By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  32. For the character of the “tornados,” see Brooks, Yankee Traders, 81. For weather patterns at Cape Palmas, see JLW to RA, 7 January 1835, ABCFM.

  33. For mosquitoes and malaria, see Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio, Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe (New York, 2003); James L. A. Webb, Jr., Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge, UK, 2009), 3–9; Randall M. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore, 2007), 19–31. Cf. Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, CT, 2005), 55.

  34. Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 4–5.

  35. For a nineteenth-century physician’s description of the course of malaria, see J. Hume Simons, M.D., Planter’s Guide, Family Book of Medicine: For the Instruction and Use of Planters, Families, Country People, and All Others Who May Be Out of the Reach of Physicians, or Unable to Employ Them (Charleston, SC, 1848), 72–82.

  36. For the evolutionary history of malaria in West Africa and for the development of some immunities by West Africans, see Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 18–41.

  37. Quotations: JLW to RA, 4 March 1835, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 23 November 1835, ABCFM. For malaria and pregnant women, see the World Health Organization’s “Malaria: Fact Sheet,” January 2013, www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/.

  38. JBW to RA, 15 June 1835, ABCFM. For the use of opium to treat malaria, see Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 123–124.

  39. Dr. J. Hall to B. B. Wisner, 19 March 1835, ABCFM; JBW to RA, 15 June 1835, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 7 July 1835, ABCFM. For the use of cinchona bark, the development of quinine, and the uncertainties of when and how to use quinine, see Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 95–98, 102–110, 127–128.

  40. Quotations: JBW to RA, 15 June 1835, ABCFM.

  41. Quotations: JLW to RA, 4 August 1835, ABCFM. For the African role in the slave trade, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK, 1998). For US-made ships, especially those constructed in Baltimore for the slave trade, see Donald L. Canney, African Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1842–1861 (Washington, DC, 2006), esp. 21–22.

  42. Quotations: JLW to RA, 30 September 1835, 7 November 1835, 19 November 1835, ABCFM. Letter written on different dates but sent as one letter.

  43. For the role of missionaries in creating “standard” languages, see Dmitri van den Dersselaar, “Creating ‘Union Ibo’: Missionaries and the Igbo Language,” Africa 67 no. 2 (1997): 273–295, esp. 273–275. For missionary dictionaries as “the point of contact” between missionary “linguistic power” and the discourse of an indigenous people, see Derek Peterson, “Colonizing Languages? Missionaries and Gikuyu Dictionaries, 1904 and 1914,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 257–272. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff have argued that missionaries “colonised the consciousness” of Tswana people of South Africa. See their influential two-volume Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), and vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1997). For a critical review article on the Comaroffs, see Paul S. Landau, “Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution,” in Africa 70, no. 2 (2000): 501–519.

  44. For the ways in which missionary and African encounters involved a dialogue in which Africans were not passive, see J. D. Y. Peel, “The Pastor and the Babalawo: The Interaction of Religions in Nineteenth-Century Yorubaland,” Africa 60 (1990): 338–369; Paul Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, NH, 1996). For the effects of the dialogue on missionaries, see Lamin Sanneh, Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process. The African Dimension (Maryknoll, NY, 1993).

  45. Quotations: JLW to RA, 13 December 1834, ABCFM.

  46. Quotation: ibid.

  47. Quotation: ibid.

  48. JLW to RA, 7 March 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 1 January 1839, ABCFM; Alexander, A History of Colonization, 423; “Western Africa,” Missionary Herald, November 1836, 409–413; JLW to RA, 7 February 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 28 June 1836, ABCFM. For Margaret Strobel’s relationship with JLW and JBW, cf. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), esp. 291–292; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), 27–51; James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990), 17–44.

  49. Quotation: JLW to RA, 23 November 1835, ABCFM. For acquired immunities to malaria, see Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 9–10, 33.

  Chapter Seven: Beneath an African Sky

  1. For details of the trip to Rock Town, see JLW to RA, 19 November 1835, ABCFM. Cf. for early description of Rock Town, J. Leighton Wilson, “Journal of J. Leighton Wilson on a Missionary Tour to Western Africa,” 11 and 14 February 1834, ABCFM.

  2. JLW to RA, 19 November 1835, ABCFM. For other descriptions of how the Grebo handled canoes in the surf, see Wilson, “Journal,” 28 February 1835, ABCFM; Robert Smith, “The Canoe in West African History,” Journal of African History 11, no. 4 (1970): 515–533.

  3. For the history of swimming generally and especially by West Africans, see Kevin Dawson, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,” Journal of American History 92 (2006): 1327–1356.

  4. Quotation: JLW to RA, 19 November 1835, ABCFM.

  5. Quotation: J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 214. Cf. also Wilson, “Journal,” 14 February 1834, ABCFM. The term “fetish” is rarely used today to describe African “greegrees.” Wyatt MacGaffey, for example, used “charm” for the physical bodies that embody spiritual power. See Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago, 1986).

