The Occom Circle

Moor’s Indian Charity School was a grammar school for Native Americans that Eleazar Wheelock opened in North Lebanon, Connecticut in 1754. The school was named for Colonel Joshua Moor, also spelled More, who donated the land and school building. Moor’s was essentially an expansion of the grammar school that Wheelock opened in 1743 to support himself during the fallout from the First Great Awakening, when Wheelock, who'd participated in itinerant ministry during the Awakening, had his salary confiscated by the colony of Connecticut. In December of that year, Samson Occom asked Wheelock to teach him as well. Wheelock's work with Occom was so successful that Wheelock decided to replicate the experiment with other Native American boys. He accepted his first Indian students in 1754, and in 1761 began taking female students as well. Wheelock believed that in time, his school would become just one part of a larger missionary enterprise. He planned to send his Anglo American and Native American students to various tribes as missionaries and schoolmasters, with explicit instructions to pick out the best students and send them back to Moor’s to continue the cycle. His ultimate goal was to turn his school into a model Christian Indian town that would include farms, a college, and vocational training. However, Wheelock’s grand design did not survive the decade. Wheelock lost the vast majority of his Native American students; he fought with many of the best, including Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, David Fowler, and Hezekiah Calvin, and other former and current students accused him of subjecting Native Americans to disproportionate amounts of manual labor. In 1769, perhaps due to concerns about corporal punishment, the Oneida withdrew all their children from Moor’s. When Wheelock relocated to Hanover in 1769, only two Native American students came with him, and it became clear that Wheelock’s focus was on Dartmouth and that Dartmouth was for white students. After Wheelock’s death in 1779, Moor’s Indian Charity School receded further into the background as John Wheelock, his father’s reluctant successor, stopped taking Indian students. Some Native American students were enrolled in Moor’s until 1850, when the school unofficially closed.

Norridgewock is the name of a band of the Abenaki Indians/First Nations, an eastern Algonquian tribe that occupied an area in Maine along the border of Acadia, on the western bank of the Kenebec River. It was also the name of their village, now called Old Point in Madison, Maine. The name is a version of Nanrantsouak, meaning "people of the still water between the rapids." The Norridgewocks lived peacefully through cultivation of maize, beans, and squash and seasonal ocean fishing, until the arrival of Europeans. Both France and England claimed their territory, and the village of Norridgewock occupied a strategic site on the way to Quebec. In 1694, Father Sebastien Rale (or Rasle) arrived in Norridgewock, establishing a Jesuit mission and the first school in the area. Rale converted most of the tribe and buit a large church where Native youths served as acolytes. The village also had a stockade. A series of wars ensued between the English and French, centered on this area. In 1721, at the beginning of "Father Rale's War," Rale encouraged the Norridgewock leaders to deliver a letter to the English governor at Georgetown demanding the removal of English settlers from Abenaki lands. This resulted in a raid on the village in 1722 and the Battle of Norridgewock in 1724, in which the village was destroyed, Rale killed, and the inhabitants relocated to Quebec. The New England poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, memorialized this battle in his 1836 poem "Mogg Megone." In 1766 Wheelock sent Aaron Kinne, who mentioned the Norridgewocks, to Georgetown, Maine, to investigate the possibilities of setting up Indian schools and recruiting Indian children for Moor's.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the three major branches of Christianity, along with Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism. It numbers around 1.1 billion adherents world-wide and is a complex institution ruled by the Pope at the top (hence the variant names Popish or Papist, which denote a follower of the Pope––in Italian "Papa") and descending ranks of archbishops, bishops, cardinals, and priests at the local or parish level. It traces an unbroken history to Jesus Christ and his Apostles, in particular Peter, the "rock" upon whom Jesus said he would build his church (Matthew 16:18-19) and Paul, who spread the gospel in Rome. The RCC locates the elements of its "catholicity"––doctrine, authority, universality––in the New Testament and became associated with Rome as the capital of the Roman Empire and principal city of the ancient world. Several Popes, acting like imperial monarchs, consolidated and extended the jurisdiction of the RCC to remote areas of Gaul (France), Spain and Africa. Eventually, the Eastern Orthodox Church split off and developed its own structures, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, Church reformers in Europe split off into various sects of Protestantism, which had a particularly violent relationship with Roman Catholicism. These two branches disagreed profoundly on key issues of doctrine and practice: the Trinity, the role of the Virgin Mary, church governance, baptism and the sacrament, to name a few. The RCC began what it called the Counter Reformation to turn back the tide of reform and also redoubled its evangelizing efforts, sending priests and monks to the Americas to convert Native peoples, largely in French- and Spanish-held territories. Congregationalists who settled New England were particularly wary of "Papists," associating their beliefs and missionary activities with the Devil and persecuting them mercilessly. There is no explicit religious toleration for Catholics, or others, until after the American Revolution. Wheelock complains of competing with Catholic Jesuit missionaries active among the Senca Nation and Canadian Indian tribes. Protestants associated Catholicism with hierarchy, hypocrisy, and outward, empty show as does Occom in his bitter letter to Wheelock of July 24, 1771, in which he calls the "semenary" that Wheelock has relocated to New Hampshire with very few Indians in attendance, "too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees, for She is already adorned up too much like the Popish Virgin Mary" (771424).

