¹ Flickinger, Daniel Kumler, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life: For Forty Years a Laborer in the Mission Work of West Africa, as Missionary, Missionary Secretary, and Later as Missionary Bishop (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1907)Google Scholar, 5, 13, 35. From 1857 to 1885, Flickinger served as Corresponding Secretary of the United Brethren Missionary Society. In 1865 he founded the Missionary Visitor, a denominational missionary magazine with a circulation of 45,000 by 1881. See Fleming, George D., Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone (Huntington, Ind.: United Brethren Publishing Establishment, 1971), 120–125Google Scholar; Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 13, 106, 153.

² Daniel K. Flickinger, “Lecture on Africa” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, United Methodist Church Archives, Madison, N.J (hereafter UMCA). While the manuscript is undated, internal evidence strongly suggests that it was written in the early 1880s.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Flickinger regularly cited Wilberforce in this way. See Rev. D.K. Flickinger, “Western Africa,” The Missionary Monthly (February 1897): 7; Daniel Flickinger, “Miscellaneous notes for lecture” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

⁵ The story was treasured and frequently retold. See, among many other accounts, Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 109; McKee, William, History of Sherbro Mission, West Africa, Under the Direction of the Missionary Society of the United Brethren in Christ (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1874)Google Scholar, 180; The Missionary Monthly V, no. 11 (November 1901): 4. For additional biographical details, see Daniel Flickinger, “The Book Commended” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

⁶ Daniel Flickinger, “Western Africa No. 5,” in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

⁷ For example, see McKee, History of Sherbro Mission, 180–181.

⁸ Berger, Daniel, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1897)Google Scholar; Fetters, Paul R., ed., Trials and Triumphs: A History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Huntington, Ind.: Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 1984)Google Scholar. J. Steven O'Malley emphasizes the influence of radical pietism on early United Brethren thought. See O'Malley, J. Steven, “The Mission of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in Sierra Leone,” in Exploring Christian Mission Beyond Christendom: United Methodist Perspectives, ed. Cartwright, Michael G. (Indianapolis, Ind.: University of Indianapolis Press, 2010), 17–22.Google Scholar

⁹ Berger, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 230–231.

¹⁰ There is no sustained scholarly discussion of Wilberforce's life and career. He has been discussed briefly in two books: Fyfe, Christopher, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 420–421Google Scholar, 473, 491; and Knight, John, ed., Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2000), 91–92Google Scholar. For a short biography, see Witmer, Andrew, “Daniel F. Wilberforce,” in African American National Biography, eds. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8: 277–278.Google Scholar

¹¹ Nicholas, Mark A., “Conclusion: Turns and Common Grounds,” in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, eds. Martin, Joel and Nicholas, Mark A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 276.

¹² Hill, Patricia, The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985)Google Scholar. See also many of the essays in Reeves-Ellington, Barbara, Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and Shemo, Connie A., eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the substantial ideological limitations on American women's self-assertion through missionary activity, see Porterfield, Amanda, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

¹³ The phrase is from Jean Comaroff and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 9. Much of the debate over this influential study revolved around questions of agency, prompting the authors to respond at length to charges that their writings had robbed “the Africans of their voice and agency.” See Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 47; Peel, J.D.Y., “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995): 581–607.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ Case, Jay Riley, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Makdisi, Ussama, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Sharkey, Heather J., ed., Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013).Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Modern, John Lardas, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 293.

¹⁸ See Keane, Webb, “From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 4 (1997): 675Google Scholar; Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 3–7. The list is drawn from Johnson and Asad. On the destructive equation of humanity with agency, see Asad, “Comments on Conversion,” 272; and Johnson, “On Agency,” 114.

¹⁹ Johnson, “On Agency,” 115.

²⁰ Keane, Webb, Christian Moderns: Freedom & Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Keane, “From Fetishism to Sincerity,” 674–7675.

²¹ The quotation is from Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity, 37.

