By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  Not long after the establishment of Good Will, Leighton received a letter from S. C. Logan, the secretary of the Northern church’s Committee on Freedmen. Logan had been a great admirer of Leighton before the war, and he had taken up his work for the Freedmen because of one of Leighton’s missionary addresses. Now he wrote Leighton asking about possible cooperation between Northern and Southern Presbyterians in the building of churches and schools for the Freedpeople. He asked for Leighton’s views about such cooperation and for any suggestions he might have about ways that the two churches could work together. Logan’s letter provided Leighton with an opportunity to express in a candid manner just what he thought.21

  Blacks, Leighton wrote, had been a happy part of congregations with white Southerners until the Southern country had been “deluged with Northern agents of every hue and stripe, the great mass of whom seemed to regard themselves as heaven-commissioned to fill the minds of the negroes with hatred and animosity toward their former owners.” He insisted it “was utterly untrue to say there was any marked bitterness between the whites and blacks of the South, either before or subsequent to the war, save what was called into existence” by these Northern agents. Leighton used Good Will as an example and claimed black members had left Salem because they believed that Northern Presbyterians would give them more financial support than impoverished Southern whites could provide. Blacks would quickly become, Leighton claimed, dependent on this Northern largess and expect the North to continue these favors indefinitely. Providence, Leighton insisted, had appointed the Southern church as the chief agent for the great work of enlightening and improving the condition of the Freedmen. Northern men had nothing but a theoretical knowledge of the African character, while Southern men had been familiar with the race all their lives.22

  Logan responded in a respectful but forceful manner. The alienation Leighton described between Southern whites and blacks was not the result of Northern inference, he said, but rather flowed from the “grand idea of liberty.” Liberty and the “assertion of their manhood” had led blacks out of the gallery of Salem and down the road to establish Good Will. The Freedpeople had not been seduced by Northern promises; nor were they relying on Northern charity. Rather, they had left on their own and had made great sacrifices in the effort to build their own church and establish their own school. As for white Southerners knowing blacks better than Northerners, Logan reminded the former missionary to Cape Palmas and Gabon that the church had been sending missionaries with great success beyond their home ground into other regions of the world. Furthermore, he said, Leighton was simply misreading providence. Once the Southern church did have responsibility for the nurture and care of blacks in the church. “But that time has passed, and circumstances have changed; this people have changed also.” And then Logan made his most telling point—“while you have been studying them, they have been as busily engaged in studying you.” Logan was respectfully but clearly making his point—blacks had been watching white Southerners for a long time. And because of their watching and what they had learned about white assumptions, intentions, and actions, they had gone out from the white-controlled congregations to form their own congregations, to worship in the ways the Spirit moved them, and to call their own leaders and to organize in freedom their own congregational life.23

  Perhaps nothing revealed Leighton’s blindness and deafness—his inability to transcend the world of his Black River home—more than this correspondence with Logan. All around him were black men and women whom he thought he knew, but whom he saw only partially and opaquely. He had grown up with them and had come back to live among them after his years in Africa, yet he failed to hear the depth of their yearning for freedom and their rejection of any white claim to own them body and soul. Perhaps even more fundamentally, Leighton failed to hear their insistence that whites did not own an exclusive claim to a Black River home. This home ground was as much theirs as it was Leighton’s. They had worked the land, and their labor had brought forth the land’s riches. In all the radical insecurity of slavery, they had lived here, raised their families here, and buried their loved ones here. They, too, heard the deep voices of this landscape with its cotton fields and sandy roads and swirling dark waters. They, too, remembered what life had been like on its plantations and in its settlements, and their memories contested the claim that only “kindly relations” had existed between masters and slaves. So they had the freedom to invite, if they wished, Northern help to establish black churches and schools on their own home ground. The arrival of such help was not some Yankee imperialism intruding on white Southern territory, but Yankee help in response to the invitations of Southerners—black Southerners—to come to the place they called home. But Leighton could acknowledge only one memory of what life had been like at Pine Grove, and he could see as he looked out across the landscape only a white South, a South where blacks were seen not only as laborers, but also as a responsibility and burden for well-meaning white Christians.

  FOR LEIGHTON AND his colleagues, as for other white Southerners, the challenge was how to keep the South white and how to suppress any competing memories of old times. Leighton’s young colleague John Lafayette Girardeau gave a brilliant articulation of their strategy. Girardeau had followed John Adger in his work among the blacks of Charleston, and it had been Girardeau who had built Charleston’s Zion church into a center of African American life in the city, with over 2,000 blacks worshiping weekly at Zion in the years before the war. When the Carolina dead from Gettysburg were brought home after the war to be reinterred in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery, Girardeau was chosen to address the 6,000 whites who gathered for the occasion.24

