RUSSWURM HAD TO contend not only with a meddling missionary, but also with restless settlers who were frequently angry about his decisions and unhappy about what they perceived to be his autocratic ways. An explosive confrontation between the governor and the colonists took place in the summer of 1837. And the person who most directly challenged Russwurm was Charles Snetter.
The brig Baltimore arrived at the Cape on July 4, 1837, with a passenger whose brief experience in Harper would ignite the fury of the settlers against Russwurm and his father-in-law, George McGill. The passenger—a fourteen-year-old boy—had been discovered after the Baltimore had left port and was considered a runaway slave. The ship’s captain was determined to return him to Maryland in order to avoid a heavy fine and possible criminal prosecution. While the brig was anchored in the harbor, the boy—with the help of a settler—managed to escape the ship. He “ventured his life for his freedom,” a settler later wrote, in order to make it through the surf to shore. When the captain discovered that the boy had escaped, he came on shore looking for him. George McGill provided the captain with help, and the boy was captured.42
Charles Snetter, hearing the commotion when the boy was taken, tried to intercede with the captain, but to no avail. He appealed to McGill, the vice agent, but was dismissed as meddling. Standing with other settlers, Snetter wept as he watched the boy being carried back to the ship and slavery. The next day, Snetter wrote Latrobe. McGill, he said, had laughed at him for “his weakness” in protesting and weeping over the return of the young boy to the ship. “Never did I see a captive runaway in Custody since I left America untill I seen it in this colony,” Snetter said. He wondered if this action meant that any slaver could come to Harper and capture settlers or Grebo and carry them off. He reminded Latrobe that the colony’s constitution said there was to be no slavery in the colony, and he warned that he would not remain in the colony if such practices were allowed to continue.43
Snetter had strong settler sympathies on his side—a crowd had been with him when he pleaded that the boy not be returned. But Russwurm supported McGill, and they both thought of Snetter as a dangerous rabble rouser who had stirred up the settlers over an affair that was none of their business. And so they paid no attention to his protests and became even more determined to limit his influence among the colonists.44
Snetter’s work at Fair Hope, however, also complicated matters. Leighton was in the midst of insisting that Fair Hope was separate from the colony, and he didn’t want to add unnecessary fuel to his controversy with Russwurm. So he accepted without protest the return of the boy to the ship, and he wrote Latrobe and expressed his regret that an employee of the mission had become involved in a colonial issue. But only a few months earlier, he had protested vigorously when Russwurm had allowed the repair and resupplying of Pedro Blanco’s slave ship. Perhaps a Maryland runaway came too close to his memories of Boggy Gully or Fair Hope plantation, to old Jacob the cook at Pine Grove, or Paul the carpenter in Savannah. Or maybe he reasoned that the international slave trade was illegal, but slavery in Maryland was not. For whatever reason, Leighton thought he could protest a slave ship being provisioned at Cape Palmas, but not the return of a boy on the run from slavery in Maryland.45
Leighton didn’t know it at the time, but he was making an ominous distinction. The difference between his reaction to the Baltimore runaway and his reaction to the slavers traveling the Liberian coast must have seemed hypocritical not only to Russwurm and McGill but also to Snetter. But if Leighton was aware of the distinctions he was making—and his reasons for making the distinctions—he did not acknowledge these distinctions in his letters home.
A few months later, when Leighton was in Monrovia, he saw settlers engaged in extensive business dealings with six slave ships that visited the port for provisions. Fearing that Cape Palmas faced the same danger, he wrote Anderson that if the hopes of colonization societies were realized, it would be a disaster for Africa. Unless the Liberian colonies refused to support the international slave trade in any way, he said, Mother Africa “can never rejoice at the recovery of her lost and stolen children.”46
But when Leighton looked at the relationship between the settlers and the indigenous people, he wondered if the colonies would themselves become slaveholding countries. He noted a proposal before the colonial assembly in Monrovia that would establish a fourteen-year apprenticeship for Africans, which he thought was a disguised attempt to establish slavery in the colony. He feared that whites in the colonization societies were “constructing a machine with their own hands that is destined only to scatter fire brands and death among the inhabitants of unhappy Africa.”47
RUSSWURM FOUND ALL of Leighton’s concerns about the international slave trade simply an example of another arrogant white trying to tell black Americans how to act. When Leighton had protested the provisioning of the slave ship, the governor had written his predecessor, Oliver Holmes, about Leighton’s meddling in colonial affairs. Russwurm told the white Baltimore dentist—who was eager to hear the worst about Leighton—that the ship had been none of the missionary’s business. It was his firm belief, Russwurm continued, that if the meddling didn’t stop, colonial governors would have to deal with issues that distracted them from their primary responsibilities of governing. As governor, he said, he already had “to contend against the ignorance and prejudice of the colonists and these are enough for any one individual.”48
Chapter Nine
The Bitter Cost of Freedom
