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The example of Presbyterian missions to the Chickasaws in northern Mississippi presents a myriad of historical issues concerning the missionaries themselves, the Chickasaws, enslaved Africans belonging to the Chickasaws, and the multiethnic nature of early nineteenth-century mission church experience. To be sure, internal and sometimes external contradictions "bemired southern evangelicals," and the life and work of Presbyterian missionary T. C. Stuart, among others, bear witness to the complexity of that struggle.1 Making missions to Native Americans in northern Mississippi even more sophisticated are the theological implications of Presbyterianism involved in the mission's goals and approach.2 Prior to Chickasaw Removal and after banishment to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), Christian missionary men and women worked alongside and cultivated relationships with their indigenous neighbors. Historians have examined these missions among Native American nations such as the Cherokees and found that the missions to the southern Indians impacted the overall development of Native American religion in America, specifically in the South.2
Historians have also investigated the role of slavery within Native American nations. Many Indian groups were struggling to survive within a context where human chattel slavery had become normative.4 Given the prevalence of slavery in the Mississippi territory, the mission activity in frontier Mississippi after statehood was thoroughly multiethnic. Indeed, the multiethnic nature of mission activity in frontier Mississippi lends complexity to any understanding of T. C. Stuart, the Monroe Church, Presbyterian domestic missions, and religion in Mississippi. Mission work was also rooted in centuries of European incursion and tied as much to European ideas of property, race, and slavery as it was to American Indian cultural practices.5 Slavery, racialist ideology, and multiethnic Native American ancestry had a tremendous impact on understandings of Presbyterian missions among the Chickasaws.6 In the early nineteenth century, federal policy toward Indians was unapologetically Christian and assimilationist in its intent. John C. Calhoun and Thomas McKenney, as well as other early agents of the US government, sought to use "Christian missionaries to mold Indians into the models of American society." Early missionary attempts at "molding" the Chickasaws gave way to the power and influence of leaders who wanted their "children to read and write and do mathematics." Missionaries quickly realized that the Chickasaws had their own views and uses for missionaries. Chickasaw...