America (1845)

C H A P T E R V I

America

[ I845 ]

HE United States Adoniram had left in 1812 had been not much more than a loose aggregation of seaboard states. It faced east, to Europe. Its only sources of wealth were in agriculture and foreign trade. The few rich men were great landowners or merchants. Although with the Louisiana Purchase the boundaries of the young nation had come to lie somewhere along the Rocky Mountains, the real frontier extended no farther than the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Its visible prosperity could be seen mostly in the proud, busy ports of Salem, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Roads were few and poor. On land men traveled afoot, by stagecoach or on horseback; or along the shore by coastal sailing vessels.

When Adoniram returned in 1845, after an absence of thirtythree years, the nation had turned to face west. The frontiers were in Texas and along the course of the Missouri River, and in rapid movement. It was clear to everyone that all the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific must belong to the United States, the claims and objections of Mexico notwithstanding. A major issue of the preceding year’s presidential election campaign—which the dark horse James K. Polk had won—— had been the annexation of Texas; a major slogan, “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” with reference to the nation’s northwest boundaries. The news of Polk’s nomination had been flashed to Washington by the new electric telegraph. Manufacture had become a great source of wealth. Whole new industrial cities, like Lowell, in Massachusetts, had sprung up around water power sites along the rivers. The clanking machinery in other factory towns was turned by hissing steam. A new class of wealthy men had emerged —- the industrialists. There was swelling an intoxicating consciousness here and there of the unbelievable mineral wealth— copper, coal and iron, perhaps even precious metals—that lay beneath the earth. There were many roads now; the northeastern states were crisscrossed with canals; fleets of steamboats were plying the Great Lakes and the Mississippi; and railroads radiated out from all the large cities, extending tentacles that would in time, everyone knew, link together the whole sprawling country.

There were new problems. In 1812 it had been the freedom of American ships to sail the high seas as a neutral while the great powers of England and France were at war. Now, as the great period of territorial expansion approached its climax, the problem of slavery was beginning to loom darker and huger. The nation was already starting to divide. Even the foreign missionary movement had begun to feel it. There had been an acrimonious debate over whether Christianity sanctioned the owning of slaves. Some Northern churches and individuals had refused to contribute to foreign missions if their money went into a common treasury with that of slaveholders. At a state convention, Alabama supporters of Baptist missions sent to the national headquarters resolutions demanding “explicit avowal that slaveholders are eligible and entitled equally with nonslaveholders” to appointment as missionaries by the Mission Board. The Board replied in as conciliatory way as possible, but did feel constrained to say that “if anyone should offer himself as a missionary having slaves, and should insist on retaining them as his property, they could not appoint him.”

The Southern churches promptly severed their ties with the Board and formed “The Southern Baptist Convention”——whereupon a special session of the General Convention was called in New York in September of 1845, while Adoniram was at sea, and organized the “American Baptist Missionary Union.”

When the Caravan had set sail for India in 1812, Salem’s vessels were among the fastest and largest under the American flag and Salem itself one of the most prOSperous ports in the country. Now in 1845 Salem, its harbors too shallow for the new fast clippers, was becoming a backwater, already beginning to live in the memory of past glories.

As for those four eager young missionaries who had sung hymns joyfully together in their cabin the night before the Caravan sailed, three had long been dead. I-larriet Newell had slept in the cemetery at Port Louis on the Isle of France for more than thirty years; Samuel Newell in Bombay for twenty-four; Adoniram’s Nancy under the h0pia tree at Amherst for nineteen.

Of the four signers of the petition to the General Association which Adoniram had presented at Bradford the day he met Nancy, Adoniram believed himself to be the only survivor. Mills had died at sea in 1818, returning from Africa. Of the two whose names had been removed in order not to frighten the Association with too many applicants at one time, Richards had died in Ceylon in 1822 and Rice in 1836, never having resumed service as a foreign missionary. Rice had worn himself out in the United States promoting foreign missions and Columbia College in Washington. Financial difficulties of the college had brought him under reproach, and his life had ended in sadness. Gordon Hall, who had been ordained at the Tabernacle in Salem with Adoniram, Nott, Newell, and Rice, had died in India in 1826.

To Adoniram, as the Sophia Walker dropped anchor in Boston Harbor, it seemed as if they had all gone: all his early associates. Only he was left, with his three motherless children who had never seen their homeland. And of his own boyhood family only his sister Abigail lived on in Plymouth.

