believe in missions.'" [1]

Of course, most readers do not have missionaries much on their mind today, except perhaps to dismiss them. In Lucy Sante's "Models for Being," her review of Hua Hsu's recent memoir Stay True, she writes of Hsu’s first book, A Floating Chinaman (2016), which tells the story of H.T. Tsiang (d. 1971), a Chinese immigrant to America whose novels were continually rejected by publishers. Tsiang failed not because Americans weren't interested in the Chinese, Sante states, noting that Buck was at the time a best-selling author. The American readership of the period, Sante claims, could accept only Buck's view of the Chinese, which was "missionary." [2] Missionary? What does that one word mean to Sante and her readers? It's a reductive statement, to be sure. Like every one of us, Buck was a complicated human being, and so were the missionaries she had come to know in China, including, of course, her father. Unfortunately, the good ones far outnumbered the bad, Buck acknowledged in her speech. Why? One reason she cited was lack of support by sponsoring agencies or the wrong kind of support from them. Nonetheless, they expected to see high numbers of converts and were disappointed and disapproving when those numbers didn't materialize. As Buck saw it, the problem was that "neither the messenger nor the message [had] been suited to the needs of the people."

And what would suit those needs? "I should like to see every missionary sent to satisfy a special need of a community -- not the artificial need of a mission station for a clerical man or a woman evangelist or what not, nay a real need of the people. ... It seems to me this is the only basis for missions. It removes from us the insufferable stigma of moral arrogance, and it gives us besides a test of our own worth. Before we can share anything with benefit we must have tried it ourselves." In other words: "Above all, then, let the spirit of Christ be manifested by modes of life rather than by preaching... Let us cease our talk for a time... and let us try to express our religion in terms of life."

In her concluding remarks, Buck goes out on a great big limb, at least by today's standards of wokeness. Speaking neither as an American nor even as a Christian, but, by virtue of the years she had spent in China, she spoke as a Chinese person. And in that persona, she, who strongly objected to the non-Asians [3] cast in the leading roles of the movie version of her most famous novel, delivers her challenge: "Come to us no more in arrogance of spirit. Come to us as brothers and fellowmen. Let us see in you how your religion works. Preach to us no more, but share with us that better and more abundant life which your Christ lived."
_________
1. The essay was reprinted in Harper's, January 1933, 143-155.
2. New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022.
3. Paul Muni was born born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund in the Ukraine; Luise Rainer was born in  Düsseldorf, of a German mother and German-American father.

As part of my research for The Missionary Factory, I felt it my duty to read The Good Earth, since its author, Pearl S. Buck, was the child of a missionary father and the book, published in 1932, has been so influential and the United States and throughout many parts of the world in translation. And it continues to be here, to some extent, in popular-reading circles, despite the fact that, as Hilary Spurling wrote in ​Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth in 2010, "her novels have been effectively eliminated from the American literary map." [1] There is no place for her in the feminist canon, for example, Spurling observed. And as if to cement Buck's place in the sea-level portion of the literary firmament, in 2004, The Good Earth was an Oprah's Book Club pick.

For those who need a gloss of its narrative line, the book tells the life story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant who is born poor at the end of the nineteenth century and has grown rich as a farmer by the time of the Japanese invasion in the 1920s. In the end, as he lays dying, his sons promise they will never sell that good earth of his, but, it is understood, they are cunningly planning to do exactly that. A movie version of the book was released in 1937, but I have never seen it, and will have to brace myself if I choose to see it now. I have learned how far from the novel it strays and that all the main characters are played by non-Asian actors due to the sensitivities of the day -- the same, perhaps, that caused the abomination of Mickey Rooney being cast as Mr. Yunioshi in the 1961 film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

For myself, I found the novel workmanlike, or perhaps I should say workwomanlike. She begins with her ground situation and then plows ahead (no pun intended), hitting all the cultural markers (polygamy, opium) that she wants to represent. I imagine it was a tour de force in her day. Readers weren't used to being offered a chance to learn about the life of Chinese peasants, and they were curious. Occasionally, I tired of the book, but I continued not only because, again, I felt it my duty to read it, but because I did "want to see what happened next." 

I was disappointed that there was only one brief mention of a missionary, described as a tall foreigner in strange (Western) clothing. In 1936, however, Buck published Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul, a memoir of her father, Absalom Andrew Sydenstricker (1852-1931), and that's where I found some good and useful information relevant to my project, even though he was not educated at the seminary here in Andover.

As a sixteen-year-old, Andrew (as he is called in the book, although he wasn't in his lifetime) heard the preaching of a missionary from China at a church in West Virginia, where he was born and raised, and determined, against his parents' wishes, that he, too, would become a missionary. Eventually, in 1879, just before his graduation from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, he was accepted by the Southern Presbyterian Mission Board. His trial sermon, "The Necessity of Proclaiming the Gospel to the Heathen, with Especial Reference to the Doctrine of Predestination," had been published in a church paper. A month later, after an arranged marriage, he and his wife, Caroline (in the book, called Carie), were on their way to China. He was, in Buck's telling, a charming but arrogant and blatantly misogynistic man who, for instance, believed his new wife could have been over her seasickness on that first voyage if she had only tried hard enough. Instead, he told Buck, "she allowed seasickness to become aggravated so that she never really recovered." [2] As for Andrew, he "was never ill in any way," she claims. [3] Surely, a miracle for a missionary in a foreign land. Buck also claims that he was intolerant of "race superiority." [4] Again, a rarity. And that's why, she says, he was treated poorly by other missionaries and considered them his enemies. In any event, he was gone into the field for many weeks at a time, leaving alone Carie and their eventual children, including Buck, to fend for themselves. (The ones who survived, that is.) To them he was a stranger.