²² While the United Brethren in Christ leaders at the heart of this study had relatively little to say about African-American missionary activity in Africa (excepting that of Elizabeth Wilberforce and Joseph and Mary Gomer, who were employed by the church for many years), such activity is obviously crucial for a fuller account of how African missions shaped U.S. ideas about agency and race, particularly following the Civil War. See Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Williams, Walter L., Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Harris, Paul W., “Racial Identity and the Civilizing Mission: Double-Consciousness at the 1895 Congress on Africa,” Religion and Culture 18, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 145–176.Google Scholar

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²⁶ On early national views of Islam, see Brooks, Joanna, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 95. Confrontation with different systems of belief through colonial contact with Africans and Native Americans drove an ongoing process of defining religion more systematically and comparatively. On this, see Landau, Paul, “'Religion' and Christian Conversion in African History: A New Model,” The Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (1999): 8–30Google Scholar; “Editors' Introduction,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. Warner, Michael, VanAntwerpen, Jonathan, and Calhoun, Craig (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 26–27.Google Scholar

²⁷ Some of the tensions are explored in Fea, John, “The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian's Rural Enlightenment,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003): 462–490Google Scholar. The mutually reinforcing commitment to the individual agent is explored in many studies, including Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Noll, Mark A., America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Stark, Rodney and Finke, Roger, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Thomas, George M., Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar

²⁸ Howe, Making the American Self, 115.

²⁹ J. Steven O'Malley notes the United Brethren attempt to revitalize religion by “shifting authority from status-quo pastors to lay people who longed to live out the message of the Bible.” See O'Malley, “The Mission of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in Sierra Leone,” 19. See also Heyrman, Christine Leigh, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).Google Scholar

³⁰ For United Brethren discussions about the doctrine of total depravity, see Berger, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 306–308. The German Reformed contingent within the denomination had from the beginning espoused a moderate Calvinism, rejecting the doctrines of predestination and perseverance of the saints. On this point, see Fetters, ed., Trials and Triumphs, 70–71.

³¹ Michael Warner, “Speech and Space,” The Immanent Frame (November 27, 2009), http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/27/speech-and-space.

³² Howe, Making the American Self, 63–77.

³³ Ibid., 116. As Howe argues, for evangelicals freedom was closely coupled with control.

³⁴ Throughout the nineteenth century, American protestants worked to limit the sale and consumption of alcohol at home and abroad. Many were convinced that the sale of alcohol in Africa by European traders seriously damaged their missionary efforts. See Flickinger, Daniel K., Ethiopia; Or, Thirty Years of Missionary Life in Western Africa (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1885), 113–114.Google Scholar

³⁵ Berger, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 247–251, 331.

³⁶ See Forbes, Robert P., “Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment,” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery, eds. McKivigan, John R. and Snay, Mitchell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).Google Scholar

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³⁸ Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 16, 38, 49–117.

³⁹ Conforti, Joseph, “Jonathan Edwards's Most Popular Work: ‘The Life of David Brainerd’ and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture,” Church History 54, no. 2 (1985): 188–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries, 5.

⁴¹ See Harris, Paul William, Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24–37Google Scholar; Sherlock, Peter, “Missions, Colonialism and the Politics of Agency,” in Evangelists of Empire?: Missionaries in Colonial History, eds. Barry, Amanda, Cruickshank, Joanna, Brown-May, Andrew, and Grimshaw, Patricia (Melbourne: University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, 2008), 16–17Google Scholar, http://www.msp.unimelb.edu.au/missions/index.php/missions/issue/current.

⁴² A Collection of Hymns For the Use of the United Brethren in Christ (Dayton, Ohio: Vonnieda & Sowers, Agents, 1858)Google Scholar, 525.

⁴³ These themes figure prominently in the missionary hymns assembled in ibid., 513–532.

⁴⁴ McKee, History of Sherbro Mission, 65–68. Webb Keane's work has shaped my analysis here. See Keane, Christian Moderns; Keane, “From Fetishism to Sincerity.”

