“Vulgar Appearing Little Bodies”: Samuel G.

Howe and American

Missionaries in Greece, 1827-1830*

James W. Trent Jr.

Gordon College
255 Grapevine Road
Wenham, MA 01984

james.trent@gordon.edu
(978) 290-6512

*This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians,
Atlanta, April 2014.
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“Vulgar Appearing Little Bodies”: Samuel G. Howe and American

Missionaries in Greece, 1827-1830

Abstract

Between 1827 and 1830, Samuel G. Howe, a young American physician, learned the

skills of social reform and community resettlement in war-torn Greece, a time immediately after

the country’s war of independence from the Ottoman Turks. While he carried out these activities,

Howe encountered Congregationalist missionaries sent to Greece by the American Board of

Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston. His reactions to these missionaries reflected

both his Unitarian upbringing and his experiences in Greece. Critical of what he regarded as both

the evangelical emotionalism of the followers of Charles Grandison Finney and the brash

atheism of Abner Kneeland, Howe formed his opinions of the American missionaries in Greece

from their theology, from their assumptions about the Greek people, as well as from what he

regarded as the missionaries’ class demeanor. In doing so, Howe, like other young, well-to-do

Unitarians, formed the boundaries of an emerging faith, while also constructing his place in the

social world of Jacksonian America.

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Samuel G. Howe expressed conflicting opinions about American missionaries in Greece,

especially those of the Trinitarian variety. A physician and Unitarian, Howe left the United

States in November 1824, around the time of his twenty-third birthday, to join Greek patriots

fighting for their independence from the Ottoman Turks. Only two months earlier, he had

completed his medical education at the Harvard Medical School, at the time located in Howe’s

hometown of Boston. In attendance at the University’s commencement ceremonies on a warm

September afternoon was the sixty-seven year old hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis

de Lafayette. In Cambridge just five days into his 1824-1825 tour of the nation, Lafayette spoke

to the Harvard graduates of the heroic war of independence that Greek armed forces were

fighting against the army and navy of the occupying Turks. Along with the University’s

graduates, crowds from Eastern Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, and Rhode Island had

come to Cambridge to see and hear the legendary general. Later, in others towns in the

Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic States, Lafayette cajoled North Americans to remember the

Greek struggle. Knowing that America officials were reluctant to become involved in foreign

revolutions, Lafayette nevertheless urged private citizens in town after town to raise funds,

especially for the purchase of ships for the Greek navy. Like other young Americans in the early

and mid-1820s, Howe had become enamored of all things classical after reading about Lord

Byron’s return to Greece in 1823, and thereafter reading and re-reading Byron’s Childe Harold's

Pilgrimage. Thus, Lafayette’s patronage of Greek revolutionaries at Howe’s commencement

ceremony only strengthened his already ardent Philhellenism.1

Howe arrived in Greece in January 1825. During his first two years in the country, he

worked in the capacity that he had intended: as a physician treating wounded and sick Greek

armed forces. Besides medical duties, he occasionally saw combat. After one skirmish he
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recorded in his diary the killing of a Turk, “[He] held his head out long enough for me to take

aim at it and level him with a rifle-ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know

whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall.”2 Even before the

armada of England, France, and Russia destroyed the fleets of the Turkish and Egyptian navies at

the Battle of Navarino in October 1827, Howe’s duties had begun to shift from the work of a

physician to what his contemporaries called a philanthropist and today we would likely call a

social worker. In various forms, the new role would occupy Howe for the remainder of his life,

beginning in 1832 as the first director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind and in 1846 as the

first superintendent of the Massachusetts School for the Education of Idiots, both in South

Boston.3 Providing food, clothing, shelter, and employment to dispossessed, war-weary,

widowed, orphaned, and sometimes starving Greeks, Howe developed skills for social

amelioration.

At the insistence of Greek authorities, in November 1827 Howe left Greece to return to

the United States. He arrived in New York in January and began a seven-month North American

speaking tour, during which he raised money and supplies for the newly independent, but

thoroughly disorganized post-war Greek nation. Despite his busy schedule, he also managed to

write and then publish his history of the Greek war, An Historical Sketch of the Greek

Revolution. By November of 1828, he had returned to Greece with provisions that he dutifully

distributed. With that work accomplished, he hired 400 unemployed and landless workers to

begin the construction of an orphanage at on the island of Aegina. Many of these workers were

refugees from Athens, who could not, or would not, return to their homes and their previous

lives. After the completion of the orphanage in late December, he launched a more challenging

public-works project: the draining and the reconstruction of Aegina’s long-neglected harbor. To
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accomplish this second task, he added to his labor force 100 women, most of whom were

widows.4

With work on the port completed in March, and with the support of Greek authorities, in

April 1829 Howe established a colony of landless Greek refugees at Hexamilia, a small village

on the Isthmus of Corinth. Calling the colony sometimes Washingtonia and other times

Columbia, Howe devoted the next year (his last year in Greece) to the development of the

colony. The Washingtonian colony was an experiment in land reclamation and refugee

resettlement. Not knowing the first thing about farming, Howe hired a Swiss farmer to educate

the colonists in the agricultural arts and to oversee their labors. Like Howe, the colonists knew

little about farming, most having worked in pre-revolutionary occupations tied to the sea, rather

than to the land.5

Howe developed skills as a social reformer alongside of Trinitarian missionaries who,

like Howe, found themselves drawn to Greece during and shortly after its revolution. Under the

auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Congregationalist

missionaries like Josiah Brewer, Rufus Anderson, Eli Smith, and Jonas King came to Greece to

preach forms of American Protestant Christianity to a people, who had followed the Christian

faith for centuries. Each of the missionaries was a graduate of the Andover Theological

Seminary in Massachusetts, a theological school founded by Congregationalists in 1807 after

Harvard University’s Divinity School moved toward Unitarianism. Likewise, each of the

clergymen shared Calvinist doctrines, evangelical zeal, and a predetermined distrust for an

Eastern Orthodox Church that, as they saw it, justified itself more by iconic symbols, ritualistic

practices, and superstitious habits than by scripture. At the same time, as Howe would conclude,
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the four missionaries had styles of evangelizing, assumptions about the Greeks, and class

deportment that were markedly different.6

The first of the four Congregationalist missionaries that Howe encountered was Eli

Smith. [Image 1: Eli and Sarah Huntington Smith ca. 1850] A native of Connecticut and a

graduate of Yale, Smith was the same age as Howe, twenty-seven years old. After seminary and

ordination, Smith began his missionary work by journeying to Malta where he attempted to

convert Maltese Catholics. Dressed in a “thrifty no-nonsense black suit, vest and spade cap of

(his) calling,” Smith soon found himself thoroughly repelled by the island’s Catholic inhabitants,

not just for his drab attire, but even more so because of his zealous Calvinism. With little support

for his evangelism, Smith restricted his energies to the study of Maltese, Italian, and most

importantly for his eventual work, Arabic. His aversion to Roman Catholicism would remain a

lifelong preoccupation. Muslims, he reasoned after his experience at Malta, were people who

would find his Protestant gospel message, if not more pleasing than would Catholics, then at

least less threatening. Before his death in 1857, he had translated large parts of the Protestant

Bible into Arabic. However, in 1828, after a time in Beirut where his attempted to convert

Lebanese Muslims proved no more successful than his efforts to convert Catholics, he received

instructions from the Commission for Foreign Missions to tour the newly liberated Greece to

assess the potential for Protestant missions among the country’s recently liberated Orthodox

Christians.7

Accompanying Smith on his travels in the Morea and Greek islands was Rufus Anderson,

at that time the assistant corresponding secretary of the Board of Commissioners. [Image 2:

Rufus Anderson ca. 1850] Never a missionary himself, Anderson became head of the missionary

organization in 1832. Based at the Board’s offices in Boston, Anderson nevertheless made trips
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to begin missions and to support missionaries in the Near East, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii),

and India. Five years older than Smith, Anderson was a graduate of Bowdoin College and had

been a student with Smith at Andover seminary. He had wanted to do mission work in India, but

the board recognized his administrative skills and insisted that he work out of the board’s

headquarters. Anderson would lead the organization for thirty-four years, until his retirement in

1866. Unlike most missionaries of his generation, including most missionaries sponsored by the

Commission for Foreign Missions, Anderson never presumed that missionaries needed “to

civilize heathens” by changing their “primitive societies” before they could bring the gospel to

change human hearts. In April 1829, Anderson, along with Smith, spent a few days at the

Washingtonian colony. Howe was away at the time, but the missionaries learned about Howe’s

efforts from John D. Russ, another young American physician working with Howe at

Hexamilia.8

Preceding Smith and Anderson in their Greek travels were two other North American

missionaries, Josiah Brewer and Jonas King. Except for a brief mention of Brewer that Howe

made in his diary, we know only a little about Brewer’s contact with Howe. Brewer was a

graduate of Yale where he was his class’s valedictorian and a classmate of Eli Smith. [Image 3:

Josiah Brewer and Family ca. 1850] He was the same age as Smith and, like Smith and

Anderson, was a graduate of Andover Theological Seminary. In 1830, he would authored the

book, Residence in Constantinople, recounting his brief 1827 missionary activities in Turkey. At

the time that Smith and Anderson visited with Howe, Brewer was back in the United States

preparing for his marriage to Emilia Ann Field of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. From Howe’s

diary entry, it is likely that Howe met Brewer in the early part of 1829, in any case before

Brewer’s return to the United States. Smith, Anderson, and Brewer knew each other well, not
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only because of their overlapping time at seminary, but also because in May 1826 the three men

were ordained together in Springfield, Massachusetts, Anderson as an evangelist, and Smith and

Brewer as missionaries. In 1828, Brewer had opened a school for girls at Hermoupolis, the

capital city of the Aegean island, Syros. Schools for girls were few in Greece, and both the

parents and the island’s predominantly Catholic authorities supported Brewer’s Hermoupolis

mission school. In 1830, around the time that Howe left Greece to return to the United States,

Brewer, now returned from the United States, would join with his former classmate, Smith, as

the two searched through Egypt, Syria, and Palestine for a mission site that would fulfill their

calling, and Smith’s temperament.9

The fourth Congregationalist missionary in Greece was Jonas King. [Image 4: Jonas King

in Greek Attire ca. 1840] The oldest of the four clergymen, King was thirty-six years old when in

July 1828 he sailed for Greece after a speaking tour supporting United States aid to the newly

liberated country. Before Congress and in several American communities, King had given

speeches, probably overlapping and perhaps joining, with Howe during his tour of New England

and Upstate New York for the same purpose. On the ship, bringing King to Greece was John

Stuyvesant, a close compatriot of Howe and one of the three Americans who had fought

alongside of the Greeks through most of the revolution. On the ship also was a cargo of clothing

and food that King was in charge of dispersing to the Greek populace.

King was an 1816 graduate of Williams College, and like the other missionaries, a

graduate of the Andover seminary. During a stint teaching in Charleston, South Carolina, he

received ordination, but soon thereafter left the country for Paris where for over a year he studied

Arabic in preparation for mission work in Palestine. After less than two years in the Near East

and entirely frustrated by what he characterized as opposition from Maronite Catholic clergy,
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King left Palestine. At the time of his exit in September 1825, he published his, “Farewell

Letter,” a denunciation of Catholicism that was widely distributed ahead of his return to the

United States. His 1828 arrival in Greece, therefore, represented his second attempt on the

mission field.10

King began his new missionary activity by opening a school for girls. Unlike Brewer’s

school for well-to-do grammar school girls on Syros, King’s school on the island of Tenos

served older girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty, almost all of whom were poor. The

school’s Lancastrian curriculum emphasized the reading and study of the Protestant Bible with

King delivering long lectures on the veracity and moral uplift of scripture, along with its basis

for faith. The girls understood little that King had to say, as much for his strange theology as for

his classical, not modern, Greek vocabulary and diction. Tenos’s population was a mixture of

Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Soon King received opposition from the clergy of both

groups, with the Catholics organizing to have the school closed and its books excommunicated.

Just as he had alienated Catholics three years earlier in Palestine, King also proved a threat to

Tenos’s religious authorities, Catholic and Orthodox alike.11

In a diary entry dated 21 May 1829, Howe commented on a chance encounter with Eli

Smith and Rufus Anderson. From this entry and others, it is likely that Howe had previously met

Anderson and. perhaps, he knew Smith also. Their unplanned meeting occurred on the road

between the Washingtonian colony and the town of Vostitza. A few days later, the missionaries

joined Howe for some days at the colony. Of course, Howe did not intend his diary comments

about the two missionaries, as well as the entry about Brewer and King, for public consumption.

Nevertheless, they suggest that Howe shared some of the Protestant missionaries’ biases about

Greek Orthodox Christianity; yet, in his personal reflection, Howe made a distinction between
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what he saw as a rational gospel of love, action and perfection, and an alternative gospel of

dread, fear, and the consequences of original sin.

Howe’s religious perspective began in one of Boston’s most theologically liberal

Protestant congregations, the Brattle Street Church. Baptized there shortly after his birth in 1801,

Howe grew up regularly attending the church of his parents, Joseph N. Howe and Martha

Gridley Howe. Three pastors served the Brattle Street congregation during Howe’s youth: Joseph

S. Buckminster (1805-1812), Edward Everett (1814-1815), and John Gorham Palfrey (1818-

1831).12 Each of these ministers was a part of an Eastern Massachusetts movement that had

witnessed several Congregationalist churches, founded upon the strict Calvinist doctrines of their

Puritan founders, shift to a freer and more scientifically compatible Unitarianism. Straddling the

Calvinism of its origin and the deism of Enlightenment freethinkers, the Brattle Street Church

attracted many of Boston’s entrepreneurial and political elites. Attending meetings of the church

along with the Howe family were the families of Abbott Lawrence, Harrison Gray Otis, and

Thomas H. Perkins. Joseph Howe was a Democrat and most of the congregants were Federalists,

but the difference hardly kept the Howe family from being a part of one of Boston’s elite

churches. Indeed, as a Unitarian and a successful businessperson, Joseph Howe’s political

deviation never kept him from that group of wealthy Bostonians. It was out of this liberal

Christian and upper class milieu that Samuel Howe, at least in part, developed his opinion of the

Congregationalist missionaries.13

No doubt, Howe’s lifelong interest in phrenology, first kindled during medical school,

also shaped these theological assumptions. Like his future friend and mentor, the phrenologist

George Combe, Howe saw sin as a material evil, from which the human body, as well as the

body politic needed purging. Human beings did not inherit evil from Adam and Eve’s fall, nor
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did the fall leave people inevitably dependent on God’s grace. Rather, God had given human

beings the capacity to do good, to rid the world of evil, and to become active agents of the good.

Linking liberal theology with phrenology, Howe throughout his life regarded education and

social improvement as active ways of eliminating evil.

At the same time, his musings reflected a class distinction grounded in his Unitarian faith

and upbringing. For Howe some missionaries exhibited a refined and calmly dignified demeanor

not unlike the Unitarian ministers of his youth, while others were what he identified as the

“methodistical” variety – crude, passionate, self-righteous, and typical of some “awakened” and

low-church Trinitarians.14

Thus in his diary entry, Howe notes that missionaries like Eli Smith and Jonas King

might spread God’s word and even serve the war-ravaged Greeks, but they did so as “narrow-

mind[ed], vulgar appearing little bod[ies], who have come probably to spy out the land and see

whether there be any hope of propagating their dogmas.” Howe’s encounter with the Greek

world might have changed his occupational role –from a physician to a philanthropist, but it had

changed neither his theological presuppositions nor his sense of status and class. Smith would

become the foremost Nineteenth-Century American translator of the Protestant scriptures into

Arabic, but both his scholarship and his efforts were for Howe grounded in Calvinism, only

slightly modified by an Arminian evangelicalism. Like other new-day Calvinists, Smith prayed

with his mouth, while Howe prayed, as he never failed to boast, with his feet. Moreover, like

Finney and his followers, Smith remained obsessed with sin, man’s fall from grace, and personal

salvation, while Howe believed human nature lent itself to perfection through education and

“right living” – perfection of the individual and of society itself. Of Smith and his sort, Howe

wrote in his diary, “I think it is unnecessary that a man in order to fulfill his duty to his kind
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should be set apart from them and before them, that he should read black letter or wear black

breaches, or look black on the foibles of his neighbors.”15

As much as Howe disliked Smith, his distaste for Jonas King was even greater. Of the

four missionaries, only King would marry a Greek woman and remain in Greece until his death

in 1869. Unlike the others, he was responsible for acquiring relief and distributing it to Greek

peasantry. Yet for Howe, King’s evangelical passion combined with his persistent piety

represented the worst example of what Howe characterized as missionary insensitivity to Greek

culture. At the time also in upstate New York, Charles Grandison Finney was creating what

today we identify as the Second Great Awakening. Howe directs his criticism of King at what he

characterized as the same irrational, even crazed, fervor of Finney’s “awakening.” In his diary,

he writes with unrestrained frankness, “As for King – the sanctified, hypocritical, selfish and

bigoted Jonas King, the deuce knows where he will find a proselyte with all his prayers and

fastings. The Greeks are not the old grannies to be humbugged by any such unnatural demeanor.

He is mocked and deceived.” King’s ministry in Greece would eventually include imprisonment

and the near constant denunciation by the nation’s Orthodox hierarchy. He would labor on,

finding few converts and even fewer supporters for what one commentator called his “staunch

evangelical ardor.” 16

If Howe had little tolerance for the missionary work of Smith and King, he gave credit to

the character of Rufus Anderson and Josiah Brewer. Even before Howe had recorded his diary

entry, Brewer had left Greece and Anderson was only in the county long enough to assess its

potential for a permanent mission sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for

Foreign Missions. Yet Howe saw in them a dignity and respect for the Greek culture and religion

that reflected his own theological and class biases. Rufus Anderson, he writes, is “a man
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apparently of good mind, inquiring disposition and shrewd judgment.” Moreover, remembering

Josiah Brewer, he notes, “As yet I have known but one American missionary do any good, [and]

that was Brewer.”17

On 10 July 1829, Howe mailed a letter probably addressed to Edward Everett. Everett

was one of Howe’s principal sponsors in Greece. At the time, he was a member of Congress and

previously had been the minister of the same theologically liberal Brattle Street Church where

Howe had attended services in his youth. As he typical did, Everett had Howe’s letter published

in Boston papers and then had it reprinted in newspapers across the nation. In his letter, Howe

comments on the place of missionaries in post-revolutionary Greece. Avoiding the disparaging

rhetoric and hyperbolic tone of his diary remarks, while anticipating his departure from Greece a

year hence, he writes about the character of his replacement. In doing so, he compares what he

projects the character of his successor should be to that of the current American missionaries in

the newly liberated country. This new agent, he writes, should be “a plain, active, quick-sighted

man of the world. Let him if possible be one acquainted with the East, with the Greeks and their

language.” He then adds what he regards as the agent’s moral characteristics. “Let him be

enthusiastic, yet patient, mild, yet courageous, and hardy of body . . . Let him not be a bigot or

zealot.” From these characteristics, Howe shifts, quite abruptly, to contrast these qualities with

those of missionaries he has recently encountered. He writes, “I have known many foreign

missionaries here; yet I know but one to whom I would trust the establishment with any

satisfaction; nay, must I say it, I have never known but one or two whom I think have done or

will do any good to Greece or to the advancement of religion.” For Howe, at the root of their

failure lies the “rush with mad zeal to attack the strong hold of sin.” The Greek clergy and laity

are quite astonished that these eager American Protestants have entered their country to save the
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inhabitants from a faith that they revere for centuries to one that makes no sense to them. As

Howe sees the matter, the missionaries’ imprudent attacks on the Orthodox faith of the Greek

masses merely “steel them to it.” Although he shares their criticism of the church’s reliance on

iconic and ceremonial mysticism, Howe recognizes that American missionaries - these “regularly

enlisted soldiers of the cross” – have their own peculiar form of mysticism, one resting upon

biblical literalism supported by fear and irrationality. Words are cheap; better to “go about

among the people, clothed as they are clad, speaking as they speak, living as they live.” Deeds

not words embody Howe’s Christian faith. 18

Howe’s conflicting opinion of American Protestant missionaries lay in his Unitarian-

grounded distrust of what he saw as a Calvinistic emphasis on original sin grafted to Arminian

zeal and emotional irrationalism. In 1828 during the nine months that he lectured across New

England and New York at the behest of the newly formed Greek government, it is likely that

Howe read about, and perhaps experienced firsthand, the Finneyite revivals. Giving his lectures

about the Greek war and the desperate needs of the war-torn Greek people, he toured cities and

towns in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York where Finney and his followers were at

the height of their preaching and soul winning. Although a Presbyterian, Finney had rejected Old

School Calvinism with its claims for total depravity and predestination. Instead, like the

Methodists whom Howe so ridiculed, Finney argued and preached that, although human beings

have a common sinful nature, God had given them free will to choose, or to reject, God’s path to

their own salvation. Following Wesleyan tradition also, Finney insisted on Christian

perfectionism. To bring sinners to that free choice of redemption, Finney, like his “new order”

Calvinist-Congregationalist contemporaries, proclaimed a highly emotional gospel message that

focused singularly and consistently on individual salvation. Through Central and Western New
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York, but by the 1820s, in Northern and Western New England, the Second Great Awakening

had swelled the membership rolls of Methodist and Baptist, and even some Congregationalist

churches.

As Howe understood it, this peculiar American Christian faith, with its sin-driven

emotionalism and its insistence on both individual salvation and an individual relationship with

God mediated only by scripture, was alien to the Greeks’ centuries-old Orthodox religious ethos.

In his diary entries, Howe often criticized what he regarded at the Greek Orthodox clergy’s

routinized theology and their sometimes-disingenuous behavior; yet, he had seen their courage

during the revolution and had witnessed their ability to unite a dispossessed and war-weary

Greek population. He learned also that Greek people were intelligent and resourceful. Their

Orthodox faith might depend upon symbols, rituals, and outdated authorities, but the Greeks kept

a sense of humor about all parts of their lives, including the religious parts.

Accompanying Howe’s theological distrust of both Calvinism and evangelical

“awakening” was a class distinction. Some missionaries, like Anderson and Brewer, exhibited a

calm, thoughtful demeanor of a learned, disinterested upper class, while other purveyors of the

Gospel like Smith and King, reduced themselves to conduct of the lower class, conduct governed

by antinomian passions and bigotry. Howe admired the former, while having no use for the latter

– for what he identified as those “preaching, praying, or acting the black coat.” At the end of his

letter to Everett, he situates both his theological distrust and his class bias in the context of

Greece’s newly independent state. He writes,

Strangers are too apt to suppose [the Greeks] have little veneration for their

religion, because they have little for their priests; but this is not the case. . . .

[A]s information is diffused and civilization advances, their present belief must
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give way to a purer creed, and the way to accelerate the latter is to hasten the

former. . .. You may smile, but I assure you I am a missionary, though in an odd

way. I cannot preach, and would not if I could. I do not lengthen out my

countenance, clothe myself in sable garments, nor do I open my mouth to

proclaim myself a regularly enlisted soldier of the cross. . .. The most difficult

thing a missionary will have to do among the peasantry is to convince them he is a

Christian.

A physician, not yet twenty-eight years old, who had seen nearly five years of fierce

guerilla warfare and intense human suffering, Howe was no theologian. Yet his reaction to the

American missionaries he encountered in his last years in Greece reflected a theological tension

that would persist even after his return to the United States in 1830. That reaction, in a wider

sense, was also one that New England’s Protestant leaders and institutions would contend with

for at least another decade. Unitarians like Howe had broken from the Calvinism of their

Congregationalist forebears. The break, they felt, needed to happen to release them from the grip

of doctrines that stood in the way of human agency, human perfection, and social harmony. Yet

the break also created new theological and social instabilities. On the one hand, Charles

Grandison Finney was unleashing a groundswell of Arminian theology, expressed in evangelical

fervor that seemed out of the control to both clerical and civil authorities. On the other hand,

Bostonians like Abner Kneeland, under the influence of Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen,

and a vocal champion of the lower classes, would soon challenge even the theologically liberal

claims of Boston’s upper-class Unitarians. Never restrained by Calvinism, Kneeland would

move from being a low-church Baptist, to a lower class Universalist, and finally to atheism. On
 17

his return to Boston, Howe would confront and write about what he saw as the threat of

