American Revolution to the Civil War. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman.
Nobles applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Education of Betsey Stockton at the University of Chicago Press website.And so the Stewarts and Betsey Stockton found themselves ashore, likewise “most probably forever.” They also found themselves in less than commodious accommodations. The main house in the missionary enclosure— “which at home would be called small,” Stockton observed— had been essentially prefabricated, with wood measured and cut in Massachusetts, then shipped around Cape Horn to Honolulu, and assembled on-site in 1821. It didn’t have sleeping room for everyone, so most of the missionaries occupied small huts on the surrounding grounds. “We had assigned to us a little thatched house in one corner of the yard,” Stockton wrote, “consisting of one small room, with a door, and two windows— the door too small to admit a person walking in without stooping, and the windows only large enough for one person to look out at a time.” The missionaries came together for meals in the main house. As aboard the Thames, Stockton took note of the social arrangements: “The family all eat at the same table, and the ladies attend to the work by turns.” Stockton took her turn, and she found value in the time she spent serving the others: “Had I been idle, I should not in all probability been so happy in my situation as I was.”The Page 99 Test works to the extent that it catches Betsey Stockton arriving in Hawaiʻi in 1823—a critical turning point in her first 25 years of life. Born in 1798 in Princeton NJ, she was “given, as a slave” into the household of the Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent Presbyterian pastor in Philadelphia who became the president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1812. During her adolescent years, Green emancipated her from slavery but kept her in his household as a servant until 1822, when she joined one of Green’s former students, Charles Samuel Stewart, as part of a “missionary family” sailing from New Haven to Hawaiʻi. She would be the only single woman and the only Black person aboard the whaleship Thames for five months, enduring turbulent seafaring, physical suffering, and spiritual trial. The main source of comfort came in her increasingly close connection to Charles Stewart, his wife Harriet, and their son, Charles Seaforth, born at sea just before the Thames came in view of Hawaiʻi.
Stockton kept to the enclosure most of the time, but she ventured away on a few occasions to fetch milk from another compound about two miles away— the home of Anthony Allen, one of the most significant Americans in Hawaiʻi, and certainly the most notable African American. Allen had first come to Hawaiʻi as a mariner in 1810 or 1811, and the following year he returned to settle on Oʻahu. Up to that point, though, his life had been anything but settled, a “story of wanderings & adventures,” as he told it, that took him around the world, eventually to the Pacific and remarkable success.
And so Betsey Stockton and the Stewarts went ashore to take up their missionary duties. Stocktonʻs missionary contract called for her to be “employed as a teacher of a school, for which it is hoped she will be found qualified.” Qualified she certainly proved to be, and she started the first school for the makaʻāinana, or ordinary people of the islands, a significant and successful achievement. In Hawaiʻi, Betsey Stockton embraced the calling she would follow for the rest of her life, teaching people of color of the lower classes.
The Hawaiʻi chapter of her life came to a premature end, however. Harriet Stewart became too ill to remain in the islands, and the Stewarts returned to the United States in 1826, with Betsey Stockton accompanying them. She remained a loving and loyal friend of the Stewart family throughout her life, but she also pursued her own path as a teacher, returning to Princeton in 1833, where she became a founding member of the town’s Black Presbyterian church and the sole teacher at the sole—and segregated—school in Princeton’s sizeable Black community until her death, in 1865. In the face of America’s racism, which permeated the North no less than the South, Betsey Stockton engaged in a grassroots struggle for decades, working to keep a Black community together in a nation coming apart. Her persistence, I argue, was a form of resistance.
--Marshal Zeringue
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