Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic

4. Friendly Mission: The Holy Conversation of Quakers and Senecas

chapter 4 Friendly Mission: The Holy Conversation of Quakers and Senecas We desire not to fill your ears with words, but rather to recommend you to retire and gather your minds into Quiet and Settlement. . . . You will be in the way of receiving light knowledge and Counsel superior to any we can impart for there is a divine principal of light and grace in every heart. —Quaker missionary Halliday Jackson to the Senecas (1806) We find that Friends are different from other people[;] they do not speak roughly to us, and what they say is like our friends and intended for our good. —Cornplanter (1809) In the summer of 1798 Quaker missionaries first arrived among the Senecas . They looked forward, hopeful about the future, but that beginning had a significant past. The Quakers knew that Senecas had been possessed by unprecedented dangers in the post-Revolutionary years. And they were on hand when Handsome Lake, through his prophecies and programs, developed a hybrid religious and social solution to Seneca perils. As Handsome Lake’s teachings took shape, Quaker missionaries offered their own assessment of the Senecas’ travails, and they too prescribed solutions. The Friends’ and Handsome Lake’s religious programs were clearly at 118 mastery odds. Yet, surprisingly, Handsome Lake’s ministry did not threaten the Friends’ mission, nor did the Quakers’ holy undertaking fundamentally challenge the Gaiwiio. The presence of Quakers meant the relative absence of other, more meddlesome Christian missionaries. And the prophet proved able to cultivate his new way within a space inadvertently opened and defended by Quakers. None of this was a conscious strategy. But the Friends in turn benefited from Handsome Lake’s measured support of their social program. Quakers were unusual missionaries. And their cooperative approach made for a strange, unplanned, but vital partnership with the Senecas, characterized by disagreement as well as agreement, but consistently supported by mutual respect and toleration. In 1811, the Philadelphia magazine Port Folio would publish a diatribe it attributed to ‘‘the Prophet of Alleghany.’’ Allegedly, he was addressing his people on the Genesee River in June 1802, seeking to counter the appeals of a ‘‘missionary’’ whose work represented the culmination of colonial ruin: He began with a catalog of indictments: ‘‘They have driven your fathers from their ancient inheritance—they have destroyed them with the sword and poisonous liquors—they have dug up their bones, and left them to bleach in the wind.’’ Now, the Handsome Lake figure railed, missionaries aimed ‘‘at completing your wrongs, and insuring your destruction by cheating you into the belief of that divinity, whose very precepts they plead in justification of all the miseries they have heaped on your race.’’1 The Quakers were decidedly not the missionaries the Seneca prophet supposedly excoriated here. Handsome Lake saw them as partners, not opponents , a potential antidote to the poison of white encroachment. His chief disciple, Governor Blacksnake, would tell the Friends in 1806, ‘‘all the Indians and the white People know that the Great Spirit talks with our Prophet. . . . Your young men [resident missionaries] and us are like one[.]when we want anything done we consult them and they assist us, and our Prophet tells us what to do and so we get instruction from both.’’ The Quakers, for their part, resisted any urge to dispute Handsome Lake’s prophetic status publicly, and they were eager to advance their mission through collaboration and without aggressive proselytizing. They practiced restraint, refused to assert their doctrines, and counseled quiet reflection among the Senecas, as capable as any people to receive the Inner Light.2 The Friends’ charity and forbearance would help enable Seneca revitalization in ways they could hardly imagine. They engaged the Senecas in a long-term conversation of words and deeds and aspired to transform them, Friendly Mission 119 but the Quakers’ greatest contribution to Native survival might have been their willingness to take ‘‘no’’ for an answer. Holy Inoculation: Quakers among the Senecas As the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening began to blaze though the Burned-Over District of New York and beyond, the arrival of the Society of Friends among the Senecas produced a firebreak of sorts. The Quakers were just as steadfast as other missionaries, and just as devoted to Native cultural and religious transformation. Like others, they sought a fundamental alteration of the Senecas through a program of ‘‘civilization’’ and Christianization. But...