The Penobscot (Penawahpskewi) people are indigenous to the Penobscot River watershed in what is now Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. When Europeans arrived in the early 17th century, the Penobscots were part of the Wabanaki, a powerful confederacy of tribes that included the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Abenaki Indians, who all spoke a related Algonquian language. Other tribes who spoke the same language and were culturally and/or politically associated with the Penobscots include the Caiba (Kennebec), Norridgewock (Nanrantsouak), Arosaguntacook (Androscoggin), Wawenock (Wawinak), and Pigwacket (Pequawket or Saco River Indians). Their first recorded leader, Chief Bessabez (or Bashaba), ruled over a nation of 20 villages. From 1606 to 1616, the Penobscots were decimated by intertribal conflict, and smallpox introduced by Europeans. Long wars with their hereditary enemy, the Mohawks, lasted until 1678 when only 347 Penobscots remained. Between 1675 and 1760, the Penobscots and other Indian nations, who allied with the French, were caught up in the battle between Britain and France for control of the region, which exhausted their resources. Washington requested that the Penobscots side with the Americans during the Revolution, and because of this they were allowed to stay on their lands after the war. But despite continued support of American causes, the tribe was ignored, their lands appropriated when Maine became a state, and treaties broken. In 1965, Maine became the first state to create a separate Department of Indian Affairs to help recognize and implement Penobscot sovereignty. In 1980, Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy Indians received a settlementof $81 million and were able to buy back some ancestral lands where the nation continues to maintain its traditions. In 1766, Aaron Kinne mentions the Penobscots to Wheelock as one of the tribes in the area around Georgetown, Maine, who might be ripe for missionizing.

The Plymouth Company began as one of two competing branches of the proprietary Virginia Company chartered by King James I in 1606 to raise private funds to settle "Virginia," a name that at the time applied to the entire northeast coast of North America. Comprised of merchants from Plymouth, Bristol, and Exeter in England, the Plymouth Company sent settlers to found the short-lived Popham Colony on the coast of present-day Maine in 1606, which was abandoned the following year. In 1607, the rival London Company sent settlers to Jamestown, in present-day Virginia, a colony that struggled but managed to achieve a foothold. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, one of the original leaders of the Plymouth Company, wanted to prevent Puritans from dominating the region and obtained a land grant extending from the Piscataqua River to the Kennebec River, which he gave to friends in England who became known as the Proprietors. In 1640, the Proprietors ceded the patent to the freeman of the New Plymouth Colony, which had been established on the land, and which obtained exclusive land rights from the local Indian sagamores. The first Indian war in 1676 destroyed the colony and in 1753, the Maine General Court formed a new corporation called “The Proprietors of Kennebec Purchase from the late Colony of New Plymouth,” which was shortened to “Plymouth Company,” and lasted until 1818, when it disposed of all its interests in the territory.

