The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (70 page)

31.
George M. Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 5; Theodore Bacon,
Leonard Bacon,
182.

32.
Warner,
New Haven Negroes,
21, 28–29, 58. In 1810–11, William Lanson built on contract the last, stone section of New Haven’s Long Wharf. In October 1831, a mob seized four white women and fourteen white men in “New Liberia.” Earlier, mobs had assaulted blacks in New Haven and had torn down “a Negro hut on ‘Sodom Hill.’ ”

33.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 311. For contrasting and roughly contemporary efforts to deport and make use of criminal classes, see Robert Hughes,
The Fatal Shore
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 1–42; Joanna Waley-Cohen,
Exile
in Mid-Qing China, 1758–1820
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–32, 78–102.

34.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 303–4, 309.

35.
Ibid., 309–10.

36.
In the 1820s, American free blacks became increasingly aware that emigration to Liberia had resulted in the literal death of many of their brethren.

37.
Memoirs of American Missionaries,
13–14, 217–19; P. J. Staudenraus,
The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 18–19, 28, 37–47; [Bacon],“Report of the Committee,” 307, 309, 312, 316.

38.
Lawrence B. Goodheart,
Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), 37, 44, 46, 56, 80. Wright, who like most abolitionists of his generation had once supported the colonization movement, wrote to Bacon in 1837: “I put it to your inmost soul Bacon: you know you were wrong in that whole miserable humbug of colonization. …Now take my advice and come out like a man—a true Christian—and confess your sin.” Ibid., 37.

39.
Theodore Bacon,
Leonard Bacon,
187; Staudenraus,
African Colonization Movement,
77–78, 117.

40.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 313.

41.
Ibid., 306, 312.

42.
Ibid., 307, 314–15.

43.
Samuel H. Cowles to Leonard Bacon, Feb. 9, 1825, part 1, box 1, folder 19, Bacon Family Papers.

44.
Cowles to Bacon, Feb. 9, 1825; David E. Swift,
Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy before the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 19–23.

45.
Cowles to Bacon, Feb. 9, 1825; D. Greene to Leonard Bacon, April 25, 1824, part 1, box 1, folder 16, Bacon Family Papers.

46.
Greene to Bacon, April 25, 1824.

47.
Cowles to Bacon, Feb. 9, 1825.

48.
Ibid.

49.
Ibid.

50.
Ibid.; Julie Winch,
Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 29–38.

51.
Cowles to Bacon, February 9, 1825.

1.
John Hepburn,
The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule, or An Essay to Prove the Unlawfulness of Making Slaves of Men
(Philadelphia: Andrew Bradford, 1714), 23–43.

2.
Yet, some eighty years before Congress outlawed the slave trade in 1808, America’s slave population began to benefit from rapid natural growth. North America absorbed no more than 5 percent of the African slaves transported to the New World.

3.
Gary B. Nash,
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), 101. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton,
In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 179. George E. Brooks, “The Providence African Society’s Sierra Leone Emigration Scheme, 1794–1795: Prologue to the African Colonization Movement,”
The International Journal of African Historical Studies
7, no. 2 (1974): 185–86.

4.
This vague sense of Africa and the importance of the Sierra Leone model is demonstrated in a recently discovered source. See Richard S. Newman, Roy E. Finkenbine, and Douglass Mooney, “Philadelphia Emigrationist Petition, circa 1792: An Introduction,”
William and Mary Quarterly
64, no. 1 (Jan. 2007): 162.

5.
For the Edwardsean antislavery tradition, see Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,”
Journal
of American History
92, no. 1 (June 2005): 52–55, and passim. For Hopkins and his role in Providence among the
black population, see Brooks, “The Providence African Society’s Sierra Leone Emigration Scheme,” 185–86; Horton and Horton,
In Hope of Liberty,
179. For a general account of Hopkins’s life, see Joseph A Conforti,
Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings
(Grand Rapids, Mich: Christian University Press, 1981).

6.
Nash,
Forging Freedom,
101.

7.
Ibid.; Brooks, “The Providence African Society’s Sierra Leone Emigration Scheme,” 187; Horton and Horton,
In Hope of Liberty,
179.

8.
Sheldon H. Harris,
Paul Cuffe: Black American and the African Return
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 15–17.

9.
Ibid., 58.; Lamont Thomas,
Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 4, 73–74, 88–91.

10.
Horton and Horton,
In Hope of Liberty,
186.

11.
I rely heavily on Julie Winch’s excellent biography of James Forten,
A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 177–97; Horton and Horton,
In Hope of Liberty,
177–87.

12.
From 1800 to 1810, the free black population increased by 72 percent. Calculated from the table in
Remarks on the
Colonization of the Western Coast of Africa by the Free Negroes of the United States, and the Consequent Civilization of African and Suppression of the Slave Trade
(New York: W. L. Burroughs Steam Power Press, 1850), 9. For a thorough and modern demographic analysis of free black population patterns in the major cities of the United States see Leonard P. Curry,
The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

13.
Nash,
Forging Freedom,
242.

14.
Quoted in Horton and Horton,
In Hope of Liberty,
188.

15.
Winch,
A Gentleman of Color,
182.

16.
Thomas,
Rise to Be a People,
118, 118n18.

17.
Winch,
A Gentleman of Color
; Isaac Van Arsdale Brown,
Biography of Robert Finley
(Philadelphia, 1819), 99–102, quoted in William Loren Katz, introduction to William Lloyd Garrison,
Thoughts on African Colonization
(New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), vii.

