Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Epsicopalians, and Papists (Roman Catholics)

[caption id="attachment_8521" align="aligncenter" width="1250"] No matter what kind of beliefs you may have, it is a nearly impossible task to keep track of all of the various Christian denominations. [/caption]

How do Christian denominations define themselves? By their stated beliefs, right? Well, that is largely correct. But maybe the different church bodies are better understood in terms of their history, that is,  how and why they were established and how they evolved. Both of those are really good ways of understanding the denominations, but you can slice it up another way.

I'm talking about the question of how a church governs itself.

The names of different kinds of Christians in the title of this post are all derived from the political units that were emphasized in each church body.

The Congregationalists believe in local control. The powerful political unit for them is the local congregation.

The Presbyterians govern their church with a Presbytery, a court consisting of the ministers and elders of several congregations.

The Episcopalians (although it isn't obvious) get their name from the word "bishop." Their church government depends more than anything on a national council of bishops, known in the United States as the House of Bishops.

Roman Catholics were once referred to derisively as "papists," a reference to their allegiance to the Pope and a top-down hierarchy. Animosity between various Protestant churches and the Roman Catholics was high for many years.

 

Simple right? So simple that we have time to ask why these differences became prominent.

Congregationalism is associated with Puritanism and, as you may know, the Puritans believed that some individuals were predestined for salvation. The mark of being chosen for salvation was some kind of conversion experience. But that is a generalization. Puritan ministers often developed some kind of "morphology of conversion," a complex explanation for who had the right to call themselves Christians. All the controversies over what made one a legitimate Christian made local control the most efficient (and probably the only possible) form of church government for the Congregationalists.

Presbyterianism (like Congregationalism) is a Calvinist denomination. Although the origin of the word is not known, to me it seems logical that this church is governed by a "court" of ministers and elders, because John Calvin himself was a lawyer by trade.

The Episcopalian Church is associated with the Church of England and the Anglicans. I imagine that explains their focus on a council of bishops.

Finally, of course, the Roman Catholic Church claims to be the original Christian church. At some point it became too big for their bishops to govern, so they developed the present system of Cardinals and a pope.

 

 

The Mormons and the Strangites of Beaver Island

I addressed the beginnings of Mormonism in a previous post.

 

Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, was also the mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois (and, according to some, he was even a candidate for President of the US) when he was attacked and killed by an angry mob. He was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois at the time, but bullets from the mob's firearms reached him. That, by itself, could be the topic of a blogpost, but instead, it is only the opening hook.

After Joseph Smith died, there was a struggle for power between Brigham Young, Sidney Rigdon, and James Strang. All three men (and later a fourth, Joseph Smith III) felt they were entitled to lead the Mormon church. Most Americans don't realize that not all of Joseph Smith's followers got behind Brigham Young and headed west for Salt Lake City. Rigdon and Strang and later Joseph Smith III each had their own followers and their own churches.

 

The Strangites, followers of James Strang, established their community on Beaver Island, in the northern part of Lake Michigan.

[caption id="attachment_7617" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Thanks to Citynoise for making this graphic available via Wikimedia commons:[/caption]

 

James Strang had only been a Mormon for about a year when he claimed to be the rightful leader of the church. He'd actually once declared himself "the perfect atheist"(Gilbert in Smithsonian, August, 1995, page 86). So it would not be unfair to look at Strang's career cynically. He was more than ambitious, he was hungry for power.

 

It was in 1843 that the young James Strang and his new wife, Mary, settled near Burlington, Wisconsin, an area close enough to Illinois to have Mormon settlers at that time. As Bil Gilbert points out in his Smithsonian article, Strang probably looked upon the earnest and zealous Mormons as potential followers. A biography written by James Strang's own grandson, imagines that Stang (the grandfather), when he came upon the credulous Mormons felt

like a prospector who has finally struck it rich[. He] knew that he had found his listening audience.

While Joseph Smith started Mormonism by claiming to have discovered gold plates with divine revelation written in "Egyptian Hieroglyphics," James Strang claimed to have found the same kind of revelation written on brass plates that he found in southern Wisconsin. Strang added to his remnant of Mormons by active recruiting.

That is how it began. The things that actually happened on Beaver Island during the short time that it was James Strang's kingdom are covered well in Bil Gilbert's 1995 article in Smithsonian Magazine.

The "teaser" for Smithsonian's website reads

About 145 years ago, a former attorney and future polygamist named James Strang had himself crowned the King of Beaver Island, Michigan. His reign was short and ended violently but while he ruled he did so the old-fashioned way: by divine right as the ultimate lawgiver, political authority and arbiter of morals.

