In 1816, Nathaniel Willis (1780–1870) established a weekly newspaper, The Boston Recorder, whose purpose was "to diffuse Christianity and civilization throughout the world” and “to extend all the blessings of civilization and Christianity to every human creature.” It was published every Wednesday afternoon. The printing took place at No. 76 State-Street (" entrance through Mr. H. Messinger's Hat-Store or in the rear of the building from Wilson's Lane”). A small operation, in other words, but one with big aspirations. Willis claimed it was the first religious newspaper in the world.

In Vol. 1, No. 1, published on January 3, 1816, the paper's editor, D.J. Burr, announced that one of the paper's specific missions was to sell tracts,  including “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” Dr. Watts’ Advice to Young Men,”  and “Intemperance, Its Gradual and Insidious Progress.” Shortly, there were ads for the New England Tract Society: “Ten Pages for One Cent, or a cheap way of doing good.”  As one ad goes: “Thousands, and hundreds of thousands of these silent preachers might be sent, at a small expense, to the poor and destitute, with the best prospect of promoting their good.”

On October 22, 1816, a Recorder news story boasted that a  leader of the Presbyterian church at Pine Ridge, Mississippi Territory, had “performed a missionary tour through the western and southern states and territories” distributing “near fifteen thousand tracts” from the New England Tract Society. The piece quoted someone who called them “winged messengers of salvation.” On a second tour,  the same churchman distributed 8,000 more. In the same issue, another piece was titled: “Deplorable Superstition among the Catholics.”​ For of course the Catholics were the Presbyterians' rivals. Christianity was one thing, Catholicity, complete with its "idols" was another.

Willis's son, Nathanial Parker Willis (1806-1867), known as N.P., was born in Portland, Maine, where Willis senior had tried and failed to establish a religious newspaper before successfully launching The Recorder. N.P. attended P.A., arriving in Andover at age fifteen in 1821 and graduating with the class of 1823. According to Henry A. Beers's 1885 biography, American Man of Letters: Nathaniel Parker Willis: “Of the two great fitting-schools founded by Samuel and John Phillips respectively at Andover and at Exeter, [P.A.] remained an insoluble lump of Calvinism, a wedge of defiant Orthodoxy.” [1] Beers recounts that as a student N.P. dated young woman named Polly D. Low, who was about eighteen, i.e., his senior by three years, and a textile-factory worker. They kept company on Sunday, her one day off, but when N.P. went away for four weeks, he returned to find she had become engaged to a butcher’s son, and he was warned to stay away from the factory.

In his last year in Andover, N.P. joined the church, but biographer Beers expresses skepticism about the genuineness of the young man's religiosity: “Any one who has witnessed one of those spiritual epidemics, called ‘revivals,’ in some school or college needs no description of the kind of pressure brought to bear on the thoughtless but easily excited young consciences there assembled." [2] It might be set in motion “by the death of a fellow student, by a general sickness, or the depression of gloomy weather in winter term. . . the movement at Andover was taken in hand by the ‘Seminarians’ . . . the unregenerate are visited in their rooms by classmates who are already church members, and are prayed with and urged to attend the meetings and summit themselves to the outpourings of the Spirit. Under this kind of stimulus there follows a great awakening. . . Momentous choices are made in an instant and under the stress of contagious emotions.” [3] In Beers's account, N.P. wrote to his father on January 12, 1823, that after a prayer meeting for the unconverted, he went into “Cutler’s room, and Allen and I stayed there till almost eleven o’clock. There were several of the Seminarians there, and we prayed and sung, prayed and sung, till it seemed a little heaven on earth.” [4] The son wrote to his father again three days later to say he had gone to meeting, where “[s]obbing and weeping was heard all round the room." [5]

N.P. went to Yale after Andover. (Of the choice, Beers wrote that Willis senior “would almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a hot-bed of Unitarianism as [Harvard].” [6]) In the end, however, N.P. lost the fervor of his faith in New Haven. In Beers's words: “The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of undergraduate life.” [7] Of that loss, Willis wrote to his parents: “My own experience makes me very much alive to the frequent fallacy of the hopes which are experienced in revivals.” [8]

All of which brings up these questions in my mind: In any age, why do some people convert and others not? What is the motivation of those who do convert? And how often does the conversion experience have staying power? That is, how often does it change one for life? Is anyone keeping statistics on this sort of thing?

