Samson Occom: The Boy Who Taught Himself to Read

Around the year 1740, a strange rumour began to travel through the Mohegan villages of eastern Connecticut. Samson Occom, who was about sixteen, heard it along with everyone else. Years later he wrote it down: “we heard a Strange Rumor among the English, that there were Extraordinary Ministers Preaching from place to Place and a Strange Concern among the White People.”

The Mohegan people had lived alongside English colonists for about a century by then. They knew the English, traded with them, sometimes worked for them, and had steadily lost land to them. They knew the English had a religion and went to their meeting-houses on Sundays. But Samson had never seen the English like this. Something was happening to them. They were weeping in church. They were travelling miles to hear preachers. They were asking each other questions about their souls.

What Samson was hearing about was the movement now called the Great Awakening, a wave of revival that swept through the British colonies of North America in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Preachers like George Whitefield, who had come over from England, drew crowds of thousands in the open air. Local ministers began to preach with new urgency. And some of these preachers came to Mohegan.

Samson went to hear them. Then he went again, and again. He wrote that after he was “awakened,” he went to every meeting he could get to. For about six months he was, in his own words, “under Trouble of Mind.” He did not describe all of what he felt, and we should not pretend to know more than he told us. But he was clearly a teenager who had heard something he could not ignore, and who did not yet know what to do about it.

Born at Mohegan

Samson Occom was born in 1723 at Mohegan, on the land of his people near New London, Connecticut. He did not know the exact day. His father, Joshua, was a hunter. His mother, Sarah, was a strong and devoted woman who, later in life, became a Christian.

When Samson wrote about his childhood, he used the language of his time and his new faith. “I was Born a Heathen and Brought up In Heathenism,” he said, meaning that he was raised in the traditional religion and ways of his people rather than as a Christian. He described his family as living “a wandering life,” moving with the seasons to hunt, fish and gather. They did not farm the English way. They lived in wigwams.

He also wrote that English ministers had tried, before the revival, to reach the Mohegans. A minister from New London sometimes came up in the summer to preach to them, and an English schoolmaster had at one point come to try to teach the children. But Samson said the Mohegans had little interest. They went, sometimes, but they did not care much for what they heard. There is nothing surprising about that. The English were the people taking their land. Why would they want the English religion?

That is part of what makes his story remarkable. When the revival came, something about it reached him. Perhaps it was that the preachers were so obviously sincere. Perhaps it was that the message was not “become English” but “you are a sinner and Christ can save you,” which applied to the English as much as anyone. Samson does not tell us everything that went on inside him. He simply tells us that he kept going.

A Discovery of the Way of Salvation

At about seventeen, Samson’s months of trouble came to an end. He wrote about it in one of the clearest sentences in his whole account: “I had, as I trust, a Discovery of the way of Salvation through Jesus Christ, and was enabled to put my trust in him alone for Life & Salvation.”

Look at that sentence closely. He did not say that he had become English, or that he had become respectable, or that he had been accepted by the colonists. He said that he had discovered a way: that salvation came through Jesus Christ. And he said that he put his trust “in him alone.” Not in his own goodness, not in his people’s traditions, not in the English and their churches. In Christ. He went on: “From this Time the Distress and Burden of my mind was removed, and I found Serenity and Pleasure of Soul, in Serving God.”

Notice too that small phrase, “as I trust.” Samson was humble about his own experience. He did not boast that he had been dramatically transformed. He trusted that God had done something real in him, and he spent the rest of his life acting on that trust.

Historians are not entirely sure who first preached to him. His teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, later said that Samson was converted under the preaching of James Davenport, a fiery and controversial revivalist. Samson himself does not name a single preacher; he simply says that ministers came and he went to hear them. It may have been several people over many months.

What we do know is what happened inside him next. He wrote that he felt “an uncommon Pity and Compassion to my Poor Brethren According to the Flesh,” meaning his own Mohegan people. He wished that he could teach them what he had learned. But there was a problem. He could not read.

A Primer and the Neighbours

In the same months that he was going to the revival meetings, Samson had started to learn his letters. He bought himself a primer, a small, simple book used to teach children the alphabet and basic reading. He did not go to any school. Instead, he went to his English neighbours again and again and asked them to help him sound out the words.

Think about what that took. He was not a little child; he was a teenager, nearly a young man, sitting with a book meant for small children and asking people from another nation, the nation that held power over his own, to help him. He was learning to read in English, a language that was not his first. And he did it, slowly, because he wanted to be able to read the Bible for himself and to teach it to others.

This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about Samson Occom’s teenage years. His faith did not make him passive. It made him hungry. Before he had any idea where his life would go, he set about getting the one tool he knew he needed.

Four Years with Wheelock

Samson kept working at his reading for a few years. Then, when he was about nineteen or twenty, his mother went to the town of Lebanon, Connecticut, and Samson asked her to find out whether the minister there, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, would teach him for a week or two. Wheelock was a Congregational minister who had been one of the preachers of the revival, and he kept a small school in his house for English boys preparing for college.

Wheelock said yes, and wanted to see Samson straight away. Samson went, thinking he would be back home within a few days. “Instead of Staying a Forthnight or 3 Weeks,” he wrote, “I Spent 4 Years with him.” He arrived in December 1743.

Wheelock was a demanding teacher, and Samson was a determined student. He studied English, and then Latin and Greek, and later some Hebrew, the languages a minister in New England was expected to know. He was the first Native American student Wheelock ever taught, and his success gave Wheelock an idea: that Native young people could be trained as teachers and missionaries for their own nations. Years later, Wheelock would open a school for exactly that purpose. Without Samson, there would probably have been no such school. That fact will matter later in the story.

But Samson worked his eyes too hard. Reading by poor light, hour after hour, his eyesight became so weak that he had to give up formal study by about 1748. He never finished the full college course that he had hoped for.

Schoolmaster at Montauk

In 1749 Samson went with some Mohegans on a fishing trip to Montauk, at the far eastern tip of Long Island in what is now New York. The Montaukett people there had no teacher. Samson started holding meetings, and they asked him to stay and open a school. He stayed for about twelve years.

He described his work there simply. He taught the children. He led religious meetings. He visited the sick and conducted funerals. He wrote letters and documents for people who could not write. He settled arguments. Every school day began with prayer. He invented his own methods for teaching small children to read, including, he said, writing the letters of the alphabet on small pieces of cedar wood so that the children could handle them and learn them like a game.

He married a Montaukett woman, Mary Fowler, in about 1751, and together they had many children. They lived in a wigwam, and they were poor. The missionary society that sponsored Samson paid him very little, and sometimes not at all. To feed his family he hunted, fished, farmed, carved wooden spoons and ladles and gunstocks to sell, and bound books for English families, often working late into the night.

In 1759, the Presbyterian ministers of Long Island examined him and ordained him as a minister. He was one of the very first Native Americans to be ordained in the English colonies. The boy who had learned his letters from a primer and his neighbours was now a fully recognized minister of the gospel.

The Tour of Britain

By the 1760s, Wheelock’s school for Native students, called Moor’s Indian Charity School, needed money. Wheelock and his supporters, including the famous preacher George Whitefield, came up with a plan: send Samson Occom to Britain. A Native American minister, educated and eloquent, would show British Christians what their money could do.

In December 1765 Samson said goodbye to Mary and their children and set out, with a minister named Nathaniel Whitaker. While waiting for the ship, he wrote that he did not know whether he was looking for the place where his bones would be buried, but that he believed he was “called of God by a strange Providence and that is enough.”

He arrived in England in February 1766, and preached his first sermon there in Whitefield’s chapel in London. For more than two years he travelled across England and Scotland, preaching (by most estimates) between three and four hundred times. Crowds came, partly to hear him and partly, it must be said, to stare at him, because a Native American preacher was a novelty in Britain. He met powerful people, including the Earl of Dartmouth, and the hymn-writer John Newton. King George III gave £200. By the time Samson sailed home in 1768, the tour had raised more than £12,000, an enormous sum, given for the education of Native Americans.