⁴⁵ Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 127–128.

⁴⁶ Mills, J.S., Mission Work in Sierra Leone, West Africa (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1898)Google Scholar, 53. The very definition of the modern self in the regnant faculty psychology of the nineteenth century was mastery over the emotions.

⁴⁷ Quoted in Hough, Samuel S., Our Church Abroad (Dayton, Ohio: Otterbein Press, 1916)Google Scholar, 81.

⁴⁸ Rachel Wheeler writes that Jonathan Edwards believed the heathen world “was held captive by Satan, and missionaries were Christ's army, sent to liberate those held under Satan's sway.” See Wheeler, Rachel, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 212–213.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Flickinger, Daniel K., Off Hand Sketches of Men and Things in Western Africa (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Printing Establishment, 1857)Google Scholar, 34. Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce later called such people “civilized or devilized heathens.” See Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, March 21, 1902, box 1, United Brethren Historical Center, Huntington University, Huntington, Indiana (hereafter UBHC).

⁵⁰ Makdisi, Ussama, “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 680–713Google Scholar. It should be noted that Daniel Flickinger was optimistic about the benefits of European colonialism in Africa, praising the efforts of Henry Morton Stanley and his Belgian employers.

⁵¹ Seeing Our Missions Across the Seas (Dayton, Ohio: The Foreign Missionary Society, United Brethren in Christ, 1918)Google Scholar, 15; Berger, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 446; Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 180; Rev. Flickinger, D.K., Our Missionary Work From 1853 to 1889 (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1889), 174–75Google Scholar; Hough, Our Church Abroad, 44.

⁵² See the discussion in Keane, Christian Moderns, 181.

⁵³ The phrase is from O'Malley, “The Mission of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in Sierra Leone,” 21.

⁵⁴ Quoted in McKee, History of Sherbro Mission, 216; Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 16–17.

⁵⁵ Chidester, David, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 15.

⁵⁶ In the early modern period, race was articulated through an array of claims about religious alterity. For a discussion of limpieza de sangre in Spain and the Americas, see Martínez, María Elena, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. The overlap between “race” and “religion,” and the continuing existence of beliefs that defy easy classification in either category, is discussed in Goldschmidt, Henry, “Religion, Reductionism, and the Godly Soul: Lubavitch Hasidic Jewishness and the Limits of Classificatory Thought,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 3 (September 2009): 547–572.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Goetz, Rebecca Anne, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Ibid. See especially ch. 6.

⁵⁹ Protestant efforts to convert peoples they continued to view as racial others are also evident in the early modern proselytization of European Jews and Muslims. The author thanks an anonymous reader on this point.

⁶⁰ Keane, Christian Moderns, 180.

⁶¹ Ibid., 6. Keane concentrates on Protestant citations of inauthentic speech as a sign of enslavement and deprivation of agency through ritualization in Catholicism, Islam, and paganism. The evangelical belief that American missionaries “belonged to a modern movement that would overturn the oppression of native idolatry, Islamic fanaticism, and Catholic superstition” is discussed in Makdisi, “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible,” 680–713.

⁶² Keane, Christian Moderns, Chapter 4.

⁶³ Hunt, Lynn, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, Chapter 2. Hunt notes that many Enlightenment theorists did not view history as inevitably progressive.

⁶⁴ Wolloch, Nathaniel, “The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 245–59.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, ch. 6.

⁶⁶ Smith, Mark M., Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Flickinger, Ethiopia, 129.

⁶⁸ Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 285–289.

⁶⁹ Rogers, Richard Lee, “‘A Bright and New Constellation’: Millennial Narratives and the Origins of American Foreign Missions,” in North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory, and Policy, ed. Shenk, Wilbert R. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 39–60.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ O'Malley, “The Mission of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in Sierra Leone,” 17–22.

⁷¹ Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?,” 600.

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⁷³ Flickinger, Ethiopia, 48–49.

