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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2021
This essay examines how the project of national security was beset by the affective intensities of “Jeffersonian trembling.” While white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement, mainstream supporters of the movement to colonize US blacks leveraged their fear to export insecurity and precarity onto African Americans. The claim of “white genocide” dates back to biopolitical anxieties that drove the colonization movement to control and manage the chimera of black population excess. Such efforts required the conversion of blacks into data so that they could be brought under a regime of “algorithmic governmentality.” Instead of targeting individual black bodies, white nationalism read the latest data about black people in toto as a threat. Different in scale from the surveillance techniques that overseers, patrollers, and other agents of slaveholding society employed, colonization represented a security algorithm for tackling a data problem that was the size of the African American population itself. In this history, we can detect how the logic of security is always a racialized formation that is intimately connected to feelings of insecurity.
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2 Ibid.
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9 Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. Macey, David (New York: Picador, 2003), 243Google Scholar.
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12 Foucault, Security 1, defines biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, or a general strategy of power.” The approach is two-pronged, involving, on the one hand, discipline, which “is exercised on the bodies individuals” and security, which “is exercised over a whole population” (ibid., 11). Security identifies the population as a principal concern for biopolitics. As Fleur, Greta La and Schuller, Kyla, “Introduction: Technologies of Life and Architectures of Death in Early America,” American Quarterly, 71, 3 (Sept. 2019), 603–24, 606Google Scholar, explain, within biopolitical thinking, population “denotes a biological phenomenon subject to and thus best administered through its own processes, such as rates of mortality, birth, illness, wealth generation, and income distribution.”
13 Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751,” Founders Online, National Archives, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080. Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume IV, July 1, 1750, through June 30, 1753, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 225–234, 7.
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16 Young, Sandra Sandiford, “John Brown Russwurm's Dilemma: Citizenship Emigration,” in McCarthy, Timothy Patrick and Stauffer, John, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: The New Press, 2006), 90–113, 99Google Scholar.
17 See the Library of Congress online exhibit, “The African-American Mosaic,” at www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam004.html.
18 There is some range to the historical span for tabulating the numbers of people colonized through ACS efforts, which produces varying counts. “In its century of operations, the Colonization Society oversaw the removal of 15,385 Blacks to Liberia,” according to Castiglia, Christopher, “Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship: John Witherspoon, Robert Finley, and the Colonization Society,” Early American Literature, 33, 2 (1998), 192–214, 192Google Scholar. Stopping the tally at the start of the War, Civil, Guyatt, Nicholas, “‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic” Journal of American History, 95, 4 (March 2009), 986–1011, 987Google Scholar, states, “around 10,000 Blacks, fewer than 1 percent of those in the United States in 1820, were removed to Liberia between 1820 and 1860”. Power-Greene, Ousmane K., Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), xviiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar, writes, “Although Liberia did inspire nearly 13,000 African Americans to leave the United States to settle there between the founding of the colony and the Civil War, this represented less than 3% of the total free Black population in the United States during that time.”
19 Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 5, 41.
20 Antoinette Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism versus Due Process,” in Katja de Vries, ed., Privacy, Due Process, and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology (New York: Routledge, 2015), 143–67, 144.
21 Antoinette Rouvroy, “Algorithmic Governmentality and the Death of Politics,” Green European Journal, 27 March 2020, at www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/algorithmic-governmentality-and-the-death-of-politics.
22 Foucault, Security, 344.
23 Browne, Simone, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
24 Johnson, Jessica Marie, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text, 36, 4 (Dec. 2018), 57–79, 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Ibid. See also McKittrick on “the mathematics of the unliving.” McKittrick, Katherine, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 44, 2 (2014), 16–28, 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Hacking, Ian, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” in Cisney, Vernon M. and Morar, Nicole, eds., Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 279–95, 281, 294Google Scholar.
27 See Barbara Perry, “‘White Genocide’: White Supremacists and the Politics of Reproduction,” in Abby L. Ferber, ed., Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism (London: Routledge, 2004), 71–91 on the reproductive dimensions of white supremacists’ invocation of “white genocide.”
28 Zeskind, Leonard, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2009), xviiGoogle Scholar.
29 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in R. J. Johnston, Peter J. Taylor, and Michael J. Watts, eds., Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 261–74, 261.
