The Heathen School Read online

  Another brother-in-law, Daniel Brinsmade, was an agent of the Mission School; it was he who brought the matter to the attention of the full governing board. There was still no open declaration from Harriet or the family, but the rumors had become too strong to ignore. On June 7, Brinsmade “made his suspicions know[n] to the Board, and it made them (as he expressed it) ‘as white as sheets.’ ” Timothy Stone “rose up and said it was a lie, but upon hearing Mr. B[’s] reasons, his mouth was stop’d.” Joseph Harvey, minister in nearby Goshen and also a school agent, was assigned to confront the Golds—parents and daughter—which he did, in a “long letter,” a few days later. Harriet responded with a letter of her own, which “in full expressed her determinations.” At some point, too, there was a face-to-face meeting: “[T]hey talked to her half a day, but she would argue them down.… She would say, ‘We have vowed, and our vows are heard in Heaven; color is nothing to me; his soul is as white as mine.’ ” (Here was the language of race, given voice and repudiated in the same breath.) Moreover: “[H]e is a Christian; and ever since I embraced religion I have been praying that God would open a door for me to be a missionary, and this is the way.” Others close to her family also sought to intervene. Some years later, she remembered, in particular, a long “conversation with Dr. [Samuel] Gold [her cousin] and how he labored with her to dissuade her from her purpose, he supposing she was going to place herself in a very unhappy situation.”86

  The following Sunday, Harvey handed her an ultimatum, “which she is to answer by next Thursday.” Either the board would “publish to the world what they know and their surprise!” or Harriet would agree to break her engagement, in which case they would “enjoin secrecy.” In short: You have two alternatives. Go forward, and be exposed to public disgrace; or retreat, and we’ll do our best to arrange a cover-up.87

  Harriet did not retreat. Thus, as promised, when the board met at the end of the week and approved its annual report, it included the following statement on the proposed marriage: “We feel ourselves bound to say, that after the unequivocal disapprobation of such connexions, expressed by the Agents, and by the Christian public universally; we regard the conduct of those who have been engaged in or accessary [sic] to this transaction, as criminal; as offering an insult to the known feelings of the christian community, and as sporting with the sacred interests of this charitable institution.” These comments—especially the word criminal—would set off impassioned debate within the “christian community” throughout Connecticut, in Boston at the offices of the American Board, and well beyond. The echoes were heard as far away as the Cherokee Nation, where the wounds they caused would fester for years. Indeed, the agents went a step further. In order to disclaim any responsibility of their own, they pointed an accusing finger toward “a single individual, to whose misguided and extraordinary conduct all our troubles on this subject are justly to be ascribed.” They provided no name, but didn’t need to. All who read their statement would know they meant Lydia Northrup, who by this point had become something of a consensus scapegoat.88

  Meanwhile, in Cornwall events were moving toward a dramatic culmination. The standoff between Harriet and the agents “was known far and wide, as speedily as the wings of the wind could spread it.” Plans were laid for a public protest on the town “plain”—the open space directly fronting the Mission School. The time was set for Wednesday evening, June 22 (coincidentally, or not, the summer solstice). Harriet herself would leave a vivid description.89

  The previous night, she is spirited away to a neighbor’s house, “it being thought unsafe for me to stay at home.” She is shown to an upstairs room, from which she has “a full prospect of the solemn transactions in our Valley.” At the appointed hour, many “respectable young people, Ladies and Gentlemen” gather as a group “to witness and approve the scene & express their indignation.” Most are well known to Harriet. Some are her longtime friends; one is her cherished older brother Stephen. Special staging has been prepared ahead of time, including “a painting…[of] a beautiful young Lady & an Indian…[and] also … a woman, as an instigator of Indian marriages.” (These, of course, are meant to represent the chief targets of the meeting: Harriet, Elias Boudinot, and Lydia Northrup.) As twilight falls, church bells begin to toll—“one would conclude, speaking the departure of a soul.” Two young men bring “corpses” [effigies] to simulate a funeral pyre. Stephen steps forward and ignites a “barrel of tar” as a means to consume the whole. Flames and smoke shoot skyward, reminding “some … of the smoke of their torment [in Hell?] which they feared would ascend forever.” Watching from her hideout, Harriet is stricken: “[M]y heart truly sung with anguish at the dreadful scene.” The fact that these “transactions” take place “but a few rods east of the Mission School-house” strikes her very forcibly; she takes comfort in thinking that the scholars are “in that very season … assembled in their Academy, praying … I trust earnestly & sincerely, for their enemies.” (From here on, “their enemies” and hers will be the same.) Alas, these include “not … merely … the wicked world”; for “professed Christians” are present in the angry crowd and give “their approbation.”90

