American Colonization Society

After the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, the growth and export of cotton became a highly profitable business. Central to the business was the setting up of plantations, staffed by enslaved laborers. Due to the increased demand, imports of African slaves grew until legal importation was barred in 1808, after which time Maryland and Virginia openly bred slaves, "producing" children for sale "South", through brokers such as Franklin and Armfield, to plantation owners. This resulted in the forcible relocation of about one million enslaved people to the Deep South. The Africans and African Americans became well established and had children, and the total number of the enslaved reached four million by the mid-19th century.[9]

Due in part to manumission efforts sparked by revolutionary ideals, Protestant preachers, and the abolitionist movement, there was an expansion in the number of free blacks, many of them born free. Even in the North, where slavery was being abolished, discrimination against free blacks was rampant and often legal. Few states extended citizenship rights to free blacks prior to the 1860s and the Federal government, largely controlled by Slave Power, never showed any inclination to challenge the racial status quo. Even in the North, free blacks were often seen as unwelcome immigrants, taking jobs away because they would work for cheap.[10]

Some slave owners decided to support emigration following an aborted slave rebellion headed by Gabriel Prosser in 1800, and a rapid increase in the number of free African Americans in the United States in the first two decades after the Revolutionary War, which they perceived as threatening. Although the ratio of whites to blacks overall was 4:1 between 1790 and 1800, in some Southern counties blacks were the majority. Slaveholders feared that free blacks destabilized their slave society and created a political threat. From 1790 to 1800, the number of free blacks increased from 59,467 to 108,398, and by 1810 there were 186,446 free blacks.[11]

In 1786, a British organization, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, launched its efforts to establish the Sierra Leone Province of Freedom, a colony in West Africa for London's "black poor." This enterprise gained the support of the British government,[12] which also offered relocation to Black Loyalists who had been resettled in Nova Scotia, where they were subject to harsh weather and discrimination from some white Nova Scotians.[13][14] Jamaica maroons were also deported to the colony,[15] alongside former slaves freed by the Royal Navy after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1807.[16][17]

Drawing of Paul Cuffe (1812)

Paul Cuffe or Cuffee (1759–1817) was a successful Quaker ship owner and activist in Boston. His parents were of Ashanti (African) and Wampanoag (Native American) heritage. He advocated settling freed American slaves in Africa and gained support from the British government, free Black leaders in the United States, and members of Congress to take emigrants to the British colony of Sierra Leone.[18] In 1815, he financed a trip himself. The following year, Cuffe took 38 American blacks to Freetown, Sierra Leone.[19] He died in 1817 before undertaking other voyages. Cuffe laid the groundwork for the American Colonization Society.[20]

The ACS had its origins in 1816, when Charles Fenton Mercer, a Federalist member of the Virginia General Assembly, discovered accounts of earlier legislative debates on black colonization in the wake of Gabriel Prosser's rebellion. Mercer pushed the state to support the idea. One of his political contacts in Washington City, John Caldwell, in turn contacted the Reverend Robert Finley, his brother-in-law and a Presbyterian minister, who endorsed the plan.[22]

John Randolph

Henry Clay

Richard Bland Lee

Bushrod Washington

Four early organizers of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States.[23][10][24][25]

On December 21, 1816, the society was officially established at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C. Among the Society's supporters were Charles Fenton Mercer (from Virginia), Henry Clay (Kentucky), John Randolph (Virginia), Richard Bland Lee (Virginia), and Bushrod Washington (Virginia).[10][23][24][25][26] Slaveholders in the Virginia Piedmont region in the 1820s and 1830s comprised many of its most prominent members; slave-owning United States presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison were among its supporters. Madison served as the Society's president in the early 1830s.[27]

At the inaugural meeting of the Society, Reverend Finley suggested that a colony be established in Africa to take free people of color, most of whom had been born free, away from the United States. Finley meant to colonize "(with their consent) the free people of color residing in our country, in Africa, or such other place as Congress may deem most expedient". The organization established branches throughout the United States, mostly in Southern states. It was instrumental in establishing the colony of Liberia.[28]

The ACS was founded by groups otherwise opposed to each other on the issue of slavery. Slaveholders, such as those in the Maryland branch and elsewhere, believed that so-called repatriation was a way to remove free blacks from slave societies and avoid slave rebellions.[10][lower-alpha 1] Free blacks, many of whom had been in the United States for generations, also encouraged and assisted slaves to escape, and depressing their value. ("Every attempt by the South to aid the Colonization Society, to send free colored people to Africa, enhances the value of the slave left on the soil."[30]^: 51) The Society appeared to hold contradictory ideas: free blacks should be removed because they could not benefit America; on the other hand, free blacks would prosper and thrive under their own leadership in another land.[31][lower-alpha 2]

