History Lessons: Contextualizing Black Emigration of the Nineteenth Century

The context of the nineteenth century in the United States of America spurred a number of social and political movements and ideologies by African-Americans that responded to the brutal oppression of slavery and sub-citizenship endured during that period. Among northern communities of free Blacks, covert gatherings of southern slaves, meetings of federal government officials, and societies of abolitionists, individuals voiced their thoughts and opinions on potential solutions that could, in their respective interests, address and alleviate the condition of the Negro in America. A number of prospective solutions included the idea of Black emigration and the creation of settlements outside of the United States. In response to the efforts by the American Colonization Society in 1816—efforts to create settlements in Liberia and Sierra Leone for free Blacks—a number of Africans in America gravitated to three major camps regarding the idea of emigration: (1) rejection of colonization in favor of Black integration into American society (2) rejection of the idea of colonization as a means of eradicating opposition to slavery and (3) support for colonization in alignment with the ideals of Pan-Africanism.

Certification of Membership- American Colonization Society

The Ordering of Things: The Social Context of Black Emigration

            The creation of The American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 reflected the changing societal attitudes towards slavery and America’s realization of the growing voice of free Black populations in political and social matters concerning slavery. With the enactment of the United States Slave Trade Act in 1808, the continued importation of African slaves into the country was abolished, and many political leaders and groups began examining the possibilities of gradual reform on issues involving slavery. Scholars describe this period after the abolishment of the slave trade as characterized by the “suppression of emotion on the subject of slavery,” a suppression that sought to “ameliorate the tensions of slavery without abolishing the practice.”[1] The ACS, a federally supported, southern-dominated organization, developed from these sentiments and framed its position as a moderate stance between the traditional practices of slavery and the possibility of abolition. ¹

Actions of the ACS included fundraising and creating initiatives to encourage emigration of free Blacks from the United States; however, the motives of these initiatives were far removed from the concerns of liberating African peoples in America. As Bjorn Stillion affirms, “free Blacks at this time were…transforming themselves from being “free colored people to African-Americans,”¹ and the increased expression of Black thought and ideas on topics such as race relations, dissatisfaction with sub-citizenry, and southern slavery through more public outlets would eventually lead to increased suppression of these ideas by White America. Vincent Harding cites the example of the Black Methodists in Charleston, which largely outnumbered the white Methodist membership in the city during 1812.[2] This Black Methodist denomination worked to develop their own quarterly conference, had their own collections, and possessed control over the church trials of their own members, completely independent of the supervision of the White Methodists of Charleston.² Recognizing the White intolerance of and anxiety over Black means of public expression, the ACS categorized the free Black population as a potential threat to the institution of slavery, or as Harding writes, a “thorn in the side of slavery.”²

The Order of Things: Black Responses to Emigration

            As free African-Americans began grappling with the idea of emigration in light of the creation of the ACS, a number of ideologies developed among Blacks in an effort to advocate in the best interest of the race, including both Northern free Blacks and those enslaved.

(1) Black Integration and the Rejection of Colonization

            In response to the ACS, many Blacks, particularly in Washington, D.C., formulated petitions against emigration, suggesting, instead, a solution of social racial mixing to solve the problems of color prejudice.¹ In a broader sense, the free Blacks in Washington, D.C. considered petitioning to be an act of political consciousness¹, a step towards exercising actual political power within the United States social context, and a means for ultimately gaining citizenship and progress towards equality—a radical idea during the period. To challenge the ideas of colonization, Black proponents of a counter memorial to colonization cited a number of arguments against emigration, including the notion that persons of color were similar to Whites in that Blacks had good morals and “endeavored so as to conduct themselves as to merit the good will and friendship of their white brethren.”[3] In an attempt to resist the ideas of colonization, memorialists also utilized the negative perceptions and negative connotations of Africa as an argument against emigration. Black anti-colonizationists claimed that Africa was inconsistently and hypocritically characterized as both a “problem and a solution,” for Africa was, to the ACS, “the land of the savage, yet it also was supposed to provide the trappings of civilization that free Blacks could not attain in the United States.”¹ Through petitions against colonization, northern Blacks sought to quell the fear of Black militancy and rebellion expressed by southern Whites after the abolition of the slave trade. More importantly, however, Blacks utilized these petitions in an attempt to establish themselves as African-Americans—a growing political and social constituency within the United States.

(2) Northern Blacks and the Fight Against Slavery

            Free northern Blacks often perceived their plight and future in the United States as fundamentally tied to and dependent upon the destinies of their enslaved brothers and sisters in the South. After the creation of the ACS, communities of Black freedmen in cities such as Philadelphia and Charleston proactively voiced their opposition to the idea of emigration. Unlike the reasoning of the Counter Memorialist groups of Washington, D.C., Blacks in this context opposed emigration because it represented the idea of voluntarily separating the free Black population from the struggle of the slave populations of this country.² The ACS motive and agenda to “rid the country of its ‘problem’”² became increasingly apparent to African-Americans such as Denmark Vesey, a former slave of Charleston who purchased his freedom and later went on to lead the plans for a slave rebellion in South Carolina in 1822.  Harding cites Vesey’s opposition to the idea of colonization: “We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country; they are our brethren by the ties of consanguinity, of suffering and of wrong; and we feel that there is no more virtue in suffering privations with them, than fancied advantages for a season.”^2,[4] In Martin Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, he details the convening of the Anti-Colonization Meeting of colored freedmen in Philadelphia, PA. There, Black leaders protested the idea of colonization as a “benefit of the slave holding interests of the country, and that as freedmen, they would never prove recreant to the cause of their brethren in bondage.”[5] In opposition to the ideas of emigration by the ACS, northern Blacks reaffirmed their commitment to the radical liberation struggle of southern enslaved African-Americans.

 (3) Emigration and Pan-Africanism

            Similar to Black intellectuals who protested against emigration in an effort to advance Black liberation from slavery in the United States, free Blacks in favor of emigration also advocated for racial liberation, but on a broader scale. In 1836, Delany called for a plan to elevate the Black race, a plan that embraced a more abstract view of African liberation in the form of Pan-Africanism. Delany and other scholars of the nineteenth century saw emigration as a potential means for Black self-improvement and self-definition, encouraging free Black people to establish communities in locations such as the Caribbean, South America, Mexico, and Canada.^2,5 Distinct from the attempts at colonization by the ACS, Black, self-directed emigration exemplified the power of independent Black organizing, an element historically significant to the Black liberation struggle.²

            The proposal of free Black emigration from the United States created a number of varied ideologies and philosophies regarding the role of the free Northern colored populations in the advancement of Black liberation. Although embraced (and rejected) in various contexts, the ideas on Black emigration illustrate the breadth of African thought and its importance in understanding how Black people constructed and responded to their own experiences.

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[1] Bjorn F. Stillion. “ Polyvocality and the Personae of Blackness in Early Nineteenth-Century Slavery Discourse: The Counter Memorial Against African Colonization, 1816,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Summer 2012

[2]  Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), 67-130

[3] National Intelligencer. 30 December 1816. (Digital copy of newspaper accessed through a portal at http://public-argument.wikispaces.com/). Accessed October 2013

[4] Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times Through the Civil War (New York: Citadel Carol Publishing Group, 1979)

[5] Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, 1852. African-American Social & Political Thought 1850-1920. Ed. Howard Brotz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1992) 47