Indian Slaveholders and Presbyterian Missionaries, 1837–1861

Abstract

Founded in 1837 to provide a denohinational foreign mission board for the Old School Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (PBFM) had from the outset a very different outlook toward mission work among slave-holding Indians than did its closest rival, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which served the New School Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. The difference increased until 1859 when the latter organization, unable to reconcile its antislavery conviction with the determined proslavery position of the southern Indians, withdrew from that field. The PBFM, headquartered in New York City, thereupon took under its patronage most of those ABCFM missionaries who had been abandoned by their Boston-based board for refusing to expound and practice an antislavery position among the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks.