By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  But Margaret and James had not been immune themselves to the diseases of a tropical environment, and after nine years in Ceylon, they were headed home in 1842 in the hope that Margaret would regain her health. Jane’s return to the United States was timed in part for her to see her much-loved sister. But neither Jane nor Leighton had realized how difficult their separation would be, how much they would miss one another, and how anxious they would be as month after month passed with no communication between them.

  JANE ARRIVED IN New York in the early fall of 1842 and hurried south to be reunited with her Pennsylvania family. Eight years had passed since she and Leighton had sailed for Cape Palmas, and she was eager to see her Bayard cousins—Theodosia Bayard and Elizabeth Bayard Henry were like sisters to her, and she regarded James Bayard as a brother. But Jane was also eager to see and consult with her cousin Hugh Hodge, a prominent Philadelphia physician and professor at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her recurrent spells of fever, she had never fully recovered from her bout with dysentery in the fall of 1841. The attack had left her weak, and some of its symptoms still lingered when she arrived in Philadelphia. Dr. Hodge insisted that she stay in the city under his care for several months, so she stayed in the fine home of James Bayard on Washington Square in Philadelphia, and Theodosia and the Henrys visited her there. She told them about life at Cape Palmas and the work and adventures she and Leighton had had among the Grebo people.5

  During her absence, the Bayards and Henrys and their church friends had read not only Jane’s letters but also Leighton’s reports, which had been published in the Missionary Herald. They must have had a thousand questions for Jane: What did a greegree look like? Did the Grebo still leave bodies on the island of the dead? Had she seen a sassy wood ordeal herself? Could the children really learn to read and write in English?

  Jane surely faced these questions and also many more, for she had been to a distant land and had lived among “savages.” Missionaries—even missionary wives—were expected to tell stories of such exotic places and exotic peoples and to report on the spread of the gospel in foreign lands. And much to James Bayard’s distress—he had been secretary of the Philadelphia branch of the American Colonization Society—Jane had to explain why they were leaving Cape Palmas after so many years there and after all of their efforts to learn Grebo and work among the Grebo people. There had been conflicts with Russwurm and Latrobe, and she and Leighton and the other missionaries had come to believe that colonization was a type of imperialism that hindered their work as missionaries. They had finally decided to leave Cape Palmas because of the hostility of the settlers and the colonial authorities. The papers were already reporting extensively on the controversy and stating the charges and countercharges between the missionaries and the colonial authorities.6

  Jane, of course, could not speak at a public meeting or during a church service, for she was a woman, and her sphere was confined by polite society to that which was private and domestic. Besides, Jane was shy and did not even want her name to appear in print. So she spoke quietly in elegant parlors and drawing rooms, in carriages rumbling down busy Philadelphia streets, and at dinner tables loaded with familiar food, and in this way and in these circumscribed situations she conveyed images of Africa to family and friends. She told them of the Grebo and of life on a mission station overlooking the Atlantic. She told stories of King Freeman and his remarkable brother William Davis, and of Simleh Ballah with his filed teeth and tattoo. She told of how the men had been frequent guests at her dinner table, and how they had taught the missionaries much about the ways of the Grebo. And she had, as well, much to tell about the settlers at Harper—about Governor Russwurm and Paul Sansay; about Charlotte, Paul’s sister, who had once been Jane’s personal servant; and about all the others who had once lived on Hutchinson Island across from Savannah and who now lived on Bayard Island across a little river from Harper and Big Town.

