Joseph Bullen

Rev. Joseph Bullen Jr. was the first Presbyterian minister to permanently settle in the Mississippi Territory. He served as a pioneer missionary to the Chickasaws, as the organizing pastor of Mississippi’s first Presbyterian church, and as the first moderator of the Mississippi Presbytery.

Bullen was born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, on 8 July 1750, the fifth generation of Bullens in America. He received his BS from Yale in 1772, and in 1774 he married Hannah Morse. The couple had nine children.

Bullen was ordained on 6 July 1774 as pastor of the Congregational Church of Westminster, Vermont. He served the congregation for eleven years while also pursuing business endeavors, and he was remembered as “a man of learning, talent, and piety, a fine writer, and a clear and sensible and instructive, though not eloquent preacher.” He preached before the Vermont State Legislature in 1783, which awarded him a tract of land for his “sarvis as a chaplain” during the Revolutionary period. He moved to Athens, Vermont, in 1785 and worked as a farmer, a miller, and eventually the organizing pastor of a church. He represented Athens in the state legislature in 1788 and 1791.

In 1799, Bullen responded to the New York Missionary Society’s appeal for “missionaries to the destitute parts of the country.” Accompanied by his seventeen-year-old son, Joseph III, he made the arduous two-month journey south and reached the Chickasaw village of Big Town, near Tupelo, on May 20. Bullen observed, “The Chickasaw are without any kind of religious observances and without temple and priest. . . . They believe there is a good Father above but pay him no kind of religious homage.”

Bullen preached his first sermon to the Chickasaws on 2 June 1799. He worked to translate the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, administer baptism, officiate marriages and funerals, and minister to natives and enslaved Blacks. Bullen kept “a voluminous journal,” describing his labors, Chickasaw culture, white settlers, and his own (often poor) health. His mission focused on Christian doctrine and morals but also had political notes. He spoke to one leader “of the creation, and how all men are brothers—of sin—of redemption . . . of the great love the Council at New York have for the Chickasaws, and of the good will of his great father the President, expressed in a letter from the Secretary of War.” He left in September, and after a brief visit to the Cherokee he returned home to Vermont in November.

In March of 1800, Bullen began a second journey to the Chickasaws, this time with his wife and five youngest children. Several family members fell sick at Bedford, Pennsylvania, and a daughter, Abigail, died. After burying her “among strangers,” the family continued south, apparently by flat boat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the Chickasaw Bluffs (now Memphis). From there, “Mr. Bullen procured a sufficient number of pack horses from the Indian traders to convey his family and chattels about one hundred miles . . . to the ancient Indian town of Pontotoc, near which he procured an old Indian settlement for a family residence.”

After three years of challenging service among the Chickasaws, the Bullens moved to the Natchez region, where Joseph worked as a farmer, teacher, and minister. In 1804, he organized the Bethel Church in Jefferson County, the first Presbyterian church in the Mississippi Territory. Three years later he helped organize the Bayou Pierre Church, which became First Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson. He also organized Union Church Presbyterian Church in 1817. Historian John G. Jones recalled, “In our boyhood it was our privilege to hear him preach. . . . He was a tender-hearted man, and manifested great affection for his auditors, and was more ‘a son of consolation’ than ‘a son of thunder.’”

As Presbyterian churches multiplied, the Synod of Kentucky—the ecclesiastical body overseeing the Mississippi Territory—granted a petition to form a new presbytery. On 6 March 1816, at Pine Ridge, four ministers and three ruling elders organized the Mississippi Presbytery. Bullen was elected moderator.

Bullen’s wife, Hannah, died on 17 October 1818. He died seven years later, on 25 March 1825. The couple is buried three and a half miles west of Canonsburg in Jefferson County, near the former site of Bethel. His gravestone reads, “A preacher of the gospel nearly 50 yrs. A native of Massachusetts.”

The Bullens’s seventh child, Dr. Benjamin Morse Bullen, represented Jefferson County in the first meeting of the Mississippi legislature in 1817. Their youngest son, Samuel Dudley Bullen, “served as Captain in the War of 1812 and was at the Battle of New Orleans.”