Charles Hodge and a number of conservatives protested. While emphasizing their own commitments to the Union, they insisted once again that the church had no right to decide a political question. During the American Revolution, they said, many Christians in Great Britain had regarded the Americans as rebels. But neither the Church of Scotland nor the Church of England had issued mandates of loyalty to King George. They did not declare it to be obligatory for Christians in America to do all that lay within them to strengthen, uphold, and encourage the king in the exercise of the prerogatives of his crown.25
The assembly rejected the protest and issued a stinging rebuke to the Princeton professor and those who supported his position. Did they expect the assembly to sanction by its silence the treason of white Southerners?
Would they have us recognize, as good Presbyterians, men whom our own government, with the approval of Christendom, may soon execute as traitors? . . . What, when “a crime, the heinousness of which can be only imperfectly estimated” . . . is already committed; when thousands of Presbyterians are likely to be seduced from their allegiance by the machinations of wicked men; . . . when armed rebellion joins issue with armed authority on battle-fields, where tens of thousands must perish; when it remains a question, whether our national life survives the conflict . . . is it uncalled for, unnecessary, for this Christian Assembly to renew . . . respect for the majesty of law, and a sense of obligation of loyalty? Let posterity decide between us.26
Leighton immediately resigned from the Board of Foreign Missions. He crossed into Virginia at Alexandria the day before travel was closed. Jane and Cornelia stayed behind in Pennsylvania for a conflicted Jane to say her tearful goodbyes to family and friends. In New York, Walter Lowrie wrote to B. V. R. James that “our dear brother J. Leighton Wilson” had resigned his position with the board and had returned to South Carolina. And far off in Monrovia, James responded with “deepest regret.” “This information,” he wrote Lowrie, “gives great pain and great disappointment. Yet I must say again, I believe Mr. Wilson’s motives are pure and holy.” Your country, he wrote, “is truly in a sad and awful condition, and all to effects of slavery. I have foreseen this sad calamity for many years. God is true and just, and I believe what he has said in his Holy Word!”27
Other friends in the North grieved Leighton’s departure, too, for few men in the church were as greatly admired or loved as he. But not many of his friends were surprised. Years later, a colleague in New York remembered visiting Leighton before his departure for Pennsylvania. Leighton had told him that he prayed that God would save the nation from civil war, “but if it comes, my mind is made up, I will go and suffer with my people.”28
LEIGHTON HURRIED SOUTH toward Columbia. In Richmond and everywhere south of Richmond, he could see the gathering of troops as white men responded to the call to defend their homeland and new nation. In Columbia, he stayed at the home of his old professor George Howe, a few blocks from the seminary where thirty years earlier Leighton had begun his formal theological education. Together with Howe and other church leaders who were clustered around the seminary, Leighton joined in conversations about the formation of a Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. Presbytery after presbytery in the South was withdrawing from the assembly, and there was, they thought, a clear need for a distinct national church for the new nation.29
In late June, Leighton left for Louisville, Kentucky. There he met Jane and Cornelia for a joyful but tearful reunion. With great difficulty, Jane had said her goodbyes to Margaret and other loved ones, but Leighton was committed to a Southern home, and so, with the help of influential family members, she and Cornelia had made their way across the Ohio River into Southern territory. Now together again, the little family hurried south to Columbia, and from Columbia to Pine Grove. Leighton rented a house nearby, not too far from the old family place and Boggy Gully, not too far from the Black River and Mt. Zion. So Leighton cast his lot with the South, with home, with a specific place he believed to be his homeland, and with a people he believed to be his people. And Jane joined him, and she, too—this child of Savannah and Philadelphia—cast her lot with the South.30
Leighton’s return to the South was, he believed, an act of patriotism—of local patriotism—of devotion to a particular and remembered place and to a particular and greatly loved people. But the return was not simply a reflection of a local patriotism for Leighton, for it was also an act of national patriotism, of patriotism for a remembered national life. He was joining, he believed, those who were defending an older America against the imperialism of the Yankees, and against perceived threats to the ordered ways of the nation and the ways the nation had been governed. He had painfully concluded that if he remained in the North, if he took his stand not with Dixie but with New York and Philadelphia, with Princeton and Boston, with a Yankee idea of the Union, he would be deserting a people and a place he loved. If this was to be the cost of freedom for those who lived by Boggy Gully and in the other settlements and slave quarters of the South, then the cost was too high. So he took his stand with Dixie, with Pine Grove and Mt. Zion, and with a white South.
