By the Rivers of Water
Page 27
Meanwhile, Dr. Samuel McGill, the son of the Methodist minister and trader George McGill and Russwurm’s brother-in-law, had learned what was going on. McGill—who had recently returned from studying medicine in the United States, where he had endured the racism of his fellow students—had joined the crowd, in order, he later said, to “note the effects” of the concoction on the struggling woman.38 She was young and robust, but her eyes already were glazed when he arrived. He took her pulse—it was soft, and her skin was dry. She could not hold up her head, and it rolled on her shoulders and breast. She tried to walk but stumbled and fell. Members of the crowd, infuriated when they learned of Leighton’s opposition, took hold of her feet and began dragging her, cutting her badly. She finally freed herself from them, and McGill, thinking her near death, pleaded with the crowd to let him take her, offering to treat also the man whom she was accused of bewitching. He was pushed away in the fury of the moment. Still she struggled. They held her arms and legs, and one man put his foot on her head as they tried to pour more red water down her throat and then down her nose. Somehow she found the strength to resist. They put sand in her eyes and mouth, but she fought them off. Finally they overwhelmed her by pouring water in her nostrils and clapping strong hands over her mouth, then they buried her head under the sand. In this way she died, and with her died the hope that the ordeal had been abolished.39
For Leighton, the woman’s horrifying death was a painful reminder that old ways die slowly and not without a great struggle. The way forward for the mission was to be long and arduous, and hopes for the conversion of the Grebo had to be tempered by a realization of the strength and resilience of Grebo traditions.
WHILE THE PLANS to relocate were being discussed at Fair Hope, and while life in Big Town was showing a growing strain between old traditions and new ways, the settlers at Bayard Island were struggling to establish a new life in a demanding environment. After all but two children had passed successfully through the initial fevers, the hard realities of life in a young colony soon began to be felt. The supplies Leighton had provided upon their arrival were exhausted in six months, and recurrent fevers and other illnesses began to take their toll. Names began to disappear from the colonial records—eighteen-year-old Diana McIntosh died the first year; twenty-seven-year-old Juba McIntosh died the next, as did seventy-year-old Belinda Mumford and Juba’s little three-year-old, Hosa McIntosh, whose father, Renty, was in Savannah.40
But others were surviving and making a new life for themselves where the surf pounded around a West African cape and where night fires in Big Town could be seen in the distance. Charles and Mary Sansay, in spite of their age, were working hard on their little farm, as were John and Catherine Johnson on theirs. Some on Bayard Island were employed as sawyers and laborers, and one was learning to be a blacksmith. Several of the women were working as spinsters and needlewomen, and among both the men and the women there were those who were finding marriage partners in Harper and who came out to Fair Hope for Leighton to marry them.41
As a skilled carpenter, Paul Sansay was in the best position to prosper in the young colony. Now what he had learned in Savannah he put to use at Cape Palmas—his knowledge of saws, augers, gimlets and chisels; his understanding of how a joist was connected to a beam and how a window could be framed or floorboards tightly laid. After he had built his own neat house, and had gotten his parents and his sister settled in their new home, he found plenty of work to do in Harper. Leighton hired him to do some work at Fair Hope, where Paul met and became friends with Wasa and William Davis. His sister, Charlotte, who had been Jane’s personal maid in Georgia, also came out to Fair Hope, but only occasionally, and she and Jane, who had spent so much time together in Savannah and at Fair Hope plantation, renewed in only limited ways their complicated relationship. Charlotte was now a free woman in West Africa. The distance between Bayard Island and the Fair Hope mission was apparently a help as Charlotte sought to avoid being caught in any remnant of slavery’s web that had once entangled her and Jane.42
Paul did not forget his wife and children in Savannah. Six months after he arrived at Cape Palmas, he wrote Latrobe asking for help in freeing his family. “I do feel myself,” he said, “very happy that my lot has fell were it is. But in one thing only I can Say that I am not Satisfied in that is my wife and children that I have left behind me being Slave as I was but has not the chance that I had of getting them freedom there is one thing I should like you to write me about that is if I could not make it convenient for me to come over next fall to see if I could not do something for them perhaps with a few friends I may be the means of getting them out of bondage by next fall expedition.” If any of his friends asked about him, he told Latrobe, he should “tell them I am under my own vine and fig tree none dare molest nor make me afraid and doing well as I can expect.”43
Paul wrote his wife as well, sending the letters to Nicholas and asking him to read them to her. But slowly his letters began to grow more infrequent. In 1841, Nicholas wrote Latrobe that Paul’s wife had not heard from him in some time and that she was anxious to do so, as her master was moving her and the children to Macon in the middle of the state. Was there any chance that she and the children might be freed? Had Paul, she wondered, reached Baltimore? If he had, Nicholas told Latrobe, it was important to warn him not to return to Savannah. Georgia law was clear—he would be arrested and sold back into slavery.44
But Paul never made it back to Baltimore, and while he prospered and became a leader in the colony, he never married again. So he made a life for himself in the new land far from his place of birth and slavery, and far from his wife and children. And more than most of the settlers, he made friends among the Grebo—especially the newly converted Christians Wasa and William Davis.45
Chapter Twelve
Rose-Tinted Glasses
In 1841 the Maryland legislature asked the Maryland Colonization Society for a full report on the progress of its colony at Cape Palmas. Having appropriated $20,000 a year for the work of the society, the legislature was asking how successful the project had been in furthering the effort to whiten Maryland.1
