For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, ... they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.
—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

The A.B.C.F.M. sent its first missionaries to India (1812), then Ceylon (Sri Lanka) (1816), then the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) (1819), then the Middle East (1820). They were by all accounts and for a variety of reasons most successful in the Sandwich Islands. They had mixed results in India and Ceylon. And while nowhere on earth stirred their seminary-trained imaginations more than the locale where the sacred episodes of the Old and New Testaments had taken place, they ended up having little to show for their efforts there, either. They also racked up significant failures in China and Africa, where A.B.C.F.M. enterprises began in 1830 and 1833, respectively. As for the A.B.C.F.M.’s “home missionaries,” who, beginning in 1820, set up missions in the Midwest, South, and West in attempts to convert both indigenous people and wayward settlers, their results were perhaps most disastrous of all. But the movement, while it failed in its stated mission to convert the world, did succeed in spreading the word about the inferiority of races other than white and creeds other than Christianity. For that reason, the currently prevailing image of nineteenth-century missionaries, at least among secular humanists, is that of narrow, paternalistic, ethnocentric agents of imperialism. It's simplistic, but not unfair. And yet to leave it dismissively at that prevents any understanding of  missionaries of all types who are operating in the world today.

I was drawn to this subject for a variety of reasons, but foremost among them was the connection  between missionaries and the printed word. The nineteenth-century philologist J. Hammond Trumbull wrote in Origin and Early Progress of Indian Missions in New England that before Reverend Eliot’s time, “an idea generally prevailed, that Indians must be taught English, before they could receive religious truths.” [1] Eliot’s Bible changed that way of thinking. The conundrum wasn’t completely settled by the Eliot Bible’s publication, however. The effectiveness of the translation depended on speakers of Algonquin learning to read on a printed page what had been a perfectly adequate, oral language system for eons, albeit a complicated one. Commenting on the length of many Algonquin words, Cotton Mather scoffed: “One would think they had been growing ever since Babel, unto the dimensions to which they are now extended.” [2] One wonders what he would have thought about a certain word yet to be coined, since there was no need for it in his lifetime: antidisestablishmentarianism.

​
By the early nineteenth century, the failure to convert New England's indigenous communities was acknowledged. And although comparable failure lay in foreign lands, from the A.B.C.F.M.'s perspective those faraway places seemed enticingly clean slates. Besides, the British had already made inroads. What is more, missionaries need to migrate. It goes along with the leaving behind of a former self. “Migration, in the mass, strengthens the spirit and unity of a movement," Eric Hoffer opined in The True Believer. [3] “Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find when they join a mass movement, namely, change and a chance for a new beginning.” [4] 

Not that the A.B.C.F.M. gave up on the home missionary enterprise. On the contrary, in 1812, Reverend Leonard Woods of the Andover Theological Seminary, in a sermon delivered before the Massachusetts Missionary Society on its thirteenth anniversary, pleaded for home missionaries to join the cause: “Behold the immense territories on the North, West, and South of these United States." “Lift up your eyes, my hearers, and see a world in ruins.” “Remove the gospel ministry from New England for one generation, and we should be in danger of sinking in moral degeneracy below the heathen.” “Behold our savage wilderness; and the continents and islands, which lie in pagan darkness.” “With proper exertion on the part of clergymen and opulent christians, ten years might bring forward an army of consecrated youth for the pastoral and missionary office. It is fundamental in all our plans for the enlargement of the church.” [5]

To be sure, the harvest was great and the laborers few. (Luke X: 2)  But all those languages! To learn any one of them was a daunting task. But there was a solution. In its Annual Report for 1816, the stated goal for the Cherokee mission was to "make the whole tribe English in their language, civilized in their habits, and Christian in their religion.” [6] The Annual Report went on: "Assimilated in language, ‘they will more readily become assimilated in habits and manners to their white neighbors; intercourse will be easy and the advantages incalculable.” [7] And so they had come full circle to a pre-Eliot Bible stance.
​
___________________
1. J. Hammond Trumbull, Origin and Early Progress of Indian Missions in New England with a List of Books in the Indian Language Printed at Cambridge and Boston 1653-1721 (Worcester, Massachusetts: For Private Distribution, 1874), 6.
2. Magnalia Christi Americana; or the Ecclesiastical History of New England (Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1820), Volume 1, Book 3, 507.
3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 21.
4. Ibid., 20.
5.  Leonard Woods, A Sermon Delivered before the Massachusetts Missionary Society, on their thirteenth anniversary, May 26, 1812. (Boston: Printed by Samuel T. Armstrong, 1812).
6. Quoted in Althea Bass, Cherokee Messenger (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936), 31. A.C.B.F.M.'s Seventh Annual Report, 11-12.
​7. Ibid.

​O blessed Captivity! no other perfect liberty. Such truly walk at liberty, who have no will of their own, but resign themselves to the commanding and dispossessing will of the only wise God.
— Reverend Samuel Phillips, A Word in Season. Or, The Duty of People to Take and Keep the Oath of Allegiance to the Glorious God (Boston: Samuel Kneeland & Timothy Green, printers, 1726)

The short-lived partnership of Ames & Parker produced Andover's first  imprints in 1798-1799. There are just two of them known to exist. One is a pair of captivity tales; the other is a Thanksgiving sermon delivered to the parishioners of South Church by Reverend Jonathan French. In other words, one is about perceived darkness; the other, perceived light.

The Narrative of a Late Expedition against the Indians, first published in 1783, tells the stories of Dr. John Knight, who escapes  his capture; Colonel Crawford, an "old warrior among the savages” (he had served under Washington in the Continental Army), who is killed; and another escapee, John Slover, who supplies myriad gory details. The editor of the tales, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, deleted all mention of the fact that Colonel Crawford was executed in retaliation for the infamous Gnadenhütten massacre of some ninety unarmed Christian Delawares converted by the Moravians in Ohio. A Remarkable Narrative of the Captivity & Escape of Mrs. Frances Scott, which was appended to the men's stories, was initially published in 1785. Exactly six months earlier, on June 29, 1785, “painted savages” had killed Mrs. Scott’s husband and their four children, and taken her captive. The chief of the tribe, an “old man” who no longer went out hunting with the younger men, was assigned to guard her. A month into her captivity, while he was preoccupied with graining a deer skin — traditionally, women’s work — she was able to escape. She spent another month wandering in the wilderness, engaged in “serious meditation” and “devout exercises,” and surviving on “no other subsistance but chewing and swallowing the juice of young cane-stalks, Sassafras leaves, and some other plants she did not know the names of.” Finally, guided by a “beautiful bird” and then another just like it, she chose one path over another, and came upon a white settlement appropriately called New Garden. “Thus, in the third month of her captivity, she was unexpectedly though joyfully relieved from the dreadful impending death by famine,” a third-person narrator tells us. “[H]ad she taken the other valley, she never could have returned.” And so she was home again, albeit suffering from residual effects, the epilogue concludes: “Mrs. Scott continues in a low state of health, and remains inconsolable for the loss of her family, particularly bewailing the cruel death of her little daughter,” an eight-year-old who was “tomahawked and stabbed” while in her mother’s arms.

