I. Antebellum Evangelicalism, Heathenism, and Agency

Within the early United States, the convergence of diverse ideological and social factors propelled an association of human personhood with individual choice and unconstrained action. Free choice and action were core characteristics of republican citizens, defined in distinction to the limited self-determination of slaves and subjects.Footnote ²³ They were also key traits of participants in the market economy, the expansion of which multiplied opportunities for self-constitution in areas ranging from consumption to careers to personal identity.Footnote ²⁴ The autonomous, self-willed individual, liberated from the weight of tradition and the past, has also been central in the creation of the modern self.Footnote ²⁵ Closely related but not identical to these developments was the formation of evangelical protestant notions of selfhood, defined in opposition to the alleged formalism of Catholicism, tyranny of Islam, mandates of established religion, and spiritual bondage of the unconverted at home and abroad.Footnote ²⁶ Friction between these views could be intense, but all possessed a mutually reinforcing focus on the individual agent.Footnote ²⁷

The emphasis on the liberated individual within American evangelicalism had itself long been shaped by a range of social forces as well as the internal logic of evangelical theology and practice. Evangelicalism can be defined in part through the deliberate assertion of personal choice in the religious life.Footnote ²⁸ Only religious commitments freely and voluntarily made qualified as authentic. The new birth, the conversion experience at the heart of evangelical theology and practice, generated novel commitments and identities that could prove disruptive of even the most entrenched social and religious hierarchies.Footnote ²⁹ The disestablishment of religion at the federal and state levels following American independence resulted in the extraordinary proliferation of new or previously marginal religious groups, including Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and United Brethren in Christ. Pluralism and religious entrepreneurialism in turn fostered more individualistic ways of thinking about religious identity and belonging. Even when a commitment to Reformed teachings about human depravity persisted, as was the case with the United Brethren, the abundance of options pushed religious identity from the arena of communal and familial tradition to the domain of personal choice, an experience that inevitably impressed itself upon doctrine.Footnote ³⁰ Disestablishment thus accelerated the tendency within evangelical protestantism toward what Michael Warner, discussing the nature of conversionist preaching, has called “agentialized belief.”Footnote ³¹

For nineteenth-century evangelicals, the celebration of self-determination was tempered both by a sense of the substantial threats to its realization and the need to discipline the liberated self lest freedom yield licentiousness. The threats were both internal and external. Sinful human nature might overthrow the restraints of law and self-discipline. Traditional theological concerns about the lures of the world and the flesh were amplified by the influence of faculty psychology, which advocated rational governance of morally and politically disruptive passions.Footnote ³² Snares filled the world as well. Evangelical reform efforts in the years before the Civil War sought to liberate men and women from externally imposed restrictions upon their free moral agency so that they might voluntarily embrace internal self-discipline.Footnote ³³ This aim drove campaigns to reform schools, prisons, asylums, gender relations, alcohol abuse, and slavery.Footnote ³⁴ While largely abstaining from activism, the United Brethren in Christ forbade the consumption of alcohol by church members, eyed secret societies such as the Freemasons that required loyalty oaths with deep suspicion, and in 1821 barred all slaveholders from church membership.Footnote ³⁵ Divisions over slavery are a crucial reminder that evangelical Protestants disagreed over the implications of their shared commitment to free personal choice.Footnote ³⁶ But even slaveholding evangelicals who claimed their benevolent guidance was necessary to prepare slaves to freely choose Christ typically permitted their slaves to decide for themselves where and even whether to attend church. Saving faith could not be mandated.Footnote ³⁷

The aim of fleeing fleshly and worldly snares was of course not unconstrained autonomy, but a conformity to the will of God that was more perfect because it was freely chosen. As John Lardas Modern has argued, for antebellum evangelicals “true religion” was a matter of “systematic organization” of the self, an exalted aspiration regularly thwarted by experience.Footnote ³⁸ The struggle to observe, understand, and discipline the self was a fundamental aspect of protestant experience, and many evangelicals saw missionary service as enabling new levels of self-renovation precisely because it demanded so much. One exemplar was the puritan missionary David Brainerd, whose character was mediated to an immense evangelical readership through the personal diary edited by Jonathan Edwards.Footnote ³⁹ Another was Harriet Newell, who along with other missionary women was said to possess greater scope for self-denial than men as a consequence of being more closely bound to home and kin.Footnote ⁴⁰ Missionaries spoke constantly about the painful struggle to subordinate their natural longings for family, home, and native land to the will of God, freely forsaking their preferences in his service.Footnote ⁴¹ In the plaintive words of “Missionary Farewell,” a United Brethren hymn, “That hallowed bond we sever/ Which the hand of Nature joined.”Footnote ⁴² No area of the heart or will could be permitted to remain bound to external powers or attractions, whether good or evil, when God demanded complete and deliberately chosen submission.

Viewed through this impatience with external restraints on free moral agency, nineteenth-century campaigns to evangelize the world are more easily situated within the Benevolent Empire of evangelical reform. When American missionaries articulated their task, they spoke about awakening those who were slumbering, or removing the chains of heathenism, or, perhaps most frequently, of bringing light and restored vision into the realm of darkness.Footnote ⁴³ According to one United Brethren minister, the spiritual bondage of “heathens” and Muslims in West Africa was evident in their worship of the devil, statues, and greegrees, objects with talismanic powers.Footnote ⁴⁴ Daniel Flickinger often displayed such objects to American audiences when discussing “the superstitions of the people and how they were imposed on by witch masters and medicine men.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Heathenism, another missionary claimed, ensnared Africans in a condition resembling childhood in the dominance of emotions and senses over intellect.Footnote ⁴⁶ United Brethren missionaries mobilized this rhetorically powerful discourse of an incapacitating heathenism well into the twentieth century. They contrasted the ability of even the most wicked resident of “a Christian land” to “change the course of his life” with the profoundly attenuated agency of Africans “controlled by a realm of spiritual darkness inhabited by legions of spirits.”Footnote ⁴⁷

