The Laws of God, the Laws of England, and the Laws of the Land: CMS Missionary Navigation of (in)Justice in Mid-19 ^th Century Lower Niger Basin Slave Societies

Abstract Confronting and eliminating the injustice of the slave trade and slavery were crucial to the mission of the Church Missionary Society and its mid-19th-century ‘Upper Niger’ missionary agents in Nigeria. The native CMS missionaries on the Niger, led by Samuel Adjai Crowther, held a dual identity as subjects of the British Government (via the British colony of Sierra Leone) and as native members in their host communities. They were freed slaves or children of freed slaves who returned from Sierra Leone to serve in the natal regions from which they or their parents had been deported as slaves. They were the ones who purveyed the Christian ‘laws of God’. The influence of the British government, manifest, for example, in British consular oversight and in the frequent visits of imperial gunboats, also constituted them into subjects with the responsibility to espouse British law, ‘the laws of England’, and especially abolition and anti-slavery, in their Niger mission stations. But they were politically dependent on the support and approval of their politically autonomous hosts, whose structure of justice, ‘the laws of the land’, still accommodated slavery. This essay explores how these native CMS missionaries navigated among these conflictual juridical and moral spheres of responsibility.