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Introduction

To the Free Colored People

Air-Spider and the fly

Will you, will you be colonized?

Will you, will you be colonized?

Will you be colonized on the African shore?

And my fears will sleep,

And you will rouse them no more . . .

—A Slaveholder, “Colonization Song,” In The Anti-Slavery Harp, 1848¹

When in early 1817 free blacks in Georgetown, Virginia learned of the creation of the American Colonization Society, an organization established to settle them in West Africa for their own “elevation,” they gathered at the house of Nicholas Warner to “shew [sic] unto the world at large [their] dislike to colonize in Africa.”² During the meeting, those present discussed the threat of this new organization, declaring the necessity for “free and independent men of color” to form “a firm and strong social compact” and to agitate against the ACS.

After the meeting, Christopher McPherson, the secretary, sent circulars to black community leaders that called on “Free People of Color” to support “a memorial to Congress, praying for the colonizing of the free people of color on the waters of the Missouri river, and under the government of the United States.” It was crucial, McPherson claimed, that free blacks “lose no time in forwarding them to the National Legislature; that the subject may be acted upon during the present session.”³ Nearly a decade before the National Black Convention movement would bring free blacks together to discuss matters pertinent to their communities, African Americans in Georgetown took a decisive step toward unifying blacks across the country against the white-led ACS and what they believed was a threat of mass deportation to Africa.

Organized resistance to colonization began to coalesce immediately after the formation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in December 1816. Free blacks were disturbed when they heard that some members of the ACS had joined the organization to rid the nation of those free blacks who, they believed, “corrupt[ed]” slaves and “render[ed] them discontented.”⁴ If American Colonization Society members truly believed in their professed mission to offer free blacks a better life in Africa, then why would members claim that free blacks had a corrupting influence on slaves in the South? Such a position caused many African Americans to distrust the ACS and argue that the organization was really motivated by a belief among white slaveholders that colonizing provided a perfect way to preserve slavery while ridding the nation of an unwanted group of free blacks who were living on the margins of society in the early republic.⁵

There were of course some blacks, such as Paul Cuffe, who shared white colonizationists’ notion that the creation of an African American–led nation not on American soil could benefit those individuals and families who left. However, others worried that settlement in Africa or elsewhere would leave enslaved Africans in the South without their most passionate defenders. This viewpoint became popular in the black community immediately after the formation of the American Colonization Society, and from the earliest anticolonization meetings free blacks emphasized this point when confronted by white colonizationists who sought to convince them to form a colony in Africa.⁶

Yet when white colonizationists learned that free blacks viewed the organization and its ideology as antiblack, they were shocked.⁷ ACS members refused to accept such an accusation, arguing that anticolonizationists misunderstood their intentions. Once the free black community learned of the colonizationists’ noble intent, these same free black adversaries would accept colonization in Africa as the only route to racial advancement. With this reasoning, the ACS set out to build a base of support among free blacks and in turn to convince them that white ACS members only sought their best interests.

Although at times this worked, and several prominent blacks, such as the black editor and intellectual John Russwurm, did change their view of the Society and indeed did leave for Liberia to begin their lives anew, nevertheless between 1820 and 1860 the overwhelming majority of free blacks rejected the Colonization Society and Liberia.⁸ Perhaps Frederick Douglass articulated this sentiment best:“Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost. Here we are, and here we shall remain. While our brethren are in bondage on these shores, it is idle to think of inducing any considerable number of free colored people to quit this for a foreign land.”⁹

This book is about the free black struggle against the American Colonization Society and the colonization movement they led. It examines the efforts of activists and reformers who believed that the colonization movement was one of the greatest obstacles to African Americans’ gaining citizenship in the United States. For that reason, many whites and free blacks who took part in the post-1830 abolition movement condemned the ACS and settlement in Liberia for being an impediment to their own efforts to see that blacks were included within the nation. Furthermore, blacks feared that colonization to Liberia would become national policy. Thus, it wasn’t enough to ignore the colonization movement: free blacks believed they needed to destroy it.

As this book shows, from the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816 to Lincoln’s colonization plan during the Civil War, the majority of black abolitionists and community leaders believed that the battle against the American Colonization Society and colonization to Liberia was central to their quest for citizenship. Simply put, this was because black leaders believed that colonization in the wake of emancipation—gradual or immediate—would be a cruel fate for a people who had practically built the nation and whose labor had provided the commodity (cotton) that was so crucial to the United States’ economic ascendancy during the nineteenth century.

From the Northeast to the “Old Northwest,” free blacks wanted more than freedom—they wanted to live in a land without slavery, racial violence, or employment discrimination. Their vision was intertwined with that of the Americans who first struck against British rule in an effort to build a republic based on inalienable rights of land, liberty, and equality regardless of one’s station in life. They wanted to be a part of the nation, and they believed that white colonizationists wanted to drive them away. This book shows that in each of the six decades before the Civil War, the struggle against the colonization movement remained a central issue in free black communities, just as it had been a central topic of discussion among white politicians, clergy, and social reformers who failed to see how free or freed black Americans could ever be a part of the national fabric.

