Abstract
In this chapter the author draws from extensive research using the Bethlehem Boarding School archives, housed at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA. Examining the students’ oration of 1793, student records, periodicals, and publishers’ receipts demonstrates that the inclusion of the female students in the 1793 service in the Old Chapel represents an important liminal space of contact between Native Americans and the newly established Republic. The author argues that a collaborative classroom exercise of dialogue and poetry written by the female students, entitled “On the Aborigines of America from Carver, Morse, Smith, and Bartram,” presents a subversive model of white relations with Native Americans that seeks to counter genocidal policies towards America’s indigenous peoples. The students’ oration, which cites numerous injustices culled from personal experience and the readings of books and periodicals, presents an alternative model of Native American and European American relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Organized public examinations and demonstrations of student oratory were a common feature of many female academies during the early republic. Carolyn Eastman notes that “Eighteenth-century schoolgirls of all ranks spoke regularly on formal, ceremonial and recognizably ‘public’ occasions—and they learned to do so in a cultural context that foresaw uses for those skills in everyday life” (261). Catherine E. Kelly notes that “At the Bethlehem Female Seminary the most prominent ‘daughters of Columbia’ claimed identities as sophisticated and discerning readers, and they did so within an intellectual and cultural context that laid a heavy emphasis on ‘ornamental accomplishments’” (124). It is important that the circumstance of Stansbury’s speech to the Iroquois and the students’ attendance at the service in the Old Chapel was orchestrated at the request of the students. Even though the service was an organized and formal welcome of the Iroquois to Bethlehem, the students’ participation was an impromptu entrance into a politicized public sphere. Stansbury’s speech is noteworthy as a production of a student at a female academy because of its political engagement. Unlike many records of public oration from seminary students during the early republic, Stansbury’s speech exists outside of typical public examinations meant to showcase student work.
- 2.
Throughout this essay I have retained the spelling and punctuation of Kliest and the students of the Boarding School when quoting their work. All materials used with permission of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem.
- 3.
Kliest was the daughter of Anna and Daniel Kliest, a locksmith and citizen of Bethlehem. Kliest entered the Boarding School as a young girl and was educated there until 1777. In 1788, Kliest became a teacher at the Boarding School. During Kliest’s time at the Boarding School, she experienced much of the same curriculum as her later students. Kliest was an innovative and talented teacher, who taught a variety of courses including writing, reading, and art classes. See McKinley, passim.
- 4.
Robert Beachy traces the importance of Moravian manuscript culture in the Atlantic World, specifically the role of the “Gemein Nachrichten,” the record of each Moravian community, which “functioned primarily as a communal devotional organ, circulating reports from Moravian missionaries and communities” (34).
- 5.
William C. Reichel’s history of the Boarding School is an extensive documentation and invaluable resource that draws on the archival record and personal accounts of the students and teachers. Reichel’s work on the Boarding School influences several subsequent scholarly works. Mabel Haller’s Early Moravian Education in Pennsylvania is an indispensable resource on the Moravians and their role in education, especially in early America. Mary Beth Norton’s examination of the Bethlehem Boarding School draws heavily on the work of Reichel, Mabel, and family papers, but not the archives of the Boarding School. See Norton 283–287. In many cases scholarship on the Boarding School has focused on a limited segment of the archival record, often relying on secondary sources. Thankfully, more recent work has begun to delve deeply into the archival record of the Boarding School. Recent scholarship dealing exclusively with the Boarding School explores topics relating to musical education or other subjects like race . Catherine Bancroft’s exploration of race and the history of the Boarding School through an exploration of the life of Maria Beaumont, a student from the West Indies, is an important intervention on the history of the Boarding School during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For further information about the curriculum of the Boarding School see Smith 35–62.
- 6.
Katherine Carté Engel documents the evolution of Bethlehem as a communal economy and the social and economic effects of the Moravians abandoning this system. Engel also traces how the military and political strife of the 1750s and 1760s fundamentally changed the way the people of Bethlehem interacted with Native Americas. See Engel 240–241.
- 7.
Engel notes, “When Bethlehem’s leaders placed the school and its students at the center of the ceremony, they elevated the school above all other potential versions of the town’s identity, including as a home to a congregation that still supported missionary work among the Delaware” (244).
- 8.
Reichel’s history of the Boarding School includes an account of the Iroquois visit and a translation of Stansbury’s speech taken from The Bethlehem Diary (97–105). According to Tom McCullough, an archivist at the Moravian Archives, it is unusual that Stansbury’s original speech was not recorded in English with a German translation accompanying it in The Bethlehem Diary. Stansbury’s speech can be found in Gemein Nachricten, 1792, Part I, Quartal 2, Item II, MAB.
- 9.
For the full text of this poem see Anonymous 3.
- 10.
Carolyn Eastman notes that the figure of Native Americans permeated the curriculum of schools during the early republic. Often the focus was on mimicking the rhetorical practices of Native American speakers. I see the work of the Boarding School students doing more than mimicking Native Americans; the students’ endeavors work towards a meaningful understanding of the plight of Native Americans. See Eastman, “The Indian Censures the Whiteman,” passim.
- 11.
The word extirpate had a specific contextual definition likely recognizable to Kliest and the students. According to Jeffrey Ostler, “The word extirpate did not mean simply to drive away or remove. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was synonymous with extermination and meant to root out, to eradicate, to destroy” (587–588).
- 12.
Logan’s Lament was an important part of school curricula across the nation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Carolyn Eastman notes that “schoolchildren throughout the greater Northeast from Baltimore to Vermont memorized and recited Indian speeches in schools, alongside speeches by Cicero and George Washington, as an accepted component of learning how to read and comport themselves” (536–537). Gordon Sayre observes, “when young American boys (and girls?) memorized and recited Logan’s words … they repeated what thousands were saying in other schoolrooms around the nation” (163). My work on the Boarding School reveals that young women did read and memorize Logan’s Lament as part of their curriculum. For additional context on the reception and criticism of the authenticity of Logan’s Lament see Seeber 130–146.
- 13.
For further details of Stansbury’s life see Cornell 55–59.
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Specter, G.D. (2018). “We Cannot Be Indifferent”: Native Americans and the Students of the Bethlehem Boarding School. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_6
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