Witnesses
In 1903, British consul Roger Casement began his investigation into reports of ongoing atrocities in the Congo Free State. He boarded the Henry Reed, the American Baptist Missionary Society’s steamer that would carry him on his three-month journey. Casement hoped—as did his Protestant missionary guides—that his choice of missionary transport would allow him to be independent from the colonial authorities. It would be harder for officials to monitor his progress and control what he saw. Local officials would not be warned in advance of his arrival. Casement hoped that this would allow him to witness things as they really were.1
It was challenging for outsiders to access unfettered information about the Congo Free State. For more than a decade, there had been competing narratives about what was happening in this colony. King Leopold II’s government insisted that it was a benevolent colonial project dedicated to spreading civilization in “Darkest Africa.” But others claimed that agents of the state committed horrible atrocities. They reported an oppressive “rubber tax” that kept the people practically in a state of slavery. They reported horrific violence against those who would not—or could not—comply with government demands for rubber. Readers living far away from the Congo were not sure whom to trust. The European and US press published these accusations as well as government rebuttals. Casement’s trip was designed to be independent and unbiased. He wanted to get to the truth, and to share what he learned with the governments in Britain and the United States—both of which he currently served as a consul. And so he turned to the missionaries for help.
Casement rode on a mission steamer, was accompanied by missionary translators, and stayed in missionary homes. Missionaries connected him with Congolese informants and shared with him their own observations. Though many missionaries had long kept quiet about what they had witnessed in the Congo Free State, they assisted the consul in his efforts to set the record straight. Some of these missionaries would become among the most important American witnesses to atrocities in Africa, working alongside humanitarian allies to demand international intervention.2
Casement’s report, published in England and the United States in 1904, provided a stark and disturbing picture of King Leopold’s rule. Casement fully endorsed the claims that atrocities were rife in the Congo Free State. Among other harrowing examples, he told the story of a young boy named Epondo, whose hand had been cut off at the wrist in an effort to intimidate his neighbors to collect more rubber for the state. Epondo’s story, Casement wrote, was not an isolated incident. He and the missionaries met other boys with similar injuries and described similar atrocities throughout the colony. Writing to the governor-general, Casement summarized his findings about the violence and oppression of the rubber system: if it continued, it would inevitably lead to the “final extinction” of the Congolese people, as well as the “universal condemnation of the civilized world.”3
In the Congo Free State, Leopold and a small circle of select companies held a monopoly on rubber. The incredibly high profits, Casement’s readers learned, were the result of oppressive and coercive conditions that amounted to a kind of state-sanctioned slavery. In key regions, taxes were paid in rubber, and the quantities were outrageous. Leopold’s government claimed that the amount of rubber was reasonable and comparable to the taxes that any government could legitimately charge their subjects in support of government services, ignoring the issue of whether the colonial subjects in Congo were the beneficiaries of those services in any meaningful way. But Casement and his missionary informants argued that the government was being disingenuous. It was impossible to harvest sufficient rubber while also making a living: it was simply too demanding. There was no time for anything else. The effects were wide ranging: houses were in disrepair and fields were untended. But that was not all. Failure to pay the impossibly high rubber tax could result in horrific violence against one’s person, family, or entire village.
King Leopold was in violation of the agreements that had been reached at the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the Brussels Conference of 1890, Casement informed his readers. Those international conventions placed Leopold as the sole ruler of the Congo Free State on the understanding that he would be a benevolent leader. He had pledged to end the practice of slavery and to spread Christian civilization in Africa. But these promises were never realized. It was clear that Leopold could not be trusted to reform matters. Some other political body needed to intervene. Britain was the most obvious choice, but American missionaries hoped that the United States, too, could take some sort of action. They would be disappointed.
Africa was not a high priority for US diplomacy at the turn of the century. The United States did not yet have its own consul in the region, and so Casement provided aid to Americans in the Congo as well.4 In 1903, those Americans largely consisted of Protestant missionaries. After Casement’s report, the US missionaries’ requests that the State Department send them a consul of their own were finally answered. Soon a US consul and vice consul would arrive in the colony at Boma, though they and the missionaries would continue to work with their British colleagues—particularly when it came to sharing information with the world about atrocities.5
The American missionary community in the Congo Free State consisted of a mix of white and Black missionaries of multiple denominations. Ever since the first American missions to Liberia in the 1820s and 1830s, Black American Christians had taken part in the civilizing and evangelizing work of American Protestant missions in Africa. Due to the racism of both the US government and white-run American missionary organizations, they had not generally been a part of the network of missionary diplomats with access to US political power. The missionary experience as witnesses to Congo atrocities would begin to shift this, however slightly.
Rumors of bad things happening in the Congo had circulated in the 1890s, but it was not until 1904 that people in the United States really paid attention. When the missionaries began their work in the region during the 1880s and 1890s, international crises all over the world attracted American attention, and one might have expected that Congo atrocities would have generated a similar public outcry. Americans were responding to humanitarian crises in Cuba and fighting a war in the Philippines. They were attempting to navigate the complicated politics of the Boxer Uprising in China and the Hamidian massacres in Turkey. But the early missionary reports of Congo atrocities in the 1890s attracted little public notice. Perhaps Americans were distracted by the pressing concerns of the Gilded Age. But white Americans seemed comfortable ignoring the charges of violence against African men and women—especially when the stories were so forcefully denied by Leopold’s supporters.
At a time when hundreds of African Americans were lynched in the United States annually, it was unsurprising that the news of Africans being killed in the Congo attracted little attention among white Americans.6 But a small number of Black and white missionaries began to draw American attention to the inhumane treatment of Africans under the Congo Free State. As they had in so many earlier moments of missionary troubles, they demanded action from their government. But humanitarian crises alone would not be enough to motivate the US State Department to respond. It would take a direct attack on missionaries in 1909 to get the state involved after many years of reluctance.