On the other hand, a coalition made up mostly of evangelicals, Quakers, philanthropists, and abolitionists supported abolition of slavery.[10][29] They wanted slaves to be free and believed blacks would face better chances for freedom in Africa than in the United States, since they were not welcome in the South or North.[10][29][lower-alpha 3] The two opposed groups found common ground in support of what they called "repatriation".[10]

The presidents of the ACS tended to be Southerners. The first president was Bushrod Washington, the nephew of U.S. President George Washington and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.[25][37] From 1836 to 1849 the statesman Henry Clay of Kentucky, a planter and slaveholder, was ACS president. John H. B. Latrobe served as president of the ACS from 1853 until his death in 1891.[38]

The colonization project, which had multiple American Colonization Society chapters in every state, had three goals. One was to provide a place for former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants to live, where they would be free and not subject to racism. Another goal was to ensure that the colony had what it needed to succeed, such as fertile soil to grow crops.[39] A third goal was to suppress attempts to engage in the Atlantic slave trade, such as by monitoring ship traffic on the coast.[39] Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher proposed another goal: the Christianization of Africa.[40][lower-alpha 4]

Membership certificate of Rev. Samuel Rose Ely, dated March 1840. Henry Clay's signature as president of the Society is visible at the bottom.

The Society raised money by selling memberships.[41] The Society's members pressured Congress and the President for support. In 1819, they received $100,000 from Congress, and on February 6, 1820, the first ship, the Elizabeth, sailed from New York for West Africa with three white ACS agents and 88 African-American emigrants aboard.[42] The approaches for selecting people and funding travel to Africa varied by state.[43]

From the beginning, "the majority of black Americans regarded the Society [with] enormous disdain",[47]^: 143 a "fixed hatred".[7] Black activist James Forten immediately rejected the ACS, writing in 1817 that "we have no wish to separate from our present homes for any purpose whatever".[48] As soon as they heard about it, 3,000 blacks packed a church in Philadelphia, "the bellwether city for free blacks," and "bitterly and unanimously" denounced it.[1]^: 261

Now—after the Colonization Society has been formed without the consent of the colored people[,] after the enterprise has been violently pushed, against their reiterated protests, tor seventeen years—after its friends acknowledged that coercion has been used in getting away its victims—and so long as they would persuade us that this is not the native country of colored Americans; and that we ought not to let them remain here—what is it better than gross mockery to talk about consent?[7]

Frederick Douglass condemned colonization: "Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here."[49] Martin Delany, who believed that Black Americans deserved "a new country, a new beginning", called Liberia a "miserable mockery" of an independent republic, a "racist scheme of the ACS to rid the United States of free blacks." He proposed instead Central and South America as "the ultimate destination and future home of the colored race on this continent" (see Linconia).[50] A recent (2014) writer on Connecticut African Americans summarizes the attitude amongst them:[51]

African Americans viewed colonization as a means of defrauding them of the rights of citizenship and a way of tightening the grip of slavery. ...The tragedy was that African Americans began to view their ancestral home with disdain. They dropped the use of "African" in names of their organizations...and used instead [of African American] "The Colored American."

While claiming to aid African Americans, in some cases, to stimulate emigration, it made conditions for them worse. For example, "the Society assumed the task of resuscitating the Ohio Black Codes of 1804 and 1807. ...Between 1,000 and 1,200 free blacks were forced from Cincinnati."[1]^: 262 A meeting was held in Cincinnati on January 17, 1832, to discuss colonization, which resulted in a series of resolutions. First, they had a right to freedom and equality. They felt honor-bound to protect the country, the "land of their birth", and the Constitution. They were not familiar with Africa, and should have the right to make their own decisions about where they lived. They recommended that if black people wish to leave the United States, they consider Canada or Mexico, where they would have civil rights and a climate that is similar to what they are accustomed to. The United States was large enough to accommodate a colony, and would be much cheaper to implement. They question the motives of ACS members who cite Christianity as a reason for removing blacks from America. Since there were no attempts to improve the conditions of black people who lived in the United States, it is unlikely that white people would watch out for their interests thousands of miles away.[52]