  Another account of the same events appears in a letter by a close eyewitness, and adds significant details. The writer, Elizabeth Pomeroy, was Rev. Bassett’s sister-in-law and a member of his household. The “great commotion” of the preceding week had, she noted, created a general atmosphere of “trembling & anxiety.… Some of the youth and others here are determin’d she [Harriet] shall never go to the Cherokee Nation.” Moreover, “a rumour had been circulated that some high fellows from Litchfield, Goshen & other towns were coming that night to burn or pull down the building belonging to the institution, & the house of Col. G[old] Father of the young lady.… Solemnity & consternation sat in the faces of our scholars for they expected personal assault if not death before morning.” As evening came on, Miss Pomeroy—though “confined to my room” by fear—leaned out a window to speak with one of the scholars who was just then passing by; “with a pleasant smile he said…‘we are going to have a prayer meeting.’ ” This greatly affected her; “the contrast was so striking between them & our civilized heathen that I could not restrain my tears.” Soon Rev. Bassett arrived and “join’d his praying flock.” However, as things turned out, those assembled for the protest were a “peaceable Mob.” The effigy burning was “all they did,” and presently they dispersed, “saluting the school house with a few stones” as they left. The scholars felt greatly relieved; indeed, some thought “it was like one of the [Indian] Council fires, and gazed with astonishment.”91

  Now, and for months to come, Cornwall was “in great turmoil.” On July 2, Everest made this assessment: “The best people here, & neighboring clergymen say that they would oppose it [Harriet’s marriage] to the last moments, & that if she was a friend of theirs they would much rather follow her to the grave. We are not alone in our feelings. Nineteen-twentieths of New England view the subject just as we do.” But, surely, this was an exaggeration; the people of Cornwall itself were not of one mind. Some felt especially repulsed by the notion of “burning a sister in effigy.” Harriet claimed a number of “precious friends” as supporters, “but the excitement … is such that they dare not have it known that they are on my side.” Even church routines were disrupted: “Communion is put off on account of some difficulty occasioned by the Report.” Harriet had long been part of the choir, but now she was “requested to leave the singers’ seat” so as not to “disgrace the rest of the girls.” (Some, or all, in this group may have sympathized with her. When the minister’s wife “advised [them]…to dress in white to-day & wear a piece of black crepe on the left arm … they did not.”) The Northrups were in a particularly vulnerable position. In Harriet’s view, they “do suffer most cruelly & unjustly”; hence they “have left Cornwall for the present—it being unsafe for her to be here.” Daniel Brinsmade put their departure in a rather different light: “Mrs. N.… went off in the ni
ght and has not as yet return’d.… I shall do all in my power to prevent her getting away.”92

