[In the following excerpt, Brown Ruoff explores Occom's Sermon in the context of the genre of the “execution sermon.”]

I. BACKGROUND

Occom (1723-92) was raised as a traditional Mohegan, the northernmost branch of the Pequots and fiercest of the New England tribes. For a brief period in the mid-seventeenth century, the Mohegans, then numbering 2,000, greatly expanded their territory. By the end of the seventeenth century, this territory had been greatly decreased by land cessions. Because the settlers regarded the nomadic Mohegans as idle thieves, they issued orders to remove the Indians from the towns. By the end of the seventeenth century, Mohegans were no longer independent. The first successful attempt to gather Mohegans into villages was made in 1717. Eight years later, the tribe numbered only 351 and was split into two opposing camps, located one-half mile apart on the west side of the Mohegan river between New London and Norwich, Connecticut.

Born in a wigwam, Occom was the son of Joshua Tomocham and Sarah, who was reputed to be descended from Uncas, the famous Mohegan chief. Joshua's father, “Tomockham alias Ashneon,” had settled near Uncas Hill (later Mohegan) late in the seventeenth century (Love 21-22). In his autobiographical sketch dated 17 September 1768, Occom describes the life his parents and their fellow Mohegans led during his youth: “I was born a Heathen and Brought up in Heathenism, till I was between 16 & 17 years of age, at a place called Mohegan, in New London, Connecticut, in New England. My Parents Liv'd a wandering Life, as did all the Indians at Mohegan; they Chiefly Depended upon Hunting, Fishing, & Fowling for their Living and had no Connections with the English, excepting to Traffic with them, in their Small Trifles; and they Strictly maintained and followed their Heathenish Ways, Customs, & Religion, though there was some Preaching among them …¹

The preaching of evangelical missionaries like George Whitefield aroused strong religious zeal in sixteen-year-old Occom. After his conversion a year later, Occom longed to learn to read in order to study the scriptures. In 1743, he went to Lebanon, Connecticut, to study with the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, one of the greatest of the New England evangelical preachers: “So I went up, thinking I should be back again in a few Days: when I got up there, he received me With kindness and Compassion and instead of Staying a Fortnight or 3 weeks, I Spent 4 years with him.”² Occom left when ill health and eye strain prevented him from studying longer.

Occom then accepted the invitation of the Montauk Indians of Long Island to become their schoolmaster. In 1751, over Wheelock's objections, he married Mary Fowler, a Montauk. After his marriage, Occom was perpetually in desperate financial straits because salary was always too small to support his rapidly increasing family, which eventually numbered ten children. He supplemented his income by working as a farmer, fisherman, cooper, and bookbinder. Ordained in 1759, Occom spent the next year as an itinerant minister in lower New England.³ Occom became a missionary to the Oneida Indians in 1761. Determined to work among his own people, Occom moved his family in 1764 to Mohegan, after his application to serve as missionary to the Niantics and other neighboring tribes was approved. That year he also assisted Whitefield in raising money for Wheelock's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut.

Because of his success as a preacher and fund-raiser, Occom was sent to Great Britain to raise money for the school. Accompanied by the Reverend Nathanial Whitaker of Norwich, he set sail in December 1765. In Great Britain, he found a culture far different from the white or Indian cultures of his native land. Both awed and appalled, Occom called London “such Confusion as I never Dreamt of—there was Some at Churches, singing & Preaching, in the Streets some Cursing Swaring & Damning one another, others was hollowing, Whestling, talking gigling, & Laughing, & Coaches and footmen passing and repassing. Crossing and Criss-Crossing, and the Poor Begars Praying, Crying, and Beging upon their knees …” (quoted in Blodgett 88).

Supported by Whitefield and his followers, such as the second Earl of Dartmouth, Occom preached at least three hundred sermons and raised over £11,000 in two years. He impressed all he met with his propriety, modesty, and dignity. Less impressed were Whitaker and Wheelock, who prodded him lest his native pride get out of hand (Blodgett 94). Despite his increased sense of individual worth and pride in his Indianness, Occom was beset by worries about his family, which was totally dependent on Wheelock for sustenance. After arriving home in 1768, Occom was less inclined to follow Wheelock's advice or to accept low pay without protest. Relations with Wheelock worsened when Occom learned that his mentor had removed the Indian Charity School from Lebanon, Connecticut, to Hanover, New Hampshire, where it became present-day Dartmouth College. After hearing this news and reports that its Indian enrollment had shrunk to three, an angry Occom fired off a letter to Wheelock, dated 24 July 1771, reminding his friend of the school's original purpose:

