of, and opposition to, this Society,” he noted, “and if they go to Africa, it will be because they are compelled.”31 The ACS pushed activists to assert a connection to the soil on which they stood, and that rhetoric claimed a physical space and forged bonds among black Americans.
Opposing colonization thus united black Americans in a broad political community and encouraged activists’ investment in unity as a tool to secure rights through citizenship. After holding national conventions each year from 1831 to 1835, black activists did not gather in the latter half of the decade, but they looked to revive the event in the summer of 1840 when Maryland lawmakers proposed state-funded black removal. On June 16, a group of activists meeting in New York called for a national convention, declaring that “the existence of the late Maryland Black Law should arouse every colored inhabitant of this Nation to a proper sense of his endangered condition.” The organizers hoped the convention would bring together an impressive number of black Americans, enabling “simultaneous action” against the ACS. They chose New Haven as the site for their proposed meeting, perhaps to convey the power the movement had outside of larger urban centers. In a nod to the geographical breadth in which black politics flourished, the several dozen signers of the document identified themselves by their home cities, including Brooklyn, Poughkeepsie, Nantucket, Worcester, Hartford, Newark, Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati.32 They used the call to show that they had united a dispersed community and bypassed allegiance to states, conveying a wider opposition to the Maryland proposal. But in the coming years, internal strategic differences led black northerners to struggle to revive the national convention.
Over several weeks before the 1840 convention call went out, free black Americans discussed its possible revival in the pages of the Colored American. Charles B. Ray, then editor of the paper, wrote in early May that he supported a national convention as a means to deal with “American caste” and to enable black people to “take a higher and firmer stand for our rights as American citizens.” In soliciting responses on the subject, Ray opened a debate on the function of a broad-based black American politics. Some of the correspondents agreed with Ray that a national convention could unite the scattered populace of “disfranchised American citizens.” But Ray wondered aloud whether or not such a plan truly represented black people broadly. Noting a series of upcoming political events, including meetings of the American Moral Reform Society in Philadelphia, a New York State convention in Albany, the Ohio State School fund society, and various New England temperance groups, Ray suggested that the black men in attendance should dedicate portions of those meetings to planning what might be a truly national convention. He hoped that working through those meetings might produce a new call that would capture “the voice of the people.”
In using his newspaper as a venue to debate the merits of a national convention, Ray imagined that print culture was a way to construct political unity. While a handful of Ohioans might visit New York’s convention, or teetotaling Pennsylvanians could trek to a New England temperance meeting, Ray saw more potential in the spread of the written word. He understood the coalition-building power of print, that given time and republication, a call originating at any local gathering could garner support from across the free states. As editor and sole proprietor of a well-established black newspaper, that concept served Ray’s interests, but it also argued for wider opportunity by imagining a political community that was open to any person with access to the printed word and a desire to claim a voice in political debates.33
That Ray’s newspaper effectively served this purpose is borne out by the responses he received, which suggest that people relished the opportunity for conversation without the hardships of travel.34 For example, African Americans who met in Worcester and Pittsburgh in June 1840 sent records of their proceedings to Ray’s newspaper. Black Pittsburghers found the original call for the New Haven convention too hasty and argued that a national convention should be held no sooner than the spring of 1841 in order to achieve “a union of the whole.” Meanwhile, those gathered in Worcester thought a convention that would promote “united action in our cause” could not be held before September 1841.35 As the meeting date for the New Haven convention approached, a number of black people gathered in the city to protest the gathering. They called themselves “citizens of New Haven,” though some had traveled from Hartford and New York City to express their concerns. They denounced the proposed convention as “inexpedient, and uncalled for,” and noted that organizers even had failed to consult residents of their intended host city. These critics declared that the convention call represented only “a meagre proportion of our people.” If the call did lead to an assembly, they argued that it should not be called a national convention, a title they saw as too important to be claimed prematurely by a political minority.36
Although Ray and others agreed with the New Haven convention organizers that it was critical to oppose colonization, the convention’s critics were also deeply concerned with organizing a geographically diverse political community. Indeed, their desire for such a coalition was so powerful that concerns about unity at times seemed as though they might distract activists from the project of claiming legal protection through citizenship. Beyond the reality that no single free black person or group of people could truly speak for all African Americans, free and enslaved, the desire for unity produced tensions among activists and, at times, efforts to silence alternative viewpoints.
In the end, the New Haven convention failed rather spectacularly. Ten days before it was to begin, some of those who had signed the call publicly withdrew their support.37 On September 7, the appointed opening date, one man arrived in New Haven to sit as a delegate. The next day, the gathering grew to five, two of whom lived in the city, and they met at a private residence on the edge of town. Upon hearing this news, Charles Ray gleefully reported that the convention had been “almost a total failure,” satisfied, perhaps, that his paper had led people to reject the meeting. “The Convention did not come off quite so well as we expected,” Ray quipped. “We thought there would have been two or three others in attendance.”38 Much of his satisfaction arose from evidence (at least in his own newspaper) that black people placed such significance on broad political engagement. They appeared to agree with him that, if a national convention was to be part of black citizenship politics, it should not be planned hastily or called for trivial matters and that it ought to be organized by a representative body and held in a location convenient for people across the free states. Nonetheless, Ray’s humor must have been as bitter as it was biting, given his expressed interest in constructing a citizen status connected to rights and his sense of the value of a national convention for that pursuit.39
In addition to internal strategic differences, racist mob violence presented a serious challenge to reviving the national convention.40 After the New Haven fiasco, for example, black Philadelphians began planning a national gathering in their city to be held in the summer of 1842, but hostile white observers organized to prevent the meeting. In their convention call, activists cited the U.S. Constitution and claimed “the privileges and immunities of citizens.”41 Even in their early planning stages, meetings intensified white opposition. One observer noted that, because of ACS doctrine and black disfranchisement, white Philadelphians were conditioned to believe that their black counterparts were not entitled to any legal protections. He reported that white youths would “justify outrages on the colored children, by [saying] ‘they have no rights.’ ”42 Many people had no context in which they could comprehend the idea of black equality and viewed any work to that end as a destabilizing attack on society.
In the summer of 1842, as black activists planned and white Philadelphians simmered, black people paraded through Philadelphia to celebrate West Indian Emancipation Day. On the morning of August 1, 1842, nearly 1,200 people came together for a celebratory march across the Schuylkill River in the western part of the city.43 One of their banners depicted a black man pointing with one hand to his broken chains and with the other to the word “LIBERTY” writ large in gilded letters above his head. Later, white rioters would claim that the banner bore the more dangerous slogan “Liberty or Death.” Sometime before eleven o’clock, a handful of young white men contrived to block
