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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 to turn towards the “slumbering volcano” in the Caribbean in order to start anew and cast their lot with other Africans building a nation free of slavery and racial prejudice.⁸ Born in Connecticut, Saunders interacted with free blacks from Philadelphia to Boston early in his career as an educator in the African school in Colchester, Connecticut, and Boston’s African School. As a teacher at the African School, Saunders lived amongst Boston’s “Brahmins,” meeting Paul Cuffe, the wealthy black ship captain, and most certainly winning his approval, and then developing a relationship with Cuffe’s daughter. In 1811 these ties allowed him to rise to the role of secretary of the African Masonic Lodge, alongside Baptist clergyman Thomas Paul. As a member of the Lodge, Saunders first began to consider joining with Paul and others to organize a Haitian emigration movement.⁹

While traveling with Paul on a fund-raising effort to Britain in 1815, Saunders learned about the Haitian project from British dignitaries who had applauded Cuffe’s efforts a few years earlier to settle black Americans on the coast of West Africa.¹⁰ Perhaps because of Haiti’s instability during its first fifteen years of statehood, Cuffe had instead placed his hopes in a new African colony to be founded near British Sierra Leone.¹¹ But Paul and Saunders had sailed to Britain to try to convince antislavery activists and politicians that black Americans were just as eager to relocate to Haiti as they were to Sierra Leone or anywhere else in West Africa.¹² Even if Paul and Saunders had shifted their plans from Africa to Haiti, they still built upon Cuffe’s previous efforts to unify British and American abolitionists interested in destroying the transatlantic slave trade and ending the oppression of Africans in the West. As it turned out, several leading British abolitionists agreed that Haiti remained an apt site for black American settlement. According to a newspaper account of the meeting with British abolitionists, Saunders and Paul listened to William Wilberforce praise “Christophe, the black king of Hayti,” for having “every princely quality.” Wilberforce declared that Christophe had “a right more legitimate than the ex-emperor of France, or the kings of Spain and Naples . . . besides being the Farther [sic] of his people.” In addition, Christophe was, in Wilberforce’s view, “a patriot, liberator, and hero . . . and pious christian . . . [who] wanted nothing but Bibles, prayer books, implements of agriculture, and information respecting the arts, sciences, and humanity of Europe.”¹³ Evidently, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce succeeded in confirming Prince Saunders’s view about Haiti, leaving Saunders with the intention to sail to the island and learn more about King Christophe’s plan for African American emigration.

King Henry Christophe had risen to power in Haiti after the previous ruler, Dessalines, was murdered near Port-au-Prince on October 17, 1806.¹⁴ Christophe, described as “a fine portly looking man . . . quite black, very intelligent, pleasant, and expressive,” had a domineering personality that was “useful on the battlefield, but a liability as a political leader.”¹⁵ Soon after he became king, he found himself faced with opposition from Alexandre Pétion, the leader of the “mulatto faction” who sought to impose upon Haiti an executive system based on the national assembly of representatives from different regions. Christophe, upon learning of Pétion’s manipulation of the Assembly, rushed towards Port-au-Prince prepared to do battle with Pétion and his men. After two days of combat, Pétion’s army stood its ground, and Christophe retreated to the north. Thus, in 1807, Haiti remained a divided nation, with Christophe in control of the North Province and the valley of the Artibonite in the West Province, and Pétion commanding most of the west and the South Province.¹⁶

While Pétion struggled to maintain his command in the south and west, and to begin engaging in negotiations with the French, Christophe sought English support and guidance. Ever fearful of a French invasion, Christophe forged ties with England and declared English to be Haiti’s official language and Protestant Christianity its state religion. Hoping that English abolitionists would use their influence to help Haiti create diplomatic ties with England, Christophe reached out to William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. In 1814 Wilberforce commented, “I am very sure I should not lose a day in embarking for Hayti. To see a set of human beings emerging from slavery, and making most rapid strides towards the perfection of civilization, must I think be the most delightful of all food for contemplation.” Wilberforce embraced Christophe and Haiti, sending financial assistance, plows, and farmers to teach Haitians English methods of agriculture.¹⁷

Like Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, the famed abolitionist who rose to public attention when he became one of the original members of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, took to Christophe’s vision as well, and he became his adviser in Europe. Clarkson kept Christophe informed about the probability of French invasion, and more generally of French and English opinions about Haiti, while offering him advice about his policies—especially the nature of his military rule. When a friend described to Clarkson the American Colonization Society–inspired movement to colonize African Americans in West Africa, Clarkson sent word to Christophe that he ought to reach out to African Americans interested in leaving the United States. Clarkson mentioned to him the advantages of black American emigration to Haiti, explaining, “Such persons would be very useful to your Majesty. They would form that middle class in society which is the connecting medium between rich and the poor and which is the great cause of prosperity in Europe, but which cannot at present have been raised up in your Majesty’s Dominion.” Clarkson hoped that Christophe “would of course give to each family a few acres of land.”¹⁸

African American emigration from the United States to Haiti, Clarkson believed, was good government policy. He explained to Christophe that an African American presence in Haiti could compel the United States to recognize the new republic. Clarkson, however, was not fully aware that southerners in the United States opposed Haitian independence, and this stood as a major obstacle to such a plan. Not until the Civil War, four decades after Christophe’s death, would the United States ultimately recognize the black republic as an independent nation.¹⁹

Christophe embraced Clarkson’s African American emigration plan, offering an initial donation of $25,000 for those free black Americans who were interested in resettling in Haiti.²⁰ Learning of this financial allocation, Saunders traveled to Haiti to meet Christophe and provide help for his emigration project. When Christophe and Saunders first met, each seemed impressed by the other. Saunders praised Christophe’s vision for Haiti as expressed in his “Manifesto of the King,” in which Christophe proclaimed, “True to our oath, we will sooner bury ourselves beneath the ruins of our native country, than suffer an infraction of our political rights.”²¹ Christophe delighted in meeting a man with such pronounced “African features,” refined manners, and high intellect. Christophe immediately appointed Saunders his “official courier,” hoping that Saunders could help him gain diplomatic recognition from Britain.²² With letters and documents from the king, Saunders traveled to London to meet with British abolitionists and London’s high society to further such ends.

