Eulogy on William Apess
Speculations on His New York Death

ROBERT WARRIOR         

"And while you ask yourselves, `What do they, the Indians, want?' you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them and say, `They want what I want.'"¹ These words, spoken on two occasions in the Odeon Theatre in Boston in January 1836, are among the last history records of Pequot intellectual, William Apess, speaking in public. They come at the end of what is surely the pinnacle of Apess's intellectual career, his Eulogy on King Philip, a stunning revision of American history in which Apess condemns the historical and contemporary practices by which Natives lost and were losing their lands to invading Euroamerican. Apess delivered the eulogy on January 8, then again in what was apparently a sort of command performance encore on January 26 (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground 275).
        The Eulogy, published in two editions after it was delivered, is the last of Apess's five books, all of which are nonfiction. He also published an autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in two separate editions (1829 and 1831); The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ: A Sermon (1831); The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833); and Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835) (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground lxxx-lxxxi). Each of these books is remarkable in its own way, especially given the extremely modest background of their author. "Apess's work," according to Jace Weaver, "must be viewed as resistance literature, affirming Indian cultural and political identity over against the dominant culture" (55).
        Apess is among a number of Native intellectuals from the eighteenth {2} and nineteenth centuries to whom scholars have paid increasing attention over the past decade and more. Others include Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, Peter Jones, Elias Boudinot, and George Copway. These scholars have produced a range of work that includes extremely helpful and illuminating anthologies and articles built around recovered writings to full-length archival and textual studies of multiple and single authors.² The purpose of this paper, though, is not so much to add to what we know of Apess's texts, but to examine the circumstances surrounding his death in 1839, not in New England, but in New York City.

A NEW YORK MYSTERY

What happened to Apess after he departed the stage at the Odeon is shrouded in mystery; the contemporary realities of the 1830s and the attendant problem of Native invisibility in the northeastern United States surround his story outside of his published work. A year after his orations at the Odeon, Apess published second editions of both The Experiences of Five Christian Indians and Eulogy on King Philip, but has yet to show up in the historical record as having continued his life in the public eye. Indeed, the only public mentions of Apess are in court in debt actions. Even there, an inventory of his household goods appears while he does not.
        For years, that was all that seemed possible to know after 1836. One early critic speculated that his political activities had made him violent enemies and that he had been murdered like his African American New England nationalist contemporary, David Walker (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground xxxviii_xxxix). Others assumed he fell into dissipation and died anonymously.³ Eventually, 1839 obituaries from New York City papers emerged in archival research, followed by transcripts of an inquest into Apess's death.⁴ Up to the point of the discovery of the New York obituaries, Apess seemed every bit a product of New England and every inch a New England writer. Then, somehow, Apess had moved from New England to New York City and had died there.⁵
