After the time of the American Revolution nothing spurred thinking about issues of African American literary activity, of African American voice and authority, like the creation and activities of the American Colonization Society, including its program of encouraging African American emigration to Africa. Operationalizing notions of a white American national identity, though led by white Americans whose motives varied widely, the society from the outset had tense and complex relationships with African Americans, especially with the free people of color at whom much of its program was aimed. Even though many had been drawn to Cuffe’s program and to those of his predecessors, a sizable number of black people, both slave and free, viewed the society with favor or, at the very least, believed that its program offered possibilities for personal achievement in Africa that were unlikely to be realized in the United States. Even more black people, however, viewed the society with horror and spoke out strongly against its aims and purposes.
There was much in the early rhetoric of the colonization society and in the character of its founders to encourage both reactions. The founders themselves came from differing backgrounds and brought different purposes to their work. One of the most visible, and the man long identified with the creation of the society, was the Reverend Robert Finley, of New Jersey, a deeply religious man who was no less deeply troubled by the effects of slavery on American society. Viewing slavery as a national sin and impelled by missionary ideals, he believed that the evils inaugurated by those who had brought Africans to America could only be repaired through a project of repatriation and the gift of the gospel to Africa, which was what his colonization plan proposed.1
Finley’s approach to colonization synthesized ideas from such earlier white figures as St. George Tucker and Ferdinando Fairfax, as well as Jeffersonian notions of national identity, with those of Paul Cuffe, his predecessors, and his admirers. The possibilities of realizing a black nation through the work of African Americans were important to Finley. He urged that sending to Africa a body of migrants who were familiar with the civilization of America and with Christianity could be a means for realizing Africa’s potential. “With what joy would she view them,” he wrote in his seminal Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks in 1816, “improved in arts, in civilization and in knowledge of the true God. She would forget her sorrows, her wounds would be healed, and she would bless the hands of her benefactors.” Africa would take its place among the nations of the world.2
At the same time, Finley predicated his sense of the need for colonization on a vision of the future that owed much to Thomas Jefferson’s view that black and white peoples in America could not live together in a state of freedom and equality. Though he saw signs of progress among the free people of color in the North, he concluded that “the friends of man will strive in vain to raise them to a proper level, while they remain among us. They will be kept down, on the one side by prejudice, too deep rooted to be eradicated, on the other, by the recollection of former inferiority, and despair of ever assuming an equal standing in society.” The only solution was to “remove them. Place them by themselves in some climate, congenial with their color and constitutions,” by which he meant Africa.3
Other figures in the colonization society shared one or both of Finley’s aims. Ideas of incompatibility dominated much of the earliest colonization rhetoric, though a democratic language stressing possibilities of self-government and nation-building, along with an emphasis on missionary purposes and possibilities, was important as well. Many who cooperated with Finley shared his essentially antislavery beliefs; others were attracted to the venture, especially in the South—where such figures as Virginian Charles Fenton Mercer were at least as important as Finley in the creation of the society—simply because if it were successful, it would provide for a way of getting a “troublesome” free black population out of the way.4
The aims of the American Colonization Society built on and even magnified issues of authority and color that had long figured in the development of African American thought and letters, as Finley and many of his colleagues understood. For them, it was always important to stress that any plan for colonizing the free people of color in the United States was a plan to be undertaken with their consent. It was not to be a project of forced deportation but, rather, one of voluntary emigration, however subtly coerced, chosen by the migrants themselves.
I
The relationship of this concern to issues of color and authority became apparent virtually from the moment of the society’s founding. The society was incorporated on 28 December 1816, electing officers and issuing a memorial to Congress over the name of Bushrod Washington, nephew of George Washington and a Supreme Court justice, the society’s first president. Within days the Washington National Intelligencer, which favored the society and its program, published a “Counter-Memorial proposed to be submitted to Congress on behalf of the free people of colour of the District of Columbia,” in which it set forth arguments against the society’s plans, in ways that directly looked to issues of color, consent, and national identity.5
The countermemorial was purportedly written by a group of “free people of colour, resident in the district of Columbia, born in the United States, and of parents born there also.” Building on older traditions that rejected Jeffersonian tendencies toward an exclusionary national identity, the countermemorial also moved in new directions, stimulated by the discussion of colonization, to consider African American claims on a place in the American nation. The “memorialists” said that “they would rather die than quit their native country” and pledged to “cling to this their native soil whilst they have breath and be buried where their fathers before them are buried.”
The motif was to be repeated often in the coming years. In some sense playing on Jeffersonian notions of homogeneity as the basis for national identity, the countermemorialists based homogeneity on history and human unity, both of which should transcend the racialist tendencies in Jeffersonian and white colonizationist views. The “memorialists” also took a somewhat less than favorable view of Africa as “a country inhabited only by savages and wild beasts.”6
But even more important were issues of consent. Here, too, the memorialists asserted an American identity, but one founded on rights as well as on history and experience. The countermemorialists questioned the right of such “arbitrary associations of men” as the society “to decree that your memorialists are miserable.” They declared themselves “free men” who “consider themselves in every respect qualified to determine for themselves what is, and what is not, for their own benefit and advantage,” concluding “that indeed of all the rights and privileges which they hold under the constitution and laws, they consider the right to determine for themselves whether they be happy or not, by far the most natural, the most precious, and the most inviolable.”7
It is difficult to know who wrote the countermemorial. In most ways it anticipated other memorials and remonstrances that were soon to emerge from mass meetings of free people of color opposed to the society’s plans, even expressing a distrust of the society’s assurances that any emigration would be voluntary rather than coerced. In this it suggests at least the author’s familiarity with an emerging body of sentiment rejecting the colonizationist plan as well as, undoubtedly, opposition among free people of color in the Washington area. In other ways it went off in very unusual directions. Ridiculing the view on the part of men from Jefferson to Finley that differences in color created a basic incompatibility between peoples of African and European descent, the countermemorial suggested that the real solution to the society’s concerns was amalgamation: “In a few generations the odious distinctions of color would pass away.” And it could easily occur. “Among your memorialists,” said the countermemorial stated, “are very many young men, of industrious and sober habits, of ordinary school education, and of mechanic trades, who would not feel themselves degraded by intermarriages with the whites.”8
The paper’s editor took the piece for a satire, noting that the writer’s “object, it is apparent, is to endeavor, by ridicule, to check the progress of the Colonization Plan,” and he wanted no one to “mistake for gravity the well-meant irony of our correspondent.” If the editor’s interpretation is correct, it shows the extent to which consent notions continued to raise complexities in regard to color and status in the United States and how they created, for some, real areas of vulnerability for an enterprise like colonization, which, harking back to Botsford and others, appeared to seek the consent of people of color to their own exclusion from American life.9
On the other hand, in suggesting “amalgamation” as a solution to the American color problem the countermemorial may have been, and more likely was, an early, ultimately procolonizationist effort to parody and thus undermine what was already shaping up as a significant body of argument in opposition to the society. Even to acknowledge a role for blacks in the discussion of colonization was to admit them into the realm of public discourse, into the American public sphere. The writer made this clear when he had the memorialists propose a future in which, through “amalgamation,” they should become “blended with the great American family.” Far from satirizing colonization, that is to say, the author of the countermemorial used the apparent assertion of a black voice into the public realm to challenge such assertions in themselves. The effort was intended to illustrate, in a particularly vivid way, the dangers of not going forward with the colonizationist scheme, while dismissing the interest of Finley and others in securing black consent. That it did so through the bugbear of “amalgamation” drew a connection destined to play a role in antiblack rhetoric through the antebellum period and beyond.
