The American colonization society

Contents

Page

Preface vii

Introduction 9

Chapter I. The Free Negro and the Slave 13

Chapter II. Organization, Purpose, Early Years ... 46 Chapter III. American Colonization and Garrisonian

Abolition 125

Chapter IV. Colonization and Emancipation 180

Chapter V. Colonization and the African Slave Trade 215

Preface

The following study was undertaken at the suggestion of Professor John H. Latane, of the Johns Hopkins University. It is a genuine pleasure for me to acknowledge and express my thanks for the interest he has shown at every stage of the work. As a result of his instruction, together with that of Professor J. M. Vincent, also of the Johns Hopkins University, I have come to appreciate, I hope, the importance of a critical evaluation of historical evidence. My thanks are also due those connected with the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, where most of the research work was done, and particularly to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose courtesy I shall not soon forget. Rev. M. L. Fearnow very kindly read a portion of the manuscript and suggested several changes.

E. L. F.

Introduction

It is just a century since a group of men of distinguished talents came together in the city of Washington for an interchange of views on the solution of the negro problem. The result was the organization of the American Colonization Society. From the time of its inception the Society appealed to men in every walk of life and from every section of the Union. The whole movement was in response to a national, not a sectional sentiment. From the day of its birth to the day when, by the proclamation of the president, the slaves in the South were set free, leaders of thought and framers of national policy looked to this organization to save them from what Jefferson had called the fire bell in the night.

Between the Missouri Compromise and John Brown's raid there were few platforms upon which representative men from New England, the West, and the upper South could stand and discuss dispassionately the negro problem. But upon the platform of the Colonizationists they could, and did, stand. On that platform stood Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and William H. Crawford of Georgia, Elisha Whittlesey of Ohio and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. There Elijah Paine, that distinguished farmer, jurist, and philanthropist of Vermont, could, in common with his neighbor, Roger M. Sherman of Connecticut, talk with the owner of three hundred slaves, William H. Fitzhugh of Virginia. There stood Francis Scott Key, Charles Fenton Mercer, John Marshall, and James Monroe. There the author of the Olive Branch made common cause with

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the editor of the North American Review. There James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was of the same mind as was Abraham Lincoln, who stood as the guardian of a national spirit which that time honored instrument had done so much to create.

The organization of the Methodist Church was rent in twain over the question of slavery; but Bishop Beverly Waugh, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was a Colonizationist in common with Bishop John C. Granberry, of the Southern Methodists ; and these made common cause with Bishop Clark of Rhode Island and Bishop Meade of Virginia, both of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Waldo of Massachusetts, and McDonogh of New Orleans, contributed many thousands of dollars for the cause. Presidents McLean of Princeton, Duer of Columbia, Day of Yale, Everett and Sparks of Harvard, were all Colonizationists. Richard Rush, John Eager Howard, Henry Rutgers, John Taylor of Caroline, General George Mason, General Walter Jones, Robert Ralston, Benjamin F. Butler of New York, John Tyler, Henry A. Wise, J. J. Crittenden, Abel P. Upshur, M. C. Perry, and Levi Lincoln, men who thought differently along many lines, all supported the colonization movement.

The decade, 1830-1840, witnessed the development of large areas of the Southwest, and with the economic change came a fundamental change in the point of view of the South toward slavery. Professor Dew's contribution in the "Pro-Slavery Argument" is indicative of a lamentable change that was coming over the mind and conscience of the South. If ever, during the nineteenth century, conditions in the United States called for the leadership of men of foresight and moderation to set forth convincingly the evils of the system that was getting its hold on the South, that time was 1831 and the ten years following. The Colonizationists, both Northern and Southern, attempted to provide just such men and just such leadership. It was with the secret cooperation of the American Colonization Society

INTRODUCTION I I

that Jesse Burton Harrison, a native of Virginia who was then living in New Orleans, contributed to the American Quarterly Review his "Review of the Slave Question," which was intended to counteract the undoubtedly great influence of Professor Dew's argument. Harrison appealed to the Southern States, and particularly Virginia, to throw off that greatest hindrance to economic development. What would have been the result if such a campaign as that begun by Harrison had been allowed to go on unobstructed for a decade or a generation it is not possible to say ; but that this was precisely an important part of the program of the Colonizationists will appear in the pages which follow.