Although most free black leaders opposed colonization, they did not necessarily reject all emigration plans. In some cases, free black leaders championed emigration to places such as Haiti because they believed that such initiatives showed African American potential and undermined the colonization movement to Liberia. Emigrationism remained an ideology of empowerment that centered on the notion that a black-ruled nation could provide a refuge for those African Americans who found racism intolerable, and that a powerful black republic could potentially arbitrate on behalf of African people enslaved everywhere.

For several reasons, the study of black emigration to Canada, Africa, and the Caribbean provides a crucial context in which to understand anticolonization discourse and activism. First, African American leaders often considered relocating to a more supportive place to agitate against slavery and white prejudice. Some scholars argue that Liberia also became a crucial refuge for pan-African intellectuals such as John Russwurm, Edward Blyden, and Alexander Crummell, to name a few. However, this study focuses on emigration initiatives and debates that intersected with the struggle against colonization to Liberia, because most black leaders did not share the opinion of Russwurm, Blyden, and Crummell about Liberia. This more narrow approach toward anticolonizationists such as Frederick Douglass and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, as well as black-led emigration movements to Haiti and Canada, seeks to complement the excellent studies of Liberia and black colonizationists who formed a pan-Africanist community in West Africa. Ultimately, this book explains why the majority of free black Americans rejected colonization despite the efforts of those who tried to convince them that Liberia remained their best hope for living their lives in a black-led nation free of racism.

Although historians such as Winston James, Claude Clegg, and Marie Tyler-McGraw have examined African American colonization in Liberia, no work has focused exclusively on those who opposed colonization between the founding of the American Colonization Society and the Civil War. Recent studies of the American Colonization Society, like those published by Eric Burin and Beverly Tomek, reexamine white colonizationists’ ideology and intentions within the context of the antislavery movement, particularly in Pennsylvania. Burin’s study is especially useful because it offers both the perspective of Colonization Society members and also that of those freed persons who actually left for Liberia. Here, Burin departs from the foundational work of P.J. Staudenraus, which almost exclusively focuses on white colonizationists’ efforts to make colonization national policy, by telling the story of the colonization movement as one of elite white males—some southern and others northern.¹⁰

Beverly Tomek builds on Burin’s and Staudenraus’s works by framing the colonization movement in Pennsylvania as a legitimate reform attempt which coincided with other humanitarian efforts that strove to better the lives of free blacks. By situating the colonization movement within the context of the activities of white reformers, such as Elliot Cresson, Beverly Tomek shows that those who participated in the colonization movement sometimes had overlapping motives. Often, she writes, these men were “too conservative for the northern reform community even though their antislavery stance made them too radical for the South.” 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 living in cities all across the nation, they also worked to 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. In addition, wealthy blacks shared poorer blacks’ kinship with those still enslaved in the South. Even if only for this reason, they wanted to stay in the United States rather than leave for Liberia.

Although Frederick Douglass and other anticolonizationists continually agitated about the idea that the colonization movement sought to banish free blacks to Liberia, they were not entirely correct. In fact, some ACS members rejected compulsory colonization from the outset. These northern “emancipationists” often clashed with other members of the ACS, particularly those from the South who owned slaves. Since these northern members truly believed that black Americans would never be accepted as equals in the United States, colonization in Liberia seemed to them like a munificent alternative. Nevertheless, they had no intention of driving free blacks from U.S. shores by means of a sort of reverse middle passage. In fact, colonizationists in Massachusetts placed their efforts within the context of prophetic Christianity more often associated with the works of black agitators such as David Walker. For example, Alexander H. Everett rose at a colonization meeting in Massachusetts in 1847 and spoke with contempt about the belief that “the African is a degraded member of the human family.” In his view, such statements were nothing less than “miserable heresy,” and he argued that those who held that belief needed to “goback to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were, and what they did, three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization—when they constituted, in fact, the whole civilized world of their time.” Not only did Everett call upon his audience to recognize the glorious history of Africans, he noted that Egyptians were in fact “black,” quoting the “father of history” Herodotus, who wrote that “Egyptians were blacks with curled hair.” Even though some in the audience disputed his claim, Everett declared: “I cannot believe that the father of history did not know black from white.” Thus, Everett asserted that the very civilization that Americans claimed as a testament to white European superiority was actually derived from “these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization.”²⁷

Furthermore, Everett and others in the room claimed that colonization had the potential to provide the “dark continent of Africa” with missionaries to spread Christianity to the “benighted” Africans, while redeeming free black Americans who had been forced unjustly from their “native land.” It would be in Africa, these colonizationists declared, that black Americans could create a home without racial discrimination, and build an equal society where political power and economic independence could finally be attained.

