RACIAL BORDERS
JAMES SILK BUCKINGHAM stopped off in Baltimore for about a month in 1838. Buckingham was a prominent British journalist and social reformer who had just retired from the House of Commons. He was also a world traveler who wrote extensively about his journeys. This trip, his second in North America, would provide him with the material for a two-volume narrative of his year-long tour: America: Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive.1
Buckingham seems to have enjoyed his time in Baltimore. He pronounced the city “unusually favorable in every point of view.” But from some points of view, the city struck him as a curiosity. “It is worthy of remark,” he wrote, “that in all our intercourse with the people of Baltimore, and we were continually out in society, we heard less about slaves and slavery than in any town we had yet visited.” Other discoveries about Baltimore seemed even more surprising. “It seemed remarkable to us, and was not less agreeable than unexpected, that we should meet, in the populous capital of a slave-state, more toleration on the subject of slavery, and a more general sympathy with its removal, than with a larger number of those residing in the free state and populous city of New-York.”2
By Buckingham’s account, in other words, Baltimoreans seldom spoke of slavery, but when the subject came up, it did not provoke much strife. The limited and subdued character of discussions of this delicate topic may have been suited to the city’s position on the frontier between slave and free states. But other border towns were not notable for moderation in matters of race. St. Louis mobs destroyed the printing presses of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy on three occasions, until he decided to move across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois, another border town, but in the supposed safety of a free state. An Alton mob killed him while he was trying to defend a fourth press.
Noisy abolitionists could run into trouble in Baltimore as well, but not such deadly trouble as Lovejoy’s. William Lloyd Garrison came to Baltimore in 1829 to help Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy with the publication of his newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy, according to Harriet Beecher Stowe, was “a quiet, persistent, drab-clothed, meek old man,” and his abolitionist newspaper roused little opposition in Baltimore because “everybody was good-naturedly sure” that what it said was of no practical consequence. When Lundy left town for about six months, leaving Garrison in charge of his paper, trouble began not long afterward. Garrison later conceded that he “wasn’t of much help” to Lundy, “for he had been all for gradual emancipation . . . I became convinced that immediate abolition was the doctrine to be preached, and I scattered his subscribers like pigeons.”3
Garrison attracted official attention after writing an article about a New England ship owner, Francis Todd. One of Todd’s ships, the Francis, had picked up a cargo of 75 slaves in Baltimore for shipment to Louisiana. Though the domestic trade was legal, Garrison argued that it would have been no worse for Todd “to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in the foreign slave trade, than to pursue a similar trade along our coasts.” Such “men who have the wickedness to participate therein,” he continued, “. . . should be SENTENCED TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT FOR LIFE. They are the enemies of their own species—highway robbers and murderers.” Then he sent a copy of the article to Todd. The ship owner filed a $5,000 libel suit against him, and the State of Maryland prosecuted Garrison for criminal libel. He was found guilty and fined $30, which he refused to pay, and was sentenced to six months in jail. Imprisonment, however, proved no great hardship for Garrison. He took his meals with the warden’s family and was not confined to his cell, and wrote sonnets on its walls. He used his seclusion to compose three lectures on slavery, a number of public letters, and a dramatic account of his trial. Though its healthfulness and internal arrangements had been troublesome, it must have been a fine-looking jail. James Buckingham had pronounced it one of Baltimore’s “public buildings that may be spoken of with praise.” Of course, “being encompassed with high walls,” it could be appreciated only from “one of the commanding eminences in other parts of town.”4 Garrison had the privilege of seeing it up close.
Arthur Tappan, a prosperous New York abolitionist, paid Garrison’s fine and secured his release after only seven weeks of imprisonment. By the time Todd’s civil suit for libel came to trial, Garrison had removed himself from the jurisdiction of the Maryland courts, and he avoided paying the $1,000 judgment handed down in favor of the ship owner. Given Baltimore’s well-established record of dealing harshly with unpopular newspaper editors, its relatively gentle treatment of Garrison was not standard practice, and it is worthy of note that the court awarded Todd only $1,000, not the $5,000 he originally claimed.
Like Elijah Lovejoy, abolitionists in other border towns did not fare as well as Garrison. Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky was converted to abolitionism when he attended a lecture by Garrison at Yale in 1832, while Garrison was on the lam from the libel judgment in Maryland. Clay returned to Lexington, where he began publishing an abolitionist newspaper. He made a habit of carrying a Bowie knife at all times. The knife helped him to survive two assassination attempts. In 1843, he used it against an assailant who had shot him in the chest. In 1849, six assailants beat, stabbed, and attempted to shoot him. He killed one with his Bowie knife and drove off the others. In 1845, a mob broke into his newspaper office and expropriated his printing press, but instead of destroying it, they shipped it across the Ohio River to Cincinnati. Perhaps they had heard about the knife.
