The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  3

  Colonizing Blacks, Part I: Migration and Deportation

  THE EXODUS PARADIGM

  The Haitian Revolution coincided in time with the founding of Sierra Leone and with the growth of Anglo-American interest in African colonization. While it should be stressed that African colonization had earlier and independent origins, there can be no doubt that the eminent Virginians who helped found the American Colonization Society in 1816 were deeply influenced by the specter of Haiti and the continuing conspiracies it seemed to inspire among slaves and free blacks from Virginia to Barbados. If Haiti symbolized one of the possible outcomes of slave emancipation, the emigration or removal of free blacks represented a quite different “solution” to the problem of slavery, at least in the United States. About the voluntary character of this proposed migration there was considerable ambiguity and debate. But between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the hope that a dangerous population could be gradually drained away and that black missionaries could be enlisted to carry Christian civilization to Africa profoundly influenced the public controversy over emancipation.

  From Jefferson to Lincoln, most of America’s major leaders insisted that the blight of slavery could not be overcome unless a distant refuge were found for the black beneficiaries of freedom. This premise was angrily rejected by Northern free blacks, who took the lead in challenging the motives of white colonizationists. After 1831, white abolitionists increasingly made the disavowal of colonization the core of their confession of faith; they attacked the American Colonization Society and its colony Liberia as vehemently as they attacked slavery itself. But, despite denunciations by abolitionists and Southern defenders of slavery, the idea of black resettlement kept rebounding after apparent defeats. Various black leaders, such as Paul Cuffe, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin R. Delany, Alexander Crummell, and James Theodore Holly, promoted their own increasingly nationalistic projects for an African or Caribbean homeland. Delany, according to Edward Wilmot Blyden, a black advocate of Liberian colonization, had the qualifications to become “the Moses to lead in the exodus of his people from the house of bondage to a land flowing with milk and honey.”1 The essential distinction between choosing to emigrate and being colonized by others has usually obscured the fact that the early speeches and reports of the white American Colonization Society anticipated the central themes and expectations of black emigrationists from Garnet and Delany, in the slavery era, to Marcus Garvey, in the 1920s.

  Modern historians have understandably been hostile to the ACS and its diverse supporters. The colonization movement often embodied and encouraged the most insidious forms of white racism. Historians have frequently quoted the expressions of racial contempt, fear, condescension, and hypocrisy that contributed to the colonizationists’ appeal to American whites. There is evidence that this prejudice alienated blacks who might otherwise have found in the colonization ideology a ground for racial pride and solidarity. For now it is sufficient to emphasize that colonization, as a movement seeking white consensus, embraced a variety of contradictory motives, interests, hopes, and visions. The simple dichotomy between the ACS Antichrist and the abolitionist Redeemers, which abolitionists perpetuated as a way of explaining their own journey from spiritual blindness to a new Reformation, can only obscure our understanding of both movements.

  Although colonizationists have conventionally been dismissed as hopelessly impractical visionaries, for example, they were clearly more realistic than the abolitionists when they argued that white racial prejudice would remain intractable for generations to come, that the achievements of a few individual blacks would not benefit the masses, that progress would depend on black solidarity and collective effort, and that the formal act of emancipating slaves could not be divorced from the need for an economic and social environment in which freedmen could exercise their full capacities for human development. This is not to say that the program of the ACS was the right solution. But if the colonization movement actually represented a dangerous obstacle to African American self-fulfillment, we will never understand or even recognize similar obstacles if we rely on negative caricature and fail to grasp the complexity of the movement’s appeal. Instead of recapitulating the well-known history of the ACS, it seems more promising to approach the issues of deportation and colonization from several comparative perspectives that may point to unsuspected relationships and configurations of meaning.2

  At first glance the distinction between emigration and expulsion seems clear-cut. In the archetypal story of Exodus, God enabled the Israelites to flee from Egyptian bondage and undergo the trials and self-purgation that prepared them for a life of freedom in the Promised Land. Some five centuries later, when the children of Israel in the Northern Kingdom sinned against “the LORD their God, who had freed them from the land of Egypt,” by worshipping idols and practicing pagan rites and enchantments, they were punished, according to the Hebrew prophets, by an Assyrian conquest that led to mass deportations from Samaria to Upper Mesopotamia and Media, where ten tribes of Israelites lost their historic identity.3 In Christian theology, it might be said, the saved emigrate to heaven; sinners are deported to hell or perhaps to purgatory, where they gain a second chance.

