What Hath God Wrought (39 page)

Robert Finley seems to have learned of colonization from Mercer and Cuffe but gave it his own spin. His version of colonization was more clearly antislavery than Mercer’s. Finley saw it as a way of solving both the slavery problem and the race problem, encouraging manumissions by individual masters and, in the long run, gradual emancipation by states. No longer would southern whites have to fear that emancipation would create a class of embittered freedpeople ripe for rebellion. This vision did capture the imagination of certain self-consciously enlightened moderates in the Upper (and occasionally even in the Lower) South. Some slaveholders were willing to promise emancipation to certain slaves at a future date on condition they then left for Africa. Such action, while partly altruistic, also helped ensure the good behavior of the slave and deterred escape. Slaves might even negotiate under these circumstances, agreeing to emigrate only if family members could accompany them.
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Finley’s followers operated colonization as a voluntary fund-raising charity, while Mercer’s treated the cause as a political lobby. The two groups cooperated within a nationwide American Colonization Society, headed at first by Associate Justice Bushrod Washington and later by ex-president Madison. (Ex-president Jefferson, though on record as supportive of colonization, remained aloof from the movement.)
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In the next few years, the legislatures of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and six northern states followed Virginia’s example in endorsing colonization; so did the national governing bodies of the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal denominations. The Maryland legislature was the most forthcoming with funds. In an age of great migrations, when many people responded to a wide range of problems by leaving home, plans to address the problems of race and slavery through migration commanded serious support down to the time of the Civil War and even afterwards.
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In 1819, Mercer succeeded in getting an appropriation from the Monroe administration to subsidize the ACS; more help would come later. The American Colonization Society operated, like the national bank and so many other institutions in this period, as a mixed public-private enterprise. The society decided to follow the example of the British philanthropist Granville Sharp. He had founded Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa in 1787 as a haven for blacks migrating from England and the empire, some of whom had originally been liberated by the British army during the American Revolution.
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In 1821–22, the U.S. Navy helped the ACS purchase from indigenous Africans land adjacent to Sierra Leone in order to found Liberia, with its capital of Monrovia named in the president’s honor. After Andrew Jackson became president, the federal government sharply reduced the financial support it had been providing.
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Still, by 1843, African Americans to the number of 4,291, most of them former slaves, had migrated to Liberia; over ten thousand more would come before the Civil War. Disease exacted a heavy toll and deterred others from coming. At first it was supposed Liberia might be a U.S. colony, but in 1847 the nation declared its independence. The settlers saw themselves as freedom-loving black Americans, enabled by migration to realize their dream of opportunity, seldom as Africans returning from exile. For over a century these settlers and their descendents would rule the indigenous African inhabitants through the Liberian True Whig Party.
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The minority of Colonization Society migrants who took an interest in African cultural roots were generally first-or second-generation African expatriates. Among these was Abdul Rahahman, born into a wealthy noble family in Timbo (now part of Guinea), captured in war as a young man, enslaved, and shipped across the ocean to New Orleans. Eventually Rahahman was recognized in a Natchez market by a white mariner who had known his family in Africa and had been aided by them. With the help of this man and the ACS, Rahahman’s cause attracted publicity and contributions. He finally secured his own liberation and that of eight family members. Rahahman returned to Africa in 1829 after an absence of forty-one years. When he died (sadly, soon afterwards) he donated his writings to the library of the Timbo school where he had been educated as a child.
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In the meantime, Paul Cuffe had died prematurely in 1817, and other black leaders sympathetic to his cause, such as AME Bishop Richard Allen, began to have second thoughts. Could not locations for black self-development be found less distant than Africa—such as Haiti or the American West? And if the talent and resources of the black community were drained off into emigration, would not the plight of the remaining African Americans worsen? While reaching out to whites, the colonization movement began to lose some of its early appeal among the free Negro elite. Colonization gathered support from an unstable coalition, and it was difficult to strike the right balance among the different aims of its supporters. The great majority of free African Americans firmly decided that their future lay in the United States. Still, historians have estimated that about 20 percent of free blacks remained favorably disposed to emigration during the years from 1817 to the Civil War. During the 1850s, the black nationalist Martin R. Delaney would advocate a “Back to Africa” program of his own.
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One of the most committed leaders in the American Colonization Society was Secretary of State Henry Clay. Although Clay operated his plantation of Ashland in Kentucky with the labor of fifty slaves, he consistently advocated gradual emancipation for his home state from 1799 until his death half a century later. Self-consciously moderate, Clay saw colonization as a responsible middle ground between abolitionism and the defense of slavery as a positive good. His enthusiasm for it was typical of his faith in active government and his optimism that solutions could always be found that offered something to everybody. Colonizationists like Clay took the existence of white racism as a given and tried to work around it to achieve emancipation. It would not be necessary to transport
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black Americans to Africa; Clay advocated colonization as a way of reducing the black population in America to the point where the whites would not feel threatened by the prospect of emancipation. Although the number of people transported to Liberia was very small, Clay insisted that colonization constituted a realistic program. He estimated in 1825 the annual increase in the slave population of the United States at fifty-two thousand. If each year fifty-two thousand healthy young slaves could be freed and persuaded to go to Liberia, this would keep the slave population static or slowly declining, at a time when the white population was doubling every generation. Eventually, Clay argued, the black percentage of the American population would fall to the point where southern whites would feel comfortable with the abolition of slavery. There was nothing fantastic about Clay’s numbers: The illegal international slave trade of the 1820s was still transporting more than fifty-nine thousand people a year across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, mostly to Brazil and Cuba, in spite of efforts by the Royal Navy to interdict it.
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President Adams never shared Clay’s enthusiasm for African colonization, but he allowed his secretary of state to promote it and continued the modest level of financial support commenced by the Monroe administration.

