At the same time, Leighton asked Anderson about the two young slaves Leighton had himself inherited. Could they be sent to Boston? Perhaps John, the older of the two, might be apprenticed as a bookbinder or trained in some other mechanical art, with the hope that he might join the mission someday. Thinking Jessie a girl, he asked if some woman in Boston might receive her and educate her. “My only desire,” he noted, “is that she may be educated and set free where she would be happy and respectable.” And he added, “I know nothing at all about this child,” which was obviously true, since Jesse was a little boy. Leighton wrote his father at Pine Grove, telling him what he had written Anderson, and asked him to do what was necessary to have the children sent to Boston. But, he said, “I wish it distinctly understood however that neither of the children are to be removed without both their own and their mother’s consent.”11
Meanwhile, conditions in the colony continued to deteriorate. With food supplies greatly reduced, Russwurm asked Freeman in February 1838 to join him on a visit to the bush to see if provisions could be purchased directly from the interior towns, with their extensive rice fields. With a few other settlers and Big Town Grebo, they hiked to Grand Cavally, King Baphro’s town, where they were strongly advised not to try to go up the river. The river Grebo were jealous of their trading privileges with the interior and did not want any competition from Harper or Big Town. Ignoring the advice, the travelers took canoes and headed up the river. They were soon attacked, robbed of all their possessions, stripped of all their clothes, and sent walking back completely naked and humiliated. The whole affair seemed to Leighton but another example of Russwurm’s poor judgment and lack of leadership. The year before, Leighton and William Davis had made a trip up the Cavally and had met no hostility from the river Grebo. Russwurm’s river fiasco, along with the continuing feud over missionary personnel being required to serve in the colonial militia, was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Leighton and Jane. In April 1838, Leighton wrote Nicholas not to send the people to Liberia.12
Leighton wrote that he hoped the letter reached Nicholas before the people left Georgia. He assured his brother-in-law that the letter would not have been sent without the weightiest reasons. “Since the election of a colored man to the office of governor of this Colony,” Leighton wrote, “and another for Liberia proper, the progress of colonization has been in a rapid and fearful decline; and I look upon it at this moment as on the verge of ruinous precipice.” He and Jane had become convinced that “colonization as conducted at present is little else than a system of iniquity and oppression.” He thought the colonists at Harper had become idle, vicious, and turbulent, and that they would soon starve to death unless they began to plunder and rob the Grebo. Indeed, he thought such an event probable unless the Grebo united and overwhelmed the colony. He noted that those who had arrived on a recent ship did not have adequate supplies, and that many of them had, according to the colonial physician, died from want of food. Leighton believed “the chief part, if not the whole of these evils, have arisen from the mismanagement and want of principle” on the part of Russwurm. And, he added, “the time has been when I felt that anything was better than unconditional Slavery: but I would now change the tone and say that anything is better than Colonization.” He was confident that many colonists, if given the chance, would return to the United States, and he was convinced that if the Bayard people came to Harper, “poverty, wretchedness, and discontentment must be their portion.” He and Jane believed that Nicholas would be able to find good alternatives to colonization for the emancipated people. If, however, the letter was too late and the people had already sailed, he and Jane, he assured Nicholas, “shall use our best efforts to place them on the best footing out here.”13
However legitimate Leighton’s fears about the deteriorating conditions in Monrovia and Harper, his almost casual comment—“Since the election of a colored man”—revealed a world of racial assumptions—assumptions he had brought with him from Pine Grove and from Union College in New York and from Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina. However much he had struggled against those assumptions and however much they had been challenged by his time with the printer James, with Freeman and Ballah and William Davis, old voices still spoke out of deep memories. These voices slipped out in casual comments, especially during times of stress, and let it be known that they would not, could not, be easily silenced. When Leighton wrote Nicolas, the old voices spoke their mind and revealed their power to shape what Leighton saw, to evoke what Leighton felt, and to guide what Leighton did.