To look upon the American Colonization Society as an organization whose success is to be measured solely by the number of shiploads of negroes taken to Africa is to misunderstand the whole movement. Any adequate estimate of the work of Colonizationists must take into account the effect of their program upon the preservation of national unity. And yet, measured concretely, the Colonization Society was a potent factor in securing the emancipation of slaves, thousands of them, and would have secured the liberation of thousands more, had not the rapid expansion of the Southwest, the consequent increased demand for slaves, and the counteracting influences of hostile propagandists brought about the enforcement of hitherto laxly enforced laws and the enactment of more stringent laws prohibiting emancipations.

The influence of the Society in the suppression of the slave trade has, it seems, been entirely overlooked ; and yet, there was a time in its history when it probably saved from transportation into slavery no fewer than twenty thousand native Africans a year.

The limitations of both time and space that are necessarily imposed upon one who undertakes to make a study of this character have made it impracticable to present here a complete history of the Colonization Society. That history covers one hundred years ; for the Society is still in existence, although, since the close of the Civil War, its influence has been considerably limited and it now undertakes but a very small part of what it once undertook. It has been impracticable here to extend the study even to the opening of the Civil War except in the influence of the Society upon the slave trade and upon emancipations and manumissions. The period covered is limited to the years 1 817 to 1840. No one who is even tolerably acquainted with the Society's history after its reorganization in 1839, when it came under the control of the North Middle and New England States, can have the slightest well-founded suspicion that thereafter it pursued a proslavery policy. It has been the chief aim of the writer to set forth unequivocally its aims and purposes prior to that time. The years 1839 and 1840 were years of severe strain upon the Society, and some of the most persistent of its leaders were in low spirits during that time. This will appear at the close of the second chapter. But this by no means signifies that there were not brighter days ahead. Indeed, the Society's resources grew rapidly from 1840 to the very beginning of the Civil War. From 1817 to 1839 Colonizationists looked upon their work chiefly from the point of view of its effect upon the solution of the negro problem in the United States ; after 1840 they looked upon it chiefly from the point of view of its effect in building upon the coast of Africa a model negro republic. The object, in this study, has been to set forth fully and completely this first period of its history.

CHAPTER I

As late as 1825 New England had not forgotten that she had had a part in the introduction of negro slaves into the Southern States. In that year Daniel Dana, addressing the New Hampshire Auxiliary Colonization Society, said :

Let us not imagine, for a moment, that we in this Northern clime, are exempt from that enormous guilt, connected with slavery, and the slave-trade, which we are so ready to appropriate to our brethren in distant States. We have no right thus to wash our hands. From New England have gone the ships and the sailors that have been polluted with this inhuman traffic. In New England are the forges which have framed fetters and manacles for the limbs of unoffending Africans. The iron of New England has pierced their anguished souls. In New England are found the over-grown fortunes, the proud palaces which have been reared up from the blood and sufferings of these unhappy men. The guilt is strictly national. . . . National, then, let the expiation be. Let us raise up the humbled children of Africa from their dust. . . . Let us send them back to their native land. 1

Four years later a clergyman from Maine, who hailed the organization of the American Colonization Society as the most promising means of ridding the land of slavery, but whose faith in its efforts was shaken on his hearing that plantation owners who had not set free their slaves were prominent in the movement, made the following confession :

With many others of the Northern people, I have long entertained erroneous views. I have supposed that slavery was an evil confined merely to the slave-holder himself, and that he might and ought immediately to manumit his slaves. But I am convinced that slavery is a National sin ! that we, who are so far removed from the scene of its abominations, partake of its guilt 1 that it is an evil which is entailed upon the present generation of slave-holders, which they must suffer, whether they will or not ; and therefore the North should aid the South, in the expense of emancipating and transporting their slaves back to the land of their fathers. 2

1 African Repository, vol. i, p. 146.

Professor Silliman, of Yale, called attention to the fact that had New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania been cotton producing States, the slave system would have been fastened on them " to the full extent of profitable employment," and he added :

Neither can it be denied that the slave trade, for the supply of the South, was carried on by too many persons in the North. . . .

Slavery is now generally acknowledged, in this country, to be an enormous evil. . . . costly to the proprietor, ... a source of increasing domestic danger; an insult to the purity of our religion and an outrage on the Majesty of Heaven. This language is not stronger than that which lately resounded in the Capital of Virginia. This is not the proper occasion to discuss the project of the entire and immediate abolition of slavery; it is enough that it is, at present, impracticable; nor will we take upon us, to reprehend with severity, the intemperate, uncourteous and unchristian language with which the friends of Colonization are from certain [abolition] quarters, assailed through the press. . . . Should their attempt fail, through the unfair and unjust opposition of its enemies, the latter will have much to answer for, to Africa itself, and to the African race in this country, and to the world. 3

The attitude of the upper South toward the question of negro slavery went through three distinct and important phases from colonial times to the beginning of the Civil War. The period from the beginning to the close of the eighteenth century may be considered approximately the period of the first phase, when the colonies sought from the king relief from the alarming growth of the slave system. Of this period, suffice it here to say that the single colony of Virginia passed twenty-three acts whose object was the suppression of the evils of slavery. All these came to naught as the result of the royal veto. 4 The third period extended from 1835 or l &4° to the beginning of the Civil War. This was the period during which the South was definitely and frankly set on the continuation of the slave system. It was the period between the years 1800, and particularly between 181 5, and 1835 or 1840, that claims special attention in this study. If during the first period the evils were clearly anticipated and the system called forth protests, if during the last period the visions of Southerners were blurred as a result of a supposed economic self-interest and resentment at the course of radical Abolitionists, during the middle period slavery was looked upon by leaders of thought in the South and in the North as one of the great national problems that pressed for a solution. The American Colonization Society undoubtedly came into being as a result of this point of view. The men who are to be considered its founders recognized in both the free negro and the slave a momentous problem, and the aim of Colonizationists was to find a satisfactory solution of it. The aim of the writer is to present here fairly and fully the nature of that problem.

South Carolina and Georgia, and a large part of Alabama, never engaged with enthusiasm in the work of Colonization. The Southwestern States were but recently admitted into the Union. It was that group of States stretching from, and including, New York at the North, to, and including, North Carolina at the South, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the western limit of Kentucky, that seemed to understand fully the gravity of that problem; yet throughout the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the evils of slavery were admitted by well nigh every State in the Union.

Then, why did not the slaveholding States at this time abolish slavery? Because they did not know how; because the abolition of slavery was the greatest problem the South had ever been called on to face ; because no man had suggested a plan that seemed capable of execution. As late as 1828, J. B. Harrison, of Virginia, a man who had traveled a great deal in his State and who spoke with authority, declared : " Almost all masters in Virginia assent to the proposition, that when the slaves can be liberated without danger to ourselves, and to their own advantage, it ought to be done." 5

As early as 1804, Dr. William Thornton, the versatile and distinguished friend of Washington, wrote : " I condemn not, but feel for the situation of the possessors of slaves.

It is a misery entailed on them by those who did not deeply study the laws of humanity, and who depended too implicitly on laws grounded in impolicy and excluding justice." 6 And Gerrit Smith, who later became an ardent Abolitionist, said, in 1828: "I am certainly far from reproaching our slaveholders with the peculiar relation in which they stand towards some of their hapless fellow creatures. It is not the fault of most of those slaveholders. Most of them were born to that relation. Many of them sincerely deplore this part of their inheritance." 7 President Nott, of Union College, said, in 1829: "Our Brethren of the South, have the sympathies, the same moral sentiments, the same love of liberty as ourselves. By them, as by us, slavery is felt to be an evil, a hindrance to our prosperity, and a blot upon our character. But it was in being when they were born and has been forced upon them by a previous generation." 8 In 1827 C. F. Mercer reported for a committee of the House of Representatives, in reply to memorials of the friends of Colonization :

In many States . . . [the] total number [of slaves] was, as it still continues to be, so great, that universal or general emancipation could not be hazarded, without endangering a convulsion fatal to the peace of society. . . . Nowhere in America . . . has emancipation elevated the colored race to perfect equality with the white ; and in many States the disparity is so great that it may be questioned whether the condition of the slave, while protected by his master, however degraded in itself, is not preferable to that of the free negro. [And yet, even in these States,] the principle of voluntary emancipation has operated to a much greater extent than the laws themselves, or the principle of coercion upon the master has ever done, even among those States who had no danger whatever to apprehend from the speedy and universal extension of human liberty. 9

In a letter received from a gentleman in Massachusetts by the secretary of the Colonization Society in 1826, we find this statement:

The late, and more frequent emancipations in the middle and southern States, is producing a very happy influence on the public

6 William Thornton Papers, MS., vol. xiv, "Letter to a Friend," 1804.

'Letters of American Colonization Society, MS., G. Smith to R. R. Gurley, Nov. 17, 1828.

