Home : The Voice : October 2002 

FORMER TENNESSEE SLAVE MEETS
THE MONARCH OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Mrs. Martha Ann Ricks Presented to Queen
Victoria and Invited to Lunch at Windsor Castle

by George M. Apperson

QUEEN VICTORIA “graciously accorded an interview at Windsor Castle” to Martha Ann Erskine Ricks, “the Liberian negress who had come from Africa to see her Majesty,” The Times of London reported on July 17, 1892. Mrs. Ricks was not a British subject but the Illustrated London News published her picture on July 23 and commented that she, “has all her life felt a strong love for the Queen of England, whom she regards as the Mother of her people, and of all the poor and oppressed.” The story, which reads like fiction, began in Blount County, Tennessee, in 1817 when a daughter was born to George and Hagar Erskine.

Her father, George M. Erskine, was a slave until he was about thirty-seven years old. He came to the attention of Dr. Isaac Anderson around 1812 when he was being prepared for membership in the New Providence Presbyterian Church. Anderson tutored the talented slave and purchased him in 1815. He then applied to the Blount County Court for his manumission, and immediately after, Erskine was introduced to the Presbytery of Union, meeting in Maryville. He asked to become a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry and was unhesitatingly accepted. [Presbyterian Voice, Dec. 2001, synodoflivingwaters.org]

When the American Colonization Society was founded in December 1816, it attempted to meet the challenge of giving legal equality to African Americans, both slave and free, by establishing them in a country of their own. A major objective in founding an American colony in Africa was to provide a base for ending the evil of the slave trade and bringing “liberty and religion” to the so-called Dark Continent. The Synod of Tennessee, organized in 1817, gave voice to the powerful antislavery sentiment in East Tennessee by vigorously endorsing the Society. Erskine was liberated as the project was beginning and he embraced its objectives with enthusiasm.

From the cool, green hills of East Tennessee to Equatorial West Africa is a long journey, both for body and mind. An ideal explanation, expressed on the coat of arms of Liberia, proclaims “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here,” but the commanding reason for founding the colony was the politically divisive and morally corrosive problem of African slavery in the United States. Nine days after he arrived in Africa, George Erskine, with a new sense of liberation, wrote, “Never did I feel so much like a freeman as I have since I came here.” His family, with no desire to return to America, shared his enthusiasm and his own sense of coming to his natural home prompted him to say, “I would heartily recommend to every freeman of colour, to leave the United States for Liberia.”

Martha Ann was thirteen when the family left Tennessee for Hampton Roads, Virginia, to board a ship that had been provided for bringing African Americans to Liberia. Her grandmother, Martha Gaines, who was born in Africa, her parents and six brothers and sisters made up the family group. Her mother, Hagar, and all the Erskine children, had been redeemed from slavery by Erskine’s arduous efforts. When he was licensed as a minister in 1818, Erskine began a series of journeys, raising funds to rescue his family from bondage. In December 1827 he reported that he had bought his wife and five children from their owners. In 1828, returning from New England, Erskine received four hundred-fifty dollars in Philadelphia to purchase his twenty-one-year-old son who had joined the Presbyterian church three years earlier and wanted to become a minister. By 1829, two remaining children had been rescued from slavery by their father and the family was ready to begin a new life in Africa.

Thirty passengers on the ship Liberia were from Loudoun County, Virginia. Their letters, written from Africa, were published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in July 1989. Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw, in editing the letters, noted that there were twelve emigrants from Tennessee on board, providing the initial clue for bringing the long-forgotten Erskine story into focus. Ms. Kyra E. Hicks of Arlington, Virginia, read the account of Erskine’s experience on the Internet, as published in Presbyterian Voice, and realized that it provided background for her research on Martha Ann Erskine and her remarkable story. One emigrant had been recruited for the Liberian venture by Erskine himself. Nineteen-yearold Sion Harris of Knox County, Tennessee, was literate and intelligent, and later became Martha Ann Erskine’s first husband.

