Samson Occom

Samson Occom was a Mohegan minister who raised the money that founded Dartmouth College and then broke with the man who spent it. He was converted in the Great Awakening at about sixteen, studied for four years with Eleazar Wheelock, and became a preacher and schoolmaster among the Montauk on Long Island, where he lived for a decade on a fraction of what English missionaries were paid and supported his family by fishing, farming and binding books. He was ordained by the Long Island Presbytery in 1759. In 1765 Wheelock sent him to Britain to raise funds for the Indian charity school; he preached some three hundred sermons over two years, was the first Native American many Britons had seen, drew enormous congregations, and collected around twelve thousand pounds, with the Earl of Dartmouth heading the subscription. He came home to find his own family had been left in near destitution in his absence, and then watched Wheelock move the school to New Hampshire and charter it as a college that enrolled colonists. He wrote to him that it had become alba mater, a mother for whites, and never spoke to him again. His Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul in 1772 was the first work by a Native American printed in English and went through nineteen editions. He compiled a hymnbook, kept a journal, and wrote an autobiographical narrative that describes the pay discrimination plainly. In his last years he helped found Brothertown in New York, a settlement of Christian Indians from several nations intended to be self-governing and out of the way of colonial land pressure. He died there in 1792.

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