The Heathen School Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by John Demos

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-679-45510-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-385-35166-9 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956402

  Jacket images from the Friendship Album of the Foreign Mission School in the collection of the Cornwall Historical Society, Cornwall, CT

  Jacket design by Megan Wilson

  First Edition

  v3.1_r2

  To Carter Umbarger

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

  History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

  And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

  Guides us by vanities. Think now

  She gives when our attention is distracted

  And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

  That the giving famishes the craving.

  —T. S. ELIOT, “Gerontion”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE Beginnings

  Chapter One American Outreach: The China Trade

  Chapter Two “Providence unquestionably cast them on our shores”

  INTERLUDE Hawaii

  PART TWO Ascent

  Chapter Three American Mission: The World Savers

  Chapter Four “A seminary for the education of heathen youth”

  INTERLUDE Cornwall

  PART THREE Crisis

  Chapter Five American Paradox: The Indelible Color Line

  Chapter Six “So much excitement and disgust throughout our country”

  INTERLUDE The Cherokee Nation

  PART FOUR Finale

  Chapter Seven American Tragedy: Renascence and Removal

  Chapter Eight “Even the stoutest hearts melt into tears”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  Prologue

  Just a piece of local history…

  More than any of my previous projects, this one began with serendipity.

  Summer 1996. I have gone with my wife for an evening visit to the home of an old friend in the town of Cornwall, Connecticut. Before supper we chat with other guests, one of whom begins to tell us a story from Cornwall’s past. It is, he says, “just a piece of local history”—but interesting all the same. In fact, it’s very interesting; as the details unfold, I’m transfixed.

  A “heathen school” specially designed for indigenous youth from all parts of the earth … Young men and boys from Hawaii, Polynesia, India, China, plus a smattering of European Jews, and quite a few Native Americans, too, all brought together in little Cornwall during the opening decades of the nineteenth century … Educate them, “civilize” them, convert them to Christianity, then send them back to help start similar projects in their various homelands, and the entire world will be “saved” in the shortest time imaginable: thus the goal of the eminent Protestant ministers in charge … High hopes and strong claims of initial success, followed by unexpected crisis … They court, and marry, our daughters!…Families torn apart, public outrage at fever pitch: the school shut down in disgrace … And then, in the aftermath, two of the heathen “scholars” back in their own nation, leaders now, charting a painful “removal” process, along an infamous “trail of tears …” Until, at the very end, comes violent death…

  At home later that night, I cannot sleep; what I’ve heard at my friend’s house goes around and around in my head. The next morning, I get up early and drive straight to the library. I’m anxious to discover how much this story of the heathen school has been known, and written about, previously. The answer is: not a lot. There are passing mentions in several books, and a chapter or so in at least two, but no full-fledged treatment. I drive home, and ponder. A book project is a major commitment; does this clear the bar? Is there more here than “a piece of local history”? It doesn’t take long to decide.1

  Remembered now from many years later on, that moment is still vivid in my mind. The research, the thinking, the writing: All is done; only publication awaits. The process has not been easy, but I have no regrets. The story of the heathen school is “local,” yes, but it’s also a national story, even an international one. And it has taken me into some very deep layers of the American past.

  One of these is the enduring legacy of “American exceptionalism.” At their best, our national traditions have fostered a generous spirit of outreach toward neighboring peoples and nations, a feeling of obligation—not to say “mission”—to make the world as a whole a better place. (Think the Marshall Plan, after World War II. Think the Peace Corps. Think the ever-ready offers of American-driven relief following disasters all around the globe.) “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,” John Winthrop famously declared while leading the first band of Englishmen and women to colonize Massachusetts (1630). And that idea—America as a “redeemer nation,” showing others the way to broad-gauge human improvement—has been with us ever since. To be sure, exceptions to this exceptionalism intrude. Generosity may slide into arrogant presumption, helpfulness into imperialism. All of our country’s wars fought in my lifetime had, as their declared purpose, something more than national aggrandizement. Most were, in one way or another, meant to protect and advance humane values thought to be characteristically American—freedom, democracy, opportunity. Yet some of them, in hindsight (or even at the time), have a markedly downside look.2

  In short, it’s been part of America’s history—this redemptive project, this crusader mentality—all along. It’s been creative and destructive, glorious and tragic, noble and ignoble, by turns. Inevitably, attitudes toward it will differ, but there is no doubting its power as a key historical theme. It both frames and suffuses the story of the heathen school.