The Congo Free State and Empire
In 1884, shortly after recognizing Leopold’s rule in the Congo, the US government appointed an agent to the Congo Valley to investigate the potential for US commerce in the region. American knowledge of the Congo was limited. In the mid-1880s, Henry Stanley’s writings about his explorations were the main source of information. Stanley, the adventuring journalist whose search for David Livingstone had fascinated readers on both sides of the Atlantic, had given Americans reason to believe that the region was “a territory of inexhaustible resources.” It was not immediately clear, however, how Europeans and Americans would be able to access those resources. Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen summarized Americans’ understanding of the Congolese when he described them as “wild, savage and cruel,” people who had just begun to “find civilization dawning upon them.” He suggested that it might be an “inviting” field for African American outreach. Black Americans, he argued, were well positioned “to educate and civilize fifty millions of blacks” in the Congo Free State.7
It was Stanley’s map that King Leopold had used in 1884 as he began to draw the contours of what would become a unique colony in Central Africa. Unlike colonies that were controlled by a metropolitan government, the Congo Free State was the domain of a single man: King Leopold II of Belgium. But it was similar to other colonies in many ways. The borders were somewhat arbitrary (as the colonies were made to serve the metropole rather than the communities on the ground), and Leopold tried to expand his territorial possessions beyond what his agents could actually control. The colony maintained its power through a colonial army called the Force Publique. Soldiers from Zanzibar, Nigeria, and Liberia served along with growing numbers of Congolese soldiers under white officers.8
Figure 10.1. Map of equatorial and southern Africa, 1898, including the region covered by the Congo mission. Note the minimal detail in central Africa.
Source: ABCFM, Maps of Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: The Board, 1898), 1.
The promise of a benevolent civilizing empire in the Congo Free State drew missionaries to the region. Although King Leopold was Catholic, he had promised to welcome Protestant missionaries into his colony and embrace freedom of religion.9 At Berlin and then again at Brussels, he had made it quite clear that the goal of the colony was to bring the blessings of free trade and Western “civilization” to the region. Missionaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, would serve an important role in that project.
The Berlin Conference heightened the expectation among missionary supporters that the time had come for great evangelistic progress in Africa. The United States sent representatives to Berlin, but did not sign on to the important agreements that came out of that convention. This strategic choice reflected the tumultuous US political debates about empire and foreign intervention in the last decades of the century. By not signing, the United States signaled its lack of interest in colonizing Africa, even as the presence of US diplomats in Berlin revealed American hopes to benefit from the fruits of African colonization by European powers. In the mid-1880s, America’s interests in Africa were twofold: commercial possibility and humanitarian civilization. The United States was pleased with the promise of new trade opportunities that colonization seemed to present in Africa and welcomed the supposed embrace of benevolent measures like the end of the slave trade within the continent. Yet some members of Congress saw participation in Berlin as a break in a US diplomatic tradition of noninterference and anti-imperialism.10
Because they saw new evangelistic possibilities, American missionaries were supportive of these developments. Missionaries had, in fact, begun planning for new stations near the Congo River shortly after Stanley’s reports were first published. Many of these missionaries agreed with the author in the Missionary Herald who argued that the United States and Europe owed a great debt to Africa because of the history of the international slave trade. Now, they believed, the time had come for a concerted effort to civilize and evangelize this region that was simultaneously poised to transform the world economy due to its natural agricultural and mineral wealth and degraded by slavery, polygamy, and witchcraft. Protestant evangelism would bring the gift of civilization and pave the way for Africa to grow into its full potential as a major contributor to “the wealth and culture of mankind.”11 American missionaries, both Black and white, responded to the call.
While the United States was not a signatory in Berlin, it did play an important role in the early colonial history of the Congo Free State. In February 1884, the United States became the first country to formally recognize Leopold’s rule over the country—announcing its “sympathy with and approval of the humane and benevolent purposes” of the government there. This recognition opened the way for France and Great Britain to follow suit and recognize Leopold’s power in advance of the Berlin Conference. When American missionaries later called on their government to take action in the Congo Free State, they would cite this early recognition as grounds for US intervention. Recognition, the missionaries and their humanitarian allies would argue, gave the United States a stake in how the colony was run.12
During the early years of the Congo Free State, the US government’s interactions with the colony were not extensive. The government sent no consul, though it would work as best it could to support American missionaries when they came into conflict with the local government. The first of these missionary troubles emerged in 1888, when Stanley, working for Leopold’s government, seized the American Baptist mission’s steamer by force. In August, the missionaries appealed to the nearest US consul—stationed at St. Paul de Loanda (Luanda) in Angola, nearly five hundred miles away—and the complaint made its way to Washington and Brussels over the next several months. As US officials rose to defend the rights of their missionaries, they relied on the old language of missionary diplomacy. The missionaries, they understood, were doing important work that would make commerce and progress possible. These were “unselfish and self-sacrificing men who, braving the dangers of climate and the privations incident to a savage and unsettled country, have posted themselves there as aids of humanity and religion.” As such, they were invaluable to the colonial government, and deserved both protection and consideration.13 The United States, however, continued to believe that this protection could be safeguarded well enough without a direct representative there, despite ongoing missionary pressure to appoint a consul to the Congo in the following decade.
The United States was more directly involved in the Brussels Conference of 1890, signing on to the Brussels Act’s documents that defined the colonization of the Congo as a benevolent effort to spread civilization and end slavery. Certainly this was how missionaries and humanitarian reformers understood the documents. As they saw it, the US government made itself duty-bound to protect the rights of the people of the Congo and to defend them against any abuses they might face from the colonial government. In theory, the agreement pledged its signatories to ensure that colonization would be a benefit to the colonized.