        The inquest, a document handwritten in script, offers no ironclad answers to the circumstances of Apess's death. In attendance were three witnesses: a wife named Elizabeth, the daughter of the owner of the {3} boarding house where Apess and his wife were living, and a fellow boarder. Apparently, Apess sought medical attention due to pain in his right side and purging and vomiting that had lasted two days. A Dr. Viers prescribed something to help him purge more quickly. The next day Apess felt better and was able to brush his teeth and eat some toast. The boarder who testified at the inquest reported that he spoke to Apess that day and reported that he seemed well. Five minutes later, according to the boarder, Apess was dead. The coroner concluded that apoplexy had caused his death, indicating that a sudden, stroke-like event had ended his life. Barry O'Connell, who has traced out as much of Apess's history as any scholar, conjectures that bad medicine from Dr. Viers was really the cause, pointing to the woeful state of health care at that time ("Once More Let Us Consider" 168).
        The more likely possibility is that a long drinking career, much of which Apess himself details in A Son of the Forest, had caught up with him; others have argued this is consistent with the apoplectic conclusion of the coroner. All three of those who testified at the inquest reported that Apess was a heavy drinker, with the fellow boarder reporting that he was known to go on drinking binges that would last for some days, and then would not drink at all. His wife, Elizabeth, reported that "he has lately been somewhat intemperate" (O'Connell, "Once More Let Us Reconsider" 168).
        O'Connell contends that none of this adds up to Apess being a victim of alcohol abuse, suggesting that much more likely that Apess had occasional drinking binges. After all, over a hundred years later, life expectancy for a Native male would still be little more than the forty-one years he lived. This, though, seems like wishful thinking given the pervasive theme of alcohol use in Apess's own writing and in the testimony of all witnesses at the inquest.
        Why Apess would have moved from Massachusetts to New York City is still not known and may never be. Elizabeth testified in the inquest that she had been married to Apess for either two or ten years (the handwriting is difficult to decipher), which is noteworthy since her marriage to Apess could have overlapped with the publication of his wife, the former Mary Wood's story in Experiences (they married in 1821). Further, no record shows Apess as being part of any larger com-{4}munity through which he might have gained an audience, such as a local Methodist church or society, for instance.
        But nearly any of this evidence from the inquest could have been exaggerated, meaning that we might never be able to pinpoint the exact contours of Apess's last years. Perhaps Elizabeth Apess and his fellow boarder underplayed the extent of his drinking in his last days as a way of denying the unhealthiness of their own lifestyles. Perhaps Elizabeth thought a marriage with a decade's duration sounded better than one of a few years, so she overstated how long they had been together.
        After briefly reviewing the contours of Apess's life as he presents it in A Son of the Forest, I will speculate somewhat on the possible circumstances of his move to New York and his death, using what history says about New York as a commercial, publishing, and intellectual capital in those years.