Of N.P.'s Andover class of forty-four, seventeen went on to become clergy. [9] N.P. himself became a poet and editor, who worked with Poe and others whose names are better known than his today. In 1844, the elder Willis sold​ The Recorder to  a Reverend Martin Moore. In 1885, Beers wrote, "“It still lives as the ‘Congregationalist and Boston Recorder.’” [10]

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1. Henry A. Beers, American Men of Letters. Nathaniel Parker Willis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 18.
2. Beers, 22-23.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 27.
5. Ibid., 28.
6. Ibid., 17.
7. Ibid., 58.
8. Ibid., 59.
9. 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), 184.
10. Beers, 9.

 We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. --The True Believer

I've been thinking about John Allen Chau, the twenty-seven-year-old American missionary who was killed when he tried to approach the residents of India's North Sentinel Island in 2018. I have found easy parallels between his ideas, ideals, and actions, and those of the missionaries who were trained at the seminary in Andover two hundred years earlier. In 1818, the  ABCFM published The Conversion of the World. Or, the Claims of Six Hundred Millions and the Ability and Duty of the Churches Respecting Them by two members of the class of 1812, Gordon Hall and Samuel Newell. The book was printed in Andover by Flagg and Gould, widely distributed in America and England, and reprinted many times. The pair had considered publishing it anonymously. In the end, they identified themselves so that the book would be “received with a livelier interest, and to produce a greater and more extended effect.” [1] They were in essence missionary celebrities, because they were among America's first foreign missionaries ever. Newell was especially renowned, because his wife, Harriet Newell, had died at age nineteen within months of her arrival. The mother of a baby who died at five days, she was celebrated as the first American missionary "martyr." In the Christian press the same word has, likewise, been used to describe Chau. Of course, most segments of the secular press don't hesitate to use the word "fool."

Harriet Newell's posthumous celebrity was spurred by the publication of her memoir by Flagg and Gould in 1814. Historian Mary Kupiec Cayton, in “Canonizing Harriet Newell: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement in New England, 1800-1840,” found that between 1814 and 1840, the book  was reprinted in at least twelve cities and in fifty editions. [2] She also discovered that slews of female babies  were named "Harriet Newell" starting directly after their namesake became an inspiring personage in Christian households. [3]

Not that Harriet had converted a single "heathen" soul. Nor had she actually written her memoir herself. Andover's Reverend Leonard Woods introduced, compiled, and was ultimately, even officially, its author -- he, who gave one of his own daughters "Harriette Newell" when she was born in 1815. Cayton found further that Harriet had herself read inspiring books about missionaries, including a newly reprinted American volume by Melvill Horne -- perhaps the very one printed by Galen Ware in Andover in 1810. Harriet had grown up in nearby Haverhill and gone to Bradford Academy, a well-known evangelical Christian school at the time. In fact, it was the place where the decision to found the ABCFM was made. But there really was no comparison between the effectiveness of Horne's book and Harriet's. As Cayton points out, “[Stories of dead or dying] adolescent girls in particular spoke to the audience of young women who comprised the majority of the newly converted.” [4]

Regarding Harriet's death and subsequent memoir, Woods wrote: “‘The Life of Mrs. Newell,’ by a widely extended influence, has done more good than she would probably have effected in a long life of usefulness.” [5] Better dead and read, as it were? Witness that the ABCFM used her story for decades to publicize the efforts of foreign missions -- and to fundraise without compunction. Others exploited her memory, too. Just one example: a print of her Haverhill birthplace was printed and sold by A.B. Jacques of Boston in 1853, forty-one years after her death in Port Louis on the island of what was then known as British Mauritius.