One year after Brussels, the Southern Presbyterians established their first mission station in the Congo. This organization had been founded when the Presbyterian denomination split over slavery prior to the US Civil War. The Southern denomination’s mission board, now run by former slaveholder and missionary to Liberia John Leighton Wilson, was eager to evangelize this newly accessible part of Africa. The first two missionaries, Samuel Lapsley and William Sheppard, traveled to Luebo and began their work of learning languages, exploring the region, building schools, and providing very basic medical care.14 Sheppard, an African American graduate of the Hampton Institute, had long hoped to go to Africa as a missionary. The denomination, however, was not prepared to send a Black man as the sole missionary anywhere. It was only when Lapsley, a white Presbyterian minister, presented himself as a potential missionary to Africa that the Presbyterians began their Congo mission.
The missionaries preached to whoever would listen and enrolled “recaptured slaves,” some of whom they had purchased, in their schools. They hoped that Congo would soon become “a colony of the emancipated.” When Lapsley died in 1892, Sheppard remained as the sole missionary and continued his three-pronged work of teaching, preaching, and healing alongside hippopotamus hunting, artifact collecting, and exploring Central Africa until the denomination could send additional missionary laborers. In 1893, Sheppard was initiated into the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of his contributions to Euro-American knowledge of Africa.15
At the same time that the Presbyterians were setting up their mission, another Black American was traveling through the region. George Washington Williams, a former Baptist minister who was traveling in the Congo to consider sites for a possible African American mission, would become the first of many witnesses who would go on the record about atrocities he had seen in the Congo. Williams, like other American and European missionaries, had at first been quite optimistic about the possibilities of the Congo Free State. He had met with King Leopold himself on his way to Africa. But he was quickly disillusioned. He wrote an “open letter” to Leopold, soon published in both the United States and Europe, accusing the government of murder, slavery, expropriation, and sexual crimes. Upon his 1889 return to Washington, DC, he met with President Benjamin Harrison and the secretary of state. Williams wrote that he had seen “crimes against humanity” in the Congo Free State—an early use of the phrase that was designed to highlight the extreme nature of the crisis. He called on the United States to take action. Williams’s writings circulated in the US and British press, but his appeals did not result in much action. Few listened to what he had to say. Williams would die before the international movement for Congo reform really got started.16
Atrocities
The rubber tire was invented in 1888. Between bicycles and automobiles, new transportation technologies in the 1890s created a seemingly endless market for rubber, and King Leopold was determined to get as much out of his colonial holdings as possible and levied a demanding rubber tax. To reach the rubber vines, some people had to travel significant distances from their homes. If the people were to provide the state with all the rubber it demanded, they simply would not have time to labor for their own benefit and support. Leopold’s land policy further exacerbated matters. The Free State had decreed that any “unoccupied land”—meaning land not being cultivated or inhabited, and any produce of that land—belonged to the state. This included land used for hunting, farming, and fishing. Leopold turned much of that land over to a few privileged companies—the concessionaires—most of which thanked Leopold with a majority share of their profits.
Conditions were bad enough when Williams witnessed the rubber system in the early 1890s, and they only got worse. In 1899, Leopold ordered his officials to bring in even more rubber. He instructed them to “enjoy gentleness first” but if the people were unable or unwilling to harvest the amount that the state required, they might “employ the force of arms.” And they did.17
Rubber taxes had to be delivered to either the Force Publique or armed sentries, depending on whether one lived in Crown or concessionaire territory. In violation of the humanitarian pretentions of the Berlin and Brussels agreements, the Congo Free State armed these groups to police their neighbors. The rubber system thus provided fire power and state legitimacy to longstanding animosity. Since the sentries themselves would not receive payment unless they delivered the expected amount of rubber, they were highly motivated. The results were disastrous.18
American Baptist missionaries had protested conditions in the Congo since the late 1880s, to no avail. Local officials did not reform, and the US press opted not to publish their protests.19 In an effort to defang his early critics, Leopold created a Commission for the Protection of the Natives in 1896. This group of six consisted of three Catholic and three Protestant missionaries, all tasked with informing the administration of any abuses that they learned of. Yet the commission was ineffectual—and likely was so by design. The commissioners lived far enough away from each other to make regular meetings impossible, and they all lived far enough away from the areas that faced the worst atrocities to make it unlikely that they appreciated the full scope of the violence.20
In 1899, the American Presbyterian mission decided to investigate formally the rumors of massacres and violence. They well understood that state officials would do nothing if the missionaries simply reported what they had heard from visitors to their mission. Only firsthand accounts could have any hope of making a difference and forcing change. And so, four years before Casement began his investigation, missionary William Sheppard prepared to see for himself.
By the time Sheppard began to look into the atrocity allegations, he had been in the Congo for nearly a decade. His language skills were good enough that he had made friends and allies among the Bakuba people. But he was nervous as he made his way toward the Zappo Zap camp. They were working for the state to collect the rubber tax, and Sheppard had heard terrible things, including reports of cannibalism.21 He did not know what to expect.
As he made his way north, Sheppard passed villages that should have been bustling with people. He knew them to house a thousand people in earlier times. Yet they were empty. In one village, he saw the corpse of a woman who had been left leaning against the wall of a house. Sheppard and his guides met only fifteen people, and these were “very much frightened” and “ready to fly into the bush” to escape. From the few villagers he met, he learned of people who had been killed, others who had been shot and wounded, and even more villages abandoned or burned. The Zappo Zaps were nearby.22
After a few days of walking, they met a group of the Zappo Zaps, one of whom recognized Sheppard from Luebo. This man would become his informant, not only pointing out the smoke from a burning village the Zappo Zaps had just left, but answering Sheppard’s questions about what, exactly, was going on. He showed Sheppard the bodies of two men he had shot and welcomed the missionary into the camp.
