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Richmond Free Blacks and African Colonization, 1816–1832

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Marie Tyler McGraw
Marie Tyler McGraw
Affiliation:
Marie Tyler McGraw is a Fellow at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. 20560. USA. She would like to thank James Horton, director of the Afro-American Communities Project and Svend Holsoe, director of the Liberian Research Institute for their assistance with this article.
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Extract

Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1588, was referring to the Elizabethan poor whose ranks were newly enlarged by the economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century. His rationale for government-sponsored colonization has hardly been improved upon in the subsequent four hundred years and examples of its application can be found over much of the globe, from Acadians in Louisiana to convicts in Australia. Two hundred and forty years after Hakluyt, the American Colonization Society was founded in Washington, D.C., to encourage the emigration of American free blacks to Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , August 1987 , pp. 207 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 Staudenraus, P. J., The African Colonization Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)Google Scholar provides the only real institutional overview of the national society.

2 Examples include Mehlinger, Louis, “The Attitude of the Free Negro Toward African Colonization,” Journal of Negro History, I, 276–301Google Scholar; Sweet, Leonard, Black Images of America 1784–1870 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 56Google Scholar; Curry, Leonard P., The Free Black in Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 232–34Google Scholar; Berlin, Ira, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, 1974), 204Google Scholar; Schick, Thomas, Behold the Promised Land (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1980), 7Google Scholar; Bracey, John H. et al. , Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970)Google Scholar notes that individual free blacks were interested in colonization without noting that many of these free blacks also were responding through organizational structures. In general, historians have been slightly more willing to admit the complexity of the white response to the American Colonization Society than to acknowledge the same complexity for free blacks.

3 Leesburg, (Virginia) Genius of Liberty, 23 Jan. 1817Google Scholar; William, Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Coloniation (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832)Google Scholar (reprint edition New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), Part I, ii–xi; Part II, 61–3; Staudenraus, 259.

4 “Roll of emigrants that have been sent to the Colony of Liberia, Western Africa, by the American Colonization Society and its Auxiliaries, to September 1843, and etc.,” Senate Documents, 28th Congress, and session, 1844, IX, 152–54.

5 Louis, Manarin and Clifford, Dowdey, The History of Henrico County (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 165Google Scholar; Russell, John H., The Free Negro in Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1913), 61Google Scholar; Babcock, Theodore S., Manumission in Virginia (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1974), 17, 21–22, 39, 65.Google Scholar

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15 Staudenraus, 87–93; Taylor, 28, 31; Alexander, 246. Cary's letters from Liberia were reproduced in a variety of publications including The Latter Day Luminary, Annual Report of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions for the United States and the African Repository. Copies of the first two are held in the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, Richmond, and the latter in the American Colonization Society Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Taylor, , Biograpby of Elder Lott Cary…, 28–31Google Scholar; Mark, Miles Fisher, “Lott Cary, The Colonizing Missionary,” JNH 7, 4 (10 1922), 411–43.Google Scholar

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18 John Tyler to John White Nash, Washington, D.C., 6 May 1828, Richmond Colonization Auxiliary papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond. For an overview of these interconnected and powerful families in the early nineteenth century, see Harrison, J. H. Jr., “Oligarchs and Democrats – the Richmond Junto,” Virginia Magaine of History and Biography, 8, 2 (04, 1970)Google Scholar; for the politics of Richmond colonization, see letters to R. R. Gurley, national secretary of the American Colonization Society, from William Meade, Benjamin Brand, John French, William Crane, John Cocke, all on Reel 314, ACS papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Alexander, 256–57; For Cary's death, C. M. Waring to Rev. R. R. Gurley, Monrovia, 10 Nov. 1828 in ACS papers, Vol. 12, Domestic Correspondence, Reel 4, No. 2003.

19 Svend E. Holsoe, ed., “A List of Passengers to Liberia by Place of Origin,” Liberian Research Institute, Philadelphia; Svend E. Holsoe, ed., “Letters from Liberia, 1829,” Liberian Research Institute, Philadelphia; Benjamin Brand to Lott Cary, Jan. 1826; Benjamin Brand to Lott Cary, Feb. 1827; Benjamin Brand papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.

20 Mrs. Amelia Roberts, to ACS, 16 April 1829, African Repository, 5 (1829–30), 155; Frederick James to ACS, 6 May 1829, ACS papers, Series 1, Vol. 15, Reel 5, No. 2517. James describes himself as having lived in Washington, D.C. for fourteen years. On the 1820 passenger list of the Elizabeth, he is listed as being from Philadelphia; J. Mechlin, Jr., to ACS, 22 April 1829, African Repository, 5 (June, 1829), 122–23 cited in Holsoe, “Letters from Liberia, 1829,” Liberian Research Institute, Philadelphia; Schick, Behold the Promised Land, Chs 1 and 2; William Crane to R. R. Gurley, Richmond, 30 March 1829; in ACS papers, Vol. 14, Domestic Correspondence, Rees 5, No. 2424–25; Jackson, , Free Negro Property Holding, 184–85.Google Scholar

21 Tom, Schick, “Emigrants to Liberia, 1820–43: An Alphabetical Listing” (Newark, Del.: Liberian Studies Association, 1971)Google Scholar; Benjamin Brand to R. R. Gurley, 3 Jan 1832, Reel 12, No. 5981, ACS papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Staudenraus, 189; James, O'Brien, “From Bondage to Citizenship” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1975), 58, 60, 62.Google Scholar

22 Holsoe, , “List of Ship's Passengers…” Virginia Senate Journal 1831–32 (Richmond John Warrock, 1832), 7–15Google Scholar; Alison, Goodyear Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debates of 1831–32 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 125–27, 149–164Google Scholar; Russell, 73–74, 115.

23 Joyce Appleby's sorting Out, in Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, of the various uses of “liberty” in Anglo-American political thought is very helpful in determining what colonizationists, white and black, meant by free black liberty. That liberty seems to have been based on what Appleby called the liberal or Jeffersonian definition of liberty. This version, optimistic and future-oriented, centers on Lockean and Hobbesian notions of man voluntarily leaving an ahistoric state of nature to form compacts and create society. This may explain why, even in states' rights Virginia of the late antebellum period, legislation for deportation or coerced, non-voluntary emigration to Liberia was discussed but never passed. The principle of choice for free blacks had to be maintained or the whole colonization enterprise was specious, as abolitionists had often claimed.