The geographic ambivalence of border towns did not routinely create an atmosphere of moderation on issues of race. Their location at the boundary between slavery and freedom might just as easily have placed them on the front lines of the irrepressible conflict. If Baltimore succeeded in repressing, or at least gentling, this raw sectional animosity, its geographic location as the northernmost southern city (or the southernmost northern city) cannot, by itself, provide a complete explanation. Perhaps Baltimore’s connection with the West did as much to mute the town’s deliberations about race as its position between North and South. The western grain trade, the foundation of the city’s prosperity, linked Baltimore to a region where slavery was relatively unimportant. Slaves were part of Maryland’s tidewater tobacco economy. Some Baltimore-owned ships carried tobacco to England, but the city had no substantial economic stake in the slave-based culture of tobacco growers.5
The town’s geographic affinities and economic interests distanced Baltimoreans from plantation slavery. But some Baltimoreans owned slaves, and others engaged in the slave trade. The US Constitution had made the importation of slaves illegal after 1808, but the prohibition served as a stimulus to domestic commerce in human beings. The demand for slaves in Maryland was declining, but there was a strong market for slaves in New Orleans. Baltimore attracted merchants who purchased slaves in the city and its surrounding counties and shipped them to the Deep South, where they were needed to cultivate sugar, cotton, and rice. The business had its critics. In 1827, abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy attacked the city’s leading slave dealer, Austin Woolfolk, as a “monster in human shape.” Woolfolk encountered the editor on the street, knocked him to the ground, and tried to strangle him, until bystanders intervened. Woolfolk was charged and found guilty of assault, for which he was fined one dollar.6
There was a kind of symmetry—admittedly imprecise and scarcely just—between the limited penalties imposed on William Lloyd Garrison and Austin Woolfolk. They suggest a community doing its best to avoid making a fuss about slavery. Though its geographic position between North and South with an economy oriented toward the West may explain its ambivalence, Baltimoreans’ reticence concerning slavery may have had as much to do with who they were as where they were.
When James Silk Buckingham was “out in society” in Baltimore, he encountered the diverse members of the city’s merchant class. It consisted of emigrants from Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, who owned slaves or took slavery for granted, as well as businessmen who traded in slaves. In addition to these there were prominent Quaker millers, merchants, and bankers such as Philip and Evan Thomas, Thomas and Evan Ellicott, Evan Poultney, and Johns Hopkins.7 Some of the Quakers’ ancestors were Puritans who settled in Maryland under the Act of Toleration passed by the provincial assembly in 1649 (and repealed five years later), and later joined the Society of Friends. Later still, Quaker businessmen were attracted to Baltimore from neighboring Pennsylvania by the town’s rapid growth and prosperity. During the Revolution, more Quaker merchants left Philadelphia, where the British occupation had become an inconvenience to commerce. Some relocated in Baltimore. Their sons and grandsons made or inherited fortunes.
Abolitionist Quakers and proslavery patricians coexisted within Baltimore’s economic and social elite in what was still a relatively small city. They socialized with one another and, perhaps more important, did business with one another. For Baltimoreans “out in society,” there was one subject suitable only for subdued conversation or none at all. Baltimore’s location just south of the Mason-Dixon Line undoubtedly made a difference for its residents’ responses to the issues of slavery and race, but border cities, almost by definition, are complicated places, and Baltimore’s experience of the “middle ground” was not the same as that of St. Louis or Lexington.
In Baltimore, slavery itself represented a compromise with freedom. The local conditions of servitude allowed considerably more autonomy to slaves than they could exercise on the tobacco plantations of Southern Maryland. In Baltimore, for example, “term slavery” was relatively common. It was a variant on indentured servitude. About 20 percent of all slaves sold in the town were term slaves, who usually reached manumission after 8 to 12 years’ service. Term bondage did not represent a gesture to conscience on the part of slave owners. After slaves had served out their terms, their former owners often purchased new slaves. Term slavery was a practical expedient. Term slaves were less expensive than lifetime slaves, and they were thought to be more willing workers. They were also less likely to run away than slaves who could look forward only to a lifetime as chattel, and running away was a practical option for Baltimore slaves.8
In another departure from plantation slavery, some of Baltimore’s masters hired out their slaves to manufacturers and shipyards and expropriated their pay as profit. Frederick Douglass worked under such an arrangement as a ship caulker in Fell’s Point. He was expected to find work on his own and turn his wages over to his owner at the end of each week. Though he had more freedom than he might have had as a field hand, he did not enjoy his independence. “I endured all the evils of being a slave,” he wrote, “and yet suffered all the care and anxiety of a responsible freeman.” Some of his anxieties may have resulted from the animosity and violence that black workers suffered at the hands of their white competitors in the labor market. Douglass was able to put aside enough of his earnings to finance his escape.9
Some owners permitted their slaves to save enough from their earnings to purchase their freedom. Once free, former slaves often bought and freed family members still in bondage.10 According to Christopher Phillips, term slavery, self-purchase, and practices such as “living out,” under which slaves resided away from their masters, all revealed “more than fleeting glimpses of a developing autonomy already begun during enslavement.”11 Douglass had glimpsed it almost as soon as he arrived in Baltimore from the Eastern Shore plantation where he had spent his childhood: “A city slave is almost a free citizen, in Baltimore, compared with a slave on Col. Lloyd’s plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, is less dejected in his appearance, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the whip-driven slave on the plantation.”12
Douglass reasoned that slavery “dislikes a dense population in which there is a majority of non-slaveholders.” Acts of cruelty and marks of violence would be heard or seen by neighbors, some of whom, including Baltimore’s Quakers, might regard them as wordless arguments for abolition. But in Baltimore, Quakers toned down their abolitionism much as masters toned down slavery. In 1789, the city’s Quakers had joined some emancipationist Methodists to form the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery. But in 1800, the society disbanded. In 1807, an attempt to revive the organization failed when some of the town’s most prominent Quakers declined to take part. In 1816, however, the abolitionists regrouped to form the Protection Society. Its purpose was not to free slaves but to prevent free black people from falling into the hands of slavers.13 In private, its members might harbor abolitionist principles, but in public at least they adjusted their objectives to accommodate local circumstances. Conflict avoidance has been an enduring motif in Baltimore’s engagement with slavery and race.
