Samuel Buell’s deeply lined faced hints at the weight of the spiritual crisis he witnessed throughout his life. His personal religious journey provides a window onto what life was like in colonial America during and after the Great Awakening, a swell of religious enthusiasm that spread from upstate New York across the country beginning in the 1720s. 

Early biographical accounts of Buell’s life indicate that he was not particularly devout until after he turned seventeen in 1733, when for several months, he “was led to the most affecting discoveries of the evil of sin, the plague and total depravity of his heart, the utter insufficiency of his own righteousness.” Sudden onslaughts of spiritual crises were common during the Great Awakening and prompted thousands across America to rethink their faith.

The fiery teachings of a preacher undoubtedly inspired young Buell’s exploration of his “depravity and sins.” Of those religious figures, Englishman George Whitefield was the most revered. Reacting to what they perceived to be the decline in religious adherence throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, evangelical preachers like Whitefield preached directly to the people, traveling from town to town. Ministering to large crowds in churches and often in open fields, these preachers encouraged laypeople to seek their rebirth into the faith to avoid eternal damnation. Like thousands of other Americans in the eighteenth century, Buell’s acceptance of these teachings changed his life. 

Buell life’s mission became promoting “the salvation of souls…[and to] serve God in the gospel of his son.” He graduated from Yale College in 1741 and became an evangelical preacher himself in 1743. Just three years later, he took the position of pastor at East Hampton, where he ministered for nearly 50 years.

The Reverend Samuel Buell encouraged ongoing efforts to convert local American Indian tribes to Christianity. This brought him into contact with one of eighteenth-century Long Island’s most complex religious leaders, Samson Occum (1723–1792), a Mohegan Indian Christian convert. 

Early historians described Occum as “a heathen reformed,” an example of what they believed to be the civilizing powers of Christianity on the country’s American Indian population. Today, historians view Occum as a man caught between two worlds. While he voluntarily converted to Christianity and became a preacher, Occum was also a tribal leader and a vocal advocate for the rights of American Indians, who then faced systematic dispossession of their ancestral lands throughout the Northeast. 

Seen through Occum’s eyes, eighteenth-century Suffolk County history becomes a story of religion and community, and a window into the history of racial differences in America. 

Samson Occum was born in Connecticut in 1723 into a Mohegan Indian community. For centuries, Christian missionaries had attempted to convert the Mohegans, to mixed results. Beginning in the mid-1600s, tribal leaders sought alliances with local English authorities to secure their peoples’ safety. These political negotiations sometimes required that preachers be allowed to spread Christian teachings, as did the 1673 contract in the BHS collection between the Mohegan tribal leader Sachem Uncas and Mr. James Fitch, minister of Norwich. While European preachers sought to “civilize” through Christianity, religion may have appealed to American Indians like Occum for the negotiating power it provided.

Like Samuel Buell, Occum was swept up in the fervor of the Great Awakening as a teenager. Occum’s conversion and desire to learn brought him to the attention of Eleazar Wheelock, a Yale-educated minister who became Occum’s mentor and oversaw his education in English, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in addition to ministerial studies. 

In 1749, Occum began the first of his ministries among American Indian tribes, which over the next few decades would include Montaukett, Lenape, Oneida, and Iroquois peoples. Wheelock arranged for groups like the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge to pay Occum, but he received far less than a white itinerant preacher would have. This injustice influenced Buell to recommend Occum’s ordination into the Long Island Presbytery in 1759, a position that provided Occum with a more stable source of financial support.

Unlike many of his American Indian contemporaries, Occum received a formal education that enabled him to leave an extensive written record of his life. Occum did not see converting as embracing “civilization” but rather as utilizing a platform through which he could achieve some measure of equity with his white neighbors. Embracing Christianity connected Occum to powerful men like Buell, with whom Occum could attempt to negotiate on behalf of his people. 

Years of mistreatment fueled Occum’s disillusionment with the religious establishment, which through its actions reasserted time and again that Occum would never truly be their equal because of his race. In the 1770s, Occum organized a Pan-Indian settlement called Brothertown in upstate New York, where he and many of Long Island’s surviving American Indians immigrated. Occum’s faith allowed him to transform his community, but perhaps not in the way his white mentors had envisioned. 

Commissioned portraits like Samuel Buell’s capture their subjects as they wished to be remembered, with their serene expressions and elegant clothing highlighting their respectability and affluence. Abraham G.D. Tuthill painted Buell in his black robes and preaching bands, depicting him as a religious leader and a pillar of his community. Buell’s public accomplishments support this image. He was a Revolutionary War hero who remained in East Hampton to defend the community. After the war, he helped establish East Hampton’s Clinton Academy, which opened in 1784 as one of the town’s first coeducational schools.

When examining portraits like Buell’s, it is important to consider not just what is depicted but also what was omitted. Like his fellow landowning neighbors throughout Suffolk County, Samuel Buell was a slave owner. Early English settlements like East Hampton were established in the mid-1600s. Their agricultural and maritime businesses required laborers, and enslaved labor quickly became the most profitable type. By 1698, nearly 22 percent of Suffolk County’s population was of African American descent and nearly all were enslaved. 

By the late 1700s, most of Suffolk County’s slaveholding households had only one or two enslaved people. It was a rarity for Suffolk County families to own more than two people. The 1755 census shows three enslaved persons in Buell’s household; the 1790 federal census, the first of its kind, documents an increase of that number to five, marking Buell as one of the county’s most prolific slaveholders. 

When he died in 1798, Buell left instructions in his will to manumit—or legally free—three enslaved laborers, Jree, Eber, and Prine. He also stated that the three men would earn their freedom only after serving long mandatory indentures to Buell’s family members. For example, Eber would only become free after he served “Mrs. Buell until eighteen years of age and then to be sold for seven years and that at twenty-five years of age to commence free from servitude if he behaves well if not to serve a year or two longer.” Eber’s was a rocky path to freedom. Like the rest of New York state’s enslaved population, Buell’s enslaved laborers may not have been legally free until 1827, when New York’s gradual emancipation law took effect. 

Enslaved laborers laid the foundation for Samuel Buell’s legacy, but very few references or artifacts documenting their existence survive. As a result, objects like Buell’s portrait and its representations of his wealth must stand in to remind us of enslaved peoples’ contributions to the history of Long Island.

Two men guided the first century of religious life in East Hampton. The Reverend Thomas James presided over the local church from 1650 to 1699, followed by the Reverend Nathaniel Huntting from 1699 to 1746. During these formative years, negotiations and tensions with the neighboring Montaukett people were a frequent concern. James expressed interest in acting as a missionary among the local indigenous population; town records indicate most of his time was spent establishing the settlement and its local whaling economy. Indigenous peoples were an important source of information, including the potential uses of local plant life for food and medicine, for European settlers.

Rev. Samuel Buell dominated the second half of the 1700s, ministering from 1746 until his death in 1798. Buell’s tenure was marked by the religious revitalization and disruptions of the Great Awakening and the Revolutionary War. After the British victory at the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, many American rebels fled to safety across the Long Island Sound to Connecticut. Buell stayed in East Hampton and cooperated with occupying British forces. His steady correspondence with both British and American leaders helped him negotiate the trade of essential goods with Connecticut during the war. Neither a hardline patriot nor a loyalist, Buell explained to Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull that his primary concern during the war was “the Weal and Prosperity of my Native Country and the Public.”

Buell’s successor, Lyman Beecher, spent the least amount of time on Long Island, but ironically he is the best-known public figure. Beecher arrived in East Hampton fresh from Yale College in 1799 and ministered there only until 1810. Known for his strict Presbyterian teachings, Beecher gained national notoriety for his activism and vocal positions in public debates about the era’s pressing moral issues, including temperance and abolition. Several of his children, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, later eclipsed Lyman’s own celebrity in the fight against slavery.