American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

JUDSON, ADONIRAM

(9 August 1788, Malden, MA-12 April, 1850, at sea, off the coast of Burma). Education: B.A., Brown University, 1807; student, Andover Theological Seminary, 1808-9. Career: Schoolteacher, Plymouth, 1807-8; linguist and missionary to Burma, 1812-50.

In Congregational history the faithful, occasionally, have had an annoying way of becoming Baptists. Congregationalism stressed the idea that communion should be available only to mature converts. This view could easily be extended to baptism, and occasionally was. Henry Dunster* became a Baptist in 1654, ending his distinguished C1ij:eer as president of Harvard, and Adoniram Judson defected in 1812, ending the promising beginning of the first overseas Congregational mission.

After graduating from Brown and teaching for a year in Plymouth, Judson went to Andover, where he became the leader of a group of young men who founded the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Judson was appointed to travel abroad to make contacts with an English mission association, and was captured at sea by a French privateer and imprisoned-the first of many misadventures in his foreign travels. Soon released, he went on to London, where he found the mission society leaders cordial but unwilling to embark on a joint enterprise.

Back in the United States he followed a course soon to be common among Congregational missionaries, receiving ordination, marrying, and boarding ship all within a few days. Thus in 1812 the Judsons and another missionary couple set sail for Calcutta. Along the way Judson read Baptist literature, expecting to encounter English Baptist missionaries, and eager to anticipate and obliterate their arguments. But instead of converting them, he was converted by their tracts, and when he stepped off the ship in Calcutta he was a Congregationalist no more. His wife required further convincing, but after more study, she 100 converted. In September of 1812, seven months and some fifteen thousand miles after his Congregational ordination, Adoniram Judson and his wife were rebaptised.

Judson compiled a distinguished record during almost four decades in Burma, withstanding virulent disease, hostility from the British, and imprisonment by the natives. He translated the Bible and numerous tracts into Burmese and compiled a English-Burmese dictionary. And he initiated missionary efforts that brought thousands of Burmese men and women into the Baptist church.

These achievements were cold comfort to the American Board, which had lost its earliest, and as it would turn out, one of its best missionaries. But the Congregationalists redoubled their efforts to found missions of their own, and were served by men like the Hiram Binghams**, father and son, who managed to preserve their faith on land and sea in places as remote as the Hawaiian and the Gilbert Islands.

Bibliography
A: The New Testament in Burmese (MauImein, Burma, 1832); The Old Testament in Burmese (MauImein, Burma, 1834-35); Dictionary, English and Burmese (MauImein, Burma, 1852).
B: DAB 10, 234-35; Francis Wayland, Memoir of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, 2 vols. (Boston, 1853); Edward Judson, Life of Adoniram Judson by His Son (Philadelphia, 1883); Honore Willsie Morrow, The Splendor of God (New York, 1929) [historical novel]; Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson (Boston, 1956).