27. Quotations: ibid.
28. For the judgment that a diplomatic incident had been narrowly avoided, see Deschamps, Quinze Ans, 307. See also ibid., 303. Deschamps summarizes positive French perceptions of JLW: “Wilson a été certainement un homme remarquable. Il a frappé Bouet, Darricau, Méquet qui ont admiré son œuvre, son activité, sa modération; la largeur et la justesse de ses jugements sont frappants.” Ibid., 101. Cf. as well Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875, 106–107. See also J. Leighton Wilson, “West Africa,” Missionary Herald, June 1846, 210–211.
29. Quotation: Bucher, “The Village of Glass,” 398–399.
30. For the continuing defiance of Glass and Toko, see WWD, 25 January 1848, WHS; “West Africa,” Missionary Herald, December 1848, 196.
Chapter Eighteen: Home Visit
1. Quotation: JLW to RA, 28 March 1851, ABCFM. In many places WW’s diary describes Catholic/Protestant relationships at the estuary. See, for example, WWD, 15 February 1847, 12 May 1848, 29 April 1849, WHS.
2. “Western Africa,” Missionary Herald, January 1846, 3.
3. Quotation: JLW to RA, 13 December 1847, ABCFM. See also JLW to RA, 17 January 1848, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 30 January 1849, ABCFM.
4. David E. Gardinier, “The Schools of the American Protestant Mission in Gabon (1842–1870),” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 74, no. 2 (1988): 172. For recent converts as key players in mission work, see Peggy Brock, “New Christians as Evangelists,” in Mission and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford, 2005), 132–152.
5. JLW to RA, 18 March 1838, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 15 July 1843, ABCFM; Jane Preston, Gaboon Stories (New York, 1872), 69–70; Gardinier, “The Schools of the American Protestant Mission in Gabon,” 172.
6. For Dorsey, see Richard L. Hall, On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (Baltimore, 2003), 456. JLW to JHBL, 6 July 1837, MSCS; Gardinier, “The Schools of the American Protestant Mission in Gabon,” 172. For Mary Clealand, see Preston, Gaboon Stories, 70. For their marriage, see Gardinier, “The Schools of the American Protestant Mission in Gabon,” 172. For the birth of William Leighton Dorsey, see WWD, 2 July 1848, WHS; David E. Gardinier, Historical Dictionary of Gabon (Metuchen, NJ, 1981), 109. For their daughter Sara Dorsey, see “Ma Sara,” teacher and wife of pastor Owondo Lewis, in Jean Kenyon MacKenzie, Black Sheep: Adventures in Africa (Boston, 1916), 163–165, 198–200. For their daughter Celia, see Robert Hamill Nassau, My Ogowe: Being a Narrative of Daily Incidents During Sixteen Years in Equatorial West Africa (New York, 1914), 314–315.
7. WWD, 16 September 1846, 6 November 1846, WHS. See also JBR to Dr. James Hall, 11 July 1846, MSCS.
8. For the continuing relations between the James and Wilson families, see, for example, JLW to BVRJ, 6 May 1857, CTS; BVRJ to JLW, 8 July 1859, CTS.
9. WWD, 27 November 1846, WHS. For the conflict between settlers and Grebo in 1844, see Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 225–246; Jane Jackson Martin, “The Dual Legacy: Government Authority and Mission Influence Among the Glebo of Eastern Liberia, 1834–1910” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1968), 164–178; and cf. King Freeman to JHBL, 1 April 1844, MSCS. For the role of Matthew Perry and the Africa Squadron, see Donald L. Canney, Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1842–1861 (Washington, DC, 2006), 45–68. For a report on the Episcopal mission at Cape Palmas in 1846, see Missionary Register (London), 1 January 1848, 3.
10. Quotation: WWD, 28 November 1846, WHS.
11. “Appointments by Agent Maryland State Colonization Society,” March 1845, MSCS; JBR to Dr. James Hall, 1 January 1844, MSCS; JHBL to Dr. James Hall, 1 March 1847, MSCS.
12. “Appointments by Agent Maryland State Colonization Society,” March 1845, MSCS; JBR to Dr. James Hall, 1 January 1844, MSCS; JBR to JHBL, 30 December 1845, MSCS.
13. Quotation: WWD, 26 December 1846, WHS.
14. JLW to RA, 11 April 1847, ABCFM.
15. Quotation: J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 366.
16. Quotation: JLW to RA, 6 April 1848, ABCFM. For JLW’s securing of another gorilla in 1848 and for its measurements made by Dr. Gautier, a French physician then in Gabon, see WWD, 21–23 September 1848, WHS. For JLW’s securing of still another in 1851, which he again sent to Boston, see JLW to RA, 7 October 1851, ABCFM.
