By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  What surprised Leighton was how those who lived by Boggy Gully also began to claim in the years ahead this same landscape as theirs. They had, after all, worked the land in the heat of the day, plowing straight furrows and picking bale after bale of cotton. They had gathered at night before leaping flames to eat their suppers, do their flirting, and warn their children. Here, on this particular spot of earth, they had been living their lives, and over the years they had watched the rich soil of the land receive their dead, and they had sensed the land beneath them shifting and becoming the sacred home of their ancestors. So in later years they, too, claimed this landscape as theirs, and their voices, however suppressed and muted by slavery and racism, also began to carry the sounds and intonations of a Black River home.19

  AT SOME POINT in his early years Leighton’s parents realized that he was a bright, eager student. They had themselves received modest educations, as might be expected among a people settling new land. Most likely, they had gone for only a few years to a little school taught by a Presbyterian clergyman living nearby. But they valued education, and they gathered in their home a small library and made sure that their children had ample opportunities for an education suitable for rising young gentlemen and ladies. While his brothers and sisters did well enough with their studies, Leighton showed himself to be the promising scholar of the family. He loved to read, and there were enough books in the family library to keep him busy—six volumes of Ancient History by the French historian Charles Rollin, with their stories of Greeks and Persians, and Romans and Carthaginians; John Bigland’s two-volume History of England and a Life of Napoleon, and Matthew Henry’s Complete Commentary of the Whole Bible. And of course there was the Bible itself to be read daily, and the Westminster Shorter Catechism to be memorized, and John Fox’s Book of the Martyrs to be scrutinized, with its pictures of tortured Protestants that so deeply influenced Leighton’s view of Catholics and what he and his Protestant ancestors regarded as Rome’s tyranny over Christian people. From an early age he plunged into Latin, memorizing vocabulary, mastering declensions, and learning to conjugate verbs. When he was sixteen, he was sent to the little Mt. Zion academy in Winnsboro in the South Carolina upcountry, where many of the state’s prominent families were sending their sons for the foundations of a classical education. When he was eighteen, his father sent him to Union College in Schenectady, New York, then under the presidency of the highly regarded and deeply pious Eliphalet Nott. With his background at the Mt. Zion academy, Leighton was able to enter the college as a junior, to take up the more difficult Latin writers, to study natural sciences, mathematics, and moral philosophy, and to begin his study of the Greek language, and then, in his last term, Hebrew.20

  Schenectady was a long way from the Black River—its winters were cold and its students, mostly from New York and New England, seemed at first to be equally cold, lacking the warmth and easy manners of the Lowcountry. “There are too many Yankees for my pleasure,” he wrote his sisters. He found that “they possess no confidence in each other, nor for anyone else. They destroy all confidence that one student has for another. I am sorry to say it, but instead of having my Southern prejudices against the Yankees removed I have had mine confirmed.” He was clearly a homesick Southern boy, and he confessed to his sisters that he spent much time thinking about home. He remembered with longing “our dwelling with everything that pertains to it. The little shade trees in the yard, the little water oak in front of the milk house, the one behind it, the many pines in front of the piazza. The large pines on every side of the house.” And he thought about “going into the house and taking my seat by the fireside with you all; taking a part in the chit chat; but above all, the privilege of kneeling together around the family altar. This is the place to enjoy a foretaste of heaven!”21

  But this homesickness did not last long, and Leighton soon turned his attention to the adventure of being in a new place with new people. He found he had a Witherspoon cousin from Alabama at the college, and to his delight he found a new friend from Charleston, John Adger, who became a lifelong friend. And he began to discover as well that he actually liked Yankees, and that they actually liked him. And he began to make friends with them.22

  As for the landscape, he was stunned by the beauty of upstate New York with its lakes and mountains and rich fertile fields. During his first summer break he began to take long hikes with his new friends. He wrote home that with “knapsacks on our backs and muskets on our shoulders,” they walked from Schenectady to Albany, a distance of some twenty miles. They took a steamer the next day down the Hudson River to the village of Catskill, then hiked twelve miles to a house in the mountains where they spent the night. Early the next morning, they climbed a high peak of the Catskills, where they had splendid views of the surrounding countryside dotted with cities and towns. They hiked on toward the falls of the Catskill River. As they drew near, they heard the roar of the falls and saw mists rising from the river. Then came the falls themselves with their thundering power—light and shadows flashed on their waters and a sudden coolness flowed through the air. All seemed to draw Leighton into the grandeur of the place, creating within him a feeling of awe in the presence of a sacred mystery.23

  There were other hikes to be made—one to the junction of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, then down to Troy, then back to Schenectady, a distance of forty miles in one day. Leighton loved the countryside and the mountains, and whenever in the future he climbed other mountains in distant places and saw magnificent views, he compared them to the magnificence of the Catskills.24

