By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  But the question, of course, remained: Was slavery one of those “wicked laws, contradicting the eternal principles of rectitude,” requiring the church to testify against it? Thornwell and the Southern assembly—unlike later defenders of the South—readily admitted that slavery “lies at the root of all the difficulties which have resulted in the dismemberment of the Federal Union, and involved us in the horrors of an unnatural war.” The fundamental question for Thornwell thus became, Do the scriptures directly or indirectly condemn slavery as a sin? Thornwell’s answer was to look at the scriptures themselves. Is not, he asked, the institution of slavery recognized and accepted in both the Old and New Testaments? And, if you try to appeal to the genius and spirit of Christianity and the Golden Rule to “love your neighbor as yourself,” did not Moses and the apostles sanction slavery while accepting the Golden Rule? So Thornwell and the assembly—including Leighton—did not condemn slavery. They insisted that the responsibility of the church was not to address the system of slavery as an institution governed by the state, but rather, to speak to the relationship between masters and “servants.” The church was to call masters to be kind and benevolent in their treatment of their slaves, and to be concerned for the salvation of those committed to their care by a mysterious providence. And the church was to teach slaves to be obedient to their masters. In this way, the doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” became a powerful theological and ideological weapon for the defense of slavery and in the years to come became a defense for a “Southern way of life.” Now the church could stand in silence and say that it had no authority to adjudicate political issues or to address the great social questions of the day. When Leighton signed the “Address,” he indicated anew that he had returned home to the world he had known as a youth.6

  Leighton reported to the assembly on his trip to the Southwest Indian Territory, and the assembly enthusiastically adopted his recommendation that the Southern church assume responsibility for mission work among the people of the territory. He urged the assembly to adopt, as the “great end of her organization,” the mission of the church “into all the world.” Once again, the assembly enthusiastically approved his recommendation.7

  Southern Presbyterians, who had been far behind Northern Presbyterians in their concern for missions, thus committed themselves to foreign missions as never before. For the next one hundred years, Southern Presbyterians—with other white Christians in the South—were to be marked by a new passion for foreign missions, to be equaled only by their passionate insistence that the church not meddle in politics or social issues. The assembly elected Leighton as its secretary for foreign missions, a position he was to hold for the next twenty-three years. But of course with the federal blockade of the South, and with the devastations of war, there was little he could do other than work to support the struggling mission among the Indian Nations of the Southwest until the war came to its bloody end.8

  FROM THEIR HOME near the Black River, Leighton and Jane watched the progress of the war, and their hopes rose and fell with reports from distant battles. In 1862, battle followed battle, with victory on one side and then another—Union victories at Fort Donelson in Tennessee and Pea Ridge in Arkansas, at New Orleans and at bloody Shiloh in Tennessee. But the Confederates had their victories as well—Stonewall Jackson’s successes in the Shenandoah Valley, the defeat of a Union attack on Charleston, and Lee’s victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run. But the loss of life on both sides was staggering, more than anyone had anticipated. Antietam in Maryland turned out to be the bloodiest single day of battle of the war—and in American history—and although its outcome was said to be inconclusive, it was enough of a Union victory for Lincoln to announce that he intended to issue an Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing slaves in any Confederate state not under Union control.9

  As the reports of battles lost and battles won arrived at their Black River home bloody year after bloody year, so, too, did the news of young men dying. The little community of whites who worshiped at Mt. Zion was hard hit. Leighton’s brother Sam lost two sons, including young Leighton Bayard Wilson. Families began traveling to Virginia to bring back the bodies of their men and boys from some distant battlefield or hospital burying ground. Leighton helped to conduct some of the services as sons and husbands were committed to the ground of the Mt. Zion cemetery, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, while the community confessed its sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through Jesus Christ their Lord. But the grief was intense, and whatever consolations came from their Christian faith, the bitter losses remained and were long remembered.10

  Distant battles had a direct impact on Leighton’s work for the new church. New Orleans had been the location of the church’s office of domestic missions. When the city fell to the Union navy, Leighton was given the responsibility of domestic missions—to add to his responsibility for foreign missions—and in this way the work of supplying Presbyterian chaplains for the Confederate Army became his primary responsibility. In this task, Leighton showed himself to be a skilled administrator. He worked out a system whereby more than a quarter of the Presbyterian pastors in the South spent some time as army chaplains. They worked in hospitals among the wounded, wrote letters home for the dying, and preached to and counseled troops who knew they were facing death or terrible wounds. Leighton went to Virginia, and there, crouching with troops in the muddy trenches around Petersburg, he talked and counseled and read scripture and served the Lord’s Supper. He visited in hospitals and tried to comfort those who were suffering the traumas of wounds. And he sat by the beds of those who were inflicted by the scourges of the battlefield trenches and army camps—pneumonia or dysentery or typhoid or a rotting gangrene or some terrible combination of them. Leighton met with Robert E. Lee, and together they spoke about the “spiritual wants of the army” and the need for chaplains among the troops.11

