BY THE RIVERS OF WATER
BY THE RIVERS OF WATER
A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
ERSKINE CLARKE
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TEXT DESIGN BY JEFF WILLIAMS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clarke, Erskine, 1941-author.
By the rivers of water : a nineteenth-century Atlantic odyssey / Erskine Clarke.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-03769-8 (e-book)
1. Wilson, J. Leighton (John Leighton), 1809–1886. 2. Wilson, Jane Bayard, 1809–1885. 3. Missionaries—Liberia—Biography. 4. Missionaries—Gabon—Biography. 5. Missionaries—United States—Biography. 6. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.—Missions—Liberia. 7. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.—Missions—Gabon. 8. Grebo (African people)—Missions. 9. Mpongwe (African people)—Missions. I. Title.
BV3625.L6W554 2013
266.51092—dc23
2013021385
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Judy and Will
And he shall be like
a tree planted by the
rivers of water, that
bringeth forth fruit
in his season.
—PSALM 1:3, KJV
CONTENTS
Maps
Preface
Part I: Starting Places
1A Slave’s World
2Many Mansions
3A Black River Home
4A Place Seen from Afar
Part II: Journey to a West African Cape
5Testing the Waters
6Fair Hope Among the Grebo
7Beneath an African Sky
8Sorrows and Conflicts
9The Bitter Cost of Freedom
10Exploring Strange Worlds
11The Conversion of William Davis (Mworeh Mah)
12Rose-Tinted Glasses
13“The Liberty of Choosing for Themselves”
Part III: Life Among the Mpongwe
14Toko and the Waterwitch
15A Sophisticated, Hospitable, and Heathen People
16Rainforest Lessons
17The French: “The Most Dishonest and Shameless People”
18Home Visit
19“He Worships with Sincere Devotion the Customs of His Ancestors”
Part IV: Homeward Journey
20An Unsought and Unexpected Appointment
21A Patriot’s Choice
22Civil War
23Home Ground
24Distant Voices
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Index of Names
1. Bird’s Eye View. In this view of antebellum Savannah, Hutchinson Island can be seen in the distance. The Bayard slave settlement was toward the left end of the island.
2. Hutchinson Island. This map shows the layout of the Bayard property on Hutchinson Island. Note the slave settlement, the landing, and the old rice fields with their canals and dams. Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.
3. Georgia Coast. A network of tidal rivers and creeks marks coastal Georgia. Both Bayard slaves going to General’s Island and Jane Bayard going to Fair Hope Plantation frequently travelled the inland waters between Savannah and Darien.
4. Sumter County. The Black River, South Carolina, served as a highway for Scotch-Irish settlers in the eighteenth century. By the 1850s, the plantations and churches of their descendants reflected the wealth created by a rapidly growing slave population.
5. Western Africa. This map, from Leighton Wilson’s Western Africa, provides an overview of the coast and shows the geographic relationship of Cape Palmas to Gabon and the major places the Wilsons visited on their travels in West Africa.
6. Harper, Big Town, and Vicinity. This map shows the relationship of the Fair Hope mission to its setting at Cape Palmas. Note Bayard Island.
7. Gabon Estuary. Gabon rivers and their estuary provided easy access in the nineteenth century to Mpongwe towns and villages.
8. The American Board. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was one of many Protestant mission agencies rapidly expanding its work around the world during the nineteenth century. Note that “Indian Nations” were regarded as “foreign missions.”
PREFACE
By the Rivers of Water is a history set in the midst of a nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It is a story of a strange odyssey by a young white couple from the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry who left plantation homes and the elegant little city of Savannah and sailed ocean highways to West Africa. There they lived for seventeen years, first in a cottage above the pounding surf at Cape Palmas and later in a cottage by the broad waters of the Gabon estuary. Odysseus-like, they sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths. They encountered different peoples, found cultures that evoked both admiration and horror, and visited landscapes of great beauty and waiting dangers. But unlike Odysseus, they did not undergo in their travels a journey from a great estrangement to a spiritual restoration; this was no odyssey from a war-torn city to a longed-for home. Rather, their odyssey was a journey into a wider world and into an expansion of the human spirit. And their return to home was a return that followed the call of familiar voices, places, and scenes—a seductive call that emerged from deep within their memories and that echoed in their hearts. They returned because they were unable to resist the voice of a beckoning Southern homeland, unable to ignore the call of those who had loved them since their childhood, unable to abandon those who were waiting at home for them.