Although Leighton accused the North of an aggressive imperialism, he knew only too well that the South was hardly free from such a charge. He had compared the actions of the colonists at Cape Palmas to the imperialism of Georgia and Andrew Jackson in the removal of the Cherokee, and he knew that the calls for the reopening of the international slave trade were linked to a grand vision of some Southern whites for a slave nation that included not only captured Mexican territory but also Cuba. But what Leighton now perceived as Yankee imperialism was directed against his own people, his home, where all of his deepest emotions had been shaped and where his affections were still rooted.31
To be sure, Leighton had been willing to leave father and mother, brothers and sisters, and a landscape of deep memories. When he and Jane had heard the call to be missionaries, they had left home, and they had sought to free themselves from its peculiar institution. They had moved far beyond their home and far beyond most white Americans in their regard for Africans and their descendants. But even though they had freed their slaves, and even though they thought they had freed themselves from slavery, they had not freed themselves from their history, and they had not realized how their love for home—and for one another—had continued to entangle them in the web of slavery and racism. For racism was a part of their Southern home, and for them to love a white Southern home and family had come to mean, in some diabolical way, that they had to support slavery and its underlying racism. Slavery was who they were in spite of their manumissions, in spite of their fighting the slave trade, in spite of their years away from Pine Grove and Savannah and Fair Hope plantation. They could not, finally, separate slavery from home or from themselves, because they could not find the freedom to transcend the contingencies of their lives, and they could not abandon the loyalties of their hearts.
Leighton and Jane thought, of course, that they had the freedom to make a choice between the North and the South, between those who were committed to restricting and eventually abolishing slavery and those committed to defending it. They did not believe in some kind of social determinism—that the deep influences of home finally limited their freedom or their range of choices. They were, after all, missionaries. They had spent years trying to convert the Grebo and the Mpongwe, King Freeman and Simleh Ballah, Toko and King Glass. They had called on them to give up the traditions of their people, to abandon old practices and social arrangements, and to see the world and act in it in new ways. And though not many had converted, some had—above all, William Davis, who as an adult had defied the contingencies of his own life, given up many of the deepest assumptions of his people, and freely decided to be a Grebo Christian. Yet Leighton and Jane and their missionary colleagues believed that their best strategy for the conversion of the Grebo and the Mpongwe was to focus on the children, to remove them as much as possible from the influences of home a
nd the surrounding culture, and to have them internalize at an early age certain assumptions, dispositions, and ways of seeing the world. What they had difficulty seeing were the ways in which their own childhood homes, their own histories, had created within them certain assumptions, dispositions, and ways of seeing the world, and how, out of the chaos of many feelings and conflicting motives, they had made their decisions.32
Certainly, Leighton and Jane themselves knew a broader world than their Southern homes. Their dispositions and their ways of seeing the world had been challenged by their varied experiences. Odysseus-like, they had sailed on strange seas far from home and had seen what was, for them, strange sights, some abhorrent, and some marvelous. They both had sailed on many occasions along the West Coast of Africa, had seen Sierra Leone, Cape Coast, and Accra, and they knew the sound of the surf at Cape Palmas and the wide expanses of the Gabon estuary. Leighton had trekked far from the coast with William Davis and other Grebo, trying to reach the Pah and the Mountains of Moon, and he had sailed on the Waterwitch far up the Como to see distant villages with Toko. King Freeman and King Glass, B. V. R. James and Josiah Dorsey, Margaret Strobel James and Mary Clealand Dorsey, Toko and William Davis—they all in one way or another had allowed Leighton and Jane to catch at least important glimpses of other worlds and to transcend some of the assumptions that had shaped their lives. So it was not that they were provincial, or that they had not changed and had their visions broadened. Nor had their abhorrence of the slave trade been a sham. Rather, the love of home and the demands of loyalty and the power of early memories had finally been stronger than an alternative vision that could be seen on the horizon with Lincoln’s election.
Home was consequently the siren voice that seduced them on their odyssey, that called out to their spirits in the familiar accents of their youth and of their dreams and enticed them south. To follow this beckoning voice, Leighton and Jane had to silence other voices, voices that they had heard on their journey across a surging Atlantic and beneath an African sky. They had to say to James and King Freeman, to William Davis and Mary Clealand, to Toko and Wasa and Maria—be silent.
