abstractSimon writes to say that he must keep school to earn money. He
promises to repay a past debt to Wheelock as soon as possible and asks for a
recommendation, and for help in obtaining money from the sale of his house, which
has been
purchased by Jacob Fowler. He requests that Wheelock not inform anyone of his
whereabouts.
handwritingHandwriting is clear and legible.
paperLarge sheet folded in half to make four pages is in good-to-fair
condition, with moderate-to-heavy creasing, staining and wear that leads
to a
minor loss of text. Repair work holds two halves of the document together.
inkBlack-brown.
noteworthyA note, likely 19th-century, added after the trailer reads:
"Indian, probably brother of Dan.l." A modern label reading "Part of the
Frederick
Chase Collection given by his heirs" has been affixed to the top right corner
of
one recto.
layoutThe first page of the letter is on one recto, but the second
page is on two recto, not one verso.
Modernized Version
Deletions removed; additions added in;
modern spelling and capitalization added; unfamiliar abbreviations expanded.
I would Inform you a Little about my affairs and where I
am at present I purpose to
begin a School here tomorrow and
take it for Six Months for I have been very Badly dissipated about Money ever since I have been Down so that I think it best to keep School 'til Spring
About that account that is between the College and me as Quick as I can possibly
settle it I will and I hope the Dr will not
go to be[illegible]ding of me for I always mean to Settle wi[gap: tear][guess: th] every one as Quick as
lay in my Power and I have some hopes of being after a while if I have my Health
and prosper I am very Sorry that I did not take Better Care in
time But I think now it will do me good for Time to come so that I shall understand who to Deal with and Who to not
Page 1v
Blank page.
Page 2r
I should be glad if the Dr. would send me a Recommendation for I do know that I have Done anything
that I have no right to one though I must
confess that my conduct has not been very good in a great many respects but I can bu[gap: hole][guess: t]
hope that Dr. will Look over many of my Faults and help me all that He can
Jacob Fowler has bought my house and has given me a Note is to send me an order Down upon Capt.
Backus and I beg that Dr. will give Him an order
because
I am absolutely in need of one —
For I cannot get Money to purchase Clothing
'til
Spring not 'til such Times I can get some for keeping School —
I would have the Dr. keep counsel and not tell anybody where I am or like to be so I
Dartmouth College is small liberal arts institution in Hanover, New
Hampshire. It has about four thousand undergraduate students taking
courses in Arts and Sciences, and another two thousand in graduate
schools in the Sciences, Comparative Literature, and Liberal Studies, as
well as the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering,
and the Tuck School of Business. It is a member of the Ivy League, and
the ninth oldest institution of higher learning in the U.S. The charter
establishing the College was signed in 1769 by John Wentworth, Royal
Governor of New Hamsphire, who wanted an academy of higher learning in
the colony. Its founder, Eleazar Wheelock, was a Congregational minister
from Connecticut who, after his success in educating Samson Occom as a
school teacher and Indian missionary in the 1740's, started Moor's
Indian Charity School in 1754 to continue what he regarded as a divine
mission to educate Native boys and girls to become missionaries. As the
school grew, Wheelock began looking for a new location closer to Indian
Country where he could expand. But in the 1760's he became disillusioned
by the relative failure of his progam and began turning his attention to
the education of Anglo-American men as missionaries. After a protracted
search, he secured the royal charter in New Hampshire and in 1769 moved
his family and base of operations to Hanover, where he established the
College. It is named for William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, who
contributed to the funds raised by Occom and Whitaker on their
fund-raising tour of Great Britain in 1766-68 and became a member of the
London Trust that administered those funds. The College's charter
announced its purpose as "the education and instruction of youth of the
Indian tribes in this land [in] all parts of learning which shall appear
necessary and expedient for civilizing and christianizing children of
pagans…, and also of English youth and any others." But Wheelock's
priorities were, in reality, the reverse. While he gave public notice in
1770 that "My Indian charity school … is now become a body corporate and
politic, under the name of DARTMOUTH COLLEGE," he created this parallel
structure to allow him to use the funds that were collected specifically
for the education of Indians. Only around 75 Native students enrolled at
the College before 1972, when it rededicated itself to educating Indians
and established the Native American Studies Program. This is also the
year Dartmouth went co-ed. Occom was angry and embittered at Wheelock’s
abandonment of his “great design,” for which he had sacrificed so much.
Their relations cooled after Occom’s return from England, and he never
visited his mentor again, or, for that matter, Dartmouth College.