This Alqonquian-speaking Native American/First Nations people call themselves the Wolastoqiyik Tribe, after the Wolastoq (or Wulustuk, anglicized to Walloostook) River, meaning "beautiful" river. In English it is known as the St. John River, and forms the border between the US and Canada on the northeastern coast, emptying into the Bay of Fundy. They are a member of the Wabanaki Confederacy, meaning "People of the First Light or Dawnland" referring to their location, which includes the Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscot Indians, with whom they share language and culture. The Wolastoqiyiks are also called the Maliseet people, an English version of the French name Malecite, which means "broken or lazy talkers," and was the name Mi'kmaqs used for Wolastoqiyiks, contrasting their close dialect to the Mi'kmaqs' own language. The French fur traders and missionaries who met the Mi'kmaqs first, adopted their name for the Wolastoqiyiks. The Wolastoqiyiks claim a close physical and spiritual bond with the Wolastoq River, and practiced agriculture and hunted and fished along its shores. Like their neighboring Tribes, they were converted by French Catholic missionaries and influenced by French fur traders who had been active in New France from the late 1500s. Sometime in the later 17th century, they moved their headquarters from the mouth of the River to the upper reaches. In 1699, French explorers reported nine Indian settlements in the St. John valley. At about this time, the Native Nations in this area began to form an alliance to counter British expansion into their lands that became the Wabanaki Confederacy. The French, who were at war with the British over control of territory in North America, supported them and depended on Wolastoqiyik warriors to fight on their side. When hostilities ceased, the victorious British expelled the French and intermarried people, and made treaties with the local Indian Nations, though their traditional lifeways were destroyed, and the lands set aside for the Wolastoqiyiks were increasingly reduced by white settlers. In 1765, they petitioned the Governor of Canada to protect their rights and territories. This chaotic situation did not deter Wheelock from looking at the Northeastern Canadian Indians as potential sites for English Protestant missions. In the winter of 1766, he sent Aaron Kinne to scout the area, who reported that though the area was rich in resources, the Indians, including "the St. John's Tribe" were under the (diabolical) influence of French Catholicism. Undeterred, Wheelock wrote to Whitaker in the Fall of 1767 of continued interest in the Tribe after hearing reports of "a great Appearance of Religious Concern in Numbers of them" (ms. 767502.1). Nothing seems to have come of these attempts. After the Revolutionary War, many loyalists fled the new US and settled on land along the St. John River, granted to them by the British government. Acadians who had fled the British in the 1730s had settled this land, and were now displaced further upriver around the Madawaska River settlement of the Wolastoqiyiks, putting increased pressure on the already dwindling Tribe. By the 1830s, most Wolastoqiyiks had assimilated into the Acadian communities or relocated to other villages. Today, there are a few Wolastoqiyiks living outside Edmundston, the site of one of their original main villages. The State of Maine recognized the Maliseet, along with the Mik'maq, as official Tribes in 1974. In 1989, the Province of Québec officially recognized them as the eleventh Aboriginal Nation, with a reserve near the town of Rivière du Loup.

The "Canadians" to whom Kinne refers are the Mi'kmaq and the Passamaquoddy Tribes. Along with the Wolastoqiyik or Malisset Tribe, whom Kinne calls "The St. John's Tribe," they are the original inhabitants of the area north and east of Georgetown, Maine, where Kinne was stationed as a missionary, in what is now called New Brunswick, Canada. These three tribes combined with the Abenaki and Penobscot Tribes in southeastern Maine to form the Wabanaki Confederacy, a coalition of five Algonquian speaking nations of the eastern seaboard, who banded together in response to aggression by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Kinne is responding to Wheelock's request for "intelligence" about groups of Indians in the region who may be open to Protestant missionizing, indicating that as early as 1766 Wheelock was looking to expand his reach beyond the Haudenosaunees in central and western New York, who had been his primary target.