​____________
1. Gordon Hall and Samuel Newell,  The Conversion of the World. Or, the Claims of Six Hundred Millions and the Ability and Duty of the Churches Respecting Them(Andover, Printed for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by Flagg & Gould, 1818), 3. 
2. Mary Kupiec Cayton, “Canonizing Harriet Newell: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement in New England, 1800-1840,” in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960, edited by Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. Not counting Harriet N.s or simply the increase in Harriets, Cayton found, the given name Harriet Newell does not appear in genealogies prior to 1814 but shows up suddenly in 1814 and continues to be a notable choice for daughters for some time thereafter.
4. Ibid., 78.
5. Harriette Newell Woods Baker, Reminiscences and Records of My Father, Rev. Leonard Woods, D.D., of Andover (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, Printers, 1887), 50. She wrote under her own name; she also went by the pen names Mrs. Madeline Leslie and Aunt Hattie. Her most famous book was Mrs. Leslie's Tim, the Scissors Grinder: Or Loving Christ And Serving Him (1861), which first appeared as a serial in the Boston Recorder, subsequently sold half a million copies, and was translated into several languages. As Mrs. Leslie, she published about two hundred moral and religious tales in all.

Ever since I started this project, I have been aware that missionaries were collectors of the very objects they professed to scorn: "heathen" idols. In Andover such objects were put on display at local fundraising events for the missions, especially events designed to attract children. I didn't quite understand the full reason why until I read Stephen Hooper's account of comparable objects sent home by British missionaries, Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860, the exhibition catalogue for the eponymous show on view at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia in 2006. I thought the idols were merely meant to be curiosities, like objects in cabinets of curiosity, but they were much more than that to the missionaries and to the people back home whose dollars supported the missionaries' ventures.

“Evidence of the triumphs of Christianity through mission work, and of the need for funds to sustain it, was embodied in captured idols which were sent back to Europe for display in mission museums and in fund-raising exhibitions," writes Hooper, director of the University of East Anglia's research unit. [1] “Those religious objects which were not destroyed by zealous converts under the direction of the missionaries were collected as trophies for despatch to missionary museums in Europe. Here they functioned as performance indicators, to use the modern idiom, and as vehicles for fundraising campaigns in which the public was presented with the grotesque horrors of idolatry and encouraged to support continuing mission work." [2]

Besides religious objects, missionaries collected everyday objects, many of which are beautiful to behold, including carved bowls, drums, whisk handles fan handles, necklaces, fish hooks, and head rests. The missionaries didn't collect them because of the objects' aesthetics, however. As Hooper writes of material collected in Polynesia: "Everyday items deemed not explicitly religious, were also collected to show the capacity of Polynesians for useful arts, and therefore their ability to achieve salvation. It was important for missionaries to stress that idolaters were not beyond redemption, and therefore worthy of expenditures of energy and funds.” [3]

The late Jeffrey Cox, a historian of Britain and religion who taught at the University of Iowa, wrote in one of his books that "for most British children in the nineteenth century, the single largest source of information about what foreign peoples were like came from the foreign missionary societies of their respective denominations.'" [4] I would venture that the same went for many American children of the period, certainly ones in Andover.

The London Missionary Society Museum was established 1814; it opened the following year. ​By the early twentieth century, when the museum had outlived its effectiveness as a fundraising tool, it closed, and the collections were dispersed to other institutions, including the British Museum. Similar collections found their way into American museums. “The natural-history cabinets of most of the New England colleges owed the diversity of their specimens to devoted missionary sons around the globe, who sent back everything from volcanic rocks in Hawaii to the Assyrian slabs and tablets reposing in the Nineveh Gallery at Amherst,”  Clifton Jackson Phillips wrote in Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860.  [5] 

The Andover seminary's collections were dispersed long ago, with much of the material eventually going to the Peabody Essex Museum. Those objects are rarely exhibited, but when they are the signage says "Andover Newtown Theological School," reflecting the seminary's early twentieth-century merger with the Newton Theological Institution of Newton Centre, Massachusetts. [6] ​The colossal war god on permanent display in the PEM's newest wing entered its collection in 1846 from a source no longer known, but it may well have been a missionary. The similar one at the British Museum was donated by W. Howard in 1839, according to the museum's website. No information is given about who W. Howard was. The website does say that the carved-breadfruit figure, which, like PEM's, is over six feet tall, may have been brought to England by King Litholiho (Kamehameha II) in 1824, as a gift to King George IV. [7] Chris Wingfield, a Hooper colleague, has written of an unintended consequence of the missionary collections. It is that they are "extremely significant as a unique and early source of information" about existing religions in the various parts of the world where the missionaries attempted to proselytize." [8]  True. But at what cost?

