By the Rivers of Water
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17. For the destitute conditions of the churches, see Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. 2, 1861–1890 (Richmond, VA, 1973), 89–92. For the establishment of a sustentation fund, see “Memorial to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, on the Work of Domestic Missions and Sustentation,” Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States (MGAPCUS), 1866, 49–51. After the war, the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America adopted the name “Presbyterian Church in the United States.” The church was generally referred to as the “Southern Presbyterian Church.” The “Northern Presbyterian Church” was the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.
18. Quotation: MGAPCUS, 1865, 369–370.
19. For black membership at Mt. Zion and Salem Black River, see MGAPCUS, 1867, 227. For blacks leaving their white-dominated churches, see Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 2:307–331; Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1995), 229–242.
20. Inez Moore Parker, The Rise and Decline for the Program of Education for Black Presbyterians of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A., 1865–1970 (San Antonio, TX, 1977), 139–186.
21. The correspondence between Logan and JLW can be found in “Fourth Annual Report: The General Assembly’s Committee on Freedmen, of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America,” PHS, 22–51.
22. Quotations: ibid., 29–31.
23. Quotations: ibid., 41, 48, 49.
24. For the work of Girardeau at Zion before the Civil War, see Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 189–199.
25. Quotations: John L. Girardeau, Confederate Memorial Day at Charleston, S.C.: Re-interment of the Carolina Dead from Gettysburg (Charleston, SC, 1871).
26. For an ideology and its language as a guardian of identity, see Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), esp. 218–219; Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York, 1986), 258–261.
27. For the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups, see Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 265–313.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Distant Voices
1. Quotation: Matthew 28:19. Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. 2, 1861–1890 (Richmond, VA, 1973), 306.
2. For the expansion of Southern Presbyterian missions, see Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 2:294–307.
3. Quotation: JLW to JBW, 18 July 1842, CTS. For JLW’s awareness of the massive number of slaves carried to Brazil, see J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 430–451. For the number of slaves carried to the North American mainland between 1619 and 1860, see David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT, 2010), 205. For the number carried to Brazil between 1791 and 1856, see ibid., 261. See also ibid., 4–5, 17, 261–269. For slavery in Brazil, see Katia M. De Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Brunswick, NJ, 1989), esp. 125–128. For the final abolition of slavery in Brazil, see Seymour Drescher, “Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective,” in Rebecca J. Scott et al., The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (Durham, NC, 1988), 23–54.
4. Quotation: J. J. Bullock to Hamden DuBose, letter reprinted in Hampden C. DuBose, Memoirs of Rev. John Leighton Wilson, D.D., Missionary to Africa and Secretary of Foreign Missions (Richmond, VA, 1895), 247–248.
5. Quotation: J. Leighton Wilson, “Notes of Travel: Trip to Brazil,” CTS. The notes begin on 23 November 1874 and have no page numbers. The dates are often unclear.
6. Quotation: ibid.
7. Ibid. See also Frank L. Arnold, Long Road to Obsolescence: A North American Mission to Brazil (n.p., 2009).
8. For the reasons for the move to Baltimore, see J. Leighton Wilson, “Our Removal,” The Missionary, September 1875, 197.
9. Quotation: “Mr. B. V. R. James,” in “Annual Report, Board of Foreign Missions,” 1869, PHS.
10. For the “Back to Africa Movement” of this period, see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 320–363.
11. For Blyden’s correspondence with JLW, see, for example, Edward W. Blyden to JLW, 10 March 1859, PHS; Edward W. Blyden to JLW, 9 June 1860, PHS. For important overviews of Blyden’s work and influence, see Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionist Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 230–235; V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN, 1988), 98–134.
12. Quotations: “Letter from President Latrobe,” African Repository, April 1877, 59–61. For the holocaust Leopold unleashed on the Congo, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1998).
13. Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia, MO, 2011).
14. Jane Jackson Martin, “The Dual Legacy: Government Authority and Mission Influence Among the Glebo of Eastern Liberia, 1834–1910” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1968), 258–289. For the American Colonization Society’s report on the war, see “War with Greboes,” African Repository, April 1876, 40–42.
15. Martin, “Dual Legacy,” 284–287.
16. See, for example, Bella A. Nassau, “Woman in Africa,” The Missionary, June 1873, 163–165; “A Call from Gaboon,” The Missionary, April 1877, 92; “Africa—Gaboon Mission,” The Missionary, September 1878, 210–212; “Africa and the African Mission,” The Missionary, December 1882, 268–271.
17. For WW’s explorations of the Ogowe River, see K. David Patterson, “Early Knowledge of the Ogowe River and the American Exploration of 1854,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 1 (1971): 75–87. The Walkers retired to the United States in 1870. At the death of Albert Bushnell in 1879, Walker returned at the urgent request of the Mission Board and remained until 1883. For Bushnell, see, for example, “Gaboon and Corisco Mission, West Africa, by Rev. A. Bushnell,” The Missionary, January 1872, 13–14; “Letter of Rev. A. Bushnell,” The Missionary, December 1873, 278–279.