As Sheppard described their conversations, he was sure to emphasize his own shrewdness as well as the dangers he faced. Though his “heart burned,” he worked to control his emotions and get as much information as he possibly could. The Zappo Zaps spoke to him not only about their actions, but also about how the colonial Free State had demanded that they claim slaves, rubber, ivory, and food from the villagers. “I don’t like to fight,” Sheppard remembered one man saying, “but the State told me if the villagers refused to pay to make fire.” Sheppard described the men sitting around the fire with hands “dripping with the crimson blood of innocent men, women, and children.” They showed him their weapons (Sheppard estimated that he saw five hundred guns) and the sixty women they had taken as prisoners. They led him to see the bodies of some eighty or ninety people they had killed that day: corpses with portions of flesh cut off, some with heads removed. But the image that would be most often repeated in later reporting on the atrocities was the pile of eighty-one right hands, severed from human bodies, and roasting over a slow fire. The hands, he learned, were removed so that the men could prove to the State that they had, in fact, killed the people as they had been ordered, and not used the bullets for their own purposes. It was a horrible story, full of violence and terror. And even as he described the Zappo Zaps as cruel, Sheppard was clear where the blame ought to rest: with the colonial Free State.23
Sheppard and his missionary colleagues now faced the challenging question: what should they do about it?
Missionaries in general and Congo missionaries specifically had long had to confront the question of how involved they ought to be in local political questions and humanitarian crises. In the decade and a half since the American Presbyterians began their work in the Congo, they had said very little about the atrocities that they saw emerging in the Free State. Missionaries had largely been silent in the 1890s, concerned that the government would expel them from the country if they spoke out. By the end of the decade, as Sheppard returned from his investigation, they had begun to regret that silence.24
Missionary silence was the result of both political realism and moral cowardice. Reporting the atrocities they witnessed would be costly, and those who chose to speak up did so at considerable risk. Missionaries in the 1890s were generally too afraid to pay that price. Sheppard in particular worried that, as a Black man, his testimony against a white government would not be taken seriously.25 But he did not have to act alone. With the partnership of William Morrison, his fellow Presbyterian missionary, his report eventually reached a wide audience. Morrison’s writings appeared before the British Parliament. Sheppard’s writing appeared in the US and British press. Word was getting out.
King Leopold had actively silenced his critics since the 1880s, paying for positive coverage of the colony and denouncing the witnesses of the atrocities. It would not be until the end of 1906 that Americans learned of the active lobby of journalists that Leopold had employed to control the depictions of the Congo in the US press and politics. In the face of such powerful propaganda and influenced by the ongoing questioning of the role of missionaries after the Boxer Uprising, it was quite easy for missionary opponents or skeptics to accept Leopold’s insistence that the missionaries were meddlesome and speaking about complicated matters they did not fully understand.26
The US missionaries accordingly did all that they could to emphasize the accuracy of their reporting. After Sheppard’s initial exploration, missionary Lachlan Vass conducted a second investigation, which confirmed everything that Sheppard had seen. At first, the mission had no desire to publicize their findings in front of a wide audience. Instead, they reached out to local officials in the Congo Free State and, when this did not result in any changes, Morrison wrote directly to King Leopold. The king dismissed their comments as inaccurate. The Belgian press claimed that any problematic behavior was the fault of the African tribes themselves, and that any bad actors had already been punished. Morrison decried the “whitewashing or indifferent responses” that the mission had received and wondered if the time had come for the missions to turn to the US government for assistance. Once again, missionaries insisted that the United States needed to send a consul to a region of missionary interest. And perhaps, Sheppard believed, the US press needed to cover these atrocities more directly.27
As the missionaries in Congo began to speak out more directly, their sponsors at home worried that they might go too far. Samuel Chester, the secretary of the Presbyterian Executive Committee of Foreign Missions, adopted a warning tone when he responded to Sheppard’s 1899 report. The Executive Committee approved of the missionaries’ decision to investigate and found Sheppard’s conduct “courageous and prudent.” But it was essential that the missionaries used the “utmost caution” in moving forward. After all, the missionaries had to avoid being accused of “doing or saying things inconsistent with [the mission’s] purely spiritual and non-political character.” In the midst of the turmoil over the Boxer Uprising, it was essential that the mission could be identified as wholly religious in its nature. They could not be seen as troublemakers.28
For several years, the missionaries followed this advice. William and Lucy Sheppard worked to establish their mission station at Ibanche. In 1900, the mission celebrated the arrival of a new printing press that would allow them to print their own classroom and periodical publications. They reported high rates of conversion, with nearly three hundred new members baptized into the church in 1903. The mission had grown in personnel, too, with new Black missionaries recruited by Sheppard. They opened new schools.29 Though the missionaries complained that Congo officials continually denied their requests for new land to expand their reach, they were quiet about any other concerns they might have had.
But in 1903, both William Morrison and William Shepherd took furlough trips to England and the United States and began speaking directly in public about the state of affairs in the Congo. Morrison in particular became an important figure in the creation of the American Congo Reform Association (modeled on the organization E. D. Morel founded in England in the same year). Only when they had left the Congo were the missionaries able to claim the mantle of experts on what had been happening in the Congo Free State. They were witnesses to atrocities, and they would finally do their part to spread the word.
In the summer of 1903, US newspapers reported that Morrison joined a delegation petitioning the State Department. Their request, as the Baltimore Sun explained, was that the United States “call a halt upon the policy of monopoly and alleged inhumanity” in the Congo. The actions of King Leopold and his agents were “in contravention of the Berlin and Brussels treaties,” and the United States, as the first country to formally recognize the Congo Free State, had both a right and a duty to intervene.30 But the Roosevelt administration insisted that US nonparticipation in Berlin meant that the United States had no role to play. The US government, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay insisted, must remain neutral. But the missionaries and their supporters were not deterred.