When Saunders arrived in London he established himself as the principal African American advocate of Haitian emigration in Europe. Upon publication of The Haytian Papers, a series of documents related to Haiti, he had impressed British dignitaries so favorably that he became the “darling of British royalty.” At a party thrown by Countess of Cork, for instance, his eloquence and refined manners served him well as he dined with members of the English court and London’s social elite. So well did Saunders ingratiate himself with the English upper crust that word of his “flamboyant lifestyle” got back to Christophe, who recalled him to Cap-Henri, Christophe’s capital.²³

When Saunders returned to Haiti in 1816, he brought two English teachers familiar with the Lancastrian method, a technique employed in England that included “mechanical teaching devices, and used advanced children to monitor the work of beginners.”²⁴ His confidence in his “official courier” restored, Christophe named him his minister of education, and Saunders organized several schools and introduced vaccination in Haiti.²⁵ Over several years, Saunders traveled back and forth between the United States, England, and Haiti, attempting to gain support and to convince other African Americans to emigrate there. Recognizing the linkages among the abolition of slavery, black self-determination, and international recognition of Haiti as the first black republic established in opposition to slavery, Saunders hoped to persuade free blacks in the North that Haiti could provide them with an asylum from American racial oppression.²⁶

Before Saunders returned to Boston in 1818, the mainstream press had already set the stage for his Haitian emigration plan. One article in the New England Palladium in 1817 championed Haiti as an ideal location for black emigration, preferable to an African colony such as Sierra Leone. The article proclaimed that “a land of promise nearer our doors” seemed a more likely location than Africa. The author of the article reminded free blacks that, in Haiti, “the same constitution that excludes the white man, invites the black.”²⁷

Soon after Saunders arrived in the United States, he published a second edition of The Haytian Papers for an American audience. These documents, according to Saunders, proved that black people were capable of self-rule and were endowed with “natural intelligence,” falsifying the assertions of prejudiced whites who “have endeavoured to impress the public with the idea that those official documents, which have occasionally appeared in this country, are not written by black Haytians themselves.”²⁸ Saunders’s respect for Haiti and King Christophe stemmed in no small part from the “Code Henri,” and Saunders asserted that “nothing that white men have been able to arrange is equal to it.”²⁹ Saunders presented Haiti’s legal code and portions of the “Deliberations of the Consuls of the Republic” to demonstrate African resourcefulness and intelligence. Ultimately, he hoped to gain white financial support for African American immigration to Haiti, and impress upon black Americans the potential for a better life in a nation free of racial prejudice and slavery.³⁰

In September 1818, Prince Saunders left Massachusetts for Bethel Church in Philadelphia to make an address for the Pennsylvanian Augustine Society in regard to his Haitian emigration plan. His address called for black education and self-determination, and he suggested to the African American audience that they consider taking their intelligence and Christian virtue to Haiti. He explained: “Perhaps there never was a period, when the attention of so many enlightened men was so vigorously awakened to a sense of importance of a universal dissemination of the blessings of instruction, as at this enlightened age, in this, in the northern and eastern sections of our country, in some portions of Europe, and in the island of Hayti.”³¹ By the meeting’s end, Saunders had convinced prominent African American leaders such as James Forten and Russell Parrott, who had condemned colonization soon after the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1817, that emigration to Haiti and colonization to Africa were rooted in two quite different and discrete notions.

It appears that Parrott and Forten were persuaded by Saunders’s speech, and this may have planted the seed of interest in emigration to Haiti that grew among free blacks in the North during the 1820s. Although historian Arthur O. White characterizes Saunders’s address as an “ironic moment,” where the “foremost black colonizationist” lectured an anticolonizationist audience about educational uplift and Haitian emigration, the evidence suggests that free blacks in Philadelphia distinguished the emigration proposals initiated by blacks from those of the white-led African colonization project.³² The Haitian emigration movement, he insists, differed from the ACS-derived colonization movement to Africa. Thus, Saunders’s goal was to convince his audience that black Americans had the chance to lead a transnational movement against slavery, the slave trade, and nation building on a grand scale.

As the idea of Haitian emigration gained popularity throughout the North in the 1820s, some black Americans, such as a man named James Tredwell, wrote directly to Haitian officials to inquire specifically about the benefits of leaving the United States for Haiti. The secretary general of Haiti, Joseph Inginac, responded that “the men of color, who may desire to become Haytians, will find but little difference in our manner of living from that of the places they shall leave. . . . Men of all arts, of all trades—smiths, braziers, tinmen, ship and house carpenters, millwrights, caulkers, coopers, cabinet makers, boot and shoemakers—can earn in this place from six to twelve dollars per week, and even more, according to their talents and activity.”³³

While this letter reads like an advertisement for Haitian emigration as an alternative to living “under the dominion of a barbarous prejudice” in the United States, Secretary General Inginac expressed his sincere desire to see African Americans enjoy the fruits of liberty in a way that reflected his sense of African diasporic unity. For example, he wrote that “this message, sir, could not but be received with the greatest satisfaction by those who have sacrificed twenty-eight years of their life, in order to efface the traces of a yoke to which other men, who pretend to virtue and justice, had long enchained them.” The secretary-general deliberately and explicitly framed Haitian independence within an oppositional tradition that linked emigration to Haiti with the black American struggle against slavery in the South and racial discrimination in the North.³⁴

After gaining support from prominent blacks from Boston to Philadelphia, Saunders shifted his appeal to the mostly white antislavery organization, the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race. In 1818, just over a year after the formation of the American Colonization Society, colonization was at the center of debate at the American Convention’s annual meeting, the largest gathering of American Convention members in its history. It was here that Saunders read his “Memoir,” based upon his experience in Haiti, in an effort to build a network of white American philanthropists with the financial wherewithal to fund African American emigration to Haiti. Saunders also utilized this opportunity to differentiate between colonization and emigration, and he expressed to the delegates the general fear among free blacks that a large-scale colonization scheme had been hatched to expel them from the United States. In his conclusion, he explained that a movement encouraging free black emigration to Haiti would undermine the American Colonization Society, while providing blacks with a new home.³⁵ Saunders read his “Memoir” to show these antislavery reformers that Haitian emigration was a more realistic alternative than African colonization.While it is unclear how influential Prince Saunders’s presentation of his “Memoir” was to the members, the outcry against colonization among some of the delegates compelled the Convention’s leadership to establish a committee to investigate colonization.³⁶ This committee was also instructed to investigate Haitian emigration within the context of the ACS’s African colonization project.³⁷

After deliberating on the merits of colonization, the American Convention’s committee reported back that it found the ACS’s plan unrealistic, and that it would neither improve the lives of African Americans nor eradicate slavery in the United States. The committee determined that the $82,000,000 in estimated expenses was too costly, and the fact that most African Americans rejected colonization only further compromised the ACS in their eyes.³⁸ While committee members believed that colonization and emigration would benefit some free blacks, they declared that ultimately both the ACS colonization plan and the Haitian emigration movement would undermine universal emancipation, which many wholeheartedly supported.³⁹ Thus, little enthusiasm for either colonization to Africa or Haitian emigration took root among white American Convention members in the late 1810s.

Although the committee rejected colonization or emigration schemes, it did recommend, instead, a black settlement west of the Missouri River, which would allow benevolent whites to support resettled blacks as they lifted themselves from their “degradation.”⁴⁰ This, the committee argued, would benefit the nation because these industrious African Americans were capable of populating the western frontier with upright, Christian communities that would resemble the ones they would leave in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By spreading Christianity to indigenous tribes who viewed the United States and Western culture with disdain, African Americans had the potential to serve as intermediaries for those native peoples on the outskirts of American civilization.⁴¹ The committee’s recommendations were included in the American Convention’s annual statement, which was mailed out to abolition societies across the nation.

