The American Colonization Society (ACS) was formed in 1816 to send free African Americans to African shores. Created by a coalition of white philanthropists who wanted to provide incentives for ending slavery and slaveholders who wanted to deport free blacks (whom they deemed to be subversive to plantation discipline), the colonization society grew steadily during the 1820s and 1830s. In fact, it became one of the largest reform organizations of the early antebellum era, with more local chapters than even abolitionists had in such northern states as Pennsylvania. In addition, the colonization society attracted the support of some of the nation’s leading political figures, such as expresident James Madison, presidential hopeful Henry Clay of Kentucky and Massachusetts governor and renowned orator Edward Everett. The colonization society sponsored the expatriate colony of Liberia and generated intense debate among black as well as white reformers over the society’s goals and motivations. The group existed through the Civil War before formally ending operations in 1865.
The American Colonization Society operated through national and branch organizations. It held an annual convention and published its proceedings every year. In addition, it printed a newspaper promulgating the society’s activities, The African Repository. Perhaps the group’s most famous single undertaking was the establishment of Liberia, a colony of former slaves located on the western coast of Africa. Founded in 1823, Liberia achieved independence in 1847, becoming a destination for a number of free black activists, including former anticolonizationist John Russ-wurm, a coeditor of the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published in New York City between 1827 and 1829; Martin Delany; and Thomas Morris Chester. The American Colonization Society garnered donations totaling nearly $2.5 million for the colony of Liberia. Roughly 12,000 free blacks and former slaves eventually traveled there. The ACS initially headed most of the colony’s main posts: White appointees from the American Colonization Society controlled Liberia until 1841, although black settlers held a variety of powerful administrative positions, including secretary to the colonial agent, acting governor, and superintendent of education.
Beyond Liberia, the American Colonization Society spurred two important and interrelated events after its founding in 1816. The first involved colonization’s impact on black activism; the second, colonization’s impact on the broader cause of abolition. Although some African-American leaders, such as James Forten of Philadelphia, listened to early colonizationist plans with an open mind, most black Americans vehemently opposed the group. Arguing that the American nation was a black homeland too, and that Americans must end slavery immediately rather than export black activists, they organized against colonization in cities and towns ranging from Boston to Baltimore. The largest black anticolonization demonstration occurred in Philadelphia at Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. Several hundred protesters forced the city’s black leaders to publicly condemn colonization. Black leaders in other communities did likewise between 1817 and the early 1830s.
This groundswell of black activism was the only public movement against colonization before the 1830s, when a new generation of radical abolitionists emerged in American culture. The nation’s leading antislavery societies during the early 1800s disavowed colonization as a strategy for ending slavery but also refrained from publicly attacking the American Colonization Society or its leaders. Early abolitionists, led by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society, sought to curry favor with the nation’s leading politicians, jurists, and philanthropists. In this manner, early reformers hoped to slowly but surely build political support for gradual abolition plans. Early abolitionist groups did not accept black members, either, although they did work with local black leaders in community schools and in courts of law.
African Americans hoped to prevail upon early white abolitionists to support their anticolonizationist struggle. They petitioned white reformers and met with them privately on several occasions. For over a decade, however, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and American Convention of Abolition Societies refused to unleash public condemnations of colonization. African-American reformers filled this void. During the 1820s Boston’s David Walker issued perhaps the most famous black pamphlet of the antebellum era, “An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” Walker called on African Americans to organize anew against slavery and racial injustice. In particular he focused on the evil of colonization, arguing that the plan merely sought to rid the country of free blacks as a means of strengthening slavery. According to Walker, African Americans had to raise national voices of protest in response.
In this way, colonization became a springboard for a new and more radical brand of abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison, the famed editor of The Liberator, was influenced by black anticolonization protest during the late 1820s. After meeting such black activists as James Forten and Baltimore’s William Watkins, both of whom provided Garrison with black protest documents, the young white printer shifted his beliefs. No longer a quasicolonization-ist or gradual abolitionist, he vowed to become the most ardent opponent of slavery and colonization in the country. Garrison began publishing his own newspaper in Boston in 1831, and he consistently debated colonization speakers throughout the mid-Atlantic and New England. In 1832 Garrison also published a pamphlet opposing colonization, “Thoughts on African colonization,” which prominently featured black protest documents.
Further reading: Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005); P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 18161865 (New York: Octagon Books, 1980).
—Richard Newman
World History
