Against Wind and Tide. Ousmane K. Power-Greene
missionaries to spread Christianity to the “benighted” Africans, while redeeming free black Americans who had been forced unjustly from their “native land.” It would be in Africa, these colonizationists declared, that black Americans could create a home without racial discrimination, and build an equal society where political power and economic independence could finally be attained.
Although Massachusetts’s colonizationists placed their argument for colonization within a framework that some free blacks may have found acceptable, most black spokespersons in the North and Midwest could not help but point out that the majority of white colonizationists did not hold such views. In fact, Samuel Cornish, one of the first black newspaper editors, charged white colonizationists with using newspapers to spread negative views of blacks. He believed white colonizationists often highlighted black criminality, drunkenness, and disreputable behavior in an effort to convince elected officials that free blacks were a “public nuisance” and ought to be colonized in Liberia for the good of the nation.28
For black spokespersons to convince the broader society that black people, given equal opportunity, were worthy of equal citizenship rights, they needed to shift the conversation from deporting black people to Liberia to a discussion centered on how to provide equal opportunities to African Americans, who faced discrimination and antiblack policies at every turn. Here, then, I suggest that there were important links between anticolonization agitation, blacks’ quest for citizenship rights, and the social reform movements of the nineteenth century. Every penny donated to the ACS’s brand of “improvement” was one penny diverted from what free blacks and their white allies viewed as extraordinary and pressing concerns in the community, such as education and relief for the poor. The main question anticolonizationists were confronted with in this world of benevolence and charity was: why spend money—state or private—on improving or “elevating” the condition of free blacks in the United States when prejudice and racism stood as a barrier to their ultimate progress?
Furthermore, black anticolonizationists connected immediate abolitionism with moral reform and mass education because they believed that poor, uneducated blacks were most vulnerable to deportation to Liberia and that they provided fuel for antiblack discourse. When whites stopped focusing their attention on driving blacks from the nation, and began supporting reform and uplift efforts at home, they would see that black people were as capable as any other group of contributing positively to the country of their birth.29
Anticolonizationists “appealed to the heart” of their white detractors, holding firm to the belief that white Americans would one day abandon their racial animosity and confer social status, political power, and economic opportunities upon black people when they accepted that blacks had shed their blood and sweat to build the nation.30 Although this seems optimistic, perhaps even utopian (given the rise of King Cotton), free black “founders” like Richard Allen had witnessed emancipation within individual states in the North during the Revolutionary era, and they remained hopeful about the possibility of attaining citizenship and ending slavery during the first few decades of the 1800s. Nevertheless, black activists and intellectuals such as David Walker understood that this would not come easy. By writing pamphlets, essays, and letters to the editors of white newspapers, black leaders refused to be silenced, or to allow pro-colonization, antiblack articles or essays to go unanswered. This bustling print culture had the dual intention of proving black intellectual capabilities and arousing blacks, as Richard Newman explains, to “build a public protest movement to overwhelm white apathy” through mass action.31
Free African Americans were nearly as deathly afraid of mass deportation to Liberia as they were of being kidnapped and forced into slavery. Even while the prospect of slavery being reinstated in the North or spreading into the old Northwest seemed unlikely, the fact that well-positioned businessmen, clergy, and politicians met annually to discuss how to convince the federal government and wealthy elites to fund free black colonization in Liberia was disturbing, to say the least. Thus, the struggle against colonization could only be won if free blacks obtained recognition as legitimate, hence equal, citizens in the nation. Without citizenship, they believed, they would always be threatened by what they deemed to be a mass deportation movement akin to the Cherokee removal of the 1830s.32
This study argues that anticolonization discourse and activism actually reaffirmed African Americans’ faith in republican and democratic ideals, even in the face of colonizationists’ systematic assault against their quest for citizenship. It was through anticolonization agitation that the African American protest tradition found fertile soil, with free blacks in the North recognizing colonization as a threat to their ultimate goal.
This debate over the fate of free blacks originated during the Revolution. By the end of the war, white leaders in both the North and the South contemplated African American colonization as a feature of their emancipation plans. Since “whiteness” became one of the most important criteria of citizenship, many white reformers considered free blacks unqualified for such status.33 White public officials such as Thomas Jefferson claimed colonization was the most effective way to promote emancipation on a national level.34 Others claimed that individual manumission and colonization in territories outside U.S. borders, especially in Africa, would offer slaveholding whites a realistic way to end slavery gradually without the prospects of having to live amongst the newly emancipated ex-slaves who, they believed, constituted their greatest enemy.
When white state representatives met behind closed doors in Philadelphia in the late 1780s, African Americans asserted their American identity through petitions and letters to state legislatures, arguing that they had just as much right to live in the new nation as whites. These petitions claimed that slavery violated the principles of the Revolution, and their authors wondered how a nation proclaiming that all men were equal could continue to be built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. Through their words black petitioners hoped to demonstrate their humanity and point out the contradiction of a Christian nation enslaving fellow human beings.35
Slavery cast an ominous shadow over the new nation, pushing the Founding Fathers to contemplate ways to deal with the inherent contradiction of holding humans in bondage while charging British authorities with treating colonists like “slaves.” Although questions surrounding slavery dominated this discussion, those who met in Philadelphia struggled to come to a consensus about the status of free blacks within the new nation. What rights did free blacks have? How should individual states deal with these “public nuisances” who threatened the institution of slavery in the South and the social order in the North? Did free blacks, as slaveholding whites argued, jeopardize slavery by providing enslaved Africans with a group of coconspirators prepared to partake in a cataclysmic insurrection that would sink the newly formed republic? Such concerns were very much on the minds of those who, nearly thirty years later, organized the American Colonization Society.
Although most New England states began abolishing slavery within a decade after the Revolutionary War, the nationwide temperament of white supremacy remained boundless. Blacks in major cities, such as Boston, Providence, and New Haven, confronted equally oppressive and disturbing patterns of racial exclusion that functioned to perpetuate white power and to maintain pre-emancipation social, political, and economic relationships. While whites in New England sought to “disown slavery,” they used various practices and methods to force blacks into segregated communities, and, if possible, they hoped to push them out of the nation.
Colonization was the culmination of the “erasure” of people of color that commenced soon after the Revolution was won and emancipation began in northern states such as Massachusetts. Historian Joanne Pope Melish identifies this process as two-pronged. First, whites represented blacks in print media as “absurd” and “threatening” as a strategy to undermine their efforts to attain citizenship rights.36 Second, whites used episodic violence against black people to reinforce racial boundaries, and when individual blacks behaved in ways that whites viewed as unbecoming, they lashed out at them. Both collective violence and individual acts of terror were actually an expression of the type of white attitudes that underpinned colonization ideology, even if some colonizationists did not necessarily condone these actions. However, both those who espoused colonization ideology and members of the ACS agreed that Africa remained the best place for free black