Although these recommendations reflected white American Convention members’ generally positive attitude about black potential, they were also worded in a way that illustrates the paternalistic attitude of white reformers of the time. For example, the committee believed neither African colonization nor resettlement in Haiti had any chance of succeeding on the grounds that African Americans were unprepared for self-rule. Of course, James Forten and Prince Saunders must have balked at such conclusions, even if they were well intended. What made the committee’s recommendations particularly irksome to free black leaders were the specific comments that sounded nearly identical to the types of racialist comments made by members of the American Colonization Society. For example, William Rawle, the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and a member of the American Convention, opposed colonization yet agreed with one of the main colonizationist tenets: White racial hostility and African American poverty were major obstacles for assimilating blacks within northern cities.⁴² Even so, Rawle was well aware of free blacks’ animosity toward colonization, and for this reason he supported the idea of settling free blacks in the West. Fearful perhaps that Rawle’s comments sounded too much like those of colonizationists, other members reminded him that the Convention’s constitution forbade supporting such a plan, and this may have halted further efforts that year to promote the creation of an African American settlement in the West.

However, this did not end the debate over colonization.⁴³ When the American Convention met for its next annual meeting in 1819, some members arrived still determined to discuss colonization further. In fact, some of them had heard of blacks who were indeed considering colonization to West Africa, and this contingent called on their peers to reopen debates about colonization and the ACS. These members pointed to a report from the Kentucky Abolition Society affirming that a group of blacks in Kentucky had written to both the American Colonization Society and its Kentucky state auxiliary to request passage to Africa. Thus, they called on their American Convention colleagues to take a closer look at colonization and not dismiss it outright without a more thorough examination of its potential benefits. But as historian Beverly Tomek has shown, in the end the majority of American Convention members held firm in their rejection of colonization as a waste of resources that could better be used for other humanitarian purposes.⁴⁴

While the Convention had moved on, Prince Saunders toured northern cities in the late 1810s, promoting Haitian emigration and struggling against such skepticism. He hoped his close ties with British abolitionists would help persuade people that his Haitian emigration plan had merit. As he had done in the preface to his Haytian Papers, Saunders frequently reminded white audiences that he was “personally acquainted” with Wilberforce and Clarkson, and that he had their unwavering support for “any object, which might serve to advance the great cause of African improvement and happiness.”⁴⁵ Such references to distinguished English abolitionists, esteemed in the minds of American Convention members, suggest that Saunders understood emigration to Haiti as part of a larger human rights struggle transcending national borders and ethnic particularities. Rather than present emigration as an isolated phenomenon, Saunders connected Haitian emigration with the global movement against slavery, the slave trade, and African oppression. Like Olaudah Equiano, Paul Cuffe, and Prince Hall, Prince Saunders understood that his fight for African American self-determination and improvement had a transnational context.⁴⁶

Saunders returned to Haiti in August 1820, but violence erupted shortly after he arrived there. Before long, King Christophe died and Saunders fleed the country aboard a ship bound for Philadelphia. His troubles were far from over: before his ship left the port it was hijacked, and the robbers who boarded the vessel took Saunders’s clothes and other possessions, leaving him at the mercy of Christophe’s successor, President Jean-Pierre Boyer. Upon meeting Boyer, Saunders faced the task of convincing him to embrace the American emigration plan, arguing that a unified Haiti under Boyer would inspire African Americans seeking refuge from racial oppression in the northern United States. For this reason, he explained to President Boyer, thousands of African Americans would immigrate to Haiti if Boyer were to bestow his blessings on the project and back up such support with the financial means necessary to make it happen. Boyer, however, seemed indifferent, and Saunders left the island for Philadelphia believing that Boyer was “possessed of very little ability to govern” and that he was “prejudiced against blacks.”⁴⁷

Despite what Saunders thought about him, Boyer actually did acknowledge the benefits to Haiti of black American immigration.⁴⁸ Because Boyer sought the United States’ recognition, he thought that an African American presence in his country would boost its appeal in the eyes of American statesmen. He also recognized that Haiti would benefit from skilled African American artisans and agricultural laborers.⁴⁹ As for those emigrants recently manumitted in the United States, Boyer hoped to entice them with an offer of free land in Haiti, and soon enough this became a major feature of Boyer’s recruitment efforts. Boyer also sought to undermine the American Colonization Society’s African colonization plan by demonstrating Haiti’s advantages over those of West Africa.⁵⁰

Even though Saunders was frustrated with Boyer’s lack of cooperation, other black leaders continued to advocate Haitian emigration during the mid-1820s. Thomas Paul returned to his role as chief advocate of Haitian emigration just as Saunders faded from the picture.⁵¹ Paul frequently reminded audiences that “having been a resident for some months in the Island of Hayti, I am fully persuaded that it is the best and most suitable place of residence which Providence has hitherto offered to emancipated people of colour, for the enjoyment of Liberty and equality with their attendant blessings.” Furthermore, he claimed that “a country possessing an enterprising population of several hundred thousand of active and brave men, who are determined to live free, or die gloriously in the defence of freedom, must possess advantages highly inviting to men who are sighing for the enjoyment of the common rights and liberties of mankind.”⁵²

Blacks in Philadelphia shared Paul’s interest in Haitian emigration, and in July 1824, some of them met to consider President Jean-Pierre Boyer’s invitation to resettle in the nascent black republic. To clarify their position on colonization, they began the meeting by denouncing “any measures which may be taken to transport them to the coast of Africa.” According to one account, “The free blacks of Philadelphia have unanimously protested against the execution of the plan to colonize them in Africa; and have expressed their determination to discountenance it. Their attention, it appears, is turned to Hayti.” The meeting continued with discussion about the “favorable climate, a fruitful soil and a free government [where] they may acquire all the privileges which the most favored Whites of the most favored country can enjoy. . . . blacks and mulattoes are continually leaving this country and taking advantage of the invitation of the Haytians.”⁵³

Philadelphia blacks were not alone in their interest in the Haitian emigration plan. In fact, free blacks in Maryland came under the influence of Haitian emigration when an elected agent, George McGill, returned from Haiti excited about President Boyer’s support for African American immigration. McGill shared with the audience his opinions about Haiti as a location for resettlement, reading a letter he had from Secretary General Inginac. In this letter, Inginac explained that “His excellency has been charmed to hear that the decendants [sic] of the African, form the project of coming here and carrying their industry into a free country, which guarantees to them an honorable existence under the protection of a constitution.” This sense of shared racial identity between African Americans and Haitians reinforces the notion that a sense of African diasporic unity underpinned the Haitian emigration movement. Secretary General Inginac proclaimed, specifically, that Haitians were “interested more than any other in the fate of the descendants of the Africans, whose blood runs in their veins,” and hoped to provide blacks in America with an opportunity to help “the Haytiens form at this time a society whose end is to favour the emigration of our American brethren into the Republic.”⁵⁴

Individual accounts of life in Haiti also encouraged black Americans to seek Haiti as a refuge from the American racial caste system. According to one newspaper account, John Lewis, “a respectable man of colour,” spent several years in Haiti and then returned from the nascent republic “perfectly satisfied with the stability of the government there established.” Upon returning to the United States, the article claims, Lewis made plans “to remove his family there for a permanent residence.” These accounts broadened the appeal of Haitian emigration, and enticed some blacks to seek Haiti rather than to continue “like wander[ing] Israelites, without a tabernacle and without a home.”⁵⁵

