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2. “One of the Wildest Projects Ever”: Abolitionists and the Anticolonizationist Impulse, 1830–1840

In February of 1833, Maria Stewart stood before a group of people gathered at the African Masonic Hall in Boston to condemn the ACS for its goal of “influencing us to go to Liberia.” Rather than donate money to fund black colonization in Liberia, these “real friends” of African Americans, Stewart urged, should use those funds “which they collect, in erecting a college to educate her injured ones in this land.” Stewart explained that the colonization movement was siphoning off funds to educate and care for free blacks in the North, while doing little to change the circumstances in this country that stifled black progress. “The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved land,” she argued, and then brought Africans to America, “made them bond-men and bond-women,” and now sought to “drive us to a strange land.” It is for this reason, as Stewart explained, that “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.”¹

This was not the first time Stewart lectured on colonization, marshaling various arguments that were common among anticolonizationists in the early 1830s. Through these lectures Stewart demonstrated her intellectual merit, poetic gift, and ability to analyze the contradictions she found central to colonization ideology, which she also had published in the Liberator. “I observed a piece in The Liberator a few months since,” she explained, “stating that the colonizationists had published a work respecting us, asserting that we were lazy and idle.” This was simply untrue, she explained. Even if there were some in Boston “who never were and never will be serviceable to society,” she asked, “have you not a similar class yourselves?”² If whites had been placed under the burden of racial prejudice and slavery, they too would struggle to display qualities associated with Christian virtue and social respectability. This was not about African depravity, Stewart explained; this was about education and uplift.³

From the Mid-Atlantic to New England, African Americans gathered in churches, halls, and public spaces to express their disapproval of the views of the ACS. In January 1831, for example, black leaders in New York City called a meeting in Prince Hall Mason’s Boyer Lodge (named after Jean-Pierre Boyer, the fourth president of Haiti) to express their outrage at the “proceedings of an association under the title, ‘New-York Colonization Society.’” Those in attendance condemned the organization for “vilifying us” and attempting to promulgate the notion that blacks represented a “difference of species.” Such notions were unfounded, they argued, because “Our structure and organization are the same, and not distinct from other men.” With this in mind, the group claimed to be “content to abide where we are,” rather than leave for Liberia as wards of the ACS. Although colonizationists attempted to convince the general public in the United States and Britain that racial distinctions presented an intractable barrier to free blacks seeking acceptance in American society, African Americans in New York asserted, “We do not believe that things will always continue the same,” arguing that the day would come when black Americans would be vindicated, and “when the rights of all shall be properly acknowledged and appreciated.”⁴

As the antislavery movement shifted toward immediate abolition, black American leaders convinced white abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, that colonization undermined both the cause of ending slavery and free blacks’ efforts to gain rights in the North. Most importantly, Stewart showed, colonization became linked to antiblack policies, race riots, and employment discrimination in the states where slavery had been outlawed. Unfortunately for black abolitionists and anticolonizationists, white abolitionists often shared the same racialist attitudes as those most hostile to the cause, and the movement to end slavery needed to be linked with a movement for black equality and citizenship in the North.⁵ For this reason African Americans who worked against slavery and colonization also struggled to destroy the pervasive view among whites that black Americans were inherently unequal.

By the 1830s, African Americans had argued for a decade that the American Colonization Society and its auxiliaries discredited, smeared, and undermined African Americans’ efforts to obtain equal rights and citizenship in America. For this reason the colonization movement became a central topic of discussion among blacks attending conventions and participating in newly formed antislavery societies and colored associations. This “new breed” of abolitionists had, as Richard Newman points out, “revolutionized” the tactics of the movement against slavery in America by 1830, and this pushed white reformers to act with a sense of immediacy toward ending slavery and overwhelming the American Colonization Society and its agents.⁶

Had it not been for free blacks such as William Watkins and David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison might have continued to hold colonization sympathies as well as his view that “immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable.”⁷ African Americans’ opinions about the American Colonization Society were widely known. Few expressions of black protest against colonization so influenced Garrison to take a different path more than the anticolonization ideas presented in David Walker’s infamous An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker had left for the North soon after Denmark Vesey’s plot in South Carolina in 1822, which made whites even warier about free African Americans’ presence in the slave South. Arriving in Boston in 1825, Walker became a member of an outspoken community of African Americans struggling against colonization.⁸ He joined Prince Hall’s well-known African Lodge No. 459, and participated in the formation of the first black American association, the Massachusetts General Colored Association. This network of black community leaders afforded him the opportunity to associate with many people involved in the Haitian emigration movement and other timely issues within the black community of Boston.

