William Apess Research Articles

William Apess and the Nullification of Settler Law

William Apess and the Nullification of Settler Law

Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 by Mark J. Miller

Reviewed by: Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 by Mark J. Miller Philippa Koch (bio) Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850 mark j. miller Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 240 pp. In Cast Down, Mark J. Miller offers a thought-provoking analysis of the role of suffering in the creation of the modern individual subject. His core argument is that "the religious rhetoric of abjection participated in the creation of new and wide-ranging racial norms while also allowing and sometimes even encouraging participants in evangelical discourse to depart from these emerging norms" (5). Religious understandings of abjection, which Miller defines in terms of both performance and identification, contributed to understandings of both race and gender in early America. To suffer and to describe suffering is to organize interior, affective experiences, behaviors, and—perhaps most markedly, Miller argues—ideologies. Miller focuses on two historical eras he views as central to the transformation of abjection and its role in defining "modern notions of interiority [End Page 257] and the liberal humanist subject" (2). He looks first at the transatlantic religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s—focusing in particular on Puritans and Quakers—and the manner in which they understood suffering and thus transformed public discourse on conversion and the regulation of the self, often vis-à-vis emerging Enlightenment ideas of rationality and sentiment. He then moves, second, to the 1830s and 1840s in a discussion of liberal reformers, whom he views as successors to (or inheritors of) the earlier religious discourse on suffering. By connecting these two eras, Miller makes a significant argument for the role of religion in the formation of the American public in terms of sympathy, race, and gender. He writes that antebellum reformers depended on long-standing religious ideas about suffering and its role in authorizing and licensing speech and evangelism. The authoritative speech and work that developed within this tradition, then, would merge with "rational, empiricist Enlightenment discourse grounded in ascetic self-control." By the 1830s and 1840s, these two forms of discourse together allowed "religious communities [to harness] the power of sentiment to institutionalize white male control" (5-6). It should be noted that Miller does not oversimplify this trajectory; while religious discourse provided a sense of continuity and authority to what were, in fact, new ideas about inherent racial difference, religious communities themselves often resisted new forms of scientific racism through discourse. In making his argument, Miller offers four chapters and an epilogue focused on very different texts, including conversion narratives, martyrologies, religious periodicals, abolitionist newspapers, novels, and plays. He begins with a chapter on the New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards and his Faithful Narrative as well as his personal conversion narrative, which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Miller argues that Edwards, on the one hand, furthered a developing model of conversion that depended on a performance (in body or text) of an interior state of grace. Such conversion accounts relied on the experience, performance, and interpretation of suffering, which were crucial for the development of both "masochism and the liberal subject for whom masochism could be a perversion" (26). While other scholars have highlighted Edwards's personal conversion narrative as a prototype of "feminine masochistic eroticism," however, Miller argues that Edwards in fact works to regulate such desires and reject their perversity. Miller emphasizes Edwards's focus on controlling his voice, acknowledging [End Page 258] the limited authority offered by uncertain grace and, thus, also resisting the "liberal humanist subject." Recognizing Edwards's control is critical not only for understanding Edwards but also his context; with its focus on experience and interiority, the new conversion narrative could authorize marginal colonial voices, but Edwards sought to contain such potential with careful attention to hierarchy. Miller's close reading of Edwards sets up the analysis for the rest of the book. Miller is careful, always, to highlight the expansion of certain genres toward new, modern conceptions of the individual and of suffering—and yet he also clarifies how authors themselves understood, engaged, and resisted these expansions. Cast Down continues with an excellent chapter on the Pequot (and adopted Mashpee) William Apess, who served as a Methodist preacher and whose writings demonstrate...

“To Preserve This Remnant:” William Apess, the Mashpee Indians, and the Politics of Nullification

This article situates the work of American Indian writer and activist William Apess in the context of contemporaneous debates around removal of the Cherokee nation from the state of Georgia and the secession crisis brought on by South Carolina. These two national political battles inform the work Apess does with the Mashpee Indian community of Cape Cod, represented by their collected work The Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835). Building on the scholarship by Maureen Konkle, Andy Doolen, and others, this article argues that Apess frames the state-level political battle of the Mashpee in the larger national context of removal and southern secession as a means of disrupting the political logic of the state of Massachusetts. In seeing the political treatment of the Cherokee by the federal government, Apess rhetorically recasts the Mashpee community as “nullifying” state law as a means to both barter for enhanced rights for the community and, more importantly, call into question what Indian citizenship and sovereignty meant for the most vulnerable forms of Indian community in antebellum New England.

