The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic
A chronicle of a school ordinarily interests few beyond those connected with it. This work is an exception. The Foreign Mission School of Cornwall, Connecticut, founded in the 1820s, represents a focal point for several cultural trends, including Christian evangelism, native-white relations, and even celebrity. Demos opens with a man who impressed Protestant eminences in New England. Hawaiian Henry Obookiah was a convert to Christianity whose memoir was immensely popular. His example beckoned the possibility of converting whole peoples, and so, under Congregational Church aegis, the “heathen school” was founded to train natives to be missionaries to their people. Demos discovers from letters and newspapers that the school ran into controversy (and a decline in donations) when two Cherokee students proposed to two young white women. Demos’ description of the social convulsions that ensued renders intimate insight into attitudes of the period. The school disbanded, and the couples went to Georgia to be swept up in the Cherokee removal of the 1830s. A poignant, well-researched historical vignette of how changing the world weighs on the individual shoulders bearing the task. --Gilbert Taylor