17. Quotation: Thomas S. Savage and Jeffries Wyman, “Notice of the External Characters and Habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, a New Species of Orang from The Gaboon River,” Boston Journal of Natural History 5 (1847): 441. For JLW’s role in the “discovery of the gorilla,” see Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (New York, 1861), 347. JLW’s role in the “discovery” has long been downplayed, as if he did not realize the scientific importance of the njina. For the controversy that followed after JLW turned over the skulls and bones to Savage in New York, see Richard Conniff, The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (New York, 2011), 227–239. For an analysis of degrading portrayals of Africans as apes and, in particular, as gorillas, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT, 1995), 39–44, 180.
18. JLW to RA, 21 June 1847, ABCFM.
19. Quotations: JLW to SSW, 28 February 1844, SCL.
20. Quotations: ibid. Cf. the Apostle Paul’s position in 1 Corinthian 8 about refraining from eating meat offered to idols.
21. Quotation: ibid. For JLW’s continuing conversations about slavery with family members and other Southern whites, see JLW to RA, 9 December 1852, ABCFM. For the growth of wealth in the Wilson family, see, for example, Last Will and Testament of William Wilson, Will Records 1 A, 13 May 1850, PCSC. For Sumter County developments, see J. D. B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States . . . Being a Compendium of the Seventh Census (Washington, DC, 1854), 302; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, SC, 1998), 286.
22. For a report of JLW’s visits and the content of his addresses, especially his accounts of French aggression and his denunciation of the export of New England rum to Gabon, see Boston Daily Atlas, 8 July 1847, 1. For his article on languages, see J. Leighton Wilson, “Comparative Vocabularies of Some of the Principal Negro Dialects of Africa,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 1, no. 4 (1849): 337–381. For JLW’s role as an early student of Bantu, see Robert Needham Cust, A Sketch of the Modern Languages of Africa, vol. 2 (London, 1883), passim.
23. JLW to RA, 13 December 1847, ABCFM. For reports on JLW’s sermons and talks in Charleston and Savannah, see Laura Maxwell to Mary Jones, 4 December 1847, Charles Colcock Jones Papers, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University; see also letter of 17 December 1847. For the sale of Fair Hope plantation, see Buddy Sullivan, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater: The Story of McIntosh County and Sapelo (Darien, GA, 2001), 258, 284n145. For the settlement of Roswell by wealthy Lowcountry families and the development of its mills, see Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, CT, 2005), 190–201.
24. For JLW’s experience of his old home, see JLW to RA, 7 January 1848, ABCFM; Mrs. Shaw, “Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church: 1809–1976” (n.p., 1976), 15; S. E. Wilson to JLW, 19 July 1847, copy, ABCFM. In 1850, JLW wrote of Pine Grove as “identified almost with our existence.” See JLW to “Dear Sister,” 15 October 1850, SCL.
25. Quotation: “Anniversary Week in New York,” New York Herald, 15 May 1848.
26. Quotations: ibid. For continuing anger over the French attack of the American mission at Baraka, see “Louis Philippe,” New York Herald, 30 August 1848. Cf., for similar observations about the intelligence of Africans and the spirituality that marked many African cultures, JLW to Elipha White, 8 July 1837, in “Fair Hope, Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 21 October 1837; JLW to Elipha White, 10 March 1838, in “Fair Hope, Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 15 December 1838. See, esp., Wilson, Western Africa, 379–381.
Chapter Nineteen: “He Worships with Sincere
Devotion the Customs of His Ancestors”
1. Leighton Wilson, “Mr. Wilson’s Journal, November 1842,” ABCFM. See also J. Leighton Wilson, “Extracts from the Journal of Mr. Wilson,” Missionary Herald, June 1843. For demographic figures and reasons for the decline in the Mpongwe population, see K. David Patterson, “The Vanishing Mpongwe: European Contact and Demographic Change in the Gabon River,” Journal of African History 16, no. 2 (1975): 217–238.
2. Quotation: WWD, 3 March 1843, WHS.
3. Quotations: WWD, 5 January 1848, WHS. See also K. David Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875 (Oxford, 1975), 105, 128.
4. Quotation: “Western Africa,” Missionary Herald, 12 January 1848.
5. Quotations: WWD, 29–30 January 1848, WHS. Cf. JLW’s description of Indâ, or Ndâ, in J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 395–396.
6. Quotations: WWD, 29–30 January 1848, WHS. For burial ceremonies, cf. Robert Hamill Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa (New York, 1904), 215–222.