Writers of our earliest American captivity narratives were focussed on portraying themselves as having been saved by their belief in God. They also regularly presented to their readers the kind of concrete, socio-anthropological details about their captors that Mary Rowlandson, for example, had provided hers. (“I laid down my load, and went into the wigwam, and there sat an Indian boiling horse-feet [they being wont to eat the flesh first, and when the feet were old and dried, and they had nothing else, they would cut off the feet and used them]…”) But what came to matter just as much during this period was a narrative’s propagandistic qualities. The United States was expanding rapidly, and many of the most popular titles, the ones that citizens clamored for, were those that seemed to justify dispossessing or simply destroying those who got in the way.

As for Reverend French's thirty-one page Thanksgiving sermon, it wasn’t connected to the Pilgrim feast or Thanksgiving celebrations as we know them; those didn't begin until the Victorian era. Rather, it was one of those typical, topical sermons usually delivered on Thursday, not Sunday, as indeed this sermon was, on November 29, 1798.

Which sold more copies? And where were they sold? Church members customarily paid to have a sermon printed and distributed among themselves in the parish. This one may also have been distributed at P.A., where in 1796 Reverend French had begun to act as a provisional professor of divinity. The captivity narratives may have been sold at a local tavern. The one in Andover known as the “Ye Ames Tavern” was built between 1794 and 1800 on what is now Elm Street, at a point between North Parish and South Parish. [1] Was the tavern keeper the "Ames" of the Ames & Parker partnership?  The Andover Center for History and Culture website mentions a Parker in connection with an Ames. He is James Parker Jr., who gave the land for the tavern to "to Benjamin Ames, gentleman, and Joshua Lovejoy Jr., yeoman, on Christmas Day in 1773." [2] The same lot was "transferred to Benj. Ames senior to his son Benjamin Ames Jr. on August 8, 1800." [3] If Ames was one part of the partnership, was a member of the Parker family the other part? Like most ephemeral printing-partnerships, Ames & Parker left no records. So no one can say.

​What we do know is that, along with sermons, captivity narratives were at the time being cheaply printed everywhere as printers’ attempted to satisfy the public’s ravenous appetite for “the eighteenth-century equivalent of the dime novel.” [4] Of the period when ​The Narrative of a Late Expedition was packaged and sold along with Mrs. Scott’s story by Ames & Parker, the tales “of barbarity and bloodshed. . . were everywhere the thing.” [5]

​___________
1. https://preservation.mhl.org/21-elm-street Retrieved May 6, 2022.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Roy Henry Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature,  Vol. 19, No. 1, Mar. 1947, 12. Dr. Pearce’s first book, Savagism and Civilization, published in 1953, was one of the academia’s earliest explorations of ideological representations of Native Americans in Western thought and in American literature.
5. Pearce, 10.

I might not even be mentioning Mark Newman at all in this story, except that he was the one who founded Andover's first bookstore, which is where Andover's first printing press was set up. (The Andover Bookstore,  established by Newman in 1810, is often declared to be the oldest, continuously operating bookstore in the United States, but that isn't true. [1]) The bookstore's printing press is the connection to the missionary movement, for preaching was one thing; disseminating the word of God in print was another, and the more favored method for quite a while. 

Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1772, Newman was graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, which had been founded in 1781 by Samuel Phillips's uncle John. He went from there to Dartmouth, originally intending to become a clergyman, but apparently didn't find a parish will to accept him. He next tried to secure the mastership of a town school somewhere unspecified, but his short stature and slightness of build had made the committee doubt “his power to control boys who had conquered the two previous masters. He begged for a trial, and waiting patiently till the tallest & stoutest youth led the riot, he called the master rebel to the middle of the room, [and] gave him a round flogging. ” [2] Why the committee didn't take him on after that isn't revealed in the documents I have read. In any case, in 1793, he became an instructor at P.A.

In Claude M. Fuess's book Men of Andover, Newman is characterized as  “indecisive and fumbling.” [3] Maybe so, but one good decision he made in 1795, the same year he assumed the P.A. headmastership, was to marry Sarah "Sally" Phillips. At thirty years old, she was Newman’s senior by seven years. The daughter of William Phillips of Boston, she was also a second cousin to Judge Phillips -- not a bad family connection to have in Andover.

His predecessor in the headmastership was Ebenezer Pemberton, who took over after Eliphalet Pearson left for Andover for Harvard in 1786. Pemberton stayed for seven years. When he resigned in 1793, he claimed the reason was ill health; however, he shortly started his own academy in nearby Billerica. In Fuess's history of P.A., An Old New England School, he wrote in gossip-column fashion that "everything indicates that he left Andover mainly because he had incurred the displeasure of Judge Phillips, probably because of some love affair which did not satisfy the Phillips family." [4] 

_________________
1. The Moravian Book Shop was founded in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1745. https://www.moravian.edu/bookshopRetrieved May 6, 2022.
2. Phillips Academy Archives, Head of School records, 1786-1873, Box 1, Folder 3, “Newman, Mark, 1795-1810.”
3. Claude M. Fuess, Men of Andover: Biographical Sketches in Commemoration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of Phillips Academy  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 111.
4. Claude M. Fuess, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover ​ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1917), 108.

After the American Revolutionary War, Samuel Phillips continued to make gunpowder in his Andover mill, but not without further troubles. As recorded in Philemon Chandler's diary, a second explosion occurred on August 25, 1784. [1] Perhaps because of that or because the demand for gunpowder had subsided, Samuel Phillips shortly decided to diversify the mill,  by making paper there, too. To that end he hired Thomas Houghton, a recent emigré who had come from Britain with paper-making skills.