AFRICAN AVOIDANCE
The Protection Society provided antislavery Baltimoreans with a platform for opposing slavery that posed no immediate threat to slave owners or dealers. They soon created another, more substantial vehicle that served the same purpose. When James Buckingham came to Baltimore in 1838, the city was at the center of the African colonization movement, whose advocates proposed to ease conflict about slavery by reexporting African Americans to Africa. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 at a meeting led by Henry Clay in the chamber of the US House of Representatives, and Baltimoreans had been among the organization’s earliest and most earnest supporters.
In 1817, Baltimore attorney Robert Goodloe Harper, still in his Federalist phase and serving in the US Senate, issued a public letter outlining a rationale for colonization. Harper’s lengthy statement was printed, widely circulated, and became a manifesto for the emergent colonization movement in Baltimore and elsewhere. Although he was a member of the Protection Society, whose purpose was to ensure that free black people remained free, Harper’s justification of the colonization project emphasized its usefulness in reducing the presence of free black people in American society. Colonization, he said, would “confer a benefit on ourselves, by ridding us of a population for the most part useless, and too often vicious and mischievous. These persons are condemned to a state of hopeless inferiority and degradation.” In America, Harper thought, to be both black and free was a personal tragedy with collective consequences that would become a social affliction. “You may manumit a slave,” wrote Harper, “but you cannot make him a white man.” The mark of his former, degraded status was indelible, and he could never escape it. He could never penetrate the “barrier between him and the whites . . . between him and the free class.” Losing all hope of advancement, the free black person also lost the desire to rise. “The debasement which was at first compulsory, has now become habitual and voluntary . . . He looks forward to no distinction, aims at no excellence, and makes no effort beyond the supply of his daily wants . . . The authority of the master being removed, and its place not being supplied by moral restraints or incitements, he lives in idleness and probably in vice, and obtains a precarious course by begging and theft.”14
Harper’s disparagement of free blacks was not unusual, even among white Baltimoreans who opposed slavery. Antislavery proto-economist Daniel Raymond thought that manumitted slaves, though industrious before their emancipation, “become vagabonds, and one half of them perhaps, get into the penitentiary” once they were freed. Hezekiah Niles observed that “free blacks among us are less honest and correct, less industrious and not so much to be depended on . . . as the well-treated slaves.”15
Harper claimed that “free people of colour” not only were “a nuisance and a burden” to themselves but also “contribute greatly to the corruption of slaves . . . by rendering them discontented and disobedient.” Unable to enter white society, free blacks remained members of the same class as the unfree, who envied the idleness of their emancipated acquaintances and grew resentful of their masters’ authority.16
For white Baltimoreans, the problems presented by free people of color were a particular concern because Baltimore, since 1810, had held the largest concentration of free black people in the United States. By 1830, Baltimore’s population of about 80,000 included 14,000 free black people, almost four times the number of slaves in the city. By 1860, before President Lincoln had emancipated a single slave, 92 percent of all African Americans in Baltimore were free.17 From its inception, the American Colonization Society had embraced the goal of enabling free blacks to leave America for Africa.18 The organization’s cause appealed to those who thought, like Robert Harper, that free black people had no proper place in American society. In Africa, they would no longer be inferior misfits. “They would become proprietors of land, master mechanics, ship-owners, navigators and merchants, and by degrees schoolmasters, justices of the peace, militia officers, ministers of religion, judges and legislators.”19
Beyond its usefulness in reducing the population of free blacks, Harper saw a larger promise in the colonization movement. “It tends,” he wrote, “ and may powerfully tend to rid us gradually and entirely in the United States of slaves and slavery: a great moral and political evil, of increasing virulence and extent, from which much mischief is now felt, and very great calamity in future is justly apprehended.”20 The calamity that Harper apprehended, apparently, was not the Civil War but a slave insurrection like the one in Haiti, which, a generation earlier, had helped to make him a Federalist. Such “terrible convulsions in civil society” might yet lie far in the future. But, in Harper’s view, slavery also did more immediate damage. It was bad for white people.
A casual survey of the country, Harper suggested, demonstrated that prosperity and growth were concentrated in regions that relied on free labor; stagnation and decline, in the slave states. This was so partly because slaves labored for their masters rather than themselves and therefore worked as little as possible. In slave society, white people were idlers too. They “insensibly associate the ideas of labour and of slavery, and are almost irresistibly led to consider labour as a degradation.” In slave society, indolence was a habit shared by both races.21
According to Harper, the liberation of slaves depended on the departure of their free sisters and brothers. Once America’s free black residents migrated to Africa and established a colony there, the settlement could serve as a destination for newly emancipated slaves. Its existence might increase the frequency of manumission, “for many persons who are now restrained from manumitting their slaves, by the conviction that they would generally become a nuisance if manumitted in the country, would gladly give them freedom if they could be sent to a place where they might enjoy it, usefully to themselves and to society.”22 Colonization would therefore lead to the gradual decline of slavery.
