Ann Hasseltine Judson

She carried the light of civilization into the darkest corner of the world, it seemed. For those at home reading of the heroic service of Ann Hasseltine Judson, the first celebrated female American missionary, it was an ideal sacrifice: to leave home and venture into this darkness armed with true belief. The work of spreading Christianity exposed her to disease, starvation and bodily suffering before she died in Burma. In biographies written during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Judson becomes a contemporary, realist saint, her martyrdom "magnanimous and sublime," her career a public distinction (Clement, 52). Her devotion to the noble cause of saving souls modeled a new way women could participate in heroic work outside of the home, though memorials often frame Ann's ministry as the helpmeet of her missionary husband, Adoniram Judson. George Hervey writes: "As the life of Mrs. Ann Hasseltine Judson was completely identified with that of her heroic husband, it has been thought neither desirable nor possible to contemplate them altogether apart" (277). Yet, in Burma, surrounded by strangers, Ann would face her most significant trials apart from her husband, bereft of his protection and in fact, protecting him.

Ann Hasseltine was born on December 22, 1789 in Bradford, Massachusetts to John and Rebecca Hasseltine. There is little factual information known about Ann's childhood; the biographies conclude that she was not remarkably different from other girls her age. This common beginning makes her an accessible model of the heroic distinction any girl can attain with resolve. Walter Wyeth's memorial, written over sixty years after Ann's death, reintroduces her story to public attention in order to inspire a missionary impulse in readers. Yet Wyeth suggests she did not begin as a person to emulate: "She cannot be said to have been a genius, and no example may be made of her in this respect to help or hinder any young person who reads the story of her youth" (12). Such ordinariness might stand in the way of the role-modeling purpose of her story. Instead, it allows the reader to recognize herself in the heroine and imagine taking the same steps that led to a distinguished name in history. As S.W. Williams, the editor of a contemporary collected biography notes:

Biography is at once the most useful and the most entertaining species of literature. It is a mirror into which all may look and see more or less clearly the reflection of their own images...the history of one is the possible history of all. (preface)

Commendable examples become most effective through such mirroring between the inspirational figure and the more common reader.

As a young adolescent, Ann enjoyed the amusements and entertainments that most lively girls her age pursue. Her disposition was active and restless, such that her mother described it as "rambling" (qtd. in Knowles, 5). However, she also showed self-discipline when it was required of her, and applied herself assiduously to her studies at Bradford Academy. In her aptitude for learning and dedication to mental improvement, education was the first sphere in which Ann markedly stood out from her peers. Following a favorite method in collective biography of reading gleams of a heroine's future greatness in her developmental years, Frank Goodrich focuses on her determined approach to education: "Here [at Bradford Academy] she first displayed those qualities which so distinguished her in later life—strength of mind, precision of thought, and indefatigable perseverance" (343-4). Ann Hasseltine’s earnest self-improvement, in Goodrich’s account, implies that a reader similarly detemined might rise to eminence from the common level.

Though biographies agree on the portrait of a remarkably dedicated student, the young girl was nevertheless attracted by the worldly pleasures her peers enjoyed—balls, plays, assemblies, and the company of admiring young men. In her journal, she acknowledged her own dissipation: the concerns of her toilet for the evening's diversions took precedence over moral self-reflection. Goodrich suggests that she threw herself into these pastimes as if knowing she would soon renounce them:

Her gaiety so far surpassed that of her friends, as to suggest a vague apprehension that she had but a short time in which to pursue her career of folly, and would be suddenly cut off. (344)

Here there is a prediction of another favorite trope in a heroine's narrative—the moment of redirection or conversion from sinful pursuits onto an unwavering path toward greatness.Wyeth takes full advantage of this method in biography:

One having a volatile disposition may do otherwise than run in the way of evil, and with alacrity may pursue the good; and a habit of vivacious conduct, when sanctified, will be productive of virtuous deeds to a surprising extent. (14, emphasis added)

A noteworthy detail in many accounts of the dissipated phase of Ann Hasseltine’s development ties her to another heroine celebrated in the annals of collected biography: Ann was said to have received the first conscious glimpse of the eternal peril in which she had placed her soul when she incidentally picked up Hannah More's Strictures on Female Education and her eyes providentially fell upon a quote from the Bible:"She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth" (qtd. in Wyeth, 16). The repetition of this detail exposes the mechanics of the mirroring technique biographers use: Ann's introspection is sparked by something she reads, modeling the effect her own story is intended to have upon the reader of a collected biography. While this incident was not an instantaneous moment of conversion for Ann (she had several relapses into pleasure-seeking), it is significant for revealing the work being done behind the biography in terms of crafting patterns for other women to follow.

