But for all of his struggles to overcome in his own heart and mind the racism of American society, Leighton could not fully overcome the world of deep assumptions that roamed far down in his memory. All of his earliest recollections of Pine Grove and Boggy Gully, all of his experiences in New York, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts, all that he had seen in Charleston and Savannah and Fair Hope plantation, had taught him that whites were to be ultimately in charge. So when Russwurm had been appointed governor, Leighton had written Anderson that, while he thought the appointment to be “judicious,” he nonetheless felt “it quite a revolution in affairs that brings us under a black government.” 24
For his part, Russwurm had no doubts about the deeply bred racism of whites. His conviction, after all, about the pervasiveness of American racism had been a primary reason for his emigration to Liberia, where he hoped the burden of race could be lifted. And now, as governor at Harper, he found an influential white man at the Fair Hope mission station—it must have seemed that he was unable to escape even in Africa the oppressive presence of whites.
Leighton and Russwurm, though cordial enough toward one another, consequently found it impossible to establish a relationship of trust. Leighton wrote to Anderson that the reserved Russwurm “keeps quite at a distance from us and watches with a very suspicious eye—why I do not well know for no one has desired his administration to be successful more than I have.” Leighton was experiencing what many well-meaning whites had learned, to their dismay—that many African Americans felt guarded around whites. It was dangerous for them to forget the power or the deep racial assumptions that lingered in even well-intended white minds.25
The governor, however, had other, more immediate concerns than Leighton and Fair Hope during his first year in office. Tensions intensified as supplies in the colony shrank—even as new immigrants arrived—and the price of Grebo rice continued to soar. The colonists, Russwurm wrote Latrobe, were “too dependent upon the natives for almost every kind of labor” and were not producing adequate supplies for themselves. And, he added, a number of colonists were longing to return to America. The idea, he said, “that we cannot do without ‘the fleshpots of the Egyptians’ is too firmly fixed in their minds.”26
The settlers, for their part, were dismayed by their difficulty in obtaining rice and by the pilfering of the Grebo, which seemed to have no end. As tensions grew between the settlers and the Grebo, the settlers increasingly thought of the Grebo as “savages” and regarded them with growing hostility. Rather than identifying with the Grebo as African brothers and sisters, the settlers clearly regarded themselves as Americans, as a people distinct from the Africans around them. They were arriving by a different route at the same conclusion that abolitionists were coming to and that those who rejected the idea of colonization had been saying for some time—that African Americans were fundamentally Americans and not Africans. The settlers wanted to maintain this American identity, which was rooted in Western civilization and which built upon the skills and culture of the West—especially an ability to read. Their privileged position at the Cape in relationship to the Grebo was built on the power that flowed from Western culture. One leading settler wrote Latrobe that he was afraid that before the settlers could get a good school, the Grebo would be educated by the mission school, and “the natives would become our equals, and even surpass our youth in literary requirements.” He insisted that the education of the Grebo was a cause of constant concern among the colonists. In regard to the Grebo, he thought the colony should adopt the opinion “of residents of the Southern States in relation to their blacks—‘they had better remain in a happy state of ignorance.’”27
The settlers, of course, differed from the abolitionists and other opponents of colonization in that they thought they could practice their American culture more fully and completely in Liberia than in the United States with its powerful racism. The bitter irony was that the colony, as an extension of the United States, brought with it its own peculiar form of American racism in the settlers’ disdain of the Grebo.28
In late 1836, the rising tensions between the settlers and the Grebo erupted. Someone broke into the colony’s storehouse and stole some trade goods. The colonial authorities promptly arrested an old man, a much venerated leader among the Grebo, and put him in jail. The Grebo were enraged and determined to free the man and take revenge on the colonists.