Still, Finley himself continued to see consent as an important element in the colonizationist cause. He wanted to show that colonization really represented the wishes of many free people of color, that he was speaking for them and that they would validate his efforts. By the time the National Intelligencer piece appeared, he, along with his coworker Samuel Mills, had already begun to correspond with Paul Cuffe, seeking support and cooperation, which, at the beginning at least, Cuffe seemed willing to give. Also, with Cuffe’s encouragement, Finley and Mills soon began to contact those leaders in New York and Philadelphia who had supported Cuffe in the past, including, especially, James Forten. Forten, along with Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and others, were generally supportive of the idea, although as Gary Nash has shown, they soon learned that they represented a small minority of their constituents.10
As Nash has also shown, the response in Philadelphia was stronger than Finley, Forten, or Cuffe expected. At a 15 January 1817 meeting of three thousand people chaired by Forten, at which he, Jones, Richard Allen, and John Gloucester all spoke in behalf of colonization, the nays had it. Most in the crowd distrusted the motives of white colonizationists and, echoing concerns expressed in the countermemorial, feared that the society planned, not a voluntary scheme of emigration, as Cuffe had proposed, but a compulsory deportation scheme. Far from seeing it as an antislavery measure, they saw it as a plot by slaveholders to rid their own region of a potentially subversive population.11
The result was a memorial that strongly condemned both the American Colonization Society and its aims. The memorial’s similarity to the Washington “countermemorial” was striking, suggesting, again, that the Washington document had caught themes in circulation even before the society’s founding—perhaps in response to other exclusionist efforts— but it nonetheless had great impact on its own. It was to set the tone for African American opposition to colonization over the next two decades.
Acknowledging the racist nationalist implications of the scheme, the Philadelphians described colonization as a measure intended to “exile us from the land of our nativity.” Writing that “our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America,” they stated: “We, their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat manured.” The exile proposed by the society “would not only be cruel, but in direct violation of those principles, which have been the boast of this republic.” The society’s proposal cast a “stigma” on all free people of color, even as it abandoned them in a hostile environment after generations of exclusion from the mainstream of their own society: “Without arts, without science, without a proper knowledge of government, to cast into the savage wilds of Africa the free people of color, seems to us the circuitous root through which they must return to perpetual bondage.” Signed by Forten, Jones, Allen, Gloucester, and others, the memorial declared a unanimous and unreserved opposition to the society and its plans.12
Philadelphia was not the only city where vocal opposition developed. In addition, no doubt, to Washington, Richmond was the setting for a large meeting that took a more moderate stance, but one no less skeptical of the enterprise. Recognizing some virtue in colonization itself, the Richmond memorialists urged a project focusing on “the most remote part of the land of our nativity”—suggesting a location on the Missouri River—something they would prefer to “being exiled to a foreign country,” and demanded a right to participate in the discussion.13
Finley was surprised and troubled enough by these responses to return to Philadelphia to try to rebuild support. He met with leaders and had some sense that he had persuaded them that both separation and colonization offered the best prospects for their future. The result, however, was a mass meeting during the summer that resulted in a longer “Address to the humane and benevolent Inhabitants of the city and county of Philadelphia,” reiterating many of the points made in the earlier memorial but also predicting that if slaveholders used colonization as a way of granting manumissions to individual slaves, the result would likely be those the slave trade had wrought on Africa: “Parents will be torn from their children—husbands from their wives—brothers from brothers— and all the heart-rending agonies which were endured by our forefathers when they were dragged into bondage from Africa will be again renewed, and, with increased anguish. The shores of America will, like the sands of Africa, be watered by the tears of those who will be left behind.” Again raising issues of consent, they assured their readers that such a plan had not been requested by them. 14
The problems such objections, and such voices, raised for Finley are illustrated by a brief piece he composed in 1818, a short time before his death, drawing on a long tradition in the development of an African American voice. This was his “Dialogues on the African Colony,” set in heaven and involving an imagined discussion on colonization among William Penn, Paul Cuffe, and Absalom Jones, the latter two also recently deceased. Cuffe is represented as the spokesman for colonization and the society, Jones as the opponent, and Penn as an initially neutral participant whom each respects and wishes to persuade. Penn has heard of colonization and is, like the Philadelphia memorialists, deeply concerned that through such a plan, “no further violence or cruelty will be attempted against” people of African descent.15
In his representation of Jones, Finley revealed the weight of the language of opposition that had developed in Philadelphia and Richmond during the preceding year. “Jones”’s words draw heavily on the memorials and remonstrances that had appeared earlier. He cites the cruelties of the slave trade and argues that colonization would merely compound them. He notes the progress of the free black communities and asks, “Whence the necessity of their leaving a country to which they have now become attached by long habits, and in which their means of comfortable subsistence and their modes of living are constantly improving?” Echoing the Richmond memorialists, he suggests that if there must be separation, it should be to some other location within the bounds of the United States, along the Missouri or the Mississippi River.16
Significantly, Cuffe speaks for Finley even as Finley draws on Cuffe’s thought, as well as his own. In Africa, Cuffe says, “a whole nation would be released and restored to the land of their forefathers.” Africa “would be explored and civilized; the institutions of political freedom, and the benign influence of the gospel extended over that most dreary and benighted corner of earth.” With such progress, Africa would ultimately “contest the palm of greatness with the other nations of the earth” and achieve the respect of all. This would never happen for people of African descent in the United States, where “their minds are in too depressed a sphere to be reached by the influence of most of those motives that most powerfully operate upon mankind.” Only in Africa could freedom and virtue be achieved.17
Finley made Cuffe an effective spokesman. Penn, though a great believer in brotherhood, has to concede the truth of much that Cuffe is made to say. “However the good and humane may struggle” to eradicate prejudice in themselves and others, white Americans are unlikely to succeed, Penn says. Rejecting inferiority, he nonetheless is made to feel that for blacks “the wall of partition between them and the whites” will always remain “impassable.” More telling, even Jones recognizes the force of colonization arguments, rendered in Cuffe’s voice. By the end, both neutral observer and opponent are converted to the society and its cause.18
At one level the dialogue shows just how prescient the Washington countermemorialist was. Finley, like many of those who had come before, apparently saw the necessity not simply of black consent to his project but of a black validation for his positions, a validation he sought to achieve by representing his ideas in a black voice, drawing, in this case, on an authentic figure and on a relatively accurate portrayal of a debate blacks themselves had put forward to get his point across. Paradoxically, given Finley’s point of view, he, no less than Edmund Botsford a decade earlier, felt the need to portray a black consent to exclusionist policies, to vest a black voice with the very authority his policies would ultimately seek to deny, to maintain a place for the black voice in public deliberation even as he worked toward its ultimate disfranchisement and removal from the American world.19