The conversion narrative also serves as a means for biographers to do away with any unfitting characteristics present in youth, which, retained into adulthood, would undermine her example as a heroine. Thus Wyeth writes:

When Miss Hasseltine became a subject of the Spirit's work, her nature was as fully moved as previously when some suggestion of earthly pleasure was presented. Even more, for she was susceptible to an influence of a high character in greater degree than she was to any one of inferior origin. (14)

So complete was the conversion that Ann herself becomes, in turn, "an influence of a high character" for the readers of her biography. Some biographies don't acknowledge her youthful folly—in these works, she was always already an infallible paragon, though at first waiting to discover the avenue for her heroic work. At age seventeen, this avenue was paved by religion: Ann "publicly professed herself a disciple of Christ" when she became a member of the Congregational Church in Bradford on September 14, 1806 (Goodrich, 345).

Another sign of Ann's development towards the work of Christian ministry for which she would become famous is signaled early in 1807, when she started a school for local children. She instructed them in the manner of her own education and also tried to impart to them the importance of leading a religious life. On the first day she taught, Ann began class by reading aloud a prayer, "astonishing the little creatures by such a beginning, as probably some of them had never heard a prayer before" (qtd. in Goodrich, 346). Soon, she was teaching children from other towns, traveling to hold classes in Salem, Haverhill and Newbury (Goodrich, 346). By exporting her efforts to educate others in Christianity, she prefigured her later missionary work. Similarly, Ann's biographer in the collected work Queenly Women, Crowned and Uncrowned , states:

It was well said of her that the zeal which made her a missionary abroad first made a missionary of her at home...On the Sabbath it was her custom to fix her mind upon some one of her friends, take their arm, and, as they walked home from Church, endeavor to stir them up to seek Christ. (58)

The missionary impulse in Ann was stirred—in a short time, it would not be friends whom she engaged to seek Christ, but strange "heathens" (a term ubiquitously used during the imperialist era) in the distant land of Burma.

In 1810, America did not yet have an organized Society to promote foreign mission work, although several Christian associations already existed to spread the gospel in remote parts of the United States. In June of that year, the General Association of Massachusetts (Congregational) met in Bradford. Adoniram Judson, a Seminary student and member of the Third Congregational Church in Plymouth, came to this meeting to petition the Association for its support of a foreign missionary cause. As a result of this petition, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was created and Judson along with three other men were granted a missionary designation to India. During this meeting in Bradford, a dinner was held for the ministers at Mr. Hasseltine's house; Judson was present and Ann waited on the table (Wyeth, 30). From this first encounter, a strong attachment grew between them and Judson soon sought her hand in marriage, a proposal that also asked Ann to join him in foreign mission work. Acknowledging the danger in which she would be placed, Judson wrote a letter to Mr. Hasseltine, asking:

Whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring, to see her no more in this world; whether you can consent to her departure for a heathen land, and her subjection to the hardships and sufferings of a missionary life; whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean; to the fatal influence of the southern climate of India; to every kind of want and distress; to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death. (qtd. in Bolton, 278)

The sacrifice laid bare in this letter shows the religious zeal felt by all parties—parents who would accept this fate for their daughter, a young woman who would knowingly subject herself to such trials a world away from the family and home of her childhood. However, there was also a conflict of interests apparent in the hasty engagement, which took place only three months after they first encountered each other at Mr. Hasseltine's dinner table. In her journal, Ann expressed concern that her attachment to Adoniram would sway her to become a missionary—a commitment that should be motivated by a calling to religious duty, not by feelings of personal affection.

She became convinced that divine will had presented her with the means to carry out a missionary impulse she had felt independently since her own conversion. Accepting his proposal and the fate that awaited her in a heathen land, Ann married Adoniram Judson on February 5, 1812. It was an unprecedented decision to leave America and journey with her husband to a part of the world unknown and terrifying to the imagination. Her conviction that God's hand was guiding her helped Ann to quell the fears she expressed in her journal:

Were it not for these considerations, I should, with my present prospects, sink down in despair, especially as no female has to my knowledge ever left the shores of America to spend her life among the heathen; nor do I yet know that I shall have a single female companion. (qtd. in Goodrich, 348)

Public opinion at that time was opposed to such a calling for a woman: "It was deemed wild and romantic in the extreme, and altogether inconsistent with prudence and delicacy" (Wyeth, 31). Ann Judson recognized that she placed herself apart from prudent and delicate women—from any female peers—who might confine their work to charitable visiting in the parish. Ann's belief that God had directed her to this higher calling was labeled as a "delusion" (Wyeth, 35) by some—just as her religious zeal was derided as the "wild and romantic" (31) fantasy of an impressionable and enamored young woman. However, the reality she faced in Burma fully tested her faith: Ann would come home once for the sake of her health; yet, she returned to the mission with as much zeal as she had the first time, not then knowing the hardships that awaited her. Biographies written after her death and memorials that sought to revive missionary spirit laud her true courage and faith in a work that paved the way for women who felt called to a similar duty. These biographies also register the evolution in public opinion; by the end of the nineteenth century women's engagement in wider fields of public work had become far more acceptable.

