The Heathen School

December 9, 2013
Demos, a Yale historian and master of micro-history (Bancroft and Parkman Prize winner for Unredeemed Captive), turns his attention here to a well-intentioned 1820s effort to create a Connecticut school to Christianize “heathens” (mostly Indians and Hawaiians) and send them forth to missionize. The sad, sometimes tragic, results could have been anticipated. Some of the young male students, two Cherokees foremost, became enamored of town daughters. The consequences, perhaps inevitably, were instances of racism, clerical fear, an overall public hubbub, leading to the school’s collapse. But not before two long and apparently successful marriages between the Cherokees and the towngirls were conducted. Those Indians eventually became noted leaders during their tribe’s searing dispossession and exile westward—of their “ethnic cleansing”—wherein one of them was murdered by a fellow tribesman. Demos tells this tale with scarcely hidden feeling. His research is characteristically prodigious, his writing disarming, and his story captivating and of national resonance. However, his first-person usage (a recent minor fashion among historians) intrudes on that story, and strange typographical mannerisms (long passages in small typeface) blemish a marvelous story that needed no such embellishments.

Starred review from February 1, 2014
A carefully constructed study--featuring a chilling denouement--of the disruptive effects of "civilizing" mission work among indigenous peoples. Demos (Emeritus, History/Yale Univ.; The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World, 2008, etc.) manages a sly, significant feat in this historical study/personal exploration. As part of a grandiose scheme to redeem and improve the status of "savages" such as American Indians, the early Americans devised a "heathen school" in Cornwall, Conn., for some of the exemplary members of various ethnic groups, beginning with five Pacific Islanders brought to the shores by trade ships. The Hawaiian native Henry Obookiah proved the most famous immigrant, having arrived around 1809, eager to be educated, Christianized and sheltered with Yale faculty. Eventually, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sponsored him, along with the other Hawaiians, for the Foreign Mission School, inaugurated in 1817. The school was run by philanthropic donations, and it taught a mix of English, arithmetic and geography, for the eventual purpose of conversion and evangelization. Gaining new students from some of the Indian nations, East Asia and elsewhere, the school helped undermine some of the stereotypes about the intelligence of "pagans" and served as a model experiment as well as a tourist attraction. However, the seeds of its success, namely assimilation and acculturation, also led to its downfall, as the "scholars" attracted white women partners and, thereby, scandal amid a deeply racist America. The two success stories, involving Cherokee scholars John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, both married white women and moved to the Cherokee Nation, gaining important leadership roles that, ultimately, steered the nation's fate toward removal and thereby invited the men's own violent demises. In "interludes" alternating with his historical narrative, Demos chronicles his visits to the places involved--e.g., Hawaii, Cornwall--in order to impart a personal commitment to this collective American tragedy. A slow-building saga that delivers a powerful final wallop.

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Starred review from January 1, 2014

Tantalizing glimpses of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions School in Cornwall, Connecticut, derisively known as the "heathen school," may be found in many books about the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Notable Native Americans such as Elias Boudinot and John Ridge were "civilized" there. Demos (Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History, Yale Univ.; The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America) provides a much-needed history of the school that identifies the lofty goals of its founders to educate bright people from around the world in order to return them, as Protestant missionaries, to their homes. Demos shows how the founders' dreams fell victim to racial bigotry within both the student body itself and in the greater Cornwall community. The school closed in the aftermath of the interracial marriages between Boudinot and Harriett Gold, and Ridge and Sarah Bird Northrup. Boudinot and Ridge subsequently returned to Georgia with their wives, became involved in Cherokee politics, and were signatories of the Treaty of New Echota (1835), which traded the Cherokee homeland in the East for land in present-day Oklahoma. VERDICT This brilliant work is highly recommended for all who study American history. They should read it with To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul.--John R. Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2014
A chronicle of a school ordinarily interests few beyond those connected with it. This work is an exception. The Foreign Mission School of Cornwall, Connecticut, founded in the 1820s, represents a focal point for several cultural trends, including Christian evangelism, native-white relations, and even celebrity. Demos opens with a man who impressed Protestant eminences in New England. Hawaiian Henry Obookiah was a convert to Christianity whose memoir was immensely popular. His example beckoned the possibility of converting whole peoples, and so, under Congregational Church aegis, the heathen school was founded to train natives to be missionaries to their people. Demos discovers from letters and newspapers that the school ran into controversy (and a decline in donations) when two Cherokee students proposed to two young white women. Demos' description of the social convulsions that ensued renders intimate insight into attitudes of the period. The school disbanded, and the couples went to Georgia to be swept up in the Cherokee removal of the 1830s. A poignant, well-researched historical vignette of how changing the world weighs on the individual shoulders bearing the task.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)