Given the issues at stake, it is also not surprising that one result of the founding of the American Colonization Society, and of the debates it inspired, was the emergence, really for the first time, of questions about who could legitimately speak for the free people of color in the United States and the reinvigoration of questions of credibility so far as a black voice was concerned, especially as public documents opposing the plan continued to appear. In 1819 Philadelphians raised such questions as they attacked the society for publishing an announcement in a local newspaper urging support for the society and claiming sizable black interest in its scheme. Following another large meeting, another remonstrance, signed by Forten and Russell Parrot, was issued rejecting the society and its scheme and suggesting that any black supporters were simply “a few obscure and dissatisfied strangers among us” who wanted chiefly to be made “Presidents, Governors and Principals in Africa,” while the sentiment among “the respectable inhabitants of colour” remained decidedly opposed.”20
The society itself showed its assessment of the significance of such charges by continuing to publicize voices of its own speaking on behalf of the society and its cause. In its 1820 annual report the society presented a letter signed by a number of colonists in Sierra Leone urging Americans to immigrate. “Africa, not America, is your country and your home,” the colonists wrote, and they weighed in from experience, albeit in the framework of longstanding conventions, as they drew on primitivist views of an African land of plenty, one that would achieve complete happiness with the arrival of more colonists to bring the gospel—the only thing lacking—to the minds of the native peoples.21
The society also continued to try to link itself with the authority of Cuffe. In the same annual report, for instance, it published an extract from Peter Williams’s 1818 discourse on Cuffe’s death, including the portion in which Cuffe was said to have seen himself as “a member of the whole African family.” It did so despite Williams’s own somewhat less than enthusiastic view of the society, not to mention Cuffe’s very different view of the “African family” from that proffered by Finley and other white colonizationists.22
Something similar may be seen in the society’s treatment of one of its most noted black converts, Daniel Coker. Coker had written about the special destiny of African Americans in his 1810 Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister; at the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church he had spoken further about a special African character and destiny. Such tendencies, along with a familiarity with Cuffe’s ideas, may have influenced Coker to begin thinking about colonization, as did a despair over divisions within the Baltimore African churches and a series of personal financial reversals. There is also some evidence that the colonization society sought him out, offering him inducements to come to its assistance. In any event, by the end of the decade Coker had come to look upon the society’s efforts with favor, and he became an eloquent spokesman for the possibilities the society offered free people of color for a new life in Africa.23
Much of the testimony Coker supplied in support of the society appeared in a Journal he began in 1820, when he himself went to West Africa. The society published the Journal almost immediately, identifying Coker as a “Descendant of Africa” and using the Journal to try to demonstrate the support it could achieve from an African American leader. What would ultimately become the society’s own colony at Liberia was not yet established when Coker went to Africa. Venturing to Sierra Leone, among the first of the society’s emigrants, he was himself involved in negotiations that led to the acquisition of a territory for future American migrants. During that same period the society’s white commissioner, Samuel Crozer, died, and Coker became the society’s chief agent on the ground, a post he retained for several months. Even after his replacement he continued to be an important figure in Sierra Leone, where he remained after other Americans had moved on to the new territory, living there until his death in 1835.24
Coker seems to have felt, as his earlier writings indicate, a strong affection for Africa. He saw commercial possibilities, as others had, and claimed something like a spiritual tie with Africans as people. “My soul cleaves to Africa,” he wrote shortly after his arrival, “in such a manner as to reconcile me to the idea of being separated from my dear friends and the comforts of a christian land.”25
But the Journal was in keeping, above all, with the missionary purposes often cited by the society as being among its aims, and it presents a Coker who is fully in accord with those purposes, who sees the enterprise as ultimately under the guidance of providence. Looking out on the sea as he approaches the African continent, Coker can only think of the eighteenth chapter of Isaiah, in which the prophet contemplates the land “which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia” and “a nation scattered and peeled” to ask, “What is God about to do for Africa? Surely something great.”26
He presented further evidence for such a prophetic vision in the Africans themselves. Visiting a market and seeing that the people “were all nearly naked, both men and women,” he is again brought to Isaiah, this time in the twentieth chapter, drawing on complex associations between biblical prophecy and ideas about ancient Africa that had been developing since the close of the eighteenth century. The passage prophesies the reduction of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia by the Assyrians, as those defeated in war would be led away naked and barefoot, falling from their former glory. Even as they fell, however, they could rise again, standing as an example to the world. In the very appearance of the Africans he describes, Coker puts his own hopes within a rhetorical framework that was well known in African American literary traditions.27
Coker thus said much to support what at least some society leaders offered in their official rhetoric, undercutting the more negative tendencies—stressed by opponents—in the colonizationist cause. In a letter attached as an appendix to the Journal, addressed to a Baltimore friend contemplating emigration, Coker commented on the good native character of the Africans and on the potential of the continent itself. “It is a rich land,” the letter reads, “and I do believe it will be a great nation, and a powerful and worthy nation,” even if “those who break the way will suffer much.” Directly denying the contentions of the Philadelphia memorialists and others, in another appended letter he declared, “We have no reason to fear, for Africa is our home.”28
For all his apparent nationalism, however, Coker was far from breaking with the society itself, and he was willing to use his pen to validate the society’s character. Noting tensions that had developed on shipboard between the colonists and the society’s white agents, Coker met with all the men among the colonists and vouched for the agents, saying that one only wanted “a sable skin to make him an African.” He also demanded the signing of a pledge of “full confidence in the judgment and sincere friendship of the agents.” Over the next couple of years Coker continued to do the work of validation, representing a black voice in favor not only of the society’s enterprise but of the organization itself. In one of a series of letters appearing in the society’s Fourth Annual Report, letters addressed to an audience that was made up, at least ostensibly, of blacks as well as whites, Coker offered positive views of the future for the African colony, and he set forth the opinion, sometimes encouraged, that colonization itself would help bring an end to slavery. But he also concluded, “I am confident of one thing, that for some time we shall need white agents,” giving a clear endorsement not only of the society’s goals but of its operations. Here, then, was an important black validation of the society, firmer, perhaps, than Finley’s imagined speakers in heaven.29
II
The American Colonization Society’s reliance on black voices is important not only for the ambiguities it helps to emphasize in the colonizationists’ aims and purposes but also because of the extent to which it shows how complex issues related to the creation of an African American public presence and a literary persona, intersecting with those of color, authority, and, in this setting, credibility, could become. To some extent, these issues remained rooted in traditions going back to the seventeenth century, building through the era of the Revolution, and carried forward from the earliest days of the American republic. These issues went well beyond colonization as such. The idea of a black voice that could speak directly to the experience of slavery continued to play a role in American letters even as many people were turning to issues of colonization and consent.
