It is published only a week ago and it feels like a little kickoff of what is going to be a number of talks that i will be doing here and there. This is the first one. A chance to try it out on all of you what i might hope to be doing later on as well. I will find out what works and doesnt work when i talk here tonight. Let me just say that my plan for this presentation has 23 different parts. I will start by saying a little bit about how i got on to this project in the first place and something about the process of working with it for a good number of years. Then i will move to a thumbnail, 1520 minute thumbnail of the story that lies at the heart of the book, and then i will do a little reading from the book, a certain passage or two from the book to give you a sense of flavor of what is in between the covers, and maybe at the very end i will say a little bit about what drew me to the project and while i think it was worth spending a few years working on and it might be worth reading a book about. How i came to the project. It was by total chance. Y i have on old friend who has a house in cornwall and one day in the mid90s, my friend invited by wife and myself down for dinner. And as i recall, we were standing around, it was a summer evening, standing around outside with gin tonics in our hands, i think, and one of the neighbors, who was a dinner guest, started telling us of little, what he called a piece of local history. He said it is just a piece of local history but since i am a history guy maybe i would be interested. He began to unfold this story to the tune of a few minutes and i was transfixed right away by the story. I was so intrigued and fascinated that as i recall y d yktd i could not sleep that night. I got up and drove straight to yale and went to our library there to see if anything much was written about this or known about this story beyond the locality of cornwall. And the answer wasnt very much. It is mentioned. I think they are here and there and all are maybe a couple books where it appears to the tune of 1015 pages. But the point is there was no full scale treatment. And i decided i would like to make a commitment as book project. 20 years in time have passed. It wasnt easy to do. I was leaping out of what was my period of history that i made my way as a colonialist and the historian of the colonial period and this was set in the 19th century so i had to feel my way into a new territory. I read a couple books along the way and i never let get of this and i got to a point of finishing this off. If i had not gone to a friends house that night this book wouldnt be here and a lot would be different. It happens that way sometimes. In fact, i have had other projects that were more or less by chance come my way but this was the most extreme case of serendipty in writing for me. Here is my thumbnail of the story. The background is a pattern, national eethos of the opening years of the 19th century. The newly independent United States began around then to reach out in a major way to the rest of the world in commerce, in its political ambation, in its go ahead spirit as it was said at the time. And the epitomy was the china trade of his out reach. A rapid trade with the fareast centering in the city of canton. Dozens of ships heading that way and returning loaded with cargos of tea, and silks, and many other chinamade items on which americans of that era placed an increasingly high premium. Well, travel to china for all of the tradeships involved a mid ocean stop over in the hawiian islands. It led to reshuffling of personal with a few young haw i hawaiian men coming on board and they go wherever the trade ships took them. And some might eventually land in one or another part of the United States, mostly, i think in new england. F fast forward to what is the first major scene or act in my book. It is an autumn day in the year 1809, the setting is yale college where students are passing in and out on their way i suppose to class. I myself see the same thing 200 years later many times. On this particular morning, there is something a little different. A young man who clearly doesnt belong there. He is darkskinned and exotic looking and wearing ragged sa sailer clothes is sitting off to one side quitely weeping. The yale students notice him, and feel concerned and ask him the reason for his apparent distress and he replies because no body gives me learning. He is referring to the fact that all of them are getting lots of good learning and he is not. And this comment is sure to get their attention. He is a hawaiian and worked as two years for crew. He was dropped off in new haven and found his way to the steps of yale. He had a hawaiian surname but took the given name of henry when working with the soldiers. He was taken under the wing of a number of yale students responding to his initial complaint about not learning they give him english language lessons and instructed him in the religious faith as yale was a very religious place at the time. I am not sure one could say the same thing about it today. For sure a lot has changes. One thing leads to another and the education and conversion of henry becomes what you might say campuswide project. I am exaggerating a bit but i think his presence was acknowledged on campus so much so in fact he was taken into the household of a College President who was a protestant minister named Timothy Dwight. And yale has a college of Timothy Dwight and i am a faculty fellow associate there. Dwight, and the students and a fair number of outsiders who come to have a look at the scene all get involved with him. And he makes Good Progress both in learning english and in his spiritual condition as well. And after some months, it is decide he should go else where to continue the same process. He is taken to an academy in massachusetts and passed around different ministers households where he visits for weeks or sometimes month at a stretch. Reports of his arrival and progress are published in religious newspapers and journals and in fact, he is on his way to what almost could be called a celebrity status. If we could have dropped