The advocates of Indian removal did not always mirror the communities urging the relocation of other peoples. Senator Frelinghuysen’s robust defense of the Cherokee led the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to invite him to extend that compassion to enslaved black people. The senator fit the profile of an antislavery advocate. He was a leading social and religious activist and was involved in a range of reform movements, including temperance, the improvement of prisons, and public education. Garrison had also been a colonizationist, but, like many people in the humanitarian wing of the ACS, he turned to abolition as the organization became hostile to emancipation and as African Americans expressed unified and strident opposition to the plan. Frelinghuysen seemed to sit in that liberal camp, and he had earlier worked with progressives such as Arthur Tappan and Gerrit Smith, both of whom transitioned from colonizationism to abolitionism.22
The editor had reason to believe that the senator could be coaxed toward antislavery. During an 1824 fund-raiser for the New Jersey Colonization Society, Frelinghuysen had rehearsed many of the ideas that later informed his defense of the Cherokee. He emphasized the philanthropic aims of colonization: providing a refuge for the victims of the slave trade rescued at sea and creating a “home” for the free black communities of the United States. He hinted at the association’s antislavery potential, however distant. He declared slavery unjustifiable and rebuked the nation for denying physical and spiritual liberty to millions of people. Frelinghuysen even defended the intellectual and cultural capacity of African peoples, arguing that suggestions of their inferiority were erroneous in a society that outlawed their advancement and invoking the Haitian Revolution and its black generals as examples of their capacity.23
Theodore Frelinghuysen simultaneously considered the free black population “a separate, degraded, scorned, and humbled people.” That bleak assessment closed a lecture that was otherwise sympathetic to the plight of free and enslaved African Americans. Frelinghuysen had grown up in a slaveholding house. His father, Frederick Frelinghuysen, was the stepson of the Reverend Jacob Hardenbergh, the president of Queen’s College (Rutgers) and a slave owner. After graduating from New Jersey in 1770, Frederick Frelinghuysen became the first tutor at Queen’s. He married Gitty Schenk—of the wealthy Dutch slaveholding family—and owned slaves throughout his life.24
Senator Frelinghuysen’s racial beliefs regulated his compassion. The ideas that grounded his virile defense of the Cherokee also informed his final judgment against the emancipation of black people. As Frelinghuysen explained, race was “a line of demarcation drawn deep and broad; and durable as time.” No matter how fully one sympathized with the enslaved, race made abolition, to quote President Wilbur Fisk of Wesleyan University, an exercise in “moral quackery.” Fisk was complaining that a recent publication had quoted him in ways that suggested he was an abolitionist. He publicly rejected abolition and announced his support for colonizing black people. Frelinghuysen also saw removing African Americans as a superior alternative to the “madness of self-destruction” inherent in abolition. He began his chancellorship at the University of the City of New York with a pro-colonization tour of the city. Later, as a vice presidential candidate on the Whig ticket in 1844, Frelinghuysen offered his long tenure in the American Colonization Society as evidence of goodwill toward southern slaveholders.25
Race constrained the political solutions to the social challenges of the nineteenth century, particularly when those questions concerned the composition of the citizenry. Professor Charles Follen, an abolitionist, provided Harvard’s students with evidence of the intellectual and cultural equality of African people extending back to the ancient Egyptians. The belief that the fates of subjugated peoples lay naturally in the hands of the dominant classes could lead down humanitarian or destructive paths. Follen cautioned his undergraduates about the limited value of Jewish history, which, although “the most interesting of all antiquity,” was filled with so much superstition and hyperbole that it was largely impenetrable. “The Hist[ory] of the Jews is important only as a hist[ory] of religion,” a student in the class jotted, “for they were the most depraved and the most worthy of contempt and censure of all.”26
Many Christians doubted the biological capacity of Jews for conversion. “In taking leave of the Soc[iet]y I heartily pray that it may be instrumental in promoting the spiritual & temporal welfare of that ancient & wonderful people whose present infidelity is among the strongest evidences of the Religion they reject,” wrote Peter Augustus Jay in 1822 upon resigning as director and treasurer of the American Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews (ASACJ). A trustee of Columbia College, Jay also headed the New York Manumission Society as it lobbied to apply revenues from public lands to colonize African Americans in Africa, Haiti, or “such countries as they may choose for their residence.” The ASACJ funded efforts to Christianize or deport American Jews. In 1823 John Robert Murray, another Columbia trustee, brokered an agreement with Jacob Van Rensselaer and Hezekiah Pierpont, two of New York State’s wealthiest men, to endow the association by transferring some of Pierpont’s lands in Jefferson, Lewis, Franklin, and St. Lawrence counties at a significant discount. It was the same year that Pope Leo XII reestablished mandatory Jewish ghettoization in the Papal States.27