By the Rivers of Water is the story of John Leighton Wilson and his wife, Jane Bayard Wilson, the best-known and most influential American missionaries in West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. Around their story—with all of its startling contradictions and deep ambiguities—are gathered the stories of other men and women whom they encountered on their odyssey: Gullah slaves from Georgia and Philadelphia bankers; Grebo kings and a brilliant young woman at Cape Palmas; Portuguese slavers and African slave traders; African American colonists in Liberia; white missionaries, black missionaries, Mpongwe kings, and merchants in Gabon; French imperialists; and South Carolina secessionists. Here in this Atlantic world—in the midst of this cacophony of disparate voices, cultures, and societies—the Wilsons made their way, guided, they believed, by a divine providence. On their journey, they found their lives entangled not only with the lives of diverse peoples, but also with the landscapes through which they traveled, which reached out to embrace and engulf them in the sights and sounds and tastes of particular places.
The Wilsons were members of affluent—and in the case of Jane, aristocratic—families in Georgia and South Carolina. Their grandfathers had been officers in the American Revolution—Majo
r General Lachlan McIntosh, Colonel Bubenheim Bayard, and Captain John James, son of Major John James. Through the Bayards they were closely connected to the families of prominent bankers and physicians in Philadelphia, to US senators in Delaware, lawyers in New York, and professors in New Jersey. Through the Wilsons they were part of a dense network of increasingly prosperous planting families who, through the labor of their slaves, were turning Sumter County in South Carolina into one of the wealthiest regions in the nation.
When Leighton and Jane Wilson decided to become missionaries in West Africa, many of their family members and friends were deeply alarmed. The Protestant missionary movement was young, and to many of the Wilsons’ contemporaries, their decision to become missionaries appeared quixotic, if not fanatical. And to go to Africa with its raging fevers seemed nothing less than suicidal. Although there was a growing enthusiasm for Christian missions as the nineteenth century proceeded, many whites regarded the missionary effort as ridiculous, as an act of religious hubris. And in regard to Africa, many thought mission efforts doomed to failure. They asserted—especially as a new scientific racism began to develop in the nineteenth century—that Africans were unable to comprehend the Christian gospel or to adopt the “civilized” ways of Christian people.
Such nineteenth-century ideas, when added to the widespread distrust and often disdain of missionaries in our day, make it difficult to enter the Wilsons’ world and travel with them on their odyssey. The perceived presumption, and, all too often, the obvious arrogance of missionaries—and indeed, of the mission movement itself—make the world of Leighton and Jane Wilson seem distant and uninviting. Yet, to begin to understand the stunning religious transformations of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in particular the development of a truly global Christianity, requires that we try to cross the distances that separate us from these early Protestant missionaries. We must try to peer as deeply as we can into their world with its commitments and sorrows, its adventures and failures, its travels and homecomings, and to listen as carefully as we can to their often surprising voices.
If the odyssey of Leighton and Jane Wilson seems strange and distant, the worlds and voices of those whom they encountered along the way seem equally strange and distant. The distinctive accents of Gullah slaves in the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina sound peculiar to most twenty-first-century ears. The Gullah left few written records, and for generations their voices have been largely ignored or regarded as merely quaint and entertaining. Yet today their story and stories are beginning to be heard more clearly as archaeologists dig into old slave settlements, as anthropologists investigate Gullah storytelling, and as historians gather records of Gullah life from courthouses and plantation records and from the letters of whites and from even a few precious letters Gullah slaves themselves wrote or received. Their history is a part of the history of the American South, and their lives were entangled with and interpreted and challenged the lives of Lowcountry whites—including Jane and Leighton Wilson.
The free African Americans whom the Wilsons encountered in Liberia were on their own odyssey—from the land of slavery to a homeland in West Africa. Their voices sound at first clear and familiar to contemporary ears. Their records are abundant and their efforts to escape US slavery and racism resonate with the deep sensibilities of many twenty-first-century people. Yet the peculiar ambiguities of their colonialism and of their relationship with the indigenous people of Liberia make their world and their perspectives also seem strange and often surprising and difficult to understand. These ambiguities are perhaps best seen in the life of a remarkable governor of the colony at Cape Palmas, and in the life of a former Charleston barber who died as a patriot of his new homeland, fighting the Africans who had long lived there.
