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  • Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World by Edward E. Andrews
  • Phillip H. Round
Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World. By Edward E. Andrews (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013) 326 pp. $39.95

While visiting Sierra Leone in 1811, African-American evangelist Paul Cuffee witnessed the public reading of a letter from a Christian Oneida community in upstate New York. He was impressed by the attentive response that it received from a Baptist congregational audience. Despite thousands of miles of ocean and centuries of distinct historical and cultural experiences, these disparate Christian communities appeared to share a kinship and camaraderie. The spark of this hard-to-define commonality provides much of the impetus behind Andrews’ Native Apostles, a study of how early modern European missionary societies used indigenous Africans and Native Americans as evangelists across the Atlantic world.

With the maturation of British Atlantic world studies during the past decade, scholars like Andrews have come to realize that in addition to maritime commerce and martial conquest, missionary evangelization was integral to both the expansion of European empires and to the formation of unique, often hybrid cultural spaces across the region. Laura Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia, 2004), for example, demonstrated that Britons’ financial support of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was based in large part on their shared sense of sentimental attachment to the plight of non-European, non-Christian peoples. This collective feeling, in turn, fueled a renewed sense of pride of membership in the British Empire.

Native Apostles thus arrives at a propitious moment in the development of the historiography of the Atlantic world, with its promise of bringing together the often-separate fields of Black and Native Atlantic studies under the rubric of Christian evangelization. As a six-chapter, chronological study that offers the “untold story” of how colonized peoples in the Atlantic world responded to and re-shaped Christianity in their own images, Andrews’ work brings to light heretofore neglected Native American and African participants in the construction of the early modern Atlantic: for example, Philip Quaque, the first African ordained in the English church; Good Peter, Isaac Dakayenenserte, and [End Page 550] Deacon Thomas—leaders of the Oneida and later Protestant evangelists; and the Afro-Moravian missionaries Jacob Protten and James Capitein.

In his opening pages, Andrews usefully reasserts the centrality of Martha’s Vineyard in New England as a locus of Indian preaching efforts that actually eclipsed those of English missionaries; he also fruitfully uncovers the efforts of two Native women (known only as Rebecca and Esther) at nearby Manomet Ponds who ran a school for Indian children. In subsequent chapters, Andrews considers the role of Native peoples in the establishment and running of the “Charleston Negro School” of the 1740s, the West African Moravian and Anglican missions, and the education and conversion of the Iroquois.

Even as Andrews admits to a “paucity of records” about such native missionary activities, he manages to tease out fascinating case studies from the recovery of such persons and events. Especially important in this regard are the structural similarities that he finds between African and Native American Christian communities. Recruited for their skills in the dialects of Native peoples, as well as their access to indigenous kinship networks, Blacks and Indians were often nearly destitute compared to their white missionary peers; the missionary societies regarded them as a cheap and hardy source of labor, able to endure harsher conditions and to subsist on fewer luxuries than their European counterparts. Nor was comfort to be found in their own communities; both groups of native ministers often found themselves isolated and lonely, driven to itinerancy and identity crises in the face of marginalization by Europeans and non-Europeans alike.

In this respect, Andrews’ conceptualization of “native” as including both Indian and Black represents an especially useful innovation; it renders the plight and the agency of these African and Native American subjects as singularly coherent within the logics of European Atlantic empires, as well as their world-wide systems of evangelization. In one of the book’s most successful...

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