  6. Quotation: Wilson, Western Africa, 215.

  7. JLW to RA, 19 November 1835, ABCFM; Wilson, “Journal,” 14 February 1834, ABCFM; Wilson, Western Africa, 211–216. See also Erskine Clarke, “They Shun the Scrutiny of White Men: Reports on Religion from the Georgia Lowcountry and West Africa,” in African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, ed. Philip Morgan (Athens GA, 2010), 131–150.

  8. Quotation: JLW to RA, 19 November 1835, ABCFM.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Quotation: JLW to RA, 1 April 1836, ABCFM; cf. Dr. Thomas Savage, “Death of a Chief—Funeral Ceremonies,” The African Repository and Colonial Journal 15 (1836): 107–110; John Clarke, “Letter from Cape Palmas,” The Baptist Magazine (London), 1 May 1841, 247.

  12. JLW to RA, 1 April 1836, ABCFM; cf. Stephen Wynkoop, “Journal of S. R. Wynkoop to Western Africa,” 31, ABCFM; Savage, “Death of a Chief”; Clarke, “Letter from Cape Palmas,” 247.

  13. JLW emphasized “the agency” of the fetish. See Wilson, Western Africa, 211–216. For the issue of causality and agency, see Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 1–13; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, 1992 [1976]), esp. 44–45; Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, 2007). For an early and influential discussion of the issue of causality among non-European peoples, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford, 1937). For a helpful summary of the issues, see Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge, UK, 1987), 186–203.

  14. Quotation: “The Rev. John Leighton Wilson Received the Instructions of the Prudential Committee in the Central Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia,” Missionary Herald, 19 October 1834.

  15. An increasingly secular West would largely abandon a belief that some transcendent being acts with purpose in the details of history to move creation and human life toward a final goal. For introdu
ctions to the immensely complex story of secularization and its implications for Christian thought, see Herbert Butterfield, “God in History,” in God, History, and Historians: Modern Christian Views of History, ed. C. T. McIntire (Oxford, 1977), 192–204; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Foolishness of the Cross and the Sense of History,” in ibid., 68–80; Arnold Toynbee, “The Christian Understanding of History,” in ibid., 176–191. Cf. also Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, 2006), esp. 293–342.

  16. Quotations: Isaiah 55:8–9; John 1:14. Cf. JLW’s reflections on death of young missionary couple, JLW to RA, 28 January 1837, ABCFM.

  17. For “missionary hubris,” see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004),180. For missionaries and cultural imperialism, see Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 367–391.

  18. Quotation: Wilson, Western Africa, 215. For the question of the fear of “forces of evil” in the contemporary African churches and the role of Christian faith in reducing that fear, see Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York, 2006), 124–125.

  19. Quotation: Romans 8:21. For the dynamics of conversion, see Robert W. Hefner, “Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 44; Humphrey J. Fisher, “Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversions in Black Africa,” Africa 43 (1973): 27–40. Cf. Keane, Christian Moderns, esp. 6–9, 37–82, 176–196.

  20. JH to JHBL, 15 October 1834, MSCS; Richard L. Hall, On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (Baltimore, 2003), 95–97. For early accounts by Europeans of the “red water ordeal,” see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 241. Cf. the competing interpretations of the death of a slave woman in Virginia in Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), 84–85.

  21. Quotation: JLW to RA, 4 August 1835, ABCFM. Cf. JH to JHBL, 15 October 1834, MSCS.

  22. Quotation: JLW to RA, 4 August 1835, ABCFM. Missionary Herald, January 1836, 65–66. For the widespread publication of such a narrative, see Missionary Register (London), 1 August 1836, 360. The missionary narrative that pitted the heroism and faith of the missionary against some terrifying African practice was perhaps most firmly established by the Swiss missionary Fritz Ramseyer. He and his wife were held captive by the Asante in present-day Ghana for four years. They observed widespread human sacrifice, and at the death of a prince the sacrifice of six hundred slaves and the strangulation of three wives. See Fritz Ramseyer, Quatre Ans Chez les Achanties (Paris, 1876). Such narratives played a key role in establishing images of Africa and in encouraging the mission movement. See Patrick Harries, “Anthropology,” in Mission and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford, 2005), 238–246. But see also J. D. Y. Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 581–607.

  23. Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 113–115; JLW to JHBL, 6 September 1836, MSCS.

  24. Anna M. Scott, Day Dawn in Africa; or, Progress of the Prot. Epis. Mission at Cape Palmas, West Africa (New York, 1858), 25–26.

  25. Quotation: JH to JHBL, 1 May 1836, MSCS.

  26. Quotation: JLW to RA, 18 March 1836, ABCFM.

  27. Quotation: JLW to RA, 23 November 1835, ABCFM.

  28. Quotation: “Minutes of a Public Meeting,” 5 September 1838, MSCS. For settler antagonism toward the Grebo, see JLW to RA, 7 March 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 3 November 1836, ABCFM; JBR to JHBL, 12 February 1837, MSCS; JBR to JHBL, 22 September 1841, MSCS.

  29. Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 118–124.

  30. Wilson, Western Africa, 138. For a helpful summary of the differences between the Americans and the Grebo on landownership, see Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 46–55.

