for funds and potential recruits in free black communities throughout the nation. While the members of the ACS worked tirelessly to convince black Americans that Liberia remained a better option than Haiti, the “first black republic,” black Americans and particularly their leaders championed Haiti while denouncing Liberia. This books seeks to show the reason for that, as well as to explain why the vast majority of free blacks rejected Liberia and the ACS’s effort to promote colonization there between the establishment of the ACS in 1816 and the Civil War more than four decades later.
One caveat must be noted at the outset, and it surrounds the terms colonization and emigration. Scholars have used these two terms rather loosely and at times interchangebly since the publication of P.J. Staudenraus’s work on the American Colonization Society in the early 1960s. However, free African American activists, abolitionists, and community leaders in the nineteenth century rarely did so. This is because those who spoke with reverence of Haiti sometimes denounced Liberia, and they sought to dissociate their interest with emigrating to Haiti, and even Canada, from the American Colonization Society’s Liberia project. Thus, in this book the terms colonization, colonizationist, and colonizationism refer to the people and ideas of those who associated themselves with the ACS and Liberia. Emigrationist, emigrationism, and emigration movements, meanwhile, are associated with the black-led movements that paralleled the colonization movement.
Such narrow usage of similar terms may appear to some as hairsplitting. However, free blacks who promoted emigration would never describe their initiatives as “colonizationist” because that term, to them, was tainted by its association with the ACS’s colonization movement to Liberia. In fact, some free black leaders, such as Martin Delany, actually denounced those who called him a “colonizationist” even as he championed emigration during the 1850s. In an effort to offer some clarity for this interconnected story , I describe those who promoted emigration to Haiti, Canada, and West Africa (except to Liberia) as emigrationists and those aligned with the ACS and Liberia as colonizationists.
Chapter 1 examines how the Haitian emigration movement of the late 1810s and 1820s undermined the American Colonization Society and African colonization. Over eight thousand blacks left for Haiti during the 1820s, and some black spokespersons who denounced Liberia championed Haiti during this decade. By the end of the 1820s, Haiti actually became a more common destination for black emigrants than Liberia.
Chapter 2, “‘One of the Wildest Projects Ever’: Abolitionists and the Anticolonizationist Impulse, 1830–1840,” looks specifically at the role of anticolonization ideology and activism within the abolitionist movement. Black spokespersons convinced William Lloyd Garrison that the ACS was a major obstacle facing those interested in ending slavery immediately, as well as those agitating for black citizenship. Thus, Garrison would follow his African American colleagues’ cue and work ardently toward undermining the ACS whenever and wherever possible. Through the pages of Garrison’s Liberator, African American abolitionists established a clear anticolonization position that would provide Garrison with the fuel he would need to trounce ACS leaders in the press and on the lecture circuit.
The third chapter, “‘The Cause Is God’s and Must Prevail’: Building an Anticolonizationist Wall in Great Britain, 1830–1850,” follows the anticolonization movement to England, where ACS officials sought financial support for their African colonization project. However, black abolitionists like Nathaniel Paul joined William Lloyd Garrison to oppose ACS leaders in public debate in an effort to show the British public that black Americans had no desire to leave for Liberia. Thus, anticolonization agitation became a centerpiece of the black international struggle against white racial antagonism in the United States.
While the ACS suffered many setbacks during the 1830s, the organization actually had a rebirth in the late 1840s. Thus, the fourth chapter, “Resurrecting the ‘Iniquitous Scheme’: The Rebirth of the Colonization Movement in America, 1840–1854,” examines the way pro-colonization forces, particularly in the Midwest and West, utilized colonization ideology to undermine black Americans’ ability to gain citizenship status in the newly formed states. Anticolonization in this context became central to the struggle against white racist policy. Black American leaders were compelled to accept on some level that the ACS had been weakened by the abolitionists during the 1830s, but not destroyed.
By the 1850s, a shaky political landscape, a black-led emigration movement, and an aggressive ACS bent on shaping national politics forced anticolonizationists to organize with renewed vigor. These circumstances compelled the most famous black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, to devote increasing time and energy toward calling on black Americans to stay put and expel from their minds any notion that leaving the nation would do anything to end racial oppression and slavery. The fifth chapter charts this development and shows how Douglass conflated emigration and colonization in order to undermine Martin Delany and those “black nationalists” who argued for the creation of a black American homeland in Africa, because he feared that such pronouncements aided the colonization movement.
Chapter 6, “‘For God and Humanity’: Anticolonization in the Civil War Era,” examines African American debates over colonization and emigration within the context of the Civil War. Lincoln took a page from Henry Clay and made colonization—in this case, to Latin America—a centerpiece of his gradual emancipation plan. Douglass and other black abolitionists were livid. Even after four decades of anticolonization agitation, white American politicians and spokespersons continued to flirt with the idea that colonizing black Americans away from U.S. shores was the only way to proceed in the wake of emancipation.
The epilogue of the book provides a discussion of the legacy of the ACS and how some black Americans would eventually decide that leaving the South was the only alternative after the collapse of Reconstruction. Rather than witness the death of colonization or emigration, black Americans would time and time again consider leaving their communities or even the country when white racial hostility reached unimaginable levels of barbarity. Consequently, those who believed that America could one day live up to its ideals as a land of liberty and justice witnessed violence in the 1870s and 1880s as an ominous sign, and what has been described as the “nadir” in African American history compelled many black Americans to reconsider emigration to Haiti or colonization to Liberia as a last resort.
Introduction
To the Free Colored People
Air-Spider and the fly
Will you, will you be colonized?
Will you, will you be colonized?
Will you be colonized on the African shore?
And my fears will sleep,
And you will rouse them no more . . .
—A Slaveholder, “Colonization Song,” In The Anti-Slavery Harp, 18481
When in early 1817 free blacks in Georgetown, Virginia learned of the creation of the American Colonization Society, an organization established to settle them in West Africa for their own “elevation,” they gathered at the house of Nicholas Warner to “shew [sic] unto the world at large [their] dislike to colonize in Africa.”2 During the meeting, those present discussed the threat of this new organization, declaring the necessity for “free and independent men of color” to form “a firm and strong social compact” and to agitate against the ACS.
After the meeting, Christopher McPherson, the secretary, sent circulars to black community leaders that called on “Free People of Color” to support “a memorial to Congress, praying for the colonizing of the free people of color on the waters of the Missouri river, and under the government of the United States.” It was crucial, McPherson claimed, that free blacks “lose no time in forwarding them to the National Legislature; that