IN FACT, THE letter arrived in the United States too late by several months. Early on the morning of April 29, 1838, the newly emancipated people from Hutchinson Island gathered on a Savannah wharf, said their painful goodbyes, and boarded the brig Opelousas. Then, when the tide was right and the morning wind was filling the ship’s sails, anchors were raised, and the captain edged the ship into the flowing river. They moved with the current as Paul and the others from the settlement stood on deck. They watched as the city began to fade from sight. Savannah’s tree-lined parks and slave markets, its sturdy warehouses and soaring church steeples, slowly disappeared into the horizon and drifted into their deep memories. Now the travelers looked out over the passing landscape of marshes and unhurried creeks and saw Tybee Island come into view and then the mouth of the river. Before them lay the rolling Atlantic and the hopes of an old dream—to live a life of freedom on the shores of Mother Africa.14
They first spent a week in Baltimore, where for the first time they publicly claimed family names. In Savannah they had had only first names—Paul or Belinda or Jack or Juba, the “servants of” the Bayards. Now they claimed family names and family histories that declared that they were people with their own memories and with their own identities. They listed their names as Adams, Jenkins, and Johnson, as Jackson, Jones, Mumford, and Ward—names that linked them to a more distant past, often to earlier owners who were remembered in secret traditions, and whose names had marked the beginning of an African American family tradition. Paul and his parents and his sister all took the name Sansay, after a white Haitian refugee family in Savannah. No one took the name Bayard, but almost a third took the name McIntosh after the old General. In this way they linked their past and their memories to their future and their hopes as free people.15
They sailed from Baltimore on May 15, 1838, on the schooner Columbia and arrived at Cape Palmas on July 2. There they passed through the crashing surf in Grebo canoes and, for the first time in their lives—after so many years of waiting and yearning—finally felt the African shore beneath their feet. Here at this place, on this African soil at Cape Palmas, they saw before them in the little town of Harper what they had seen only from afar—a homeland and a place of freedom. What awaited them, however, was not only freedom, but also hard times and a long road into a demanding and uncertain future.16
The difficulties they faced became immediately apparent when their supplies were brought off the ship—the pine chests that Paul had made were brought ashore, and their bedding and personal possessions were there, but the supplies that Nicholas had ordered to be purchased in Baltimore were nowhere to be seen. Leighton was furious. He wrote immediately to the Maryland board: “We are utterly at a loss to know what is to become of the new emigrants. The Captain has landed one barrel of cornmeal and says that this is all the bread stuff he has on board for them and Mr. Russwurm has not on hand one of rice that he can spare them nor is there any probability so far as I can see that he will be able to procure any for six weeks to come—besides it is a time of an unparalleled scarcity throughout the colony.” Mr. Bayard had, Leighton said, sent funds to Baltimore for a six-month food supply, but what had arrived was not enough for ten days. Moreover, Leighton wrote, no provisions had been made for them to have materials for the construction of their houses. Leighton told the Maryland authorities that he was going to purchase the necessary provisions and materials from the first ship
that arrived at the Cape. He would give the captain a money order that could be redeemed in Baltimore out of the funds sent by Nicholas. Fortunately—Leighton later regarded it as providential—they had at Fair Hope an extra twenty-five bushels of rice that had been purchased before it had become necessary to reduce the size of the school. Without this, Leighton later wrote Latrobe, “I do not see but they would have suffered extremely.”17
Russwurm was also distraught. In addition to the lack of provisions, he worried about the composition of the immigrants, in particular the mothers with children who had left their husbands behind in slavery. “Can a woman with 2 or 3 children be expected to maintain herself for the first 2 or 3 years in a new country? An acquaintance with people just emancipated knows that it is with the utmost difficulty that males ever can be driven to make the requisite exertion to maintain themselves—how much greater then the difficulty where you have to deal with females without protectors.”18
So in this way, under these demanding circumstances, those who had fled Hutchinson Island began their new life of freedom at Cape Palmas on the West African coast. There were thirty-one of them altogether. At Leighton’s and Jane’s request, they were given land on an island in the slow-flowing Hoffman River immediately north of Harper. Russwurm thought it a poor choice, because it was away from the security of Harper, but the soil was good, and Jane and Leighton evidently thought it wise for the new arrivals to be some distance from what they regarded as the corrupting influences of the older settlers. With Leighton and Jane helping to provide medical attention—they were learning more about how to treat malaria with quinine—the Columbia emigrants were, Russwurm wrote, “highly favored” and suffered relatively little from the fever. Two young children died, but in comparison to those who had come out on other ships, the new emigrants were thought healthy.19
Regardless of what Russwurm, Leighton, and others thought about the indolence of newly freed slaves, Paul and his father, Charles, began immediately to clear their land. Paul was thirty-five and his father sixty-nine, and they showed in their tough hands and strong bodies the hard labor of their years. They had each been allotted five acres, and the work ahead of them was arduous, but they set to work and cut trees and grubbed up stumps with axes and mattocks. With Paul’s mother, Mary, and his sister, Charlotte, they used hoes to turn the land, because they had no mules or oxen to pull plows. And Mary, who was now sixty-six, planted a large garden, just as she had done for so many years on Hutchinson Island. When the building materials that Leighton secured arrived, Paul took them and, using his good skills as a carpenter, began to construct a neat house for himself. Within six months of his arrival, he could write: “I have got my farm partly cleared down and my house twenty by twenty six almost finished.” Later, across the little settlement road from his house, he built another neat house for his parents and sister, who meanwhile lived with him.20