  A second large theme at the story’s center is what the critic Tzvetan Todorov calls “the discovery self makes of the other.” How do we deal with others who are manifestly different from ourselves? This, of course, is not a specifically American question, nor is it only a history question. Rather, it has a broadly existential grounding; it’s generic; it’s part of the “human condition.” It takes many forms (difference of race, of class, of gender, of culture, of religion, of age, of sexual orientation, and so on); each one of us confronts it, in our private lives, every day. Yet in America—the United States of America—it has acquired a public depth and coloration; for the bedrock fact of human difference has shaped our collective experience from the start. The three-way encounter of our colonial period—Indians, Europeans, and Africans—was extraordinary; the Old World across the Atlantic had nothing like it. And this was only the beginning. The magnetic force of our national project has continued to draw into our midst people of every stripe and condition. The heathen school was a microcosm of the struggles rooted in this part of our history.3

  There is a third key element to mention up front; it may sound counterintuitive, but no matter. This is a story of failure. Its dark, tragic end lies far from its bright beginning. As such, it’s not the sort of thing writers and readers of American history commonly look f
or. The national narrative we favor has a triumphalist score; progress is its central note. Yet our history is strewn with failures, large and small: projects gone awry from poor planning or bad luck, ideas missing their mark, emotions running amok, and—especially in an “exceptional” country—the hubris of overreaching. Many of these are forgotten almost as soon as they conclude; often, a feeling of shame attaches to them. Sometimes the groups most directly involved acknowledge them only to claim a lesson learned, and a reason to “move on” as fast as possible. Yet most failures do, at the very least, tell us something about who we are as a people; we ignore them at our cost. Of course, every individual life knows personal failure—moments of falling down, or falling short. From this, too, much can be learned. As Samuel Beckett has written, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”4

  In sum: America as a redeemer nation. The encounter of self with other. The shape and substance of failure. Plus the inherent drama of the story itself. Reasons enough for me to write this book, and—dare I hope—for others to read it.

  And one thing more. Along with the serendipity that got me started came fate. My father, born of Greek parentage and raised in Istanbul, was educated just after the start of the last century at a place called Anatolia College, a missionary school in a remote part of central Turkey. Indeed, the college’s original sponsor was the very same American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that played a key role in the story of the heathen school. Anatolia’s students were a mix of Eastern Orthodox Greeks and Armenians, and Turkish Jews, the staff (for the most part) Protestant Americans. It was, then, itself a heathen school.

  Summer 1997. I’m a year into the project, and have a full day of research ahead; notes are piled high on my desk. At lunchtime I take a break to fetch the mail from our village post office. Included in the deliveries is a fund-raising brochure from Anatolia College. (The college goes on, though now relocated to northern Greece.) I am about to toss it aside, and go back to my work on the heathen school, when my gaze is drawn to an image on the brochure’s front; it’s an old photograph of the college orchestra taken many decades previous. And there, looking out at me from the middle of the photograph, is my father (age about eighteen), yet another heathen youth marked for salvation. In his left hand he grasps a trumpet.

  A trumpet? Is this a summons? Serendipity and fate: Maybe the two together “make history”?

  Final prefatory note: The book has a somewhat unusual architecture. Each of its four parts contains two chapters: The first is brief, designed to provide context for what immediately follows; the second unfolds the narrative. The parts, in turn, are separated by “interludes” about places central to the story. Occasional indented passages are vignettes presenting up-close views of specific events and people.

  Tyringham, Massachusetts

  May 2013

  PART ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  • CHAPTER ONE •

  American Outreach: The China Trade

  With their Revolution completed, their Constitution written, their nation established, the self-styled Americans faced the world in a fundamentally altered posture. Throughout the preceding two centuries, they had been colonists—and thus, in a broad sense, dependents. They had absorbed from elsewhere regular infusions of migrants, of “goods,” of cultural nourishment and guidance.