He was also a hero; at least he was to Buck. "To be a missionary is an acute test of integrity," she writes. "For a missionary has no supervision. He lives among a few equals, the other missionaries, and a great many whom he feels his inferiors, the natives. His governing board is thousands of miles away -- there is no one to see how many hours he works or whether he is lazy and self-indulgent. And the climate, the small but absolute security of salary, the plentiful number of cheaply paid servants, all make laziness easy, and a man's fellows are loath to tell of him even if they see, and the Chinese converts are helpless for they do not know to whom to complain. There is no one beyond the missionary for them. These stand next to God and are supreme in authority, having the right to give or withhold funds which mean life." [5]

Despite its hagiographic tendencies, the memoir is candid. Buck does not deny the hardships of a missionary's life: "In that hot foreign climate, in the storms of wind and dust, in the floods and wars and risings of mobs against them, in such uneasiness of life, in such impossibility of achieving what they have set themselves, in bitter isolation from their kind, in the inward oppression of their own souls, that oppression which looks out of their somber eyes and sounds in their voices, apathetic if they are not angry, the wonder is not that men of God quarrel with each other so often, but that they do not kill each other or themselves more often than they do." [6] There are stories, she opines, "but nobody wants them told, for the Work must go on." [7] 

By the mid 1930s, however, the "Work" was being done differently: "I have not seen anywhere the like of Andrew and his generation. They were no mild stay-at-homes, no soft-living landsmen. If they had not gone as daring missionaries, they would have gone to the gold fields or explored the poles or sailed on pirate ships. They would have ruled the natives of foreign lands in other ways of power if God had not caught their souls so young... Ah, well, they are all gone now. There are no more left like them. Those who take their place in our modern times are shot through with doubt and distrust of themselves and their message... They see good in all religions and they no longer wage any more wars and they serve their lives out for a small security... The giants are gone." [8]

Those so-called giants were often translators. I have often wondered how accurate those translations were. Buck has this to say about her father's translations: "Early in his career Andrew decided that the Chinese translation of the Bible was balderdash. There were all sorts of absurdities in it because, he said, the translators had not sufficiently understood Chinese idioms." [9] "Andrew decided, therefore, that as soon as he had time he would make a new translation straight from the Hebrew and Greek into Chinese. It was about this time that the missionaries themselves became convinced that they should have a new translation and chose a committee to make it..." [10] Appointed to be on the committee, Andrew threw himself into the work, choosing to use "not the classical Chinese beloved of old scholars but the strong vernacular mandarin of the people." [11]

I'll be on the lookout for other judgements about those famous and lauded translations. some of which were printed in Andover. I'll also, as usual, be following the money. On his periodical visits home to America, Buck writes, her father "was almost always away," just as he was when the family was in China. But he wasn't collecting souls. He was "collecting money." [12]

__________________
1. Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 9.
2. Pearl S. Buck, ​Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936), 58. 
3. Ibid., 59.
4. Ibid., 129.
5. Ibid., 220-221.
6. Ibid., 80.
7. Ibid., 81.
8. Ibid., 75-76.
9. Ibid., 181.
10. Ibid., 177.
11. Ibid., 196.
12. Ibid., 176.

How lucky I was this past summer to have come across the book whose cover is pictured above! I bought it at Tim's Used Books, a shop we like to visit on rainy afternoons during our annual trip to Provincetown, on the tip of the Cape. What are the chances of my having found it otherwise? It was published in 2019 by Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, a grandson of the Reverend Cecil Tyndale-Biscoe, who spent fifty-seven years, from 1890 to 1947, as a missionary in India, most prominently as headmaster of London’s CMS (Church Missionary Society) School in Srinagar, a large city in the Kashmir Valley. Who knows how the book ended up in Ptown?

What's most important to me about The Missionary and the Maharajas is that Hugh, born in Kashmir in 1929, who used his grandfather's diaries in preparing his manuscript, didn't edit them in the way that they would have been edited by the CMS. And so Hugh, a biologist, is free to admit: “In Kashmir the efforts of the foreign missionaries had mixed success: the evangelists were singularly unsuccessful in converting either Hindus or Muslims in Kashmir proper and had little effect on Muslims in Baltistan or Buddhists in Ladakh…” [1] But what has been of equal importance is that this book quoted from another piece of writing about missionaries that I am even more grateful to have read: a review of one of the reverend's books, dismally and revealingly titled Character Building in Kashmir (1920). As quoted by Hugh, the review, published in a London periodical, The Athenaeum, pulls no punches: the book is described as “noisy, meddlesome and self-righteous,” as well as “heartless and brainless” and “full of racial and religious 'swank.'” [1] I didn't doubt it, but I would never have searched out a copy of the review itself if its author's name hadn't been E.M. Forster. Barely three pages long, it is one of the best explanatory summaries of the rationale of the home interest in the missionary movement that I have read. Forster is addressing the British home interest only, but it rings true for the all the civilian supporters of the American missionary movement, which of course took the British one as its model.
​
Forster succinctly links the movement's rise and fall to the industrial revolution, an approach that resonates with me and even pings my title, ​The Missionary Factory. "Thanks to the development of machinery," he writes, "a pious and leisured middle class came into existence who, mindful of the Gospel injunction, prepared to evangelize the heathen. There had been missionaries before their day, but they had been isolated idealists like St. Francis, or had held the sword of the State like Cortes or Pizarro." [1]

