[In the following essay, Peyer surveys Occom's complete body of work, stressing the “vision of a New England Christian Indian ‘Body Politick’” expressed throughout his writings.]

Samson Occom's Remarkable life history spans a dark period in the evolution of Indian-white relations in North America, dominated by suspicion and hatred on both sides. In spite of severe health problems and permanent disillusionment with Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, the “Pious Mohegan” managed to establish a solid reputation as an ordained Presbyterian minister, best-selling author, accomplished hymnist, and widely acclaimed orator. In his difficult role as cultural broker during troubled times he never once veered from the missionary path he had chosen for himself and remained true to his personal vision of an evangelical revival among his colonized people. When he finally came to the realization that it was practically impossible for Indians to live in “civilized” society according to the principles he had been taught to believe in by Protestant missionaries, he chose instead to found a new nation of Christian Indians in the “wilderness.”¹ …

Occom's English writings cover a period of nearly fifty years. The greater part by far of his literary output was never intended for publication, and some of the published pieces did not appear in print until long after his death. Nevertheless, he produced two very popular texts during his lifetime, a rather admirable achievement if one keeps in mind that more than half of the practicing Protestant clergymen in eighteenth-century New England never published anything and only a handful ever managed to publish more than one sermon.²

Occom began to keep a journal on the day he entered Wheelock's school, on December 6, 1743, and maintained it irregularly until March 6, 1790.³ Its conspicuously impersonal language and lack of descriptive passages, which led Blodgett to lament that Occom had “no talent for gossip, no ear for sound, or eye for the sight and show of things,” would not qualify it as a bona fide diary according to most definitions.⁴ Occom's succinct and meticulous listings of places visited, persons met, services performed, compensation received, and funds expended indicate that we are dealing here with a straightforward “professional journal,” as required by the missionary societies from their representatives in the field, rather than expressions of his inner thoughts and emotions as might be expected from a spiritual diary or conversion testimony.⁵ Like other contemporary missionary journals (i.e., Samuel Kirkland's), its introspective passages are too few and far between to serve as an adequate basis for a meaningful interpretation of the text. Its merit lies more in the nature of a historical document, particularly the more detailed sections describing his travels to the Oneidas in 1761 and 1764, his journey to England in 1765-66, and his peregrinations between Mohegan and Brothertown from 1784 to 1790.⁶ The lengthy section (actually a separate notebook with forty-six pages of text) describing the England voyage from November 21, 1765, to July 22, 1766, for instance, is a unique eighteenth-century Indian travelogue with interesting, though brief, descriptions of famous places and people. His account of his travels between Mohegan and Brothertown, on the other hand, is a singular autoethnographic documentation of the postcontact formation of a heterogeneous New England Christian Indian tribe in New York. Furthermore, in its function as an unadorned record of his activities as a missionary, Occom's journal could also be likened to traditional warrior stories, or “coup tales,” which David Brumble has included as legitimate examples of “preliterate traditions” in his excellent study of American Indian autobiography.⁷ These factual oral accounts of valorous deeds performed by an individual formed the basis on which, so to speak, his “professional” status and prestige within the community remained on “public record.” In a similar manner, Occom frequently documented his “missionary coups” in the field. “After Sermon a Number of Young People stayd to have exercise with Texts of Scripture and it was very Solemn many were deeply affected,” he noted on Tuesday, March 21, 1786, “and I believe they can't forget the night, the most careless of them will remember it as long as they live and long even to eternity they must carrie it.”⁸

Occom's oft-cited autobiographical sketch, which is included among his journal entries, was written September 17, 1768, on a separate, twenty-six-page notebook. On the surface it is a typical example of salvationist literature—writings with an evangelical purpose—which predominated in eighteenth-century colonial America. The autobiography begins in conformity with the usual schema of Indian conversion testimonies collected during the previous centuries by missionaries like John Eliot or Experience Mayhew, describing the process of his spiritual transformation from “heathenism” to “civility” and continuing with the development of his career as a missionary. However, rather than closing with the expected transition from “Trouble of Mind” to “Serenity and Pleasure of Soul, in Serving God,” as mentioned at the beginning of the sketch, it turns abruptly into an angry denunciation of racial discrimination within the missionary field that has, as far as I can tell, no precedent in conventional salvationist texts. In this case, at least, Occom is making effective use of the conversion narrative format, or “the voice of a dominant order” (to quote Arnold Krupat), as a platform for his own undisguised, authentic voice.⁹ Occom undoubtedly had every intention of reaching the general public with his autobiographical sketch in order—as he explained in a much shorter, letter-format version of his life history written just before his departure for England on November 28, 1765—to counter the rumors that were then being spread about him and to take the “opportunity to give the World in few words, the true Account of my Education.”¹⁰ Other indications of his desire to have it published are the fact that the text has been carefully separated and changed (edited?) in several places and that it is subdivided into sections (chapters?) with underlined headings. That neither Wheelock nor the missionary societies had an interest in having it circulated is not surprising. As David Murray has shown, as long as Indian literacy was not widespread, anything published by an Indian “was likely to reflect the tastes of a white audience, and conform to a large extent to what at least some of them thought it was appropriate for an Indian to write.”¹¹ The authentic voice of early North American Indian writers is, therefore, often discernible only if published material can be compared with unpublished sources or, failing that, if the authors' life histories and works are viewed simultaneously in an ethnohistorical perspective. Control over the publishing business is, in effect, the precondition for the hegemony of a dominant voice in literature; but, as James Scott has also pointed out, there are ways in which the dominated authentic voice can infiltrate a text in a “guarded” or “disguised” way to create a “hidden manuscript” with a critical message.¹²