down to hartford even you would have found people that knew about him for sure. His story, his achievements, leave people to wonder whether something similar might be done for others like thim. Other quote unquote heathen people in various parts of the world who like him lack education, quote civilized ways of living and above all lack the blessings of christian face. He becomes the germ and the seed of a powerful new missionary idea. As it all plays out, president diet dwight and others hatch a plan to setup a special school for heathen youth so transformation can be achieved on a wider scale. It will have the official name of the official manner school put it quickly gets dubbed the the heathen school. Its location is in townha hall connecticut and it opens in the spring of 1817. There a dozen students in the first group. Several hawaiians and a couple from india, a native american, and a couple of white new e englanders are training to be missionaries over se overse overseer overseas and feel this will benefit them. There were pacific islanders, china, a few european jews, a couple greeks and that surprised me. I am a greek extraction but in those days greeks were considered to be heathen. Why not . As time passed, there was growing number of American Indians and in all i think about 15 different tribes would be represented at the school. I got to skip lightly over the actual workings of the school buchlt but i want to emphasis and it would be hard to overemphasis the intensely held hopes and ambitions that underlie this project. The idea was the grads would grat go and take what they learned and took it back to their country. If all went well, and they were very explicit about this, the entire world would be saved and that was the key word in every important way, saved in the shortest time imagineable. One particular happening in the schools first year should be mention mentioned. Henry took sick, he was the centerpiece of this, and he had a case of typhus and after a period of weeks, he died. And the School Sponsored and leaders then sensed the chance to constru the passing as a martyrs death. His teacher wrote a book about his memoirs and it became an International Best seller. You can find copies around still. I found a copy of the first astate departments decision in a secondhand bookstore in cambridge. So i think there are about 12 different editions of it that were published through the whole span of the 19th century. And well partly, in response to the publication of the memoirs, interest and support were the school shot up as measured in fundraising, in visits by outsiders, the school became a big tourist attraction. In newspaper publicity and so on. All of the while the leaders of the school were putting out a lot of favorable pr insisting that everything was going splendedly and exactly according to plan. That is what they said. In fact, i think, this was quite far from the reality. There were Serious Problems right from the start. Problems on the academic side. How do you teach people that are various in backgrounds and education. And problems of discipline. Quite a few students had to be expelled for one or another kind of misconduct. But for several years, they manager managed to maintain a good public reputation. And then something happened where romans developed between the students and the fair well woman of cornwall. Not part of the plan. I imagine them thinking it is one think he should bring you here and convert you and another thing you should romance our daughters. The first such case involved a young cherokee man named john ridge and the 16yearold daughter of the schools steward. Her name was sarah northrup. You will get details from these when i read from the book in a few. I will say when the involvement came out there was a big uproar locally and then well across the state as the news spread extending to other parts of the country. Intermarriage between people of different race and color was simply unacceptable. It was not acceptable to a great majority of americans. Eventually they did marry and went off to johns home in the Cherokee Nation what is now north georgia. The school tried to tap down public feelings by in effect claiming it was a onetime thing. And promising it would never happen again. But, within scarcely a year later it did. Another cherokee student and a Young Cornwall woman became engaged and then got married. So the previous controversy was renewed and intensified with lots of impassioned rhetoric and threats to destroy the school buildings. A night with an angry crowd gathered on the town green and burned them in effergy and so forth. With a result of the second pair of intermarrieds left town as quickly as possibly and went off, like the first pair, to the Cherokee Nation. By now the school was domed. Public feels were against it. And the leaders became concerned that its continuous might put the entire missionary movement at risk. They shut it down for good after it lasted a decade and did their best to submit public memory of it. There is a tailend end of the y i want to mention. John ridge and elias became leaders of their nation. And this is where where you might say the little story intersects with development. We are now in the 1830s at this point and the federal government is precedes pressing the cherokees to accept removal from their traditional homelands and relocation much further to the west in what is today oklahoma. I would imagine you know the headlines of this. There is a famous Supreme Court that favors the cherokees saying it would be illegal and not part of administration and Andrew Jacksons causes force removal and this is what is known as the cherokee trail of tears. As leaders of their nation, they were at the center of the whole removal controversy. At first and for years thereafter, they led the opposition of removal going back and forth to washington and negotiating with top officials including the president himself in defense of cherokee interests and the cherokee wish to remain where they were. But at a certain point these two flipped and became leaders of a minority faction that supported removal