![]() ![]() This remarkable woman “was counted almost a preacher” as well as a healer, and when she died at the age of forty-five, all who knew her remembered how remarkably “useful” she had been to all with whom she came into contact (150). Hannah Caleb, Apess added, found her Christian work in teaching young Native children to read and spreading the Gospel to any who would listen (147–48).Īpess’s next example of true piety was his Aunt Sally George of Groton, Connecticut, another who found solace in the Baptist faith. After experiencing a striking conversion in which “the heavens seemed to descend, and with them an innumerable company of angels,” she joined a Free-Will Baptist Church and found the love and respect she sought. and every people of all nations whom God hath made,” they would “backbite each other, and quarrel with one another, and would not so much as eat and drink together.” Worse still, the “poor Indians, the poor Indians, the people to whom was wedded by the common ties of nature, were set at naught by those noble professors of grace, merely because were Indians” (145). Her husband’s death while fighting with the French army in Canada and then that of all of their children, who had succumbed to one illness or another, had brought her to the brink of despair.Īt first, religion offered Hannah no solace because, although the Christians she knew “openly professed to love one another. Hannah Caleb, on the other hand, remembered bitterly the racial prejudice that she had experienced before she found her faith. She did not appreciate Methodism’s egalitarian emphasis as much as the spiritual peace it brought her: at camp meetings she thought that she had arrived in “the suburbs of glory,” so much did God’s love sweep her away (142). Mary Apess’s experience took the form of more mystical devotion. This was his polite way of saying that the Episcopal Methodists no longer shared his views of the dignity of each individual and, thus, of mankind’s final unity. ![]() He also voiced the complaint that he had deemphasized in the second edition of A Son of the Forest: after about four years, he had joined the Protestant Methodists rather than remain among the Episcopal Methodists because it had become clear that the latter’s “government was not republican” (133). ![]() Apess had a compelling desire to press any human near him “to his bosom,” he wrote, for his love now embraced the entire human family (129). ![]() Not only had his own heart changed, he recalled, but everything around him had too. “I felt convinced,” he said of listening to the preaching of one “Brother Hill,” “that Christ had died for all mankind that age, sect, color, country, or situation made no difference” (127). In the account of his own conversion, Apess related some of the chief episodes that he had discussed in more detail in A Son of the Forest, reemphasizing how the Methodists’ message of Christian brotherhood had moved him. The other three narratives are “as-told-to” accounts Apess had interviewed the women and redacted their words.Įmphasizing these individuals’ spiritual progress, the pamphlet as a whole-but especially the “Looking-Glass”-displayed a radicalization of Apess’s rhetoric that owed much to his exposure to Boston’s African American and abolitionist circles. In his own account, Apess reprised the story he had related at greater length in A Son of the Forest his wife’s narrative is in her own voice. The five Natives about whom Apess offered personal religious narratives were his wife, Mary Hannah Caleb his aunt on his father’s side, Sally George Anne Wampy and himself. One result of Apess’s circulation among Boston’s abolitionists was the publication in the early spring of 1833 of his Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe, a pamphlet to which he appended a brief essay, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” intended for the self-reflection that its title indicates. Apess called one essay a “looking-glass” in hopes that white people would be able to view themselves as they were perceived by individuals of color. 68-71), Gura examines a pamphlet written by Apess addressing race, rights, and privilege in America in the 1830s. In the following excerpt from The Life of William Apess, Pequot (pp. Following Apess from his early life through the development of his political radicalism to his tragic early death and enduring legacy, this much-needed biography showcases the accomplishments of an extraordinary Native American. Gura offers the first book-length chronicle of Apess’s fascinating and consequential life. The Pequot Indian intellectual, author, and itinerant preacher William Apess (1798–1839) was one the most important voices of the nineteenth century. ![]()
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