Finding the lost tribe of Israel

Five times Harriet Livermore struggled her way across the planet to the Holy Land. IN Jerusalem she walked in paths, tradition says, that Jesus walked. Relying on the meager income from sales of her books or on the kindness of strangers, she grew passionate about the creation of a Jewish homeland. "I … declare war on behalf of the Commonwealth of Israel" she wrote in one of her books. When she ran out of money, sometimes selling silver spoons inherited from her New Hampshire family, she came home.

Livermore also became a strong advocate of Indian rights in a time when Native Americans were being confined to reservations or killed in war by the American government as the nation pushed westward. Her own suffering, the suffering of the Jews and the Indians all worked together in her mind. She came to believe the beleaguered Indians were the famed lost tribes of Israel. Her job, she decided, was to preach to Native Americans, convert them to Christianity, or possibly lead them back to their ancestral homeland in the Middle East. Heeding the call, Harriet traveled west against all odds and tried to gain access to Native reservations. But fearing her tendency to treat Indians with equality, she was ejected from Kansas by the Bureau of Indian Affairs during her missionary work there.

Finally, at the age of 80 -- having suffered unrelenting discrimination, abandoned by family and followers, misunderstood and impoverished -- she died in an alms house in Philadelphia. Harriet Livermore lived long enough to see her first doomsday prediction fail, but not long enough to see the free state of Israel for which she advocated tirelessly. She dreamed, she wrote, of a day when women would be "clothed in the sun, and walk on the moon."

But what little is left of her fame, hangs today on a few lines written about her by poet John Greenleaf Whittier. As a boy, Whittier and his Quaker family were trapped for two days in their Haverhill, Mass. home by a heavy snowstorm. Harriet Livermore, by coincidence, was with the family during the storm and Whittier recalled her in his enormously popular poem "Snow-Bound". She is the "not unfeared, half-welcome guest". The poet noted her legendary temper, her lustrous eyes and "unbent will's majestic pride". The portrait was not complimentary. When Livermore first read Whittier's description of her, legends says, she threw the book across the room.

FOR MORE INFO: "Harriet Livermore, the Pilgrim Stranger: Female Preaching and Biblical Feminism in Early-Nineteenth-Century America," by Catherine A. Brekus in Church History, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 389-404.

Copyright © 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. J. Dennis Robinson is the editor of the popular web site SeacoastNH.com and author of books about Strawbery Banke Museum and Wentworth by the Sea Hotel. He will be presenting a lecture on the founding of Strawbery Banke this evening at the Portsmouth Public Library. Admission is free. This article was written with research assistance by Maryellen Burke.