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George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition
Joseph Yannielli
| In late October 1847, somewhere along the West African coast, William Raymond took a break from his usual busy schedule to write a letter. It had been almost six years since he arrived on the shores of Sierra Leone with the thirty-five surviving veterans of the Amistad slave revolt, and though he remained confident in the success of his mission, he was emotionally stressed and physically exhausted. Most of the Amistad group had abandoned him long ago. His two children were dead and buried, and he had almost lost his wife as well, before she escaped to America to recuperate her health. Tropical disease, stubborn chiefs, and avaricious slave traders had all taken their toll. Though only thirty-two, Raymond appeared at least a decade older. All his front teeth were gone, and a native girl had just discovered a lonely crop of rough white hair sprouting mischievously from the top of his head. He longed for a replacement, someone who would allow him finally to "plunge into the interior," to "live and die unknown and unheard of." So it must have been a great relief to learn that his colleagues in New York were sending him George Thompson.1 |
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Raymond did not know Thompson personally, but like many Americans, he knew his reputation as a militant abolitionist, his covert attempt to smuggle slaves out of Missouri, and his subsequent capture and imprisonment. Perhaps because of this, as he penned his greeting to Thompson, Raymond could not help recalling his own early experience in the cause. As a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the 1830s, he had gone out of his way to visit members of the local black community and tutor them "in reading, spelling, writing, and geography." White citizens stalked and harassed him during these daily sojourns across town, and he had tried his best to ignore them. But after allegations that he was sexually involved with a black woman surfaced in the press, he was summarily dismissed by the Amherst faculty and forced to leave town at the end of his sophomore year. "This was my schooling," he confided to Thompson. "This was my diploma ... it did more to discipline my mind than all the Greek roots I had dug out, and all the geometrical problems I had solved for the preceding two years. It ... changed my feelings to those of a black man. From that day I became a black man." Raymond called this his "providential education." But it was also, more explicitly, a political education. No missionaries could succeed among the people of West Africa, he believed, unless they had achieved, or were willing to achieve, this kind of intimate emotional bond with the oppressed, and he hoped Thompson's experiences on America's western frontier had provided the necessary credentials. "Of your former life I know nothing," he wrote, "but I venture to say you came out of the penitentiary much more of a black man than you went in."2 |
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Raymond never had a chance to discover exactly how much of a black man George Thompson had become. Raymond contracted yellow fever less than a month later, died quickly, and was buried outside Freetown. When Thompson finally arrived in Sierra Leone in early May 1848, he found the countryside deep in the throes of a bitter war, the mission station half-abandoned, and no senior agent to turn to for advice. But, like Raymond, he felt that his persecution in America had prepared him well for the daunting task ahead. "My sufferings have only tended to cement my interests with those of the colored race," he opined in a letter published in the American Missionary not long after his release from prison. Because of the United States' historic involvement in the slave trade, he believed that all of white America had a special responsibility to the people of Africa, and he looked forward to spending the rest of his life in an effort to redeem that "bleeding and injured" continent.3 |
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