The Six Nations (often called the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois) is a confederacy composed of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras. The first five tribes unified at some point before European contact (dates differ by centuries), and the Tuscaroras joined them in 1722, after colonial violence drove the tribe out of Carolina. The Haudenosaunee occupied much of what is now central New York, and, thus, were sandwiched between French, English, and Dutch territories. They allied with the English against the French early on, just as their arch-enemies, the Huron, allied with the French. Despite the Six Nations’ unity, the constituent nations experienced European contact in different ways. The Mohawks and Oneidas, as the two easternmost tribes, had by far the most contact with the English, while the Senecas and Cayugas, the westernmost nations, had little contact with the English (although both hosted French Jesuit missionaries). Mohawk territory was the site of Johnson Hall, the administrative center and home of Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Northeast. The Oneidas, meanwhile, played host to several prominent Anglo-American missionaries and were thought of as the most Christianized Haudenosaunee tribe by many colonists. Eleazar Wheelock became fixated on the Haudenosaunee soon after he established Moor’s Indian Charity School in 1754. He saw in them the opportunity for a fresh start, since he believed that New England Indians had assimilated to Anglo-American norms in all the wrong ways (too much rum, too little Christianity). Wheelock established contact with the Haudenosaunee through Sir William Johnson and made the Mohawks and Oneidas the focal point of his missionary efforts for much of the 1760s. The American Revolution had dramatic repercussions for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Mohawks, Senecas, Onondagas, and Cayugas sided with the British, while the Oneidas and Tuscaroras sided with the Americans. Since all Haudenosaunee hold membership in both a tribe (Mohawk, Oneida, etcetera) and a matrilineal clan (bear, wolf, and others), the tribes’ divergent alliances brought about political schism and violence within extended families. Furthermore, Haudenosaunee territory was devastated during the war, especially in General Sullivan’s 1779 raid on Cayuga and Seneca territory. After the Revolution, many Haudenosaunee who had affiliated with the British relocated to the Grand River Reserve in Canada, while many of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras remained in New York. The Haudenosaunee at the Grand River Reserve established their own council fire, which operated in parallel with the original council fire at Onondaga. Today, both council fires are still active, and each tribe also has its own independent government (as do displaced Haudenosaunee populations, such as the Oneidas of Wisconsin).

Connecticut is a state in southern New England that borders Massachusetts to the north and the Long Island Sound to the south. Its name is derived from the Algonquian "Quonehtacut," meaning "long river," referring to the Connecticut, which runs from the border with Canada into the Long Island Sound. The area was originally inhabited by Algonquian-speaking Pequots, Mohegans, and Quinnipiacs. European settlers took advantage of tribal divisions to establish dominance in the region. Dutch explorer Adrian Block sailed up the Connecticut River in 1614, establishing an active Dutch trading post at what is now Hartford. English claims to Connecticut began in 1630, but settlement truly began when Thomas Hooker, a Congregationalist minister now known as "The Father of Connecticut," left Boston to found Hartford in 1636. Hartford became the center of the Colony of Connecticut, which did not receive its charter until 1662 when Governor John Winthrop, Jr. secured it from Charles II. In 1665, the Colony of New Haven, established in 1638 by the Puritan minister John Davenport, joined the Colony of Connecticut under this charter. Early settler relations with local Indians were tense, and encouraged the New England colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven to unify as the "United Colonies" or "New England Confederation" and fight together, with Indian allies, in the Pequot War and again in King Philip's (Metacom's) War. These wars helped establish a specifically Connecticut and specifically American identity; the latter drove the colony to join the rebellion against Britain in 1776. Occom, born into a Mohegan household in Connecticut, was closely associated with the Colony and retained strong ties to the region throughout his life. He converted to Christianity in 1743 when the Great Awakening spread through Connecticut, and inspired Wheelock's Indian Charity School, which was founded in Lebanon, CT in 1754. He also became involved in the Mason Land Case, a long-standing dispute over the ownership of reserve Mohegan lands in Connecticut. Wheelock also had strong ties to Connecticut, moving his Indian Charity School only when the colony would not grant it a charter.

