American Missionary Association

The American Missionary Association formed in 1846 in Albany, New York, as an alliance of Christian abolitionists who chose not to associate with the existing missionary agencies operated by various Protestant denominations. The spark for the formation of the association dates to the plight of the Amistad captives in 1839. This group of Africans enslaved in violation of international law successfully revolted against their captors aboard a Spanish slave ship—but ended up on trial in the United States when the ship drifted into a harbor on Long Island, New York. The well-publicized trial led many northern abolitionists to push mainstream missionary organizations, including the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to assist the Amistad voyagers in their return to Africa, but the organizations refused. The frustrations of these Christian abolitionists led to the formation of three groups: the Union Missionary Society, the Western Evangelical Mission Society, and the Western Indian Missionary Committee. In 1846 all three groups combined to form the American Missionary Association.

The American Missionary Association initiated the publication of its monthly organ, The American Missionary, and set about establishing foreign missions in Africa, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and the Far East. Early officers of the organization included William Jackson of Massachusetts, George Whipple of Ohio, and Lewis Tappan of New York. Funding came from small donations from established denominations, especially the Congregationalists. Shortly after its founding, the association expanded its activities to include missions among fugitive slave communities in Canada and organized a Home Department to direct expansion into western territories and southern states. Missions in the slave states were pioneered by the Kentucky planter-turned-abolitionist John G. Fee, who later founded Berea College with the association's support.

Frederick Douglass had little interaction with the American Missionary Association. As an advocate first of Garrisonian and later of political abolition, Douglass supported nonreligious means of bringing an end to slavery. Nevertheless, the association was an important element in the antebellum antislavery movement. The association's agitation led to reform in major denominational missionary groups, including the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Home Missionary Society. In its refusal to affiliate with slaveholders, the organization set an important example for other groups working in the South. As the association and other established missionary organizations competed for contributions, those organizations came to adopt stronger antislavery positions to mollify contributors. The association also acted as a vehicle through which Christian abolitionists could lobby for antislavery action within mainstream Protestant denominations.

During the Civil War the American Missionary Association followed the Union army south, funding and supporting schools for freed men and women. In the period immediately surrounding the war, the association founded as many as five hundred schools for African Americans; during Reconstruction it focused efforts on funding institutions of higher education, including Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Although the association expanded its western operations to include missions among Native Americans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, its legacy remains tied to the abolition of slavery and the assistance and education of the freed African Americans of the South.

Bibliography

Beard, Augustus Field. A Crusade of Brotherhood: A History of the American Missionary Association (1909). New York: AMS Press, 1972.
McKivigan, John R. The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.

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