⁷⁴ In actuality, as Walter Johnson has argued, a welter of temporal narratives existed in the Atlantic world and in the encounter between Africa and America. This was certainly not a clash of two monolithic temporalities. See Johnson, Walter, “Time and Revolution in African America: Temporality and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Bender, Thomas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 148–67.Google Scholar

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⁷⁶ Noll, America's God, ch. 6.

⁷⁷ Quoted in ibid., 307.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 104, Thompson, Joseph Parrish, The Moral Unity of the Human Race (New York: M.W. Dodd, 1851)Google Scholar; Livingstone, David N., “Geographical Inquiry, Rational Religion, and Moral Philosophy: Enlightenment Discourses on the Human Condition,” in Geography and Enlightenment, eds. Livingstone, David N. and Withers, Charles W.J. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 93–119Google Scholar. For an example from the eighteenth century, see Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, 213–222.

⁷⁹ Blum, Edward J., Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, ch. 2; Stauffer, John, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Ryan, Susan M., The Grammar Of Good Intentions: Race And The Antebellum Culture Of Benevolence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

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⁸² Andrews, Edward E., Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).Google Scholar

⁸³ According to historian Walter L. Williams, during the final three decades of the nineteenth century at least 68 African men and women traveled to the United States along transnational missionary networks, most hoping to gain an education and return to Africa as missionaries. See Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, Appendix.

⁸⁴ Flickinger, Our Missionary Work, 239–244.

⁸⁵ Flickinger, Ethiopia, 166.

⁸⁶ Harris, Nothing but Christ, 162. The strategy, as originally articulated by Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and later embraced by the United Brethren and other groups, recognized that with limited funds, dangerous conditions, and relative lack of interest at home, it was simply more efficient to work toward turning the missions over quickly to native pastors. Additionally, Anderson emphasized the great “difference there is between” the “circumstances and states of mind” of civilized peoples, “and those of a heathen and barbarous people.” In his view, even the most faithful and successful missionary dared not hope for “so much social advancement for two or three generations to come, as would make it pleasant to think of leaving his children among the people for whose spiritual well-being he delights to spend his own strength and years.” See Anderson, Rufus, “The Theory of Missions to the Heathen,” in The Missionary Enterprise: A Collection of Discourses on Christian Missions, ed. Stow, Baron (Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1846)Google Scholar, 38.

⁸⁷ Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, 26. Emphasis in original. See also Apter, Andrew, “Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration of Africa's Heart of Darkness,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 577–598.Google Scholar

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⁸⁹ Driver, Felix and Martins, Luciana, “Views and Visions of the Tropical World,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, eds. Driver, Felix and Martins, Luciana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 14; Kenny, Judith T., “Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Language of the British Hill Station in India,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 4 (1995): 694–714.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ See the discussion of Conrad in Achebe, Chinua, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1988).Google Scholar

⁹¹ Nott, J.C. and Gliddon, George R., Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854)Google Scholar, 189.

⁹² Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 54. And see also Rev. M.F. Keiter, “Our Foreign Mission,” The Missionary Monthly (January 1897): 6.

⁹³ Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 68, 84–85. See also Flickinger, Ethiopia, 122.

⁹⁴ Daniel K. Flickinger, “Africa” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA. For another public discussion of racial determinism and evangelization, see Daniel K. Flickinger, “Our Pulpit: Africa” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook related to Missions in Africa,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA. There at times appear to be elements in Flickinger's thinking of what historian George Fredrickson termed “romantic racialism.” See Daniel K. Flickinger, “Western Africa,” The Missionary Monthly 1, no. 2 (February 1897): 6. There is also some variability in his statements on race. While in some lectures he categorically dismissed the supposed connections between physical characteristics and intellectual, moral, and spiritual traits, he hedged slightly on the same question in at least one address, judging that it was still an “open question” as to whether “the color of the skin, thickness of the skull and jutting out of the heel” had much to do with “determining the quantity or quality of brains an individual possesses.” For this difference, compare two undated manuscript lectures, both titled “Lecture on Africa” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

⁹⁵ McKee, History of Sherbro Mission, 68–69.

