If he had later walked to the northern edge of Harper, Walker would have seen Bayard Island, although the name Bayard had now been dropped and largely forgotten. Paul Sansay was still living there by himself and was a leading member of the settler community. He remained a thorn in Russwurm’s flesh, always taking the side of the settlers when there were conflicts with the governor. The carpentry skills that Sansay had first learned in Savannah as an apprentice to the slave carpenter Jack had served him well in Harper. He had been appointed “Measurer of Lumber” and “Measurer of Buildings” and had his hand in many things—too many, Russwurm thought. His father, Charles Sansay, had died a few years before, and his mother was living with his sister, Charlotte, who had once been so close to Jane as her personal “servant” in Savannah and at Fair Hope plantation.11
Charles McIntosh was the most prominent of the other citizens of Harper who had once lived in the Hutchinson Island slave settlement by the waters of the Savannah. He still carried the name of General Lachlan McIntosh, had been elected constable, and had recently returned from a long exploratory trip to the interior. His party had followed inland routes traveled by Leighton in 1836 and 1837 when he had tried to reach Pah country. Like Leighton’s party, McIntosh and his party had experienced illness and difficulties, but they had learned that the Pah—like the Fang in Gabon—were moving toward the coast, and they were eager to establish direct trade relations with Harper without Grebo middlemen.12
So the former Bayard Island, with all of its links to Savannah, was becoming a part of Harper. Those who lived there were putting old ways and old memories behind them, and they were assuming new identities as free men and women, citizens of Maryland in Liberia. And Fair Hope—it was becoming a receding memory for those who had once lived there, who had hoped there and had grieved there. Walker finished his visit and left the place where he had buried his Prudence, where once ocean winds had filled his days and the sounds of the surf had echoed through long, sleepless nights.
CAPTAIN LAWLIN SAILED from Cape Palmas on December 1 and, after stops along the way, reached the Gabon estuary on December 26, 1846. At about 3 p.m., they anchored off Glass’s Town and met Jane and hundreds of Mpongwe on the beach. “I can barely describe the sensation I felt,” he wrote in his diary, “in again meeting the people who have so long been waiting and despairing of my return.”13
Leighton and Jane had been awaiting the arrival of the Walkers in order to be free to return to the United States on furlough. It had been thirteen years since Leighton had sailed out of New York Harbor with Jane, and he was long overdue for a rest for the good of his health. He wanted to promote the mission among various constituencies while in America, but he and Jane were simply ready for a visit home. So, four months after the Walkers arrived, the Wilsons sailed with Captain Lawlin for New York. With them were the Episcopal missionaries Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Savage, who had arrived with Captain Lawlin from Cape Palmas.14
Sometime before Savage arrived at Baraka, Leighton had learned that an enormous ape—called a njina by the Mpongwe—had been killed by a hunter. When he went to a nearby village and saw the skull of the animal, Leighton wrote that he “knew at once, from its peculiar shape and outline,” that it belonged “to an undescribed species.” He purchased the skull and some of the animal’s bones, intending to send them to Rufus Anderson in Boston. When his friend Dr. Savage from Cape Palmas arrived, Savage encouraged him to try to secure as well the bones of another njina. Leighton, with his many contacts around the estuary, was able to buy a second but smaller skull.15 Leighton carried these two skulls, together with their accompanying bones, to New York, where he turned them over to Savage to take to Boston. Leighton later wrote Rufus Anderson, “The skulls and bones of the African ourangs [the common name used for large apes], which I loaned to Dr. Thomas Savage and which he has informed me have been left with the Society of Natural History, Boston, were intended for the Missionary Rooms.” If, however, Leighton wrote, they will serve “the cause of science better by remaining where they are, I am willing that you should make such disposition of them.”16
The skull and bones, in fact, caused an immediate sensation in the scientific community and among the general public. Savage, together with Jeffries Wyman, professor of anatomy at Harvard, rushed to write an article for the Boston Journal of Natural History: “Notice of the External Characters and Habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, A New Species of Orang from the Gaboon River.” The gorilla quickly burst into the awareness and imagination of the Western world. Most ominously, the Harvard professor wrote in the Boston journal that “it cannot be denied, however wide the separation, that the Negro and Orang do afford the points where man and the brute, when the totality of their organization is considered, most nearly approach each other.” In this way the njina Leighton first saw in a Mpongwe village was on its way to becoming, in the imagination of the Western world, a terrifying beast of the jungle—a beast often associated with the most degrading images of Africans.17
While Savage was meeting with Professor Wyman, Leighton and Jane were busy visiting friends and family. They went first to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, for a happy reunion with Jane’s sister, Margaret, and her husband, James Eckard, who were staying briefly with the Bayard cousins. James Eckard had recently accepted a call to become pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. In Lawrenceville, Leighton saw two-year-old John Leighton Eckard for the first time. His nephew, like William Leighton Dorsey in Africa, bore the name of the missionary from Pine Grove.18