Robert Harper became a life member of the American Colonization Society and a founder of its Maryland auxiliary. It was Harper’s suggestion that led the society to name its African colony Liberia, from the Latin liber, meaning “freeman.” Harper also enlisted a diligent apprentice in the enterprise. John H. B. Latrobe, future attorney for the B&O, studied law in Harper’s office for more than two years and listened to him speak at length on his two favorite subjects: internal improvements and African colonization. Harper’s projected canal from Baltimore to the C&O came to nothing, but colonization took hold, and Latrobe became one of its most ardent advocates. He suggested naming Liberia’s capital city after President Monroe, whose liberal interpretation of the Slave Trade Act of 1817 enabled the federal government to give financial support to the American Colonization Society’s settlement in Liberia. The law authorized the president to provide for captives rescued from slave ships by resettling them in Africa.23
Like Baltimore itself, the colonization movement was full of compromises about race and slavery. It could accommodate both pro- and antislavery sentiments. To the defenders of slavery, the movement offered a solution for the problem posed by the coexistence of free and unfree blacks in the same society. Colonization would remove free black people to the continent where they belonged, where they could flourish as full citizens of their own nation, but too far away to encourage resentment and disobedience among their brothers and sisters who remained behind in America and in slavery. On the other hand, for many whites with antislavery sentiments, colonization promised to remove one of the difficulties posed by emancipation. America could liberate its slaves without the inconvenience of having to live with them after they were free.24
Colonization promised social and political equality for black people, but not in the United States. In Africa, free black people could achieve equality among themselves, while whites preserved it for their own part in America. The population of Africa, though not part of the colonization movement, also stood to gain. America’s black emigrants, having been exposed to the elevating influence of Anglo-American civilization, would contribute to the civilization and Christianization of Africans even more inferior than they.25
The enterprise foundered on one immovable obstacle. The vast majority of African Americans—slave and free—were generations removed from Africa and had no interest in going back. For them, America was birthplace and home, however unwelcoming, and Africa seemed alien, dangerous, and backward by comparison. The colonization scheme also embodied a distinctly unfavorable assessment of African American rights and capabilities. It held that free blacks in the United States could never hope to become citizens with the same rights as white Americans. Not surprisingly, abolitionists condemned the colonizers. William Lloyd Garrison mounted an extended assault on the movement.26
FALSE START
After Robert Harper’s death in 1825, John Latrobe became the principal worker for the colonization movement in Maryland. Since he was only 22 years old, he depended on men older and more prominent than himself to serve as the leaders of the Maryland auxiliary. One of these was Eli Ayres, a physician who had acted as agent for the American Colonization Society in negotiating the purchase of the site where Liberia’s capital city would rise. Ayres also sought to reinvigorate the colonization movement in the United States. Its local auxiliaries, according to Latrobe, consisted “of elderly gentlemen whose respectability gave a countenance to whatever they set their name to.” Ayres wanted to create local executive committees made up of “active, zealous, young men—working men—who brought to the task assigned a portion of enthusiasm.” He organized an executive committee for the colonization society’s auxiliary in Baltimore. In addition to Latrobe and Ayres, it included Charles Harper, the son of Robert Harper.27
Latrobe and the younger Harper set out to overcome black resistance to colonization. They decided that “an address from the people of Liberia to the colored people of this country might do some good here.” After receiving the statement from Monrovia and circulating it “as extensively as we could,” the next task was to “get up an address from the colored people of Baltimore to their brethren . . . and we waited upon the clergymen of the Methodist church to aid us in providing a place of meeting.” Harper and Latrobe were invited to make the case for colonization to a black congregation at a Methodist church on Fish (now Saratoga) Street. They arrived to find that “the meeting was not full by any means.” Harper delivered an address “to expound the subject to the good people.” Latrobe followed with a motion that the address be adopted by the meeting. The congregation endorsed it without objection.28
The next morning, Harper and Latrobe discovered that they had been at the wrong church—a congregation of “radical” Methodists. If they wanted solid black support for colonization, they would have to persuade the “orthodox folks” who attended the Sharp Street Methodist Church. Organized in 1787, it was the oldest black congregation in Baltimore. When Latrobe and Harper arrived at Sharp Street, the sanctuary was full, “and our colored friends were stowed like herrings in a barrel—men, women, and children all flocked to hear about Africa.” The two advocates of colonization delivered the same speeches they had made at the Fish Street church. Latrobe later recalled that “an intelligent whitewasher, black as the ace of spades,” rose to deliver a response, “and a most excellent speech he made.” He did not object to colonization itself, but insisted that African Americans had to be educated and prepared before they departed for Africa. After his response, according to Latrobe, “one or two colored men manifested an inclination to speak, but the chairman seemed to think that quite enough had been said . . . and put the question whether the address just read should be adopted. He only took the ayes, but did not call for the nays.” The “presiding clergyman” declared that the address had been adopted, “gave out a hymn, and dismissed the congregated people . . . rather peremptorily with a prayer.” When Latrobe “remarked to [the clergyman], upon his prompt proceedings, he said that if he had let one talk, a dozen would have followed, and nobody’s opinions would have been altered.”29
Harper and Latrobe also attempted to mobilize a white constituency for colonization. In 1827, they organized a meeting of colonization supporters in Baltimore that resolved to establish as many chapters as possible across the state. They recruited Charles Carroll of Carrollton to serve as the president of the organization. Other officers included Philip E. Thomas, Hezekiah Niles, Roger B. Taney, Solomon Etting, and General Samuel Smith—all Baltimoreans. The two young organizers also solicited funds for the American Colonization Society, and in 1827, the state legislature agreed to make an annual appropriation of $1,000 for the colonization of free black Marylanders.30
The General Assembly terminated its grant because, by the end of 1828, the American Colonization Society had been able to transport only 12 black Marylanders to Liberia. The results for African Americans overall were no more impressive. By 1827, after 10 years of effort, the colonization society had conveyed a total of only 802 colonists to Liberia, and some of these were recaptured from slave ships by the US Navy.31
