In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty examines the rhetorical uses of “Israelite Indian stories” by varied groups in the early Republic to bolster theological and nationalistic claims. Although speculation that the indigenous people of the Americas originated from a “Lost Tribe” of Israelites dated back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these stories took on a new life after the American Revolution as evangelical Protestants, Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people like the Cherokee found them useful when asserting nationalist and racial claims for their respective communities. The evolution of these stories and their uses supports Dougherty's argument that nationalism and “manifest destiny” were neither fixed nor uniform concepts during the period of early US expansion. Instead, a close study of these stories, and the contexts in which communities employed them, reflect multiple competing nationalisms and strategies pursued by individuals and groups in the emerging racial and imperial hierarchies of a growing United States. The emergence of an expansionist nation that prioritized the rights of white men was not a necessary conclusion within the early United States, and Dougherty's exploration of multiple alternatives sheds light on the nationalist frameworks that these groups proposed instead.
Throughout five chapters devoted to each group, Dougherty documents the evolving uses that individuals and communities found in these stories. For evangelical Protestants, these stories inspired missionaries to build on what they believed to be a bedrock Israelite religion in native cultures. This conception of indigenous history also aligned with a providentialist outlook on early United States history that inspired sympathy and kinship for contemporary Native Americans, while also affirming territorial expansion by encouraging indigenous people to convert to Christianity and willingly move westward. For early Mormons, Lamanite stories that sought to fill in the history of the indigenous diaspora in the Americas served to help create a sense of community distinct from mainline Protestantism. These stories also inspired a shared sense of suffering as Mormons faced similar removals and exiles; yet Doughterty asserts that these feelings of kinship did not extend to political alliances with indigenous people.
For American Jews, a shared ancestry with Indians helped bolster claims for racial parity and land sovereignty in an increasingly hostile and expansionist United States. A comparison of the uses of these stories by famous Jewish editor Mordecai Noah and Pequot minister William Apess serves as the focal point for this chapter. Dougherty then devotes a chapter to the Cherokee and the ways that individuals utilized these stories to encourage greater missionary support amid the decades-long struggle for nationhood and sovereignty against the encroachments of the federal government and the state of Georgia. Deliberate efforts to connect Cherokee traditions and practices by Cherokee mediators served to bolster land claims and independence from missionary control, and reasserted the validity of traditional Cherokee ceremonies and practices frequently targeted as idolatrous by white missionaries. The final chapter devotes attention to the American public as a whole and traces the decline of interest in these stories as expansionism became secularized and treated as natural rather than providential. Taken together, the chapters offer a compelling rationale for the thesis that divergent groups formed their own ideas about nationalism and expansion.
Dougherty's cautious reading of the Cherokee oral histories captured by missionary Daniel S. Butrick are representative of the close reading and cautious use of primary sources throughout the book. His explanation of mediation as a practice within Cherokee storytelling and the multiple layers of translation and interpretation that went into producing these accounts demonstrates his attention to detail as a scholar. Likewise, his ability to unite disparate groups through their use of “Israelite Indian stories” is an innovative take on an oft-neglected subset of early American writings. Dougherty is at his strongest throughout the book when he focuses on how these stories undergirded competing ideas about nationalism and identity.
Despite these strengths, Dougherty's efforts to connect the ideas invoked by “Israelite Indian stories” to the emotions they purportedly evoked are less convincing throughout the book. Dougherty devotes significant explanation in the introduction to the rationale behind his treatment of “emotions as practices” and the rhetorical uses of emotions by communities to “taxonomize and control their members’ emotions” (14–15). This third major contribution that Dougherty makes in Lost Tribes Found is best restricted to the emotions authors hoped to invoke within their readers when utilizing “Israelite Indian stories,” as it is difficult to demonstrate with certainty that these stories served as the motivation for actions. For example, the pathos embodied within the “vanishing Indian” trope that took hold in the Northeast during the eighteenth century, examined in detail in Laura M. Stevens's excellent book The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), can explain the interest evangelical Protestants had in supporting missions to indigenous tribes like the Cherokee in an equal, if not more convincing, way. Without substantial evidence drawing on the readership of these stories and their emotional response, this claim falls flat in an otherwise well-documented book that employs sources with care.
The religious foundations of imperial expansion and role that “Israelite Indian stories” played in debates regarding expansion and racial hierarchies remain the strongest contributions in Lost Tribes Found. Dougherty's book will be of interest to specialists within the field of religious studies, rhetoric, imperialism, and nineteenth-century American culture. The narrow focus of the book ensures that it is best suited for specialists rather than an undergraduate or general audience unless readers have an abiding interest in the subject matter. In conclusion, Dougherty's use of an oft-neglected genre of writing in the early Republic breaks new and important ground in Lost Tribes Found and makes it an interesting and important book.