These metaphors of slumber, captivity, and darkness shared a preoccupation with stunted agency, the giving-over of personal freedom and autonomy to material objects such as greegrees or to illegitimate authorities. Heathenism subjected its helpless victims to sin and Satan's rule.Footnote ⁴⁸ Making matters even worse, maintained Daniel Flickinger, was the fact that the depredations of slavetraders and other Western profit-seekers had “caused very many to sink depths into the pool of moral pollution to which they never would have gone had they been left to themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁹ United Brethren missionaries saw themselves as rescuing Sierra Leoneans from spiritual bondage to fetishism and idolatry by inaugurating what historian Ussama Makdisi has termed “evangelical modernity,” the benefits of modern life putatively disentangled from the moral complications of crass colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁰ Historians of the Sierra Leone mission made a habit of observing that stones from the famous reformed slavetrader John Newton's eighteenth-century slave pen on nearby Plantain Island had been repurposed to build a school for African preachers and teachers.Footnote ⁵¹ Physical and spiritual shackles alike were riven. Blindness was turned to sight and the lost were found as the Gospel restored human agency.Footnote ⁵² That such “human liberation projects” required holy violence was a common belief among United Brethren missionaries.Footnote ⁵³ Joseph Gomer, an African American Union army veteran who with his wife Mary spearheaded United Brethren efforts in Sierra Leone for years after their arrival in 1871, wrote, “Every day I can point sinners to the Lamb of God; every day I can assist in tearing down the strong works of the enemy of my Heavenly Father and my Redeemer.”Footnote ⁵⁴

When evangelicals denounced heathenism, they invoked a discourse that had long been used to collapse the complexity and diversity of indigenous religions into the putative absence of religion. This alleged absence was in turn associated with an array of negative traits, including laziness.Footnote ⁵⁵ Heathenism was among the first concepts used in the articulation of racial difference.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Rebecca Goetz has shown, early Virginians pioneered the influential claim that Africans and Indians were “hereditary heathens,” by nature incapable of conversion to Christianity.Footnote ⁵⁷ On colonial frontiers ranging from seventeenth-century Virginia to nineteenth-century Southern Africa, Europeans used the concept of heathenism to create the concept of race, and deployed the concept of race to justify political and economic hierarchies. Goetz has also shown how Christianity could be used, particularly by the marginalized, in efforts to destabilize claims about differential essence.Footnote ⁵⁸ References to heathenism by the United Brethren and other evangelical supporters of overseas missions thus utilized a concept associated with racial difference in order to rally support for the conversion of the world.Footnote ⁵⁹

Nineteenth-century Protestant critiques of heathenism resonated with contemporary criticisms of Catholicism in scorning material mediations of the spiritual, and, more broadly, with modernist efforts to cast off encumbrances on the autonomous self. Webb Keane, following William Pietz, has observed that missionary, Marxist, and Freudian imputations of fetishism all summoned historical narratives in which the one doing the imputing avoided a surrender of autonomy.Footnote ⁶⁰ Keane has argued that in the “moral narrative of modernity,” it was those who refused to exercise their agency separately from illegitimate rulers, traditions, and material objects who were said to be backward and premodern.Footnote ⁶¹ As much as they might revile one another, evangelical and modernist apostles alike preached the gospel of the emancipated self. The liberation of the individual, moreover, signaled the arrival of a new epoch in world history.Footnote ⁶²

As this suggests, the understandings of human agency embraced by champions of global missions were entangled, in more or less obvious ways, with claims and assumptions about time and space. The connections between temporality and agency ranged from arcane considerations of biblical eschatology to practicalities of timekeeping. History, as read through the biblical narratives, was progressive, advancing inexorably to a magnificent, foreordained conclusion under the direction of God himself. The progressive nature of history was confirmed by popular interpretations of Enlightenment stadial theory, and developed into a secular science by theorists such as Turgot, Condorcet, and Comte, who injected it with immense optimism regarding humanity's ability to fashion its own future.Footnote ⁶³ Some saw history progressing toward the triumph of Christianity and others toward the demise of theistic religion, but central to both religious and secular dreams of modern progress was enhanced control over nature and over the self.Footnote ⁶⁴

For American evangelicals caught up in the exciting and sometimes bewildering changes of the first half of the nineteenth century, familiarity with French social theory was not required to see that something significant was happening. Remarkable innovations in transportation and communications technologies promised to introduce new and liberating temporalities, speeding travel and the spread of useful information by “overthrowing the tyranny of distance.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Along with greater reliance on clock and mechanical time would come increasing mastery over nature, including human nature.Footnote ⁶⁶ American evangelicals believed that God had authored this progress. Daniel Flickinger claimed that the Bible had created American turnpikes, canals, railroads, and telegraph lines by fostering invention and enterprise, crucial attributes of human agency, in Americans.Footnote ⁶⁷ These shifts were widely seen as both harbingers and catalysts of the approaching millennium, the promised kingdom of God on earth.Footnote ⁶⁸

Millennial narratives offered inspiration and coherence to programs of reform and world evangelization by fostering great optimism about both the temporal and spatial scope of progress. Evangelicals used such narratives to locate themselves within biblical time in a drama that ended with people from every language and nation worshipping the Christian God.Footnote ⁶⁹ United Brethren in particular drew upon a tradition of radical pietist millennialism that envisioned a glorious age in which religious unity triumphed over the barriers dividing humanity.Footnote ⁷⁰ Reformers and missionaries might actually accelerate the arrival of the millennium through acts of “temporal reorganization,” both great and small, that were seen as central to nineteenth-century missionary work.Footnote ⁷¹ Among the regularly cited proofs that this culminating drama was at hand was the adoption by native peoples of new ways of marking time. Daniel Flickinger devoted a chapter of an 1885 book on West African missions to systems of counting and timekeeping. He claimed that those he had lived among relied exclusively upon natural cycles such as seasonal changes to mark the flow of time. They had no knowledge of the calendar or clock. As one United Brethren hymn put it, missionaries entered “the land where is heard no sweet Sabbath bell.”Footnote ⁷² Flickinger rejoiced that the missionary presence had begun to foster rival temporalities, reporting that he had observed a man using an improvised calendar to note the days of the week, and that the man had stated that he could not sell his goods on the Sabbath.Footnote ⁷³ American readers perhaps interpreted both the market activity and awareness of calendrical time as signs of modern progress, noting, as was commonly believed, that native peoples entered historical time—left the stasis of heathenism and became capable of cultural advancement—as they embraced the liberating disciplines of Christian civilization.Footnote ⁷⁴