BALTIMORE SECEDES
By 1831, the Maryland Colonization Society was sufficiently dissatisfied with the performance of its parent society to consider steps toward independence. At first, the issue was money. The Maryland chapter, while willing to provide financial support to the national organization, wanted to become something more than a conduit carrying the state’s contributions to the society in Washington. The chapter wanted to control funds of its own. The members aspired not merely to support the colonization movement but to organize their own parties of emigrants to Liberia. That was why they needed money. The managers of the national organization conceded the point, provided that the Maryland organization would pay $20 for every African American transported from Maryland to Liberia, to cover the cost of settling them after they landed.32
A dispute ensued about this “tax.” Marylanders, after all, had been among the most generous contributors to the colony’s purchase. They also contributed to the operating expenses of the national organization. Now they were to be assessed an additional charge for colonists transported to Liberia at their expense. A committee of the state society also argued that the $20 charge for each emigrant was excessive and that the actual expense for settling emigrants was only $2.75 per person. The controversy forced the cancellation of Maryland’s first, independently organized party of free black emigrants in June 1831. In the fall, another contingent of free black people was collected to leave for Liberia. Eli Ayres, who had been appointed agent of the Maryland Colonization Society, assembled them in a six-week sweep through the counties northeast of Baltimore and down the Eastern Shore. The party numbered only 31. Ayres had been stymied on the Eastern Shore by rumors that he was a Georgia slave dealer using the emigration scheme to ensnare free black people for a return to slavery in the Deep South. But this time, at least, the ship sailed.33
The dispute with the parent society in Washington exposed differences between the state and national organizations that extended beyond organizational finances to the issue of slavery itself. The Baltimoreans who were negotiating with the national board of managers complained that one of “the greatest difficulties now presented to the Parent Board at Washington, is to reconcile the discordant views entertained on the Subject of colonization by the friends of it. The New Englander considers it in one point of view & is impelled by one notion:—the N Carolinian looks at it quite differently and acts from opposite feelings.” The Baltimore committee suggested that by trying to conciliate the two wings of the colonization movement, the national organization became “an object of suspicion” to both. If the various state societies were allowed to pursue their own views, this “sectional jealousy which is now daily exhibiting itself to impede the progress of the Society, would at once cease to exist.”34
The discordant “sectional jealousies” concerning race and slavery produced disputes of precisely the sort that Baltimoreans sought to avoid. They were poised between the New Englanders and the North Carolinians and were likely to turn against one another in the debate about the proper course of the colonization movement—whether it was to preserve slavery by deporting free blacks or to diminish slavery by providing a place of exile for manumitted slaves. The Baltimoreans could distance themselves from these tensions by organizing their own parties of emigration to Liberia, open to both free blacks and manumitted slaves. This liberality preserved a convenient ambiguity about the aims of the colonization movement, a way to sidestep the sectional jealousies that disturbed the national society.
The Maryland Colonization Society made its first move toward independence in 1831, when it applied for a corporate charter from the state legislature. The group had chosen an opportune moment to launch its own African colonization program. In 1831, a Virginia slave, Nat Turner, had led an insurrection of slaves and free blacks in which as many as 55 white people may have been murdered. For many whites, African colonization now became a mission of life-and-death importance.35
The Maryland General Assembly embraced colonization as state policy. In March 1832, the legislature not only granted the colonization society its charter but directed the governor to appoint three members of the society as a board of managers “whose duty it shall be to remove from the state of Maryland, the people of color now free, and such as shall hereafter become so, to the colony of Liberia,” or to any other place so long as it was out of state. Every court clerk in Maryland who received a deed of manumission and every register of wills who recorded a bequest that freed slaves was required to notify the board of managers of the names and ages of these former slaves within five days or face a $10 fine. The board of managers was to take custody of the manumitted slaves and deliver them to either the Maryland or the American Colonization Society. The ex-slaves were then to be readied for transportation to Liberia. If former slaves rejected that option, the board of managers was to transport them to places of their own choosing outside Maryland. If recalcitrant ex-slaves refused that option as well, the managers were to notify the county sheriff, who was to place these supposedly free black persons under arrest and deposit them somewhere outside the boundaries of Maryland. Manumitted slaves could avoid this outcome in two ways. They could renounce their freedom and continue to live as slaves, or they could obtain annual permits from a county court to remain free “if the said courts be satisfied by respectable testimony that such slave or slaves so manumitted, deserve such permission on account of their extraordinary good conduct and character.”36
To finance the departure of free black people, the legislature was ready to pay the board of managers—and the Maryland Colonization Society—as much as $20,000 in 1832, and up to $200,000 over the next 20 years. The legislature directed that the state borrow the money needed to finance the enterprise, and it imposed a special levy to pay off the debt.37
Little more than a month after the General Assembly made the Maryland Colonization Society an instrument of the state’s racial policy, the society’s board of managers issued an “address” to the people of Maryland. It observed that the mandate the board had received from the state legislature “purports to effect the free people of color alone,” but the state’s colonization society operated “upon the entire colored population, slave and free; and, if followed up . . . the spirit of the age and the experience of the state warrant the belief that it will . . . entitle Maryland to be ranked among the free states of the Union.” Robert Goodloe Harper’s vision continued to guide the society, but it was also guided by the enduring political necessity of charting a path between the supporters of slavery and its opponents. Its purpose was to demonstrate “the ability of a slave holding state to free itself from slavery by its own resources, in its own way, and without the ill-timed and injudicious interference of others in [its] internal concerns.”38 Colonization was not abolition, but it was not a defense of slavery either.