  LEIGHTON RETURNED TO South Carolina in the fall of 1829. After a few months at Pine Grove enjoying the company of family and friends, he went to study in the home of his uncle, the Reverend Robert James, pastor of the Salem Black River congregation. James was a highly regarded and greatly loved pastor, and he reminded Leighton of his mother, who had died a few years earlier. Leighton, who had been very close to his mother, rarely mentioned her in the years to come when he wrote home or when he wrote of home. Rather, like Jane Bayard in Savannah, he seemed to carry painful memories in the silences of his correspondence and in the quiet places of the heart. William Wilson had remarried, and his second wife was a kind, affectionate woman fourteen years his junior. Leighton was always respectful toward her, but their relationship was distant; when he wrote home, his greetings to her always seemed an afterthought.25

  Robert James directed his nephew’s studies—they read the New Testament together in Greek, and the Old Testament in Hebrew, and took up the study of theology. James had a special passion for ministry among the growing slave population along the Black River, and Leighton had opportunities to see his uncle teaching, preaching, and visiting among the black slaves in the neighborhood. Under James’s leadership, the Salem congregation began to develop a sense of responsibility for the religious life of the slaves, and by the time Sherman’s army shook the land, Salem had 100 white members worshiping with 610 slave members. Leighton looked to his uncle as a mentor and guide and admired his piety, his pastoral ways with people white and black, and his disciplined intellect. His uncle was said by others to “have much of the milk of human kindness,” and his relationship to those around him was said to be “marked by gentleness and urbanity.” Leighton sought to develop these characteristics in his own life, becoming much like his mother’s brother. And he began to have questions about slavery as he went with his uncle from slave settlement to slave settlement, visiting with the people, hearing them talk about their sorrows and anxieties, and getting glimpses of the ways in which slavery not only oppressed them, but also hung like a building cloud over the whole land.26

  Leighton, however, was not yet sure what he wanted to do with his own life or what vocation to pursue. Law was a possibility, and so was the ministry, but he was unsettled. And so, like many recent college graduates in his situation, he decided to teach for a while. He accepted a position in Mt. Pleasant across the Cooper River from Charleston. It was a good
choice. He enjoyed his teaching, had time in the afternoons to study, and took time to walk and ride horseback in the surrounding countryside and to ponder the questions that troubled his sleep. On the weekends he went into Charleston and stayed with the parents of his college friend John Adger, who was in seminary at Princeton. He found their home to be remarkable, and their family life filled him with admiration. “There is,” Leighton wrote his sister, “more domestic happiness and harmony in this family than I have ever seen in any other. Love appears to be the ruling principle, and peace the consequence.” The Adger home was also large and wealthy far beyond anything Leighton had known. James Adger, the father, was a merchant and cotton factor who sold crops for planters and supplied them with seeds and fertilizers, with harnesses and slave clothing, with barrels of molasses and bacon and all the supplies needed to run a plantation. He was hugely successful and had extensive business connections in the North and in England. He also had his own shipping line, which included his pride, the James Adger. Although he was a prudent man when sharing his opinions, Adger apparently had little sympathy for the parochialism of many of the planters who came into the city from Charleston’s hinterland. They often needed to borrow money from him on next year’s crop, and they often seemed to have little awareness of the larger world that lay beyond South Carolina, or even beyond their home county or their plantation. The Adgers, in contrast, summered at the Virginia Springs, at Newport and Saratoga. They went shopping in New York and Philadelphia, visited friends in New Jersey and Boston, and made extended trips to Britain and the continent. They were also members of the Second Presbyterian Church, and on Sunday mornings Leighton went with the family to worship at the large and imposing sanctuary at the end of a small park. He soon began to teach Sunday school and to become acquainted with some of the ministers of the city.27

  A few months after Leighton began going into the city for the weekends, a series of revival services began to be held in a number of the churches. He began going on weekday evenings and quickly was attracted to Dr. Benjamin Morgan Palmer of the Circular Congregational Church. Palmer was the most progressive church leader in the city and the leading advocate for a number of benevolent causes. His congregation was politically powerful, numbering among its members US Senator Robert Young Hayne; former governor Thomas Bennett; and Hugh Swinton Legare, a leading intellectual in the city who would later become US attorney general and then US secretary of state. Along with Hayne, Bennett, and Legare, many of Charleston’s oldest and most respectable families were members of Circular, including DeSaussures and Porchers, Aikens and Vanderhorsts, Hutsons and Perroneaus and a host of other Lowcountry grandees. Leighton, while still staying with the Adgers, began attending Circular regularly.28

  A religious awakening was beginning to move among both whites and blacks in the city. This local awakening was part of a Great Awakening—a religious revival that had been for several decades sweeping back and forth across the country from colleges in the East to frontier camp meetings in the West. Indeed, it was a part of a larger evangelical awakening that included Great Britain and the Protestant churches of continental Europe. In Charleston, such diverse figures as Henry Laurens Pinckney, editor of the Charleston Mercury and soon to be a US congressman, and Charles Snetter, a black barber on Market Street, were touched by the deep soul-searching flowing from the religious services in the city. They, together with a number of others, joined Circular and became a part of Palmer’s large and growing congregation. Palmer was inviting his hearers to move beyond orthodoxy, a belief in the truth of Christian faith. For Palmer, knowing the catechism was important, but more important was knowing Jesus. Living an upright, moral life was also important, but more important was a grateful heart—the very foundation for a faithful Christian life. Palmer was inviting his hearers, in powerful and winsome ways, to open their hearts to God’s love and to claim Jesus as their personal redeemer. Listening to Palmer and to other preachers in the city, Leighton experienced his religious faith being challenged and the foundations of his life trembling.29

  Not long after Leighton began to attend the evening services, he began to feel the absence of God in his life in spite of his churchgoing and his daily Bible reading and prayer. “God,” he wrote his sister, “has hidden his face from me and if I really ever had a hope, for the present it is absent.” The absence of God and a sense of absolute loneliness and abandonment left him deeply shaken. After one service, he suddenly had a vision of hell and eternity—not a hell of fire and brimstone, but a hell where he was utterly alone and abandoned, cut off from those whom he loved and from those who loved him, cut off in profound isolation from love itself. He saw himself standing before the judgment seat of God before whom all pretenses were swept away and all was made clear. In that moment, he saw “the deceitfulness and obstinacy of my heart of which I had no previous conception and the depth and nature of that deceitfulness!!” And he found himself without hope for a Redeemer. In his imagination, he wrote, he saw himself “surrounded by a beloved father, Mothers, sisters and brothers and innumerable host of friends, all dressed in white robes and glittering crowns, to bid me an eternal adieu. And I could almost feel the last pressure of the cold grasp.” “Think of my feelings!” he exclaimed. Then he saw eternity. “In vain I tried to fathom its depth. I rolled years upon years and centuries upon centuries, until my imagination was exhausted and I could not see that I had begun to measure the duration of this torment. My feelings were so much tortured that I could no longer bear even to imagine myself the subject of it. I placed another in it and could hear him century after century as he sank deeper and deeper exclaim ‘is there no end?’ and the reply was as often ‘Eternity.’”30

  His conversion followed several weeks later. With overwhelming emotion he experienced the “perfect love of God which casts out all fear.” Christ, the love of God incarnate, had not abandoned him, Leighton confessed, but had come after him and was his Redeemer and Friend, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, who, in the final day, would stand in Leighton’s place before the judgment seat of God. This conversion experience was the turning point of Leighton’s life. From then on he measured his journey from this place, a journey that would not end with a final “eternal adieu” but with a joyful reunion in an eternal home where, with believers of all generations, he would feast at the banquet table of the Lord.31

  Leighton’s conversion experience and the convictions that flowed from it meant that in the coming years he was not afraid of death. To be sure, he saw death as an enemy that stalked him and those whom he loved. He would struggle and fight with death, and as colleagues and friends fell under its power, he would learn over and over again how cruel and ruthless death could be. But Leighton was convinced that death did not have the final word on those who had “a precious Redeemer in Jesus Christ.” Death for them, in spite of its enmity and all of its terrors, was transformed into a friend in God’s gracious providence and an entry into an eternal home. To tell this good news, to point people to this amazing grace, became the consuming passion of his life—he now sang “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved,” with the conviction of his own experience.32

  To have Jesus as his Friend and Redeemer, however, meant for Leighton that he must discipline himself as he sought to follow his Lord. And critical for this discipline were self-reflection and a daily examination of his heart and life through prayer and Bible reading. He came to love and to pray the Psalms—Psalm 51: “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. . . . Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” And Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” He must, he was convinced, struggle to avoid the illusions, the self-deceptions, and the deceitfulness that had marked his life before his conversion. He must seek to see himself as he was and not as he pretended
to be. This struggle, this warfare of the heart, made others—friends and foes alike—see in him a man of great integrity. Yet he himself confessed that despite his disciplined efforts there was much about himself that he did not see, or perhaps could not see, or maybe refused to see. And what was most difficult for him to see were the waters in which he always swam, the waters of his Black River home, and how the fear of being cut off from that home continued to linger in the deep places of his heart in spite of his conversion. A great struggle lay ahead of him between the freedom that he claimed in his conversion and the confining power of love for a particular people and a particular place.33

  LEIGHTON AND OTHER whites, however, were not the only ones being touched by the Charleston revival services. Some African Americans in the city also felt a new stirring as they peered into the light of the revival fires and saw new hope rising. Many began to seek membership in Charleston churches.

  Those African Americans who wished to join the Circular Congregational Church had to spend time in a class under the supervision of one of the black leaders of the congregation. The purpose of the class was for Bible study and for an introduction to great themes of the Christian faith. All were expected to learn the questions and answers of a catechism that the congregation’s pastor had written specifically for slaves and free persons of color. Charles Snetter, the black barber, was assigned to the class of Charles Henry. Both men were literate free blacks, and both had influential whites as friends and supporters. Henry was particularly close to the pastor, Benjamin Palmer, who held him in high regard for his piety and leadership. Snetter had as a patron Thomas Grimké, one of the most respected men in the city. Grimké was from an aristocratic Huguenot family and was deeply involved in benevolent causes and national benevolent organizations. Two of his sisters, Sara and Angelina, had moved north and were soon to become deeply involved in the growing antislavery movement and the struggle for women’s rights.34