As the idea of Haitian emigration gained momentum in the 1820s, the American Colonization Society acknowledged the threat that Haitian emigration posed to their own African colonization plans, even as colonization societies proliferated throughout the nation. In fact, ACS auxiliaries and “Committees of Correspondence” had sprouted in New York, Maryland, Vermont, Virginia, Connecticut, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.⁵⁶ Virginia boasted twenty-one auxiliaries, thus establishing it as the epicenter of colonization sentiment in the South, while New York’s six auxiliaries led all northern states. State auxiliaries represented an extension of the larger national organization, which operated out of Washington, D.C.⁵⁷

The ACS’s broad base of support and its distinguished membership came with benefits and drawbacks. Agents of state auxiliaries often cited the membership of esteemed statesmen such as Henry Clay as a way to gain financial support and recruit new members from the white population of towns and cities. At times, though, the national affiliation proved to be a burden for agents in the Northeast who had joined the colonization movement to support what they believed were the organization’s benevolent intentions. In their effort to unite southern and northern interests, the members of the parent organization shied away from any overt declaration that the organization supported gradual emancipation, and instead claimed only that it “encouraged” free blacks to leave America for their West African settlement. This did not bode well for those members and agents interested in colonization as a tool for the emancipation of Africans enslaved in the South, or as a means to offer free blacks an alternative to living in a society rife with rampant “Negrophobia.”

For this reason, Prince Saunders and his ally, the Reverend Thomas Paul Sr., exploited the ACS’s ambiguous stance on emancipation in order to undermine the ACS and African colonization. Some ACS agents reported meeting blacks who were openly hostile to colonization, yet supportive of Haitian emigration. When, for example, Loring Dewey, an agent of the American Colonization Society and the New York auxiliary, attempted to recruit new members, he found that black people’s unfavorable view of the ACS did not mean they were opposed to leaving the United States. From the hamlets in the Hudson Valley to the outskirts of New York City, he noted, “a preference of Hayti over Africa was frequently expressed.” Among those whites sympathetic to the plight of free blacks in the North, Dewey discovered that “there was not only an opposition to colonization in Africa manifested by many, but an assurance given of their ready aid to promote emigration to Hayti.” Taking these views into consideration, Dewey wrote to the American Colonization Society in the hope of gaining support for Haitian emigration as well.⁵⁸

As he waited for a reply, Dewey shared his idea with his colleagues who, as it turned out, were not at all enthusiastic about Haitian emigration. General Robert G. Harper even chided Dewey about it, explaining that Haitian emigration would not serve the interest of the larger organization.⁵⁹ This did not deter Dewey, who, on his own, wrote to President Jean-Pierre Boyer inquiring about African American emigration. When the managers of the New York Auxiliary Society learned of Dewey’s correspondence with President Boyer, a special meeting was called to discuss his actions. White slaveholding members, and their sympathizers in Virginia and Washington, D.C., viewed Haiti with scorn, and many of them believed that a free black emigration movement to Haiti would threaten the perpetuation of slavery in America. Thus, the New York auxiliary was compelled to rebuke Dewey for his actions. On April 1, 1824, the New York Colonization Society Board of Managers claimed that “colonization is the only ‘remedy’ for slavery, the mighty ‘evil’ of our country. . . . Hayti, which at first would seem to offer great advantages, is found, by examination, to be encumbered with difficulties, which will probably for a long time prevent colonization there to any considerable extent.”⁶⁰ This mild statement was soon followed up with a more forceful comment in the press, rejecting Dewey and his Haitian project. By May, the New York Colonization Society went on record to declare, “The New York Auxiliary Colonization Society has officially disavowed the proceedings of Mr. Dewey, the agent, in opening a correspondence with President Boyer, of Hayti, for the establishment of colonies in that Island, and recommended the removal of Mr. Dewey from this agency.”⁶¹

The New York Colonization Society accepted this recommendation for Dewey’s dismissal when they met in July. According to one account, “certain resolutions were passed disclaiming the correspondence of Mr. Dewey, and denouncing the plan of emigration to Hayti as contrary to the known wishes and interfering with the great national objects of the American Colonization Society.”⁶² Accordingly, Dewey was dismissed as an agent of the American Colonization Society. However, a representative of the parent organization stepped forward to establish a new society “to promote the emigration of the Blacks to Hayti.” Twenty-five members were appointed to create a committee to call for a closer look at black Americans’ interest in leaving for Haiti. In an unusual turn of events, these ACS members organized a “Haytian Emigration Society” of their own, perhaps to co-opt the movement.⁶³ However, it took almost two months for the committee to establish the society and to begin recruiting blacks to emigrate to Haiti. It is unclear to what degree these efforts worked to undermine “legitimate” Haitian emigration efforts by free blacks or to stifle critics of the ACS who claimed that the organization needed to accept black interest in Haiti within the broad parameters of colonization. West Africa, after all, was not the only place to resettle the few blacks who sought to leave America.

Even if the New York Colonization Society had missed its opportunity to shape the destiny of Haitian emigration, the dismissed New York Colonization Society agent, Loring Dewey, met with others to consider President Boyer’s overtures towards black Americans. After discussing business matters, a Dr. J. Wainwright put forth a resolution recommending that “a Committee of Nine be appointed to take into consideration the documents submitted to this Meeting in relation to the Emigration of Coloured Persons to Hayti, and report to an adjourned meeting, to be held on Friday the 25th.”⁶⁴

Peter A. Jay, the son of Founding Father John Jay and an active member of the New York Manumission Society, and eight others met to discuss the free and enslaved black population of the state, and the July 4, 1827, termination of slavery in New York.⁶⁵ They wondered whether African Americans in the state would “cheerfully embrace any opportunity that may present to place the descendants of Africa in a situation which will furnish them with more powerful motives, than are offered among ourselves, to respectability of character, and intellectual improvement.” The goal, though, was still to convince free blacks to leave, whether to Africa or Haiti. Historian Leslie Harris explains that in 1826, delegates from the New York Manumission Society were perhaps influenced by this goal, and they called on members of the American Convention to promote “the transportation of the whole coloured population, now held in bondage, to the coast of Africa, or the island of St. Domingo.⁶⁶

After discussing the prospects of Haiti as a suitable location for black emigration, the committee resolved “that it is expedient to form a Society, to be called ‘The Society for promoting the Emigration of Free Persons of Colour to Hayti.’” They established the price of subscriptions and membership, and their desire to create a board of directors. Before the meeting closed, Chairman Thomas Eddy read an “interesting communication” that described a meeting among notable African Americans, including Peter Williams and Samuel E. Cornish, that discussed President Boyer’s proposition as well as black interest in such a venture.⁶⁷ Members also pointed out that African American “excitement” over Haitian emigration was intertwined with their anticolonization sentiment. Whites had come to believe that emigration to Haiti demonstrated black agency, and African Americans’ desire to participate in the success of a black republic that represented black people’s abilities and potential. This of course did not mean that the majority of free blacks felt so inclined to leave. However, for those free blacks who had come to the conclusion that New York City would never be a place where blacks could live in safety from white violence or discrimination, Haitian emigration seemed a much better alternative than the ACS’s Liberia colony.