The moving force of a contact with slaves as a formative influence on antislavery feeling, for example, remained important even in the difficult era of the 1820s. The southern abolitionist John Rankin, for example, conceded that slavery in the abstract might “wear a tolerable aspect,” but “when I bring it near, inspect it closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women, who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my sensibility is immediately aroused.” The much-cited comment of John Randolph, of Roanoke, who was at least publicly ambivalent about slavery, that the greatest orator he had ever heard was a slave mother whose “rostrum was the auction block” dates from this period.30
Traditions of black voiced protest against slavery also remained vital throughout the period. Such an influential publication as the Genius of Universal Emancipation, which the antislavery Quaker Benjamin Lundy began to publish in Ohio in 1821, was filled with poetry and fictions, representing slave voices bemoaning the cruelties they had to undergo, that offered the kind of indictment of a slave society and its hypocrisies their experiences allowed them a special vision to see. In one of the first, entitled “Soliloquy of Sambo, A Negro Slave,” Sambo recounts his pain in order to level an indictment: “Ye white men, your hearts are e’en harder than steel, / You war against reason—to mercy you’re foes.”31
Such poetry was given reality by narratives that substantiated more fictionalized representations. William Grimes, a fugitive from Virginia living and writing in Connecticut ten years after his escape, cast his purposes in terms Rankin would have appreciated when he wrote that one reason for setting out his life story was that “to him who has feeling, the condition of a slave, under any possible circumstances, is painful and unfortunate, and will excite the sympathy of all who have any,” long a motive behind antislavery presentations of black personae. And Grimes did tell a terrible story of suffering and betrayal as, once in Connecticut, he was found out, almost remanded to slavery, and forced to use most of what he had been able to accumulate through hard work and industry to purchase his freedom. “Let any one suppose himself a husband and father,” Grimes wrote, “possessed of a house, home, and livelihood: a stranger enters that house; before his children and in fair day light, puts the chain on his leg, where it remains till the last cent of his property buys from avarice and cruelty, the remnant of a life, whose best years had been spent in misery! Let any one imagine this, and think what I have felt.”32
Clearly evoking the power of the black voice to describe the truth of slavery, Grimes validated his indictment of the system through a vivid evocation of the experiences he had undergone. “If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave,” he wrote, “I would in my will leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America.” His concluding line reads, “Let the skin of an American slave, bind the charter of American Liberty.” As many critics have noted, such lines, linking Grimes’s body with his experience and each with his authoritative stance toward slavery, virtually summarized the claims of the black voice in the American discursive world, claims that had been taking shape for decades before Grimes’s work appeared.33
The claims Grimes represented were to be made a number of times during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Lemuel Haynes, as John Saillant has shown, also took advantage of traditions associated with a black voiced commentary on American affairs to protest not only against slavery but also against the white nationalism that colonization and other trends represented. Examining an 1820 sermon Haynes preached on the rescue of two white accused murderers from the gallows, Saillant shows how Haynes represented his own role as confidante to one of the accused and the moral role it entailed. He did so in a way that stressed his own rightful place in the community of religious and moral discourse the events evoked and his own distinct role as a commentator on that community.34
It was in this vein that African American speakers, complementing Grimes and Haynes, continued to demonstrate by their words, deeds, and very presence the hypocrisy of white America and to assert their superior understanding as black observers of American principles. William Hamilton, in an 1827 oration commemorating the abolition of the slave trade, did this, as earlier speakers and writers had done, through an attack specifically aimed at “an ambidexter philosopher” who could assure the world “that all men are created equal and then suggest that some men are not.” This was the same Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton reminded his audience, who both kept slaves and told the world “that God hath no attribute to favour the cause of the master in case of an insurrection of the slaves.”35
Hamilton’s invocation of providence reflects the continuing prominence of Jefferson, by now almost the archetypal symbol of American hypocrisy for African Americans in regard to slavery and to their own peculiar destiny to reveal that hypocrisy. Even white minister Thaddeus Harris, speaking in Boston in 1822, similarly cited Jefferson’s prediction of divine retribution for slavery. Harris too did so in a way that looked not so much forward to insurrection but to Jefferson’s hypocrisy and to the unique way in which a black experience could comment on it.36
Thus, traditions of African American ideological critique tended to remain important through the 1820s. Exemplary traditions, especially exemplary religious traditions, also remained alive during this period.
Solomon Bayley’s Narrative, written by himself but filtered through an English amanuensis, Robert Hurnard, told the familiar story of a Christian slave tested by slavery. Like Grimes, Bayley also was an escaped slave who had been retaken by his owner and forced to purchase his freedom. But as William Andrews has noted, Bayley’s lesson was entirely a Christian one, for he felt that in his experiences, from slavery to freedom, the lesson to be learned was “that God is rich in mercy towards sinners of the deepest die.”37
Nevertheless, exemplary traditions could not be divorced from issues of color and condition even if they were evoked in ways that did not challenge the prevailing order. Elizabeth Ladd’s 1824 Some Account of Lucy Cardwell, a Woman of Colour used Cardwell’s happy death as proof of the scriptural claim “that God is no respecter of persons,” but mainly as an “encouragement, more particularly of her own colour” to follow Cardwell’s example. Sometimes, however, more subversive versions continued to appear. The Washington Theological Repertory in 1821 reported an exemplary story of a slave whose master refused to allow him to attend prayer meetings. “Well, Massa, you sell my liberty?” “I have no objection to that.” “Well, Massa, how much?” “Two hundred fifty guineas.” It was a large sum, but one the slave worked hard to pay, so important had religion become to him. Here, at least, was a tale that more than implicitly put slavery in a bad light by showing the superior religiosity of one whose piety put both the slaveholder and the system itself to shame. In the process, intentionally or not, it helped to put forward notions of moral superiority that others were advancing in more militant terms.38
This theme and an array of other traditions were given a vivid rendering in the story of Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, known as Abdul Rahaman, a Moslem prince who became a celebrity after being discovered and finally freed from Mississippi slavery in the late 1820s. Abdul Rahaman told of having been taken in battle, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in about 1788. Finally writing an Arabic letter in 1826 seeking contact with his family, Ibrahima was recognized as nobility, freed, and, following a tour of the North to raise funds for his passage, returned to Africa, where he died.
