Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response. By Lee Clark Mitchell. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981. xvii + 320 pp. Illustrations, index. $18.50)

John Witherspoon, Scottish-American clergyman, political leader and educator, was born at Gifford, East Lothian, educated at Edinburgh University and ordained Presbyterian minister. In his mid-forties he went to America as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. He held political office for New Jersey and played a major role in organizing the Presbyterian Church in America and improving the College at Princeton. Witherspoon was representative of eighteenth-century Scottish and American Calvinists who tried to reconcile their orthodox theological doctrines with the Enlightenment’s philosophical currents of empiricism, scepticism, and utilitarianism by harmonizing reason and revelation. Although Witherspoon was a philosophical eclectic, Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy was the major source of his utilitarian ethics and republican politics. Witherspoon was not an original thinker, but his popularization of Scottish common sense and moral sense philosophy through his forceful personality and effective teaching laid the foundation for its dominance of nineteenth-century American academic philosophy.

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Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk. New York: Palgrave, 2001. ISBN 0-333-80109-1. Price: $65.00. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-691-05029-5. Price: $55.00.

Romanticism on the Net ◽

10.7202/007726ar ◽

2003 ◽

Author(s):

Laura Mandell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

New York ◽

New Jersey ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Princeton University

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American Presbyterian Missionaries, Enslavement, and Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Gabon

Social Sciences and Missions ◽

10.1163/18748945-02601003 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 93-122 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

John M. Cinnamon

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

South Carolina ◽

New Jersey ◽

Racial Inequality ◽

Slave Trade ◽

The United States ◽

Princeton University ◽

Southern Cameroon ◽

French Colonial

When American Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries arrived in the Gabon Estuary in the 1840s, they entered a world marked by vibrant commerce; violence and inequality; widespread slavery and slave-trading; British, French, and U.S. Anti-Slavery Patrols; and incipient French colonialism. This article draws on the published accounts by two U.S. missionaries, John Leighton Wilson, who served in Gabon from 1842 to 1851, and Robert Hamill Nassau, who worked on Corisco Island, the Gabon Estuary and Ogowe River, and the southern Cameroon coast from 1861 to 1906. Together, their writings provide insights into early colonialism and especially the long decline of enslavement and slave trading. While Wilson witnessed the establishment of Libreville in the 1840s, Nassau encountered slave trading first on Corisco and later on the Ogowe during the period of French colonial exploration. Both men, shaped by their African experiences as well as their respective social locations in the United States, held strong views on African domestic slavery and the slave trade. Wilson, from the South, was an ambivalent abolitionist who railed against the Atlantic Slave trade while hesitating to denounce slavery and racial inequality in his native South Carolina. Nassau, from New Jersey and educated at conservative Princeton University, was prompted above all by the missionary impulse. He sought to convert and “uplift” formerly enslaved Africans while nevertheless underlining their “servile” characters and benefitting from their labor as docile, socially vulnerable mission workers.

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