(1798-1839)
Pequot preacher and writer; leader of the "Mashpee Revolt"
William Apess's newspaper obituary makes its judgment summarily: "In New York, it appears that for some time past, his conduct had been quite irregular, and he had lost the confidence of the best portions of the community.... He has occasionally indulged much too freely in drink, and would take frolics that would continue for a week or two." His death at forty-one seems to have been the direct result of alcoholism.
Born in a tent in the woods in late January 1798 somewhere around Colrain, Massachusetts, Apess had a beginning that appears consonant with his end. His father, also named William, was a man of mixed race, part Pequot and part white; his mother, Candace (her last name is unknown), was probably a slave, quite possibly part African American. These were people at the bottom of every social hierarchy—poor, without a stable homestead, a mixture of the two races most despised by other Americans. Nothing in the world to which he was born promised young William tolerance or support.
Thus begun and ended, William Apess's life might seem scripted on the most blinding stereotypes about Indians. Yet his books and his promotion of Indian rights justify our attention, in part because of their subversion of all such stereotypes. A knowledge of the circumstances of his birth and death, and of the fact that he was nearly beaten to death by his maternal grandmother when he was four, complicates most categories of racial or ethnic identity, as does what we know of the rest of his life.
At age five he was bound out to a neighboring white family, the Furmans, in Colchester, Connecticut. Raised by them until he was eleven, during which time he received his only formal education—six "winter" terms—Apess then had his indenture successively sold to two elite gentry families in the area. In April 1813 he ran away from the second of these, the William Williamses, to New York City, where he joined a militia company and served in the War of 1812. Being forbidden to attend Methodist camp meetings had precipitated Apess's decision to abandon his master and join the army. He mustered out in 1815, and spent the next eighteen months working a variety of jobs in Canada—all the while struggling to overcome a serious drinking problem that had become established when he was in the militia. Determined to break the habit, Apess decided to return "home"—to Connecticut, to his natal family, and to his people, the Pequots, from whom he had been separated for all of his formative years.
In the course of these experiences Apess forged a powerful identity as a Pequot, despite the trauma of having been beaten by his Pequot grandmother and brought up in apparent isolation from other Pequots. Just as remarkably, he made himself, with at best a modest formal education, into a writer of notable polemical power; he became a canny critic of white Europeans' use of history and Christianity to justify their racism against Indians. His autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829; 2d ed. 1831), is the first published autobiography actually written by an American Indian.
A Son of the Forest tells the story of a life of abuse and oppression, and tells it without either self-pity or an insistence on its author's exceptional nature. Produced for a world of white readers in which Indians existed only as stereotypes—stereotypes so pervasive and tenacious that the actualities of Indians' lives and histories could not be successfully represented—Apess's first book uses irony, as well as direct address, in a remarkable attempt to communicate very different understandings of Indians' lives.
Apess's own life after he returned to Connecticut from Canada in 1816-17 changed in ways that both confounded the stereotypes and made possible the assertion of his Pequot identity. Two important events marked the first years after his return. Apess once again attended Methodist camp meetings, drawn not simply to Christianity, but to a church that then had a special appeal to the lowly and dominated. Its egalitarianism had special power for those, like Apess, who had experienced the worst of the prejudices of the culture, enabling an affirmation not only of one's own spiritual worth, but also of one's own kind: "I felt convinced that Christ died for all mankind—that age, sect, color, country, or situation make no difference. I felt an assurance that I was included in the plan of redemption with all my brethren." He experienced conversion and was baptized in December 1818.
He also met Mary Wood of Salem, Connecticut, at a camp meeting. Herself apparently of mixed racial parentage, Mary Wood had also been a bound servant. They were married in December 1821 and lived together until Apess's death. They had at least three children, the oldest a son, Elisha or William (?), and two daughters (their names are unknown, though they married brothers, the Chummucks of Mashpee, Massachusetts).
Throughout the 1820s Apess grew more confident that God had called him to preach the Gospel. Refused ordination by the Methodist Episcopal Church—because, in his view, of its prejudice against Indians—he was ordained in 1829-30 by the Protestant Methodist Church, a more egalitarian Methodist group.
Apess's ordination inaugurated a brief but brilliant public career as a preacher to Indians, African Americans, and whites throughout New England and New York. An itinerant, following Methodist practices of the day, Apess was able to become knowledgeable about the conditions and needs of his fellow Indians throughout the region. He seems to have increasingly seen himself as their advocate. It was in this role that he first visited Mashpee, the largest of the surviving Indian towns in Massachusetts. The Mashpees had long been struggling to achieve full self-government, free from the paternalism of state-appointed white overseers and a minister chosen by Harvard College. Apess's arrival in 1833 was catalytic. The Mashpees made him one of their leaders. His polemical skills were at their sharpest in the several manifestos he produced, powerful enough to persuade Levi Lincoln, the rather hysterical governor of the state, that he faced a full-fledged armed rebellion—thus the name "the Mashpee Revolt" for what was a peaceable demand for all the rights of self-government belonging to any citizen. Apess's account, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts (1835), his fourth publication, remains the best source of information about the incident.
The controversy over Mashpee briefly made Apess a national and regional figure—and earned him many enemies. The Mashpees won most of their demands and, possibly for this reason, drew away from Apess's leadership. His last known public appearance came in Boston in early 1836, when he gave his "Eulogy on King Philip." It generated enough controversy that he was asked to repeat the address a second time. Only his obituary gives us any information about his final years.
Brief though it was, as hard as it began and ended, Apess's life was filled with achievement. His five publications represent the most substantial body of work by a Native American writer prior to the twentieth century. In them and in his life he demonstrated that in New England, and in the United States in general, Indian peoples persisted in forms and cultural identities far more complex and diverse than white people realized. His writing continues to teach by provoking a steady examination of the differences between Indian peoples' actual lives and the Euro-American culture's ongoing misrepresentations of them.
Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Barry O'Connell, On Our Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
Barry O'Connell
Amherst College