⁹⁶ Flickinger, Ethiopia, 68.

⁹⁷ Keane, Christian Moderns, 55.

⁹⁸ McKee, History of Sherbro Mission, 180–181, Daniel Flickinger, “Africa” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 178. This source and Wilberforce's own account indicate that both of his parents were converts to Christianity. See Wilberforce, Daniel F., Sherbro and the Sherbros; Or, A Native African's Account of His Country and People (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1886)Google Scholar, 3.

¹⁰⁰ Wilberforce, Sherbro and the Sherbros, 16–17.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 17, 26–27.

¹⁰² Luckmann, Thomas, “The Constitution of Human Life in Time,” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, eds. Bender, John and Wellbery, David E. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 151–166.Google Scholar

¹⁰³ Johnson, “Time and Revolution in African America.”

¹⁰⁴ J.D.Y. Peel provides support for this conclusion in his discussion of the many ways Yoruba Christians reinterpreted and repositioned themselves and their kin by means of biblical narratives, including through naming practices. See Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?,” 593–598.

¹⁰⁵ This formulation is meant to highlight Wilberforce's belief, shared with his American evangelical allies, that civilization apart from Christianity was corrupted and corrupting. Wilberforce wrote that even New York City, where he experienced racial prejudice that on one occasion denied him accommodation in four hotels, “needs missionaries to enlighten its people.” Quoted in Flickinger, Ethiopia, 265.

¹⁰⁶ Quoted in ibid., 266.

¹⁰⁷ Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel Kumler Flickinger, August 21, 1896, “Correspondences: Sierra Leone 1895–1905,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁰⁸ Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 110; Flickinger, Our Missionary Work, 121–22. Daniel Flickinger, “Editorial,” The Missionary Monthly V, no. 11 (November 1901): 4.

¹⁰⁹ “Afric's Sunny Lands: Native African Describes Peculiarities of His Countrymen,” in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹¹⁰ Wilberforce, Sherbro and the Sherbros, 7.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 24, 29.

¹¹² Fabian, Time and the Other. On race and comparative religion, see Chidester, Savage Systems; and Masuzawa, Tomoko, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹³ Wilberforce, Sherbro and the Sherbros, 35. Wilberforce expressed himself similarly in a 1901 address to a meeting of United Brethren women. See “Minutes of Twenty-Sixth Annual Session of the Board of Managers of the W.M.A.,” The Missionary Monthly V, no. 6 (June 1901): 8.

¹¹⁴ Wilberforce, Sherbro and the Sherbros, 27.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 15–16.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 11.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 24.

¹¹⁸ Ibid.

¹¹⁹ Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?,” 593–595.

¹²⁰ Quoted in Flickinger, Ethiopia, 299.

¹²¹ “Minutes of Twenty-Sixth Annual Session,” 8.

¹²² Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel Kumler Flickinger, October 26, 1902, box 1, UBHC.

¹²³ Lucy K. Wilberforce to Daniel Flickinger, October 2, 1902, box 1, UBHC.

¹²⁴ Daniel K. Flickinger Diary (1895–1905), February 28, 1896, Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹²⁵ Daniel K. Flickinger Diary (1895–1905), February 3, 1896, Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹²⁶ Wilberforce, Sherbro and the Sherbros, 30–31.

¹²⁷ Ibid., 31. Emphasis in original.

¹²⁸ Ibid., 31–33.

¹²⁹ Ibid., 24.

¹³⁰ Ibid., 28–29.

¹³¹ Ibid., 11–12. While the practice in question is more precisely termed polygyny, I have followed the usage most common among contemporary writers and referred to it as polygamy throughout this article.

¹³² Ibid., 10, 13–16, 22.

¹³³ Ibid., 22.

¹³⁴ Ibid.

¹³⁵ Ibid., 37.

¹³⁶ Ibid.

¹³⁷ Berger, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 445–446.