A few days later, the authorities learned that a young boy was the real culprit. They went to arrest him, but this time the Grebo were ready. They chased after the arresting officers and a number of settlers, who all ran to Fair Hope, scrambled over the fence, and found refuge in the mission house. Four or five hundred armed Grebo with blasting war horns and ringing bells arrived at the gate of the mission, where Leighton had placed himself to meet them. Standing in the midst of the Grebo, Leighton found that “not one single individual offered the least disrespect.” Leighton convinced them to sit and wait while he went to meet with Russwurm and Freeman.29
Leaving Jane to wait alone with those outside the gate, Leighton went into Harper, where Russwurm and Freeman joined him. Leighton asked the governor to release the old man to Freeman’s care, and Russwurm agreed. Leighton, now joined by the king’s brother William Davis, went into Big Town and arranged a palaver for the next day. When the palaver was announced, the Grebo at Fair Hope returned to Big Town, while more settlers came to the mission seeking refuge until the matter was settled.
The next day at the palaver Freeman was clearly furious at Russwurm. Freeman told him he should not remain at Cape Palmas—Russwurm later wrote that Freeman “has thrown it in my teeth that I am not a proper man for Governor—meaning that I am not a proper white man.” The king consequently addressed Leighton—who found himself caught in the middle of the dispute—and not Russwurm, and Leighton had to use all the influence he had to get Freeman to give Russwurm a fair hearing. Russwurm, speaking through Leighton, said that the two people could live peacefully if the pilfering stopped. So the accusations and negotiations proceeded, with Leighton acting as a mediator, until an agreement was reached that satisfied the Grebo and the crisis came to an end.30
Russwurm was grateful to Leighton for his intervention. He wrote Latrobe that Leighton had played an important role in settling the dispute and that Jane had acted with equally commendable zeal. Leighton hoped that good might come of the confrontation. “There is a melancholy disposition,” he told the American Board, “among the greater part of the Americans when set down in this country to be overbearing and to treat the natives as an inferior race of beings. This affair will teach them to respect their rights and to treat them with more kindness and decorum.”31
ALTHOUGH THE GOVERNOR and the missionary were thus cordial to one another, and had acted together in defusing a crisis with the Grebo, they were soon to find that Cape Palmas was not large enough for both of them. They had brought across the Atlantic competing memories and visions that made the Cape contested ground. Russwurm remembered his struggles as a black man at Bowdoin; Leighton remembered Pine Grove and Boggy Gully. The governor remembered being burned in effigy by angry blacks because of his decision to go to Liberia; the missionary remembered the enthusiastic send-off he and Jane had received in Philadelphia. Russwurm envisioned Harper as a refuge from American racism and as a center for a proud new African American nation. Leighton envisioned Fair Hope as one of several launching spots for the conversion of Africa to the Christian faith and as a school to raise up indigenous leaders to accomplish that conversion. Both men brought strong wills and deep commitments to their respective visions. The consequence was conflict and the eventual abandonment of Fair Hope.
NOT LONG AFTER the palaver, Charles Snetter came to live and work at Fair Hope. He had been a thorn in Russwurm’s side—he was strong-willed, popular with the settlers, and not above challenging the authority of the governor. The governor—worried that Snetter would become an agitator appealing to the passions and prejudices of the peopl
e—had removed him from his position as storekeeper. Certainly the dark-skinned former Charleston barber identified more closely with the settlers and their experiences than with the light-skinned, highly educated Russwurm. Snetter spoke the language of the settlers, Russwurm the language of a Bowdoin graduate. Russwurm’s remarkable achievements and his deep internalization of Western culture had made him not only a favorite of the colonization board in Baltimore, but also a man well-prepared to challenge a pervasive white racism. But these achievements, and his internalized values and class assumptions, had a tendency to distance him from the very people to whom he was so deeply committed. He thought of the settlers as “ignorant and prejudiced,” worried about their morals, and thought many of them ill-prepared for the responsibilities of colonists. He consequently tended to be autocratic—a trait the board in Baltimore thought of as firm and decisive. But critics later complained that the colony was “a large plantation [with its] governor acting as an overseer.”32
Leighton had a house built at Fair Hope for Snetter’s family. He employed Snetter to run the mission’s secular affairs and hired his wife as a schoolteacher. Leighton had high hopes for Snetter. He proposed to the American Board that Snetter, although lacking formal education, could be prepared as a doctor for the mission. Dr. Savage had agreed to be his mentor, and Leighton hoped the board would agree to bring Snetter, after his apprenticeship with Savage, to New England to study for a year or two in a medical school there.33
Russwurm was understandably unhappy with Snetter’s remaining at the Cape, for he represented the most serious challenge to his leadership. In this way, Leighton’s long friendship with Snetter—reaching back to their days together in Charleston at the Circular Church—and his employment of Snetter became points of tension between the governor and the missionary.