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1. Stephen Hooper, Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860 (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), 65.
2. Ibid., 27.
3. Ibid.
​4.  Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 97. Quoted in Hooper, 125.
5. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University, East Asian Research Center, 1969), 302. Phillips has an interesting background: According to the DePauw Libraries, where his papers are archives: "His interest in Asia while he was stationed in Japan with the Occupation Forces following World War II and after his discharge when he stayed on in a civilian education job with the Department of Defense. Phillips entered Hiram College in 1938 working as a preacher at a nearby church to pay his way. After graduation in 1941 and before entering the service, Phillips received a B.Th. degree from the Starr King School of Theology in 1944. He returned to the United States in 1949 and entered Harvard University where he received an M.A. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1954." https://depauw.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/472 Retrieved June 8, 2022.
6. In July of 2015, the Andover Newton Theological School announced that it would sell its campus and become part of Yale Divinity School, a process it completed two years later.
7. https://smarthistory.org/temple-figure-of-war-god-ku-kaili-moku/   Retrieved June 7, 2022. It's unclear to me why the  Peabody Essex Museum decided to cover its god's genitals with a loin cloth. As Hooper comments in his catalogue of the 2006 exhibition, in which the British Museum's example was shown: "The genitals are disproportionately small, yet the posture is vigorous."
8. Chris Wingfield, “‘Scarcely more than a Christian trophy case’? The Global Collections of the London Missionary Society Museum (1814–1910),  Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 29 no. 1 (2017): 109.

When there are thousands of heathen on our borders, millions in America, and hundreds of millions in other parts of the world, whose souls are as precious, and who need salvation as much as our friends and acquaintances, it is not easy for a minister to decide where he must labor, in order to do the most good. He must therefore seek for divine direction.”
 -- Justin Edwards to Daniel Poor,  June 29, 1812.

In 1812, after the death of Reverend Jonathan French, twenty-five-year-old Justin Edwards (1787-1853), began his tenure as the third pastor of Andover's South Church. Born in Westhampton, Massachusetts, the Williams College graduate and member of the seminary's class of 1811 had a preaching style described as “nakedly direct." His language, turns of expression, and illustrations" were characterized as "homely."  “His gestures were few, and not easy." But his "earnestness and honesty" was said to have kept his audience at attention. [1]

Soon after his settlement, he began to meet weekly on Monday evenings with Mark Newman, Ebenezer Porter, Leonard Woods, and Moses Stuart, and several others “for devising plans for doing good and advancing the interests of the Redeemer’s kingdom, at home and abroad, in every practicable way.”  [2] In 1817, he became corresponding secretary of the tract society, in which each of these men were also involved. Edwards wouldn't make his mark encouraging men to become missionaries,  however; he grew to have another obsession, one that was, perhaps, a better match for his style of speaking and being, and for his local audience: intemperance.


__________________
1. ​South Church Articles of Faith and Form of Covenant (Andover: Warren F. Draper, 1859), 112.
2. William A. Hallock, “Light and Love” A Sketch of The Life and Labors of the Rev. Justin Edwards, D.D. The Evangelical Pastor; the advocate of Temperance, The Sabbath, and The Bible (New York and Boston: American Tract Society, 1855) 43. A  note on the author: Hallock was a seminary graduate (class of 1822). He was also was an agent of the New England Tract Society, 1822-25, and corresponding secretary of the American Tract Society, 1825-70.

​Gordon Hall (1784-1826), whose name is one of the seven on the Missionary Bowlder plaque, experienced the Second Great Awakening in his early twenties while he was still living in his hometown of Tolland, Massachusetts. Many of his friends, likewise, “became pious” towards the end of 1806.* In the summer of 1810, Hall, by then a Williams College graduate who was studying at the seminary in Andover, had already decided he wanted to be a missionary and knew the place he wanted to go: India. “Blessed be God there are some parents, who rejoice that they have children willing to forsake them and their country for Christ,” he declared in a letter to a friend. Alas, his parents were not among the rejoicers. (Nor had he been a child for quite some time when he wrote that.) Nonetheless, on February 6, 1812, Hall was one of five men (each commemorated on the plaque) who were ordained at the Tabernacle Church of Salem, in anticipation of their becoming the first missionaries sent abroad by the A.B.C.F.M.