Throughout 1904, American and British Protestant missionaries worked with the American Congo Reform Society to draw public attention to the plight of Congo and to encourage state intervention on the part of the United States and Britain. In April, a group of missionaries presented a memorial to the US Senate with a request that the government push for an impartial inquiry. But the request was vague and conservative. They only asked the Senate to follow the inquiry with “such other action as may be found necessary and appropriate for the correction of the evils from which the State is suffering.”31
Over and over, the missionaries had insisted that what they wanted was an impartial investigation—one that might set the record straight and make it clear to the world at large what was happening in the Free State. After that, they hoped, the United States would act with others to end the suffering. How that might happen, however, was unclear. This lack of an obvious course of action certainly did not help the Roosevelt or Taft administrations imagine a future in which they would intervene in this foreign crisis. The missionaries could only hope to convince a reluctant government that the situation was so dire, and that existing treaties were in such clear breach, that there was no choice but to act.
The missionaries’ memorial opened with basic information: a history of the Congo Free State, the role of the United States in securing its international recognition, and a geographic and ethnographic survey of the region. But it quickly delved into the “catalogue of wrongs” that the memorialists found it their “painful duty” to relate to the Senate. They wrote about a wide range of atrocities—from forced labor to hostage taking, to burning villages and “the indiscriminate slaughter of people pursued and hunted in the forests to which they flee.” They spoke of mutilation of living and dead bodies, of cannibalism, and more. “Horror is added to horror,” they wrote.32
The general report was followed by the “reluctant testimony” of nine missionaries—American and British—who could provide firsthand testimony of what they had seen across different regions of the Congo Free State. All nine were published in the Congressional Record for general consumption. One missionary reported that he knew of forty-five villages that had been entirely burned to the ground; another reported seeing a pile of bones and counting thirty-six skulls. Altogether, the missionaries supported the assertion of Rev. John Weeks that the people “had their spirit crushed out of them by an ever-increasing burden of taxation that has taken the heart out of them and made life not worth living.” They hoped that the United States could work with Britain to investigate and force a change.33 Though the Senate would not take action in 1904, the publication of these reports contributed to the general spread of US interest in the Congo.
Morrison, joined by Samuel Chester, visited the White House to make their case directly to President Roosevelt. Like the president’s other missionary visitors, the men left their meeting cautiously hopeful. Though Roosevelt could not promise to take any action—he insisted that the United States had no grounds to do so unless US citizens were mistreated—they saw hints that he was sympathetic. They had found the president to be an engaging conversation partner. Morrison noted that Red Rubber, the report on the Congo atrocities by E. D. Morel, lay on Roosevelt’s desk.34 Sheppard, too, would visit the president, bearing gifts of textiles and artwork to demonstrate “the abilities of the persecuted Congolese.”35 Secretary of State Elihu Root would later complain about these missionaries and their supporters in the Protestant churches who “were wild to have us stop the atrocities in the Congo.”36 For the time being, and despite Roosevelt’s seeming sympathies, Roosevelt and Root would do nothing.
The missionaries did not only appeal to the US government. They also appealed to the public. In October 1904, Morrison took to the stage in Boston for the meeting of the Boston Peace Congress. His passionate speech accused the Congo Free State of failing to promote free trade, the civilizing mission, or the suppression of slave raiding as they had promised to do at the Berlin and Brussels Conferences. This was a “dark, bloody, and treacherous” era of history, he told his audience. When he came to describe the forced labor and forced military service that were at the heart of his complaints against the state, Morrison wanted to be sure that his audience could understand just how terrible conditions really were. “Words fail me,” he said. It was simply “the most heartless and iniquitous [system] in the history of modern colonization enterprises.”
To demonstrate this claim, Morrison went on to describe the things that he himself had seen. His descriptions were blunt. “I have seen the people, filled with terror, flee into the forests for safety,” he told his audience. “I have seen villages, in which officers and soldiers had quartered for the night, pillaged and desecrated in the most shameless manner, and that, too, right under the eyes of the government officials.” The apparent prosperity that the Congo Free State had brought its investors was only made possible by “the lash and the chains and the repeating rifles” that the state and the rubber companies relied on. Morrison painted a picture of destruction and terror with his words.37
Sheppard, for his part, relied not only on his words, but on his Kodak camera. Alongside images of mission buildings, students, artifacts, and wild game, Sheppard shared stark images of the victims of atrocities. One such picture shows three adolescent boys, bare-chested and wrapped in white cloth, holding out their arms for the camera. The pale cloth was a strategic choice to highlight their injuries. All three had their hands cut off.38
Images like this were an important part of the Congo reform tool-kit. Technological developments had made cameras more portable and easier to use, and early twentieth century missionaries all over the world made use of them as a valuable way to record their experiences and share the mission field with their supporters at home.39 But photographs took on a particular significance in moments like this. To all who suggested that missionaries were exaggerating or meddling in things they did not understand, Sheppard and his peers could present the seemingly unassailable evidence of a visual record. The photographs were proof in a way that even the missionary descriptions could not be. Sheppard’s images, alongside those of British missionary Alice Harris, brought an emotional weight to the written and oral descriptions of Congo atrocities. Readers who might have been tempted to skim past the words were stopped in their tracks by the striking images.40
