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Not Race, but Grace: Presbyterian Missionaries and American Indians, 1837-1893

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Race, writes George W. Stocking, Jr., was "a characteristically nineteenthcentury phenomenon." Historians of articulate racial thought in America generally believe that the optimism of the eighteenth century gave way in the nineteenth to pessimism in matters of race. Growing numbers of scientists, and perhaps nonscientists too, came to believe that certain races were innately inferior, retarded by inherited qualities that were unchangeable or changeable only over long periods of time, and that cultural manifestations were the product primarily of biological endowment. By late in the century, according to Stocking, "race and culture were linked in a single evolutionary hierarchy extending from the dark-skinned savage to the civilized white man. " 1 In the first six decades of its life (1837-1893) the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America sent more than 400 missionaries to at least seventeen diverse Indian tribes.2 Convinced of the absolute superiority of their Christian civilization, these missionaries relentlessly denounced the ways of the Indians.3 They condescended to and