Politicians and Indian administrators shared a fixation on “civilization” with Christian mission leaders in the early nineteenth century. But for most mission leaders, the civilizing mission was viewed primarily as a foundation for the more important task: conversion.
The extent to which missionaries on the ground were driven by the motivations of the federal government because of their financial dependency on the Civilization Fund is a legitimate question. We considered the sources of funding for the largest organization, the ABCFM, which are readily obtainable in federal reports and missionary annual reports.
Almost 14% of ABCFM Indian mission funds were received from the Civilization Fund, compared to over 86% that derived from individual donors, churches, and auxiliaries.
To take the ABCFM’s most famous American missions, only about 10% of the total funding for the combined ABCFM Cherokee missions (Southeast and Arkansas) came from the federal government.
Because of the relative insignificance of federal funding to the total American Board funds, this data should perhaps lead scholars to a greater skepticism about the extent to which Indian missions were primarily a function of federal Indian “civilization” policy over against Christian evangelistic zeal.
This approach can certainly be taken too far: we know, for example, that the Methodist Episcopal Church organized its missionary society in direct response to the passage of the Civilization Fund, and it seems unlikely that some of the smaller groups like the Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina and Georgia would have created mission schools were it not for federal funding. But the ABCFM data should, at the very least, signal a note of caution about exaggerating the importance of government support.
A potentially important discovery from our data is a seeming disconnect between the picture of Indian missions that would have been captured in federal reports and compiled within the Office of Indian Affairs and that perceived by the leaders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
The ABCFM was the largest American missionary society and the most significant organizer and funder of Indian missions. It consistently received the lion’s share of federal funding–when combined with major predecessor organizations that merged into the American Board, over half.
Yet the vision of Indian missions from American Board headquarters in Boston was quite different from that of Thomas L. McKenney in Georgetown. For the Office of Indian Affairs, the well-organized, consistently submitted reports from the ABCFM’s Choctaw schools would have seemed like the crown jewel of the missionary enterprise. In 1826, federal records list eleven of them, all “prosperous,” spelled out with full data furnished by their superintendent, Cyrus Kingsbury.
In contrast, the ABCFM’s Cherokee schools, superintended by Ard Hoyt, did not submit a report that year at all. To make up the absence, the OIA simply included the previous year’s property numbers alongside a note complaining that no reports had been received. These schools continued to receive federal funding despite their failure to submit reports. However, the effects on the total report data are quite profound: we only have reports from Brainerd, the centerpiece of the Cherokee missions, for two years, so we lack full financial, personnel, and student data.
Because our data represents what was received by the OIA, it helps to reveal the disconnect between Boston and Washington. In the American Board’s own records, the Cherokee missions in the Southeast received close to $90,000 in the decade, while the Arkansas Cherokee missions received another $55,000 and the Choctaw missions received slightly less than $55,000. From the ABCFM’s own vantage point, the Cherokees remained the center of their mission enterprise to American Indians.
Our team also considered the vocations of the various mission personnel recruited to work in the missions. Alongside superintendents, missionaries (generally ordained ministers in the 1820s), as well as occasionally other religious personnel like catechists or native preachers, teachers, both male and female, were primary to almost all missions. In addition, many missions included farmers, mechanics of all kinds (e.g. mechanics, carpenters, and blacksmiths), as well as missionary wives, who were classed, at least at first, by the ABCFM as assistant missionaries.
The larger missions often have large numbers of mechanics, while smaller missions normally employ only teachers and missionaries. This hints at the priority of these different functions for mission societies. Education in reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as religious instruction, were primary, carried out in even the most remote schools. Learning agriculture or a craft, was seen as important, but it was ultimately secondary to the conversionary task and the basic skills of literacy that opened up a spirituality rooted in the text of the Bible.
We considered the number of women in the missions. As expected from the mission history literature, single women represented a relatively small number of mission personnel during this early period. Married women served along with their husbands, but they were not always given official roles within the mission stations.
We performed initial network analysis on personnel, but were not able to reach definitive conclusions about the place of women within the network. Within the network, the status of highly central women tended to be highly correlated to their position as wives of male leaders (e.g. the superintendents of larger missions).