Embedded within the reforming quest to reinstate the full moral agency of non-Christians at home and overseas was an anthropological claim derived from Christian tradition and the new moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. The dominant Christian interpretations of the creation account in Genesis taught the common origins of all human beings, and this reading was augmented by passages in the New Testament, chief among them Acts 17:26, in which Paul declared that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Daniel Flickinger referenced this text in the lecture discussed at the beginning of this article as he responded to claims that West Africans were too physically or morally inferior for missionary efforts to succeed. Supplementing these ancient teachings were the writings of Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Francis Hutcheson, which were widely read in the early republic, producing an “evangelical Enlightenment” that was far more hopeful about human abilities than the Calvinist orthodoxy of the New England puritans.Footnote ⁷⁶ As the antebellum revivalist Charles Finney explained in a ringing critique of traditional Calvinism, the duty of repentance for sins stemmed from the fact that people “are moral agents, and have the powers which God requires them to exercise,” while the duty to pray implied they “are bound to see the evidence, and to believe.”Footnote ⁷⁷

For nineteenth-century American evangelicals reared on these beliefs, all human beings possessed an innate “moral sense” that discerned virtue and vice. This strand of Enlightenment thinking reinforced a belief in the “moral unity of the human race” that fueled evangelical optimism about the possibility of cross-cultural communication and attempts to convert the world.Footnote ⁷⁸ Social and political radicals at times developed the egalitarian potential of such claims.Footnote ⁷⁹ More commonly they were obscured or eclipsed by competing beliefs and commitments, including assertions of racial difference grounded in the discourse of heathenism. Their claims about the moral purity of “evangelical modernity” notwithstanding, missionary projects were frequently implicated in colonial schemes, undermined by the bigotry of missionaries, and marred by the unequal treatment of native Christians. Antebellum reformers commonly marginalized and distanced those whom they professed to assist.Footnote ⁸⁰ While advocates of global evangelization asserted that all people had a common origin, belonged to the human family, and could therefore be Christianized and civilized, missionary rhetoric advanced certain configurations of racial difference even as it denied others.

This combination of beliefs informed the most influential antebellum missionary strategy, which sought to train and deploy a “native agency” to form self-governing, self-propagating, and self-supporting churches.Footnote ⁸¹ The approach had precedents in the early modern Atlantic world.Footnote ⁸² While efforts to “raise a native agency” usually involved working with Christian converts where they lived, young converts were sometimes educated in the United States.Footnote ⁸³ The United Brethren attempted this with at least one Sierra Leonean in addition to Wilberforce, but the plan collapsed when the young man died.Footnote ⁸⁴ Officials were so hopeful about training Wilberforce that they spent nearly two hundred dollars annually to educate him during one of the worst economic crises in American history.Footnote ⁸⁵ As Paul William Harris has argued, the “native agency” strategy is best understood as pragmatic rather than progressive, founded upon a quest for efficiency rather than a belief in equality.Footnote ⁸⁶ The approach nevertheless enabled, in theory and at times in practice, indigenous religious leadership and cross-cultural collaboration and fellowship.

Simultaneously, a competing strand of the Enlightenment birthed theories of ineradicable human difference sharply at odds with the expansive temporal and spatial address of early missionary programs and their notions about human agency. The stadial theory and naturalization of time associated with the Scottish Enlightenment endowed ethnography and later anthropology with an impulse toward what has been called temporal distancing, neatly encapsulated in Johannes Fabian's observation: “The pagan was always already marked for salvation, the savage is not yet ready for civilization.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The scientific theories of race that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century furthered this tendency by denying coevalness to racial others, depicting them as anachronisms from an ancient past, particularly following the dramatic expansion in ethnological time during the 1860s.Footnote ⁸⁸ For some proponents of such theories, racial others were locked outside historical time by their innate biological inferiority, lacking agency to make the responsible individual choices required for participation in modern civilization.

Geographical difference often shaped this denial of coevalness, as shown in the claims of many travelers about the stunted cultural development of “the tropics.” In regions of great natural abundance, the theory suggested, industry languished, human activity and agency declined, time slowed, and history stopped.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this interpretation, places such as West Africa, and the people who inhabited them, were removed from civilization both temporally and geographically. Thus the protagonist of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness described his passage into the African interior as “like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Theorists who believed that physical differences prevented cultural or moral improvement of “races of inferior organization” claimed that “the Negroes in Africa must remain substantially in the same benighted state wherein Nature has placed them,” locked outside modernity.Footnote ⁹¹

Nineteenth-century evangelicals who championed the costly and demanding work of global evangelization often found themselves criticized or ignored. Opposition from within the church led Daniel Flickinger to write in 1907 that his “hardest work in behalf of missions was not done in Africa” but in America as he struggled “to convert Christians from the error of their way, and to show them their duty to the heathen.”Footnote ⁹² Flickinger was repeatedly accused of “attempting the impossible” by traveling to Africa to convert “niggers” and help “the negroes.”Footnote ⁹³ Racially driven pessimism about African agency prompted Flickinger, in the lecture on Africa discussed above, to strenuously dispute the assertions of some that physical characteristics such as skull formation had “anything to do in determining the quantity or quality of brains, or the moral susceptibilities, or spiritual endowments, or anything of that kind.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Flickinger and his likeminded colleagues advanced historical narratives that used the temporal and racial distancing of their form of stadial theory to undermine the more extreme temporal distancing of racial or geographical determinism. William McKee urged readers who doubted the power of the gospel to help the people of Sierra Leone to consider that within recorded history every Christian nation had been as “ignorant, superstitious, selfish and idolatrous” as the “negroes of West Africa to-day.”Footnote ⁹⁵ No country could escape idolatry on its own, but the gospel could rescue any group. Flickinger made the same point by projecting forward in time and asking his readers to imagine themselves in an alternative future: “take from us the Bible and its influences, and in a very few centuries our condition would in every respect be as wretched as that of the most degraded race on the face of the globe.”Footnote ⁹⁶

II. The Rise of Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce

When Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce began his rise to denominational and national notice during the early 1870s, he thus entered—as both subject and object, active participant and closely watched evidence—an ongoing and contentious conversation about agency, race, and Christianity. Wilberforce was attractive to United Brethren supporters precisely because he embodied so fully the autonomous subject aimed at by both the missionizing and modernizing projects.Footnote ⁹⁷ Admirers celebrated his combination of identities and allegiances—“full-blood African,” native speaker of the Sherbro language, patriotic Sierra Leonean, evangelical Christian, disciplined and intelligent student—both for what they said about his promise as a missionary and what they said about his status as an unconstrained agent.Footnote ⁹⁸ Wilberforce moved skillfully across geographical and social space—seemingly as comfortable in the obscure religious borderlands of the protestant Atlantic as the heart of the American Midwest. In his mastery of Western cultural forms and, correlatively, himself, supporters also detected an ability to travel across time, leaving behind the imprisoning darkness of heathenism for the glorious liberation of evangelical modernity.

