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

Part One

{ 15 } Part One After the Revolutionary War, New Englanders moved west to the Ohio River Valley, spreading across the lands ceded by Iroquois tribes in western New York as well as the Western Reserve, what would become Ohio in 1803. For many migrants, this settlement was seen as the latest stage in the fulfillment of a national destiny, and the settlement in Ohio drew comparisons to the Puritan settlement of New England. One account even told of a group of settlers floating along the Ohio River on a boat named the Mayflower, and after landing in Marietta, Ohio, they “reenacted the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth.” The Protestant clergy, particularly those located in Connecticut, followed this settlement of the Western Reserve closely, watching speculators and land companies map out the land into frontier towns for adventurous Yankee settlers. In the 1810s, members of the Connecticut Missionary Society saw the Western Reserve as more than an opportunity for material riches, and they { 16 } part one believed that this “New Connecticut” offered a chance for moral regeneration for the descendants of English Puritans. In speaking and writing about the Western Reserve, they condensed history, recalling images of the New World in the 1600s as well as locales recently selected for Protestant foreign missions. The West was at once a “howling wilderness” and a “garden paradise,” awaiting the attention of godly men and women who would prepare a fruitful harvest.1 While some in the East believed that the frontier would reanimate the Puritan spirit of two centuries earlier, anxiety also existed that the white settlers leaving the “civilized” settlements of New England might degenerate into savages. Consequently, after a brief failed attempt to convert the Indians of the Western Reserve to Christianity, the missionaries sent out by the Connecticut Missionary Society shifted their attention to the souls of white settlers. Harrowing accounts of white frontier families relied on descriptors more commonly applied to Natives than to white Americans. As an example, New Englander Zerah Hawley’s dismal travel narrative written in the early 1820s observed that the residents of Ohio were “literally barefoot” and their houses contained little furniture.2 Indicating the amount of regression among the westerners, Hawley commented that the women’s clothing “is very ancient, similar to the fashion of our grandmothers ,” and older women wore their hair in braids, “much in the manner of Chinese gentlemen.”3 Far more disturbing to Hawley, families and unrelated guests slept together “promiscuously in one room . . . without anything to screen them from view of each other.” While dress and living conditions may be explained and forgiven, Hawley could not tolerate this breach of the gender order, and to him it indicated that these white settlers had taken a “great step toward a state of barbarism.”4 Hawley’s commentary also reflected his fluency with the emerging Protestant missionary movement in the United States, and its underlying theory that all the world’s peoples existed on different rungs of the ladder toward Christian civilization. Indeed, he perhaps had the recently launched American mission to the Sandwich Islands in mind when he wrote, “Missionaries are, as appears to me, almost as much needed here as in the Islands of the Seas; and as these people are our own brethren according to the flesh, there appears to be a duty incumbent on those who possess the means” to save these frontier families who “are groping in Heathenish darkness.”5 For Hawley and many other easterners traveling to the Western Reserve, part one { 1 } the signs that their fellow white Protestants were backsliding into savagery were deeply disturbing. Almost a decade later, Oberlin’s founder, John Jay Shipherd, shared Hawley’s view of the creeping barbarism of the frontier, and the need for religious and moral institutions to protect white settlers from backsliding . Shipherd, his wife, and their two young sons moved from upstate New York to Elyria, Ohio, a six-year-old town southwest of Cleveland. Shipherd found the discomforts of frontier life physically and spiritually taxing. One night on the way home at twilight, he wrote his mother, “I lost my way, as I could not see the marked trees or tracks which were covered with leaves—and to comfort me while searching for the road a gang of wolves set up a howling which make the woods ring.” But, he reassured his mother, the wolves...