Leaving Jane with the Bayard and Hodge relatives in New Jersey and Philadelphia, Leighton hurried south. He was eager to see his father, who was now in his seventies and in poor health. But Leighton also needed to see his sisters and brothers and make his position on slavery clear to them. When he had sent his father documents freeing his two slaves—John and Jesse—it had caused, his sister Sarah wrote, much grief and perplexity in Leighton’s family. They wondered if he had been “influenced by a desire to appease the abolitionists.” He had responded by writing that he had never intended to cause pain, and that he didn’t know how they could think he was influenced by a desire to appease the abolitionists when he had made his own position on slavery clear to the family long before the abolitionists had begun to attack him. So Leighton hurried south, back to Pine Grove, back to the place he called home and to the people who were family, in order to reiterate what he had already said to them. He had written Sarah in a language and with sentiments he thought most likely to persuade her and other members of the family.19
He began by saying that slavery was not necessarily sinful. Since the Bible nowhere directly condemned slavery, he thought—at least theoretically—that “a conscientious Christian may hold slaves without committing a sin.” But American slavery, he insisted, was opposed to the spirit of the gospel. Leighton told Sarah that while there were many objectionable features to American slavery, he would select two to describe in order to clarify his views for his family. We cry out with one accord, he wrote, against the pope for denying Catholics the use of the Bible. But the pope could respond by saying that we deny the slave the use of the Bible. Moreover, it was not simply a matter of having a personal right to own slaves: “I, as a conscientious Christian,” he told his sister, “may hold slaves and not abuse my authority. I may conduct myself towards them in such a way as to secure their and my highest happiness. But remember I am lending the influence of my example to others who may and will abuse their power. For the sake of others therefore, I cannot hold slaves.” Leighton knew his sister would recognize the reasoning of his argument—the same sort of argument was being used by the temperance movement. A person had the moral freedom to drink alcoholic drinks in moderation, but for the sake of others who might abuse alcohol, a Christian was to refrain from drinking. “I, as a conscientious Christian,” wrote Leighton “abstain from the use of ardent spirits (chiefly) for the sake of others. For the same reason I wish to rid myself of slaves.” He told Sar
ah that when he had sent bills of freedom for his slaves John and Jessie, all he had expected or desired was that they know that they could choose to go north to freedom or remain at Boggy Gully under the guardianship of Leighton’s father or one of his brothers. The choice was to be theirs. “And this,” he wrote Sarah, “is still my wish.”20
In this way, Leighton talked to his family about slavery, about John and Jessie, and about all the slaves who lived by Boggy Gully and the other growing slave settlements that now marked the homes where Leighton’s brothers and sisters lived. He told them that he was no “ultra-abolitionist,” but that slavery was doomed to die. It was best if white Southerners led the way for the emancipation of their slaves. The family must have listened carefully to Leighton—or at least politely—for they were very proud of him. Already a brother and sister had named sons for him. But the Wilsons of Pine Grove and surrounding plantations knew something Leighton apparently had not realized—slavery was prospering all along the Black River and throughout Sumter County, and the Wilsons were prospering along with their neighbors. The slave population of the county had more than doubled since Leighton had been away, and the county would soon be the wealthiest in the state and one of the wealthiest in the nation. Helping to fuel that growing wealth was the developing technology of modern, Western civilization and the arrival of a railway in Sumter County. Trains could carry with great efficiency cotton, the product of slave labor and sorrow, to humming mills in far-off England and New England.21
So Leighton tried to explain his opposition to slavery in ways that he thought his family would be most likely to hear and appreciate. He was trying to be clear and forceful without alienating them or causing their support of slavery to harden. He was clearly no William Lloyd Garrison or Frederick Douglass furiously denouncing slaveholders as “man stealers,” or calling for the immediate abolition of slavery. Nor did he write as a slave who daily suffered the degradations and oppression of slavery. Rather, he wrote as a much-loved child of Pine Grove, and he used the language, manners, and piety of his home to try to persuade his family that slavery must finally be abolished. He did not seem to comprehend the entrenched power of slavery or its growing strength. Nor did he anticipate what would become clear only later—the inability of civil discourse to bring slavery to a peaceful end. But more than any of this, what he could not see, or would not see, was the seductive power of his Black River home. Already in the 1840s this home ground was calling to him to come over to the side of slavery, beckoning him to join the people he loved and the place he loved, reminding him of the obligations of gratitude for a generous love that had been given him since his birth.