The very name Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce highlighted the emancipatory possibilities of evangelical protestantism. With its message of personal transformation, missionary theology encouraged the formation of new identities. Native peoples often signaled their place within the expansive social worlds created through missionary encounters with the names they selected for themselves and their children. Wilberforce's parents followed a common practice among Sierra Leonean Christian converts by taking the name Wilberforce in honor of the English abolitionist who had played a crucial role in the formation of the colony.Footnote ⁹⁹ The first and middle names they gave to their son, borrowed from the visiting missionary Daniel Flickinger, showed their desire to take their place within the emerging world of global protestantism. His parents also honored local custom in giving their son a Sherbro name, Sau-Coyah, which marked his place within the family and the generations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When they came of age, Sherbro children were typically inducted into the secret societies that regulated religious and social life. In recognition of their altered identity and place within the community, they received new names. But the young Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce never joined a secret society, and he received his second name at birth.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In breaking with tradition, Wilberforce's parents registered their new relationship to the past, consolidating their position in a new community of time and identity by grafting their son into a constructed lineage with a different temporal frame, what sociologist Thomas Luckmann calls a “biographical scheme.” According to Luckmann, biographical schemes create meaning, making sense of individual lives in the present by placing them within the temporal framework of longer-lived entities such as family, class, or nation.Footnote ¹⁰² The concept is useful in showing that the patrimony Wilberforce received from his parents, expressed in a name that placed their son within a narrative of Atlantic crossings and global Christianity, asserted freely chosen inclusion in the geographies and temporalities of evangelical modernity. Sau-Coyah was recognizable to other Sherbros as the third son of a woman whose family ruled the Imperi chiefdom. Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce was a new creation. The name pointed not to a familiar past but to recent encounters and to the future they might produce. Historian Walter Johnson has noted that naming practices and rival temporal schemes could be used in efforts to maintain ancestral identities and resist domination.Footnote ¹⁰³ Both could just as readily be used to secure the privileges of association with transnational evangelicalism through the deliberate renovation of identity.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Wilberforce embraced this vision of himself during the early years of his association with the United Brethren. His loyalties were not to the civilized world as such, but to evangelical modernity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He reserved his warmest expressions of gratitude and camaraderie for those “good people of Dayton and elsewhere,” who by their “kind interposition” had snatched him “from the degradation of heathenism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Foremost among them was the man whose name he bore. For decades both men regarded Wilberforce as the vanguard of a gathering army of newly created African agents. Discussing himself in the third person in an 1896 letter to Flickinger, Wilberforce wrote, “Giving that little boy your name, and sending him to Dayton, has not only been a benefit to that boy, but to many in Africa. . . You could not count the results that would grow out of it. The wave of influence is extending and widening.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

For many years Wilberforce fulfilled the fondest expectations of his evangelical sponsors. In 1878 he graduated from Dayton High School, was ordained as an elder in the United Brethren in Christ church, married an African-American woman from Dayton named Elizabeth, and returned to Sierra Leone as a missionary.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He became superintendent of the United Brethren mission schools there, and gradually won fame and popularity in the church as his work prospered during the 1880s and 1890s. Daniel and Elizabeth Wilberforce visited the United States with their young family in 1885, and Daniel proved to be a gifted speaker capable of drawing large crowds. A newspaperman who attended one of his addresses drew attention to what obviously struck him as an unusual mixture of aptitudes and identities: Wilberforce was “highly educated” and “a gentleman in every respect,” yet recited Bible passages and sang songs in his native language, and “sees things from the standpoint of an African.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Here, in the young missionary's spatially unbounded and self-assembled identity, were the tokens of a modern man. When not lecturing, Wilberforce studied medicine and wrote a study of the Sherbro people.

III. Sherbro and the Sherbros

Published in 1886 by the United Brethren Publishing House, Sherbro and the Sherbros is both an ethnographic overview of the people with whom Wilberforce identified by birth, and an extraordinarily revealing window into how he publicly engaged questions of agency, race, and Christianity. Wilberforce opened his study with an interpretation of the past that clearly signaled his association with evangelical modernity. The evils of the European slave trade, he reported, had been replaced in a “wonderful change” by the increase of legitimate trade, the explorations of Livingstone and Stanley, and the formation of the Congo Free State, changes that opened the way for the glorious triumph of Christianity on the “dark continent.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ With this historical framework, Wilberforce indicated his qualified embrace of Western modernity and his social distance from the Sherbro people described in the book. Long trapped in “labyrinthian darkness” and ensnared by the “superstitious notions” of heathenism, Sherbros sorely needed the spiritual emancipation offered by missionaries that centuries earlier had freed Saxons from heathenism and turned them into “the dominant race in the world.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Wilberforce thus followed contemporary writers both in discovering race in religious alterity and participating in the temporal distancing of ethnographic writing, by which the coevalness of encounter is transmuted into historical difference, placing its subjects in an earlier era.Footnote ¹¹² But he also destabilized that familiar approach. Readers are never permitted to linger long on some monolithic and static Sherbro past, but are whiplashed from the past to the present and back again. Wilberforce accomplished this through his constantly shifting and unstable cultural identity in the text. There are indications that this was a carefully designed strategy. Evangelical American readers were given many reminders that Wilberforce was one of them, including two first-person plural exhortations to support the spread of Christianity with the words, “The heathen world is open to us,” and the question, “Have we faith to follow in the path pointed to us?”Footnote ¹¹³ Wilberforce also revealed his marginality within Sherbro society. As the child of Christian parents, he possessed no firsthand knowledge of the secret societies that dominated many aspects of Sherbro life.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He further emphasized his outsider status by telling readers that some West Africans marked his cultural and linguistic differences by referring to him as “white man.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

This move is perhaps to be expected. What needs more explanation is the striking degree of identification with the Sherbro found in the text. The subtitle, “A Native African's Account of His Country and People,” may reveal one motive in its claim to privileged access to ethnographic information as a cultural insider. But something else appears to lie behind Wilberforce's use of the first-person plural in describing Sherbro ways, including many practices he condemned. “I would not have you infer that we catch all our wives in war,” he cautioned readers.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In another passage he positioned himself among the “heathen without the Gospel,” writing, “We have trusted greegrees, we have appealed to charms, and have worshipped idols and devils. All have failed us; we have no peace, no hope.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Wilberforce, who wrote the book while living in the United States, even distinguished between his readers, to whom he referred as “you in the land of Gospel light,” and his people and himself, “who are in darkness.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

By placing himself within both the “we” of evangelical modernity and Sherbro heathenism, notwithstanding the reality that he had been raised by Christian parents, Wilberforce offered himself as supporting evidence for the optimism of missionary programs and their conceptions of human agency. Discussion of the heathen past highlighted the temporal distance he had traveled within a few decades. Talk of the darkness that blanketed Africa accentuated his own enlightenment. His facility in textual movements between competing identities drew attention to his intelligence and agency. As Webb Keane has noted, evangelicalism historically required critical distance between an active, choosing subject and his beliefs. Wilberforce advertised precisely this high degree of reflective detachment by authoring an ethnography of his own people, not to mention playing with pronouns in a way that allowed for multiple constructions of the self. He took advantage of the empowerment achieved through authoring narrative, using his movement across time and space to reveal the capabilities of his people.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He was a glimpse of the future of Africa, one who had broken into history through his own choices, and it was his will and activities, and those of his evangelical allies internationally, that would realize this promise. Six years earlier, he had predicted that “we stand upon the threshold of another era in the history of Africa.”Footnote ¹²⁰

For Wilberforce, as for many of his readers in the United States, the liberation and self-mastery of modernity was attained in part through participation in new temporalities. United Brethren congregations donated clocks to their mission stations in Sierra Leone, and Wilberforce told one group that he hoped to place a clock at every station.Footnote ¹²¹ He also viewed the observation of the Sabbath as evidence of progress in his work.Footnote ¹²² His daughter, Lucy, raised funds for a bell for the mission school, where it could be used to enforce greater time discipline.Footnote ¹²³ These tokens of the Wilberforce family's desire to spread clock and calendrical consciousness were interpreted as one facet of their commitment to the renovation of the self. During a trip to Sierra Leone in 1896, Daniel Flickinger noted in his diary that Wilberforce managed his family and laborers as well as he governed his school.Footnote ¹²⁴ Skillful management in these areas could be interpreted as proof of self-mastery and agency. African and African-American men were often stereotyped as lazy and sexually promiscuous during the era of colonialism and Jim Crow. Wilberforce's dedication to time discipline and monogamy was highly significant in this context, signs of his ability to master racial inclinations and appetites that might otherwise hold him captive.Footnote ¹²⁵

Wilberforce defended the universal address of evangelical modernity most explicitly in criticizing those who dismissed missionary work with the saying, “Charity begins at home” and voiced their “doubts of the Christianization of Africa and Africans, as if certain nations have obtained from heaven a patent right to this gospel of Christ.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Such concerns failed to recognize that Christian lands were Christian because of missionary successes, and not because of any inherent affinity for Christianity. “Religion is not,” Wilberforce informed his readers, “indigenous to any particular country, nor is it especially adapted to any one climate. Wherever found it is exotic.”Footnote ¹²⁷ He pointed to the flourishing state of West African missions in general and United Brethren missionary efforts in particular, some of it due to his own labors, as evidence that Africa could be improved.Footnote ¹²⁸ He also mentioned the possibility that even readers living “in the land of Gospel light” could suffer the diminished agency typically associated with heathenism by being “lulled to sleep under the sense of carnal security.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Geography gave no protection against error and raised no insuperable obstacles to faith. According to Wilberforce, God did not limit himself to “any particular place, people or time,” but wanted the gospel preached “to every individual of the race.”Footnote ¹³⁰

For all the explicit and implicit cultural criticism contained in Sherbro and the Sherbros, Wilberforce refused to deliver blanket condemnations. The book combined vigorous critiques of Sherbro customs with insights meant to reveal the full humanity of Sherbro people. In a passage describing the harmful effects of polygamy, for example, Wilberforce told his readers that those who practiced polygamy did not see it as a crime or sin, and explained that it played an essential role in determining social status.Footnote ¹³¹ Wilberforce also reported that the Sherbro honored customs and laws that protected “the rights of men,” were less violent and equally hospitable to strangers as Americans, and were not, as was often claimed, by nature lazy.Footnote ¹³² The problem, he explained, was the influence of “climatic effects” and heathenism, which influenced the physical as well as the spiritual and moral condition of those in its thrall.Footnote ¹³³ Wilberforce urged readers to introduce Christianity and industrial education to Africa through missionary work, producing a more “favorable atmosphere” for the development and improvement of African people, and only then “bring your verdict” about African nature and capacities.Footnote ¹³⁴ This blend of potent critique and affirmation of underlying human unity was precisely the message of the generation of United Brethren missionaries, including Daniel Flickinger, who had most profoundly shaped Wilberforce. Now he reproduced their message and used it to promote his own endeavors.

