By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  Dr. James Hall, who by odd circumstances happened to arrive at the Cape at the time of the treaty, walked through the ruins of Big Town. The founder and first governor of Maryland in Liberia looked around and saw the blackened ruins of what he remembered as old King Freeman’s Town. The town, he lamented, had once had been thickly covered with circular thatched houses, running up to a point like haystacks, containing some 1,000 or 1,200 men, women, and children. Here, in 1834, with Leighton watching, he had negotiated with Freeman over the sale of land to the Maryland Colonization Society. Now, he wrote, not a vestige of Big Town remained except for a few blackened coconut trees, the circular hearths and hard-beaten earthen floors of Grebo houses, and masses of broken crockery, items which once had constituted their principal wealth. Hall believed that “those who first gave us a right to set foot in the land” had been “divested of their natural right guaranteed to them again by solemn treaty.” They had been “driven from their homes and the homes of their fathers by an unjust war.”27.

  Among those who had participated in the war was Paul Sansay. He had survived the conflict, but two years later, James wrote Leighton, the carpenter had died. He had once made, under the harsh demands of slavery, an agonizing decision for freedom. He had hoped that he would be able to find a way to bring his wife and children to Cape Palmas, but the cost of their purchase and transport had been too much for him, and he had lived out his days on the African coast as a free but single man. With his death, the record of those who had once lived in the slave settlement on Hutchinson Island, by the flowing waters of the Savannah, came to an end.28

  Big Town’s destruction must have evoked many memories for Leighton and Jane. It no doubt appeared a confirmation of their worst fears—that colonization was an act of imperialism, and that the colonists at Cape Palmas were intent on subjugating the Grebo and taking their land.

  REPORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE also arrived regularly in New York telling of developments at Baraka and outlying schools and stations. William Walker wrote his old colleague faithfully, and letters and annual reports from the mission were printed in Boston’s Missionary Herald, where Leighton and Jane could read the latest news of friends and places they remembered with such affection.29 Moreover, Leighton had official responsibilities that kept him in touch with Rufus Anderson in Boston, as the Presbyterian Board in New York and the American Board in Boston had occasions to cooperate in their mission efforts. But the most regular letters and reports came from the Presbyterian missionaries on the island of Corisco, which lay off the coast a short distance from the estuary. Because of their proximity and shared commitments, the missionaries on the island and those at Baraka were in regular touch with one another and frequently visited each other. To Leighton’s and Jane’s surprise, one letter from Corisco arrived accompanied by a little girl—seven-year-old Cornelia DeHeer. Cornelia had been born in Ohio and had gone with her missionary parents to Corisco. When her mother had died of a malignant fever, her grieving father had sent her to New York, asking Leighton and Jane to take her into their home as their own daughter. This they gladly did, for she came as a happy gift to their hearts and lives. They quickly loved her as their own child, and she, in turn, grew to love them as her adopted parents.30

  Some of the news that arrived from Baraka was encouraging, but much of it was not. The hard work of translation was proceeding, the press was turning out a steady stream of books and pamphlets, and the schools were often full of promising students. But death continued its steady assault on the mission. New missionaries arrived, and many soon died. Most discouraging was the death of Dr. C. A. Ford. The missionaries had hoped that as a well-educated and accomplished physician, he would stand between them and the raging fevers, debilitating parasites, and all the many other ailments that hardened their livers and threatened their lives. And they hoped as well that his medical work among the Mpongwe would help break up their superstitions, since many of their beliefs were intimately related to their diseases. The doctor had cured some and eased the pain of others, but he had been no match for death, and after several years, he, too, had succumbed to a tropical fever. Still, the work went ahead, and from time to time the missionaries saw encouraging signs that their work was not in vain. They hoped that “perhaps the seeds sown in tears during these years past are about to spring up and bear fruit to the glory of God.”31

  DURING THESE YEARS, the French continued to consolidate their power around the estuary. The little town of Libreville was growing up around the Catholic mission and around the military post, which had now been moved to higher ground on what was called “The Plateau.” French and other European traders were aggressively replacing the Mpongwe as the middlemen who bought lumber and ivory and other goods from the interior to sell to traders who came on ships now crowding into the estuary. Even more alarming for the Mpongwe was their own rapidly declining numbers. When Leighton had first arrived in 1842, he had estimated that 6,000 Mpongwe, plus another 6,000 of their slaves, lived around the estuary. By the closing years of the 1850s, the number of Mpongwe had dropped to only 3,000. Introduced diseases—especially smallpox, measles, and syphilis—had done their work, as had New England rum. Birthrates had plummeted, and pregnancy had come to be viewed by many as an economic drag on the earning capacity of young women—especially in their relationship with visiting seamen—and therefore something to be avoided. For all of these reasons, the Mpongwe found themselves in an ever-deepening crisis as the demographic foundations and economic base of their society steadily eroded.32

