Ebony and Ivy (26 page)

President Eleazar Wheelock of Dartmouth College
SOURCE: Hood Museum, Dartmouth College

An early supporter of the Susquehannah Land Company, Dr. Wheelock also considered relocating his school to Pennsylvania despite the resistance of Commissioner William Johnson, who privately labeled this one “of the Schemes that had their birth in N[ew] England” and were “calculated with a View of forming Settlements so obnoxious to the Indians.” Johnson was concerned about the New Englanders' territorial ambitions in New York and Pennsylvania, having already sided with the Penn family in the controversies over Connecticut's western claims. The Susquehannah Company offered Wheelock a sixty-square-mile grant for his Indian academy.
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Nonetheless, even as the enmity between the colonists and Native peoples peaked, college officers were promoting Indian education to raise money in Britain. In 1753 the Presbyterian Synod of New York sent Samuel Davies and Gilbert Tennent to England on behalf of New Jersey, the school's second tour in fewer than five years. “And oh! how transporting the Tho't, that these Barbarians may be cultivated by divine Grace in the use of the proper Means, and polished into genuine Disciples of the Blessed Jesus!” Rev. Davies prayed before his departure. They raised £3,000 during a two-year tour.
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By the time Samson Occom arrived in England on behalf of Rev. Wheelock's school, these American agents were bumping into one another as they rushed to meet potential donors. In 1762, during the war, Provost William Smith took the dangerous trip to England, only to find James Jay appealing to the same patrons for King's College in New York. The Archbishop of Canterbury combined the campaigns and divided the proceeds between the two schools; altogether the Pennsylvanians took away nearly £7,000, while the New Yorkers claimed £10,000. In letters to the English clergy and the crown, Smith and Jay stressed that their colleges were struggling to recover from “the Ravages of a destructive War, which laid waste a considerable part of both Provinces.” Occom's tour had modest results in Ireland because the Reverend Morgan Edwards had just finished scouring the Protestant settlements for the College of Rhode Island. In London, Rev. Occom ran into Jay in the midst of an appeal. Jay was emphasizing the religious and strategic benefits of converting Native peoples, countering popish missions from Canada, and unifying what had always been an especially diverse colony. He was knighted for his efforts.
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Although he still promoted himself as an Indian teacher, Rev. Wheelock was shifting his energies to the college and its white students. He confronted an Anglican hierarchy suspicious of Congregationalist expansion, eroding support for Indian instruction in New England, and power brokers such as William Johnson who controlled access to more promising western missionary fields. A special SSPCK committee held a portion of the £12,000 collected by Samson Occom, and forwarded the interest to the college at a time when the Indian academy was a minor concern.
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The Mohegan minister Samson Occom