The contentious proceedings at the annual meeting of the American Colonization Society in 1833 imperiled the political balance that Baltimore’s board of managers was struggling to maintain. Latrobe explained that for many years, the Maryland auxiliary had relied on the national society as “the expounder of the principles of Colonization . . . At the last annual meeting, however, . . . circumstances exhibited themselves, which demanded from the State Society a different course in relation to the principles.” It had become apparent that “Colonization had two sets of friends, who supported it from motives diametrically opposed to each other. The north looked to Colonization as the means of extirpating slavery. The south as the means of perpetuating it.” “The Colonization Society,” wrote Latrobe, “had attempted to conciliate for years, between these parties, and so long as it would keep the question of principle from being publicly mooted, it was partially successful. But the explosion came at last. The discussions of the last winter in Washington led, as a necessary consequence, to the fair and distinct development of opposing parties.”39
Less than a month after that fractious meeting, banker Thomas Ellicott, a member of the Maryland society’s board of managers, offered a resolution deploring “the existence of division and discord in the board of managers of the American Colonization Society. The dispute threatened the “great and philanthropic objects” of the movement that had invested so much in the creation of a colony on the African coast. Ellicott added, however, that the Maryland board of managers was “nevertheless of the opinion that it is neither politic nor expedient, nor within the limits of their chartered powers . . . to interfere in the disputes which may arise out of conflicting principles in that Board.” William G. Read, also a board member of the Maryland society, offered another resolution, urging that the “benevolent tendencies of the enterprise ought to be left to disclose themselves in all their various aspects, and that it is the duty of every well wisher to the cause to cooperate strenuously in promoting our immediate object of planting on the shores of Africa a free and happy colony without introducing new topics of discussion which might tend to distract our counsels and paralyze our exertions.”40 The board tabled both resolutions, declaring in effect that it would take no position on taking no position.
At the board’s next meeting in April 1833, John Latrobe offered another resolution announcing that the success of colonization in Maryland depended upon “the facilities afforded for the transportation and reception of emigrants on the coast of Africa which can only be secured . . . by the establishment of a settlement in Africa where there will be no restraint upon emigration beyond the control of the State Society.” Latrobe proposed that the Maryland Colonization Society purchase a site at Cape Palmas on the African coast, south of Monrovia. His proposal was not new. He had been promoting the acquisition of Cape Palmas by the American Colonization Society at least as early as 1829, but the organization had taken no action.41 Now, however, the purchase acquired new significance. It would allow Maryland’s organization to operate independently of its parent society, not only in transporting emigrants to Africa, but also in providing them with a separate place to live once they got there. In taking this step, the Maryland society would insulate itself more completely from the controversies that shook the national organization and threatened the unity of its Baltimore-based subsidiary. Other branches of the American Colonization Society could depart from the quarrels in Washington and retreat northward or southward to the comparative unanimity of their home states. But the divisions that erupted in the national organization were essentially the same as the ones that might provoke open conflict among the Baltimoreans who ran the Maryland Colonization Society. They were precisely the issues that James Buckingham’s hosts refrained from discussing when they were “out in society.”
Though they did not reject Latrobe’s proposal, the board of managers hesitated. Latrobe made a persuasive case for Cape Palmas, but he had never seen the place (and never would). Its reported advantages justified the “Society in taking further steps for its more particular exploration and purchase.”42 There was also the matter of money. Even the injection of state funds would not enable the organization to purchase, establish, and staff its own African colony. But the society’s new independence afforded it an opportunity to enlarge its territory for fundraising. Since the organization’s explicit, though very long-term, objective was the “extirpation” of slavery, it could appeal for support to friends of colonization in the North, where there were few African Americans to be exported to Africa, but many philanthropic white people with antislavery inclinations. The Maryland society hired an agent to collect contributions “North of the Potomac,” in addition to their local agent who concentrated on organization building, fundraising, and recruitment of emigrants within the state. When it took its first steps toward independence in 1831, the society also enhanced its fundraising prospects in Maryland. The Baltimore Gazette commented that the organization’s “plan of appropriating the funds raised in the State, to the use of the State in the removal of its own emigrants” made it “more than ever the interest of the people of Maryland, to contribute to its resources.”43
After assuring themselves that their purchase of a colony in Africa would not endanger their state financing, the Maryland Colonization Society’s managers voted to acquire Cape Palmas, renaming it “Maryland in Africa.” While it lasted, it was a relatively successful enterprise. Emigrants who were unhappy with life in Monrovia frequently moved to “Maryland” because it was well-run by comparison, and getting there was not as difficult as returning to the United States.44
COLONIZATION AND THE COLOR LINE
Colonization provided a basis for consensus about slavery and race among prominent white Baltimoreans, but it opened new schisms among the city’s free black people. For its time, the free black community of Baltimore was both large and well-organized. Its population had achieved the critical mass needed to sustain a variety of independent black institutions. Black churches were the first to emerge, and some of them sponsored their own schools; there were no public schools for black children until 1867. After the churches and schools came social, business, charitable, and cultural organizations that transformed the city’s African American population “from a formless aggregate of transients . . . to a society that coalesced around the affirmation of racial distinctions.” This mosaic of African American organizations was undoubtedly an asset to black Baltimore. It was a source of identity along with psychological and social support, and it “provided an essential undergirding for the development of a unique urban culture and cohesive community in Baltimore.”45
This collective asset, however, was also a liability. Organization meant division. African Americans joined different churches, different denominations, different organizations that produced rival leaders with disparate constituencies and divergent interests. Sometimes the burden of maintaining unity was too much to bear, even within a single organization. One of the earliest rifts split the Sharp Street Methodist Church, where John Latrobe and Charles Harper had delivered their appeal on behalf of colonization. Eleven years before their visit, the church’s pastor, Daniel Coker, and a minority of his congregation had seceded to form a new church. The issue was race. The Sharp Street church was part of a denomination governed by whites. Rev. Coker and his followers wanted to be free of the white hierarchy. They founded Bethel Church, which would soon join a new, black denomination to become Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Bethel was the radical “Fish Street church” to which Latrobe and Harper had addressed their first appeal for colonization.46
Rev. Daniel Coker, a portrait probably painted by African American artist Joshua Johnson around 1805, when Coker was 25 years old. Three years earlier, while living in New York, Coker was ordained as a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1816, he became one of the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. Four years later, he was one of the first black Baltimoreans to accept the invitation of the American Colonization Society to set sail for Africa, where he settled in Liberia and later relocated to Sierra Leone.