Written in part to generate support for Wilberforce's missionary projects, Sherbro and the Sherbros concluded with a request to American readers not for more missionaries, but for books, clothing, and money to support the work of young African Christians “who are ready to enter the field” of missionary service.Footnote ¹³⁵ In advocating indigenous initiative, Wilberforce echoed decades of conventional wisdom among United Brethren missionary leaders. He was also staking out the ground of his future service, for he recommended literary as well as industrial education and requested support for a new project.Footnote ¹³⁶ Returning to Sierra Leone in 1887 with funding from a Denver potato tycoon, Wilberforce started and served as principal of the Rufus Clark and Wife Theological Training School, an institution designed to cultivate African teachers and preachers by providing the “common branches of study” and advanced theological training.Footnote ¹³⁷ There were similar institutions in West Africa and around the world, but Wilberforce was bucking the influential views of white educators such as Samuel Chapman Armstrong of the Hampton Institute. Armstrong criticized the earlier policies of evangelical missionaries like his own father who supplemented academic education with industrial education rather than entirely eliminating academic education as unfitted to the limited abilities of colonized peoples.Footnote ¹³⁸

Even before the publication of his book, word of the gifted young African missionary had spread beyond denominational circles as his story was told to promote particular understandings of African agency and the African self.Footnote ¹³⁹ In 1883, in the second volume of History of the Negro Race in America, the pioneering African-American historian George Washington Williams wrote a three-page biography that identified Wilberforce as “a striking illustration of the capabilities of the Negro.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In this book, ancient Africa, particularly Egypt and Ethiopia, was depicted as the cradle of civilization, continuing a prominent theme in anti-slavery writing.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This explanation challenged historians who relegated Africa to a static and undifferentiated past, in the process writing Africans out of any shared experience of the present. The difference between these interpretations was not so much in their view of contemporary Africa, for race historians beginning with Williams tended to present modern Africa as at best backward and at worst deeply degraded, an evaluation that continued until the Harlem Renaissance.Footnote ¹⁴²

The real difference was in the claim that Africans and people of African descent were not inherently inferior and were thus capable of fashioning advanced and cultivated lives, both in the past and in the present. Williams had opened his first volume by attacking the conclusions of the many writers on “ethnology, anthropology, and slavery” who during the past several decades had “strenuously striven to place the Negro outside of the human family.”Footnote ¹⁴³ It was in this defense of the unity of the human race and the equality of human capacity that Wilberforce was most useful to Williams. “Marvellous as it may seem,” he wrote, this young man had in less than one decade emerged from the “darkness” of paganism and vaulted up the ladder of civilization, “from a state of savage life up to civilized life.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In other words, the immense time periods separating racial groups in the developmental schema of contemporary racial science had been traversed, with apparent ease, by this Sierra Leonean man with no obvious advantages. This use of Wilberforce's story aligned closely with the way he and United Brethren supporters cited his story to support the case for human equality. As with the several dozen other race historians active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Williams sought to write histories that would forge a collective and positive group identity in the context of worsening racism.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Booker T. Washington may have drawn on Williams when he related Wilberforce's story several decades later as an example of the enterprising nature of “native Africans” serving white denominations as missionaries to Africa.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Though much had occurred in the intervening years, Washington restricted his account to Wilberforce's arrival in the United States and academic accomplishments. By concluding his narrative with the young missionary's return to Sierra Leone, he avoided the more complicated and less obviously inspiring later years of his career. Washington's emphasis reveals that he had interpreted Wilberforce's successes in a way that confirmed his growing interest in the humanitarian elevation of Africans through collaboration with European imperial powers.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As he committed himself and his institution to a colonizing mission to Africa informed by the same narrative of the African past guiding European colonizers, Washington pointed to Wilberforce as proof that it could work.

IV. Tensions Within the Mission

Several developments during the 1890s began to alter the way Wilberforce thought about himself, his native culture, and his relationship with the United Brethren in Christ. After a century of unity, the denomination divided in 1889 in an acrimonious dispute over proposed revisions to its constitution.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ When a series of court cases gave control over church and mission properties to their more numerous adversaries, Old Constitution partisans—later joined by Daniel Flickinger—came to rely on Wilberforce to continue their missionary work in Sierra Leone.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ He was made superintendent of the Imperi mission. Wilberforce was also building closer ties with his Sherbro kinsmen and British colonial officials during this period, a process facilitated by his familial ties to the ruling elite of the Imperi chiefdom and his multilingualism. Colonial documents from the 1890s show his extensive work as an intermediary and advocate for Sherbro and Mende interests in the Imperi chiefdom.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Within a few years Wilberforce had become an influential adviser to the Paramount Chief of Imperi and an important British ally in the campaign to eradicate secret societies and ritual cannibalism in Sierra Leone.Footnote ¹⁵¹ His ministry was bearing fruit as he brought many converts into the church.Footnote ¹⁵² Daniel Flickinger was delighted with how deeply Wilberforce had managed to integrate himself into Imperi society, and told audiences that Wilberforce's skill in protecting his people against traders, speculators, and British colonial officials had made him very popular, increasing the ministry advantages he already enjoyed as a black man.Footnote ¹⁵³

Though it only became apparent in retrospect, the decisive turning point in Wilberforce's relationship with the United Brethren was the Hut Tax Rebellion of 1898, an uprising provoked by British colonial taxation. Rebel forces intent on uprooting all foreign influences killed seven American missionaries and several hundred African Christians.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Wilberforce had campaigned against those working to undermine the colonial administration.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ He and his family were able to flee to safety while a relative bargained for their lives, but their residence and mission station were burned to the ground.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In the aftermath of the rebellion, Wilberforce continued religious services in a makeshift church. He belonged to the ruling family through his mother, and when the Paramount Chief of Imperi died soon afterward, Wilberforce accepted the invitation to take his place, a decision approved by the British Acting Governor.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ According to colonial reports, his territory covered 350 square miles and was home to about 24,000 people.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ His new duties included accepting the surrender of rebels, holding peace talks, directing reconstruction efforts, and collecting colonial taxes, from which he received a commission.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Supporters in the United States celebrated his elevation to Paramount Chief. One denominational magazine ran a cover photograph of Wilberforce wearing the attire and holding the objects that signaled his power.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Several years later an article told readers that in his work as Paramount Chief, Wilberforce “serves as a mighty factor in the Christianization of his own, and adjacent tribes.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

Beneath the celebratory surface, however, resentments and misunderstandings had begun to take root. United Brethren officials eager to rebuild their war-torn mission were frustrated when Wilberforce's demanding workload as Paramount Chief consumed the majority of his time, causing him to suggest that perhaps he should voluntarily give up his missionary salary.Footnote ¹⁶² This did not please Daniel Flickinger, who urged Wilberforce to leave the chieftaincy and resume his missionary duties.Footnote ¹⁶³ Wilberforce was under pressure from another direction as well. According to a British colonial report, by 1903 a powerful faction within the Imperi district was challenging his leadership. He was separated culturally from his people by his “European dress, his domestic life, his complete severance from fetish customs,” and his political authority rested wholly on British support.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ But any chance that Wilberforce would resume full-time missionary work vanished as he came to recognize his disagreements with the white missionaries sent to reinforce the mission following the rebellion. Those disagreements, as Wilberforce understood them, arose from new approaches to missionary activity by a younger generation of United Brethren missionaries far more pessimistic than their predecessors about the agency of African Christians.