Samuel Phillips, meanwhile, was doing well for himself, politically and financially. In 1781, he had been elected to the Massachusetts State Senate and appointed Justice of the Court of Common Pleas for Essex County by John Hancock. He was called Judge Phillips thereafter. By the time George Washington visited Andover on November 5, 1789, Judge Phillips was the State Senate’s president. By then, too, his mansion,  planned on a scale beyond anything then known in the town, had been completed. [2]

Like Samuel Phillips, other early American paper makers were men of means. They needed to be, because of the capital necessary to begin such an enterprise. John Hancock's wealthy uncle, Thomas Hancock, for instance, was part proprietor of the first paper mill in Massachusetts, constructed in Dorchester (in a section that is now part of Milton) in 1728-1729, after the General Court of Massachusetts passed an act designed to encourage the manufacture of paper in New England. [3]  He was otherwise a merchant engaged in bookselling,  stationery sales, and printing in Boston for which he had been importing paper from Britain, at least until the Revolution, during which paper could scarcely be obtained at any price, and what there was, was inferior. After the Revolution, the quality problem continued. According to William Goold's Early Paper Mills of New England (1875):  “Some of the paper was so poor that it crumbed to pieces in two years, owing to some impurity in the bleaching.” [4]

Thomas Houghton had high hopes for the mill in Andover, especially given Samuel Phillips's continuing involvement in government. As he wrote to his extended family back home in the U.K:  “The State printers have promised Mr. Phillips their custom. I am informed they will take at least to the amount of £1200 a year of us. He has also great interest, both in Boston, Cambridge, and Salem, and many other places.” [5]  ​On June 16, 1789, however, he wrote to Phillips himself to express his clear concern about gunpowder being made in the same factory where he was trying to make paper: “I did not imagine, I could not imagine, such an engagement.” [6] Still, he continued with the project, motivated by Phillips's promise to him that if the paper mill became profitable the two men would become partners. When Houghton wrote home again on July 24, 1791, he was still hopeful but also still trying to make a profit for his employer, citing the competition that stood in his way: “Here is many paper-mills erected within about twenty miles to thirty miles of us.” [7]

From his perch in Salem, Reverend William Bentley had his characteristically long view. He observed in his diary on April 24, 1793, that Andover was blessed with both pastoral delights and the potential to develop its industries: “The situation of Andover being elevated there are fine prospects from its hills, & the view of town is opened in every part, & beautifully diversified," he wrote. "There are seven bridges over the Shawshin [today called the Shawsheen]… There is not much fishing in this river, which is obstructed by the Mills upon it. I saw some children with scoop nets amusing themselves upon it.”

By 1795, the paper mill finally turned a profit and the Phillips-Houghton partnership became a reality. Remarkably, part of the mill was still being used for making gunpowder, and Houghton remained worried about it, expressing in another letter to Phillips his fears about a “misfortune by fire.” [8] Unfortunately, on October 17, 1796, a third explosion at the mill occurred, killing two men, including a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman named Peter "of the Island of St. Lucia, who in consequence of the Wars in the West Indies [between the British and French over the sugar colonies] came here for his education." [9] An epitaph on a gravestone in the South Parish cemetery gives the age of the other victim, David Hall, “32 years & 8 months," adding, "We mourn the sudden swift remove,/From earth and all enjoyments here; When Christ commands, we must obey/Without a murmur or a tear.” [10] The gunpowder portion of the mill, which had been destroyed by the fire caused by the explosion, was shut down after that forever.

____________
1. See ms. of Moses Wood, Extracts from Mr. Philemon Chandler’s Diary, Andover Center for History and Culture (hereafter, ACHC). I have found no other mention of the explosion.
2. See  John L. Taylor, Memoir of His Honor Samuel Phillips (Boston: 1856), 114-115.
3. John BIdwell, American Paper Mills, 1690-1832: A Directory of the Paper Trade  with Notes on Products, Watermarks, Distribution Methods, and Manufacturing Techniques (Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 85.
4.  William Goold, ​Early Paper-Mills of New England, (Boston: Historic and Genealogical Register, 1875), 11.
5.  Quoted in Bailey, 582.
6. ACHC, William A.Trow Collection, Sub-group IV, Series D, Sub-series 1-b-1.4.
7. Quoted in Bailey, 584. According to Jedidiah Morse, by 1796 there were twenty paper mills in Massachusetts, including the one in Andover. (Jedidiah Morse, The American Universal Geography [Boston:Isaiah Thomas, 1796], 403.)
​8. ACHC, William A.Trow collection, Sub-group IV, Series D, Sub-series 1-b-1.
9. https://ma-vitalrecords.org/MA/Essex/Andover/aDeathsM.shtml   Retrieved May 4, 2022.
10. Bailey, 349.

In 1780, while still serving as P.A.’s first headmaster, Eliphalet Pearson married Pricilla Holyoke (1739-1782), daughter of Edward Holyoke, who had been president of Harvard College for the thirty-two years prior to his death in office. Thirteen years Pearson’s senior, Mary herself died shortly after giving birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter, Mary Holyoke Pearson. Three years later, Pearson married money: Sarah Bromfield (1757-1831), whose father, Henry Bromfield (1751-1837), owned a successful shipping firm that, among other activities, exported tobacco produced by slave labor in Virginia. [1] One year into that second marriage, Pearson left Andover, having been hired to be Harvard’s Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages. Eventually, though, his classes became so small he was asked also to teach English grammar and rhetoric, and to correct English exercises and themes. [2] It wasn't his teaching style or personality this time that prevented him from connecting well with students. The idea of mastering the old languages was losing favor with undergraduates, and the year after Pearson's arrival back at his alma mater, Harvard made the study of Hebrew  optional. [3]

Perhaps no one could have foretold it at the time, but the decision signaled the beginning of a radical change in Cambridge, where Unitarianism would eventually dominate and conservative Calvinist Congregationalists like Pearson would be shown the door. Certainly no one could have foreseen that Pearson would leave Harvard in a royal huff, return to Andover, and from there plot his revenge.

​***
“The pleasure of hating, like a poison mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; … What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at?”-- William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating”  (1826)

______________
1. His first father-in-law had a connection to slavery, too. A plaque affixed to Harvard's Wadsworth House on April 6, 2016, reads: "Juba & Bilhah [no surnames recorded]/Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of President Edward Holyoke/(1737-1769)." https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/04/harvard-acknowledges-slave-connections  Retrieved May 4, 2022.
2. Robert H. Pfeiffer, “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 45, No. 4, Tercentenary Issue (April 1955), 82.
3. Ibid.