On February 16, 1812, Hall delivered a sermon, "The Duty of the American Churches in Respect to Foreign Missions," in Philadelphia, twice, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, in which he addressed the usual objections, especially the argument that missionaries would be better off going west rather than east, to attend to the Indians and wayward settlers. Three days later, he and others set sail. “Thus was established the first mission of the American Board,” he wrote after arriving in Bombay in December. Others, including British missionaries, had failed before him. “Can it then be doubted," he asked rhetorically, "that the mission at Bombay, though embarrassed in its first establishment. . . and greatly afflicted since, by the illness, removal and death, of an unusual number of missionaries, will at length prove, not only the means of blessing, to the American churches and to their daughters in other lands, but according to its original design, make Bombay the metropolis of a pure Christianity in Western India.” Years later, Hall himself would die of cholera. But for the time being his faith and his youthful inexperience gave him confidence. In a letter to James Richards,  who was still studying at the seminary, he wrote: “The embarrassments we experience, will, in all probability, soon be removed. I think you may safely tell all the missionary brethren, that there is no adequate cause for their relinquishing their purpose.” To another seminarian Hall wrote: “While here, we have been diligent in acquiring the language of the heathen," that is, Mahratta.

By 1815, Hall had managed to translate into that language most of the gospel of Matthew, a harmony of the gospels, and prepared a small tract. He was also preaching in Mahratta. In one day, he recounted, he preached in seven places to a total of about two hundred people. He often got noisy pushback and mockery. He was undeterred: "It is one part of a missionary’s trials, rightly to bear the impertinence, contradictions, insolence and reproaches of men, who are sunk to the lowest degradation, both mental and moral.”

He did have complaints, though: about the people back home. To Samuel J. Mills, another of the men in the initial group of seven who was, like Richards, still stateside, he lamented that people thought there were plenty of missionaries and Bibles in India. To the Society of Inquiry, an organization founded at the seminary for would-be missionaries, he wrote that Christians must be convinced it is “their duty to evangelize the whole world” because Christ commanded it. More important, “Christians must be convinced of the means to be employed for evangelizing the world,"  by sending men, lots of them. “A small pamphlet on the subject should be prepared," he urged. It should be "printed in great numbers," distributed for free, and in that way "put into the hands of every minister of every persuasion.” Nor should parents stand in their sons' way. “Parents must devote their sons to the work," even if it likely meant they would never see them again.
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* Memoir of Rev. Gordon Hall (Andover: Flagg, Gould and Newman, 1834; New York: J. Leavitt, 1834), 16. All subsequent quotes are from this posthumous source. I do, however, often wonder about the veracity of missionary memoirs. How heavily were they edited? How close to the truth are we getting when we read these accounts? They are reportedly derived from correspondence and journals. But those letters were meant to be read by a wide circle of concerned people back home; they were not intimate. Journals of that period, which typically charted one's spiritual progress, were also meant to be communally read; they were not the private, individualistic writings that personal diaries later came to be. (Interestingly, today's bloggers have returned to the earlier traditional of public diary keeping. Hall's could qualify as one.) A comparison of original materials with published accounts would answer these questions, but the manuscripts are not easily found in archives or anywhere else. Still, yes, I have relied on a missionary memoir for this post, because it is what people would have read and understood as fact, whether it was or not, and that would have had an effect on their own, real-world actions.

On October, 14, 1910, the Andover Townsman reported that some two thousand people had attended the dedication of the so-called Missionary Bowlder at P.A.:  “Strangers from all parts of the state and country, fifteen hundred strong, arrived from Boston shortly before ten o’clock, and together with a goodly number of townspeople witnessed the dedication of the  memorial tablet and bowlder at Rabbit Rock.” Weighing several tons, the boulder had been moved to the campus from the town of Andover’s Carmel Woods and imbedded with a bronze tablet memorializing the five Andover seminarians — Adoniram Judson, Samuel Nott, Samuel J. Mills, Samuel Newell, Gordon Hall, James Richards, and Luther Rice — “whose consecrated purpose to carry the Gospel to the heathen world led to the formation of the first American Society for Foreign Missions,” that is, the A.B.C.F.M. The organization that sent the first Americans abroad as missionaries had been founded in 1810.