30 Weheliye, Alexander G., Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 19Google Scholar.
31 Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 9Google Scholar.
32 Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 7Google Scholar.
33 Horsman, 276, notes that those who boasted their “pure” descent from white stock were “prepared to accept only a few of the inhabitants of the Spanish West and Southwest as white.” But, as Roediger argues, for many working-class people, the stigmatization of blackness and its entanglement with class identity helped to solidify their hold upon whiteness, which otherwise might been tenuous at times.
34 William Jay, An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Anti-slavery Societies, 4th edn (New York: R. G. Williams, for the American Antislavery Society, 1837), 109. Then again, the proximity of figures such as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and others to the Trump administration, not to mention media outlets such as Breitbart News and Fox News, indicates that white nationalism is making inroads from the margins toward the center of acceptable discourse.
35 The ACS counted on broad support from American churches in presenting its case to the public. As Sweet, “The Fourth of July,” 260, writes, “What can only be termed a massive propaganda blitz was aimed at the clergy. Colonization auxiliaries dispatched collection agents into the fields to persuade ecclesiastical bodies and local clergymen to transform Independence Day celebrations into rites applauding the merits of colonization. Sermon topics, statistics, colonization arguments and even itinerant evangelists for colonization were provided local churches for the occasion.”
36 Baxter Dickinson, 12, made this pitch to the Auxiliary Colonization Society of Springfield, Massachusetts on 4 July 1829. His vision of a white republic “destined within the compass of the passing century to embosom a white population of eighty millions” was certainly in reach but only if the unwelcome remainder of a surging black population were removed from the overall national equation.
37 ACS, Seventh Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States. Within an Appendix (Washington, DC: Davis and Force, 1824), 90.
38 Ibid. 91.
39 Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique,” 157.
40 ACS, Seventh Annual Report, 91.
41 Foucault, Security, 71.
42 Ibid., Security, 71.
43 Freedom's Journal, 30 March 1827, 9, original emphasis.
44 Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” 282.
45 Carey, Matthew, “Letter from Matthew Carey, Esq. of Philadelphia,” African Repository, 41 (1829), 270–72, 271Google Scholar.
46 While African Americans opposed colonization plans of white organizations, African Americans since the late eighteenth century had shown interest in emigrating to Trinidad, Jamaica, Saint Domingue, and Barbados. Paul Cuffee, Prince Hall, James Forten, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano were among those who supported black emigration before the formation of the ACS.
47 Freedom's Journal, 30 May 1828, 74, reported that a Senate committee on foreign relations had investigated colonization and determined the costs to be prohibitive. While the transportation costs for sending the annual increase among the free people of color would amount to just $700,000 per year, it could cost as much as $5,700,000 to remove the annual increase of the slave population. The Senate committee estimated the cost of removing the entire slave population at $190,000,000.
48 The distinction between government and governmentality is important in understanding the role and influence of the ACS. While the first refers to formal elements of the state, Foucault's idea of governmentality encompasses social institutions, which, while not formally allied with the state, nevertheless support and further its control.
49 Nash, Gary, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 224–27Google Scholar.
50 On a national level, the federal government kept up the steady pace of passing discriminatory legislation: “In 1790, Congress limited naturalization to white aliens; in 1792, it organized the militia and restricted enrollment to able-bodied white male citizens; in 1810, it excluded Negroes from carry the U.S. mails.” Litwack, Leon, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 31Google Scholar.
51 Harris, Leslie M., In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Pres, 2003), 118Google Scholar.
52 Litwack estimated that “by 1840, some 93% of the northern free Negro population lived in states which completely or practically excluded them from the right to vote.” Ibid., 75.
53 Ibid., 31.
54 Kazanjian, David, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121Google Scholar.
55 Jay, An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, 7.
56 Foucault, Security, 20
57 Hamilton, John T., Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 27Google Scholar.
58 Dillon, Michael, Biopolitics of Security: A Political Analytic of Finitude (London: Routledge, 2015), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Jay, 8.