Like Joseph Smith before him, you might say that James Strang had bitten off more than any American can safely chew.

Near the end of Gilbert's article he tells us that Strang's devoted followers scattered after his death.

During the next several weeks, hundreds of destitute Strangites were deposited haphazardly on the docks of Chicago, Detroit, Racine, and Green Bay.... Without [Strang] his flock was incapable of taking determined action.

Nevertheless, Strang's "original" Church of Latter-Day Saints still exists to this day. They have their own website, in which the Book of the Law of the Lord... first translated from the brass plates onto paper, is now displayed in digital format:


Checkout the Strangites website.

Why Weren't the Perpetrators of the Gnadenhutten Massacre Brought to Justice?

If you've been following this series of posts, you already know that the Gnadenhutten Massacre was a horrible and shameful example of frontier violence during the American Revolution (which also makes it part of the Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes). The massacre itself was described in the post just prior to this one.

Those of you who have read my book, Proud and Determined, know that The Stockbridge Mohicans were briefly suspected of arson, kidnapping and murder by their white neighbors in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Those suspicions were short-lived, because of the larger picture: a state of war between the British and the French with the Stockbridge Indians ready to fight for the British. (Those acts of arson, kidnapping, and murder, committed by French-allied Indians, were what brought the French and Indian War to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.)

The Moravian Indians in the Ohio River Valley, however, were in a much different situation. They were associating themselves with German-speaking missionaries. The Moravian missionaries - aside perhaps, from the fact that they were white - really had no standing in American society (and no standing in British society either). The Moravian committment to peace and justice meant on the one hand that the mission communities themselves weren't going to exploit their Native converts. But on the other hand, the Moravian Indians were - in a lot of ways - a lot more vulnerable to outside forces compared with Indians like the Stockbridges who had managed to align themselves with the white American powers-that-be.

The Moravian committment to peace is something that their white farmer neighbors simply didn't understand. In their view - according to Leonard Sadosky (201) - it was impossible for Indians to be neutral in war.

And you probably remember from my last post that that was part of the context in which the Gnadenhutten Massacre occurred.

You'll also remember from earlier posts that Sadosky divides frontier society into three groups: The largest group was made up of common white farmers and the Pennsylvania militia that were guilty of killing ninety-six Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten came from this largest group.

But the smallest group in number, the gentry, or upper class whites, held positions of power and they were the ones who should have brought the perpetrators to justice. Why didn't that happen?

Sadosky's chapter ("Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre") in the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, has been very difficult for me to "get my head around" and I think I know why. His topic is an event of great cruelty and racism - but he manages to go beyond the cruelty and racism of the Gnadenhutten Massacre to see more.

According to Sadosky (page 202), "Indian trade, alliance, and coexistence...formed the centerpiece of the Continental commanders' [frontier] strategy" at Fort Pitt. And this rubbed the common white farmers the wrong way. Going back as far as 1779, Sadosky analyses Colonel Daniel Brodhead's roughly two years as commander of Fort Pitt, which ended with the common farmers pressuring General George Washington to relinquish his position.  By the end of 1781, Brigadier General William Irvine was the new commandant at Fort Pitt. When Irvine left to consult with Congress, "the rumble of mutiny and rebellion was heard from inside the walls of Fort Pitt"(197). The enlisted men (the common white farmers) were rebelling against the upper class white officer corps.

When General Irvine returned, he struggled to get everybody onto the same page. His approach to - or avoidance of - the Gnadenhutten Massacre is explained by Sadosky:

Irvine was determined to not become a victim of political pratfalls that had handicapped, and in some cases almost killed, his predecessors. Fortunately for the historian, on several occassions Irvine revealed his inner thoughts... Just weeks after he returned...and learned of the violence...he observed that "The general and common opinion of the people of this country is that all Continental officers are too fond of Indians"(204).

General Irvine wanted to keep his job - and save his skin. That serves as enough of an explanation as to why he kept quiet about the massacre.

In Sadosky's last paragraph he writes that an

adversarial and hierarchichal social structure combined with a potent public policy debate [produced] a combustible situation. Commandants Daniel Brodhead and William Irvine were patrician, autocratic outsiders in a world that valued independence, liberty, and patriarchal authority. Given the anti-aristocratic nature of the American Revolution, the commandants found themselves in a position that offered enormous potential to offend the local populace. The militiamen of Washington County wanted a change in how the Continental commanders made use of the enormous public powers granted them. Violence against the Continental army's Native wards, and threats against its officers were a brutal, but effective way to achieve these ends. Daniel Brodhead's inability to heed the signs of popular discontent resulted in his removal from office and set into motion a series of events culminating in massacre and rebellion.