As Ibrahima’s biographer Terry Alford has shown, although most of what people learned about the prince was true, it was also colored by exaggeration and tradition. Ibrahima’s story of his own noble origins and military career echoed similar tales of enslaved nobility going back to the eighteenth century. Moreover, Ibrahima’s tale appeared only shortly after accounts, less well known, of one Omar ibn Said, a Moslem prince turned Christian slave in South Carolina. Unlike Omar, however, Ibrahima deliberately evoked traditions associated with Oroonoko and other exotic types. In his fundraising efforts he often appeared on tour in the dress of a “Moorish prince.” Where Omar played on ideas of religious superiority founded in “pious Negro” traditions, Ibrahima stressed the harsher conventions of a black voiced indictment of American hypocrisy. Once, when asked about his feelings toward Christianity, Ibrahima is said to have replied, “The [New] Testament very good law; you [Christians] no follow it; you greedy after money. [If] you good man, you join the religion. [But] you want more land, more neegurs; you make neegur work hard, make more cotton.” Whether on his own or through his amanuenses—and several memoirs of Ibrahima appeared, most not in dialect—Abdul Rahaman illustrated not only the role a black voice was expected to play but also the role of tradition in the construction of that voice.39
Many writers thus continued to invest a unique political and religious authority in a black voice, grounding that authority in traditional frameworks of distinct experience and unique perception. They also maintained tradition as they continued to evoke the significance of a lengthy history of literary production, in the process helping to maintain a kind of African American literary canon. Phillis Wheatley’s career continued to be of interest to antislavery writers and editors. So did the efforts of other literary figures. In 1822 the Abolition Intelligencer, of Kentucky, joined Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation in publishing selections from Ignatius Sancho’s correspondence in order to “furnish instruction to those who doubt the mental strength of the blacks.” The Intelligencer’s editor, John Finley Crowe, also produced a lengthy series of essays entitled “The surprising influence of Prejudice,” intended to expose the irrationality of accusations of African inferiority, citing literary achievements, among other factors, to make his case.40
A year earlier, in a Short History of the African Union Meeting and School-House, erected in Providence (R.I.), a member of the meeting, after celebrating its accomplishments, attached an excerpt from the Providence Gazette that he had found relevant to his own concerns. This excerpt, like the piece Crowe had published, also focused on issues of inferiority and achievement and also used literary accomplishment as a key form of evidence, in this instance citing the correspondence between Banneker and Jefferson, as well as the achievements of a Haitian official, Baron de Vastey, for support.41
The Short History is further revealing, however, because it includes an extract from an “English paper” praising the achievements of ancient Africa, claiming that “the Greeks so celebrated for the polish of their taste, were in a state of the greatest ignorance and barbarity; living like beasts upon herbs and acorns, till civilized by colonies from Egypt.” Here, too, was a theme that remained vital in thinking about the place of Africans and African Americans in the world order. Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation had evoked Egyptian history in an 1822 essay directly attacking the views on African inferiority in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. An unnamed New York writer rendered the idea poetically in the same year, celebrating an Africa “where Art and where Science first grew; / Where pyramids tower’d aloft on the view.” The place such a history gave to modern people of African descent within the larger “civilized” world remained an important ground for asserting a place within the American public realm.42
Such efforts to demonstrate the historical importance of African peoples were given new impetus by new anxieties white Americans were showing about the role of a black voice in the public arena, carrying forward but going beyond traditions initiated in earlier times. This anxiety was revealed in part by the parodic “counter-memorial” from Washington, D.C., that appeared in response to the founding of the American Colonization Society. But the growing white nationalism of the early nineteenth century was finding expression in more than the issue of colonization. As James Brewer Stewart has emphasized, the 1820s represented a time of significant difficulty, much of it in the face of, and probably because of, continuing institutional development among free people of color. One may note, as Graham Hodges has done, the building and subsequent destruction of New York’s “African Theater,” the focus of at least some resentment for daring to present Shakespeare, in 1822. One may also note, with Stewart, the exclusionist legislation, including New York’s 1821 restrictions on black suffrage, throughout the decade as evidence of similar anxieties and resentments.43
In the South, such anxieties had the added impetus, never entirely absent, provided by fears of slave unrest. During the 1820s these fears were exacerbated when, in 1822, an insurrectionary plot led by the freeman Denmark Vesey was uncovered in Charleston, South Carolina. This led to a crackdown on those people of African descent who appeared to act too “free” as well as to increasing efforts to enforce restrictions on literacy. But it did not take a specific incident to bring such anxieties into play. Even before Vesey, Virginia’s legislature showed its anxiety over issues of voice and authority, about the dangers of black activity in the religious realm, by voting to restrict African American ministers’ access to slave congregations. The northern evangelical Jeremiah Evarts, criticizing the legislation, cited the example of Lemuel Haynes to condemn what white Virginians had done, but Virginia’s legislators would have thought muzzling Haynes less an unjust than a positive outcome of their efforts.44
The anxiety also came through forcefully in what Gary Nash and Shane White have described as an explosion in dialect writing, intended to demean blacks and to dismiss the possibility of an articulate black speaker, that began to be visible during the late 1810s and, even more, during the 1820s. Accompanying a complementary growth in visual caricatures, especially of middle-class blacks, these materials also ridiculed many of the endeavors that were at the center of a black literary culture— the voluntary associations that had sponsored such occasions as the orations celebrating the end of the slave trade, the growing body of black speeches and essays in favor of the abolition of slavery, invariably referred to as “bobalition” in this body of writing. Even Phillis Wheatley’s work, so important to antislavery, came in for a dialect parody toward the end of the decade. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has said, the parody not only revealed a desire to mock but, like the purported countermemorial, showed enough familiarity with the work itself to indicate the author’s appreciation for the impact her example might have had in discussions of national identity. Ridiculing speech, these materials also ridiculed as pretentious any efforts by blacks to enter into the American public discourse.45
III
Still, as the 1820s went forward, it was the colonization plan and the suspected motives of the American Colonization Society that did most to
bring issues of color and authority into focus. Some of this process took place within the society itself. White colonizationists were always of more than one mind, or at least were forced to portray themselves in more than one way, on issues of color and status. In outlining their aims, from the beginning white colonizationists had stressed the character of the free people of color as “alien and outcasts in the midst of the people,” as one put it in 1825. They cited statistics of crime and pauperism in an effort to prove that blacks could not become productive members of American society. They offered images of Africans as a people who “have less constitutional sensibility; less foresight; and attach a vastly less value to human life and happiness than christianity and education have taught us to do.” Though relating such shortcomings to condition rather than viewing them as innate, these colonizationists nevertheless cited the persistence of those failings as ample evidence of the incompatibility of African and European peoples on a level of equality in a common society.46
But colonizationists had already gotten off on the wrong foot with African Americans, and they continued to provoke opposition. Meetings continued to rally African Americans to attack the society. Prominent leaders continued to condemn the scheme. Most notable was a series of letters from the “Colored Baltimorean” William Watkins, a prominent civic leader, attacking the society for its portrayal of African Americans. Watkins’s letters, which began to appear by the mid-1820s in Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, did much to make African American concerns known to a wider antislavery audience.