60 Cohen, Patricia Cline, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 174Google Scholar.
61 Ibid., 192.
62 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, at https://web.archive.org/web/20080914030942/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html, 289, emphasis added. As Guyatt, “The Outskirts of Our Happiness,” 991, describes Jefferson's thinking, colonization would create a “double emancipation” by rescuing whites from blacks while freeing blacks from slavery. Kazanjian, 92–93, identifies “Jeffersonian colonization” as a numerical and statistical solution that saw “colonization as a form of racial governmentality.” My focus here, of course, is not so much on Jefferson's views as on ritualistic invocations of his warning. For more on how Jefferson's ideas about republicanism required black colonization see Saillant, “The American Enlightenment in Africa.”
63 “Fourth of July,” African Repository, 5 (1829–30), 87–91, 88.
64 J. B. Harrison, “The Colonization Society Vindicated to Virginia, in a Discourse Delivered before the Lynchburg Colonization Society, at its Anniversary, in July, 1827,” African Repository, 3 (1827), 193–208, 196, original emphasis. A Virginia lawyer with moderate antislavery feelings, Harrison's participation in the ACS illustrates the organization's ability to appeal to slavery's critics as well its defenders.
65 Benjamin Silliman, “Some Causes of National Anxiety,” African Repository, 8 (1832–33), 161–78, 170.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 171.
68 Ibid, 172.
69 Ibid., 171.
70 See Hodgson, Dennis, “Malthus’ Essay on Population and the American Debate over Slavery,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51, 4 (Oct. 2009), 742–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on how ideas about Malthusian displacement played into pro-slavery and abolitionist debates.
71 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, at https://web.archive.org/web/20080914030942/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html, 147.
72 Christian Mirror, 31 Jan. 1829, 344.
73 Silliman, 172.
74 Walker, David, Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Especially, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829. Third and Last Edition, with Additional Notes, Corrections, Etc. (Boston, MA: David Walker, 1830), 71Google Scholar.
75 Freedom's Journal, 18 May 1827, 37.
76 Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” at www.gutenberg.org/files/15859/15859-h/15859-h.htm.
77 Carey, “Letter,” 271.
78 Ingrid Diran, “Scenes of Speculation: Harriet Jacobs and the Biopolitics of Human Capital,” American Quarterly, 71, 3 (Sept. 2019), 697–718, 700.
79 Ibid., 706.
80 Gutman, Herbert G., Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 96Google Scholar.
81 Davis, Adrienne, “Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle”: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective, eds., Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Pres, 2002) 103–27, 117Google Scholar.
82 Ibid., 105.
83 Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joel Yancy, 17 Jan. 1819, in Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book with Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 42.
84 For more on Jefferson's longstanding interest in statistics and “settler colonial biopolitics,” see Dikant, Thomas, “Settler Colonial Statistics: Jefferson, Biopolitics, and Notes on the State of Virginia,” Early American Literature, 54, 1 (2019), 69–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 To John Adams from Joseph Milligan, 30 Nov. 1818, at https://founders.archives.gov/?q=milligan%20%22has%20been%20translated%22&s=1111311111&sa=&r=2&sr=.
86 Davis, 105.
87 Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Boston Review, 20 Feb. 2018, at https://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world.
88 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 201.
89 Jeffersonian trembling sits deep within the “lacunae of racism as an object of knowledge” that Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 57, discerns in Foucault's account of biopower. La Fleur and Schuller, “Introduction,” 608, express this argument in historical terms: “While beliefs about the significance of racial difference – or, as eighteenth-century naturalists tended to describe it, ‘human variety’ – differed greatly across time and space, the separation, categorization, and hierarchization of human life into racial taxa extended the reach of biopower in the early Americas in ways that would have wide-ranging consequences for Black and Native peoples, in particular.” Foucault's history, in contrast, is predominantly European. For the problems this creates see Mbembe, who examines the coordination of biopower, the plantation system, and colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that “biopolitics discourse not only misconstrues how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human, it also overlooks or perfunctorily writes off theorizations of race, subjection, and humanity found in Black and ethnic studies, allowing bare life and biopolitics discourse to imagine an indivisible biological substance anterior to racialization.” Weheliye, 4.
90 Freedom's Journal, 13 April 1827, 17; Walker, Walker's Appeal.
91 Foster, Frances Smith, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History, 17, 4 (Winter 2005), 714–40, 720CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 43.
93 Walker, 71.
94 Ibid., 32.
95 Ibid., 32–33.
96 Best, Stephen, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
97 Walker, 81.
98 Ibid., 84.
99 Ibid., 85.
100 Ibid.
101 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, 246.
