Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa. By Lisa A. Lindsay

In recent decades, historians have deepened our understanding of the Black Atlantic world by exploring the intimate stories of African Americans who left the United States for Africa. While much of this scholarship has fixated on how these migrations shaped African American identity in the United States, Lisa Lindsay’s Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa focuses more attention on the African side of this story and, in doing so, enriches our understanding of race on both sides of the Atlantic. Lindsay brings her training as an African historian, with a specialization in Nigerian history, to bear on the remarkable life of James Churchwell “Church” Vaughn, a free black man who left the United States in 1853 to live in West Africa until his death in the 1890s. Through the story of Vaughn and his family, Lindsay highlights how African-descended peoples faced both interrelated, yet distinct racial regimes of slavery, segregation, and colonialism throughout the Atlantic World The book helps demystify these “Atlantic bonds” by showing how people throughout the African diaspora navigated white supremacy in ways that were defined by distinct “political and economic structures—and their differences over time and space” (232).

With impeccable attention to detail, Lindsay traces the circumstances which led Church Vaughn to leave the United States at the age of twenty-three. Born to a free mother of African and Catawba descent, Vaughn and his siblings were never slaves themselves. Yet, their father, enslaved until late in his life, conveyed his death bed wish that his children leave the United States and go to Africa because the brutal entrenchment of South Carolina’s slave regime had made life increasingly tenuous for free people of color. In the end, only one of his sons, Church Vaughn, realized this dream and secured passage to the newly independent black republic in Liberia. While Lindsay lacks specific information on Vaughn’s time in Liberia she paints an evocative portrait of life in the young republic. She shows that Liberia’s effort to realize both freedom and self-determination for its citizens was undercut by the fact that the nation functioned as a settler state which violently displaced indigenous populations and used them as an “apprentice” labor force that approximated slavery. After two short years, Vaughn abruptly left Liberia for Yourbaland, modern day Nigeria, where he was employed as a carpenter and he helped white Southern Baptists build a missionary outpost. After getting caught between an inter-ethnic conflict stemming from the dissolution of the Oyo Empire, he was eventually drawn to the coast where he found the bustling port of Lagos, then home to a cosmopolitan population of around 20,000 people. In this section of the book, Lindsay shows how Vaughn, as a literate English-speaking migrant with mechanical skills, parlayed his status as an outsider to assume a relatively privileged position vis-a-vis the many uneducated and unfree indigenous Africans who lived in and around Lagos. She argues that these conditions allowed him to thrive under the early stages of British colonialism in Nigeria, which featured relatively few European settlers and provided ample opportunities for someone who was, like Vaughn, oriented towards Western notions of property rights, Christianity, and anti-slavery.

While very few of Vaughn’s own writings have survived, Lindsay masterfully fleshes out his life through newspaper articles, government and missionary records, and the accounts of contemporaries whose stories intersected with his own. Lindsay focuses on Church Vaughn’s story, but the book thrives when she uses the lens of his transatlantic family to narrate the evolution of racial regimes within the ostensibly post-slavery societies of postbellum South Carolina and British colonial Lagos. This comparison highlights the fact that Vaughn thrived in Africa while his South Carolinian family struggled amidst the violent white backlash to Reconstruction and the eventual onset of segregation. While British colonialism initially fostered individuals like Vaughn who became part of the local elite, by the last decades of the 19^th century this gave way to a more overtly white supremacist colonial policy. Lindsay effectively dramatizes how this shift touched Vaughn’s life most directly in a chapter on his struggle to create the first nonmissionary Christian congregation in West Africa. In this section, she shows how he led his fellow parishioners to break with the increasingly condescending and racist white missionaries sent by the U.S.-based Southern Baptist Church. Here the American and African stories reconnect as Vaughn’s rebellion against the church grew from the rising wave of anticolonial nationalism in Nigeria that was also aligned with African Americans’ efforts to create all-black institutions in the United States. Lindsay highlights these convergences by showing how Vaughn’s African and American families remained in contact and continually renewed their bonds in ways that were shaped by both their shared and distinct experiences of race on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The book’s chapter on Liberia is both one of the most intriguing sections of the book and the place where Lindsay is on the shakiest ground. She does an excellent job exploring the deep contradictions of Liberian society and strongly suggests that Vaughn left the colony because he might have objected to the nation’s “American-style ethnic caste system based on land dispossession and labor exploitation” (101). Considering Vaughn’s later resistance to participating in West African slaveholding practices, this is a very plausible argument, but without explicit evidence it also raises the question of why Vaughn might abandon life in Liberia even as most of his fellow migrants readily accommodated themselves to a settler mentality which allowed for the routine exploitation of indigenous Africans. While such mysteries warrant further exploration, they do not detract from the book’s considerable achievements. More than anything, Atlantic Bonds serves as a useful corrective to understandings of African diasporic identity that rely on the uncomplicated mythologies of cultural nationalism. In uncovering the story of Church Vaughn and his family Lindsay shows how people of African-descent maintained transatlantic bonds despite that fact that racism shaped their mobility and prospects in distinct, and even divergent, ways throughout the Atlantic world.