  And she had much to say about Fair Hope—how it had become like a little village, with its houses and garden, with its school and church, and with even its own cemetery on a bluff above the Atlantic. She and Leighton had lived there in their cottage, and there she had taught in her school, with students such as Wasa and Maria, Mary Clealand, and other sons and daughters of the Grebo. Now, in Philadelphia, she described Fair Hope as a remembered place, a habitation filled with purpose and anchored in her imagination. She and Leighton had been happy there, in spite of illness and grief and disappointment, and they had been full of hope there; they had felt at home there even as they had known Fair Hope was not their home. And in spite of her reticence and her restricted sphere as a woman, her narratives began to be reported in papers as the experiences of a highborn woman in Africa. In this way Jane became an interpreter of Africa—a vast continent—and through family and friends and papers her stories and her interpretations became for many a window into an imagined world.7

  IN LATE NOVEMBER 1842, Jane was able to leave Dr. Hodge’s care and sail for Savannah. After a short trip down the coast, her ship moved slowly up the Savannah River until the little tree-covered city came into view, and then the ship came to anchor across from Hutchinson Island. As she looked around her, Jane now saw Savannah and its waterfront with the eyes of one who had seen an African coast and had come ashore at an African cape in an African canoe with singing Grebo boatmen. Familiar scenes greeted her as she made her way from the riverfront up to the Savannah bluff—slave porters pushing heavy carts up the steep cobblestone dray-ways, slave women walking elegantly with baskets of vegetables on their heads, slave fishermen hawking mullet and shrimp, crabs and oysters. Jane now saw all of this as one who had sat at table with King Freeman and William Davis and Simleh Ballah, who had taught Wasa and Maria and Mary Clealand. And she saw it all as one who knew free people living on Bayard Island who had once lived as slaves across the Savannah.

  Jane had a happy reunion with Nicholas and his family. He had been through deep waters himself—he had been married twice and twice widowed. He was now married a third time—to a widow with three children—and he and his large family welcomed Jane back to her old Savannah home. Jane went out to Richmond-on-Ogeechee and saw her friend Eliza Clay, who was still conducting her classes for the religious instruction of her slaves. But Eliza’s brother Thomas Clay had died a young man, and Eliza was now running the large plantation while looking after her brother’s children and his rather helpless widow. In Savannah, Jane went and sat once again in the pew where she had once sat with her parents at the Independent Presbyterian Church. There, as she sang familiar hymns, she could look into the high balcony that surrounded the elegant sanctuary and see slaves sitting in their place. And when communion was celebrated, and the slaves came out of the balcony, they sat at the long table by themselves after the white members had been served. How different from Fair Hope, where she had sat at the communion table with William Davis and Wasa and the other worshipping Christians.8

  Then, in the late fall 1842, Jane was at last reunited with Margaret, who finally arrived from Ceylon with her husband. Jane and Margaret had been inseparable as young sisters, and now, after eight years apart, they had much to share. Margaret had suffered greatly from cholera and showed in her worn looks how desperately sick she had been. But she was recovering, and she had happy memories of Ceylon and the Tamil people on its north coast. The Batticotta school where James had taught was thriving—many wealthy Hindus were sending their sons to the mission school to be prepared for a changing world. Few, it was true, had converted—they seemed more interested in receiving a Western education than in becoming Christian—but some had been drawn to Christianity and had been baptized. Already some of the school’s former students had become teachers and pastors, and they were laying, it was hoped, the foundation for a Tamil church. But the Eckards had already decided that Margaret’s health would not allow them to return, so their years of mission work had come to an end. James had agreed to spend the next year in S
avannah raising funds for the American Board.9

  Nicholas told the sisters how he had managed their property while they had been away. Most of the land on Hutchinson Island had been sold for the handsome price of $8,000. Nicholas, prudent man that he was, had invested the money in insurance and railroad stock. Both stocks held promise for the future—especially the stock in the Central Railway, which was soon to connect Savannah with Macon in the middle of the state. A transportation revolution was sweeping the country, and Nicholas was glad to be able to transfer some capital from land to railroads. Already the stocks were providing a good return on their money, better than what was received from land still owned by the sisters. Altogether a substantial fund had been accumulated for them during their years abroad.10