During their odyssey, the Wilsons met many different African peoples—from the Mandingo and Vai in the north, to Fanti on the Gold Coast, to the Fang in tropical rainforests. But most of all, they encountered and lived among the Grebo at Cape Palmas and the Mpongwe on the Gabon estuary. Modern Western people must strain—and strain hard—to hear the voices and catch intimations about the nineteenth-century world of the Grebo and of the Mpongwe. Most daunting is trying to hear individual voices—attempting to recognize the sound of a king’s voice at Cape Palmas or the voice of his precocious niece; or trying to hear the voice of a wise Mpongwe merchant or of an old Mpongwe king struggling to maintain the traditions and independence of his people. Yet their voices—hard to hear as they are—rise up in documents and what anthropologists call “hidden transcripts,” and they demand that we try to hear them, too, and that we look, that we squint hard, and peer across the great distances that separate us from them, and try to get glimpses into their world. They call us to acknowledge that they, too, had lives and were part of cultures worthy of acknowledgment and understanding. They speak and insist that they, too, were travelers, and that they were on their own and sometimes surprising odysseys. They were not silent and passive participants in a larger Atlantic world, but were vocal and active players in that world. And they point us to their own stories as revealing interpreters of modern Western assumptions and power.
TO LISTEN TO these disparate voices, to attempt to explore at least the most important aspects of these diverse cultures and societies, and to hear a coherent story emerging from many individual stories, requires a disciplined imagination. The discipline demands a careful reading and rereading of texts; one must listen to many witnesses, and pay special attention to what is odd and local. Such discipline requires one not only to listen to many nineteenth-century voices, but also to engage the voices of many twentieth-and twenty-first-century specialists—especially anthropologists and archaeologists and historians of the American South, of an Atlantic world, and of the diverse societies of West Africa. The research for this intense listening leads to wondering, and the listening and the wondering together prepare the way for the historian’s imaginative reconstruction of a coherent distant story.
To be sure, any persuasive reconstruction of the past must demonstrate careful research and faithful attention to details. But the historian’s task is not primarily to present a catalog of discovered “facts.” Rather, the historian attempts to enter as deeply as possible into past lives and into the social and cultural contexts of those lives in order to interpret and re-create for the present a past world. The study of history is, finally, an exploration of mysteries, the continuing exploration of—and arguments about—the lives of particular people, and about the dynamics and forces that influence the course of human life. The writing of history is plunging into other times and other places and into the story and stories of other people and then emerging with the historian’s account of what has been seen and heard even in the empty places and silences of the past. Among the many things encountered, as one follows the strange odyssey of the Wilsons, is the mystery of good intentions and cruel consequences, and the enigma of human freedom in the midst of slavery and the contingencies of human life.
PART I
Starting Places
Chapter One
A Slave’s World
From the slave settlement on Hutchinson Island, Paul could look across the river to Savannah with its waterfront of toiling men: sweating stevedores loading and unloading sailing ships from exotic, unknown places; slave porters pushing and pulling heavy carts up steep cobblestone dray-ways to city markets; sailors dropping rusty anchors, swabbing decks, and hoisting sails. In the midst of all this activity, Paul could see and hear, as an almost unnoticed part of the landscape, white-bodied seagulls and terns calling wildly to one another as they flew back and forth above the dark river waters.1
Since the founding of Savannah in 1733, the Savannah River had shaped much of the life of the little city. Its waters connected Savannah to London and Liverpool, to Cuba and Jamaica, to Boston and Charleston, and to the cities, villages, and rivers of West Africa. From its port flowed the produce of a Georgia hinterland, and to its port cam
e riches from a wider world. Savannah’s tree-lined parks and slave markets, its soaring church steeples and sturdy warehouses packed with lumber, cotton, and rice—all in one way or another depended upon the river waters.2
By early December 1832, the river had also played its part in shaping Paul’s life and the lives of those who lived with him in the slave settlement. Most mornings he crossed the river in a little bateau to work in the city as a carpenter. And most evenings he returned to the settlement across waters stirred by tide and river flow and sometimes by night winds that made the paddling hard and the crossing dangerous. Over the years he had learned well the moods of the river, and he knew the coming in and going out of its waters. When the moon was full and the time right, he had to paddle against the tide as it surged strongly up the river pushing back its waters and bringing past the slave cabins on Hutchinson Island hints of the Atlantic and its wider world. But when the moon was new, and especially when there had been heavy rains inland, and swamps had emptied dark, cypress-stained waters into the Savannah, he had to direct his bateau against the river’s flow as it pushed hard against the tide and brought downstream reminders of a Southern landscape.3
Paul, now thirty-one, was too young to remember slave ships unloading their frightened cargoes of men, women, and children, but his father, Charles, remembered. Charles had worked the waterfront as a porter and had witnessed the foul-smelling ships as they sailed slowly past Tybee Island at the mouth of the Savannah and unloaded their slave cargoes at the waiting wharfs—the Mars and the Betsy, the Aurora and the Franklin, the Polly and the Mary, and many others.4
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