Christian activists favored relocating or segregating even Jewish converts to Christianity, a medieval stratagem that they revived as they reconciled their faith with race. Missions to Jews emphasized conversion and removal, and the missionaries’ weapons included everything from Hebrew editions of the New Testament to political campaigns to uproot recalcitrant Jews. In addition to exiling the unconverted, the ASACJ proposed opening a twenty-thousand-acre reservation in western New York for the settlement of Christianized Jews. Anticipating a growing population of Jewish converts, Elias Boudinot bequeathed four thousand acres in Warren County, Pennsylvania, for their settlement. “For nearly eighteen centuries that people have suffered for the sin of killing the Prince of life,” reads the 1823 founding address of the Portland Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews. That Israel would embrace Christianity was a promise from “Him who cannot lie.” Balancing prophecy with a surrender to racial determinism, the Maine organization then pledged to raise funds to find an American “asylum” for Jewish converts.28
ASSIGNING BLACK PEOPLE’S BURDEN
At the emotional height of his speech against Indian removal, Senator Frelinghuysen asked his colleagues: “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?” The question was an ethical trap in which Frelinghuysen also became entangled once the debate shifted to black people. “We view, with unfeigned astonishment, the anti-christian and inconsistent conduct of those who strenuously advocate our removal from this our native country to the burning shores of Liberia, and who with the same breath contend against the cruelty and injustice of Georgia in her attempt to remove the Cherokee Indians,” declared free black residents of Providence, Rhode Island. A public meeting of black Bostonians accused the ACS of using “philanthropy, smooth words, and a sanctified appearance” to further an “absurd” proslavery program. Black leaders such as Henry C. Thompson of Brooklyn, New York, and George C. Willis of Providence, along with white abolitionists including Simeon Jocelyn of New Haven, Connecticut, and Garrison in Boston, condemned this transparent intellectual inconsistency.29
Many northerners were attracted to the idea that providence intended black people to Christianize Africa and thereby redeem America from slavery, and they used that belief to distinguish their movement from southerners’ anti-Indian furor. For these northerners, Indian removal lived in an uneasy dialogue with African colonization, one that they resolved with the remote promise of a Christianized Africa. Congressman Jabez Huntington asked Connecticut Supreme Court justice David Daggett, a Yale graduate and founder of Yale Law School, for advice on Indian removal. Daggett, who also served as a vice president of the Connecticut Colonization Society, aggressively defended the territoria
l rights of the Cherokee and dismissed white Georgians as “howling villains.”30 Congressman Isaac Bates of Massachusetts, Senator Peleg Sprague of Maine, and scores of other New England and mid-Atlantic politicians came to parallel conclusions.
An extravagance of sympathy for Africa in colonizationist rhetoric was, in part, a response to this ideological tension. President Milledoler assigned the Rutgers class of 1831 responsibility for fulfilling providence by colonizing black Americans, reversing the history of slavery and the slave trade, and securing the “greatest good out of the greatest evils.” He promised that “monumental pillars” would one day be raised for them in Africa if they completed this noble work. “Remember the toil and the tears of black men, and pay your debt to Africa,” Frelinghuysen implored. “We have injured, and we must make reparation.” President Fisk of Wesleyan declared that Africa was fated for a religious revolution. “And among other cares poor forsaken Africa must not be neglected,” cautioned Rev. Griffin. “Her crime of having a sable skin must not exclude her from the kingdom of heaven.”31
In contrast, northern scholars, ministers, and politicians often bristled at applying the arguments against Indian removal to their own region. The level of Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw civilization was a consistent protest leveled by opponents of relocation. These nations democratically governed thousands upon thousands of people on millions of acres. They had productive farms, businesses and factories, roads, schools, churches, newspapers, and countless other indicators of civilization. Connecticut representative William Ellsworth offered a census of Cherokee wagons, sheep, horses, cattle, pigs, and ploughs to prove that “they are the creatures of the same God with ourselves.”32 Opponents of Indian removal rejected not race but the necessity of relocating people who had attained an acceptable level of social accomplishment, were believed to be declining in numbers, and were already spatially isolated.