What the nineteenth-century movement's leaders understood, says Forster, was that in order to achieve their aims with the army of missionaries they were assembling they needed money, and that money needed to come from private enterprises, not the state. What they also understood was that the mission "met a home need." The newfound surplus of middle-class cash was "seeking a sentimental outlet." No wonder "the elderly and childless women [found] comfort in the movement and would sometimes leave it all their wealth." The author of A Passage to India, published in 1924, goes on to say: "Some societies would have endowed art and literature with the surplus: our middle class spent theirs in trying to alter the opinions and habits of people whom they had not seen." [2]

Forster is writing in the past tense, because by the post-World War I period the movement was on the downswing both in Britain and in the United States. There are, he writes, two, linked reasons why: "The industrial revolution, which created [the movement], also created the abyss that has swallowed it up. The factories, as the century progressed, produced more and more guns and ammunition. The Gospel of Peace was preached to all nations, but the countries that preached it most meanwhile perfected the sinews of war. In 1914 there was an explosion at the heart of Christendom whose effects are incalculable; but among them we may predict the decay of foreign Missions. It is not only that the heathen have shown themselves puzzled and cynical, so that Chinese who have served in France raise eyebrows when cargoes of Bibles arrive in China. It is that there is less money to pay for the Bibles." [3]

Forster's essay is actually a review of three other books in addition to Tyndale-Biscoe's. He gives the others good marks, for he judges their authors to be well-meaning and motivated purely by faith. One of them, Samuel Pollard, author of Unknown China, is even a decent wordsmith: "Were one discussing travel-books, one would be able to speak at greater length of this charming writer, and of the wild and lovely world that he reveals." [4] Meanwhile he brutally slams the reverend's tome. "If you wish a boy to stay at your school," the reverend wrote in a paragraph that Forster quotes, "do not be too kind to him or visit him when he is ill or in trouble (though of course you will do so, notwithstanding, knowing that right will prevail in the end), but be hard on him: and if you have occasion to punish him, then punish him severely, and he will love and follow you like a spaniel: A wife, a dog, and a walnut tree/The more you beat them the better they be,/But truer still of the Kashmiri." [4] Given my reading of Hugh's book, the reverend wasn't kidding. That is exactly what he did, even though, as Hugh repeatedly points out, he was physically abused as a boy in a British public (private) boarding school and never, ever forgot it.

​Forster seems just as amazed as I have been by the energy expended back then on "the labor of imposing a single religion upon the terrestrial globe." It was, he admits as I do, "an extraordinary ideal, whatever one's personal sympathies, and it will bulk more largely than we realize in our history, when that history comes to be written. To what extent Christians still hope for their universal harvest, it is not easy to say. They think it right not to give up hope, but that is rather different. They can scarcely ignore the double blow that the war has dealt to missions -- cutting off their funds and discrediting the Gospel of Peace at its source. And even if they ignore it, the heathen does not." [5]
________
1. “Missionaries,” The Athenaeum, 22 October 1920, 545. The review is signed only "E.M.F."
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 546. Note: The subtitle of Pollard's book is A Record of the Observations, Adventures and Experiences of a Pioneer Missionary During a Prolonged Sojourn Amongst the Wild and Unknown Nosu Tribe of Western China.
5. Ibid., 547.

All along during my research I have found missionary memoirs unsatisfactory as literature -- or even as journalism. And while it is true that most were edited, sometimes severely, there is still an essential quality missing from even the unedited ones -- a quality that has to be present for a memoir of any kind to succeed. Honesty, candor. Those attributes would be the ideal, but hard to achieve even for a professional writer. Maybe, in the case of the missionaries' works, I'd let it go at credibility, believability. Would that be asking too much? Apparently, yes, because the worst of the memoirs always make the experiences sound too good to be true.

Those who promoted missionary endeavors, understandably, wanted the memoirs they published to be inspirational to future missionaries. Raw, unsparing accounts would not have served that purpose. But there is another reason why nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionary memoirists in particular struggled to avoid both sins of omission and commission. I found that reason expressed in V.S. Pritchett's novel Dead Man Leading (1937). It's about Harry Johnson, a missionary's son, who goes exploring in Brazil, the very place where his missionary-father had disappeared seventeen years earlier, when Harry was six. I read in one of Pritchett's own memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), that he had researched British missionary diaries in order to write the book. "Missionaries always write down the practical detail," Pritchett observed. Yes, but I am after the emotional ones. In any case, this is the relevant passage: "Loyalty, adherence to a code which respects the privacy of another's soul, and then a dislike of causing pain and of starting quarrels and controversies which may go on for a lifetime -- all these virtuous motives work in only too well with a motive less exalted, like the fear of libel, to prevent travelers from writing true histories of their expeditions." [1] Substitute the word missionaries for travelers. The passage works just as well.

