Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T08:12:10.066Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Heresy Is the Only True Religion: Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), A Southern Freethinker in Africa and America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2013

Jeremy Rich
Jeremy Rich*
Affiliation:
Marywood University
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Atheists are not the first group that comes to mind when one commonly thinks of late nineteenth-century southern Appalachia. Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), a self-taught scientist from southwestern Virginia who moved to southern Gabon in 1892, sought to bind together conventional southern middle-class views on race and manhood with religious skepticism. Studies of unbelief in the United States have almost entirely ignored the South as well as the ways that freethinkers engaged with race, thereby leaving out men like Garner. Though Garner drew on northern and midwestern freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll for critiques of Christianity, he also saw himself as a defender of paternal southern views of race from northerners and from Christian missionaries. Still, he distanced himself from other southern agnostics, especially the race-baiting William Cowper Brann, by presenting himself as a fatherly protector of Africans and African Americans. Garner used his observations on Gabonese societies to critique colonialism and missionary work as denials of biological differences between the races. Interestingly, Garner contended that Gabonese spirituality was materialist and lacked a notion of divinity. Ultimately, Garner downplayed his freethinking and his anti-colonialism in his published work—probably to ensure his ability to continue his research in colonial Africa and perhaps to better market himself in the United States.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 65 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Richard Lynch Garner, “Autobiography of a Boy” (unpublished manuscript, 1941), Richard Lynch Garner File, Washington County Historical Society, Abingdon, Virginia. This manuscript was compiled from a series of Garner's letters written in 1904.

2 Garner's reputation languished in obscurity after his death. Gregory Radick's recent work The Simian Tongue is the sole academic work that examines Garner's idiosyncratic career and views. On Garner's background, Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago, 2007), 87–90Google Scholar; Rich, Jeremy, Missing Links: The African and American Worlds of R.L. Garner, Primate Collector (Athens, GA, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 On Christianity in Appalachia, McCauley, Deborah V., Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Urbana, 1995)Google Scholar; Leonard, Bill J., ed., Christianity in Appalachia: Profiles in Regional Pluralism (Knoxville, 1999)Google Scholar; Dorgan, Howard, The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope (Knoxville, 2001)Google Scholar; Sparks, John, The Roots of Appalachian Christianity: The Life and Legacy of Elder Shubal Stearns (Lexington, KY, 2004)Google Scholar. On constructions of Appalachian religious practice that presented the region as exotic, see Shapiro, Henry, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1978)Google Scholar; Batteau, Allen, The Invention of Appalachia (Tuscon, 1990)Google Scholar.

4 For general works on atheism in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Warren, Sidney, American Freethought, 1860–1914 (1943; New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, 1985)Google Scholar; Jacoby, Susan, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Hunsberger, Bruce and Altemeyer, Bob, Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers (Amherst, NY, 2006)Google Scholar.

5 On skeptics outside of the East Coast in the United States, see Carver, Charles, Brann and The Iconoclast (Austin, 1957)Google Scholar; Whitehead, Fred and Muhrer, Verle, “Introduction” in Freethought on the American Frontier, ed. Whitehead, Fred and Murher, Verle (Buffalo, 1992), 15–23Google Scholar; Jacoby, Freethinkers, 174–78, 210–12; Sparks, John, Kentucky's Most Hated Man: Charles Chilton Moore and The Bluegrass Blade (Nicholasville, KY, 2009)Google Scholar.

6 Kikley, Evelyn, Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen: Gender and American Atheism, 1865–1915 (Syracuse, 2000), 142Google Scholar.

7 Kaye, Harvey, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York, 2005), 156–91Google Scholar.

8 Kikley, Rational Mothers, 29–50.

9 On the construction of white masculinity in the South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Silber, Nina, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1993)Google Scholar; Whites, LeeAnn, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens, GA, 1995)Google Scholar; Friend, Craig Thompson and Glover, Lorri, eds., Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Athens, GA, 2004)Google Scholar; Cobb, James, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York, 2005), 74–81Google Scholar; Friend, Craig Thompson, ed., Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction (Athens, GA, 2009)Google Scholar.