Nicholas Bayard had received letters from Jane and Leighton in late 1836 asking him to make the final arrangements for the emancipation of their slaves. The letters had taken almost five months to make their way from Cape Palmas to Savannah, but Nicholas was very glad to receive them, for he was eager to bring the intentions of his sisters and their husbands to completion. He had discovered years earlier, while trying to develop the General’s Island plantation, that the management of a plantation was no easy matter. And more recently he had been finding the management of his sisters’ slaves to be burdensome even in Savannah and on nearby Hutchinson Island—shoes and clothing had to be provided; corn, pork, and other provisions had to be purchased; accounts had to be kept; doctors had to be summoned; and many small details of slave life seemed to need constant attention. As a banker preoccupied with what would become the financial crisis of 1837, he was ready to free himself of responsibilities for Paul and Charles and Charlotte and all those who lived in the settlement across the flowing waters of the Savannah.1
Nicholas wrote immediately to Latrobe asking about “all the privileges and inducements extended by your society to emigrants.” He wanted the details before he talked to those in the settlement, for he anticipated that some who lived there would be reluctant to leave Savannah for what he called “the blessings of freedom and colonization.” Moreover, the Hutchinson Island plantation itself needed to be sold immediately. Restrictions, Nicholas wrote, had been placed on the property in 1818. His father had entered a contract with the Savannah authorities that required him to abandon the rice fields with their regular flooding and draining. The authorities wanted to reduce the fever-causing miasmas that rose from any rice fields near the city, so Dr. Bayard had agreed to grow only “dry crops” on the land and to maintain the dams to keep out the tide. Now, in 1836, if the people in the settlement were suddenly removed, there was a real danger the land would be flooded and a heavy penalty incurred. Already there had been difficulty with the city authorities. Some years earlier, an inspector had found the plantation badly neglected when most of the people had been moved to General’s Island—the dams of the old rice fields had been washing away, trunks regulating the flow of water were missing gates, and in many spots nothing prevented the ebb and flow of the tide. Alarmed that “noxious vapours” might arise from such neglected fields, the city had insisted on extensive work, and it had to be done in order for the estate to avoid a heavy fine. So Nicholas felt he could not proceed with the emancipation u
ntil the plantation was sold and he was freed from the responsibility of maintaining the dry culture of the island.2
In early 1837, Nicholas was finally ready to visit the settlement and tell those who were known as Bayard slaves about the plans for their emancipation. He had made the trip across the river to the island many times—to check on crops or the sick, to visit in the settlement, or talk with an overseer—but the familiar trip must have caused some anxiety for him every time, as he spent most of his days behind a desk. To get to the island, first he had to make his way carefully down the steep cobblestone dray-ways from the Savannah bluff to the waterfront, where a boatman would be waiting with his bateau—what the Gullah called a “Trus-me-Gawds.” Nicholas would climb in, seat himself as the little boat was held in place against the lapping waters, hold on as the boatman pushed from shore—and trust in God that they would not be flipped suddenly into the river. With only the thin planks of the bateau between him and the dark waters, he must have felt the river’s closeness and the power of its deep currents and its flowing tide. He knew only too well that the Savannah had claimed many victims, for some from the settlement had been caught by its waters. Now, in February of 1837, as the little boat moved out into the river and toward the island, Nicholas could see, through a small copse of winter woods, the settlement where the people were waiting.3
The slaves had gathered in the open space before the cabins. Here, over the years, in this communal space, fires had burned, food had been prepared and eaten, stories had been told, songs had been sung, and things had been said that could only be said in secret away from the ears of whites. Nicholas greeted them and then told them of the plans for their emancipation. He read letters from Jane and Leighton describing the colony at Cape Palmas and the Grebo people among whom they lived. Nicholas told them they were not to be forced to go to Africa—if they wished, they could go to a free state in the North and begin a new life there. But they could not be emancipated and remain in Georgia; the state’s laws would not allow it. The decision was to be theirs.4
In this way, the slaves of Hutchinson Island finally learned what these missionary owners had planned for them and what options were being placed before them. Paul and his father, Charles, and his sister, Charlotte; Old Adam and young Clarissa; the driver, John, and the plowman, William; and all the others—they who had known so few options in their lives—were now being asked to make a choice. Each of them and all of them together had had to struggle under the weight of slavery’s chains to find some small space to move around on their own and to make decisions that mattered in their own lives. And now they were being told they must decide about their own future. So they stood there before Nicholas, these black men and women, these Gullah people, and out of the experiences and circumstances of their individual lives and their life together they listened to Nicholas tell them about the choices they had to make. Some were old and enfeebled, some were young and strong, some were mothers with children in their arms, some were women who had husbands on other plantations or in the city, some were men with wives and children who—owned by others—would be left behind if their men chose freedom. As Nicholas laid out for them the choices they had to make, they knew only too well that even now, even the option to decide, even the opportunity for freedom, carried the deep sorrows of their history and revealed once again the pervasive, entangled oppression of their slavery. Nicholas told them they did not have to decide immediately—the plantation with their settlement home would first need to be sold, and they had time to consider their options. So their time of deciding, of choosing, began, there in the settlement where the waters of the Savannah murmured close by and white-bodied seagulls and terns called wildly to one another and flew back and forth above the river waters.5
