James Cooley Fletcher was a Presbyterian minister and missionary with strong activities in Brazilian lands. Fletcher was 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 a daughter of C�sar Malan, a minister from Geneva. He went back to the USA in 1850, when his daughter Julia Constance Fletcher was born. In the next year, he went to Rio de Janeiro as an agent of both the American Christian Union and American Seamen's Friend Society in a mission which endured until 1854. The American Christian Union worked together with the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society. Both of them also supported Fletcher years later. In 1855 and 1856, Fletcher was back in Brazil, this time as an agent of the American Sunday School Union. During this trip he traveled more than 5,000 kilometers through Brazil, giving out Bibles. 

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