​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.

Some examples of objects in the collection of the seminary in Andover are listed in an 1833 volume, Memoirs of American Missionaries, Formerly Connected with the Society of Inquiry in the Andover Theological Seminary Embracing a History of the Society. One object in particular caught my eye: it was described as a brick, more than a foot square, and about three inches in thickness, supposed to have come from the Tower of Babel. As the catalog has it: "It was dug from one of the mounds on the Euphrates, by a European gentleman traveling in the East. This gentleman presented it to the Rev. Mr. Bardwell, who deposited it in the Museum." [1]

I am guessing this depositor was Horatio Bardwell (1788-1866), A.T.S. class of 1814.  He and his wife had been missionaries in Bombay. They were part of the second group to be sent overseas in 1815, following those who went with Gordon Hall,  Adoniram Judson, et al, three years earlier. That wife had been the former Rachel Furbush (b. 1786) of Andover --  “a very talented and devoted young lady of the West Parish, where her father had a large farm,"  according to P.A.'s sister school's newspaper, the Abbot Courant, in a story published long after both Bardwells had died. [2] They had not stayed long in missionary service. They returned to the U.S. in 1821, due to Rachel's poor health, after which the Rev. Dr. Bardwell was appointed a traveling agent (fundraiser) for A.B.C.F.M. He lived at 20 Abbott Street in Andover in a large house built for him and Rachel and the family in the 1832-1834 period, After Gordon Hall’s death in 1826, Bardwell had been urged to return to the mission  but he declined. [3] instead he compiled Memoir of Rev. Gordon Hall, first published in 1834 in in Andover by Flagg, Gould and Newman.

As for the Tower of Babel brick, it certainly makes one want to murmur, "And if you believe that, I have a bridge. . ." Anticipating doubt, even way back in 1833, the Society of Inquiry wrote: "In evidence of its genuineness, it may be observed, that it is stamped with what [British linguist] Sir William Jones calls the ‘arrow-headed Persian.’ “ [4] If the brick's whereabouts were known today, I suppose someone could conduct scientific testing to determine its age, but who on God's earth would be able to somehow prove that the Tower of Babel even existed, much less that this was a brick from that structure? Faith is a curious thing.
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1. Society of Inquiry, Memoirs of American Missionaries, Formerly Connected with the Society of Inquiry in the Andover Theological Seminary Embracing a History of the Society, etc. (Boston: Peirce and Parker, 1833), 361.
2. Abbot Courant,  Vol. XVI, No. 1, January 1890.
3.Horatio Bardwell, Memoir of Rev. Gordon Hall, A.M.: One of the First Missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at Bombay (Andover: Flagg, Gould and Newman, 1834), v.
4. Society of Inquiry, 361.

Elizabeth Elkins Sanders (1762-1851) of Salem, Massachusetts, published Tract on Missions in 1844 when she was eighty-two years old. To put it mildly, she was not in favor of them. She used a Bible quote for an epigraph on her title page, Matthew X: 5, 6: "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans, enter yet not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

She explained in her text that she took those words to mean Christians should proselytize among their own wayward kind instead of looking to convert practitioners of other religions of the world. She criticized missionaries for wanting to travel to "foreign climes" "at free cost," while "pretend[ing] to be influenced by a desire of doing good to their fellow men." The statement is harsh, but she was angry -- angry about the wasted energy and funds that could have been going to helping people in our own country, especially indigenous and enslaved ones. In 1845, she published Second Part of the Tract on Missions, repeating much of what she had said in the first part. In 1848, she published Remarks on the 'Tour Around Hawaii,' by the Missionaries Messrs. Ellis, Thurston, Bishop, and Goodrich in 1823. "The missionaries observe that they found much difficulty in making the people comprehend the necessity of repentance for sins which they were not conscious of having committed," she wrote in that final book.

To be fair, her pamphlet about the tragedy of our indigenous people, Conversations Principally on the Aborigines of North America, published in 1828, is naive and contains stereotypical characterizations, but it expressed ambivalence about attempting to converting them: ". . . our Aborigines are presented as heathen, who are unable to comprehend the sublime doctrines of Christianity, because they cannot bend their reason to embrace the debasing superstitions which have been presented to them, and bow before the idols we have set up." She went on: " 'We need not search out the dark corners of the earth' to reform abuses, or to overcome superstition, too much is required at home."

Mrs. Sanders (sometimes spelled "Saunders") was the wife of a successful merchant, Thomas Sanders. They lived in a palatial Federal-style brick house (built 1805) on Salem's fashionable Chestnut Street (show above). Their children married well, especially Catherine (1784-1823), whose husband, Dudley Leavitt Pickman (1779-1846), made his first fortune as a supercargo in the East India trade, then invested in business enterprises like water power for the newly founded and industrialized cities of Lowell and Lawrence. What did she really know about the missionaries? How seriously was she taken? She was a Unitarian, so her attitudes are not surprising. Was she influential or was she preaching to the choir? I wish I could find her papers. Pickman's are plentiful. Why shouldn't hers be? She must have written scores of letters in her long lifetime. I can find only one small grouping, written to a grandson, at the Peabody Essex Museum's library, which I'll go look at one of these days soon. Nor can I find an image of her. Surely someone of her status sat for her portrait in oil. It may still be with the family. . .?  Family, are you out there? Can you help?

