bond between Africans enslaved and those free. Throughout the antebellum era, black leaders used such arguments to persuade audiences of the detriment of colonization, and this became central to black abolitionists’ anticolonizationism.
Like other African Americans writing against the ACS, Walker acknowledged that at least a few whites who supported colonization were “friends of the sons of Africa.” Nevertheless, he believed that those white reformers, “laboring for our salvation,” had been duped into “this plot” and needed to “see if the end which they [had] in view [would] be completely consummated by such a course of procedure.”12 Walker expressed “with tenderness” that he “would not for the world injure their feelings,” but hoped that his words would lead them to realize that “the plot is not for the glory of God, but on the contrary the perpetuation of slavery in this country forever, unless something is immediately done.”13 Ultimately, like many other black leaders, he argued that “This country is as much ours as it is the whites’; whether they will admit it or not, they will see and believe it by and by.”14 With the completion of the Appeal, Walker challenged many white abolitionists to rethink gradual emancipation and colonization, which had been among the most common antislavery ideologies before the 1830s.
When Garrison did change his mind about colonization, he decided that his first step on the road toward convincing the nation to embrace “immediatism” was a thorough indictment of the American Colonization Society, colonization ideology, and Liberia. He would soon follow in Walker’s footsteps and complete his anticolonization treatise, Thoughts on African Colonization. Animated with Garrison’s penchant for polemics, the volume made American intellectual history by making blacks themselves central to the struggle, demonstrating black agency during a time when most whites believed they themselves knew what was in blacks’ best interest. Anticolonization became the foundation upon which “Garrisonism” was built. It was the “key transitional topic” for those who considered themselves disciples of Garrison, and who vowed to fight slavery.15
Even though Garrison’s New England Anti-Slavery Society canvased the Northeast with lectures calling for an immediate end to slavery, black Americans had been waging an intellectual battle on two fronts: one against slavery and the other against colonization. This led them to hold conventions during the first half of the 1830s to discuss the cause of freedom in ways that departed from the previous generation’s effort to “appeal to the heart” of white reformers, as well as gradualists who embraced colonization. As William Hamilton explained, “However pure the motives of some of the members of that society may be, yet the master spirits thereof are evil minded towards us. They have put on the garb of angels of light. Fold back their covering, and you have in full array those of darkness.”16
Historians have established that African American conventions in the early 1830s became a venue for free blacks to challenge white people’s declarations of racial supremacy.17 Like Freedom’s Journal, public conventions offered masterful oratorical performances crucial to demonstrating black American intellectual acumen and self-advocacy. Consequently, blacks used conventions as yet another public space in which to express their anticolonization views. Aware that they were “being watched,” free black convention-goers spoke with eloquence, intelligence, and passion in their attempt to counter colonizationists’ claims that black people lacked the prerequisite traits to warrant citizenship in the United States.18
From the inaugural Black Convention held in Philadelphia in September 1830, black Americans declared that these conventions could work to combat the “various ways and means [that] have been resorted to; among others, the African Colonization Society is the most prominent.”19 Even if some delegates believed that Canadian emigration, or emigration to Haiti, had the potential to aid those who had been ensnared in specific assaults on their livelihood, Liberian colonization, in their eyes, worked against race advancement and the destruction of slavery.20 As would be the case at subsequent conventions, the resolutions at the inaugural convention made clear that free blacks did not doubt the “sincerity of many friends who are engaged in that cause,” but still affirmed their anticolonizationist stance.21
Nevertheless, blacks who gathered at these conventions were at times willing to listen to agents of the ACS, who sought to set things straight with free black male leaders who, in turn, seemed certain that colonization represented an evil only surpassed by slavery itself. In 1832, for example, ACS secretary Ralph Gurley attended the Second Annual National Black Convention in Philadelphia to convince African Americans that the ACS only sought to ameliorate the condition of free blacks who lived under an oppressive racial order in the United States. Black leaders “patiently listened” to Gurley, allowing him to speak “in behalf of the doings of said Society” so that those assembled could “arrive at truth” in a way that “seldom has been witnessed” during a meeting in which the majority had been decidedly against the ideas set forth by a speaker. Still, when Gurley finished his “eloquent arguments,” black leader John Vashon stood to denounce the American Colonization Society’s project, reminding delegates that the Colonization Society sought only to secure slavery by deporting free blacks to Africa. After both sides had had their turn, the delegates voted. A majority came out against the ACS, proclaiming that “the doctrines of said Society, are at enmity with the principles and precepts of religion, humanity and justice, and should be regarded by every man of color in these United States, as an evil of magnitude, unexcelled, and whose doctrines aim at the entire extinction of the free colored population and the riveting of Slavery.”22
Such an unequivocal statement against colonization may have discouraged Gurley, but he did not blame black convention attendees. Instead he focused his contempt upon Garrison for “poisoning their minds with Anti-Colonizationist ideology.” Ever since Garrison had first published the Liberator in 1831, Gurley had regarded Garrison’s invective against the ACS as the root cause of the negative opinions of the ACS held in black communities in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. But Gurley actually had it backwards: black leaders in Baltimore had first pushed Garrison to renounce the colonization ideology espoused by the ACS and fight against slavery and colonization. Garrison had himself been “poisoned” by black anticolonization.
Scholars for years have pointed out that Garrison’s popularity among black leaders was directly related to his stance on colonization. This popularity translated into subscriptions to Garrison’s Liberator newspaper, which by the early 1830s supplanted Freedom’s Journal as the most important newspaper for the cause of freedom in the North. While some blacks pooled their money for subscriptions, African American supporters with wealth and prestige sent large donations to fund the paper. James Forten, for example, paid for twenty-seven subscriptions and sent Garrison many words of encouragement. In fact, scholars note that white subscribers only comprised one-fourth of the Liberator’s readers, and Garrison actually ceased looking toward the white community for support. “Our white people are shy of the paper,” Garrison bemoaned in a letter to Simeon Jocelyn. “This ill success,” he explained, “is partly owing to colonization influence, which is directly and actively opposed to the Liberator.”23
It is very likely that Garrison was correct about Colonization Society members’ disdain for him, his paper, and the ideas he so freely shared with any audience that would invite him to speak. In fact, in issue after issue, the Liberator published anticolonization letters and essays by black people attacking the American Colonization Society, its local auxiliaries, and the principles that underpinned colonization. Often these letters were in response to pro-colonization editorials, or had been published in other newspapers and reprinted in the Liberator so that Garrison could alert his readers to the ongoing debate over colonization appearing within the pages of mainstream papers.
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