or as they called it relocation. And they negotiated a treaty that was sponsored by the group and accepting removal on behalf of all of the cherokees and was signed in their living room. This made them in the eyes of many cherokees nothing less than traders. When the removal process was complete and the nation was relocated in oklahoma, they were both assassinated on the same morning, june 22 by their tribal opponents. This was a sensational event and it led to decades of reprisals and revenge killings within the Cherokee Nation and to this day ridge and butte are remembered with bitterness by many cherokees. And finally, why did these two men flip on the removal question . Well, what they said for public consumption was there was no hope if the cherokees tried to remain where they were. They were vastly outmatched by the federal government and the wheat white people of the lower south that insisted on nothing than removal. I think there is something more and something they expressed privately. In effect, they felt betrayed which jackson happened the way he did they felt betrayed then and back at the heathen School Memories came up. They were approved and admired at star students and then cast out when they fell in love with whom in the white student. And crossed the race line. Where potentially explosive issues of race might once again interfere. Thats the end of my thumbnail. So now if you would indulge me i will read a little bit from the book. I would like to read a section that is about the courtships. Let me interrupt myself for a minute. In the mid1820s, when he was a young man but already kind of leaving the nation he sat for a portrait in washington by a famous painter especially for painting indian chiefs. He was a magnificent portrait right now it is hanging in the exhibition of arkansas at the museum. Anyway, it was a wonderful portrait into a kind of indian gallery and then a lot of prints were made from the portrait and they were published in books and so on. I was thrilled when a few months ago i discovered that one of the early prince was coming up for auction at a local estate and i was able to get this into hand colored print as i say it was exciting for me to get it. In many ways, i have to sort of contest that he is my hero in the story. He acted in a necessary and noble part also many people peoe wouldnt agree with me. Anyway, back to the story i will explain a little bit more about the context. He suffered from the kind of green gel or disease that often left him quite went and full of aches and pains and it kind of disabled him. This happened when he was at the school. What they did with scholars is they brought them into the house and cared for them and gave them the best that they could end the sort of medical care. That is where he began to get involved with his daughter. At some point he was confined in their house beginning in december of 1820 were in that herman was the name of the principal. Reports to the american board of commissioners to meet regular reference to his unhappy situation. So in approved very much in his conduct and learning and now seriously disposed he has from a child than feeble and his complaints have rather increased as of late. April 21 he continues to be ill and in june he is in a very feeble state of health. In july he continues to be out of health. In the latter months, the general store he had a family run the shop recorded in the sale to the scorer of mr. Northrup. Through the spring and early summer he was under the local physician of samuel gold however in midjuly he had a specialized form of treatment. Meanwhile, he repeatedly urged the return home to his family, aand the idea that he himself resisted. He wants to stay and pursue his studies. When the reports of the worsening condition. He was a cherokee chief and he decided to undertake the journey to cornwall. The arrival in midoctober was a local sensation. He had white top boots that had ever entered the town and its commanding personal presence a tall and athletic form made the deepest possible impression. He stayed for a full two weeks and nearby litchfield. He was a very famous and eminent protestant minister. And he converts dot length the minister whose daughter catherine described him as, quote, one of the princes of the forest. Perhaps his son was present to serve as interpreter. He was received in th into varis households including that of doctor gold. Decades later the doctors son would write back, quote, no memory is more clear than that of a visit to my home in my sixth year of the cherokee chief in the uniform of a u. S. Officer. They also included this. Where am i . My father exchanged presents with him giving him a small telescope carved in blackstone. The same nearly 3 feet in length the surface with a passage of time hangs today and closed in the glass case and on the living room wall in the home of a gold descendent attached to it is an agent label this pipe once belonged to the major id distinguished chief of the Cherokee Nation presented in 1820 that it had often been smoked in the council. It was generally expected john would return home with his father but when the time came he remained at cornwall. Several months later he declared he chose to stay and still does. He chose to stay and still does. Was it Something Else holding him to the school to the households in which he would remain a patient for about two years. He had a personal connection. It remains the fullest that we have. It does have the feel of authenticity. It centers on one particular occasion and begins. Mrs. Northrup had so much care she would send her daughter into johns room to take care of him. It could. For a time he seemed to improve so much so that they said i do not think it is best to give him any more medicine that he has a deep trouble and you must find out what it is. On the afternoon when sarah had left the house, mrs. Northrup taking her stockings for the students went to sit with john and she said to him you have some trouble and must tell me you have no mother here only me and you have always confided to me. She said i do not want to tell you. You must