The boulder monument and its dedication during the A.B.C.F.M.'s centenary year was the idea of Reverend Charles C. Carpenter (1836-1918). A Massachusetts native and missionary himself, in Labrador, Canada, from 1858 through 1865, after which he joined the Union Army, Carpenter worked in Tennessee after the war, then returned to New England to study at the seminary (class of 1875), be ordained, and serve as a minister in Peabody, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. At the time of the dedication, he had retired from the pulpit and was working as editor of the Andover paper that published the unsigned piece about it.

Reverend Carpenter is said to have found the boulder himself, but it took eight men and eight horses to move it to the spot where it remains in place to this day. I do wonder if current P.A. students read the plaque, notice the word "heathen," and if they do, what they think about it.

Lucy "Patty" Pierce Merwin Porter (1778-1841) was a minister's daughter and then a minister's wife. In fact, her husband-to-be, Ebenezer Porter, after graduating from Dartmouth in 1792,  took the place of her father, Reverend Noah Merwin, at the pulpit in Washington, Connecticut. In 1804, the itinerant artist Ralph Earl (1785-1838) painted both Reverend Porter's portrait and hers. Mrs. Porter, with her squiggles of curly bangs, looks pleasant enough in Earl's rendering, but Sarah Stuart Robbins, writing about her in Old Andover Days, recalled her as a  grim personage.

“Just where the dividing line may safely be drawn between common sense and religious fervor it would be difficult to say," Robbins wrote. "That the two things are often unwisely separated, no one who knew Mrs. Porter can ever doubt. Living entirely sequestered from society, occupying the great house alone with her husband and one servant, until, late in life, she brought into it two adopted children, shutting out from it sun and air and even God’s beautiful light, she made it a place in which the ‘sorrowful spirit’ brooded over everything.” [1]

The "servant" that Robbins mentioned was Almira Quacumbush.  ​According to her headstone -- she is buried right beside Reverend Porter's in the P.A. cemetery -- she had worked for the Porters as "a faithful domestic“ for thirty years by the time of her death on May 3, 1834. Well known to the P.A. community, she is described as “black but comely” in Sarah Loring Bailey's history of Andover. [2] So is Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The phrase is of course from the Bible. [3]

On Friday evenings, Robbins attended the weekly “Jews’ Meeting” at the Porters' house, where she and the other attendees gathered to pray for "the conversion of the despised, downtrodden Jews.” [4] (On Friday evenings, no less!) They were led by successive pairs of seminary students, but Mrs. Porter was the “sole originator” of these meetings,"  according to Robbins, who, to her credit, didn't fail to note that Christ himself was a Jew. [5] As for the Porters' own Sabbath, cooking was prohibited on Sunday in their household. Dinner was prepared on Saturday. They didn’t even permit themselves to take a walk for visiting or “other unnecessary purposes.” [6]

Reverend Porter may have not taken many walks, anyway. He was an invalid, due to weak lungs, which made preaching difficult for him. And although he is said to have sawed and split wood for exercise, he rarely left home at all, except in pursuit of better health. When he was feeling particularly bad during New England winters, he headed South. In 1815-1816, for example, he spent time in Charleston and Savannah. He passed another winter in St. Augustine. In 1821, he went to Havana and New Orleans. Inevitably he saw what the institution of slavery looked like in each of these locales, but in letters home to Mrs. Porter he referred to the enslaved people even there as “servants.” [7] One of them, named “Bob," who was a "waiting man," he described as "hopefully pious," and noted that Bob had learned to read the Bible that Porter had given him the previous year. [8] As for his treatment of his own “domestics,” his biographer took pains to write in 1837, four years after Porter's death, it was “uniformly mild and paternal.” [9]
__________________
1. Robbins, 113-117.
2. Bailey, 515.
3. "I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon." -- Song of Solomon 1:5.
4. Robbins, 85.
5. Ibid., 83.
6. Lyman Matthews, Memoir of the Life and Character of Ebenezer Porter, D. D., late president of the Theological seminary, Andover (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1837), 25.
7. Ibid., 103.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 306.