​
Samuel F. B. Morse, the painter-scientist, is the Morse family member best known to general readers. But even though he and his two brothers all attended P.A., it is their father, Jedidiah, who figures most prominently in the history of Andover, Andover Theological Seminary, and, as a result, American missionary work. Appropriately, Jedidiah was a geographer. He had the whole world in his head, if not in his hands, and he intended it to be conquered for Christ.

As the American Revolutionary War ended, Jedidiah was graduated from Yale with the class of 1783, after which he pursued theological studies with Jonathan Edwards Jr., not the famous theologian of the Great Awakening but his son. He also continued with his  “Day School" for "Young Misses" in New Haven, an enterprise he had started to finance his final year of college. [1] There, struggling to teach them geography without a textbook, he created his own in manuscript form, which the students copied out. Enlarged and printed in 1784, this document became his Geography Made Easy, acknowledged to be the first geography textbook printed in America. In 1789 he published a second book, American Geography. After Yale adopted it, his reputation was made. Years later, S.F.B. Morse, who friends and family called by his second name, Finley, was nicknamed “Geography” at Yale. All this is despite the fact that Jedidiah, the "Father of American Geography," essentially copied William Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar (1770) “almost in toto for his information on the non-American world” and "drew heavily” on John Pinkerton’s Modern Geography (1802) for later editions. [2]

In any case, the young Jedidiah had other ambitions. In 1786, he made first foray into political activism, debating David Daggett, a New Haven attorney, on the question of whether sumptuary laws ought to be revived in the United States. Morse, who still powered his hair and dressed in the old-fashioned way, in knee breeches, silver-buckled shoes, and \ "odd gloves with the fingers cut off" [3] -- argued the affirmative side, and his position was printed along with Daggett's in the New Haven Gazette, and the Connecti­cut Magazine. [4] Three years later, ​he realized another of his goals: he took a pulpit, in Charlestown (now part of Boston). The Revolution had left ministers in a precarious position, however. He would not enjoy the prestige of Andover's Reverend Phillips. Men of the cloth were no longer considered to be the sole arbitrators of morality; nor were they going to be supported by taxes any longer. In the name of individual liberty, all laws protective of religious institutions were being abolished, giving people the freedom to go to church or not. 

The dangers of religious pluralism were dramatized by one of our first American novelists, Charles Brockden Brown, whose first novel, Wieland (1798) is told by Clara Wieland, sister of Theodore Wieland, a deranged, doomed religious fanatic. In Clara's view, the roots of Theodore's problem lay with their father, who had devised his own religion and let his children do the same: “Our education had been modeled by no religious standard," she writes a friend in this epistolary fiction. "We were left to the guidance of our own understanding, and the casual impressions which society might make upon us… It must not be supposed that we were without religion, but with us it was the product of lively feelings, excited by reflection on our own happiness, and by the grandeur of external nature. We sought not a basis for our faith, in the weighing of proofs, and the dissection of creeds.” [5] The novel's other dramatized concern was America's abandonment of religion altogether, leading Brown  to cast Theodore Wieland as a domestic missionary, one who “had imbibed an opinion that it was his duty to disseminate the truths of the gospel among the unbelieving nation." [6] His efforts came to little: “His exhortations had sometimes a temporary power, but more frequently were repelled with insult and derision." He didn't blame himself, however. "The license of savage passion, and the artifices of his depraved countrymen, all opposed themselves to his progress.” [7]

___________________________
​​1. W.S., “The Family Papers of Jedidiah Morse,” The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 10, No. 3, January 1936, 52.
2. See James A. Field, "Near East Notes and Far East Queries," in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, edited by John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 29 .
3. Richard J. Moss, The Life of Jedidiah Morse: A Station of Peculiar Exposure (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995), ix.
4. Moss, 29. f.n. 32. New Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut Magazine, October 5, 12, 1786. The debate took place Sept. 13 , 1786.
5. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation; edited with an introduction by Fred Lewis Pattee (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), 22. The first edition was published in 1798 in New York by H. Caritat.
​6. Brown, 10.
7. Ibid., 12.

Samuel Phillips was busy with others activities besides his "Phillips School" in the years preceding and during the American Revolutionary War. In 1773, he was elected town clerk and treasurer of Andover, following the example of his father, who, having had that position for the previous decade plus, was soon to be elected town moderator. In addition, on July 19, 1775, joining Samuel Adams and John Hancock among others, Samuel Phillips was appointed Andover’s delegate to the Provincial Congress, in Watertown, for the period 1775-1776. Simultaneously, the man who Reverend William Bentley described as being “of a slender form” and “not engaging," dammed Andover’s Shawsheen River and started a gunpowder factory to supply George Washington’s troops. [1] The water of the river eventually powered other factories here, but the powder mill was Andover’s first real manufactory of any significance or size.

Some town histories make it seem as if Phillips, in establishing the gunpowder factory, was being altruistic. Powder was indeed in short supply, and a  “resolve” was passed “Encouraging Mr. Samuel Phillips Jr. to manufacturer gunpowder.” [2]
But it was certainly meant to be a money-making venture. As Reverend Bentley wrote: “He was a man exceedingly attached to interest so as not to leave a pure reputation near him" — “interest” presumably meaning "self-interest," that is, “profit.” [3]

His partner at the gunpowder factory was none other than Eliphalet Pearson. Often repeated in secondary sources about Pearson and the factory is a quote, attributed to Washington, that described him as "worthy not only to lead boys, but to command men.” The fact is, however, it's only hearsay, three times over: someone said that students said that George Washington was said to have made the statement. As for Phillips, despite Bentley's opinion, his mythologizing began while he was still young and continued apace. On June 7, 1878, in a story headlined “The Phillips Centennial,” in the Boston Post, Reverend Alexander McKenzie claimed that Samuel Phillips had worked in the gunpowder factory “from morning to night in his farmer’s frock with his neighbors.” This seems highly unlikely on two counts: first, he was nothing of a farmer, nor were other members of his family; and second, it's doubtful he actually got his hands dirty at the mill, and that was probably a good thing, for him. It proved to be a dangerous place. On June 2, 1778, just a few weeks after the opening of P.A., an explosion there killed three men and destroyed part of the building. [4]