I found other applicable insights in Dead Man Leading, thoughts I have not found in now literally years of reading missionary memoirs. One pertains to desertion: "Desertion is one of the commonest occurrences among parties of exploration. A man falls sick, his nerve fails, there are quarrels about objective, direction, time or money, there is jealousy of a leader, weakness or tyranny in authority; ... in isolation petty idiosyncratic differences become magnified into intolerable crimes." [2]

Other passages are about loss of faith, or the shoring up of it. In the situation that being isolated in a foreign land presents, introspected with one's own thoughts day after day, one would naturally get closer to God or would naturally start to doubt or even deny Him.

​I also found in Dead Man Leading thoughts about diaries in general, which are as true of mine as anyone's. Speaking of the diary kept by Harry's companion and rival, the journalist Gilbert Phillips, Pritchett's narrator notes: "He is accurate but unrevealing. Phillips was not, however, suppressing what he knew; like so many diarists, he was overwhelmed by the big event. The more he felt the less he wrote." [3]

Retention of the old ways of the mother country is another of the novel's germane themes: "Men who live cut off from their own race, in a foreign country, fall back for support on a peculiar inner life of their own." The home of Calcott, an expat that the explorers encounter, one who knew the lost missionary-father and who now had a Brazilian wife and children, was "an inner temple full of holy relics of life as it might be lived on Old Kent Road." The narrator's description of it  goes on in detail, worth quoting here, because they eventually resort to using the language of religious faith: "There was the Union Jack spread over the Brazilian piano, and a book of English ballads, never opened but always on it. There were pictures of boxers and actresses cut out of illustrated papers and pinned to the wall. There was the linoleum in his own room, a coal-scuttle and fire-irons which his mother had sent out to him years before. The old lady had never been able to understand that a fire was not lit in these parts from one year's end to the other; but Calcott would not throw these useful things away. He kept them like sacred vessels and implements." [4]

Of missionaries in general, Calcott had his opinions. To Harry he said: "Your father was all right. More than you can say about most missionaries, but when you get a good 'un, they're good." [5] But what does he mean by "good"? A question for the ages.

Although, as mentioned, Harry was only six when his father disappeared, he remembered some of his qualities: "His shouts to them when he taught them to swim, how he taught them to camp and light fires, how he said Grace before meals, how his voice was sonorous and harsh in churches, how he showed them native weapons, how there was always a quarrel with the missionary society, full of sarcasm on their father's part, about money. Sometimes important people from the society came to the house and then their father would talk in a language they rarely heard there. A very zealous, religious jargon." [6] That's, alas, what a lot of the missionary diaries are made of.

After these visits, Harry often heard his father say with sudden candor: "'Keeping these people quiet is a question of knowing the language.'" [7] Exactly.
​______________________
1. V.S. Pritchett, Dead Man Leading (London: Chatto & Windus, The New Phoenix Library, 1952), 61.
2. Ibid., 147.
3. Ibid., 148.
4. Ibid., 104-105.
5. Ibid., 96.
6. Ibid., 242.
7. Ibid., 243.
After reading the above edition, I obtained a copy of the edition whose cover is pictured above, for which Paul Theroux wrote the introduction. Given his body of work as a travel writer and his experiences as a traveler, he was a good choice, but the few pages he wrote are disappointing. They are pretty perfunctory, and not particularly illuminating. ("It is impossible in a short introduction to do full justice to this novel.") One comment is worthwhile: the one in which in notes that Pritchett wrote the book without having traveled to Brazil first. "I am usually doubtful about novels written by people who have never travelled to their setting," he writes. "'And he'd never set foot in Africa!' readers say of the author of Henderson the Rain King [Saul Bellow]; but no one who has been to Africa has to be told that." In Theroux's mind, Dead Man Leading is "completely convincing. And of course Pritchett himself [was] a great traveler; he eventually went to Brazil and was able to confirm that he had invented the truth." If only editors of nineteenth-century missionary memoirs, most of whom never themselves went into the missionary fields, had been able to achieve that.

In 1833, the U.K. abolished slavery. That galvanized U.S. abolitionists, including those at A.T.S., where a student Antislavery Society was formed as an auxiliary of the New England Antislavery Society. The group was small, however; only a few seminarians supported it, and faculty discouraged it, with Ebenezer Porter, A.T.S.'s president, going on record as being against slavery as “a very great national evil,” but also dead against "immediate emancipation" as being not merely “inexpedient” but “impossible.” [1]

​Porter conceded that some enslaved people, once they had been freed, “might be employed as the laboring peasantry of this country,” but that others, “through indolence and intemperance, would die and putrefy, like the frogs of Egypt,” and that still others “would be hunted, and manacled, and shot, by white men, in self-defense; till the bolder spirits among them, ripe for treason and violence, would organize an army of outlaws.” He believed in short that life in the U.S. was unthinkable without slavery and that "an immediate abolition of it would tear up the foundations of society.” Instead, he was in favor of colonization as “an adequate and immediate remedy.”

