The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  Cornish, who in two years would launch the first African American newspaper, presided as minister over the debt-ridden First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York. He had been given special training at the Philadelphia Presbytery, had served as a missionary to slaves in Maryland, and had then worked as an evangelist with impoverished blacks in one of the worst slums of New York. At the time Cowles met Cornish and talked so late into the night that he got little sleep, the black pastor could take pride in his new brick church and congregation of several hundred. But Cornish, whom Cowles considered “a good and intelligent though of course imperfectly educated man,” was anything but happy or deferential to a white colonizationist whose own education was incomplete. As Cowles informed Bacon, this black man expressed himself without inhibition and “with more national and manly feeling than I was exactly prepared for”:44

  He said that his people had borne their full share of the toils and hardships[,] the fears and sufferings that had been endured in order to make this country what it is. He thought they had therefore a good righ[t] to enjoy it. But this was denied to them while at the same time as if to render the injustice with which they were treated more cutting and to show the extent of their degradation[,] all the privileges of the most favored were with ostentatious generosity offered to the offscourings of Europe. For himself he was so hurt by this injustice[,] he was so sensible of the utter degradation that he should hail with a joy he had never felt—the breaking of that day when the whites[,] impelled by no cause which should involve his people in guilt[,] should rise and destroy them—every living soul—thus terminating at once their own uneasiness and the miseries of the blacks. Such a day he never expected to see but he often sighed for it when he pondered on the condition of himself and his people. 45

  This sense of despair, dramatized by the fantasy of an unprovoked genocide, no doubt confirmed Cowles and Bacon in their conviction that only a separation of the races could prevent further injustice and open genuine opportunities for blacks. One of Bacon’s other colleagues, who felt that whites owed an enormous debt to African Americans, had written in anguish over the difficulty of arousing interest and making white people care: “But Alas! What can make white men sympathetic with black men—freemen with their own slaves? They can feel for the Hindoo for the Greek and for the black Hottentot, if he is at as great a remove the distance gives a kind of dignity in which the commonness and disgust of seeing and receiving a black man at their own door is lost.”46

  But for Cornish, blacks could hardly be expected to welcome the offer of distance or to see any dignity in being colonized. As Cowles paraphrased him:

  [T]he whites it seemed were about to take another step in injustice. Such were the feelings of disgust and contempt with which they regarded the blacks that they could not rest so long as the possibility remained of [the blacks] rising to their own level and mingling with them in the various scenes of life. Since then they were not likely to be of any further service on the whole and although they were so much attached to this country and so much accustomed and wedded to civilization that they must suffer much by the change[,] yet they had formed a Soc. for the purpose of transporting them all to the barbarous and horrible land of their fathers.47

  Cornish assured Cowles that “he knew that some men who were connected with the C.S. [ACS] were actuated by very different feelings and such as entitled them to the highest gratitude of the blacks”; yet the popularity of the ACS “depended on the contempt and disgust with which negroes were commonly regarded. It was hard to be the object of such feelings.” One can only wonder whether Cowles and Bacon got Cornish’s point about colonizationists treating individuals as members of an impersonalized class. No doubt they separated their own motives from the repellent motives they needed to accept if the ACS were to succeed. Cornish told Cowles that blacks would be content “to oppose passive resistance” to the efforts of the colonizationists, but it was too much to expect “that they would voluntarily yield to it when it required that they should suffer the treatment of convicts.”48

  On Cornish’s recommendation, Cowles called on James Forten when he reached Philadelphia. It is a mark of Cowles’s and presumably Bacon’s ignorance of the black community that Cowles had not previously heard of Forten and misspelled his name, while noting that he was “said to be worth from [$]1 to 200.000 00, He is proud of his money and vain of his abilities which have enabled him to get it and withal possesses a great deal of information.”49 A prosperous sailmaker, Forten was nearing sixty and had long been the leader of Philadelphia’s black elite. For a decade he had been at the center of controversies over colonization, at first cooperating with the business and African emigration ventures of Paul Cuffe, the black shipowner who transported American blacks to Sierra Leone, and then strengthening his own position as a racial leader by chairing public meetings to denounce the ACS. According to Cowles, his sentiments were very nearly those of Cornish “unmodified and unrestrained by religion.” Indeed, Cowles regretted that his lengthy and exhausting visit with Forten had prevented him from seeing James Cassey, a barber and financier “of less fortune but more liberality,” whom Cornish had recommended “with more confidence.”50

  Forten had long been interested in selective emigration to Haiti, and he shocked Cowles by praising “the great men of Hayti [as] the defenders and the avengers of his race.” Forten’s views on the outcome of racial conflict differed sharply from those of Bacon:

  [H]e said repeatedly, that reasoning from the righteousness of God and from the manifest tendency of events[,] he was brought to the conclusion that the time was approaching and to judge from his manner, was already at the door when the 250,000,000 who had for centuries been the oppressors of the remaining 600,000,000 of the human race would find the tables turned upon them and would expiate by their own sufferings those which they had inflicted on others. When they had done this[,] he could hear proposals for placing all men on the same level and not till then.

