William Apess, religious liberty, and the conversion narrative

ABSTRACT

This paper reads Pequot William Apess’s (1798–1839) The Experiences of Five Christian Indians (1833) in light of Apess’s equation between racial equality and religious liberty. Disgusted by the prejudices of the Congregational church he was forced to attend as a young indentured servant, Apess joined the egalitarian Methodists. His masters admonished that as an Indian he was unprepared to choose his religion, which spurred his association between racial and religious liberty. Five Christian Indians cleverly elaborates these views. Apess marshals the conversion narrative genre to undermine stereotypes of Native Americans as a vanished heathen race. His appropriation inserts his brethren into public discourse as both persevering as a people and exercising spiritual agency. In the concluding essay “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” Apess challenges White Christians’ prejudices with scriptural, logical, and historical interpretations demonstrating racial equality. White treatment of Native Americans thus mirrors white Americans’ spiritual monstrosity. This dissident exercise of religious freedom, which gained Apess brief notoriety in 1830s New England as part of the antebellum social justice milieu, did not sway the hearts and minds of white readers. The idea that scripture’s meaning was so self-evident as to be immediately accessible to any individual’s moral sense was thoroughly ingrained in nineteenth-century U.S. American Protestantism. White Christians’ understanding of scripture was conditioned by a deep belief in racial hierarchy. Despite this roadblock to Apess’s effort, the work’s resuscitation in recent years illustrates the survivance of antebellum native dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• William Apess
• religious studies
• conversion narrative
• critical race studies
• Native American studies

Acknowledgment

I completed initial research on this project under the auspices of a Professional Improvement Leave at Auburn University at Montgomery and am grateful for that support. Moreover I presented an earlier version of the essay at the 2018 meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts and am grateful for the feedback I received there, as well as for the feedback provided by Prose Studies’s anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Joanna Brooks, “From Edwards to Baldwin,” 435.

2. Bruce, Earnestly Contending, 45.

3. Bruce, Earnestly Contending, 53–54.

4. Gura, Life of William Apess, xiii-xiv.

5. Krupat, “All that Remains,” 75.

6. Apess, A Son of the Forest, 21.

7. Elrod, “Piety and Dissent,” 152. See further Gura, Life, 17–18; O’Connell, Introduction, xxxi-xxxii; Warrior, The People and the Word, 19–20.

8. Miller, “Mouth for God, 231–2.

9. Apess, Son, 13.

10. Apess, Son, 21.

11. Compare Haynes, “Divine Destiny,” 35 on Apess’s embrace of Methodism as a crucible for his identity formation and way of productively processing his shame over prejudice and racial difference.

12. Apess, Son, 12.

13. Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking Glass, 65.

14. Apess, Son, 18.

15. Apess, Son, 33.

16. Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 127–8.

17. Apess, Son, 33.

18. Bellin, “Red Routes,” 48.

19. Bellin, “Red Routes,” 59; Apess, Son, 10.

20. e.g., Krupat, “The Voice in the Margins,” 148, who later disputed this claim in Krupat, All that Remains, 74–75, 88, where he roots Apess’s oppositionality in his religious roots; Bellin, “Red Routes,” 59.

21. Bellin, “Red Routes,” 65.

22. Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 114–5.

23. Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 127.

24. Lisa Brooks, “The Common Pot,” 163.

25. Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 131.

26. Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 133.

27. Gura, Life, 29.

28. Welburn, Roanoke and Wampum, 98 also discusses hidden references to native tradition in his examination of Apess’s night lost in a swamp during his early itinerancy. Welburn speculates that Apess is relating being tricked by the Little People of the Pequot, who used phosphorescence (blinking lights, will-o-the-wisps, etc.) to lure travelers. Welburn places the episode in the context of Apess’s confrontation of the challenges inherent in reconciling Christianity to a traditional native worldview. Haynes, “Divine Destiny, 37 stresses that Apess found in Methodism a space to link his Pequot and U.S. American identities, as Methodism offered a respite from the social contempt toward Native Americans that Apess chafed against.

29. Apess, Son, 45–46.

30. Apess, Textual Afterword, 320–24.

31. Apess, Textual Afterword, 323; This conflict is vividly described in the 1829 edition of Son of the Forest, while the wound is fresh, but was excised from the 1831 edition, produced after Apess softened on the Methodist Episcopals. In Five Christian Indians, Apess only comments that he faulted the Methodist Episcopals because “their government was not republican.”