On August 7, 1835, the New Bedford Mercury reported on a July 27 lecture delivered in Boston by A.T.S.'s Moses Stuart.  His discourse, according to the Mercury reporter, “demolished the Abolition scripture quoters.” Stuart had not changed his mind fifteen years later. In fact, he seemed more than ever convinced of his position. In 1850, he published a pamphlet, Conscience and the Constitution, that once again used scripture to defend his position. He even purported to know what Christ was thinking about the issue: “He [Christ] doubtless felt that slavery might be made a very tolerable condition, nay, even a blessing to such as were shiftless and helpless, in case of kind and gentle mastership.”  [3] His conclusion: like Porter, he believed that colonization was the solution to the problem.
________________________
1. Lyman Matthews, Memoir of the Life and Character of Ebenezer Porter, D. D., Late President of the Theological Seminary, Andover (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1837).
2. Sherlock Bristol, The Pioneer Preacher: Incidents of Interest, and Experiences in the Author’s Life. With an Introduction and Notes by Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Originally published in Chicago by F.H. Revell in 1887.
3. http://www.yaleslavery.org/WhoYaleHonors/stuart.html   Retrieved August 5, 2022.

​In the summer of 1814, Samuel J. Mills made a second tour to the same regions he had explored with John F. Schermerhorn. His companion this time was another A.T.S. grad, Daniel Smith (class of 1813). Their chief object was the distribution of Bibles and tracts. Mills had found with Schermerhorn that religious reading material was scarce in the American interior. Thomas C. Richards, in Samuel J. Mills: Missionary Pathfinder, Pioneer and Promoter, published in 1906, wrote that Mills and Smith carried six hundred English-language Bibles, five thousand New Testaments in French, and fifteen thousand religious tracts, along with fifty copies of the Harriet Newell memoir. [1] Much or even most of the material had been printed in Andover by Flagg and Gould. The pair also attempted to form Bible, tract, and moral societies in the territory, where their main competition was from Catholic missionaries.

When they got back to Andover, Mills, aided by Smith, wrote an account of their trip. Report of a Missionary Tour through That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains was published in 1815. Afterwards, Smith continued to work as a home missionary, assigned to Natchez and then Louisville, where he died in 1823. As for Mills, he too did more home missionary work, but then in 1818 he finally got sent overseas, by the American Colonization Society. Founded in 1816 by Presbyterian minister Robert Finley (1772-1817), with an assist by Mills among others, the organization stated as its aim the establishment of a colony in Africa where free blacks could be sent. Mills had had the idea that a thinly settled place in our own American West might work as an alternative to Africa. in the end, though, the Society envisioned somewhere on Africa's west coast as the better choice. And in 1818, Mills and Ebenezer Burgess (A.T.S. class of 1814) were charged by the Society with going there to find a suitable place to buy, with the funds coming from the sale of memberships.

The two embarked on February 3, 1818, for Sierra Leone. On arrival, they met up with Thomas Joiner. According Gardiner Spring's Memoir of Samuel John Mills [2], Joiner was "a son of a prince of some distinction," who, as a boy had been kidnapped and sold into slavery in the West Indies. The story Mills told was that Joiner was eventually "redeemed by an English captain, who knew his father," was "well educated" in England, and then "restored" to his native country. According to the memoir, Mills observed of him: "He is a man of good character and habits, and has acquired property and influence. He has just returned from England, where he left two sons for an education. He says that he shall buy a brig the next year, to import his own goods. Will not some of our American people of color be fired by this example?”

Mills didn't live long enough to find out. “The health of Mr. Mills before he left the United States was slender, having a stricture on the lungs, and a dangerous cough,” Spring wrote. And even though he was said to have felt well enough in Africa, where he and Burgess tentatively selected a place on Sherbro Island as a site suitable for the colony, he caught a bad cold on the voyage home, grew feverish, and never recovered. He died on June 16, 1818, age thirty-six, and was buried at sea.

In his recent book Persistence of Memories of Slavery and Emancipation in Historical Andover, Edward L. Bell noted that colonization schemes found common cause among "African American Nationalists," "American racists," "pro-segregationists," abolitionists, and missionaries, "among others.” [3] That includes the leadership of the A.T.S., where a Committee on Colonization was formed in 1823. The majority of black Americans, however, were bitterly opposed to it.  "Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here," Frederick Douglass wrote in his anti-slavery newspaper, The North Star, in 1849. Nonetheless, the idea persisted, and in 1822, a place, named Liberia, had been chosen for the experiment. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's character George Harris, having escaped to Canada, decides to go there with this family ("wife, children, sister, and mother") after a short time in France in pursuit of education. He has heard the arguments against colonization: "You will call me an enthusiast: you will tell me that I have not well considered what I am undertaking. But I have considered, and counted the cost. I go to Liberia, not as to an Elysium of romance, but as to a field of work. I expect to work with both hands,—to work  hard; to work against all sorts of difficulties and discouragements; and to work till I die. This is what I go for; and in this I am quite sure I shall not be disappointed."

