Nearly a decade before the National Black Convention movement would bring free blacks together to discuss matters pertinent to their communities, African Americans in Georgetown took a decisive step toward unifying blacks across the country against the white-led ACS and what they believed was a threat of mass deportation to Africa.
Organized resistance to colonization began to coalesce immediately after the formation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in December 1816. Free blacks were disturbed when they heard that some members of the ACS had joined the organization to rid the nation of those free blacks who, they believed, “corrupt[ed]” slaves and “render[ed] them discontented.”4 If American Colonization Society members truly believed in their professed mission to offer free blacks a better life in Africa, then why would members claim that free blacks had a corrupting influence on slaves in the South? Such a position caused many African Americans to distrust the ACS and argue that the organization was really motivated by a belief among white slaveholders that colonizing provided a perfect way to preserve slavery while ridding the nation of an unwanted group of free blacks who were living on the margins of society in the early republic.5
There were of course some blacks, such as Paul Cuffe, who shared white colonizationists’ notion that the creation of an African American–led nation not on American soil could benefit those individuals and families who left. However, others worried that settlement in Africa or elsewhere would leave enslaved Africans in the South without their most passionate defenders. This viewpoint became popular in the black community immediately after the formation of the American Colonization Society, and from the earliest anticolonization meetings free blacks emphasized this point when confronted by white colonizationists who sought to convince them to form a colony in Africa.6
Yet when white colonizationists learned that free blacks viewed the organization and its ideology as antiblack, they were shocked.7 ACS members refused to accept such an accusation, arguing that anticolonizationists misunderstood their intentions. Once the free black community learned of the colonizationists’ noble intent, these same free black adversaries would accept colonization in Africa as the only route to racial advancement. With this reasoning, the ACS set out to build a base of support among free blacks and in turn to convince them that white ACS members only sought their best interests.
Although at times this worked, and several prominent blacks, such as the black editor and intellectual John Russwurm, did change their view of the Society and indeed did leave for Liberia to begin their lives anew, nevertheless between 1820 and 1860 the overwhelming majority of free blacks rejected the Colonization Society and Liberia.8 Perhaps Frederick Douglass articulated this sentiment best:“Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost. Here we are, and here we shall remain. While our brethren are in bondage on these shores, it is idle to think of inducing any considerable number of free colored people to quit this for a foreign land.”9
This book is about the free black struggle against the American Colonization Society and the colonization movement they led. It examines the efforts of activists and reformers who believed that the colonization movement was one of the greatest obstacles to African Americans’ gaining citizenship in the United States. For that reason, many whites and free blacks who took part in the post-1830 abolition movement condemned the ACS and settlement in Liberia for being an impediment to their own efforts to see that blacks were included within the nation. Furthermore, blacks feared that colonization to Liberia would become national policy. Thus, it wasn’t enough to ignore the colonization movement: free blacks believed they needed to destroy it.
As this book shows, from the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816 to Lincoln’s colonization plan during the Civil War, the majority of black abolitionists and community leaders believed that the battle against the American Colonization Society and colonization to Liberia was central to their quest for citizenship. Simply put, this was because black leaders believed that colonization in the wake of emancipation—gradual or immediate—would be a cruel fate for a people who had practically built the nation and whose labor had provided the commodity (cotton) that was so crucial to the United States’ economic ascendancy during the nineteenth century.
From the Northeast to the “Old Northwest,” free blacks wanted more than freedom—they wanted to live in a land without slavery, racial violence, or employment discrimination. Their vision was intertwined with that of the Americans who first struck against British rule in an effort to build a republic based on inalienable rights of land, liberty, and equality regardless of one’s station in life. They wanted to be a part of the nation, and they believed that white colonizationists wanted to drive them away. This book shows that in each of the six decades before the Civil War, the struggle against the colonization movement remained a central issue in free black communities, just as it had been a central topic of discussion among white politicians, clergy, and social reformers who failed to see how free or freed black Americans could ever be a part of the national fabric.
Although most free black leaders opposed colonization, they did not necessarily reject all emigration plans. In some cases, free black leaders championed emigration to places such as Haiti because they believed that such initiatives showed African American potential and undermined the colonization movement to Liberia. Emigrationism remained an ideology of empowerment that centered on the notion that a black-ruled nation could provide a refuge for those African Americans who found racism intolerable, and that a powerful black republic could potentially arbitrate on behalf of African people enslaved everywhere.
For several reasons, the study of black emigration to Canada, Africa, and the Caribbean provides a crucial context in which to understand anticolonization discourse and activism. First, African American leaders often considered relocating to a more supportive place to agitate against slavery and white prejudice. Some scholars argue that Liberia also became a crucial refuge for pan-African intellectuals such as John Russwurm, Edward Blyden, and Alexander Crummell, to name a few. However, this study focuses on emigration initiatives and debates that intersected with the struggle against colonization to Liberia, because most black leaders did not share the opinion of Russwurm, Blyden, and Crummell about Liberia. This more narrow approach toward anticolonizationists such as Frederick Douglass and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, as well as black-led emigration movements to Haiti and Canada, seeks to complement the excellent studies of Liberia and black colonizationists who formed a pan-Africanist community in West Africa. Ultimately, this book explains why the majority of free black Americans rejected colonization despite the efforts of those who tried to convince them that Liberia remained their best hope for living their lives in a black-led nation free of racism.
Although historians such as Winston James, Claude Clegg, and Marie Tyler-McGraw have examined African American colonization in Liberia, no work has focused exclusively on those who opposed colonization between the founding of the American Colonization Society and the Civil War. Recent studies of the American Colonization Society, like those published by Eric Burin and Beverly Tomek, reexamine white colonizationists’ ideology and intentions within the context of the antislavery movement, particularly in Pennsylvania. Burin’s study is especially useful because it offers both the perspective of Colonization Society members and also that of those freed persons who actually left for Liberia. Here, Burin departs from the foundational work of P.J. Staudenraus, which almost exclusively focuses on white colonizationists’ efforts to make colonization national policy, by telling the story of the colonization movement as one of elite white males—some southern and others northern.10
Beverly Tomek builds on Burin’s and Staudenraus’s works by framing the colonization movement in Pennsylvania as a legitimate reform attempt which coincided with other humanitarian efforts that strove to better the lives of free blacks. By situating the colonization movement within the context of the activities of white reformers, such as Elliot Cresson, Beverly Tomek shows that those who participated in the colonization movement sometimes had overlapping motives. Often, she writes, these men were “too conservative for the northern reform community
