The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (29 page)

Bacon’s faith in such a glorious transfiguration may have been no more miraculous than
William Lloyd Garrison’s later faith that white racial prejudice would be quickly overcome by moral suasion. Bacon does express some skepticism regarding the “entire success” of the colonization plan and insists on the necessity of establishing, preferably in New England, “a Seminary for the education of blacks previously to their leaving the country.” While he stresses the need for state and federal financial support, he relies above all on a popular movement that will take on the holy character of the
Bible Society and
Missionary Society. Here Bacon is following the revered path of Samuel
Mills, one of
Andover’s recent heroes and martyrs, a missionary and fund-raiser for various benevolent societies who began working
for the ACS in 1816, collecting donations to train black missionaries and magistrates, and in 1817 sailed off on a “mission of inquiry” to England and Sierra Leone, only to die at sea the following year from a disease contracted in Africa.

Bacon was strongly tempted to follow the missionary calling of his father and of close friends and classmates like
Samuel Worcester. Knowing how each letter from a missionary awakened “a higher joy, and a livelier interest” among supporters, he can imagine how communications from
Liberia, reporting tangible progress in eradicating the slave trade and Christianizing Africa, would bring
Americans a sense of “increasing brightness,” until “the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord.”
³⁷
Bacon’s reasoning and imagery tell us a great deal about the way race and class were conceptualized within a framework of secularized theology, a framework that was angrily rejected and denounced by
immediate abolitionists like
Elizur Wright, who had played with Bacon as a child and who had then been instructed by him and
Nathaniel Taylor at Yale.
³⁸
On an instrumental level, Bacon soon became aware of the woeful inadequacies of the ACS management: as a result of the “Report,” he and an Andover classmate received a free trip to Washington to meet and be courted by the national leaders of the Society, whom Bacon accused of inept administration and the “want of that energy and business-like regularity of operations” that explained the success of other benevolent societies.
³⁹

Even in the “Report,” Bacon casually acknowledges that the colonization plan, while “practicable,” would depend on achieving the consent and agreement of three groups. First, the consent of blacks themselves. Second, judging by the estimates of the ACS, the government would need to appropriate each year at least $250,000 to transport the annual increase of free blacks, or $2 million, “or a capitation tax of less than twenty-five cents on all the citizens of the United States,” to transport “the whole annual increase of bond and free.” Reports from the legislatures of
Virginia,
Maryland, and
Tennessee were at least encouraging, and Bacon notes that a federal tax on the “fatal poison” of liquor would more than suffice, thereby allowing the nation’s two greatest evils “to counteract and destroy each other.”
⁴⁰

A third hurdle would be the willingness of Southern slaveholders to free their slaves if they were assured that all blacks, including the potential Spartacus or Toussaint, could be removed to a safe and
distant refuge. Since Bacon was blind to the economic importance of slave (and free
black) labor and assumed that large numbers of masters were eager to manumit their bondsmen, especially in northern
Virginia, he theorizes that the power of example will spread once it is realized that emancipation is “no longer useless and dangerous,” and that public opinion will eventually “declare itself louder and louder against the practice of slavery till at last the system should be utterly abolished.” National unity on the subject would also be promoted if
New Englanders talked “less of the guilt of slavery, and more of the means of counteracting its political and moral tendencies; or if, when they speak of its guilt, they would acknowledge that New England is a partaker; if they will remember that it was their ships and sailors that carried the African in chains across the ocean.”
⁴¹

Yet, even assuming that national unity could transform the ACS into a powerful and effective agency of benevolence, a modern crusade inspired by the knowledge that
colonization had been the vehicle for extending civilization from ancient
Egypt to
Greece, from Greece to
Rome, from Rome to the rest of Europe, from Europe to America and eventually to Hindustan and Hawaii, would American blacks themselves agree to carry the torch back to Africa in order to disperse “the shadows of heathenism” and “see Ethiopia waking, and rising from the dust, and looking abroad on the day, and stretching out her hands to God till all the fifty millions of Africa are brought into the ‘glorious light and liberty of the sons of God’ ”? Bacon wastes no words on this vital question of black consent. In meeting the objection that “free blacks cannot be induced to go,” he simply states that some have gone and “hundreds are waiting to go.”
⁴²

Because colonizationists almost always dismissed this question as quickly as Bacon did, it has been generally assumed that they paid no attention to the views of African Americans and were long unaware of the bitter hostility to the ACS that finally found expression between 1827 and 1830 in Samuel
Cornish’s
Freedom’s Journal,
David Walker’s
Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,
and the black national convention movement (to which we will later turn). But early in 1825 Bacon received a long and informative report on black opinion from
Samuel H. Cowles, one of the three other members of the
Andover
Society of Inquiry’s committee on colonization, who had traveled through
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore on his way to meet with ACS officials in Washington. Cowles was interested in promoting the idea of a black seminary or college, which Bacon and
Solomon Peck, another member of the original Andover committee, had presented to the ACS in 1823. During days of heated debate with Samuel
Cornish and James Forten, Cowles also struggled in vain to vindicate the colonizationist cause in the eyes of influential black leaders.
⁴³

