Violent Saviors, page 9
Ségur himself had exclaimed on his way to Saint Petersburg: “When one enters Poland, one believes one has left Europe entirely.” Noting the “dirty villages” and “cottages little different from savage huts,” he felt he had “been moved back ten centuries.” When Ségur got to Russia, he described it as a half-civilized place, a mixture of “the age of barbarism and that of civilization, the tenth and the eighteenth centuries, the manners of Asia and those of Europe, coarse Scythians and polished Europeans, a brilliant, proud nobility, and a people plunged in servitude.” The “Scythians” Ségur saw reminded him of “demi-savage figures” he had seen carved on ancient Roman ruins.11
Indeed the label “Scythians” was borrowed by Western European thinkers from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (490/480–425 BCE), who so named the barbarian people north of the Black Sea. Some eighteenth-century thinkers applied the name “Scythians” to all of Eastern Europe, until the label gave way to another more lasting designation also borrowed from ancient history—the Slavs.12
The career of an American world traveler named John Ledyard gives further insight into how the Enlightenment era promiscuously lumped together Eastern Europeans with other uncivilized peoples. Ledyard was born in 1751 in Groton, Connecticut, the son of a sea captain who worked in the Caribbean trade.13
Ledyard in 1772 began his career at a school in New Hampshire. A Congregationalist minister, Eleazar Wheelock, had started Moor’s Charity School a few years earlier to Christianize and civilize America’s own less developed people, the Native Americans. Wheelock’s first big success was a convert to Christianity from the Mohegan tribe named Samson Occom. The Europeanized Occom then successfully toured England to raise funds for Moor’s Charity School.
One who responded to Samson Occom’s appeals was an evangelical Christian and one of England’s richest men, John Thornton. Thornton’s son, Henry, would later help start the philanthropic colony in Sierra Leone. At the beginning, the school gave courses to thirty-five Indian boys and ten girls on farming, Christianity, and Greek and Hebrew. Wheelock expected the students to go back to their communities to propagate true religion, advanced technology, and difficult languages nobody needed. Meanwhile, Occom and Wheelock had fallen out soon after Occom’s return from Britain, with Occom complaining that Wheelock had abandoned him to poverty. Wheelock in turn denounced Occom: “I have taken much pains to purge the Indian out of him, but after all a little of it will sometimes appear.”
Wheelock’s other Indian students proved to be even less enthusiastic about Wheelock purging the Indian out of them. Wheelock shifted the school’s objective to training white missionaries to the Indians. He refounded the school in 1769 with a new name taken from one of its patrons, the earl of Dartmouth. It is today Dartmouth College.14
The twenty-one-year-old John Ledyard in April 1772 attended the Dartmouth courses on civilizing the natives and then spent time among the Iroquois. He would for the rest of his career compare Russians and other so-called backward peoples to American Indians.15
Adding further to his development qualifications, Ledyard joined from 1776 to 1780 the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook. The expedition made stops in southern Africa, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, southern China, Cochin China (Vietnam), and Alaska. In Alaska he encountered Russian fur traders. Another stop in Kamchatka gave Ledyard further exposure to Russians.16
These last encounters made Ledyard want to explore Russia and Siberia. He finally made it to Saint Petersburg in 1787, where he wrote to Thomas Jefferson about how he had encountered “a Scythian at the table that belongs to the royal society of Physicians here.” Ledyard told Jefferson, “The moment the savage knew me & my designs he became my friend.”17 Ledyard’s new “savage” friend offered to help him with his planned expedition to Siberia.
