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  • The Old South Confronts the Dilemma of David Livingstone
  • Daniel Kilbride (bio)

David Livingstone (1813–1873) posed a problem for white southerners before the Civil War. He was the greatest hero in the Anglophone world but also a thoroughgoing abolitionist. Livingstone’s heroism stemmed from his 1854–1856 crossing of Africa from Luanda (in today’s Angola) in the west to Quelimane (in Mozambique) in the east. This stupendous feat would have earned Livingstone renown in its own right. But what made Livingstone a hero was how he explained the significance of his exploits, both in speeches he made in Britain upon his return in 1856–1858 and in his book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, which caused a sensation in Britain and the United States when it was first published in 1857. Livingstone used his experiences to express a compelling vision for the regeneration of Africa. He came to believe that missionary efforts had to be preceded by commercial relations rooted in what he and like-minded Britons called legitimate trade—the exchange of items such as cotton, palm oil, and ivory for European-made goods. Livingstone believed that without this foundation the slave trade and its attendant violence, social dislocation, and moral corruption would confound all efforts to bring Western civilization to Africa. Livingstone was the essence of the ideal early Victorian man—self-abnegating, modest, ecumenical, and relentless. He believed with absolute conviction in the idea of progress, the notion that humankind could improve itself materially and spiritually under the stewardship of a benign God. And he had succeeded at what few Europeans had even attempted—to bring this vision to the African interior. He could not be ignored. Livingstone was “the hero traveller,” a South Carolina writer conceded, “a name in every mouth” across the Anglo-American world.1 [End Page 789]

His travels alone would have made Livingstone a compelling figure to Americans, who were avid consumers of British culture despite an acute sense of cultural nationalism and the presence of significant pockets of Anglophobia—especially prevalent in the South due to British antislavery meddling.2 But Livingstone also appealed directly to Americans in the final pages of Missionary Travels. Like a growing number of reform-minded women and men on both sides of the Atlantic, he had come to see the United States and Great Britain as partners in the great cause of spreading Christianity and Western civilization across the world. “It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for liberty and progress rest,” he wrote. Livingstone understood the United States to be an outpost of British civilization, Americans and Britons bound together by ties of culture and blood. The glorious task of regenerating Africa, of bringing her into the community of civilized nations, lay with English-speaking peoples everywhere. The necessary first step was the eradication of the slave trade via the establishment of legitimate trade, specifically in the cultivation of cotton. Livingstone found cotton growing throughout southeastern Africa, and he concluded—erroneously, it turned out—that the Zambezi River was navigable deep into the interior, providing a ready thoroughfare for commercial penetration. When Africans learned that Britons and others would happily buy all the cotton Africa could produce, they would abandon slave trading.3 [End Page 790]

Perhaps with his American audience in mind, Livingstone took pains to point out that Britain shared responsibility for the survival of the peculiar institution owing to its consumption of plantation staples. “We now demand increased supplies of cotton and sugar, and then reprobate the means our American brethren adopt to supply our wants,” he chided his compatriots. “Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race practicing the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by increased demands for the produce of slave labor, in perpetuating the enormous wrong.” Livingstone maintained that Britain had the standing, over white southerners’ objections, to work for the end of slavery in the United States. “We claim a right to speak about this evil . . . the more especially because we are of one blood,” he wrote. If Africa could achieve even a fraction of its cotton-growing potential, England...

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