I am very jealous that instead of your Semenary Becoming alma Mater, she will be too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees, for She is already aDorned up too much like the Popish Virgin Mary. She'll be Naturally ashamed to Suckle the Tawnees for she is already equal in Power, Honor and Authority to any College in Europe, I think your College has too much Worked by Grandeur for the Poor Indians, they'll never have much benefit of it, …

But when we got Home behold all glory had Decayed and now I am afraid, we shall be Deem'd as Liars and Deceivers, in Europe, unless you gather Indians quickly to your College, in Great Numbers and not to have so many whites in the Charity, …

(quoted in Blodgett 122-23)

In 1774, Occom published A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774). Undoubtedly inspired by the acclaim for his Sermon Preached by Samson Occom (1772), the volume was partly prepared for use by Christian Indians. New editions appeared in 1785 and 1792. A fine singer, Occom had met most of the contemporary hymn writers during his tour of Great Britain. Although the extent to which Occom wrote specific hymns is difficult to determine, authorities credit him with those not found in other hymnals or assigned to other hymnologists. Most of these reflect the subject matter and style of his sermons (Blodgett 144-45).

Occom became increasingly involved in Indian affairs. Earlier he had helped the Mohegans try to settle their land claims. He now enthusiastically supported the plan of Joseph Johnson, his Mohegan son-in-law, to remove the Christian Indians of New England to lands offered by the Oneida in western New York. The Revolutionary War halted these plans. A staunch believer in neutrality for Indians, Occom felt that the war was the work of the devil. In an address probably written in early 1776, Occom urged Indians “not to intermeddle in these Quarrils among the White People.”⁴

Little is known of Occom's activities during the war. For six years beginning in 1784 he traveled through New England to raise funds for the settlement on the Oneida lands. He moved his own family there in 1789. Occom devoted his last years to helping the Christian Indians defend their land claims against Oneida efforts to reclaim the land and white plots to lease Christian Indian land for much less than its value. When he died in 1792 at the age of 69, his funeral was attended by more than three hundred Indians.

II. THE SERMON

Probably the first book published in English by an American Indian, the Sermon Preached by Samson Occom … at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772) was so popular that it was reprinted at least nineteen times and translated into Welsh in 1827. The occasion for the sermon was the murder of Moses Cook, a respected citizen of Waterbury, Connecticut, by Moses Paul, a Christian Mohegan who committed the act while drunk. Held on 2 September 1772, the execution attracted a large audience of Indians and whites because it was New Haven's first hanging in twenty years, and because it afforded a unique opportunity to hear an Indian preach against his people's alcoholism.

The theology of the sermon is based on New Light Calvinism, which stressed dramatic conversion and held that virtue was a characteristic present in all humankind.⁵ The appeal of this evangelical theology for Indians, as it was for African Americans, was the promise of racial equality under God and a standard of conduct against which they might judge the actions of white Christians. Its form is derived from the execution sermon, a once popular genre that may well make a comeback if proposals to televise executions are approved. In “True Confessions and Dying Warnings in Colonial New England,” Lawrence Towner attributes the popularity of the genre to its relationship to religious practices in the early colonial period, when probing the depths of one's soul and confessing to one's sinfulness were part of private and church ritual. Confessions became as common in seventeenth and eighteenth-century courts as they were in churches. Towner argues that the genre's real significance is as “a form of hortatory literature consciously designed to make criminal acts detestable and to induce proper behavior in society as a whole” (533). Whereas in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, confessors were usually members from within society, by the eighteenth century they were more likely to be black, Indian, Irish, or foreign pirates. Between 1702 and 1776, eleven Indians were executed (Towner 537 n. 6).

In “Early American Gallows Literature,” Ronald A. Bosco indicates that the first example of gallows literature published in America is Samuel Danforth's The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (1674). During the next 126 years, a total of 163 execution-related titles were published. Several dealt with the execution of Indians, including one published just four years before Occom's: Timothy Pitkin's A Sermon Preached at … the Execution of John Jacob, an Indian, for Murder (81-82, 92). Wayne C. Minnick notes in “The New England Exeuction Sermon, 1639-1800” that authors of these sermons “ranked among the best educated, most influential men of their society.” The delivery of the execution sermon, far from being a function which “attracted cheap showmen inclined to capitalize upon grisly but impelling circumstances,” was “a serious expression of religious impulse by some of New England's finest minds” (78). Among the great practioners of this genre were Increase and Cotton Mather. The execution sermon followed a distinct structure: a text that was elaborated and paraphrased into a doctrine; the delineation of a series of propositions derived from the doctrine; and a general and specific application of the doctrine (79, 81).