NICHOLAS WAS UNSUCCESSFUL in his attempt to sell the Hutchinson Island plantation—real-estate values had plummeted because of the financial crisis, and he could find no buyer for the valuable riverfront property. He consequently decided to move ahead with the emancipation plans and to hire enough slaves to keep up the place and maintain its old rice dams and gates so that the land would be dry, free from noxious miasmas, and not liable to costly fines from the city authorities. In late October 1837, he wrote the Maryland Colonization Society board that he anticipated that most of the Bayard slaves would embark for Cape Palmas early in the next year.6
Some of the slaves were still struggling with their decision—Should they claim their emancipation and go to West Africa or to one of the Northern states, or should they remain in Savannah with their families in slavery? Isaac had a wife on an adjoining plantation. Juba was the mother of five-year-old Grace and the infant Hosa. Her husband, Renty, the children’s father, lived on a nearby plantation. Jack, the son of carpenter Jack who had been Paul’s teacher, had a wife on another plantation. And Paul himself—he had a wife and children in the city. They all had to struggle not only with their own conflicted feelings but also with what they were being told by family and others—that it was folly and madness to leave Savannah for the treacherous shores of Africa.7
For Paul, the struggle was apparently intense. On the one hand, he was deeply drawn to freedom. As a carpenter moving around the city, he had tasted a little freedom, and that taste had made the bitterness of slavery unbearable. On the other hand, he was deeply attached to his wife and children. In spite of his hard work as a carpenter and what he had earned for the Bayard estate, he did not have the money to purchase his own family. Moreover, Savannah itself was his home—he knew its streets and alleys and the sounds of the city and the peculiar feel of the wind as it blew inland over marshes and riverbanks. He knew by name many of its people—black and white—and how ships sailed proudly from its wharfs and how parks and gardens provided delight to the eye and relief from the sun. This space, this particular place among the places inhabited on the earth, was where he had been shaped as a man, a black man among the Gullah-speaking people of the Georgia Lowcountry. But what Paul also knew was that Savannah was a place of slavery and that Cape Palmas promised to be a place of freedom. So he chose to take the risk of freedom and go to his rightful inheritance. He chose freedom, but his choice was not free of history. His choice was the choice of a particular black man in Savannah who bore the physical marks of his people, who carried in the details of his life the larger story of what black men and women had experienced in America, and who consequently had to choose between the narrow and bitter options offered him as a black man. But he claimed what freedom he had and he chose Cape Palmas. And he told his wife and children that he would do all that he could as a free man in Africa to gain their freedom and bring them out to join him in his new home.8
NICHOLAS NOW MOVED rapidly to make the final arrangements with the Maryland board. He sent a check to cover the expenses of the transport of the freed slaves from Baltimore to Harper and enough funds to purchase supplies to last them for six months after their arrival. He purchased clothes and shoes for the emigrants in Savannah, provided them with bedding and other household goods, and had Paul make chests out of white pine boards, so that all of the people would have a way to carry their personal belongings. He booked passage for them on the brig Opelousas to carry them in April from Savannah to Baltimore. But as the time approached, Nicholas worried that some would not go. “Efforts have been made,” he wrote the Maryland board, “and are still making by the acquaintances (both white and coloured) of these servants to prevent their embarking: with no success as yet that I know of, but the point cannot be fully tested till the last moment.” In the end, all but two adults decided to go—Old Toby, who was sick, and Old Lucy, who was blind. Old Toby soon died, and Old Lucy lived out her last days in the quarters behind Nicholas’s town home. The rest decided that they were finally strangers, foreigners on Hutchinson Island, who yearned for a homeland where they would be free.9
WHILE THOSE IN the settlement were making their decisions, and beginning to gather and pack their few possessions and the supplies Nicholas purchased, Le
ighton and Jane were becoming increasingly anxious—had they made a terrible decision when they had written Nicholas, encouraging the people of the settlement to join the colonists at Cape Palmas? When they had written the letter, they had thought that Maryland in Liberia was a promising colony. Now, in early 1838, with conditions in the colony rapidly deteriorating, and with their growing antagonism toward Russwurm and their deep doubts about his leadership, they wondered—Were they encouraging people to risk their lives in a floundering little colony with little promise? Moreover, they were becoming increasingly convinced that the colonization of African Americans was at its heart imperialistic. Leighton wrote Rufus Anderson in February 1838 about the impending emancipation and emigration: “We are not elated at the idea of them coming to this country, for we regard the colonization cause as a very doubtful one—yet as it is their choice, and as almost anything is better than indefinite slavery, we do not presume to control their choice.” But Leighton had concluded that “if the Dutch Boors and English settlers in South Africa have oppressed and injured the Kaffers and Hottentots, then you may expect the American colonists to carry on the work of oppression here as soon as their numerical strength would warrant, with tenfold fury.”10
By the Rivers of Water Page 21