ONE OF THE BENEFITS of their newly established authority over the Mpongwe, according to French claims, was the end of the slave trade in the estuary. With their warships in the estuary, the French announced that no slaver would dare to sail around Cape Clara and risk the confiscation of his ship.32
The missionaries at Baraka thought such claims not only an illusion but also a deliberate deceit. They saw the coming and going of slave ships to towns around the estuary while the French pretended that the ships were nowhere to be seen. And the Mpongwe were as eager as ever to engage in the trade. Everywhere the missionaries went they saw slaves being bought and sold, often within sight of the French. Two slave factories at King William’s Town—directly across the estuary from the French fort—sent fifteen or twenty slaves on their way to Brazil every week. Moreover, Spanish slave ships regularly visited towns on the north shore that were right under the nose of the French. To their continuing dismay, the missionaries knew that many of the slave ships had been built for their brutal business by Americans in New York, Salem, and Baltimore. Walker thought “the accursed traffic treads out every avenue of this country for the bones and sinews of men.” When he saw Mpongwe buying slaves in Shékiani and Bakèlè towns, they seemed to him “more like vipers than like men.” And when he watched a Mpongwe man leave a son as security for some ivory and take a slave to King William’s Town to be sold, he felt overwhelmed by the human capacity for evil. “There is,” he wrote in his diary, “more degradation in this world than my philosophy ever dreamed of.”33
While they watched the continuing operations of slave traders in the estuary, the missionaries at Baraka became alarmed when they learned in 1851 that the British were considering ending their efforts against the international slave trade. The expense of keeping a British squadron patrolling the coast of West Africa was, some were saying, too much. Besides, it was being claimed that the squadron was not particularly successful and that the good done by the fleet was the concern of only a few. Parliament had already taken the first legislative steps to have the squadron withdraw from the coast of Africa. Leighton immediately wrote an article emphasizing what had been accomplished during the previous twenty years. He sent the article to England, where it was published, and a copy was given to the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerstone, who had it widely distributed. Drawing on his years of experience as a missionary and traveler, Leighton asked the British public to look carefully at the situation; the Royal Navy, he insisted, had ended the slave trade along large swaths of the West African coast. Leighton urged the British to continue their efforts on behalf of Africa and all humanity. He later received copies of his pamphlet, which were sent “in the name of Lord Palmerstone,” and then welcomed word that Parliament had voted to continue the operations of the squadron. Leighton wrote to the Missionary Herald in Boston and declared that American Christians ought to be thankful for what the British had accomplished with their African squadron. Their efforts, he predicted, would come to be regarded “as one of the most noble achievements of the nineteenth century.”34
EVEN AS THE missionaries went about their varied work, illness and death continued to undermine the strength of the mission. Mrs. Bushnell died of a liver ailment in January 1850. Then the Prestons were struck with liver problems; William Walker became largely debilitated by fevers; and Jane Cooper had a recurrence of her hysteria. The four of them sailed for New York in June 1850, hoping to recover their health. Walker hoped as well to overcome his depression and move beyond his grief for Zeniah. Leighton and Jane, together with a distraught Albert Bushnell, remained at Baraka with the newly arrived missionary Jacob Best. Then, in October 1850, the prayers of the mission seemed answered with the arrival of Dr. C. A. Ford, a man whom Leighton called a “real physician.” But even a real physician was no match for the African fevers and other tropical diseases that stalked the mission compounds. Shortly after Dr. Ford began his practice, another young couple arrived—Roland and Nancy Porter. She was pregnant, and within a year—in spite of Dr. Ford’s efforts—mother, father, and infant daughter were dead.35
