The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm

The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799-1851

Winston James

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814743140
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

“If I know my own heart, I can truly say, that I have not a selfish wish in placing myself under the patronage of the [American Colonization] Society; usefulness in my day and generation, is what I principally court.”

“Sensible then, as all are of the disadvantages under which we at present labour, can any consider it a mark of folly, for us to cast our eyes upon some other portion of the globe where all these inconveniences are removed where the Man of Colour freed from the fetters and prejudice, and degradation, under which he labours in this land, may walk forth in all the majesty of his creation—a new born creature—a Free Man!”
—John Brown Russwurm, 1829.

John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851) is almost completely missing from the annals of the Pan-African movement, despite the pioneering role he played as an educator, abolitionist, editor, government official, emigrationist and colonizationist. Russwurm’s life is one of “firsts” first African American graduate of Maine's Bowdoin College; co-founder of Freedom’s Journal, America’s first newspaper to be owned, operated, and edited by African Americans; and, following his emigration to Africa, first black governor of the Maryland section of Liberia. Despite his accomplishments, Russwurm struggled internally with the perennial Pan-Africanist dilemma of whether to go to Africa or stay and fight in the United States, and his ordeal was the first of its kind to be experienced and resolved before the public eye.

With this slim, accessible biography of Russwurm, Winston James makes a major contribution to the history of black uplift and protest in the Early American Republic and the larger Pan-African world. James supplements the biography with a carefully edited and annotated selection of Russwurm’s writings, which vividly demonstrate the trajectory of his political thinking and contribution to Pan-Africanist thought and highlight the challenges confronting the peoples of the African Diaspora. Though enormously rich and powerfully analytical, Russwurm’s writings have never been previously anthologized.

The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm is a unique and unparalleled reflection on the Early American Republic, the African Diaspora and the wider history of the times. An unblinking observer of and commentator on the condition of African Americans as well as a courageous fighter against white supremacy and for black emancipation, Russwurm’s life and writings provide a distinct and articulate voice on race that is as relevant to the present as it was to his own lifetime.

I John Brown Russwurm

Prologue
The Man Out of Place

He is almost completely missing from the annals of the Pan-African movement. The two leading studies of the movement do not even mention him, let alone register or analyze his contribution.¹ A third mentions him only briefly and in passing, devoting four sentences to the pioneer in a book almost three hundred pages long.² The great George Padmore, in his Olympian, if polemical, historical overview of the Pan-African movement, correctly registers his name among the New World pioneers of Liberia but has him leading twenty-one African American emigrants to the settlement almost a decade before he actually left the United States—alone.³ And despite his Jamaican roots and Caribbean allegiance, he is unknown and so unremembered in his native island and the rest of the archipelago. His name is absent from Jamaican and Caribbean history books, and he has no pedestal in the remarkable pantheon—from Blyden to Padmore to Fanon to Rodney—of Caribbean Pan-African intellectuals and activists. It is true that he left the Caribbean at an early age, but so did Blyden, and unlike Blyden he returned to the Caribbean as a young man, in the vain hope of resettling there.⁴ Moreover, early in his youth he became fascinated with Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, wrote and spoke about them, and seriously considered and even planned to settle in the “Black Republic” after graduating from college. His interest in Haiti abided with him, even after his emigration to Liberia, to the very end of his days. He is better known in the United States, but not by much; there his image is distorted in much of the historical scholarship, and his true achievements are inadequately recognized and appreciated.

John Brown Russwurm, as I shall demonstrate and argue, deserves better. His pioneering efforts, achievements, and example—as educator, abolitionist, editor, government official, staunch emigrationist, and colonizationist—put him in the vanguard of the Pan-African movement. Moreover, Russwurm’s own internal struggle with the perennial Pan-Africanist dilemma of whether to go to Africa or stay and fight in the United States was the first of its kind carried out and resolved in the public domain. That struggle was robust and energetic, and its path to resolution and the resolution itself tell much of the times in which he lived and the limited options available to himself and those of the African diaspora who yearned for a full and dignified life as human beings, unencumbered by the horrors of slavery, racism, and white supremacy.

What follows is a brief overview of the life and struggles of John Brown Russwurm, ending with an assessment and determination of his proper place within the Pan-Africanist tradition. This biographical portrait, an entry into the historical record, is especially necessary because Russwurm has had no scholarly biography.⁵ It is accompanied by a selection of Russwurm’s own writings that not only lay bare the trajectory of his political thinking and contribution but also provide an important perspective on the challenges and struggles of his time. The selection begins with his writings on Haiti while he was still a student at Bowdoin College and follows his output through his editorship of Freedom’s Journal, ending with his work in Liberia on the Liberia Herald and additional material from his governorship of Maryland in Liberia. Though enormously rich and varied as well as impassioned and powerfully analytical, Russwurm’s writings have never been previously anthologized. But the combined neglect and ignorance of his writings do not reflect their intrinsic and historical value. Russwurm’s writings in fact provide a unique entrée into the thinking of one of Afro-America’s first organic and most gifted intellectuals as he struggled with the problems of black life from the early national to the antebellum period and searched for their resolution. Russwurm was also one of the most remarkable and valuable witnesses of the age. He occupied a unique and unparalleled point of view on the American republic, the African diaspora, and the wider drama of the times. In the age of black slavery, Russwurm was not only freeborn but also among the first African Americans to receive a university education; he had lived in the Caribbean and Canada before moving to the United States; he was an unblinking observer of and commentator on the condition of African Americans as well as a courageous fighter against white supremacy and for black emancipation and uplift. In short, Russwurm’s was a distinct and articulate voice, one especially worthy of our attention and respect.

John Brown Russwurm, then, has two broad objectives: to provide a biographical portrait of the man, including a critical assessment of his contribution, and to give readers an opportunity to more readily and directly peruse and engage with Russwurm’s own writings, in their richness, complexity, passion, and pathos, as well as their insights and blindnesses, strengths and weaknesses.

1
From Boy to Man

Born in Port Antonio, capital of the eastern Jamaican parish of Portland, on October 1, 1799, John Brown Russwurm was the son of a black mother and a white American merchant on the island, John R. Russwurm. Virtually nothing is known of the mother, not even her name. Russwurm himself was surprisingly silent on the subject. A number of nineteenth-century sources referred to her as a “Creole” woman, which is hardly helpful. An 1848 report in the Portland Transcript (Maine) informed its readers that Russwurm’s father had, as was “very common” in the West Indies, “married a colored lady, from a very respectable family, by whom he had his son John.”¹ She has been variously ascribed the status of slave, free woman of color, and “housekeeper,” a combination of concubine and domestic servant or domestic slave.² She is said to have been a “Negro,” and recently one scholar has described her as a “mulatto” and Russwurm as an “octoroon,” but without evidence to support either claim.³ The brutal truth is that we know virtually nothing about her, so she is an enigma and is likely to remain unknowable. Given the Jamaican planter and merchant class’s preference at the time for light-skinned black women, Russwurm’s mother might well have been a “mulatto,” but the evidence is elusive and probably nonexistent. Perhaps, as some have speculated, she died in childbirth or soon after the boy was born;⁴ this would help to explain Russwurm’s silence, since he would not have known her or would have known her only slightly. Were Russwurm the typical, so-called “Jamaican mulatto” of the early nineteenth century, one would be inclined to attribute the silence to a deliberate suppression of African antecedents stemming from the impulse that Edward Long, the eighteenth-century planter-historian, memorably dubbed the “pride of amended blood.”⁵ But Russwurm was by no means typical of his Jamaican caste or class, nor was he ashamed of his dark skin. On the contrary, he was proud of his blackness and his African ancestral homeland.

As was generally the case with such white-nonwhite unions in the British Caribbean at the time, much more is known about Russwurm’s white father. The senior Russwurm, the son of a German immigrant, was born in 1761 into an upper-class Virginia family and went to England as a youth to complete his education. After some considerable time in Britain, he returned to the United States but soon moved to Jamaica to seek his fortune. When he arrived on the island is uncertain, but he probably did so in his early thirties. Operating as a merchant rather than as a slave plantation owner, he apparently loved his black mistress and treated her as a wife; it was later claimed that Russwurm was officially married to her, but this is improbable, given the mores—if not the laws—of the time.⁶ He became a justice of the peace and an assistant judge in Portland. By all accounts, he also loved his son, his firstborn, and was keen to protect the boy from the ravages of racism.⁷ In 1807 he sent the eight-year-old to boarding school abroad. But unlike the majority of his class in the British Caribbean, he sent his son not to Britain but to Montreal to be educated. The reasoning behind the choice of Canada, let alone Montreal, remains a mystery, though Russwurm Senior’s settling in Maine, near the Canadian border and relatively close to Montreal, suggests that he wanted to be closer to his son than sending the boy to England would have allowed. It is also possible that he planned to move to Maine before sending Russwurm to Montreal. Russwurm’s later writings on the Caribbean suggest that he probably returned regularly to Jamaica during school holidays, as was the pattern for upper-class boys who studied abroad. Five years after sending his son to Montreal, Russwurm Senior left Portland, Jamaica, to settle in Portland, Maine, then a province of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Why or how he chose Maine as his new residence is also open to speculation. The family claimed that he went to Maine “for his health,” which of course is not an explanation at all.⁸ Why not Boston? What was wrong with Rhode Island? At best, it might help us to understand why he left Jamaica, not why he went to Maine. As already indicated, Maine might very well have appealed to him because of its relative proximity to his son’s school across the border in Quebec. However, it is noteworthy that he did not return to the South, where his influential and wealthy slave-owning relatives lived, but chose instead to take up residence in a state that had outlawed slavery.⁹

Some accounts claimed that he arrived in the United States with his son, but the most reliable suggests he did not. Young John was, however, rather fortunate that after his father married an American widow, Susan Blanchard, a woman in her twenties, who already had three children, he was accepted as a full member of the new family. The senior Russwurm, who was more than twice his wife’s age, must have been fearful of Susan Blanchard’s reaction at discovering he had a “black” son.¹⁰ According to Susan Blanchard Russwurm’s own account, her husband spoke fondly and with great interest of the boy John in Quebec but revealed the true relationship only after he became fatally ill. He need not have worried. A remarkable woman, Mrs. Russwurm was not only educated and enlightened but also extraordinarily generous. “She decided, at once,” reported the Maryland Colonization Journal in its tribute to Russwurm, “to adopt the boy into her family, and he was immediately sent for.”¹¹ She also insisted that the boy be given his father’s name, thus becoming John Brown Russwurm rather than John Brown, as he had previously been known. Susan Russwurm was apparently the only mother John ever had, and most certainly the only one he had after the age of eight, when he left for school in Quebec.¹² Their mutual regard, affection, and love would continue up to Russwurm’s untimely death in 1851.

By all accounts John Russwurm was happy to have been reunited with his son and only child. He was unashamed and, given the tenor of the times, remarkably open in his association with and pride in the boy. Instead of disowning little John—described as “a mulatto of fine personal appearance and manners”—or hiding him away from the society of his friends, John Russwurm, as one of Maine’s local historians of the nineteenth century noted, “did not conceal the relationship” between himself and the boy. On the contrary: “He was proud of his son. He introduced him into the best society in Portland, where he was honored and respected. He attended the best schools and had all the privileges that other boys of the best families enjoyed.”¹³

But these sunny days, though not as bright as the local historian would have us believe, did not last for long. On April 3, 1815, a few months after John joined the family, his father died.¹⁴ John was left entirely in Mrs. Russwurm’s care with a small legacy, which was largely used up in settling the estate.¹⁵ His wealthy relatives, the Russwurm clan in the South, provided no support to John and seldom bothered to even answer his letters of entreaty. In an angry letter to his older cousin John Sumner Russwurm, John complained of the lack of reply to his earlier correspondence. “After having waited a considerable time,” Russwurm wrote in July 1819, “I concluded to address you once more, and that for the last, if you saw fit not to answer it. Concerning myself[,] nothing more shall ever escape me concerning my situation in life.” He apparently heard nothing from his cousin for almost seven years. And when John Sumner Russwurm condescended to write, he was evidently interested in finding out about the legacy his uncle (John Brown’s father) had left him (some two thousand dollars), being held on to by a tricky Maine lawyer. In the end, Sumner Russwurm got his cut, but at the expense of others, much to the displeasure and disappointment of his uncle’s widow, who essentially regarded him as a crook. “I think if I cannot depend upon your Honour and friendship,” she wrote him, “there is nothing in this world I can depend upon.” There is no evidence that he ever made her whole.¹⁶ The burden thus fell exclusively upon Mrs. Russwurm, who continued to treat the young Jamaican as her own son. Some years later, James Blanchard, a son from her first marriage, noted that Mrs. Russwurm “has done all she could have expected had he been her own son. I sometimes joke Mother,” he revealed, “about her black son[,] the Gov[ernor,] and tell her that I am jealous—that she thinks more of him than she does of either of her white sons.”¹⁷ But Susan Blanchard Russwurm had far more love and decency than she did money. True, she had inherited money, the house, and the seventy-five-acre farm at Back Cove (Westbrook), which John Russwurm had bought in 1812 soon after his arrival in Maine and where she had lived after their marriage.¹⁸ But in addition to her three children from her first marriage, she had the responsibility of caring for John and his infant half-brother, Francis Edward, who had been born only a year before Russwurm Senior died.¹⁹

But John encountered more difficulties than just financial ones during this period in Maine. According to Mrs. Russwurm, he lived with the family for the next two years after his father’s death but attended school for only half of the time. “It was rather difficult at that time,” she explained, “to get a colored boy into a good school where he would receive an equal share of attention with white boys, and this I was very particular should be the case.”²⁰ The death of his father combined with the racism encountered in Maine more than likely pushed John to decide on returning to and trying his chances in Jamaica.

John had lived the first fifteen years of his life outside the United States and in the relatively privileged and tolerant (for one of his class and color) environments of Jamaica and Montreal.²¹ It must have been difficult for him to adjust, especially given the sudden relatively diminished family circumstances after his father’s death. He had never forgotten his Jamaican connections and now insisted upon returning to the island.²² Mrs. Russwurm thought it inadvisable, but he “seemed so desirous” of going back to the island, which he regarded as “his home,” that she “very reluctantly” consented. “I shall never forget,” Mrs. Russwurm wrote, “the day I carried him to Portland and parted company with him—the sorrow he expressed at parting with my children, particularly his infant brother, showed how strongly he was attached to us all. I offered to bring him back, and try and get some good man for his guardian. He said ‘no; that will not better my color. If I was a white boy, I would never leave your family, but I think it is best for me to go.’”²³ Russwurm was thus aware of not only the financial burden that his presence added to the straitened Blanchard-Russwurm household but also the extra load that the disability of his color imposed upon those close to him as well as himself. For contrary to popular lore, New England was by no means free of racism. Thus, in the spring of 1817 and before his eighteenth birthday, Russwurm sought to get away, back to Jamaica, no...