By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  And far away in Savannah, where the cotton was piled high on wharfs and where on a full moon the tide pushed hard against the flow of the river, Paul and his father, Charles, and his sister, Charlotte, and all of the other Bayard slaves went about their daily lives and no doubt wondered about the future and what they would have to face and what they would have to do when their white owners finally made known to them their decisions.

  Chapter Eight

  Sorrows and Conflicts

  While Leighton and Jane were growing accustomed to life under an African sky, troubles were slowly building for all of those who lived at Cape Palmas. Oliver Holmes, the white dentist from Baltimore, had been a miserable appointment as agent and interim governor of the little colony. His public dispute with Charles Snetter—who had become the most respected member of the settler community—had undermined his authority, and neither the Grebo nor the settlers trusted him. Holmes returned their distrust with a vengeance and a deep contempt.

  Fortunately for the colony, Holmes’s tenure was short lived. After only seven months at the Cape, he received news in early September 1836 that a new agent and governor had been appointed. Holmes immediately resigned and announced that he was leaving the colony. “He returns in quite a bad humor with the colonists,” Leighton wrote Rufus Anderson, “and says he will do all he can to injure them at home. I have only to say of him that his course and conduct has been boyish and puerile in the extreme—some abatement however is to be made for his youth and the fever in his brain.”1

  If Holmes’s departure was good news for all who lived at the Cape, even better news arrived for Leighton and Jane—they learned in the late summer of 1836 that the mission board in Boston was sending out a young white couple and a young African American man to join them in their work at Fair Hope. Leighton and Jane were elated. While they had come to think of Fair Hope as their home and were happy in their work, they longed for colleagues, not only to help with the growing responsibilities of the mission, but also to be friends and companions. Leighton wrote Anderson that when they thought of the near arrival of the three colleagues, they felt “that our cup of happiness is not only full but running over.”2

  David White, a New Englander, was an earnest young graduate of Leighton’s alma mater, Union College, and of Princeton Theological Seminary. His wife, née Helen Wells, a lively young woman from New York, was deeply in love with her husband and committed with him to the mission in Africa. Benjamin Van Rensselaer James was a free black from New York who was to establish and run a printing press at the Cape. His primary responsibility would be to print materials for schoolchildren, religious tracts, hymns, and portions of the Bible—first in English, then in Grebo. Light skinned with dark, curly hair, James was to a remarkable degree a man without guile. To be sure, he was savvy about the ways of whites and knew the harsh realities of racism. But he confronted the white world out of a deep inner peace and a genuine piety and he was soon to win not only Leighton’s and Jane’s respect but also their affection.3

  The trio arrived at the Cape on Christmas Day, 1836, as the surf thundered and rolled toward shore. With them was Thomas Savage, a white physician who was joining the new Episcopal mission that had been established by James Thomson on the far side of Harper. “When we reached the beach,” wrote Helen White, “we found Mr. and Mrs. Wilson waiting with open arms to receive us.” The Whites and James climbed the hill to Fair Hope and found it, Helen wrote home, a beautiful location and much more pleasant and delightful than they had imagined in their most sanguine moments. King Freeman and nine of his headmen called to pay their respects and to welcome them to their country. In this way the newcomers began their time at Fair Hope with warm welcomes, with the excitement of a new and exotic place, and with high hopes for their new work as Christian missionaries.4

  But within a few weeks all three were struck with fever. Helen was first. Initially her symptoms were not severe, and David gave her constant, loving attention. James was next, but he recovered quickly with the careful ministrations of Leighton and Jane. Helen’s fever, however, lingered, and her husband grew increasingly alarmed. They talked together about their decision to come out to Africa, and he said he had never enjoyed so much of life in so short a time as he had since his arrival at the Cape. She assured him of her love and how glad she was they had come.5