18.
As early as January 10, 1817, a meeting of blacks in Georgetown expressed their unwavering opposition to African colonization but indicated a willingness to consider a settlement on the Missouri River. Winch,
Gentleman of Color,
189–90.

19.
Ibid., 189–91.

20.
Nash,
Forging Freedom,
237.

21.
Quoted in ibid., 237–38.

22.
Katz, introduction to Garrison,
Thoughts on African Colonization,
ix.

23.
William Lloyd Garrison,
Thoughts on African Colonization: Or, an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. Together with the Resolutions, Addresses and Remonstrances of the Free People of Color
(Boston: Printed and published by Garrison and Knapp, 1832), Part 2, 9.

24.
Ibid. Part 2, 10.

25.
Ibid., Part 1,
Introductory Remarks,
40, 6.

26.
Ibid., Part 2, 11.

27.
Ibid.

28.
Ibid., 11–12.

29.
In fact, many black abolitionists would subsequently remember the anticolonization protest as the “Spirit of 1817.” Julie Winch,
Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 38.

30.
Between 1804 and 1808, there was a significant increase in the number of African
slaves imported into the South, mainly
South Carolina. Most of the 40,000-plus imports were legal and were brought in response to the demand created by the
Louisiana Purchase and the knowledge that importations would soon be prohibited.

31.
David Brion Davis,
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
(Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 2003), 35–36.

32.
For a discussion of why this occurred, and the meanings surrounding “
African” see Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,”
The American Historical Review
85, no. 1 (Feb. 1980): 53; Craig Steven Wilder,
In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City
(New York: New York University Press, 2005), 158.

33.
Quoted in ibid.

34.
This opposition to the ACS had the unintended effect of opening black lines of communication from
Canada, the
West Indies, Africa, and all along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. These new international connections were further strengthened as black denominations, such as Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, began to conduct missionary activity abroad. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp,
Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories
(Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 50–51.

35.
Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 263.

36.
Horton and Horton,
In Hope of Liberty,
194.

37.
Ibid., 195.

38.
John Brown Russwurm, “Condition and Prospects of Haiti,” John Brown Russwurm Papers, Bowdoin College Archives, Brunswick, Maine.

39.
Weekly Anglo-African,
Jan. 12, 1861. The staying power of affection for Haiti throughout the antebellum period and beyond is rather phenomenal given the numbers of returned emigrants. The symbolism of what Haiti represented to American blacks clearly outweighed the setbacks of emigration. For a thorough analysis of this “legacy” in the nineteenth century, see Philip N. Edmondson, “The St. Domingue Legacy in Black Activist and Antislavery Writings in the United States, 1791–1862” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2003).

40.
Richard S. Newman,
The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 96.

41.
Ibid., 99, 103.

42.
Bella Gross, “Freedom’s Journal and the Rights of All,”
The Journal of Negro History
17, no. 3 (July 1932): 245.

43.
For Cornish’s early life and work I rely heavily on Christopher Allison, “Floating on the Stream of Prejudice: The Making of the Religious Activism of Samuel Cornish” (M.A. thesis, Yale University, 2010); the first significant biographical treatment is Howard Nathaniel Christian, “Samuel Cornish: Pioneer Negro Journalist” (M.A. thesis, Howard University, 1936). A concise and critical chapter (with a few biographical errors) is “The Negro Conservative: Samuel Eli Cornish” in Jane H. and William H. Pease,
Bound with Them in Chains; a Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement,
Contributions in American History, no. 18 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1972), 140–61. For an excellent analysis of Cornish’s interactions with other abolitionists and reformers, white and black, see David E. Swift, “Black Presbyterian Attacks on Racism: Samuel Cornish, Theodore Wright and Their Contemporaries,”
Journal of Presbyterian History
51 (Dec. 1, 1973): 433–70; Swift,
Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), especially chapters 3, 4, and 5.

44.
Sandra Sanford Young, “John Brown Russwurm’s Dilemma: Citizenship or Emigration?” in
Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism,
ed. Timothy P. McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 92 and passim.

45.
Ibid.

46.
For a good exposition of antiblack sentiment, in print and in public in the 1820s, leading up to the publication of
Freedom’s Journal,
see Shane White,
Stories of Freedom in Black New York
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 46–51; Swift,
Black Prophets of Justice,
32.

47.
David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” in Davis,
From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 238–57; previously published in
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
49, no. 2 (September 1962): 209–30.

48.
The result of this refusal to print black protest meant that most whites were largely ignorant of the fact that there was significant black opposition to
colonization. Thus, when Garrison published
The
Liberator,
accusations that Garrison had tainted the people of color against colonization were natural. There would only be pockets of whites who were aware of black opposition prior to the 1830s. Swift,
Black Prophets of Justice,
26.