In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section William Apess

  • Introduction
  • General Overviews
  • Biographies
  • Primary Texts
  • Apess, Identity, and Native Literature
  • Apess and History
  • Apess and Religion
  • Apess, Authorship, and Print Culture
  • Apess and Other Writers

American Literature William Apess
by
Rochelle Raineri Zuck
  • LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0254

Introduction

William Apess (b. 1798–d. 1839) was a writer, activist, ordained Methodist minister, member of the Pequot Tribe, and adopted member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Apess was born in Colrain, Massachusetts, and spent most of his life in New England. His parents were William and Candace Apes (Apess later changed the spelling of his last name). His father was of Pequot and white ancestry; Drew Lopenzina’s biography Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass notes that records list Candace Apes as a “Negro woman” owned by Captain Joseph Taylor. Apess also claimed descent through his mother from the Wampanoag leader Metacomet (King Philip), whom he would later celebrate in his Eulogy on King Philip (1836). Apess spent his early years as an indentured servant to white New England families before running away at age fifteen and being conscripted into the army during the War of 1812. In 1821, Apess married Mary Wood and, according to Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass, the couple had seven children. He received his preaching license from New York’s Methodist Society and published his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in 1829 and brought out a second edition of the autobiography in 1831. Apess’s work is the first known book-length autobiography published by an Indigenous person. That same year, he published a sermon entitled “The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ.” During this time, Apess circulated as an itinerant minister and lecturer as well as a writer. In 1833, he visited the Mashpee Wampanoag community on Cape Cod and learned of their political and religious grievances, including their opposition to Harvard-appointed overseers and minster Reverend Phineas Fish. Apess, who was formally adopted by the Mashpee, worked with tribal members to agitate for Mashpee sovereignty and self-government (including control of timber resources and use of their church building) and for them to have a minster of their own choosing. In what came to be known as the Mashpee Revolt (or Woodland Revolt), Apess and other Mashpee members prevented four white men from removing timber from Mashpee lands, and he chronicled his involvement with the Mashpee Revolt in Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts (1835). Apess delivered his famous lecture Eulogy on King Philip at Boston’s Odeon Theater twice in January 1836 and later published it. Subsequently, Apess moved with his family (which included his second wife, Elizabeth) to New York City in search of employment. He died in New York City at the age of forty-one.

General Overviews

There are no book-length overviews of Apess’s written work and oratory, although discussions of his literary productions are included in biographies such as O’Connell 1992, Gura 2015, and Lopenzina 2017. Warrior 2005 argues for Apess’s centrality to the canon of Native American literature and highlights his literary innovations.

  • Gura, Philip F. The Life of William Apess, Pequot. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

    DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469619989.001.0001

    First full-length biography of Apess that is aimed at both a scholarly audience and a general readership. Traces Apess’s life through his birth and early years in Massachusetts through his death at forty-one years old in New York City. Relies on archival records, newspapers, and other contemporary print sources; Apess’s own writings; and secondary scholarship to provide a historically rich study of Apess’s life and works.

  • Lopenzina, Drew. Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017.

    Offers an excellent historical account of Apess’s life and work and situates Apess within a broader political, cultural, and religious landscape of the northeastern United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Grounded in extensive archival research and recovery work that fills in many of the gaps in earlier accounts of Apess’s life. Explores how Apess intervened in and spoke back to narratives of US nationhood and settler colonialism.

  • O’Connell, Barry. “Introduction.” In On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Edited Barry O’Connell, xiii–lxxvii. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

    Foundational introductory essay that introduces and briefly discusses Apess’s written work, oratory, and activism within the broader context of his life and times. Starting point for any scholarly work on Apess.

  • Warrior, Robert. “Eulogy on William Apess: His Writerly Life and His New York Death.” In The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction. By Robert Warrior, 1–47. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

    Important study of Apess as a writer of nonfiction that characterizes him as an “intellectual beacon” (p. 3) for later Native intellectuals. Part of a broader argument for the importance of reading Native nonfiction, which then as now often receives less critical attention than fiction and poetry. Warrior (Osage) offers biographical account of Apess, situates him within the broader history of Native New England, and offers critical readings of his major works.

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