About the Author:
ERSKINE CLARKE is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Our Southern Zion and By the Rivers of Water. His book Dwelling Place received the Bancroft Prize, which is considered one of the most prestigious awards in American history writing, as well as the Mary Lawton Hodges Book Prize and the Malcolm Barrow Bell Award. He is professor emeritus of American religious history at Columbia Theological Seminary.
Review:
''A sinuously nuanced pursuit of a Southern Christian missionary couple's conflicted journey from slaveholding Savannah, Georgia, to West Africa . . . [A] thorough and compelling history of missionary work and the nineteenth-century African American experience both in America and abroad.'' --Kirkus Reviews
''This is Atlantic history at its best. The missionary travels of John Leighton and Jane Wilson open a window onto one of the major contradictions in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, where slave ships from Africa crossed paths with ships carrying freed American slaves back to Africa. Such contradictions were reflected in the internal struggles of John Leighton Wilson himself, who freed his own slaves in Georgia and fought a twenty-year battle against the slave traders on the coast of Africa, but still found his loyalties strangely torn by the American Civil War.'' --Robert Harms, Yale University, author of The Diligent: Worlds of the Slave Trade
''Clarke has written a riveting account of missionaries John and Jane Wilson and their encounters with the indigenous people of west Africa and with free African Americans seeking escape from American slavery and racism. And in giving voice to their beliefs, hopes, and fears, he has created a remarkable window into many of the central struggles of nineteenth-century America.'' --Dan Carter, University of South Carolina, author of Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South
''An original history that tells the engrossing story of two white missionaries and their often stormy relations with their mostly black fellow countrymen, against the background of America descending into Civil War.'' --Publishers Weekly
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