Apess's <em>Eulogy</em> on Tour: Kinship and the Transnational History of Native New England

Abstract

Apess’s Eulogy on TourKinship and the Transnational History of Native New England Daniel Radus (bio) Though scholars have learned much about William Apess in the past two decades, the last three years of the Pequot intellectual’s life—from 1836 to 1839—have remained, according to Robert Warrior, nonetheless “shrouded in mystery” (The People 4). In his collection of Apess’s writings, first published in 1992, Barry O’Connell noted that two performances of the Eulogy on King Philip in Boston were Apess’s “last in the public eye” (276). That Apess disappeared from public life after January 1836 has become the conventional analysis, persisting nearly to the present day.1 Our adherence to this standard account is hardly censurable, of course. Insofar as we are interested in Apess for his remarkable writing, the first appearance of the Eulogy marks a watershed moment: the text is his last and, as many critics have claimed, his most realized articulation of the plight of Native peoples in nineteenth-century New England.2 But the appeal to the Eulogy as Apess’s last textual incarnation perhaps has diverted our attention unduly from the nature of its performance, from how this address—the only writing by Apess we know to have lived beyond the letter—in fact represented not a conclusion to Apess’s intellectual life but rather a new beginning, one that has remained shrouded only by the difficulties of tracking the author from the page to the stage. The Eulogy in Boston was neither Apess’s last moment in the public eye nor the apex of his intellectual development. Instead, that lecture inaugurated a series of performances that took Apess across New England, to the nation’s capital, and perhaps to New York City. In the months after his lectures in Boston, Apess delivered the Eulogy in Salem and Worcester and near Hartford. One year later, he likely lectured in New York. He then went south, visiting Washington in late 1837 to speak about and decry the treatment of several tribal delegations visiting the [End Page 81] city—likely those that had met weeks earlier to broker a peace among the Sauk, Meskwaki, and Sioux.3 Thus, while evidence of Apess’s final years has led many to conclude that they were marred by dissipation—economic, familial, and physical—these revelations lend credence to Warrior’s speculation that this period may have been marked also by a widening and an intensification of Apess’s intellectual pursuits (The People 38–43).4 Indeed, as Warrior suspected, the geographical reach and the intellectual breadth of Apess’s career expanded significantly in the three years prior to his death. Though I attend in some detail to Apess’s lectures outside New England, here I focus on how the Eulogy’s presence across that region signals a new stage in the development of Apess’s public persona and political project. Advertisements for the Eulogy reveal that in his last years Apess augmented the practices that had structured his earlier public appearances. Since at least 1830, Apess had supplemented his itinerant preaching with lectures at larger and often secular venues where he would speak on social issues and sell books.5 In touring the Eulogy, Apess expanded his relationship with those venues by using the infrastructure of the region’s burgeoning lyceum circuit. In all four of its locations, the Eulogy occurred in a venue that hosted speakers sanctioned by city lyceums.6 Concurrent with this new access to the lecture circuit was Apess’s increasingly strategic use of print publicity to fashion himself and his works. The volume of promotions sold to publicize the Eulogy dwarfs that of earlier lectures by Apess, suggesting a concerted and well-funded effort to market the talk to auditors. Likewise, changes to those promotions as the Eulogy traveled in New England reflect Apess’s keen sense not only of the region’s media infrastructure but also of how the vagaries of local audiences and histories could impact the presentation and reception of his lecture. More than an addition to the historical record, then, this account of the Eulogy allows for considerations of Apess as a figure whose politics...