The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (22 page)

This emphasis on underdevelopment and black imperialism, however justified by the continuing disfranchisement and exploitation of the vast majority of Liberia’s population, obscures the symbolic importance of the settlers’ achievement. The Americo-Liberians, one must remember, were all former slaves or the descendants of slaves. Even the elite Johnsons, Robertses, Shermans, and Tubmans belonged to the most degraded and persecuted caste in North America, a caste that increasing numbers of whites thought incapable of self-government or of anything but the most menial labor. From the very outset, Liberia’s racial and ideological mission was defined by Western criteria of historical progress. It is clearly unrealistic to judge the Americo-Liberians’ treatment of aborigines by higher standards than those applied to white colonists from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
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And it was the white demand for
cocoa,
rubber,
coffee,
gold, and other products that Liberia’s coerced labor was intended to serve.

Despite a shortage of capital, labor, and political experience, the Americo-Liberians established a
constitutional republic in 1847 and maintained relative political stability for more than a century. Against
overwhelming odds, they also preserved their national independence during a prolonged period when Britain and France were gnawing at their borders and when massive foreign debt and economic dependency increased the dangers of annexation. Competing in a capitalist world market with the most exploited, colonialized regions of the tropics, Liberia developed small but successful rice, sugar, and coffee plantations. Unfortunately, the perils of this route became evident in the late nineteenth century, when the
global agricultural depression gave a decisive advantage to Cuba, Brazil, and other countries that profited from superior infrastructures and from more plentiful or more easily regimented labor.
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If Liberia’s modest achievements failed to abate the rising intensity of racism in the Euro-American world, the very survival of the nation made an important though belated contribution to black pride and hope. The relationship between
Liberia and black nationalism was always complicated by the American
free black community’s vehement hostility to the American Colonization Society. Early
Liberian settlers such as
Daniel Coker,
Lott Cary, and John
Russwurm, who might have been remembered as Pan-African pioneers, have traditionally been depicted as misguided accomplices in a racist conspiracy.
Lewis Woodson,
James M. Whitfield, and other early contributors to a black nationalist perspective advocated separate black settlements within the United States as a way of breaking the bonds of racial dependency while avoiding the taint of African colonization. After the financially troubled
ACS forced Liberia to become independent in 1847,
Martin Delany was prepared to admit that the nation had “thwarted the design of the original schemers, its slaveholding founders.” At the same time, he excoriated President
Roberts for having forfeited all the honor he had won on a diplomatic mission to Europe by giving an official report, “like a slave, ‘cap in hand,’ ” to
Anson G. Phelps, a wealthy American merchant and colonizationist.
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As we shall see in later chapters, this central concern with racial self-respect and the psychological hazards of dependency on whites was clearly a prerequisite for black liberation. But it also became a political weapon, used for various motives, that stimulated suspicion and bitter discord among black leaders. The fear of becoming an unwitting agent of white racism tended to dim the points upon which various factions of black abolitionists agreed. Frederick Douglass epitomized the first of these basic beliefs in 1854, when, after deploring
the degraded and servile occupations of most
free blacks, he asserted that “the free colored man’s elevation is essential to the slave colored man’s emancipation.” If this principle extended to the condition of free blacks wherever they resided, especially where they had escaped the effects of discriminatory laws,
Liberia could hardly be ignored.
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A second point of agreement by the 1850s was that conditions and prospects for free blacks in the United States were worsening, not improving. The
Fugitive Slave Law brought despair and physical insecurity not only to such prominent fugitives and foreign lecturers as Garnet,
Pennington,
William Wells Brown,
Samuel Ringgold Ward, and William and
Ellen
Craft, but to the most obscure American free blacks, who were now vulnerable to seizure and enslavement without due process of law. The
Dred Scott decision confirmed the fact that Southern slavery, far from being weakened by the “elevation” of free blacks, was eroding that population’s last remnants of civil rights. If virtually all black spokesmen still clung to the hope of regenerating America’s corrupted institutions, most of them showed a growing interest in external influence and alternatives to domestic political action: in the British
free produce movement, which might weaken or destroy the market that poisoned the American economy; in related proposals for free black agricultural settlements in the Caribbean, South America, or Africa, which would serve as models of African American self-determination; and in efforts to restore Africa’s ancient leadership and promise by equipping its natives with the techniques and knowledge of Christian civilization. Liberia was intimately connected with all these aspirations. Indeed, President
Roberts warmly encouraged plans for free-labor
cotton and welcomed, along with Christian missionaries, agents sent by English textile firms.
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As early as January 1849, Henry Highland Garnet broke ranks with Frederick Douglass and
black abolitionist tradition on the issue of
emigration. Clearly influenced by the attacks of white land reformers on monopoly and aristocratic privilege in the eastern states, Garnet advocated black emigration to the West and Southwest as a “source of wealth, prosperity, and independence.” After cleverly associating aid to fugitive slaves with other forms of uplift and geographic mobility, he informed Douglass

Garnet still felt it necessary to denounce the forcible expatriation of blacks from the United States, although by the mid-1840s,
ACS officials were insisting that emigration to Liberia would have to be selective as well as
voluntary and that the Society wanted to help small numbers of aspiring blacks to “rise above their present level,” to Christianize Africa, and to abolish the slave trade at its source. Garnet applauded these objectives, when detached as far as possible from the ACS, and predicted that the new Liberian Republic would become the “Empire State of Africa.”
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In England he continued to expose the hypocrisy of the Clays and Websters, “who made the laws and would then transport the black man, that he might be freed from their operation!” But Garnet also assured a large meeting of the
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that Americans “were a people who did things rapidly and earnestly … in right and in wrong.” There was still hope, therefore, that America would fulfill its Revolutionary promise and abolish slavery “almost instantaneously” if British public opinion constantly spoke out, reminding “the Americans of that sacred declaration, whereon their constitution as a nation was based, that declaration which declared that all men are equal.” Garnet quickly added that such arguments on consistency must be reinforced by economic pressure, especially capital investment in free-grown cotton in Africa and other regions.
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This goal of undermining the Southern slave economy became a centerpiece of Garnet’s later
African Civilization Society and similar black emigration projects.