Kneeland’s blasphemy to rational religion and to class stability. Linking Kneeland’s threat to

what he saw as the menace of Jacksonian politics, Howe claimed that Kneeland’s theological

irrationality, not unlike the irrationality of the evangelical followers of Finney, supported social

instability and unrest.19

Like other young, well-to-do Unitarians, Howe formed the boundaries of an emerging

faith, while also constructing his place in the social world of Jacksonian America. The four

Protestant missionaries in Greece, whom Howe met following the end of the country’s war of

independence, represented two versions of Nineteenth-Century American foreign missions.

Josiah Brewer and Rufus Anderson, although Calvinists, epitomized a Christian message that

Howe valued. To be sure, they shared Howe’s distaste for what they viewed as the Greek

public’s reliance on Orthodox superstition; yet, they nevertheless refused to condemn Orthodox

religion and Greek culture. In addition, their demeanor was calm and thoughtful. They were not

at all like Finney and other “methodistical” sorts. Eli Smith and Jonas King, on the other hand,

were all too reminiscent of Finney. Their new-day Calvinism shaped a Christian message that

only alienated a people whose faith was centuries old. Moreover, their gospel message, mediated

only by scripture and constructed for a highly individualistic and anxious society like the United

States, fell flat in Greece where a war-torn population needed a message that was both communal

and familiar. In Howe’s view, their methods and message merely replaced one irrationality with

another.

Howe’s reaction to the American missionaries in Greece reflected, not just his own

theological and social class biases, but also a larger tension in New England Protestantism and in

New England class arrangements. Many enlightened upper class Unitarians, like Howe, were
 18

departing from the constraints of Calvinistic Congregationalists. Yet in their release from such

Calvinism, they negotiated a new religious direction that avoided what they saw as the social

instability brought about by the irrational and socially disruptive followers of both Charles

Grandison Finney and Abner Kneeland. In Greece, Howe learned firsthand that

Congregationalists, despite their theology, could be rational and respectful of different cultures,

but not always. That learning, embodied in the tensions of the rational and the irrational, and the

respectful and the ill-mannered, would remain with Howe and other emerging Unitarians of the

period as they constructed an emerging faith.

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Notes

1
Salem Gazette, 7 September 1824, 1. See also, Lloyd S. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds:

Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1996), 104-9; Stephen A. Larrabee, Hellas Observed: The American

Experience of Greece, 1775-1865 (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 65-72;

Edward M. Earle, “American Interest in the Greek Cause, 1821-1827.” American Historical

Review 33 (October 1927): 44-63; Paul C. Pappas, The United States and the Greek War for

Independence, 1821-1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and William St. Clair.

That Greece Might Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence. (London: Oxford

University Press, 1972), 298.

2
Laura E. Richards, ed. Letters and Journal of Samuel Gridley Howe, Greek Revolution (Boston:

Dana, Estes, 1909), 209.

3
Besides Howe’s supervision of these two residential schools, he was an active member of the

Boston Prison Discipline Society. He championed the earliest work of Dorothea Dix for services

to Massachusetts’s “insane” in local poorhouses and jails. He worked with his college friend,

Horace Mann, on public school reforms. In the late 1840s, he became associated with anti-

slavery activities. During the Civil War, he served on board of the United States Sanitary

Commission and was a representative of the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. During the last

decade of his life, he served on the Massachusetts State Board of Charities.

4
Samuel G. Howe. An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution (New York: White, Gallaher &

White 1828). On Howe in Greece, see James W. Trent Jr. The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe
 20

and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2012), 34-55.

5
Trent, 44-49.

6
For secondary literature on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and on

American missionaries in Greek during the 1820s, see: John A. Andrew, Rebuilding the

Christian Commonwealth: New England Congregationalists and Foreign Missions, 1800-1830

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976); Pierce R. Beaver. “The Legacy of Rufus

Anderson,” Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 3 (July 1979): 94-97; Phillips Clifton,

Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of

Commissioners for Foreign Mission, 1810-1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1969); Charles A. Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821-1852

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Paul William Harris. Nothing but Christ: Rufus

Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (New York: Oxford University Press,

1999); Samir Khalaf, Protestant Missionaries in the Levant: Ungodly Puritans, 1820-1860.

