William Apess and the Plight of Nineteen-Century Native Americans
By Simonetta Carr - Posted at Place for Truth:
“As the nineteenth century moves on,” W. Robert Godfrey tells us, “Americans are by and large gripped with a new sense of optimism – optimism that they have found a republic successfully, optimism that they are moving westward, optimism in what many called a sense of ‘manifest destiny,’ a sense of providence, that the Lord’s hand is on this nation and wants us to succeed. Now, of course, the question is always, ‘Who is us?’ A manifest destiny was not always successful for Native Americans, and the push westward was justified as what the Lord wanted for the growing European and now Americanized population on the East Coast as they moved west.”[1]It was a time when many people began to speak against slavery – a subject that later led to the American Civil War. Many writings by abolitionists are still popular today. But while people like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass are studied in elementary schools, few people know about the Native Americans who spoke out for justice and peaceful cooperation. One of these was William Apess, a pastor and prolific writer who was highly recognized in his lifetime.
A Difficult Youth
Apess was born in 1798 in Colrain, Massachusetts, the oldest of six children, to poor mixed-race parents who soon separated. He then lived with his grandmother who was addicted to alcohol and beat him so frequently and violently that the town’s authorities intervened by moving him into a foster family of European descent.
Apess moved from foster home to foster home until he was old enough to formally become an indentured servant. The families who took him in taught him to fear Native Americans. Their teachings, coupled with memories of the beatings he had received from his grandmother, caused him to run every time he saw anyone with a darker complexion.
But the beatings were not a thing of the past. Once, when depression after the death of a old woman who had been very close to him made him physically sick, the master of the house, convinced this was a work of the devil, and decided to frighten the devil by flogging the boy. This was just one of many beatings he received in various homes during his indenture.