William Lloyd Garrison began publication of his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, followed in 1832 by his Thoughts on African Colonization. According to President Lincoln, it was “the logic and moral power of Garrison and the antislavery people of the country” that put emancipation on the country’s political agenda.[53] Garrison himself joined it in good faith."[54]^: 63 All the important white future abolitionists supported the Society: besides Garrison, Gerrit Smith, the Tappans, and many others, as can be seen in the pages of the Society's magazine, the African Repository. Garrison objected to the colonization scheme because rather than eliminating slavery, its key goal, as he saw it, was to remove free black people from America, thereby avoiding slave rebellions. Besides not improving the lot of enslaved Africans, the colonization had made enemies of native people of Africa. Both he and Gerrit Smith were horrified when they learned that alcohol was being sold in Liberia.[55]^{: 178–179}[56]^: 230[2]^: 351 He questioned the wisdom of sending African Americans, along with white missionaries and agents, to such an unhealthy place. In addition, it meant that fewer slaves achieved their freedom: "it hinders the manumission of slaves by throwing their emancipation upon its own scheme, which in fifteen years has occasioned the manumission of less than four hundred slaves, while before its existence and operations during a less time thousands were set free."[57]

In the second number of The Liberator, Garrison reprinted this commentary from the Boston Statesman:[58]

We were, however, rather surprised to see the proposal of sending the free negroes to Africa as returning them to their native land. It would be as well at least to talk of sending these reverend gentlemen back to England as their native land. The negro is just as much a native here as are these reverend gentlemen themselves.—Here the negro was born, here bred, here are his earliest and pleasantest associations—here is all that binds him to earth and makes life valuable. If the welfare of the negro, and not a new scheme for begging, be really the object in view, we desire the reverend gentlemen to step forward and vindicate the rights of the negroes trampled upon by their brethren in Park Street. If they would really promote the happiness of the negro, let their efforts be directed to raise the oppressed black in the scale of moral elevation here. Let them admit him to more rights in the social world;—but unless they desire to be laughed at by all sincere and thinking men, they had better abandon the Quixotic plan of colonizing the Southern negroes at the cost of the North, until we can free our own borders from poverty, ignorance and distress.

The philanthropist and public intellectual Gerrit Smith, the wealthiest man in New York State, had been "among the most munificent patrons of this Society," as put by Society Vice-President Henry Clay.[59]

This support changed to furious and bitter rejection when he realized, in the early 1830s, that the society was "quite as much an Anti-Abolition, as Colonization Society".[60] "This Colonization Society had, by an invisible process, half conscious, half unconscious, been transformed into a serviceable organ and member of the Slave Power." It was "an extreme case of sham reform".[54]^: 63 In November 1835, he sent the Society a letter with a check, to conclude his existing commitments, and said there would not be any more from him, because:

The Society is now, and has been for some time, far more interested in the question of slavery, than in the work of Colonization—in the demolition of the Anti-Slavery Society, than in the building up of its Colony. I need not go beyond the matter and spirit of the last few numbers of its periodical for the justification of this remark. Were a stranger to form his opinion by these numbers, it would be, that the Society issuing them was quite as much an Anti-Abolition, as Colonization Society. ...It has come to this, however, that a member of the Colonization Society cannot advocate the deliverance of his enslaved fellow men, without subjecting himself to such charges of inconsistency, as the public prints abundantly cast on me, for being at the same time a member of that Society and an Abolitionist. ...Since the late alarming attacks, in the persons of its members, on the right of discussion, (and astonishing as it is, some of the suggestions for invading this right are impliedly countenanced in the African Repository,) I have looked to it, as being also the rallying point of the friends of this right. To that Society yours is hostile.[60]

Nathaniel Paul

In the meeting of forming British African Colonization Society held in London in July 1833, Nathaniel Paul, an abolitionist in support of William Lloyd Garrison's "Thoughts on African Colonization," argued that a significant number of opponents, including Black Americans in prominent cities of America, found inequality towards the Society because according to him, they were the ones who had remarkably contributed and fought to protect this country as their home through a historical period of generations.[61] However, this Society was then trying to forcefully send them back to their ancestors' lands as, by that time, they were considered at risk for rebellion in the name of emancipation. In contrast, the new Europeans who had not been part of this country in such events were instead welcomed to settle here.[61]  

• Birney, James Gillespie (1838). Letter on colonization : addressed to the Rev. Thornton J. Mills, corresponding secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society. First published in 1834. New-York: American Anti-Slavery Society.