tell me. That is the trouble. Have you ever mentioned it to her . No. We havent said one word to each other. How can i help it when she has taken such good care of me over the past two years . She said yes i do love john. She saw there was trouble in the camp. It was for that further between the two young sweethearts they must send their daughter away. Thus shortly thereafter mr. Northrup took her to her grandparents in new haven and told her what they brought her for. He wished to introduce her to other gentlemen in to try every way to get her mind off of john ridge. She wanted none of it and, quote, she would take no notice of any gentle man or any company. She had no appetite for food and they thought she would soon be a victim of consumption. Understandably her grandparents grew alarmed about her and it was nothing to do. There were difficulties on johns side. They expect you to their son to take away from the nation preferably h. E. Stalker. When he wrote home of her wish to marry sarah they were surprised and dismayed. She consulted with one of the missionaries that warned she might feel superior and that her son would be more useful to the people that connected with him by marriage. She then had a letter sent to john objecting to intentions when she reaffirmed the love for sarah the parents persuaded to yield. It was clear now that there feelings could be the night. They wait in their parents possibilities and formed a new plan. They told john to go home and stay for two years and he could come back without his crutches he might marry sarah. They did come back after two years. Back in the Cherokee Nation has symptoms lessened enough to return to his intended bride. They reached cornwall a month later. The previous stipulation had been met though still somewhat he could walk without crutches. Theyre in tensions were published as bandits and the church following longestablished practices in the matters. Now at last what some have called the secret things was exposed and local reaction began to build. But they were moving fast. January 27, 1824 of the marriage was formalized in a small gathering in their home. Reverend timothy stone was one of the agents on servers and it was an obvious choice to perform the ceremony declined to protect his own and at the schools reputation, his colleague reverend walter smith. They set to return to the Cherokee Nation they remained in cornwall for some days longer. They would visit and be visited by friends and relations in a kind of ritual acknowledgment of the married estate according to the local resident. On the next morning the kernel in the Church Called upon them and conducted them to the the meetinghouse interceded them with his family. Presumably this was intended as a sign of personal respect. On the scholars bench to the front of the Church Additional gestures would follow. They were invited to use the captains while the farmer in the neighborhood together and they are they were treated with that attention which is to be given to the members of the school by some of the inhabitants of the vicinity. This, however, seems to have kindled the resentment. It is one of the causes of the disgraceful affair which in the coming months would bring so much excitement and discussed throughout the country. Indeed his comment that some were already displeased with the attention frequently lavished on the scholars. Whatever the source, they soon faced the highest indignation as another report said. They were described to a friend how the papers crew claimed as an outrage and the preachers denounced it in the pulpit. The news flew in the wind to their surrounding towns to the rest of the state and beyond. Threats were made by the best most respectable men to drive the natives from the country and to heed in dignity engaged. The gentleman from richfield. It was an entirely demolished building in which the school was kept. They felt obliged on their way out of town as they become targets of the attack. As they traveled by the stagecoach they were met by excited throngs denouncing him for taking away a white girl. On his part he acknowledged having added the world and one of its fairest flowers. But he was not her inferior in any respect. According to the longtime editor of the newspaper the american legal come and no white man in town approved of the transaction except the clergyman and two other founders. They conspired to promote the match of the wedding had been performed in secret so to see deceived the public. Even though her father, innocent of the direct involvement, quote, was afflicted of distraction at the degradation of his daughter and left the family and has gone it isnt known where. An account from a family and ann eyewitness confirmed the presence of the ceremony declaring that he felt dreadful. Newspapers throughout connecticut and come in nine or ten other states became channe channels. It was a harsh critic in issue after issue he deprived the affliction and the disgrace throwing herself into the arms of an indian. For many of the readers, that were carried a particularly invidious connotations of a sexualized ugliness. He links to this criminal connection with a reigning missionary spirit, and more particular with the school to embrace marriage as a new kind of missionary machinery for the savages. It was, he declared, one of the objects to break down objects of color and make a reporters become nursing mothers to a race. Another local newspaper stated simply the intermarriage with the indians and the missionary school at cornwall has now begun is not a subject for irony. To be taken into the wilderness that must indeed be a heart rendering pain. Other opposers were inclined to blame the participants directly. Some said the girl wants to be e publicly with Committee Indiana hung and the mother drowned. Meanwhile the Church Leaders were reportedly about to bring smith to try over performing the marriage. Indeed there was widespread expectation of worse to come. According to the press accounts, code, the foreign scholars walk arm in arm with married and unmarried ladies from the town. Some of the stories passed around seem