David Walker used his Appeal to rail against the colonization movement, displaying “a vehemence and outrage,” biographer Peter Hinks argues, “unprecedented among contemporary African American authors.”⁹ While one can only speculate about the degree to which Walker’s Appeal influenced the intellectual maturation of any one abolitionist, what we do know is that Garrison was deeply moved by it. In fact, in the summer of 1830, when Hezekiah Grice, a black community leader in Baltimore, met with William Lloyd Garrison to discuss the idea of a national black convention, Garrison seemed more interested in discussing the Appeal to Coloured Citizens. According to Grice, “Mr. Garrison took up a copy of Walker’s Appeal, and said, although it might be right, yet it was too early to have published such a book.”¹⁰

It may well be that Article IV of Walker’s Appeal, entitled “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Colonizing Plan,” is what persuaded Garrison to see the connection between colonization and antiblack violence in the North and the system of racial oppression that stifled free blacks and barred them from a life consistent with the American creed. At the outset of his section on colonization, Walker charted the origins of the ACS among the power brokers of the nation, noting the influential role of Henry Clay in promoting the colonization “scheme.” By citing the black community’s immediate and unequivocal rejection of the formation of the ACS, Walker placed this anticolonization sentiment within the framework of the black protest tradition. Likewise, Walker applauded the role of Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All in providing blacks with a forum for expressing their disapproval of colonization, a realm in which African Americans could demonstrate their understanding of the various dimensions of what he perceived as the ACS’s mass-deportation scheme.

Walker’s condemnation of colonization was grounded not only on the belief that black progress in the North depended on striking down colonization. He argued as well that the fate of Africans held in bondage in the South also depended on putting an end to colonization schemes. “Do they think to drive us from our country and homes,” he wondered, “after having enriched it with our blood and tears, and keep back millions of our dear brethren, sunk in the most barbarous wretchedness, to dig up gold and silver for them and their children?”¹¹ By connecting his plight with that of his southern brethren, Walker established one of the main underpinnings of anticolonization rhetoric: colonization would sever the bond between Africans enslaved and those free. Throughout the antebellum era, black leaders used such arguments to persuade audiences of the detriment of colonization, and this became central to black abolitionists’ anticolonizationism.

Like other African Americans writing against the ACS, Walker acknowledged that at least a few whites who supported colonization were “friends of the sons of Africa.” Nevertheless, he believed that those white reformers, “laboring for our salvation,” had been duped into “this plot” and needed to “see if the end which they [had] in view [would] be completely consummated by such a course of procedure.”¹² Walker expressed “with tenderness” that he “would not for the world injure their feelings,” but hoped that his words would lead them to realize that “the plot is not for the glory of God, but on the contrary the perpetuation of slavery in this country forever, unless something is immediately done.”¹³ Ultimately, like many other black leaders, he argued that “This country is as much ours as it is the whites’; whether they will admit it or not, they will see and believe it by and by.”¹⁴ With the completion of the Appeal, Walker challenged many white abolitionists to rethink gradual emancipation and colonization, which had been among the most common antislavery ideologies before the 1830s.

When Garrison did change his mind about colonization, he decided that his first step on the road toward convincing the nation to embrace “immediatism” was a thorough indictment of the American Colonization Society, colonization ideology, and Liberia. He would soon follow in Walker’s footsteps and complete his anticolonization treatise, Thoughts on African Colonization. Animated with Garrison’s penchant for polemics, the volume made American intellectual history by making blacks themselves central to the struggle, demonstrating black agency during a time when most whites believed they themselves knew what was in blacks’ best interest. Anticolonization became the foundation upon which “Garrisonism” was built. It was the “key transitional topic” for those who considered themselves disciples of Garrison, and who vowed to fight slavery.¹⁵

Even though Garrison’s New England Anti-Slavery Society canvased the Northeast with lectures calling for an immediate end to slavery, black Americans had been waging an intellectual battle on two fronts: one against slavery and the other against colonization. This led them to hold conventions during the first half of the 1830s to discuss the cause of freedom in ways that departed from the previous generation’s effort to “appeal to the heart” of white reformers, as well as gradualists who embraced colonization. As William Hamilton explained, “However pure the motives of some of the members of that society may be, yet the master spirits thereof are evil minded towards us. They have put on the garb of angels of light. Fold back their covering, and you have in full array those of darkness.”¹⁶