Latrobe wrote a glowing report. The colony, he said, was intended to make the American settlers the means of civilizing and Christianizing their ancestral homeland. He reported a happy relationship between the society and the missionaries and acknowledged that the missionaries had played an important role in preserving peace and goodwill between the Grebo and the colonists and in the improvement of both. He asserted that the Maryland Colonization Society board had authority over the colony and that the colonial authorities at Cape Palmas governed on behalf and in the name of the board. The board, he said, was building a new nation in Africa, and when the time came for the board to transfer its power to the settlers, then Maryland in Liberia would stand as a nation among the family of nations. And to make clear that the Maryland Colonization Society did not regard itself as one US benevolent society among many, Latrobe insisted that all persons residing in the colony who were not citizens of it were like strangers residing in any other civilized country. They had to obey the laws of the colony. Latrobe was clearly claiming that the Baltimore board had authority over the missionaries connected with the Boston board and the Episcopal mission society.2
In regard to the Grebo, they were, Latrobe said, clearly “savages,” and by implication their country was not “civilized” and those residing in it were not bound to pay obedience to Grebo laws. Latrobe informed the legislature that Maryland in Liberia had experienced a total exemption from native wars in spite of the savage ways of the Grebo. He acknowledged that many opponents to colonization believed that civilized settlers inevitably encroached upon and finally exterminated the indigenous people around them. But Latrobe insisted that the black settlers at Cape Palmas would eventually absorb the Grebo into colonial society and in this way become a blessing to Africa. For Latrobe, such an amalgamation was nothing less than striking proof that the contact of civilized peopl
e and savages was only fatal for savages “when the barrier of colour interposes an obstacle to amalgamation which can never be overcome.” In conclusion, Latrobe and the Baltimore board boasted that the prosperity of their colony at Cape Palmas was unparalleled in the history of colonization. They proudly announced that the inhabitants of Maryland in Liberia had “proved an honor to their race.”3
Latrobe and the Maryland board must have known that their report was a view of the colony as seen through rose-tinted glasses manufactured in their own offices. Indeed, anyone who read the Maryland Colonization Journal, edited by Dr. James Hall, must have known the same. At the time of the report, only 453 emigrants had been sent to the colony and approximately 107 had arrived from Monrovia and Liberia proper. Of these 560, the board’s report said, only a little over 200 were in the colony in January 1841. Some had returned to the United States, and others had left for Monrovia, but many, very many, had died within a year or two of their arrival. With the colonists often weakened by severe food shortages and poor housing, the death rate, especially among children, had been staggering. Moreover, Russwurm and Samuel McGill had been regularly reporting the intense hostility of the settlers toward the Grebo while reflecting their own disdain for the settlers themselves. As for the missionaries, both those of the American Board and those of the Episcopal mission were preparing to leave the bounds of the colony because of what they perceived to be the opposition of the colonial authorities to their presence there and the opposition of the settlers to the education of the Grebo.4
But rose-tinted glasses seemed necessary in Baltimore in 1841. The census of 1840 had sent a deep tremor through the white Maryland establishment because it had revealed the expansion of the American frontier in the south. Ambitious and aggressive whites were pouring into a black belt of rich and promising land that stretched from Georgia to the Mississippi Valley. The settlers, seeking their fortunes, had created a huge demand for slaves to clear the land and plant and harvest cotton. As a consequence, slave traders had been busy in Baltimore, as well as in Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and many points in between. They had been buying black men, women, and children and marching them to the lucrative markets of an expanding Cotton Kingdom. Some planters on the old Atlantic seaboard had joined this exodus, taking their slaves to the beckoning lands of Alabama and Mississippi, of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For the slaves, the westward movement was like a Second Middle Passage, a terrible uprooting and often agonizing separation from family and friends. For many whites in the old seaboard areas, however, this removal of slaves presented threatening demographic shifts. In Maryland, in particular, the westward movement of slaves appeared to be creating a grave danger for the state—while slaves were leaving, free blacks were staying and having large families.5
In circulars sent throughout the state, Latrobe spelled out the alarming census returns and their implications for Maryland. The state was becoming, wrote Latrobe, a place inhabited by two distinct races of free people—one white and one black. Each race, he said, had widely differing characteristics. Latrobe pointed out what seemed obvious to him—free whites and free blacks could not live together in harmony on the same soil. Never in history had they done so, he insisted, and the inherent and unchangeable principles of human nature would keep them from doing so in the future. If whites and free blacks ended up living together in Maryland in anything like equal numbers, Latrobe predicted, one of two alternatives would be the result. One was intermarriage and equality of political rights. The other was the oppression of free blacks, their rebellion, the repression of the rebellion in a bloodbath, and the final expulsion of what Latrobe called “the weaker and less energetic race.”6
Latrobe dismissed the first alternative as impossible. Intermarriage and political equality could not be considered, Latrobe said, because of “the degraded condition of the coloured race, and the fact that the marks of their degradation are distinct, indelible and perpetual; and will ever prevent those who have been their masters, from receiving them as equals, in the social or political relations.” In addition, such an amalgamation between the two races would lead to the humiliation of whites as they lost their identity in what Latrobe called a “mongrel posterity.” But the other alternative also seemed unthinkable. Many whites, Latrobe thought, would object to a bloody expulsion of free blacks, because whites had as one of the principles of their nature an “aversion to discord and violence.” There was only one way to avert such impending and dreaded calamities, he said: African colonization. Latrobe clearly believed that perceived racial differences between whites and blacks were insuperable, while the cultural differences between the African American settlers and the Grebo were not. Amalgamation was desirable in Cape Palmas, but would be an unthinkable calamity in Maryland.7
Governor Russwurm apparently made no written response to the report or to the circulars sent out by Latrobe and the board. Perhaps it was simply what he had come to expect.