  Toko, who worshiped “with sincere devotion the customs of his ancestors,” felt deep in his old bones this shaking of foundations. He had been the premier trader in the estuary, the most respected man among the Mpongwe, because of his honesty, his business acumen, his irrepressible good humor, and his knowledge of the stories and ancient ways of his people. But by the late 1850s, he saw his trade being taken over by Europeans. He could see the crumbling and abandoned places and the decline of his people all too clearly. He wondered about the cause of such ruin, and as a Mpongwe, he thought it must be the result of some malevolent intent and act of sorcery. Toko exacted his revenge. One day, a slave of his was discovered who had made a fetish to keep trade away. Toko had the man bound, taken out into the estuary, and dropped overboard, to drown struggling against the waters.33

  A few months earlier, Toko’s son Ntâkâ Truman—who had been a student at Baraka—showed that he had not abandoned the ways of his ancestors in spite of his having listened for years to the lessons and sermons of Jane and Leighton and Walker and the other missionaries. When Truman’s young wife died, he—like his father—looked around in Mpongwe fashion for some sorcery that must have caused her death. One of his slaves, Awĕmĕ, was caught and accused of bewitching her. William Walker knew Awĕmĕ—he called him “a poor, sickly, stupid fellow”—and did not believe Truman when he said that the slave had confessed. Walker questioned Awĕmĕ, and he could get no such confession out of him. Then Truman had Awĕmĕ tortured to make him confess to a fetish or some poison, but the frightened slave endured, and his torturers said his endurance was sure proof of his guilt. Walker confronted Truman and, using both Mpongwe traditions and Christian belief, angrily warned him against killing Awĕmĕ. He told Truman that if he killed the man, the slave’s image would hound him in dreams and in waking visions of the night, and Truman would meet Awĕmĕ and Walker at the judgment seat of God. Truman winced and writhed, and the women who sat by howled with rage, but Walker’s threats did no good, wrote Walker, and so they murdered him.34

  So the customs of the ancestors persevered and showed their strength as Toko’s slave struggled against the waters of the estuary and as the blood of Truman’s slave laved the ground near Baraka. But neither the water nor the blood arrested the decline of the Mpongwe or the steady erosion of a Mpongwe world that had once been praised for its sophistication and hospitality.

  TOKO DIED ON December 3, 1858. He had long suffered with asthma and ha
d finally given up struggling for breath. He had first welcomed Leighton to the estuary, and he had been the great friend of the missionaries at Baraka even as he maintained the remembered ways of his people. The French, in honor of the old man who had so long opposed them, fired several cannons—one blew up as if in protest, killing one man and seriously injuring another.

  Two days later, about daylight, Walker conducted a private service as Toko was buried in the little cemetery at Baraka among the missionary graves. The English sea captain Samuel Dyer had a tombstone erected for his old friend, and in the surrounding towns and villages the women wailed the ancient Mpongwe laments.35

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A Patriot’s Choice

  For years Leighton and Jane had wondered about and worried about the growing tensions between the North and the South, and they had experienced in their own lives the charges and countercharges that swirled around American slavery. During their engagement in 1832 they had written one another about the Nullification Controversy and what dangers it might hold for the future of the Union. When they had joined with abolitionists in opposing the colonization movement during their years at Cape Palmas, they had been called racists by settlers and colonization officials. And when they were in the midst of trying to free their slaves in the 1830s and 1840s, Leighton had been attacked by abolitionists as a “vile slave-holder” and “man-stealer.” Then, once Leighton and Jane had freed their slaves, Leighton’s family and friends had questioned his loyalty to the South. They wondered if he had become “a rampant abolitionist.” Following the Mexican-American War, Leighton and Jane had been alarmed by reports they received in Baraka about the bitter debates over slavery and its expansion. And when they learned of the Compromise of 1850, they had felt greatly relieved “for the safety of the Union of the states.” At least all of this was how they remembered and thought of their experiences of the great questions that were threatening to shake the foundations of the nation’s life.1

  During the 1850s, Leighton and Jane had ample opportunity to see the growing differences between the North and the South. As they went about their daily lives in New York, they could see a steady stream of new immigrants arriving from distant ports. These new arrivals brought with them old ways, new hopes, and no memories of an earlier America. In his travels around the country, Leighton saw the rapid swelling of cities in the North and the constant push of the frontier in the West. In soot-covered Pittsburgh, he saw the glow of iron furnaces and heard the noise of new factories. In far-off St. Louis—already in the 1850s larger than Charleston and Savannah combined—he saw the mixing of peoples from many places and the strength and restless energy of a river city on the edge of opportunity. And everywhere people seemed to be moving, creating, destroying, apparently cut loose from their pasts, yet trying to carry remembered ways into new places and new landscapes.2