  On closer inspection, however, voluntary migrations have seldom been free from pain, nostalgia, and regret; involuntary exiles have sometimes found a promised land. Images of colonization and expulsion, particularly since the Protestant Reformation, have been enriched by biblical narratives that were known to some degree by the lowest classes of society and that reach back to the earliest human memories of migration, conquest, deportation, and longing for a lost homeland. Psychologically, such experiences have also echoed the stages of individual life from weaning and the departure from a natal family to aging, death, and the succession of generations. Historically, the appeal of a new beginning has usually been mixed with fears of disinheritance, of exile from the graves of ancestors, of becoming, like Cain, “a ceaseless wanderer on earth,” dispossessed of place and society.

  If we wish to move beyond a parochial view of the debate over colonization, it will be helpful to examine precedents that illustrate a wide range of motives and meanings associated with deportation and escape. Because the Exodus narrative became so vitally important for the Puritan settlers in North America, for interpreters of America’s struggle for independence from England, and for blacks advocating a return to Africa as well as for black slaves longing for emancipation, we should begin by reviewing several points that might not be familiar to modern “secular humanists” who seldom read the Bible.

  Most surprising, perhaps, is the continuing allure of the land of bondage. As Michael Walzer reminds us, “the great paradox of the Exodus, and of all subsequent liberation struggles, is the people’s simultaneous willingness and unwillingness to put Egypt behind them.” The biblical commentaries “are full of stories of Israelite assimilation in Egypt … Many Israelites admired the very people who oppressed them, copied Egyptian ways, curried Egyptian favor. And other Israelites feared and repressed the impulse to act similarly in themselves.”4 If the Hebrews resented the disabilities that had deprived them of Egyptian luxuries, memories of relative well-being erupted at times of rebellion, as when Dathan and Abiram asked Moses, “is it not enough that you brought us from a land flowing with milk and honey [Egypt] to have us die in the wilderness, that you would also lord it over us?”5 Such dissent could be mitigated, at least, by reminding the Hebrews of the oppression they had suffered as slaves and “strangers” in Egypt. This biblical theme, coupled with a liturgical reexperiencing of bondage and deliverance, became absolutely central to Judaism and to its expressions of love and gratitude to a monotheistic God. As early as 1808 the Reverend Absalom Jones, a former slave who had purchased his own freedom and had helped found the African Church of Philadelphia, told his congregation that just as Passover linked every Jew to their historic deliverance from slavery, so American blacks should commemorate events like Haitian
independence in order to “remember the history of the sufferings of our brethren, and of their deliverance,” and to ensure that this experience would descend “to our children, to the remotest generations.”6

  Although the book of Exodus gives relatively little detail on the rigors of bondage in Egypt, the injustice of the oppression is signified by God’s wrath, the succession of ten plagues, and the annihilation of the Pharaoh’s army at the Sea of Reeds. Future slaveholders could draw little comfort from this model of emancipation, or from the example of the Hebrews plundering their masters, by way of restitution, of gold, silver, clothing, and flocks and herds.