Captain Nathaniel Lovejoy, whose progenitors came to Andover in 1650, wrote of the occasion in his diary: “… about 3 o’clock the Powder House took fire It was destroy’d together with the Magazine & Three Men Destroy’d in the Explotion.” It must have been a moment of reckoning in the town. Captain Lovejoy otherwise recorded little else in his diary but the weather, e.g., “June 1, rains considerable, Quite cold. June 2. Continues… June 3: “Outwinds & great rains.” [5] Work did not resume at the mill until some months later, and the diary of Philemon Chandler, a blacksmith who, like Captain Lovejoy, descended from early Andoverites, says the disaster caused “great consternation in the town.” [6] It is a sentiment repeated by Sarah Loring Bailey in her ​Historical Sketches of Andover (1880). [7] For while Washington needed the powder for the war, the citizens of the town did not need the factory as a place of their employment. According to a Chandler family  genealogy, one of the children of Philemon used to chant the doggerel: “Father can plough and hoe, Mother can card and spin;/ Hetty can knit like a witch/ And the money comes tumbling in.” [8] Maybe, too, townies weren't very good at running a mill and the explosion was evidence of it. What is more, the quality of the powder was poor. As a result, two Frenchmen were ordered to Andover to oversee the remaking of the operation. British prisoners of war were subsequently employed there, until the Massachusetts government contemplated removing them, possibly for use in a prisoner exchange. In a letter to a member of the Board of War, Samuel Phillips protested their removal, pointing out that “some have married, had children, taken the oath of allegiance, paid taxes, and become useful members of society.” [9] According to the Chandler genealogy, at least one British deserter, William Hill, settled in Andover, too, and his son Richard D. Hill married Deborah Chandler. [10]
 
_____________________________
1. William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Salem: Essex Institute, 1905-1914), February 12, 1802.
2. Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, XIX,203-204, quoted in Edward Moseley Harris, Andover in the Revolution: A New England Town in a Period of Crisis, 1763-1790 (Andover: Walsworth Publishing Company, 1976), 66.
3. Bentley, February 12, 1802.
4. Some sources say the explosion occurred on June 1, not June 2. In an email to the author on March 25, 2021, Kenna Therrien, formerly of the Andover Center for History and Culture, explained the discrepancy and made a case for June 2 being the correct date: “The Puritans (and then their descendants the Congregationalists) didn't use the pagan names for the days of the week. They started with First Day (i.e. Sunday), Second Day (Monday), and so on. Third Day would be Tuesday. June 1, 1778 was a Monday (thank you, Google!), but the June 2 date makes sense in this context, since it would be Tuesday, Third Day. So June 2 seems like the right date, without knowing for sure. The June 1 date we have turns out to be a circular reference: we cite [a book by Julie Mofford] as the source of the date, and Julie Mofford's book cites us. I can't tell where we got that date from, unless it's buried in Samuel Phillips's papers.
5. American Antiquarian Society, Nathaniel Lovejoy: Diaries, 1762-1809, Mss. Octavo Vols. L.
6. Quoted in Matthew E. Thomas, Historic Powder Houses of New England: Arsenals of American Independence (Charleston: The History Press, 2013). https://books.google.com/books?id=coWNCQAAQBAJ&pg=PT57&lpg=PT57&dq=andover+gunpowder+mill+explosion+1778&source=bl&ots=hi7jW1HBy1&sig=ACfU3U0h4fF-ar1ttoSVnRzXA1iqINaz-g&hl=en&sa=X&ved#v=onepage&q=andover%20gunpowder%20mill%20explosion%201778&f=false Retrieved April 26, 2022.
7. There was “considerable local feeling about the danger of the mill”: Sarah Loring Bailey, Historical Sketches of Andover (Comprising the Present Towns of Andover and North Andover) (Boston: Houghton, 1880), 347.
8.George Chandler, The Chandler Family. The Descendants of William and Annis Chandler Who Settled in Roxbury, Mass. 1637 (Worcester: Printed for the Family. Press of Charles Hamilton, 1883), 57.
9. Quoted in Bailey, 348, who cited “Pickering papers, Mass. Hist. Soc.” i.e., Col. Timothy Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Dec. 24, 1779, Vol. 17, 317.
10. Chandler, 1017.

On July 21, 1773, Eliphalet Pearson and Theodore Parsons, both natives of what is now Byfield, Massachusetts, engaged in a formal debate as part of their class's graduation exercises at Harvard. The topical subject chosen that year:  whether slavery was agreeable to natural law. Parsons, the son of a minister who owned three slaves [1], argued against the proposition. Pearson, whose family was slave-less, argued in favor, citing the idea that the “right of authority [to subordinate] others, independent of all voluntary contract on the part of the subordinate,” was “universally acknowledged.” [2] He also argued that African peoples' delivery into slavery here was “a blessing,” removing them "from the state of brutality, wretchedness, and misery, in which they [were] at home so deeply involved.” This was the case no matter how “faulty any individuals may have been in point of unnecessary cruelty.” [3]

The debate tradition had started with Harvard’s first commencement in 1642, but the Pearson-Parsons disputation was unusual for eliciting so much comment that its transcription was published, making it the college's first graduation debate recorded in full and verbatim. Debate teams today prepare both side of the argument, the better to answer their opponents' objections to their reasoning. Sides are chosen by a coin toss. What each debater personally thinks about an issue isn't revealed publicly, and the same can be said about what Pearson and Parsons thought. What is known is that after graduation, Parsons trained to be a physician [4], while Pearson got a job teaching at one of the first public grammar schools established in Andover. His Bromfield School undoubtedly conformed to the typical early New England schoolhouse type: a one-room shanty where the teacher would hear student readings from the Bible and recitations from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Breaking up the monotony, the local minister and his wife would sometimes visit. In Andover, that would have been Reverend Jonathan French and Mrs. French.

Did Pearson get his job in Andover the same way French may have gotten his? Pearson and Samuel Phillips (and Parsons, too) had become friends when they schooled together in Byfield, at the Dummer Charity School (later Governor Dummer Academy, now the Governor’s Academy), and the three also knew each other at Harvard, although Phillips was graduated two years earlier. In any case, while Pearson was teaching, he took up the study of theology and practice-preached. Years later, Pearson’s son Henry Bromfield Pearson wrote that his father had a “weakness of sight” and that is why he failed to be "settled" as a minister. [5] Phillips, meanwhile, was buying up Andover property piecemeal at one of the highest elevations in town. This would become the setting for his “Phillips School," later known as Phillips Academy. [6] On January 24, 1777, a deed states, he bought two tracts of land from Samuel Wardwell, whose namesake ancestor happened to be one of the three Andoverites hanged as witches in 1692. [7] There were many more acres to go, for Phillips, still in his mid-twenties, had a lofty vision for his school, whose purpose was set forth in its Constitution. It was designed "for the purpose of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences, wherein they are commonly taught; but more especially to learn them the Great End and Real Business of Living." [8] With the funding secured from his father and a deed of gift from his uncle John Phillips, the school opened for class on April 30, 1778.

