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Eleazer Williams was the son of a St. Regis Indian, Thomas Williams, and his wife, Mary Ann Kenewatsenri. Thomas was the grandson of Eunice Williams, daughter of John Williams, 1664-1729, minister of Deerfield, Massachussets, who was captured in 1704 in a French and Indian raid. She married an Indian chief of Caughnawaga and her descendants all bore the name of Williams. Eleazar himself asserted in 1824 that he was born at Sault St. Louis (Caughnawaga, Canada).
In 1800 Deacon Nathaniel Ely of Longmeadow, Massachussets, whose wife was a Williams, invited Thomas to bring there two of his sons to be educated. John was intractable and was soon sent home, but Eleazar remained with his Puritan relatives for several years. He proved to be an apt scholar, although he never fully mastered the English language.
In the War of 1812 he served as a scout for the Americans on the northern border of New York. After peace was declared he became imbued with a desire to do missionary work among the Oneida, and was appointed lay reader and catechist by Bishop Hobart of the Episcopal Church. He persuaded a number of the New York Indians to embrace the Episcopal faith, a small church was built on the reservation, and the missionary translated the prayer book and hymns into the Iroquois language. By this success he attracted attention, and he was approached by land agents who were eager to obtain the Oneida reservation. With them he planned to persuade the Oneida to seek a new home in the West, conceiving a grandiose scheme for an Indian empire in the promotion of which he was to play a leading part.
In 1821, with the permission of Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan Territory, he led a party of chiefs to Green Bay, where they negotiated a treaty with the Menominee and Winnebago chiefs by which the Easterners were ceded land on Fox River. (The original parchment copy of this treaty is in the library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. )
Williams signed the document as an Indian chief; Charles Trowbridge, who signed as Cass's representative, said of him later that he "had all the peculiarities of a half-breed Indian as undoubtedly he was". The next year Williams led a number of his neophytes to their new home in what is now Wisconsin. As their missionary, indorsed by the Episcopal Church, he began at Green Bay a school for Indian and French half-breed children.
He did not shine in his role of schoolmaster, however, and ended it by marrying Madeleine Jourdain. He took her East, and Bishop Hobart confirmed her and gave her the name of Mary Hobart. Her relatives, the Menominee Indians, gave her a large tract of land on Fox River, and there she and Williams lived, though he was frequently away, persuading new groups of tribesmen to emigrate and pursuing his plans to build an Indian empire.
In 1830, however, he visited Washington, where his plans were rejected. Meanwhile, in 1824, he had been superseded as Episcopal missionary at Green Bay, and while he still preached occasionally to the Oneida at Duck Creek, about 1832 he was repudiated by this group. Thereafter he became impecunious and unsettled, absented himself from his wife and home, mortgaged her land, and lost caste with his former friends. Williams as early as 1839 confided to an editor in Buffalo that he believed that he was the real Dauphin of France.
In 1841 the Prince de Joinville, son of King Louis Philippe, visited Green Bay, and Williams later claimed that the prince asked him to sign an abdication, which request he refused. Prince de Joinville repudiated this account of his interview with Williams, in whom he said he was interested merely as an Indian missionary.
In July 1849 the United States Magazine and Democratic Review carried an anonymous article claiming royal birth for Eleazar Williams; his literary executor later asserted (Putnam's Magazine, July 1868) that the article was probably by Williams himself. It was not, however, until J. H. Hanson, an Episcopal minister with a romantic turn of mind, published in Putnam's Magazine (February 1853) an article entitled "Have We a Bourbon among Us?" that Williams sprang into undeserved fame.
Much discussion followed; William Gilmore Simms in the Southern Quarterly Review (July 1853) ridiculed Williams' claim, but many others eagerly accepted it.
Meanwhile, Williams' fortunes fell lower. About 1850 he accepted a small salary to preach to St. Regis Indians at Hogansburg, New York, where he died eight years later in comparative obscurity, still maintaining that he was the Dauphin of France.
Williams' papers and books were presented to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; they consist of sermons, mostly in the Indian language, of a diary, detailing his interview with Joinville, and of business papers and documents. He published Prayers for Families and for Particular Persons, Selected from the Book of Common Prayer (1816); a spelling book (1813) "in the language of the Seven Iroquois Nations"; Good News to the Iroquois Nation (1813); and translations of church books. A life of his father which he wrote appeared in 1859. He is credited with simplifying the writing of the Mohawk language by using only eleven letters of the alphabet.
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He was a handsome man and vain of his personal appearance.
He married on March 3, 1823, one of his pupils, Madeleine Jourdain, then fourteen years of age. They had a son and two daughters.