The Congo reformers fought an uphill battle in the United States for political, historical, and diplomatic reasons. Opponents pointed out that there was little precedent for US intervention on humanitarian grounds. They wondered if these reformers were being duped by British imperialists who simply wanted the Congo for themselves. They accepted the claims that the missionaries were meddlers who did not fully understand what they were talking about, and they accepted the excuses and explanations from Brussels that minimized problems in the Congo Free State.41
Not everyone was satisfied with these excuses. Senator Morgan, whose former law partner had been Lapsley’s father, worked to bring the missionary reporting on Congo atrocities before the Senate several times, including a 1906 memorial signed by fifty-two Congo missionaries, nineteen of whom were US citizens.42 Edwin Denby, a congressional representative from Michigan and the brother of Charles Denby, the US minister to China during the Boxer Uprising, was just one example. Denby wrote to the secretary of state about his constituents’ demands that the government needed to do “something to bring about an international inquiry” into the conditions in the Congo. The State Department refused. Secretary of State Elihu Root went so far as to suggest that accusations of atrocities under colonial rule were inevitable. “If the United States had happened to possess in Darkest Africa a territory seven times as large and four times as populous as the Philippines,” he mused, “we, too, might find good government difficult and come in for our share of just or unjust criticism.”43 While Congo reformers saw these atrocities as uniquely horrific, Root’s frank comment was a reminder that violence was common to all colonial projects. If the United States intervened here, where would it stop? And, importantly, Root suggested that US colonial rule might not withstand humanitarian scrutiny either. Root’s letter to Denby was published in the Belgian press, where it was a welcome statement of support for the Congo Free State’s representatives in Brussels.44
In time, it was missionary rights, not human rights, that inspired consular action. Protestant missionaries were having a hard time purchasing land, and framed this as a matter of religious freedom. Protestants believed that the government was more willing to provide land to Catholic missions, finding them to be more fully aligned with government interests. Yet the letter of the law demanded that Protestant and Catholic missions should be treated equally. Unlike missionary appeals about atrocities, the land question found a ready and willing audience in the State Department. This was a clear question of the rights of US citizens, and the government was happy to act.45 The reply from the secretary-general of the Free State that the Americans had the right to purchase land, but not the right to compel anyone to sell to them, was less than satisfactory.
Slowly, the State Department began to reconsider its stance on neutrality in the Congo Free State. By 1907, the United States had its own consul in the colony. Toward the end of his term, President Roosevelt and his administration began to articulate a more expansive reading of its rights and responsibilities as a signatory at the Brussels Convention. Missionary troubles and missionary testimony had long demanded the United States take on a more interventionist role. Once missionaries’ testimony about the atrocities they had witnessed got them into trouble with the colonial government, the government began to expand its understanding of how it could and should intervene—or not—in international humanitarian crises.
Missionaries on Trial
Sheppard and Morrison returned to the Congo from their American furlough in 1906 and were shocked by what they saw. William Sheppard would write about the drastic changes that only a few years had brought to the region for the Kasai Herald, the mission’s quarterly magazine for American donors. Where once there had been a community of “great stalwart men and women” living “happy, busy, prosperous lives,” there was now destruction and suffering, far beyond what had been present a few years earlier. Farms had turned to “weeds and jungles,” homes were “half-built” and “much neglected.” The streets were dirty. “Even their children cry for bread.” What had changed? For Sheppard, the explanation was quite simple: it was the expansion of the rubber companies’ activities.
The Bakuba had been besieged by “armed sentries of chartered trading companies” who forced the people to harvest rubber at a pay so low that it was practically slavery. They could not live on such pay, and they could not escape the companies. The result was obvious: they suffered.46
As far as the charges against the rubber companies in the Congo Free State went, Sheppard’s article was quite tame. There was no mention of atrocities here: no severed hands or cannibalism. No villages burned or women kidnapped. No massacres. His claims were simple, and easily demonstrated: forced labor and pitifully meager wages. His reporting from several years earlier had been far more explicit and damning. But it was this article and the resulting legal action that would bring Sheppard and Morrison to trial for criminal libel. It was, in many ways, this article that would force the US government to take action in the Congo Free State. With the arrest of the missionaries, the State Department no longer faced only a humanitarian crisis. Now, they had to consider the rights of US citizens abroad.
On February 23, 1909, Sheppard and Morrison received a summons to the court in Leopoldville (Kinshasa), some nine hundred miles from their home in Kasai. The summons alleged that Sheppard’s article had been “incorrect and highly damaging” to the Compagnie Kasai, “heaping on it reproach, sullying the honor of its operation and committing an offense against its authority.” The company charged Sheppard, as the article’s author, and Morrison, as the Kasai Herald’s publisher, with criminal libel. They demanded eighty thousand francs from the two missionaries (the equivalent of sixteen thousand dollars at the time) and a retraction in the next issue of the publication.47 The charges were serious and the stakes were high.