Of the school’s first fifty-one students, males only, of course, thirteen came from Andover, the rest from the surrounding region. They were aged six (Josiah Quincy III of Boston) to twenty-nine (James Anderson of Londonderry, New Hampshire). [9] That youngest boy was the son of Josiah Quincy Jr. and Abigail Phillips, a member of Phillips's extended family. The child was sent away to school in the first place because his father had recently died, and he and his mother were living with his maternal grandfather, Abigail’s father, William Phillips, “a man of tyrannical & unamiable [sic] character, and it was desirable to remove an active & noisy boy from his household.” [10] Alas, Josiah was delivered from one tyranny into another, at P.A. “I was compelled to sit with four other boys on a hard bench four hours in the morning, & four in the afternoon & study lessons I could not understand,” he wrote. [11] Compounding the problem was the headmaster chosen by Phillips: Pearson.

P.A. students called him the “Elephant," inspired not only by his name but by his ponderous size and gait.  His personality gave students cause to ridicule him, too, and I can't help but wonder if its unpleasant features, rather than his poor eyesight, were what prevented a parish from taking him on as a minister until death did them part. As described by Quincy, he was a “distant & haughty” figure. “I have no recollection of his ever having shown any consideration for my childhood,” he wrote. “Fear was the only impression I received from his treatment of myself, or others.” [12] Compelled by Pearson to learn by heart Cheever’s Latin Accidence — a.k.a., An Elementary Grammar, for Beginners in the Study of the Latin Language, compiled by Ezekiel Cheever — Quincy opined that Pearson’s “stern and severe temper caused him to adapt this [English] system & to inflict suffering on his pupils.” [13] Pearson, for his part, told Quincy’s mother that her son didn’t have the intellectual capacity for Harvard, his aspiration, and advised her to take him out of P.A. and place him in a counting house. Quincy, however, did enter Harvard, at age thirteen, graduated with highest honors in 1790, and in 1829, became the college's fifteenth president.

____________
1.Peter Galison, “21 July 1773: Disputation, Poetry, Slavery,” Critical Inquiry 45, Winter 2019, 381; his source: “Massachusetts Slaves,” The Youth’s Companion,  December 19, 1907, 652.
2.Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson, A Forensic Dispute on the legality of enslaving the Africans, held at the public commencement in Cambridge, New-England, July 21st, 1773. / By two candidates for the bachelor's degree (Boston: Printed by John Boyle, for Thomas Leverett, near the post-office in Cornhill, MDCCLXXIII [1773]), 11-12.
3. Forensic Debate, 31.
4. In 1779, however,  while serving as a ship's surgeon on the privateer brig Bennington during the American Revolutionary War, Parsons disappeared at sea, aged twenty-eight. See  https://colonialnorthamerica.library.harvard.edu/spotlight/cna/catalog/990122641550203941 Retrieved January 20, 2021. And:https://archive.org/stream/storybyfieldane00ewelgoog/storybyfieldane00ewelgoog_djvu.txt Retrieved March 4, 2021.
5. On Pearson's failure to be settled (the old word for securing a ministerial position), see John Lewis Ewell, The Story of Byfield, a New England Parish (Boston: George E. Littlefield, 1904), 142-145.  For the comments of Pearson's son, see Phillips Academy Archives, Head of School Records, Eliphalet Pearson, Box 2, Folder 10, “Henry Bromfield Pearson, 1795-1867,” undated manuscript copy of  “Respecting Dr. Eliphalet Pearson.”
6. Phillips Academy is “commonly called simply Andover,” writes Paul V. Turner in his essay,“The Campus as Palimpsest,” in Academy Hill: The Andover Campus, 1778 to the Present (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art and New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 1. It’s certainly true in the wider world, but Andover townspeople don’t refer to it that way, preferring P.A., since the term "Andover" also designates the town itself as well as, sometimes, Andover High School. And P.A. is what I will call it here.
7. As quoted in an obituary for William Wardwell that was published in the New England Historic Genealogical Society's Memorial Biographies (1890-1897) (Boston: NEHGS, 1908), 9: 352: "His ancestry is given briefly as follows: Thomas Werdall came from Ipswich, England, and took oath as a Freeman in Boston, 1635.  Samuel Wardle, his son, was born in Boston, married Sarah Hawkes, and removed to Andover.  Solomon, his son (or grandson), had nine children."  It is know that Samuel Wardle (aka Wardwell) married Sarah Hawkes, it was this Samuel who was executed during the Salem Witchcraft hysteria in 1692.” Also:  “There were two Wardwells that immigrated to New England pre-1635.  One was Thomas Wardwell, the other was William Wardwell. Samuel the victim of the hysteria was the son of Thomas of Boston.” Andover’s That Samuel is also assumed to have been the inspiration for Matthew Maule, who is accused of being a witch in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.
8. See https://archive.org/stream/constitutionofph00philiala/constitutionofph00philiala_djvu.txt​ Retrieved April 26, 2022.
9. Biographical Catalogue of the Trustees, Teachers and Students of Phillips Academy, Andover, 1778-1830 (Andover: The Andover Press, 1903), 25-26. Completed and stereotyped in 1892, it was reissued with additions for the 150th anniversary of the school.
10. PAA, Eliphalet Pearson Papers, Box 2, Folder 15, labeled, “Bibliographical Sketch of E. Pearson by a Critic.” (Hereafter, Quincy.) The sketch is an unsigned, typewritten manuscript, undoubtedly written by Josiah Quincy III. Similar words and sentiments can be found in Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, by his son Edmund Quincy (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867), 26. “Mr. Phillips was advanced in life, of a stern and peremptory temperament. I was noisy, heedless, and troublesome, and it was for his interest as well as for mine that we shied be separated.”
11. Quincy, 25.
12. Ibid., 24.
13. Ibid.

It is difficult to keep all the Samuel Phillipses straight. The Reverend Samuel Phillips, who married Hannah White in 1711, had five children, including a son, born in 1715, who was named Samuel Phillips, too. That second Samuel Phillips went into business, probably the import-export trade, but there don’t seem to be easily searchable, retrievable records about him in the voluminous Phillips family papers at Phillips Academy, according to its archivist, Paige Roberts. The second Samuel Phillips, the businessman, also got involved in Andover’s business, as town moderator, and was a deacon at his father’s church. On Christmas Eve 1744, businessman Sam and his wife, Elizabeth Barnard, lost a child. Reverend Phillips noted in his diary that his grandson—a third Samuel Phillips—had lived thirteen months and eighteen days and that the cause of death was "quinsey" [sic]. [1] Elizabeth gave birth to yet another Samuel Phillips, the fourth one, on February 5, 1752. Of her seven children, he alone survived to adulthood. And since it was he who would become the principal founder of P.A., with assistance from his father and an uncle, his survival means that--like Reverend Phillips's failure to land the job in Norton--fate again played a role in Andover’s history.

