The Old South Confronts the Dilemma of David Livingstone

Abstract

David Livingstone (1813-1873) posed problem for white southerners before Civil War. He was greatest hero in Anglophone world but also thoroughgoing abolitionist. Livingstone's heroism stemmed from his 1854-1856 crossing of Africa from Luanda (in today's Angola) in west to Quelimane (in Mozambique) in east. This stupendous feat would have earned Livingstone renown in its own right. But what made Livingstone hero was how he explained significance of his exploits, both in speeches he made in Britain upon his return in 1856-1858 and in his book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, which caused sensation in Britain and United States when it was first published in 1857. Livingstone used his experiences to express compelling vision for regeneration of Africa. He came to believe that missionary efforts had to be preceded by commercial relations rooted in what he and like-minded Britons called legitimate trade--the exchange of items such as cotton, palm oil, and ivory for European-made goods. Livingstone believed that without this foundation slave trade and its attendant violence, social dislocation, and moral corruption would confound all efforts to bring Western civilization to Africa. Livingstone was essence of ideal early Victorian man--self-abnegating, modest, ecumenical, and relentless. He believed with absolute conviction in idea of progress, notion that humankind could improve itself materially and spiritually under stewardship of benign God. And he had succeeded at what few Europeans had even attempted--to bring this vision to African interior. He could not be ignored. Livingstone was the hero traveller, South Carolina writer conceded, a name in every mouth across Anglo-American world. (1) His travels alone would have made Livingstone compelling figure to Americans, who were avid consumers of British culture despite an acute sense of cultural nationalism and presence of significant pockets of Anglophobia--especially prevalent in South due to British antislavery meddling. (2) But Livingstone also appealed directly to Americans in final pages of Missionary Travels. Like growing number of reform-minded women and men on both sides of Atlantic, he had come to see United States and Great Britain as partners in great cause of spreading Christianity and Western civilization across world. It is on Anglo-American race that hopes of world for liberty and progress rest, he wrote. Livingstone understood United States to be an outpost of British civilization, Americans and Britons bound together by ties of culture and blood. The glorious task of regenerating Africa, of bringing her into community of civilized nations, lay with English-speaking peoples everywhere. The necessary first step was eradication of slave trade via establishment of legitimate trade, specifically in cultivation of cotton. Livingstone found cotton growing throughout southeastern Africa, and he concluded--erroneously, it turned out--that Zambezi River was navigable deep into interior, providing ready thoroughfare for commercial penetration. When Africans learned that Britons and others would happily buy all cotton Africa could produce, they would abandon slave trading. (3) Perhaps with his American audience in mind, Livingstone took pains to point out that Britain shared responsibility for survival of peculiar institution owing to its consumption of plantation staples. We now demand increased supplies of cotton and sugar, and then reprobate means our American brethren adopt to supply our wants, he chided his compatriots. Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race practicing gigantic evil, and other aiding, by increased demands for produce of slave labor, in perpetuating enormous wrong. Livingstone maintained that Britain had standing, over white southerners' objections, to work for end of slavery in United States. …