William Walker and Ira and Jane Preston returned to Baraka in January 1852—Jane Cooper had remained in the United States and was living with the Eckards in Washington. With Walker was his third wife—Kate Hardcastle Walker of New York. She had accepted his proposal for marriage even though she knew the dangers that awaited her in Africa. Leighton and Jane received her warmly, as they had received Prudence at Fair Hope and Zeniah at Baraka.36
But after the welcome had been extended and the newly arrived missionaries had gotten comfortably settled at the mission station, Leighton and Jane told them of their own decision to return to the United States. Leighton’s health had been undermined first by measles, then by influenza, and now by a serious liver ailment that appeared to be the result of accumulating illnesses. Jane had had difficulty recovering from an attack of fever, and she was struggling to regain her strength. Dr. Ford insisted they must return to the United States, warning that their lives were at risk. So Leighton and Jane quickly packed what they needed to take with them—they expected to return in a year—and sailed for New York on March 1, 1852.37
PART IV
Homeward Journey
Chapter Twenty
An Unsought and Unexpected Appointment
Leighton and Jane had a painfully slow voyage along the West African coast, stopping regularly at various ports for the captain to dash and barter, buy and sell with African tradesmen and merchants. Still, however tedious the voyage, the stops were opportunities for them to visit new places and to revisit places they had known on earlier trips. Everywhere they went, Leighton made notes about the slave trade, about the influence of the British squadron, and about the various peoples, cultures, and environments of the coast.1
At Cape Palmas they rode once again the high and crashing swells of the surf to visit Harper and Big Town. Landing at the beach, they went ashore. Here, so many years before, they had been greeted by King Freeman and a great crowd of shouting, dancing Grebo. Now, the beach was “McGill’s Landing,” named after Governor Russwurm’s father-in-law, the merchant George McGill. No crowd welcomed them. They climbed the hill to the place where Fair Hope had once been their home. Looking around, the couple saw thick-walled and sturdy warehouses and a blacksmith shop owned by Anthony Wood—he and Leighton had once trekked together far into the interior through verdant fields of rice. The now veteran missionaries walked through the cemetery of deep memories to the place where their cottage had stood. For seven years they had worked and dreamed and prayed at this place. On the cottage’s piazza, Freeman and Simleh Ballah and William Davis had joined them in the late afternoons to sit and talk as the surf pounded and as the evening lights of Harper and Big Town flickered and then glowed in an African night falling quickly across the landscape. Now, as they stood at this place of memories, Leighton and Jane could see not only Harper and Big Town but also the island of the dead, recently renamed Russwurm Island. Within a few months, Freeman, as Pah Nemah, king of the Grebo at Big Town, would be carried to the island and placed beneath a canoe tipped on its side. There under an African sky he would become a part of a landscape that had been his home. And in Big Town, the people would pour out their ancient laments for one who had led them safely through a dangerous time of great transition.2
Russwurm had died in 1851 after a protracted illness. His had been a remarkable life of brilliant accomplishments amid disappointments and deep contradictions. Having found America a choking, oppressive place, he had sought freedom and dignity in a struggling colony on the African coast among settlers who identified themselves as Americans and representatives of American culture. Often disdainful of the settlers, Russwurm had nonetheless poured out his life for them and their cause. The leader of a colonial enterprise, he had been a friend of the Grebo, and with Freeman he had managed to keep the peace between Harper and Big Town. The settlers had been eager for him to be replaced as governor, but when he died, they kne
w that a difficult future awaited them without his leadership.3
So Jane and Leighton found Cape Palmas a changed place. And because it was changed and because they were changed by their years at Baraka, leaving the Cape was not difficult or painful. They were to continue to remember their time there, and they were to continue to pray for the Grebo and the Episcopal mission among them. But Fair Hope and Big Town and Harper and even Bayard Island were now a part of a memory receding into the chambers of their hearts and into scenes of their imaginations.