Before going on to discuss Occom's two published works, mention must first be made of the brief ethnographic account of the Montauks he penned earlier, in 1761, but which was not published until 1809.¹³ It proves that he did have sufficient “ear for sound” and “eye for the sight and show of things” to make careful note of traditional Montauk marriage customs, naming ceremonies, religious beliefs, funerary practices, and conceptions of the afterlife. Even though he concludes that the Montauks have since “renounced all their heathenish idolatry and superstition,” his field notes do not lack a certain sense of scientific distance worthy of a serious ethnographer. His assessment that the Montauks had a dualistic notion of “one great and good God” opposing “a great evil god” and that they believed in the existence of a life after death, “where the righteous, or those who behaved themselves well in this world, will exercise themselves in pleasurable singing and dancing forever,” suggests a preexisting affinity between Coastal Algonquian spirituality and Christianity. This notion of a religious parallelism, evident in New England Indian folklore since the seventeenth century, would soon become a standard feature of American Indian literature.¹⁴ Also striking is his description of “Powaws” (shamans) and the “great mystery of darkness” surrounding them which, as he says with an unmistakable touch of pride, “I don't see for my part, why it is not as true, as the English or any other nation's witchcraft.” A related curiosity that reveals his continuing interest in Indian lore is his collection of Indian herbal medicines, which he jotted down in 1754 and probably experimented with—along with occidental practices like bleeding—during his later services as a lay physician. Some of the “prescriptions” he recorded at this time were printed posthumously, in 1954, as a small booklet titled Ten Indian Remedies.¹⁵

The second highlight in Occom's career, which earned him moderate literary laurels in his own day, came in the summer of 1772, when a Mohegan named Moses Paul requested that Occom deliver a sermon at his execution in New Haven the coming fall.¹⁶ Moses Paul, a Christian Indian who had first served in the army and then on a British man-of-war, committed a senseless murder under the influence of alcohol on December 7, 1771, for which he was duly tried and sentenced to hang. Criminal executions had been major public events in colonial New England since the seventeenth century and provided Protestant ministers with a welcome occasion to exhort the multitudes. In the so-called execution sermon, a preacher would first berate the condemned criminal for his/her misconduct and present an analysis of how he/she had come to fall so low, before turning to the general audience with a warning that they, too, could be led astray in a similar manner. The execution sermon thus fulfilled several social functions: In conjunction with the execution itself it was expected to be an effective deterrent for prospective criminals, it pointed out the association between the miscreant's deeds and the general state of morality in society, and it provided a moral justification for the execution itself. Beginning with Samuel Danforth's Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (1675), the execution sermon was also made available to an absentee audience in published form and soon developed into an autonomous genre which enjoyed as much popularity as that other unique New England literary creation, the captivity narrative. Between 1639 and 1800 more than sixty execution sermons were printed, and they continued to be widely read until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when public hangings were abolished in New England. The approximately fifty authors of execution sermons ranked among the top intellectuals of New England and included religious eminences like Increase and Cotton Mather, Charles Chauncy, John Rogers, Andrew Eliot, and Nathan Strong.¹⁷

Moses Paul's execution on September 2, 1772, was a carefully orchestrated spectacle. Public executions of Indians per se were not that unusual in colonial New England—on the contrary, in Massachusetts, for instance, the cases involving Indians outnumbered those of whites.¹⁸ But in this particular case, it was the first (and only) time that an Indian delivered the sermon at the execution of a fellow tribesman. The colonial authorities were well aware of the propagandist potential of this unique event: On the one hand, there was an ordained Christian Indian whose very presence and words would not only justify the execution but also serve as visible and audible proof for the success of their efforts to civilize Indians and, on the other, a fallen Indian to whom society had discharged its responsibilities by giving him the advantage of a Christian upbringing but who, in accordance with a widespread stereotype, still succumbed to the most ordinary of all Indian vices. Inebriety was commonly thought to be a main source of Indian violence, even though similar alcohol-induced criminal cases among whites received the most frequent treatment in execution sermons.¹⁹

The event drew the expected crowd, including Indians and African Americans, and Samson Occom's execution sermon turned out to be such a success that he was immediately pressed to have it published. After an appropriate delay for “modest” consideration, he finally gave in to public demand for reasons he explained afterward in the preface of the printed version, which, in his own words, was also “a little altered and enlarged in some places”:

It seems altogether unlikely that my performance will do any manner of service in the world, since the most excellent writings of worthy and learned men are disregarded. But there are two or three considerations that have induced me to be willing, to suffer my broken lines to appear in the world. One is, that the books that are in the world are written in very high and refined language; and the sermons that are delivered every sabbath in general, are in a very high and lofty stile, so that the common people understand but little of them. But I think they cannot help understanding my talk; it is common, plain, every day talk: little children may understand me. And poor Negroes may plainly and fully understand my meaning; and it may be of service to them. Again, it may in a particular manner be serviceable to my poor kindred, the Indians. Further, as it comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it, because it is from an Indian. Lastly, God works where and when he pleases, and by what instruments he sees fit, and he can and has used weak and unlikely instruments to bring about his great work.²⁰

Despite all this overt demonstration of becoming Christian meekness and republican “plain talk” by an Indian who was about as erudite and well read as most other scholars of his age, Occom was quite correct in his estimation of possible public interest in such a piece coming “from an uncommon quarter.”²¹ The first edition of A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul … was printed by the press of Thomas and Samuel Green at New Haven on October 31, 1772. Demand was so high that a second edition was printed in New London on November 13, followed by a third on December 4 and a fourth on January 22 of the following year. Love recorded at least nineteen editions printed in various towns in New England and in London, including a Welsh translation in 1789.²² His sermon was also condensed into a sixteen-stanza broadside printed and sold in Boston and Newburyport in November 1772.²³

At first glance Occom's execution sermon appears to be the replication of a current salvationist genre. Just how closely Occom patterned (and plagiarized in part) his version after previous execution sermons becomes clear if one compares it to Sylvanus Conant's Blood of Abel, and the Blood of Jesus, a sermon that was given in 1764 at the execution of a young African American for murder and printed the following year.