FROM NEW ENGLAND TO NEW YORK

Apess was born in 1798 in Colrain, Massachusetts, the first child, most probably, of William and Candace Apes.⁶ His parents separated in 1801 and young William was sent to Colchester, Connecticut, to live with his mother's parents, where he was physically abused. At age four, the city of Colchester bound him out to a local couple, who sent him to school until he was twelve. Then, Apess's indenture was sold to a judge in New London, but he ran away from the judge's house several times before his indenture was sold once again (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground xxix).
        During his time in New London, Apess began attending Methodist meetings and, on March 13, 1813, had a conversion experience (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground 12, 19-20). His rebellion against his indenture, however, continued following this conversion and he ran away and joined the United States Army and served on the Canadian front of the War of 1812 (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground 26-31). After mustering out of the army, Apess wandered around Quebec and Ontario before returning to Connecticut in 1817 (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground 37).
        Returning to the Methodists, Apess was baptized by immersion in {5}1818 and began exhorting and preaching. He was married in 1821 and he and his wife, Mary, had at least one and perhaps as many as three children. Apess worked and preached in various places in southern New England and in 1827 was licensed by the Methodists to exhort. Following this, Apess began to work as a missionary in the northeast. In the midst of conflict with this particular sect of Methodists over his ordination, Apess began what was then an unprecedented publishing career for a Native writer (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground 50-52).
        Apess was raised in the crucible of Native New England, had been abused in various ways in it, and spent his adulthood giving voice to those who experienced the oppression of that world in silent invisibility. He helped lead one of the most important Native revolts of the nineteenth century at Mashpee in Massachusetts and created an unprecedented public persona for himself.⁷ Following the publication of his books in his mid thirties, Apess departed New England for New York City. Why exactly Apess moved from Massachusetts to New York is still not known and may never be.
        All of this requires speculation, and I would like to suggest that it is worth taking some leeway in doing so. Though we'll never be able to determine specifically from the boxes of correspondence left by Apess, but maybe we ought to suppose that Apess could see that his own infamy was little more than an obstacle to those at Mashpee, about whom he cared so deeply. And perhaps he had big plans for his days in New York, plans to make a bigger name for himself and have a wider impact on the world of Indian affairs than was possible from a New England pulpit or stage. Maybe he saw people like David Walker go out from Boston to Philadelphia, New York, and Washington and wanted to do the same.
        New York in 1838 was in the grip of the economic aftershocks of the Panic of 1837, an economic collapse with national implications precipitated by runaway inflation and labor unrest (Burrows and Wallace 603). Following riots in February 1837, the city's infrastructure all but collapsed. Real estate prices plummeted, manufacturing was devastated, banks called in loans and mortgages, and bank patrons started pulling money from accounts (Burrows and Wallace 612-13). The ensuing depression would last until 1843.
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        The time following the panic was perhaps not the most promising period for Apess to make a move to New York City, but the decade and a half leading up to the panic had been meteoric for the city. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, connecting the city to all the important western markets via the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and New Orleans (Burrows and Wallace 430). New York, which had been an important place in the development of the American colonies, and then the United States, was poised to become a major metropolitan power. As Edward Burrows and Mike Wallace note, "Not surprisingly, . . . it was during these same years that Manhattan became the center of book publishing in the United States" (441). Readers in the west saw New York publishers like the Harper brothers, flooding the market with cheap books. Further, "during the 1830s New York was the fastest growing city in the United States, and at some point during the decade it surpassed Mexico City in population, becoming the largest city" in the western hemisphere (Burrows and Wallace 576).
        Apess's first recorded trip to New York was when he had earlier run away from his indenture and trained for the U.S. Army on Governor's Island (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground 24). Years later, in 1829 he deposited the copyright to the first edition of A Son of the Forest in New York City and in 1831, published both The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ and a revised version of A Son of the Forest there (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground xxxiv). Given these facts and the considerable gaps in evidence of Apess's whereabouts for months and years at a time, he may have frequented New York City before moving there subsequent to his death.
        Any number of aspects of New York might have attracted Apess, including the fact that in 1831 the state abolished prison terms for debtors, except in cases of fraud (Burrows and Wallace 522). Given his debt problems in Massachusetts, he very well could have made his way to Manhattan any time after the first of these actions in 1836, or perhaps he was going back and forth. Additionally, if his struggles with alcohol did, in fact, continue during these years, perhaps the relative anonymity of New York and the pervasiveness of its drinking culture drew him. Burrows and Wallace report that alcohol was a ubiquitous feature of Manhattan social life, especially among the lower classes: "rampant overproduction hammered the price down to twenty-five cents a gallon, less per drink than tea or coffee" (485).