Reverend Phillips preached from the South Church pulpit for sixty years, a not unusually lengthy portion of time, since ministers were understood to have been appointed for life. Histories of early Andover don't go much into what he said all those years in his sermons, although publication occasionally followed, as in Seasonable Advice to a Neighbour, Given by Way of A familiar Dialogue; or In Answer to various Questions, relative to Five important Points in Divinity. Done with a View to promote practical Godliness, which was printed and sold by S. Kneeland of  Boston in 1761. But those histories often do mention that each time he and his wife walked from the parsonage to the church, they were accompanied by their two African American “servants," one of them, a man, close by the side of the Reverend, the other, a woman, assisting Mrs. Phillips. It was a message that spoke more loudly than words, conveying the relative stature of each member of the foursome and their corresponding place in the community.

Even before they were freed, writes Edward L. Bell, an historic preservation officer at the Massachusetts Historical Commission, enslaved people in New England "were typically referred to with the seemingly gentler-sounding euphemism of ‘servant’ that masked hard-working lives marked by surveillance, lack of control, segregation, confinement, objectification, base brutality, and familiar isolation.” [2] However, to judge by a two-item lot sold at an auction of Printed and Manuscript African Americana at Swann Galleries in New York in 2020, neither "slave" nor "servant" was necessarily used when referring to people of color in Andover, their status understood. The first item the lot was a bill of sale showing that John Foster (b. 1724) of Andover sold to his son Solomon Foster (b. 1743) of Littleton, Massachusetts, “a negro woman named Elizabeth of about twenty-eight years of age” on April 25, 1772. [3] The price was “ten Pounds.” The second item, another bill of sale dated June 15, 1778,  indicates strongly that Solomon Foster must have lost the same woman at some point and was now reacquiring her from Peter Bulkley of Littleton. Bulkley, the bill says, was selling to him “a negro woman named Elizabeth” along with “the last child the sd [sic] Elizabeth had.” Given the additional enslaved person, the price was now “Thirty pounds.” [4] As for why enslaved people, once freed by Massachusetts law in 1783, stayed on as “servants" (who invariably earned "slave" wages), they usually had no place else to go.

The image of the enslaved couple accompanying the Phillipses to church was first mentioned in print by Reverend John L. Taylor in his memoir of Judge Phillips, published in 1856, in which he was relying on the memory of an eye witness, not his own recollection. (Taylor was born in 1811, one hundred years after the Reverend took the job in Andover.) [5] In 1959, Claude M. Fuess, the P.A. headmaster, repeated the detail in Andover: Symbol of New England. Without crediting the Taylor memoir and as if he had himself witnessed the foursome, Fuess wrote, “It was a slow and stately procession which the congregation rose to greet as it entered the church door.” [6] In his book, Persistence of Memories of Slavery and Emancipation in Historical Andover, Bell names the couple, Salem and Rama, and notes that Rama was also variously known as Rema, Remy, and Rhena. In 1760 Reverend Phillips produced “A Form, For a Negroe-Marriage” for Salem and Rama. [7] A marriage license in essence, it wasn't just a record of the legality and permanence of their relationship. Bell stresses that the Form “repeatedly reminded them of their roles and duties as slaves to him and Mrs. Phillips,” which took precedence [over] their duties to each other.” [8]

Reverend Phillips died in 1771. The following year, a Reverend Jonathan French was installed as the new pastor of South Church. French and the fourth Samuel Phillips (that is, the future Judge Phillips, who was the Reverend Phillips's grandson) had been at Harvard together (class of 1771). So fate, in the form of a personal connection, probably had a hand in a career move in Andover once again. After the Reverend Phillips's death, Salem and Rama served Reverend French, as did two of their four sons, Cyrus and Titus. But how that came to be, says Bell, is "uncertain," meaning he doesn’t know whether they were given to Reverend French by Reverend Phillips's bequest or by the church, because Bell couldn’t discover who had paid for them in the first place. [9] They may well have been church "property." Or not. Charlotte Lyon, South Church's historian, has written: "When [Reverend Phillips] died in 1771, I think Mrs. Phillips gave the slaves, Salem and Remy, to Rev. Jonathan French at the parsonage." [10] In other words, Lyon thinks that Salem and Rama were Mrs. Phillips's to give.

​Those who condoned or tolerated slavery in the eighteenth century are often forgiven with the same phrase in which racists of more recent vintage are likewise absolved. That is, they were "of their time." And yet throughout history there have been people who have managed not to be of their time. In 1770, three years before the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley published "An Elegiac Poem of the Death of that Celebrated Diving, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, George Whitefield." The British itinerant evangelist had died one year earlier than Reverend Phillips, having fallen ill in Newburyport, where he is buried. The poem was published as a broadside and a pamphlet in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and subsequently published with Ebenezer Pemberton’s funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, bringing Wheatley international acclaim even before the book was issued. The poem urges preachers to include "Africans" in their mission and to tell them: "If you will chuse to walk in grace's road,/You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to GOD. [11] Undoubtedly, Reverend Phillips as well as Reverend French were made aware of it. Of course, in the 1770s, Wheatley's literary achievements could take her only so far. Her byline on the Whitefield poem reads not "Phillis Wheatley," but "PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, Belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston" -- he who had named her after the slave ship ​Phillis that had brought her here!  What is more distressing, the most famous lines of Wheatley's best known poem, "On Being Brought From Africa to America," express gratitude that she was enslaved in the first place: " ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:/ Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.” It is the exact argument that anti-abolitionists would use for their own justification of slavery. [12]
​______________________
1. Samuel Phillips Diary, in An Astronomical Diary, or, An Almanack 1744 by Nathaniel Ames. Collection of American Antiquarian Society. Note: Quinsy, as it is correctly spelled, is an old term for a peritonsillar abscess.
2. Edward L. Bell, Persistence of Memories of Slavery and Emancipation in Historical Andover (Boston, Shawsheen Press: 2021), 39.
3. Charlotte Helen Abbott, "Early Records of the Foster Family," https://mhl.org/sites/default/files/files/Abbott/Foster%20Family.pdf Retrieved April 23, 2022.
4. Swann Galleries, Lot #7, March 26 (May 7), 2020. The catalog is dated earlier, but due to the pandemic, the sale was delayed. Dates of birth of the Fosters are from https://mhl.org/sites/default/files/files/Abbott/Foster%20Family.pdf  Retrieved April 23, 2022.
5. John L. Taylor, A Memoir of His Honor Samuel Phillips (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1856), 9.
6. Claude M. Fuess, Andover: Symbol of New England, The Evolution of a Town (Andover: The Andover Historical Society and the North Andover Historical Society, 1959), 156.Fuess, Symbol, 156-157. The same image is included by Richard D. Shiels in “The Scope of the Second Great Awakening in Andover, Massachusetts, as a Case Study,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 2. Religion in the Early Republic (Summer 1985): 226.
7. Bell, 121.
8. Ibid. 
9. Ibid., 122.
10. Charlotte Lyon, “South Church: Founding History and Abolitionism: An Essay Regarding New Facts,” March 2011, unpublished, 1.
11. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wheatley/whitefield/whitefield.html  Retrieved April 24, 2022.
12. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america  Retrieved April 25, 2022.