He felt like another Rip Van Winkle. Nothing was familiar, everything was strange. He expected to make arrangements for the children and settle down in quiet obscurity, perhaps with Abigail, until it should be time to return. He expected no attention. Who knew him any more except those with whom he had corresponded? He expected to be ignored, and he welcomed the thought.

He could not possibly have been more mistaken.

Before going on shore, he had been worried about where to look for a place to spend the night. This new, bustling, unfamiliar Boston intimidated him. '

But as he stepped off the ship he found crowds of people waiting to receive him. The Boston Traveller reported his arrival. “A hundred houses” were “at once thrown open to him,” a hundred families competed for the honor of receiving him.

As he shyly received homage, murmuring his thanks in the low, husky whiSper that was all his throat permitted, he began to feel as intimidated by these crowds of welcomers and their all but worshipful welcome as he had been by Boston itself. He began to realize with a certain feeling of discomfort that he had become even while living a legendary figure of awesome proportions.

The Caravan leaving Salem had left in its wake the seed of that legend. The almost foolhardy daring of that first foreign missionary attempt, the youth and sincerity of the young missionaries, something almost pathetic in their determination to risk everything to bring the Gospel to the heathens, had been discussed far and wide. For every one who thought the missionaries merely zealots, a score were stirred with sympathy. The death of Harriet Newell at nineteen had quickened the growth of the legend. Within a short time Leonard Woods, Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Theological Seminary, had brought out a memoir of Harriet telling, largely through her letters and extracts from her journals, the whole story of her life and death. The memoir went into edition after edition.

The religious magazines—the Panoplist, the American Baptist and other publications— had been steadily printing every scrap of missionary news that came into their hands. Nancy’s Particular Relation of the American Baptist Mission to tbe Barman Empire had been followed after her death by Knowles’ Memoir of Mrs. Ann Judson, which, like Harriet’s memoir, had gone into many printings and been read by hundreds of thousands. At every religious fireside its descriptions of the horrors of Ava had been read aloud with a breathless excitement few novels could hope to arouse. The lives of the missionaries— particularly those of Adoniram, Nancy and Sarah —— had come to be viewed as a never-ending story, packed with hair-raising episodes, pathetic scenes of grief which brought tears to the eye, and periods of suspense lasting as long as two years—such as the one when Adoniram and Nancy were out of communication with the world during the Anglo-Burmese war. And, most exciting of all, it 'was all true. And no one knew how it would “come out in the end.”

Adoniram had been the subjeCt of thousands of sermons, the theme of hundreds of thousands of prayers. Thousands had named their children for him. The country was full of men and women who had been hearing all their lives about the great missionary Adoniram Judson, the saint of Burma. But although the Judson legend had been growing for thirty-three years, few now living had ever seen the man himself. This was their chance. Scarcely any celebrity, any public figure, any hero, could hope to rival the interest aroused by the visit of Adoniram Judson to the United States.

He had no sooner arrived that October Wednesday in 1845 than a public meeting of welcome was arranged at the Bowdoin Square Church in Boston. The meeting was to be held Friday. There was no time for public announcements. The news spread by word of mouth. Nevertheless the church was packed and even the aisles filled long before time for beginning.

As Adoniram sat on the platform with the dignitaries the sheer size of the crowd almost appalled him. He was tired and sick, the cold weather had aggravated his sore throat, he was still exhausted with grief for Sarah and worry for the children. Perhaps worst of all, as he heard himself the sole theme of everything that was said, saw himself the attraction, he began to suspect that he was simply being shown off as a curiosity, like an exotic wild animal. But that thought he dismissed as unworthy. Certainly nothing in this particular meeting could lend credence to such an idea.

The meeting produced one surprise. After a psalm and a prayer, Dr. Daniel Sharp, pastor of the Charles Street Church and president of the Mission Board, gave an address of welcome. Adoniram rose to reply. But the penetrating voice of his youth was gone. His husky whisper could not be heard, and William Hague, pastor of the Federal Street Church, stepped to his side and repeated his expressions of thanks sentence by sentence. When Adoniram sat down, Hague continued with a review of Adoniram’s career. But as Hague spoke, heads began to turn. An elderly gentleman was slowly working his way from the back of the church through the crowded aisle to the platform. He mounted it and crossed over to Adoniram, whose attention had been attracted by the slight disturbance. Suddenly he recognized the man, rose to his feet, clasped him by the hand and embraced him.