Stowe herself advocated colonization; she later changed her mind. And by the time she published The Minister's Wooing​ in 1859, while living here in Andover, her character Dr. Hopkins was made to look foolish for supporting the scheme, one of whose ulterior purposes was the Christianization of Africa. (“If we want to get the gospel to the Africans, why not send whole shiploads of missionaries to them, and carry civilization and the arts and Christianity to Africa?”) Or was that merely a rationale? The fictional Hopkins didn't seem to give that any mind; he also believed that one day “the whole earth [would] be of one language.” But what language would that be? A widely held theory was that it would be Hebrew. The omniscient narrator of The Minister’s Wooing, no doubt speaking for Stowe, expressed a more sublime vision: “The truly good are of one language in prayer. . . There may be many tongues and many languages of men, — but the language of prayer is one by itself, in all and above all.”

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1. Thomas C. Richards, Samuel J. Mills: Missionary Pathfinder, Pioneer and Promoter (Boston, New York, and Chicago: The Pilgrim Press, 1906).
2.  Gardiner Spring,  Memoir of Samuel John Mills (Boston: Perkins & Marvin; New York:  Leavitt & J.P. Haven, 1818).
3. Edward L. Bell, Persistence of Memories of Slavery and Emancipation in Historical Andover (Boston, Shawsheen Press: 2021).
4. Frederick Douglass, "Colonization," The North Star, January 26, 1849. http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abar03at.html  Retrieved August 8, 2022.
5. The Minister's Wooing was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly from December 1858 to December 1859. It was published in book form in 1859, first in London by Sampson Low, Son & Company, then in New York by Derby and Jackson.

Samuel  J.  Mills (1783-1818) did not go to India with the original members of the Brethren. He was not selected for reasons I haven't yet been able to discover, and maybe never will. I guess it's one measure of my success with this project that when I try to continue my research, at least via the Internet, I keep getting material that I myself have posted right here on this website. In any case, in 1812, while the other newly ordained men were trying to get themselves established overseas, the A.B.C.F.M. determined that Mills and another recent A.T.S. graduation, John F. Schermerhorn (1786-1851), should go on a trip together throughout the south, west, and southwestern states, their aim being to determine the spiritual state of white settlers and indigenous people alike. What they really wanted to know was how receptive these groups would be to their brand of missionary message and how much proselytizing work had already been done by other, competing denominations (most of which would need to be undone, in their view). Upon their return, the two published A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals. A pamphlet of fifty pages, it was datelined Andover,  December 10, 1813.

Until then, home missionary work had been confined to western New York, Vermont and parts of Ohio. The two followed a route that started in remoter parts of Ohio. From there they went to Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, then down to New Orleans via the Mississippi. Of the parts of Ohio they visited, they wrote: “The counties of Preble, Dark, and Miami are wholly destitute of preaching, excepting by a few New Lights, and some Methodists. Butler and Montgomery have only three preachers, and many of these places have had but little attention from missionary societies. [There was a] wild enthusiasm, which raged through these parts a few years ago. . .” However, they learned, “From the best information that could be obtained from eye witnesses of this work, there is great reason to believe, that it was principally terror and fear which induced members to join those societies; for this work began and ended with the earthquakes, in these counties; and the whole strain of preaching by the Baptists and Methodists was, that the end of all things was at hand, and if the people were not baptized, or did not join society, there was no hope for them.” Some real conversions had occurred, they conceded, but “many, who joined their societies during the earthquakes, have already left them.”

Certainly that is a useful insight into the often temporary nature of the conversion experience. They also made comments that revealed their attitudes towards their rivals in the field. “From the manner in which these [domestic missions] are conducted," they wrote, "it is evident that but a small portion of the destitute parts of our country are visited by intelligent and correct missionaries; and that many evils result, or at least that the good is not effected which might be. . .”  Their vision is for their kind of missionaries to stay longer in each place. To leave too soon "only opens a door for preachers of different denominations [Baptists, Methodists, New Lights, Halcyons] to creep in, and propagate their peculiar sentiments.” A report on Baptists said: “The preachers of this denomination are generally illiterate; few are possessed of good common English learning, and there are also some, that can neither read the Scriptures, nor write their name.” Too much attention was paid to feelings by these preachers, they believed -- a common view among the establishment churches whose authority was being questioned and overruled by those who chose to follow these more accessible and forgiving theologies.

As for the settlers inhabiting these frontiers, Mills and Schermerhorn were appalled by their polluting ways: “It would be highly desirable in a missionary view to find a tribe uncontaminated by the vices of the whites, and where the iniquitous trade by his treachery has never learnt the Indian to deceive or by his persuasion to get drunk.”

In 1823, Jedidiah Morse published the fourth edition of A New Universal Gazetteer, or Geographical Dictionary … Accompanied with an Atlas. One of the books he listed in his bibliography is David Williams Harmon’s Journal. He must have been particularly keen to read Harmon's observations about indigenous people, because in 1820 the U.S. government engaged him to undertake a comprehensive examination of the Indian tribes of the country.