  But henceforth the currents would flow, also, in reverse direction. The new United States would increasingly—sometimes aggressively—turn out toward other groups and places. It would proudly proclaim its republican credo as a “beacon of freedom” for political reformers around the world. It would proffer its “go-ahead” spirit as the key to social development. It would urge its highly charged version of Protestant Christianity on all sorts of “heathen” unbelievers. Moreover, its people would rapidly multiply their physical contacts with the rest of humankind. Especially after about 1800, their travel and commerce would extend, quite literally, to the farthest corners of the earth.

  The acme—the epitome—of this remarkable outreach was the so-called China Trade. To be sure, Americans were followers, not pioneers, here. Britons, Russians, and Spaniards (among others) had preceded them along the route to “Cathay,” since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese had claimed the island of Macao (just south of Canton) in 1557. And occasional Europeans had been voyaging that way, singly or in small groups, from far back in the Middle Ages. The American colonists, meanwhile, had been expressly forbidden by their imperial masters to join in most forms of international exchange.1

  Yet once independence was achieved, American traders hastened to assert claims of their own; within little more than a generation, they gained for themselves a leading role. From Boston and Salem, Massachusetts; from Newport and Providence, Rhode Island; from New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore, the ships poured out—by the dozens each year. Canton was their chief, but far from their only, destination. For the China Trade was just one piece of a still larger “East India” (Asian) connection. Calcutta, Madras, Sumatra, Batavia, Port Jackson, Manila: These places, too, figured heavily in the traders’ itinerary. The eventual outcome would include some astonishing individual fortunes, and a burst of capital formation to fuel the first phase of American industrial development.2

  Even within itself, the China Trade was complex, many-sided, ever changing.

  It was a clutch of prosperous merchants—gathered on summer afternoons in a massive glass-domed structure called the Boston Exchange Coffee House—dressed in ruffled nankeen shirts, seated at finely turned mahogany-and-bamboo tables, sipping tea from china cups, exchanging choice bits of financial gossip, and looking out across the nearby harbor for the return of long-departed ships. (Some voyages lasted for as long as four years.)3

  It was twenty-odd Yankee farm boys turned “tars,” the crew of a trim three-masted schooner—becalmed in the midst of a glassy tropical sea—mending ropes and sails and nets, whittling scrimshaw figurines, catching sea turtles, counting the spouts of a passing whale, cursing the endless, windless horizon, and dreaming all the while of the “shares” they would one day carry home to stake a claim in their native countryside. (Most sailors in the China Trade would make just a single voyage, and then return to the land.)4

  It was a gang of sea-hardened hunters—young men bent on adventure, set ashore for months at a stretch on a rock-rimmed beach along the outermost of the Falkland Islands, deep in the lower Atlantic—methodically clubbing to death hundreds of bellowing fur seals, whose skins would then be scraped and dried on nearby pegging grounds prior to stowage en masse for shipment to the Orient. (Fur seals were taken from islands and atolls across a broad arc girdling the entire southern quadrant of the globe, including large sections of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Within a scant few decades, the hunt had rendered them nearly extinct, almost everywhere.)5

  It was another group of Yankees—but this one a resident colony, and numbering in the hundreds—living as “alone men” on the Spanish-owned isle of Mas Afuera, off the west coast of South America, huddled in dank wooden huts, with scruffy little vegetable plots set alongside, struggling against ceaseless storms, insects, and disease, drinking, gambling, fighting, and gathering their own stash of skins for the arrival of the next season’s trade fleet. (Mas Afuera was a seal hunter’s El Dorado. It is estimated that three million skins were taken from this one little site, before a Spanish naval squadron evicted the hunters, and burned their settlements, in 1805.)6

  It was yet another group, with another trading target, in another place: Fiji, far out in the South Pacific—where a transient population of foreign “beachcombers” mingled with native islanders, in love and war and occasional rites of cannibalism—all to the end of securing the highly aromatic bundles of sandalwood that would later fetch huge sums on the Canton market. (The Chinese turned sandalwood into a fine powder that, for centuries, they had used as incense in elaborate religious and funerary ceremonie
s.)7

