May 25, 2018
Third in a series of spinoff articles from recent research on the
Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists
by Janet Thorngate
One of the first three people baptized and received into membership in the Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptist Church was an Indian named Japeth who lived in New London in Connecticut Colony.1 Later in the year that Japeth was baptized, and for most of the next two years, King Philip’s War engulfed much of southern New England as Natives under Wampanoag Chief Metacomet (dubbed King Philip) fought the United Colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth). It was five years after the war that the next Native Americans joined the church. They lived on Martha’s Vineyard, the large island about forty-five miles southeast off the coast of Newport.2
Relationships between the Native Americans and the English colonists on Martha’s Vineyard followed a very different pattern than those on the southern New England mainland. From the beginning, the goal of the English proprietor was to convert the Indians to Christianity. He used quite different methods, however, than the Massachusetts missionaries, not only learning the Wampanoag language (Algonquin/Massachusett) and their religion but working within the parameters of their society. He did not require converts to abandon their customs, respected Native leadership and property rights, and trained Native converts as preachers and teachers of their own people. Schools to teach the Natives successfully prepared them to read the Bible (John Eliot’s 1663 version in Massachusetts). They became part of the Calvinist Puritan church (Congregational). About the time Japeth was baptized in New London (1675), it was estimated that about three hundred Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoag families (roughly 1500 people) were Christians, more than half of the Native population; English settlers there had increased to 180.
The mainland Wampanoags lost the war and their independence but because those on Martha’s Vineyard had never supported Philip, relations between English and Wampanoags there changed little. By then, however, Baptist preachers were active on the island and many English and Wampanoags were lured from the Congregational monopoly by ideas of believer’s as opposed to infant baptism and a church free of political control.
In Newport, Elder Hiscox of the ten-year-old SDB Church received a letter from Thomas West, the first practitioner of medicine on Martha’s Vineyard. “God has clearly made known unto me the way of baptism,” he wrote, “so that now we both wait to give up ourselves unto God in that ordinance therefore pray come to us and help us.” Hubbard later recorded that Hiscox went to the island, baptized Thomas and Elizabeth West and “Sister Rogers,” and the church’s messengers laid hands on them and added them to the church. Tacked on to the brief message was this curious note: “…where there is two Indians, Christian Indians as they call them that keep the 7th day.”
That was May 1681. Not until a December letter to Edward Stennet in England do we hear more of those “two Indians,” again in a kind of footnote to Hubbard’s focus on two others:
This week past there came two Indians, one of them an old man & his son, both baptized at Nantucket; the old man was sent forth to preach unto the Indians…. And brother Hiscox and they had a reasoning together, found the old man very sound in what they knew; had a Bible in their own language, etc. After much discourse they reasoned about Jehovah’s 7th day Sabbath and after much discourse the old man said, I thought a little water sprinkled was baptism, but God have opened my eyes, now I see it is not: God can open my eyes to see the Sabbath also. There is two Indians was baptized here this summer by brother Hiscox in our town, and they had hands laid on them by brother Hiscox and the church brake bread with them: they live on Martha’s Vineyard in York government. They through grace do stand fast with one brother and two sisters; blessed be God.
Eventually we learn their names (one of the many spellings of their names) in a letter a month later: Isaac Takkamme and David Oakes. “And brother Isaac [who was then in Newport] saith his brother and his wife will be next for baptism and the Sabbath: this is good news.”
Hubbard visited the five Vineyard members himself in 1683 reporting that all were well including “those brother Indians who stand fast and courageous in and for God’s truth and cause.” Last reference to them was in a Hubbard letter to Henry Reeve, a member in Jamaica, Long Island, saying that Isaac Tuckkamee had been in Newport “ten days or more” reporting that all was well on Martha’s Vineyard and “some more there keep the 7th day Sabbath” and “he doth desire you would inquire for an Indian that was sold to Jamaica, his name is Gesse.” Those sober last words remind us that though at least most Native Americans on Martha’s Vineyard at that time were free, it was not the case with all elsewhere.
After Samuel Hubbard’s death, when the Newport church began keeping official records, there was no further mention of Isaac Takkamme or David Oakes. The first official membership list (1708) includes Elizabeth West and two of her children (Thomas had died) and two Rogers women, but no recognizable Native American names. But, wait—not yet end of story!
“An Indian named Isaac” living on Martha’s Vineyard, is mentioned in an obscure but fascinating note in the I Hopkinton record book years later. The church authorized money to send a member to “inquire into the circumstances of an Estate that was given by an Indian named Isaac at Martha’s Vineyard.”
The bequest was in four equal parts: to the Newport church, the I Hopkinton church, Elder Thomas Hiscox (I Hopkinton pastor and son of William Hiscox who baptized Isaac Takkamme), and the Tribys (Ruth Triby a Newport member).
Efforts to find a will or any further scrap of information about it (in Newport church records, Martha’s Vineyard legal records, etc.) have so far produced more questions than answers. They have turned up more spellings (and possible spellings) for Isaac’s and David’s Indian names, verified that they were real people who lived on Martha’s Vineyard, bought and sold property (in some cases to each other) as early as 1667 for both, as late as 1688 for David Oakes and 1721 for Isaac Takkamee. A still unverifiable but unrefuted eighteenth century theory is that Isaac was Isaac Decamy, pastor of a Native American Baptist church on Martha’s Vineyard around 1700.
What can we conclude? So many questions remain. The personal and church relationships cultivated between these Native American members and their Rhode Island church brothers and sisters do stand in contrast to the tragic pattern of colonist-Native relationships repeated from New England westward through the next century.
1 See Sabbath Recorder, May 2018, “Native American in the Newport Seventh Day Baptist Church”, Part 1.
2 Sources for Newport church information in this article may be found in Baptists in Early North America: Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists by Janet Thorngate (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2017), particularly pages 35-37, 43-47, 58, 60, 65-68. In addition to a history of the church in its historical context, the book includes the previously unpublished church records and the collected writings of Samuel Hubbard pertinent to the church’s history. The book may be ordered from the publisher for $60: www.mupress.org or Mercer University Press, 501 Mercer Univ. Dr., Macon GA, 31207. A few copies are available from the SDB Center.
For Martha’s Vineyard see (1) Banks, Charles Edward. The History of Martha’s Vineyard, Dukes County, Massachusetts. Boston, George H. Dean, 1911-25. Reprinted Edgartown, MA: Dukes Co. Historical Society, 1966, (2) Segel, Jerome D. & R. Andrew Pierce, The Wampanoag Genealogical History of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub. Co., Berwyn Heights, MD.: Heritage Books 2003-2016, particularly vol 1 109, 197, 273, (3) Dresser, Thomas The Wampanoag Tribe of Martha’s Vineyard: Colonization to Recognition (Charleston SC: The History Press, 2011), particularly p. 54.