The company had long denied any wrongdoing. Shortly after the article first appeared, the director of the Compagnie Kasai demanded a retraction. The company did not make use of armed sentries, he claimed, and the pay was not too low. If it was, he asked, why did people continue to work for them?48 Another officer insisted that the company “works solely in accordance with the principle of supply and demand, and the natives are not forced to make rubber for us.”49 The missionaries, however, insisted that they knew better than these officials who did not even reside in the region. The missionaries had no doubt that an impartial investigation would demonstrate the veracity of their assertions. The company’s denials could only be made “as a result of ignorance or dishonesty,” Morrison asserted. When he responded to the company director, he enclosed a photograph.50
The missionaries did not expect to find justice in the colonial courts. The government held over half of the company shares—a fact which US and British newspapers continually cited as evidence that this was a case between the Belgian government and the mission. It seemed foolish to imagine that the missionaries could face impartial judgment. All earlier government investigations had seemed perfunctory and biased. When the most recent government investigator left the region shortly after his arrival, having made it quite clear that his interest was more in the exoneration of the company than the discovery of the truth, Morrison summed up his feelings bluntly: “So much for his investigation.”51
The day after the missionaries received the summons, Morrison wrote to William Handley and Wilfred Thesiger, the US and British consuls at Boma, as well as to Samuel Chester, the director of the Southern Presbyterian Foreign Mission Committee in Nashville. This was, he explained to Chester, a test case. Local officials were trying to control what the missionaries could say about conditions in the Congo and to whom they could say it. The missionaries would need both “public indignation” and government support to support them through the trial.52
As soon as the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Committee learned about the prosecution of the missionaries, they informed the State Department. Chester’s letter to Secretary of State Philader Knox echoed generations of earlier missionary pleas to the government to protect missionaries “in their rights as American citizens.” There was “just reason to fear” that the missionaries would not get “a fair trial according to American ideas,” Chester explained. Now that US citizens were being charged with libel for reporting that Belgian reforms had not been realized, would the government protect them and demand that their trial be fair and transparent?53
The mission’s supporters expressed two main concerns: that the missionaries’ case could be heard impartially, and that it would be held at an appropriate time and place. “Justice and fairness,” the missionary society assumed, would only be assured if the Congo officials knew that the US government was watching. They asked the State Department to instruct the consul at Boma to attend the trial and report on “any departure from the principles of international law or from the customs and practices of civilized governments.” The missionaries had already been depicted as “meddling.” Their supporters were anxious that they would not be punished for speaking out.54
In Boma, missionary Lachlan Vass met with the consuls while his brethren in Kasai prepared for their long journey. Transatlantic cables made communication between Washington and its consuls much faster than it had been in earlier decades. The missionaries had found a sympathetic audience in Secretary Knox, who agreed that there was nothing inappropriate in Sheppard’s article. By February 27, consul Handley had already received his instructions to attend the trial and to keep an eye on matters. He, along with Thesiger, agreed that the charges were “ridiculous.” After all, the article did not say anything that could not be backed up by multiple other reports. Thesiger’s recent investigation into conditions in the region for the British government was far more damning than anything that Sheppard had written or Morrison had published.55
The international community, too, had begun to turn more decisively against Leopold’s rule in the Free State. International pressure had already resulted in Belgium’s annexation of the Congo in 1908. It would no longer be the sole property of the king; the Congo Free State would become the Belgian Congo. The Belgian government hoped that this change in rule would satisfy critics, but reformers were not so sure if the “Belgian Solution,” as it was called, would create any real change.56 At the time of the trial, neither the US nor Britain recognized Belgian rule in the Congo. They hoped the delay would force Belgium to put more meaningful reforms in place. As the trial loomed, missionaries hoped that this government stance would strengthen their bargaining power.
Missionary concerns were heightened by the seeming injustice of the timing and location of the trial, which was originally scheduled for May 25 in Leopoldville. As the dry season left part of the river unnavigable by steamer, much of this journey would have to be taken overland. The missionaries and any witnesses would have to expect to be away from home for at least five months. It was, at the very least, inconvenient and expensive. The missionaries and their supporters suggested that this was intentional. At such a distance, how could the missionaries be expected to have sufficient witnesses who could attest to the veracity of Sheppard’s article?
The State Department’s strategy to aid the missionaries was two-pronged, reflecting the particular challenges of this moment of colonial diplomacy. As Secretary Knox instructed the consul in Boma to work with the missionaries on the ground in the Congo, he also instructed the US ambassador in Brussels to do what he could with the Belgian government. In May, the United States requested that Belgium change the time and place of the trial, but these efforts were unsuccessful. Despite annexation, the Belgians informed the Americans that they were unable to force any changes in the Congo justice system.57 For observers who had hoped that the Belgian government’s attempts to increase oversight in the Congo would result in better conditions and more avenues for diplomacy, this development was unpromising.
If the Americans in Brussels failed, those in Boma succeeded. Consul Handley ultimately convinced the court to postpone the trial, arguing that the missionaries could not possibly reach Leopoldville in time for the original May date. They needed time to secure witnesses and a lawyer, as well as time to travel the considerable distance to court. It would be August before the missionaries made their way to Leopoldville. The trial date was first pushed back to July 31, then again to September 24. Throughout these delays, the transatlantic network of Congo reformers and missionary supporters kept the case and the US missionaries in the public eye.