It was Samuel Nott. Adoniram had thought him long dead, but here he was, still alive. He and Adoniram were the only two survivors of that firSt missionary group of 1812. Together, he and Adoniram had laid down the ultimatum to the American Board in 1811. When others questioned Adoniram’s motives in becoming a Baptist, in Calcutta long ago, Nott had defended him. Ill health had forced Nott to leave India in 1816. Now he was pastor of the Congregational Church in Wareham.

As man after man on the platform joined the group around the two men, Hague stopped in midspeech. Dr. Sharp introduced Nott to the audience. The poignancy of the reunion and the memories it aroused brought tears to many of the watchers. Nott himself was shaken by emotion as he recalled aloud that he gave Adoniram “the right hand of fellowship” as part of that ordination ceremony long ago in the Tabernacle Church in Salem. When Adoniram became a Baptist, he did not withdraw it.

Nott was well aware—more than Adoniram, because he had been in the United States since 1816—of the bitterness of some of the controversies that had raged at home over Adoniram. Adoniram’s impetuousness had offended some. His conversion to Baptism had outraged others. Still others had insisted that Samuel Mills was the father of American foreign missions, not Adoniram. For that matter, neither Mills nor Adoniram had ever claimed the honor, but each had been praised by some overzealous supporters and blamed by his detractors as if he had.

The fires of those arguments had faded long since, but the ashes were still warm. Therefore, said Nott to the audience, what impressed him most this night was that, out of the five who went to India, three were dead. Soon the remaining two would be gone, but the thing they went out for, the Word of God, would stand fast and eventually prevail. And that was what mattered rather than the details of creed. As to whether Adoniram Judson or Samuel Mills was the originator of foreign missions, “he deemed it a very trifling question.... Samuel Nott, Jr., certainly was not. They were all mere boys, but with God’s blessing on their puerile efforts, they had begun an influence which is spreading over the world.”

These conciliatory reflections of Nott, a Congregationalist speaking from a Baptist platform, probably summed up the conclusions of all but a few diehards. They had been boys when they went out. Their mistakes had been the mistakes of youth’s inexperience. But with all their inexperience — perhaps partly through the sheer foolhardiness it gave them—they had begun something much bigger than themselves. And as for their mistakes—the miStakes had all been paid for many times over.

The remarkable meeting brought forth one more surprise. The audience had no sooner settled down than still another missionary pioneer was discovered in its midst. He was Hiram Bingham, a graduate of Andover Theological Seminary in the class of 1819, who with his. classmate Asa Thurston went out that same year on the first mission to the Sandwich Islands—Hawaii, “Owhyee.” The crowd must have returned home that night more than satisfied, for had they not seen, besides Adoniram Judson, the only living associate of his earlieSt days and one of the two first missionaries to the scented islands of the Pacific?

As for Adoniram, he spent a sleepless night. The crowds and the excitement were cause enough, but they were not all. There was rising in him a feeling of distaste for all this adulation and praise. He could not believe it wholly sincere. He knew himself too well to believe he deserved it. He could not preach or speak because of the condition of his throat. He could only allow himself to be looked at. With disgust, he felt he was becoming merely an exhibit ——and he began to feel hostility for those who wanted to stare.

The meeting at the Bowdoin Square Church was only the beginning. There seemed to be a new welcome ceremony every night. Even his days were not free. His own Board held a special meeting of welcome for him October 20, 1845, the Monday after his arrival. He was suffocated by visitors.

About a week later he fled north to see the Hasseltines and consider what to do with his children, and perhaps to visit Ralph and Abiah Hall, Sarah’s mother and father. A few years later they were living in Skaneateles, New York, but at this time might Still have been in Salem.

He traveled to Salem on the railroad which had been built north from Boston in 1838. Salem, like everything else, had changed. The old life around the wharves was gone. The railroad was becoming the commercial center of gravity in the town with the result that the Tabernacle Church, where he had been ordained, was now on the fringe of the business section. The railroad station, a small wooden structure, stood where the central dock of the South River had been. Most of the land had been filled in since. A bell, originally a convent bell captured at the siege of Port Royal, announced the departure of each train. Across the way stood an old red warehouse which served as waiting room and ticket office.

Almost all the people he knew in Salem were gone. Lucius Bolles, who had been secretary of the Mission Board, had died only the preceding year. Samuel Worcester, Adoniram’s indefatigable friend and supporter, had been in his grave for more than twenty years. But the Tabernacle Church still stood. Revisiting it, he found that the settee on which the candidates for ordination had been seated was still there, and he sat on it once more.

