Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa by Lisa A. Lindsay (review)

Lisa A. Lindsay's Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa makes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding subfield of Atlantic biography. In an anthology that Lindsay and John Wood Sweet coedited, the prominent African historian Joseph C. Miller wrote, "The so-called 'biographical turn' in the 'Black Atlantic'… is a historiographical advance that I find as profound as the 'quantitative turn,' the sweeping research of pan-disciplinary proportions a half-century ago" ("A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn," in Lindsay and Sweet, eds., Biography and the Black Atlantic [Philadelphia, 2014], 19). Trained as an Africanist, Lindsay demonstrates in this deeply researched, well-written work the continuing evolution and maturity of this subfield. Her work focuses on the remarkable life of James Churchwill Vaughan, who was born free in Camden, South Carolina, but left the South for Liberia and modern-day Nigeria.

In 1975 Ebony magazine published an article that recounted the story of a native African, Scipio Vaughan, whose son James Vaughan settled in Yorubaland, which he recognized as his father's homeland because of the ritual facial scarifications those people shared with his father. James Vaughan remained in touch with his South Carolina relatives, establishing enduring transatlantic family ties. The story was compelling, but was it true? Lindsay embarked on a quest to find out, and after extensive research in the United States, Liberia, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom, she answers that question in Atlantic Bonds.

Unsurprisingly, the Ebony article told only part of the story and was not entirely accurate. Scipio Vaughan was not African; he was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1780. Trained as a carpenter, he came to South Carolina with his master Wylie Vaughan around 1800. In 1815, at age thirty-five, Scipio Vaughan wed Maria Theresa Louisa Matilda Conway, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a free black man and an Anglo-Catawba mother. The couple raised nine children. Wylie Vaughan died in 1820 and manumitted Scipio Vaughan in his will. Scipio Vaughan purchased land and willed property to his children. His son James Churchwill "Church" Vaughan was born in 1828. Scipio Vaughan died in 1840, and a series of tragedies struck the family. The status of free black people deteriorated in the 1850s, and Church Vaughan began considering emigration to Liberia. With the help of the American Colonization Society, he set out for the colony in 1853 to escape "'the oppressive laws then in force against colored men in the Southern States,'" as was inscribed on his tombstone (p. 67).

Conditions in Liberia were harsh, and after a few years, Church Vaughan agreed to accompany Southern Baptist missionaries to Yorubaland to work as a carpenter. He pursued an education with the missionaries, acquired his own land, and in 1865 married Sarah Omotayo, who may have been a mission schoolgirl. When the local military chief turned on the missionaries, Vaughan, his wife, and their young son fled to Lagos, Nigeria, and safety.

Lagos boomed under British control, and Vaughan's skills as a carpenter were in high demand. He opened a successful hardware store, and in 1869 he sent his South Carolina relatives enough gold to change their lives for the better. Sarah Vaughan bore seven children, three of whom survived to adulthood. He educated his children, bringing his sons into his business. The family attended the Southern Baptist Church in Lagos, but in 1888, after years of enduring insults from racist white American missionaries, Church Vaughan and his sons helped form the African-led Native Baptist Church, the "first nonmissionary Christian congregation in West Africa" (p. 180). Virtually all the Baptists in the city joined the church, and soon other local denominations declared their independence from the missionaries. Church Vaughan died in Lagos in 1893, a wealthy and respected man with a large, prosperous extended...