When Rufus King was about to leave the Senate to accept Adams’s appointment as minister to Britain in 1825, he laid out a program of African colonization to be funded by the government’s western land sales. It was similar to ideas advanced earlier by Jefferson and Madison. Nevertheless King’s proposal angered many southern politicians, for they had come to feel that the slavery question must be left to the southern white public alone. Radicals like George Troup of Georgia and William Smith of South Carolina used the issue to strengthen their local power base and inflame resentment against the Adams administration.
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Meanwhile, the Ohio state legislature had recently (in January 1824) passed an even more far-reaching resolution, proposing colonization linked with gradual emancipation, the whole package to be accomplished at federal expense. Within a year this proposal was seconded by the legislatures of seven other free states plus Delaware, the southern state with the fewest slaves. In reaction, six other southern state legislatures passed resolutions deploring outside interference with slavery.

Despite the hopes of King and others to use land sales for emancipation and colonization, the Great Migration to the West both undercut colonization plans and facilitated the expansion of slavery. The early white support for colonization in Virginia and the rest of the Upper South largely rested on a desire to shrink the black percentage of the population. But the export of people through the interstate slave trade could serve much the same purpose—the “diffusion” (as it was called) of the blacks so they would pose less of a danger in the case of rebellion. As it became clear that the New Southwest beyond the Appalachians would absorb them, masters found it more attractive to sell surplus workers out of state than to pay for their manumission and transport to Africa. African colonization was then revealed more clearly as a means of facilitating emancipation, and therefore became more alarming to states of the Deep South whose economy clearly rested on the exploitation of enslaved labor. These states had never embraced colonization; now, their politicians denounced it harshly. They feared involving the federal government in any solution to the problem of slavery, even on a voluntary basis, lest it move in more threatening directions later.
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African colonization constituted one of the most grandiose schemes for social engineering ever entertained in the United States. Improvers of this era did not think small. The colonization program provided a means for questioning the merits of slavery that remained discussible in many slave states until the 1850s. At least in the Upper South, the American Colonization Society could function along with temperance organizations, Sunday schools, and Bible societies, as part of the network of Christian reform movements.
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Despite considerable support, the colonization plan was ultimately killed by resistance from two opposite quarters: southern masters and African-Americans themselves.

In the event, many more black Americans in search of a better life would move to Canada than to Liberia. Slavery had been ended in the colonies of British North America by a series of executive, legislative, and judicial actions in the late eighteenth century. As a result, Canada attracted both fugitive slaves and free Negroes from the United States. There they joined the descendants of black Loyalists from the Revolution, African American refugees from the War of 1812, and Jamaican maroons transported to Nova Scotia. In one migration of 1829, a thousand free African Americans, after violent persecution in Cincinnati, obtained refuge in Canada. Although Canadian whites were seldom eager to welcome large numbers of black settlers, by 1860 the black population of Canada numbered about forty thousand.
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An escaped slave named Joseph Taper, who settled on a farm in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1839, wrote this letter back to a white Virginian, instructing him to pass it on to his former master:

V

On the evening of September 12, 1826, a stonecutter named William Morgan languished in the jail of Canandaigua, New York, where he was being held for an alleged two-dollar debt. Morgan had been subject to a series of persecutions by local authorities and mysterious mobs ever since he had undertaken to publish the secret rituals of Freemasonry. His home in nearby Batavia had been ransacked in search of the manuscript. An attempt to burn down the shop where his work awaited printing had been foiled. Two days earlier he and his printer had both been transported to this jail on trumped-up charges. The printer had been released by a magistrate, and Morgan expected he would be too as soon as his case was called. Suddenly, the prisoner learned that someone had paid his bail. Morgan found himself released into the custody of strangers who forced him into a waiting carriage. “Murder! Murder!” he cried out. The renegade former Mason was never again seen alive.

The investigation of Morgan’s disappearance was hampered at every turn by the cover-up of strategically placed Freemasons. Although his wife and dentist identified a partly decomposed body, three inquests did not make an official finding. Juries were packed with Masonic brothers; accused conspirators fled before testifying. Eventually the sheriff of Niagara County served thirty months for his central role in the kidnapping conspiracy, but otherwise prosecutors had little to show after twenty trials. Enough came to light, however, that the public felt outrage and the Masonic Order (whose leaders never denounced the crimes committed against Morgan or dissociated the order from the perpetrators) was badly discredited.
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