SOURCE: “Conclusion,” in Samson Occom, Dartmouth College Publications, 1935, pp. 215-18.

Blodgett is the author of the first comprehensive biography of Occom. In the following excerpt from that work, he offers a summation of the missionary's life and work, declaring that Occom “never ‘sold out,’ as so many Indians did. … [He stood for Indian autonomy, dying at last in an independent Indian township which he had fought to create and preserve.”]

The Indian who emerges from the foregoing record is not a subtle character. No complex analysis is required to arrive at a fair estimate of the man. As a preacher he never questioned the orthodoxies in which he was trained. Unlike so many ministers in his day, he was not given to the kind of textual interpretations which led so often to new offshoots from the main stream of a religious faith. The gospel he learned from Eleazar...