Groton is a town located in southeastern Connecticut between
the Thames and Mystic Rivers. This land was originally settled by the Niantic
tribe, who were forced out in the early 1600s by the Pequots. During the Pequot
War in 1637, Captain John Mason’s soldiers and Indian allies attacked the
Pequot’s Mystic fort, burning down the fort, killing mostly women and children,
and largely displacing the Pequots. John Winthrop Jr. and his Puritan followers
first settled Groton in 1646 as part of New London. In 1705, the General Court
allowed the Groton inhabitants to incorporate as a separate town due to its
increased population. The town was named Groton after Winthrop’s England
estate. Farming, shipbuilding, and maritime trading sustained the Groton
economy throughout the eighteenth century. Beginning in 1712, land disputes
between the Connecticut government and the Pequot tribe in Groton ensued, and
the Pequots sent many petitions and grievances to the Connecticut government.
Legal battles concerning the colonists’ leasing of the 1,700 acres on which the
Pequots lived continued throughout the 18th century, as missionaries came to
the area to teach religion and establish schools. After the Revolutionary War,
many Groton Pequots joined other Connecticut tribes and moved to the
Brothertown settlement in upstate New York.
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.
Abraham Simon was a Narragansett Moor’s student who
played a prominent role in Brothertown’s early civic life. Abraham was
born in 1750 into the prominent Simon family, a Charlestown Narragansett
family that sent five children to Moor’s (James, Emmanuel, Sarah,
Abraham, and Daniel). The minister at Groton, Jacob Johnson, recommended
Abraham Simon to Wheelock during the Fort Stanwix Congress in 1768 (how
Jacob Johnson knew Abraham and why he had brought him to Stanwix is
unclear. His ministry was only 30 miles away from Charlestown, so that
may have been the connection). Abraham studied at Moor’s from 1768 until
1772, and, with his brother Daniel, was one of the few Indian students
to relocate with Wheelock from Connecticut to New Hampshire. In 1772,
Abraham made a brief journey on Wheelock’s behalf to the Tuscaroras, who
proved uninterested in missionaries or schoolmasters. The next written
record of Abraham Simon dates to 1774, when he wrote to Wheelock to
inform him that he was going to keep school among the Pequots, which he
did for approximately six months. In 1775, he enlisted in the army and
served as a medic at Roxbury for at least part of the Revolution.
Abraham immigrated to Brothertown in 1783 and was elected to the town’s
first council. His house was a center of communal life, and appears many
times in Occom’s diary as the location of religious meetings. Abraham
died in Brothertown sometime before 1795, when his land was recorded
under his widow’s name. Some confusion exists regarding Abraham’s death
and burial. In 1925, some Dartmouth students became aware of an Indian
named Abraham Symons who had lived in East Haddam, Connecticut, from
1790 until 1812. They assumed that this Abraham Symons was the
Narragansett Abraham Simon, and erected a tombstone for him in East
Haddam. Had they consulted William DeLoss Love’s account of Brothertown,
perhaps they would not have done so. The town of East Haddam remains
convinced that Abraham Simon is Abraham Symons, despite the fact that
their account of Abraham’s life and connection to East Haddam relies on
conflating his life with his brother Daniel Simon’s.
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.
Jacob Fowler was a Montauk Indian whose life was
dramatically shaped by Samson Occom, his brother-in-law. Occom taught
Jacob when he was a child, and in 1762, Jacob followed his older brother
David Fowler to Moor's. After three years he was approved as an usher in
the 1765 examination, and in 1766 he went to assist Samuel Johnson at
Canajoharie. He taught among the Six Nations until at least mid-1767. In
early 1770, Occom procured him a job teaching at Mushantuxet through the
Boston Board of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian
Knowledge. Jacob taught and preached among the Pequots at Mushantuxet
and Stonington until 1774, when Wheelock hired him to teach at Moor's,
which had relocated to Hanover, NH as a complement to Dartmouth College.
During this time, Jacob also assisted Joseph Johnson with efforts to
rally the New England Christian tribes for a move to Oneida territory
(the Brothertown Movement). By 1776, there were no Indians enrolled in
Moor's and Jacob moved on to serve Governor John Trumbull of CT as a
messenger to the Six Nations during the Revolution. After the
Revolution, he continued organizing the Brothertown Movement and was
among those who initially emigrated in 1784. He was elected clerk at
Brothertown, and died sometime in the spring of 1787.
Captain Nathaniel Backus Junior (II) provided Occom
with supplies. Like Elijah Backus, he was a member of the prominent
Backus family. Although he also had a son named Nathaniel Backus (III),
it is more likely that Nathaniel Backus Jr. refers to Nathaniel Backus
II, as Nathaniel Backus II regularly went by N. Backus Jr, since he
co-existed in Norwich politics with his father, Nathaniel Backus Sr.
(I).