Its founding was one of the initial steps in a long series that contributed to disengagement of Baltimore’s free black community from the city’s white population. This estrangement may have become more pronounced after 1831, when the white response to Nat Turner’s Rebellion intensified the pressure to ship black people to Africa and imposed new restrictions on free black people who remained in Baltimore. The state had attempted to prevent free African Americans from entering Maryland as early as 1807, but policies of exclusion became increasingly harsh after 1831. Free black people who entered the state were permitted to remain for only 10 days. Those who stayed longer could be fined $50 for each week they remained beyond 10 days. Any free black person who left the state for more than 30 days was considered a nonresident and, on return, was subject to the same 10-day limit, followed by the fine of $50 a week. Subsequent legislation made it illegal for free black people to enter the state at all, except as servants with their masters. First offenders were to be fined $20; a second offense carried a fine of $500. Offenders unable to pay would be sold as slaves. In Baltimore it was difficult to enforce these restrictions. The city’s free black population was so large that outsiders could escape detection for up to a year, and the state courts held that penalties for remaining in the state illegally had to be imposed within 12 months of the offense.47
Other restrictions imposed in the aftermath of the Nat Turner scare limited the right of assembly for African Americans. A state law of 1831 prohibited black religious services unless conducted or authorized by a white clergyman, who had to be present at the service from beginning to end. An exception was made for Baltimore’s numerous free black people and their numerous churches. They could hold their own services up to 10 p.m. with the written permission of a licensed white preacher. Meetings of African Americans for nonreligious purposes were forbidden by a later statute, but another exception was made for Baltimore, at the request of some of its white citizens, who argued that the law prevented the functioning of black charitable societies organized to assist destitute members of the race. In Baltimore, free blacks certified to be of good character, and who paid annual taxes of at least five dollars, could form such organizations, but only with the written permission of the mayor, which had to be renewed annually. The mayor was also empowered to send observers to oversee the meetings of these groups.48 There is no indication that any mayor actually did so.
By the late 1830s, it had become customary for black Baltimoreans who wanted to hold social functions to petition the mayor for permission. The requests were usually accompanied by letters of recommendation from white citizens. In 1838, for example, white acquaintances intervened with the mayor so that a “Mrs. Ross” and her “very quiet family” could hold a Christmas Eve party. John Miller, “a very discreet genteel colored man,” carried a letter to the mayor’s office urging that he be allowed to hold a “Ball” in Long Alley. For black Baltimoreans, even oyster suppers called for mayoral approval. Those who needed to be out on the streets after 10 p.m. because their jobs required them to work late also needed mayoral permission and found whites to support their requests.49
By comparison with the rest of Maryland, however, Baltimore seems to have responded permissively to African American efforts at independent organization and socializing. A few of the requests written by white Baltimoreans in support of black social gatherings refer to the prospective black hosts—perhaps surprisingly—as good or worthy “citizens.” The term implies an autonomous political status, but of course, free African Americans were considerably less than citizens in practice. They could not vote or hold office. White acquiescence to freedom of association among free blacks was not an acknowledgment of their equal citizenship, but an acceptance of black separation and the existence of a distinct African American community.