  On the other hand, it would appear that for God even the creation was an easier task than liberating slaves. When American abolitionists like the Reverend George Barrell Cheever invoked the Mosaic precedent, they condensed biblical history and overlooked the extraordinary difficulties of emancipation and “reconstruction,” a process not quite finished at the end of the Pentateuch.7 While the Hebrews’ deliverance depended at every stage on God’s decisive acts, God in turn required a human leader who was not a lowly slave but the Hebrew foster son of the Pharaoh’s daughter, a man of double identities who had killed a bullying Egyptian taskmaster and was yet “much esteemed” among the Pharaoh’s courtiers and the Egyptian people. First it was necessary for God to persuade a reluctant Moses to become a truly voluntary leader and deliverer. Then Moses, working through his brother Aaron, needed to perform miraculous signs to convince the Israelite elders that God would liberate His people. Although Moses had access to the Pharaoh for repeated negotiations that sometimes gave ground for hope, God taught a lesson in the realities of human power by hardening the Pharaoh’s heart and showing that only the worst afflictions could force the king to give in. In effect, the Pharaoh finally combined emancipation with immediate deportation, ordering Moses and the Israelites to leave Egypt in the middle of the night. After overcoming these prodigious obstacles, Moses soon discovered that the Egyptians had changed their minds and that his own people, catching sight of the pursuing army, cried out: “Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness?’ ”8

  The act of physical liberation, we soon learn, is not sufficient; long trials and discipline are needed to prepare a people for the obligations of authentic freedom under covenant with God. This message took on poignant meaning for African American emigrationists. In 1820, when the first expedition sent out by the American Colonization Society and United States government settled at a swampy, unhealthful spot on Sherbro Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, the colonists were soon decimated by disease. Before dying, the society’s white agent granted his commission as leader to Daniel Coker, a mulatto minister and teacher who on shipboard may have prevented a black rebellion against white authority. At times of crisis Coker had repeatedly prayed that “He that was with Moses in the wilderness be with us,” and that “He that divided the waters for Israel will open our way, I know not how.” By May 1821, Coker confided in his journal that “Moses was I think permitted to see the promised land but not to enter in. I think it likely that I shall not be permitted to see our expected earthly Canaan. But this will be of but small moment so that some thousand of Africa’s children are safely landed.” A century later, Marcus Garvey employed the same precedent in a speech restating the goals of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA): “It was because of lack of faith in the children of Israel that they were held up for so long in the wilderness and why so many of them died without seeing the Promised Land. That same lack of faith will be the downfall of many of us.”9

  The Exodus narrative has been central to the Judeo-Christian idea of God shaping the course of human history through a succession of warnings, promises, punishments, and rewards. Taken as the literal transcription of God’s revelation to Moses, the story has been recapitulated and transmogrified not only in the Old and New Testaments but through much of Western history. It has conveyed the astounding message that in the past God actually heard the cries of the oppressed and was willing to free slaves from their masters. Indeed, God passed over the brilliant and powerful peoples of the ancient Near East and chose a group of degraded slaves to bear the awesome responsibility of receiving and transmitting His law. Exodus has therefore furnished a model for every kind of deliverance, whether by escape, revolution, or spiritual rebirth. It has helped people understand the suffering, rebellious “murmuring,” and moral testing that mark the road toward the Promised Land.

  Although Christian theologians generally interpreted the Mosaic Exodus as a prefiguration of Christ’s redemption of humankind, numerous Christian groups have identified their own sins, afflictions, rewards, and mission with those of ancient Israel. Such views of similitude have ranged from momentary and casual analogies to a sustained sense of reenacting sacred history. There is no need here to consider the convolutions of Protestant covenant theology, the different meanings assigned to “Israel,” or the chasm that increasingly separated a small group of religious skeptics from the multitudes who felt empowered by their direct access to the Word of God. It is sufficient to note that by the late sixteenth century, English preachers thought it self-evident that God had chosen England for special blessings and responsibilities because, as numerous sermons put it, “we are like unto the children of Israel.” As Michael McGiffert has shown, the parallels perceived between ancient Israel and Protestant England made a base upon which the clergy “built the towering scaffold of moral nationalism.” The Israelite paradigm, by affirming the continuity of sacred history and the consistency of God’s judgment of nations, enabled preachers to draw upon the matchless eloquence of the Hebrew prophets as they condemned the sins of the land.10 The evolving Jeremiad, with its enumeration of collective crimes and its alternative visions of national holocaust and a New Jerusalem, created a framework for interpreting both the Puritan Exodus to America and the English civil wars. The Israelite paradigm became so embedded in Anglo-American Protestant culture that such diverse groups as the English and American Puritans, clerical supporters of the American Revolution, the Mormons, and black emigrants and “Exodusters” pictured themselves being delivered from Egypt.11

