19th Century Reality

A Black Presbyterian In A Grudging World

by George M. Apperson

Edward Blyden was born on St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, in a predominantly English-speaking Sephardic Jewish community where he and his family were members of the Dutch Reformed Church. When an American Presbyterian, John P. Knox, became minister of the church in 1845, he recognized Blyden’s unusual intellectual ability and began tutoring him. Sensitive, religious and ambitious, Blyden decided to become a Presbyterian minister himself, with his parents’ approval.

Knox realized that he needed theological training and arranged a trip to the United States. But because he was black, schools, including Rutgers, his pastor’s alma mater, rejected him. In New York, with John B. Pinny, a Princeton Seminary graduate and former missionary to Liberia, he attended Thanksgiving Day services in 1850 and never forgot hearing “a political discourse having reference to the Fugitive Slave Law recently enacted.” In justifying the law, the minister asserted that “the efforts of those who were endeavoring to elevate Africans in America, were, and always would be, fruitless,” and cited the racist version of the curse of Noah as irreversible proof. This idea haunted Blyden during this long career as an African intellectual and he undertook to confute it in his writings. He found Psalm 68:31 deeply relevant, from an early poem to later powerful sermons; “Ethiopia,” it promised, “shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”

Blyden was eighteen when the New York Colonization Society sponsored his emigration to Liberia. To Dr. Pinney he wrote, “I want to see Africa, from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, brought under Christian influence.” Passing through Philadelphia on his way to sail from Baltimore, he was escorted by an official of the Society because, as he remembered, “I was in great fear of being seized as a slave under the operations of the Fugitive Slave law which was at that time causing great excitement in the country.”

He arrived in Monrovia in January 1851, and Harrison Ellis was no longer minister of the Presbyterian Church or principal of the Alexander High School. Preaching without formal theological education and teaching without academic training had broken Ellis’s moral resolve and his Alabama Presbytery voted to suspend him. David A. Wilson, a graduate of Princeton Seminary, had replaced him. Wilson saw Blyden’s unusual ability and secured support from Americans for his full-time study. Wilson tutored him in Latin and Greek, Mathematics and Theology, while Blyden, on his own, studied Hebrew which he had heard spoken on St. Thomas. It seems likely that the man he called “Father Harrison,” whose knowledge of Hebrew astonished Alabama Presbyters, helped and encouraged him. Blyden eventually became fluent in eight languages, including Arabic.

When Wilson was absent due to ill-health, Blyden filled his place as principal, while he was also preparing for the Presbyterian ministry. His literary skills were developing and after a military expedition against native chiefs who were causing “carnage and bloodshed,” his detailed accounts were published in the Liberia Herald. When the editor resigned in 1855, he was appointed to take his place. At twenty-one, already an accomplished public speaker, Blyden was chosen as orator for Liberian Independence Day in Monrovia and “in this happiest style claimed the attention of all who were so fortunate as to be within hearing.”

Ordained in 1858, he succeeded Wilson as head of the Alexander High School but the Missions Board in New York refused him funds for further education. Blyden turned to sympathetic Englishmen and initiated a remarkable correspondence with William E. Gladstone, among others. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister, was a noted Classical scholar. He responded generously to his request for books, especially for Liberia College when Blyden was professor of Classics from 1862 to 1871.

Sincere patriotism made Blyden an obvious choice to fill political and diplomatic posts for his country. He served on occasions as ambassador to the Court of St. James and represented Liberia on missions to the United States. Washington, he thought, was a “disagreeable place,” with nothing worth seeing except government buildings, the Smithsonian and the Observatory. “To a colored man,” he wrote during the American Civil War, “the sight of these is not sufficient to requite him for the indignities he suffers in getting there, and insults he must endure while there.” When his description of the “Mixed Races in Liberia” (not intended for publication) was issued by the Smithsonian, a mob in Monrovia tried to lynch him. Rescued by a friend, he fled to Sierra Leone.

Blyden’s serious dislike of mixed-race Africans dominated his ethnic perceptions. He believed that there was a distinctive African personality and that racial purity was essential for the emergence of coherent and stable political organizations. He came to support a native church organized by Africans and independent of the missionary influence that was dominant at the founding of Liberia. His tolerance of polygamy, traditional in Africa but abhorrent to western Christians, was prompted by his uncritical appreciation of customs ingrained in their culture. A sympathetic understanding of African Muslims prompted acrid criticism from traditional Christians but the complexity of his mind can still be appreciated by reading his Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh, 1887).

What might this extraordinary youth from the West Indies have achieved had he not experienced the trauma of American racism? That this man was born more than a century ahead of his time seems evident. But his career may lead us to reflect on the social challenges of the twenty-first century and the price of intolerance in the American experience. Education remains a golden key that unlocks human potential. And as Presbyterians, we need to find courage to translate the words of the Apostle Paul to Philemon into personal conviction, “that our goodness might not be by compulsion but of our own free will.” (Philemon, verse 14)