[Blodgett is the author of the first comprehensive biography of Occom. In the following excerpt from that work, he offers a summation of the missionary's life and work, declaring that Occom “never ‘sold out,’ as so many Indians did. … [He] stood for Indian autonomy, dying at last in an independent Indian township which he had fought to create and preserve.”]

The Indian who emerges from the foregoing record is not a subtle character. No complex analysis is required to arrive at a fair estimate of the man. As a preacher he never questioned the orthodoxies in which he was trained. Unlike so many ministers in his day, he was not given to the kind of textual interpretations which led so often to new offshoots from the main stream of a religious faith. The gospel he learned from Eleazar Wheelock sufficed him to the end of his days, and he regarded with suspicion—witness his conversation with a “Shaking Quaker”—all attempts to develop new faiths from the sacred text. His sermons were simple, orderly, at times eloquent, and nearly always effective with his audience. He was prone to dwell in the fashion of his time upon the peril of the soul. He gauged the success of his pleading by the tears he produced, by the degree to which his auditors were aroused to fright and alarm over the terrible question of salvation. His chief aim was to arouse the conviction of sin.

He was a solemn man by nature. There is not a hint of light-heartedness in all his writings. As his religion would naturally intensify the gravity of his temperament, so also the bitter poverty he faced his life long in the struggle to maintain a large family, the necessity for literally begging his subsistence from his patrons, the irritation of dealing with factions among his own people, and the greater irritation of beholding his race driven back by an invading civilization—all these conspired to throw his life into the shadows.

Yet it would be easy to overdraw the picture of Occom's trials. If he was poor, he was not as poor as most Indians. If he was patronized, still he was a celebrity in his own right, an important man. One even notices in some of his letters a pleasant touch of vanity. He was likeable. He scored a conspicuous social success over Whitaker in the English tour. He was eagerly greeted wherever he stopped on his many journeys through the wilderness. He made friends easily. He was affectionate, intensely domestic, and strangely industrious. He did not have an unusual intellect, but he possessed a solidity, an integrity of character, which preserved his independence in an alien culture. His greatest virtue was his refusal to act the white man. He never “sold out,” as so many Indians did. Even though one notices a note of self-pity in his emphasis on “the poor Indians,” one must also admit that, surrounded to the last by the spectacle of a tremendous new force altering the destiny of his people, he stood for Indian autonomy, dying at last in an independent Indian township which he had fought to create and preserve.

It is fitting to take our leave of him with two eyewitness impressions, one from an Englishman who heard him preach on the English tour, the other from an American minister who in his boyhood heard him exhorting his people in Connecticut. The Englishman wrote:

“Mr. O. was rather under the middle stature, of a broad make, with long straight hair, tawny complexion; and had a good voice. There was an original simplicity in his conversation, which rendered it agreeable. He slept two nights at my house when travelling with Dr. W. to collect, in March, 1767. A clergyman and a dissenting minister had some conversation with him, who said that he understood the Greek Testament very well. A friend of mine removed to America in 1788, and settled at Greenburgh in the Jerseys. In a letter, dated, Sept. 24, 1791, he says, he heard Mr. Occom preach at the White Plains. He had then the care of two Indian congregations, about 300 miles distant from the White Plains, and he was informed, that since his settlement with them, they had left off their frolics and their hunting: every family had a farm, by which they supported themselves with as much regularity as the white people. They also paid great attention to the education of their children; and a school was established among them for teaching the English language. Mr. Occom was said to be very happy with his people, and they with him; and he hoped that real religion was advancing among them.”¹

The second impression comes from the Rev. Daniel Waldo, who wrote a letter, July 7, 1853, for the sketch of Occom in Sprague's ANNALS:

“It is not much that I can tell you, from personal recollection, of the Rev. Samson Occom, though I distinctly remember to have heard him preach when I was about fourteen years of age. He preached, on one occasion, in an old meeting-house, in the part of Franklin, Conn., then known as Pettipaug; and, as it was only a few miles from my native place, I was attracted, in company with many others, by his reputation as an Indian preacher, to hear him. He made an impression on my youthful mind, which has remained in a good degree of vividness, through the long period of seventy-seven years,—and evidence that the impression must have originally been one of no inconsiderable strength. Mr. Occom, at the time referred to, seemed to me to be a man between fifty and sixty years of age. He was of about the medium height, had rather a round face, and a bright intelligent expression, with a full share of the Indian look. There was nothing in his general manner, as far as I remember, to mark him as one of the sons of the forest; but his English education might naturally be expected to eradicate, in a great measure, his original Indian peculiarities. His voice was pleasant, but not very loud—sufficiently so, however, to accommodate his text, but I recollect that his subject led him to speak somewhat at length of what he called a traditionary religion; and he told an anecdote by way of illustration. An old Indian, he said, had a knife which he kept till he wrote the blade out; and then his son took it and put a new blade to the handle, and kept it till he had worn the handle out; and this process went on till the knife had had half a dozen blades, and as many handles; but still it was all the time the same knife. I cannot be very particular as to the application he made of it, but the story I remember very well, and it seemed to me at the time to be very pertinent to the object for which it was told. His manner in the pulpit, as I remember it, was serious and manly; and he spoke without notes, and with a freedom which showed that he had a good command of his subject. He was undoubtedly a man of much more than ordinary talents, and though, for some time, a cloud rested over him, I believe those who had the best opportunity of judging, were disposed, on the whole, to think well of his Christian character.”²

Notes

1. This account was written, evidently for an English demoninational paper, by an Englishman of Kettering, who signed his communication with the initials, N. C. No “N. C.” appears in the list of subscribers to the English fund from Kettering. The clipping is in the Dartmouth Archives. The two Indian congregations are, of course, those of New Stockbridge and Brothertown.

2. Sprague, W. B. Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. 3—New York, 1858.