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This chapter presents the story of the first expedition sent to Africa by the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the efforts of two of Paul Cuffe's close friends and supporters — John Kizell, a Nova Scotian leader of the Friendly Society that Cuffe had helped to found in Freetown, and Daniel Coker, one of the founders of the AME and Cuffe's point man in Baltimore — to take control of the fledgling colony away from the white officials sent out by the Colonization Society. Kizell, who served as the local host of the venture, and Coker, who was the leader of the settlers, sought to found a black “African” colony on Sherbro Island (off the coast of southern Sierra Leone) that might develop into a commercial center of the sort that Cuffe envisioned. The settlement at Sherbro disintegrated in a welter of recriminations, as Coker and Kizell sought to blame each other for its failures and to retain favor with leaders of the Colonization Society in the United States. Coker largely won the battle of reputations, but both moved back to Sierra Leone, and neither played any further role in the ACS's efforts in Africa. As they withdrew, the vision of an African nation that had grown out of early black authors' assertions of African identities and that had flowered in Paul Cuffe's nationalist project began to lose its grip on black activists within the United States and on black emigrants moving to the American colony that was soon founded in Liberia.

This chapter examines the rebirth of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the colonization movement in America during the period 1840–1854. As the 1850s approached, colonization gathered strength and whites united across class lines in support of the ACS project, turning colonizationism into a moderate position in a nation divided over slavery. The ACS gained new adherents in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, thus giving the organization a new lease of life. This chapter considers how colonization ideology was utilized by pro-colonization forces, particularly in the Midwest and West, to undermine the ability of African Americans to gain citizenship status in the newly formed states. It also shows how anticolonization emerged as a crucial factor in free blacks' struggle against white racist policy.

This chapter examines the anticolonization movement in Britain and how it helped black abolitionists in their fight to end slavery in the United States. During the 1830s and 1840s, the American Colonization Society (ACS) sought financial support for their African colonization project. In response to ACS agents courting British antislavery leaders and presenting colonization as if it were popular among blacks in America, black abolitionists like Nathaniel Paul joined forces with William Lloyd Garrison to challenge Elliot Cresson and other colonizationist agents to procure philanthropic dollars and win public sympathy. This chapter considers how Garrison, Paul, and other abolitionists engaged ACS leaders in public debate in an effort to convince the British public that African Americans had no intention of emigrating to Liberia.

This chapter examines the Haitian emigration movement during the period 1817–1830 and its impact on the American Colonization Society (ACS) and African colonization more generally. During the 1820s, more than 8,000 black Americans left the United States and headed for Haiti. The belief that Haiti represented the best of African potential encouraged some free blacks in the North to join Haitian emigration societies as a sign of solidarity, while others emigrated there. This upsurge in pro-emigration sentiment in the black community was primarily in response to the rise of the ACS and its African colonization project. This chapter discusses how several of the most prominent black Americans of the era utilized a transnational network of social reformers to challenge the ACS while endorsing Haitian emigration. It also considers the rhetoric of nationalism used by black leaders as a discourse in which the formation of an African diasporic identity through nation building in Haiti was intertwined with the struggle against white supremacy in America and abroad.

This chapter explores a number of myths and misconceptions surrounding the colonization movement to reassess the role of the movement in early U.S. history. It focuses particularly on the arguments, first made by immediate abolitionists but later supported by many historians, that the movement was a proslavery effort as well as an effort to ensure that the United States would be a “white man’s country.” Guyatt argues that these familiar approaches code colonization as racist in its intentions and proslavery in its effects and have thus prevented us from confronting the awkward truth that many supporters of colonization were indeed opposed to both slavery and prejudice. To reconcile this, he explores the motives and tactics of the American Colonization Society (ACS), looking beyond the society and towards the full range of colonization thinking in the early United States.

