Many studies of America's antebellum reform era have focused on the prominent men and women at the top of the reform organizations who directed affairs from Boston, New York or Philadelphia. This dissertation traces the life and letters of a non-elite Connecticut layperson, Hannah More, whose fascinating life story and career (1809-1868) illustrates the profound involvement of laypersons in multiple reform causes as extensions of their religious and spiritual commitments. Hannah More's passion for reform took her to work among the Cherokee and Choctaw in Indian Territory, to serve among the Amistad survivors in Sierra Leone, and to postings as diverse as rural upstate New York, slaveholding Kentucky and tropical West Africa. Documents from her lengthy employments by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the American Missionary Association (AMA) bring into sharp relief the tensions within those organizations over slaveholding, missionary methodology, and serving Native American, African-American and African populations.
The narrative of Hannah More's life recovered from 750 pages of letters, manuscripts and documents connects many of the social and religious movements of the antebellum era, including abolitionism, Evangelical opposition to Federal policy toward Native Americans, Second Great Awakening spirituality, women's higher education, missionary efforts directed to Native Americans and West Africans, and pre-millennialist Adventism. Her difficult pathway through several of the Benevolent Empire's most prominent organizations richly illustrates the restlessness of the reformist spirit, and the spiritual and social perfectionalism that characterized many of those whose millennialist expectations were being disappointed by very human and political organizations.
Recruited as a missionary by Rufus Anderson, Hannah More worked alongside and corresponded with Samuel Worcester, Chief John Ross, Lewis Tappan, survivors of the Amistad affair who had resettled in West Africa, and the founding leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Hannah More's prolonged correspondence and difficult encounter with the emerging Seventh-day Adventist community in Battle Creek, Michigan provide insight into the social values of what was then a small surviving splinter group of the former Millerite movement.
