By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  In early December, Jane left for a planned trip to Fair Hope to visit with her McIntosh relatives. Leighton gave Nicholas a letter of intent announcing their engagement. Nicholas had been cordial to the young seminarian, and Leighton hoped he would have no serious objection to their plans. Nicholas did say that he thought they were acting in a precipitous manner, but Jane, he said, was an adult and was to make her own decisions.4

  James Eckard and Margaret also had a whirlwind courtship. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, James had practiced law for several years before entering Princeton Theological Seminary. He was a serious young man—studious, but not brilliant—with a mother who had long hovered over him in a protective manner. James nevertheless possessed a bright and friendly outlook on life, and he was committed to foreign missions in spite of his mother’s alarm and opposition. Within a few weeks, he and Margaret announced both their engagement and their intention to become missionaries. He and Margaret also received Nicholas’s blessing, although Nicholas must have had similar misgivings about the precipitous way in which they had become engaged. The young couple was soon accepted by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and by the spring of 1833, plans were under way for them to go to Ceylon to work in the expanding mission among the Tamil people there and in southern India.5

  The news of these two engagements could not have been kept a secret from those in the settlement on Hutchinson Island. No one—including Jane, Margaret, and Nicholas—knew what the engagements would mean for Paul and his family, or for the others who lived in the settlement. But they all knew that Leighton Wilson and James Eckard would now be playing key roles in shaping the future of the black men, women, and children who were called Bayard slaves.

  LEIGHTON HAD RETURNED to Columbia in mid-December 1832. Shortly after his arrival back at the seminary, he received a letter from Jane. Now, she wrote, I will “leave kindred, friends and happy country and uniting my destiny with yours, seek and find a home in some savage wild.” She confessed that she “looked for one to whom in every emergency I could look for support, comfort and advice. Such I think, I fondly think, I have found in you—time alone must undeceive me.” And Leighton wrote back: “The longest time that we may be companions, I hope will only prove that it is my delight and study to make you happy. But Jane, do not overrate me—do not expect too much. The fact that you repose such implicit confidence in me has drawn forth feelings from my heart towards you which I could scarcely believe existed there.” However precipitous their engagement, they were clearly in love with a love that would only deepen and grow over the coming years.6

  So Leighton and Jane continued their courtship and their correspondence. They wrote of their dreams and plans. They worried about the nullification controversy swirling in South Carolina. Following the lead of John C. Calhoun, Lowcountry planters were insisting that the state had the right to nullify tariffs passed by the US Congress that the nullifiers regarded as antislavery acts. Unionists in the state, primarily from the nonplantation Upcountry, were horrified and condemned the nullifiers as unpatriotic. Leighton and Jane feared the state was in danger of plunging into a civil war between the two parties, a war that would swallow up family and friends in a bitter conflict. The two parties finally compromised, and the crisis passed, but Leighton saw nullification as a clear signal of dangers to come. South Carolina radicals had shown themselves willing to act in reckless ways to split the nation and protect slavery.7

  The young couple were also deeply troubled about what was happening to the missionaries who were working among the Cherokees in Georgia. The state, in its bloody aggression against the tribe, had arrested and imprisoned several missionaries who stood with the native people. Leighton wondered if Andrew Jackson would send federal troops into the state to liberate the missionaries and to protect the Cherokees from white aggression. Much to his disgust, during the coming years he watched the federal government’s treachery toward the native people unfold as the Jackson administration aided in the usurpation of Cherokee lands by whites. In a few years, Leighton would see parallels between this treachery, the aggression of white Georgians, and the treatment of Africans by African American colonists.8

  Leighton plunged back into his studies in Columbia, but he took time in the spring to visit Jane at Fair Hope. He was now the one to sail down the inland waters to Darien and to ride out to Fair Hope past rice and cotton fields and through pine barrens and under the long avenue of oaks. William and Maria McIntosh welcomed him like a son and were delighted that their Jane had found such a man as Leighton. For his part, he loved Fair Hope, took an interest in the Gullah people around him, and found the McIntosh family to be welcoming and loving. Back in Columbia, he wrote Jane: “I have a peculiar out goings of affection towards your Uncle and family, and sometimes wish I was there to tell them how much I love them. I love them because they are so kind to you. No one can find a more direct access to my heart than by showing the least kindness to my Jane. . . . You must tell my Fair Hope friends how much I love them.”9

  BY THE LATE WINTER of 1833, Leighton had begun serious negotiations with the American Board. They agreed that he would spend part of the coming spring and the first part of the summer at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts studying Arabic in preparation for his time in Africa. So in early March he made his way north. The plan made sense—given how little they all knew about West Africa—but it would have been better for him to study Portuguese, Spanish, or even French. Still, the time was not wasted. He was once again thrown into language study, a task that was going to demand disciplined, strenuous work from him for the next two decades. While he was near Boston, he would be able to make frequent visits to see Rufus Anderson and Benjamin Wisner, secretaries of the board, and discuss his plans with them.10