7. WWD, 15 May 1848, WHS.
8. Quotation: WWD, 17 October 1847, WHS. For Mpongwe girls educated at Baraka entering liaisons with white traders, see David E. Gardinier, “The American Board (1842–1870) and Presbyterian Board (1870–1892) Missions in Northern Gabon and African Responses,” Africana Journal 17 (1998): 221.
9. Quotation: WWD, 8 April 1848, WHS.
10. For a report of their departure from Providence, Rhode Island, see “Sailing of Missionaries,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 17 June 1848, 1.
11. Quotations: WWD, 7–8 May 1848, WHS. For Zeniah Walker’s illness and death, see WWD, 26 February 1848, WHS; WWD, 22 April 1848, WHS.
12. WWD, 14 July 1848, WHS; WWD, 26 October 1848, WHS.
13. Quotation: WWD, 31 March 1849, WHS. See also Albert Bushnell, “Report of the West African Mission for 1848,” ABCFM; J. Leighton Wilson, “Letter from Mr. Wilson,” Missionary Herald, February 1850, 37.
14. Quotation: WWD, 20 May 1849, WHS.
15. Wilson, Western Africa, 391–396.
16. Quotation: ibid., 394. For the use of the decomposing brain, see ibid. For the complex relationship of Mbwiri to other male secret societies, such as the Bwiti among the Fang and the Mwetyi among the Shékiani, see Kairn Klieman, “Of Ancestors and Earth Spirits: New Approaches for Interpreting Central African Politics, Religion, and Art,” in Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary, ed. Alisa Lagamma (New Haven, CT, 2007), esp. 54–59. See also André Raponda-Walker and Roger Sillans, Rites et Croyances des Peuples du Gabon (Libreville, Gabon, 2005), 189–237.
17. Quotation: WWD, 15 July 1849, WHS. See also Wilson, Western Africa, 391.
18. Quotation: Wilson, Western Africa, 394.
19. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 255; Walker and Sillans, Rites et Croyances, 241–243.
20. Quotations: WWD, 21–23 March 1848, WHS; Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 260–261.
21. Quotation: JLW to RA, 28 March 1851, ABCFM. See also Wilson, Western Africa, iii, 390–391.
22. Quotation: WWD, 1 July 1849, WHS.
23. For boils, see WWD, 31 March 1849, WHS. For a student’s death from an ulcerated foot, see WWD, 23 October 1848, WHS. For liver problems, see Albert Bushnell to RA, 16 February 1850, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 2 August 1850, ABCFM. For the West African pathogens that most afflicted Europeans, see Robert A. McGuire and Philip R. P. Coelho, Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress: Diseases and Economic Development (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 88–97. The author discussed health issues in tropical Gabon with Drs. Fuka Bamanga Jomain and Wayne Fricke of Bongolo Evangelical Hospital, Gabon, 19 August 2007, Libreville, Gabon.
24. Quotation: JLW to RA, 6 February 1849, ABCFM. See also WWD, 1 February 1849, WHS; Jane Preston, Gaboon Stories (New York, 1872), 82–84.
25. Quotations: JLW to RA, 6 February 1849, ABCFM; WW to Prudential Committee, 7 February 1849, ABCFM; Missionary Herald, June 1849, 210.
26. Quotations: WW to L. B. Treat, 19 February 1849, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 6 February 1849, ABCFM.
27. Quotation: JLW to Charles Hodge, 2 October 1849, CTS. See also David E. Gardinier, Historical Dictionary of Gabon (Metuchen, NJ, 1981), 165–166; Gardinier, “The American Board (1842–1870) and Presbyterian Board (1870–1892),” 223–224.
28. Quotations: John 1; JLW to RA, 7 October 1851, ABCFM. Conversations with Professor John Ellington, who had translated the Gospel of John into several Bantu languages, November 2011, Montreat, North Carolina.
29. Quotation: Preston, Gaboon Stories, 69–70.
30. For improving relationships between the French and the missionaries, see, for example, JLW to William Wilson, 12 September 1850, SCL. For Du Chaillu’s relationship with the mission and especially the Wilsons, see Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (New York, 1861), 27; Hampden C. DuBose, Memoirs of Rev. John Leighton Wilson, D.D., Missionary to Africa and Secretary of Foreign Missions (Richmond, VA, 1895), 147; K. David Patterson, “Paul B. Du Chaillu and the Exploration of Gabon, 1855–1865,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 7, no. 4 (1973): 649. For Du Chaillu and the gorilla, see Richard Conniff, The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (New York, 2011), 285–303.