From Salem he took the stage to Bradford. John Hasseltine, Nancy’s father, was dead but his wife still survived in the comfortable old homestead between the church and Academy, an old woman of eighty-four with a single year of life ahead of her. Nancy’s sisters Mary and Abigail Hasseltine were still living with their mother, and Abigail had been head of Bradford Academy, now grown much larger, for many years.

Bradford, too, had changed. It seemed to have mellowed and slowed down, like an aging person. It was now merely a quiet suburb of Haverhill, across the river. Haverhill had burst out of its village swaddling clothes to become a booming industrial city, its factories stretching up and down the river humming and clacking with machinery.

Adoniram arrived in Bradford with a severe cold, but there was to be no rest. A huge meeting had been scheduled in his honor in Haverhill for the night after his arrival. He dreaded it, but felt that “as it has been appointed, I suppose I must attend.” But he begged the secretary of the Board “that I may be excused from attending any more such meetings, until I get a little better.” After the meeting and the continuous stream of callers, which spoiled most of the pleasure he had eccted from Bradford, he meant to go to Boston for a few days and then to Worcester. He thought wistfully that “if I could spend the next Sabbath alone in some chamber, I should feel it a great privilege, both as a refreshment to the soul and a relief to the body.”

All this while he had been trying to decide what to do with his three children, young Adoniram, Elnathan and Abby Ann. Shaken and insecure among strangers in a strange country, they could not help feeling neglected as their father was called away for meeting after meeting, his time taken by visitor after visitor. People were kind to them, but they needed their father. He had decided against taking them back to Burma. He could not even take them on the many trips he foresaw himself soon making around the country. He finally decided to place the two boys with Dr. and Mrs. Newton, friends in Worcester with whom George Boardman, Jr., Sarah’s son, was staying, and to leave Abby Ann with his sister Abigail in Plymouth.

On the thirteenth of November he took the boys to Worcester on the railroad, while he sent Abby Ann down to Plymouth in the care of his sister Abigail. It may have been on this day, when he took his seat in the cars at Worcester after leaving the weeping boys, that a newsboy came along with the daily papers. Adoniram accepted one and began to read. The boy stood waiting for the money until a lady sitting with Adoniram told him the boy expected to be paid for his paper. “Why!” exclaimed Adoniram in surprise, “I have been distributing papers for nothing in Burma so long that I had no idea the boy was expecting any pay.”

A few days later he visited Abby Ann at Plymouth and from there went down to Providence for a great meeting. The next day he spent at Brown University where the whole student body assembled to see him. The Philermenian Society, to which he had belonged, held a special meeting for him and so did the Society for Missionary Inquiry.

From Providence he went to New York, where the Triennial Convention of the Baptist Church was holding a special session. Here he saw at first hand how the issue of slavery was not only dividing the country but even disruptively affecting the foreign missionary movement.

There was already a debt for missions of some forty thousand dollars which weighed heavily. The disaffiliation of the Southern churches meant that this had to be assumed by the Northern group, to which it was obvious most of the missionaries abroad would adhere.1 As a result, there was talk of contracting missionary activities,

1 Eventually they all did, except a Reverend Mr. Shuck, who was stationed in China. and even abandoning the Arakan mission. This was too much for Adoniram, and he protested. As his voice failed, Dr. Spencer H. Cone, who, while they were both shut up in Baltimore by the British Army in 1815, had heard Luther Rice tell about Adoniram’s conversion, repeated his offer to go himself to Arakan if the Baptists were willing for him to give up the dictionary. Kincaid and Abbot, who had served with Adoniram in Burma, were present, and they added their words to Adoniram’s. It was enough. The final decision was to enlarge the missionary movement, not to abandon stations.

At the end of November, a few days after returning to Boston from New York, Adoniram received a letter from Moulmein. Little Charlie had died early in August at the age of a year and a half. While they were at sea and Sarah’s life had still a month to run before ebbing away, little Charlie was already gone. Perhaps, thought Adoniram, when Sarah arrived in heaven she was pleasantly surprised to find Charlie, a baby angel, waiting there for her.

This left only two of the children in Burma—Henry and Edward, the youngest, still not quite a year old. With Abby Ann at Plymouth and the two older boys at Worcester, he had done what he could for his children in America. His thoughts began to turn once more to his duty in the East—not only to his children, but to the unfinished dictionary.