Methodist Episcopal missionaries – Author Sarah Angleton

It wasn’t until 1976, under the direction of then US president Gerald Ford that Black History Month became an officially designated event in the life of the United States, though versions of it had been recognized in various parts of the country for fifty years by then. Ford hoped that Americans would “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

It does raise some controversy, which I can understand somewhat. To designate only one month to the contributions of Black Americans throughout history could be considered a disservice both to Black Americans and to American history itself, which is much better understood when all of its threads are looked at together. I get that argument.

It’s great to set aside a month for this to be our focus, as long as we don’t ignore the stories of Black Americans during the other eleven months.

I have, fortunately, seen in my lifetime a noticeable shifting in the way history is taught to incorporate more of the Black voice and I am hopeful that trend will continue, but I also see value in setting aside time to focus on some of the things we still have the tendency to miss.

I will be the first to admit that this blog rarely features history from the Black community. The reason for that is certainly not intentional racial exclusion, but stems rather from the reality that this blog is a place I generally try hard to keep fairly lighthearted, which so much of Black history sadly is not. It’s made up of a great deal of struggle and I have a hard time knowing how to write about that in the same space where I joke about cussing parrots and moon poop.

But today, I do want to take the opportunity to look at the neglected story of an impressive Black man who appears in my most recent novel, White Man’s Graveyard, a book that includes neither cussing parrots nor moon poop, but does wrestle with some complicated and racially charged American history.

Born free in Rhode Island in July of 1801, Reverend George S. Brown was a skilled stone mason and a powerful preacher. Rumor has it he also played the bagpipe, but I won’t hold that against him. Brown traced his conversion to 1827, when, emerging from a part of his life he referred to as his years of carousing, he felt called to the Methodist Episcopal Church where he soon became a licensed preacher.

I have found no pictures of either Rev. Brown or his mission at Heddington, but this is a Liberian mission station (Edina) from the same time period, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And boy did he preach. At one point while he attended seminary, he was told he couldn’t preach because it proved too distracting from his studies. He did it anyway. And it seems that people listened. His diary is filled with references to sermon topics and scripture passages, to congregations and conversions, and what is amazing for the time is that he was as likely to preach, and be well received, in white churches as he was in Black.

In fact, the only Methodist Episcopal Church to which he was ever officially appointed lead pastor was in Wolcott, Vermont, where in the 1850s, he ministered to a white congregation and even led them through a building campaign.

Before that, however, he served as a missionary to Liberia. That’s where I first encountered George Brown, encouraging purses to open and prayers to flow for the outreach opportunities presented by the colonization movement which sought to firmly establish an African colony for former American slaves.

George Brown was arguably the most effective Christian missionary to ever serve in the colony of Liberia. He established a mission post east of Monrovia called Heddington where he and his church of indigenous Africans withstood a brutal attack from slavers, and sought opportunities to reach further into the interior of the continent with the gospel message.

Brown also did not shy away from standing up to his white colleagues, including physician Sylvanus Goheen (one of the main protagonists in my novel) and mission superintendent John Seys, whose legal struggles with the colonial government seemed to Brown a terrible distraction from the mission. His refusal to align with a side, both of which he saw as wrong for various reasons, led to legal trouble of his own when Seys later attempted to block him from full ordination in the United States.

That’s where the story becomes sad and familiar because of course, the word of a white man outweighed the claims of even a well-respected and free Black man in 1840s America. Thankfully, George Brown persevered and eventually won the court battle.

I mean, this is one funny looking instrument, no matter who plays it. OpenClipart-Vectors, via Pixabay.

Reverend Brown is in my book because he was an integral part of the historical story on which it is based. In my earliest notes, he even provides one of the voices through which the story is told, but in the end, I didn’t think I could do him justice. Maybe someday another author will pick up his story and run with it. I hope so, because he strikes me as a man of deep conviction and unwavering integrity, an American well worth learning about this month and in the other months as well.

It’s true he never left bags of poop on the moon and if he owned a parrot that swore like a sailor, I never found any record of it. I do wish I had discovered more than a fleeting reference to his bagpipes, though, because I find that stories about bagpipes are often genuinely hilarious.

On June 11, 1837, the ship Charlotte Harper set sail from the United States for the West Coast of Africa where a colony had been established by the American Colonization Society for the purpose of resettling former American slaves. The ship carried supplies for the settlements of Bassa Cove and Monrovia in the colony of Liberia, a handful of ACS agents, a couple of teachers, and one eager twenty-four-year-old Methodist Episcopal missionary physician named Sylvanus Goheen.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of Sylvanus, but this is his good buddy John Seys, superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal mission in Liberia. Smith sc., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Looking back on history, we might have some strong opinions about colonization, most of them probably negative. At that time, opinions were mixed. But this farm kid from Pennsylvania, youngest of a large brood, and fresh from medical school, such as it was in the 1830s, didn’t question the nobility of his intention to help carry the light of Christ to the new colony. He did, however, fear he might not make it there at all.

Watching the waving handkerchief of the one brother who, with tears in his eyes, had come to send him off, the image slowly fading from view along with the coastline of the United States, Sylvanus began to envision looming tragedy that would send him to the bottom of the Atlantic. The newspaper headlines his mother would read began to drift through his mind: Storm Sunk Vessel and All Aboard Lost or She Went Down in the Night, Cause Unknown or She Happened in with a Pirate who Murdered All Aboard. I think it’s safe to say he was freaking out a little.

And this is where, after hours and hours of puzzling my way through the handwriting of my ancestors, I lament the fact that a lot of school children are no longer learning cursive. PublicDomainPictures, via Pixabay

I don’t blame him. I’d have probably been freaking out, too. Sylvanus Goheen was imaginative, charming, and pretty funny. He was also sort of arrogant and sometimes kind of petulant, but we all have our faults and, if I’m being honest, he reminds me a little bit of myself.

That makes sense to me, because he was the younger brother of my grandfather’s great grandfather. I first encountered Sylvanus on the pages of a diary he presented to his sister Ann around the time of his departure for Liberia. This diary, though shorter on details than I’d have liked, turned up beneath the false bottom drawer of a lawyer cabinet among my grandmother’s possessions. That’s where my aunt found it shortly after my grandmother’s death.

Since I’m the writer in the family, she presented it to me and I placed it on the backburner where it simmered for quite a few years while, though I dabbled with it a little, I spent most of my time with mummies, lost manuscripts, and scoundrels. But now finally it’s quite a few years later. It’s also October, which means that if you are in the United States, this is officially Family History Month as declared by Congress in 2001 because, evidently, they had nothing better to do.

It’s the month for interviewing your oldest relatives, for checking out the genealogical tools available at your local library, for sending off for that kit that tells you how closely you’re related to Genghis Kahn, and for searching the false bottom drawers in your heirloom furniture. Because I bet you’ll find interesting people, who did interesting things, and if you can manage to learn about them, you might even discover hints of yourself.

Genghis Kahn, allegedly among the most genetically successful men of all time. Clara-Agathe NARGEOT (1829 – ?), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And maybe, if you do a little more research, and a little more than that, and a little more than that until you’ve done quite a lot of research about them, you might someday take them off the backburner and write a book. That’s what I finally did.

My newest novel White Man’s Graveyard will be released in just a few weeks. In its pages, you’ll get to meet Sylvanus, his sister Annie, a dog named Hector, an orangutan named Jenny, and a whole lot of other characters, many of whom come from my own family’s past, and a few of whom come from my head. You’ll also get to explore a controversial piece of not always well remembered American and Liberian history.

And you’ll discover whether or not Sylvanus was murdered by a pirate.