Samson Occom

On September 2, 1772, a man stood ready to be hanged in New Haven, Connecticut. His name was Moses Paul, and he was a Wampanoag, a Native American. In December of the year before, he had got into a fight in a tavern in Bethany. The innkeeper refused to serve him any more drink, a certain Moses Cook struck him, and Paul killed Cook. The court in New Haven sentenced him to the gallows.

In July, Paul had written a letter from prison. He asked one particular minister to preach on the day of his death. His reason was brief: “considering that we are of the same nation.” That minister was Samson Occom, a Mohegan from eastern Connecticut.

Occom came. He preached on a text from the letter to the Romans: For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23). He spoke directly to the condemned man. He spoke to the rest of the listeners. And he turned separately to the Native people who had come, with a stern warning about drink.

That sermon was printed in New Haven the same year. Then came one reprint after another. Historians usually call it the first writing by a Native American to be published under his own name. Occom was forty-nine at the time. He already had a whole life behind him as a teacher, preacher and spokesman for his people. He had raised money in England for a school that later became Dartmouth College, one of the oldest universities in America. And he had discovered that the school did not remain what he had been promised.

It began in Mohegan, in 1723.

A PEOPLE LOSING THEIR LAND

Mohegan lay close to the small town of New London. The area is now called Montville and lies within the Mohegan reservation. In 1723 Connecticut was a British colony. Colonists and Native peoples lived side by side, and between them it kept coming back to one thing: land.

For the Mohegan, one matter would color their entire century. In 1640 their leader Uncas had made an agreement with the colony about a large piece of land. Who actually owned that land now? The Mohegan said: it was entrusted, not given away. The colony saw it differently. That lawsuit, the Mason case, dragged on for decades, until 1773. It divided the tribe and would occupy Occom for half his life.

His father was called Joshua and was known as a hunter. His mother was called Sarah. The family name is spelled differently in the sources: Tomacham, Ockham. According to some biographers the family descended from Uncas. That is often said, but I have not found a firm source for it. The Brothertown Indian Nation, the people Occom would later help to found, tells that he was born in a wigwam.

He grew up in the religion of his people. That is how he later put it himself: he was born a heathen and brought up a heathen.

A PRIMER AND A NEW TESTAMENT

Around 1740 a wave of revival swept through the English colonies. Historians call it the Great Awakening. Traveling preachers called people to personal conversion, and this reached the Native villages too. Sarah, Occom’s mother, became one of the first Mohegan to become Christians.

In 1768 Occom wrote a short account of his life. In it he tells that he was sixteen when the preachers came. For half a year he was restless inside. He bought a primer, a simple reading book, and asked English neighbors to teach him the letters. At seventeen he found, as he wrote, rest in Jesus Christ. He began to read the New Testament and wanted to teach the children of his people to read. Other sources give 1741 as the year of his conversion. One biographer names the preacher James Davenport, but Occom himself names no one.

What drove a Mohegan boy to knock on his white neighbors’ door with a spelling book? He wrote little about it. He mostly described what he did.

In 1742 the Mohegan chose him, not yet twenty, as counselor to their leader Ben Uncas II. So even as a young man he was someone his people listened to.

A WEEK OR TWO IN LEBANON

In 1743 his mother went to Eleazar Wheelock, a young minister in the village of Lebanon, Connecticut. She asked him to teach her son for a week or two. Occom stayed four years.

Wheelock was a Congregationalist, part of a movement of English Protestants in which each local congregation is self-governing. He taught Occom Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Later Occom continued his studies with another minister, Benjamin Pomeroy, in preparation for Yale. It never came to that. In the summer of 1749 his eyes became so strained that he had to stop.

In 1754 Wheelock opened a school for Native pupils in Lebanon, Moor’s Indian Charity School. Later that school would send Occom to the other side of the ocean.

TWELVE YEARS AT THE EASTERN TIP OF LONG ISLAND

In 1749 Occom went along on a fishing trip to Montauk, at the eastern end of Long Island. The Montaukett were looking for a schoolmaster. He first agreed to half a year. He stayed about twelve years.

His own account is matter-of-fact. He had some thirty pupils during the day and an evening school besides. He led the services, visited the sick and settled quarrels. He rode some thirty miles to preach to the Shinnecock as well. He lived in a wigwam and moved twice a year with his family. To have his corn ground he had to travel eighteen miles.

In 1751 he married Mary Fowler, a Montaukett and one of his former pupils. They had ten children; Wikipedia counts eleven. Researchers at Dartmouth describe Mary as a woman who stayed faithful to the Montauk way of life, and as a counterweight to Wheelock’s influence. I mention her here because she is missing from many books about Occom. His story cannot be told without her.

