The first proposal for organized education of any kind in the American colonies concerned the education of Native Americans. In keeping with the prevailing ideology of colonial conquest that suggested a European obligation to ‘pacify’ and ‘civilize’ indigenous people, British Virginians petitioned the crown for funding to develop an Indian college within a decade of the first permanent settlement at Jamestown. Though the plans for the proposed college in Henrico were officially endorsed both by the Virginia Company in 1618 and King James, the goal of establishing an institution to educate the "‘Children of the Infidels’" (qtd in Wright 3) was to be ultimately frustrated by fraudulent money management. In an unending effort to turn a profit in the colonies, the venerable treasurer of the Virginia Company, Sir Edwin Sandys, collected a net £2,043 but used the Indian college funds to ship indentured tenants for what were supposed to be college lands. With the first European effort to establish a college for Native Americans, a pattern of fraud and failure to enact official plans was set, a pattern which to was persist throughout the colonial era.

Harvard College’s financial survival was linked to moneys contributed by English benefactors who were apparently eager to play up their perceived pious obligation to convert the Native Americans to Christianity. At its founding, Puritan Harvard’s stated mission was to avoid the scenario of "‘[leaving] an illiterate ministry to the church when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.’" (qtd in Wright 7) However, shortly after the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was established to distribute funds for colonial educational establishments, Harvard’s president Henry Dunster professed an interest in converting Indians in order to gain access to the free-flowing charitable funds that were available for that purpose.

Dunster’s requests for funding his Indian education project were well timed: his financial campaign in 1650 roughly coincided with the uneasy end of Connecticut’s Pequot War in which the Puritans badly offended their allies, the Narragansetts, with the extreme savagery they displayed towards the Pequots. The War’s conclusion may have worried the Brits into mounting a serious attempt to establish an Indian school, thereby creating a system of go-betweens to assist in both missionary and political affairs.

The impetus to incorporate Native Americans into the European colonists’ social universe was somewhat more urgent in colonial Virginia. Just prior to the movement to found the Anglican school of William and Mary, Bacon’s Rebellion in May of 1676 exposed the tenuous nature of the colonial government’s authority. Nathaniel Bacon, a rogue and professional outlaw, organized a group of frontier vigilantes in a rebellion against the wealthy planters and political leaders in Virginia. Uniting servants, small farmers and slaves against the colonial elite, Bacon waged a campaign of indiscriminate destruction against Native Americans on the Virginia frontier, whom they felt profited from the coddling by the government. It was apparent to the government that there was a serious need to create a mechanism for socialization of the Native Americans in order to co-opt the constant threat they posed on the frontier.

Efforts to establish institutions of Native American education flagged for the six decades between the founding of William and Mary and the beginning of Dartmouth College. During this time the British government grew more and more wary of France’s presence in the New World. French settlers had succeeded in cultivating lucrative trading relationships with Native Americans in Canada and the Mississippi Valley and enjoyed healthy profits from the booming fur trade. As French and British lands expanded to the point of contact in the Ohio Valley, it became clear that to a great extent, Indians held the balance of power in America.

Though the British successfully defeated the French in 1763, New England, the area burdened most by the threat of France’s influence, was unnerved by the demonstration of just how fragile this balance of power was. Following the French and Indian War, the British issued the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting settlement west of the Appalachians in an attempt to prevent its own colonists from creating alliances with the Indians on the frontier. The government also made hasty attempts to weld relationships with local tribes, in an effort to shore up what political power it had. The defensive measures taken by the British government after the War reflect its awareness of the unsturdy power structure that existed in colonial America.

The founder of Dartmouth College, Congregationalist Elezar Weelock, benefited from the tense clash between French and British colonial power. The case of Dartmouth represents yet another appeal to pious inklings of English benefactors for Indian educational funds, rendered all the more powerful this time by British insecurities concerning Native Americans in the aftermath of the French and Indian War.

In 1763 Eleazar Wheelock advanced a proposal for establishing a college in New Hampshire for the purpose of "introducing religion, learning, agriculture an manufacture among the Pagans in America" (qtd in Wright 10). A master in the art of false advertisement, Wheelock sent a former Indian student to England to solicit funds for his project. The student, Samson Occum, raised £12,000 "in the mistaken belief that the funds were to be employed ‘towards building and endowing an Indian academy...’" (Wright 10). Yet, following a then familiar pattern, Wheelock had no intention of using the funds to build the said Indian academy. Instead he exhausted all of Occum’s collections in 15 years educating 160 students, a mere 40 of whom were Native American (Wright 10).

Link to overview of Native American Education

Link to Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

Link to Anglican Timeline