The racial divergence did not come all at once. The emigration of black Methodists from Sharp Street to Bethel and other AME churches was slow, and some black Methodists never left the denomination that they shared with whites. Black Methodists sorted themselves into three groups: those who continued to worship with whites (but only from the rear pews), those who joined all-black congregations under Methodist Episcopal governance, and those who belonged to AME churches.50
Black Methodist divergence was only one of the divisions that impeded black Baltimore’s achievement of unity. According to Christopher Phillips, the city’s free black community was less “fractious” than the one in Philadelphia, but black Baltimoreans were sharply divided on African colonization.51
Daniel Coker seems to have been an early storm center within Baltimore’s black community. At one point, he was expelled from his AME church on the basis of charges never disclosed. He was soon reinstated, but his position had been undermined, and he faced difficulty in restoring his personal finances. In addition to these problems, Coker found himself an unwilling partisan in bitter conflict between his Bethel church and his former Sharp Street church. Convinced that the battle was weakening both congregations, Coker decided, in 1820, to accept the invitation of the American Colonization Society to sail on its first ship to Liberia so that he could “leave all these divisions behind in America” and return to the land of his ancestors. On his trip from Baltimore to New York, where he was to board ship for Africa, Coker made several speeches in support of colonization before large audiences of African Americans. He continued to propagandize for colonization from Liberia, where he became not only the pastor of another AME church but a ship owner and coastal trader, a leader of the American colony, and eventually a combatant in still more controversies.52
William Watkins was one of Coker’s students at the Sharp Street school when Coker was its principal teacher. Watkins became a teacher in the school at just about the time that Coker embarked for Africa, and he later established an independent school of his own.53 Watkins expressed strong opposition to the colonization movement promoted by John Latrobe and Charles Harper. The “address” they had presented at the Sharp Street and Bethel churches appeared in Baltimore newspapers as a “Memorial of the Free People of Colour,” signed not by Latrobe and Harper, who were its authors, but by the chairs and secretaries of the meetings convened at the two black churches.54
Watkins responded as “A Coloured Baltimorean” in the abolitionist Genius of Universal Emancipation, challenging the memorial’s authenticity as a statement of black support for colonization. In fact, he argued, most of “our coloured brethren” had been “not a little surprised to see a memorial . . . containing sentiments so repugnant to their well known opinions.” To support his contention that few free black people wanted to leave for Africa, Watkins noted that a recent ship departing Baltimore for Liberia carried only 10 emigrants from the largest population of free black people in the country.55
Watkins next published an indictment of the American Colonization Society itself. Behind the fog of ambivalence about slavery that sustained the precarious unity of Baltimore’s colonization movement, Watkins found hypocrisy. It seemed “very strange” to him “that those benevolent men should feel so much for the condition of the free coloured people, and, at the same time, cannot sympathize in the least degree, with those whose condition appeals so much louder to their humanity and benevolence—Nor is this all: we are apprized that some of the most distinguished of that society are themselves SLAVEHOLDERS!” Members of the colonization society expressed deep concern for “poor, degraded Africa.” Their remedy for the sorry continent was to dispatch free black Americans as agents of civilization—the same free black people condemned in the speeches of colonization advocates as “of all classes of the population of this country, the most vicious; who, being contaminated ourselves extend our vices to all around us, to the slaves and to the whites.” These were “to be the pioneers of this great work of regeneration and reform. Fine materials indeed to accomplish so glorious a work!”56
Having deflated the colonization movement’s disingenuous claims to benevolence, “A Coloured Baltimorean” next appealed to the material and emotional interests of free black people themselves. “Why should we abandon our firesides and everything associated with the dear name of home—undergo the fatigues of a perilous voyage, and expose ourselves, our wives, and our little ones to the deleterious influences of an uncongenial sun, for the enjoyment of a liberty divested of its usual accompaniments, surrounded with circumstances which diminish its intrinsic value?” It was better, he wrote, to “die in Maryland under the pressure of unrighteous and cruel laws than be driven, like cattle, to the pestilential clime of Liberia.”57
In 1831, as secretary of a meeting of Baltimore’s free black people, Watkins—under his own name—recorded a series of resolutions adopted in opposition to colonization. But along with these there was one that acknowledged the division that colonization had produced among the city’s free black people: “We are deeply sensible that many of our warm and sincere friends have espoused the colonization system, from the purest motives—and that we sincerely regret their efforts to ameliorate our conditions are not more in accordance with our wishes.”58
Not all black endorsements of colonization were engineered by white partisans of the cause. In 1835, Watkins would find himself standing in opposition to acknowledged leaders of black Baltimore, including the pastor of his own church. Three black ministers issued a statement, claiming to speak for the city’s free African Americans, in which they declared the sympathy of their community for the cause of colonization. Watkins challenged their claim to speak for Baltimore’s black population, since they had not called a single meeting to find out exactly what sentiments black Baltimoreans held on the subject. He stood in opposition not just to respected leaders of the black community but to his own professional colleagues. A year earlier he had become a preacher at the Sharp Street church. Writing to William Lloyd Garrison, whose abolitionist newspaper had provided Watkins with a public, if anonymous, voice, he claimed that the black ministers had threatened him with a coat of tar and feathers and that a meeting had been called in Baltimore County to consider what means might succeed in putting an end to his advocacy of abolition and his attacks on colonization. Though Garrison had published many of Watkins’s previous letters in the Liberator, Watkins asked him not to print this one. For the moment, at least, he had been silenced. After 1835, Watkins’s letters to Garrison became infrequent.59
Watkins’s dispute with the black ministers carried implications that extended beyond the issue of colonization. In Baltimore’s black community, whose members were divided by denomination, church, and social status, it was not clear whether anyone could speak for the race as a whole on any issue. The colonization movement, moreover, posed special difficulties for its black critics. It was not just that the movement had many genuine sympathizers among black Baltimoreans. In Baltimore, at least, the colonization movement was a vehicle that prominent whites employed to sidestep hard questions about slavery and racial equality. For black Baltimoreans, it was no easy matter to mobilize against ambivalence and evasion, even though they might conceal hypocrisy. Moreover, the town’s free African Americans facilitated white evasion. As they withdrew further into their own, separate community, they made it easier for whites to avoid the explicit consideration of relations between the races.
William Watkins made a final assault on the black clergy in 1837, complaining of the “incompetency of the colored ministry, in general, to supply the intellectual wants of the colored population of our country.”60 It was one of his last outbursts in print. After 1838, not much more is heard from him. By 1844, he was no longer listed as a Methodist preacher. In that year, he was overwhelmed by the conviction that the end of the world was imminent, and he joined a millenarian movement whose purpose was to prepare for doomsday. Perhaps he had found it impossible to live in the world as it was. Finally, like Daniel Coker before him, he found that the only escape from the internal strains of black Baltimore was emigration. He left, not for Africa, but for Canada.