18. Quotations: WWD, 27 June 1867, WHS; WWD, 25 August 1865, WHS. For King William’s burial of the two women, see WWD, 14 March 1865, WHS.
19. For details of the decline of domestic slavery among the Mpongwe and the role of the leopard men, see Jeremy Rich, “Leopard Men, Slaves, and Social Conflict in Colonial Libreville, c. 1860–1880,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34 (2001): 619–638. See also, for the “leopard men,” Abbé André Raponda-Walker, Notes d’histoire du Gabon (Brazzaville, 1960), 178–182. For Toko’s son Ntâkâ Truman’s description of the leopard men, see Ntâkâ Truman to John Lowrie, 1 November 1878, PHS. For a comprehensive overview of the role of leopard men and their relationship to the secret Mwiri societies in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Gabon, see Christopher J. Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester, NY, 2002), 196–203.
20. Quotation: WWD, 29 March 1867, WHS. For the Mpongwe loss of their political and economic independence, see K. David Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875 (Oxford, 1975), 107–130.
21. Quotation: Ntâkâ Truman to John Lowrie, 3 August 1875, PHS. For Ntâkâ Truman’s conversion as a “passage,” see Diane Austin-Broos, “The Anthropology of Conversion: An Introduction,” in The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, eds. Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier (Lanham, MD, 2003), 1–12; cf. Terence Ranger, “The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 65–98. For Ntâkâ Truman, his relationship with the American missi
onaries, and the story of the mission during these years, see David E. Gardinier, “The American Presbyterian Mission in Gabon: Male Mpongwe Converts and Agents, 1870–1883,” American Presbyterians, Spring 1991, 61–70; David E. Gardinier, “The American Board (1842–1870) and Presbyterian Board (1870–1892) Missions in Northern Gabon and African Responses,” Africana Journal 17 (1998): 215–234; David E. Gardinier, “The Schools of the American Protestant Mission in Gabon (1842–1870),” in Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 75 (1988): 164–184. For an example of the shift in mission strategy and for mission boards’ support of imperialism in the last part of the nineteenth century, see, for example, Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford, 2011), 29–30, 104–125. Cf. also Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, “Forging an Ideology for American Missions: Josiah Strong and Manifest Destiny,” in Wilbert R. Shenk, ed., North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory, and Policy (Grand Rapids, MI, 2004), 163–191.
22. For the insistence that indigenous peoples were not passive in the face of any missionary imperialism and for the complexity of the mission movement’s relationship to cultural imperialism, see Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 367–391. For the continuing power of the old ideal of a self-governing church emerging from missionary efforts, see C. P. Williams, The Ideal of the Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden, 1990).
23. For William Leighton Dorsey, see Gardinier, “The Schools of the American Protestant Mission in Gabon,” 172. For “Ma Sara,” see Jean Kenyon MacKenzie, Black Sheep: Adventures in West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 1916), 163–165, 198–202. For Celia, see Jane Preston, Gaboon Stories (New York, 1872), passim.
24. For Mary Clealand Dorsey’s marriage to a Scotsman, see Preston, Gaboon Stories, 69–70.
25. For the impact of translations, see “Missionary Translation in African Perspective,” in Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, rev. ed. (New York, 2009), 191–228. The ABCFM had transferred the Gabon mission to the Northern Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission in the 1870s. With French pressure on the American missionaries, the Presbyterian board transferred the mission to the Société des Missions Évangéliques of Paris in 1892. The last Americans left Baraka in 1913. See Gardinier, “The American Board (1842–1870) and Presbyterian Board (1870–1892),” 182–183.
26. For JLW’s work in Baltimore, see Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 2:294–307. For Margaret Eckard’s death, see DuBose, Memoirs, 297–308.
27. Quotation: JLW to A. A. Hodge, 24 February 1881, CTS. See also JLW to “My Dear Sister,” 12 August 1880, SCL; JLW to “My Dear Sister,” 3 June 1881, SCL; JLW to “My Dear Sister,” 7 April 1884, SCL.
28. See “Bayard, Nicholas James,” in The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, ed. Robert Manson Myers (New Haven, CT, 1972), 1462–1463.
29. For JLW preaching regularly at Mt. Sinai, see DuBose, Memoirs, 309–317. For the Good Will school, see “Teacher’s Monthly School Report,” 1867–1869, Good Will School, Sumter, South Carolina, in Freedmen’s Bureau Records, National Archives, Washington, DC; Annual Reports, “The General Assembly’s Committee on Freedmen, of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America,” 1867–1876, PHS; Inez Moore Parker, The Rise and Decline for the Program of Education for Black Presbyterians of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A., 1865–1970 (San Antonio, TX, 1977), 139–186. For Freedpeople being taught a “Yankee ethic,” see Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), 450–556; and, especially, Edmund L. Drago, Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston’s Avery Normal Institute (Athens, GA, 1990). For the ethos of the school during the early decades of the twentieth century, author’s interview with former students of the Good Will school, 13 May 2011, Good Will Presbyterian Church, Sumter County, South Carolina. For the ways in which memory can shatter the ideological claims of a dominant class, see Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA, 1987); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1984), esp. “Hermeneutics and Historicism,” 460–491; Paul Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretation (Evanston, IL, 1977).