  David, however, became depressed as he watched Helen struggle—her temperature rose and fell, rose and fell, and rose again. He began to say that he would die when the fever hit him. Walking out beyond the garden, he found a spot overlooking the surf, pointed it out, and told Leighton he wanted to be buried there. Soon the fever did strike him—with great intensity. Leighton and Jane did all they could to fight it—they gave him calomel, then laudanum, then morphine, trying to calm his agitation and ease the fever. They used “the cups” to bleed him, and then mustard plaster to blister him and rouse him when he sank. At one point he grew wild and frantic as his fever rose higher and higher. Fighting for his life, he threw off his bedcovers and tried to climb out the window of his room before Leighton was able to restrain him. A physician came from a visiting American naval vessel, but nothing availed as David sank into a coma and, Leighton wrote, “death laid his sceptre” upon him.6

  A funeral followed quickly, though Helen was still ill and could not attend. Ballah, William Davis, and two other Grebo men served as his pallbearers, taking his coffin out to the selected spot. Freeman walked behind them, as did a large crowd of the people, who had come to join a grieving Leighton and Jane and to see and hear the funeral service for a white man. They saw a coffin without food or gifts carried to an open grave in the African soil. They saw deep grief that was restrained, heard hymns sung, and listened to Leighton read from the Bible. And they heard, through Ballah’s translation, Leighton preach on those who die in the Lord and on the promises of the gospel for eternal life.7

  When Helen had been told of her husband’s death, she asked for prayer that God would give her strength to face her loss. Her only desire to live, she said, was to do good for the Grebo people. Leighton and Jane gave her constant, tender attention, but Helen’s sense of being alone without the young husband whom she loved was overwhelming, and she felt far from the home she had known. She wept the tears of a broken and lonely heart. The ship’s physician attended her; Dr. Savage came as well, after recovering from his own fever—they shaved her hair off and applied blisters to her head, her breast, and her feet. They gave her calomel and opium, but nothing stopped the raging of the fever, and in great pain and deep loneliness she joined David in death. Two weeks after her husband’s funeral, she was buried beside him at Fair Hope at Cape Palmas on the West African coast.8

  The agonizing deaths of such an attractive, lively young couple were a heavy blow for Jane and Leighton. “You can little imagine,” Jane wrote her family in Philadelphia, “how desolate we are, and how this stroke has bowed us to the ground!” Leighton wrote Rufus Anderson in Boston that his and Jane’s feelings were indescribable. He trusted, he wrote, that it had “humbled us more than any previous event of God’s providence and has taught us to feel that there is no hope for Africa except in the Almighty arm of Jehovah.” Leighton confessed that he found their deaths mysterious and inscrutable. He kept telling himself that somehow their deaths were a part of God’s gracious providence and that the Judge of all the earth would do right. But such a confession was not easy. He and Jane had received the young couple with joyful but trembling hearts, and then their worst fears had been realized. The entire mission at Fair Hope seemed to be called into question—How could they go on, he wondered, or how could they encourage other young couples to join them in the work? He and Jane prayed and prayed again asking for strength and guidance. They talked together into the night and comforted one another and reminded each other of God’s love and God’s promise not to desert them. And slowly they gathered their courage and faith, and Leighton wrote Anderson that they would not lose heart. “There is hope for Afric
a,” he told Anderson, “and we believe that God’s mercy towards her will yet be disclosed in such a way as will make the hosts of Heaven and the inhabitants of earth wonder and adore.” So Leighton and Jane—while knowing only too well that the fever had caused the deaths of the young couple—placed their deaths finally in the mystery of God’s providence and put their own hopes in what they believed to be God’s good and gracious purposes for Africa.9

  Whatever their trust in divine providence and their hopes for Africa, Leighton and Jane were discouraged and felt beaten down. They had a fine new colleague in B. V. R. James, but their grief over the death of the young couple was intensified by what they began to regard as the deteriorating conditions of the young colony.