IN MONROVIA LEIGHTON and Jane stayed in the comfortable home of the James family. B. V. R. James had become an ardent patriot of Liberia and had put his earlier reservations about colonization behind him. In 1847, Liberia had become an independent nation. Its independence had been prompted in part by the old question that had so troubled Russwurm and Leighton—Did a colony have the authority as a state to enforce its laws, or was it just the project of one benevolent or philanthropic society in the United States? In 1845, the governor in Monrovia had ordered the seizure of a British vessel for refusing to pay port fees. In response, the British had sent a gunboat to retaliate by taking a large vessel owned by a prominent resident of Monrovia. And the British government had informed the US government that it “could not accept the slightest assumption of any sovereign powers being present in a commercial experiment of a Philanthropic society.” The settlers’ desire for independence consequently grew more intense, and with the strong encouragement of the American Colonization Society, independence had been declared in 1847. James had grown to love this independent Liberia, and he was deeply committed to its prosperity and progress.4
When Leighton and Jane visited with the James family in 1852, they learned that their old colleague and friend had recently participated in a military campaign against a powerful African king. Tensions, always simmering between colonists and the surrounding Africans, had exploded in an open war. In a long letter to a friend in the United States, James had joyfully compared the resulting settler victory to the biblical story of the Israelites entering the Promised Land and defeating the Canaanites. A few months earlier, in December 1851, William Walker had learned, while visiting Monrovia, how the African American settlers, in retaliation for a brutal attack, had killed a number of Africans and had nailed their heads and hands on settler houses.5
LEIGHTON AND JANE arrived in New York in early summer 1852. They went immediately to Washington for a happy reunion with Margaret and James Eckard. From there they went to Philadelphia to visit Jane’s cousins Theodosia Bayard and Elizabeth Bayard Henry, and for Leighton to see Jane’s cousin Dr. Hugh Hodge. Hodge advised them not to go south during the summer months, but for Leighton to have a time of quiet recovery in the New England mountains. So Leighton and Jane, together with Theodosia and the Eckards, found accommodations with a farming family in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.6
By the end of August, Leighton was feeling stronger. They went to Washington, and while they were staying with the Eckards, Leighton began making speaking trips and buying supplies in New York for the mission, including an iron fence for the cemetery at Baraka. In October they finally headed south to Pine Grove. Sisters and brothers and cousins and friends welcomed them home and drove buggies down sandy roads to hear their stories about life in a distant and exotic place. But William Wilson had died in 1850, and the death of the old patriarch and the absence of his voice made Pine Grove more than ever a place of memories, and in that absence Leighton and Jane put their heads down at night on the rope-strung bed where Leighton had once dreamed as a child.7
They left for Charleston in November and stayed in the handsome Adger mansion on Spring Street. Leighton’s old college friend John Adger had returned from his missionary labors in Armenia, where he had worked to translate the Bible into modern Armenian. In Charleston, Adger had started a new work among the city’s slaves—in the face of much white opposition. But under Adger’s leadership, and with the financial support of his father, the largest church building in the city would soon be erected for the use of slaves, who had already named the new church “Zion.” John Adger and his young colleague John Lafayette Girardeau had worked out a plan whereby only a few white families would belong to Zion, and while they would provide the church officers, in good paternalistic fashion, they and not the slaves would have to sit in the balcony of the church, and they would listen to sermons that addressed black slaves and not white owners. Already, large numbers of blacks—slave and free—were finding in the deeply oppressive atmosphere of Charleston a little free space to breathe at Zion. They had begun joining the church in large numbers, turning Zion into one of the centers of African American life in Charleston.8