He traveled as best he could in compromised health and with the limited funds provided by the government. In 1822, he published A Report to the Secretary of War of the United States, on Indian Affairs [i.e., John C. Calhoun], Comprising a Narrative of a Tour Performed in the Summer of 1820. That book, too, mentioned Harmon and included long extracts from his Journal. For example: "A half-civilized Indian is more savage, than one in his original state. . . They readily discover and adopt our evil practices; but they are not as quick to discern, and as ready to follow, the few good examples, which we set before them.” It's not commendable that Harmon would make such a declaration or that Morse would reproduce it, but in doing so they were trying to make the point that white people corrupted the indigenous people who came in contact with them. Indeed, Morse's own observations about indigenous people were not infrequently laudatory, but he never could find his way clear of  the  way of thinking exemplified in this backhanded compliment: "Backbiting, whispering, cursing and swearing, to our shame it must be said, are vices not of savage, but of civilized man!!” Interestingly, though, Morse went so far as not only to condone but to urge intermarriage. His reasoning: “They [indigenous people] would then be literally of one blood with us, merged in the nation, and saved from extinction.”

The threat of extinction was real, because of the federal policy known euphemistically as "removal." But Morse didn't see  the those relocations as the colossal tragedies they were. He was in favor of them. He believed the government was right and prudent to  "remove" whole indigenous nations, although he didn't want them to be relocated in the wilderness, where, he predicted they would “return again to the savage life." He wanted, instead, to see them living in "some suitable, prepared portion of our country.”

in the minds of most whites, what separated so-called savages from their so-called, would-be civilized selves was written language. The fact that they didn't have one was the glaring difference, although, it was acknowledged, they had sophisticated and complex spoken languages. So sophisticated and complex that they were often beyond the abilities of missionaries to master them -- hence, one of the reasons why those proselytizers went much more willingly and enthusiastically and in far greater numbers to, say, India instead of Indiana. As Reverend Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, said in an ordination sermon in Boston in 1817 that addressed the language issue -- and which Morse quoted in his Report: “It is a matter of surprise that the Indians, situated as they have been for so many successive ages and generations, without books, or knowledge of letters, or of the art of reading or writing, should have preserved their various languages in the manner they have done. Many of them are copious, capable of regular grammatical analysis, possess great strength, gracefulness and beauty of expression. They are highly metaphorical in their character."* It's a compliment, to be sure. Disconcertingly, however, Reverend Beecher concluded: “I should not think it desirable to employ means to preserve any of these Indian languages among the living languages. . . As fast as possible let Indians forget their own languages,  in which nothing is written, and nothing of course can be preserved, and learn ours, which will at once open to them the whole field of every kind of useful knowledge." And then this: "I am, therefore, opposed to the idea of making any very laborious or expensive translations of the Bible, or of any other books.”

Others, especially in the A.B.C.F.M., felt this way, too. And so for the next few decades, Bible translations and printings would not be priorities among home missionaries, but, in the warped logic of the world conversion enterprise, foreign-language  would be exactly what overseas missionaries, trained at Andover, would have at the top of their list of things to do.

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*Lyman Beecher, The Bible a Code of Laws: A Sermon Delivered in Park Street Church at the Ordination of Rev. Sereno E. Dwight . . . Boston, September 3, 1817 (Andover: Mark Newman, 1827).

Originally titled French Trader and Half Breed Son, George Caleb Bingham's painting, which I saw recently at the Shelburne, is now known as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. The title change was implemented by New York's American Art-Union, an organization that between 1839 and 185  promoted American art through exhibits and the distribution of popular prints. It's easy to imagine that the substitution was made because the narrative that the original title suggested would have been offensive to the Art-Union's audience. The change is just as well. The term "Half Breed" is offensive to audiences of today.

The painting reminded me of Daniel Williams Harmon (1778-1843) of Vermont, who went to work for a fur-trading company in 1800 at age twenty-two, then twenty years later published his Journal of Voyages and Travels in the Interiour of North America. Reprinted many, many times, the first edition was printed in Andover by Flagg and Gould.

Diaries, journals, and memoirs of fur traders of the period are plentiful, but Harmon's was exceptional because it recounted not only his experiences in the Canadian wilderness but also told how and why he decided not to abandon the French-Cree woman he had been living with, along with their fourteen children, when he left the territory and went home. Abandonment was the usual practice, the journal's editor, Reverend Daniel Haskel of Burlington, Vermont, wrote in a preface.

Working from Harmon's longhand manuscript, Reverend Haskel created a narrative he described as “not properly [his] own, nor that of Mr. Harmon, but something between both." Unfortunately, the original is unavailable for comparison; its whereabouts is unknown. Nor could I find a connection between Reverend Haskel and Andover. He was not a seminary graduate, but its missionary aspect may have supplied it. As Reverend Haskel explained, he had hopes that the North West Company, for which Harmon worked, would help fund a Canadian missionary enterprise, adding that some employees actually had contributed several thousand dollars to the cause. Noting that Harmon did not abandon his woman or their children, as fur traders and trappers typically did, he said he thought that those with mixed blood would be more effective than anyone in the education of "Natives," because they knew the language. 