Wilberforce complained to Daniel Flickinger in 1902 that white missionary B.O. Hazzard and his newly arrived colleagues had alienated native church members and mission workers with their arrogant manner. They distanced themselves from those around them and refused to “come down to the people as the former missionaries did,” a failure that Wilberforce believed was based on diminished confidence in native abilities and a belief in their own racial superiority. He urged Flickinger to send “missionaries who do not stand aloof from a man and regard him as a different sort of a being, because he has a black skin,” and suggested that the mission turn over more of its work to natives, accelerating implementation of its own long-stated policy.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ These tensions made Wilberforce, who had far more experience than any other missionary in the field, increasingly uneasy about exercising leadership over white colleagues.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Assessing the origins of his strained relations, Wilberforce told Flickinger that the turning point had been the rebellion of 1898, after which white missionaries acted less as colleagues and more as overseers, showing a tendency to “condemn what has been done and to find fault.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ This was hard to endure. “I shall not be in their way,” Wilberforce wrote, and resigned from the mission in 1903.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

The findings of other historians suggest that the changes in the mission that so deeply alienated Wilberforce were not peculiar to United Brethren efforts in Sierra Leone. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, during which missionary schemes were often costly but seldom clearly successful, enthusiasm about rapidly creating a “native agency” for the spread of Christianity had in some quarters yielded to approaches based on a belief in the entrenched powers of heathenism. As more missionaries accepted the conception of race as a deeply ingrained set of inclinations and capacities, fashioned over millions of years, it became far less plausible to them than to an earlier generation of missionaries that Africans could be quickly inducted into modern life, and accordingly into equal status as evangelists, pastors, church elders, and teachers. On American mission stations from Liberia to Natal, missionaries had long mixed their potentially egalitarian message with racial prejudice and segregation.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ For some, new concepts of race justified an indefinite period of political and ecclesiastical rule by Euro-Americans, a shift that Philip Curtin, describing the British public, summarized as a change from “conversionism” to “trusteeship.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ This change coincided with a lessened need to rely upon indigenous partners as more American resources and missionaries flooded onto the mission field in the early 1900s.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Less sanguine about the possibility of rapid cultural and religious development, they tended to exert greater control than their antebellum forebears and were often reluctant to share ecclesiastical authority.

Matters continued to worsen after Wilberforce's departure from the mission. He was still a member of the United Brethren church, but for several years church leaders had been alarmed by rumors that his morality was suspect. Possibly as early as 1901, his fellow missionaries had begun to investigate Wilberforce on suspicion of polygamy, common among chieftains of his stature.Footnote ¹⁷² By 1904, A.F. Stoltz, who had arrived a year earlier to replace Wilberforce as superintendent of the mission, was confident that the rumors were true, reporting to Daniel Flickinger, “We have sufficient proof from many sources as to D.F.W. being a polygamist.”Footnote ¹⁷³ In early 1905, after Stoltz confronted Wilberforce directly with his allegations and was rebuffed, the missionary officials of the Old Constitution branch of the United Brethren church quickly severed all ties with Wilberforce, declaring that he had failed to deny charges of polygamy and had refused to accept the correction and discipline of church leaders.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

V. Wilberforce in American Racial Discourse

More clearly than any other episode in Wilberforce's life, the furor over his alleged polygamy reveals competing conceptions of African agency and the African self. Public and private statements by journalists, missionary officials and missionaries, and Wilberforce himself indicate that understandings of agency were still entangled with ideas about time and space. They also illuminate the widening gap between the anthropologies of antebellum missionaries such as Daniel Flickinger and the generation that succeeded them. The actions of a relatively obscure Sierra Leonean political and religious leader won headlines in newspapers across the United States because they could be exploited as evidence in the process of American race-making.

The story hit American newspapers almost immediately. Some articles were quite brief, others more detailed; some primarily descriptive, others exuberantly polemical; but nearly all, from Buffalo to San Francisco, structured their accounts around a narrative of reversion. Most headlines signaled this interpretation through their use of the word “back,” indicating regressive movement across time, space, culture, or some combination of the three.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In advancing these claims, none of the articles reckoned with the fact of Wilberforce's birth into a Christian family and longstanding marginality within Sherbro society. Rather than returning instinctively to the ancestral beliefs and customs of his childhood or his parents, Wilberforce had begun during his thirties to explore facets of Sherbro society for the first time. American newspapers ignored such details, instead citing the enslaving power of heathenism to explain the young missionary's lapses. Twining religion and culture with biology, they constructed race.

Many of the newspaper accounts pointed to spatial and temporal constraints that they claimed had stripped Wilberforce of his agentive status and drawn him back inexorably into the heathen past. A story in the Washington Post asserted that Wilberforce, swayed by occult influence or something “in the air of his home,” had “lacked in the ability to resist the call of his native savage instincts” and had thus “returned to the wild and mysterious rites of the heathen.” Using a phrase popularized two years earlier by novelist Jack London, the writer noted that the “call of the wild had been greater than all the influences of training.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ This notion received visual support with the same striking image of Wilberforce dressed as Paramount Chief that United Brethren officials had published four years earlier to display his elevated position within Sherbro society and his accompanying advantages as a missionary. Another writer declared that Wilberforce's superficial educational progress was no match for his racial nature: “The little veneer smeared over him by the schools of America was scarce more than a varnish. It gave the appearance of civilization, but it was a mere ambush behind which the savage lurked. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and you cannot inflate a savage with civilization and culture with a hand pump. The slow processes of evolution must be patiently waited on.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ A third writer combined determinist arguments from spatial and temporal factors when he noted—in an article that included the racially-freighted, recently coined term “atavism” in its headline—that conceivably “some strange effect of reversion was produced by restoration to primeval environment.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Wilberforce might have once shown an appearance of rational self-determination, but genetic inheritance imprisoned him in the savage past.

