Heading: (African American, 1848)
Author: Eden, Rachel [Mrs. James]
Title: Autograph Letter Signed by the Wife of a Black Missionary Pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Monrovia, Liberia
Place Published: Monrovia, Liberia
Publisher:
Date Published: May 19, 1848
Description:

2pp.+ stampless address leaf. To Walter Lowry [Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions], New York.

Rev. James Eden, was born a free Black in Charleston, South Carolina. When the Presbyterians offered passage on the Ship Hercules to 150 freed or free-born Blacks from South Carolina and Georgia, Eden, his wife and young children sailed to Monrovia, arriving in January 1833. For 14 years, Rev. Eden was Pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Monrovia.

Rev. Eden had been a member of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in that city, but when it was implicated in a slave revolt, he and other "dispossessed" Blacks, most still slaves, were welcomed into a Scottish Presbyterian Church, probably his connection to the Presbyterian Missionary Board in New York of which former Senator Walter Lowrie was Corresponding Secretary. Around 1825, Eden married Rachel. They had six children by the time that Eden, in 1832, organized a meeting of free Blacks in Charleston to "to devise measures for emigrating" to the new land of Liberia. In 1847, like many Liberian missionaries, White and Black, he died of fever, leaving Rachel and her four teenaged boys and girls to struggle to survive on their small farm. Nothing more is known about Rachel or her fate. This may be the only letter of hers which has survived, one of the very rare letters written by an African-American woman emigrant to Liberia a dozen years before the American Civil War.

"...I am about but not so well... the boys...re still in my [possession?] and I am still striving to do the best I can in teaching them and instructing the best way I can, I am not able to let them go to school through the week as they have to cultivate the farm to make something to [support?] upon but Sunday and night school they are well attended to and improves very fast, my condition in present in consequence of my advancing in age and no help at this time... make this known to the members of the mession and the members of Presbyterian connection in behalf me and asked them their assistance feeling that perhaps some may have felt the same or have undergone the same having been bereft of a companion and left a lone in a new County without the aid of any one even to look to for the least things but I shall trust in him that at all times sticks to me closer than a brother, that is my Redeemer perhaps it if was not for him I would have despaired, I have children but they are all single but one... and [he] not able to assist me as he lives so far...you will mention me to the Ladies of the Churches and tell them that I am still striving for the prize and will they give me something to assist me in any way, that seems best to them and I pray that God will abundantly bless them in their basket and in their store."

Very good.