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        Elizabeth Apess, the woman at Apess's inquest, may be another part of the equation. As previously mentioned, she claimed a marriage to him of two or ten years, meaning they could have been together at the time he deposited the copyright of A Son of the Forest in New York in 1829. But he was married to his first wife, Mary, in 1821. Male abandonment of family was rampant in Native communities in New England, which Apess knew from experience from his own father.⁸ So conjecturing that his and Mary's marriage split up is not a stretch. Or even possibly, he maintained two marriages at once.
        The possibility exists that Mary and Elizabeth are the same person going by different names, but, if so, it is hard to reconcile Elizabeth's testimony of either a two-year or ten-year marriage. Poor women in New York City were particularly vulnerable, especially when they were single, so it seems unlikely she was merely making up her story from whole cloth. The inquest was not a pleasant event, taking place in a well-appointed office, but at the boarding house. It is easy to read as impacted by class as the doctor, a representative of officialdom, imposes himself on the witnesses.
        Thus, if anything, if Elizabeth and Mary are the same person, she would seemingly want to make herself sound all the more respectable by claiming all the years of marriage possible. "While a woman's wages might well be instrumental in keeping her household afloat," Burrows and Wallace write, "she could seldom earn enough to support herself on her own. This was particularly evident from the condition of wage-earning widows, who often lived closeted in tiny garrets or huddled in cellars or half-finished buildings, at the edge of destitution" (478). However they came to be together, life without William Apess was most probably going to be grim for Elizabeth.
        Absent any new, revealing documentary evidence, it is entirely possible that Elizabeth is a woman with whom Apess had a long-standing affair and with whom he was living as a married couple at the time of his death. New York was a place where something like that could happen in a way that would have been impossible in small-town Massachusetts. Even if they came across as an interracial couple, sections of New York were much more tolerant on that score than most places.
        If this scenario is true, it means that Apess left a wife and perhaps {8} teenage children to face debt peonage in New England. Perhaps the children were already bound out to continue the cycle of servitude already so familiar to generations of New England's Native people. If, on top of that, Apess was dealing with a significant substance abuse problem, he is hardly a moral exemplar to hold up as morally blameless. Then again, is that what we should be looking for when we turn to his writing?
        William Apess led an extraordinary life in a desolate time for Native people in New England. Born with no advantages, his early life was a descent into a hellish reality that was a matter of fact for many, if not most, of his Native contemporaries. Somehow, out of all of that, he managed to escape the worst of it only to launch himself right back into the maelstrom of it all. He may have started believing too much that white Christians and their churches could be prompted to make things better for Native people, but our history of writing is littered with plenty of people who did the exact same thing. Apess turned a corner, and by the time of the Eulogy, he envisioned his history and his experiences as illuminating a path toward the future.
        That, in the end, is what I hope drew Apess to New York before his untimely death--the palpable energy of intellect interfacing with the public in ways that were making the small press runs and public lectures of New England a thing of the past. Observers in the mid-1830s reported people all over the city voraciously reading papers like the New York Sun and Horace Greeley's Herald (Burrows and Wallace 523_25). The Sun cost a penny and could be seen in the hands of common people. Also in that decade, William Hamilton and Peter Williams Jr. launched Freedom's Journal, the first African-American paper in the United States (Burrows and Wallace 549). The press, according to Burrows and Wallace, "addressed something that had never quite existed before except in republican theory: a `public' at large, a civic demos. In doing so, it offered New York's citizenry the technical and textual means to grasp their city's growing miscellaneity" (528).
        What an exciting time it must have been for a writer like Apess to witness the wholesale changes that were taking place in the intellectual currents of the United States. Beyond the popular press, the 1830s were the run up to the first great intellectual age in the life of the United States. {9} And New York was superceding New England at the head of it. This was the era of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. New England had its share of formidable intellects, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, but even one so luminous as Margaret Fuller was drawn to New York in 1844 to take up reviewing for Greeley's Herald (Bender 158-60).
        To continue speculating about Apess, any efforts he made to be part of this rising tide were, no doubt, thwarted. The literary clubs that were springing up around the city were for white men, most of them minor figures remembered for belonging to those clubs, not the substance of their work. But I can imagine Apess picking up an issue of the Knickerbocker or the Democratic Review (two of the leading literary journals) and looking for an inroad to Manhattan's burgeoning life of the mind. I can picture him reading the literary gossip and being reminded of what it's like to be always on the outside looking in.
        His Manhattan was no doubt one dominated by cramped quarters and short provisions in a crumbling tenement. "New York, it was widely agreed," say Burrows and Wallace, "was the filthiest urban center in the United States; Boston and Philadelphia gleamed by comparison" (588). Still, perhaps there were moments of magic that go unrecorded in the archives--a chance encounter with Cooper, a serious discussion with an editor willing to look at his work.