AFTER THIS QUICK visit with family, Leighton returned to New Jersey, bringing sister Sarah with him. He spoke with students at Princeton as well as in New York, at Yale, and at Andover about Africa and the great need for more missionaries. And he wrote and published an article in the Journal of the American Oriental Society on the “Comparative Vocabularies of Some of the Principal Negro Dialects of Africa.” He noted the differences between the languages of the northern coast and those of the southern. He pointed out the ways that coastal peoples had incorporated new words into their vocabularies through their trading activities with one another and with Europeans. And he spoke of their use of pronouns, verbs, and adjectives and how the different languages made gender distinctions. But most important of all, he called attention to the common ancestry of the dialects spoken across the vast region of southern Africa. He said that although a common ancestry had been suggested some years earlier, sufficient evidence had been lacking to establish it as a fact. In order to provide such evidence, he gave parallel vocabularies and details of grammar from the dialects of people from Cameroon in West Central Africa to Mozambique in East Africa and south to the Cape. After many pages of comparisons, he concluded that his study showed a degree of resemblance between these dialects sufficient to prove that they were related to one another and that the numerous peoples who inhabited an enormous swath of southern Africa must be of one great family. The article was an important early contribution to the identification and study of what came to be called the Bantu language and peoples of southern Africa.22
IN DECEMBER 1847, Leighton and Jane traveled south to spend the winter months with family. They visited Charleston, where Leighton spoke and preached at Circular Congregational Church, the church where he and the barber Charles Snetter had once worshiped together. They traveled to Savannah and met old friends, and Leighton preached on missions and the effort in Gabon. Jane’s McIntosh cousins had sold Fair Hope plantation and were now living in Savannah, but her brother, Nicholas Bayard, had moved to the village of Roswell in the former Cherokee nation of upcountry Georgia. The twice-widowed Nicholas had married Eliza King, daughter of Roswell King, who had founded Roswell near the new city of Atlanta shortly after the Cherokees had been violently forced from their lands. The Kings had been joined by other Lowcountry families who had largely divested themselves of their slaves and had used the income from the sale of their slaves and plantations to invest in new textile mills in Roswell and in the railroads spreading across Georgia. Perhaps Leighton thought of the Grebo when he looked around at the handsome mansions that had been built in Roswell, and perhaps he remembered how he had compared the imperialism of the settlers at Cape Palmas to what Georgia was doing to the Cherokees. And maybe he remembered how he had had at least a little taste of what it was like to be on the receiving end of Western military power and aggression when the French had bombarded Baraka. But perhaps he didn’t remember any of this, or if he did, maybe he simply didn’t talk about it with his in-laws and friends.23
IN JANUARY 1848 Leighton and Jane went to Pine Grove, where they enjoyed its balmy winter days. Now they had time to walk sandy roads through open pine forests and down to the Black River swamp; time to feel the warmth of a winter sun; and time to rest. They visited those who lived by Boggy Gully, saw and talked with John and Jessie, and attended church at Mt. Zion, where Leighton preached in the afternoons to the growing number of slaves who were members of the congregation. And though Leighton was eager to return to Baraka and to his work among the Mpongwe, he knew—and Jane also knew—how deeply he was attached to this place. Here he once again experienced the light of the morning sun pouring through his old bedroom window bringing a new day. Here in the late afternoons as he walked well-known trails by fields he had worked as a boy, the land itself triggered memories—the evening air would stir, bring the fragrance of earth fresh turned by late winter plowing, and offer an irrepressible sense of well-being. And here by the Black River and Boggy Gully, at Pine Grove and Mt. Zion, the sound of familiar voices told him he was home, where whites were owners and blacks were owned. He was a child, an offspring, of this place, and no amount of travel would free him from the ways in which this Black River home had shaped his inner life and bound him to this particular landscape where settlement cabins stood close to plantation houses.24