In agreeing to deliver Paul's execution sermon, Occom took on the delicate task of communicating with both white and Indian audiences without alienating either one. The murder of a respected white citizen by a drunken, Christian Indian must have confirmed the worst suspicions of those whites convinced that Indians were unsalvagable, inhuman instruments of the devil who must be removed or exterminated. Occom is successful in his threefold task: he communicates to his mixed audience the universality of sin and redemption, urges the condemned prisoner to accept Christ, and exhorts his fellow Indians to change their ways. In his preface Occom states that he deliberately uses “common, plain, everyday talk” that little children, Negroes, and Indians can understand. The text he selects is one Minick notes among the most popular for execution sermons: Romans 6.23—“For the Wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (81). On the surface, the bulk of the sermon seems to be just a passionate discourse on the standard propositions common then and now in evangelical preaching—the temptations of sin, the unending horrors of hell that unrepentant sinners will endure after death, and the eternal joys of heaven awaiting those who are saved. However, because these propositions are delivered by an Indian, they convey the implicit message that human nature, not race, makes us susceptible to temptation and that God's love of all people makes redemption equally possible for us all.

Both his preface and his remarks to the “reverend gentlemen and fathers in Israel” are cast in a humble tone. After acknowledging his need for their guidance in understanding God's oracles and begging them not to be offended, Occom tactfully reminds the whites of their duty to encounter sin and fight the battles of the Lord. Casting aside this humility, Occom forcefully takes a “tough love” stance when he addresses Paul and the Indian audience. His comments to the condemned man are a balancing act. On the one hand, he tells Paul that the murder of Moses Cook is especially contemptible because the prisoner, as a Christian convert, committed the act with his eyes open. On the other, by urging Paul to repent, Occom reminds his audience that God can forgive the worst of offenses, even the murder of a white man by a drunken Indian. The great popularity of the sermon undoubtedly stemmed from the sections directed to Paul and “My poor Kindred.” In the latter, Occom vividly describes how alcoholism has destroyed Indian families. Occom does not specifically blame Indian alcoholism on whites, though his Indian audience would have been acutely aware of the fact that the problem did not exist before the coming of whites. Instead, he insists that Indians accept responsibility for their alcoholism and for the evils it has brought to Indian people: “God made us men, and we chuse to be beast and devils, God made us rational creatures, and we chuse to be fools” (101). To eradicate the problem, Occom exhorts them to “break off from your drunkenness,” repent, and accept Christ as their savior (103).

One of the few temperance sermons published during the late eighteenth century, Occom's sermon is a powerful early statement of how alcohol devastated Indian families. It is also an important example of how an Indian author adapted Western European theology and a literary genre for his own purposes. In addition, it reveals how early Indian authors effectively communicated with a variety of audiences.⁶

Notes

1. Blodgett 31. Biographical information is derived from this source.

2. Blodgett 27. The autobiographical statement and the sermon are included in the Heath American Literature Anthology, ed. Paul Lauter, 1. 730-51.

3. Occom was ordained by the London Society, also known as the New England Company. Its Boston Commissioners represented the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, which was controlled by the Church of England. Occom also had dealings with the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, controlled by the Scotch Presbyterians and also called The Scotch Society. See Blodgett 37 n. 1, 51.

4. Blodgett 163. The address is quoted in its entirety in Love 228-29.

5. Alan Heimert analyzes New Light Calvinism in Religion and the American Mind.

6. David Murray discusses Occom's rhetorical strategies in Forked Tongues 49-57.

Bibliography

Blodgett, Harold. Samson Occom. Dartmouth College Manuscript Ser. 3. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 1935.

Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1966.

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 2 vols. New York: Heath, 1990.

Love, W. Deloss. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. Boston: Pilgrim, 1899.

Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1991.

Occom, Samson. A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians of All Denominations. New London: Timothy Green, 1774.

———. A Sermon Preached by Samson Occom … at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian Who Was Executed at New-Haven, on the 2d of September 1772. … Bennington: William Watson, 1772. 10th ed., 1780.

Towner, Lawrence W. “True Confessions and Dying Warnings in Colonial New England.” Sibley's Heir: A Volume in Memory of Clifford Kenyon Shipton. Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1982. 523-39. [No editor listed]