  31. Oliver Holmes to JHBL, 13 July 1836, MSCS; Jane Jackson Martin, “The Dual Legacy: Government Authority and Mission Influence Among the Glebo of Eastern Liberia, 1834–1910” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1968), 88–89.

  32. Quotations: JLW to JHBL, 6 September 1836, MSCS.

  33. For Holmes’s disdain of the colonists, see Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 195; JLW to RA, 3 November 1836, ABCFM; JBR to Oliver Holmes, 27 December 1837, MSCS.

  34. JLW to JHBL, 25 May 1836, MSCS. See also JLW to RA, 12 June 1836, ABCFM.

  35. JLW to JB, 24 October 1833, CTS; J. Leighton Wilson and Stephen Wynkoop, “Report of the State of the Colony of Liberia,” 24 March 1834, ABCFM.

  36. JLW to Ira Easter, 2 June 1836, MSCS. See also JBR to JHBL, 12 February 1837, MSCS; JBR to Oliver Holmes, 27 December 1837, MSCS.

  37. JLW to RA, 1 April 1836, ABCFM.

  38. Quotation: JBR to JHBL, 12 February 1837, MSCS. For settler complaints about being misled and neglected, see, for example, “Afflicting News from the Colony at Cape Palmas,” The Liberator (Boston), 10 January 1835; “Memorial of Colonists to the Board of Managers,” 15 June 1836, MSCS; “Petition of Colonists,” 24 October 1844, MSCS. Cf. William E. Allen, “Rethinking the History of Settler Agriculture in Nineteenth-Century Liberia,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 37, no. 3 (2004): 435.

  39. These issues and the historiography around them are brilliantly analyzed in David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven, CT, 2001), esp. 123–136. See also “Black Memory and Progress of the Race,” in David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 300–337.

  40. Quotation: Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (Oxford, 2009), 71. For the society’s efforts to whiten Maryland, see ibid., 359–389. For abolitionists’ use of JLW’s reports on colonization, see, for example, “Colonization,” The Liberator (Boston), 8 July 1842; and cf. “The Scheme of the Maryland Colonization Society,” The Liberator (Boston), 9 August 1834; “Immediate Abolition,” The Liberator (Boston), 24 January 1835; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), 1–42.

  41. Quotation: Wilson, Western Africa, 126. For Grebo houses, see ibid., 107–109.

  42. Quotation, ibid., 126. For the work of Grebo women generally, see ibid., 107–109, 125–126. For the elegant stride of West African and African American women carrying large burdens on their heads, and for how this walking technique conserves energy, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 200–201.

  43. Quotations: Wilson, Western Africa, 126–127.

  44. Quotations: ibid., 125.

  45. J. Leighton Wilson, “Journal of a Tour to King Neh’s Town on the Cavally River,” 6 June 1836, ABCFM.

  46. For William Davis, see “Extracts from Letters of Mr. Wilson, at Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 8 September 1838; Martin, The Dual Legacy, 101. Davis was serving as JLW’s translator while Simleh Ballah was in Baltimore.

  47. For Mary Clealand, see “Extracts from Letters of Mr. Wilson, at Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 8 July 1837; JLW to RA, “List of Students,” 6 December 1839, ABCFM.

  48. Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 265–266.

  49. Quotation: Wilson, “Journal of a Tour,” 6 June 1836, ABCFM. For the African traditions of rice cultivation and the influence of rice on the development of the Lowcountry rice economy and cuisine, see Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 33–46; Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia, SC, 1992). For the
debate among historians about the extent of African influence in the development of Lowcountry rice plantations, see David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1329–1358. The authors concluded that “the rice regime owed much to improvisation; it was a hybrid, synthetic rather than European or African in character” (1354). For responses to Eltis et al., see American Historical Review 115 (2010): 123–171.

  50. Quotations: Wilson, “Journal of a Tour,” 7 June 1836, ABCFM.

  51. Quotation: ibid., 7 June 1836.

  52. Quotation: John H. B. Latrobe, Maryland in Liberia: A History of the Colony (Baltimore, 1885), 48.

  53. For Ballah’s time in Baltimore, see ibid., 48–52.

  54. Quotations: Latrobe, Maryland in Liberia, 130–133.

  55. Quotations: JLW to JHBL, 6 September 1836, MSCS.

  56. For Grebo dialects, see Sue Hasselbring and Eric Johnson, “A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Grebo Language Area of Liberia,” SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-074: 100, www.sil.org/silesr/abstract.asp?ref=2002-074.

  57. Quotation: J. Leighton Wilson, “Excursion to Bolobo,” 25 October 1836, ABCFM.

  58. Quotations: ibid., 26 October 1836.

  59. Quotation: ibid.

  60. For the active role of the African as a translator and interpreter of the Christian message, see Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (New York, 1989); Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism.’” Cf. Keane, Christian Moderns, esp. 6–9, 37–82, 176–196.

  61. Quotations: Wilson, “Excursion to Bolobo,” 26 October 1836, ABCFM. Cf. Hilary M. Beckles, “Crop over Fetes and Festivals in Caribbean Slavery,” in In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History and Legacy, ed. Alvin O. Thompson (Kingston, 2002), 246–263.