But an Indian in New York in the 1830s was pretty much what an Indian preacher was in New England--a novelty. Phineas Taylor Barnum moved to New York in 1834 and opened his American Museum in 1841, two years after Apess died. According to Burrows and Wallace, he
        

stocked his [m]useum . . . with jugglers and ventriloquists, curiosities and freaks, automata and living statuary, gypsies and giants, dwarfs and dioramas, Punch and Judy shows, models of Niagara Falls, and real live American Indians. (Barnum advertised the latter as brutal savages, fresh from slaughtering whites out west, though privately he groused that the "D___n Indians" were lazy and shiftless--"though they will draw." (644)

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        That would probably have been the reaction of most New Yorkers who might have helped someone like Apess. If it was dressed up to appeal to the basest fantasies of contemporary America, maybe it would sell. Apess, never having had much truck with such work, may have passed on opportunities that have gone unrecorded.
        All someone in that position could do was look at the intellectual stream that was flowing by and hope that the future would create new possibilities. I like to imagine, based not so much on evidence as the sense I get as a reader of his work, that in his brighter moments in those last few years, William Apess peered into the future and knew that someday his books would be recognized for their genius and he would be regaled as having provided a turning point. That he knew he would not always be alone.
        Isolation is a persistent feature of Native American intellectual life, a topic of conversation nearly every time and place Native writers and scholars gather. Most Native scholars seem to know all too well the realities of indifferent advisers, insensitive colleagues, insufficient resources, and lack of intellectual camaraderie. Any graduate student or professional scholar can face these issues, but Native people in the academy are affected in particular ways.
        Many, if not most, Native students and scholars know what it feels like to be the only Indian on campus, to be alone. Imagine, then, what it must have been like for Apess. He fought hard to make his way back home, then became by position and circumstance a leader more than a member of his communities. He ended up with no known intellectual associates, no one with whom to share the vicissitudes of his writerly life. Maybe he heard Elias Boudinot speak sometime in Boston, but he didn't really know a single other person like himself. So I hope he did allow himself a hopeful glimpse into the future that helped him believe he would someday, as he does through the fact of these words, inhabit a world of his peers.

NOTES

        1. From Barry O'Connell, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot. Subsequent references to Apess's writings are to this edition.
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        Apess spelled his name with both one and two s's. O'Connell argues convincingly that Apess clearly chose by the end of his life to use two s's in spelling his own name rather than using "Apes" as he had in his first two publications (xiv). The name continues to exist among contemporary Pequots and, whatever the spelling, is pronounced in one syllable.
        2. Among the anthologies and articles are Joanna Brooks, "Six Hymns by Samson Occom," Early American Literature 38.1: 67-87; Laura J. Murray, ed., To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776 (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998); Theda Purdue, ed., Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983); Bernd Peyer, ed., The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians, 1768-1931 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982); and, Gerald Vizenor, Touchwood: A Collection of Ojibway Prose (Original year; 2nd ed. New Rivers Press, 1994).
        Book-length projects include Maureen Konkle, Unbelieving Indians: Treaties, Colonialism, and Native Historiography (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004); Bernd C. Peyer, The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997); Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians; Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000); and, Weaver, That the People Might Live. Konkle's book, including a thoroughly researched chapter on Apess, was published after the initial submission of this article. I became familiar with Konkle's research in the midst of my research on Apess, though I have not quoted it directly. While differing in some of its points from this article, Konkle deos not present any new evidence in her book that substantively changes my argument.
        Cusick's major work is not available in a recent reprint. It is Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (3rd ed., Lockport, New York: Turner & McCollum, Printers, Democrat Office, 1848).
        3. In Roanoke and Wampum, Ron Welburn speculates that Apess left New England for a career in whaling. He imagines Apess signing up to sail on the Pequod with Captain Ahab in search of Moby Dick.
        4. Inquisition on the View of the Body of William Apes, New York County, New York, April 10, 1839, New York County Coroner, Department of Records and Information Services, 31 Chambers Street, Municipal Archives of the City of New York.
        5. O'Connell speculates that Apess perhaps wrote A Son of the Forest in New York City based on his copyright deposit of the book there in 1829 (On Our Own Ground xlii). Given that when he wrote his introduction, the evi-{12}dence of Apess's 1939 death in New York City had not surfaced, O'Connell's supposition was especially prescient (though, of course, still not proven). Though he does not reference Apess, a thorough literary history of New England can be found in Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1986).
        6. Following O'Connell's example, I have used Apes for the parents since this spelling is the only one that shows up in historical documents in which they appear (On Our Own Ground xxvii). O'Connell has traced what can be known of Apess's parents. His father, William Apes, shows up in census documents as a free white man, but the name Apes is clearly of Pequot origin and O'Connell is most certainly correct in pointing to faulty racial classification in those times as the reason for the confusion. Though Apess never names her, his mother was most probably the women listed in the 1820 census, Candace, as the wife of William Apes. Similar to the confusion regarding her husband, in that and other documents, she is described as a "Negro" who was freed from slavery in 1805, a "free white woman," and a Pequot (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground xxvii). It is very likely then, that Apess's ancestry was a mix of Pequot, white, and black.
        7. For accounts of Apess's role in the Mashpee Revolt, see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville MA: Media Action, 1987), 33-34; and Donald M. Nielsen, "The Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833," New England Quarterly 58 (1985): 400-420.
        8. See Jean O'Brien, "`Divorced' from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth Century New England," in Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Hanover NH: UP of New England, 1997. 144-61.