Betrayed

What happened next is painful, and it would be dishonest to soften it.

When Samson got home, he found his family in difficulty. Wheelock had promised that they would be looked after while he was away, but help had come slowly, and Mary had written that she was out of corn and had no money to buy any.

Then, in 1769, Wheelock moved his school from Connecticut to Hanover, New Hampshire, and founded a college there, named Dartmouth after the Earl of Dartmouth who had led the trustees of the British money. Much of the money Samson had raised went into the new college. And Dartmouth College, as it grew, educated mainly young white men from English colonial families, not Native students. Wheelock seems to have believed he was still serving the original purpose, by training white missionaries to go to Native nations. But to Samson, it looked like a betrayal of every promise he had made to the people who gave.

He told Wheelock so. He made a sharp joke in Latin: the school that was supposed to be an alma mater, a “nourishing mother,” for his people, would turn out to be an alba mater, a “white mother.” The friendship between the two men, which had lasted for a quarter of a century, never fully recovered.

There was also a deeper wound. In 1768, the same year he returned, Samson wrote a short account of his life, now known as A Short Narrative of My Life. It is one of the earliest autobiographies written in English by a Native American, and most of what we know about his teenage years comes from it. At the end, he complained, quietly but plainly, about how he had been treated. For twelve years at Montauk he had been schoolmaster, minister, interpreter, judge and scribe, and he had been paid far less than English missionaries received for doing less. He asked why. And he answered his own question: “I believe it is because I am a poor Indian.” He added, “I Can’t help that God has made me So; I did not make myself so.”

That is racism, and Samson knew it. He was not angry with God for making him Mohegan. He was saying that he was exactly who God had made him, and that the way Christians had treated him did not match what they claimed to believe.

What Came After

Samson did not give up. He had low moments: in 1769, ill, out of work and discouraged, he got drunk on at least one occasion, and he confessed it openly to his fellow ministers, who examined the matter and cleared him. He got up again.

In 1772 he preached a famous sermon at the execution of Moses Paul, a Native American man condemned for murder, who had asked for Samson to preach. He spoke to Moses Paul as a brother and urged him to come to Christ. The sermon was printed and went through many editions; it was one of the first works by a Native American author to be widely read. In 1774 he published a collection of hymns.

His greatest work came later. He helped gather Christian Native people from several communities in southern New England, whose lands were being swallowed up, and lead them to a new settlement on land in New York given to them by the Oneida nation. In 1785 they named their town Brotherton, often called Brothertown. Samson became their minister. He wrote that their church was “the first Indian Presbyterian Church that ever was formed by Indians themselves.” The Brothertown people later moved west to Wisconsin, where their descendants still live today.

Samson Occom died in July 1792, at about sixty-nine, while walking out to look for timber. More than three hundred Native people came to his funeral. His grave was never marked. But he had spent his life doing what he decided to do at seventeen: putting his trust in Christ “alone,” and telling his own people about him.

In Their Own Words

“I believe it is because I am a poor Indian. I Can’t help that God has made me So; I did not make myself so.”

— Samson Occom, A Short Narrative of My Life (1768)

Think It Through

1. Samson heard about the revival among “the English,” the very people who were taking his people’s land. Why do you think the message still reached him? What does that say about the message itself?
2. As a teenager, Samson taught himself to read using a children’s primer and help from his neighbours. Is there something you need to learn for what you believe God wants you to do, even if it feels embarrassing to start?
3. Wheelock helped Samson enormously, and also let him down badly. How do you think about someone who has done you both good and harm?
4. Samson said, “I did not make myself so.” What does it mean that God made you who you are, including the parts other people may look down on?

Read More on Ochorus

Samson Occom’s own writings are not yet in the Ochorus library, but his author page carries a full biography that tells the rest of his story in more detail, from his years at Montauk to his sermon at the execution of Moses Paul and the founding of Brothertown, with more of his own words along the way.