  At home, Leighton and Jane established regular routines as they sought to build a new life in the midst of so much death and destruction. Jane saw after the house and the education of Cornelia, and she joined other women at Mt. Zion in an “Association for Relief.” They made blankets, quilts, and uniforms; washed and boiled old clothes and cut them into strips for bandages; and gathered food from gardens, barns, and smokehouses to be sent to hospitals and to loved ones in muddy trenches.12

  Leighton worked in his study, writing letters to pastors and securing chaplains and preparing addresses and sermons for different church groups. Early on Sunday mornings, he preached to large congregations of blacks, who gathered in a little grove of trees at Mt. Zion before they all went in the church for a worship service with the whites.13

  When not in his study or traveling, Leighton once again took up gardening, the pastime he had enjoyed so much at Cape Palmas. John, Leighton’s former slave, whom Leighton had freed but who still lived by Boggy Gully, came and worked with Leighton, and the two men finally became acquainted with one another. They worked together in the garden soil—a white man and a black man whose lives had been intertwined across the great distances that had separated them, and that still separated them. Who knows what they thought as they unavoidably looked at one another working this Black River garden? When John saw Leighton digging, planting, and reaping, what did he think of this Wilson from Pine Grove, this missionary to Africa, who had freed him and offered him the choice of leaving home for the North or for Africa? Did he wonder about this tall white man who had come back to his Black River home to take his stand on the side of slavery? And when Leighton saw John digging, planting, and reaping, what did he think of this strong black man, a carpenter, whose mother had been inherited by Leighton’s mother, this black man who also claimed the name Wilson and a Black River home? Did he wonder about John, about what he thought and felt, this black man who loved his own family and his own people and the landscape of his home so much that he would not abandon them even for a fuller freedom in a distant place? But perhaps neith
er man thought much about the other, and perhaps neither looked at the other and wondered. Perhaps they simply worked the soil together and assumed that all was already known that needed to be known about the other.14

  WHILE LEIGHTON AND Jane struggled to keep some order in their lives and to be of service to the church and their young nation, battle continued to follow battle, and Confederate territory and hopes shrank. In May 1864, news arrived that General William T. Sherman had taken Rome, Georgia, in the northwestern part of the state. Nicholas Bayard and his family had moved to the little city in 1859, and Nicholas had invested heavily in the railroads, steamboats, and ironworks that were making Rome a prosperous city in the old Cherokee territory. When Sherman’s troops withdrew to join the attack on Atlanta, Nicholas’s investments were largely destroyed and left in smoking ruins. So the banker who had once sent Paul Sansay and the other Bayard slaves off to Africa with their pine chests of belongings now found himself and his family largely destitute.15

  In early September, Atlanta fell, and with its fall there soon came fire and great destruction—the train depots and sheds, the rolling mills and machine shops, and the foundries and the arsenals were all put to the torch, and with them going up in the flames were hotels, churches, and businesses as well as somewhere between four thousand and five thousand homes. In the middle of November, Sherman plunged into middle Georgia on a brilliant and daring march to the sea. Cutting his supply lines and all communications with the North, he moved his great army toward Savannah, declaring that the army would live off the land. Foragers were organized to plunder a large swath of Georgia, and to bring corn, peas, and bacon; cows, pigs, and chickens; horses and mules to the rumbling army. Behind them the foragers left burning barns and the ruins of smoldering homes, and following them came newly liberated black men, women, and children.16

  By early December, Sherman was near Savannah. On December 10, Richmond-on-Ogeechee, the plantation home of Eliza Clay, went up in flames. Jane had often visited the plantation, one of the most beautiful in the South, and here her friend Eliza had helped to prepare Margaret Strobel for her role as a teacher at Cape Palmas. Already to the south, Darien had been destroyed, and among the surrounding plantations that had been raided and had buildings burned was Fair Hope, where Jane had spent so many happy days with her McIntosh relatives, and where she and Leighton had made plans for their life together as missionaries.17

  On December 20, the mayor of Savannah surrendered the old city so that it would not suffer the fate of Atlanta. The next day Sherman telegraphed Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah.” Now Union troops marched through the streets where Paul Sansay had once hurried to his carpentry work, and they marched past wharfs where stunned Africans had once come out of the wretched holds of slave ships into the light of a Georgia sun and into the life of Georgia slaves. The marching troops brought with them freedom for the black slaves in the city, and it seemed to many of the liberated slaves nothing less than miraculous, the bold act of a liberating God. “I’d always thought about this, and wanted this day to come, and prayed for it and knew God meant it should be here sometime,” an enslaved woman declared as she looked around at the troops and shook her head in disbelief. “But I didn’t believe I should ever see it and it is so great and good a thing, I cannot believe it has come now; and I don’t believe I ever shall realize it, but I know it has though, and I bless the Lord for it.” The historian of First African Baptist Church remembered in the cadences of a black preacher the jubilant scene: the Yankees “had come for our deliverance, and the cry went around the city from house to house among the race of our people, ‘Glory be to God, we are free!’ Shout the glad tidings o’er Egypt’s dark sea, Jehovah has triumphed, his people are free!”18

  Sherman soon crossed the flowing waters of the Savannah into South Carolina. Before leaving the city, he told a South Carolinian, who was seeking to return home, “You will be going out from the frying pan into the fire.” He did not believe he could control his troops as they entered the state that was believed to have started all of the death and destruction of the war. “You have heard of the horrors of war,” Sherman warned. “Wait until my army gets into South Carolina and you will see the reality.” And he told a Union officer that the time had come to punish the people of South Carolina. In a surprise move, Sherman marched toward Columbia and not Charleston. Town after town went up in flames, as did any barn or plantation house that lay in the path of the army. Soon it was Columbia’s turn. Shortly before Sherman moved his army out of the fallen city toward North Carolina and the final surrender of Confederate forces, Columbia went up in flames. By the morning of February 18, 1865, substantial parts of the city were smoldering ruins.19

  As Sherman’s army moved toward the north, foragers and small detachments of Union troops rode along the Black River road, raiding the surrounding plantations. But the destruction they left behind was not as severe as that which followed Sherman’s main army. Leighton, learning of the disaster that had swept over Columbia, organized a relief effort. Members of Mt. Zion gathered meal and bacon from their own dwindling supplies. Leighton secured two four-horse wagons, and he and John loaded them with the gathered supplies. With John driving one wagon and Leighton the other, the white man and the black man made their way together over the fifty miles to the city, where they found that the seminary had escaped the fire and was now housing many hungry refugees. After unloading what they brought and visiting among those crowded into the seminary’s dormitories and classrooms, the two men returned with their empty wagons to their Black River homes.20

  A FEW MONTHS before Columbia’s destruction, B. V. R. James wrote Walter Lowrie from Monrovia and spoke of the furious storm of human passions now raging across an unhappy America. Leighton’s old colleague and friend believed that God “thoroughly holds in his hand the vial of wrath that is now being emptied upon the nation.” For James, the cruel war would only come to an end when God was “satisfied with the measure of wrath to be meted out to a people who have for more than one hundred years been treasuring up iniquity for this day of his vengeance.” Until then, James said, “all must bow to God’s holy will and say ‘It is the Lord, let him do whatsoever seemeth to him good!’”21

  Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. On Good Friday, April 14, Lincoln was assassinated.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Home Ground

  Seven months after the fighting had reached its bloody conclusion and civilians could make their way through the desolate landscape of the South, Margaret Eckard set out from Pennsylvania to reach Jane and Leighton. She was determined to reach her sister as quickly as possible, even though travel was demanding and dangerous—rails and bridges had been destroyed, Richmond and other cities and towns were in ruins, soldiers and refugees were still trying to get home, and Freedpeople were on the move, desperately looking for husbands or wives, parents, or children who had been carried away or sold to some distant or unknown place.1

  Margaret spent a month struggling southward until she finally reached the little village of Mayesville, not far from the Black River. An early winter storm had swept in from the west and covered the landscape with ice—young pines were bent over, and the branches of large pines threatened to snap with a loud crack and fall to the forest floor from the weight of the ice. Exhausted by her travel and its anxieties, she rode out early in the morning to the farm Leighton had rented. Jane heard the sound of the buggy and then saw her sister. Hurrying to one another over the frozen ground, the sisters fell into each other’s arms as waves of emotion and the deep grief of the war washed over them. They had parted with much anguish four years earlier, each following her husband and what she believed to be the path of duty. Now they held tightly to one another in a silent embrace, their voices choked by mingled sorrow and joy. Margaret’s daughter later remembered her mother’s description of the reunion and how she could see in Jane’s “white hair, bent form, wrinkled face,
shabby dress, the want of comforts about the house, what that loved one had gone through and suffered.” Yet Jane knew that her own suffering and want were not to be compared to that of many others, and she spoke not a word of complaint, either then or afterward.2

  Margaret apparently brought what was most immediately useful—US dollars. Leighton and Jane also had US dollars from the sale of the house they had bought in Savannah in early 1861. With these funds they bought the old Pine Grove house from Leighton’s sister Sarah, together with fifty acres that immediately surrounded it, and they purchased an adjacent forty acres from a cousin. Here, they thought, was land enough for a large garden, some corn, an expanded orchard, a wood lot, and pasture for a few cows and horses—a place where they could live happily and simply while they sought to be faithful to the responsibilities that lay before them in a defeated and devastated South.3

  Included in the fifty acres they had bought from Sarah were the former slave cabins by Boggy Gully. When Sherman’s army shook the land, those who lived in the old settlement had to discover, like other Freedpeople across the South, the meaning of their emancipation and the place they would call home. They had to learn the limitations now being placed on whites, and they had to find the boundaries of their new freedom—to decide where they were going to live, now that they could move around, and how they were going to make a living, now that they no longer had to plow and cook for “master and missus.” At the war’s end, many Freedpeople across the South had hoped that they would receive some land in compensation for their years of slave labor, perhaps even forty acres and a mule. But such hopes had quickly faded, and they were left with questions about how to respond to whites who were determined to keep them in their place of subordination.4