Indigenous intellectual traditions and biography in the northeast: A historiographical reflection

AbstractOver the past two decades, a substantial literature has developed probing Robert Warrior's idea that we can trace a written Indigenous intellectual tradition back to the mid‐eighteenth century. Focused on Indigenous peoples who wrote fairly extensively, much of this literature has tended to treat the same individuals: Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Peter Jones, William Apess, and George Copway (among others). Over the past 5 years, a series of biographies have been published on other individuals who fit within this community of intellectuals. Drawing together these two streams within the historiography, this essay probes the concept of Indigenous intellectual traditions, suggesting that scholars need to look beyond print culture. Doing so will better account for Indigenous concepts of sovereignty and territory, the involvement of women, the role of class, as well as the relationship between these traditions, historiographical practices, and settler colonial systems of power.

Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 ed. by Theresa Strouth Gaul

Reviewed by: Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 ed. by Theresa Strouth Gaul Michael P. Taylor (bio) Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 Edited by theresa strouth gaul Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014 289 pp. Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 offers to Americanists and Native Americanists alike a versatile collection of perhaps the earliest published Native American woman author in the United States. Until Theresa Strouth Gaul gathered and recontextualized Catharine Brown's (Cherokee) letters and diary alongside other nineteenth-century representations of Brown in Cherokee Sister, scholars had remembered Brown largely through an 1825 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions publication, Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (1825). As its title suggests, Memoir narrates Brown as unilaterally assimilated into white Protestantism and celebrates her as a model Christian convert. As a result, contemporary scholarship has likewise often reduced Brown to narratives of isolated assimilation rather than placing her either within her specific Cherokee community or within broader conversations with such now-canonized contemporaries as William Apess (Pequot), Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), and Black Hawk (Sauk). By privileging Memoir's oversimplification of Brown over the inherent complexities and contexts of Brown's own writings, scholars have so far, albeit unintentionally, disconnected her from such critical contemporaneous and contemporary issues as Native American sovereignty, land, kinship, and the ongoing epidemic of sexual-colonial violence against Native American women. As Gaul suggests in her carefully constructed editor's introduction, Cherokee Sister responds to the ongoing reduction of Brown by "put[ting] the pen back in her hand" (2). By doing so, Cherokee Sister not only restores autonomy to Brown's [End Page 218] writings, it also reasserts Brown's articulate agency as an early Cherokee woman who interpreted, taught, exhorted, and wrote toward her stated goal to "be useful to [her] people" (73). Beyond republishing the writings of yet another important early Native American woman writer within the growing body of Native American literature, Cherokee Sister will prove valuable to a wide range of college classrooms. Brown's writings directly address issues central to American literary studies, Native American studies, Cherokee studies, religious studies, and gender studies. Gaul's collection also offers ample analytical opportunities for classroom studies of nineteenth-century biography, autobiography, epistolary writing, and diary writing. While Gaul gracefully places Cherokee Sister at the "nexus" of each of these disciplines, however, she places the responsibility onto teachers and students to construct the more comprehensive context(s) necessary in order to situate Brown in a more direct relationship with any one of these disciplinary frameworks (5). In terms of Brown's place within current discussions of Native American or Cherokee studies, for example, Gaul places Brown's writing in conversation with Cherokee scholars Daniel Heath Justice and Jace Weaver in order to emphasize her place within the Cherokee literary tradition. Yet Gaul has not fully reconstructed the relationships between Brown and such contemporaneous Cherokee women writing and community-specific literary activism as the 1817 Cherokee women's petition against Indian Removal. It is likewise up to the teacher or student to analyze Brown in conversation with such broader contemporary currents in indigenous feminism, indigenous literary nationalism, and transindigeneity. Although Gaul could have claimed a greater significance for Cherokee Sister by situating Brown's writing more overtly within the long tradition of Cherokee women writing or within specific branches of current Native American and indigenous studies, Cherokee Sister's ability to speak to so many interconnected contexts and issues will service a range of college classrooms toward a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of agency and adaptation in nineteenth-century Native American literatures. I am eager to work alongside my students to (re)connect Brown further to the intricate networks of early and contemporary Native American women writers as part of my indigenous and American literature classes. [End Page 219] Michael P. Taylor Brigham Young University Michael P. Taylor michael p. taylor is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. He teaches in the fields of indigenous studies, American studies, and nineteenth-century American literature. His scholarship focuses on indigenous literary...