8 African Repository, vol. v, pp. 277-278.

9 27th Cong., 3d sess., House Report no. 283, pp. 408-414.

THE FREE NEGRO AND THE SLAVE \J

mind, generally in this part of the country. They give a spring to public sentiment, and they teach this great lesson, which we northerners are beginning to understand, that many slaveholders retain their slaves not because they love slavery; but because they cannot better the condition of their slaves by emancipating them. . . . The south and the north, I am fully persuaded, after having recently traveled thro' nearly all the states of this happy Union, are approaching every day towards the same views in reference to this whole subject of our African population, both the bond and the free. ... The influence of your Society on public sentiment is the main thing. . . . 10

The following comment appeared in the New York Tract Magazine :

What is the condition and character of those who are emancipated? ... In general black people gain little, in many instances they are great losers, by emancipation. Law may relieve them from slavery, but laws cannot change their colour. 11

In 1818, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, at its meeting in Philadelphia, declared :

We do, indeed, tenderly sympathize with those portions of our church and our country, where the evil of slavery has been entailed upon them ; where a great, and the most virtuous part of the community abhor slavery, and wish its extermination, as sincerely as any other; but where the number of slaves, their ignorance, and their vicious habits generally, render an immediate and universal emancipation inconsistent, alike, with the safety and happiness of the master and the slave. 12

A most valuable contribution to the discussion of this whole subject is to be found in a letter from Francis Scott Key to Benjamin Tappan, in 1838. At a general conference of Congregational Churches the question of slavery was up for discussion. It was proposed to appoint a committee to correspond with prominent Southerners, in an effort to find out the true sentiments of that section on the subject of slavery. Tappan put to Key a number of definite questions. Key prefaced his reply by saying that he had been born and reared in Maryland, a slaveholding State, but " No Northern man began the world with more enthusiasm against slavery than I did. For forty years and upwards, I have felt the greatest desire to see Maryland become a free

10 African Repository, vol. ii, pp. 121-122.

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State, and the strongest conviction that she could become so." For he believed that "no slave State adjacent to a free State can continue so," the superiority of free, over slave, labor being so clearly demonstrated, and the power of public sentiment being so strong that gradual emancipation would always result. He continues :

I have emancipated seven of my slaves. They have done pretty well, and six of them, now alive, are supporting themselves comfortably and creditably. Yet I cannot but see that this is all they are doing now; and, when age and infirmity come upon them, they will probably suffer. It is to be observed, also, that these were selected individuals, who were, with two exceptions, brought up with a view to their being so disposed of, and were made to undergo a probation of a few years in favorable situations, and, when emancipated, were far better fitted for the duties and trials of their new condition than the general mass of slaves. Yet I am still a slaveholder, and could not, without the greatest inhumanity, be otherwise. I own, for instance, an old slave, who has done no work for me for years. I pay his board and other expenses, and cannot believe that I sin in doing so.

The laws of Maryland contain provisions of various kinds, under which slaves, in certain circumstances, are entitled to petition the courts for their freedom. As a lawyer, I always undertook these cases with peculiar zeal, and have been thus instrumental in liberating several large families and many individuals. I cannot remember more than two instances, out of this large number, ih which it did not appear that the freedom I so earnestly sought for them was their ruin. It has been so with a very large proportion of all others I have known emancipated.

Tappan's first question was : " Does the opinion generally prevail among the ministers and members of southern churches that slaveholding as practised in this country, is sanctioned by the Word of God? If this is not their opinion, how do they justify themselves in holding slaves?" Key's reply was that he thought that the Bible neither sanctioned slaveholding, under all circumstances, nor prohibited slaveholding, under all circumstances. The golden rule should be applied in each particular case. He continued :

Hundreds and thousands of Christians, showing in their whole life, undoubted evidences of the faith which they profess, have so applied this rule to their consciences, and so come to this conclusion. Their brethren at the North, knowing nothing of the peculiar circumstances under which they have acted, nor of the care and faithfulness with which they have inquired and decided, call upon them to justify themselves for violating the sanctions of God's Word.

