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Authors
William Apess (1798-1839)
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Kim McQuaid’s “William Apess, a Pequot: An Indian Reformer in the Jackson Era,” New England Quarterly (1977), 605–25, is the first study to recognize the full potential significance of Apess’s work. Arnold Krupat, in The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (1989) and Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (1992), has offered readings of Apess’s major works. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff’s “Three Nineteenth-Century American- Indian Autobiographies,” in Ruoff and Jerry Ward Jr.’s Redefining American Literary History (1990), also comments on Apess. David Murray’s Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (1991) has some informative and sophisticated discussions of Apess. The complete works of Apess have been superbly edited by Barry O’Connell, in a volume called On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot (1992). O’Connell’s introduction and notes provide the indispensable starting point for any further study of Apess. O’Connell’s A Son of the Forest and Other Writings (1997), a selection from the complete writings, has an updated introduction that adds some new material. See also the chapters “The Irony and Mimicry of William Apess” and “Personifying America: Apess’s ‘Eulogy on King Philip,’ ” in Cheryl Walker’s Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth- Century Nationalisms (1997). Maureen Konkle has a chapter on Apess in her Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography (2004), and Robert Warrior’s The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005) has a chapter offering a “Eulogy” for William Apess. David Carlson’s Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (2006) has two chapters on Apess, one on what he calls the “constraints of conversion,” and a second on “Indian liberalism.” Krupat’s All That Remains: Native Studies (2007) considers “William Apess as Public Intellectual.”
As William Apess tells it in his autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), his grandfather was a white man who married the granddaughter of King Philip, or Metacom, the loser of the 1678 "King Philip's War." As a small boy, Apess was abused by his alcoholic grandparents and then sold as an indentured laborer. The boy's master allowed him to attend school and introduced him to Christianity, the most important influence in Apess's life. As an adult, he became a preacher, and in 1833 he moved to Mashpee, the last Indian town in Massachusetts, to preach. Apess saw Christianity and racial prejudice as completely incompatible, and this became one of the central themes of his writings and sermons. In his famous Eulogy on King Philip, delivered in 1836 in Boston, he insisted that Indians wanted only what the descendants of the Pilgrims wanted: justice and Christian fellowship.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
From the historical and literary record, we have only a glimpse of Apess, and he seems a tragic figure, expressing a deep sense of betrayal by the culture whose faith and social practices he was essentially coerced to accept as a boy. An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man (1833) is an epilogue to a book about the experiences of several Native American children growing up in an increasingly white world -- and this essay can also be read as an epilogue, or epitaph, to Apess's own life.
1. Apess has a powerful sense of irony. Select passages in which he uses this rhetorical strategy, and compare these moments to passages in Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
2. A central theme of An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man is the inherent incompatibility of race prejudice with the tenets of the Christian faith. How does Apess first express that discontinuity? How does he develop it, rather than merely belabor it, over the course of this essay?