In 1812, Ebenezer Porter (1772-1834), a Congregationalist minister serving a parish in Washington, Connecticut, published a sermon about a man found dead in the snow with a bottle of liquor by his side. It was called “The Fatal Effects of Ardent Spirits,” and got the attention of, among others, Lyman Beecher, who had recently begun what would become a nationwide temperance movement. Within the year, agents of the Connecticut Missionary Society were distributing the sermon throughout New England, and the forty-year-old Porter had been offered a professorship at the seminary in Andover. He arrived here with his family in June to fill the slot left by Edward Dorr Griffin, who, while still at Andover, had been appointed the first pastor of Boston's Park Street Church. When he realized he couldn't do justice to both positions, he'd needed to choose, and chose Boston.

One day, Porter was browsing in Mark Newman's bookstore, where he bought  a “little religious book” for eight cents. [1] As his biographer wrote years later, "The thought occurred to him that books of that size might be printed for three cents, if benevolent individuals would unite to publish them in a cheap form and in large quantities.” [2] He envisioned “a few choice tracts, printed in large editions.” [3]  It wasn't such an original idea. There was Britain's Religious Tract Society after all, founded in 1799. In any case, on May 23, 1814, the New England Religious Tract Society was founded by Porter, Moses Stuart, Jedidiah Morse, Leonard Woods, and William Bartlet (the money man, who was made the society's president). And soon enough tracts were being printed by Flagg and Gould. One of them was a Porter sermon, preached at  Andover's South Church, called “Great Effects from Little Causes," during which he related some typical stories about good deeds. But then towards the end, he spoke self-reflexively about tracts.

​Britain's tract society, he noted, had distributed at least twenty million tracts in various languages in its first fourteen years. “Every man, woman and child can do something — can do much. Who cannot spare one cent, to buy a small tract? That tract, dropped on the high road, or given to a stranger, may carry comfort to some desponding, or conviction to some careless heart; may reclaim some profligate, awaken some drunkard to sobriety, some sabbath-breaker or swearer to saving reform . . . The day is coming, when men will be accustomed to reckon the establishment of a tract or a moral society, or a prayer meeting, among the instruments of ushering in the glory of the church, and the salvation of the world.”
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1. William A. Hallock, “Light and Love” A Sketch of The Life and Labors of the Rev. Justin Edwards, D.D. The Evangelical Pastor; the advocate of Temperance, The Sabbath, and The Bible. New York and Boston: American Tract Society, 1855), 44.
2. Lyman Matthews, Memoir of the Life and Character of Ebenezer Porter, D.D (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1837), 327-8.
3. A Brief History of the American Tract Society, 8.

It is claimed in Youth From Every Quarter by Frederick S. Allis Jr. that Moses Stuart’s 1813 book, published by Flagg and Gould, was “the first Hebrew grammar to be published in the United States." [1] The same erroneous information had previously been published in Scott H. Paradise’s A History of Printing in Andover, Massachusetts, 1798-1931. Paradise also wrongly claimed: “The new press was fortunate in having the first fonts of Greek and Hebrew type in America.” [2]

One possible source of Paradise’s errors  was a misreading of “An Illustrious Town, — Andover” by F.B. Makepeace, published in The New England Magazine and Bay State Monthly in 1886. [3] In discussing William Newcombe’s A Harmony in Greek of the Gospels, first published in Dublin and then reprinted by Flagg and Gould in Andover, Reverend Makepeace said: “This was probably the first book in Greek published here.” Here, meaning Andover, not the United States. He continued: “The first book in Hebrew printed at the Andover Press was Stuart’s Hebrew Grammar. . .” [4] Note: At the Andover Press, not in the United States.

Whatever the cause of the Paradise and Allis errors, the fact is that Judah Monis (1683-1764), North America's first college instructor of  Hebrew, at Harvard from 1722 to 1760, was the author of the first Hebrew textbook published in the United States — and indeed, in North America. Bostonian Jonas Green printed 1,000 copies of it in 1735. (So he obviously had the fonts to do it.) Titled Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet, the book was subtitled in English: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue, being an Essay to bring the Hebrew Grammar into English to facilitate Instruction of all those who are desirous of acquiring a clear idea of this primitive tongue by their own studies. [5] Monis, who had converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1722, sold the book himself out of his Cambridge home, his best customers being Harvard students, since it was a required text for all graduates for some twenty-five years.

