A Story of Star Students

In The Heathen School, John Demos traces the rise and fall of the Foreign Mission School that operated in Cornwall, Connecticut, for a bit more than a decade beginning in 1817. Drawing students from Hawaii, from the Mediterranean, from Asia, and especially from American Indian communities, the school's promoters hoped to train missionaries in New England, send them back into the world, and extend the reach of their brand of Protestant Christianity. Demos saw this short-lived school as a microcosm, shedding important light on American exceptionalism, that “redemptive project” and “crusader mentality” (p. 4) that long has rested at the core of national identity; on the challenges that come with confronting and accepting cultural difference; and, finally, on the history of failure, though Demos has relatively little to say about this.

Four characters dominate the narrative: Demos himself, as historian and storyteller, and the school's three star students. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Demos opens with a discussion of the China trade and the place in it occupied by the Hawaiian Islands, showing that this international venture was all sorts of things, great and small, far and wide across the globe. Pacific Islanders, he says, engaged themselves in the China trade, and among the most important of these was Henry Obookiah.

Obookiah's journeys, his conversion to Christianity, and his arrival in Connecticut where he and four other Hawaiian boys comprised the first group of students, fills much of the first quarter of the book. Demos discusses the missionary impulse, the growth of the “Heathen School” as an institution, its early successes, and the alacrity with which the school's promoters on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions broadcast their triumphs to prospective donors and supporters.

He also describes the school's gradual decline, by examining the evolution of an American science of race, and the emergence and development of racist thought about native peoples. He discusses the growing number of Native American students at the school, and the courtship and eventual marriage of two of those students—the Cherokees John Ridge and Elias Boudinot—to the white daughters of men affiliated with the Foreign Mission School. These marriages provoked an ugly and racist backlash, which Demos describes in detail as he follows Ridge, Boudinot, and their wives from the Indian school back to the Cherokee Nation in Georgia, and along the Trail of Tears to the Indian Territory. Retelling a story that historians have told many times before, Demos describes the assassination (or execution) of Ridge and Boudinot for violating a Cherokee Nation law that made land sales a capital crime.¹

Interspersed with these discussions are a series of “interludes.” Demos visits Hawaii, the home of Obookiah. He roams the beach, hoping to see the place where Obookiah “was born and passed through childhood—in effect, to walk in his tracks” (p. 48). He visits Cornwall looking for physical signs of the Mission School. While walking the town common, Demos “can easily imagine” events in the life of the Mission School. At the Academy building, which still stands, “in my mind's eye,” Demos tells us, he can “glimpse the scholars passing in and out, a medley of size, age, color, clothing and demeanor” (p. 123). Finally, Demos visits the Cherokee Nation in Georgia and in the West. At New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation prior to 1838, Demos studies replica buildings and, again, tells his readers how “in my mind's eye I correct for a passage of two centuries by imagining the presence of trees and other vegetation” (p. 197).

The interludes reveal as much about how Demos works as a historian as they do about the places that he visited. Demos tells us how he first learned of the Foreign Mission School, of his initial visit to the library, and how he concluded that the...