When Loring Dewey sailed to Haiti toward the end of 1824 to gain a firsthand impression of the island, he was well aware that this would aid his recruitment campaign when he returned to the United States. By January 10, 1825, having arrived safely in Samaná, located in a part of eastern Hispaniola that had recently been occupied by Haitian troops, Dewey sent a letter back to the United States describing his experience and encouraging the continuation of the recruitment efforts of Haitian emigration societies. One hundred twenty free blacks sailed to Haiti with Dewey, and upon arrival they bore witness to what Dewey called the “abundance and luxuriance of the foliage of the trees and plants.” “I know no part of the new countries of our land,” he claimed, “from the earliest settlement till the present time, that presented to settlers so great and immediate advantages as are here offered to our emigrants.” He described the large plantations, which had been abandoned by Spanish residents after the area was occupied by Haitian troops, claiming that, with only seven hundred inhabitants, there would be plenty of room for African American settlers, since at one time the peninsula had provided space for thirty thousand residents.⁶⁸

Such an account must have enraged his old colonizationist colleagues. By this point, nearly all members of the ACS believed that Haitian emigration threatened to destroy the project of African colonization because it shifted free blacks’ attention closer to home. In addition, African American emigration to Haiti seemed to stir up southern slaveholders’ fears that such a movement would unsettle their slaves, given Haiti’s radical legacy.⁶⁹

The conflict between Dewey and the New York Colonization Society illustrates two important points about the colonization movement in the 1820s. First, individuals came into the colonization movement with diverse motives, creating a fragile alliance among whites from North and South who supported the ACS. Second, the Dewey-NYCS dispute shows the limits of the national ACS’s ability to monitor local auxiliaries from its national headquarters in Washington. Considering the range of backgrounds and interests among ACS members, and the different perspectives about the efficacy of West African settlement versus Haitian emigration, it’s little wonder that the state affiliates began to pull away from the national organization and act independently during the following decade.

As white colonizationists tried to undermine Dewey and others, black people met to organize a group to sail to Haiti and investigate the possibilities for black emigration there. On August 7, 1824, free blacks in New York gathered at the African Baptist Church to hear a report about Haitian emigration and President Boyer’s offer. One account of the meeting in the Columbian Star claimed, “The Committee reported the expediency of forming a Society in that city, for the general object of promoting emigration to Hayti . . . [and] having been read, it was unanimously voted to form a society.”⁷⁰ Those in attendance moved quickly to select twenty people to form a board of managers to run the society. It appears that Thomas Paul, “a missionary from the Baptist Missionary Society” in Haiti, made a positive impression on the gathering. When he spoke to the group about his conversation with President Boyer, the audience seemed even more confident than before that the island was a suitable location for resettlement.⁷¹

President Jean-Pierre Boyer’s agent, “Citizen” Jonathan Granville, attended a meeting of New York black leaders and expressed “satisfaction” about free blacks’ efforts to initiate a Haitian emigration movement in New York.⁷² Described in the mainstream press as “a man of respectable talents and acquirements, possessing all the finer feelings of men in polished society, and exhibiting the elevated deportment of a gentleman,” Granville explained that Boyer had offered to “defray part of the expense of the transportation of the colonists.”⁷³ Furthermore, Granville claimed to have the authority to arrange for six thousand black American emigrants to set sail to Haiti. Once they arrived, according to Granville, they would be provided with land, citizenship, and temporary provisions.⁷⁴

In Baltimore, white antislavery newspaper editor Benjamin Lundy had been following Granville’s recruitment efforts in northern cities, writing in one editorial that “it is now supposed, that between four and five thousand coloured persons have already embarked for Hayti, or will have done so before the end of this month, under the direction of citizen Granville, whose arrival in New York was announced on the 13th day of June last.”⁷⁵ Black American interest in Haiti encouraged Lundy and reinforced his belief that “the prejudice of the white people, against the blacks, operates as an almost insurmountable barrier to the progress of emancipation.” This conviction motivated Lundy to put all his efforts behind Haitian emigration. Some whites with power and influence joined Lundy’s Haitian emigration cause, and, according to a report describing a meeting of the Baltimore Emigration Society on September 4, 1824, “the Board proceeded to the election of officers, when the honorable Edward Johnson, Mayor of the city, was chosen President . . . [and] Citizen Granville, Agent from the Haytien [sic] was then introduced to the Society, and explained in a very lucid manner the object of the Government of the Hayti, in sending him on his present mission.” The previous day, the article stated, Baltimore’s “respectable men of colour” met with Granville at the Bethel Church to discuss President Boyer’s offer and African American interest in Haitian emigration. According to an article in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, those who gathered resolved “That we highly appreciate the liberal offers of President Boyer, and that we will use all honourable means to procure a speedy and effectual emigration of the free people of colour . . . [and] That Robert Cowley be appointed to take the names of persons disposed to emigrate, to whom application may be made as early as possible, at the African Bethel Church, in Fish street.”⁷⁶

In New York, Peter Barker wrote a letter to Lundy explaining that he planned to travel to Haiti as a representative of the Haytien Emigration Society of New York. The letter claimed that he intended to “make definitive arrangements with president Boyer for the future transportation of coloured persons to Hayti.” Prominent African American leader Peter Williams joined Barker “as agents of this Society, to confer with President Boyer on this important subject of Emigration, investigate the situation of the emigrants, and settle upon a solid basis the order and arrangement of our future transactions.”⁷⁷

By January 1825, African American emigrants living in Haiti had begun to send letters describing their experiences to family and friends in the United States. While, according to Lundy, “they are generally well pleased with their new situation,” and although “the government has completely fulfilled the reasonable expectations of all who have thus sought an asylum from the tyranny of prejudice under the fostering wing of its protection,” nevertheless, rumors were circulating in the United States that African American emigrants were miserable in Haiti. Lundy seemed relieved that the most recent letters he had received “contain a complete refutation of many of those rumors,” which he felt should put to rest potential emigrants’ fears about embarking on a voyage to the Caribbean island. One letter from a black man from Baltimore claimed, “I like the place much; we have been sick, but are all well at this time. It is much better here than I expected to find it.” In another letter, an emigrant remarked, “The district is well watered by numerous streams, and seems only to require the art and industry of man.” He concluded that “it appears that our choice of this place was wisely directed.”⁷⁸

Lundy believed that the negative rumors he had encountered only reflected a growing resentment from certain segments of the nation that did not want to see Haitian emigration succeed. According to Lundy, “Late accounts from every quarter, in fact, tend to corroborate the sentiment expressed in the last number of this work, viz. that the unfavourable reports respecting the situation of the emigrants to Hayti, were circulated by persons unfriendly to the removal of our coloured people to that island.”⁷⁹ This group, he deduced, represented slaveholding interests and others who simply failed to understand the great benefit of Haitian emigration. Lundy explained that “there are, it is true, some honest well-meaning persons who are conscientiously scrupulous as to the propriety of it; but these are, comparatively, few in number; and I hesitate not to believe that their doubts arise from a want of the necessary information.”⁸⁰