“William Apess Was Born Here”: Marking William Apess on the Geographical and Cultural Map

“William Apess Was Born Here”: Marking William Apess on the Geographical and Cultural Map

Tales of Two Indians: William Apess and Eleazer Williams in the Era of Dispossession

Tales of Two Indians: William Apess and Eleazer Williams in the Era of Dispossession

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of PoeNovel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of PoeNovel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).

William Apess, Pequot Pastor: A Native American Revisioning of Christian Nationalism in the Early Republic

Pequot Native and Methodist Minister William Apess has received growing recognition among historians as a unique voice for Native Americans—and minorities in general—during the early Republic. This essay began by inquiring into Apess’s relationship with the Christian nationalism of his day. Extensive readings of Apess’s works, scholarship on all aspects of Apess’s life, and analyses of Christian nationalism during the early Republic initially revealed severe conflict. Apess is fiery in his critique of Anglo American society and religion; he questions the integrity of Christians who treat Native Americans with a double standard. Analyzing Apess’s critiques and his proposed solutions in depth, however, shows that his main problem rests with faulty implementation of genuinely good ideals. Apess’s solutions actually rest on revising and enforcing, not destroying, the main components of Christian nationalism. This essay concludes that Apess should be read as advancing his own revised form of Christian nationalism; his plan for the future of America and national unity embraced establishing a more perfect Christian union.

C19: "Unsettling,": March 17-20, 2016, State College, PA

C19: "Unsettling,"March 17-20, 2016, State College, PA Hannah Lauren Murray (bio), Christy L. Pottroff (bio), Christine Yao (bio), William Hunt, and Anthony G. Cohen (bio) The 2016 C19 conference theme was "Unsettling," an indication that the fourth biennial meeting would feature work dedicated to new perspectives and revitalizing critiques. "Unsettling" necessarily called for revisionist approaches "to the methodologies, geographies, languages, and texts that disturb, divert, and reconstitute" the field, and it drew scholars prepared for the occasion. Race was a major analytical vector that helped destabilize such fields as print and material culture, science studies, law, and liberalism. Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality played important roles in topics including urban planning, nationalism, food studies, and religiosity, which unsettled canonical texts and scholarly methodologies. This unsettling resulted in a number of provocative tectonic shifts in nineteenth-century American literary studies. Program Link: https://c19conference.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/2016-conference-program-updated-3-3.pdf unsettling race, nation, and the borderline Presenters on the "Conversions: Race, Religion and the Politics of Belonging" panel considered how race manifests in antebellum religious texts. Ben Bascom examined Christianity as a tool against colonialism and slavery in Boyrereau Brinch/Jeffrey Brace's The Blind African Slave (1810). Bascom argued that through religious practice, Christians foster inclusion and change; in contrast, when [End Page 144] they adhere to the institution of slavery, they legitimize exclusion. Duncan Faherty investigated another slave narrative, on Omar Ibn Said's 1831 Arabic autobiography. Said's decision to write in Arabic and transcribe Koranic suras from memory, Faherty contended, demonstrates resistance against his state-imposed identity. Faherty asked what other texts may have been lost through white America's ignorance and mistranslation of enslaved persons' non-English expressions. Shelby Johnson read William Apess' "Eulogy on King Phillip" (1836) as a revisionary interpretation of Christian thought that materializes history and refuses Native American spectralization. In Apess' eulogy, a disinterred child's corpse bears material witness to suffering and thus, Johnson argued, forcefully indicts white apathy to Native displacement. Ashley Reed argued that Bayard Taylor's short story "Confessions of a Medium" (1860) illuminates white middle-class male anxieties concerning immigration and integration through spiritualist performance. When a white female medium channels spirits such as Blackhawk from the nation's unsettled borders, Reed noted, spiritualism's unruly world threatens to destabilize ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Liberalism was another concept that conference participants interrogated. In "Race and the Fault Lines of Liberalism: Sex, Fashion, Food," contributors assessed how networks of communication and exchange in the Black Atlantic defy Eurocentric assumptions about the liberal subject and public sphere. In her discussion of Leonora Sansay's novel Zelica: The Creole (1820), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg questioned how the text's backdrop in the Haitian Revolution undermines the raced, gendered, and heterosexed attributes that the Ages of Revolution and Enlightenment too frequently assumed. Reconnoitering the print culture in nineteenth-century Harlem, Carla Peterson compared the society periodicals disseminated by publishers such as Philip Bell and James McCune Smith to [End Page 145] those of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Washington Irving. For Peterson, the print culture activities of these "Black Gothamites" bespeak the presence of an African American public sphere and cultural consciousness, championing the adoption and refinement of a middle-class gentility. Reviewing the work of African American cookbook authors in the nineteenth century, Rafia Zafar understood the compiled recipes as reflecting the culinary knowledge and sensibilities of the African diaspora and an emergent black hospitality industry. According to Zafar, in works by chef-authors such as Malinda Russell and James Hemings, authors intimate first-hand experience with American chattel slavery to enhance recipes' authenticity. This attention to unconventional forms of writing and language likewise informed "The Poetic of Community: From Abolition to Post-War Reunion." The panel questioned how politicized instances of citation, intertextuality, and collective poetics might forge a new understanding of the circabellum's dynamic reading and writing publics. Faith Barrett presented on African American abolitionist Amos Gerry Beman's prolific scrapbooking efforts. According to Barrett, Beman's pairing of newspaper clippings with acrostic poems celebrates black leaders in the American antislavery movement while supplying examples of veneration, contemplation, and political...