  Margaret learned the details of the emancipation of their slaves, and from Jane she no doubt learned about those who had once lived on Hutchinson Island. Jane reported that Paul Sansay was doing well and had become a friend to some of the Grebo converts, but he had been in a major dispute with a newly arrived Catholic missionary (who would stay only a short time at the Cape) over some work Paul had done for him. Paul’s sister, Charlotte, had adopted two orphaned children, but had seldom come out to Fair Hope to visit Jane, her former mistress. John, who had been the driver on Hutchinson Island, and his wife, Catherine, had gone with John’s younger sister, Rhina, to work with Presbyterian missionaries some miles north of Cape Palmas at Sutra Kru and were as hard working and reliable as always. But it had been a mistake, Jane no doubt said, to send them all to the Maryland colony, with its deep hostility toward the Grebo—it would have been better to have made arrangements for them to settle in a Northern state.11

  The sisters made a quick trip to Fair Hope plantation to see their McIntosh relatives, who had been so kind to them as orphaned girls. For both of them, but especially for Jane, the plantation was a place of deep memories. Here she had learned to love the quiet of a Lowcountry landscape, and here she had experienced the love of her McIntosh family. Once again she saw Gullah people working in rice and cotton fields and saw their evening fires in the plantation settlement, and she heard once again their distinct Creole intonations, which evoked memories of Big Town and another Fair Hope.12

  Jane needed to see not only her own family but also Leighton’s, so after her time in Savannah and at Fair Hope she made her way to Pine Grove shortly before Christmas 1842. There she found the Wilsons waiting to see their dear Jane and hear reports from Africa. Now, as she had with her family and friends in Pennsylvania and Georgia, she told her stories of Africa and of Leighton and of their work among the Grebo people. After church and at the dinner table, and later sitting on the piazza on balmy winter afternoons, questions were asked and answers were given that built a missionary narrative and painted an image of Africa as seen through the eyes of one who had lived in a cottage at Cape Palmas. There she had taught bright, eager Grebo children not only to read and write, but also geography and math and natural science. There in that distant place she had regularly welcomed to her dinner table black men and women—Margaret and Catherine Strobel from Savannah; Mr. B. V. R. James from New York; and King Freeman, Simleh Ballah, and William Davis from Big Town. How strange and exotic—and not a little threatening—it must have all seemed to those whites who lived their settled lives close to the Black River and not far from the cabins at Boggy Gully.13

  And what did old Jacob the cook and those who served meals and cleaned rooms and brought tea to the piazza, what did they hear when they heard these stories told to the Wilsons and their friends? Did they have their own questions to ask Jane? How did those who had sent Leighton off with such a tumultuous outpouring of emotion and prayer respond to Jane’s stories of Africa? How, in the evenings around communal fires by Boggy Gully, did they retell what they had heard and overheard about black men eating at the same table with a white woman, about black children learning to read and write so quickly, about the Grebo William Davis helping Leighton to translate whole books of the Bible?14

  THE SLAVE SETTLEMENT at Boggy Gully presented its own questions to Jane. How was she, a missionary teacher among the Grebo, a missionary host to Grebo men, a missionary wife who had sought to demonstrate a Christian life to Grebo people—how was she to react to those who lived in bondage at Pine Grove? In particular, what was this missionary going to do about her husband’s two slaves? Leighton had inherited them through his mother, and he knew little about them. He had asked Jane, before she left for the United States, to visit with them and to try to get to know a little about them. Perhaps, he said, she could prevail on them to accept an offer of freedom and move to one of the free states.15

  Jane met with John and Jesse and found that John, the older of the two, had married and did not wish to leave his wife. Jesse, still a young boy, was attached to his mother—she was in poor health and increasingly feeble—and he did not wish to leave his Black River home either.16

  Leighton had never received a reply from Rufus Anderson in Boston or a friend in New York when he had written them in 1838 about the possibility of John’s going north and learning some “mechanical art” or becoming a bookbinder. Nor had Leighton had a reply from his request that Jesse be educated in Boston. Leighton had only the vaguest memory of Jesse and had thought the young slave a girl. “My only desire is that she may be educated” Leighton had written Anderson in 1838, “and set free where she would be happy and respectable.”17

