Scipio Vaughan’s South Carolina

In 1840, Church Vaughan’s dying father Scipio advised his family to return to Africa, the continent of their ancestors. Although Scipio had spent most of his life as a slave, his ten children and their mother were life-long free people of color in Kershaw County, South Carolina. Through hard work and the careful cultivation of white patrons, they made an independent living and owned their own land. As this chapter shows through the experiences of this family and their neighbors, however, inland South Carolina became increasingly restrictive and dangerous for free people of color in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the time Church Vaughan’s free Anglo-Catawba mother and African American father married in the 1810s, so many slaves worked on Kershaw County cotton plantations that planters had good reason to fear rebellion, such as one that was brutally suppressed in 1816. Over the following decades, plantation slavery expanded over land previously controlled by Native Americans. Though Scipio Vaughan was gradually manumitted, even free people of color faced increasing legal restrictions, social exclusion, and violence. This chapter illustrates their limited pathways to freedom as well as the mounting pressures on free people of color that made emigration attractive.

Vaughan’s Rebellion

By the late 1880s, freedom as prosperity and autonomy was coming under threat in Lagos. Increasing numbers of European personnel pushed Africans out of their posts in the civil service and foreign-owned commercial firms, limiting opportunities for elite Africans. White leaders of the mission churches sought to reverse decades-old policies and monopolize control over African congregations. Within the Baptist church—with which Vaughan had been associated since coming to Yorubaland thirty years earlier--a new generation of white missionaries subjected him and others to racist condescension. This chapter considers the responses of Vaughan and his contemporaries to the new era of white supremacy in Lagos. In 1888, Vaughan and several others formed the Native Baptist Church, the first non-missionary church in West Africa; they were followed by separatist movements in other denominations. They linked their struggles to those against slavery, referring to the mission church as a barracoon and their subordination to white missionaries as bondage. Understanding the new racism as part of a wider, Atlantic world phenomenon, Vaughan and the other Christian rebels drew on a classic diasporic strategy of separation from white establishments. Thus, this chapter illustrates the role of the African diaspora in changing developments within Africa.

Troubled Times in Yorubaland

This chapter considers Vaughan’s first decade in southwestern Nigeria (1855-67) in the context of West Africa’s major developments: warfare, migration, slave trading, missionary Christianity, and colonialism. During the warfare that convulsed the region for much of the nineteenth century, thousands of captives were exported as slaves to the Americas. Others were rescued by the British Navy and landed at Sierra Leone; some of these, along with ex-slaves from Brazil and Cuba, later returned to Yorubaland. Meanwhile, missionaries from Britain and a few from the United States pushed inland. Though Vaughan had come to Yorubaland as a carpenter for American Southern Baptist missionaries, he was living separately from them when he was taken captive during the brutal Ibadan-Ijaye war. He escaped to Abeokuta, where the African American activist Martin Robeson Delany had recently tried to negotiate a settlement for black American immigrants. Vaughan and the other diasporic Africans in Yorubaland may have hoped to fulfill their dreams of freedom in the land of their ancestors, but they found something more complicated. As this chapter shows, freedom as autonomy meant vulnerability, while freedom as safety or prosperity was best achieved through subordination to strong, autocratic rulers, who profited from slavery themselves.

The Love of Liberty

Within months of his arrival in Liberia in 1853, Church Vaughan was able to undertake more of the rights and duties of citizenship than he ever had before. He trained and served with a militia; he received a land grant to establish his own homestead; and he was eligible to vote. Yet Vaughan spent less than three years in Liberia. What motivated him to leave? As this chapter details, Vaughan learned that settler society was in its own way as exclusive and exploitative as the one he had left behind in South Carolina. From the beginnings of American colonization, a series of military battles and lopsided treaties had either displaced local African peoples or else brought them under the “protection” of the Liberian administration, subject to the foreigners’ laws and unfavorable trading agreements. Liberia’s boosters described this process as bringing civilization, especially since one of their goals was to stop slave trading between local leaders and transatlantic purchasers. Yet Liberians’ use of indigenous labor for their own enterprises closely resembled slavery, as some contemporaries pointed out. When presented with the opportunity to leave Liberia—for a place reputed to be roiled by warfare and slave-trading, no less—Vaughan took it.

Leaving Home

In late 1852, twenty-four year old Church Vaughan boarded a ship bound for Liberia. The vessel had been chartered by the American Colonization Society, an organization founded by white philanthropists and politicians to send African Americans “back” to Africa. As this chapter details, the Society’s mission and efforts were fraught with racist condescension. Since its beginning, African Americans and their allies were repelled by the white supremacy inherent in the Society’s mission and its kowtowing to slaveholders, and relatively few enrolled in the emigration scheme. By the early 1850s, however, new developments pushed increasing numbers of African Americans, like Vaughan, to look toward the continent of their ancestors. As sectional divisions tore at the United States, southern politicians devised new laws to limit free black people’s mobility, inhibit their ability to make a living, and generally equate them with slaves. As Church reached adulthood, predatory officials threatened his family’s livelihood, while the old ties of patronage that had protected them in an earlier era disappeared. Even if emigration did offer a chance for a new life where black people governed themselves, it was a hard bargain to make. This chapter includes an account of some of Church Vaughan’s Liberia-bound shipmates, who chose to leave the United States only under terrible duress. Church Vaughan almost did not leave either.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the life history of James Churchwill (“Church”) Vaughan and the historical issues that examining his life helps to clarify. These include the pervasiveness of slavery in the 19th century Atlantic world, the blurry distinctions between slavery and freedom, African American “return” to Africa, and the influence of the African diaspora on Africa itself. The chapter also lays out the methodological challenges of writing biographies of unknown individuals. Vaughan’s story as remembered by his family members is contradicted by historical evidence; but the way that story was produced and transmitted offers insights into historical memory as well as the comparative history of slavery, freedom, and white supremacy in the Atlantic world.

Afterlives

More than a century after Church Vaughan died in 1893, his descendants in Nigeria and those of his siblings in America kept alive a particular family story. Vaughans remembered Church’s father Scipio as a Yoruba man brought to Charleston as a slave. Decades later in Yorubaland, according to their accounts, Church Vaughan met people bearing his father’s “country marks,” who embraced him as a long-lost relative. Written evidence, however, indicates that Scipio Vaughan was born in Virginia. Where, then, did this story come from? What did it mean to Vaughan descendants as they remembered and retold it? And what meaning can readers take from the “real” story today? This chapter considers these questions. It traces the “country marks” story to encounters between Vaughan’s daughter and American cousins she visited in the 1920s, an era of fascination with Africa as well as violent attacks on African Americans. It argues that although the country marks story gives Vaughan African roots, it was his un-rootedness—his mobility—that brought about the prosperity he was able to bequeath to his descendants. Church Vaughan’s life shows how a vision that transcends national borders and fixed identities can be a resource in a harsh, unfair world.

Reconstructions

In 1869, Church Vaughan’s relatives in South Carolina heard from him for the first time in years. While they were struggling in the Reconstruction South, their kinsman had moved to Lagos, now a British colony, and was building a prosperous business and a new family. His success was clear from the gifts that he sent: gold coins. In comparing the lives of Church Vaughan and his American relatives, this chapter considers the prospects for freedom in postbellum South Carolina and early colonial Lagos. Although slavery had been outlawed in both places, the key difference between the two was white supremacy. In South Carolina, not only did former slaveholders and their supporters endeavor to restrict the freedoms of the previously enslaved; in their vision, all people of color should occupy the lowest economic and social status. In Lagos, to the contrary, colonial rule did not bring an influx of Europeans, and white supremacy did not flourish. Church Vaughan and other newcomers to Lagos were largely free from extractive patronage relationships and personal violence, and they were free to make a good living. In this way, Vaughan had opportunities in colonial Lagos that his relatives in South Carolina no longer enjoyed.