I've been struggling with Sadosky's nineteen-page chapter for a few weeks now and I'm glad to be done with it. For almost the entire time, I was not able to get past the brutality and racism of the massacre itself to understand what Sadosky was able to add to it with his broader analysis. But that is what sets his work apart from the others.

The final post in this series will be about at least one long-term effect of the shameful day in Gnadenhutten.

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Leonard Sadosky Recounts the Gnadenhutten Massacre

[caption id="attachment_953" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] This is an artist's conception of the Gnadenhutten Massacre. The white militiamen did use hatchets to scalp their victims. However, the killing itself is believed to have been done with a cooper's mallet.[/caption]

My previous post ended with a "To be Continued..."

We were at the point where David Williamson again brought together a militia of white farmers. The horrible massacre itself was still a few weeks away.

I imagine there is no substitute for actually reading Leonard Sadosky's chapter: "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre: The Contest for Power in the Public World of the Revolutionary Pennsylvania Frontier." (It is found in the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814.) Consider this a first look at Sadosky's work.

Again - my disclaimer - the Gnadenhutten Massacre still was what it was. It cannot be explained away. It was certainly what we now would call a crime of war. [Sadosky appropriately cited the sources he used with endnotes which I have not reproduced here.]

 

As you may remember from my previous post, many of the Moravian Indians - and the two missionaries, Zeisberger and Heckewelder - had been taken away from their villages by British-allied Indians in the fall of 1781. Most of them were allowed to return to gather corn in February, 1782. While they were busy in the fields, the Indians of Gnadenhutten were warned by a party of warriors "that they would probably be pursued"(198). Sadosky adds

Some villagers were worried, but the majority reasoned that since the Americans knew they were Christians, and since they needed to finish gathering their corn, they would return to Sandusky only when the enitre harvest was gathered. It was a fatal miscalculation.

Then he goes on to describe the events of that shameful day, March 7, 1782. As Williamson's roughly two-hundred men came near Gnadenhutten, they came upon a young Delaware man and immediately one of the Pennsylvania rifles fired, injuring the man in the arm and knocking him to the ground. Sadosky continues

As the militia came upon him he begged for his life, saying he was Joseph Shebosh, the son of a white Moravian missionary. Another gunshot echoed through the frozen woodland, and Shebosh was dead (198).

And then he was scalped.

The militia rode on into the town where they managed to appear non-threatening to the peaceful Indians, warned them of possible danger, talked about taking them to Fort Pitt for their own safety and then they had the Indians hand over whatever weapons they had.

According to Sadosky, the white farmers' militia found it "odd" that the

Delawares were using axes, pewter bowls, pewter spoons, teakettles, and cups. They observed also that their horses were branded and that other articles were stamped with letters. Surely, they reasoned, these goods were evidence that these Indians had engaged in the plunder of Washington County (PA), or at least were friendly with those who had. Williamson and his men accused the Delawares of theft and murder (199).

Accusers often jump to conclusions when making allegations.

According to Sadosky, "Accounts vary as to what transpired next." But - although the particulars vary from one source to another - together all the sources "present a fairly coherent picture of Gnadenhutten's final day," which included "violent actions that were as cold and calculated as they were brutal"(199).

Wiliamson convened a war council in which about two dozen militiamen advocated the sparing of the Indians' lives. But the majority ruled. The militia informed the men, women and children of Gnadenhutten that they were going to be put to death. The Indians first protested and then resigned themselves to their fate. On page 200, Sadosky quotes Heckewelder who was still being kept prisoner at Sandusky (Heckewelder's own source will be revealed later in this post).

They kneeled down, offering fervent prayers to God their Savior - and kissing one another, under a flood of tears, fully resigned to his will, they sang praises unto him, in joyful hope, that they would soon be relieved from all pains, and join their redeemer in everlasting bliss.

The next paragraph is Sadosky's description of the massacre itself:

Those militiamen who did not wish to participate in the killing left the village. But plenty of Pennsylvanians and Virginians remained to enact the sentance of death. Still singing, still crying, the male Moravians were separated from the women and children, and led to two separate houses. Then, one militiaman seized the mallet of Gnadenhutten's cooper from one of the houses and began striking the men on the head with it one by one. After the first man had killed fourteen, he called for another to take his place. All the Indians were struck, then scalped. Finally the militiamen set the houses afire. Amazingly, two young boys managed to survive the slaughter - one by hiding silently in a cellar, the other by feigning death amidst the pile of corpses in one of the "slaughter-houses." They both escaped, made their way to Sandusky, and their testimony became the basis for the accounts of Moravian historians George Loskiel and John Heckewelder (200).