  If Leighton saw new immigrants and booming cities and industries in the North, when he traveled to the old southwestern and southern frontiers—places such as Mississippi and Texas—he encountered the explosive energy of slavery. The contrast between North and South seemed stark. Young black men and women in massive numbers were being marched over land or packed onto trains to labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, or carried by steamers down the Mississippi from the Upper South to New Orleans’s booming slave market, or to new cotton fields in Texas. In the years since Leighton had been a boy by the Black River and Boggy Gully, more than a million slaves had experienced a Second Middle Passage from the seaboard South to the southern interior as the Cotton Kingdom spread and sent down deep roots. By the time Leighton began his travels around the country in the 1850s, this Second Middle Passage already far exceeded in numbers the total number of Africans brought in the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. Yet Leighton, who had been so horrified by the international slave trade, and who had worked so hard against it, did not see or recognize this massive deportation of slaves, this forced uprooting of African Americans, this astonishing expansion of slavery across the South, as an intolerable scandal that cried out for him to join with those who were condemning it and who were fighting its power and arrogance. Or, if he saw and recognized the scandal, and if he heard the call to protest, he turned his eyes away and rejected the call.3

  Yet, at the very time Leighton was ignoring this Second Middle Passage, he reacted with alarm and forthrightness to calls by some white Southerners to reopen the international slave trade. White radicals in the South were rejecting, with angry defiance, any claim that slavery was an evil and that it must be abolished. Rather than give an inch to any hint of antislavery sentiment, they had been marshaling for years every argument they could discover or concoct—including a rising scientific racism—to justify slavery. Slavery was, after all, an ancient institution known in all societies and supported by all religions. And an advancing scientific knowledge, they said, demonstrated that Africans unmistakably constituted an inferior race with smaller brains. Slavery was, they consequently announced, a positive good, the best possible way to manage a labor force and utilize the untamed energy of Africans and their uncivilized descendants.4

  Now, in the 1850s, these proslavery radicals were snarling with increased intensity as they insisted that no moral sentimentality or Northern hypocrisy should be allowed to block slavery’s expansion. And in this context they made their most arrogant claim—they stood against the tide of the nineteenth century, commanded it to roll back, and demanded the reopening of the international slave trade. They dreamed of slave ships once again sailing boldly and legally into Charleston harbor and up the flowing waters of the Savannah and into the port at New Orleans. Leighton knew these dreamers and the noxious night air from which their dreams emerged only too well. As a young man, he had written Jane about “my native Carolina” and the radical spirit that lurked beneath polished manners, an ostensible piety, and profound isolationism. Moderates in the state had been trying for years to temper the radicals, and Leighton had tried to do his part even from a distance. He had written letters to the Charleston Observer about African students who would astonish whites with their quick mastery of languages and Western learning. And he had written about the brilliant William Davis and his daughter, Mary Clealand, and about Wasa, and about the beauty and flexibility of the Mpongwe language, and about Toko and his ability to master complex trading responsibilities, and Toko’s marvelous Waterwitch. But although moderates seemed to be keeping the peace, the radicals in the state, and their fellow “fire-eaters” in other Southern states, had kept up their agitation, waiting for their moment. The call to reopen the international slave trade was a shameless expression of their contempt for any antislavery sentiment and a part of their strategy to divide the nation and create a slaveholding confederacy. Among other things, the fire-eaters hoped that a reopened international slave trade would incense the North, and that Northern outrage would cause white Southerners to unite and move toward secession.5

  In 1858, the South Carolina legislature received a report, initiated by the governor, advocating a proposal that the state, on its own, reopen the international slave trade. Leighton was horrified. He wrote a long and scathing article for the Southern Presbyterian Review that was republished and distributed as a pamphlet in the summer of 1859—“The Foreign Slave Trade: Can It Be Revived Without Violating the Most Sacred Principles of Honor, Humanity, and Religion?” He did not need, he wrote, to address the impact such a trade would have upon the South. His friend John Adger had already shown the “extreme folly and danger of such a measure.” Leighton’s intention was to show that the “South cannot countenance the revival of this traffic without dishonoring herself, and inflicting renewed and incalculable misery and wretchedness upon the inhabitants of Africa.” Such a trade, he insisted, never had been, and could not be, carried on except by fraud, by violence, and by perpetual warfare and bloodshed. And so, once again, he rehearsed the history and bloody consequences of the trade, citing European travelers who had recoun
ted the horrors of African wars for slaves and the rapacious appetite of whites for slaves and for the wealth that slaves brought. In addition to pointing to the cruelties involved in capturing slaves, Leighton described the cruelties of the journey from the African interior to the coast, the cruelties of detention on the coast, and the cruelties of the Middle Passage, which, Leighton wrote, “is but another term for the grossest cruelties ever practiced upon any portion of the human race.” Leighton insisted that the number of Africans who would die in slave wars, detentions, and Middle Passages would far exceed the number who would survive to labor in the cotton and sugar fields of the South. “Is the South,” he asked, “prepared for this? Will she forego her honor, her sense of justice, and her religion, so far as to associate herself with the vilest men that have ever disgraced the annals of humanity, and once more apply the torch of discord and war for the purpose of obtaining slaves?” It seemed inconceivable to him that the South he knew could be so blind as to accept such a course, or that South Carolinians could be so full of insane arrogance, so devoid of Christian compassion, and so confined to their own little world that its leaders would propose such a course.6