  The family remained passionately engaged with what all had come to call, simply, “the subject.” Some twenty of the letters that passed among them have survived to the present; individually and together, these offer vivid testimony of agonizing crisis and conflict. Most were composed during a three-month stretch between mid-June and mid-September. The writers included four of Harriet’s sisters and three of the sisters’ husbands. At the start, the entire group was united in opposing her plans, and hopeful of forcing a reversal. Their strategy was two-pronged: direct pleas to Harriet herself and a concerted campaign to marshal broad-gauge public resistance. Herman Vaill, husband of her sister Flora and recently an assistant principal at the Mission School, was the pivot around which much of this activity revolved. Vaill was the author of five of the letters and a recipient of fifteen. One that he sent Harriett on June 29, from his home in Millington, Connecticut, was the longest (at approximately four thousand words) and most detailed of the entire lot. In some parts lawyerly and distanced, in others passionate and personal, it encompassed all major parts of the case against her proposed “matrimonial connexions.” These included “rash presumption & disobedience” in yielding to the “selfish inducement [of] love of another”; disloyalty to family, by using “gross deception & even falsehood” to conceal her plans; the likelihood that “current members of the school” would assume “license to follow the example of Ridge & Boudinot”; and the “inevitable consequences” of harm to missions everywhere and to the larger “Cause of Christ,” with the eventual result that “more of the heathen will be lost.” Vaill implicated Harriet’s parents (his own in-laws), too; their “silent secret aid & approbation” amounted to “having knowingly disguised the truth.” And he concluded with an especially bitter slap: “Will you go? If you are a hypocrite & designed for a reprobate, doubtless you will.”93

  Harriet would later say of this letter, “[I]t cuts the hardest of anything she has ever received from anyone.” There is no evidence that she replied. Clearly, though, she showed it to several in her family. More than any other part of their correspondence that summer, it clarified—and personalized—the issues at hand. Harriet’s parents were greatly upset by the accusations made against them. Sister Catharine wrote to Vaill that “it is as much as ma can bear … to be charged of telling a falsehood; especially by her children. Pa was very much offended, he was outrageous—he could hardly speak peacibly [sic] about you.” Harriet herself lamented the “great division of feeling among many but especially in our family. It appears as though a house divided against itself could not stand.”94

  For a time, indeed, the family struggle only deepened. Harriet’s brothers-in-law maintained their “fix’d and unalterable … opposition”; in their letters to one another, they traded angry, sometimes mocking, comments on “this business.” At one point, Brinsmade asked Vaill how well his parishioners “like the idea of having a clergyman who is brother to an Indian.” At another, he wondered facetiously why “we dont see and feel how good and how pleasant a thing it is be kissd by an Indian—to have black young ones & a train of evils.” And Vaill went so far as to write: “[I]f H. must die for an Indian or have him, I do say she had as well die … better to die on the side of Xtian honour & Gospel sincerity than to pine away with satisfied love, & its consequences [i.e., mixed-race children], on the bed of Love.” (“Satisfied love” and “bed of Love”: This was as close as any of them ever came to broaching the sexual aspect of Harriet’s “connexion” with Elias. But surely it was, for all, a powerful undercurrent.) Meanwhile, too, they redoubled their efforts “to break up the Indian wedding.” In mid-August, Cornelius Everest described to Vaill half a dozen letters he had recently sent to others; in some of these the recipient was urged to join in creating a chain by appealing to additional like-minded friends. In fact, Everest had written to Boudinot himself, in hopes of administering “a damper if not a death blow to this business.” He wished “we had all written jointly week[s] ago to E.B.,” and urged Vaill, “if it be not too late,” to send off a letter of his own. Harriet’s brother Stephen, for his part, “is outrageous”—so wrote one of his friends. “For his own comfort, for the comfort of H & the whole family, I wish something might be done to bring his feelings down where they ought to be.” He had stopped going to church, and made wild threats against Boudinot’s life.95

  The sisters, however, were moving in the opposite direction—were gradually changing their minds and becoming what Vaill called “turn overs.” By summer’s end, all but one of them had decided to stand with Harriet, and against their husbands. Mary Brinsmade wrote to the Vaills: “I opposed the thing till conscience repeatedly smote me & now, I must acknowledge that … my feelings are in unison with the multitude of my Christian friends who tell me to comfort Harriett.” In fact, she added, “Harriett never appeared more interesting than she does at present.” Mary was influenced by “several … clergymen” who had reached the same point, with some even speculating that “great good is to be brought about in these latter days by this event.” (When her husband took her letter and added a few lines of “dissent” in the margins, she crossed them out before mailing it. He then sat down and wrote separately, noting her “wrathy” disposition toward him.)96