Harmon had initially been hired by the company as a warehouseman in Montreal around the time of his twenty-first birthday. He was shortly recruited as a clerk, and expected to be employed as such for seven years. In fact, he stayed for more than double that period of time, and rose up the ranks as he traveled by canoe with his fellow workers into the Northwest territory.

When day was done, the workers liked their drink, and expected everyone to partake. Those who refused were “baptized,” i.e., thrown into the nearest body of water. Haskel, a non-drinker, was somehow left alone to have tea with an “Irish gentleman," but he closely observed the drinking habits of his colleagues and of the indigenous people who worked alongside them.

He witnessed drunk Indians frequently, but at least alcohol didn't turn them into fighters. “Of all people in the world, I think the Canadians, when drunk, are the most disagreeable," he wrote. "Indeed, I had rather have fifty drunken Indians in the fort, than five drunken Canadians.”

Fur trapping afforded much leisure, Harmon reported, perhaps four fifths of his time. Everyone read. Harmon turned to Bible reading and committed his soul to God after his first-born son, George, died. “Resolved, that the scoffs of the wicked, directed against serious religion, shall never have any other effect upon me, than to make me strive the more earnestly, to lead the life of a sincere christian [sic],” he wrote. In time, his woman took up with God and religion, too. That is the reason he didn't leave her behind.  Besides feeling that it was his moral obligation, he considered it his duty “to take her to a christian land."

Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.
-- Ivan Illich, from a talk about missionaries delivered at the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects, St. Mary’s Lake of the Woods Seminary, Niles, Illinois, April 20, 1968.

I had not heard of Ivan Illich (1926-2002), an Austrian who converted to Catholicism and became a priest, until I read a volume of letters to and from Flannery O'Connor, Good Things Out of Nazareth, published in 2019. Its editor, Benjamin B. Alexander, included correspondence between O'Connor and a friend, Rosyln Barnes, who became a missionary in Latin America. As a young woman, she joined the Papal Auxiliary Volunteer Corps for Latin America, a lay movement sanctioned by Pope John XXIII. In 1962, in preparation for time in the field, she went to Mexico for language studies at a teaching center in Cuernavaca. It was run by Illich.

O'Connor and Barnes had both attended college in Milledgeville, Georgia, O'Connor's hometown, and then both went on to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O'Connor obviously having become the successful writer of the two. Like Illich, Barnes was a Catholic convert. “[O'Connor] was the one responsible for my conversion,” Barnes wrote in a letter to a mutual priest friend. [1] In fact, it was also O’Connor who recommended and counseled Barnes to take up missionary work, and was impressed by her joining Illich in Mexico, wanting to hear all about it through their correspondence, since Illich was by then a highly controversial figure in the church and elsewhere. 

Illich had a perspective on missionaries that sounds very twenty-first century, except that he was espousing it long before its time. Like many, he was critical of “apostolic tourism.” [2] But his views were much more radical than that. He had no patience with the superior attitudes of North Americans. He believed that the faithful of Latin America should not be expected to conform to the American values. Rather, he wanted missionaries to embrace the cultural values of the indigenous people they were trying to convert. [3] Some called him "anti-American," Alexander notes. "Some wanted him removed." Eventually the church essentially did that, by withdrawing funds from his center. He severed ties with Catholicism at that point and resigned from the priesthood. ​His idea that “the Catholic Church should dissolve its bureaucracy scarcely helped his standing with the Vatican," wrote Pearce Wright in The Lancet after Illich's death. [4]

Why there was an obituary at all in The Lancet, a British medical journal, is easily explained. Illich had become notorious for his criticisms of modern medical practices, too. In his 1974 book, Medical Nemesis, he popularized the word iatrogenesis, meaning "disease induced by doctors.” [5] And there was more: “In addition to his disquiet with organised religion," Wright wrote in his obit, "he argued that school made people dumb, and the legal system, rather than providing people with solutions, heightened their frustration. He argued that even science was being strangled by institutionalization. " And there was more: "Illich scythed his way through numerous institutions he believed outmoded. He was a priest who thought there were too many priests, and a teacher of more than 50 years standing who maintained that children learnt best at home or in casual situations rather than through formal education. He also suggested that modern technology was oppressive, claiming, for example, that automobiles enslaved society and bicycles were a faster way to travel.” [6]
​
I have  ordered two biographies of Illich via Interlibrary Loan. I am eager to learn more about this iconoclast many of whose views seem to align with mine. Meanwhile, Barnes, after  studies at Illich’s center in Mexico,  was sent to Universidad Catolica del Norte, in Antofagasta, Chile. She disappeared there sometime after November 17, 1964 (the date of the last of her missives published in the Uncollected Letters) and was later presumed dead. [7] 

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1. Benjamin B. Alexander, ed., Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O'Connor and Friends (New York:  Convergent Books/Crown, 2019), 336.
2. Ibid., 243.
3. Ibid.
4. Pearce Wright, "Ivan Illich," The Lancet,  Vol. 361,  January 11, 2003, 185.  www.thelancet.com  Retrieved July 20. 2022.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Alexander, 184.