Professor's Stuart's daughter Sarah Stuart Robbins published ​a memoir, Old Andover Days, in 1908. This, too, may be a source of the errors of Paradise and Allis, but I don't think Robbins got her information from the 1886 magazine article. She undoubtedly got it from her family, perhaps a boastful Professor Stuart himself. “A little way down the hill toward Boston . . . stood Shipman’s store," she wrote, speaking of the building that was initially occupied by Mark Newman. ". . . Even the stronghold of trade in the guise of this little country store was in Andover made to pay tribute to the requirements of theology and learning; for in this same building my father had his printing-press." Note: his printing press, even though it wasn't. It belonged to the seminary. "This may seem a strange possession for an Andover professor," she went on; "but when my father began to teach Hebrew, he found that he must write a Hebrew grammar, there being nothing adequate on the subject in the English language. When the grammar was written, because there were no Hebrew characters in American printing-offices, and no printers capable of setting up Hebrew type, he had to solicit contributions, buy a press, and import Hebrew type. He even set up some of the grammar himself, until he could train compositors capable of doing such work." [6]

It's touching that a daughter was so proud of her father and his accomplishments; I wish, though, that she'd had her facts right. Granted, it was a memoir. Supposed history writing is held to a different standard. Unfortunately, Claude M. Fuess repeated the same misinformation in his history of P.A. [7] What is more, a plaque on the former home of the Stuart family, on the P.A. campus, continues to spread the false news. My guess is that it went up around the time of the P.A. bicentennial celebrations in 1978. I have pointed out the error to P.A.'s archivist, and cited for her all the information I have posted here. As of this writing, the plaque remains in place.
 
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1. ​Frederick S. Allis, Jr.,  Youth From Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy (Andover: Phillips Academy; Distributed by the University Press of New England, 1979), 129.
2. The unpaginated Paradise pamphlet is online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4198088&view=1up&seq=9 Retrieved June 1, 2022.
3. Vol. I, No. 4, 314.
​4. Ibid.
5. For more information, see Robert H. Pfeiffer, “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 45, No. 4, Tercentenary Issue (April 1955): 363-373.
6. Sarah Stuart Robbins, Old Andover Days (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1908), 20-22.
7. See An Old New England School (1917).

Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), a grandson of Jonathan Edwards and the president of Yale College, delivered a sermon at the opening of the seminary in Andover. [1] His theme was the New Millennium. "The period, my Brethren, is hastening: the morning star will soon arise, which will usher in that illustrious day, destined to scatter the darkness of this melancholy world, and cover the earth with light and glory; the second birth-day of truth, righteousness, and salvation." Years earlier, in 1794, while he was pastor of the Congregational Church in Greenfield Hill, Connecticut (now a historic neighborhood within Fairfield), Dwight had been pushing the concept when he published Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts. As he described it, there would be “one blood, one kindred, reach from sea to sea, one language spread, one tide of manners run; one scheme of science, and of morals one; And, God’s own word the structure. . .”

In  A Discourse on Isaiah, a two-part sermon delivered on consecutive Fast Days in  July and August of  1812, he once again connected the New Millennium to advances the spread of the English language. “Missionaries are to be sent every where. . .," he told his audience in the chapel of Yale College  "The good seed is now to be sown in every land,” he declared. As he had in Greenfield Hill he stressed the single language concept: " . . . it is a very interesting consideration, that the language, which we speak, is established in many parts of the world; particularly in those, where these benevolent exertions are especially needed, and where they are likely to produce the greatest effect. . . Nor is the period distant, when it will be spoken by the numerous millions. . . westward of us, to the Pacific ocean. The people of Great Britain, and of these States, are the only people in the world, who have taken a deep interest at the present remarkable period in spreading the Gospel among mankind. There are probably more valuable religious books in our language, than in all the others, which are spoken in the world.”

Britain and the United States also had the ships, he pointed out. “With the utmost ease we can go everywhere . . ." And then he brought up technology. "We can transport printing presses, and men to conduct them. We can send money, instructions, information, and all things else, which are necessary or useful . . . Thus God has most wonderfully provided for the only two nations, who are strongly inclined to promote this design, a combination of advantages, for carrying it into execution, unprecedented in the annals of mankind.” It was going to be as easy as that, in his opinion.

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*There were many other Timothy Dwights. This one was Timothy Dwight IV. Another was his grandson and namesake, Yale’s twelfth president, whose term of office ran from 1886 to 1899.