Poor unhappy Bristol! The Day of your Death is now come, and you have but a very few Hours more to live. The Laws of the Land and the laws of God, call for the Destruction of your mortal Life; Whoso sheddeth Man's Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed. This is the Decree of Heaven, and it is to be executed by Man, nor have you the least Ray of Hope that you shall escape; for the Sentence is past, not to be revok'd—the Day of Execution is come—the Guard is about you—the Instruments of Death are made ready—your Coffin and your Grave are open.²⁴

My poor unhappy brother Moses … the day of your death is now come; the king of terrors is at hand; you have but a very few moments to breathe in this world,—The just laws of man, and the holy laws of Jehovah, call aloud for the destruction of your mortal life; God says, “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” This is the ancient decree of heaven, and it is to be executed by man; nor have you the least gleam of hope of escape, for the unalterable sentence is past; the terrible day of execution is come; the unwelcome guard is about you; and the fatal instruments of death are now made ready; your coffin and your grave, your last lodging, are open ready to receive you.

Like most execution sermons, Occom's is also composed of three parts: He first elaborates on the general nature of sin, then confronts the condemned man with his heinous crime, and finally addresses the general audience with the usual lengthy warnings about death, sin, the horrors of hell, and the possibility of salvation through belief in Jesus Christ, all reinforced by numerous biblical citations. The message to the condemned man is standard as well, reminding him of imminent death and the justice of his punishment, denouncing his horrible sin, adjuring him to repent, and promising him a place in heaven through the mediation of Christ. Even Occom's eloquent excursions on intemperance, the central theme of his sermon, closely echo Samuel Danforth's popular Woful Effects of Drunkenness, which was published decades earlier.²⁵ However artificial it may seem from a modern-day perspective, Occom's execution sermon, rated by a contemporary reader as “ingenious discourse,” obviously found wide acclaim among late-eighteenth-century New England and British audience as it outsold and outlasted all of its predecessors and successors.²⁶ It was a best seller of its day.

But there is more to Occom's execution sermon than its positive reception. Its essential message is contained in the unconventional section in which he directly addresses his “poor kindred” on the sin of intemperance. Once again he seems to be following the salvationist conventions of eighteenth-century execution sermons by placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the condemned criminal—“it was the sin of drunkenness that has brought this destruction and untimely death upon him”—and then proceeding to use his impending death as a general warning, first and foremost, to all Indians in the audience. However, rather than focusing on the popular issue of intemperance and violence among Indians—Moses Paul had, after all, clubbed a respected white citizen to death—he goes on to illustrate how alcohol has been the main source of misery for his people:

By this sin we can't have comfortable houses, nor anything comfortable in our houses; neither food nor raiment, nor decent utensils. We are obliged to put up any sort of shelter just to screen us from the severity of the weather; and we go about with very mean, ragged and dirty cloaths, almost naked. And we are half starved, for most of the time obliged to pick up any thing to eat.—And our poor children are suffering every day for want of the necessaries of life; they are very often crying for want of food, and we have nothing to give them; and in the cold weather they are shivering and crying, being pinched with cold—All this for the love of strong drink.

A drunkard, he goes on like Danforth before him, is an irrational being who, “if he has any money or any thing valuable, he may lose it all, or may be robb'd, or he may make a foolish bargain, and be cheated out of all he has.” And then, inserted almost unobtrusively at the end of his lengthy discourse, comes the conclusion: “And here I cannot but observe, we find in sacred writ, a woe denounced against men, who put their bottles to their neighbors mouth to make them drunk, that they may see their nakedness; and no doubt there are such devilish men now in our days, as there were in the days of old.” Although he clearly identifies the root of the problem here, he still refrains from merely shifting the responsibility for the effects of drunkenness from the individual concerned to colonial society. Moses Paul was not innocent in his eyes because he had “been brought up under the bright sun-shine, and plain, and loud sound of the gospel.” Occom thus confronted him with the observation that “you have had a good education; you can read and write well; and God has given you a good natural understanding”; in other words, by acquiring knowledge he should have known better than to allow himself to be duped in this manner by the “devilish men now in our days.” To the Indians in the audience he posed the following question immediately after establishing Moses Paul's guilt: “by this sin we have no name nor credit in the world among polite nations; for this sin we are despised in the world, and it is alright and just, for we despite ourselves more; and if we don't regard ourselves, who will regard us?” (italics mine). The tamed Christian “savage,” who is thus overtly berating his renegade compatriot to appease New England Puritan self-righteousness, is also making a covert psychological appeal to his peers' self-esteem to resist one of colonialism's most effective agents. Overall, that section in Occom's sermon directed at the Indian (and African American) audience, which one might justifiably call the “hidden transcript” within the salvationist discourse, reflects his own belief in Christianity—and the educational process he directly associated with it—as a guiding force in the will to overcome the spiritual chaos inherent in the colonial encounter. He also makes the realistic (and very personal) connection here between social inequality among ethnic minorities and “this abominable, this beastly and accursed sin of drunkenness.”²⁷

Other than being the most widely read example of a typical early New England literary tradition, Occom's sermon is also the earliest concrete example of the confluence of Indian oral tradition and European literacy. “Indian monologues” have fascinated the Euro-American public since at least the second half of the seventeenth century, and this phenomenon obviously coincides with the fact that most of the early Indian authors were also successful public speakers. Written versions of public addresses thus make up a substantial portion of American Indian literary production well up until the 1920s.²⁸

The success of his sermon enabled Occom to publish his Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1774, which was never quite as popular but nevertheless went through at least two additional editions in 1785 and 1792.²⁹ Just how many of the 108 numbered hymns in the collection were his creation is impossible to ascertain. Love maintains that a considerable number of them are not found in earlier books or remain unassigned by hymnologists, concluding therefore that Occom was the author of such. Blodgett also believes that Occom probably did compose several of them on the basis of three handwritten hymns found in Dartmouth's Baker Library Special Collections, which “have the naiveté, the earnest simplicity, which is characteristic of his utterances.” The greater part by far are by Watts, Wesley, Madan, and other noted hymnists and were thus collected from contemporary hymnbooks, several of which he had brought back from England.³⁰ Certain hymns that have generally been attributed to him, such as the two somewhat different versions of the same hymn titled “Awaked by Sinai's Awful Sound” or “Waked by the Gospel's Powerful Sound,” which were not included in the original collection, became quite popular shortly after his death and have survived in present-day hymnals.³¹ More important than the question of authorship, however, is Occom's avid interest in psalmody, which he shared with most Christian Indians since the days of Eliot and the Mayhews, and his successful incorporation of this Western tradition for Indian domestic purposes. Communal singing of spiritual melodies, especially the Anglo-American style of hymnody founded by Isaac Watts (1674-1748), continues to be a popular social activity among Indians today and may well be one of the most effective and permanent vehicles of cross-cultural communication ever applied by Christian missionaries throughout the world. In marked contrast to Blodgett's somewhat condescending evaluation of Occom's skills in hymnody, oral tradition among the Shinnecock Indians of Long Island, as recorded by one of their number in 1950, recalls his Gospel songs with unencumbered enthusiasm: “The words were so beautiful and the melodies so touching the Indians claimed they heard them in the skies.”³² It could be, then, that Occom's Christian hymnals exuded an authentic voice to Indian listeners, one that went beyond (or perhaps inside) the usual literary meaning associated with the term.

On April 2, 1786, Occom, who had observed earlier that Montauk shamans “get their art from dreams … or night visions,” had a dream (or vision) that was apparently significant enough for him to record it in his journal with unusual attention to detail:

Last Night I had a remarkable dream about Mr. Whitefield, I thought he was preaching as he use to, when he was alive, I thought he was at a certain place where there was a great Number of Indians and Some White People,—and I had been Preaching, and he came to me, and took hold of my wright Hand and put his face to my face, and rub'd his face to mine and Said, I'm glad, that you preach the Excellency of Jesus Christ yet, and Said, go on and the Lord be with thee, we Shall now Soon done, and then he Stretched himself upon the ground flat on his face and reach'd his hands forward, and made a mark with his Hand, and Said I will out doe and over reach all Sinners, and I thought he Barked like a Dog, with a Thundering Voice,—and I thought Some People Laugh'd Some were pleased, and Some were frightened, and after that he got up, Said to me I am going to Mr. Potters to preach, and Said will you go, and I Said Yes Sir and as we were about to Set out I awoke, and behold it was a Dream—and this Dream has put me much upon thinking of the End of my Journey.³³

In this remarkable dream the late Whitefield, foremost voice of the Great Awakening, appears to him much in the manner of a powerful Indian spirit and, contrary to all the Clellands, Jewetts, Sargeants, and Wheelocks of his stony missionary career, assures him of the righteousness of the path he has chosen to follow just before he is transformed into a barking dog. According to Frank Speck, the Mohegans considered dreams to be messages from ancestors who are in the spirit world, which gives some indication of Occom's close spiritual ties to the New Light revivalist.³⁴ It is tempting, of course, to speculate on the possible symbolism of the physical transformation. The practice of sacrificing a dog after an ominous dream, for instance, was fairly common among Coastal Algonquians; and Daniel Brinton has established parallelisms between the Greek Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the passage over the river Styx, and similar canine spirits in Indian lore who challenge souls on their way to the other world.³⁵ Occom's careful description of his dream is thus very reminiscent of what Brumble refers to as traditional “power-quest narratives” which, in contrast to the more succinct “coup tales,” were accounts of visions or dreams that needed to be told in great detail so that they might be interpreted properly by those qualified to do so and subsequently evaluated by them and the community as potential sources of spiritual power.³⁶ On the other hand, he may simply be making a straightforward association with revivalist “exercises,” or neuromuscular seizures that sometimes befell converts during public worship (including the act of barking like a dog), which came to be an increasingly common expression of religious exaltation at the turn of the century.³⁷ Occom's dream, in which Christian and Algonquian spirituality are obviously fused together, could thus be interpreted as a form of visionary power legitimizing his own choice to initiate a religious revival among his people.

The accomplishments of a transcultural individual can be measured in part by an assessment of his/her reputation among the societies in which he/she functioned. Occom has had a pond, a bridge, an inn, and even a World War II Liberator vessel named in his honor. The Samson Occom Pooled Income Fund, which generated an additional half-million dollars in tax-deductible donations from Dartmouth's alumni in 1980-82, proves that his name is still good for credit. It is this kind of posthumous “fame” that must have prompted a Dartmouth scholar to refer to him ironically as “Big Chief Samson Quantum Wampum Occum.”³⁸ Occom's legacy among the eastern Indian communities that were affected by his life's work, however, forces us to see the role of a Christian Indian in a somewhat more differentiated perspective.

Despite his many difficulties, there is no evidence that Occom ever wavered one iota from his chosen destiny. His moments of crisis, and there were not a few, thus had little to do with problems of identity, ethnic or otherwise. Instead, they were strictly of a socioeconomic nature, resulting primarily from the racial discrimination he encountered in his chosen professional field and straightforward poverty. In terms of psychology, they had more to do with a damaged self-esteem as a result of social oppression than with any culturally related personality conflicts. He never ceased to be an active member of the Indian community he had been born into, and he maintained both his native language and traditional kinship ties. At the same time, he voluntarily adopted new religious impulses from the Great Awakening and earnestly believed in the evangelical Calvinist reading of original sin and the terrible prospect of eternal damnation, which he ardently preached to his Indian and white convocations. But he also regarded Christianity as a substitution for the spiritual void resulting from the post-contact disruption of traditional Indian ways of life and sought to instrumentalize it as a means of cementing together scattered remanants of conquered New England tribes, who faced immediate biological and cultural extinction, into new and viable communities. In this process, he made effective use of English as the lingua franca for the distinct Indian speech communities involved in his experiment who, according to his own observations, at times represented as many as “ten different Languages.”³⁹ Protestantism and European life styles, to which the Mohegans and other New England Indian groups had been adapting long before Occom was born, did not automatically displace deeply rooted social patterns, even though dramatic changes were inevitable due to the repressive constellation of the contact environment.

What, then, became of Occom's vision of a New England Christian Indian “Body Politick”? As with the Gay Head Indians, conversion was also a tactic for survival and, in this sense at least, history never proved Occom wrong, for the Indians among whom he exerted his influence—Mohegans, Montauks, Niantics, Tunxis, Shinnecocks, Mahicans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Oneidas, and others—did in fact survive, even though dominant society has since proclaimed them “invisible.” The nature of his relations with the Long Island Indian communities, for instance, was such that the memory of his sojourn there has been fondly preserved until the present day. Both Montauks and Shinnecocks regard him as one of their great ancestors. The Montauk Historical Society even made a proposal in 1969 for the declaration of a Samson Occom Day, which was celebrated during the summer of the following year. On this occasion Peter Silva, Jr., son of the Shinnecock sachem, delivered a speech honoring the Mohegan missionary with the following words: “[Occom] gave his fellow Indians hope, thought of tomorrow, pride, and respect for the individual; he laid the foundation for the coming together of minds.”⁴⁰ Another testimonial to Occom's historical significance is the reference made by the Mohegans in the course of their first petition for federal recognition in 1978 to his form of leadership (defined by their tribal historian as a “sociocultural authority” that need not necessarily be embodied in an official sachemship and can arise during periods of severe cultural conflict) as proof of the continuity of the tribal political framework. That the approximately one thousand enrolled Mohegans of Uncasville, whose cultural identity has been tied to a Protestant church erected in 1831, finally did achieve federal recognition on March 7, 1994, is due at least in part to Occom's life work.⁴¹ Perhaps the greatest tribute to Occom's efforts is the fact that the New England Christian Indian community he founded in New York is currently seeking federal recognition as the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin.⁴²

In retrospect, it can be said that Samson Occom is at least as significant historically as Eleazar Wheelock's most famous pupil, the Mohawk Joseph Brant (ca. 1742-1807). Brant adopted a similar policy of voluntary removal, leading his people to Ontario after the American Revolution in order to establish an independent Indian township there, but—in contrast to Occom—he had the great advantage of having been born into a prestigious position within a powerful and still fairly autonomous Indian nation. In the realm of American Indian literature, however, Occom plays a much more important role than the equally literate Brant, who has been the subject of many English publications but the author of none.⁴³ To assess properly Occom's place in the history of American Indian literature—especially when the question of reception is raised—one must bear in mind his dual role as missionary and author and, in addition, make correlations among those of his writings that were published during his lifetime, those that appeared posthumously, and those that never made it into print. There can be little doubt that many of Occom's unpublished sermons were directed to members of ethnic minorities and the lower classes. “To all the Indians in this Boundless Continent,” he begins in one of his undated manuscripts, “I am an Indian also, Your Brother and You are my Brethren the Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh.”⁴⁴ Like many of his white counterparts in the Protestant revival, he did not refrain from expressing overt criticism on highly volatile contemporary social issues such as abolitionism. “If I understandthe Gospel aright,” he wrote concerning certain ministers who held slaves (i.e., Wheelock), “I think it is a Dispensation of Freedom and Liberty, both Temporal and Spiritual, and (if) the Preachers of the Holy Gospel of Jesus do preach it according to the mind of God, they preach True Liberty and how can such keep Negroes in slavery? And if ministers are True Liberty men, let them preach Liberty for the poor Negroes fervently and with great zeal, and those ministers who have Negroes set an example before their People by freeing their Negroes, let them show their faith by their Works.” In another of his unpublished sermons he is even more vehement in his opposition to slavery: “[T]here is one Sort of open murther is now carried on allowedly by those who are calld Christian People and here some may (querry) again and Say, What is that, Why it is encouraging and carrying on Negro Slave Trade, this is a Murdorous Trade, it is the Worst Complicated Wickedness to Carry on this Trade, it is the most accused and most Devilish Practice that ever was found among the Children of men.”⁴⁵ His abolitionist sentiments apparently influenced the famous African American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, with whom he maintained sporadic contact and whose oft-cited letter revealing her own critical views on the issue was originally addressed to him.⁴⁶ Occom's authentic voice thus breaks through much more frequently in his unpublished manuscripts, or “undisguised transcripts,” and it is here, too, that his literary talents become most apparent. This is particularly evident in his autobiographical sketch, one of his most expressive pieces, and in a few of the letters that have been cited above.⁴⁷ Eighteenth-century New England was obviously not quite ready yet for this kind of writing coming from “an uncommon quarter.”