The first Mrs. Judson, Ann Hasseltine, met her husband, Adoniram Judson, in 1810 while he, a seminary student at Andover, was having dinner with her father, Deacon John Hasseltine, at their family home in Bradford, Massachusetts. Ann and Adoniram were married in 1812 and set sail for missionary work in India. On arrival, they both became Baptists, so they are downplayed in the early history of the A.B.C.F.M., a collaboration between Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and not incidentally the Judsons' sponsors. Nonetheless, he and she were undeniably in that first group of proselytizers planning to save the world. The second Mrs. Judson, Sarah Boardman, followed the death of the first in 1826; then came a third, Emily Chubbuck,  after Sarah's death in 1845. Adoniram himself died in 1850.

I sought out the book The Lives of The Three Mrs. Judsons by Arabella M. Stuart, originally published in 1851, reprinted dozens of times, and republished in 1999 by the Particular Baptist Press of Springfield, Missouri, because I had hoped to learn more about each of these women. Unfortunately, a missionary biography that isn't a hagiography is as rare as the proverbial black tulip. In fact, I have yet to find one. Reading such a book is like reading The Lives of the Saints, which I loved to do as a child, attracted by the inevitable high drama. One also typically finds in the written lives of missionaries the kinds of attitudes towards non-white people ("dark browed and darkened-minded heathen") that were pervasive in the period. Except that, even though you expect it, it's always disconcerting. What is also alarming are their attitudes towards non-Christian belief systems. For example, Buddhism, Stuart wrote, is "one of the most ancient and wide-spread superstitions on the face of the earth." [1] Superstitions? She does give them that their "religious system. . . contains many except moral precepts and maxims," but concludes that they are "utterly powerless to mould the character of the people to wisdom or virtue."  She goes on: "Buddhism in its moral precepts is perhaps the best religion ever invented by man." Invented. Her word. "The difficulty is, its entire basis is false." Buddhists might say the same about Christianity and their "absurd superstitions," "unmeaning rites" and "senseless formalities, to which they cling with a stubbornness that nothing but the power of God can subdue."  But they didn't say that to the various Judsons. Instead, as reported by Stuart, their rebuff was merely this: "Your religion is good for you, ours for us." "You will be rewarded for your good deeds in your way, we in our way."  And what was the Judsons' response to this magnanimity? In Stuart's word: "They found [in the "semi-barbarian" people of Burma, where their missionary work was taking place] they had to deal with one of the proudest and most conceited races on earth."
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* The book was originally titled The Lives of Mrs. Ann H. Judson, Mrs. Sarah B. Judson, and Mrs. Emily C. Judson: Missionaries to Burmah. All quotes are from the 1999 reprinting.

In 1805, Samuel J. Mill, Gordon Hall, and James Richards, all undergraduates at Williams College, spent a day fasting, praying, and talking about their dreams of foreign missionary work on behalf of the "heathen." Later known as the Haystack Prayer Meeting, it is often given credit for sparking initial interest in foreign missionary careers for Americans. But the controversial idea was only that until the three young men arrived at the newly founded seminary in Andover and began a secret society called the Brethren. There they were joined by four others -- Adoniram Judson, Luther Rice, Samuel Newell, and Samuel Nott -- all of whom were eager to fulfill what they believed was their duty to spread the word abroad, not just in the Americas. On June 10, 1810, those seven met in the home of Moses Stuart, their Andover professor, who helped them arrange an audience at Bradford Academy in Bradford, Massachusetts, where a meeting of the General Association of the Congregational Church's leadership was being hosted by the school.* There four of the Brethren -- Mills, Judson, Nott, and Newell -- successfully argued their case for the founding of the A.B.C.F.M. And so while it is true that the Haystack Prayer Meeting provided an impetus and that some semblance of the organization would probably have come into being anyway, the A.B.C.F.M.'s inauguration was hastened by the existence of the seminary in Andover. “If these young men had been obliged to study theology, as the custom had been up to this time, with various pastors scattered about New England, this fellowship . . . and cooperation would have been impossible,” wrote a biographer of Mills. [1] Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg concurs. “Largely as a result of the efforts of a small band of Andover seminarians, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was formed in 1810, constituting the first official American support organization for the work of foreign evangelization," she wrote in  Mission for Life: The Judson Family and American Evangelical Culture. [2]

​*Bradford Academy was a coeducational secondary school when it was founded in 1803 by the First Church of Christ. Ann Hasseltine, who married Judson, becoming the first of his three missionary wives, was a student there in 1806. So was Harriet Atwood, who married Newell, and fatefully, after her death at age nineteen, became the nominal author of her famous posthumous memoir. Winslow Homer's mother, Henrietta Benson Homer (1809-1884), went there, too. So did Harriet Beecher Stowe's husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, before going on to Bowdoin College, then the seminary at Andover. In 1836, Bradford Academy chose to devote itself exclusively to the women's education. It went on to evolve into Bradford Junior College for women, then the coed Bradford College which, debt-ridden and bureaucratically bloated, closed in 2000. Seven years later, the Assemblies of God bought the eighteen-acre campus. After its $5 million renovation, a cost covered by Hobby Lobby founder David Green and affiliates,  it was given to Zion Bible College, which relocated there from Barrington, Rhode Island. It is now known as Northpoint Bible College, whose stated purpose is "to teach and train students for Excellent Pentecostal Ministry in fulfillment of The Great Commission." Missionary work, in other words.

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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), 57.
2. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The Judson Family and American Evangelical Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1984), ix.