This chapter tells the story of Elliott Cresson, a staunch proponent of the colonization movement. Cresson began working for the American Colonization Society (ACS) diligently in 1829 and continued his efforts until he died in 1854, but the high point of his involvement came in the 1830s. He joined the movement because he saw the scheme as the only realistic way to end slavery in the United States. The image of fellow human beings waiting in chains and groaning under the lash galvanized Cresson and his colleagues into action, and this group of philanthropists became Pennsylvania's most diehard colonizationists. Thanks to their efforts the ACS went from sending mostly free blacks to Liberia to sending mainly manumitted slaves. This change was due largely to Cresson's determination that colonization was founded on the humanitarian principles of antislavery and black uplift.

This chapter focuses on the missionary ideas shared by those from New England who supported the African recolonization movement. It features Leonard Bacon and Lydia Sigourney and traces their motives for supporting the movement. It examines the belief that Chrsitians had a responsibility to civilize and evangelize the world, cultivating sympathy for others, and fighting slavery. According to the author, New England colonizationists saw the American Colonization Society’s efforts as an important part of a broader missionary movement.

The rise of the American Colonization Society represented a sweeping shift from the reform program of the first abolition movement. For first movement abolitionists, slavery created a corrupted societal environment that degraded blacks and blinded whites to the inherent equality of African Americans. The first movement abolitionist agenda was premised on overturning this corrupted environment, caused by racial slavery. According to colonzationists, however, the problem facing antislavery advocates was not slavery itself but race. As colonizationists saw it, an unalterable racial divide between white and black Americans created a fixed societal environment of black inferiority in which prejudice was unconquerable. The reality of an unchangeable white prejudice made freedom a mockery in the North and an impossibility in the South, as long as African Americans remained within the nation's borders. Colonizationists turned their backs on the reformers who came before them by arguing that slavery could not be abolished through black incorporation. Unless those of African descent were removed from American society, colonizationists insisted, emancipation constituted a delusional hope.

Ericson traces the efforts of the American Colonization Society to gain the financial support of the U.S. government and the public-private partnership that ensued. He maintains that this partnership was not only one of the first of its kind on the federal level, but that it was also the most enduring prior to the Civil War. He concludes that without federal support, the society probably would never have founded Liberia and that the support was crucial to the colony’s survival.

This chapter examines how emigration and colonization converged in Frederick Douglass's battle with Martin Delany and those “black nationalists” who argued for the creation of a black American homeland in Africa. It explores black leaders' positions on emigrationism in view of the American Colonization Society's colonization project. It also considers Douglass's intentional conflation of colonization and emigration as a political strategy in order to advance his anticolonization agenda. In particular, it analyzes Douglass's rejection of the idea that a widespread emigration movement would be beneficial to the majority of blacks, as well as his argument that the pro-emigration rhetoric espoused by men like Delany encouraged colonizationists' view that African Americans desired to leave the United States rather than lobby for inclusion.

The emergence of colonization as a potential antislavery tool drove a wedge between competing factions among abolition societies. a long and at times divisive debate that fractured the abolition societies and signaled the rising influence of colonization among white reformers as an answer to ending slavery. With their claims to American citizenship under direct threat from the ideology of the American Colonization Society, black abolitionists more readily distinguished colonization from emancipation. People of color and the abolition societies of the Mid-Atlantic had jointly discredited the ACS soon after its founding. But by the beginning of the 1830s, it was black activists who had become the foremost champions of first movement abolitionist values, advancing the cause of combating slavery by overturning white prejudice and improving the condition of African Americans within the United States.

This chapter tells the story of former Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) member Mathew Carey. Carey was a Philadelphia printer and Catholic exile from Ireland who opposed bondage and oppression of any class of people. At the same time, however, he was an ardent supporter of the political aspects of colonization and was enticed by the movement's promise that it would be a modernizing force for the young republic. The story of his life and of his work for the American Colonization Society (ACS) illustrates the political side of the movement. For Carey colonization was a way to ride the nation of an outdated system of production. It would also encourage cultural uniformity and solidify the bonds of interest between farmers, merchants, and manufacturers. His writings offer a clear picture of the America he envisioned and the role of colonization in it.