The growing antagonism between Leighton and Russwurm broke into the open when one of Pedro Blanco’s slave ships came limping into the harbor at Cape Palmas in April 1837. The ship had been trading along the coast, purchasing rice to provision a cargo of slaves. When Russwurm allowed the ship to stay in the harbor—and also allowed settlers to work on the ship, and its captain to buy supplies from the colony’s store—Leighton became furious. On visits to Monrovia, he had learned that Russwurm, while still living in Monrovia, had sold a ship to Blanco, and that he had regularly supplied the slaver with provisions—essential food needed for the transatlantic passage of a slave ship. Leighton had thought such activities would cease when Russwurm became governor at Harper, but now, by letting the slave ship load provisions at Cape Palmas for a cargo of slaves, Leighton concluded, Russwurm was deliberately aiding the international slave trade. He wrote Rufus Anderson in Boston that the governor had “prostituted the character of the colony by rendering himself and the settlers accessory to this odious and nefarious traffic.” He and Dr. Savage protested vigorously, but Russwurm ignored them. The two missionaries wrote Latrobe about the affair, warning that if such cooperation with slavers was not stopped, and Russwurm rebuked, they would not be able to keep quiet about what was happening in the colony.34
Differences between the governor and Leighton were also exacerbated by the presence of African American teachers connected with the mission. Russwurm complained to Latrobe that Leighton was hiring some of the most gifted settlers from Harper to work at the mission, drawing them away from work that might more directly benefit the colony. Latrobe wrote Leighton about the matter, and Leighton replied that the original agreement with the Grebo had stipulated that the mission would provide schools for the Grebo, and that the mission had spent considerable time and money educating those settlers who were now serving as teachers. Leighton agreed, however, that he would hire no more settlers as new teachers. Instead he would hire native Africans, Fanti who had been educated at Cape Coast by British missionaries.35
But this accord did not put an end to the tensions between Russwurm and Leighton. Russwurm insisted that the teachers should participate in the colonial militia. “My own opinion,” Russwurm wrote to Latrobe, “is that all colored persons in the colony should perform public duties unless expressly sent out by the missionary society as preachers or teachers.”36
Leighton insisted, however, that those who were teaching Grebo children could not be part of a militia organized to fight the Grebo. Teachers marching back and forth with the militia would make them look like the enemy of those they were seeking to serve. Furthermore—and this infuriated Russwurm—Leighton regarded the colony as a project of an American benevolent society, one among many such societies. One benevolent society could not impose conditions on the work of another, especially when it had been insisted from the first that the mission at Fair Hope was independent from the colony.
Leighton’s stance presented a direct challenge to the colonial authorities, to the Maryland Colonization Society, and to their premise that Maryland in Liberia was a legitimate state. But Leighton was adamant—how, he wondered, could a group of men in Baltimore organize themselves into a benevolent society and then pretend they had the authority to establish a nation at Cape Palmas?
