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Chapter  Visions of Handsome Lake Seneca Dreams, Prophecy, and the Second Great Awakening matthew dennis Now it came to pass in these days that one of the Heathen (the Brother of Corn-planter the Chief[)] lay upon his bed sick and behold he was in a trance for nearly an hour, and when his Spirrits revived again he spake of the many things which he had seen and heard. —Quaker missionary Halliday Jackson (1800) With these words, the Quaker missionary Halliday Jackson narrated the genesis of a new Seneca religion. He employed an archaic, biblical language to mark the seriousness of his purpose and the larger historic moment.1 Not just among the Senecas, but also throughout the United States, Americans were beginning to undergo revivals, experiment with communitarianism , contemplate the millennium, experience visions, hail new prophets, and found new faiths. Historian Gordon S. Wood has called this era ‘‘the time of greatest religious chaos and originality in American history.’’2 By midsummer 1799, the young Quaker missionaries Halliday Jackson, Joel Swayne, and Henry Simmons had been living among the Allegany Senecas for barely a year. These men represented the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and its well-established Indian philanthropy efforts. The Seneca community at Allegany, located in southwestern New York, along the border with Pennsylvania, would be a major Quaker missionary focus well into Visions of Handsome Lake 227 the nineteenth century, yielding both successes and setbacks for Natives and Friends alike. Jackson, Swayne, and Simmons had arrived the previous May. Welcomed by the community leader Cornplanter and his people, they set themselves up in the old village of Genesinguhta, upriver from Cornplanter ’s town, Jenuchshadago. There, Jackson wrote, ‘‘we began to be husbandmen and Vinedressers, and laboured abundantly in the field.’’ The young men persisted through the fall and winter. In the spring, an optimistic Jackson was inspired to quote Song of Songs (2:12): ‘‘the winter is past, the storms were over and gone, the flowers appeard on the Earth, & the time of the Singing of Birds was come.’’ Jackson hoped for more than the annual renewal that came each spring; he dreamed of cultural revolution among the Senecas: ‘‘And the works of our hands did prosper, and brought forth fruits of increase—And the Heathen round about us began to labour in these days and enclose fields, like unto us for they desired to become husbandmen.’’ But the rebirth that materialized among the Senecas—a revitalization the Quakers themselves helped to advance—was not the one these Friends had envisioned. A hybrid faith influenced by Christianity and white social practice, the Gaiwiio (or Good Message) nonetheless found its deepest inspiration in Iroquois traditions and the new prophecies of Handsome Lake.3 This essay examines the visions of Handsome Lake and the Native revival and new religion it engendered. It places the Seneca prophet’s revelations in the context of an ancient Iroquois dream practice—an old and enduring cultural phenomenon, with important religious, social, and therapeutic functions—as well as the popular world of the early national United States, which remained a ‘‘world of wonders.’’ In examining the theology and moral reform that emanated from Handsome Lake’s revelations, I explore the gendered content of the prophet’s ministry, which in limited ways meshed with the messages of Protestant missionaries. And I analyze the ways in which dreams offered power, authorizing both radical and conservative teachings. Handsome Lake’s visions were simultaneously innovative and ‘‘traditional’’—through his dreams the prophet translated relative powerlessness into new strength and revitalization, offering his people (like the citizens of the new republic generally) a means to deal with their postcolonial predicament. A focus on dreams and visions among the Senecas helps to situate this Native revival within the contours of the Second Great Awakening—a critical historical event largely examined by historians as if Indians did not exist. Yet the Senecas lived and continued to live within the (2024-04-19 21:54 GMT) 228 The Eighteenth Century heart of the Burned-Over District in New York, a dynamic place of dreamers and prophets, radical experimentation and emergent new religions.4 ‘‘The winter of 1799–1800 was in western New York long called the time of the Great Revival.’’ So wrote the historian of American religion Whitney R. Cross, as he considered the onset of the Second Great Awakening without mentioning the Senecas or Handsome Lake. Yet the Seneca prophet anticipated by a matter of months the surge of revivals that...

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