The most dedicated promoter of the missionaries’ cause was the Christian Observer, one of the official publications of the Southern Presbyterians. News of the trial first appeared in the April 21 issue; by the end of 1909, it had published twenty-six articles on the case.58 For the readers of the Christian Observer, the stakes of the trial were very high. Its outcome would “set a precedent that will either retard or advance the cause of Congo reforms, and will either guarantee protection to missionaries of all denominations or will put the missionary in a position where he cannot claim or expect protection that is ordinarily given to the trader or the traveler.”59
As they advocated for the missionaries, the writers in the Christian Observer drew on the long tradition of asserting the rights of missionaries as US citizens. Missionary citizens had the right to do their work, and the US government needed to protect that right; this claim had been at the core of missionary diplomacy since the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, that claim joined with the emerging humanitarian concerns that had complicated US foreign relations for several decades. The articles claimed a new missionary right: to bear witness and testify to the world about atrocities that they had seen. The Observer insisted that missionaries possessed “the right to expose and publish the wrongs inflicted on unhappy tribes by foreign nations who are exploiting them for gain.” And this right required the US government to “back up her citizens who are unveiling and denouncing barefaced violations of an international treaty, and the justice and courage to enforce that right.”60
Whether or not they read the Christian Observer, Americans could follow the progress of the trial in the secular press. An April 1909 article on the charges that first appeared in London made its way to multiple US papers on May 10. Readers across the country read that the trial “may be considered one of the Belgian government against the missionaries,” and that the missionaries’ accusations were confirmed not only from other missionary observations, but also by official reports from both the US and British consuls. As the newspapers explained the charges against the company, they repeated the basic claims of the Congo reform movement against the Free State. If the case had been intended to silence critics, it had the opposite effect and instead publicized the charges against Leopold.61 As the summer progressed, the US press continued to cover the story, discussing both the trial and the atrocities.62
Readers throughout the country were kept up to date on the various religious groups who had reached out to request the intervention of the State Department and President Taft. The Presbyterians, for example, used the occasion of their General Assembly meeting in the summer to urge both the US and British governments to demand reforms in the governance of the Congo. Regional papers made sure to mention Sheppard and Morrison’s connections to the American South. Some, but not all, specified that Sheppard was Black. Most made sure to mention that Sheppard was a member of the Royal Geographical Society, as if to clothe him with as much respectability as possible.63
The result of this coverage was twofold. It kept the pressure on the US government to act in the missionaries’ defense while also broadening the network of support for these missionaries. Petitions in support of the missionaries reached the State Department from multiple missionary organizations and denominational bodies. In the Boston Daily Globe, the secretary of the Christian Foreign Missionary Society argued that “the Congo situation must be radically changed. Missionaries must be free to speak the truth. The people must be granted the rights of which they have been wrongfully deprived.”64 These conversations about rights could occasionally be blurry: whose rights were at stake? The rights of the Congolese, or the rights of the American missionaries?
If found guilty, the missionaries would have to pay a hefty fine. Sheppard, however, insisted that he would never pay. To do so, he believed, would be an acknowledgement of wrong. Instead, he declared that if the court found him guilty, he would choose to go to prison. This “testimony to the truth of his charges” would, he hoped, “be the best means of protesting against the oppressions and cruelties” of the Compagnie Kasai.65
On October 5, American Presbyterians learned of the outcome of the trial with the arrival of a one-word telegram from Morrison: “Acquitted.” The charges against Morrison had been dropped first, and in early October those against Sheppard, too, were dismissed. The Christian Observer explained that the victory was for more than just these two missionaries. “The entire world is demanding that Belgium shall make her rule in the Congo just and beneficent,” the journal remarked. The outcome of this trial should show Belgium that the time had come to “set her house in order.”66
Sheppard’s journal of their journey home, later published in the Christian Observer, reveled in the joy of reunion with his family after four months of separation, but also spoke of the profound costs that this legal victory had demanded. One of their witnesses—a young man—became sick with malaria and died on his journey home. He left behind parents, a wife, and children. The missionaries had been acquitted of libel. Their right to testify to what they had seen was enforced. But there was no guarantee of reform to come. Missionary rights had been secured, but not the rights of the Congolese.67 That would require more than the testimony of missionaries. Diplomatic and station actions would be required to reform the Belgian Congo.
One piece of leverage that the United States had during the missionaries’ trial was the possibility of not recognizing the Belgian Congo. Belgium had annexed the Congo Free State early in 1909, and neither the United States nor Great Britain had yet recognized the legitimacy of the new government. Both powers were waiting for the promise of reform. On the ground in Africa, missionaries and consuls were doubtful that the shift in colonial rule would make much of a difference. The Congo Reform Associations in England and America kept pressure on their respective governments to try and make sure that real change could happen. Sheppard and Morrison’s trial provided the United States with an occasion to make this point to Belgium. If the missionaries could be persecuted for writing about what they had witnessed, and if the atrocities continued, how could the United States be expected to recognize the Belgian Congo as a legitimate colony?
Humanitarian crises demanded that missionaries serve as witnesses. Indeed, their witness could often publicize the crisis in the media and diplomatic spheres. For decades, US missionaries had positioned themselves as experts who shared the world with their supporters at home. Before the Congo, they prided themselves on sharing the bad along with the good—indeed, writing about the supposed horrors of foreign cultures could be a powerful fundraising tool to further the evangelical movement throughout the nineteenth century. But atrocities like what they witnessed in the Congo Free State demanded something new of missionaries and it demanded something new of their American supporters. These were not problems that could be solved through the spread of Christian civilization or missionary influence. They demanded political intervention.
As missionaries and their supporters petitioned the US government to respond to humanitarian crises, they forced an important question: How and when would the US intervene out of humanitarian concern? Which victims merited their attention? How much suffering was too much? When did political considerations supersede human rights?
The US government and its citizens had pondered these questions before, but in the 1890s and the decades that followed, humanitarian crises emerged all over the world: in Cuba, in Armenia, and in the Congo. The Congo Free State presented Americans with the question of how far they would go to protect the rights of oppressed people who were not white, and who were (largely) not Christian. An active group of reformers ultimately could not pressure the government to do much. When US citizens—missionaries—went toe-to-toe with the colonial government, US diplomats did their duty to protect them. Once the State Department decided to finally take action in defense of Americans’ rights in the Congo Free State, they stood by the veracity of the missionary witness and demanded fair treatment and reform. With Sheppard’s acquittal and the promise of some change in the colony, the United States was satisfied. But without the missionary trial, it is unclear if the government would have done even this much. Roosevelt had made it clear that the United States could only act if and when its own citizens were in danger. With the case against Sheppard and Morrison, the government finally got the opportunity to bring human rights into diplomatic policy. In 1911, the United States officially recognized the Belgian Congo.
The Congo missionaries were not the only missionary witnesses to atrocities around the world. In the Ottoman Empire, too, missionaries sounded the alarm starting in the 1890s about attacks against the Armenian people. These attacks would escalate to genocide. In the midst of world war, missionaries would once again work with other humanitarians to try to pressure the government to take action on behalf of those in need.