32. e.g., Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 167; Miller, “Mouth for God,” 229; Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind, 137–38; Warrior, The People and the Word, 24–25.

33. Lopenzina, Indian’s Looking Glass, 168.

34. Brereton, From Sin to Salvation.

35. Apess, Experiences, 144–5.

36. Apess, Experiences, 145–6.

37. Apess, Experiences, 146–7.

38. Apess, Experiences, 147.

39. Apess, Son, 31–33.

40. Apess, Experiences, 145.

41. Compare Haynes, “Divine Destiny,” 30–31 on Apess’s innovations on the conversion narrative genre: Apess follows the “typical structure of the conversion narrative,” but he relays “a conversion experience atypical of most Protestant male converts of the era. In other words, the conversion narrative format provided a familiar background upon which to view an unfamiliar style of conversion.”

42. Apess, Experiences, 145.

43. Apess, Experiences, 157.

44. This criticism of white inconsistency is a constant feature in Apess’s writings. For instance, see Son, 31. The criticism hinges on the idea that whites treat Indians in a way they would not accept as fair should the roles be reversed.

45. Lisa Brooks, “Common Plot,” 157.

46. Apess, Experiences, 158.

47. Apess, Experiences, 157–9.

48. Apess, Experiences, 159.

49. Wyss, Writing Indians, 159. See also Gura, Life, 14 on Apess’s doctrinal tutors in this manner of interpreting scripture: “The way Apess names this group, ‘the Christians,’ suggests that he did not mean the term generically. Rather, these were likely followers of Elias Smith, a Vermont native and strong Jeffersonian who in the 1790s had left his Calvinist Baptist faith to espouse a doctrinally similar Christianity based in radically democratic principles. Smith claimed, for example, that every individual should read the New Testament for himself or herself and not blindly follow inherited dogma as interpreted by the priesthood. Further, along with others of this persuasion, such as Barton Stone in Kentucky and Alexander Campbell in Pennsylvania, Smith rejected all notions of civil hierarchy, linking his religious beliefs to the nascent political culture whose champions sought to extend the boundaries of American democracy.A master of publicity and communication, in 1808 Smith took advantage of the explosive expansion of print culture to start the nation’s first religious newspaper, the Herald of Gospel Liberty, to proselytize his cause. Through it, he urged Christians to follow religious liberty wherever it took them despite any objections from established clergy. Indeed, Smith permanently earned their wrath by calling their seminaries nothing but ‘Religious Manufactories’ established for ‘explaining that which is plain, and for the purpose of making easy things hard.’ The Christian Connexion, as his denomination came to be known—later, the Disciples of Christ—proved an appropriate faith for budding democracy; the very term ‘connexion’ implies the sense of an extended, loving family relationship among all believers. Not surprisingly, when Apess was able to read the Gospels for himself, he focused on those passages in which Christ preached the equality of all men and women under God, regardless of skin color.”

50. Kidd, God of Liberty, 6.

51. Byrd, Sacred Scripture Sacred War, 5, 16; see 70, 91, 103, 109–10, 112–3, 115–6, 118, 124–5, 133, 138, 141, 145–6 on common verses cited.

52. Kidd, God of Liberty, 133–5.

53. Apess, Experiences, 158.

54. Apess, Experiences, 158.

55. e.g., O’Connell, Introduction, lxx; Gustafson, “Nations of Israelites,” 34; Krupat, All that Remains, 74–75; Weaver, That the People Might Live, 57; Wyss, Writing Indians, 161–3.

56. Zuck, “William Apess, the ‘Lost Tribes,’ and Indigenous Survivance,” 2–3.

57. Zuck, “William Apess,” 14.

58. Noll, America’s God, 94–95, 104–5, 110, 209–10.

59. Noll, America’s God, 322–3, 371.

60. Noll, America’s God, 10–11, 370, 384.

61. Noll, America’s God, 111, 371.

62. Noll America’s God, 396, 417–8.

63. Noll, America’s God, 384.

64. Noll, America’s God, 416.

65. Noll, America’s God, 417.

66. Noll, America’s God, 392, 395.

67. Noll, America’s God, 17.

68. Noll, America’s God, 387.

69. Gura, Life, 28.

70. O’Connell, Introduction, xxi.

71. Peyer, Tutor’d Mind, 120–1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John C. Havard

John C. Havard is Professor of Early American Literature at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity (U of Alabama P, 2018) and co-editor of Spain, the United States, and Transatlantic Literary Culture throughout the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2021). He has also published a variety of essays in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hemispheric and religious studies.