T. C. Stuart and the Monroe Mission among the Chickasaws in Mississippi, 1819–1834

The example of Presbyterian missions to the Chickasaws in northern Mississippi presents a myriad of historical issues concerning the missionaries themselves, the Chickasaws, enslaved Africans belonging to the Chickasaws, and the multiethnic nature of early nineteenth-century mission church experience. To be sure, internal and sometimes external contradictions “bemired southern evangelicals,” and the life and work of Presbyterian missionary T. C. Stuart, among others, bear witness to the complexity of that struggle.¹ Making missions to Native Americans in northern Mississippi even more sophisticated are the theological implications of Presbyterianism involved in the mission’s goals and approach.² Prior to Chickasaw Removal and after banishment to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), Christian missionary men and women worked alongside and cultivated relationships with their indigenous neighbors. Historians have examined these missions among Native American nations such as the Cherokees and found that the missions to the southern Indians impacted the overall development of Native American religion in America, specifically in the South.³

Historians have also investigated the role of slavery within Native American nations. Many Indian groups were struggling to survive within a context where human chattel slavery had become normative.⁴ Given the prevalence of slavery in the Mississippi territory, the mission activity in frontier Mississippi after statehood was thoroughly multiethnic. Indeed, the multiethnic nature of mission activity in frontier Mississippi lends complexity to any understanding of T. C. Stuart, the Monroe Church, Presbyterian domestic missions, and religion in Mississippi. Mission work was also rooted in centuries of European incursion and tied as much to European ideas of property, race, and slavery as it was to American Indian cultural practices.⁵ Slavery, racialist ideology, and multiethnic Native American ancestry had a tremendous impact on understandings of Presbyterian missions among the Chickasaws.⁶ In the early nineteenth century, federal policy toward Indians was unapologetically Christian and assimilationist in its intent. John C. Calhoun and Thomas McKenney, as well as other early agents of the US government, sought to use “Christian missionaries to mold Indians into the models of American society.” Early missionary attempts at “molding” the Chickasaws gave way to the power and influence of leaders who wanted their “children to read and write and do mathematics.” Missionaries quickly realized that the Chickasaws had their own views and uses for missionaries. Chickasaw “leaders saw missionaries as a means of gaining an education in the white man’s ways so that they could learn to deal with the forces infringing on their lives.”⁷

Mission churches became spaces for reciprocal, multiethnic interaction, ecclesiastical equality, and mutual edification. The mission church offered a space on the fringes of southern society where missionaries often pushed the envelope of contemporary social mores regarding race. Missionaries found themselves at the very center of these interactions, and, given the fiercely racialized southern religious hierarchy of the early nineteenth century, missionaries to the Chickasaws found themselves culturally, geographically, racially, and religiously on the periphery. These complexities help us further understand the multiethnic nature of the early nineteenth-century South and how religion played a pivotal role in providing a space for multiethnic interaction.

Licensed to preach by the South Carolina Presbytery on April 19, 1819, the Reverend Thomas C. Stuart, otherwise known as Father Stuart, was one of the earliest Presbyterian missionaries in Mississippi. Sent by the Synod of South Carolina in 1820, Stuart established the Monroe Mission and was a missionary among the Chickasaws of northeastern Mississippi. Today, the Monroe Mission, or the old Monroe Church, is just six miles south of the town of Pontotoc. In 1823 Stuart organized the church and by 1830 had a membership of over one hundred members. E. T. Winston, biographer and editor of Stuart’s published papers, mentioned that Stuart’s mission to the Chickasaws was the beginning of “religion and education for all of North Mississippi.”⁸ While this commitment to bring formal Christianity to the Chickasaws was certainly driven by evangelicalism, there were other characteristics that typified Presbyterian mission work. Presbyterians were noted for their belief in education, so teaching students how to...