  While the experiences of such groups were in some ways incommensurable, Michael Walzer suggests that the endless repetition of the Exodus story established a cultural pattern that has shaped Western perceptions and understandings of liberation. He also provides valuable insight into the continuing tension between “Exodus politics” and a messianism that emerges from the Exodus experience but looks forward to “a new heaven and a new earth,” which finally appears (though not mentioned by Walzer) in the book of Revelation after “the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”12

  The Land of Canaan, Walzer points out, was simply the antipode of Egypt—a specific geographic place to which Israelites could return, work as free farmers, and enjoy their milk and honey. Exodus politics were attuned to the realities of life, power, and human fallibility. Permanent liberation from Egyptian bondage required social discipline and education. It was not sufficient to survive the march across the desert, to train a new generation that had not been debased by slavery, to conquer Canaan and build a new nation. Far more difficult was the task of remaining true to the covenant, of preventing the reemergence of Egyptian corruptions from within. The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE signified the failed hopes of the first Exodus. To escape the Babylonian conquest, many Jews even fled to Egypt.13

  Jewish messianism arose in the period of the Babylonian exile when the prophets began to envision a new Exodus, a new covenant, and a restored Israel as the new Promised Land. As the prophet Jeremiah made clear, God’s new covenant would be qualitatively different from the Sinai covenant, “when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, a covenant which they broke, so that I rejected them.” F
or God would soon forgive past iniquities and inscribe His law upon the hearts of His people, “in their inmost being,” so “all of them, from the least of them to the greatest, shall heed Me.”14 These visions of forgiveness and redemption nourished traditions of Jewish and then Christian messianism that confidently awaited a total transformation of human nature, the restoration of Adamic innocence and Edenic peace. Instead of opposing Egyptian bondage with a free but worldly Canaan, the messianic writers opposed all the evils of the existing world with a millenarian paradise that would appear, often after a series of apocalyptic terrors, at “the end of days.”15 The spiritualizing tendencies of messianism were countered in postbiblical Jewish thought by a sense of historical continuity with the patriarchal age and the specific worldly event of the Exodus from Egypt, leading to the revelation of God’s law. Yet the Jews’ continuing experience of persecution and exile also generated heightened dreams of a second Moses, a final Exodus, and a “definitive redemption.”16 As we shall later see, a similar tension pervaded the American colonization and abolitionist movements. If the abolitionists’ demand for “immediate emancipation” represented in one sense a moral Exodus from the Egypt of colonization, it also relied on a spiritual regeneration sufficient to overcome not only racial prejudice but every vestige of the Kingdom of Darkness.

  PRECEDENTS: EXILES

  American colonizationists were hardly eager to identify the United States with Pharaonic Egypt or to associate their cause with the notorious expulsions of European history.17 When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “we should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors,” he seems to have meant that, compared to Spain, Virginia would reap far richer benefits and escape far worse calamities by beginning, while “it is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly.” In 1832, a fellow Virginian and ardent colonizationist, Jesse Burton Harrison, stressed that “the very last cases to which we would compare such gradual withdrawal … would be the expulsion of the eight hundred thousand Jews from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, or that of nearly a million of Moors under Philip III, or that of the Huguenots from France.” The difference had little to do with consent, since Harrison spoke frankly of the “deportation” of freed slaves, contrary to the usual rhetoric of the Colonization Society. The difference lay in the avoidance of sudden, disruptive change and in the alleged worthlessness to Virginia of the black population. In contrast to America’s blacks, Harrison affirmed, the Jews, Moors, and Huguenots “carried with them greater personal wealth in proportion to their number, finer skill, and more thriving habits than were left behind them.”18