  During his time in New England, both Jane and Leighton felt pressure from friends and acquaintances who were stunned by their decision to go to Africa. They insisted that it was dangerous, even suicidal. Even James Eckard’s mother—never hesitant to make her opinions known—entered the fray. Writing to Leighton and Jane from Pennsylvania, she urged them not to go. Her objections, Leighton wrote Jane, “I could regard . . . in no other light than fanciful and framed with too much indifference to poor benighted Africans, to deserve a very serious consideration.” But Leighton acknowledged that “many hard things have been said about us—such as ‘going to Martyrdom,’ ‘pursuing shadows’ etc.” The objections were not simply that Africa was deadly with its fevers and dangerous with its “savage people.” More formidable and fundamental were objections rooted in the deepest racism, objections that rested on the claim that Africans were not capable of understanding and receiving the Christian gospel. Leighton’s memory of the piety and Christian faith of African Americans at Mt. Zion and at Circular made him dismiss such claims as ridiculous and dangerous, but he was to spend years challenging such claims in his reports and in his descriptions of Africans and of the rich and varied cultures of Africa. Such objections, he wrote Jane, “affect me in no other way than to grieve my heart for the narrow and contracted feelings of those with them, and as long as you are firm and unmoved in our present plans, I shall move right forward in prosecuting them and be one of the happiest men in the world.”11

  After conversations with Anderson and Wisner in Boston, they all agreed that he should make an exploratory trip to West Africa to determine the best place to establish the mission. Leighton hoped for a while that one of his seminary classmates would join him, but one by one they dropped out of the plan, some because of parental objections or the objections of a fiancé, others because they feared their health was not adequate for the challenge. So it was agreed that he should try to find an African American who would accompany him and help with the necessary arrangements for the establishment of the new mission.12

  Upon completion of his studies in July 1833, Leighton headed south. He stopped in New Haven to visit with the faculty and students at Yale, and then again
at Princeton to talk about missions and the new mission to Africa. In Philadelphia, he met Jane’s relatives, who, he wrote Jane, “gave me a very warm grasp and treated me as kindly as if I had been their real cousin.” Margaret and James Eckard were there, having already married, and were making their final arrangements before they sailed for Ceylon. “They are both cheerful,” he reported to Jane, “Margaret as much so as I ever saw her. She has told me a great deal about you.”13

  Leighton arrived in Savannah in the middle of August. He was eager to get to Fair Hope and see Jane, but first he had to find an African American who was free and willing to accompany him on his exploratory trip. After several false starts, he was put in touch with Joe Clay, a literate free black with close connections to Thomas and Eliza Clay of Richmond-on-Ogeechee. A leader among blacks in the city, he was a deacon and one of two clerks of the First African Baptist congregation. As clerk he had recorded much of the early history of the congregation—it was later said by a church leader that he was consequently clothed by the people with great dignity and made by them “an [object] of emulation.” Leighton was genuinely impressed by Clay, and Clay agreed to accompany him. The African American deacon was apparently deeply interested in a mission to Africans. He wanted to see for himself the homeland of his ancestors and evaluate the progress of the new colony of Liberia. Leighton and Clay agreed to meet in Philadelphia in October, and Leighton made arrangements for the deacon’s travel.14

  At the same time, Leighton met Margaret Strobel, a free woman of color, a prominent seamstress in the city, and the mother of a young daughter, Catherine. She was eager to go to Liberia and be a teacher, and Leighton told Jane that he very much approved of her. Leighton consulted with Mary Howard—who had been teaching Margaret Strobel—and some other white women who were to be her sponsors, and then a plan was proposed. “Mrs. Strobel,” as Leighton came to call her, could go to Richmond-on-Ogeechee to study under Eliza Clay and learn from Eliza’s teaching experiments with the plantation slaves. When Jane returned to Savannah, she could take responsibility for the oversight of the young seamstress’s education. Margaret Strobel agreed to the plan, and so did Jane. But, Leighton warned Jane, she must be careful “not to pursue any course with her instruction that would be exceptionable in the eye of the law.” Teaching even a respected free woman of color more than basic reading and writing required great prudence in Savannah if serious problems with the white authorities were to be avoided. Whites feared not only the content of what might be taught but also the disturbing image of an educated black person.15