  While Forten may simply have intended to shake up his youthful white visitor, his menacing words must have strengthened the convictions of Cowles and of New Haven’s newly appointed Congregational leader. Cowles concluded, however, that the anti-ACS sentiments he had encountered in New York and Philadelphia were shared by “all the blacks north of the Potomac.” And in Baltimore he was disheartened by the “very tedious” talk of the ACS’s General Robert Goodloe Harper, whose tacit disapproval of the New Englanders’ educational plan “was a good preparation for what I was to find in Wash.”

  In the nation’s capital, Cowles discovered that the ACS was “certainly a strange matter.” Elias Caldwell, the Society’s first secretary, “never distinguished for his abilities,” was now superannuated and near death. One of the officers seemed attached to the cause “but has everything else to do”; another “sputters in your face a moment and then is off with whew.” Although Cowles found much to admire in Ralph R. Gurley, the young Connecticut Yankee who really ran the society and who was about to succeed Caldwell as secretary, Gurley’s ingenuousness was “a great defect in a man of business.” Judge Bushrod Washington, the most celebrated name on the ACS roster, in reality “had nothing to do [with the society] and cares nothing about it.”51

  As we have seen, in the antebellum period a large majority of whites continued to believe that slave emancipation was unthinkable without some form of colonization, a fact reflected in Lincoln’s support of the idea in the first years of the Civil War. By the late 1850s, even most black leaders had shifted their hopes to some kind of racial emigration, and those very temporary hopes resurfaced as late as the 1920s with the surprising support for Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement. But in the 1820s, slaveholders in the Deep South were instrumental in blocking the political goals of the ACS, and despite their continuing oppression, the great majority of American blacks always resisted pressures for emigration or colonization. As we will see in the next chapter, it was such black resistance that thwarted any signif
icant merger of antislavery and colonization and that led to the emergence in the early 1830s of a new biracial movement for the “immediate” emancipation of all American slaves.

  7

  From Opposing Colonization to Immediate Abolition

  PAUL CUFFE AND EARLY PROPOSALS FOR EMIGRATION

  Before the American Colonization Society was formed in 1816, evoking strong black protest, the connections between emigration, colonization, and genuine antislavery sentiment seemed much clearer. That could even be true when the proposed colonization involved some coercion. For example, in 1715 the Quaker John Hepburn appended to his own pioneering abolitionist tract an anonymous article, “Arguments Against Making Slaves of Men,” which countered almost every conceivable defense of human bondage. Yet this seemingly radical author argued that before being emancipated, all blacks should be given a Christian education and then returned to Africa, where they could further the causes of religion and civilization. Slaves would have to choose between this form of liberation with free transportation or remain as slaves in America. The author drew on the example of white Christians who had been enslaved by Moors or Turks and who longed to be redeemed and returned to Europe. Significantly, even this early proposal included a suggestion of missionary work in Africa, an idea that would attract some black emigrationists and eventually become a central theme of the ACS.1

  Clearly the idea of returning slaves to Africa had a very different meaning in the colonial period, when a majority of American slaves had been born in Africa and transported westward in the Middle Passage.2 In 1773 a group of Massachusetts slaves petitioned the legislature, appealing not only for their natural right to freedom but for an opportunity to obtain funds to transport themselves to some part of the African coast where they would found a “settlement.” African-born blacks in Rhode Island expressed a desire to return to a more agreeable warm climate, free from racist oppression.3

  Nevertheless, the parallel with rescuing Christian slaves in Muslim regions was highly misleading, even apart from the fact that West Africans were not trying to redeem their enslaved brethren in America. As the petition of the Massachusetts slaves indicated, it was difficult to find a homelike destination in Africa. Even if an African-born slave managed to return to his or her native region, there could be a genuine danger of reenslavement. For this reason philanthropists also began to think in terms of founding slave-free settlements, which led Granville Sharp and other British reformers to establish Sierra Leone in 1787 as an African refuge for blacks freed during the American Revolution, who had begun to crowd the streets of London. If African American slaves had actually been in a position similar to that of English slaves in Tripoli, there would have been no ambiguity about returning to a homeland. Or if, like slaves in ancient Rome, they had not been racially differentiated and could have become genuine citizens after being manumitted, there would have been no need to seek a homeland. But as whites even in colonial Virginia made clear, slaves could not ordinarily be manumitted without having to leave the colony. As we have now repeatedly seen, emancipation thus involved powerful pressures for removal but no clear location to which to move—except a vague sense of Africa, symbolized by the problematic and at times lethal British colony of Sierra Leone.4

  It is significant that New England, which witnessed the most important early antislavery agitation in the Revolutionary period, also became the site of the first black interest in emigration to Africa. In the North, Vermont in 1777 became the first government in the world to outlaw slavery by constitutional fiat, and to the south, the Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins, a disciple of the slave-owning Jonathan Edwards, became the father of an abolitionist theology that connected the First Great Awakening of the 1740s with the second great period of religious revivalism in the 1820s and beyond. It can be argued that Hopkins’s linkages of slavery with divine punishment and a new conception of original sin and “disinterested benevolence” had a profound influence on nineteenth-century abolitionists and even Harriet Beecher Stowe. But it was in 1770, when he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, that Hopkins directly confronted the slave trade and a population of African-born blacks and began writing key abolitionist works. After attempting to establish a school for black missionary work in Africa, he continued to advocate free transport for freed slaves who wanted to return to Africa.5