  THE MAN CHOSEN to replace Oliver Holmes as governor, John Brown Russwurm, was a black man—a great surprise to all who thought blacks needed whites to govern them and keep them from descending into anarchy. At least he was perceived to be black by those whose eyes had been shaped by the racial assumptions of white America. With a white father and a light-skinned Jamaican mother, he was thought of as white by the Grebo until they were told he was black.10

  What was certain was that Russwurm was a remarkable man, and that he had struggled against the racism of a white world all of his life. He was one of the first black graduates of an American college and was the cofounder of the first black newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal. And he was to be the single most important leader in the early history of Maryland in Liberia, a colony established by alarmed whites in order to help whiten America.11

  Russwurm had graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he had had as classmates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a number of men who would become US senators and congressmen. He had read Herodotus in Greek and Livy in Latin, had studied natural science and mathematics, and had shown a special interest in history. Deeply immersed in the cultural traditions of the West, he was nonetheless fully aware of his status as a black man in white America. A classmate remembered him as a “diligent student, but of no marked ability,” as he compared him to Longfellow, Hawthorne, and a number of prominent political leaders—a high standard of “marked ability” for any college student. Russwurm was, he wrote, rather withdrawn and eager to avoid any situation that might embarrass him because of “his sensitiveness on account of his color.” The tone of the comment and the assumptions it represented revealed the painful challenges faced by a brilliant young black man in antebellum America.12

  Russwurm had launched Freedom’s Journal with Samuel Cornish after moving to New York in 1827. The journal was intended to counter the harsh racist propaganda being published in several of the city’s papers. The editors declared that their purpose was “to arrest the progress of prejudice” and to serve as a shield against the evils of such prejudice. But the paper was also intended to encourage a spirit of independence and community identity among the city’s growing African American population.13

  Russwurm had been particularly vehement in his attacks on the American Colonization Society and the Liberian experiment. What free blacks were committed to, he had insisted, was the emancipation of those in bondage. First must come the removal of slavery’s chains; then the possibility of emigration could be considered. But after two years of such attacks on colonization, Russwurm had changed his mind. He had arrived at the conclusion that it was a “mere waste of words, to talk of ever enjoying citizenship in this country: it is utterly impossible in the nature of things: all those who pant for this, must cast their eyes elsewhere.” As a proud and accomplished man, he simply thought that racism ran too deep in America for any black to find a true home in the land of slavery.14

  The response to his change of heart had been swift and vociferous. Blacks burned him in effigy in New York and Philadelphia. He was called a traitor to his race. His old colleague Samuel Cornish later compared him to Benedict Arnold. When Russwurm announced that he had accepted a position in Monrovia as superintendent of schools, many believed he had been bought out. William Lloyd Garrison wrote, in The Liberator: “If his vanity had not been superior to his judgment, and his love of distinction greater than his regard for consistency, he would never have been seduced away to Liberia.”15

  Russwurm had first arrived in Monrovia in 1829 and came into almost immediate conflict with its white governor—it galled him to have a white man over a black colony in Africa. He founded the colony’s first newspaper—the Liberian Herald—and used it to promote black pride and independence, and had also served as colonial secretary. He entered business partnerships with several successful merchants, including the Methodist minister George McGill from Baltimore, whose daughter he married in 1833. With his seemingly inexhaustible energy, Russwurm became a partner and friend of Dr. James Hall—before Hall’s appointment as the first governor of Maryland in Liberia. In time, Hall—who was also a graduate of Bowdoin—became one of Russwurm’s closest friends and supporters. In turn, Russwurm named one of his sons James Hall.16

  Years later, the white physician provided an intimate and perceptive description of his friend. Russwurm, Hall said, was a tall man who carried himself in a dignified and gentlemanly manner. He had large eyes that were keen and penetrating. He had a good mind and was able to quickly judge the character of those around him. But Hall also thought his friend “was exceedingly sensitive, amounting even to jealousy, and having once lost confidence in a person, he seldom, if ever, re-acquired it.” He was reserved, and, like many blacks, he did not, for good reason, reveal much of himself to whites—a reserve he also began to show toward blacks after being attacked so fiercely in New York. Hall found him, however, to be not only reserved but also sensitive about his status as “a colored man.” He was particularly ready to take offense at anything said by a white. It required, Hall wrote, “the greatest delicacy in the choice of words to render even praise acceptable to him, when coming from a white man.” Hall thought that few blacks had suffered so much from such causes.17