  Leighton left Savannah in late August 1833 to visit his family at Pine Grove and to be ordained at Mt. Zion before his departure for Africa. He expected to meet in Columbia the Reverend John Brooke Pinney, a New Englander and a graduate of Franklin College (the University of Georgia) and Princeton Theological Seminary. Pinney was headed to Liberia to work among the settlers and had already spent much of 1833 traveling for the American Colonization Society to promote colonization. When Wilson arrived in Columbia, he found to his dismay that Pinney’s life had been threatened by an angry mob while he spoke at the First Presbyterian Church. A rowdy crowd of whites had gathered at the church and had become indignant when they found blacks in the audience listening to Pinney talk about freed men and women going to Liberia. There, he said, they could enjoy all the benefits of freedom in their own country. Leighton wrote Jane that Pinney “had been driven off the day before by a mob! And for what? For the great and unpardonable crime of speaking about the Colonization society in a public address where there were Negroes!!” An excited “rabble” had endangered Pinney’s life, and his friends had been forced to smuggle him quickly out of the city. Wilson felt that “such an outrage has seldom ever occurred before and the excitement in Columbia seldom ever equaled. The whole transaction will be published and I trust the indignation of the religious community will be aroused against such an affair.” And then he confessed to Jane: “To tell you the truth Jane, I must acknowledge that there is in my native Carolina much of the spirit of revolutionary France.” What was foreboding for Wilson about the incident was not only the chaos and excitement of the “rabble,” but an eighteenth-century rationalism that still lingered in the state among those hostile to religion. The most virulent racism and radical proslavery ideology would flow, he feared, from this “spirit of revolutionary France,” and these forces would attack not only the work that Thomas and Eliza Clay were doing among their slaves in Georgia, but also any claim to the full humanity of Africans or African Americans.16

  Leighton left Columbia in disgust and hurried to Pine Grove. There he found his extended family and many friends waiting to attend his ordination and to say their tearful goodbyes. The Saturday night before the ordination, Pine Grove was crowded with guests—including eight ministers and four Presbyterian elders, who must have slept several to the bed in the sprawling plantation house. The next morning, Leighton’s uncle Robert James preached the ordination sermon at Mt. Zion and struggled to contain his emotions when he spoke of his nephew’s impending departure for an unknown land. Leighton’s father began to weep freely, and the staid congregation heaved with waves of emotion that could not be suppressed as they thought of young Leighton, one who had grown up among them by the waters of the Black River, leaving for Africa. In what appeared to many of them to be the mysterious providence of God, he was embarking on a journey toward certain death on behalf of Africans from whose villages and cities their own slaves had been drawn.17

  That afternoon, Leighton preached before a huge congregation of slaves who came from the surrounding plantations to stand in the park-like area that surrounded the church. Leighton spoke of missions and of sailing to the land of their ancestors with the message of Jesus Christ. They, too, were overcome with emotion as he spoke of Africa and of his hopes for its people. They swayed and moaned and wept, like an ocean that cannot be at rest, and they pressed around him as he spoke. Afterward, they came one by one in a long line to shake his hand. One old man, an “Elder in Israel,” a leader in the black community, came forward and declared his own responsibility for Leighton’s going to Africa. Leighton’s going, he told Leighton, was in answer to his prayers. Perhaps the old man was remembering the land of his birth, for he held out his hand to Leighton and said “he would add to his prayers one dollar for the spread of the Gospel in that country.” The old man was, Leighton wrote Jane, a poor slave who in the midst of his poverty gave for Africa. Others came forward, but their weeping became so intense that Leighton had to tear himself away before he had told the tenth part goodbye. So he left them there at Mt. Zion, near the waters of the Black River, and they swayed and moaned and wept when they remembered Africa, when they remembered the land of their ancestors.18

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Leighton was in Philadelphia making plans for his exploratory trip. He had stopped in Baltimore and had visited the offices of the Maryland Colonization Society. The society, originally a part of the American Colonization Society, having established its independence, had received generous financial support from the Maryland legislature. The hope was that a new colony, Maryland in Liberia, could be established, and that it would avoid some of the difficulties faced by the Liberian colony at Monrovia and its surrounding settlements. The Liberian colonists were reporting frequent shortages of food. In letters to friends and family that often ended up in newspapers, they told of being ravaged by disease, and they seemed to be in constant conflict with the indigenous people of the area. The American Colonization Society, many were complaining, had largely abandoned them once they had arrived in Liberia, and some were saying they wanted to return to their true home, the United States.19

  John H. B. Latrobe, the principal organizer and corresponding secretary of the Maryland society, believed that with the financial support of the Maryland legislature a new and more successful colony could be established on the West Coast of Africa. As an enterprising manager, however, he was looking for other support wherever he could
find it. Consequently, when Leighton showed up as a representative of the growing American mission movement, Latrobe gave him an enthusiastic welcome. He strongly encouraged him to establish a mission at the society’s proposed new settlement at Cape Palmas, 250 miles south of Monrovia. But Latrobe also learned that Leighton had very influential personal connections—especially with the Bayard family. Jane’s cousin James Bayard was the secretary of the Philadelphia branch of the American Colonization Society, and Latrobe wrote him shortly after Leighton’s visit asking if a public meeting could be organized in Philadelphia for the purposes of supporting the Maryland colonization efforts. Bayard had replied that it was not possible, since the Philadelphia branch was committed to the parent society. Latrobe was, of course, disappointed, but he was apparently pleased that Leighton and Jane had personal connections with influential members of philanthropic movements—not an indifferent matter for the promoter of a new American colony. He hoped the young couple’s involvement would bring positive attention to the Maryland experiment. But in the future, when disagreements began to emerge between the young missionaries and colonization officials, Latrobe would discover the downside to their influence. He would have to take into account not only Leighton’s and Jane’s growing reputation as missionaries, but also their deep connections with social and religious elites.20