If property, education, Christianization, and capacity for self-government were evidence of the inhumanity of Indian removal, then it would be hard to ignore the emerging civil and political entitlement embedded in the rapid social development of free African American communities. Free black people in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and in even smaller cities such as Providence, Hartford, and Newark, had thriving political and intellectual cultures. Black people paraded through the streets in celebration of markers of social progress such as the 1808 termination of the slave trade to the United States. Print media extended the reach of the African American authors, preachers, and community leaders who began invading the public sphere in the late eighteenth century. In the following decades, sermons, poems, and autobiographies by black authors from throughout the Americas were in regular circulation. In 1827 Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm began publishing Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first African American newspaper.33
It was the success of free black communities that aggravated many white people’s fears of a multiracial nation. Black neighborhoods, churches, schools, cemeteries, businesses, benevolent associations, literary clubs, insurance societies, newspapers, and political organizations combined to give African American communities an undeniable presence. As President Jackson was signing the Indian Removal Act into law, African Americans were organizing the first National Negro Convention, to publish their commitment to ending slavery, denounce the American Colonization Society, and forge greater cooperation with white abolitionists.34
Thus, colonizationists routinely balanced their estimates of the spiritual needs of Africa with predictions of the eternal persecution of black Americans. President Elihu Baldwin of Wabash College opened an 1836 meeting of Indiana colonizationists by rehearsing the long history of forced migrations, including American colonial history, which, he argued, proved the value of freedom in an unknown land over oppression in a native land. President Milledoler drew upon his decades of experience in the Indian ministries of the Dutch Reformed Church and the ABCFM to justify colonization. Jared Sparks of Harvard harvested the history of English religious and military campaigns among New England Indians to defend assigning black Americans the duty of uplifting Africa.35
Biological racism could turn these appeals for relocation into demands for removal. President Sparks gleaned scientific evidence of the cultural and mental limitations of Negroes, and he concluded that race was a fixed and impassable divide between white people and the colored world. Facing what he viewed as the “unfortunate” truth of racial inferiority, Sparks insisted upon exile. Black Americans were misplaced Africans whose color and other physical and mental characteristics ensured their eternal misuse, he declared. Therefore, he proposed the establishment of a single missionary school in the United States—allowing colonizationists to control African Americans’ access to education—linked to a network of schools in Africa.36
Many intellectuals were certain that there was simply no better use for black people than African missions. Edward Everett defended cleansing even without a pretense of abolition—the spiritual elevation of Africa was justification enough. God intended black Americans to fulfill this destiny, he insisted, because white men had civilized the entire world except Africa, where the climate and conditions made their efforts ineffective. President Fisk of Wesleyan echoed this sentiment when he argued that colonization created “a passage of civilization and salvation into the interior of that dark continent!” A leader of the Massachusetts Colonization Society, Everett recast American slavery as part of a divine plan to Christianize Africa: providence took the “descendants of the torrid clime, children of the burning vertical sun—and fitted them by centuries of stern discipline for this noble work.”37 With that moral renovation, he cleared his mind of the problem of human slavery while clearing black people from his future.
The Janus face of colonization—its benevolent and despotic manifestations—sustained seemingly incompatible communions. The declining antislavery contingent and the growing antiabolitionist constituency agreed on the necessity of removal. Here, a sincere Christian antislavery withered at the limits of egalitarianism in antebellum American society. For those who opposed human bondage, colonization contained the rhetorical residue of Christian benevolence toward Africans and Africa generated during the eighteenth-century anti-slave-trade movement. For those who perceived the presence of black people as a threat to the political and social health of the nation, it promised a radical alteration of the racial geography. “I am a friend to the Colonization Society, and yet no friend of slavery, and neither a knave nor a dupe,” Calvin Stowe responded to critics. Professor Stowe rejected the accusation of racism by invoking what he saw as the moral and scientific truth of race: “I am in favor of colonization, because I suppose it to be right, and agreeable to God’s design, that the different races of men should continue to be distinct and each reside in a climate best adapted to their physical and intellectual development.”38
New Jersey offers a vivid example of this interplay between moral philanthropy and racial animosity. The Presbyterian church in Princeton hosted the 1824 founding meeting of the New Jersey Colonization Society. Captain Robert Field Stockton presided over the state association. A passenger diary includes some of the events and sights as Captain Stockton piloted the schooner Alligator from Boston to the African coast during the spring of 1821 to find a location for the colony. “With extensive and apparently luxurious forests,” a passenger happily reported, “the Coast of Africa [is] a more pleasant spectacle than my expectations had anticipated.” On May 13 the ACS agent Daniel Coker recorded the Alligator’s arrival at Freetown. “We have been visited at our temporary residence by Captain Stockton and some of his officers,” Rev. Coker noted. “They appear’d in words to be zealous in the cause.” Just a week earlier, an English ship had captured a slaver with five hundred enslaved Africans and brought it to port.39
From the early 1820s through the Civil War, the presidents and trustees of the College of New Jersey and Rutgers governed the state and local colonization movements. New Jersey pre
sident James Carnahan served as a director of the state society, and Professor John Maclean Jr., his successor, was an officer. Rutgers president John Henry Livingston was a director, and faculty from both schools could be found at all levels of the state and local auxiliaries. Black people continued to serve the students in Princeton and New Brunswick. For example, New Jersey alumni recalled with affection their encounters with “negro Sam,” the assistant in Professor Joseph Henry’s laboratory, during the height of the colonization campaign.40
The organizational meeting in Princeton was telling. Captain Stockton opened the gathering with a lengthy examination of the history and accomplishments of the colonization campaign. He emphasized Robert Finley’s original aims: the evangelization of Africa, the end of the slave trade, and, perhaps, laying a path for gradual emancipation. However, in a transition that captured the conflict at the heart of the organization, James S. Green followed with a rant against free black people: “What a mass of ignorance, misery and depravity, is here mingled with every portion of our population, and threatening the whole with a moral and political pestilence,” he bitterly roared. “This enormous mass of revolting wretchedness and deadly pollution will, it is believed, be ultimately taken out of her territory, if the plan of the Colonization Society be adopted.” Green insisted that white people could never be safe so long as black people shared their nation. “The slave is a mere animal” and free black people were “really but little better.” Colored people lacked merit and character, Green added, and the nation would spiral into race war if black freedom was not tied to expatriation. The possibility of failure was unacceptable:
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