to trul seemed trul. One recounted a nighttime cadre. Gathering and another leaving his daughter sparking with an indian. They voted a particular date of the color wheel to speech. A woman supposedly requested to a suitor wont you indian me. Another report had sarah writing from her new home that they must marry their indian sweethearts and come on as they had agreed. There were rumors that others had been engaged and got scared out of it more specifically the three other marriages were supposed to be in the treaty. Its the principle of the marriage that should be allowed to stand does it not promise to the hundreds of other respected families in the county of similar heart rendering pain that would seize on me with death. Hundreds of other families. The possibilities were dyer and limitless. I want to stop there. It goes on and on. But you get the point. Let me say finally a few words about what i think is the meaning and importance of the story. Why i was so drawn that night i heard about it at my friends house a couple of ways i think it corrects directly to the truly big themes in American History and culture one is what we stilbutwe still refer to as n exceptionalism, the idea that its made up of Exceptional People with an exceptional responsibility and opportunity to grow and improve the rest of the world. That idea has been present virtually since the first settlers stepped off the boat with John Winthrop in boston and his famous speech or sermon in which he ordered and suggested that this new colony should be a kind of light to the rest of the world. In fact interestingly enough toomey in the last year or two that phrase has come back into the Public Discourse on little bit. So anyway, i think that american exceptionalism sort of freezes the story. Another major theme in aspect of the history and culture is of course diversity. Many different people. Human difference which i think has been central to the countrys history again from the beginning when the colonial period began and got underway then you had three different major population streams coming european, native american and africans sort of converging in the country. This was totally without precedent and again to the present day the freedom of diversity and the mixing differs and has been central to our culture and history and to our lives and obviously to the school that speaks of that. And one more thing to mention, this is a story of failure. And if there is a connection to the larger that isnt so much the history of such, but the way that we understand our history. We dont think, we dont like to think much about failure. American history is supposed to be a Success Story. Most history books are not on the failures and yet i think it is important that we can learn from failures and there have been plenty of them in American History. I was actually sort of looking for a chance to write about something. So on all three counts i dont know if i had said this the very night of the story but on all three accounts the story spoke to me in sent me off on a long process which culminates with my look. With that said, i am glad to take questions and comments. [applause] remember, you have to have a microphone. Here is one right here. Folks like timothy must have known about the crusades. In their attempt to save the world could they not have known the difficulty of saving islam . And they were very confident of their own special qualities as religious leaders. Im just making this up because i dont remember seeing a comment by anyone else involved in the story about the crusades. But my strong opposition would be that they would look back on the crusade and say those catholics. And basically they hated catholics. So they were going to do it a different way and much better. I think i was astonished that i guess i would say the confidence sometimes comes across as arrogance. But anyway, the confidence that they have in this grand idea that had suddenly dropped into their world. One back there. Thank you for your presentation. I had one concern about john junior. You mentioned that he was a hero. Wasnt john the leader of the Cherokee Nation, and it didnt werent they the wealthier element . To my understanding, they possessed slaves and really were a wealthier element in the Cherokee Nation. And so, i was concerned about whether they really sold out the tribes. Some cherokees as we know it escaped into the hills so forth and so on. Could you elaborate on that concept . First of all i use the word hero. Thats my own feelings. And so, john ridge come his father was a major part of the story. I didnt say much about him here but hes in the book and how do i say, they were major leadership figures. John ross was also a major leadership figure in for a while they were all working together. They were all by the way i think extremely wealthy in relation to other cherokees. Youre absolutely right. Both of them owned slaves and essentially were plantation owners. And i think that he was, too. I am not totally sure about his i think that he was a wealthy man and probably a slave owner, too. Any toplevel cherokee. Thats one of the irony is of course is the people that have been discriminated against. And cornwall and so on now for themselves Holding People in color in bondage. But coming as i said, they started for years really working together. They would go to washington for talks to jackson and others in positions of power and federal governmentin thefederal governmn there became this point where he decided to change his stance, and apparently this occurred after a particular meeting that he had with jackson. It was clear the Jackson Administration was not proposing to enforce the decision of the Supreme Court. Ridge went to see them and came out and there is no first hand account of the major meeting, but some accounts say that ridge seemed very depressed afterwards. So this isnt going to work. So he flipped. And in my opinion, you know, the reason that i admire him is because i dont think that there was any choice. I think that he made the necessary and in a sense of the noble choice. He said he expected that he might very