By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  But Leighton had not only been listening, he had also been talking to family and friends and to any who would listen to him. Writing from Roswell, he told Rufus Anderson about the conversations he was having with white Southerners. He had been endeavoring with some success, he told the Bostonian, “to show that the African race are capable, when placed in suitable circumstances, of a high grade Christian civilization and that a higher destiny awaits them than slavery or heathenism.” He had, he said, discussed the whole subject of slavery with every man of intelligence and influence whom he had met in South Carolina and Georgia. As far as he knew, he wrote, the conversations had not caused the slightest ill feelings. He had tried to make four points. First, that slavery could not be permanent in the United States. Second, Southerners had the duty of facing the subject realistically and addressing it before it became unmanageable. Third, Christians had the duty to impart religious knowledge among slaves in preparation for their emancipation. And fourth, the consequences of emancipation would not be as disastrous as white Southerners supposed. He found that almost everyone he talked with agreed that slavery could not be permanent in the United States. White Southerners, he thought, were willing to address the question of slavery in a realistic manner “as soon as their excited feelings have been sufficiently calmed”—he had apparently found them greatly agitated by the attacks of abolitionists and by the debates that had resulted in the Compromise of 1850. He also thought, in his own attempt at realism, that the price of cotton needed to fall if white Southerners were to think about ending slavery. He had, after all, seen the enormous growth of wealth among his own family members and friends in South Carolina from the labor of their slaves. In regard to the religious instruction of slaves, he had found—perhaps thinking especially of the work of John Adger and John Girardeau in Charleston—that Southern whites were more engaged in such a “deed of benevolence” than the people of the North knew. But there was resistance on his fourth point about the consequences of emancipation not being disastrous. “They are,” he said, “as yet very skeptical. The idea of emancipation is not half so formidable as the continuance of the blacks among them after they are liberated.”13

  In this way Leighton drew on his years in Africa, on his experience with King Freeman and Russwurm, with Toko and Mary Clealand Dorsey, to raise and press the question of slavery with Southern whites. He was trying to translate his African experiences, his encounters with living, breathing men and women—Grebo and Mandingo, Kru and Fanti, Mpongwe and Fang—into the language and idiom of white Americans, especially white Americans who spoke with the distinct accents of affluent and proud South Carolinians and Georgians. He did so as one who was both an outsider and an insider, one who had seen and known an African world and one who was a Wilson from Pine Grove married to a Bayard from Savannah and Philadelphia.

  IN SPITE OF his returning strength, Leighton’s old ailment still troubled him. He and Jane returned to Washington to spend the winter with the Eckards and for Leighton to see Dr. Hodge in Philadelphia as well as other doctors in New York. They all came to the same conclusion—returning to Gabon would jeopardize his life. Still, Leighton and Jane hoped to return to Baraka. And while they waited, Leighton began to prepare a manuscript on West Africa. He ordered books from New York and Boston, sent to London for missionary reports and travel accounts, and gathered any papers or journals he thought might be helpful. Then he had a serious attack of his liver ailment—worse than any he had had before—and he and Jane became convinced that the doctors were correct and that he should not return to Baraka.14

  In May 1853, shortly after he had recovered enough from this last attack, Leighton went to Philadelphia to attend the Presbyterian General Assembly. He was, to his surprise, nominated for a professorship at Princeton Theological Seminary—a position he quickly turned down, saying he was not qualified. But when he was elected one of the three secretaries of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions located in New York, he accepted. The decision was difficult—he and Jane loved Africa and their work at Baraka, and they longed to return to what they had come to regard as their home. But the serious nature of his illness seemed to stand in the way of their returning, and the election seemed a providential event, an opening door for them to continue their mission work. He wrote to his family in South Carolina: “The appointment was unsought and unexpected, and therefore, I suppose it ought to be considered as providential. I can do more for African missions at this post than at any other in the country.”15

  And so their life as missionaries came to an end. As a young couple they had committed themselves to beginning a new work in Africa. They had ventured out along Atlantic highways as voyagers, not knowing what awaited them, going in faith and hope, and carrying with them the worlds they had known in Savannah and Philadelphia, at Pine Grove and Fair Hope plantation. And they had found at Cape Palmas and Baraka other worlds and they had sought to learn what they could of those worlds—their landscapes and languages, their stories and traditions, their hopes and fears. They sought to learn what they could of these other worlds—and even grew to appreciate much that was in these worlds—because they thought something better awaited Africans. They believed that the Christian gospel was good news for all people, that it brought freedom from fears of malevolent forces and from death itself. They believed deeply that King Freeman and William Davis, Wasa and Mary Clealand, Toko and his children all deserved to hear the Christian gospel and to decide for themselves if it was good news. To tell this good news and to raise up Africans who would spread this good news had been the focus of their lives. In all of this, Leighton and Jane were confident that in the gracious providence of God a great future awaited Africa. So in 1853, as they made this transition in their life from Baraka to New York, they did not think of their life in Africa as simply a great adventure, and certainly not a great misadventure. Rather, they thought that they had been a part of God’s strange but loving intentions for the Grebo and the Mpongwe and for all the sons and daughters of a great continent.