WORKS CITED

Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginning of Our Time. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

O'Connell, Barry. "`Once More Let Us Consider': William Apess in the Writing of New England Native American History." After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Ed. Colin G. Calloway. Hanover NH: UP of New England, 1997.

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------, ed. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992.

Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Welburn, Ron. Roanoke and Wampum: Topics in Native American Heritage and Literatures. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

[http://oncampus.richmond.edu/faculty/asail/sail2/162.html]

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William Apess (1798-1839) was the first Native American to write and publish his own autobiography, A Son in the Forest, and was the most prolific nineteenth century Indian writer in the English language. He internalized the values of the conquering Americans, but utilized a religious zeal to construct a renewed sense of Native American identity and selfhood.

As a Pequot Indian, Apess inherited the legacy of defeat and nearly total annihilation of his people during the Pequot War of 1637. Survivors of this war were sold into slavery in the West Indies or were dispersed to live a hidden existence in southeastern Connecticut. By the late eighteenth century, the Pequots lived on two reservations, where they took care of their families through day labor and domestic work, and where a vanquished sense of tribal pride made them ripe victims for alcohol abuse and depression. Yet, Native Americans were among the general population that responded during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to evangelical Christianity. Apess was one of several Native Americans who became prominent as ministers, and he is remembered for his prolific literary talent.

Apess was born {most likely a first child} on January 31, 1798, in Colrain, Massachusetts. His father, William, a half-blooded descendant of King Philip, was a shoemaker by trade. His mother, Candace, was a Pequot who may have had part African ancestry. Her identity is more mysterious. In his Autobiography, "A Son of the Forest," he tells of being born in a tent in the woods.... He writes that his mother was "a female of the tribe, in whose veins a single drop of the white man's blood never flowed,"....

Nineteenth-century records show that the spelling of the surname was "Apes" with one "s" until son William inexplicably added the letter for his later publications. Apess' parents went to Colrain from Colchester, Connecticut, and Apess biographer Barry O'Connell speculates one reason for this was to elude Candace Apes' slave master, who did not manumit her until 1805.

Eventually, the family returned to its former home where, upon the parents' separation in 1801, young William along with his siblings, lived with his maternal grandparents in Colchester, CT.

Life with his grandparents was marked by alcoholism and abuse resulting in a severely broken arm, indenture to neighboring households, occasional friendships with local ruffians, and little formal schooling. {They ultimately all became wards. At age four, the city of Colchester bound William out to a local couple, who sent him to school until he was 12. Then, Apess's indenture was sold to a judge in New London. Apess ran away and joined a militia in New York, fighting in the War of 1812.}

Around 1809, at the height of the Second Great Awakening, an extremely sensitive religious disposition began to emerge. Apess sought to attend revivalist meetings and was impressionably receptive to the rhetorical conventions espoused by Calvinists. The youthful Apess found himself more inclined toward what he called the "noisy Methodists." Their fervor stimulated his growing personal convictions about the rightness of spontaneous expression in worship, the loving grace of Christ as the savior of mankind, and about Native Americans as one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