The seismic demographic shifts reflected in the census of 1840, however, sent ripples racing out of Baltimore harbor to hit the shores of Cape Palmas. Latrobe and his colleagues, in an atmosphere of near panic, were determined to meet the perceived threat of free blacks, to do all they could to whiten Maryland, and to be strong and resolute in their management of their West African colony—and this included how they dealt with troublesome missionaries who might raise questions about the assumptions, purposes, and results of colonization.8
WHILE LATROBE WAS writing his report and sending out circulars, Leighton and Russwurm continued to glare at one another across the distance that separated Fair Hope from the governor’s house in Harper. Each man carefully watched the other for any action or any report that would confirm his worst suspicions. Yet each of them also knew that the other had an important role to play at the Cape. Leighton acknowledged and grudgingly admired Russwurm’s concern for the Grebo. He thought that the governor, unlike almost all of the settlers, took the interests of the Grebo seriously, even if he naturally put the interests of the colony first. Moreover, Leighton knew that Russwurm and Freeman had been able to reach a detente in regard to conflicts between settlers and Grebo, and that they generally worked well together to oil the relationship between Harper and Big Town. Russwurm, on his part, knew that Leighton was regarded by the Grebo as their friend and that he had played, and could again play, an important role in helping to settle disputes.9
So the two men watched one another. And the attitudes and the actions that followed their watching reflected the world that Leighton had known at Pine Grove and the world that Russwurm had experienced in Maine and New York—the bitter burden of race seemed to have come across the Atlantic to Cape Palmas like a rat hidden in the hold of a ship.
In spite of their differences, Russwurm and Leighton found themselves once again working carefully together in May 1841 to settle a boundary dispute between the Grebo of Big Town and the Grebo of Rock Town. Through their joint efforts, a settlement was reached between the rival communities and war was avoided.10
But open conflict soon erupted between the governor and the missionary—and once more, as in 1838, the conflict was over the question of mission personnel serving in the colonial militia. Mission teachers had been secured from Cape Coast and Sierra Leone, and the colonial authorities imposed fines on them when they did not report for duty in the militia. Leighton and Russwurm exchanged notes on the matter—the notes were civil in tone but clear in articulating their different positions. Leighton quoted a letter from Anderson giving “the official” conclusion of the correspondence between Anderson and Latrobe in 1838 about missionary personnel and the militia: “As the missionaries and assistant missionaries we send from this country in the colony are to be regarded and treated as foreigners, so also are the native Teachers we may bring from tribes not subject to the colony to be regarded.” Foreigners in the colony, said Anderson, “as well as in all other parts of the world, are exempt from military duty, serving as jurors, etc.”11
&nb
sp; Russwurm wrote back defiantly: “I can say nothing about Dr. Anderson’s letter to you, as I receive instructions only from Md. Col. Soc.” And in those instructions he found nothing that exempted the “civilized” Africans at Fair Hope from military duty.12
The two men agreed to submit the question once again to their respective societies in the United States. When Russwurm wrote the board in Baltimore, he said, after giving his interpretation of the situation, that he intended to resign at the end of the year. He gave no reasons for his decision, but it was clear he was tired of dealing with recalcitrant settlers and troublesome, presumptuous white missionaries—or perhaps his announcement was a considered attempt to provoke a strong response from the board.13
At this point Dr. Alex Wilson and B. V. R. James leaped into the fray. They wrote a joint letter to the American Board in Boston. The colonists, they said, believed the Grebo and the settlers had opposing interests—the settlers were said to regard anything advancing the interests of the Grebo as detrimental to the colony. Because the missionaries were trying to elevate the Grebo, many settlers had begun to resent the work of the mission and to see the missionaries as a threat to the colony. The white physician with years of experience in South Africa, and the black printer and teacher from New York, wrote, “We would by no means condemn colonization because the Colonists are Colored persons. We believe that white Colonists of the same character and under the same circumstances would trample down and drive out the natives just as soon.” They concluded, however, that the missionaries could no longer carry on their work in the colony in peace and comfort. And they noted that the Episcopal missionaries had already decided to move their work beyond the bounds of the colony and of Russwurm’s authority.14