On August 30, 1759, Occom was ordained by the Suffolk Presbytery on Long Island. In the Presbyterian church a presbytery is the gathering of ministers and elders from a region, which appoints ministers. He had never finished university. The Presbyterians ordained him all the same, as a missionary among his own peoples.

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY POUNDS

In his life story of 1768 Occom does something almost nobody dared to do at the time. He sets the figures side by side.

For his work at Montauk he received fifteen pounds a year from the missionary committee in Boston, and later another fifteen to pay off debts. A young, unmarried white missionary received from the same committee one hundred pounds for a single year, plus fifty for an interpreter and thirty for someone to introduce him. One hundred and eighty pounds in all. Occom calculated that for twelve years of work he had received about as much as that man got in one year. And Occom was his own interpreter.

Then he tells a story about a Native boy who was bound out to an English family. The master’s son beat him almost every day. Someone asked the boy why. He thought it was because he was an Indian. Occom applied it to himself. “I believe it is because I am a poor Indian,” he wrote. And he closed with the thought that God had made him so.

I read that sentence as something other than self-pity. A man calls injustice by its name, and at the same time places his origins in the hand of God. This account, by the way, was not published until 1982. It lay in an archive for more than two hundred years.

THREE HUNDRED SERMONS IN ENGLAND

After his ordination Occom traveled in 1761 and 1762 to the Oneida, a people in the west of the colony of New York. His brother-in-law David Fowler went with him. A third journey in 1763 came to nothing, because war broke out between the British and Native peoples around the Great Lakes. In 1764 Occom moved with his family back to Mohegan. There he came into conflict with the local minister, David Jewett, who had his own interest in the Mason case. The Connecticut mission board cleared Occom of all complaints except his role in that land dispute. Whoever stood up for the land of his people, then, got into trouble with the people who paid his salary.

In December 1765 Wheelock asked him to go to Great Britain. The school needed money. Occom sailed across the ocean with the minister Nathaniel Whitaker. The well-known evangelist George Whitefield introduced him to nobles and senior clergy. In March 1766 Occom had himself inoculated against smallpox in London, a controversial treatment at the time.

What followed was a journey of almost two years through England and Scotland. Occom preached an estimated three hundred to four hundred sermons. King George III gave two hundred pounds. The Earl of Dartmouth, William Legge, subscribed fifty guineas and became one of the largest donors. Together Occom and Whitaker raised about twelve thousand pounds. That was an enormous sum. Researchers at Dartmouth estimate it at more than two million dollars in today’s money.

His sermons and his manner received much praise. Later he would write to Wheelock that in England he had sometimes felt like a curiosity on show. In May 1768 he arrived back in America.

A FAMILY THAT HAD BEEN MADE TO WAIT

At home a disappointment awaited him. Wheelock had not properly cared for his family while he was away. Occom no longer had a paid position. Wheelock offered him a post as missionary, far inland, but Occom was not well and did not want to leave his family alone for years again.

In those months something else happened that he put on paper himself. On January 4, 1769, he wrote a short letter to the board of the Scottish missionary society that supported him. He confessed that he had let himself be overcome by strong drink. He wrote that he had thereby harmed the cause of God and the name of the Christian faith, and he asked for forgiveness and prayer. That letter is still in the Dartmouth archive.

Shortly afterward a new rumor came up. In March 1769 Wheelock wrote to him that someone claimed Occom had been drinking too much again. Wheelock wrote that he did not believe it and contradicted it everywhere. He added that, if it were true, it would be “a greater wound to Christ and his cause” than what had happened before. Wikipedia says that Wheelock spread rumors about Occom. His own letter says something different. What exactly was passed around, and by whom, can no longer be properly traced.

It was the same sin Occom would warn against three years later at the gallows of Moses Paul. He knew it from the inside.

“TOO ALBA MATER”

On December 13, 1769, Wheelock received a charter for a new college from the governor of New Hampshire. It was named after the earl who had given so generously: Dartmouth. Wheelock moved to New Hampshire. The money Occom had raised in England for educating Native young people now went largely to a college for white students.

Occom saw it happen. On July 24, 1771, he wrote Wheelock a letter that changed their relationship for good. He had heard that there were no Native students anymore. “I understand you have no Indians at present except two or three mulattoes,” he wrote. He had gone to England for the poor Indians, and that was what they had told the donors too. Now he feared that “we Shall be deemed as Liars and Deceivers in Europe.”

And then a play on words that still stings two hundred and fifty years later. In Latin a university is called alma mater, nourishing mother. Occom wrote that instead of becoming alma mater, the school would be “too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnies”: a white mother, who would no longer nurse the brown children. His whole verdict lay in that one letter.

According to Dartmouth itself, the two men never saw each other again. Occom never set foot on the campus of the college for which he had raised the money.