IN THE SPRING, Leighton and Jane returned to Philadelphia to be with Jane’s Bayard family, and for Leighton to promote the mission cause in churches and schools throughout the Northeast. In June they went to New York to prepare for their departure and to attend the annual meeting of the American Board. A large and influential membership packed one of the city’s largest churches. The Honorable Theodore Frelinghuysen, former US senator and a Whig candidate for vice president in 1844, presided. Leighton was asked to speak, and he told of French aggression and spoke at length in order to “correct errors and misapprehensions in relation to Africa.” He described the landscape of West Africa and its varied and often beautiful scenery. He told of the many different peoples and traditions there and of how they were far from the stereotype of “an African.” He spoke of the need for the Christian gospel among the different peoples and nations and described fetishes and the fears that he believed lurked beneath them.25
But most of all he tried to respond to the question he had been asked over and over
again during his time in the United States, the question “about the capabilities of the African race for intellectual improvement.” He acknowledged what almost all whites firmly believed as they looked at white power spreading around the world—that there was little chance that an African or Chinese or Indian could be “made what the white race is” intellectually. But he insisted that Africans had remarkable intellectual capabilities that would astonish most whites. And he told stories of what students had accomplished—students whose “intellectual capabilities were most marvelous”—and once again told stories about the brilliance of the Grebo William Davis and his daughter, Mary Clealand. In contrast to the images that were to gather quickly around the njina bones that he had turned over to the Society of Natural History in Boston, he painted images of Africans as individuals with histories who were part of gripping stories, who had minds and a human spirituality to be deeply admired.26
But in all of this, Leighton never mentioned Toko—Toko who had sailed the handsome Waterwitch, who had amazed Leighton with his ability to conduct extensive and complex trading, and whose humor and storytelling had been a gift and a guide for Leighton. For Toko had not been converted to Christianity and did not fit the mission narrative that Leighton wanted to convey.
Chapter Nineteen
“He Worships with Sincere Devotion the Customs of His Ancestors”
While Leighton and Jane were in the United States, Toko continued his resistance to the French. He faced, however, daunting challenges. He knew the French possessed overwhelming economic and military power, and that they were using it in systematic ways to extend their domination over the estuary. At the same time, as he looked around at the towns and villages of the estuary, he could see, to his distress, that his people were losing much of their vitality. Most obvious was a rapid decline in the Mpongwe population. When Leighton had first arrived at Baraka in 1842, Toko and other Mpongwe had told him that the Mpongwe had once been much more numerous and that their numbers had been steadily falling during the past half-century. No one, Leighton noted, seemed to be certain about the causes of the decline. But by 1848 it was clear that the rate of decline was increasing rapidly. It was also clear that the rapid decline was directly related to the arrival of more and more ships from Europe and the United States. The ships brought with them goods to trade, especially rum, and also pathogens that devastated the population in periodic epidemics—in particular, smallpox and measles. And the ships also brought sailors, sailors who spent time ashore with Mpongwe prostitutes, whose husbands encouraged them to earn a little money. So syphilis and gonorrhea, together with a growing alcoholism, had spread widely among the Mpongwe, and Mpongwe birthrates had fallen below what was needed to maintain their numbers.1
By the Rivers of Water Page 39