  It was a wholesale assault on another ocean fur-bearer—the charming, hapless sea otter—in the waters off the coast of present-day Alaska. And thus, too, it was a meeting ground for white and native North Americans—the latter including Tlingit and Haida, Salish and Tsimshian, Nootka and Chinook, with their powerful warrior traditions, their water skills, their swift dugout canoes, their totem pole–fronted, stilt-raised villages, their potlatch and other complex cultural practices, all achieved within a productive system that did not (and could not) include agriculture. (The Northwest Coast would quickly become a vast adjunct to the China Trade. Sea otter pelts, informally dubbed “soft gold,” were especially prized by merchants from the cold climes of north China; a fully loaded trade ship might thus expect triple, quadruple, or even better, returns on its investment.)8

  It was a mile-long train of pack animals (llamas, horses, mules, and their attendant herders) laden with bags of silver newly mined from the cerro rico (rich hill) at the great boomtown of Potosí high in the Andes mountain range, threading its way week after week along precipitous trails in the descent to ports on the coast of Spanish Peru. From there most of the precious cargo would go in one of two directions: westward in ships known as “Manila galleons” through the Pacific via the Philippines to Canton, or north by boat to Panama, overland on the jungle-shrouded isthmus, back on the sea for transfer in Havana (Cuba) to Spain’s annual “treasure fleet,” and then across the ocean, to be unloaded, finally, at the imperial hub of Seville. Sooner or later, some might be procured by American (or other) merchants and sent on to the Far East. (Specie—Spanish silver dollars—was rated above all else in the China Trade. Indeed, the Potosí mines, by far the world’s leading source of bullion, fueled the entire system.)

  It was also, of course, Canton, the only Chinese port of entry open to foreigners. Here, at its eastern terminus, the trade was subject to elaborate regulation and protocol: gift exchanges; the engagement of pilots, interpreters, provisioners, and stevedores; the payment of taxes, duties, and outright bribes; the inspection and rating of all imported products (sea otters, for example, were divided into ten carefully delineated categories). There were dangers to avoid, ranging from Malay pirates lurking outside the port entrance, to the sudden onset of Pacific typhoons, to local sharpers who packed shipping chests with wood chips or paper instead of tea and silks, to overindulgence in samshew (a potent Chinese whiskey). There were restrictions to obey, especially those that confined all fan kwae (“foreign devils”) to a narrow waterfront warren of streets and alleys set apart from the city proper. There was an intricate commercial system to master, with hoppos (customs superintendents) and cohong merchants (those formally licensed by the emperor), coolies (day laborers) and chinchew men (local shopkeepers), “chops” (official seals and marks) and hongs (warehouses), and the widespread use of Spanish dollars. Finally, there were “goods” to buy and carry home—the point of it all—starting always with tea and silks, but also including nankeens (hand-loomed cotton fabrics), crepes, and grass cloth; porcelain tableware (“china”) of every conceivable description; lacquered furniture; elegant oil, watercolor, and reverse-glass paintings (portraits, landscapes, garden scenes); carvings in ivory, jade, and soapstone (chess sets, for example); sewing and snuffboxes in mother-of-pearl; silver flatware sets that mimicked Western styles; brightly painted handheld fans of both “screen” and folding varieties (exported literally by the thousands, and considered de rigueur for genteel American ladies throughout the nineteenth century); elaborately filigreed tortoiseshell combs (also by the thousands, also wildly fashionable); umbrellas, window shades, straw mats, wallpapers, feather dusters, horn apothecary spoons, and numerous other bits and pieces too humble to have been included in the surviving records. In short: a kaleidoscope of (what came to be known as) chinoiserie, on a scale almost impossible to comprehend. (Virtually every “middling” household, in or near American cities of the period, would have had at least a few China-made objects. And in those with direct connections to the trade, the total might easily have risen into the hundreds. Moreover, tea was a beverage of choice for people of all classes.)9