The couple left for India only two weeks after their wedding, sailing on February 19, 1812. This sudden and monumental change distressed Ann, who wrote in her journal about the pain of leaving her family and home:

My heart bleeds. O America, my native land! Must I leave thee? Must I leave my parents, my sisters and brother, my friends beloved, and all the scenes of my early youth? Must I leave thee, Bradford, my dear native town, where I spent the pleasant years of childhood; where I learnt to lisp the name of my mother? (qtd. in Bolton, 279)

In Burma, she would learn a different language altogether. The four-month voyage at sea tested her endurance for a life that guaranteed hardships. At least one other female did accompany Ann: Harriet Newell, wife of missionary Samuel Newell, though the party split ways upon arrival in India. Both left America together; however, Ann was the first to commit herself to the missionary work of spreading the Gospel amongst the native people. But her friend would be the first to die in the service of this Christian calling, succumbing to illness, along with her newborn child, only a few months after arriving on land. In the pattern of modeling that collected biographers reproduce, several writers held Harriet up as "the proto-martyr of American missions" (Goodrich, 350; Wyeth, 4).

Even before arriving at their final destination, Ann encountered situations that were completely alien to the experiences of her former life. Biographers relate versions of the following account from her journal that vividly notes the contrast from her comparatively uneventful years in Bradford:

On one occasion, Mrs. Judson was compelled to take a boat, rowed by six natives...The river was rough, the sun scorching hot, and Mrs. Judson entirely alone, in the midst of men who could administer no other comfort than might be contained in the words, "Cutcha pho annah sahib"...The daughter of New England parents, the pupil and preceptress of a Massachusetts seminary, at the age of twenty-three years, upon a Hindoo river, in a Calcutta boat manned by Hoogly watermen. . .Such a picture of the vicissitudes of life certainly belongs to that volume which treats of the truth that is stranger than fiction. (Goodrich, 352-3)

Worth noting is Goodrich's emphasis on the language barrier. Just as the above account ties the ability to comfort (the native phrase translates to "Never fear, madam, never fear") to the ability to communicate, the missionaries would have to learn the native language before they could preach the Gospel's message of saving grace. In July of 1813, when they arrived in Rangoon, Burma, the site where the mission was established, the first thing the Judsons set about doing was to learn the language so they could translate the Bible, write religious tracts and minister to the natives in their own tongue. Adoniram apparently excelled in acquiring the formal grammatical structure of the difficult language; after three years he had written a religious tract in Burmese. Ann, who was more immersed in the daily lives of the native women, learned the conversational dialect more quickly than her husband and by 1817 had begun to read the Bible to a small group of women on the Sabbath (Goodrich, 354-8). Her relative ease in communication would serve her well later, when she would have to plead with Burmese authorities to spare her husband's life.

The image of Ann, alone, surrounded by strangers and navigating into the unknown, repeatedly appears in biographies. Frank Goodrich provides a rather fantastical example in the collective biography World Famous Women; before embarking for Rangoon:

Mrs. Judson, knowing that there was not a single European female in all Birmah, [sic] engaged an Englishwoman at Madras to accompany her. By a strange fatality, and as if Mrs. Judson was providentially destined to share alone with her husband the glories and perils of the Birman mission, this woman fell dead upon the deck as the vessel weighed anchor. (354)

By another strange occurrence—the first of a number of hardships faced alone—Adoniram went missing for over seven months when the boat he was traveling in was blown off-course. While he was gone, the Burmese government began to persecute foreign teachers and the mission house in Rangoon was targeted. As the only one present who could speak Burmese, Ann was called upon to act as a diplomat and convince government officials of the mission's peaceful aims. An outbreak of cholera also occurred during her husband's absence, and she saved everyone in the mission house from infection. Due to a conflict that was brewing between England and Burma, ships were leaving Rangoon and Ann was encouraged to go, but she turned back at the last minute in faith that her husband was still alive. Two weeks later he made it back to Rangoon, to the news "that the preservation of the mission had been due to the firmness and fearlessness of his wife" (Goodrich, 358).

For their efforts, the Judsons were not able to baptize a native convert until June 27, 1819. In America, friends were working on their behalf, urging the Baptist Church (the couple had converted from Congregationalists to Baptists) to organize behind the missionary cause, succeeding in 1814 with the establishment of the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions—which later spawned the American Baptist Missionary Union and the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1822, Ann, suffering from extremely poor health, returned on her own to America in order to recover. She spent the winter in Baltimore championing her missionary cause, giving speeches and publishing her book, History of the Burman Mission . A year later, though not yet fully recovered in health, Ann said goodbye to her friends with a sense of finality, and anxiously returned to Burma. The Judsons found support from their associates back home; however, the Burmese government did not receive these religious intruders as favorably, and public proclamation of the Gospel was restricted. When war broke out in 1824 between the Burmese Empire and the English government in India, this tenuous toleration of the foreigners turned into all out persecution.

On June 8, 1824, Adoniram and several other missionaries were taken prisoner by Burmese officials on suspicion of being spies for the English. They were chained in heavy iron shackles in the notorious "death-prison," and would be held captive in deplorable conditions for nearly two years. Ann relentlessly sought any means she could of protesting their imprisonment, and pleaded with local authorities—and more directly addressed the sympathies of their wives—to spare the missionaries. She used the power of monetary persuasion instead of a religious appeal, repeatedly bribing jailers and using gifts to garner favors with the Governor to stay their execution. When officials came to the mission house to confiscate the group's private property, Ann cleverly hid several valuables which she later used as currency to obtain access to the prisoners. Biographies emphasize her ability to rouse pathos through oratory; she used her skill in the native language to disassociate her cause from British military action. To this end, she also adopted the local dress. Much of her heroic success came from being able to diplomatically navigate—though an outsider and a woman—through the patriarchal politics in Burma.

During her husband's imprisonment, Ann was alone and unprotected. Retrospectively recording the events of this time in a letter to her brother-in-law in America, she writes:

For nearly a year and a half every thought was so entirely engrossed with present scenes and sufferings, that I seldom reflected on a single occurrence of my former life, or recollected that I had a friend in existence out of Ava. (qtd. in Child, 228)

On January 26, 1825, Ann gave birth to a baby girl, Maria (a son had been born September 11, 1815, but died eight months later) with no familiar companion present to care for her during labor. When the captives were suddenly forced to march to another prison, Ann, still weak from childbirth, begged the villagers to tell her where they had been taken. With her infant in her arms, she desperately followed her husband, who was near death after walking to the jail in Oung-pen-la. She pleaded for permission to nurse him back to health, and though starving herself, she procured food for Adoniram and the other prisoners. In her weakened condition, Ann fell severely ill during an epidemic of spotted fever and could no longer nurse Maria. Her husband obtained leave to carry their feeble baby through the village, begging nursing mothers to feed his child—a story which appears frequently in biographies as a scene sure to capture the sympathies of readers.

Ann survived, and when the British defeated the Burmese forces, the foreign prisoners were finally released in March of 1826. Her tireless efforts had sustained the men through twenty-one months of captivity. She and Adoniram made plans to begin a new mission in Amherst, Lower Burma, the house and chapel in Rangoon having been destroyed. In July of 1826, he was called upon to make a journey and he left his wife and daughter, expecting to be gone for only three or four months. During this time Ann built a home for the family and two huts where she held school and ministered to the villagers on Sundays (Bolton, 292). Her husband was delayed abroad and before Adoniram returned home, he would receive word that his wife had died. Ann became ill after another outbreak of the fever. She lingered for eighteen days before dying on October 24, 1826, with none but strangers in her company. The final message she left for the man whom she had followed to this fate was a chilling summation of her missionary sacrifice:

Tell the "teacher" that the disease was most violent, and I could not write; tell him how I suffered and died, and take care of the house and things until he returns. (qtd. in Bolton, 293)

She was buried in Amherst under a hopia (hope-tree), an emblem that often appears in the background of portraits that were engraved after her death. In April of 1827, two-year-old Maria was laid to rest by her mother's side.

The first American woman to dedicate herself to the work of saving "heathens" in the "Orient," Ann Judson was also remembered as a heroine for saving the imprisoned missionaries, a heroic scene from many political conflicts in Europe and America. Goodrich writes: "She seems to have been providentially designed as the ministering angel of the Birman prison" (367, emphasis added). She is praised for her devoted ministry both to the Burmese natives and to her husband while he was held captive. Both she and her husband advocated their cause through writings for religious publications and through lectures on return visits. These representations made them famous and served as a kind of mission back home that arguably had more effect than any efforts abroad. The example she set, imagined as bearing the civilizing torch of Christian grace into dark, foreign spaces, was held up in collective biographies as a model of ministry for other women to follow. The success of this enterprise in biographical patterning is immediately apparent in relation to Ann Judson: after her death, two more women, Sarah Boardman Judson and in turn Emily Chubbuck Judson would directly emulate her missionary footsteps as wives of Adoniram Judson.

Works Cited