¹³⁸ Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 43–44.Google Scholar

¹³⁹ “A Native African,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 19, 1886, 4. And for a later reference, see Roy, Joseph E., “Africa and America Illustrated; Their Mutual Relation of History and of Service,” in Africa and the American Negro: Addresses and Proceedings of the Congress on Africa, ed. Bowen, J.W.E. (Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969)Google Scholar, 223.

¹⁴⁰ Williams, George Washington, History of the Negro Race in America, vol. II (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1883), 572–574.Google Scholar

¹⁴¹ Bruce, Dickson D. Jr., “Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians, 1883–1915,” American Quarterly 36, no. 5 (1984): 684–699.Google Scholar

¹⁴² Ibid., 695.

¹⁴³ Williams, George Washington, History of the Negro Race in America (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1882)Google Scholar, 1.

¹⁴⁴ Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, 574.

¹⁴⁵ Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F., “Mapping the World, Mapping the Race: The Negro Race History, 1874–1915,” Church History 64, no. 4 (1995): 610–626.Google Scholar

¹⁴⁶ Washington, Booker T., The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909), 336–338.Google Scholar

¹⁴⁷ Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa.

¹⁴⁸ Berger, History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, 349–398.

¹⁴⁹ Fetters, ed., Trials and Triumphs, 318–321; Fleming, Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone, 60–61, 69.

¹⁵⁰ Kalous, Milan, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players in Sierra Leone (Auckland: Wright & Carman Ltd., 1974)Google Scholar, 31, 34, 43, 182–183. While this book suffers from editorial weaknesses, it is the only published source for these Sierra Leone Government Archives manuscripts.

¹⁵¹ Ibid., 151–152, 239–246.

¹⁵² Fleming, Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone, 159; Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 219–231.

¹⁵³ The lecture containing these statements is Daniel K. Flickinger, “Africa” (n.d.) in “Scrapbook 1882–1895,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁵⁴ Fleming, Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone, 71–80; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 570–591; Mills, Mission Work in Sierra Leone, 120.

¹⁵⁵ Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 233.

¹⁵⁶ Wilberforce related these events in a letter to Daniel Flickinger reprinted in the Christian Conservator XIII, no. 50 (August 3, 1898): 1; and in another letter published in the same magazine on September 21, 1898. According to Christopher Fyfe, Wilberforce's mother and sister were murdered by rebels. See Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 572.

¹⁵⁷ Daniel Flickinger, “Editorial,” The Missionary Monthly V, no. 11 (November,1901): 4. See the discussion of the matter by the Acting Governor in Kalous, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players, 246. See also Sir Luke, Harry, Cities and Men: The First Thirty Years, 1884–1914 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953)Google Scholar, I:174.

¹⁵⁸ Fleming, Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone, 85–86, 92; Kalous, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players, 46.

¹⁵⁹ Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, April 8, 1900, box 1, UBHC. In the same collection, see also Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, May 22, 1900; Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel Flickinger, April 29, 1903.

¹⁶⁰ The Missionary Monthly V, no. 7 (July 1901): front cover.

¹⁶¹ H.J. Becker, “A Tribute to African Heroes,” The Missionary Monthly (January 1904): 8.

¹⁶² See Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, May 22, 1900, box 1, UBHC.

¹⁶³ See Daniel Flickinger to Bro. Wilberforce, March 17, 1902, and Daniel Flickinger to Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce, June 8, 1903, both copied into “Diary 1902–1906,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁶⁴ See “Report on Governor's tour through Ronietta and Bandajuma Districts” in Kalous, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players, 246–247.

¹⁶⁵ Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, March 21, 1902, box 1, UBHC.

¹⁶⁶ Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, January 10, 1903, box 1, UBHC.

¹⁶⁷ Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, June 20, 1903, box 1, UBHC.

¹⁶⁸ D.F. Wilberforce to Executive Committee of the Domestic Frontier and Foreign Society of the U.B. Church, May 29, 1903, box 1, UBHC. The quotation is from Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Daniel K. Flickinger, June 20, 1903, box 1, UBHC.