  BY THE END of the summer 1853 the Wilsons were settled in a large and comfortable home in the upper part of Manhattan. Here they immediately began to welcome regular guests—missionaries home on furlough or preparing to leave for some distant port; friends and relatives from the South and from Philadelphia and Princeton; and an occasional convert sent from some distant place to study or learn some trade in the United States. As at Fair Hope and Baraka, the Wilsons were generous in their welcome, and Jane found in overseeing such hospitality a way to make her own contribution to the mission effort. She provided a hospitality, one visitor wrote, that reflected her character—“unaffected, simple, and elegant.”16

  In the mornings, Leighton walked to the mission office in Manhattan. His two colleagues were cousins of Jane’s—Walter Lowrie, former US senator from Pennsylvania, and his son the Reverend John Lowrie. Together the three men divided the work of the board. Each took primary responsibility for a region of the world as they corresponded with an ever growing number of missionaries in India and China, in southern Africa and Siam, in Liberia and the Middle East and a variety of other scattered places. The Protestant mission effort had rapidly expanded during the time that the Wilsons had been in Africa. Missionaries in increasing numbers were traveling to distant lands establishing “foreign missions,” their work supported by missionary agencies in Britain and Germany; in Switzerland, Holland, and Scandinavia; and in the United States and Canada. In the Presbyterian offices in New York, Leighton had primary responsibility for Africa, but he also assumed increasing responsibility for the work among the “Indian Nations” of the southwestern United States.17

  Leighton’s work was demanding and took much discipline. He wrote to encourage and comfort missionaries in distant places. He ordered supplies, made arrangements for them to be shipped, worked on budgets, and kept a careful eye on finances. Every Monday the board met, and Leighton served as the board’s recording secretary while participating in the board’s de
cisions about personnel, relations with other mission agencies, and finances. He edited the foreign department of the board’s magazine, Home and Foreign Record, carefully selecting letters and reports from missionaries in order to create missionary narratives of Protestant Christianity advancing around the world—in 1856, an unprecedented sixty missionaries were sent by the Presbyterian Board alone to various mission fields. And Leighton began to travel widely and to speak at Synod meetings around the country as well as to the General Assembly, going one year to St. Louis and another year to Kentucky and another year to Cincinnati. He made an extensive tour of the Native American Nations of the old Southwest, visiting missions and schools in Oklahoma among the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, peoples forced from their homes by the land-hungry imperialism of American whites.18

  In all of his travels, Leighton saw evidence of a rapidly expanding country. He experienced once more the radical changes taking place in transportation, and he observed the restless energy, the cultural resources, and the technological sophistication that were allowing white Americans to have their brutal way with native peoples and the landscape of America. Yet what he was seeing was not only the expansion of white America, not only the knitting together of a nation with railroad tracks and steamboat paddles and telegraph wires, but also the building forces of division, the growing differences between an expanding, slaveholding South and an expanding, free North.

  IN THE EVENINGS in New York Leighton completed his manuscript on West Africa, which was published by Harper and Brothers in 1856 as Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospect. The book gathered together and greatly expanded what he had already written in letters, reports, and articles in learned journals, and it drew much from notes he had taken over the years as he had sailed along the West African coast, visiting its towns and talking to its people. The purpose of Western Africa was to provide “information about a portion of the world of which very little is truly known,” he wrote, and beneath that purpose was his always pressing desire to break open old stereotypes about Africa and Africans.19

  Leighton discussed the geography of West Africa with great care—its diverse natural scenery, its rivers and lagoons, its seasons, winds, and surfs, and how this varied geography influenced the character of different West African societies. He told of European explorations of the coast, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the misery and oppression that followed Europeans wherever their ships sailed along the coast. He wrote of three principal divisions of West African peoples and culture—Senegambia in the far north, Northern Guinea, and Southern Guinea—and made careful distinctions between the Mandingo and the Wolof, the Kru and Ashanti, the Yoruba and the Mpongwe and the “interior tribes.” He displayed his interest in anthropology and the different cultures of West African peoples, describing in detail diverse family and political structures, marriage customs and domestic habits, and the various African practices of agriculture, architecture, and trade. He wrote of polygamy and how degrading he found it for women, and how deeply entrenched it was in West African societies. He explained how the Ashanti had an absolute despotism built upon the massive ownership of slaves and a formidable army, told of their cruel human sacrifices, and explained why the Kru did not practice slavery and had a more democratic polity. He pointed out that Africans did not all look alike. Some were light and some were dark and some were in between, just as some were tall and slender and others were short and muscular. As could be expected, he paid special attention to language. One chapter compared and contrasted the languages of the Mandingo, the Grebo, and the Mpongwe. When he turned to religion, he once again pointed to differences, but he also pointed to certain continuities, especially the important role of ancestors; the apparent universal belief in the power of fetishes, witches, and sorcerers; and a widespread confidence in the efficacy of the sassy wood trial. But he was cautious, noting, “It is not an easy task to give a full and satisfactory exposition of the religious creed of the pagan tribes of Africa.”20

