Because of this, Cresson and other colonizationists downplayed emancipation as a central tenet of colonization when lecturing to some audiences, while calling colonization a feature of gradual emancipation when describing their plan to other audiences. This sort of “flexibility” may have cost them free black support, and some, such as James Forten, eventually shifted from “guarded optimism” over colonization to firm opposition.11
If Burin’s and Tomek’s work on colonization revises the history of the colonization movement from multiple vantage points, Winston James’s study of John Brown Russwurm goes deeper than any other work in exploring the American Colonization Society from the point of view of independent-minded, race-conscious black Americans. Russwurm was not the colonizationist dupe whom Douglass and other abolitionists railed against when condemning the ACS or arguing that those blacks who left for Liberia were ignorant of the organization’s “grand design.” James shows the importance of Russwurm and other black colonizationists who have been written out of the history of the pan-African struggle against slavery and white supremacy due in large part to historians’ inability to place them within the context of the domestic struggle to end slavery and the attempt to build black-led institutions outside the South.12 James joins Burin and Tomek in trying to enrich our understanding of black and white colonizationsts who never held high-ranking positions in the national organization, and who considered themselves social reformers. Moreover, these three works offer black perspectives on Liberia’s potential as a place of refuge for those African Americans who were on the verge of drowning in a tidal wave of racial animosity from the upper South to the Midwest.
This book benefits immensely from these works and other recent scholarship on the colonization movement among whites and blacks who held antislavery beliefs, but who could not envision a nation where whites and blacks lived equally. By taking a long view of the movement against colonization, from the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 to the Civil War, this book focuses on black American’s struggle against the ACS and those who believed that African colonization was the best way to “deal” with free blacks who lived outside the slave South. Thus, this book differs from recent studies of colonization, such as those by Burin, Tomek, and James mentioned previously, by placing African American anticolonizationists at the center of its narrative. This study is the first to focus on the struggle against the colonization movement, and for that reason it offers a fresh perspective for scholars interested in the impact and legacy of the American Colonization Society and Liberia on the free black protest tradition. Even if slavery ended, the anticolonizationists argued, deportation to Africa in slavery’s wake remained a serious concern. For this reason, this book shows that free black anticolonizationists regarded their efforts as something both within and beyond the abolition movement.
While scholars writing about colonization and abolition have charted the intersections of both movements in the United States, Richard Blackett’s foundational study of black abolitionists abroad points out the important role that anticolonization played in the transatlantic struggle to end slavery. Indeed, black and white American abolitionists arrived in Europe eager to spread both their antislavery message and their anticolonization views. As Blackett has demonstrated, the “antislavery wall” that black abolitionists built was also an “anticolonizationist wall” that sought to stem the flow of philanthropic dollars from Great Britain to the ACS coffers in the United States.13
Such a transnational story is central to our understanding of the colonization movement because it places black American activists within the context of nation building and identity formation in the Atlantic world. Because the movement against the American Colonization Society remained an international affair, much like the abolition movement in America, this study traces the arc of free black agitation to Britain, Africa, Haiti, and Canada. Internationalism was crucial for those struggling for black equality during the nineteenth century, and black leaders, from Prince Saunders in the 1810s to Martin Delany in the 1850s, used this well-worn circuit in Britain to raise money as they gained allies in the fight against slavery and colonization.
Scholars who study African American history have long pointed out that many African Americans supported emigration while rejecting colonization. James and Lois Horton, for example, dedicate an entire chapter of their study of free blacks in the North to a discussion of how truly pronounced the ambivalence over emigration was among free blacks. However, there was little uncertainty when it came to colonization to Liberia. In fact, the Hortons remind readers that “as their direct memory of Africa as a home diminished, and the American Colonization Society was identified with slaveholders’ plans to rid America of free blacks, few proponents of African colonization could be found among African Americans in the North.”14 With this in mind, this book builds on the Hortons’ observations but moves the debate over colonization and emigration beyond the 1830s, especially within the context of westward expansion, the rise of political abolitionism, and Liberian independence in 1847.15
Since Floyd Miller published The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Colonization and Emigration, 1787–1863 in 1975, scholars have understood emigrationism as an ideology that called on black Americans to create a nation-state or settlement, as opposed to the type of antiblack impulse that underpinned white colonizationist thinking.16 For this reason, many black Americans who embraced emigrationism rejected colonization to Liberia because they believed colonization ideology undermined black Americans’ ability to attain citizenship for those who remained. Emigrationism was more than colonization minus white control. The key issue here was black agency. As the black abolitionist James Forten explained to William Lloyd Garrison, “Colonization principles, abstractly considered, are unobjectionable; but the means employed” were what Forton and other anticolonizationists found so problematic.17 If blacks were to leave America, he argued, they would do so of their own accord, and thus they had no need for aid from white colonizationists.18
Within so much of the documentation of the anticolonization movement gleaned from newspaper editorials, convention minutes, or resolutions from public protest gatherings, the voices of African American women are noticeably faint. Such slim inclusion of black female perspectives should not suggest that black women did not have opinions on the subject, or that they were not present at the same public meetings where black male leaders drafted resolutions or petitions. However, the documents used for this work, and other works on the nineteenth-century black protest tradition, do not offer a diverse representation of black female views on colonization. Black women’s contributions to the black freedom struggle were indispensable, even if their specific perspectives on colonization come to us through only a handful of female voices, such as those of Maria Stewart, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and Mary Ann Shad Cary. It is difficult to say with certainty how much the ideas and actions of this minority of black female orators, editors, and organizers represented the majority of black women during the four decades before the Civil War. Still, black women’s voices were heard consistently from the 1830s until the 1860s. And by the 1850s, Mary Ann Shad Cary emerged as one of the most important African American anticolonizationists. She had shared Martin Delany’s initial disdain for Liberia and his views on the benefits of emigration to Canada before she contemplated leaving for Africa in the late 1850s.
Outside of the male-led American Anti-Slavery Society and its regional affiliates, African American women joined with white women in the mid-1830s to form female antislavery auxiliaries. For example, the black women who helped form the Clarkson Society in Salem, Massachusetts in 1818 did not comment on the American Colonization Society specifically, but these black women must have been aware of the strident anticolonization views of black male spokespersons such as James Forten at this time, because black women lived in communities where debates and discussions about the possible consequences of the ACS-led colonization initiative were found everywhere. Therefore, when these women showed up at meetings of female antislavery societies, they were well prepared to offer important insights about colonization to their white sisters—if, of course, these white women were ready to listen.19
While some white women joined benevolent organizations aimed at improving the daily life of free blacks