¹⁶⁹ Susan Wilds McArver, “‘The Salvation of Souls’ and the ‘Salvation of the Republic of Liberia’: Denominational Conflict and Racial Diversity in Antebellum Presbyterian Foreign Missions,” in North American Foreign Missions, ed. Shenk, 133–160. See also Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries, 133–138.

¹⁷⁰ Apter, “Africa, Empire, and Anthropology;” Curtin, Philip D., The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964)Google Scholar, 415. For a discussion of the transformation as it applied to missionary work, see Ross, Andrew, “Christian Missions and the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Change in Attitudes to Race: The African Experience,” in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, ed. Porter, Andrew (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 85–105Google Scholar. On the shift among American missionaries toward “a fuller embrace of the secular American empire of Anglo-Saxon men and women,” see Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 175.

¹⁷¹ Harris, Nothing but Christ, 162.

¹⁷² B.O. Hazzard reported in a 1901 letter that he had “found no fault” with Wilberforce, though he had not been able to acquire information about his “private life.” See B.O. Hazzard to Daniel Flickinger, February 10, 1901, box 1, UBHC. Wilberforce learned that Stoltz had been investigating him at Flickinger's request and reacted angrily to the situation. See Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Rev. A.F. Stoltz, November 12, 1904, “Correspondences: Sierra Leone 1895–1905,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA. On the importance of polygyny for rulership in another West African polity, and the problems this posed for converts to Christianity, see Akyeampong, Emmanuel, “Christianity, Modernity and the Weight of Tradition in the Life of ‘Asantehene’ Agyeman Prempeh I, c. 1888–1931,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 69, no. 2 (1999): 303–304.Google Scholar

¹⁷³ A.F. Stoltz to Brother Flickinger, December 26, 1904, “Correspondences: Sierra Leone 1895–1905,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁷⁴ Board of Missions Executive Comm. Minutes, March 8, 1905, UBHC.

¹⁷⁵ “African Missionary Returns to Heathenism,” The Saint Paul Globe, March 10, 1905, 4; “Answers Call of the Wild,” The San Francisco Call, March 10, 1905, 3; “The Atavism of Rev. Wilberforce,” The Buffalo Courier, March 10, 1905, 4; “Back to His First Love,” The Washington Post, September 27, 1905, 6; “Back to Savage Ways,” The Washington Post, September 3, 1905, B1; “Back to Savage Ways,” Rockingham Register, September 12, 1905, 1; “Backsliding of Negro Missionary,” The Ladysmith Daily Ledger, March 13, 1905, 1; “The Call of the Wild,” The Salt Lake Herald, August 18, 1905, 4; “Gone Back to Heathenism,” The Marlboro Democrat, March 17, 1905, 6; “Heathen and Chief of His Tribe,” The Salt Lake Herald, March 10, 1905, 1; “Lured Back to Heathenism,” The Washington Post, March 10, 1905, 1; “Lured Back to Heathenism,” Evening Star, March 9, 1905, 2; “Missionary Turns Devil-Worshiper,” The Watertown Re-Union, May 3, 1905, 6; “Negro Convert Backslid,” New York Times, March 10, 1905, 5; “Tropical Suns and Dusky Damsels Lured Him Back Again,” The Laurens Advertiser, March 15, 1905, 1.

¹⁷⁶ “Back to Savage Ways,” B1.

¹⁷⁷ “Back to His First Love,” 6.

¹⁷⁸ “The Atavism of Rev. Wilberforce,” 4.

¹⁷⁹ In the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the Human Leopard Society, which was powerful in the areas of Sierra Leone where Wilberforce worked, drew its predominantly Sherbro members into ritual killings that reportedly ended in acts of cannibalism. Some British colonial officials speculated that Sherbro men ate human flesh to increase their virility, others that they did so in hopes of acquiring their victims' qualities. For these speculations, see Sir Griffith, William Brandford, preface to Human Leopards: An Account of the Trials of Human Leopards Before the Special Commission Court, by Beatty, K.J. (London: Hugh Rees, Ltd., 1915), v–ixGoogle Scholar; Luke, Cities and Men, 172–173. The British prosecuted the society aggressively.