  Leighton obviously wrote Western Africa as an outsider, a stranger who had lived among some West Africans and visited among many others. As an outsider he was claiming to be an authority on West Africans and their cultures, interpreting them to a Western world. He had, as a stranger, made a massive effort to compose dictionaries and grammars, to codify some of their languages and customs, and to understand the interior life of the Grebo and Mpongwe. He had, as an outsider and stranger, moved from simply observing and trying to understand them and convert them to an identification with them. He had joined the Grebo in their struggles with the colonists at Harper, and he had sided with the Mpongwe in their resistance to the French in Gabon. But he was nevertheless an outsider, and he knew it. He knew he was from Pine Grove and not Big Town or Glass’s Town and that he had come to West Africa as a messenger and an advocate of Christian faith and Western ways. And that knowing finally made him not only confident as a stranger intent on conversion and transformation, but also cautious. So he cautioned when he described some characteristic that it was “said to be” such and such and he warned that the “interior life of the people, their moral, social, civil, and religious condition, as well as their peculiar notions and customs, have always been a sealed book to the rest of the world.”21

  For all of its focus on the history and cultures—and natural history, too—of West Africa, Leighton’s book, like his life, was intended to support and encourage a Christian mission to Africa. He was trying to present Africa and Africans in a new light, as a place and peoples deserving the attention and commitment of American Christians. The last chapter—“The Agency Devolving on White Men in Connection with Missions to Western Africa”—revealed most clearly this intent. While Leighton acknowledged and affirmed that the growth of the church in Africa was necessarily the work of African Christians, he thought that—as in the early days of the church in Europe and America—the church in Africa needed missionaries in its early days. And because he believed that the work of missionaries involved sophisticated engagement with new languages and cultures, he insisted on the need for white Christians, those with all the advantages of a classical education, to be deeply involved in the work. He knew and acknowledged the role of African Americans—remembering, no doubt, B. V. R. James and Josiah Dorsey and others doing their important work—but he thought that, given the place of African Americans in US society, too few of them had been able to secure the education necessary for the demanding work of translating, teaching, and preaching in another language and culture. For this reason, and because whites had a responsibility to Africa for all of the death and destruction they had caused, white Christians, he said, must take up the challenge of presenting the Christian gospel to Africans.22

  Leighton believed, at least he hoped, that Africa had a bright future. He had found, he wrote, that the “African is social, generous, and confiding; and, when brought under the benign influence of Christianity, he exemplifies the beauty and consistency of his religion more than any other human being on the face of the earth.” So when the missionary from Pine Grove looked to the future, he thought that the time might come when Africans “may be held up to all the rest of the world as examples of the purest and most elevated Christian virtues.”23

  LEIGHTON’S NEW YORK office was well situated for him to receive regular reports and correspondence from Liberia and Gabon. Among the missionaries in Liberia, B. V. R. James was Leighton’s most important correspondent. The two old colleagues had confidence in one another and apparently genuine affection. They signed their letters “yours truly and affectionately,” and sent their warmest regards to one another’s families. Margaret came and spent some months with the Wilsons in New York as a way to try and improve her health, and Catherine later came and stayed with Leighton and Jane because her health was greatly impaired. And when her health was better, they saw her off to Monrovia, to her home with her mother and stepfather, and to her work as a faithful missionary teacher.24

  Although
Leighton believed that whites were needed to give organizational direction to the Liberian mission, and that African Americans faced the difficulty of proving they could manage a school efficiently, he made James the real head of the mission in Liberia, giving him—and not recently arrived white missionaries—responsibility for the finances of the mission and for the oversight of much of the mission’s work. And James, in turn, supported Leighton when Leighton insisted there was a need for white missionaries to go to Liberia, and not simply black missionaries. When some African Americans attacked Leighton for this, James had written: “Well, all I have to say is, let all the good, faithful, and deeply pious white missionaries come to Liberia that can be induced to come, and means can be raised to support them; here is work enough for them and the colored missionaries too.”25

  IN 1857, WORD arrived that a long-expected war had finally erupted between the Grebo at Big Town and the settlers at Harper. The governor—Boston Jenkins Drayton—was, like Charles Snetter, a free man from Charleston who had had powerful friends among influential Charleston whites. Sent as a missionary to Cape Palmas by Southern Baptists, Drayton was imprudent and implacable in his hatred of the Grebo and stood in marked contrast to the cautious and conciliatory Russwurm. He ordered a surprise bombardment of Big Town that left the town in ashes and its inhabitants scattered and impoverished. Altogether, eight Grebo towns were burned. But the Grebo rallied, burned a number of settler homes, destroyed the Episcopal mission outside of Harper, and threatened, at one point, to destroy Harper and kill or drive off the American settlers. Only the intervention of the authorities and troops from Monrovia brought the war to a conclusion. The Liberian government and the Grebo signed a treaty acknowledging that Big Town was no more—the long-held dream of the settlers to take over the town was finally accomplished. One of the three Grebo leaders who signed the bitter treaty was Simleh Ballah, who had been Leighton’s teacher, who had sat with King Freeman and William Davis on the piazza at Fair Hope, and who had once visited Baltimore and had stayed in the hospitable home of Benjamin Latrobe.26