The movement to colonize America’s blacks can be put in clearer perspective if we examine some of the precedents or antiprecedents that were at least vaguely familiar to late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans. These historical examples should help us understand the ways in which the colonization movement combined some of the features of deportation with an idealized picture of seventeenth-century English migrations to North America.
Any expulsion or exodus is bound to be seen in a wholly different light by the world’s Pharaohs and Israelites. Like the biblical Pharaoh and America’s post-Revolutionary whites, the persecutors have typically voiced alarm over the supposedly sudden growth of a population of dangerous “strangers” or heretics. Yet the desire to expel or exterminate these unwanted subversives has been restrained, at least temporarily, by a realistic knowledge of their services. In medieval Europe, for example, the Church’s obsession with religious uniformity was often counterbalanced by a secular recognition that Jews could be extremely useful to the state because of their knowledge of commerce, credit and banking, medicine, and the languages and customs of distant Christian and Muslim lands. In thirteenth-century England, the Crown derived a significant share of its revenue from a few extraordinarily wealthy Jewish magnates. It was not until Henry III’s ruinous taxes had impoverished the Anglo-Jewish community that the way was open for the famous expulsion edict of 1290. Two centuries later, when Spain deported a far larger Jewish population, officials tried to keep the irreplaceable Jewish physicians from leaving the country. At the turn of the seventeenth century, proposals to exterminate or expel Spain’s Moriscos were resisted by landlords and creditors who relied on their labor.19
Such self-interested resistance could be overcome by a belief in two kinds of danger: the fear that the subject population would rise in armed revolt or aid neighboring enemies; and the fear that an unassimilated group would corrupt the purity of a religious or national mission. Often the two fears overlapped, as in the prophecies of Jefferson and other white leaders that the continuing presence of America’s blacks would either undermine the experiment in republican government or provoke what Jefferson described as the “exterminating thunder” of “a god of justice,” who in an armed struggle would favor the oppressed.20
Internal security served as a pretext, at least, for the expulsion of some 275,000 Moriscos from early modern Spain. Centuries of Christian reconquest had led to the subjugation of large Muslim populations that were often indispensable to the economy but that also rebelled and collaborated with Muslim armies. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Spanish Christians enslaved and massacred the Moors but also intermarried with them; Christian kings prohibited Moors from emigrating to Muslim lands and also expelled them as security risks.21 The dilemma persisted long after the conquest of Granada purged Spain of Muslim rulers. The Spanish Moriscos, while nominally Christian, rebelled in the late 1560s, when the Crown tried to eradicate their Moorish customs and culture. Envied for their industry and fecundity, the Moriscos were perceived as internal enemies who might support Turkish attacks on Spain. Philip III’s decree of 1609, ordering the Moriscos to leave Spain, won enthusiastic popular support at the very moment when Spaniards felt humiliated by concessions to the victorious Dutch; the decree was also hailed as an act of mercy to a population that deserved extermination.22
Unlike the Moors and Moriscos, the Spanish Jews had no potential military allies or traditions of armed rebellion. Although Christians repeated and embellished all the libels fabricated during centuries of anti-Semitic persecution, the Edict of Expulsion of 1492 focused on the problem of assimilation, a problem experienced in different form by nineteenth-century free blacks who sought acceptance in the United States. Following the anti-Jewish riots and massacres of 1391, many Spanish Jews converted to Christianity. To prove the authenticity of their own faith, a few of these Marranos, or “New Christians,” accused others of secret Judaizing practices. Using torture, the Inquisition extracted a sufficient number of confessions to cast doubt on anyone with a trace of Jewish ancestry. The Spanish preoccupation with purity of blood, or limpieza de sangre, merged racism with religious prejudice. In theory, Marranos were not denied the possibility of Christian redemption. In actuality, they could always be accused of Judaizing practices and be banished or burned alive. By 1492, when the Reconquista finally subjected Granada to Christian rule, Ferdinand and Isabella concluded that the Marranos and their descendants would never be free from corruption as long as Jews were allowed to live in Spain, where they could secretly instruct the New Christians and persuade them “to follow the Law of Moses.” One is reminded of the fear expressed by Southern slaveholders that slaves would never unquestioningly accept their status as long as free blacks could poison their minds and represent the possibility of a different way of life. Because Ferdinand and Isabella were determined to prevent “our holy Catholic faith” from being “debased and humbled,” they ordered all Jews to leave Spain within three months.23
Even such classic examples of expulsion usually implied a degree of individual choice and self-definition. Thousands of Spanish Jews, including prominent rabbis, accepted last-minute conversion to Christianity as a lesser of evils. Two centuries later, thousands of French Huguenots preferred Catholicism to exile or death. The French Acadians, whom the British deported in 1755–56 from Nova Scotia and adjacent territories, could probably have remained in their homeland had they accepted an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown that would have denied, in effect, the political authority of the pope. Some seventy thousand American Loyalists, the first refugees from a modern, secular revolution, also rejected the alternative of a loyalty oath and political conversion. To win acceptance none of these exiles, with the arguable exception of several thousand black American Loyalists, faced the impossible requirement of changing the color of his skin.24
Yet, for many Spanish Jews, Huguenots, and other religious and political refugees, the choice of conversion was equivalent to a choice of enslavement. The alternatives were roughly comparable to those offered to a small number of Southern bondsmen who were given the choice of emigrating to Liberia or remaining in America as slaves. The meaning of consent is also transformed by violent persecution, which can sometimes bring the oppressors and the oppressed to agree that further coexistence is impossible, especially when the oppressed are perceived and begin to perceive themselves as a separate “nation.” This point is crucially important for an understanding of the occasional cooperation between black emigrationists and white racists after free blacks had been subjected to mob attacks in Northern cities and had finally been defined by the Supreme Court as “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which any white man was bound to respect.” A few references to twentieth-century events will help us appreciate how even coercive colonization can be interpreted as a providential escape.