I want to be careful here. Wheelock also wrote many letters and had his own explanations. This is not a chapter about him. But the facts are clear: the money was requested for Native children, and it was spent mostly on others. In 1970 Dartmouth committed itself anew to the education of Native students. There is a pond there now called Occom Pond.

AT THE GALLOWS IN NEW HAVEN

In those bitter years came the letter from Moses Paul. In December 1771 Paul had killed Moses Cook, after a quarrel that began when the innkeeper refused to serve him any more drink. The execution was first set for June 1772 and, after an appeal, postponed to September 2.

That day Occom preached on the wages of sin. He held nothing back from the condemned man. “Alas! poor Moses, now you know, by sad, by woful experience, the living truth of our text, that the wages of sin is death,” he said to him. Then he turned to the Native listeners and warned them against drunkenness. In another sermon from those years he blamed the colonists for bringing drink and disease among his people, but he did not call his own people innocent because of it.

You can read that sermon as a sentence passed. I prefer to read it as a man standing at the gallows of a fellow countryman and explaining the gospel to everyone who will listen. Paul had asked for it. Occom came.

The sermon was printed in New Haven on October 31, 1772, and shortly afterward in New London as well. More than twenty editions followed. A count by the American Antiquarian Society comes to twenty-three different printings between 1772 and 1829. A Welsh translation appeared too. Some later printings contained a dialogue between Occom and Paul that was invented.

In 1773 the verdict in the Mason case was given in London. The Mohegan lost. A year later Occom published a hymnbook, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, printed in New London. Nobody knows exactly how many of the hymns he wrote himself. The hymn Awaked by Sinai’s awful sound is often attributed to him, but it only appeared after his death.

EEYAWQUITTOOWAUCONNUCK

If the colonists’ church would not serve his people, then it had to be done differently. Occom was convinced that Native peoples needed pastors and teachers from among themselves. He wrote that “the Indians must have Teachers of the own color or Nation.”

Together with his brother-in-law David Fowler, a Montaukett, and his son-in-law Joseph Johnson, a Mohegan, he worked on a plan. Christian families from several small peoples in New England would found a new community together. They were Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, Montauk, Tunxis and Niantic. In October 1774 the Oneida gave them a piece of land in the interior of New York. In 1775 a first group of fifty to seventy-five people went there.

Then the American Revolution broke out. The war scattered the new community. Some went back to New England, others found shelter with the Stockbridge in Massachusetts. Joseph Johnson disappeared during a peace mission. Only after 1783 could the families return.

In the autumn of 1785 the time had come. On November 7 Occom wrote in his journal: “we named our town by the name of Brotherton, in Indian Eeyawquittoowauconnuck.” Brother town. He became its pastor, and also served the Stockbridge and his own Mohegan.

What must it have meant for someone who had worked all his life in other people’s schools, other people’s churches and from other people’s purses, to write down a name of his own for a place of his own?

In 1787 he spoke out against slavery in a sermon. That deserves mention, and so does this: before leaving for England he had asked Wheelock whether he could use an enslaved person for the work on his farm. Dartmouth mentions both. So do I.

A SMALLER PIECE OF LAND

In 1789 Occom moved with his family to western New York for good. The land remained under pressure. A treaty of 1788 gave Brothertown a smaller area, and the state of New York allowed land to be leased to outsiders. Wikipedia reports that in April 1792 Occom put settlers off the land, but I have found no other source for that.

On July 14, 1792, Samson Occom died in New Stockbridge, New York. He was sixty-nine. Accounts of how he died differ. According to one tradition he collapsed on the way home, shortly after writing something, and his wife found him. According to another he was fetching wood to finish building the Brothertown church. Later biographers write that more than three hundred Native people came to his funeral. Where he is buried is not certain.

After his death the community fell apart. In 1795 about sixty percent of the land was sold to white settlers. Between 1824 and 1848 most Brothertown families moved further west, to Wisconsin. The Brothertown Indian Nation still exists there today. Since 2020 the Brothertown Indian Nation has celebrated Samson Occom Day every year on July 14.

WHAT REMAINS OF A VOICE?

Occom left no large denomination and no university bearing his name. He did leave a sermon, a hymnbook, a stack of letters and a short life story that had to wait two hundred years for a reader. He also left a people who still name themselves after his town.

Perhaps you recognize something of him. You gave yourself to something that was later used differently from what had been agreed. Or you carry a failure you have had to write about yourself. Occom did both. He set the sums side by side, and he put his own guilt on paper. Then he went on preaching.

On the grounds of Dartmouth, the college he never visited, a pond bears his name. And every year on July 14 a people who call themselves after Brother town remember the Mohegan who wrote that name down.