By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey by Erskine Clarke (review)

In November 1834, two South Carolina missionaries and several African American settlers arrived in Cape Palmas, a Liberian colony situated in West Africa on a beautiful stretch of land that extends nearly a mile into the Atlantic Ocean. Leighton and Jane Wilson were Presbyterian missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to spread Christianity to the Grebo people, the chief inhabitants of nearby Gbenelu, also known as Big Town. The Grebo, known for trade in rice, palm oil, chicken, and fish, also had experienced the active Spanish and Portuguese slave trade. The problem of slavery is a chief theme that historian Erskine Clarke uses to connect Cape Palmas and the Grebo of Big Town to the nineteenth-century South Carolina low country. By the Rivers of Water explores slavery, abolition, and colonization through the experiences of a South Carolina slave-owning couple who migrated across the Atlantic to mission in Liberia. Clarke offers a superbly researched and engagingly written history of the Wilsons’ daring adventures and idealistic dreams in connecting the people of two continents.

Leighton Wilson’s decision to mission in Liberia rested upon an arrogance shared among missionaries who perceived a truly global Christianity. Clarke uses the history of the Wilsons’ “strange odyssey” to gain an understanding of the “mystery of good intentions and cruel consequences, and the enigma of human freedom in the midst of slavery and the contingencies of human life” (xxii). By the Rivers of Water opens with a description of the rice fields of the South Carolina and Georgia low country. Clarke examines the plantation culture among the Gullah, the ethnic identity of the slaves held by Nicholas Serle Bayard, a prominent Savannah physician and the father of Jane and Margaret Bayard. These first chapters establish important cultural and socioeconomic relationships between Jane Bayard and her husband-to-be, Leighton Wilson, who grew up on a neighboring plantation in South Carolina, and their slaves, some of whom followed them to Liberia. By exploring these relationships and tracing the northern influences of family and education on Jane Bayard and Leighton Wilson, Clarke is able to explain the complex tensions between freedom, slavery, and Christianity that account for the slaveholding couple’s motivations and actions.

With vivid prose, Clarke narrates the Wilsons’ numerous harrowing trips abroad. Leighton scouted Liberia first, then returned to fetch his wife and several other passengers who joined them for the chance of freedom, adventure, and mission. When they arrived in Cape Palmas, the South Carolinians received a joyous greeting from the Grebo and a sinister welcome by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria. By Clarke’s account, nearly all missionaries and colonists caught the disease and at least half perished. The Wilsons, unlike many of their compatriots, survived and pursued their mission and school-building activities with incomprehensible energy. Leighton Wilson’s journal and letters provide fascinating insights into his experience with Portuguese slavers; his invention of the Grebo Bible; fetish priests; palavers; and the unique status of women in the tribes they encountered, including accounts of women buried alive for infractions considered minor in the West. Eventually, the Wilsons abandon Cape Palmas and begin a mission at Baraka, among the Mpongwe, who, unlike the Grebo, were more engaged in the transatlantic slave trade.

Throughout the book, Clarke returns to the theme of slavery. Leighton Wilson had an intense dislike of slavery and frequently challenged the institution in Africa, although, as a slave owner, he remained unselfcritical. The Wilsons, finally exhausted by their mission work, returned to the United States in the 1850s in the midst of the secession crisis. For much of the period, they stayed with family in Philadelphia. When the war broke out and the Presbyterian Church split on a North/South divide, they resigned from the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and returned to Savannah to defend it against the “imperialism of the Yankees” (334). Clarke...