Key pointed out conditions under which slaveholding was in his opinion a duty. For instance, a man inherits, through no fault of his own, an old slave, too old to work or to care for himself. So also, in the case of a slave by nature so indolent and intemperate that without restraint he would be wretched himself and a burden to others^ So, too, in the case of a slave purchased in order that he might not be sold in one of the distant States, and thus separated from a wife and family who lived on a neighboring plantation; or, in the case of the purchase by one man of the slave of another, in order to save the slave from cruel and unjust treatment.

Another question put to Key was: "Do professors of religion forfeit their christian character by buying and selling slaves, as they may find it convenient? or do they subject themselves to censure and discipline by any immorality or ill treatment of which they might be guilty towards their slaves ? " The reply was :

The persons among us who buy and sell slaves for profit are never, as I have ever heard or believe, professors of religion. Such conduct, or any immorality or ill treatment towards their slaves, would forfeit their Christian character and privileges, if their minister did his duty. And nothing more disgraces a man, in general estimation, than to be guilty of any immorality or ill treatment towards his slaves. 18

DeTocqueville, that keen observer of American institutions, expressed sentiments of great value to those who had ears to hear. He demonstrated beyond a doubt, that the abolition of slavery in the South was a far different problem from, and a far graver problem than, its abolition in the North. This was true (i) because the climate of the South was far more favorable to slave labor than the climate of the North; (2) because of the nature of the Northern and of the Southern crops, the former requiring attention only at intervals, the latter requiring almost constant attention; (3) because of the tendency of slavery to move toward the South.

He pointed out the fact that in 1830 there was in Maine only one negro for every three hundred of the whites ; in Massachusetts one negro for every one hundred; in Virginia forty-two for every one hundred; in South Carolina fifty-five for every one hundred. And his conclusion was that " the most Southern States of the Union cannot abolish slavery without incurring very great danger, which the North had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population." " The Northern States had nothing to fear from the contrast, because in them the blacks were few in number, and the white population was very considerable. But if this faint dawn of freedom were to show two millions of men their true position, the oppressors would have reason to tremble." He disclaimed any sympathy with the principle of negro slavery, but said :

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the [to him, inevitable] struggle of the two races in the United States. The negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of all civil rights ; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies. In the North everything contributed to the emancipation of the slaves ; and slavery was abolished, without placing the free negroes in a position which could become formidable, since their number was too small for them to claim the exercise of their rights. But such is not the case in the South. The question of slavery was a question of commerce and manufacture for the slave-owners in the North ; for those of the South, it is a question of life and death.

When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; viz., either to emancipate the negroes, and to intermingle with them ; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or other of the two races. 14

In a memorial from the Colonization Society to Congress in 1819, the following sentiment is expressed:

_ If one of these consequences [that is, a consequence of Colonization] shall be the gradual and almost imperceptible removal of a national evil, which all unite in lamenting, and for which, with the most intense, but hitherto hopeless, anxiety the patriots and statesmen of our country have laboured to discover a remedy, who can

14 DeTocqueville, Democracy in America, D. Appleton and Company, ed. of 1904, vol. i, pp. 383-404.

doubt, that of all the things we may be permitted to bequeath to our descendants, this will receive the richest tribute of their thanks and veneration? Your memorialists cannot believe that such an evil, universally acknowledged and deprecated, has been irremovably fixed upon us. Some way will always be opened by Providence, by which a people, desirous of acting justly and benevolently, may be led to the attainment of a meritorious object. 15

Dr. William Thornton had pointed out clearly in 1804 the seriousness of the problem of the abolition of slavery in the South as compared with its abolition in the North. At that time he said that, in the North, the comparatively few slaves were so distributed among the population that a general emancipation fell but lightly upon each owner ; whereas, in the South, " it would perhaps be requiring too much from humanity, to expect those who hold slaves to emancipate them, and thus reduce their own families from affluence to absolute misery. And there is frequently no alternative." He deprecates the evils of slavery, but " it has been not only a query with others, but with myself, whether this partial good does not increase the general evil. . . . Evil therefore rests on evil till a mountain rises whose summit is shadowed by a cloud of sin." 16 And many years later Henry Clay, in a speech on the subject of Abolition petitions, made in the United States Senate, February 7, 1839, estimated the value of property in slaves, in the South, at $1,200,000,000 — owned by persons of all classes, those who could afford to emancipate their slaves and very many who could not. Slave property, he said, " is the subject of mortgages, deeds of trust, and family settlements. It has been made the basis of numerous debts contracted upon its faith, and is the sole reliance, in many instances, of creditors within and without the slave States, for the payments of debt due to them." 17