  Eventually, feelings would soften also among the men in the family. Stephen had been from the start the most upset; but in late September, Flora Vaill could say of him: “He feels strenuously opposed to indian connections, but has given it up & sings with Harriet as usual, rides & walks with her & is as chirk [in good spirits] as ever.… I asked what he intended to do when E.B. came. He said he should be gone at that time.” Herman Vaill, too, had begun to backtrack. He wrote to Harriet’s father of his hope that “if she goes, she will … take such a course in going among the heathen as any good missionary would take.” (His use of the conditional form perhaps expressed a lingering reservation.) To be sure, Cornelius Everest and his wife (Harriet’s sister Abby) remained “more & more opposed,” and considered their “dear friends in Cornwall” to be “greatly in an error.” But they were standing alone now. About the rest of the clan, Flora wrote: “[I]t is a harmonious time … because they are all convinced it will do no good to say anything.”97

  Even as the Golds endured months of family controversy, the same matters sparked heated response in the wider world around them. Once again, Isaac Bunce, editor of nearby Litchfield’s American Eagle, was quickly out front. His unconcealed, I-told-you-so tone meshed nicely with his basic goal of focusing blame on the mission movement as a whole. Somewhat surprisingly, this brought him to the defense of Harriet. If the Eagle reports can be credited, she was now widely and “wantonly” reviled with “epithets” such as “lewd, graceless, God-forsaken, loathed, disgusting, filthy female.” Bunce, by contrast, considered her a “miserable victim,” whose mind had been “poisoned” by years and years of missionary preaching. Around the school itself, he wrote, she heard “nothing but the praises of these youths sounded.” Thus she was led to “romantic desire…[and] a holy zeal to evangelize the savages of the forest,” and finally to the arms of “the pious and lovely young Boudinot.” The school’s leaders—the agents—were, in Bunce’s view, the true culprits. Had they really imagined that “these pupils … would lose all sexual feelings by coming here?” Did they not realize that “these youths … would never think of going back to marry their own dirty, ignorant, and uncouth females … after they had learned our habits and seen the attractions of our females?” More likely, there was an actual plan to create “a nursery of Indian marriages” as a means of advancing the larger missionary cause.98

  Newspapers elsewhere in Connecticut entered the controversy; some were openly scornful. “It appears,” declared one, “that the orthodox fair ones, at Cornwall, have an overweening attachment to the Indian dandies, educated at that Mission School. Their love-smitten hearts are probably overcome by the
celestial charms, which their spiritual eyes discover in the tawny sons of the forest.” (And so on, at great length, with italics serving as virtual snickers.) The same element—ridicule in one form or another—appeared in much of the published commentary. Thus, for example, the Eagle printed a long, sardonic poem by one of its readers, entitled “Missions Unmasked.” A representative verse went as follows:

  Marry Indians and the work is done!

  Or should our Mission less successful prove

  In making converts than in making love,

  Their half-breed race of mission-tinctured blood,

  On Indian ground may do the cause more good. …

  Boast not of modern breeds—how short they fall!…

  How short of that the world ere long must see,

  Of pappoose [sic] bloods, from Yankee pedigree!

  Such writings reflected a steadily rising level of public fixation with the entire fraught “subject” of race mixing.99

  Meanwhile, Niles’ Weekly Register, a journal with a national readership, weighed in on the opposite side. “Why so much sensibility about an event of this sort?” it asked. After all, “a gentleman who was thought fit … for the office of president, openly and frankly recommended an incorporation of the Indian race with the citizens of the United States, by intermarriages.” And “the proudest man, perhaps, in America … boasts of the Indian blood in his veins.” (Most likely, this was Congressman John Randolph, one of many “first family” Virginians to claim Pocahontas as an ancestor.) Yet “the rev. doctor, who is at the head of the school, rudely exposes the name of the young lady who had found pleasure in the society of an Indian youth, and makes the affair ‘criminal’…we do not see why this fuss is made about them.”100