A month after arriving in Africa, Erskine wrote to the American Colonization Society, expressing alarm at the virtual absence of schools in the colony. Of the fifty-eight emigrants with him on the voyage, thirty-one were illiterate, he reported. His children had begun their education in Tennessee. Hopkins, ten when the family emigrated, was educated in Liberia for the Presbyterian ministry, while his older brother was left in Maryville, to be trained by Dr. Anderson. Martha Ann used her education to become a teacher. Erskine’s faith in the power of learning had been instilled in him by Dr. Anderson and by Dr. Charles Coffin, president of East Tennessee College (now the University of Tennessee at Knoxville). From 1787, the Presbyterian Church had maintained that the first step toward the final abolition of slavery was through education. Erskine feared that in the immediate future Liberia was “mostly to be peopled by slaves . . . without any education themselves, and without means and very little desire to have their children instructed.” He hoped that the Americans who had made possible his new life in Africa would be moved to establish schools in Liberia.

When the first American emigrants began arriving on the Guinea Coast, they found a terrestrial paradise with heavy rainfall and tropical vegetation. Mars Lucas, who sailed with the Erskines, informed his former master that there was cassava (for making bread), plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, rice, and bananas, as well as pineapples, figs, oranges, lemons, limes, and coconuts. Joseph Shiphard of Richmond wrote in 1830 that if slaves in Virginia really loved liberty, for a trifling sacrifice, they “might be lords of this fertile land.” Erskine, certain that he had arrived in the promised land, placed a spiritual interpretation on his new home. “I believe,” he wrote shortly after arriving, “this colony is a plant, planted by the great husbandman of the universe,” and added, “it will give me much pleasure, indeed, to labour in this part of his moral vineyard.”

The coffee tree, native to west Africa, grew wild in abundance along the coast. It thrived at low altitudes, unlike the Arabian variety, and was more robust, with large leaves and fruit. The finest variety, Coffea liberica, was given its botanical designation after the colony was named Liberia in 1824. It became an important cash crop and was popular in London and other European cities. W.H. Ellis, a former slave, who became minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Monrovia, wrote to William McClain, of the First Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. that coffee was one of the principal articles of commerce, along with palm oil, camwood (camphor), sugar, arrow-root and ginger. In the 1840’s it was reported that “everybody is planting coffee.”

Harris wrote in 1848 to Judge Samuel Wilkeson, chairman of the board of the Society, “I desire to go to America to see my friends who are in East Tenasee, Knox County, and I would like your advice about whether it would be safe or right . . . If you think it difficult to go to tenesee I would like to visit America anyhow.” He made the trip and reported his return to William McLain in 1849, “I got home Safe after 28 days and nine hours . . . I can say that I thank God that I am home in Africa. I found my family well. I never expect to contend with the collard [colored] man in America no more. If they come [to Liberia], well; if not [it is] well with me. I expect to die in Africa where free air blows, for here are liberty.” On his return from America, Sion, the proud huntsman, brought several dogs with him. Back home, he was elected to the Liberian legislature.

From the first landing of settlers on the African coast there was conflict with native tribes. When Erskine and his fellow emigrants arrived at the capital, Monrovia, it was protected by two forts with the American flag flying over them; one fort with ten guns, the other with four. In 1840, Harris composed a graphic account of an attack on the mission station at Heddington, where he and Martha Ann had settled. Three or four hundred natives, led by a petty chief, Goterah, made an assault at dawn but were repulsed by the quickthinking Harris and his colleagues. As the battle ended, Sion blew his great French horn, and the warriors scattered in terror. Goterah was killed and his head, with attached charms, was sent to Governor Thomas Buchanan in Monrovia. Sion reported that some of the natives came, “and licked my feet and said I had greegree (magic charms) and asked me for some. I told them I had none but what God gave me.” In 1858, Martha Ann presented the gun used to kill Goterah to the American Colonization Society in Washington, where Goterah’s skull had been donated in token of Sion’s courage.