Like Toko, Leighton was rooted in a place and being of that place, being one with the landscape of his home and the traditions of his people, Leighton did not find the message of Lincoln to be convincing. Leighton could not, or would not, abandon his people or their ways for to do so would be a rejection of his own deepest identity. And Jane, though deeply divided between a Northern and a Southern home, between greatly loved family in Pennsylvania and greatly loved family in South Carolina and Georgia, turned south finally because Leighton turned south, and to be with Leighton was to be home. So Leighton and Jane set their faces toward home, followed its familiar voice, and made their homeward journey after their long wanderings. They gave themselves to the white South, to a history and people committed to maintaining slavery and its deep oppression. And this giving of themselves was both an act of deep love and the desertion of a moral vision, both a commitment to a place and an abandonment of their long struggle to escape the web of their Southern home and the demands of their deepest, most insistent memories. 33
Chapter Twenty-Two
Civil War
In August 1861, a few weeks after the Confederate victory at Bull Run, Leighton went to Atlanta to help plan the formation of a Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. Already a Confederate government had been organized, and most white Southerners saw themselves as now living in a new nation with Richmond as its capital. Presbyterians in the South moved quickly to organize a Presbyterian church for the new nation. Throughout the spring and summer of 1861, presbyteries in the Southern states had withdrawn their connection with the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. They had expressed outrage that the General Assembly meeting in Philadelphia had meddled in politics, had called for support of the federal government, and had declared secession to be treason. Those meeting in Atlanta intended to draw together these now independent presbyteries into a new church under a new General Assembly.1
Leighton listened to the plans being formulated for a meeting of a General Assembly, but his heart was not in the issues of polity that were being debated in Atlanta. What he wanted to do was to make sure the new church would be deeply committed to missions, and especially to foreign missions. So he kept raising the question of missions, and he insisted that if the new church was to have integrity as a Christian church, it must have a missionary heart. Federal ships, of course, were already making it unlikely that any missionaries would be sailing out of Charleston or Savannah, or from Mobile or New Orleans. But those who gathered in Atlanta saw missions as a noble cause—a cause that lifted their eyes beyond the troubled waters of the Confederacy. Commitment to missions, they believed, would help to legitimize the new church and would provide a marker for its self-understanding and identity.2
As a result of his appeal, Leighton was commissioned to visit the Indian Nations in the Southwest, where a number of schools and churches had been established by the Board of Foreign Missions in New York. The Indian Nations had been a part of his responsibilities in New York, and during the previous seven years he had visited them on several occasions. Now, in late September 1861, he left his Black River home and traveled to the Southwest Indian Territory, in what would later become Oklahoma. There on horseback and in wagons, and sometimes on foot, Leighton followed rough roads to visit the Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Chickasaw, and he met with the Choctaw Council in Doaksville, the Choctaw capital. Everywhere, he found the people in turmoil and often divided between those who supported the North and those who supported the South. All of the communities he visited were beginning to suffer the ravages of war. Eight boarding schools, with more than five hundred pupils, had been abandoned, as most of the missionaries had returned to their homes in the North. Many congregations were also scattered. But Leighton found encouraging signs as well—treaties were being signed with the Confederate government, and the people were eager for missionaries to return and join native preachers and teachers. Leighton promised that the churches of the South would not abandon them and that he would work to have the schools reestablished and teachers and missionaries settled once again among them.3
In early December, Leighton was back in Georgia, attending the first meeting of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. The assembly met in the First Presbyterian Church of Augusta, whose pastor was Joseph R. Wilson (his son, Woodrow Wilson, was too young to pay much attention to the proceedings). The commissioners were a distinguished group of white Southerners—brilliant, affluent, well-traveled, and pious—who for years had been pouring out their powers in defense of slavery and a Southern homeland. Among them were the men who were to become Leighton’s closest friends and colleagues—James Henley Thornwell, former president of the South Carolina College and now professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary; John Adger from Charleston; Benjamin Morgan Palmer from New Orleans; Charles Colcock Jones, known among whites as the “Apostle to the Negro Slaves”; George Howe from the seminary in Columbia; and James Woodrow, who, having received a PhD in chemistry from the University of Heidelberg, had come to Columbia to teach theology. Thornwell and Jones would live only a few more years, but the others were to join Leighton in working to create a Southern Presbyterian Church that in war and in humiliating defeat would strive to defend a Southern homeland and its traditions against the onslaught of the North and a modern world.4
The assembly’s most important act was to adopt “An Address to the Churches of Jesus Christ Throughout the World.” Written by Thornwell, the address was intended to justify the creation of a new church and to demonstrate that the Southern church was not guilty of schism. Thornwell argued that it was desirable for churches to be organized along national lines, and that such organizations did not disrupt the spiritual unity of the universal church. But there was an equally pressing reason for a Southern Presbyterian Churc
h. The Gardiner Spring Resolution at the Philadelphia assembly had been a deeply political act, he wrote, overstepping the bounds of the church’s responsibilities. Church and state, Thornwell argued, were two separate spheres—the church was the sphere of grace and the state the sphere of justice. The state had no right to intrude into the church’s sphere, and the church had no right to intrude into the sphere of the state. Thornwell acknowledged that there was a point at which the respective jurisdictions of church and state seemed to meet—and that was in the idea of duty. When, he said, “the State makes wicked laws, contradicting the eternal principles of rectitude, the Church is at liberty to testify against them; and humbly to petition that they may be repealed. In like manner, if the Church becomes seditious and a disturber of the peace, the State has a right to abate the nuisance.” This bold statement must have appeared extreme to Leighton, if he remembered how he had been accused of “meddling in politics” at Cape Palmas and Baraka, when he had taken the side of the Grebo and the Mpongwe.5
By the Rivers of Water Page 46