The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Gregory Nobles (review)

Reviewed by: The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Gregory Nobles Nicholas Garcia (bio) Keywords Betsey Stockton, Slavery, Christianity, Missionaries, Resistance The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. By Gregory Nobles. ( Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 292. Cloth, $25.00.) Gregory Nobles's latest book explores the life of Betsey Stockton, a Black woman who lived through the early republic, antebellum, and Civil War eras. She was born a slave and was freed as a teenager, going on to work as a Protestant missionary in Hawai'i before becoming an educator and significant figure within Black communities in Philadelphia and then Princeton. Her story touches upon a variety of historical themes, the central of which are race and racism, religion and colonialism, and slavery and abolition. Nobles discusses these themes through eight chapters that reveal how tirelessly Stockton worked to uplift her community and push for progressive change in the United States. The book's thesis is that Black people's persistent resistance to slavery and racism in the nineteenth-century United States needs to be better recognized. According to Nobles, doing so means deeply analyzing the lives of the many Black men and women overlooked by historians. His contribution is a thorough examination of the relatively unknown Black woman activist Betsey Stockton and her experience as a slave, a missionary, an educator of Black children, and a Black community leader. Indeed, he views Stockton as someone who "who helped build institutions of resistance to racism over the decades until she died" (2–3). Foundational to this was her work as a missionary, which Nobles argues gave her the experience she needed to later uplift Black communities in Philadelphia and Princeton. He notes that Stockton would have viewed her efforts to convert Native Hawai'ians "as a step toward greater social equality among [End Page 517] island people" (9). Missionization, then, taught Stockton the significance of educating ordinary people who lacked significant advantages in life. The book not only crafts a deep biographical narrative of Stockton despite few surviving archival sources, but also reveals slavery's persistence in the northern states and within Ivy League institutions. Stockton's story highlights how stubbornly slavery held on in states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and it exposes the connections between Protestant enslavers like Ashbel Green and the institutions of higher education they managed (Princeton in his case). Nobles's discussion of the Princeton Theological Seminary and its support of the American Colonization Society is especially enlightening, as it reveals the extent to which prominent Black and white clergymen clashed in northern cities when it came to the topics of race and slavery (191). This reinforces Nobles's argument that Stockton's life should be viewed as a "form of resistance," insofar that it teaches us the ways in which Black people (and women in particular) were the primary instigators of progress in the northern states, whereas whites generally stood as a bulwark of racism even as abolition became inevitable (13). The problematic areas of the book relate to its handling of Stockton's time as a missionary in Hawai'i and Canada. Nobles might have done more here to discuss the intersections among Christianity, imperialism, and racism, especially given that he cites recent works in the field like Emily Conroy-Krutz's Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY, 2013). However, he shies away from using terms like colonialism to describe missionization, choosing instead to describe it as "cultural transformation," and framing Stockton's proselytizing more in terms of what it meant "for her personal transformation" rather than missionization's impact on Native Hawai'ians (96). More too could have been said about the historical impact of missionary organizations like the one that employed Stockton—in this case the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Indeed, organizations like the ABCFM had ties to slavery and colonialism, and they often used people of color as go-betweens when dealing with Indigenous populations. Nobles hints at this when discussing the four "pacific islanders" who served the ABCFM mission as translators in 1823, and when noting...

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