  How were white Southerners to maintain, Girardeau asked, the principles and traditions for which so many had died? How were they to resist an alien culture, the “ruthless, leveling Spirit” and “democratic license” that had arrived with Yankee armies and gunboats? Quoting Stonewall Jackson’s dying words, Girardeau declared, “Hold your ground, Sir!” And the way the ground was to be held, the way the white South was to meet the cultural imperialism of the North, was by maintaining the heart of Southern white culture, what Girardeau called “the inalienable, indestructible power of thought and language—the faculty by which we form our opinions, and that by which we express them.” The preservation of a white Southern homeland could be accomplished, he said, by “scrupulously adhering to the phraseology of the past—for making it the vehicle for transmitting to our posterity ideas which once true are true forever. . . . We may do it by the education we impart to the young; by making our nurseries, schools and colleges channels for conveying from generation to generation our own type of thought, sentiment and opinion, by instamping on the minds of our children principles hallowed by the blood of patriots.” Those hallowed principles included states’ rights and freedom from any outside interference as whites sought to maintain a “Southern way of life.” In this way a white Southern identity could be created for the future through the careful control of its memory and language.25

  So now it was the white South’s turn to try to maintain what it came to think of as the traditions of the past and the ways of ancestors. White Southerners could define themselves as standing against an invading culture, a modern world of Yankee material power and Yankee ideas that seemed to have let loose the anarchy of black self-assertion and black freedom to move beyond the place assigned to them by whites. In this struggle, the “phraseology of the past,” a coherent body of shared images and ideas, and the education imparted to children, could provide both a sense of identity for white Southerners and a guide to the future. The ways in which whites spoke of “the South,” the words they chose to describe “kindly” black and white relations, and the images they created of happy plantation homes could provide a unity to the white South not only in space, claiming a geographical region, a home ground, as its own, but also in time, linking white memories of the way things were to how things could be in the future. If the South could keep
its language, its symbolic system and way of seeing the world, then its cause would not be lost.26

  Because Leighton was to participate in Girardeau’s strategy, he was to find himself in a position not unlike that of his old friend Toko, who had struggled so mightily to maintain the identity and traditions of the Mpongwe against a modern Western world. But however much Southern whites wanted to claim a distinctiveness for “the South,” it, too, was an inescapable if sometimes reluctant and odd part of that modern Western world. A white Southern identity overlapped in powerful ways with the identity of the enemy—Yankees, American patriots, modern people. White Southerners were soon to think of themselves as patriotic Americans—perhaps, they thought, the most patriotic people in the nation. And, not incidentally, the white South knew how to use—even in defeat—the power and violence of the modern world to protect its “phraseology of the past” and to keep blacks “in their place.” Modern organizational skills, modern means of communication, modern propaganda, and modern weapons were turned on blacks. Paramilitary and vigilante groups—most notably the Ku Klux Klan—quickly organized across the South after 1865, drawing recruits from men who had served in the Confederate Army. Using strategies they had learned from the old slave patrols and local militias, white secret societies brutalized and murdered blacks and sometimes their white sympathizers—shooting them, hanging them, cutting them up, and sometimes burning them alive. Disguising themselves in terrifying dress and robes, these secret societies practiced on their victims rituals of degradation, and often emasculation, with the intent of maintaining a “Southern Way of Life.” The language of white Southerners—its words, expressions, and phrases—was not ethereal. The “phraseology of the past” did not hang suspended in the air above a Southern landscape, but was a language that emerged from, and then reinforced, violence and brutality.27

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Distant Voices

  While white Southerners went about their often bloody work of keeping the South white, crushing as best they could any black independence or self-assertion, Leighton’s heart continued to be drawn to what he regarded as the great work of foreign missions. Many Southern Presbyterians believed that the church had to focus on building up its Southern Zion as it struggled to recover from the devastations of war. But Leighton insisted that if the church was to have any claim to be regarded as a true church of Jesus Christ, then even in its weakest hour it must engage in foreign mission. Everywhere he traveled around the South—and especially when he visited theological seminaries—he spoke of Jesus’s “Great Commission” to “go and make disciples of all nations.” Soon—sooner than anyone had anticipated—theological students and others began to volunteer for mission, more than the church could send or maintain. But some could be sent, and were sent, as a Southern Presbyterian mission movement began to grow, aided especially by women and their missionary associations in local churches.1

  The mission among the Choctaw and Chickasaw that had struggled through the war years began to show promise. Missionaries began to establish new schools and churches, and Choctaw and Chickasaw pastors and teachers began to take increasing responsibility for the life of the church among their people. And with the federal fleet no longer blockading Southern ports, missionaries could once again go abroad. Soon there were growing numbers of missionaries and teachers in China, missionaries in Mexico and Colombia—and even in Italy, working in cooperation with Italian Protestants, and in Greece, working in cooperation with Greek Protestants. But the mission that captured Leighton’s imagination most fully, and that stirred his deepest memories, was the mission to Brazil—a mission that had a direct and bitter link to Baraka, and to King Glass, King William, and King George.2

