Background
Hiram Bingham was born on October 30, 1789, in Bennington, Vermont, United States, the seventh of thirteen children of Calvin and Lydia (Denton) Bingham. His father was a farmer.
Hiram Bingham was born on October 30, 1789, in Bennington, Vermont, United States, the seventh of thirteen children of Calvin and Lydia (Denton) Bingham. His father was a farmer.
Hiram received his early education in the local schools. In his twenty-third year he entered Middlebury College, and graduated in 1816. With the Christian ministry in mind, he went to Andover Theological Seminary and graduated in 1819.
On September 29, 1819, Bingham was ordained at Goshen, Connecticut, for the work abroad under the American Board of Boston. He joined a large company which sailed on the brig Thaddeus out of Boston harbor on October 23, 1819, bound for the Sandwich Islands and the establishment of mission work. Admitted by the king "for a year, " the party divided itself by royal permission and arrangement between Kailua on Hawaii and Honolulu on Oahu. Bingham with his family was among those who disembarked at Honolulu on April 19, 1820. For many months he lived in a native hut, until he erected in February 1821 a frame house which was sent out from America.
Bingham and the others addressed themselves at once to the acquisition of the language, and to its reduction to writing. An alphabet of twelve letters was soon devised, and the missionaries set themselves the task of teaching a people to read, a task much simplified by the king's suggestion that his people learn. In 1822 Bingham issued his Elementary Lessons in Hawaiian, and thereafter came a steady output of works composed by various members of the mission. In October 1825 Bingham began the translation of the New Testament into Hawaiian, and by 1839 the entire Bible had been done by him and his associates, he himself contributing Luke, Colossians, Hebrews, Leviticus, Psalms 1-75, and Ezekiel. In 1828 the Gospel of Matthew, translated by himself and Thurston, was published, and in 1829 his own Luke. In 1831 he issued his First Book for Children and his Scripture Catechism.
The services were first held in the open under immense hau (Hibiscus titiaceus) trees. In August 1821 a church was erected. Slowly the mission became fully organized. In February 1823, Bingham, Thurston, and Ellis, the ordained men, signed an article of incorporation of the Hawaiian Clerical Association which continued in power until 1863, when the Hawaiian Evangelical Association was formed. During 1826 Bingham made a one-hundred-mile preaching tour of the island in company with Kaahumanu, wife of the first great king, and chief pupil of the Binghams, who herself occupied the throne from 1823 to 1832. She had become Christian early in 1825 and was now urging the new faith upon her subjects.
On June 1, 1840, the Mission "reluctantly, yet on the whole cheerfully, recommended that Brother and Sister Bingham make a visit to the United States, " on account of Mrs. Bingham's health. Accordingly the parents and their small children left Honolulu August 3, 1840, for New York. Since the American Board thought it unwise for Bingham to return, he occupied himself in America with preaching and writing. For a time he served in New Haven as pastor of an African Church. His voluminous and generally reliable Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands; or The Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands was published in 1847. In 1863 certain friends put an annuity at his disposal. Shortly after passing his eightieth birthday he died in New Haven.
Bingham married Sybil Moseley, of Westfield, Massachussets, on October 11, 1819, at Hartford. Mrs. Bingham died at Easthampton, Massachussets, on February 27, 1848. On August 24, 1854, he married Naomi Emma Morse.