To take the most extreme example, in 1938 the Nazis’ persecution of Jews entered a new phase with the Kristallnacht beatings, murders, and attacks on Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues. A few days after Kristallnacht, Hermann Göring explained privately that the goal of such violence was to force Jews to leave Germany and settle in a distant colony like Madagascar. State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker and other officials subsequently devoted considerable time to the Nazis’ “Madagascar Project.” The idea of colonizing Jews in Madagascar had actually appeared in anti-Semitic literature in the 1920s and had led the Polish government, which was eager to get rid of Poland’s “superfluous” Jews, to sound out the governor-general of the French colony. After finally receiving French consent, Poland dispatched a commission to Madagascar in 1937 to investigate the possibility of founding a Jewish settlement there (the two Jewish members of the commission found the island inhospitable and objected to the commission’s report). The fact that Poland and even France were interested in reducing their Jewish populations suggests why neighboring governments refused to take Nazi anti-Semitism seriously or to open the
ir gates to more than a trickle of Jewish refugees. Although some German officials were still considering the goal of colonizing all European Jews in distant territories as late as the summer of 1940, “resettlement” soon became a Nazi euphemism for unprecedented mass extermination.25
This experience has dramatized both the urgency and the difficulty of finding asylum for peoples subjected to increasingly violent persecution. Few refugee groups in history have been as fortunate as the French Huguenots, who for all their suffering were often aided by foreign neighbors and were able to escape by the tens of thousands to Protestant regions in Switzerland, Holland, the Rhineland, and England. When we evaluate the nineteenth-century African colonization movement, we should keep in mind the range of emotions aroused in modern times by the plight of Soviet Jews, by the conflict between the British and Irish, by the demand of right-wing Israeli groups that all Arabs be expelled from Israel, and by Israel’s “Operation Moses,” which rescued thousands of black Falashas from Ethiopia before being disclosed to the world in 1984. Aiding the persecuted does not usually imply even tacit moral approval of the persecutors; it may, however, serve as a humanitarian cloak for prejudice or imply a pragmatic acceptance of the persecution as an irremediable fact of life.
Despite their humiliation and suffering, exiles and refugees have often found it difficult to view their rejection as permanent. Groups of Spanish Jews, Huguenots, Acadians, and other expatriates addressed kings with petitions or monetary offers in the hope of securing a right to return. Moriscos who retained Christian practice and who found themselves despised in Barbary slipped back into Spain at the risk of being discovered and condemned as galley slaves. Hundreds of the Acadians who had been dispersed among Francophobic and anti-Catholic colonists to the American South welcomed the open boats and supplies provided by the governments of Georgia and South Carolina, and sailed up the Atlantic coast in desperate attempts to reach the Bay of Fundy.26 For at least two generations after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many Huguenots awaited the providential event that would enable them to return to France and convert their countrymen to Protestantism. Although some groups of refugees, such as the Huguenots, soon lost their distinctive identity, victims of persecution were no less bound than other emigrants to the culture of their former homelands. In northern Africa, Italy, Flanders, and Turkey, Sephardic Jews continued to take pride in their Spanish language, manners, and culture, which gave them an air of cosmopolitan superiority. When America’s black refugees returned to the United States from Haiti, Canada, and Liberia, or preserved American customs and institutions abroad, they were not thereby betraying their distinctive African American subculture or diluting their resentment toward racist oppression.27
Historical comparisons also provide perspective on the mixture of exuberance and despair felt by many exiles as they sought to explain their loss of homes, property, and community as well as the frightening uncertainty of the future. For faithful Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike, such cataclysms could be comprehended only as the will of God. The Moriscos, according to Henry Charles Lea, arrived at the Spanish port of Alicante “with music and song, as though going to a festival, and thanking Allah for the happiness of returning to the land of their fathers.” Although many Moriscos mistrusted Philip III’s offer of free transport and chartered their own ships, others interpreted Spain’s sudden reversal of policy as a providential opportunity, as one leader put it, “ ‘to go to the land of our ancestors, under our king the Turk, who will let us live as Moors and not as slaves, as we have been treated by our masters.’ ”28
In 1492, many Jews expressed a similar sense of exaltation and ecstasy as they compared their suffering and banishment to the Mosaic Exodus or saw it as a “third exile,” confirming their unique relationship with God. According to Leon Poliakov, it was said that this Exodus would be followed “by a promised land of glory and honor. Others added that it would not be long before Spain recalled her children, so certain exiles, after selling their property, buried their money in the soil of the mother country.” After receiving a warm welcome in Turkey, one Jewish poet proclaimed that God had at last provided a safe asylum in which Jews could cast off corruptions and recover ancient truths:
Great Turkey, a wide and spreading sea, which our Lord opened with the wand of His mercy (as at the exodus from Egypt), that the tide of thy present disaster, Jacob, as happened with the multitude of the Egyptians, should therein lose and exhaust itself.… In this realm thou art highly favored by the Lord, since therein He granteth thee boundless liberty to commence thy late repentance.29
Some Huguenot leaders compared their persecution to that of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews; they also complained that their followers, “like the Israelites, noe sooner past the sea but they forget their deliverance and goe a Stray.” For Huguenot exiles, however, the central meaning of the Israelites’ Exodus was that God would not abandon the faithful who remained within His covenant. The punishment He had inflicted upon such persecutors as Pharaoh and Herod, in the Old and New Testaments, showed that Catholic tyrants would inevitably pay for their crimes; the agonies suffered by Protestants within France would soon cease. While Huguenot leaders, such as Pierre Jurieu, recommended emigration to America as a way of escaping conversion to Catholicism, they associated deliverance with the return to a purified France, not with a new promised land. Still, it is noteworthy that when Mademoiselle de Sers wrote to her mother and father, a Huguenot pastor, while sailing to America in 1688, she compared the way God had delivered the Israelites from the hands of Pharaoh to the way He had enabled her faithful compatriots to escape their persecutors and joyfully cross the sea. Mademoiselle de Sers was bound for Saint-Domingue. She could not foresee the chain of events that would arouse hopes similar to hers, 136 years later, among shiploads of American free blacks bound for the same island.30
PRECEDENTS: THE DISPLACED
When exiles and refugees recalled the biblical Exodus, they seldom referred to its darkest side. When the founders and supporters of the American Colonization Society asserted that “this scheme is from God!” and that “to labour in this work is to co-work with God,” they envisioned the salvation of Africa, not the slaughter or displacement of its natives. When Edward Wilmot Blyden wrote to his fellow African Americans from Liberia, telling them that God had mandated their return to an African homeland, he quoted from Deuteronomy: “Behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the Lord God of thy fathers had said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged.” But Blyden did not point out that this passage precedes God’s angry complaint that the Israelites had been fearful of trying to conquer “a people stronger and taller than we, large cities with walls sky-high.”31
In Deuteronomy, at the end of the forty years’ preparation in the wilderness, the Lord informs the Israelites that they are about to invade and occupy “seven nations much larger than you.” He promises He “will dislodge those peoples before you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them at once, else the wild beasts would multiply to your hurt.” After guaranteeing victory over the idolatrous nations that occupy the Promised Land, God issues an unequivocal command: “You shall not let a soul remain alive.” And when Joshua’s troops eventually capture Jericho, the Bible reports, “they exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and ass.”32
In actuality, archeological evidence indicates that the Israelites slowly infiltrated the Land of Canaan and did not exterminate their enemies; God’s war sermon probably reflects a post-settlement lament that the Israelites’ adoption of idolatrous customs and intermarriage with Canaanites could have been prevented by killing off the native inhabitants.33 Talmudic and medieval rabbinic commentators insisted that God’s ruthless commandment could never serve as a precedent for other times and peoples. Even the New England Puritans, who sometimes referred to Indians as Canaanites and Amalekites, were extremely reluctant to invoke God’s
commandments to annihilate specific pagan tribes. Nevertheless, the conquest of Canaan provided an example of divinely sanctioned colonization and violent displacement that was not lost on the English colonizers of Ireland and North America.34
Before examining the subject of displacement, it is important to clarify a source of possible confusion when one compares the relations between colonists and natives in North America and West Africa. During the half century following the War of Independence, white Americans subjected Indians and free blacks to increasing persecution. Demands for the removal of both groups presupposed their replacement by white citizens. There were enormous differences, however, between Indian nations who inhabited land desired by whites and communities of free blacks who tended to seek what refuge and employment they could find in crowded cities. Historically, whites had often expressed an abstract admiration for Indians that was definitely not extended to blacks. The contrast widened as writers, painters, and poets romanticized the noble savage as the primordial American.35 Yet the blacks, unlike the Indians, were also portrayed by the American Colonization Society as latter-day Pilgrims who would carry to Africa the seeds of Christianity and American civilization. Frequently likened to the founders of Plymouth and Jamestown colonies, the Liberian settlers occupied their own “Canaan” and confronted their own natives, whose population had not been depleted in advance by alien diseases such as those that wiped out whole communities of eastern Indians before Plymouth was settled.36
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 13