It is indicative of some colonizationists’ awareness of the problem they were creating that they began to turn at least as often to traditions supporting an African American authority as to a language invoking black failings. Motifs of nation-building, pioneered by Cuffe, remained an important part of colonizationist rhetoric into the 1820s and beyond, building on past traditions even as they were adapted to the colonization society’s cause. In one essay focusing directly on African American achievements in the fledgling colony a spokesman for the society wrote of his hope that Liberia was “destined to be remembered by future generations in Africa as Jamestown and Plymouth are with us,” and, in a familiar way, saw in Liberia the germ of “the promise that ‘Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God.’” Such parallels were invoked by other colonizationists. Matthew Carey, in a letter to John H. B. Latrobe, noted the difficulties facing Liberian settlers. He argued that they ultimately had to be seen as similar to those facing the first settlers of Virginia, placing both within a similar paradigm of colonization and nation-building.47
White colonizationists also celebrated black achievement in ways long known to antislavery tradition. They told of talented black individuals such as a Bermuda slave who, self-taught, had “made himself master of the first six books of Euclid, has read the writings of Locke, and most of the standard divines of the church of England.” They also celebrated talented Africans like the Gambian king Panabouré Forbana, possessed of “an upright heart, an honest mind, and a clear judgment.” The society’s official Journal, the African Repository, which began publication in 1825, was the source for, and published, William Cullen Bryant’s primitivist tribute to an African chief, capturing themes that had long been common in the development of an African American literary persona. The Repository in fact offered a range of fictional voices supporting its cause, from Bryant’s African chieftain to a poetic rendering of “The Negroe’s Dream,” in which a slave was portrayed dreaming of “an African shore, / Where black men can also be free,” visualizing “A white man, with look so benign— / Determined—unbending—and yet / So lovely—’twas almost divine” devoted to sending him there. The magazine also joined in celebrating “Abdul Rahahman, the unfortunate Moorish prince,” presenting a translation of his memoir in support of his efforts to return to his African home. Ibrahima thus validated both positive African images and the society’s aims through his own life and ambitions.48
Finally, the Repository also became a key source for ideas about ancient African greatness, helping to develop a theme that had begun to appear in African American letters about fifteen years earlier. In its first volume, of 1825–26, the Journal published two lengthy pieces on the topic, one signed only “T.R.,” the other an extract from a longer piece by T. Edward Bowdich. Both sought, in various ways, to demonstrate the origins of civilization in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, and both sought to establish that modern sub-Saharan Africans were the descendants of those ancient peoples. Bowdich, for example, focused heavily on modern African beliefs and customs, showing their similarities to those of ancient Egypt and concluding from them a direct line of descent. The message, as “T.R.” stressed, could be directly related to the colonizationist enterprise, and in ways that earlier American writers had sought to relate it to the place of black people in America: greatness could appear in the future where it had appeared in the past. “And why may not America, the best and the brightest in this wonderful series of revolution, carry back by colonies to Africa, now in barbarism, the blessings which, through ages that are passed, and nations that have perished, were received from her?”49
There was, of course, a method behind the society’s madness. Not only were white colonizationists of two minds about African Americans but they were caught on the horns of a dilemma, as such an early commentator as the Washington countermemorialist recognized and as later critics would stress. If Africans’ descendants were unfit to live in the American republic, how could they reasonably be expected to succeed in building a republican society on the shores of Africa? The society’s defenders could hardly deny black capacity even if they had to deny the possibility of black success in the United States. Such a severe moral and logical ambiguity in their position demanded the similarly ambiguous representations in their arguments even as the desire for black support, whatever its basis, required mobilizing themes and images with a clear basis in what appeared to be the African American discourse of the period.
But the real force of tradition and of issues of authority can be seen in the complex ways free people of color themselves continued to create black voices for use in the colonization debate. This process involved not just the ways in which opponents of colonization helped to set the terms of the debate, as Finley’s dialogue and other documents made clear. It also involved the contributions of a few people of color who, like Daniel Coker, saw at least some merit in the American Colonization Society and its work.
There was much to encourage black support for the society in the years after its founding, despite the widespread opposition. For one thing, many African Americans continued to evince an interest in colonization of some sort. Early opponents, including those in Richmond, did not dismiss the idea out of hand; they only rejected the society’s African proposal, looking for some place in the United States. At the very time when the society was publishing its encomiums to ancient Africa, moreover, there was a movement more clearly centered among black Americans examining the prospects for emigration to Haiti. The movement’s origins reached back to the society’s early days, to efforts by Prince Saunders, a member of the Haitian government, to encourage such a plan, meeting particularly, as both Cuffe and Finley had done, with Philadelphia’s influential black leadership.
Saunders, who earlier had corresponded with Cuffe, presented Haiti as a place of potential richness, though one in need of outside assistance and the virtues that ties with America and American immigration could bring. As Saunders himself understood the possibility of Haitian colonization, however, it was mixed in with the very issues of authority and color that debates surrounding the American Colonization Society had also raised. In a collection of Haitian public documents that he prepared for wide distribution even before his recruiting efforts in Philadelphia, Saunders made much of the documents’ importance as evidence of racial equality, noting a widespread charge, leveled in Europe and America, that they “are not written by black Haytians themselves; but that they are either written by Europeans in this country, or by some who they say, are employed for that purpose in the public offices of Hayti.” Saunders offered his own testimony, upon his honor, “that there is not a single white European at present employed in writing at any of the public offices,” that “all are black men, or men of colour.”50
Saunders’s plan never really got off the ground. Saunders himself ended up in some disgrace in both Philadelphia and Haiti. Nevertheless, he received early support from James Forten, Richard Allen, and other inveterate opponents of the American Colonization Society. They appreciated his linking of colonization with real self-determination, as Cuffe had done. That his plan had tapped into a genuine sentiment for emigration was further indicated, moreover, by a subsequent effort beginning in the mid-1820s initiated by the president of Haiti, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who made direct contact with African Americans interested in emigrationist possibilities. Attracting significant American support, especially from Richard Allen (and from within the colonization society as well), the effort also attracted about two thousand emigrants during 1824–25. This effort too was to fail. Most of the emigrants were sharply disappointed by what they found in Haiti—by its people, its government, and its society. Many quickly returned to the United States, followed by more over the next several years. Still, the project showed that an interest was present, a sentiment to be cultivated toward the success of the more ambitious project the American Colonization Society had in mind.51
Some of the most significant work in this regard played on pockets of emigrationist sentiment in such southern cities as Richmond and William Watkins’s Baltimore, where Daniel Coker had spent much of his career and where he had laid much of the groundwork for a colonizationist appeal. In both cities conditions had been deteriorating since early in the nineteenth century; in both, free black communities existed in an uneasy relationship with a slaveholding society. Emigration at least appeared to be a desirable alternative to existing conditions, and to some, the colonization society appeared a useful vehicle. Responding to such interest, the society focused strong efforts in both cities toward encouraging colonization and cooperation between itself and leading African Americans. As a result, both cities produced visible spokespersons who sought to demonstrate their support for the society and to help create a language that could make the society’s work appealing within the framework of both existing and developing traditions of African American discourse.52
Perhaps the most revealing effort to develop such a rhetoric took place near the end of 1826, resulting in a “Memorial of the Free People of Colour to the Citizens of Baltimore,” which expressed a desire on the part of a group of African Americans to emigrate and urged white support of the society and its efforts. The memorial, which was widely disseminated not only in Baltimore but elsewhere, especially after its almost immediate publication in the African Repository, was intended not only to meet its ostensible purpose of raising support but also to provide clear evidence of African American interest in the society and its plans, countering what had been a far more visible opposition.53
The memorial was a complex document with a complex history, one that went directly to issues of authority, culture, and validation as these had taken shape since the era of the Revolution. It was, for one thing, the product of several factors, including the apparently genuine interest in colonization on the part of a number of black Baltimoreans. It was the result of discussions held in two large meetings at the very churches whose divisions had driven Daniel Coker to Africa six years earlier. The first was held at the influential Bethel Church on 7 December 1826. There it was approved by those attending and signed by the minister William Cornish, a former assistant to Richard Allen, and Robert Cowley, a teacher. The second meeting was held at the Sharp Street Church. The morning after the Bethel meeting, the minister George McGill had contacted colonization society officials to complain that notice of the Bethel meeting had been inadequate, urging the scheduling of another, several days later, at Sharp Street. Here too the memorial was adopted, signed by the chairman, James Deaver, a ropemaker, and by the freeborn boot- and shoemaker Remus Harvey. The meetings, particularly the one at the Sharp Street Church, were stormy, and the memorial did not escape severe criticism, but the outcome can only reflect the favorable sentiments toward colonization that motivated at least a significant number of those present.54
The meetings were not the only evidence of interest. At least a few of those publicly associated with the memorial transformed their sentiments into action: George McGill moved to Liberia in 1827, where he achieved some prominence, serving a few years later as acting agent for the colonization society. Remus Harvey took his family there early in 1828; he became a teacher.55
But if the document spoke for people genuinely interested in colonization, other questions of voice were more problematic. In particular, the document’s authorship was far from clear. It was also the product of a concerted attempt by two of the colonization society’s white leaders, Charles C. Harper and John H. B. Latrobe, working through the “African churches” to demonstrate the black support so often cited in the society’s literature. They organized the initial meeting at Bethel to discuss both the general issue of colonization and the memorial itself; they were the officers McGill approached to set up the Sharp Street meeting. And they were chiefly responsible for the memorial’s dissemination and publication.56
Harper and Latrobe’s role created problems, however, and these were widely recognized. Benjamin Lundy reprinted the memorial in his Genius of Universal Emancipation as “purporting to be from the people of color in Baltimore,” and perhaps indicating his own awareness of the storminess of the debates, he questioned “whether this memorial is, or is not, the voice of the majority of our colored people.” Several months later he would again describe it as “the memorial said to be got up by them.” In Philadelphia, continuing the tradition of opposition to the society, three thousand members of the city’s African American community gathered on 22 January 1827 specifically to respond to the Baltimore memorial. Led by Jeremiah Gloucester and Richard Allen, the assembly produced a “Remonstrance” of its own, proclaiming that “the views of all should be known, and considered,” and condemning the memorial’s presentation of “opinions and sentiments entirely erroneous; calculated by their circulation and adoption, materially to injure rather than benefit our brethren in these United States.”57
Comments by Harper and Latrobe may, however, be most to the point. After the meetings, according to Harper, the memorial underwent some editing, chiefly having to do with “expressions” in which the memorialists “might seem to have speak too harshly of themselves.” Such comments indicate the presence of a strong white hand in the memorial’s composition. But they also demonstrate the presence of a black hand, one that would not let the document go forward without an intervention into what it said.58
There was many illustrations in the memorial of its collaborative character. Certainly, there are concessions to its white audience. Prejudice is described in virtually Jeffersonian terms as “natural” and is not used to indict white colonizationist goals. Whites are absolved of the sin of slavery, blame for which is laid at the feet of the British. At the same time, the memorial put colonization squarely in the emancipationist camp, capturing an emphasis that went back to Cuffe, if not before, and ignoring contrary tendencies in the white colonization movement. African Americans had as much of an influence on the document’s silences as they did on its words, on what it did not say as much as what it did. In particular, though it cited the problems facing free people of color, it shied away from the kinds of images of degradation, poverty, and crime to which white colonizationists often referred, focusing more on the lack of opportunities for free people of color and the pessimism such a lack engendered. Regarding the excision of language noted by Harper in which the memorialists appeared to “speak too harshly of themselves,” the omitted “expressions” are not too difficult to imagine given the formulas of white colonizationists.
But, above all, the memorial was well within traditions associated with an African American voice. This was particularly true as it juxtaposed the condition of free people of color with the professed values of its white audience. The memorialists described themselves as “surrounded by the freest people and the most republican institutions in the world, yet enjoying none of the immunities of freedom.” In using such language, and in their expressions of hope for the kind of society they would build in Africa, where they would prove themselves “republicans after the model of this republic,” they showed themselves fully aware of American ideals and purposes and of the meaning of their own exclusion from the institutions of American life.59
The memorial thus reveals something of how important a black validating voice remained, even to people who, like Harper and Latrobe, were working hard to get black people out of the United States. The white colonizationists, at least some of them, understood that their program was not without moral ambiguity. They took pains to assure their readers, as well as themselves, of their good intentions. In the introduction to the memorial’s publication in the African Repository, the Journal asserted that “to the hope and belief that we should contribute, essentially, to the improvement and happiness of the free people of colour, by establishing them in a community on the African coast, does the Colonization Society in a great degree owe its existence.” In a sense the memorial endorsed that claim, an African American approval for what the society was doing, indicating yet again the kind of validation only an African American voice could provide.60
It also demonstrated how well formed traditions for creating such a voice had become, the possibility that by this time there was something of a consensus about what kinds of positions a black speaker would be likely to take. This is shown clearly by the elements of protest and irony that, however well Harper and Latrobe appreciated them, are a part of the document’s juxtaposition of black conditions and white values by a promise to carry American, republican institutions to African shores and an assertion of an ability to do so.
Along these lines, it also showed, as Botsford’s dialogue and others works had many years before, how difficult it was to put a black voice to the purposes of its own exclusion, which is not surprising, given the contradiction in purposes such an effort implied. Such differences were strongly apparent in the concessions the memorial made to the opponents of colonization. Speaking of the alien status of Africans in America, the memorial described black and white Americans as being united “only by soil and climate,” portraying blacks themselves as “natives, and not yet citizens.” In the context of the 1820s both phrases were filled with meaning. Among white colonizationists it was a commonplace to describe colonization as repatriation of the African to “his native soil,” as in the poetic “Negroe’s Dream,” published a year before the memorial. In asserting an American nativity and a tie to American soil the memorial denied this major motif in white colonizationist rhetoric, a denial reinforced by the refusal to acknowledge Africa as the only possible destination for emigrants. “The world,” it said, “is wide.” Confounding the white nationalist ideology behind the society, denying its major tenets while accepting the more practical impulses for emigration, the memorial thus took a position much closer to that of opponents to colonization, who since 1817 had stressed an American nativity and the role of African Americans in the creation of American prosperity and achievement.