10 Twain, Mark, King Leopold's Soliloquy (Boston, 1905)Google Scholar; Zwick, Jim, ed., Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War (Syracuse, 1992)Google Scholar; Morris, Roy Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (New York, 1999), 252–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hsiung, David, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington, KY, 1997)Google Scholar; Noe, Kenneth, Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis in the Civil War Era (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2003), 67–108Google Scholar.

12 Garner, “Autobiography,” 68–77 (quotation 68).

13 The following paragraph is a summary of Garner's life as detailed in Radick, Simian Tongue; Rich, Missing Links.

14 Richard Garner to Prof. Holmes, Dec. 6, 1900, outgoing letters, box 1, Richard Lynch Garner Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, Maryland (hereafter RLGP). Garner underlined the words.

15 Radick, Simian Tongue, 116–19, 134–42, 233–34; Rich, Missing Links.

16 Turner, Without God, 171.

17 Garner, Richard, The Speech of Monkeys (New York, 1892), 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Richard Garner, “Notes on Christianity” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1906]), 1, Folder Nancy Bet, box 3, RLGP.

19 On Ingersoll, the most comprehensive work remains Larson, Orvin, American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll (New York, 1962)Google Scholar.

20 Turner, Without God, 203–25.

21 Garner, “Notes on Christianity.”

22 Ingersoll, Robert, On the Gods (Buffalo, 1990), 79.Google Scholar

23 Ingersoll, On the Gods, 93.

24 Garner, “Autobiography,” 76.

25 Ibid., 42.

26 Garner, “Autobiography,” 75.

27 Richard Garner, “The Church Militant” (unpublished manuscript, 1891), Folder The Phonograph Among the Savages, box 3, RLGP.

28 Garner, “Notes on Christianity”; Ingersoll, On the Gods, 170.

29 Doepke, Dale, “‘The Western Examiner’: A Chronicle of Atheism in the West,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 30:1 (1973): 29–43Google Scholar; Kleber, John, “‘Pagan Bob’ on the Comstock: Robert G. Ingersoll Visits Virginia City,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 22:4 (1979): 243–53Google Scholar; Taylor, Robert, “The Light of Reason: Hooiser Freethought and the Indiana Rational Association, 1909–1913,” Indiana Magazine of History 79:2 (1983): 109–32Google Scholar; Ketchell, Aaron, “Contesting Tradition and Combating Intolerance: A History of Freethought in Kansas,” Great Plains Quarterly 20:4 (2000): 281–95Google Scholar.

30 Bradford, Roderick, D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker (Amherst, NY, 2006), 62–68Google Scholar.

31 Cooper, Bernice, “Die Freie Gemeinde: Freethinkers on the Frontier,” Minnesota History 41:2 (1968): 53–60Google Scholar; Garver, Bruce and Luebke, Frederick, “Czech-American Freethinkers on the Great Plains, 1870–1914” in Ethnicity on the Great Plains, ed. Luebke, Frederick (Lincoln, NE, 1980), 147–69Google Scholar; Schneirov, Richard, “Freethought and Socialism in the Czech Community of Chicago, 1875–1887” in “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants, ed. Hoerder, Dirk (DeKalb, IL, 1986), 121–42Google Scholar; Leiren, Terje, Marcus Thrane: A Norwegian Radical in America (Northfield, MN, 1987)Google Scholar; Nelson, Bruce, “Religion, Irreligion, and Chicago's Working Class in 1886,” Journal of Social History 25:2 (1991): 236–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rampelmann, Rita, “Infidels, Ethnicity, and Womanhood: Women in the German-American Freethinker Movement,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 39 (2004): 61–76Google Scholar; Polland, Annie, “‘May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?’: The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ and the ‘Secular’ Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America,” American Jewish History 93:4 (2007): 375–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Radick, Simian Tongue, 231.

33 Richard Garner, “Things That Will and Must Come to Pass” (unpublished manuscript, 1908), Folder Tails of Dogs and Other Animals, box 4, RLGP.

34 Richard Garner to Harry Garner, Sept. 1, 1908, outgoing letters, box 1, RLGP.

35 Richard Garner to Harry Garner, Feb. 7, 1905, ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Richard Garner to Harry Garner, Sept. 1, 1908, outgoing letters, box 1, RLGP.

38 Ibid.

39 Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1984), 330–35Google Scholar; Silber, The Romance of Reunion.