Martha Ann was deeply troubled by the American Civil War. To a friend in the United States she wrote, “Tongue cannot express my sympathy to you and the Government concerning this great war that is now going on; I hear of thousands dying on both sides . . . I think a general fast throughout the world, would be the greatest thing that could be done.”

On September 10, 1830, Anthony D. Williams, later vicepresident of Liberia, reported that George Erskine was dead. His mother, his wife and three of their children, as well as twenty others of the group that arrived with them, also died in 1830, most of them victims of typhoid fever. Left an orphan, ten-year-old Hopkins W. Erskine was educated to become a missionary, sponsored by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. Martha Ann developed into a greatly respected personality, committed to her religious faith and the prosperity of the community. She must have absorbed much of her practical wisdom from Sion Harris, shown in the pride she took in her care of domestic animals and her farm. Cotton, grown with ease in Liberia, she spun and wove into cloth but it was with her needle and her skillful design in silk fabric that revived her memory in recent times. (Sion was killed by lightening in 1854 and Martha Ann subsequently married Henry Ricks.)

Through Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the most remarkable African intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Martha Ann was introduced to Queen Victoria. Born in the Danish West Indies, Blyden was a sensitive and brilliant student with a genius for languages. He was refused admission to theological schools in the United States because he was black. He then emigrated to Liberia and enrolled in the Alexander High School in Monrovia to further his education. An exponent of African nationalism and the concept of “Negritude,” he was the most influential advocate of Pan-African idealism in the nineteenth century. Blyden first represented Liberia at the Court of St. James in 1877-78 and again in 1892, when Martha Ann was in the group that accompanied him.

As a gift for Queen Victoria, Martha Ann had personally designed and executed a magnificent quilt in silk. Its motif was a single Liberian coffee tree, appliqued in full color and quilted, a vigorous expression of African folk-art. The original has not been located but an exact copy was shown in 1895 at an exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, of which a stereograph survives.

The visit to Queen Victoria was remembered in Liberia and noted by the American Consul General in his 1898 account of distinguished citizens and his own adventures, but nothing about the quilt was included. A rumor persisted, however, that Martha Ann had presented the Queen a splendid gift, designed and made with her own hands. Mrs. Cuesta Benberry, a member of the Quilter’s Hall of Fame, heard the story in the 1970’s from Dr. Julia Davis, an African American educator in St. Louis. Was it only a myth? Mrs. Benberry spent seven years probing every source available, attempting to confirm this touching gesture by a woman, born a slave, to a queen of world renown. A story that the quilt had been sent with the British needlework to be displayed at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, was finally confirmed by a contemporary newspaper account. Mrs. Benberry’s long quest to authenticate the legend of the quilt was finally resolved in 1987.

Martha Ann, with the Liberian ambassador and the other African visitors, The Times of London reported, “took luncheon in the Lancaster Tower.” An official of the Castle then showed them through the Royal apartments and library, and the report added, “The old visitor was much impressed by the Queen’s condescension and left Windsor highly gratified with her kind reception.” Describing her interview with Queen Victoria, Martha Ann told a reporter for the Illustrated London News, “I cannot tell what she said to me, but the Queen spoke very soft, and I think she must have been saying blessings for me.” Her high expectations fulfilled, Martha Ann added, “I shall now, after a time, go back to my country . . . plenty of friends have I found here, and have seen her who is our Mother. That I shall remember in the days which go by before the time shall be for sleep.”

The story of the quilt that was almost lost to memory will appear in a comprehensive guide to African American quilting by Kyra E. Hicks, with a foreword by Cuesta R. Benberry, to be published in the Fall of 2002. Black Threads, An African American Quilting Sourcebook (McFarland & Co., Jefferson, NC.)