There was, in fact, little Native education at Dartmouth. On June 15, 1774, Dr. Wheelock penned a letter introducing and recommending Levi Frisbie to Arent DePeyster, the commander of Fort Michilimackinac, at the nexus of Lakes Huron and Michigan. A year earlier he had sent Captain DePeyster a copy of his history of the Indian mission, and now he was calling on their acquaintance to help Frisbie gain access to the northwestern nations. Three days later Rev. Frisbie pushed a well-stocked canoe into the Connecticut River and paddled toward Canada to settle some of Wheelock's students among the northern nations, where they
planned to learn the northern and western languages and recruit Indian children. The four-month expedition, much of it by water, was disappointing. The delegation never reached the western territories. Where they did go, they found it difficult to evangelize under the gaze of Catholic priests. Frisbie returned with several boys for the charity school: “the oldest is not above fifteen years old; and they all have a good deal of English blood in their veins.”
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Wheelock had developed a preference for “white Indians” from lower Canada—many of whose ancestors were English captives—whom he believed were better suited to Christian education and Anglo culture. He seems to have acquired a similar preference for “white Negroes.” In 1770 Caleb Watts began privately studying geography, rhetoric, theology, and philosophy under Wheelock. Watts was the son of an English woman and a black man. Wheelock had initially intended to use Watts for a West Indies mission. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Wheelock sent Watts to the South in hopes that the black preacher could help the colonists prevent slave revolts during the upheaval of the English invasion. Not only were there few Indians at Dartmouth, but Indian students were increasingly unwelcome. Colonel Samuel Stevens warned Wheelock that he would remove his brother from the college if the young man was required to live in quarters with Indians rather than boarding in town with a white family.
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“From what I can gather it is to be a grand Presbyterian College, instead of a School for the poor Indians,” President James Manning of Rhode Island commented upon Wheelock's New Hampshire initiative. Manning feared that Dartmouth was a hundred miles from any sizable Indian community, and it had but a few highly assimilated Native students “who are brought up like us.” The Rhode Island president predicted that the money that Nathaniel Whitaker and Samson Occom raised in Britain would be “greatly prostituted.” Two years later Ezra Stiles confirmed Manning's doubts: “Dr. Wheelock[']s Indian College … has already almost lost sight of its original Design.” The task of finding Native students became less attractive as tensions between England and the colonies extinguished British funding. The same shifting
fortunes soon led the trustees of William and Mary to close their Indian College and convert the building, Brafferton Hall, into a dormitory for white students. “Doc[to]r Wheelock's Indian Academy or Schools are become altogether unprofitable to the poor Indians,” proclaimed an outraged Rev. Occom, who complained that his mentor had done “little or no good to the Indians with all that money we collected in England.”
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In the aftermath of the French and Indian War, the new strategic and economic interests of the colonists reoriented religious outreach. The Reverend Samuel Johnson endorsed William Johnson's “plan for civilizing and converting the Indians by first a school for the six nations at Fort Hunter.” The Anglican hierarchy saw the techniques that the dissenting churches had used against the Indian nations in New England as a model for New York. A Connecticut native, Rev. Johnson examined Wheelock's Indian school and concluded that “he has certainly fallen upon the right method for converting the Heathen, by civilizing their children, & teaching them Husbandry, & the arts & manufactures, while he teaches them Christianity.”
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The colonists' desire to reduce the commercial and military power of the Iroquois excited an interdenominational competition to establish a college within the Six Nations. As soon as he was installed as the rector of Trinity Church in New York City, Samuel Auchmuty began lobbying for a greater Anglican commitment in Iroquoia. Wheelock had long advertised his academy as the Protestant response to Catholic intrusions from Canada into New York and New England. He recruited Iroquois students to his schools and sent several ministers, including Samson Occom and Samuel Kirkland, to the Iroquois Confederacy. “Religious principles are debauched by the stupid Bigots that Wheelock is continually turning too go among them,” Rev. Auchmuty complained to Commissioner Johnson. He charged that poorly trained missionaries, “Wheelock[']s Cubs,” were in Iroquoia advancing not religion but the political and economic interests of the dissenters. “Such Wretches ought not to be suffered to go among the Indians.”
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Differing plans for a Six Nations College were advocated by
William Smith of Philadelphia; Myles Cooper, who succeeded Samuel Johnson at King's; Eleazar Wheelock; Samuel Kirkland, the SSPCK's missionary to the Oneida and Seneca; and John Brainerd, who replaced his brother in the Lenape ministry in New Jersey. William Johnson blocked many of the dissenters' efforts. He pointed Wheelock to the Carolinas, where, he suggested, an academy could help to subdue the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek. Meanwhile, Anglicans in New York City were designing a school on the Reverend Henry Barclay's estate in Mohawk territory, which they planned to link to King's. Commissioner Johnson was quietly exploring building his own academy at Mount Johnson on the Mohawk River, which neighbored a major Mohawk town and Fort Hunter.
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The emerging political crisis between Britain and its mainland American colonies preempted this final culture war. The Iroquois and the colonists were rapidly approaching a more decisive conflict. Enraged settlers had exterminated an entire community on the southern border of Iroquoia, and British forces had attempted genocide to the west. Massive commercial partnerships were targeting Indians' lands in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and Mississippi. During a 1765 funeral in Iroquoia, the Seneca Onoonghwandekha implored the delegates to remember the “ruined” Indian nations to the east. These people had been defeated and disarmed, and made into peasants and servants. The fiercest men now labored like “mere women.” Samuel Kirkland was there and recorded the speech. Onoonghwandekha warned that if the Six Nations failed to unite and fight against the colonists, “we shall be sunk so low as to hoe corn & squashes in the fields, chop wood, stoop down & milk cows like
negroes
among the Dutch people.”
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“Civilization or death to all American Savages” was an odd chant for an army fighting England. On July 4, 1779, General Enoch Poor's men remained in camp at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, feasting
and singing in celebration of the third anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The officers worked to build hatred toward Indians among men who likely needed little encouragement to despise Native peoples. In the presence of friendly Indians, the white soldiers drew liquor rations and entertained themselves by watching and mocking Indian dances. “A sufficient number of large boats are to be designed for the conveyance of all liquors belonging to the several state stores,” an officer in the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment reported. The quartermaster general also bought liquor from the local residents and threatened to punish anyone who attempted to evade the military's liquor monopoly. General George Washington ordered wildness. He instructed General John Sullivan to do his business “with as much impetuosity, shouting, and noise, as possible,” and to “make the troops act in as loose and dispersed a way” as was consistent with maintaining minimal military discipline. Washington also wanted “as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible” to be used as hostages and demanded “that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” Have the men “rush on with the war-whoop and fixed bayonet. Nothing will disconcert and terrify the Indians more than this.”
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The troops mustered in a region where German and Scots-Irish immigrants had been settling for most of the century. Land companies based in several colonies were active in this territory. George Washington had surveyed the area in 1753 while a Virginia militia officer. Two years before the Revolution began, Virginia governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, had tussled with Governor Thomas Penn of Pennsylvania over western lands. Murray had investments in the Ohio Valley and his government was under pressure to make good on the land warrants for veterans of the French and Indian War. When fighting began in spring 1775 between British and colonial troops, Dunmore had forced terms upon the Shawnee and Ohio Iroquois, requiring that they abandon claims south of the Ohio River and surrender all the black people living in their villages.
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