40 Dunaway, Wilma, Slavery in the American Mountain South (New York, 2003), 30, 117–18Google Scholar.

41 Garner, “Autobiography,” 8–11.

42 Ibid., 56–58.

43 Kirkley, Rational Mothers, 20–21.

44 Freethinker, June 14, 1896, 376.

45 Alexander, Charles, “Negro Secret Societies,” Free Thought 16 (1898)Google Scholar: 94.

46 Lears, T.J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Joshi, S.T., H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (West Warwick, RI, 1996)Google Scholar; Spiro, Jonathan Peter, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, VT, 2008)Google Scholar.

47 Larson, American Infidel, 70–71.

48 Anderson, David, Robert Ingersoll (New York, 1972), 129.Google Scholar

49 Ingersoll, On the Gods, 385.

50 Richard Garner, “The Negro” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c.1906]), 1–2, Folder Nancy Bet, box 3, RLGP.

51 Garner, Richard, “The Religion of African Cannibals,” The Forum, Nov. 1920, 307–08Google Scholar.

52 Garner, “The Negro,” 1.

53 Ibid., 3.

54 Richard Garner, “The Negro Question” (unpublished manuscript, 1908), 2, Folder Nancy Bet, box 3, RLGP.

55 Ibid., 3.

56 Ibid., 4–5.

57 Ibid., 5, 9.

58 Ibid., 10–13.

59 Williamson, Crucible of Race, 259–84.

60 Carver, , Brann and The IconoclastGoogle Scholar; Conger, Roger, ed., The Best of Brann: The Iconoclast (Waco, 1967)Google Scholar.

61 Brann, William Cowper, “The Buck Negro” in Brann, The Complete Works of Brann: The Iconoclast (New York, 1919), 2:15–22Google Scholar.

62 Brann, “Buck Negro,” 15.

63 Sparks, Kentucky's Most Hated Man.

64 Ibid., 72–73, 141–42.

65 “Brother Moore and the Colored Brother,” Free Thought Magazine 19 (1901)Google Scholar: 291; Sparks, Kentucky's Most Hated Man, 150.

66 Castleman, James Breckinridge, Active Service (Louisville, 1917), 59Google Scholar.

67 Tillinghast, Joseph Alexander, The Negro in Africa and America (New York, 1902)Google Scholar.

68 Brann, William Cowper, “Brann vs. Slattery,” in The Best of Brann, ed. Conger, 18Google Scholar.

69 Rich, Jeremy, “An American Sorcerer in Colonial Gabon: Politics and the Occult in Richard Lynch Garner's Gabonese Narratives, 1905–1908,” African Historical Review 40:2 (2008): 62–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rich, Missing Links.

70 Richard Garner,“Heathen Rites to Heathen Gods: Paying Mpago” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1908]), Folder The Habits of Wild Animals, box 3, RLGP.

71 Garner, “Heathen Rites,” 2–3.

72 Ibid., 3.

73 Ibid., 3–4.

74 Ibid., 9.

75 Richard Garner, “Buiti” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1906]), 15, Folder Base Ingratitude, box 1, RLGP.

76 Richard Garner, “Heathen Prayers” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1908]), 7, Folder Habits of Wild Animals, box 2, RLGP.

77 Garner, “Religion of African Cannibals,” 313.

78 Garner, “Heathen Prayers,” 7.

79 Garner, Richard, “Native Institutions of the Ogowe Tribes of West Central Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 1:3 (1902)Google Scholar: 372.

80 Garner, “Religion of African Cannibals,” 314.

81 Yerkes, Robert M. and Yerkes, Ida W., The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life (New Haven, CT, 1929), 431.Google Scholar

82 Garner, “Native Institutions,” 370.

83 Grant, Kevin, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York, 2004), 34–35Google Scholar.

84 Richard Garner, “Missions and Missionaries,” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1906]), 2–3, Folder Man as He Will Be, box 3, RLGP.

85 Garner, “The Negro Problem,” 3.

86 Radick, Simian Tongue, 150–58.

87 Ibid., 134–58.

88 Richard Garner, “Notes and Comments Involving One Buleon, a Mission Priest of Fernan Vaz, Henry Ananias Lobonchere – a Slum Editor of a Gutter Sheet – and Some of Their Allies, Representatives and Emmissaries [sic]” (unpublished manuscript, 1908), 9, Folder Nancy Bet, box 3, RLGP.