The Life of William Apess, Pequot

In The Life of William Apess, Pequot Philip F. Gura details the life of William Apess, the nineteenth-century Pequot minister, writer, and activist for Native rights. Gura draws heavily on Apess’s writings, as well as on a diverse collection of primary sources, to situate his life and work in the context of early American history.The book begins at the end—with Apess’s death in 1839 at the age of forty-one—and then proceeds chronologically from his birth and childhood in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively; through his work as a Methodist preacher, writer, and lecturer; to his death in New York City. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a major period in Apess’s life, including his conversion to Methodism, the writing and publication of his autobiography, and his activism with the Mashpees.Apess was an extraordinary figure, but Gura demonstrates that he was also a man of his time. In his youth Apess lived as an indentured servant in white households; he converted to Methodism during the Second Great Awakening; and he enlisted during the War of 1812. Gura makes the most of the intersection of Apess’s life with these and other events, giving the lay reader ample contextual detail to understand their significance. This context illuminates the world in which Apess lived and the people with whom he may have interacted. Many details of Apess’s life remain unknown, and Gura creatively mines his sources to speculate about what might have been. Indeed, he uses some remarkable sources, including a list of Apess’s household belongings and personal library.The turning point in Apess’s development as a writer and speaker came in Boston in the early 1830s. According to Gura, “Here more than anywhere else he developed his criticism of the nation’s failure to acknowledge and ameliorate the plight of its Native peoples” (54). Gura is particularly keen to draw connections between Apess’s increasing radicalism and the antislavery movement, especially in the African American community. He speculates about Apess’s possible knowledge of the writings of black Bostonians David Walker and Maria W. Stewart. The evidence connecting Apess to these figures is circumstantial: he was in Boston when their ideas were being disseminated. A clearer connection existed between Apess and the era’s leading white abolitionist, however; in 1832 Apess met William Lloyd Garrison, who heard Apess speak at least once. Gura insists that abolitionists pushed Apess to espouse a more radical theory of American racism.Such influence moved in more than one direction. For instance, Apess pushed abolitionists to think more critically about the treatment of Native peoples. As Gura’s analysis of Apess’s 1836 speech, “Eulogy on King Philip,” demonstrates, it was he who insisted—contrary to popular belief, including among abolitionists—that Indians were not “vanishing.” This directly refuted a core American myth, as “the vanishing Indian had become a household trope” (108).Gura is more tentative when making claims about the Indian sources of Apess’s radicalism, although the evidence is stronger. Apess was clearly influenced by Handsome Lake and the Haudenosaunees among whom he spent time. He also shared a stage with Elias Boudinot at an important moment in the Cherokees’ antiremoval fight. And, as suggested by the epilogue, Apess’s writings had lasting influence in Native communities even after his death.Ultimately, Gura hopes that Apess will become as well known as Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This readable and engaging narrative should bring this important figure to the attention of the public.

