spread colonization societies. Because colonization was a central tenet of gradual emancipation ideology during the late 1810s and 1820s, these white women regarded free black colonization in Liberia as a viable plan for ending slavery and providing Africa with Christian missionaries. As Elizabeth Varon affirms, “For Virginia’s most prominent female colonizationists, the conviction that Africa should be Christianized went hand in hand with the conviction that the institution of slavery was sinful and should, on moral grounds, be gradually dismantled.”20 Therefore, these white women founded ACS female auxiliaries and participated in a form of social reform that was more in line with activism that the dominant part of society deemed appropriate for women.
Although sources on anticolonization do not document black female participation in meetings, anticolonization sources do reflect the type of masculinized cultural prerogatives that underpinned black nineteenth-century protest thought. Black male spokespersons challenged the ACS and Liberia in ways that resembled their broader challenge to slavery, kidnapping, race riots, and racial discrimination. Often, such challenges presented black men as protectors of women and children who were prey for slave catchers and colonizationists. If black men, as the argument was framed, could not prevent the kidnapping of northern black women for southern slave markets, or the deportation of free black women and children to Liberia, how would they ever be considered men, and by extension, be worthy of full citizenship in the United States? These notions played on traditional gendered roles and expectations, and this idea of “manliness” was used as a strategy to capture the attention and to solicit the participation of free black men in the anticolonization struggle.21 While such recruitment rhetoric reinforced gender constructions that we may find problematic today, they were a staple of nineteenth-century male discourse. In short, black spokespersons played on dominant Western notions of “duty” and “honor” as crucial features of masculinity, central to anticolonization writings and speeches.22
Given the celebrated political and ecclesiastical figures who had prominent roles in the ACS, African Americans had a mountain of public sentiment to overcome. While anticolonizationists clamored loudly, they most certainly did not have the same access to the public sphere as men, such as Henry Clay, who held elected political positions. Even if, for example, Nathaniel Paul was capable of frustrating ACS agents, his barbs hardly discouraged ACS leaders like Clay, who, even at the end of his life, continued to wield power in Washington and advocate for colonization. To change the “public mind” on colonization remained a major hurdle of the black anticolonizationist struggle. While most whites found the specific plan unrealistic, they still believed that, at its core, colonization was the best way to “deal with” free blacks, and by extension, to ameliorate the great sin of slavery.
African American anticolonizationists also struggled mightily against the general perception among whites that free blacks had no place in America. Even whites who were not “card-carrying” members of the ACS or its state auxiliaries supported removal of free blacks from the United States. Hence, the most frequent cry among anti-abolitionist mobs was for deportation of blacks to Africa. In fact, attempts to exclude African Americans from newly formed states in the Midwest and West reveal the degree to which antiblack ideology coalesced with colonization ideology. Black people, some argued, remained a threat to national identity formation whether they were slave or free—and this mentality was exactly what worried free blacks so much. While Frederick Douglass scoffed at the ACS efforts to revive the colonization movement in the late 1840s, it seems that what the organization lacked in support it made up for with its resolve.
The region where colonizationists had the most success was the South. Most free blacks who left for Liberia came from Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. Recent studies of black colonizationists document the circumstances that led them away from these states, as well as from Mississippi. This study, however, focuses instead on anticolonization movements in the northern and midwestern states rather than in the South, because it places anticolonization within the black abolitionist tradition during the four decades leading up to the Civil War.23 By the time the colonization movement took root in the late 1820s, the abolition movement had shifted to the nonslaveholding states in the North and Midwest. Of course, the most noticeable exception here is Maryland. This study, like others on the black protest tradition, elides traditional southern boundaries, and it treats the “middle ground” state of Maryland within the context of anticolonization and pro-colonization debates in northern, midwestern, and western states.24
Although recent studies of black protest thought and activism during the nineteenth century point toward the elite character of the abolition movement, this book focuses instead on the ways anticolonization actually promoted class unity. Those blacks most susceptible to recruitment and deportation to Liberia were often poor. Thus free black elites only had to gaze across the pond to England for a precedent to fuel their concerns. Indeed, Sierra Leone, one of Britain’s African colonies, had been populated by London’s black poor, as well as recaptured Africans, Maroons from Jamaica, and desperate Canadians seeking to flee horrible conditions near the border of the United States.25 Blacks with property and standing, such as James Vashon, were well aware that one of the chief arguments the ACS used to gain legitimacy in the eyes of wealthy whites and politicians was that there was an ample supply of poor free blacks eager to leave. While ACS members purported that free blacks were anxious to flee American racism and degradation, free blacks challenged this assertion by writing letters to newspapers and holding public meetings to declare the contrary, and by presenting signed petitions to any and all who would read them. The threat of colonization collapsed class divisions, and as in any crisis, it called on free blacks to join together, or else meet their demise at the hands of colonizationists—some of whom, free blacks often reminded their audiences, owned slaves.
Scholars such as Patrick Rael have shown that the “different measure of oppression” among free blacks of various classes did not necessarily determine how they resisted colonization or other forms of oppression. Instead, Rael contends that black resistance to the white racist assumptions that underpinned central colonizationist tenets came out of “pragmatic concerns” and “romantic racialist” notions of black redemption through nation building.26 Even while members of the black elite pushed for building a black settlement in opposition to slavery and racism, most blacks only supported these plans when they were distinguished from those of the ACS and Liberia. For this reason, class status did not weigh heavily on whether or not a person rejected the ACS and Liberia. One particular case stands as a clear example of this reality.
When free blacks, having heard of the formation of the American Colonization Society, met in Philadelphia in 1817 to formulate a response, their impressions were gathered in the form of a series of resolutions. These resolutions, affirmed unanimously by those in attendance, reflected the attendees’ disdain for colonization. While such gatherings continued to occur over the course of the next four decades, it seems that those who wrote down their impressions, circulated petitions, and were elected as spokespersons may have been members of the free black elite. James Forten, for example, had publicly rejected the notion that black people wanted to leave for Africa, while privately he admitted to Cuffe that he supported Cuffe’s emigration initiative to West Africa. In this instance, Forten, an established businessman and important black thinker in Philadelphia, had faithfully conveyed the views of the majority, even when his personal opinions differed from those of others less fortunate than he.
Clearly, any study of African American history requires one to consider the ways in which class plays into particular positions regarding race advancement, uplift, or radicalism. But one must also recognize that class distinctions within the black community did not allow for the type of community formation—geographical or otherwise—that would have fostered a rigid class hierarchy in the antebellum North, Midwest, and West in the way that it may have in, say, Charleston or New Orleans. There were few blacks in Boston and New York, for example, and the spaces in which they could conduct their business, entertain themselves, worship, or protest remained sharply constricted. Colonization, understood by Forten and others as a mass deportation scheme to rid the nation of free blacks in the North, would impact all blacks in the North regardless of class status.