Although Massachusetts’s colonizationists placed their argument for colonization within a framework that some free blacks may have found acceptable, most black spokespersons in the North and Midwest could not help but point out that the majority of white colonizationists did not hold such views. In fact, Samuel Cornish, one of the first black newspaper editors, charged white colonizationists with using newspapers to spread negative views of blacks. He believed white colonizationists often highlighted black criminality, drunkenness, and disreputable behavior in an effort to convince elected officials that free blacks were a “public nuisance” and ought to be colonized in Liberia for the good of the nation.²⁸

For black spokespersons to convince the broader society that black people, given equal opportunity, were worthy of equal citizenship rights, they needed to shift the conversation from deporting black people to Liberia to a discussion centered on how to provide equal opportunities to African Americans, who faced discrimination and antiblack policies at every turn. Here, then, I suggest that there were important links between anticolonization agitation, blacks’ quest for citizenship rights, and the social reform movements of the nineteenth century. Every penny donated to the ACS’s brand of “improvement” was one penny diverted from what free blacks and their white allies viewed as extraordinary and pressing concerns in the community, such as education and relief for the poor. The main question anticolonizationists were confronted with in this world of benevolence and charity was: why spend money—state or private—on improving or “elevating” the condition of free blacks in the United States when prejudice and racism stood as a barrier to their ultimate progress?

Furthermore, black anticolonizationists connected immediate abolitionism with moral reform and mass education because they believed that poor, uneducated blacks were most vulnerable to deportation to Liberia and that they provided fuel for antiblack discourse. When whites stopped focusing their attention on driving blacks from the nation, and began supporting reform and uplift efforts at home, they would see that black people were as capable as any other group of contributing positively to the country of their birth.²⁹

Anticolonizationists “appealed to the heart” of their white detractors, holding firm to the belief that white Americans would one day abandon their racial animosity and confer social status, political power, and economic opportunities upon black people when they accepted that blacks had shed their blood and sweat to build the nation.³⁰ Although this seems optimistic, perhaps even utopian (given the rise of King Cotton), free black “founders” like Richard Allen had witnessed emancipation within individual states in the North during the Revolutionary era, and they remained hopeful about the possibility of attaining citizenship and ending slavery during the first few decades of the 1800s. Nevertheless, black activists and intellectuals such as David Walker understood that this would not come easy. By writing pamphlets, essays, and letters to the editors of white newspapers, black leaders refused to be silenced, or to allow pro-colonization, antiblack articles or essays to go unanswered. This bustling print culture had the dual intention of proving black intellectual capabilities and arousing blacks, as Richard Newman explains, to “build a public protest movement to overwhelm white apathy” through mass action.³¹

Free African Americans were nearly as deathly afraid of mass deportation to Liberia as they were of being kidnapped and forced into slavery. Even while the prospect of slavery being reinstated in the North or spreading into the old Northwest seemed unlikely, the fact that well-positioned businessmen, clergy, and politicians met annually to discuss how to convince the federal government and wealthy elites to fund free black colonization in Liberia was disturbing, to say the least. Thus, the struggle against colonization could only be won if free blacks obtained recognition as legitimate, hence equal, citizens in the nation. Without citizenship, they believed, they would always be threatened by what they deemed to be a mass deportation movement akin to the Cherokee removal of the 1830s.³²

This study argues that anticolonization discourse and activism actually reaffirmed African Americans’ faith in republican and democratic ideals, even in the face of colonizationists’ systematic assault against their quest for citizenship. It was through anticolonization agitation that the African American protest tradition found fertile soil, with free blacks in the North recognizing colonization as a threat to their ultimate goal.

This debate over the fate of free blacks originated during the Revolution. By the end of the war, white leaders in both the North and the South contemplated African American colonization as a feature of their emancipation plans. Since “whiteness” became one of the most important criteria of citizenship, many white reformers considered free blacks unqualified for such status.³³ White public officials such as Thomas Jefferson claimed colonization was the most effective way to promote emancipation on a national level.³⁴ Others claimed that individual manumission and colonization in territories outside U.S. borders, especially in Africa, would offer slaveholding whites a realistic way to end slavery gradually without the prospects of having to live amongst the newly emancipated ex-slaves who, they believed, constituted their greatest enemy.

When white state representatives met behind closed doors in Philadelphia in the late 1780s, African Americans asserted their American identity through petitions and letters to state legislatures, arguing that they had just as much right to live in the new nation as whites. These petitions claimed that slavery violated the principles of the Revolution, and their authors wondered how a nation proclaiming that all men were equal could continue to be built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. Through their words black petitioners hoped to demonstrate their humanity and point out the contradiction of a Christian nation enslaving fellow human beings.³⁵

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.