Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa

In an anthology that Lindsay and John Wood Sweet coedited, the prominent African historian Joseph C. Miller wrote, "The so-called 'biographical turn' in the 'Black Atlantic'... is a historiographical advance that I find as profound as the 'quantitative turn,' the sweeping research of pan-disciplinary proportions a half-century ago" ("A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn," in Lindsay and Sweet, eds., Biography and the Black Atlantic [Philadelphia, 2014], 19). In 1975 Ebony magazine published an article that recounted the story of a native African, Scipio Vaughan, whose son James Vaughan settled in Yorubaland, which he recognized as his father's homeland because of the ritual facial scarifications those people shared with his father. The family attended the Southern Baptist Church in Lagos, but in 1888, after years of enduring insults from racist white American missionaries, Church Vaughan and his sons helped form the African-led Native Baptist Church, the "first nonmissionary Christian congregation in West Africa" (p. 180).