A little bit like an American teenager today wandering the Third World on a gap year, Ledyard enthusiastically lumped together the peoples he encountered. Encountering “Tartars” on his journey in the city of Kazan on the Volga, Ledyard compared “the thick lip” and “broad flat nose” to Africans. The red-painted nails of the Tartar women reminded him of the Cochin Chinese (Vietnamese) he had seen on the Cook expedition. Further analysis of facial features led Ledyard to compare the Tartars with “the Chinese, the Negroes, and the Jews.”18
Ledyard also wrote his friend Jefferson “how universally” the Tartars “resemble the aborigines of America.” He observed how “the cloak of civilization sits as ill” upon the Russian Tartars as upon “our American tartars.” He recalled being part of the Dartmouth “efforts to convert our Tartars to think and act like us,” which he noted had had less than glorious success, with the relapse of even the most advanced convert, Samson Occom, into Indian-ness.19
Traveling farther into Russia, getting more excited by the mile, Ledyard in his journal remembered he had read how “the Scythians scalped their Enemies.” Drawing another connection from his own experience, Ledyard then recalled how when the Hawaiians had killed Captain Cook, “they had cut off all [of his] Hair.” Then of course there was scalping by American Indians. The practice of scalping allowed Ledyard to lump together Russian-Scythians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans.20
Like Ségur, Ledyard also got excited by an analysis of Russia’s uncivilized Kalmuck people (which he spelled Calmuc), whom he identified as a branch of the Tartars. He became more precise on their racial differences from whites, calculating that “the ears of Calmuc and Mongul Tartars, project uniformly and universally farther from their heads than those of the Europeans.” In an early example of empirical work in development, Ledyard drew a sample of three Tartar individuals and found an average ear projection of one and a half inches. Less precisely, Ledyard asserted that the Kalmuck ears “were by no means extraordinary examples—the ears of the Chinese are the same.”21
As for the Jews Ledyard encountered in the borderlands of Russia and Poland, they also seemed to him “Asiatics.” Their villages were miserable, full of poverty and dirt. This was “a proper situation for them”; indeed he thought “they ought to be placed between the borders of every Nation.”22
As Ledyard got deep into Siberia, the Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great heard about his explorations. In December 1787, she ordered Ledyard arrested and expelled westward from the Russian Empire. The sources do not make clear why. “Regarding Ledyard,” Catherine said cryptically, “discovery for others is not always discovery for us.”23
A rather sore loser, Ledyard said as he left the Russian Empire: “I quit it gladly for the Godlike Regions of the West.” Ledyard thought he was now qualified, based on “the little Tour I have made,” to prove “the inferiority of the Eastern to the Western World.” He had not previously comprehended “so vast a difference” between the two. Even Eastern European imports had showed him a difference in taste that “divides both Poland & Russia from the Genius of Europe.” Imports from France consisted of “painted Gewgaws” and toys. The French fitted out her caravans to Eastern Europe the same as she did “her ships for the Coast of Africa.”24
Back in Paris on July 4, 1788, Ledyard wrote a letter to Jefferson. After being “banished by the Empriss of Russia,” Ledyard wrote about himself in the third person, “he is now on his way to Africa to see what he can do with that continent.” Africa was never to find out what Ledyard could do with it, as he died suddenly in Cairo on January 10, 1789, at the age of thirty-seven.25
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Du Pont in 1774 had returned to his own Africa plan. He wrote the French government a memo recommending his experimental colony in West Africa. Nothing happened. Twenty-two years later, Du Pont was still pushing the plan in a proposal to the French revolutionary government. As often happened with Du Pont’s memos, his plan went nowhere.26
Du Pont had failed to become the influential civilizing expert he hoped to be. While Du Pont had failed to become the Father of Polish Progress, he had more impact on the global economy as a literal father. His son founded what is still today the giant DuPont corporation.
Meanwhile, Du Pont’s Africa scheme had gotten new life with a botanist named Henry Smeathman, who had spent four years around the Sierra Leone Peninsula beginning in 1771, studying local flora and fauna. He married the daughter of a chief. After she died, he married another chief’s daughter, who also died. His botanical studies led him by 1783 to conclude that the area could produce “an immense quantity” of rice, cotton, tobacco, and sugar for export. Smeathman thought it was “one of the most extraordinary facts in the annals of mankind” that European slave traders for nearly three centuries had failed to notice they could profit more from buying African products from willing sellers than by kidnapping slaves.
