William Apess - Career

Career

After his marriage to Mary, Apess felt a calling to a vocation to preach. In 1829 he was ordained as a Protestant Methodist minister. In the same year he published his autobiography, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess, A Native of the Forest, Comprising a Notice of the Pequot Tribe of Indians, Written by Himself. Apess' work was one of the first autobiographies published by a Native American and was published partly in reaction to advocates of Indian Removal, including Andrew Jackson. He used the common format of the time of the spiritual conversion to comment also on European-American prejudices against Native Americans.

As was the Methodist practice of the day, Apess became an itinerant preacher; he preached in meetings throughout New England to mixed congregations including Native American, European-American, and African-American audiences. While preaching in the Wampanoag dialect of the Algonquian language family, he used English language and cultural precepts to raise issues of Indian rights to European-American audiences and "to serve Indian political ends." In 1833, following a visit to the town of Mashpee, the largest Native American town in Massachusetts, Apess became convinced the State was acting illegally in denying self government to the Mashpee Wampanoag.

He participated in the so-called Mashpee Revolt of 1833-34, in which the Mashpee took action to restore their self-government: they wrote to the state government announcing their intention to rule themselves, according to their constitutional rights, and to prevent whites from taking away their wood (a recurring problem). In May 1833 the Mashpee tribe wrote to Harvard College, which administered the Williams Fund: this paid for a minister to them, although they had never been consulted in his appointment. They objected to Rev. Mr. Fish, who had long been appointed to them, they did not like his preaching, and said that he had enriched himself by appropriating hundreds of acres of woodland at the tribe's expense. Lastly, they prevented a settler, William Sampson, from taking wood away from their property and unloaded his wagon. Three Indians were indicted for riot and Apess was jailed for a month as a result. An attorney assisted them in successfully appealing to the legislature, but initially their actions were responded to by Governor Levi Lincoln, Jr., threatened the group of military force.

The issues were reported sympathetically by the Boston Advocate through June and July. The Mashpee protest followed the Nullification Crisis of 1832 on the national level, and the historian Barry O'Connell suggests that Apess intended to highlight the Mashpee attempt to nullify Massachusetts laws discriminating against Native peoples.

During the period 1831-1836, Apess published several of his sermons and public lectures, and became known as a powerful speaker. But, struggling with alcoholism and increasing resentment of white treatment of Natives, he gradually lost the respect in which he had been held; both white and Mashpee groups distanced themselves from him. In 1836, he gave a public lecture in the form of a memorial eulogy for King Philip, who had inflicted many fatalities while seeking to push the European colonists out of New England in the seventeenth century; he also attacked white treatment of Native Americans. After publishing his lecture, Apess disappeared from New England public life. He moved to New York City, where he sought work.