Lundy’s argument in favor of Haitian emigration was, of course, taken as a challenge to those who favored African colonization, and this led to a counterattack against Lundy in white pro-colonization newspapers. One supporter of the ACS wrote a letter to Lundy claiming that Lundy’s “interesting paper, endeavours to prejudice your readers against the members of the American Colonization Society, by remarks, as unfounded as uncharitable . . . [and] there has been no opposition of any description, to the emigration to Hayti, of such free blacks, as may prefer the government of President Boyer.” According to the letter, the American Colonization Society applauded President Boyer’s offer regarding African American emigration to Haiti. Furthermore, it stated that “what has been denominated ‘strenuous opposition’ was in fact, applause for the object of President Boyer: but a persevering adherence to the ends, which the Colonization Society have kept steadily in view; the formation on the coast of Africa, of a line of colonies already existed in Sierra Leone . . . the advocates for African colonization have never opposed the wishes of any, but their own members, to aid by money, or moral influence, the emigration to Hayti.”⁸¹

In his defense, Lundy explained that “In the first place, I have ever been aware, that a considerable portion of its [the ACS’s] members were averse to the abolition of slavery in this country. This has been admitted by one of the managers. Secondly, although many of them desire the riddance of the whole of the black population, it appears very unwise to choose a situation for that purpose, so far distant, that it will be almost impossible to effect the object.”⁸² Certainly Lundy’s abolitionist network provided him with inside information about the Colonization Society. As an advocate of gradual emancipation, Lundy had supported the principles behind colonization, yet he believed that the ACS was controlled by southern slaveholders. In his response to one claim that the ACS never discouraged blacks from Haitian emigration, he asked with a hint of sarcasm, “Why did an influential member of the Society aforesaid, from Virginia, repair to New York, and ‘strenuously’ oppose the emigration to Hayti, in a meeting [not of the Auxiliary Colonization Society, but] of the citizens generally, who had assembled for the purpose of considering the propriety of seconding the propositions of President Boyer?”⁸³

This conflict between Lundy and the American Colonization Society foreshadowed the battle between the ACS and William Lloyd Garrison, Nathanial Paul, and other advocates of “immediate” emancipation in the early 1830s. And, like other well-known white abolitionists, Lundy’s opinions mirrored those of black leaders who often voiced their anticolonization views at public meetings or, after 1827, in Freedom’s Journal.⁸⁴ Lundy challenged ACS members to prove that their mission on the coast of West Africa sought to end the illegal practice of trading slaves nearly two decades after Great Britain and the United States had banned it in 1807 and 1808, respectively. He also doubted the credibility of colonizationists who claimed to share anti–slave trade beliefs, arguing that they only “talk loudly” about their efforts to end the slave trade “now as [the slave trade] has become unpopular.” Lundy argued: “Even those among them who are opposed to emancipation, make [the slave trade] the frequent theme of declamation . . . because the measures adopted for its annihilation do not prevent them from procuring as many slaves as they desire.”⁸⁵

Colonizationists refused to give up, and they continued to mail Lundy letters defending the ACS, which Lundy regularly published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation. One letter claimed that “the Colonization Society have expended more money, out of their private funds, in behalf of this unfortunate race among us, than all the emancipation societies put together.” Meanwhile, some of the letters used African American emigration to Haiti as an indication that black Americans supported colonization. This interest in Haiti, they argued, proved that blacks would leave America if they had the means to do so. Of course, this argument was nothing new, and when ACS members gathered at their ninth annual meeting, William H. Fitzhugh from Virginia asked his colleagues to “recollect the recent emigration to Hayti when invited to that Island: six thousand coloured persons in a few weeks were ready to embark. Let the arm of our government be stretched out for the defence of our African Colony, and this objection will no longer exist.”⁸⁶ Although African Americans frequently declared their disapprobation of African colonization, members of the ACS used black interest in Haiti as a stepping-stone toward the means and ends of the organization.

Before the end of 1825, Haitian President Boyer had grown weary of American settlers’ complaints, and he was convinced that an African American emigration agent had stolen a significant portion of the money set aside to aid black American immigration to the island.⁸⁷ In response, President Boyer ceased providing land for American settlers and officially withdrew financial support for African American emigration in April of 1825. This forced Lundy and others to take on the burden of raising money for the transportation expenses, which proved daunting. Lundy left his newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, under the direction of Daniel Raymond, and he sailed for Haiti in an attempt to persuade the government to change its policy.⁸⁸

When Lundy met with Haitian officials, they explained that almost one-third of the six thousand black Americans had returned to the United States, and many of those who remained were proving burdensome. Desperate to salvage the movement, Lundy petitioned the Haytian Philanthropic Society for financial support for African American emigration. Although the members vowed to pay 150 dollars for the transportation of each black American émigré, those who accepted their offer would have to agree to repayment by laboring for three years and turning over one-half of their produce to the Society.⁸⁹ After only a brief stay in Haiti, Lundy returned to the United States and arranged for a ship to transport African Americans to Haiti in February of 1828. Those who arrived in Haiti with Lundy soon realized the Haytian Philanthropic Society’s terms were absurd.

Ultimately, Haiti did not become the “promised land” that African Americans had anticipated, and some complained, among other things, about the derisive way in which Haiti’s new black elite treated American settlers. The climate was unsuitable for some immigrants, and others were frustrated by the language barrier and different religious practices.⁹⁰ According to one account, black Americans were “infinitely worse off than the natives, having no commanity [sic] of language or feeling with them.”⁹¹ The Haitian government had promised to protect black American newcomers, yet, as this letter explained, “The fact, lamentable as it is, ought not to be disguised, that the American emigrant is not sure of protection, either in life or property in that island, under its present unquiet state.”⁹² And, for those black Americans eager to return to the United States, “the policy of the government there prevents their embarkation under severe penalties.” As far as this emigrant was concerned, Haiti had failed to live up to his expectations, and he called out to his African American brethren: “We trust for humanity’s sake that any further emigration of the free people of color to that island will be sedulously discouraged.”⁹³

While Haitian emigration petered out towards the end of the 1820s, African Americans and their white allies began to move in new directions. The Haitian emigration movement forced Lundy to recognize the limitations of antislavery agitation in the South. As his hope for a massive emigration of blacks to Haiti dimmed, he abandoned the project altogether, claiming that slaveholders and their sympathizers were uninterested in any program, however benign it might be, which benefited blacks. Lundy’s views about abolitionism in the South reflected what historian Merton Dillon observes as “an ultimate shift in the geographical base of the antislavery movement from South to North, with a consequent increase in sectional antipathy.”⁹⁴

Lundy lamented how few whites seemed interested in emancipation and expatriation, and he began to accept that, since slaveholders and planters profited—financially, materially, and socially—from slavery, any program designed to threaten those benefits would be met with scorn, and even, if necessary, force. Many slaveholders shuddered at the thought of the Haitian Revolution, and they feared an African American emigration movement could lead to unrest among slaves in the American South.⁹⁵ Still, Lundy remained intent on developing a plan with economic incentives that would end slavery without violence and would provide for a settlement of manumitted African Americans in Haiti. In his view, freed blacks would work more efficiently than those enslaved, and through an experimental community in Haiti, he hoped to prove that there would be a financial benefit to slaveholders if they embraced the idea of freeing their laborers.⁹⁶