Next to Paul’s five acres, John Johnson—he had been the driver on Hutchinson Island—cleared his land and with his wife, Catherine, also began to plant. And, no doubt with Paul’s help, he, too, built his house, and he and Catherine began to make a new home for themselves. And so it went as others from the old settlement cleared land and began planting. Some of the women took up spinning. And one young boy became an apprentice to a blacksmith. In this way those who had left Hutchinson Island settled on an island in a West African river and named the place Bayard Island, a reminder—like the name Fair Hope—of a remembered past.21
The Savannah immigrants found, however, in their Grebo neighbors other reminders of their past. When Paul and the others heard the Pidgin English of the Grebo, its accents and grammar did not sound strange but familiar to those who were a part of the Gullah people and of a larger Atlantic Creole community. Grebo fetishes were not startling to those who had known the secret charms used in the slave settlements on General’s Island and on the surrounding Lowcountry plantations. Grebo funerals, with their drums and gifts of food, china, and cloth, did not appear peculiar or exotic. Grebo fables and proverbs; Grebo witches and Grebo doctors; Grebo rice, benne seed, and okra; Grebo dancing and Grebo music—all no doubt evoked memories of life in the slave settlements of the Georgia Lowcountry. Yet such familiarity did not mean that Paul and the other Savannah immigrants identified, any more than the earlier settlers had, with the Grebo. For all of their familiarity with some aspects of Grebo life, those who moved from Hutchinson Island to Bayard Island saw themselves as African Americans, and not Grebo.22
TWO WEEKS AFTER their arrival, the Savannah immigrants made the startling discovery that Mother Africa and her returning children were at one another’s throats—open hostilities broke out between the African American settlers and the Grebo. Already tensions had been rising as both sides had been stealing sheep and cattle from one another. In a dispute over a sheep, one settler shot a “bush” Grebo, seriously wounding him. Settlers and Grebo from Big Town gathered at the sound of the shot. The wounded man was carried into Harper for treatment. Tensions rose dramatically.23
The following night, a fire accidentally broke out in Big Town and with strong winds quickly consumed most of the town. Although no lives were lost and many possessions had been saved, the next morning was filled with confusion and much shouting and searching. In the midst of the confusion, a party of “bush” Grebo came to the home of the settler who had shot their kinsman. They killed him, brutally murdered three of his children, and escaped back into the bush.24
Word spread rapidly among the settlers. The militia was called out, led by Charles Snetter. Snetter was regarded as the most competent military leader in the colony, and he quickly led the militia to the edge of town, where the murders had taken place. Some Grebo from Big Town had taken refuge from the fire by running to their farms, and they were now returning. The militia, with no grounds to suspect that the men had anything to do with the murders, fired upon them and bayoneted the men. Two died and another was badly wounded. The Big Town Grebo then came out in force and except for the intervention of Freeman and Russwurm, war seemed inevitable.25
Russwurm acted quickly and decisively to calm the waters, convening a court with a handpicked jury. Although most of the settlers regarded Snetter as a hero, the court found that he had acted in a precipitous way in the confusion and excitement of the moment. They turned the case over to Russwurm for disposition. The governor, who had long regarded Snetter as dangerous, banished him from the colony—he was to leave as soon as he could get his affairs in order. With this action and payments to the Grebo, the tensions seemed to ease.26
Leighton, disillusioned by the actions of his Charleston friend, dismissed Snetter from his work at Fair Hope. Snetter joined the Methodist Church in Harper—where most of the settlers were members—and began preaching an apocalyptic message about war between the settlers and the Grebo and calling upon the settlers to drive out the Grebo, just like the ancient Israelites had driven the Canaanites from the promised land. “Fire! Fire! Fire from heaven!” he shouted as he went around the colony. Settlers flocked to Snetter’s cause. A petition was drawn up denouncing Russwurm and proclaiming that Snetter’s impeding banishment was the “first move to give the lives of our wives and Children into the hands of the Savages around us who thirst for our Blood.” All of the men from Hutchinson Island sided with Snetter and signed the petition except for Paul and his father.27
Russwurm ignored the petition, and when it was posted, he had it removed. “I took no notice of it,” Russwurm wrote, “because the whole proceedings from first to last were riotous and contrary to law.” As for the colonists, he thought “all are ignorant, but those whose lives have been spent on plantations are deplorably so: they know nothing—and have to learn their social and political alphabet as much as a child does his ABCs.” The Maryland board did not respond to the petitioners, by its silence making it clear that Russwurm had the power and support of the white authorities in Baltimore.28
In early 1839, Snetter, the former Charleston barbe
r, finally left for Monrovia, where he was soon made captain of the militia’s Rifle Corps. In March 1840, he was killed leading an assault against Gatoomba, a king who had been attacking surrounding towns in the interior.29
And at Cape Palmas, those who had once lived on Hutchinson Island by the flowing waters of the Savannah began a new life of freedom in an African colony. Now they had to contend with the harsh realities of Cape Palmas—with sickness, and want, and warring peoples.
Chapter Ten
Exploring Strange Worlds
By the time the settlers from Hutchinson Island arrived at Cape Palmas in the summer of 1838, life at Fair Hope had assumed a familiar routine. Leighton and Jane rose early and, after their private devotionals, they held family worship with their sixty boarding students and the printer B. V. R. James—prayers were said, scripture read, and hymns sung. Breakfast followed: a plate of rice and some cold bread. Like the students, Leighton and James ate their rice with some palm oil, what Leighton called African butter. Jane did not use the rich oil—not having acquired a taste for it—but did use molasses on her bread, which had been baked with flour shipped from Philadelphia. Jane then oversaw the students as they washed the dishes and put them away, Leighton did his morning exercises, and James prepared for his work at the printing press. At nine o’clock, Jane began her class with the students, while Leighton was joined by his Grebo teacher, William Davis, who was leading him into the intricacies of the Grebo language.1
By the Rivers of Water Page 22