The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic by John Demos, and: Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America by Hilary Moss (review)

It is always an exciting endeavor to read and review two books that cover distinct chronological time periods, but yet push scholars to think more broadly and boldly about the history of education in both national and global contexts. The two books examined in this review, John Demos’s The Heathen School and Hilary Moss’s Schooling Citizens, are brilliant works that consider both the opportunities and constraints that education has afforded people of color in the United States across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Structured around four distinct episodes, Demos’s first section— “Beginnings”—outlines the importance of the Chinese trade routes and the global marketplace to the young American nation. Demos notes that traders on their way to and from China often used the Hawaiian Islands as a layover to trade goods. Men came and went, including those who had been expelled from their ships; men who refused to leave the islands; and men who voluntarily boarded ships bound for Canton, London, and New York. Most of these men “led difficult, unrecorded lives, on the margins of organized society,” but one, Henry Obookiah, is still remembered in Hawaii today for the life that he led thousands of miles from home. The next two chapters describe the life history of Obookiah, who rose to fame after he entered the United States and began his studies first as a guest of the president of Yale and eventually as a student at the Mission School for heathen youth. Demos asserts that Obookiah’s experience in the United States represented a “complicated mix—of appreciation and condescension, of closeness and distance” which stemmed from his promise as a Christian convert, his potential as a missionary and a fundraiser, and ultimately his unexpected death (17).

Part 2—“Ascent”—focuses on the rise of the Heathen School in Cornwall, Connecticut, to educate and civilize youth like Obookiah who had potential for Christian conversion and missionary work. Demos argues that the establishment of this school fit neatly with the idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States was different from every other place and thus had a unique role in saving the world from its own destructive practices and backwards ways (59). He traces this movement first to the American frontier, where Americans concentrated on “‘unchurched’ settlers along the western frontier—together with their Indian neighbors—along with those who had traveled from distant lands such as Hawaii, China, and India to settle in America” (63).

In part 3, “Crisis,” Demos documents how two marriages—each between a Cherokee scholar and local white woman—spurred new concerns about racial mixing between the Heathen School youth and local Cornwall residents, particularly its young women. In response, school leaders attempted to establish rules to prevent their students from interacting with locals, but as Demos illustrates, it was easier to establish these rules than to enforce them. Friendships between the heathen and Christian youth continued, and when two others—Gold and Boudinot—announced their intention to marry, the anxieties about interracial marriages between Cornwall youth and Heathen School scholars reached new heights.

In part 4, “Finale,” Demos traces the history of Native American removal and the effects that this policy had on the American mission movement, including the Heathen School in Cornwall. As the United States government forced millions off their land to make way for white settlers, the board appointed a special committee to determine the future of the Mission School. Within a few months, in the wake of the marriage crisis and the subsequent removal of Native Americans from their lands, the board decided to close the...