Samuel Ringgold Ward by R. J. M. Blackett

Author:R. J. M. Blackett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Turning His Back on North America

WARD HANDED HIS MANUSCRIPT to his publisher, John Snow, in early November 1855 and promptly left for Jamaica. Few knew of his destination. Emily had pleaded with him to return to Toronto. Ward chose instead to follow the path of many other Black Americans who, since Jamaica’s emancipation in 1834, saw its promise of freedom as an alternative to American slavery and Negro-hate. With emancipation, Jamaica joined Haiti as the southern arm of an international movement that sought to win freedom for slaves throughout the Atlantic world. Some emigrants went as missionaries; others were sojourners; fugitive slaves sought refuge; and yet others looked for new opportunities. Isaiah De Grasse, a schoolmate of Ward’s in New York City, may have been one of the first to move to Jamaica after 1834. He had grown disillusioned with the Episcopal Church’s refusal to admit him to its seminary, where he had hoped to train to become a missionary. De Grasse was so light-skinned he could pass for White, but his choice to attend St. Phillip’s, the city’s Black Episcopal congregation, raised suspicion among the church’s hierarchy about his race. De Grasse died, at age twenty-seven, of yellow fever soon after his arrival in 1841. The most consequential African American missionary was Ward’s cousin Henry Highland Garnet, who in the summer of 1852, during his tour of Britain, applied to and was accepted as a missionary by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Garnet left for his post in Sterling, Westmorland, weeks before Ward’s arrival in Liverpool. These were trying times for the church, which found it difficult to man its missionary stations on the island. A series of smallpox and measles epidemics had wreaked havoc in the country. Despite the death of his infant son soon after the family’s arrival in Kingston, Garnet wrote approvingly of what he saw once he settled in Sterling, on the west side of the island. He and his wife, Julia, opened schools for boys and girls. Garnet encouraged Black Americans to move to the island. Yet in the end, his frustration that this “beautiful and fruitful country” had been ruined “morally and commercially,” coupled with the penury of a missionary’s life, led Garnet to sever his ties with the United Presbyterian Church and return to the United States in early 1856, not long after Ward’s arrival in Kingston.1

Robert Douglass Jr., the painter and daguerreotypist, spent a number of years in the Caribbean, first in 1837 in Haiti, where he was the official artist of President Boyer, and then in the late 1840s in Jamaica, where he was commissioned to paint scenes of missionary stations. Douglass may have crossed paths with J. W. C. Pennington, the fugitive slave and Presbyterian minister, who visited the island for four months in 1846, prompted by the need to put some distance between himself and his master, who had threatened to retake him. Pennington sent home sympathetic reports of the conditions of the freed people. “I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.