The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (30 page)

Before the American Colonization Society was formed in 1816, evoking strong black protest, the connections between emigration, colonization, and genuine antislavery sentiment seemed much clearer. That could even be true when the proposed colonization involved some coercion. For example, in 1715 the Quaker
John Hepburn appended to his own pioneering abolitionist tract an anonymous article, “
Arguments Against Making Slaves of Men,” which countered almost every conceivable defense of human bondage. Yet this seemingly radical author argued that before being emancipated, all blacks should be given a
Christian education and then returned to Africa, where they could further the causes of religion and civilization. Slaves would have to choose between this form of liberation with free transportation or remain as slaves in America. The author drew on the example of white Christians who had been enslaved by Moors or Turks and who longed to be redeemed and returned to Europe. Significantly, even this early proposal included a suggestion of missionary work in Africa, an idea that would attract some black emigrationists and eventually become a central theme of the ACS.
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Clearly the idea of returning slaves to Africa had a very different meaning in the colonial period, when a majority of American slaves had been born in Africa and transported westward in the Middle
Passage.
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In 1773 a group of Massachusetts
slaves
petitioned the legislature, appealing not only for their natural right to freedom but for an opportunity to obtain funds to transport themselves to some part of the African coast where they would
found a “settlement.” African-born blacks in
Rhode Island expressed a desire to return to a more agreeable warm climate, free from racist oppression.
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Nevertheless, the parallel with rescuing
Christian slaves in Muslim regions was highly misleading, even apart from the fact that West Africans were not trying to redeem their enslaved brethren in America. As the petition of the Massachusetts slaves indicated, it was difficult to find a homelike destination in Africa. Even if an African-born slave managed to return to his or her native region, there could be a genuine danger of reenslavement. For this reason philanthropists also began to think in terms of founding slave-free settlements, which led
Granville Sharp and other British reformers to establish Sierra Leone in 1787 as an African refuge for blacks freed during the American Revolution, who had begun to crowd the streets of London. If African American slaves had actually been in a position similar to that of English slaves in Tripoli, there would have been no ambiguity about returning to a homeland. Or if, like slaves in ancient Rome, they had not been racially differentiated and could have become genuine citizens after being manumitted, there would have been no need to seek a homeland. But as whites even in colonial
Virginia made clear, slaves could not ordinarily be manumitted without having to leave the colony. As we have now repeatedly seen, emancipation thus involved powerful pressures for removal but no clear location to which to move—except a vague sense of Africa, symbolized by the problematic and at times lethal British colony of Sierra Leone.
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It is significant that New England, which witnessed the most important early antislavery agitation in the Revolutionary period, also became the site of the
first black interest in emigration to Africa. In the North,
Vermont in 1777 became the first government in the world to outlaw slavery by constitutional fiat, and to the south, the Congregationalist minister
Samuel Hopkins, a disciple of the slave-owning
Jonathan Edwards, became the father of an abolitionist theology that connected the
First Great Awakening of the 1740s with the
second great period of religious revivalism in the 1820s and beyond. It can be argued that Hopkins’s linkages of slavery with divine punishment and a new conception of
original sin and “disinterested benevolence” had
a profound influence on nineteenth-century abolitionists and even
Harriet Beecher Stowe. But it was in 1770, when he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, that Hopkins directly confronted the slave trade and a population of African-born blacks and began writing key abolitionist works. After attempting to establish a school for black missionary work in Africa, he continued to advocate free transport for freed slaves who wanted to return to Africa.
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Beginning in the 1780s, when African Americans started forming their first social organizations such as the
African Masonic Lodge in Boston, the
African Free Society in
Philadelphia, and (with the support of Hopkins) the
African Union Society in Newport, their response to colonization ideas fluctuated according to situation and changing conditions. This can be seen in the different response between blacks in
New England and Philadelphia to the arrival in 1786 of
William Thornton, the Quaker son of a wealthy Antiguan planter who had been educated at the University of Edinburgh before joining the London founders of
Sierra Leone in an effort to free and colonize slaves, including those he had inherited.
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After only a few weeks in America, Thornton claimed that he had found two thousand freedmen ready to go to Africa. It was especially in Newport and Boston that African-born blacks expressed an interest in returning to “ancestral lands,” though the Boston group wrote that they much preferred to charter a vessel of their own. Philadelphia’s blacks gave Thornton a much cooler reception, despite his glowing description of Sierra Leone. Later communications between Philadelphia’s African Free Society (AFS) and the Newport group suggested that the latter believed in a divine mission to evangelize Africa and that blacks in Newport and Boston felt they were “strangers and outcasts in a strange land, attended with many disadvantages and evils which are likely to continue on us and our children, while we and they live in this country.” In contrast, members of the AFS had all been born in America and were convinced that some whites were dedicated to improving the condition of blacks.
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Through the 1790s and early nineteenth century, Sierra Leone became a model for various black and white discussions of
emigration, though there were also numerous negative reports of terrible voyages, emigrants being stranded in ships at port, nearby slave trading, and conflict with natives. Various plans also failed as a result of lack of funding, bureaucratic obstacles, and uneven black support. But then
in 1811,
Paul
Cuffe, the famous seafaring black captain and probably the wealthiest black in the country, made his first trip to Sierra Leone and was much taken with the idea of establishing a small African American settlement (though the British administrators told him he would need more official backing from America or Britain, which he did his best to seek).

Cuffe was the son of an African-born father and Wampanoag Indian mother. His father, who died when Paul was thirteen, had been the slave of a Quaker master who had then apparently allowed him to work for his freedom.
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Cuffe himself became a devout Quaker and at age sixteen began working on a whaling ship and as a sailor, learning the arts of navigation and commerce before creating a shipping empire. Building his own ships, Cuffe traded with great success from his home in Massachusetts along the coast to the Carolinas, staffing his boats with black sailors. His Quaker connections and transatlantic travel made him the best-known African American of his time. His later activities were even covered by newspapers in most major cities. He corresponded with such figures as
Thomas Clarkson and
William Allen in Britain, and in London, after his first voyage to Sierra Leone, he won support for his ideas about black emigration from leaders of the important African Institution. Thanks to his network of influential friends, Cuffe’s colonization ideas even received strong personal support from President
James Madison and
Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, before being totally blocked by the outbreak of the War of 1812. Cuffe was the first black guest known to have been received by an American president, and Madison, addressed as “James” by Cuffe, in Quaker fashion, interviewed him with great cordiality.
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It should be stressed that Cuffe was not interested in finding a refuge for the black poor or in a mass migration to Africa. He hoped to recruit a small number of men of some property whose good character and sobriety would ensure a commercial settlement in Africa that would bring in profits, serve as a model, and enhance the image of all persons of African descent. No less important, the kind of economic development Cuffe had in mind would help obviate the need for the slave trade and create a black society free from both slavery and racial prejudice. Ironically, although Cuffe had a strong desire to join a settlement in Sierra Leone, his Pequot wife refused to leave the land of her ancestors.
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With the end of the War of 1812, Cuffe finally transported thirty-eight
carefully selected
black colonists to Africa, landing in
Sierra Leone on February 3, 1816. While not greeted as warmly as he expected, Cuffe remained highly optimistic over the future prospects of his settlers. Most of all, his timing coincided with and helped nourish an immense upsurge of interest in colonization, epitomized by the founding of the American Colonization Society in December 1816 by a group that included antislavery clergy, missionaries, and slaveholders intent on exporting as many
free blacks as possible. But then Cuffe’s health suddenly deteriorated and he died on September 7, 1817, at age fifty-eight.
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Largely as a result of the gradual but total slave emancipation in the North, the free black population increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century, an event that stimulated white racism on all levels.
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Despite the patriotic praise given to black
Philadelphians for their assistance against the British in the War of 1812, race relations deteriorated rapidly after the war. Expressions of Negrophobia became commonplace in print and on the street, and in Philadelphia, even Bishop
Richard Allen became the victim of a
kidnapper who, as was the custom, swore that he had recently purchased Allen as a slave, until Allen was able to call witnesses to testify about his identity.
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This virulent racism aroused new interest in emigration proposals—at least among black leaders like Allen and Philadelphia’s wealthy sailmaker and inventor, James Forten. Forten asserted many times that he saw no future for blacks “until they come out from amongst the white people.”
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By 1816, Paul Cuffe had established close ties with Forten and with the eminent black ministers Richard Allen and
Absalom Jones, who assured him there was strong support for colonization in Philadelphia.
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When Cuffe corresponded with the white missionary
Samuel Mills and
Robert Finley (the Presbyterian minister who played the leading role in conceptualizing and founding the
ACS), he urged them to make use of black organizations, such as the African Institutions he had helped establish in the Northern cities. He also warned Finley that the
Cape of Good Hope would be far more suitable than Sierra Leone for a massive resettlement of blacks. But, like Cuffe, Mills
and Finley also soon died (Mills had rushed to Cuffe’s bedside after learning he was ill, and after Cuffe’s death, took off on an ACS trip to Sierra Leone, where he contracted a disease that killed him on his return). This loss of three key figures destroyed important potential connections between black leaders and the more benevolent-minded leaders of the ACS.
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Because
James Forten (1766–1842) became such a central figure in the history of black opposition to colonization—as we will see, he played an important role in converting and then financially supporting
William Lloyd Garrison and thus in launching the radical biracial abolitionism of the 1830s and beyond—a bit more should be said about his background. Born free in Philadelphia, he attended the
Quaker African School run by the pioneer abolitionist
Anthony Benezet, but after his father died, he left school at age nine in order to work full-time. After the Revolution, when for a time he was a prisoner of the British, Forten was apprenticed as a sailmaker and invented a device to handle ship sails. That breakthrough helped him succeed in a major way when he started his own sail making company and became one of the wealthiest blacks in the country. Forten married
Charlotte Vandine, and they raised a large family devoted to abolitionism, philanthropy, temperance, and women’s rights. But in January 1817, Forten assured Robert Finley that even his own spectacular success could not overcome the oppression of American racism: “observing that neither riches nor education could put them [blacks] on a level with the whites, and the more wealthy and the better informed any of them became, the more wretched they were made; for they felt their degradation more acutely.
He
[Forten] gave it as his decided opinion that Africa was the proper place for a colony.”
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