Slavery cast an ominous shadow over the new nation, pushing the Founding Fathers to contemplate ways to deal with the inherent contradiction of holding humans in bondage while charging British authorities with treating colonists like “slaves.” Although questions surrounding slavery dominated this discussion, those who met in Philadelphia struggled to come to a consensus about the status of free blacks within the new nation. What rights did free blacks have? How should individual states deal with these “public nuisances” who threatened the institution of slavery in the South and the social order in the North? Did free blacks, as slaveholding whites argued, jeopardize slavery by providing enslaved Africans with a group of coconspirators prepared to partake in a cataclysmic insurrection that would sink the newly formed republic? Such concerns were very much on the minds of those who, nearly thirty years later, organized the American Colonization Society.
Although most New England states began abolishing slavery within a decade after the Revolutionary War, the nationwide temperament of white supremacy remained boundless. Blacks in major cities, such as Boston, Providence, and New Haven, confronted equally oppressive and disturbing patterns of racial exclusion that functioned to perpetuate white power and to maintain pre-emancipation social, political, and economic relationships. While whites in New England sought to “disown slavery,” they used various practices and methods to force blacks into segregated communities, and, if possible, they hoped to push them out of the nation.
Colonization was the culmination of the “erasure” of people of color that commenced soon after the Revolution was won and emancipation began in northern states such as Massachusetts. Historian Joanne Pope Melish identifies this process as two-pronged. First, whites represented blacks in print media as “absurd” and “threatening” as a strategy to undermine their efforts to attain citizenship rights.36 Second, whites used episodic violence against black people to reinforce racial boundaries, and when individual blacks behaved in ways that whites viewed as unbecoming, they lashed out at them. Both collective violence and individual acts of terror were actually an expression of the type of white attitudes that underpinned colonization ideology, even if some colonizationists did not necessarily condone these actions. However, both those who espoused colonization ideology and members of the ACS agreed that Africa remained the best place for free black Americans.37
The ACS united northern clergy and humanitarians opposed to human bondage as well as southern politicians and planters invested in slavery. While these may seem like strange bedfellows, their alliance demonstrates the important way the construction of a national citizenship had been predicated on a notion of “whiteness” that became manifest in the African colonization movement from its earliest manifestations. For this reason, the organization assembled a diverse coalition of whites who viewed both free blacks and those still enslaved as an impediment to national unity and to the future of a white republic.38 Thus, free blacks came to regard their struggle against colonization within the context of the abolition movement and their efforts to attain citizenship in the nation. After all, as the anticolonizationists contended, what would freedom mean if the end of slavery were followed by the colonization of emancipated blacks? As historian Eric Foner explains, “In an era of nation-building, colonization formed part of a long debate about what kind of nation the United States would be. . . . At mid-century, the prospects of colonizing American slaves probably seemed more credible than immediate abolition.”39 For this reason, black Americans believed that their quest for equality and citizenship depended on ending slavery and proving to those in power that free black colonization in Liberia would betray a people who had struggled since independence for a place at the American table.
1. “The Means of Alleviating the Suffering”: Haitian Emigration and the Colonization Movement, 1817–1830
On December 11, 1818, Prince Saunders, the influential black educator and secretary of the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, stood before white antislavery leaders at the annual meeting of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to rebuke the means and ends of the American Colonization Society. In his speech, he explained how the Colonization Society had encouraged congressional and state officials to fund an effort to drive free African Americans out of the United States and “back” to Africa. This colonization project, Saunders argued, was creating a “frenzy” among free blacks fearful of a mass deportation across the Atlantic Ocean reminiscent of the Middle Passage. As an alternative to colonization in Africa, Saunders requested that the delegates consider funding African American emigration to the first black republic, Haiti. Saunders described Haiti as a “magnificent and exstensive [sic] island,” which travelers had labeled the “paradise of the New World.” “If the two rival governments of Hayti [sic] were consolidated into one well balanced pacific power,” he asserted, “there are many hundreds of free people in the New England and middle states, who would be glad to repair there immediately to settle.”1
Like Paul Cuffe and other black leaders in the early nineteenth century, Saunders praised Haiti as an example of African potential, providing Africans in the diaspora with a point of reference when they challenged the racist assumptions that underpinned white supremacy in the United States. By defeating one of the most powerful nations in Europe and shaking free the fetters that bound them, Haitians had demonstrated their willingness to use any means available to them to achieve their freedom. Such a demonstration of African agency and self-determination inspired more than eight thousand black Americans to leave the United States for the small, newly independent Caribbean nation during the 1820s.2
Whether or not Haiti truly represented the best of African potential remained open to debate, yet it continued to inspire black Americans, encouraging some free blacks in the North to join Haitian emigration societies as a sign of solidarity, while others went ahead and packed up their belongings and emigrated there.3 This upsurge in pro-emigration sentiment in the black community was far from universal: most African Americans had no intention of leaving. The primary reason for this was the rise of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its African colonization project. By the end of the 1810s, free blacks had become concerned that the ACS sought, in fact, to drive them to Africa. For this reason, pro–Haitian emigration advocates had to convince free blacks that Haitian emigration would actually undermine the ACS, while affirming blacks’ potential for self-governance. Thus, those who embraced Haitian emigration dismissed colonization to Liberia and were compelled to make their argument clear and persuasive if they were to succeed.4
Indeed, several of the most prominent black Americans of the era took up the task of challenging the ACS while endorsing Haitian emigration. James Forten, the Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist, for example, played an important part both in leading the struggle against the colonization “scheme” hatched by the Colonization Society, and in urging black Americans to consider Haitian emigration.5
But was Forten’s support of Haitian emigration incompatible with, or contradictory to, his denunciation of colonization? Why did some black leaders, like Forten, protest the American Colonization Society’s colonization plan while championing Haitian emigration? This chapter outlines the rise of the Haitian emigration movement in the late 1810s and the 1820s, demonstrating that emigration (to Haiti) and colonization (of Liberia) were far from synonymous, and that black leaders utilized a transnational network of social reformers as a means to undermine colonization, on the one hand, and to fund Haitian emigration, on the other. Furthermore, it explains how black leaders used the rhetoric of nationalism as a discourse that linked the formation of an African diasporic identity through nation building in Haiti with the struggle against white supremacy in the United States and abroad.
Black leaders certainly did envision Haitian emigration in nationalistic terms, which collided with their quest for racial uplift and “respectability” in the United States.6 While northern black leaders spoke publicly of Haiti’s greatness as a rhetorical strategy for urging racial unity and challenging white racist ideology, in reality, Haiti had yet to emerge as a stable nation.7 However, as early as 1815 Prince Saunders called on blacks
