Epistolary Estrangement: Mission, Marriage, and Missives in the Cherokee Nation

Abstract:This essay uses an epistolary studies framework to examine the correspondence of Ann Paine with a male administrator of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. Over the course of 1819-1820, Paine used letters to secure a position as a missionary in the Cherokee Nation. Missionary service enabled her to separate from her husband while retaining custody of her children and maintaining her public identity as a pious Christian woman. Testing the limits of marriage through the possibilities opened up to white women by global evangelical movements, this exchange demonstrates the unique flexibility of the letter as an exploratory space to navigate and renegotiate larger questions of personal agency in relation to social institutions. Because historians have used Paine's writings describing her time in the Cherokee Nation as primary sources for their work on the pivotal period preceding the Trail of Tears, her epistolary archive bears significance in understanding the gendered efficacy of letter writing, the fluidity and constraints of marriage, and white women's early engagements with globalized Protestant missionary causes.