When one of the teachers was fined for not participating in the militia, Leighton sent an angry note to Russwurm and raised an American flag at Fair Hope to emphasize the mission’s independence. Leighton immediately regretted the tone of his note, which called into question the governor’s authority in the matter. He sent an apology the same day, but the damage was done. Russwurm was deeply offended. Although the missionary and the governor would find themselves having to cooperate with one another in the future, their relationship became one of mutual antagonism. They consequently referred the issue of militia participation to their respective boards.37
BACK IN THE United States, Anderson and Latrobe tried to defuse the growing antagonism between the governor and the missionary. The leader of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the leader of the Maryland Colonization Society’s board of directors believed that it was in the best interest of each organization for their agents to work in cooperation and harmony. The different objectives of their respective societies, they believed, could be best promoted through collaboration. At first, however, Anderson sided with Leighton, telling Latrobe that it was a great question how far one incorporated benevolent society could assume jurisdiction over the agents of another society. But when Latrobe insisted that Maryland in Liberia was a state with authority over all who lived within its borders, Anderson backed off. He agreed that, just as any foreigner living in Maryland was under the civil authorities of Maryland, so any nonsettler living in Maryland in Liberia was under the jurisdiction of its civil authorities. So Anderson and Latrobe agreed that Leighton and Jane, the printer James, and the teachers at Fair Hope were to be under the lawfully established authority of the colony.38
In his correspondence with Latrobe, Anderson also took up the question of Leighton’s angry note to Russwurm—Latrobe had sent him a copy. Trying to respond in a diplomatic and delicate way, Anderson wrote asking Latrobe to be patient with Leighton. “You will understand me, however, when I suggest, in respect to the whole matter of jurisdiction, while the governors of your colony are colored men, and our missionaries are Southern men, that while all necessary care is taken to preserve the principle of right (which ought not to be conceded by your agent)[,] difficulties which may arise, and which threaten to be serious, should, as far as may be, referred for settlement to the societies at home. I wish such a reference may never again be necessary.” In his polite but convoluted manner, Anderson was saying that African American governors and white Southern missionaries were going to clash, and that when serious differences arose, it was best to have the two white executives—one in Boston, the other in Baltimore—decide the issues.39
Whether Leighton learned of this comment by the Bostonian is unknown. But he almost certainly would have regarded such a comment as patronizing and a betrayal of his trust. Leighton accepted Anderson’s rebuke for the angry tone of his note t
o Russwurm, but he no doubt would have been deeply offended by the white Bostonian’s remark to the leader of Maryland’s efforts to rid the state of free blacks—as if Anderson and Latrobe had somehow freed themselves, in contrast to the Southerner Leighton, of any racial prejudice. Russwurm—given his long experience with patronizing whites—would no doubt have found little that was surprising in Anderson’s remarks.40
When Leighton was informed of Anderson’s position that the mission was under the jurisdiction of the colony, he protested vigorously. Maryland in Liberia was not, he noted, recognized by the United States, Britain, or any other government in the world as an independent state. Moreover, Leighton warned Anderson, the Grebo, in their original agreement with the Maryland Colonization Society, had specifically refused to yield any of their independence to the colonial authorities. Maryland in Liberia, Leighton insisted, was an imperial incursion into West Africa, and the Grebo were facing the same assaults on their independence that other indigenous peoples were facing when confronted by colonists backed by Western military and cultural power. He compared the Grebo to the Cherokees in Georgia, noting how the American Board and its missionaries had denied the right of Georgia to extend its authority over them. Did the American Board not have the same responsibility, he asked, to deny the right of the Maryland Colonization Society to exert its authority over the Grebo? In all of this Leighton was utilizing arguments that abolitionists had been hurling at colonization projects. William Lloyd Garrison had been using the bitter example of the Cherokees to denounce colonization as a scheme rooted in racism. When the little colony at Cape Palmas was being established, abolitionists in Boston had called it a “scheme in cruelty and oppression.” British abolitionists were not only organizing for “Aborigines’ Rights” but had been waging a furious campaign against the intrusion of white settlers in South Africa into the lands of indigenous people. Leighton was soon to find that the abolitionists would be utilizing his reports of what was happening at Cape Palmas as a part of their anticolonization campaign. The mission’s relationship to colonial authorities was consequently far from resolved.41
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