Mastering the dominant voice, which Occom did, also enabled him to defend himself against colonial repression. His petitions to George III and the New York Assembly prove the point. An entry in his journal dated February 8, 1786, provides an additional, rather curious, illustration: “[A]n officer came to my House and attachd my oxen for a Small Debt I owed, and Thirsday I went down to N London to see whether the Law, in the New Revised Law Book was yet in favour of the Indians, and I found it Strong in favour of us,—and I sent a line to one of the Men, and the next he came and Promisd to withdraw his action, and they did withdraw.”⁴⁸

Occom is more than just a statistical starting point in the history of American Indian literature, and not only because his writings display an unusual degree of versatility for an eighteenth-century salvationist author, including sermons, autobiographies, professional journals, tribal ethnography, and hymnody. Placed in its proper ethnohistorical context, his literary legacy enables us to take our first inside look at a representative of the Christian Indian proto-elite who chose creative adaptation as their tactic of survival in the colonial situation, and it thereby provides us with an important alternative perspective to the life histories of military leaders like Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk, and others whom we seemingly prefer to read about. The predicate “father” is thus applicable to the “Pious Mohegan” in more ways than one.

Notes

1. Most of Occom's writings are found among the papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Special Collections, Baker Library, Dartmouth College (hereafter cited as Wheelock Papers). These include his correspondence from 1756 to 1774, fourteen sermons, his journals from 1743 to 1790 (also in typescript, 3 vols.), and miscellaneous materials. Additional writings are preserved among the Samson Occum holdings of the Connecticut Historical Society (79998), which contains original and related correspondence from 1727 to 1808, a diary from 1787, and several sermons (hereafter cited as Samson Occom Papers). The material found at the Baker Library is available in microfilm under the title “The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock together with the Early Archives of Dartmouth College & Moor's Indian Charity School and Records of the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire, through the year 1779” from University Microfilm International, Ann Arbor (16 reels; reel 14 has most of the Occom writings); the Samson Occom Papers of the Connecticut Historical Society can also be obtained on microfilm directly from the society (79998, 1 reel, which I have used for reference here). Two full-length biographies have been written: William De Loss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1899)—in spite of its early publication date and ethnocentric bias, this is still the most comprehensive and perceptive account of his life; and Harold Blodgett, Samson Occom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1935). Letters relating to Occom's England journey have been published in Leon B. Richardson, ed., An Indian Preacher in New England (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1933). See also R. Pierce Beaver, Church, State, and the American Indians: Two and a Half Centuries of Partnership in Missions between Protestant Churches and Government (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1966), 153-183; Samuel Buell, A Sermon Preached at East-Hampton, August 29, 1759; at the Ordination of Mr. Samson Occum, A Missionary among the Indians (New York: Printed by James Parker, 1761), iii-xvi; Belle M. Brain, “Samson Occom, the Famous Indian Preacher of New England,” Missionary Review of the World 33 (1910): 913-919; Earnest Edward Eells, “Indian Missions on Long Island, part V, Samson Occom,” Journal of the Department of History of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. 19, no. 3 (September 1940): 99-109; John C. Huden, “Samson Occom, Indian Missionary,” Long Island Forum, November 1941, 259-260, 262; idem, “Occum's Report on Montauks,” Long Island Forum, July 1947, 127-128; Nathaniel Miles, Samson Occom, the Mohegan Indian Teacher, Preacher, and Poet, with a Short Sketch of His Life (Madison: By the author, 1888); Will Ottery and Rudi Ottery, A Man Called Sampson (Camden, ME: Penobscot Press, 1989), 34-49; A. La Vonne Brown Ruoff, “Introduction: Samson Occom's Sermon Preached by Samson Occom … at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian,” Studies in American Indian Literature 4, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1992): 75-81; William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York) 3 (1858): 192-195; and Margaret C. Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan as Spiritual Intermediary,” in idem, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 61-78.

2. See George Selement, “Publication and the Puritan Minister,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 2 (April 1980): 219-241.

3. For a listing of Occom's journals, see Blodgett, Samson Occom, 33, n. 12; and Love, Samson Occom, 38, no. 36. It is very probable that sections of the journal have been lost.

4. Blodgett, Samson Occom, 33.

5. See Steven E. Kagle, American Diary Literature, 1620-1799 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 16; William Mathews, American Diaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), ix; and Daniel B. Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), x.

6. The section on the Oneida mission is excerpted in Love, Samson Occom, 87-90; the section describing his English tour has been included in Richardson, Indian Preacher in England, 81-87, 100-109; the section on his travels between Mohegan and Brothertown is contained in part in Blodgett, Samson Occom, 169-205, and Love, Samson Occom, 249-275.

7. H. David Brumble III, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21-47. See also Hertha Dawn Wong, Sending My Heart across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 25-26.

8. Occom Journal, January 23-April 26, 1786, Wheelock Papers.

9. Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141.

10. The letter is in Wheelock Papers (ms. 7656281). Reproduced in Richardson, Indian Preacher in England, 70-71.

11. Murray, Forked Tongues, 57.

12. Ibid., 63; and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), xii.

13. Samson Occom, “An Account of the Montauk Indians, on Long Island,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser. 1, 10 (1809): 105-111.

14. See William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1640-1984 (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1986), 73.

15. Ten Indian Remedies: From Manuscript Notes on Herbs and Roots, by Rev. Samson Occom as Compiled in the Year 1754 (n.p.: Printed by Edward C. Lathem, 1964), Special Collections, Baker Library, Dartmouth College (DCH E98 M35 04). The original list is kept by the New London County Historical Society.