Letter from Barnstable Jail: William Apess and the “Memorial of the Mashpee Indians”

Letter from Barnstable Jail:William Apess and the “Memorial of the Mashpee Indians” Drew Lopenzina (bio) from mid-september to mid-october of 1833 the Pequot activist, writer, and Methodist minister William Apess served out a jail sentence of thirty days, having been found guilty of “inciting a riot” as a result of his attempts to advocate for the rights of the Mashpee Wampanoag at Mashpee on Cape Cod. Apess used his time in prison, among other things, to draft a detailed petition he would later submit to be read in the Boston Legislature. The petition, known as the “Memorial of the Marshpee Indians,” was immediately circulated throughout the “plantation,” where, in keeping with traditional processes, it was read to the assembled tribe, discussed, and amended where necessary, until a consensus was reached as to its overall language. The “Memorial” was signed or approved by well over half the residents of Mashpee and laid out the case for the Mashpee complaint, enumerating the unjust and opportunistic means by which the tribe had been oppressed over roughly a century of colonial oversight.1 As Apess observed, “There is not one enlightened and respectable Indian upon the plantation, that wants overseers or the present minister (Phineas Fish). We say that all our rulers … were placed here amongst us without our consent.” He additionally reprimands the august rulers of the state of Massachusetts that, “while ye are filled with the fat of our father’s land and enjoy your liberties without molestation will not this Honorable Body be as benevolent to us, poor Marshpee Indians, who are sighing and weeping under bondage, as ye are to the poor Cherokees?” The “Memorial” concluded with a general cry for release from bondage, exclaiming, “Oh, White man! white man! the blood of our fathers, spilt in the Revolutionary War, cries from the ground of our native soil, to break the chains of oppression, and let our children go free.”2 Apess’s Mashpee “Memorial,” although first published in The Liberator in 1834, has not, to my knowledge, been reprinted anywhere since. And yet it is a seminal contribution to Native American literature, written, as Apess would later attest to the Barton Commission in charge of investigating the affairs at Mashpee (and as recorded in the stenographer’s clipped transcription), “as voice of people.”3 Although Indigenous prison protest literature as [End Page 105] a genre can be said to already have had a complex history in the colonies up to this point, including documents produced by the eighteenth-century Pequot bond servant Katherine Garrett, the Mohegan/Wampanoag Moses Paul, and arguably even the Sauk leader Black Hawk, Apess’s petition stands as a centerpiece in the textualized struggle for Indigenous rights emerging from the heart of colonial containment. It highlights the manner in which Apess pioneered effective strategies of civil disobedience, including what I refer to hear as “negative work,” marshaling the press, public opinion, religious sentiment, and nonviolent resistance to advocate for Native sovereignty in the first half of the nineteenth century, and thereby preparing the way for future movements for people of color in the United States. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Masthead of The Liberator for February 1, 1834, in which the “Memorial of the Marshpee Indians” appears. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. The term “negative work” is lifted from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who, in his Archeology of Knowledge, employed this interesting phrase to elaborate on the rhetorical reconfiguration of the genealogical pathways of knowledge he deemed essential to exposing entrenched operations of power.4 The accrued knowledge of the Western world, in Foucault’s estimation, was founded not in incontrovertible fact nudging its way forward from the milky origins of time, so much as an agreed-on series of inscribed traditions that were largely determined and canonized by dominant forces in the present moment. Foucault seems to imply that to contest these constructed formations of historical tradition required the exertion of an opposite, or negative, force, one equal to the task of tracing the nearly imperceptible flow of power even from within its coercive containments. The relatively few published works of late eighteenth and early...