 

This series on the Gnadenhutten Massacre will continue.
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Gnadenhutten and Fort Pitt on the Frontier of the American Revolution

[caption id="attachment_935" align="aligncenter" width="300"] "Gnadenhutten" is German for "Huts of Grace."[/caption]

A lot of people won't be able to get past the fact that ninety-six Christian Indians - including women and children - were killed at Gnadenhutten Ohio. I myself didn't want to write another post about it. What good can come out of it, I was thinking. And what point is there to give the massacre context. It still was what it was, right?

If you remember one thing about Gnadenhutten, it should, of course, be the massacre itself and it goes without saying that it was a shameful, horrible atrocity.

The concepts of "crimes against humanity" and crimes of war" had not been conceived yet back in 1782. But they describe what happened at Gnadenhutten, Ohio.

While the context surrounding the Gnadenhutten Massacre will not explain it away, it would be too easy for me to just tell myself that with all the emotion surrounding the Gnadenhutten Massacre, I should just call it a war crime and then move on to another topic. No. My subject in Algonkian Church History is Christian Indians and if I'm going to give Gnadenhutten its fair weight, then I need to go into a lot more detail.

So here goes. Here are some relevant facts or context, or whatever:

According to historian Leonard Sadosky, the goings-on at Fort Pitt are an important element in knowing more about the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In his chapter "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre," Sadosky goes into a lot of detail about Gnadenhutten's context.

Sadosky tells us that Fort Pitt was run by white American oligarchs, or the upper-class. At that time, white America could be divided into the upper class (or gentry) and the common farmers. Furthermore, Sadosky notes, one of the themes of the American Revolution itself was of the common white man trying to liberate himself from the upper class. On the frontier back then (as Sadosky tells it), there were a lot of common whites, less Indians, and the smallest group of all were the white oligarchs, the gentry, or upper class. The upper class whites understood the need for diplomacy with the Indians. But the farmers had their own needs and didn't place much value on the importance of getting along with the Indians. The militia responsible for the Gnadenhutten massacre was made up of lower class white farmers.

Let's try to follow Sadosky's line of thought:

He says there was a "popular antipathy toward commerce and diplomacy with Indians [that] became manifest at several points during the years leading up to the Gnadenhutten Massacre"(193).

Sadosky understands the significance of Gnadenhutten being on the frontier during wartime:

War for American Independence placed the Moravian villages in a precarious poisition. they found themselves almost directly between the Anglo-American faming communities of western Pennsylvania, and the numerous British-allied Native villages of the Great Lakes Basin. Caught in the middle of this geopolitical vortex, the Moravian Delawares attempted to placate both sides in order to maintain their neutrality (196-197).

And how did the Moravian villages placate both sides"? According to Sadosky

The Moravian towns often provided a way station for British-allied Indians raiding the Pennsylvania farms, while Moravian leaders, such as the Reverend John Heckewelder and the Reverend David Zeisberger, provided intelligence to the Continental commanders at Fort Pitt (197).

Next comes some action:

British-allied Indians had taken the Moravian missionaries and many of the Indians as prisoners in 1781.

White farmer David Williamson gathered up a militia and toured the Moravian villages, in November, 1781, but, of course few people were around, because they were being help by the British-allied Indians.

Williamson's militia captured the few Indians they found and took them to Fort Pitt.

As soon as the commandant at Fort Pitt learned they were from the Christian communities, he released the prisoners that Williamson's militia had rounded up.

Per Sadosky (197), "The fact that the Indians' release was soon followed by attacks against farms on the western edge of Washington County raised the ire of many of the County's residents."

By early February of 1782, the enlisted men at Fort Pitt were threatening mutiny, stemming from a "lack of pay and no provision for clothing"(197). And

At nearly the same time, a raiding party from Sandusky, probably of Wyandots and Mingoes, entered the western townships of Washington County. They attacked and raided several blockhouses, killing some Pennsylvanians and taking others prisoner. Ostensibly desiring to recover the prisoners, the men of Washington County mustered into a militia unit in the latter part of February in order to pursue the Indians (198).

 

To be continued.....

 

Sadosky's chapter is part of the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

Citation:

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

 

 
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The Gnadenhutten Massacre: Introduction

This monument in Gnadenhutten, Ohio honors the 96 massacre victims.

