Missionary Outreach
The Protestant empire was above all a missionary enterprise intended by its promoters to transform and sacralize the American landscape in their image. Its leaders—white middle-class Northeasterners, New Englanders in particular—anxiously sought to expand their religious influence to peoples socially, culturally, and geographically distant from the centers of their civilization.
They found precedent in the London Missionary Society, formed in 1795 to evangelize India, but their primary engines were local. The Second Great Awakening generated evangelical zeal, encouraged social service, promoted revivalism as a means of spreading Christianity, and spawned an array of interdenominational organizations to carry out the missionary enterprise and hasten the millennium. The ideology of manifest destiny promised that God had chosen the United States to occupy the continent and extend Protestant culture to non-Christian peoples in North America and around the world. This ideology derived in large part from American Puritanism, and it is therefore no coincidence that, while the national offices of the Benevolent Empire were in New York and Philadelphia, the primary missionary impulse came from New England. A third stimulus was the anxiety with which Protestant expansionists viewed the “wild” urban and Western frontiers—both particular targets of their benevolence.
Missionary activism appeared at the state level as early as the 1790s, when societies were founded in New York (1796), Connecticut (1798), and Massachusetts (1799) to form churches and schools among whites in the seaboard cities and the trans-Appalachian West. The Connecticut and Massachusetts societies were invigorated after Congregationalists and Presbyterians there joined forces in an 1801 Plan of Union. By 1826, accelerating white Western settlement and expanding missionary outreach had led to the establishment in New York City of a consolidated national organization, the American Home Mission Society (AHMS).
Six years later, Baptists formed the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), also in New York. Reaching as far as Oregon and California, AHMS and ABHMS missionaries helped develop Eastern Protestant institutions and culture throughout the West through their preaching, teaching, and civic service. Also contributing to the urban and westward reach of the Protestant Empire were the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union, and in particular evangelical women, who staffed Eastern voluntary societies and, on occasion, married male missionaries in order to serve farther afield.
Missionary work among Native Americans—by now increasingly wary of white expansionism and protective of their traditional cultures—produced limited results. The most significant efforts were sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Congregationalist-Presbyterian society established in 1810. Promoting Anglo-American agriculture and domesticity as well as Christianity, its agents were most effective among the Cherokees of eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Georgia. Arriving in 1825 and supported in part by the federal government’s “civilization fund,” ABCFM missionary Samuel A. Worcester (1798–1859) and New England-educated Native American minister Elias Boudinot (b. Galegina; 1803?–39) persuaded many Cherokees to accept Protestantism, whites’ agricultural and political patterns, and a written version of the Cherokee language. The federal government nonetheless removed the tribe in the 1830s to Oklahoma, where Worcester joined them. Similarly, the ABCFM’s Stephen R. Riggs (1812–83) and his wife Mary worked among Minnesota’s Dakota (Sioux) beginning in 1837, learning their language, converting several to Christianity, settled agriculture, private property, and literacy, and erecting the Hazelwood mission in 1856.
But warfare between non-Christian Dakotas and the federal government soon drove Riggs and the Dakota Christians westward into what is now South Dakota.Catholic missionaries, too, missionized Western natives. The most notable was Belgian Jesuit Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–73), who arrived in the United States in 1821 and left St. Louis in 1840 to work among the Flathead or Salish of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. His St. Mary’s mission, established in 1841 near Missoula, was soon staffed by several clergy and nuns, although his frequent trips to Europe to garner support kept him from spending much time there himself. St. Mary’s was followed by other Jesuit missions in the Columbia and Willamette river valleys (some of which De Smet helped to found) and by Jesuit activity among the Blackfoot and Dakota. But growing Indian hostility in the Northwest and the discovery of gold in California in 1848 prevented large-scale Catholic immigration in the region, and financial difficulty forced De Smet to abandon his mission in 1855.
Most Protestant missionaries were even more ineffectual. Jason Lee (1803–45), a Methodist revival convert who left Independence, Missouri, in 1834 to work among the Flatheads of Oregon. He made no converts and his mission failed within a year of his death. More disastrous was the fate of Presbyterians Narcissa (1808–47) and Marcus Whitman (1802–47), who traversed the continent by wagon train and horseback in 1836 and established a mission among the Cayuse at Waiilapatu, only to be massacred at their mission house in 1847. Revitalization religions began to appear among the natives of the Pacific Northwest shortly thereafter.
Henry Opukahaia, the Hawaiian native whose highly publicized visit to New England in 1818 made Hawaii a matter of missionary interest to the ABCFM.
The Protestant missionary impulse assumed a global thrust in 1806, when a group of revival-energized Williams College students led by Samuel J. Mills (1783–1818) and crouched in a hayloft during a rainstorm spontaneously held the famous “haystack prayer meeting” and pledged their lives to missionizing abroad. The group went on to Andover Seminary, where they were joined by Adoniram Judson (1788–1850). Their efforts produced the ABCFM, which in 1812 sent Judson, his wife Ann (1789–1826), and Luther Rice (1783–1836) to India. The three converted to Baptist belief en route and, while the Judsons established missions in Burma, Bombay, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Rice returned to the United States for a lobbying effort among the Baptists that spurred them to establish their own foreign mission society in 1814. Poor health kept Mills from foreign travel, but he was active nonetheless. He toured the West for the Connecticut and Massachusetts missionary societies in 1812–13 to assess the region’s religious needs, and led the ABCFM to reach for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1819 by sensationalizing the conversion, 1809 arrival in New England, and death by typhus in 1818 of Hawaiian native Henry Obookiah (Opukahaia). Hoping to begin the millennium on this new Pacific frontier, ABCFM missionaries Hiram Bingham (1789–1869), Asa Thurston (1787–1868), and others, aided by Kamehameha II (Liholiho), converted many islanders and built Congregational churches and schools but did not supplant local tradition. Mills and his colleagues also targeted west Africa, where they hoped to send freed slaves as agents. By midcentury American missionaries were in China, Southeast Asia, Turkey, Palestine, and Latin America, exporting Protestantism in tandem with an expanding American commerce.
The Benevolent Empire as an interdenominational endeavor crumbled by 1850, undermined by sectional conflict and denominational consciousness, and the Civil War severely disrupted missionary outreach.
But the missionary impulse survived. Work abroad—this time under denominational auspices and joined by American Catholics—rebounded in the decades after 1880 with the nation’s expanding political and economic imperialism in Asia and Latin America. Missionaries also found new fields closer to home. They continued evangelizing Native Americans but also turned after 1865 to the emancipated slave population of the Southern states and the growing numbers of non-Protestant immigrants who came from Europe and Asia to augment an expanding urban-industrial working class. Their fearful concern for the future of Protestant piety, morality, and cultural dominance—not to mention white racial supremacy—in the face of increasing religious and cultural diversity generated schools and colleges among Southern blacks and social programs and urban missions among Northern immigrants. Their message of Protestantism, republicanism, and industrial discipline was often perceived as patronizing and therefore resisted.In the final analysis, the missionary ideology was most influential among white Protestants themselves. The image of an expansive American Christian culture proved problematic, as liberal Protestants sensitive to cultural imperialism increasingly acknowledged by the 1930s and 1940s. But it has survived among conservative evangelicals and remains fundamental to American domestic and foreign policy.