  While nothing had come of Leighton’s efforts to find a place for the young men in Boston or New York, his continuing ownership of them had not gone unnoticed by abolitionists. He was accused of being “a man stealer,” and the American Board was being increasingly attacked for employing a “man stealer” as a missionary. Anderson had written letters to both Jane and Leighton about the matter. Jane responded after her return to Philadelphia, explaining that the Bayard slaves had been freed, but both John and Jesse refused to leave their Black River home. She wrote Anderson: “These young men know fully, for I have spoken to them myself, that they can go to Africa or one of the northern states at any time they please. We can compel them to do either. Shall we do it?” And from Gabon Leighton wrote, telling the story once again of Paul Sansay and the others who had lived on Hutchinson Island and who now lived as free people in West Africa. He rehearsed one more time the story of his inheritance of John and Jesse, of how he had tried to free them and make arrangements for them to go to the North, and of how he had received no replies to his inquiries and how he had heard from his sister that they were “decidedly opposed to leaving the place of their nativity,” and that their family and “others thought the proposition unkind.” He told how he had asked Jane to try to get them to go north, and said that if she failed, he could think of only one thing to do—present a petition to the South Carolina legislature to allow them to be freed and remain in the state. He and Jane both emphasized that Leighton had never received any money that came from John’s and Jesse’s labors. Indeed, he said, “so far as I have had funds to dispose of in the cause of humanity, they have been appropriated chiefly to promote the happiness and comfort of those who have been in bondage.” And then he added a jab at the abolitionists who had been attacking him: “I have no desire nor have I had for years to see any of my fellow men in bondage, and perhaps when the secrets of eternity are revealed, it may be seen that I have not done less for the cause of freedom than some of my fellow men who think I have been remiss.”18

  Leighton, in his letter to Anderson, addressed what he regarded as the underlying assumptions of those who had attacked him. He did not understand their reasoning, he wrote Anderson—Was it his duty to use force with his slaves? He thought it better to use moral means, to try to persuade them to claim their freedom and leave the state. John and Jesse, he insisted, “have the liberty of choosing for themselves, and I have endeavored to communicate such light and information as will enable them to choose wisely. And this seems to me, if not the highest liberty they are capable of enj
oying, it is the best that is in my power to confer. If I take away this liberty of choice, and coerce them, then it seems to me I would be guilty of exercising that arbitrary authority over them which is one of the worst and most prominent features of slaveholding.”19

  Leighton admitted that there may be situations where it would be proper for a person to act for the good of another, even against the will of the other. But Leighton did not think this was such a case—for if he exerted his right to act for John and Jesse, he would sacrifice their rights. Nor did he think it would be for the general good of the slaves of the South if he protected himself from the attacks of abolitionists by freeing John and Jessie without moving them out of the state. They would then become public property and would be auctioned to the highest bidder. That, at best, he said, would amount to “the doubtful principle of sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general good of mankind.”20

  Leighton was revealing in his letter to Anderson how deeply he was rooted in the physical, social, and intellectual world of Pine Grove—in spite of his travels and broad interests and commitments. He valued the concrete, the particular, the given, and he sought to avoid abstractions like “the general good of mankind.” He was willing to consider the general good of slaves in the South, but what he was really concerned about were not abstract slaves, but slaves with names—John and Jesse—and their right to make decisions for themselves.

  This deep commitment to the concrete and the particular, together with his strong sense of place, would lead Leighton and Jane in 1861 to make a surprising choice of their own. But, of course, their choice—like the choices made by John and Jesse and the bitter choices made earlier by those who lived on Hutchinson Island—was not going to be simply a choice reflecting the private rights of individuals. Leighton and Jane were going to find themselves having to make a choice not as lonely individuals, but as a couple deeply enmeshed in family and rooted in a Southern landscape and entangled in the web of slavery.