 

I don't know if I can put enough weight on how sad, how shameful, or how unjust the Gnadenhutten Massacre was. But maybe just a description of the uncontested facts will be enough to make you upset - no matter if you are an Indian or non-Indian, Christian or something else. I'm going to quote the description of the Gnadenhutten Massacre from Proud and Determined:

The Stockbridges were keenly aware that a whole village of Christian Indians had already been claimed by frontier violence. The Moravian mission town of Gnadenhutten in what is now Ohio had fallen prey to a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen under Colonel David Williamson in March of 1782. The peaceful Indians...were faithful to the end; even after being told they would die the next day, they spent their last night praying and singing hymns. A total of 96 innocent Indians, including men, women and 39 children were murdered by blows to the head with a [cooper's] mallet and scalped by the militia. No attempt was made to bring them to justice.

 

*  *  *

 
I used the following sources at the time:

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 390.

Olmstead, Earl P. Blackcoats Among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991, 330-335.

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 75-78.

 

But since I wrote Proud and Determined, I've become aware of another more current source. Leonard Sadosky wrote a book chapter called "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre."  For the sake of clarity, I'll repeat myself here: ninety-six innocent Indians were massacred. Nobody, including Sadosky, questions that. And maybe that is all that matters to you.

I haven't read all of Sadosky's chapter yet, but early on he gives us a clear tipoff of what it is about:

The massacre has figured prominently in several recent histories of the Revolutionary frontier and Indian-white relations, but it has yet to be put in its appropriate context. Thomas Slaughter describes the massacre as a product of "frustration" on the part of the western Pennsylvanians, and it was but one of many events that prefigured the Whiskey Rebellion that was to follow. For Richard White, the massacre was prime evidence of an omnipresent, almost pathological feeling of "Indian-hatred" that permeated the society of the American frontier. Although the descriptions of the Gnadenhutten Massacre offered by these and other historians are generally accurate, their explanations of the massacre are unsatisfactory.

 

I haven't read much beyond that point myself. But I'm inclined to suspect that it will be fodder for at least one more post, if not several.

By the way, Sadosky's chapter starts on page 187 of the following book:

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great
Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

 

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Joseph Smith and the Legend of the Golden Bible

The Town Hall of Palmyra, New York, Joseph Smith's hometown.

One of the great nuggets of history recorded by Electa Jones (published in 1854) was a statement made by Captain Hendrick Aupaumut (1757-1830) that the Mohican Indians - at one time - had their own Holy Book or Indian Bible. But, according to Captain Hendrick, the people became less civilized and lost their ability to read it. And so this Holy Book was "buried with a chief."

A similar legend had been recorded in 1823 by Ethan Smith, the pastor of a church in Poultney, Vermont. Smith reported a legend that came from an Indian chief who claimed that the Indians

had... a book which they had for a long time preserved. But having lost the knowledge of reading it, they concluded it would be of no further use to them; and they buried it with an Indian chief" (quoted by Lynn Glaser, Indians or Jews, 69).

Lynn Glaser's research shows that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, knew of that particular legend.


This painting was by an unknown painter, circa 1842. The original is owned by the Community of Christ archives. It is on display at the Community of Christ headquarters in Independence Missouri. The painting was originally in the possession of Joseph Smith III (died 1914).

In his youth, Joseph Smith had a fascination with digging for artifacts. He, like other whites in western New York State, was something of an amateur antiquarian. Smith and many others were keenly interested in the many mounds in the area. Unfortunately, there wasn't any awareness back then of how disrespectful it was to mutilate or violate burial grounds - which is, of course, what the mounds were.

Anyway, the Mormon religion is based on their Holy Book, the Book of Mormon. Where did the Book of Mormon come from?

Well, if you believe Joseph Smith, he found golden plates with "Reformed Egyptian" characters on them and he was given the power to "translate" those characters. If you aren't a Mormon, it appears to be an incredible story. According to No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, many versions of the story of how Smith found his golden plates circulated in Palmyra, New York, his hometown. (By the way, Palmyra was about ninety miles west of New Stockbridge, home of the Mohicans from the 1780's to the 1820's.)

At least one of the accounts has Smith bringing something home and telling his family (but not showing them) that it was the golden plates. The whole family was familiar with the Indian legend of the "golden Bible" and, to some extent, this was their basis for believing Joseph's claim (Brody, page 37).

So the Indian legend that was recorded by a pastor in Vermont entered young Joseph Smith's fertile imagination and - from a non-Mormon viewpoint - he borrowed from the legend. In doing so, he started a new religion.

Is it possible that the legend of the "golden Bible" comes from the same oral thread as the Bible that Captain Hendrick Aupaumut said was "buried with a chief"? What do you think?

 

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