Visiting Harriet’s Literary Neighborhood #8: William Apess

A Son of the Forest and “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man”
 
In 1829, Harriet Beecher, though still in her teens, was a teacher at her sister Catherine’s Hartford Female Seminary.  She was also an enthusiastic participant in the school’s campaign of writing letters, petitions, and circulars on behalf of the Cherokee Indians.  In President Andrew Jackson’s State of the Union address in 1829, he supported calls for the Cherokees’ forced relocation from their ancestral homeland in Georgia to federal territory west of the Mississippi. Harriet decried that policy.
 
That same year, William Apess’s A Son of the Forest became the first extensive autobiography written and published by a Native American.  With Native American, white, and possibly African American ancestry, Apess identified with the remnant of the Pequot people, a group his father had joined.  Most Pequots had been massacred or dispersed by whites in the Pequot War of the 1630s.
 
Son of the Forest traces Apess’s struggle with alcoholism, military service for the U.S. in the War of 1812, and conversion to evangelical Methodism.  He became an ordained minister in the newly forming Protestant Methodist Church. 
 
In Apess’s autobiography and other works such as “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833), Christianity serves as a standard by which to judge—and condemn—white treatment of Native Americans.  (Apess preferred the term “Natives” to the more common “Indians,” which he considered “a slur upon an oppressed and scattered nation.”)
 
One of Apess’s important strategies was to link the oppression of Native Americans with that of African Americans and other people of color around the world: “If black or red skin or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this earth.”
 
In addition to his writing, Apess became an activist for the rights of the Mashpee people in Massachusetts.  He was jailed for civil disobedience, and the Mashpees’ nonviolent protest won some of their demands.  Apess died in 1839 at the age of 41. 
 
We don’t know if Harriet read his work, but scholars think that Apess may have influenced Thoreau, Melville, and especially Frederick Douglass as he was writing “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
 
You can read Son of the Forest and “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” on line for free. Just search by title.  Let us know what connections you see between Apess’s work and Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.  Or what about connections to writing from our own time?

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About the author:
Dr. John Getz, Professor Emeritus, Xavier University, retired in 2017 after teaching English there for 45 years.  He specializes in American literature, especially nineteenth century, as well as the intersections of literature and peace studies. He has written articles on a variety of authors including Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, and Ursula Le Guin. He appears in the documentary film Becoming Harriet Beecher Stowe, scheduled for release soon by Fourth Wall Films.   ​