The religious zeal of Apess contributed to his confused identity as an Indian. When berry-picking one afternoon with an adoptive white family, he encountered sun-tanned white women whom he thought were cruel Indians, and fled. His interest in Christianity did not prevent a periodic flogging by various masters, who vacillated in permitting Apess to attend Methodist meetings. In early 1813, Apess finally ran away to New York City with another indentured youth and, prodded by unscrupulous drinking soldiers, enlisted in the Army as a drummer. Initially Apess opposed their blasphemies, as he said in his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, "in little time I became almost as bad as any of them, could drink rum, play cards, and act as wickedly as any. I was at times tormented with the thoughts of death, but God had mercy on me and spared my life."

Apess' militia unit marched to Plattsburgh, New York, to prepare a siege of Montreal. Although he was officially a drummer as well as being under the legal age for Army service, Apess saw action in a few battles. After mustering out of his militia, he traveled and worked in southern Canada, socializing with several Native American families there. Eventually he worked his way southward, through Albany en route to Connecticut.

By the age of 19, Apess faced anew the ravages of sinful behavior and resumed earnestly attending religious meetings. One outstanding experience confirmed his religious faith more than previous conversion experiences. Leaving the southeastern Connecticut home of maternal relatives to visit his father, who had resettled in Colrain, Apess became lost one night in a swamp. This experience became profoundly significant for his convictions. He felt himself called to preach the Gospel and increasingly, even before his baptism in 1818, received opportunities to exhort congregations of Native Americans, whites, and blacks to repent and seek salvation. Although at this time he was legally forbidden to preach without a license, he proselytized throughout Connecticut and in the Albany area. In December 1821, Apess married Mary Wood, of Salem, Connecticut, a self-effacing woman ten years his senior. Religious exhorting and the need to support his wife and growing family forced him into lengthy separations from them. Only on a few occasions, such as one preaching tour in the Albany area, was his family able to be near him. Apess preached to worshippers on Long Island, in New York City, in the Albany-Troy region, in Utica, and in southern and coastal New England. In 1829, after the Methodist Episcopal church refused to ordain him, he was befriended by the Protestant Methodists who performed his ordination.

Writing, Preaching, and Activism

In 1829, the first edition of Apess' autobiography, A Son of the Forest, was published. This record of his life up to that time can best be described as a conversion narrative. Apess drew attention to how his childhood hardships and later behavioral excesses shaped his personality for baptism and his quest for heavenly reward. Conversion narratives, or testimonies, are a kind of spiritual memoir demonstrating to the reader how the author arrives at a state of grace. A Son of the Forest had no precedence as a published full-length persona narrative written by an Indian. Its very title creates a literary appeal for audiences who looked upon literacy among peoples of color in the United States as an exotic phenomenon and as proof that Native Americans and African Americans were capable of becoming civilized according to the white man's way.

The literary style of Apess is similar to that of his religious and political contemporaries. Its maturity and clarity are remarkable for someone who could only attend school during the winter months for only six years. That he slightly revised the 1831 edition of A Son of the Forest and the second editions of his other writings attests to his concern for detail and a desire to represent himself as literarily and humanly respectable. Apess came to preaching and writing in an era when white politicians, educators, and religious leaders intensely debated the fate of the Indian and the slave. He lived amidst schemes for Indian removal from the South and the repatriation of slaves to Africa. Apess was acutely aware that his congregations included as many repentant sinners as curious onlookers who simply wanted to witness an Indian preacher.

A Son of the Forest includes a lengthy Appendix in which Apess rearranged and paraphrased much of the text of a book entitled A Star in the West, published in 1816 by Elias Boudinot (not the Cherokee writer-editor of the same name). The argument advanced concerns about the similarities between the biblical Hebrews and Native Americans according to customs and character traits, and Apess used this text because he agreed with its Ten Lost Tribes thesis.