16. The letter by Moses Paul is reproduced in Blodgett, Samson Occom, 139-140.

17. See Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 156-176; Daniel A. Cohen, “In Defense of the Gallows: Justifications of Capital Punishment in New England Execution Sermons, 1674-1825,” American Quarterly 40, no. 2 (June 1988): 147-164; and, especially, Wayne C. Minnick, “The New England Execution Sermon, 1639-1800,” Speech Monographs 35, no. 1 (March 1968): 77-89.

18. See Yasuhide Kawashima, “Jurisdiction of the Colonial Courts over the Indians in Massachusetts, 1689-1773,” New England Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 1969): 532-550.

19. See Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Crime and Punishment among the Indians of Massachusetts, 1675-1750,” Ethnohistory 28, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 23-32; and Minnick, “New England Execution Sermon,” 85-86.

20. Quoted from the 1773 edition printed by S. and E. Hall of Salem.

21. Occom was an unusually well-read man. His correspondence is full of references to books he either read or would have liked to obtain. He is said to have owned an “extensive and valuable library,” which was bequeathed to his son-in-law Paul Menona. See Hiel Hollister, Pawlet for One Hundred Years (Pawlet, VT: Pawlett Historical Society, 1976), 215-216. Thanks to John Moody for this information, which he received from Dorothy Offensend of Wells, Vermont. The latter feels that Paul Menona might be identical with Anthony Paul (b. 1758), the husband of Occom's daughter Christiana and son of Moses Paul. Since both are said to have been preachers in the vicinity of Lake George, she may well be right. See Love, Samson Occom, 355.

22. See Love, Samson Occom, 169-176. It has been reprinted recently in Studies in American Indian Literature 4, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1992): 82-105; and Lauter et al., Heath Anthology of American Literature, 736-751. The original full title was A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian who was executed at New Haven on the 2nd of September 1772 for the Murder of Mr. Moses Cook, late of Waterbury, on the 7th of December 1771 / Preached at the Desire of Said Paul by Samson Occom, minister of the gospel and missionary to the Indians, New Haven, 1772. Twenty-three copies are found in Special Collections, Baker Library, Dartmouth College. The Welsh version, also in the Baker Library, is titled Pregeth ar Ddihenyddiad Moses Paul, Indian, yr hwn a gefwyd yn euog o Lofruddiaeth (Cerrfryrddin: Argraphwyd gan John Daniel, yn Hoel-y-Brenin, 1789).

23. The broadside, of uncertain authorship, is reproduced by R. Pierce Beaver, “Protestant Churches and the Indians,” in Washburn, Handbook of North American Indians, 4:434; and Ola E. Winslow, American Broadside Verse from Imprints of the 17th and 18th Centuries (New Haven: Elliots Books, 1930). An excerpt is included in Olive W. Burt, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories (1958; rpt., New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 150-151.

24. Sylvanus Conant, The Blood of Abel and the Blood of Jesus (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1765), 20. Quoted in Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory,” 172-173; and Minnick, “New England Execution Sermon,” 84.

25. Samuel Danforth, The Woful Effects of Drunkenness (Boston: B. Green, 1710). Danforth argues, as Occom does, that drink will ruin a man's health and consequently waste his estate, leave his family in poverty, and deprive him of honor and esteem among his people. See Minnick, “New England Execution Sermon,” 86.

26. Amos Whiting to Occom, May 2, 1773, Samson Occom Papers (0179-0180).

27. A similar interpretation of Occom's sermon based on the broadside version is given in Rayna D. Green, “The Only Good Indian: The Image of the Indian in American Vernacular Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1973; Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms 74-9426, 1973), 72-73.

28. See Murray, Forked Tongues, 34-48.

29. The full title is A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations. By Samson Occom (New London, CT: Printed and sold by Timothy Green, 1774). See Love, Samson Occom, 176-187. Another Indian collection of hymns was published by Thomas Commuck, a Narragansett from Brothertown (Wisconsin), under the title Indian Melodies, harmonized by Thomas Hastings (New York: G. Lane & C. B. Tippett, 1845). It contains a hymn on p. 31 that is either attributed to or named in honor of Samson Occom. Commuck, as was pointed out earlier (n. 79 above), did not include Occom as founder in his sketch of Brothertown, perhaps in order not to undermine his own false claim in the preface that “no son of the forest, to his knowledge, has ever undertaken a task of the kind”; Indian Melodies, v. Interestingly, he also dedicates one hymn to Apes[s] (p. 28).

30. Blodgett, Samson Occom, 145; Love, Samson Occom, 180-181. Among the Wheelock Papers there is a list of twenty-six hymns attributed to Occom.

31. The former is reprinted in Charles Seymour Robinson, A Selection of Spiritual Songs with Music for Use in Social Meetings (New York: Scribner, 1879), 83. The latter, dated 1801, is contained in Albert Christ-Janer, Charles W. Hughes, and Carleton Sprague Smith, American Hymns Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 553. Love, who includes both versions in his biography, feels that Occom is the author of each, though they were published after his death. See Love, Samson Occom, 183-187. Miles notes that one of Occom's humns became a standard (hymn no. 167) in the prayer book of the Presbyterian Church. See Miles, Samson Occom, 6-7.

32. Lois Marie Hunter, The Shinnecock Indians (Islip, NY: Buys Brothers, 1950), 31-33. This is an allusion to a tradition among the Narragansetts that a certain tune was known among them and other Coastal Algonquians long before the arrival of Europeans and that they immediately recognized it upon first hearing services in a Plymouth church. Commuck, a Narragansett, has incorporated it under the title “Old Indian Hymn” in his Indian Melodies. See Love, Samson Occom, 177.

