Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary -- By: Eileen F. Moffett

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 10:1 (Winter 1996)
Article: Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary
Author: Eileen F. Moffett


Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary

Eileen F. Moffett

Eileen Moffitt, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and missionary in Korea (Presbyterian Church, USA) from 1956 to 1981, taught counts in English and Christian Education at the Presbyterian Theological College in Soeul, served as director of the Korea Bible Club Movement from 1976 to 1981, and is the author of an illustrated book for children, Korean Ways. She lives with her husband, Samuel H. Moffitt, in Princeton, New Jersey. This article first appeared in the April 1995 issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Born to a slave mother about 1798 in Princeton, New Jersey, Betsey Stockton was the first unmarried woman missionary ever sent by a North American mission agency beyond the borders of the United States.1 She went to the Sandwich Islands back in 1822, when James Monroe was president of this young Republic.2

We know little about Betsey’s family except that her mother was owned by Robert Stockton, one of Princeton’s distinguished citizens whose home was “Constitution Hill.” Robert was a cousin of Richard Stockton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and both of them were grandsons of one of the original pioneer settlers of the town. There is no record of Betsey’s father at all, and it seems likely that she never knew who he was, though either her father or grandfather was probably a white man, since in her will she describes herself as a mulatto.

But her story, even with some pieces lost, is particularly fascinating because of its precedent-breaking character: a black, a slave, a woman, and the first single woman missionary from North America.

When Betsey was a small child, Robert Stockton gave her as a little servant girl to his oldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was the wife of a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia named Ashbel Green. The Greens had three sons, Robert, Jacob, and James. James, the youngest, was six years old when, back in Princeton on his grandfather Stockton’s farm, the little slave girl, Betsey Stockton, was born.

Much later, Dr. Green, in a letter of recommendation for Betsey, supporting her application as a missionary candidate, wrote: “By me and my wife she was never intended to be held as a slave.” Dr. Green was a strong antislavery advocate of his day, as was his Presbyterian minister father before him. Green’s letter continued: “We deliberated seriously on the subject of dedicating her to God in baptism. But on the whole concluded not to do it. Betsey gave no evidence of piety, or...

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