The public embarrassment experienced by supporters of African missions soon worsened, for in late 1905 Wilberforce was charged with cannibalism, punishable by death under British colonial law.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ His trial, which became a cause célèbre throughout West Africa, resulted in his acquittal in 1906 but also ended his tenure as Paramount Chief and ruined his reputation with the British. United Brethren leaders believed that Wilberforce's political foes within the Imperi district had deliberately invented the charges in an attempt to turn the British against him.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ But this did not prevent American newspapers from using the sensational charges to support their views on racial incapacity. The Washington Post asserted that cannibalism was “bred in the bone. . . and must come out in the flesh.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ This view was shared by Sir Harry Luke, a British colonial official in Sierra Leone who believed that Wilberforce was guilty and claimed years later that while his interest in “the white man's learning and arts” was commendable, “this cultivated man was a relapser, unable or unwilling to resist his atavistic urges.”Footnote ¹⁸²

American journalistic commentary on Wilberforce repeatedly claimed that he was locked in the inescapable, racialized grip of the savage past, unable to break free through his own moral agency, even though he might have actually preferred to remain a Christian.Footnote ¹⁸³ In common with many similar claims during the period, this represented a “denial of contemporaneity” to those who persisted in ways deemed anachronistic.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Wilberforce might have once appeared capable of deliberately navigating across time, space, and culture, but his actions had given the lie to his pretensions. It is noteworthy in this regard that the most vituperative of the newspaper accounts opened by mocking his name, which had signaled much that was hopeful to his supporters.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Public notice of the story was driven by the sensational charges and their account of a Christian convert moving in reverse through the temporal narrative of evangelical modernity. Having been liberated from the chains of heathenism to choose Christianity and civilization, no man would willingly return to godless and primitive customs. Wilberforce's desertion was not simple immorality. It threatened the basis of the mission by supporting critics who claimed his agentive status was purely fictive. As one writer rather gleefully noted, Wilberforce “is somewhat of a setback to those who desire to carry civilization and the gospel to the naked savages.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶

United Brethren missionaries eschewed the most extreme varieties of racial determinism, but their responses to Wilberforce reveal a spectrum of views on race. All the missionaries were hopeful Wilberforce would repent and change his ways.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ But some, including the missionary superintendent A.F. Stoltz, were more likely to view African failings as evidence of innate racial weaknesses. While investigating the reports of polygamy, Stoltz informed Daniel Flickinger that the white governor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, “said that Wilberforce was a civilized man but he came from a weak race. It was not advisable to entrust them with too much unless someone was behind them to make them toe the mark. I think he gave us sensible advice.” Stoltz thought that Wilberforce meant well, and suggested that his shortcomings were “perhaps more attributable to the inherent weaknesses of the race than to deliberate acts.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Even an expression of respect could reveal Stoltz's doubts about the racial capacity of the people among whom he was working, as in his aside to Flickinger that “Brother Wilberforce has his faults peculiar to his race, and yet I think I would trust him as much as any black man I know in Africa.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹

The older generation of United Brethren missionaries and pastors, under whose ministry Wilberforce had joined the denomination and to whom he had protested against the policies and attitudes of Hazzard and Stoltz, was less pessimistic. Daniel Flickinger urged his namesake to follow the example of fallen-but-repentant biblical heroes such as David and Peter, ask God for forgiveness, and allow him to “make you a power for good, in Africa.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Looking back on the life of the man he had inducted into church membership over forty years earlier, Milton Wright was struck by how quickly he had fallen from a promising missionary to a “dark back-slider for Africa.” But Wright claimed that “a man is the dictator of his own destiny,” and listed similar cases of sin and failure from the Old Testament.Footnote ¹⁹¹ In situating Wilberforce's experiences within a narrative that envisioned him in biblical time rather than prehistoric time, these writers continued to view him as an autonomous moral agent, one who had chosen poorly but retained the ability to act righteously. They articulated his humanity and agency through reference to the ancient past, in opposition to those who appealed to the past to deny his full humanity. In 1907, Daniel Flickinger allowed that Wilberforce had done some “questionable things” but remained hopeful that God “may yet use Mr. Wilberforce to lead thousands from heathenism to Christianity.”Footnote ¹⁹²

Throughout the crises prompted by the accusations of polygamy and cannibalism, and the swift erosion of his relationship with the Old Constitution faction of the United Brethren church, Wilberforce continued to speak forcefully of his Christian faith and his independence as a moral agent. “I am not amenable to you personally or any Body that you represent,” he wrote to Stoltz. Without denying the charges of polygamy that he had learned Stoltz was investigating for Daniel Flickinger, Wilberforce protested against not being asked directly and wrote, “Whatever your or anybody's construction should be about my lapsing to heathenism, I beg to say, I share with you the belief in ‘God the Father Almighty etc. etc.’ and to Him alone do I look for help in this world, and salvation in the world to come.”Footnote ¹⁹³ He stated that his problem was not with Christianity, but with his treatment by some Christians. He had not deserted the church; it had moved away from him. As he told Milton Wright, “I love the Church, but certain transactions and events made me feel that I was not a member of the same. I pray that matters will soon be changed, that I may be released from the chieftaincy, and be free to devote myself to the ministry.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ In another letter, Wilberforce mentioned his plans to begin an independent missionary training school, relying on donations from contributors in the United States. “Evidently he has no proper conception of the crime of polygamy, and the abhorrence of it by the Christian people of America,” Wright fumed in a letter to a colleague.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Even in the midst of his trial for cannibalism, an American diplomat observed that Wilberforce was “in no way repudiating the principles of Christianity” and another visitor noted that he wanted “to devote the remainder of his life to Christian work.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶

Despite his loss of political power due to British mistrust, neither Wilberforce's ministry nor his trials were over. His relationship with the Old Constitution wing of the United Brethren was irreparable, but he successfully pursued employment as a missionary with the larger faction of the church, and he maintained a relationship with them for decades.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In 1912 Wilberforce was again brought to trial, this time on charges that he had participated in a plot to murder a Sherbro girl and had then received a portion of her corpse.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Again he denied the charges, and again the prosecution failed to establish his guilt.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ This time British officials expelled him from Sierra Leone.Footnote ²⁰⁰ He spent time in Liberia but eventually returned to Sierra Leone, where he died and was buried in the Danville Church Cemetery in 1927.Footnote ²⁰¹