Located between the Sheepscot and Kennebec Rivers, Georgetown is an island situated in southern Maine. The Abenaki Indians originally termed the island Eroscohegan, which means good spear fishing. It was purchased from Chief Mowhotiwormet by an English fisherman named John Parker in 1649, in exchange for a hogshead of rum and many pumpkins. During Metacom (King Philip)'s War, the English settlements in the Kennebec River Valley were burned, leading to the abandonment of the island. War and Indian attacks continued to impede English settlement on and off until the fall of Quebec during the French and Indian War, when English settlers began repopulating the area. Aaron Kinne wrote a letter to Eleazar Wheelock reporting on Indian tribes in the area of Georgetown and the possibility of converting them to Christianity. Kinne notes that there are several tribes who might be open to Protestant Christianity if their alliance with the French had not already predisposed them to Catholicism.

Norwich Landing is the original name of the area around the public landing built in 1694 at the head of the Thames River in the town of Norwich, CT, to faciliate trade with England. It was a site of business and trade, also called "Chelsea Landing" and "Chelsea." Eventually, this neighborhood became the downtown area of what grew to be the city of Norwich. Because of its proximity to Lebanon, CT, where Eleazar Wheelock lived and worked, and its harbor with access to the Long Island Sound, Norwich Landing became the main point of travel for Wheelock and his associates, and visitors who frequently traveled to the area by boat.

Aaron Kinne was a Congregationalist minister and scholar who, like Titus Smith and Theophilus Chamberlain, worked as a missionary for Wheelock after graduating from Yale. After his 1765 graduation, he taught and studied at Moor's for a year before making two trips as a missionary in 1766: one to Maine to report on the local Indian tribes, and one to the Oneidas, the latter being cut short by poor health. He returned in the summer of 1768 to substitute for Samuel Kirkland. Kinne was ordained in 1770 and became the minister of the Congregationalist church at Groton, Connecticut, where he served until he was dismissed in 1798. He also became a prolific scholar, and during the Revolution, served as chaplain to American troops, including those massacred at the Battle of Fort Griswold. After dismissal from Groton, Kinne lived in a variety of locations in New England and was sporadically employed as a missionary. He died in Ohio while visiting one of daughters.

Eleazar Wheelock was a New Light Congregationalist minister who founded Dartmouth College. He was born into a very typical Congregationalist family, and began studying at Yale in 1729, where he fell in with the emerging New Light clique. The evangelical network that he built in college propelled him to fame as an itinerant minister during the First Great Awakening and gave him many of the contacts that he later drew on to support his charity school for Native Americans. Wheelock’s time as an itinerant minister indirectly brought about his charity school. When the Colony of Connecticut retroactively punished itinerant preaching in 1743, Wheelock was among those who lost his salary. Thus, in 1743, he began operating a grammar school to support himself. He was joined that December by Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian, who sought out an education in hopes of becoming a teacher among his people. Occom’s academic success inspired Wheelock to train Native Americans as missionaries. To that end, he opened Moor’s Indian Charity School in 1754 (where he continued to train Anglo-American students who paid their own way as well as students who functionally indentured themselves to Wheelock as missionaries in exchange for an education). Between 1754 and 1769, when he relocated to New Hampshire, Wheelock trained approximately 60 male and female Native American students from nearby Algonquian tribes and from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of central New York. At the same time, he navigated the complicated politics of missionary societies by setting up his own board of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, although he continued to feud with the Boston Board of the SSPCK and the London Commissioners in Boston (more colloquially called the New England Company). By the late 1760s, Wheelock had become disillusioned with the idea of Native American education. He was increasingly convinced that educating Native Americans was futile (several of his students had failed to conform to his confusing and contradictory standards), and, in late 1768, he lost his connection to the Haudenosaunee. With his inclination and ability to sponsor Native American missionaries largely depleted, Wheelock sought instead to fulfill his ultimate ambition of obtaining a charter and opening a college, which he did in 1769. To fund this new enterprise, Wheelock drew on the £12,000 that Samson Occom had raised for Moor’s Indian Charity School during a two-and-a-half year tour of Great Britain (1765 to 1768). Much of this money went towards clearing land and erecting buildings in New Hampshire for the Charity School’s relocation — infrastructure that also happened to benefit Dartmouth. Many of Wheelock’s contemporaries were outraged by what they saw as misuse of the money, as it was clear that Dartmouth College was not intended for Indians and that Moor’s had become a side project. Although Wheelock tried to maintain at least some commitment to Native American education by recruiting students from Canadian communities, the move did a great deal of damage to his public image. The last decade of Wheelock’s life was not easy. In addition to the problems of trying to set up a college far away from any Anglo-American urban center, Wheelock experienced the loss of relationships with two of his most famous and successful students, Samson Occom and Samuel Kirkland (an Anglo-American protégé). He also went into debt for Dartmouth College, especially after the fund raised in Britain was exhausted.