His plan would correct that inexplicable oversight, forming a settlement in Sierra Leone where African production would take off with European techniques, education, and government. The plan would therefore “emancipate and civilize every year, some thousands of slaves,” which would strike at the root of the European slave trade.
Smeathman was a much more talented aid promoter than Du Pont. It is unclear if Smeathman had heard of Du Pont’s plan, or if it was a case of not-so-great minds thinking alike.
Smeathman in 1783 set an example for future aid promoters when he said he would not delay things by “foreseeing and answering any objections” to his scheme. Surely, any such objections would be “of very little moment when opposed to a plan of such magnitude.” Humility was not a conspicuous feature of early expert approaches to African progress.
In 1783, Smeathman visited Paris to sell his plan for “civilizing Africa” to Benjamin Franklin, who declined to help sell others on the scheme. But British abolitionists fighting for the end of the slave trade loved the idea of an experiment to prove the superiority of African free labor to African slave labor. Smeathman had luck with one of the leading abolitionists, Granville Sharp.27
Sharp now joined the growing band of would-be saviors for Africans. In 1783, Sharp wrote a “Memorandum on a late Proposal for a New Settlement to be made on the Coast of AFRICA” referring to Smeathman’s proposal. But he altered the plan with some even better ideas. One of Sharp’s alterations was democratic self-government of the settlement. At the same time, “the settlers must not refuse to admit a Governor… of the King’s appointment.” The settlement should also “obtain the consent (and association, if possible) of the native inhabitants.”28
Sharp’s concern for the consent of Africans to be civilized was as salutary as it was rare. However, other promoters of the project did not share Sharp’s priority on Africans’ agreement to their own progress. Sharp himself did not explain how to reconcile self-government of outside settlers, the King’s authority to rule, and the agreement of local Africans.29
Sharp further developed his own plan in another tract in 1786, even including a scheme for a paper currency in the settlement. On the paper currency, as apparently with other details, Sharp surprised himself on how easy it was to solve development problems:
The advantages appear to me so great and extraordinary, that I can hardly give credit, as I proceed, to my own estimate of them, and am inclined to suspect that I am, in some way or other, enormously mistaken; but as I cannot yet find out my error…30
Sharp’s failed attempt to doubt himself would have some bad consequences. But self-confidence is good for aid promotion. Sharp would secure financing, British government backing, and settlers for his experimental colony.
Sharp had to make some strategic alliances, first with Smeathman. Smeathman in May 1786 had already gotten on his side the British Treasury and a London philanthropic group called the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. He promised this committee that he would take care of London’s Black poor “forever” by resettling them in Sierra Leone.
London’s Black poor included those who had gained freedom by fleeing to the British side in the American Revolutionary War and then made their way to London. Many such free Black people in London were in poverty, and many white Londoners were worried about their potential for crime.
In January 1786, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor stated its intent to “effectually relieve them.” It mobilized support from Londoners by proposing the emigration of this potential criminal class. In February, the Committee even tried to get support from West Indian slave owners by tying its plan to a possible new law “to prevent any Foreign Blacks being brought to this Country to remain.” The planters were enthusiastic about this attempt to shut an escape valve out of slavery.
At this point, the plan came close to embracing the removal of Black people from England back to Africa. The idea of removing uncivilized people from civilized societies had already come up under John Winthrop in 1629, and it would come up again for Black and Indigenous people in America.