Although the Haitian emigration movement of the late 1820s may have seemed a failure to some, such as Lundy, it did succeed in derailing the American Colonization Society, leading to what historian P.J. Staudenraus identifies as “a crisis” within the Colonization Society. The issue of Haitian emigration divided whites within the American Colonization Society over how best to deal with competition from Haitian emigration. This prompted managers of the ACS to send two agents, Dr. Eli Ayres of Baltimore and Reverend George Boyd, an Episcopal rector of Philadelphia’s St. John’s Church, into the North to recruit free blacks to leave for their settlement in West Africa. Through touring New York, Philadelphia, and some New England cities, they found that Haitian emigration overshadowed African colonization, and that many free blacks were hostile to the ACS program. Nevertheless, the two agents established “Corresponding Committees” in Boston and Providence, even though they had learned that many whites in the North hesitated to donate money to the colonization cause until the ACS could garner federal support for African colonization. Also, some whites claimed that they would not support the ACS until southerners took the initiative, since, as they argued, free blacks caused more problems in the South than they did in the North. With their small African settlement in Liberia struggling to create a viable presence in West Africa, the American Colonization Society remained stymied at home as a consequence of ideological rifts and a lack of clarity over the organization’s motives.⁹⁷

Regardless, Haiti remained a symbol for African Americans, much to the dismay of southern planters and some white northerners. Black Americans continued to proclaim that Haiti illustrated African potential for nation building rooted in self-reliance, individual elevation, and racial progress. These were attributes that African American leaders believed were key for African progress in the United States and the world.

Such grandiose notions of Haiti as a potential crucible for African redemption became a cornerstone of John B. Russwurm’s own racial awakening as one of the few black students in American colleges or universities in the 1820s.⁹⁸ When Russwurm gave the 1826 commencement speech to his white peers and their families at Bowdoin College, his address, entitled “The Condition and Prospects of Hayti,” extolled the first black republic, acknowledging “the irresistible course of events that all men, who have been deprived of their liberty, shall recover this previous portion of their indefeasible inheritance.”⁹⁹ Russwurm argued that Haiti demonstrated the capacity of black men to rise from the depths of oppression to the heights of liberty—an overt challenge to prevailing racial assumptions. Concluding his speech optimistically, Russwurm explained to the audience that “We look forward with peculiar satisfaction to the period when, like the Tyre of old, her [Haiti’s] vessels shall extend the fame of her riches and glory, to the remotest borders of the globe; to the time when Hayti, treading in the footsteps of her sister republicks, shall, like them, exhibit a picture of rapid and unprecedented advance in population, wealth and intelligence.” With these final words, the audience exploded “with hearty applause” at what one newspaper reporter claimed “was one of the most interesting performances of the day.”¹⁰⁰

While Russwurm’s words illustrate his awareness of the historical significance of Haiti in his own time, they also show the transnational character of the black protest tradition. Since his childhood Russwurm had been on the move, developing a pan-African identity. Born in Jamaica from a liaison between a white Virginian merchant and an African slave, Russwurm moved with his father to Quebec in 1807, and then to Maine in 1812. Although his mother’s African origins most greatly limited his life opportunities, it was his father’s liberality that enabled him to live in a manner few African Americans would ever know.¹⁰¹ Aware that his mother’s status, rather than his father’s, determined the types of obstacles he would face in the predominantly white New England community where he lived, he never lost his sense of being an African, and he cast his lot with his fellow blacks from Boston to Port-au-Prince to Liverpool.¹⁰²

Russwurm did consider joining the wave of emigrants leaving for Haiti. Winston James points out that Russwurm, having graduated from Bowdoin, planned on leaving for Haiti, yet by October 1826 he still remained in America. He travelled initially to Boston to work at the African Free School, but there was no position for him. Some tried to entice him to travel to Liberia under the ACS banner, but he turned down the offer. Soon he left Boston for New York and the opportunity to join the community of abolitionists seeking to respond to antiblack attacks in newspapers in advance of the forthcoming 1827 emancipation decree in New York State.¹⁰³

In the fall of 1827, Russwurm took command of the Freedom’s Journal when Samuel Cornish resigned to direct the African Free School and work as an agent for the New York Manumission Society. When Russwurm began to publish both pro- and anticolonization views in the paper, some free blacks became alarmed. At the time, Russwurm had not made public his drift away from his anticolonizationist stance and toward joining the American Colonization Society’s Liberian colony.¹⁰⁴ Yet free blacks in New York and other parts of the North held such negative impressions of the ACS that Russwurm’s inclusion of pro-colonization views raised the suspicion that he had become sympathetic to the Colonization Society. By February 1829, Russwurm did indeed announce his support for the ACS, explaining to his readers that his decision to leave for Liberia had come after prolonged contemplation. Regardless, Russwurm was attacked viciously by his former anticolonization peers in public meetings and in letters to the newspaper.¹⁰⁵

One interpretation of Russwurm’s shift suggests that he came to believe that Liberia was becoming a place where African Americans could build political and social institutions that would challenge white assumptions about black inferiority. Others argue that Russwurm accepted ACS secretary Ralph Gurley’s offer to join him in his colonization mission because Russwurm believed that emancipation would never take place unless “blacks already freed could move to Liberia.” Historian Sandra Sandiford Young argues: “Russwurm’s drive to establish himself in the absence of business opportunities and his abhorrence of the violence perpetuated against free blacks were the likely catalysts for his decision.”¹⁰⁶

Regardless of the reason, some African Americans viewed Russwurm’s shift in sentiment as treasonous.¹⁰⁷ Before leaving the paper he did attempt to explain his change of heart through a series of editorials. In the first of these, on February 14, 1829, Russwurm announced, “As our former sentiments have always been in direct opposition to the plan of colonizing us on the coast of Africa: perhaps, so favourable an opportunity may not occur, for us to inform our readers, in an open and candid manner, that our views are materially altered.” By March, he explained that “The change in our views on colonization seems to be a ‘seven days wonder’ to many of our readers. But why, we do not perceive: like others, we are mortal like them, we are liable to change.”¹⁰⁸ Russwurm argued that Liberia offered African Americans fertile soil, liberty, and opportunities denied them in America. As for the trials and tribulations that black colonists had endured in Liberia, Russwurm viewed them as analogous to the trials and tribulations of the first American colonists in Roanoke and Plymouth. Even so, some African Americans were unconvinced.