In the 1830s, Apess wrote prolifically about religious, historical, and political issues. The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ: A Sermon was printed in 1831 with an appendix, The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes. John the Baptist, the preacher in the wilderness and forerunner of Christ, is the model for The Increase as Apess presents a detailed and cogently organized statement on the theme of the Native American as among God's chosen people.

Another book, The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe, was published in 1833. It revealed Apess' skills as a writer, life historian, and editor. Its five testimonies confront the legacy of degradation imposed on Pequots as a people and as tribal individuals. Apess' personal statement, opening this collection, condenses what he wrote in A Son of the Forest while forcefully challenging whites about their racism. In the second testimony, his wife Mary describes her parents and presents her own observations about the advantages of piety. In the third, Apess rendered the statement of a Hannah Caleb. The remaining two testimonies are remarkable in singular ways. "The Experience of Sally George," about a woman who was related to Apess, may have been written prior to A Son of the Forest, and it is written partly in her voice and partly from an objective point of view. In "The Experience of Ann Wampy," he describes the title character's life and includes a passage approximating her speech patterns. It is an early example of oral history, a method of historical inquiry that faithfully presents a record of the spoken word. The first edition of Experiences also includes Apess' militant essay, "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man." Here Apess attacks the racial hypocrisy of white Christians who live in a world overwhelmingly populated by peoples of color and proceeds to remind Christians of the non-white identity of Jesus. The acuity of his remarks in this daring essay recalls David Walker's Appeal (1829) and the statements of Malcolm X in the twentieth century.

Apess responded to disparate rumors about conditions affecting the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians on Cape Cod by visiting their community in 1833. He quickly became embroiled in the "Mashpee Revolt" against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its energetic efforts to deny the right of this tribe any form of self-government and representation while it tacitly encouraged corruption and greed by white landowners and squatters. Apess served a 30-day jail sentence for leading a group of Indian men in removing timber from a trespassing white man's wagon. In his annotations to On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, Barry O'Connell describes Apess as playing a catalytic role to advance Indian rights rather than being the revolt's architect. After a peaceful solution was achieved, Apess published a documentary history and exposé of the incident, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained in 1835. It consisted of his observations in addition to the reprinting of letters, depositions, and petitions to governing officials by the Wampanoag selectmen, and letters reprinted from regional newspapers. The Indian Nullification is one of the outstanding legal-related documents by a private individual in the nineteenth century.

The final extant writing by Apess, Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street, Boston, was initially printed in 1836. By this time, he began to use the additional 's' in documents for his name: the 1837 edition of Experiences (which happens to exclude the "Looking-Glass" essay), also carries this unexplained alteration. The Eulogy is a long speech attributing to the seventeenth-century Wampanoag leader the qualities befitting a martyred American patriot slain in the process of defending his country from invaders.

For many years, Apess scholars could only speculate about his fate after 1838, for which an inventory of his household goods survives as the result of a debt action in Barnstable, not far from the Mashpee community. However, in recent years a published obituary came to light describing Apess' death in late April 1839 in New York City from "apoplexy." Details of his autopsy suggest a head injury possibly related to alcohol, which he managed to avoid for two decades. Whatever the circumstances, William Apess in his last years gained little consolation that Native Americans would receive justice in their lost country.

Further Reading

A Biobibliography of Native American Writers, 1772-1924 (Native American Bibliography Series, No. 2), compiled by Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., and James W. Parins, Scarecrow Press, 1981.

Dictionary of American Biography, Volume 1, edited by Allen Johnson, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928.

Redefining American Literary History, edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Modern Language Association, 1990.

Wiget, Andrew, Native American Literature, Twayne, 1985.

Algonkians of New England: Past and Present (Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1991), edited by Peter Benes, Boston University, 1992, pp. 89-100.

Gazette & Mercury (Greenfield, Massachusetts), May 7, 1839.

New England Quarterly, 50, 1977, pp. 605-625.

Studies In American Indian Literatures, 5, winter 1993, pp. 45-54.

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