 “New England resembled Scotland . . . the hard soil, the ice, the granite and the Calvinism.”
—Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (1936)

The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, a British missionary organization, was founded in 1709 to establish schools and promote the faith in "uncivilized" parts of the Scottish Highlands and among the indigenous peoples of America. In addition to sending their own here, the organization hired missionaries in the colonies, including one David Brainerd (1718-1747) of Haddam, Connecticut, after he was expelled from Yale in his third year for sympathizing with the George Whitefield revival and for having been overheard remarking that a certain college tutor, a Mr. Whittelsey, had "no more grace than this chair.” [1]  In December 1742, he began working on Long Island. He later worked in  Pennsylvania and along the Massachusetts-New York border. But his time among the New Jersey Delawares was, by his own account, his most successful.

His ministry lasted only five years, however. At age twenty-nine, he died of tuberculosis in Jonathan Edwards’s home, in Northampton. Two years later, Edwards published An Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd, a memoir of a sort, based on Brainerd’s private diary (as opposed to his public journal), but heavily annotated and edited, and in the end, mostly the work of Edwards, whose byline it bore. Today it is the most frequently reprinted of Edwards's books, but the work didn't circulate widely until the early nineteenth century, when it became recommended reading at the Andover Theological Seminary. From then on, it became a major influence on the domestic and foreign missionary movements, and must have given comfort to seminarians who were feeling doubtful about their suitability for life out in the field. “My spiritual conflicts to-day were unspeakably dreadful,” Brainard wrote on January 14, 1743, “heavier than the mountains and overflowing floods.” On January 23, he confessed: “I saw I was not worthy of a place among the Indians…” The book must also have inspired those who were suffering physically, since he had probably contracted tuberculosis years before his death and yet soldiered on, riding miles on horseback and often sleeping outside.

In 1817, within the first decade of the Andover Theological Seminary's existence, the A.B.C.F.M. established a mission on the southern border of Tennessee, close to the Georgia line, near present-day Chattanooga. It was designed to cater to Cherokees, and Cyrus Kingsbury (A.T.S., class of 1815) was put in charge of it. The board defined as it goal: making the Cherokees "English in their language, civilized in their habits, and Christian in their religion." [2] They named it Brainerd. The founding of Brainerd had been preceded by a scouting trip undertaken by  John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel J. Mills (A.T.S., class of 1812) in parts of the midwest, south, and southwest. When the pair returned, they published a fifty-page pamphlet, A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals. “It would be highly desirable," they wrote,"... 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.” [3] Missionaries from other denominations -- Methodists, Baptists, New Lights, Halcyons, and Catholics -- were likewise deplored, as were their proselytizing methods.  Of some Ohio counties, where earthquakes had been felt, they acknowledged that a "wild enthusiasm" had "raged." [4] Eye witnesses, however, gave them "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.” Granted, some real conversions had taken place, but “many, who joined their societies during the earthquakes, have already left them.” [5]

Cyrus Kingbury’s mission to the Cherokees included the founding of a  school where children were to be taught academic subjects as well as skills common to New England. For example, the board promised that as soon as a "female teacher [had] been engaged, capable of teaching [girls] to spin, weave, and sew," he would be sent "a loom and a half a dozen spinning wheels.” [6] It was 130 years later when Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) published The Times of Melville and Whitman, but he read it right from that distance:. “The South became, so to speak, officially Calvinist just at the moment when New England ceased to be.” [7]  Noting the South's "rising puritanism," he declared, “The New England schoolmistress was abroad in the land…” [8]

In New England: Indian Summer: 1865-1915, Brooks wrote directly of Andover: "One had to look far afield… for the more essential Yankee traits, for the roots and springs and sources of New England," but "one found them at Andover, where the old religion flourished as nowhere else. Then, in times past, had gone forth the missionaries who made New England a power all over the world, the five apostles of 1812 who planned the Christianization of Asia and sowed the seeds of a modern China and Turkey; the founders of schools in the seven cities addressed in the Book of Revelations, in Antioch, Tarsus, Smyrna and Ur of the Chaldees, the colporteurs who had scattered the Bible up and down the Nile, the scholars who had set up printing-presses — the first in Bulgaria, the first on the island of Malta, — and translated the scriptures into Tamil, into Mandarin, Burmese, Armenian, Turkish and the tongues of the Marshall and Gilbert islands. If Andover was not the mother of all these feats of the old religion, the theological seminary … symbolized the impulse that lay behind them, the last great wave of the Puritan faith, its final crusade to redeem the world.” [9] Meanwhile, Andover's "little boys played 'preacher'" [10] in the same spirit in which boys elsewhere played at being cops, robbers, cowboys, and "Indians."

​_____________________
1.  Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indians, (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1853), 19, 78.
2. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism," in  The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, edited by John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 348.
3. Quoted in Thomas C. Richards, Samuel J. Mills: Missionary Pathfinder, Pioneer and Promoter (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1906), 122.
3. John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel J. Mills, A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals (Hartford: Peter B. Gleason & Co., 1814), 16.
4. Ibid., 17.
5. History of the American Missions to the Heathen, from their Commencement to the Present Time (Worcester: Spooner & Howland, 1840), 62.
7. Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (new York: E.P. Dutton, 1947), 49.
8. Ibid., 58, 82.
9. Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer 1865-1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940), 79-80.
10. Ibid., 80.