  It was this brilliant, proud, and often conflicted man—who knew not only the deep indignities of American racism but also the hostility of many black Americans—who followed Holmes as governor and agent at Cape Palmas. And when he arrived at Harper in September 1836, he found at Fair Hope, on the outskirts of the settlement, a white missionary couple from South Carolina and Georgia.18

  DURING THE MONTHS after his arrival at Cape Palmas, Russwurm discovered that the colony was facing a severe food shortage. Irregular rains had reduced the size of Big Town’s rice crop. And the little gardens and farms of the settlers—often neglected for more profitable trade or lumbering—were not adequate to meet the needs of the colony. The Grebo, knowing the settlers’ dependence on Grebo rice, cassava, and palm oil, had raised their prices dramatically, reducing some settlers to great want and distress. To add to their difficulties, ships were regularly arriving from Baltimore with new emigrants—but few supplies. Russwurm was distraught. Echoing Leighton’s report to the Maryland board in the summer of 1836, Russwurm wrote that the emigrants had received extravagant promises in Maryland about what awaited them and had not been told “the dark as well as the bright side of the picture.” When they arrived and found the hard realities of colonial life, they complained bitterly to Russwurm, demanding that their needs be supplied out of the fast dwindling resources of the colonial store. The fever also struck them hard—shortly after the arrival of one ship with eighty-three immigrants, ten of their children died. A number of despairing families turned to Fair Hope for help, and Leighton and Jane were besieged with requests for food and supplies.19

  The mission at Fair Hope, however, was soon facing its own difficulties. Leighton received word in December 1837 that a financial panic, fueled in large measure by land speculation in the West and a banking crisis, had hit the United States. Supporters of the mission movement, now worried about their own finances, had cut back on their contributions to the American Board. In addition, the Presbyterian church, one of th
e primary supporters of the board, was in the midst of a bitter division between those who called themselves “Old School” and those who were known as “New School.” A leader of the Old School was none other than Jane’s cousin Charles Hodge at Princeton. And among the things he was advocating was the establishment of a Presbyterian board of foreign missions. Instead of the ecumenical American Board, governed by an independently elected board, the denomination, he said, needed its own board under the authority of the church’s General Assembly. The church had split in 1837, leaving only the New School faction supporting the American Board. This had meant another sharp reduction in funds flowing to the board’s offices in Boston.20

  For all of these reasons, Leighton had to cancel plans for establishing schools in surrounding villages, and he and Jane were forced to reduce the number of boarding students at Fair Hope. They accepted the necessity of cutting back, but Leighton wrote Anderson that if they were required to make more cuts in their work, “we would be almost tempted to resemble ourselves to a parent in the act of strangling his own offspring.”21

  WHEN RUSSWURM HAD been appointed governor at Cape Palmas, Leighton had written him a letter of congratulation. He also wrote to Latrobe to say that he approved of the appointment—not that his approval was needed, but Leighton had apparently thought that it would be an encouragement to Latrobe to hear positive reactions from someone who was living at the Cape and not making decisions in far-off Baltimore.22

  During the first months following Russwurm’s arrival, Russwurm and Leighton developed a relationship of mutual respect. But having a black governor was clearly a new situation for Leighton. For some years, Leighton had been pushing himself, trying to move beyond the degrading stereotypes that whites had of Africans and their far-flung descendants. Many of his letters and reports to America were intended to challenge such stereotypes. His experiences with Freeman, Ballah, and William Davis had given him a deep respect for them along with other Grebo. More recently, he and James had established an immediate rapport with one another. The New York printer had written Anderson shortly after his recovery from the fever: “To dear Brother Wilson and wife I shall ever feel deeply indebted for their unvaried kindness and attention during my sickness and affliction. Their cordial feelings and friendly advice have very strongly endeared them to me.”23