Thursday, October 1, 2015

American Colonization Society, A Proposed End to Slavery



            Truly, one of the biggest issues addressed by the reformers of the 1820s and 1830s was slavery. Though the reasons for abolition, emancipation, and manumission were different among the myriad of reformers, the issue continued to be hotly debated at all levels of American society and in government. The slaveholding senator from Kentucky, Henry Clay, “was a leading organizer” of the American Colonization Society in 1817, meant to address the issue of slavery. Clay and its members wanted to resolve the problems and dangers that had resulted from American slavery. Their solution and the “Society’s project” was to help colonize Liberia with America’s “freed blacks.”[1] However, Clay and these reformers were not as concerned with equality in their desires, but to promote and support colonization to rid America of the freedmen and eventually all slaves within its borders.


            While a minority of reformers wanted to see the slaves and freed blacks share in the same freedoms as their fellow white citizens in the land of liberty, others supported Clay and the Society’s fears towards them and supported their cause to alleviate certain perceived concerns as a result of the institution of slavery. One concern was simply the exponential increase in the black population. Clay had stated, “The salve population of the United States amounted in 1790, to 697,697; in 1800, to 896,849; in 1810, to 191,364; and in 1820, to 1,538,128.”[2] Naturally, the white population, particularly, the slaveholders were fearful of servile insurrections and loss of control over their slaves. In George Denison Prentice’s 1831, Biography of Henry Clay, he says that clay “spoke of the dangers to be apprehended from an insurrection of the blacks, when, in every abiding place of slavery there were fierce hearts brooding over the accumulated wrong of years, and dark hands ready to grasp the fire-brand and the dagger.”[3] Other like-minded individuals of the period also felt that slaves and freedmen had a “natural inclination toward criminal behavior, indolence, and feeblemindedness or lack of intelligence to understand democracy.”[4] For these reasons, the Society pushed for colonization, with Clay pleading the just cause for their case:

Here (United States) they (freedmen) are in the lowest state of social gradation-aliens-political moral social aliens, strangers, though natives. There, they would be in the midst of their friends and their kindred, at home, though born in a foreign land, and elevated above the natives of the country, as much as they are degraded here below the other classes of the community.[5]

            However, other reformers, who supported the end of slavery, did not share in the Society’s views or planned solutions. On April 13, 1839, in a “large meeting of the colored citizens of Cincinnati,” the Voice of Freedom published their disgust for the goals of the American Colonization Society and efforts at colonization.[6] The Colonization and the Colored People of Cincinnati expressed their opposition to the Society’s “designs…to expatriate a portion of the citizens of this country,” because of “a complexion different from the variable and uncertain shade of white.”[7] This organization went on to criticize the Society as being “unchristian and anti-republican in its tendency…because it denies all possibility of our elevation in this country, discourages all attempts to improve the moral and intellectual character of our people in this country, fosters and sustains that prejudice…by stigmatizing us as a worthless and inferior race.”[8]


            Another newspaper from the New England State of Vermont also published a critical article of the Society, and another one of its high profile members, James Madison. The former president and father of the Constitution had been reported as bequeathing four thousand dollars to the Society. The Vermont Telegraph censured Madison’s generous gift to the Society and wrote:

Why did he not bequeath to his slaves their freedom, of which they have been wickedly deprived? It would have been worth more to them than thousands of dollars, and done more good to the world than the above bequest. This shows however, that the object of the friends of colonization is, not to remedy slavery or benefit the slaves, but to get rid of the free colored population among them.[9]

            The American Colonization Society was one group of reformers that failed to meet the major challenges of slavery. Their response and goals to resolve the issue of slavery were not overwhelmingly supported, particularly, by the freedmen themselves—many of whom were born in America, not Africa.





[1] Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 126.
[2] John Seh David, The American Colonization Society, (Bloomington: iUniverse LLC, 2014), 80.
[3] George Denison Prentice, Biography of Henry Clay, (Hartford: Samuel Hanmer, Jr. and John Jay Phelps, 1831), 266.
[4] David, The American Colonization Society, 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Voice of freedom. volume (None), Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress, April 13, 1839,  http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84022687/1839-04-13/ed-1/seq-1/.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Vermont Telegraph, (Brandon [Vt.]), Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress, August 11, 1836, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025661/1836-08-11/ed-1/seq-3/.

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