Nullifying Settler Democracy: William Apess and the Paradox of Settler Sovereignty

This essay examines the concept of “Indian nullification” in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the constitutive exclusions of American settler democracy. Apess illuminates how constitutional ideals of popular sovereignty cohere around regimes of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, highlighting the paradox of settler sovereignty that provides the basis for American democracy. Indian nullification is not a simple demand that the boundaries of liberal citizenship be expanded to include Indians. It is a way of narrating and rhetorically representing the forms of settler conquest that establish the material and conceptual foundation of popular self-rule for white settlers.

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

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...

Hill Town Touchstone: Reconsidering William Apess and Colrain, Massachusetts

The Pequot author William Apess is regarded as having almost miraculously transcended poverty, racism, and injustice to become an eloquent orator. Modern scholars have imagined the place of his birth as a primitive camp in the hills. Yet Colrain, in the early 1800s, was a bustling, religiously diverse, transcultural town where white (mostly Scots-Irish), Native American, and African American people routinely crossed paths, and where the Apess family routinely crossed color lines. Over time, Apess drew on his experiences among tribal, racial, and religious groups in multiple locales (Colchester, Colrain, Ledyard, Mashpee, Tyendinega, and elsewhere) to construct a compellingly romanticized (and colonized) version of indigenous identity. Onstage and in print, he was an iconic “poor Indian” and “son of the forest”; in person, he was a well-educated, cosmopolitan performer who loved the limelight and feared the wilderness. He evoked a precolonial ideal of a pristine Native life, while delivering trenchant critiques of white settler abuses; yet he advocated for religious conformity more than for indigenous survivance. Thus, to better contextualize Apess’ life and works, we need to critically and carefully consider nineteenth-century modes of identity formation, national affiliation, cultural performance, and racial tropes, including those articulated by Apess himself.

The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura

Reviewed by: The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) KEY WORDS William Apess, Native Americans, Pequot Indians, Religion, Methodists The Life of William Apess, Pequot. By Philip F. Gura. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 216. Cloth, $26.00.) In the more than twenty years since Barry O’Connell published On Our Own Ground: The Collected Works of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst, MA, 1992), the life and writings of William Apess (1798–1839) have generated a significant amount of scholarly interest. As the first American Indian to publish his autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and the author of frequently anthologized works such as “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” (1833) and “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836), Apess’s name often appears in academic books and articles and on college syllabi. Yet, as Philip Gura points out in the prologue to The Life of William Apess, a Pequot, despite commanding the attention of a scholarly audience, Apess has yet to be fully appreciated by the general public, who, he claims, “needs a straightforward account of Apess’s life and times” (xvi). Gura’s cultural biography of Apess, which is engaging, well-researched, and accessible, provides such an account, while also speaking to the interests of an academic audience. The eight chapters in The Life of William Apess span Apess’s early years and conversion to Christianity through his career as a minister, author, lecturer, and activist, and conclude with his untimely death in 1839 at the age of forty-one. Along the way, Gura highlights Apess’s participation in major events such as the War of 1812 and the so-called Mashpee Revolt, his interpersonal relationships and professional highs and lows, and the prejudice and racism that he experienced throughout his life. To provide a vivid portrait of Apess, Gura mines official documents such as the coroner’s inquest, court records, town records, financial documents, and newspapers, in addition to Apess’s own writings and select secondary scholarship. Through his readings of these sources, Gura makes a compelling case for ranking Apess among well-known nineteenth-century figures who shared his commitment to what we might now call social justice, figures such as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady [End Page 835] Stanton, Frances Wright, Orestes Brownson, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and David Walker (xiv). For an academic audience that is likely conversant with Apess’s writings and secondary scholarship about him, one of the key contributions of Gura’s biography is to contextualize Apess’s life and work among the rich networks of individuals and communities in which he circulated. Gura opens with a brief discussion of the Pequots in the early nineteenth century and Apess’s childhood and family life in Massachusetts and Connecticut, working from Apess’s autobiography, the scanty records that remain of Apess and his family, and scholarship on Native New England. Later in The Life of William Apess, he details life in communities such as the Hard Scrabble neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, where Apess lived with his wife and children in 1825, and 1830s Boston, where Apess and his work circulated among the African American community in which David Walker and Maria Stewart lived. Gura highlights possible and documented connections, noting that while in Providence, Apess may have met abolitionists such as Nathaniel Paul and Hosea Easton, and in Boston Apess was written up in Garrison’s Liberator and shared a stage with Elias Boudinot, editor of The Cherokee Phoenix. The rich detail brings these communities to life and helps even readers who are familiar with Apess’s published works to map his numerous travels and to more fully understand the literary, historical, social, religious, and economic influences on Apess’s writings. Another strength of this work is its attention to the links between Apess’s experiences and literary productions with larger cultural and social forces. For example, as part of his discussion of Apess’s difficulties obtaining a license to preach, Gura notes how Apess’s experience reveals a broader point about Methodism in the 1820s, “the denomination’s increasing marginalization of the poor and disenfranchised...