Historians have established that African American conventions in the early 1830s became a venue for free blacks to challenge white people’s declarations of racial supremacy.¹⁷ Like Freedom’s Journal, public conventions offered masterful oratorical performances crucial to demonstrating black American intellectual acumen and self-advocacy. Consequently, blacks used conventions as yet another public space in which to express their anticolonization views. Aware that they were “being watched,” free black convention-goers spoke with eloquence, intelligence, and passion in their attempt to counter colonizationists’ claims that black people lacked the prerequisite traits to warrant citizenship in the United States.¹⁸

From the inaugural Black Convention held in Philadelphia in September 1830, black Americans declared that these conventions could work to combat the “various ways and means [that] have been resorted to; among others, the African Colonization Society is the most prominent.”¹⁹ Even if some delegates believed that Canadian emigration, or emigration to Haiti, had the potential to aid those who had been ensnared in specific assaults on their livelihood, Liberian colonization, in their eyes, worked against race advancement and the destruction of slavery.²⁰ As would be the case at subsequent conventions, the resolutions at the inaugural convention made clear that free blacks did not doubt the “sincerity of many friends who are engaged in that cause,” but still affirmed their anticolonizationist stance.²¹

Nevertheless, blacks who gathered at these conventions were at times willing to listen to agents of the ACS, who sought to set things straight with free black male leaders who, in turn, seemed certain that colonization represented an evil only surpassed by slavery itself. In 1832, for example, ACS secretary Ralph Gurley attended the Second Annual National Black Convention in Philadelphia to convince African Americans that the ACS only sought to ameliorate the condition of free blacks who lived under an oppressive racial order in the United States. Black leaders “patiently listened” to Gurley, allowing him to speak “in behalf of the doings of said Society” so that those assembled could “arrive at truth” in a way that “seldom has been witnessed” during a meeting in which the majority had been decidedly against the ideas set forth by a speaker. Still, when Gurley finished his “eloquent arguments,” black leader John Vashon stood to denounce the American Colonization Society’s project, reminding delegates that the Colonization Society sought only to secure slavery by deporting free blacks to Africa. After both sides had had their turn, the delegates voted. A majority came out against the ACS, proclaiming that “the doctrines of said Society, are at enmity with the principles and precepts of religion, humanity and justice, and should be regarded by every man of color in these United States, as an evil of magnitude, unexcelled, and whose doctrines aim at the entire extinction of the free colored population and the riveting of Slavery.”²²

Such an unequivocal statement against colonization may have discouraged Gurley, but he did not blame black convention attendees. Instead he focused his contempt upon Garrison for “poisoning their minds with Anti-Colonizationist ideology.” Ever since Garrison had first published the Liberator in 1831, Gurley had regarded Garrison’s invective against the ACS as the root cause of the negative opinions of the ACS held in black communities in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. But Gurley actually had it backwards: black leaders in Baltimore had first pushed Garrison to renounce the colonization ideology espoused by the ACS and fight against slavery and colonization. Garrison had himself been “poisoned” by black anticolonization.

Scholars for years have pointed out that Garrison’s popularity among black leaders was directly related to his stance on colonization. This popularity translated into subscriptions to Garrison’s Liberator newspaper, which by the early 1830s supplanted Freedom’s Journal as the most important newspaper for the cause of freedom in the North. While some blacks pooled their money for subscriptions, African American supporters with wealth and prestige sent large donations to fund the paper. James Forten, for example, paid for twenty-seven subscriptions and sent Garrison many words of encouragement. In fact, scholars note that white subscribers only comprised one-fourth of the Liberator’s readers, and Garrison actually ceased looking toward the white community for support. “Our white people are shy of the paper,” Garrison bemoaned in a letter to Simeon Jocelyn. “This ill success,” he explained, “is partly owing to colonization influence, which is directly and actively opposed to the Liberator.”²³

It is very likely that Garrison was correct about Colonization Society members’ disdain for him, his paper, and the ideas he so freely shared with any audience that would invite him to speak. In fact, in issue after issue, the Liberator published anticolonization letters and essays by black people attacking the American Colonization Society, its local auxiliaries, and the principles that underpinned colonization. Often these letters were in response to pro-colonization editorials, or had been published in other newspapers and reprinted in the Liberator so that Garrison could alert his readers to the ongoing debate over colonization appearing within the pages of mainstream papers.