33. Occom Journal, January 23-April 27, 1786, Wheelock Papers. Quoted in Blodgett, Samson Occom, 187.

34. See Speck, “Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut,” 274-275. On the importance of dreams in the Indian conversion experience, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787-1862 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 116-117.

35. See Regina Flannery, An Analysis of Coastal Algonquian Culture (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1939), 32-33; and Daniel G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America (1876; rpt., New York: Hashell House, 1968), 159-162, 288-290.

36. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography, 44.

37. See Peter W. Williams, America's Religions: Traditions and Cultures (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 170.

38. The essay on Occom, dated January 18, 1984, was written by Everett R. Carson and is available along with other posthumous data used here in the Samson Occom Vertical File, Wheelock Papers. Dartmouth's best-known literary exponents of Indian descent, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, also make a brief ironic reference to Occom (“that jewel in the college's crown; its very own American Indian preacher/recruiter/fund-raiser, the first in a procession of salaried aboriginal tokens”) in their novel, The Crown of Columbus (New York: Harper-Collins, 1991), 136-137.

39. Entry dated Thursday, October 18, 1787, Occom Journals, September 20-December 7, 1787, Wheelock Papers.

40. The proposal was made public in the Montauk Pioneer, August 16, 1969. Quote from the East Hampton Star, June 25, 1970. In an article in the Long Island Press, June 14, 1970, Karl Grossman refers to Occom as “an Indian revolutionary 200 years before his time.” The above material is available in the Samson Occom Vertical File, Wheelock Papers.

41. See Melissa Fawcett Sayet, “Sociocultural Authority in Mohegan Society,” Artifacts 16 (1987): 40-41; and Fawcett, Lasting of the Mohegans, 32-34. In a recent conversation, Melissa Fawcett informed me that Occom's name was still “good” for propaganda purposes and highly cherished but that the most respected elder of the contemporary Mohegan community at Uncasville is his sister Lucy Tantaquidgeon (1731-1830), who chose to remain in Connecticut and helped to found the Mohegan Church. Her descendant, the noted scholar and traditionalist Gladys Tantaquidgeon (b. 1889), was still operating the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum (founded in 1931) in 1995.

42. See Jack Campisi, The Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin: A Brief History, pamphlet (Woodruff, WI: Brothertown Indian Nation, 1991). See also Ottery and Ottery, A Man Called Sampson, 43-53.

43. Brant produced a “Mohawk Prayer Book” in 1786 together with Daniel Claus, a translation. He apparently hoped to write a history of the Six Nations in English but never completed it. See Douglas W. Boyce, “A Glimpse of Iroquois Culture History through the Eyes of Joseph Brant and John Norton,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117, no. 4 (August 1973): 286-294. On the life of Brant, see Isabel T. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984); and William L. Stone, Life of Joseph Brant: Thayendanegea, 2 vols. (New York: A. V. Blake, G. Dearborn, 1838; rpt., New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969). There is, however, a long line of Iroquoian historians beginning with David Cusick (Tuscarora) and Elias Johnson (Tuscarora) in the nineteenth century and culminating with prominent early-twentieth-century anthropologists like Arthur C. Parker (Seneca) and J. N. B. Hewitt (Tuscarora). See “Books by Iroquois Authors (Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora, Oneida, Onondaga),” American Indian Quaterly 6, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 1982): 358-376. One might also mention John Norton, Joseph Brant's adopted “nephew,” who wrote a journal in 1816 with accounts of Iroquois, Cherokee, and other eastern woodland Indians' cultures. See Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman, eds., The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970).

44. Quoted from a fragment in Samson Occom Papers (0403-0407). About eighteen sermons written between 1760 and 1766 (a few are not dated) are found among the Wheelock Papers. Several more are preserved in the Samson Occom Papers (0397-0483).

45. Undated mss., Samson Occom Papers (0474, 0456). The first is cited in Love, Samson Occom, 176. During the 1770s abolitionism was a common issue among many New Light preachers, such as Jonathan Edwards. In 1774 Connecticut passed a law forbidding the importation of Indian, black, or mulatto slaves. See Lorenzo J. Greene, “Slave-Holding New England and Its Awakening,” Journal of Negro History 13, no. 4 (October 1928): 492-533.

46. See Julian D. Major, Jr., ed., The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 6-7; and William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York/London: Garland Publishing, 1984), 44. Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753-84), an African slave purchased by the Wheatley family when she was about seven, taught herself how to write and eventually became a fairly well-known poet. One of her first writing efforts was a letter addressed to Samson Occom around 1765-66, who was well acquainted with the Wheatleys. Occom was probably instrumental in getting the countess of Huntingdon to support the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773) and helped to sell the collection in Connecticut. See Susanna Wheatley to Occom, March 29, 1773, Samson Occom Papers (0171-0173). The responding letter Phillis Wheatley wrote to Occom on February 11, 1774, a rare documentation of her own antislavery sentiments, was published in various local newspapers and is included in most modern collections of her work. A clipping from the Goodspeed Book Shop's dealer catalogue also mentions a copy of Eliot's Bible that was purchased from Occom by the African American Methodist preacher and author Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833), indicating some association between them as well.

47. See Murray, Forked Tongues, 44-47.

48. Entry of Wednesday, February 8, 1786, Occom Journal, January 23-April 26, 1786, Wheelock Papers. Occom's personal library also contained a signed copy of Acts and Laws Passed by the General Court or Assembly of His Majesty's English Colony of Connecticut in New England, in America (1769), which has been preserved in the Baker Library, Dartmouth College. See Blodgett, Samson Occom, 186, n. 8.