2. “One of the Wildest Projects Ever”: Abolitionists and the Anticolonizationist Impulse, 1830–1840
In February of 1833, Maria Stewart stood before a group of people gathered at the African Masonic Hall in Boston to condemn the ACS for its goal of “influencing us to go to Liberia.” Rather than donate money to fund black colonization in Liberia, these “real friends” of African Americans, Stewart urged, should use those funds “which they collect, in erecting a college to educate her injured ones in this land.” Stewart explained that the colonization movement was siphoning off funds to educate and care for free blacks in the North, while doing little to change the circumstances in this country that stifled black progress. “The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved land,” she argued, and then brought Africans to America, “made them bond-men and bond-women,” and now sought to “drive us to a strange land.” It is for this reason, as Stewart explained, that “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.”1
This was not the first time Stewart lectured on colonization, marshaling various arguments that were common among anticolonizationists in the early 1830s. Through these lectures Stewart demonstrated her intellectual merit, poetic gift, and ability to analyze the contradictions she found central to colonization ideology, which she also had published in the Liberator. “I observed a piece in The Liberator a few months since,” she explained, “stating that the colonizationists had published a work respecting us, asserting that we were lazy and idle.” This was simply untrue, she explained. Even if there were some in Boston “who never were and never will be serviceable to society,” she asked, “have you not a similar class yourselves?”2 If whites had been placed under the burden of racial prejudice and slavery, they too would struggle to display qualities associated with Christian virtue and social respectability. This was not about African depravity, Stewart explained; this was about education and uplift.3
From the Mid-Atlantic to New England, African Americans gathered in churches, halls, and public spaces to express their disapproval of the views of the ACS. In January 1831, for example, black leaders in New York City called a meeting in Prince Hall Mason’s Boyer Lodge (named after Jean-Pierre Boyer, the fourth president of Haiti) to express their outrage at the “proceedings of an association under the title, ‘New-York Colonization Society.’” Those in attendance condemned the organization for “vilifying us” and attempting to promulgate the notion that blacks represented a “difference of species.” Such notions were unfounded, they argued, because “Our structure and organization are the same, and not distinct from other men.” With this in mind, the group claimed to be “content to abide where we are,” rather than leave for Liberia as wards of the ACS. Although colonizationists attempted to convince the general public in the United States and Britain that racial distinctions presented an intractable barrier to free blacks seeking acceptance in American society, African Americans in New York asserted, “We do not believe that things will always continue the same,” arguing that the day would come when black Americans would be vindicated, and “when the rights of all shall be properly acknowledged and appreciated.”4
As the antislavery movement shifted toward immediate abolition, black American leaders convinced white abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, that colonization undermined both the cause of ending slavery and free blacks’ efforts to gain rights in the North. Most importantly, Stewart showed, colonization became linked to antiblack policies, race riots, and employment discrimination in the states where slavery had been outlawed. Unfortunately for black abolitionists and anticolonizationists, white abolitionists often shared the same racialist attitudes as those most hostile to the cause, and the movement to end slavery needed to be linked with a movement for black equality and citizenship in the North.5 For this reason African Americans who worked against slavery and colonization also struggled to destroy the pervasive view among whites that black Americans were inherently unequal.
By the 1830s, African Americans had argued for a decade that the American Colonization Society and its auxiliaries discredited, smeared, and undermined African Americans’ efforts to obtain equal rights and citizenship in America. For this reason the colonization movement became a central topic of discussion among blacks attending conventions and participating in newly formed antislavery societies and colored associations. This “new breed” of abolitionists had, as Richard Newman points out, “revolutionized” the tactics of the movement against slavery in America by 1830, and this pushed white reformers to act with a sense of immediacy toward ending slavery and overwhelming the American Colonization Society and its agents.6
Had it not been for free blacks such as William Watkins and David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison might have continued to hold colonization sympathies as well as his view that “immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable.”7 African Americans’ opinions about the American Colonization Society were widely known. Few expressions of black protest against colonization so influenced Garrison to take a different path more than the anticolonization ideas presented in David Walker’s infamous An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker had left for the North soon after Denmark Vesey’s plot in South Carolina in 1822, which made whites even warier about free African Americans’ presence in the slave South. Arriving in Boston in 1825, Walker became a member of an outspoken community of African Americans struggling against colonization.8 He joined Prince Hall’s well-known African Lodge No. 459, and participated in the formation of the first black American association, the Massachusetts General Colored Association. This network of black community leaders afforded him the opportunity to associate with many people involved in the Haitian emigration movement and other timely issues within the black community of Boston.
David Walker used his Appeal to rail against the colonization movement, displaying “a vehemence and outrage,” biographer Peter Hinks argues, “unprecedented among contemporary African American authors.”9 While one can only speculate about the degree to which Walker’s Appeal influenced the intellectual maturation of any one abolitionist, what we do know is that Garrison was deeply moved by it. In fact, in the summer of 1830, when Hezekiah Grice, a black community leader in Baltimore, met with William Lloyd Garrison to discuss the idea of a national black convention, Garrison seemed more interested in discussing the Appeal to Coloured Citizens. According to Grice, “Mr. Garrison took up a copy of Walker’s Appeal, and said, although it might be right, yet it was too early to have published such a book.”10
It may well be that Article IV of Walker’s Appeal, entitled “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Colonizing Plan,” is what persuaded Garrison to see the connection between colonization and antiblack violence in the North and the system of racial oppression that stifled free blacks and barred them from a life consistent with the American creed. At the outset of his section on colonization, Walker charted the origins of the ACS among the power brokers of the nation, noting the influential role of Henry Clay in promoting the colonization “scheme.” By citing the black community’s immediate and unequivocal rejection of the formation of the ACS, Walker placed this anticolonization sentiment within the framework of the black protest tradition. Likewise, Walker applauded the role of Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All in providing blacks with a forum for expressing their disapproval of colonization, a realm in which African Americans could demonstrate their understanding of the various dimensions of what he perceived as the ACS’s mass-deportation scheme.
Walker’s condemnation of colonization was grounded not only on the belief that black progress in the North depended on striking down colonization. He argued as well that the fate of Africans held in bondage in the South also depended on putting an end to colonization schemes. “Do they think to drive us from our country and homes,” he wondered, “after having enriched it with our blood and tears, and keep back millions of our dear brethren, sunk in the most barbarous wretchedness, to dig up gold and silver for them and their children?”11