Cornish, who in two years would launch the first African American newspaper, presided as minister over the debt-ridden
First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York. He had been given special training at the
Philadelphia Presbytery, had served as a missionary to slaves in
Maryland, and had then worked as an evangelist with impoverished blacks in one of the worst slums of New York. At the time Cowles met Cornish and talked so late into the night that he got little sleep, the black pastor could take pride in his new brick church and congregation of several hundred. But Cornish, whom Cowles considered “a good and intelligent though of course imperfectly educated man,” was anything but happy or deferential to a white colonizationist whose own education was incomplete. As Cowles informed Bacon, this black man expressed himself without inhibition and “with more national and manly feeling than I was exactly prepared for”:
⁴⁴

This sense of despair, dramatized by the fantasy of an unprovoked genocide, no doubt confirmed Cowles and Bacon in their conviction that only a separation of the races could prevent further injustice and open genuine opportunities for blacks. One of Bacon’s other colleagues, who felt that whites owed an enormous debt to African Americans, had written in anguish over the difficulty of arousing interest and making white people care: “But Alas! What can make white men sympathetic with black men—freemen with their own slaves? They can feel for the Hindoo for the Greek and for the black Hottentot, if he is at as great a remove the distance gives a kind of dignity in which the commonness and disgust of seeing and receiving a black man at their own door is lost.”
⁴⁶

But for
Cornish, blacks could hardly be expected to welcome the offer of distance or to see any dignity in being colonized. As Cowles paraphrased him:

Cornish assured Cowles that “he knew that some men who were connected with the C.S. [ACS] were actuated by very different feelings and such as entitled them to the highest gratitude of the blacks”; yet the popularity of the ACS “depended on the contempt and disgust with which negroes were commonly regarded. It was hard to be the object of such feelings.” One can only wonder whether Cowles and Bacon got Cornish’s point about colonizationists treating individuals as members of an impersonalized class. No doubt they separated their own motives from the repellent motives they needed to accept if the ACS were to succeed. Cornish told Cowles that blacks would be content “to oppose passive resistance” to the efforts of the colonizationists, but it was too much to expect “that they would voluntarily
yield to it when it required that they should suffer the treatment of convicts.”
⁴⁸

On Cornish’s recommendation, Cowles called on
James Forten when he reached Philadelphia. It is a mark of Cowles’s and presumably Bacon’s ignorance of the black community that Cowles had not previously heard of Forten and misspelled his name, while noting that he was “said to be worth from [$]1 to 200.000 00, He is proud of his money and vain of his abilities which have enabled him to get it and withal possesses a great deal of information.”
⁴⁹
A prosperous sailmaker, Forten was nearing sixty and had long been the leader of Philadelphia’s black elite. For a decade he had been at the center of controversies over colonization, at first cooperating with the business and African emigration ventures of
Paul Cuffe, the black shipowner who transported American blacks to Sierra Leone, and then strengthening his own position as a racial leader by chairing public meetings to denounce the ACS. According to Cowles, his sentiments were very nearly those of Cornish “unmodified and unrestrained by religion.” Indeed, Cowles regretted that his lengthy and exhausting visit with Forten had prevented him from seeing
James Cassey, a barber and financier “of less fortune but more liberality,” whom Cornish had recommended “with more confidence.”
⁵⁰

Forten had long been interested in selective emigration to Haiti, and he shocked Cowles by praising “the great men of Hayti [as] the defenders and the avengers of his race.” Forten’s views on the outcome of racial conflict differed sharply from those of Bacon:

While Forten may simply have intended to shake up his youthful white visitor, his menacing words must have strengthened the convictions of Cowles and of
New Haven’s newly appointed
Congregational
leader. Cowles concluded, however, that the anti-ACS sentiments he had encountered in New York and Philadelphia were shared by “all the blacks north of the Potomac.” And in Baltimore he was disheartened by the “very tedious” talk of the ACS’s General
Robert Goodloe Harper, whose tacit disapproval of the New Englanders’ educational plan “was a good preparation for what I was to find in Wash.”

In the nation’s capital, Cowles discovered that the ACS was “certainly a strange matter.”
Elias Caldwell, the Society’s first secretary, “never distinguished for his abilities,” was now superannuated and near death. One of the officers seemed attached to the cause “but has everything else to do”; another “sputters in your face a moment and then is off with whew.” Although Cowles found much to admire in Ralph R.
Gurley, the young Connecticut Yankee who really ran the society and who was about to succeed Caldwell as secretary, Gurley’s ingenuousness was “a great defect in a man of business.” Judge
Bushrod Washington, the most celebrated name on the ACS roster, in reality “had nothing to do [with the society] and cares nothing about it.”
⁵¹

As we have seen, in the antebellum period a large majority of whites continued to believe that slave
emancipation was unthinkable without some form of
colonization, a fact reflected in Lincoln’s support of the idea in the first years of the
Civil War. By the late 1850s, even most black leaders had shifted their hopes to some kind of racial emigration, and those very temporary hopes resurfaced as late as the 1920s with the surprising support for
Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement. But in the 1820s, slaveholders in the Deep South were instrumental in blocking the political goals of the ACS, and despite their continuing oppression, the great majority of American blacks always resisted pressures for emigration or colonization. As we will see in the next chapter, it was such black resistance that thwarted any significant merger of antislavery and colonization and that led to the emergence in the early 1830s of a new biracial movement for the “immediate” emancipation of all American slaves.