Leighton and Jane also visited with John’s sister, Margaret Adger, to whom Leighton had once proposed. Margaret’s husband, Thomas Smyth, was the scholarly pastor of the city’s Second Presbyterian Church, and he was rapidly building in his mansion on Meeting Street what would become the largest private library in the South and one of the largest in the nation. He had recently completed a major book defending the unity of the human races in which he had attacked a rising scientific racism. The focus of Smyth’s attack was Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who had described what he insisted were the differences between the African and Caucasian brains: “A peculiar conformation,” Agassiz had written, “characterizes the brain of the adult negro. Its development never gets beyond that observable in the Caucasian in boyhood. And besides other singularities, it bears a striking resemblance, in several particulars, to the brain of an ourang-outang.” Leighton’s old njina had become a key player in the attempt of white scientists to prove a dual origin for and fundamental physical differences between “Negroes and Caucasians.” In response, Smyth had called on the testimony of the Bible to defend the fundamental and essential unity of the races. But he had also challenged Agassiz and other scientists by emphasizing the history and culture of African civilizations. In three chapters on the “Former Civilizations of Black Races of Men,” he had presented a wide range of historical and anthropological evidence showing that “dark or black races, with more or less of the negro physiognomy, were in the earliest period of their known history cultivated and intelligent, having kingdoms, arts, and manufacturers.” There was no indication, he had insisted, that the enslavement of Africans was other than of modern origin. “The degradation of this race of men therefore, must be regarded as the result of external causes, and not of natural, inherent and original incapacity.” Smyth’s cause was one Leighton had long championed and would soon take up once again.9
After their visit in Charleston, Leighton and Jane sailed for Savannah. There Leighton preached at the Independent Presbyterian Church and addressed large and apparently interested audiences on the subject of African missions. The Wilsons no doubt had occasion to look across the flowing river to Hutchinson Island, where Paul Sansay and the other Bayard slaves had once lived. In less than two years, a great hurricane would come roaring up from the Caribbean and send a twelve-foot tidal surge across the island, killing almost a hundred men, women, and children who lived in its old settlements.10
From Savannah they went to visit Nicholas Bayard and his family in the little village of Roswell, not far from Atlanta. There amid humming new textile mills and handsome Greek Revival homes—built from the proceeds of Lowcountry plantations—they talked with family and many friends. The missionaries told about Toko and their dear Mary Clealand Dorsey, who was now teaching Mpongwe students, and about life at Baraka and the sorrows that surrounded its cemetery. And no doubt they told Nicholas what they knew of Paul Sansay and the other former slaves whom he had once sent to General’s Island by the waters of the Altamaha. Perhaps Nicholas remembered the day those who were called Bayard slaves had gone on board the Opelousas, and how they had stood on deck as they had sailed slowly away from Savannah on their way to Baltimore and Cape Palmas and freedom.
In Roswell, Leighton and Jane had time to reflect on what they
were seeing and learning from their travels. All around were signs of the great transformations sweeping across their homeland—especially the trains that were already reaching out in every direction and that had made their trip from Savannah to Roswell so quick and comfortable. The missionaries home from Baraka were experiencing the results of a transportation revolution and of new ways of investing capital. As they rode in cars behind powerful new engines, they were participating in a new mobility for people and cotton and cattle, for lumber and corn, and for all the products of human ingenuity. With other riders, they felt a powerful rumbling beneath them and looked out on a world rushing by train windows. Such an experience invited new ways of seeing the world and new ways of thinking about the future as the sound of the train whistle cried out across the land.11
But Leighton and Jane heard another kind of rumbling in their conversations with family and friends. Political positions about slavery were becoming more inflexible as massive numbers of slaves continued to be carried to an expanding southern frontier. The vast new territories of the far west, taken by military power from Mexico in 1848, had created a crisis. Were the recently conquered territories to be open to slavery, or were they to be free from slavery and open for white pioneers of modest means? The Compromise of 1850 had finally seemed to settle the question, promising stability for the nation. California had been allowed to enter the Union as a free state. In other territories, the slavery question was to be decided by popular sovereignty. The slave trade was abolished in Washington, DC. And a harsh new fugitive slave law was established. While Leighton and Jane were in Roswell, the presidential election of 1852 appeared to confirm the Compromise and to indicate the desire of the nation for peace and stability. Franklin Pierce, a strong supporter of the Compromise, was elected president by an overwhelming majority in the electoral college. “We trust,” Leighton had written his sister Sarah, “that God has some higher destiny for our Country” than a division of the nation.12
By the Rivers of Water Page 42