In late 1852, twenty-four year old Church Vaughan boarded a ship bound for Liberia. The vessel had been chartered by the American Colonization Society, an organization founded by white philanthropists and politicians to send African Americans “back” to Africa. As this chapter details, the Society’s mission and efforts were fraught with racist condescension. Since its beginning, African Americans and their allies were repelled by the white supremacy inherent in the Society’s mission and its kowtowing to slaveholders, and relatively few enrolled in the emigration scheme. By the early 1850s, however, new developments pushed increasing numbers of African Americans, like Vaughan, to look toward the continent of their ancestors. As sectional divisions tore at the United States, southern politicians devised new laws to limit free black people’s mobility, inhibit their ability to make a living, and generally equate them with slaves. As Church reached adulthood, predatory officials threatened his family’s livelihood, while the old ties of patronage that had protected them in an earlier era disappeared. Even if emigration did offer a chance for a new life where black people governed themselves, it was a hard bargain to make. This chapter includes an account of some of Church Vaughan’s Liberia-bound shipmates, who chose to leave the United States only under terrible duress. Church Vaughan almost did not leave either.

This chapter examines the role of anticolonization ideology and activism within the abolitionist movement during the period 1830–1840. From the Mid-Atlantic to New England, African Americans aired their disapproval of the views of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and convinced white abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, that the ACS and its colonization project posed a major obstacle to the cause of ending slavery and to free blacks' struggle for citizenship. This chapter considers Garrison's efforts to undermine the ACS and how his newspaper, Liberator, became an important medium for African American abolitionists to strengthen their anticolonization position by expressing their own attitudes about slavery, racial prejudice, and colonization.

Nicholas Wood traces the effect of the Missouri Crisis on the American Colonization Society’s efforts to gain support from the federal government. Like Ericson, Wood highlights the desire of ACS leaders to gain government support, and he traces their initial success in that endeavour before examining how the relationship changed as a result of the situation in Missouri. According to Wood, the ACS program became increasingly controversial in the 1820s and 1830s, leading Congress to reject the society’s appeals for greater aid. He concludes that the Missouri Crisis played a large role in destroying the cross-sectional trust that would have been essential for a federal colonization program to pass.

Page calls for a new assessment of the American Colonization Society by shifting the focus from the often-discussed Early Republic and Antebellum years to the period of the U.S. Civil War. This period is important because it covers the time in which an essentially northern-managed society suffered an abrupt severance from its associates in the South while the federal government enacted emancipation, recognized Liberia as an independent nation, and finally officially endorsed colonization. The society’s efforts during the Civil War reveal a great deal about its leaders’ understanding of their mission as well as the government’s relationship with colonization.

After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the Court of Vice-Admiralty at Sierra Leone lost its place at the centre of the colonial economy. Former slaves released from the slave trade by the Court, and by its successor, the Courts of Mixed Commission, became the focus of intense attention from colonial officials and missionaries. Governor Charles MacCarthy, in conjunction with the Church Missionary Society, established a network of villages, the Liberated African Villages, scattered around the colony. The villages were the site of a sustained civilizing mission, which helped MacCarthy and other colonial officials to organise labour in the colony, to attract investment from Britain, and to expand Britain’s territory in West Africa. Under MacCarthy, British antislavery transformed into colonialism, as ‘captured Negroes’ became ‘Liberated Africans.’ The chapter also explores the relationship between Sierra Leone and the American colony of Liberia.

Chapter twenty-seven examines Hodge’s first article on the issue of slavery. Hodge remained largely consistent on his views of slavery throughout his life, and they are most clearly sent down in his 1836 Repertory article entitled “Slavery.” Hodge believed that if the Bible nowhere condemned slavery, then neither could the Presbyterian Church. For a time, he and others at Princeton were ardent supports of the American Colonization Society. Their more proslavery stances put them in conflict with the more progressive antislavery views of the New School.