89 Richard Garner, “Adventures of Central Africa: Domestic Arrangements in the Jungle,” Century, Mar. 1920, 601.

90 Richard Garner, “Educated Natives” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1905]), 1, Folder Nancy Bet, box 3, RLGP.

91 Richard Garner, “Nkanjo” (unpublished manuscript, no date), 2, Folder Nancy Bet, box 3, RLGP.

92 Richard Garner, “The Heathen and the Bible” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1906]), Folder The Habits of Wild Animals, box 2, RLGP.

93 For examples, see Mary, André, Le défi du syncrétisme: Le travail symbolique de la religion d'Eboga (Gabon) (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar; Gray, Christopher, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester, NY, 2002), 44–45, 70–91Google Scholar; Tonda, Joseph, La guerison divine en Afrique centrale: Congo, Gabon (Paris, 2002)Google Scholar; Bonhomme, Julien, Le miroir et le crâne. Parcours initiatique du Bwete Missoko (Gabon) (Paris, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Rich, “American Sorcerer.”

95 Rich, Jeremy, “Troubles at the Office: Clerks, State Authority, and Social Conflict in the Gabon Estuary,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 38:1 (2004): 58–87Google Scholar; Rich, Jeremy, “Civilized Attire: Dress, Cultural Change, and Status in Libreville, Gabon, ca. 1860–1914,” Cultural and Social History 2:2 (2005), 189–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

96 Castellani, Charles, Les femmes du Congo (Paris, 1898)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trautmann, René, Tu y reviendras (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar.

97 On concessionary companies in Gabon between 1899 and the 1920s, Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, Le Congo aux temps des grandes companies concessionaires, 1898–1930 (Paris, 1972), 238–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaulme, François, Le pays de Cama: Un ancient État côtier du Gabon et ses origins (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar; Ambouroue-Avaro, Joseph, Un peuple Gabonais à l'aube de la colonization: le Bas-Ogowe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1981), 175–211Google Scholar; Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis, 151–63; Rich, Missing Links.

98 Richard Garner, “The Concessionaire System of Trade” (unpublished manuscript, no date), 2, Folder Civilized Savagery, box 2, RLGP.

99 Richard Garner, “Colonial Officials” (unpublished manuscript, no date [c. 1906]), 1, Folder Civilized Savagery, box 2, RLGP.

100 Richard Garner, “Colonizing Africa” (unpublished manuscript, no date), 1–2, Folder Civilized Savagery, box 2, RLGP.

101 Richard Garner, “Adventures in Central Africa,” Century, Mar. 1920, 613.

102 Twain, Soliloquy.

103 Ibid., 14–17.

104 Garner, Richard, Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language (Boston, 1900), 157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

105 Richard Garner, “Bubu, A Faithful Dog” (unpublished manuscript, 1908), 25, Folder Bubu, box 2, RLGP.

106 Ibid., 34.

107 Garner, Apes and Monkeys, 30.

108 Richard Garner, diary entry, Nov. 19, 1905, Folder Diary 1905–1906, box 1, RLGP.

109 Richard Garner to “Katie,” Sept. 5, 1918, Call Number 698, ALS, Haverford College Special Collections.

110 Richard Garner, entry Mar. 6, 1905, Folder Diary 1905–1906, box 1, RLGP; Richard Garner to William Hornaday, Jan. 14, 1912, Jan. 4, 1913, and Feb. 9, 1914, Correspondence R.L. Garner 1912–1914, box 52, William Hornaday Papers, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, New York City; Garner, “Adventures in Central Africa,” Century, Mar. 1920, 597.

111 Richard Garner to Harry Garner, Aug. 4, 1908, outgoing letters, box 1, RLGP.

112 Journal de la Communauté de Sainte Anne de Fernan Vaz, June 26, July 7, 1907, microfilm T2 B6, Archives of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Chevilly Larue, France.

113 Hickey, Dennis and Wylie, Kenneth, An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century (East Lansing, MI, 1993)Google Scholar; Boisseau, Tracey Jean, White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity (Bloomington, IN, 2004)Google Scholar; Keim, Curtis, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO, 2007)Google Scholar; Jones, Jeannette Eileen, In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 (Athens, GA, 2010).Google Scholar