30. DuBose, Memoirs, 309–317.
31. Quotation: JLW to “My Dear Sister,” 3 June 1881, SCL. See also JLW to “My Dear Sister,” 12 August 1881, SCL; JLW to “My Dear Sister Martha,” 22 January 1884, SCL; JLW to “My Dear Sister,” 7 April 1884, SCL; JLW to “My Dear Bro William,” 10 June 1884, SCL.
32. Quotation: DuBose, Memoirs, 263.
33. Ibid., 310–312.
34. Ibid., 318–319.
35. Ibid., 319–320.
Epilogue
1. Dahleen Glanton and Stacy St. Clair, “Michelle Obama’s Family Tree Has Roots in a Carolina Slave Plantation,” Chicago Tribune, 1 December 2008; Rachel L. Swarns, American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (New York, 2012), 234–239.
2. For the Anglican Mission in the Americas, see www.theamia.org/. According to the website, “The Americas” includes only the United States and Canada. For All Saints Anglican Church, Pawley Island, South Carolina, see www.allsaintspawleys.org/. A major dispute erupted in 2011 when the Rwandan bishops asked US leaders of the mission for more transparency and accountability in regard to finances. See Bob Smietana, “Anglican Mission in the Americas Confronts a New Power Struggle with Rwandan Patrons,” Huffington Post, February 10, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/10/anglican-mission-in-the-americas-rwanada_n_126 6831.html. For the relation of US Christianity to globalization, see Robert Wuthnow, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (Berkley, CA, 2009).
3. Quotation: Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford, 2006), 9. For details of the Pew report, see “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” December 19, 2011, www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-exec.aspx. For important studies of the changes taking place in global Christianity, see Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002); Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Westmont, IL, 2009); Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity (Edinburgh, 2010).
4. David A. Shank, Prophet Harris, the ‘Black Elijah’ of West Africa (Leiden, 1994). See also Norbert C. Brockman, “William Wadé Harris,” in Dictionary of African Biography, www.dacb.org/stories/liberia/harris1_william.html.
5. Quotation: J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 21. For RA’s emphasis on an indigenous leadership for new churches, see “The Rev. John Leighton Wilson Received the Instructions of the Prudential Committee in the Central Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia,” Missionary Herald, 19 October 1834; cf. Paul Harris, “Denominationalism and Democracy: Ecclesiastical Issues Underlying Rufus Anderson’s Three Self Program,” in North American Foreign Mission, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory, and Policy, Wilbert R. Shenk, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI, 2004), 61–85.
INDEX
Abolitionists
Amistad trial and, 198
demand that slaves be freed, 327
opposition to colonization, 118, 138, 144
use of Leighton as ally, 118, 144
Aborigines’ Protection Society, 270
Aborigines’ rights, 144, 269
Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1808), 4
“An Address to the Churches of Jesus Christ Throughout the World” (Thornwell), 340
Africa, West
diversity of, 73, 84
divisions of, 314
fetishes, 75, 106–107
fevers, 52, 64, 74, 83, 98–99, 104, 131, 136
growth of Christianity in, 376
&nb
sp; influence of whites, 127, 314
landscape, 78, 94, 122, 123, 124, 127, 176, 222, 223, 264
links with Gullah culture, 75, 106–107, 119, 227
polygamy, 243, 314
religious beliefs, 75–76, 314–315
slave trade in, 126–127, 174, 229, 239, 249, 257, 259
See also Gabon; Grebo; Mpongwe
African Methodist Episcopal Church, 375
Aga, 259
Alaska, USS, 365–366
All Saints Anglican Church, Pawley Island, SC, 376
Altamaha River, 5, 9, 10
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
African mission, reduction of funds for, 136
Ceylon mission, 56, 89, 92, 210
colonization and missionary movement, incompatibility of, 208
colony’s relationship with mission, 142–144
misleading reports on settlements, 84–85
mission strategy, 91–92
origin of, 51
response to Leighton’s application, 52
Russwurm, warnings about, 187
single women and, 34
Wilson-Wynkoop report on colonization project, 84–86, 87, 88
American Colonization Society, 48, 82, 85, 363
Anglican Province of Rwanda, 376
Ann, 71–74, 77–79
Antislavery petition in Georgia (1739), 5
Ashanti, 242
Atalanta, 221–222, 237, 238
Atlanta, defeat of, 344
Atlantic world
Creole community, 81, 120, 156, 239
highways of, 72, 81, 209
language of, 75
links, 75, 106–107, 119, 227
winds and currents of, 72
See also Slave trade
“Back to Africa” movement, 364
Bakèlè, 229, 298, 368
Baltimore, 144
Bantu language family, 284–285
Baraka, mission at