31. Henry Hale Bucher, Jr., “The Mpongwe of the Gabon Estuary: A History to 1860” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1977), 300; K. David Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875 (Oxford, 1975), 128.
32. Jeremy Rich, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (Lincoln, NE, 2007), 11, 27–35.
33. Quotation: WWD, 6 February 1849, WHS. For missionary observations of the slave trade in the estuary, see WWD, 10 August 1848, WHS; WWD, 6 February 1849, WHS; WWD, 11 August 1858, WHS; WWD, 14 August 1866, WHS. For the continuing slave trade in the estuary and the continuing role of domestic slavery, see K. David Patterson, “Early Knowledge of the Ogowe River and the American Exploration of 1854,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 1 (1972): 75–87.
34. Quotations: JLW to RA, 27 December 1850, ABCFM; J. Leighton Wilson, “Suppression of the Foreign Slave Trade,” to RA, 12 October 1852, ABCFM. See also JLW to Samuel Wilson, 1 January 1851, SCL. The pamphlet, with an introduction, was reproduced in Wilson, Western Africa, 430–451. For a succinct review of the debates about the “noble achievement” of the British, see David Brion Davis, “Honor Thy Honor,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011, 46–48.
35. Albert Bushnell to RA, 16 February 1850, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 17 September 1850, ABCFM; JLW to William Wilson, 12 September 1850, SCL; WWD, 6–14 July 1852, WHS.
36. For Jane Cooper staying with the Eckards, see JLW to RA, 17 September 1850, ABCFM. For WW and Kate Hardcastle, see WWD, 29 September 1851, WHS.
37. For an evaluation of the Wilsons’ health, see C. A. Ford to RA, 25 February 1852, ABCFM. Cf. also WWD, 1 March 1852, WHS.
Chapter Twenty: An Unsought and Unexpected Appointment
1. JLW to RA, 2 June 1852, ABCFM. Cf. George Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters and African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1970), esp. 73–131.
2. Ibid. For a detailed description of Harper in 1852 and the area where Fair Hope had once been located, see Richard L. Hall, On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (Baltimore, 2003), 328–331. For Freeman’s death, see ibid., 368–369.
3. Winston James, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851 (New York, 2010), 105–107. For the feeling of insecurity in the colony following Russwurm’s death, see WWD, 26 December 1851, WHS. Maryland in Liberia gained its independence from the Baltimore board in 1854. It became a state of the Liberian nation shortly after the war of 1857.
4. Quotation: Amos J. Beyan, African American Settlements in West Africa: John Brown Russwurm and the American Civilizing Efforts (
New York, 2005), 92.
5. WWD, 12 December 1851, WHS. For James’s letter, see Carl Patrick Burrowes, Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, 1830–1970: The Impact of Globalization and Civil Society on Media-Government Relations (Trenton, NJ, 2004), 174.
6. JLW to “Dear Sister,” 18 July 1852, SCL.
7. JLW to RA, 15 August 1852, ABCFM; JLW to “Dear Sister,” 15 October 1850, SCL; JLW to RA, 9 December 1852, ABCFM.
8. John Adger, My Life and Times (Richmond, VA, 1899), 164–200; Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1996), 189–199.
9. Quotations: William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1935), 250. See also Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 215–252; Thomas Smyth, Unity of the Human Races (New York, 1850), 74. For Smyth’s library, see O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 488–489.
10. JLW to RA, 9 December 1852, ABCFM. For the hurricane, see Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York, 2008), 30.
11. For the rapid development of railroads in Georgia, see George White, Statistics of the State of Georgia: Including an Account of Its Natural, Civil, and Ecclesiastical History; Together with a Particular Description of Each County, Notices of the Manners and Customs of Its Aboriginal Tribes, and a Correct Map of the State (Savannah, GA, 1849), 87–93.
12. JLW to “Dear Sister,” 15 October 1850, SCL.
13. JLW to RA, 9 December 1852, ABCFM.
14. JLW to RA, 11 January 1853, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 16 June 1853, ABCFM.
15. Quotation: Hampden C. Dubose, Memoirs of Rev. John Leighton Wilson, D.D., Missionary to Africa and Secretary of Foreign Missions (Richmond, VA, 1895), 230.
16. Ibid., 235.
17. For the rapid expansion of Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York, 2010), 879–891. For the expansion of Presbyterian missions, see John C. Lowrie, A Manual of Missions: Or, Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church: With Maps, Showing the Stations, and Statistics of Protestant Missions Among Unevangelized Nations (New York, 1854). See also “Annual Report: Board of Foreign Missions, 1857,” Presbyterian Church, USA (Old School), PHS.
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