  Beginning in the 1780s, when African Americans started forming their first social organizations such as the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, the African Free Society in Philadelphia, and (with the support of Hopkins) the African Union Society in Newport, their response to colonization ideas fluctuated according to situation and changing conditions. This can be seen in the different response between blacks in New England and Philadelphia to the arrival in 1786 of William Thornton, the Quaker son of a wealthy Antiguan planter who had been educated at the University of Edinburgh before joining the London founders of Sierra Leone in an effort to free and colonize slaves, including those he had inherited.6

  After only a few weeks in America, Thornton claimed that he had found two thousand freedmen ready to go to Africa. It was especially in Newport and Boston that African-born blacks expressed an interest in returning to “ancestral lands,” though the Boston group wrote that they much preferred to charter a vessel of their own. Philadelphia’s blacks gave Thornton a much cooler reception, despite his glowing description of Sierra Leone. Later communications between Philadelphia’s African Free Society (AFS) and the Newport group suggested that the latter believed in a divine mission to evangelize Africa and that blacks in Newport and Boston felt they were “strangers and outcasts in a strange land, attended with many disadvantages and evils which are likely to continue on us and our children, while we and they live in this country.” In contrast, members of the AFS had all been born in America and were convinced that some whites were dedicated to improving the condition of blacks.7

  Through the 1790s and early nineteenth century, Sierra Leone became a model for various black and white discussions of emigration, though there were also numerous negative reports of terrible voyages, emigrants being stranded in ships at port, nearby slave trading, and conflict with natives. Various plans also failed as a result of lack of funding, bureaucratic obstacles, and uneven black support. But then in 1811, Paul Cuffe, the famous seafaring black captain and probably the wealthiest black in the country, made his first trip to Sierra Leone and was much taken with the idea of establishing a small African American settlement (though the British administrators told him he would need more official backing from America or Britain, which he did his best to seek).

  Cuffe was the son of an African-born father and Wampanoag Indian mother. His father, who died when Paul was thirteen, had been the slave of a Quaker master who had then apparently allowed him to work for his freedom.8 Cuffe himself became a devout Quaker and at age sixteen began working on a whaling ship and as a sailor, learning the arts of navigation and commerce before creating a shipping empire. Building his own ships, Cuffe traded with great success from his home in Massachusetts along the coast to the Carolinas, staffing his boats with black sailors. His Quaker connections and transatlantic travel made him the best-known African American of his time. His later activities were even covered by newspapers in most major cities. He corresponded with such figures as Thomas Clarkson and William Allen in Britain, and in London, after his first voyage to Sierra Leone, he won support for his ideas about black emigration from leaders of the important African Institution. Thanks to his network of influential friends, Cuffe’s colonization ideas even received strong personal support from President James Madison and Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, before being totally blocked by the outbreak of the War of 1812. Cuffe was the first black guest known to have been received by an American president, and Madison, addressed as “James” by Cuffe, in Quaker fashion, interviewed him with great cordiality.9

  It should be stressed that Cuffe was not interested in finding a refuge for the black poor or in a mass mig
ration to Africa. He hoped to recruit a small number of men of some property whose good character and sobriety would ensure a commercial settlement in Africa that would bring in profits, serve as a model, and enhance the image of all persons of African descent. No less important, the kind of economic development Cuffe had in mind would help obviate the need for the slave trade and create a black society free from both slavery and racial prejudice. Ironically, although Cuffe had a strong desire to join a settlement in Sierra Leone, his Pequot wife refused to leave the land of her ancestors.10

  With the end of the War of 1812, Cuffe finally transported thirty-eight carefully selected black colonists to Africa, landing in Sierra Leone on February 3, 1816. While not greeted as warmly as he expected, Cuffe remained highly optimistic over the future prospects of his settlers. Most of all, his timing coincided with and helped nourish an immense upsurge of interest in colonization, epitomized by the founding of the American Colonization Society in December 1816 by a group that included antislavery clergy, missionaries, and slaveholders intent on exporting as many free blacks as possible. But then Cuffe’s health suddenly deteriorated and he died on September 7, 1817, at age fifty-eight.11

  JAMES FORTEN AND BLACK REACTIONS TO THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY

  Largely as a result of the gradual but total slave emancipation in the North, the free black population increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century, an event that stimulated white racism on all levels.12 Despite the patriotic praise given to black Philadelphians for their assistance against the British in the War of 1812, race relations deteriorated rapidly after the war. Expressions of Negrophobia became commonplace in print and on the street, and in Philadelphia, even Bishop Richard Allen became the victim of a kidnapper who, as was the custom, swore that he had recently purchased Allen as a slave, until Allen was able to call witnesses to testify about his identity.13 This virulent racism aroused new interest in emigration proposals—at least among black leaders like Allen and Philadelphia’s wealthy sailmaker and inventor, James Forten. Forten asserted many times that he saw no future for blacks “until they come out from amongst the white people.”14