I didn’t intend to write this post, but sometimes the rabbit
hole beckons.
In the past six posts, I’ve recounted, in brief, the life
and military service of Major Charles Elisha Pruyn, a devout Christian officer who
served two stints in the Army of the Potomac, one as adjutant of the 96th
New York and another as commander of the 118th New York.
You might recall that, in the last post, when Major Pruyn’s
widowed mother, Mary, learned about her son’s death, she made a solemn promise
to Reverend Robert J. Parvin that she would use Charlie’s death as inspiration
to give back to the world. She wrote, “I will now give all that earnest desire
I had for the temporal and spiritual good of my own dear child, to all the poor
sufferers, many of whom have no mother to bleed and labor for them.”
Did she fulfill her promise? Well, that’s the subject of
this post. What did she do after the war? Unsurprisingly, she dedicated the
remainder of her life to charity, but the interesting part is that she took her
talents to East Asia to do it.
To be clear, Mary Putnam Pruyn was no stranger to charity work. She had been involved in social, educational, and religious reform since before the War of the Rebellion. During her years in the city, she founded two industrial schools in Albany and a “House of Shelter.”
As you may have figured out, Mary Pruyn came from money. She
was born in Albany on March 31, 1820, the youngest of eleven children born to
Elisha Putnam and Hester Johnson. Her father was an architect and builder who
lived at 78 Pearl Street. During Albany’s dramatic period of post-Revolutionary
growth, Elisha Putnam raised a small fortune by completing contracts
for the city and for local churches. Further, the Putnam family came with a
recognizable name. The Putnams traced their lineage to General Israel Putnam,
the Revolutionary War officer known for defending Bunker Hill.
Meanwhile, Mary’s husband, Samuel Pruyn, was a merchant who
held several important positions in Albany. He served as the Chairman of the
Board of Supervisors for Albany County, inspector for the Albany Penitentiary,
deacon and president of the board of trustees of the Second Reformed Dutch
Church on Beaver Street, and colonel of the Albany Rifle Regiment. Thus, the
Pruyn-Putnam marriage—which occurred on August 15, 1838—united two prestigious
families. Surely, everyone expected their children—blessed with riches and
publicity—would amount to greatness.
But that promise proved difficult to keep. Few of Mary Pruyn’s
children lived long enough to make a name for themselves. During her life, she
gave birth to eight children: Agnes (b. July 6, 1839), Charles (b. November 11,
1840), Samuel Stephen (b. November 17, 1842), Edward (b. December 24, 1844),
Samuel (b. December 7, 1846), Mary (b. January 28, 1849), Francis (b. April 30,
1851), and Annie (b. April 7, 1854). Three of her children—Samuel Stephen, Francis,
and Annie—all died before they turned three. Another, Edward, drowned at age
eleven. Her eldest son, Charlie, was killed at the Battle of Petersburg, June
15, 1864. Only three—Agnes, Samuel, and Mary—lived beyond the War of the Rebellion.
The youngest, Mary Esther, married in April 1871. When her youngest child was finally married off, Mary Pruyn decided to embark upon the next phase of her life.
When the Civil War came to an end, there was another
important social upheaval happening on the other side of the world. Japan—which
had been long-ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate—experienced the so-called “Meiji
Restoration.” Between 1868 and 1872, the newly-installed teenage emperor,
Mutsuhito (later Meiji), began a consolidation of power that returned control
of the government to the royal family. For Americans, this meant that Japan
finally declared itself amenable to the absorption of “western” ideas. At the
moment, American and Japanese relations were only just getting underway. In
1860, Japan erected its first embassy in the United States, and in 1861,
Abraham Lincoln appointed a new minister to Japan, Robert Hewson Pruyn (only
the second ambassador to hold that position).
As you might have guessed, the name of the new minister mattered.
Robert Pruyn was Mary Pruyn’s cousin. Under Pruyn’s tenure, American
missionaries established schools in Japan to teach the English language to
Japanese children and to provide rudimentary education for Japanese girls, which was
practically nonexistent prior to the collapse of the shogunate. Upon his return
from Japan, Minister Pruyn issued a call for American missionaries to establish
a permanent school in Yokohama. Mary Pruyn led that effort. Days after her
youngest daughter married, she traveled to New York City, and there, she met
two other women who were interested in participating in the same mission: Julia
Neilson Crosby and Louise Henrietta Pierson. Together, they formed the Woman’s
Union Missionary Society, or as it was sometimes called in its fuller,
preachier form: The Woman’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen
Lands. The missionary society had several goals: to care for abandoned Japanese
and Eurasian children, to teach English, and to introduce Christianity.
Just to be clear, while Mary Pruyn’s intentions were pure-hearted,
her attitude toward the Japanese reflected an all-to-prevalent (and insidious) American opinion
that Japanese people lacked culture because they lacked Christianity. Pruyn’s missionary
letters—which are published as Grandmamma’s
Letters from Japan—frequently referred to Japan as a “heathen land,” and it
vexed her to behold a people who lacked the ability to read a Bible and who also believed their emperor descended from god. Mary Pruyn understood her mission to
Japan by viewing it through a lens of moral superiority that modern readers will likely find unappealing.
During her time in Japan, she relentlessly mocked Japanese mythology. For
example, she once wrote, “There are a great many foolish stories in this
fabulous history: such as a bird coming down and beating the mud of the island
hard with his tail; and how these two spirits made love to each other; how
their children multiplied, and in their pride they sent one to reign in the
sun, and another to be the queen of the moon; and how the first emperor of
Japan came from the sun to be the ruler of their country.”
Mary Pruyn believed Japanese folklore was heretical. When she sent letters to her grandchildren,
she made sure they understood why she was on this mission to East Asia. In
February 1875, she wrote, “I have told you so much because I want you to see
how far these people are from knowing the truth, and that they are to be pitied
rather than blamed for not believing what they have never been taught.” Indeed,
during her first day in Japan, she told her grandchildren to pray for her
success:
Now there is something I want you to do for me. Every time
you pray at night, I want you to ask God to help me do a great deal for the
little children of Japan, so they may learn to love Him, as I think you do. You
know these poor children have never heard of our dear Lord Jesus, and they do
not know how good He is, nor how much He loves them. This is what I want to teach
them, and you can pray for me. I know God hears little children, and it will
make me very happy to be sure that you pray for His blessing. Ever your loving Grandmother.
Mary Pruyn’s mission in Japan lasted five years. She set out
from New York in May 1871, arriving off the coast of Japan during the second
week of June. Her school was called the American Mission Home and her church in
Yokohama was called the Union Christian Church. She returned to Albany in 1876. Afterward, two
of her granddaughters—Helen Knox Strain and Agnes Pruyn Chapman—took up the
call and administrated the same school.
 |
| This is the American Mission Home in Yokohama. There are three women in hoopskirts. One of them must be Mary Putnam Pruyn. |
Anyway, what does any of this have to do with the Civil War?
Well, very little, except for one incident that occurred in
1872. As mentioned, Mary Pruyn’s mission home took carried on important work in caring for abandoned Japanese children. One day, an eight-year-old boy came
into her care. This is what she wrote on July 26, 1872:
I went down [the] street this afternoon, and when I came home
I found a dear little boy here, who had been brought by his mother to live with
us. His father is a wicked Englishman, who has forsaken several little
children, and cares not what becomes of them. The mother is a Japanese woman,
and very poor; but she loves her children, and wants to have them taught to
read English, though she is a heathen, and would rather not have them learn
anything of our religion; for she thinks all Christians are like the father of
her children, and if they get to be ‘Christein,’ they will be wicked as he is. What
is a little strange about this little fellow is, that although he had some
other queer name before, his mother changed it to ‘Charlie,’ just to bring him
here. It is very common for these people to change their names whenever they
please; but it seems so curious that she should choose the name that belonged
to another one of my own dear children. This little Charlie is a bright,
handsome boy, just eight years old, and although he cannot speak a word of our
language, yet he seems to understand a good deal that is said to him, and we
all think we shall love him very much.
There are many questions that arise. Did the Japanese mother
intentionally rename her son Charlie, knowing that, because Mary Pruyn had lost
a son named Charlie in the war, it might make her more amenable to take on the
education of her child?
Moreover, how did Mary Pruyn come to grips with the return
of a new Charlie to her side? Fate (or a divine intervention—if you believe in
such things) had placed new Charlie into her care. In 1864, after the death of her
Charlie, Mary Pruyn had reached her most despondent period. But she
promised herself, “Though not one ray of light can be seen, I will cling to Him
still, I will trust Him yet.” She gave her tragic life some additional patience, and this
was what came back. Did she consider her missionary
work—and all other unnamed Japanese “Charlies” who came into her custody—as the
repayment for her unwavering devotion to Christianity when the War of the
Rebellion nearly tore out her heart? Sadly, her letters do not say.
It’s tempting to think that, in some small way, she might
have believed that Charlie had been returned to her.
To say more about this would overrun the mission of my
blog. I’m not an expert in Meiji Japan, nor do I know much about nineteenth-century American missionary
work. But before signing off, it’s worth saying the obvious: despite Mary Pruyn’s
best efforts to flee the memory of the Civil War, it managed to follow her
halfway across the world.
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| Mary Putnam Pruyn |
Mary Pruyn didn’t give up on missionary work. In January
1883, she went to Shanghai, China, to establish similar institutions there. This
mission was much shorter. She contracted illness in China and returned home to Albany
in 1884. She died on February 10, 1885, a few weeks short of her 65th
birthday. She was buried in Albany Rural Cemetery, the same place where Charlie
was laid to rest.
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