This is, therefore, a good time to review the achievements of these most difficult years. The Caralla Messenger, the mission journal published in Cape Palmas, contains this interesting summary: “It is just 19 years, last Christmas Day, since the Rev. Dr. Savage formally opened the Mission at Mount Vaughan in the only building connected with it, and this but half finished. On that day, only about a half-dozen communicants, if so many, were connected with the Episcopal Church. Since then, ‘through the good hand of our God upon us,’ the Mission has established permanent stations, of greater or less efficiency, at fourteen different places, amongst colonists and natives. It has expended for churches, mission-houses, and school-houses, a sum not less than one hundred thousand dollars. In the day and boarding-schools sustained by it, not fewer than three thousand children and adults have received the rudiments of a Christian education. From six, the communicants—some of whom are now living, some dead—foreign, colonists and natives—have numbered at least three hundred. The number, at the present time, is two hundred and forty-one. The blessed Gospel is preached regularly to four colonist congregations, in some twenty different native tribes, and to one hundred thousand people. There are now, including the Orphan Asylum, seven commodious mission-houses, three churches completed and a fourth nearly so—two being of stone, one brick, and one wood—besides one very superior school-house and several more indifferent, for colonists and natives. A more sufficient cause of thankfulness still, is to be found in the number and character of the schools connected with the Mission. The High School and female day-school at Mount Vaughan; the Orphan Asylum at Harper; the native schools at Fishtown, Rocktown, Cape Palmas, Cavalla, Hening Station, Rockbookah, and Taboo; the boarding and colonist day-school at Bassa Cove, the Female High School at Monrovia, and the native boarding and colonist day-school at Clay-Ashland, give evidence of earnest and well directed effort to diffuse Christian instruction throughout the bounds of the Mission.”
But this hopeful, almost buoyant, message was followed at the close of the next year, 1856, by great distresses, many deaths of faithful workers, war among the savage tribes, and hostilities between the Government and the natives, resulting in the loss of Mission property—all of which brought disaster, and retarded the work.
The years of the Civil War in America were especially trying, since revenues from the Mother Church were much decreased. Work had to be curtailed. Yet, through all the trials, the laborers in the field, missionaries, catechists and teachers, remained steadfast under the leadership of Bishop Payne who saw clearly that the hope of the Liberian Church lay in the gradual development of the will and ability to become self-supporting, and the arousing of missionary zeal toward the unevangelized tribes from the coast inland.
In 1862, the Bishop wrote, “We endeavor always to impress upon our native converts that the lesson God means to teach them, by the troubles in America, is to exert themselves for their own support and that of the Gospel in their midst. And they feel and acknowledge the situation.”
In that year, the organization of the Church was strengthened, and the widely scattered missions brought into more compact oneness, by the formation of a General Missionary Convocation to bring the whole Church together in conference and mutual communion at stated times. A full account of this appears in The Spirit of Missions for August, 1862. Later in this year, Mr. Samuel D. Ferguson, a negro colonist, was appointed Principal of the Mount Vaughan High School, and thus began his training for the later leadership of the Liberian Mission.
Before the close of the trying War period, the Mission sustained the loss of one of its oldest (in point of service) and one of its most efficient teachers, Mrs. Elizabeth M. Thompson, who, for twenty-eight years, taught in our Mission schools. She was a native of Connecticut, of negro blood, born in 1807. In 1831, she emigrated to Liberia where she began work as a teacher in an infant-school in Monrovia. She later moved with her husband to Cape Palmas, and was associated with his work there and at Mount Vaughan, where, in 1833, he was appointed as lay-reader in charge of our budding work. Her husband died early, and she continued her work as teacher with great devotion until within a short time of her death, when ill-health obliged her to resign. She continued lighter labors in St. Mark’s Hospital almost to the end, which came in April, 1864. Mrs. Thompson was an excellent Christian character, faithful and zealous and greatly beloved by all, an example to her race, and her death caused great sorrow in the entire community.
In 1871, after thirty-one years of devoted labor in foundation-building, Bishop Payne found himself obliged, by ill-health, to give up his work. Simply and modestly he gives the following account of his stewardship.
“To the praise of His grace, God has prospered the work of my hands as well as prolonged my days. At my own station (Cavalla) I have baptized 352 persons, of whom 187 were adults. In the Mission I have confirmed 643 persons. I have lived to ordain Deacons—two foreign, eight Liberians, four natives—in all, fourteen; of Presbyters, three foreign, seven Liberians, one Native—in all, eleven; or, altogether, twenty-five ordinations have been held. And at twenty-two places along 250 miles of what was, fifty years ago, a most barbarous heathen coast, has the Church been planted, and radiating points for the light of the Gospel established. Nine churches may be considered established and supplied with ministers of the Country. Besides schools, common and Sunday, we have a High School for boys, a Training School for young men, and an Orphan Asylum to take care of destitute children in the colonies. The Church and Mission by God’s blessing, may be considered established.”
Meanwhile, the Rev. Mr. Auer, the only white missionary left after the Bishop’s withdrawal, had been even more busy than ever, with his American and native negro co-workers, in building up the waste places and planning for the extension of work; in preparing native candidates for the Ministry, in which Mr. Crummell was chief factor; in building new and repairing old school-houses; and in recruiting the ranks of the white staff. The strain had been too great, and he lived for less than a year after his consecration as Bishop Payne’s successor in the Episcopate. A few months later, Bishop Payne also died in his distant American home.
Thus the Mission was left with only recently recruited white helpers; but these, with the fine band of negro clergy, catechists, and teachers, went steadily and faithfully forward. As Bishop Payne had so confidently declared, “the mission may be considered established”; and so it was. For two years, with many misfortunes, but always in the confidence of hope, the work went forward until, in 1876, the Rev. Charles C. Penick, D. D., was elected Bishop of Cape Palmas and, on February 13th, 1877, was consecrated in Alexandria, Va. He arrived in his new field in October, and, two months later, returned this message to the Church at home, which sounds discouraging enough: “I find the American Mission confusion worse confounded. The work here has been so long without any head that the disorder is very, very great. Every building connected with the Mission is tumbling to pieces. I can put my foot through the rotten floor in the room where I now write, and it is one of the best in the house, and the house as good as any in the Mission. Books are all moulded and bug-eaten to worthlessness; furniture eaten to honeycomb; records like autumn leaves, only not so close together; no school system, no educational system; not the first move towards self-support; many changes and old questions to be settled, and not enough clergy to form a court.”