Perhaps being allied with slave owners was embarrassing for Granville Sharp and the other abolitionists, and the committee dropped the proposal for banning Black immigration to England. But the committee still advertised a softer objective of getting rid of Black people.31
The Treasury agreed to pay Smeathman, whose creditors were chasing him around London, fourteen pounds for every resettled Black poor person. The relief committee endorsed the idea that “no place” was “so fit and proper” for these London Black people as “the Grain Coast of Africa.” The committee was sure the Smeathman–Sharp plan would provide “the necessaries of life” for the Black settlers with only “moderate labour,” and so their lives would be “rendered very comfortable.” The House of Commons on July 6, 1786, approved the plan “for the Relief of a Number of distressed Black Persons, and Persons of Colour, now in this Country, and for sending them to such Place beyond the Seas as shall by His Majesty be thought best adapted for that Purpose.”32
Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the plan for the free Black people except for the free Black people. There were an estimated fourteen to twenty thousand Black people in Britain. By November 22, 1786, only 259 would-be settlers had come on board the transports scheduled to leave for Sierra Leone. Shortly before sailing on April 9, 1787, the number had increased to 344 Black people. The settlers also included 115 white people, some of whom were specialists in health, agriculture, textiles, and education.33
At this point, the ex-slave Quobna Ottobah Cugoano got involved. Cugoano understood that the project was motivated in part by a desire for removal of Black people. The Sierra Leone promoters’ embrace of this goal had not endeared would-be settlers to the plan. Cugoano caught on to this agenda right away: Many English whites just wanted the Black people “to be hurried away” by any possible means.34
Moreover, Cugoano noticed that Sierra Leone was right in the middle of the slave trade, supported by British forts. There was a British slave fort on Bance Island inside the estuary chosen for the settlement. How could the same British government both promote and fight slavery at the same time and in the same place? “Can it be readily conceived that government would establish a free colony for them nearly on the spot,” Cugoano worried, “while it supports its forts and garrisons… to carry others into captivity and slavery?” The slavers understandably deterred ex-slaves in Britain from volunteering for Sierra Leone.35
As a devout Christian, Cugoano saw some advantages to the Sierra Leone plan because “some encouragement could be given to send able school masters, and intelligent ministers, who would be faithful and able to teach the Christian religion. This would be doing great good to the Africans, and be a kind restitution for the great injuries that they have suffered.” But Cugoano did raise the rather neglected question of West Africans’ consent to the blessings-of-civilization plan. Cugoano noticed the organizers had not actually consulted any Sierra Leoneans on whether they wanted to be civilized, despite Granville Sharp’s mention of local consent. No “treaty of agreement” had “been first made with the inhabitants of Africa.” This is not what Cugoano had had in mind for voluntary exchange between Britons and Africans. Cugoano summarized that the plan had not “altogether met with the credulous approbation of the Africans here” in Britain.36
Once on board the ships prior to sailing to Sierra Leone, things apparently got worse for the few Black people who had volunteered (although there are some conflicting reports). They complained of insufficient food, beds, and clothing. A letter of January 4, 1787, signed by Black representatives complained that “their poverty is made the pretense for their transportation,” and that their treatment by whites on the ships was “little short of the discipline of Guinea-men [slave ships].” Another letter from the Black settlers on March 24 protested that the white organizers were treating Black people like slaves.37
All this Black discontent increased Cugoano’s worries back in England even more. He now recommended calling it all off. Those free Black people still on board “had better swim to shore, if they can, to preserve their lives and liberties in Britain.”38
Finally, the ships sailed to arrive in the estuary of the Sierra Leone River on May 10, 1787. The commander of one of the ships managed to sign a treaty with a local named King Tom for purchasing land for the settlement, which Sharp named the Province of Freedom. The British concept of land purchase had no local counterpart, however, and King Tom had dubious authority in that area anyway.39
Arrival coincided with the start of the rainy season. Heavy rainstorms washed away the seeds planted by settlers. The storms blew down the tents under which the hapless settlers were trying to shelter. Disease was also at its worst in the rainy season. By mid-September, 122 settlers had died. The provisions brought from England ran out.
A Black settler named Abraham Elliot Griffith quickly wrote back to Sharp. “I am sorry, and very sorry indeed, to inform you, dear Sir, that this country does not agree with us at all,” Griffith wrote. “It was really a very great pity ever we came to the country,” he lamented.40
