Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866

Part Three

{ 149 } Part Three In 1858, Lewis Tappan, the ama’s treasurer, voiced his growing frustration with the Jamaica Mission and its ministers. After conversing with a recently returned Mary Dean, Tappan met with an outgoing missionary to share his concerns about the field. The graying abolitionist con- fided to Bigelow Penfield, a twenty-four-year-old Oberlin graduate, about his dissatisfaction with “the course pursued by most of the missionaries,” and he also spoke “of the need to revolutionize the whole concern.”1 Without question, Mary Dean’s feminine civilizing mission had clashed with the mission’s patriarchal family order, but she was not the only person to complain about the older ministers and their practices. Penfield and his wife, Sarah, both a generation younger than Loren Thompson and Seth Wolcott, would also find the mission family order and the ministers’ methods to be old-fashioned and counterproductive to the ama’s goals. The final { 150 } part three two chapters turn to the growing distance between the Jamaica Mission and evangelical abolitionists in the United States. Although a young man, Penfield had an impressive pedigree connecting him to Oberlin’s history. His stepfather, Henry Cowles, was one of the school’s longest-serving professors and the editor of the Oberlin Evangelist . Cowles’s first wife, Alice Welch Cowles, had been the first head of the school’s Female Department, and she had organized the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society.2 After her death in 1843, Henry married the widowed Minerva Penfield, Bigelow’s mother. Minerva also engaged in moral reform work, and in the 1850s, she and her daughter, Josephine Pen- field Bateman, were central figures in Ohio’s temperance movement, even though Henry Cowles still disapproved of women speaking in public.3 Minerva also served on Oberlin’s Ladies Board, a group consisting mostly of faculty wives charged with the responsibility of overseeing the “moral character of young women of the student body.”4 After the radical leadership of Asa Mahan in the 1830s, Oberlin’s succeeding presidents, Charles Finney and James Fairchild, had moderated the school’s politics, but the Cowles-Penfield family remained on the abolitionist and moral-reform vanguard.5 In 1848, Henry Ward Beecher had famously aided in the rescue of two slave girls, Mary and Emily Edmondson, and his sister, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, sent them to live with the Cowles family at Oberlin . Bigelow was no stranger to an interracial household when he moved to Jamaica.6 Penfield’s nineteen-year-old wife, Sarah Ingraham Penfield, had a different kind of connection to the Jamaica Mission’s work. Her father, David Ingraham, had been the first Oberlin missionary in Jamaica, and Sarah had been born on the island in 1839. The couple found much wanting in the Jamaica Mission. Bigelow Penfield wrote six months after arriving, “Mr. Wolcott is scarcely a missionary at all, and I believe he does not expect to draw a salary much longer. I fear that Brother Thompson, with his strong bias and his mind not eminently logical, will be the greatest obstacle in the needed reformation.”7 The mission stations that had hosted encounters between Jamaicans and Americans, the Oberlin ministers and British missionaries, heterodox and orthodox Christians, and masculine and feminine interpretations of the civilizing mission now served as the site for a clash between two different generations. A major source of the generational divide in the Jamaica Mission involved gender ideology and the relationship of gender to the civilizing part three { 151 } mission. Between the mission’s beginning in 1839 and the arrival of the Penfields in 1858, the gender ideology of evangelical abolitionists in the United States had shifted considerably. In the 1830s and early 1840s, the “woman question” had split radical abolitionists. Oberlin’s administrators had generally sided with the more conservative views of Lewis Tappan and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, rather than the women’s rights position of William Lloyd Garrison and his Boston-based followers. The dividing line between these two distinct factions became increasingly blurred in the late 1840s and 1850s. At Oberlin, female students broke down some of the rules that had characterized the school in its first decade. One student, the future suffragist Antoinette Brown, recalled a conversation with Charles Finney in 1848 in which she convinced him to allow female...