Although the opportunity to castigate Russwurm presented itself, Samuel Cornish, Russwurm’s former coeditor, passed on the chance. When addressing “the sudden change of the late Editor of ‘The Freedom’s Journal,’ in respect to colonisation,” Cornish wrote that he would only say a few words about it “and I am done.” In brief, he acknowledged that “to me the subject is equally strange as to others,” and he placed it “with the other novelties of the day.”¹⁰⁹ Choosing not to attack Russwurm personally, Cornish ended his editorial by stating that

. . . my views, and the views of the intelligent of my brethren gennerally, are the same as ever in respect of colonisation; we believe it may benefit the few that emigrate, and survive, and as a missionary station, we consider it as a grand and glorious establishment, and shall do all in our power to promote its interests. . . . But as it respects three million that are now in the United States, and the eight millions that in twenty or twenty five years, will be in this country, we think it in no wise calculated, to meet their wants or ameliorate their condition.¹¹⁰

The American Colonization Society wasted little time publicizing Russwurm’s “Candid Acknowledgment of Error” in the African Repository and Colonial Journal, where an editorial explained that “The Editor of Freedom’s Journal, Mr. Ruswurm [sic], who has for several years, been decidedly and actively opposed to the Colonization Society, in his paper on the 14th of February, candidly and honourably confesses that his opinions in regard to our Institution, have become entirely changed.” There is little question that Russwurm was welcomed as an important ally for the ACS, and his support must have boosted the spirits of many colonizationists.¹¹¹

What led John Russwurm to shift from interest in emigration to Haiti and anticolonization beliefs, toward supporting the American Colonization Society and colonization? According to his editorial on February 21, 1829, Russwurm explained, “We have generally wrong ideas of the society and the members thereof. . . .” After reflecting on the successes of the ACS in southern manumissions, he came to believe that “The society have done much in favor of emancipation; for it is a fact, that there are many in the colony, who are indebted for that liberty which they now enjoy to the door which the establishment offers to liberal and humane slave holders to emancipate their slaves.” Regardless of how many ACS members held firm in their opposition to interfering “with the legal rights and obligations of slavery,” Russwurm observed that “as we well know, there are four or five hundred slaves now waiting [for want of funds] to be landed on the shores of Liberia, to become freemen.”¹¹²

When one considers the plight of African Americans in bondage, it should not be too surprising that some would support colonization as a condition of freedom. Russwurm’s account of blacks waiting for passage to Liberia, having never lived as free men and women in territories or states where slavery was illegal, failed to convince the vast majority of northerners that Africa generally, and Liberia specifically, offered more opportunity than Haiti or Canada. Thus, even while some black anticolonizationists recognized the benefit of forming a separate nation or colony outside of U.S. borders, they stood in firm opposition to an organization so closely aligned with slaveholders.

What complicates the matter is that Russwurm’s positions on slavery and emancipation differed from those of many white colonizationists. While some ACS members believed that colonization must never be allowed to threaten the existence of slavery, Russwurm and his white northern emancipationist associates viewed gradual emancipation as one of the most important reasons to support the ACS. Several notable antislavery advocates came to regard gradual emancipation and colonization as the only realistic way to promote their cause. So he concluded, “As the work of emancipation has thus commenced under the immediate auspices of the society, we cannot consider it out of the natural course of things to conclude that as the means and patronage of the society extend, this great and glorious work will also advance in the same ratio, until the blessed period come, so ardently desired by the Friends when the soil of this happy land shall not be watered by the tears of poor Afric’s sons and daughters.”¹¹³ Russwurm continued to argue in favor of colonization after he moved to Liberia and became the editor of the Liberia Herald. Besides, within the ACS there were people pushing its other members to move beyond their evasive stance on emancipation.¹¹⁴

John Russwurm’s transformation from advocate of Haiti to colonization to Liberia demonstrates the complexity of black emigrationist and colonizationist thought during the 1820s. Once Russwurm decided he was going to “quit America,” the next question centered on where he should go. Haitian emigration remained an option, yet, as Sandra Sandiford Young points out, “the collapse of the Haitian emigration venture and the severely limited opportunities for black economic advancement posed a serious dilemma” for Russwurm. Liberia, while tainted by the antiblack views held by many ACS members, still had potential. However, Russwurm was well aware that the decision to leave America for Liberia meant the loss of his esteem among black leaders in the United States. In the eyes of free blacks whose respect he had earned, he was abandoning not only America but also the community that had acknowledged his leadership. Soon, James Forten and others would claim that Russwurm’s support for colonization would add credence to the view of some white state officials that the colonization of free blacks in Liberia remained a viable and desirable plan.¹¹⁵

The African American–led Haitian emigration movement of the 1820s illustrates several crucial points about early anticolonization agitation. First, it pioneered a tradition of African American internationalism as a feature of the struggle for black rights in the United States and against African colonization. Second, it showed the ACS that those few thousand blacks who wanted to leave had shown a preference for Haiti over Liberia. Through this Haitian emigration movement, black Americans forged a transnational alliance with venerated abolitionists willing to lend support. For the next three decades, black Americans would travel to Britain for a variety of causes, seeking support in their attempt to demonstrate that African-descended people were as capable as Europeans of building a great nation. This nation-building project sought to undermine one of the chief justifications—that is, black inferiority—for maintaining slavery in the U.S. South.

The Haitian emigration movement also highlighted how far blacks would go to attain citizenship and live in a place where racial prejudice was not the central obstacle to personal advancement. While those free blacks who remained in America continued to fight against racial inequality, those who left for Haiti hoped they had finally found a way to transcend it. Over the next three decades, African American community leaders, activists, and journalists continued to regard the first black republic as a symbol of African-descended people’s potential, a symbol particularly potent for black Americans struggling against slavery and for equality in a nation that questioned their humanity and whether they had the prerequisite abilities ever to contribute to the nation equally with whites. Even for those with no intention of leaving for Haiti, the Caribbean nation continued to be a point of reference in their struggle for equal rights and against white supremacy in the United States.

Although African Americans and white antislavery advocates failed to initiate a widespread movement to Haiti, the movement did present an alternative to colonization in Africa. When recruiters spoke in churches and halls to discuss the benefits of emigration to Haiti, they used this as an opportunity to condemn Liberia and to argue that the American Colonization Society posed a serious threat to black advancement in the United States. In a way, the Haitian emigration movement spread anticolonization ideology due in large part to the advocacy of its chief promoters, men such as Prince Saunders.

However, the American Colonization Society would not give up in the face of this concerted challenge to their African project. When it came down to it, the ACS had the resources to provide a better alternative for black Americans who wanted to leave. John Russwurm remained the pro–Haitian emigration contingent’s greatest loss. Having spoken of Haiti in glorious terms, and having actually tried to raise funds for those who sought to leave for Haiti, John Russwurm chose instead to “quit America” and sail for Monrovia, Liberia, in the fall of 1829. This was obviously a major blow to anticolonizationists.

Just as the Haitian emigration movement died out, a new brand of antislavery activism took root throughout the North. By the end of 1820, the majority of the American Convention’s antislavery activist members had come to embrace colonization. Yet a new sort of antislavery advocate emerged, making the anticolonization sentiments widely held in black communities throughout the nation a cornerstone of their ideology. These men and women heeded the argument that ending slavery was not enough. As David Walker explained in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, those who battled against slavery needed also to combat the “wretchedness in consequence of the colonizing plan” if they hoped for justice and equality in the United States. Soon the man most associated with the “immediatist” strain of antislavery advocacy, William Lloyd Garrison, would work to organize a regional and national antislavery society that called for the immediate end to slavery, equality for black Americans, and the destruction of the American Colonization Society.¹¹⁶