¹⁸⁰ J.R. King, superintendent of the United Brethren Mission in Freetown, Sierra Leone, advanced this interpretation in 1906. See Kalous, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players, 251–253. The same explanation was reported in “African Missionary Promptly Acquitted,” Harrisonburg Daily News, July 12, 1906, 1.

¹⁸¹ “Back to His First Love,” 6.

¹⁸² Luke, Cities and Men, 177.

¹⁸³ “Back to Savage Ways,” B1.

¹⁸⁴ Keane, Christian Moderns, 118. Keane is discussing the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty in this passage.

¹⁸⁵ “Back to His First Love,” 6.

¹⁸⁶ Ibid.

¹⁸⁷ A.F. Stoltz to Rev. D.F. Wilberforce, November 14, 1904; and Lena Winkel to Brother Flickinger, October 27, 1905, “Correspondences: Sierra Leone 1895–1905,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁸⁸ A.F. Stoltz to Dear Brother, January 21, 1904, box 1, UBHC. Emphasis in original.

¹⁸⁹ A.F. Stoltz to Daniel Flickinger, August 9, 1904, box 1, UBHC.

¹⁹⁰ Daniel Flickinger to Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce, August 11, 1906, in “Diary 1902–1906,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁹¹ See Milton Wright to Rev. J. Howe, April 3, 1914 and Milton Wright to Rev. J. Howe, June 2, 1914, Milton Wright Papers, UBHC.

¹⁹² Flickinger, Fifty-Five Years of Active Ministerial Life, 250.

¹⁹³ Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce to Rev. A.F. Stoltz, November 12, 1904, “Correspondences: Sierra Leone 1895–1905,” Daniel Kumler Flickinger Papers, UMCA.

¹⁹⁴ Quoted in Milton Wright to Jacob Howe, August 21, 1905, Milton Wright Papers, UBHC.

¹⁹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁹⁶ Kalous, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players, 250–51, 253.

¹⁹⁷ Among other references, see Ibid., 257–60. See also Milton Wright to Rev. J. Howe, July 5, 1906, and Milton Wright to Rev. J. Howe, May 1, 1908, Milton Wright Papers, UBHC; A.F. Stoltz to the Board of Missions, U.B. Church, February 24, 1909, box 1, UBHC. On Wilberforce's 1924 address at an annual conference of the United Brethren church in Sierra Leone, see Fleming, George D., Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone: Volume II (Huntington, Ind.: Hill Crest Lithographing, 1973), 290–291.Google Scholar

¹⁹⁸ For an account of the trial by one of the British judges, see Beatty, Human Leopards, 27, 61–70. Many documents from this trial are available in Records of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Foreign Missionary Society, Sierra Leone, Sub-series: Daniel F. Wilberforce Cannibalism Trial, UMCA.

¹⁹⁹ For Wilberforce's denials, see Kalous, ed., Cannibals and Tongo Players, 258, 260.

²⁰⁰ Ibid., 264.

²⁰¹ For the year of death and burial location, see Fleming, Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone: Volume II, 291. Fleming, who served as a missionary in Sierra Leone and counted Christopher Wilberforce (Daniel's son) as a mentor, officiated at Wilberforce's funeral. See Fleming, Trail Blazers in Sierra Leone, 94.

²⁰² “Editors' Introduction,” 27; Bays, Daniel H. and Wacker, Grant, eds., The Foreign Missionary Enterprise At Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003).Google Scholar

²⁰³ Bederman, Gail, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).Google Scholar

²⁰⁴ Beatty, Human Leopards, 62.

²⁰⁵ Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).Google Scholar

²⁰⁶ Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, 9.

²⁰⁷ Quoted in Flickinger, Ethiopia, 266.