  When Leighton had first arrived in the Gabon estuary and had visited the slave barracoon at King William’s Town, he had seen four hundred naked men, women, and children who were being forced “to live like swine” before being shipped to Brazil through the horrors of the Middle Passage. During Leighton’s time at Baraka, he had watched ship after ship leave the estuary bound for the slave markets of Brazil. If Leighton did not know exactly how many people had been shipped to Brazil from throughout Central Africa during the nineteenth century, he knew nonetheless that the numbers were massive. In fact, the number of Africans carried to Brazil between the years 1791 and 1856 alone—2,343,000—far exceeded the number carried to the North American mainland from 1619 to 1860—388,000. Unlike the overwhelming majority of African Americans by the time of the Civil War, many of the newly arrived Africans in Brazil had had little contact with Christianity, and for Leighton they presented a great mission field. As the number of Southern missionaries in Brazil began to grow, Leighton decided to see the country for himself and to visit the young mission.3

  So Leighton sailed on the South Carolina, a steamer whose home port was not Charleston but New York. To embark, he had to return to the great city that had once been his home, and from which he had departed in 1861, in order, it was said, “to cast his lot with his own people.” In New York he had an opportunity to see the city’s amazing growth and to talk once again with his old colleagues in the mission office. They had all once shared much mutual affection, so that even the bitterness of the war had not alienated them from one another. And they had much to discuss. Whatever tensions existed between Northern and Southern Presbyterians at home, they were eager to cooperate in the work of foreign missions that was now expanding rapidly around the globe. Nowhere was their cooperation clearer than in Brazil, where the missionaries of the two churches regarded each other as friends and colleagues.4

  Leaving New York in late November 1874, the South Carolina steamed rapidly south, soon passing St. Thomas and Martinique and other islands of the Caribbean. Leighton was amazed by the ship’s speed and by the comforts of his cabin. He remembered his first trip across the Atlantic in 1832, when he had shared a tiny cabin with five others as the little ship rolled and tossed its way across the open ocean for two months. Now, he believed the comfort and speed of the steamers had been “brought about by the providence of God for the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom.”5

  When they reached the northern coast of Brazil, he spent several weeks in Recife and other cities that had once received slave ship after slave ship. Leighton visited with missionaries, took careful note of the environment, and thought, as he visited markets and rode streetcars, and went out into villages, that it would be difficult “to find anywhere else in the world a more thorough admixture of races. The European, the Indian, and the Negro are compounded in every conceivable proportion.” Sailing south along the coast, he was moved by the beauty of the landscape, and when the ship reached Rio de Janeiro, he thought that nothing he had ever seen could compare to its beauty and grandeur. Sailing south again, this time on a French steamer, he disembarked at Santos, and then he took the train to São Paulo, where there was a thriving Northern Presbyterian school that was already being praised in the Brazilian papers for its high standards and progressive American ways. In a few decades, the “American School” would become MacKenzie Presbyterian University, one of the premier universities in Brazil. From São Paulo, Leighton went by train to Campinas in the heart of coffee country, where Southern Presbyterians had established a congregation and the well-respected International School.6

  Everywhere Leighton went he was hosted by missionaries, and from them he received his primary impressions of the country and the prospects for Protestant missions. The Catholic Church, he was told, though present everywhere throughout the country and deeply connected with the feast days and folkways of the people, was under increasing attacks from progressive sectors of Brazilian society, especially for what was said to be the corruption of the clergy. So perhaps it was not surprising to Leighton that when he visited Protestant congregations, he found not so much the poor or the enslaved as the “respectable”: liberal Brazilians—lawyers, engineers, and doctors and their families—who were reading the Bible for themselves and rejecti
ng what they regarded as the hierarchical assumptions of Catholicism. Whatever Leighton’s hopes about the mission reaching the sons and daughters of West Africa—many of whom were still enslaved—the reality he found was a mission that in its early days was attracting people primarily from the more progressive and professional elements of Brazilian society.7

  After three months in Brazil, Leighton sailed for New York—this time on a large and handsome English steamer. He took with him powerful images of Brazil as a great mission field and a deep commitment to raising up more missionaries for the mission and more money for its support. And he took with him as well an awareness that he could not stay at Old Homestead and conduct the work of foreign missions. However much he loved his Black River home, and however much Jane loved her school, he needed to be located in a major port, a place where great steamers of many nations came, and from which they went forth, carrying goods, people, and news from around the world. So, shortly after his return to Old Homestead, he and Jane began making plans to move to Baltimore, where Benjamin Latrobe was a prominent citizen and now president of the American Colonization Society.8

  WITH THE MOVE to Baltimore in 1876, Leighton could more easily supply the needs of the Southern Presbyterian missionaries—sending them letters and papers, medicines and food, drafts of money and bills of exchange—and could stay in closer contact with the leaders of other US mission agencies. But Baltimore also provided Leighton and Jane with the opportunity to hear distant voices from far-flung mission fields. Among these voices were voices from Liberia. In regular reports sent to mission boards in the United States, they told of life in the young republic—including Cape Palmas, where so many of Leighton’s and Jane’s early hopes had been focused and where their memories still lingered over scenes from Fair Hope, Harper, and Big Town.