Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America

3. “Common, Plain, Every Day Talk” from “An Uncommon Quarter”: Samson Occom and the Language of the Execution Sermon

X Chapter 3 X “Common, Plain, Every Day Talk” from“An Uncommon Quarter” Samson Occom and the Language of the Execution Sermon “What folly and madness is it in me,”Samson Occom asks,“to suffer any thing of mine to appear in print, to expose my ignorance to the world?” Occom was neither a fool nor ignorant.Instead,in the preface to his best-selling 1772 A Sermon , Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian, he models the humility typical of eighteenth-century prefaces, especially those written by outsiders.1 Like Phillis Wheatley and John Marrant, the Mohegan minister Samson Occom occupied a crucial physical and racial space in the evangelical empire, as his ministry engaged northeastern Christians while keeping the needs of outsiders , especially Native Americans, at the forefront of his mission. Similar to Wheatley and Marrant, Occom and his texts traveled throughout the North Atlantic, from the American colonies to Great Britain and back. And, like Wheatley and Marrant, his physical person, his oral performances, and his written texts combined to create amazingly rich literacy events, especially in Great Britain where he traveled from 1765 to 1768 to raise funds for an Indian charity school. There, he delivered dozens of sermons, solicited donations, and was feted as the first Native American minister to visit that country, with his image reproduced as a popular mezzotint. Consequently, Occom developed a public presence and had a long writing history before he arranged for the pamphlet publication of the work for which he was most famous in his lifetime , A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian. These literacy events render Occom’s situation rather different from those of Wheatley, Marrant, or Briton Hammon, all of whom first emerged in public life via their published works. And yet Occom’s A Sermon captivated the popular imagination much as did Phillis Wheatley’s elegy for George Whitefield, leading to “common, plain, every day talk” U 115 nineteen editions published between 1772 and 1827 in the colonies, the early United States, and Great Britain, and giving Occom a material presence that equaled the range of his itinerant preaching and extended beyond his lifetime.2 The transmission of Occom’s sermon from Connecticut to Britain, like the circulation of Wheatley’s elegy for Whitefield from Massachusetts to Britain, illustrates that the textual manifestations of the evangelical empire flowed in both directions across the Atlantic. Occom was an energetic writer, and he left behind journals, petitions and tribal documents,sermon notes,hymns,many letters,and two drafts of an autobiographical narrative.3 With the exception of A Sermon and A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774), these other works were not published during his lifetime, a fact which reminds us that one does not need to be published to be a writer engaged broadly with a culture. While holding that principle Mezzotint of Samson Occom titled The Reverend Mr. Samson Occom: The First Indian Minister That Ever Was in Europe (London: H. Parker, 1768). Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 116 Y chapter three firmly—that publication was not necessarily the sine qua non of eighteenthcentury authorship—we nonetheless must acknowledge the way in which Occom ’s historical presence has been distorted in contemporary literary studies . Occom, like Wheatley, frequently is a placeholder on American literature syllabi—an Indian who finally speaks for himself in print.4 Ironically, the text for which he is best known, his 1768 autobiographical narrative, reprinted in modern anthologies as “A Short Narrative of My Life,” was never published in his lifetime. “A Short Narrative” provides marvelous insight into the challenges Occom faced as a teacher, a minister, a husband, and a father, and it speaks centrally to the widespread influence of the Great Awakening in bringing Christianity to those who lived on the margins of Anglo-American culture. However, the narrative also positions Occom at odds with white culture. His becomes the Indian voice crying out from the wilderness of racial prejudice and discrimination and calling for a radically hospitable Christianity that embraces all. Certainly, Occom’s life and ministry encompassed all of those positions. Occom’s autobiography enables teachers to draw a direct line from the Great Awakening and New Light theology through Occom to David Walker and William Apess (Pequot) who, enabled by nineteenth-century liberalism, the nascent human rights movement, and vast technological changes in print practices , attack Christian...