The black emigrationists made every effort to differentiate their aims and motives from those of white colonizationists. Although
Alexander Crummell became an ardent Liberian nationalist, Delany, Garnet,
Holly, and most other emigrationists looked for separate and more healthful asylums in Central America, Haiti, or the Niger Valley. With some justice they angrily denied the charge made by Frederick Douglass and other antiemigrationists that their projects were no more than fronts for the despised ACS. They could not conceal, however, the assumptions they shared with the more philanthropic white colonizationists nor their financial dependence on such figures
as
Benjamin Coates, a Quaker merchant and longtime supporter of the ACS. Despite their continuing suspicion of the ACS, black abolitionists became increasingly attuned to the symbolic meaning of Liberia.

For early black nationalists like
Edward Wilmot Blyden, a young West Indian immigrant to the United States who was inspired by the Reverend
John B. Pinney and by
William Coppinger and other Northern white colonizationists, Liberia gave substance to a growing faith that Africa’s ancient glories—the glories of Egypt, Nubia, and Carthage—could be restored. After landing on Liberian soil late in 1850, Blyden described in the official journal of the ACS “the delight with which I gazed upon the land of Tertullian, ancient father in the Christian Church; of Hannibal and Henry Diaz, renowned generals; yes, and the land of my forefathers.” White colonizationists had actually helped to popularize the views of the
Comte de Volney,
James C. Prichard, and other European writers who had affirmed that the Egyptians and eminent North Africans of antiquity were Negroid.
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Alexander Crummell experienced a similar sense of exaltation in 1853 when he and his family arrived in Monrovia from England and beheld a nation governed and populated by blacks. With his friend Henry Highland Garnet, Crummell had been educated at the African Free School in New York City, at Noyes Academy in New Hampshire (where they were attacked and driven away by an armed mob), and at Oneida Institute in upstate New York; after being denied admission to the
Episcopal Theological Seminary because of his race, he then studied mathematics, classics, and theology at Cambridge University. Like Blyden, he was confident that “the days of Cyprian and Augustine shall again return to Africa.” As a missionary he hailed Liberia as the site of a new and more glorious civilization: “The world needs a higher type of true nationality than it now has: why should not we [Liberians] furnish it?…Why not make ourselves a precedent?”
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In 1859, even
Martin Delany made his peace with Liberia, while declaiming this theme of black nationality. Having earlier shifted his sights from New World emigration to a plan for exploring and colonizing the Niger Valley, Delany compromised his principles and sought financial aid from ACS officials, some of whom were already supporting Garnet’s rival African Civilization Society. Although Delany had always been one of Liberia’s harshest critics, he sailed to Monrovia on a Liberian bark, accompanied by three prosperous black entrepreneurs
and thirty-three emigrants selected by the ACS. During the ten weeks he spent in the Republic, before moving on to Lagos and Abeokuta, Delany admired the neat brick houses and coffee plantations, met the president, traveled with
Crummell, and insisted that he had never “spoken directly ‘against Liberia.’ ” He assured the white colonizationist
John B. Pinney that he was highly pleased with the Liberians, “a noble, struggling people, who only require help from the intelligent of their race, to make them what they desire and should be.” He proclaimed to enthusiastic crowds that “Your country shall be my country,” and that “the desire of African nationality has brought me to these shores.”
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Ironically, these phrases of Blyden, Crummell, and Delany almost precisely echoed the famous letter written by George Harris, the fictional runaway slave in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which had outraged abolitionists from the moment the novel was published in 1852. Stowe’s character, it should be emphasized, had studied for four years at a French university; he and his family were light enough in complexion to pass for white, had his sympathies been inclined toward his “father’s race.” But, as Harris explains:

In Harris’s apotheosis of nationality, in his acknowledgment that Liberia had “subserved all sorts of purposes, by being played off, in the hands of our oppressors, against us … as a means of retarding our emancipation,” and in his affirmation that blacks as a nation could best serve the cause of their race,
Harriet Beecher Stowe conveyed
to millions of readers the central concerns of black nationalists of the 1850s.

It was not in a work of fiction, for example, that
Hilary Teague, the wealthy editor of the
Liberia Herald,
informed an enthusiastic gathering of Liberians that “upon you … depends, in a measure you can hardly conceive, the future destiny of the race. You are to give the answer whether the African race is doomed to interminable degradation … a libel upon the dignity of human nature; or whether they are capable to take an honourable rank amongst the great family of nations.”
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This was one “answer” to the crucial issue of black dehumanization that we examine throughout this book. Nor were such thoughts confined to a privileged elite.
Grandville B. Woodson, a former slave from Mississippi who emigrated to Liberia at age sixteen, wrote in 1853 from the isolated and poverty-ridden
Greenville settlement: