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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