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CHAPTER TWELVE

Out of Darkness

To bring the “natives of New England” living on a reserve in Lyme’s east parish “out of their heathenish state,” Jonathan Parsons joined his wife’s uncle in a request for assistance from the General Court.

The humble memorial of us, the subscribers, shows that, whereas your Honors’ memorialists, being ministers of the Gospel in Lyme in which town dwells about thirty families of Indians, natives of New England called the Niantics, the most of which continue in their heathenism notwithstanding all the good laws already made for the natives being Christianized.

Three years after his marriage, Parsons joined Rev. George Griswold in a “humble memorial” submitted to Connecticut’s General Court. The petition requested assistance in an ongoing effort to Christianize thirty families of “Niantic Indians” in Lyme’s east parish. Noting that “the younger sort of them” seemed “desirous of learning,” the ministers urged education as “a leading step to conversion.”

The memorial, written a century after the Pequot Wars, followed ongoing efforts to lead the “heathen” Niantics “out of darkness” and persuade them “to attend the public worship of God’s house, and to desire a schoolmaster to teach their children and youths to read.” The ministers argued that the chiefs resisted because they “would not be concerned with one religion or have a school unless that the English would deal honestly with them respecting their land.” Three hundred acres had been allotted as a reserve for the Niantics, but the boundaries remained uncertain and unenforced. Incursions on Niantic land had brought Court intervention at least since 1663, when a committee was appointed “to determine the differences betwixt the Indians at Niantic and the English, respecting burning their fence, or any other complaints presented to them respecting those Indians.” When Lyme’s ministers reported the Niantics’ protest in 1734 that “the English, their neighbors, had encroached on their property,” they advised that if the chiefs “could have the bounds of their land settled, they would willingly hear a sermon.” Their only requirement was to be “settled in the quiet and peaceful enjoyment of their land.”

A detailed map of the Lyme shoreline drawn by Rev. Ezra Stiles located the meetinghouses in the west and east parishes, the houses of Matthew Griswold and George Griswald, and the wigwams and burying ground of the Niantics at Black Point.

The Court once again appointed a committee to “inquire into the wrongs complained of by said Indians,” then specified boundaries and affirmed that “these shall always be and remain to be the bounds of the said Indian lands.” Assured two years later in 1736 that “the said Niantic Indians desire their children may be instructed,” the Court committed £15 from the public treasury to hire “some suitable person to instruct the said children to read, and also in the principles of the Christian religion.” The next year Governor Joseph Talcott (1669–1741) confirmed that “our school of Indians at Niantic prospers.”

In a letter published in the journal Christian History describing the Great Awakening’s impact in Lyme’s east parish, George Griswold reported in 1744 that religious concern among the Niantics had “increased for a considerable time.” He described them as a “poor, ignorant people” who for ages past had lived “without God in the world” and “did not seem to have any thing of religion among them” but to be “generally given to Sabbath-breaking.” But two rousing sermons delivered by the itinerant evangelist James Davenport (1716–1767) in 1741 had served as a catalyst for conversion. That year Parsons added the names of Nehemiah, Penelope, Hannah Jeffrey, and Sarah Jeffrey to the baptismal list of Lyme’s first church, and the following winter in the east parish “twenty or upward of this tribe of Indians,” Griswold wrote, had been “hopefully converted.” Some had reformed their “excessive drinking and Sabbath breaking,” and there had been only “two or three instances of excess,” which were followed by manifestations of “deep repentance.”

Ezra Stiles sketched the dome-shaped frame of Eliza and Phoebe Moheage’s wigwam when he visited the Niantic reserve in 1761, and he described its earthen floor, central fire pit hearth, and raised platform for bedding and furnishings.

To facilitate conversion, church members in the east parish made special accommodation for native customs in January 1744/5. After considering “the case of Ann Chesno, an Indian Woman,” they voted “to admit her into the church without requiring a confession for putting away her Indian husband,” agreeing that she had acted “according to the Indian law.” That same year, when “Hannah Jeffrey, (Indian)” offered “a confession for the sin of drunkenness and laxity” in Parsons’s west parish, it “was read and accepted” by Lyme’s first church members. But by then, Griswold reported, “the great sense of divine things seem[ed] to be in a great measure abated among those Indians,” and the school for native youth “had so little good effect, that it was given over.”

When Scottish-born physician Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712–1756) visited the Niantic reserve in 1744 while traveling on horseback through New England from Maryland to Maine, he noted in his diary seeing “thirteen or fourteen huts or wigwams made of bark” in “the Indian town of Niantique.” The memorial from Lyme’s ministers had reported thirty families of Indians in Niantic a decade earlier, but that number steadily declined. When Newport minister Rev. Ezra Stiles (1727–1795) visited the reserve in 1761, after the death of seven Niantic men serving with colonial troops in the French and Indian War, he counted “10 families besides 9 widows.”

Mercy Ann Nonsuch Matthews, shown here approaching age ninety, married in 1846 Henry Matthews, an accomplished Mohegan stonemason and basket maker who served as a deacon in the Mohegan church.

The population decline continued in the nineteenth century, and overseer Moses Warren (1762–1836) reported “less than thirty” Niantics left in 1825. The state passed a law “to protect the wood and lands of the Niantic Indians” in 1836, but thirty years later the population on the reserve had shrunk to nine. In 1870 the state declared the Niantics extinct and sold the three-hundred-acre tract on the Black Point peninsula. By then Mercy Ann Nonsuch (1822–1913), born on the reserve and “bound out” at age seven to the widowed Mrs. Ethelinda Caulkins Griswold (1778–1864), whose husband Thomas Griswold (1779–1817) was Rev. George Griswold’s grandson, had married and lived elsewhere in a comfortable home surrounded by houseplants, a parlor organ, and two Bibles. “They may declare me extinct, that does not make me extinct,” she said in 1871. “I am not extinct, I am not buried.”

In 1858 Hartford artist Charles de Wolfe Brownell depicted the legendary rock ledge along the Connecticut River known as Joshua’s Seat, part of an expanse of tribal land acquired by Richard Ely after the death of Attawanhood, called Joshua, in 1676.