well lose his lif wis a result of changing the position. They remained on the other side and the two of them from then on out became a intense opponents d adversaries. Although there is no reason to think that john ross personally was involved in the plan that led to the assassination of these people, these other people. Its clear that it was his followers hooted back. So, you know, he ends up. Ross is the principal chief at that point of the nation and continues to be the principal chief for a while. But what is really another aspect and its sad and tragic is that they were divided or generations afterwards. He didnt want the cherokees to be emalgrated with the white folk and white culture. Thank you very much for pulling together all of the this material so we have a source to go to to know the story in more depth. Would you share the story of your research and what your sources where and were you found materials . Sure. It was a winding trail; the research trail. It started right across from my office that yale because Sterling Library has a large collection of family papers and the family of herit gold and that family was torn apart by her decision to marry him. All of her siblings were bitterly upset and angry. When they burned the effergy on the town green, it was her brother who actually lit the match to the fire. All of that is spelled out in this at yale and most of that has been published in an edit volume of the family letters i think it is called to marry an indian. There was that piece and i realized i would need to consult the records and leaders of the school and that is all at harvard at hoyton library. So i spent a lot of time there. And they were anxious to save the reputation of the school but you dont have to be far between the lines to realize there was trouble all over the place on the ground and from one day to the next. I eluded to that in passing. Anyway, i went through all of the that stuff. And then there is a lot of stuff scattered around in local his r historical cites and some in co cornwall and some in other towns. The most exciting part was when i got the notion a few years ago and i said maybe i should go to hawaii what could be better . Most of my research i went as far as whister. So i didnt know why i was going to hawaii but i went. And it was a great trip. I think i was there 23 weeks. There were good documents i found in the Museum Library in missionary library in hundred honolulu. But the big island to the south was the exciting part to visit and it was a process to find out. He grew up in a village on the west coast of the big island. Which doesnt exist anymore. The village is gone. But i was able to contact some of his descendants. He never married and had had children, but he had brother and sisters so there are collateral descendants that very much remember. You mention this name in hawaii and they know who he was. They call him the First Hawaiian christian. He is famous there. I went to this little beach on the southwest side of the big island which was the site of his village. It was thrilling to stand in his foot steps. And then i went to another place 50 or so miles to the north still on the coast where after, i didnt say anything about his family history, but his parents were killed when he was 11 is a series of island wars. And they were on the loosing side as far as i can tell. He was orphaned and farmed out to ung uncle who was quote a pag pagan priest. I was able to go see the platform on the temple he is trained on. It is still there. It is a tourist site there. I was able to visit his grave site. In 1993, his remains were taken from cornwall back to hawaii and that was a very momentous moment in hawaii. They described all sorts of proceedings around this return. So i was able to see where he was reburied and it was just amazing and like no other experience i have had as a researcher. When i got home, i didnt know what difference it would make to my book, but i felt i had to write about hawaii and my experience there. One thing the book includes is not one, but three of what i call interludes in which i describe my own experience as researcher going to places that are significant to the story. First hawaii and then i decided i better go to the Cherokee Nation and i did that and the third was about cornwall itself which i knew in an intimite way. They become part of the process and of the story itself. I am interested in your connections with this story and your previous work. I was a student of ted cook and we had to read Little Common wealth and unredeemed captive and where was impressed with the way you extracted emotion from silent pros at the time where much of it was very bland. The connection with the unredeemed captive and the the heathen school seem obvious with interracial marriage and love and the horror that society felt about that. But i wonder how those compare with the hundreds of year or 120 years between the examples . Both in terms of the ideas of schooling for native americans and also marriage. How marriage had changed over that period to be a more affective relationship from the more contractual relationship marriage had had previously. Wow. That is a powerful question or set of questions, really. Well, i suppose if there is a comment element, at the base of it all, it is the whole thing about crossing culture and racial boundaries. That joins the two. The captive book and this one. And it put it differently, too. They are also about what i spoke of earlier, human difference. I think i have always for whatever been interested in what is involved in self to other connections and difficulties or whatever it may be. Even if you go further back to why witchcraft work it was about a sense of othering the socalled witches. So there is that element. And you mentioned the word emotion. I think from the start, even back into the days when i was writing the socalled new social history very different from this narrative at least in its basic approach i was interested in emotion. We act like it happened up here with people getting ideas and going out and do thing. The reasons human beings do things, actually