(Routledge, 2012); David W. Kling, “The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board

of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.” Church History 72 (December 2003): 791-819;

Margaret R. Leavy, “Eli Smith and the Arabic Bible” Unpublished manuscript: Yale Divinity

School Library, 1993; and “Looking for the Armenians: Eli Smith’s Missionary Adventure,

1830-1831.” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 50 (1992): 189-275;

Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the

Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 2008; Faith Misplaced: The Broken

Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001 (New York: Public Affairs), 2010, and “Reclaiming
 21

the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity.” American

Historical Review 102 (June 1997), 680-713; Angelo Repouis, “’The Devil’s Apostle’: Jonas

King’s Trial against the Greek Hierarchy in 1852 and the Pressure to Extend U.S. Protection for

American Missionaries Overseas” Diplomatic History 33 (November 2009), 807-837; Theodore

Saloutos. “American Missionaries in Greece: 1820-1869” Church History, 24:2. (June 1955),

152-174; Robert D. Stoddard Jr. “The Rev. Eli Smith, 1801-1857: Evangelical Orientalist in the

Levant.” Theological Review 30 (2009), 202-222, and “The Rev. Eli Smith, -18011857:

Evangelical Orientalist in the Levant.” Theological Review 30 (2009), 202-222.

7
Smith’s writings on his experiences in the mission field in Greece include “Notes on Greece

Taken during a Journey in That Country in 1829,” Unpublished manuscript, Houghton Library,

Harvard University; and Eli Smith and H. G. 0. Dwight, Missionary Researches in Armenia (2

vols.) London: George Wightman, I834. On Smith, also see Stoddard, 202-203.

8
On Anderson assessment of mission work in post-revolutionary Greek, see his: Observations

upon the Peloponnesus and Greek Islands Made in 1829 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1830).

Also about Anderson, see Beaver, 94-95

9
Brewer’s recollections of his ministry in Greece and the Near East are in his book, A Residence

at Constantinople in the Year of 1827. With Notes to the Present Time, 1830 (New Haven,

Conn.: Durre and Peck), 1830. See also, Polly Thanailaki, “The American Protestant Missionary

Schools in Greece in the Nineteenth Century and Greek Orthodox Education.” Greek Orthodox

Theological Review 49, nos. 1-2 (2004), 79-80.

10
Jonas King. “Farewell Letter” in Jonas King. The Oriental Church and the Latin (New York:

John A. Grey & Green, 1865).

 22

11
Thanailaki, 80-81.

12
Over the years, Bostonians also referred to the Brattle Street Church as the Brattle Square

Church, The Brattle Street Meeting, and the Manifesto Church.

13
Thomas H. O’Connor. The Athens of America: Boston 1825-1845. (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2006), 18; and Trent, 9-13.

14
“Diary of Samuel Gridley Howe, April 21, 1829,” Harvard University, Houghton Library, Ms.

Am. 2119 (1698), 23-24. On Howe’s views of Orthodox religion and clergy, see his An

Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution, xiv-xv, and xxi.

15
Howe, “Diary,” 23-24

16
Howe, “Diary,” 23-24. On the characterization of Jonas King, see Introduction to his Diary,

1823. American Antiquarian Society, at:

http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/collection/data/207148111

17
Howe, “Diary,” 23-24.

18
“Letter,” New York Commercial Advertiser 2 November 1829, 1; and “Letter from Dr.

Howe,” Berkshire (Mass.) Journal, 19 November 1829, 2.

19
On Howe’s public responds to Abner Kneeland, see his: “Atheism in New-England,” New-

England Magazine 7 (December 1834): 500- 509 and 8 (January 1835): 53-62. See also, Trent,

85-86.
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Addendum: Photographs

Image 1: Eli and Sarah Huntington Smith, ca. 1850

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Image 2: Rufus Anderson, ca. 1850

 25

Image 3: Josiah Brewer and Family, ca. 1850

 26

Image 4: Jonas King in Greek Attire, ca. 1840