Mary Wheelock was born Mary Brinsmead on July 26, 1714 in Milford, Connecticut. In the year following the death of his first wife, Eleazar began to court Mary Brinsmead, and the two married on November 21, 1747. Mary and Eleazar had five children together, including John, who would succeed his father as President of Dartmouth College. Little appears in the historical record about Mary, but many of the people who wrote to Wheelock, especially his Native correspondents who often lived with the family, referred to her warmly. In September 1770, Mary dismantled her longtime home in Connecticut, and travelled with her children to the Wheelocks' new home in the wilderness of New Hampshire. They rode in a coach sent over from England by John Thornton, accompanied by 30 Charity School students on foot. Eleazar, who had gone ahead to build housing for everyone, wrote a letter to Mary with many instructions about the move; the disposition of domestic animals, people, supplies; and the acquisition of money that suggests she was an able and trustworthy manager (manuscript 770510.1; this manuscript is not included in Occom Circle documents). She died in 1784 in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she is buried in the Dartmouth College Cemetery.

Ralph Rodulphus Wheelock was Wheelock's oldest son and heir apparent. While Wheelock believed that Ralph showed great aptitude for the "Indian business," others saw Ralph as arrogant and abrasive. He also suffered from epilepsy, which seriously impeded his ability to work. He died in Hanover as an invalid under almost constant care and guardianship. Wheelock's struggle to accept his son's illness and his son's struggle to overcome it provide an undercurrent for some of the stranger events in the history of Moor's Indian Charity School and Dartmouth College. Ralph grew up surrounded by and dedicated to Indian education, but also with an inflated sense of Wheelock's, and his own, importance, which stayed with him for much of his life. Joseph Brant recounts a telling anecdote: Ralph once ordered William Major, Sir William Johnson's son, to saddle his horse on the grounds that he was the son of a gentleman and William Major was not. Ralph was unable to finish coursework at the College of New Jersey, which he attended from 1761-1763, although he graduated from Yale in 1765. He made three tours of the Six Nations (in 1766, 1767, and 1768), assisting ministers in bringing back children and negotiating with tribes. He taught at Moor's for two years, and was briefly considered as a companion for Occom on the Fundraising Tour. Wheelock formally named him as his heir in the 1768 draft of his will. However, Wheelock's reliance on Ralph brought disastrous consequences for the school. In the spring of 1768, Wheelock sent Ralph to the Onondagas and Oneidas to negotiate about schoolmasters and missionaries. Once there, Ralph managed to offend the assembled chiefs beyond repair. Ralph blamed his failure on Kirkland, and it was not until 1772 that Wheelock learned the truth of the matter. It is likely that Ralph's conduct influenced the Oneidas' decision to pull their children out of Moor's later in 1768: Wheelock himself implied as much in his 1771 Journal. By the early 1770s, Wheelock had realized that Ralph was never going to take over Dartmouth College. In a later will, Wheelock provided Ralph with £50 per annum for his care, to be paid out by the College, and stipulated that his other heirs should look after his oldest son. Because Ralph was unable to serve as Wheelock's heir, the presidency of the College passed to John Wheelock, a soldier who had no theological training or desire to run a college.

Breed was a vendor who traded with Occom and Wheelock. His wares included food, building materials, alcohol, clothing, and finished metal goods. He was a staunch Wheelock supporter, and helped hold and deliver mail for Wheelock, as well as sending his (possibly first-born) son, John McLaren Breed, to Wheelock's school (J. Breed went on to graduate from Yale in 1768). While Occom was abroad, he was more lenient in supplying goods to Mary Occom than other local vendors, such as Captain Shaw, but eventually, he too refused to sell to her on credit.