act, is much more about emotion than cognition, or that is my feeling. I think from the beginning i have been trying to take a different angle on that. You mentioned more specific things like changes in attitudes toward marriage. I think you are right that there was some change, but i also thing some historians of the family exagerate the story. Who knows if the relationship was contractual. We know Little Details about the. But i never thought people married in the colonial era because their parents told them to or two families got together and made a plan for the younger folks. I am quite convinced that the younger folks have plenty to say about it and we are operating as much, or at least as much for affective reasons as contractual ones. The marriages in the heathen schools were deeply affective marriages. There is no question about it. This wasnt a hankypanky going on at cornwall. They were deeply committed to each other. And harriet is clear she loves him and wants to join the missionary cause. She is going to go down by the cherokees and help promote the process of saving the world. So there is a coming together of a broad religious purpose with what i think was a deep personal connection. I am not sure okay. Thank you very much. This is very interesting. How did john ridge get all the way to the school . How did who . From the Cherokee Nation in the south, what led him . There must have been times with the white culture . Missionaries mostly from new england had begun to coming into the area around 1810 with the cherokees. Previous to that time they rejected the idea but they changed their mind. They were interested in educational possibilities that might open up if missionaries came. So the missionaries had been there for a while. There was a little missionary school not too far from where john ridge was growing up. His parents sent him to school. He got sick actually and had to come back. But it came to the notice of missionaries that way. He was a very bright student apparently from the start. There is a neat story and i am not sure i can remember all of the details but going back to the brainer school when the teachers said i think we are going too fast with this work. Lets slow down and make sure everyone gets it. And he threw a fit and said i am doing fine and i want to go ahead. The teachers were upset and they shamed him and he repented and his father, major ridge, came over to dress him done a bit. But the point was he was marked as an especially promising young guys. And the missionaries in the cherokee territory nation, i think had some idea they were c constructing an educational pyramid are low level, second level and the brightest of those, they hoped and planned would go north to cornwall. It wasnt very widely accepted at first. There was descriptions of the ridge family being concerned about john going off especially since he was known to be sickly. But they were persuaded and he went and quite a few other cherokees. In your presentation tonight you focused on the native American Experience and the intermarriages as one of the fa facts for the demise of the school. And you mentioned it was better to go to other countries and train there. Which was the factor of the school itself and was that thought true . That is a good question. Let me back up and say i came to think over the american years of working on this that what was going on was the leaders of the school were growing very disopponented and concerns about how well it wasnt going. And when the marriage, the intermarriage crisis has as they referred to it they were glad they could use this to shut the place down. Maybe they would have done that anyw a anyway. I am not sure. I get the sense they were welcoming this chance. I think they look back on this and say we cannot let this happen again. In fact, it was already the case that in some part, at least individual missionaries were going out to india and china and they said that is what we have to do as a basic plan from here on. That is pretty clear. Thank you very much for writing this book. This is a School Project that we needed a history of for a very long time and we are lucky to have you in particular writing the book. I have an enormous number of questions about the school and just a few things that you know the story already it sounds like. I have some familiarity with it. A host of questions, observations occur to me in hearing you recount this extraordinary sequence of events. Just a few thoughts. Henry the fact he is able to be adulated publically seems to be a fledging precursor to the way the captives who never intermingle socially with the community, the new haven and farmington communities in which they are situated. They are sort of safe. And henry seems to be that way. Of course, the people following him, these very complicated cherokees, who are actually embedded in very complicated ways in American Society, but they are still outsiders. They are sort of in and out and it is very interesting. Yup. And perhaps also disturbing. There they are still seen as outsiders by the Community Even though they probably tend to largely view themselves as insiders. And they end up creating an early preview for the anti antiabolishnist and the events of the 1930s. And they create that sort of initial stage for that animus by modeling very human and loving way the capacity for people from different groups in American Society to come together and to love each other. Of course that is a model that will be rejected. And one other observation there were native africans who were in towns like boston, especially providence in the 1790s, who s Samual Hopkins and others were educating them to go back to africa, these were very early missionary efforts envisioned for africa by white americans who are being envisioned for deployment similar to what they are envisioning similar for the students at the foreign school. Just observations. And my question is was it henry dagget you said was the head of the school . Hermon dagget. Do you know if he had a relationship with david dagget . I dont. He is a celebrator of the black laws in the 1830s and a key