Letter from Barnstable Jail: William Apess and the “Memorial of the Mashpee Indians”

Letter from Barnstable Jail: William Apess and the “Memorial of the Mashpee Indians”

The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura (review)

Reviewed by: The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura Joshua David Bellin (bio) The Life of William Apess, Pequot philip f. gura Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 216 pp. Why do we need a new biography of William Apess? When numerous scholars including Barry O’Connell, Bernd Peyer, Robert Allen Warrior, Maureen Konkle, and others have authored substantial biographical studies of the antebellum Pequot activist, I think that’s a fair question to ask. To justify its existence, a new biography of Apess should uncover new materials, forge new links, propose new directions, offer new interpretations, or attract new audiences (or all of the preceding). If not, the argument could be made that it’s redundant. Measured against the foregoing, how does Philip F. Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot fare? Modestly. On the plus side, Gura’s book does suggest several new contexts for Apess’s life; though based largely on established sources—Apess’s own writings, as well as those of O’Connell and other Apess scholars—and structured largely on the oft-rehearsed plotline of Apess’s rise and fall, the book offers compelling hints about the foundations of Apess’s religious and political radicalism, as well as useful background regarding the world in which he lived. Less productively, Gura makes a plea for Apess’s historical significance that is anything but new. Even more problematically, the author claims for his book an audience that, given what his book is, I do not consider realistically within its reach. In his prologue, which delves into the circumstances of Apess’s death, Gura asks how Apess was so quickly forgotten in his own time and has remained so little remembered in ours. Writing that “today [Apess] is known primarily among scholars of Native American studies,” Gura argues that “Apess deserves the same widespread recognition as others in the antebellum period who questioned the sincerity of the nation’s ongoing commitment to democracy, a cohort of reformers that includes Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, champions of women’s rights; Frances Wright and Orestes Brownson, of the dignity of labor; and William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass, of African American freedom and equality” (xiii–xiv). Few scholars of American or Native American literature will dispute this assertion of Apess’s importance; indeed, many have made statements like it before. The question of [End Page 212] whether a book such as Gura’s is likely to raise Apess’s public profile is, however, worth asking. Gura submits that Apess’s general anonymity is attributable to the fact that his biographers thus far “have too often aimed [their] works at scholarly communities rather than at the larger public” (xvi). However true this may be, Gura’s book—which is published by a scholarly press, blurbed by scholarly reviewers, and packed with scholarly apparati—strikes me as insufficiently distinct from the studies he criticizes to achieve ends other than theirs. (Indeed, the fact that he contrasts Apess’s obscurity with the supposed renown of figures like Fuller, Wright, and Walker underscores his own faithfulness to a “scholarly community”; for who, other than a statistically tiny pool of historians and literary critics, has ever heard of these people?) If by “widespread recognition” Gura means “recognition among highly educated people,” then his mission has already been accomplished: Apess is at least as well known among those with advanced degrees as is, say, Brownson. If, however, the goal is to make Apess better known to a “larger public” of nonacademics, I would suggest that what we need is not a “straightforward account of Apess’s life and times” (xvi) but a narrative history such as those written by Erik Larson or David McCullough, whose books wear their immense scholarship lightly, appealing to a mass audience not through erudition but through brisk storytelling, vivid character portraits, and (on occasion) deviations from strict documentary accuracy in the interest of spinning a good yarn. Gura’s book offers none of this. It is, instead, a carefully researched and clearly written—a straightforward—scholarly reconstruction of Apess’s life, with few flourishes and much documentation. It covers such...

The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura

The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura