He was born in Indianapolis, the son of Calvin Fletcher, a banker and one of the first settlers of Indiana. James Cooley Fletcher graduated from Brown University in 1846, and studied theology for two years in the Princeton Theological Seminary under Charles Hodge. His studies were completed in Europe, as he sought to improve his French in order to become a missionary in Haiti. In that period, he married Henriette Malan, a daughter of César Malan, a minister from Geneva.[2]
In 1862, Fletcher sailed more than 3,000 kilometers through the Amazon River to collect species for professor Louis Agassiz. This resulted in the Agassiz expedition of 1865. In 1864 and 1865, Fletcher and the liberal Brazilian politician Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos convinced the governors of Brazil and the USA to set up a steamboat line between Rio de Janeiro and New York. Influenced by Fletcher, Aureliano and other Brazilian politicians tried and in some cases managed to make many political, social and economic reforms in Brazil; they also encouraged European and North American migrants.[1]
In 1868 and 1869, Fletcher worked as an agent for the American Tract Society. This would be his last journey to Brazil. Thereafter he was nominated consul at Oporto, Portugal, between 1869 and 1873, and was a missionary in Naples, Italy between 1873 and 1877. In 1877, he returned to Indianapolis, where he settled. His daughter stayed in Italy, where she became a prolific writer with the pen name George Fleming.
Fletcher left many important friends in Brazil, including liberal politicians and intellectuals as well as the emperor Dom Pedro II.[3] He worked as a North American diplomatic secretary, and his book left a strong image of Brazil in the USA. In Brazil, he left behind a strong desire for Protestant and Anglo-Saxon values.