figure. Question, and then i will be quite. Are there connections between this school and the schools that are beginning to be formed by people like Leonard Bacon back in new haven with africanamericans and preparing them to be there is a school, i cannot remember the name of it. The crandell school. You are pointing to before and after issues and questions which i have to say i decided not to do in the book. I felt it would comp likate things. I wanted the story to stand by itself. And you didnt explore any relationship this emerging school may have had with africanamericans . If i came to think the heathen Foreign Mission school was actually a kind of Foundation Model for prudence crandel i would have but i never saw a reason for that. My general sense was the leaders and sponsors of the heathen school just wanted it forgotten once it was gone as quickly as possible. This was a grand experiment which failed and one more quick think thing about the failure i tried to followup as much as i could with what happened to the guys. Almost, without exception, there were a couple, they faded back into where they came from and some, quite a few, came to no good and turned into alcoholics and i dont know family domestic abusers and so forth and maybe even worse. I dont know. I think this gentlemen here told me something i didnt know about one of the scholars until now which was that he was apparently driven mad after his time at the school and had to go to the hartford retreat, an insane asigh asylum i wish i had known that. I would have put it with the story. But they were trying to transform people in ways that were impossible. Professor, the particular scholar who went to the institute of living and then the hartford retreat was effectively treated, cured as you mention in the book going to an Ohio University and he converted and trained in the ministry and returned to the osage village and he was a Success Story in this case because he was going to assist the Union Mission which was under the officers of the american board and he was going to evangelize his people. But while earnhardt jr while he was there at hartford he picked up tb and died within a month of returning. So there is a bitter eye of returning with the education and the conversion and missionary seal and then dying all too soon. He got cured of the exposure to missionary but then went to college and recoop and go back and at last he was stricken with i illness and died. A zigzag story. Why did they setup the school in cornwall rather than new haven . Because cornwall was thought to be, and i guess was, an isolated place. They were concerned that the students might be sort of distracted by the whiter american environment and in cornwall they were set apart. And cornwall had a reputation of being an excellent area. And cornwall finally offered up a building and supplied lots of monetary support. And one of the things that was most effecting to me in terms of the Research Documents affecting was the appearance in the religious and missionary press which was mushrooming. Lots of these at the time. The apparent long list of donations at the time, and i mean dozen, very ordinary people sending two shirts, a bushal of potatoes, im sending 3. All kind of people represented there. Just the sheer, humbleness of this bottom layer of support. There was a higher level as well including some from overseer overseas who sent large sums of money. The information spread through the state and through the United States and it was known around t world by some quotes and that might be a little much but it was wellknown. Where is the microphone . I can talk loud i am wondering if you are familiar with intersection or interaction with the hay stack Foreign Mission movement which i understand it is repeated to be the first and at williams college. That is right chat. There is supposedly a meeting of the students to discuss and try to act on the whole idea of Foreign Missionary effort. And it was in the middle of the meeting there was a huge storm and they hid behind a haystack and it became known as the haystack meeting. Some of the people in the meeting had a direct connection to henry. 12 of them transferred from williams to yale. I dont know what the politics was, they had no control but they were very sad about the remains. There was a time of crisis the way that i understand. Sso the alliance, some of whom claimed to be connected as ten got up their plan and raised quite a bit of money in hawaii and then they told the authorities what they were about. And as i heard, they were sort of a vigorous debate within the town and i believe that i only wish that he had lived to see the book because he helped me so much early on but the way that i got the story he stood up at a crucial moment in the town discussion of all of this and the town meeting may be inside look, we have to go with the family wishes in this matter. And then h hes had a part will always be with us. And that apparently carried the day. So it is one of the most impressive sights in the cornwall cemetery. If you go there today you can usually see and i dont know, shells brought to visit the grave or other kinds of memorabilia. But they were let go because they had incorporated in their own local history. Sometimes the people that speak loudest are the ones that get remembered and i wonder how many people did not share the prejudice about that and there are at least two families whose parents finally cared about their kids more than they did the intermarriage of out of them so there must have been a lot of people who didnt share that. It isnt totally clear to share the truth. My own guess is that a majority were dead set against it but there was a group of people and they were not speaking very loudly. Fullstop maybe this would be all right and in fact some of the leaders of the board commissioners were in the sponsoring organization would care of lee upset by the prejudice that they had to keep it pretty much to themselves because they were still a minority. And then its interesting how when the debate and controversy spread out among the country of their voices were heard