Putting on “the Helmet of Salvation” and Wielding “the Sword of the Spirit”: Joseph Johnson, Moses Paul, and the Word of God

And be assured, if you fall short of heaven, into hell you must be turned: and I doubt not, but this is the earnest prayer and desire of many, who have a prejudice against the Indian nations.

Joseph Johnson to Moses Paul, March 29, 1772

And considering that we are of the same nation I have a peculiar desire that you should preach to me upon that occasion & therefore that I may likely better receive and be more impressed with the same things said by you, than if said by any other man.

Moses Paul to Samson Occom, July 16, 1772

On September 2, 1772, Moses Paul, a Christian Indian, was hanged in New Haven, Connecticut, for the murder of Moses Cook, a white man.¹ In “The Execution of Moses Paul: A Story of Crime and Contact in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut,” Ava Chamberlain comprehensively investigates and clearly explains the details surrounding Paul’s case, which probably “would have been quickly forgotten had he not, as his ‘earnest & dying request,’ invited the Reverend Samson Occom to deliver the execution sermon” (414–15). Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s sermon was first published just two months after the execution (on October 31), and by 1827 it had been published at least nineteen times, including one edition in Welsh (Love 174–75). A murder committed by a drunken Indian, his subsequent execution, and a dramatic sendoff by the most famous Indian preacher of the day combined to make Occom’s A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian an almost instant bestseller. It has, indeed, kept Moses Paul’s story alive into the twenty-first century by its inclusion in anthologies of early American literature. Although Occom’s sermon is the most well-known text connected to Moses Paul’s story, it belongs to a web of documents that have, as yet, received little attention. The March 29, 1772, letter from Joseph Johnson (Mohegan) to Moses Paul—an important item of public correspondence that addresses Paul’s salvation, but that Chamberlain’s detailed account relegates to a passing reference in two footnotes—and the July 16, 1772, letter from Moses Paul to Samson Occom, in which Paul asks Occom to preach at his execution, are two strands in this web that illustrate some of the communitistic ways in which early New England’s indigenous peoples used Christianity, literacy, and the rhetoric of nationhood to assert Native sovereignty.²

I

The alleged murder took place on Saturday, December 7, 1771; an account that was printed in both the December 10–17 Connecticut Courant (published in Hartford) and the December 20 New London Gazette provides the details:

New-Haven, [. . .] Dec. 13. [. . .] Last Saturday evening Mr. Moses Cook, of Waterbury, being at Mr. Clark’s tavern, in Bethany, where there was an Indian named Moses Paul, who had behaved so disorderly, (on Mrs. Clark’s refusing to let him have a dram) that he was turned out of doors, when he swore to be revenged on some one person in the house; and Mr. Cook going out soon after, received from the Indian (who tis supposed lay in wait near the house, in order to put his threat in execution) a violent blow on his head, with some weapon, that broke his scull in so terrible a manner, that he died of the wound last night. The Indian was apprehended and committed to the goal [sic] in this town last Sunday.

Chamberlain explains that the December 13 dateline indicates that the story probably first appeared in the December 13 issue of the Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy (421n21). It was not unusual for the same story to be printed in numerous publications, and considering the fact that the three newspapers in which the story appeared were all operated by members of the Green family,³ it is likely that the sharing of an item sure to interest readers of all kinds would have been automatic. It seems clear that the...