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Early Indigenous Literatures

A "Sketch" of Moses Paul's life, appended to a 1773 edition of Occom's execution sermon

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Moses Paul's Narrative Katherine Garret was not the only condemned Native person to garner significant public attention in 18th-century New England. Another highly publicized case was that of Moses Paul, a Mohegan man condemned to die for the murder of a white settler, Moses Cook. At Paul’s request, celebrity Native minister Samson Occom delivered his execution sermon in September of 1772.[1] While Paul did not write a confession as did Garret, an account of his life was appended to several early editions of Samson Occom’s published execution sermon. The account is not attributed to any author, but an introduction reads, “the following Sketches of his Life and Character were collected chiefly from his own Mouth.”[2]

Like Garret’s confession, this text is a heavily mediated account of the life, condemnation, and quest for salvation of a Native person; also like Garret’s confession, it was used as paratext for an execution sermon, although in Paul’s case, the sermon was delivered not by a settler minister, but by an Indigenous minister. The anonymously-penned account of Paul’s life appropriates his story in service of dominant narratives of Christian benevolence and of the repentant drunken and violent “Indian”[3] who serves as an example to other Native Americans. In the title page for Occom’s sermon, no mention is made of the appended “Sketch,” and the account merely serves to provide further context for the “inquisitive” readers of Occom’s sermon.[4] Nonetheless, despite the paratextual sidelining and mediation of Paul’s story, strains of Paul’s resistance are present in the account. I argue that Paul’s authorial presence and resistance survives, albeit in limited ways, through this text.

Other scholars have attended to Paul’s voice and story, primarily through the records of his court proceedings, through which Paul appealed his conviction in an attempt to change it from murder to manslaughter. Ava Chamberlain writes:
“No one, it seems, has attempted to uncover Moses Paul's version of the story, even though that version exists in the case's judicial records. Like that of all criminal defendants, Paul's voice is mediated by his lawyer's, and it is strained by the documents that seek to formalize it. Evident, however, are Paul's efforts to persuade both the courts and the broader New England society to accept a more complex construction of racial difference than the popular image of the drunken Indian allowed.”[5]
Matt Salyer joins Chamberlain in conversation on Paul’s “narrative record,”[6] and further argues that “all figurations of selves in texts are mediated representations.”[7] I extend this claim to the notion that all authorship is inescapably mediated. This framework allows readers of the archive to see Paul as not only the object of a story, but one of several authors of his own story, albeit an author with restricted agency.

Salyer notes Paul’s repeated insistence, including on his execution day, “on accurate details and the integrity of his own version of events.”[8] The sketch of Paul’s life, as Salyer points out,[9] relays Paul’s claim that he was innocent of all other murders of which he had been accused.[10] Throughout his imprisonment, Paul was especially adamant that he had killed Cook with a club rather than a flat iron, the weapon which he was convicted of having used.[11] The sketch of Paul’s life appended to Occom’s sermon is faithful to this detail of Paul’s version of events: “he wounded Mr. Moses Cook,” it says, “with a Club.”[12] Rather than detail Paul’s protestations regarding the true weapon used, in this particularity the text adopts and transmits Paul’s narrative as the authoritative one. Paul thus figures, to a limited degree, as an authorial and authoritative presence within the text.

The "Sketch" of Paul’s life also subtly resists a simplistic narrative of the typical drunken “Indian.” The account shares the story of Paul’s time in the army: “he inlisted in the Provincial Service, in Col. Putnam’s Company, and Regiment. He says, that he contracted many sinful Habits in the Army which before his Inlistment he was a Stranger to the Practice of.”[13] The account continues, “in the Merchants Service … he got confirmed in those evil Habits which he too easily embibed in the Army.”[14] The narrator goes on to describe how years later, as a culmination of his excessive use of alcohol, Paul fatally wounded Cook. While the account does invoke the stereotypical image of a drunken and violent Native American, it also subtly subverts this stereotype by laying the blame for Paul’s alcoholism on the influence of the army and other settler-dominated environments. The word “contracted” to describe the development of Paul’s “sinful Habits” suggests that Paul was a passive victim of the negative tendencies that others in the army transmitted to him. The narrator also takes care to note that Paul showed no proclivity for these sinful ways prior to his involvement in the army, thus further blaming the military environment for Paul’s degeneration.

Moses Paul, like Katherine Garret, used what platform he had to author a narrative of his life that persists in the archive despite its mediation and relegation to paratext.

[1] Matt Salyer, “‘Between the Heavens and the Earth’: Narrating the Execution of Moses Paul,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36:4 (2012), 77.
[2] Samson Occom, “A sermon, preached at the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, who was executed at New-Haven, on the 2d of September 1772, for the murder of Mr. Moses Cook, late of Waterbury, on the 7th of December 1771. Preached at the desire of said Paul,” 4th edition (printed and sold by T Green, New London, 1772), 24.
[3] Ava Chamberlain, “The Execution of Moses Paul: A Story of Crime and Contact in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut,” in The New England Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004), 414. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1559825.
[4] Samson Occom, “A sermon, preached at the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, who was executed at New-Haven, on the 2d of September 1772, for the murder of Mr. Moses Cook, late of Waterbury, on the 7th of December 1771. Preached at the desire of said Paul,” 4th edition (printed and sold by T Green, New London, 1772), 24.
[5] Ava Chamberlain, “The Execution of Moses Paul: A Story of Crime and Contact in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut,” 416.
[6] Matt Salyer, “‘Between the Heavens and the Earth’: Narrating the Execution of Moses Paul,” 79.
[7] Ibid., 80.
[8] Ibid., 81.
[9] Ibid., 81.
[10] Samson Occom, “A sermon, preached at the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, who was executed at New-Haven, on the 2d of September 1772, for the murder of Mr. Moses Cook, late of Waterbury, on the 7th of December 1771. Preached at the desire of said Paul,” 4th edition (printed and sold by T Green, New London, 1772), 24.
[11] Ava Chamberlain, “The Execution of Moses Paul: A Story of Crime and Contact in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut,” 449; Matt Salyer, “‘Between the Heavens and the Earth’: Narrating the Execution of Moses Paul,” 81.
[12] Samson Occom, “A sermon, preached at the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, who was executed at New-Haven, on the 2d of September 1772, for the murder of Mr. Moses Cook, late of Waterbury, on the 7th of December 1771. Preached at the desire of said Paul,” 4th edition (printed and sold by T Green, New London, 1772), 24.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.