The 1826 memorial was not the only attempt by blacks and whites alike to create a procolonization public voice, nor was it alone in the representations of voice and authority it displayed. Over the next year, testimonies to the value of African colonization from black speakers themselves continued to appear, with both white colonizationists and black supporters attaching a special mission to such a testimony. Prompted by the Philadelphia “Remonstrance,” in reply to the Baltimore memorial, a group of colonists in Monrovia prepared a rebuttal of their own, which was widely publicized by the society and printed in the African Repository at the end of 1827. The colonists praised the liberty they had found in Liberia, which they said had not been present in “our native country.” They spoke of their rights, their prosperity, and especially their escape from “that debasing inferiority with which our very colour stamped us in America.” They looked forward to building, and felt they were building, “a new Christian empire” that would be an example to the world.61
More important, perhaps, were the efforts of Lott Cary, a Richmond Baptist minister who went to Liberia in 1821. Born a slave in Virginia in about 1780, Cary converted to Christianity in 1807 and purchased his freedom in 1813. Profoundly religious, he began to develop an interest in an African mission in 1815, and a series of letters from Sierra Leone colonists published in the Baptists’ Latter Day Luminary in 1819 furthered his interest in colonization. Despite some apparent distrust of the colonization society’s motives, within two years he departed under the society’s auspices for Africa.62
Cary was a powerful leader among the colonists, and initially, at least, his relationships with the society were far from easy. He had strong conflicts for a time with the society’s agent in Liberia, Jehudi Ashmun. In late 1823 and early 1824 Cary led a pair of brief rebellions, seizing arms and a food-storage warehouse, in response to Ashmun’s policies, temporarily driving Ashmun away; later, however, he and Ashmun were to work closely together in matters of colonial organization and recruitment.63
Always commercially minded, and maintaining relationships with Richmond merchants throughout his Liberian career, Cary wanted very much to encourage immigration to the colony, and he began fairly early to serve as a spokesman for the cause. He wrote back to Virginia encouraging immigration even before his rebellion against Ashmun and the society. By 1825 the same Latter Day Luminary that had so influenced his decision to emigrate was publishing material by and about Cary in support of its own procolonization views and missionary purposes, praising his efforts and likening him to the founders of the British colonies in North America. The African Repository similarly reported his efforts, publishing letters from him describing such successes as his “conversion of a native African,” letters assuring its readers that anyone doing a survey of Monrovia’s citizens would discover that “there would not be one found among them that would be willing to return to America, unless you should chance to fall upon one that ought not to walk at large in any place.” As John Saillant has discovered, Cary also prepared a lengthy “circular letter” in 1827 that was designed to recruit immigrants and responded specifically to both the Philadelphia “Remonstrance” and the Baltimore memorial.64
Cary had great hopes for his circular, sending it to one of his Richmond commercial contacts to arrange for publication in cooperation with their mutual friends in the society. For reasons that remain unclear, the circular did not appear in print; and if Cary had wanted to push the matter, the possibility was closed, since he was killed in an 1828 accident before learning the circular’s fate. But his own sense of a role for himself as a spokesman for colonization and of the appropriate nature of an African American voice for colonization is reflected in the character of the document.65
Cary aimed his strongest words at the Philadelphians. Claiming the rights of men, they had forgotten that those rights “were lost on that same day, that their ancestors were taken Captives and conveyed into America —and made Slaves among a strange people.” They remained, he said, in captivity. Leaders like Allen, Gloucester, and “Fortune” [Forten] may have achieved a measure of success, but most remained in menial positions, with little hope of improvement, whatever their exertions. And they remained unmindful of the tenacity of a prejudice among whites that was unlikely to disappear, no matter what the accomplishments of individuals of African descent, a prejudice from which Liberia offered freedom and escape. In his indictment of white America, as Marie Tyler McGraw has suggested, Cary was not too far from others in turning the colonization society’s rhetoric back on itself.66
But his brief rebuke of the Baltimoreans may be more revealing. For them—and, significantly, he accepted their authorship of the memorial —his criticism was succinct. They had memorialized, but most had refused to emigrate. More importantly, in making their concessions to a white audience—asking to be sent away, as he characterized the memorial’s message —they had shown a subservience that Cary found appalling. Perhaps because Cary was unaware of the circumstances of the memorial’s composition, he could not appreciate the fine line the document had to walk between “voices.” But that in itself is important because Cary’s strictures help to point to issues raised by the memorial that go beyond those of tradition and validation involved in the development of a black voice as these had taken shape prior to the mid-1820s. Cary’s strictures also help reveal the tensions inherent in that voice, from a black as well as a white point of view, as a result of having to meet the demands of at least two audiences, a demand made clear by the genuine ambiguities involved in the colonizationist plan. Issues of independence and authority, as well as color and authority, were also implicated in a document like the Baltimore memorial, something Cary seems to have sensed, if he did not entirely understand its roots. But what he sensed about the need for independence and autonomy was to enter the discussion of African American literature and voice with increasing explicitness at almost the exact moment when Cary’s “circular letter” was composed.67
The most important step in the direction Cary’s letter evoked was the creation during that year of the first black-owned, black-edited newspaper in the United States. This was the Freedom’s Journal, founded in New York in 1827 and edited by John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish. The editors brought strong qualifications to the enterprise. Cornish, who would drop out of the enterprise for reasons of health after only a few months, was born free in Delaware in about 1795. Moving to Philadelphia in 1815, he had become a Presbyterian minister by the end of the decade. He served briefly as a missionary to the slaves in Maryland, then settled as a full-time minister in New York in 1822. He also became a visible opponent of colonization and of the American Colonization Society. His significance as an opponent was acknowledged by the society’s officers well before the founding of Freedom’s Journal both as a result of his activities and because of a lengthy piece he had sent to a New Jersey newspaper excoriating the society, a piece later republished in Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation. Cornish and Russwurm made a strong anticolonizationist message a major part of their newspaper as well. The apparent efficacy of the anticolonizationist voice Cornish, with Russwurm, put forward in Freedom’s Journal was enough to cause him difficulty with a few white supporters and prominent Presbyterians in New York.68
Russwurm, who continued to edit the Journal until its demise in March 1829, was born in Jamaica in 1799 to a white father and a black mother but grew up in Quebec and Maine, where he settled with his father. By 1826 he had already become well known as the first black graduate of a major American college, Bowdoin, where he delivered the commencement address, focusing on the achievements of an independent Haiti and on his hope that the Caribbean nation had “laid the foundation of an Empire that will take a rank with the nations of the earth.”69
There were several motivations behind the founding of Freedom’s Journal. Most immediate was the growing racism of the 1820s. Above all, the racism of the New York press, especially the New York editor and politician Mordecai Noah, noted for his scurrilous attacks on New York’s free black population, provided an impetus for their effort. But Russwurm and Cornish also singled out the American Colonization Society, at least implicitly, in this regard. “Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed by unnoticed,” they said, asking rhetorically, “Is it not very desirable that such should know more of our actual condition, and of our efforts and feelings, that in forming or advocating plans for our amelioration, they may do it more understandingly?”70
Certainly, by this time Cornish and Russwurm were not the only ones aware of a need to counter misrepresentations. Only about a month before Freedom’s Journal began publication, Enoch Lewis, a white Quaker editor, had created the African Observer, also to be devoted to correcting false impressions about free people of color. Lasting for about a year, and containing a variety of articles on “the history, ancient and modern of Africa,” along with “biographical notices of negroes who have been distinguished for their virtue or abilities,” it too was intended to provide an accurate account of “the situation, character, and future prospects of the free coloured population of the United States.”71
Still, Freedom’s Journal was the first black-edited, black-controlled periodical in the United States, and in the way Russwurm and Cornish stated their case they also raised directly, for what appears to have been the first time, the question that had been implicit since, especially, the inauguration of the colonization debate, namely, who should control the black voice? They were clear that unless that voice were controlled by black people themselves, black people could never be certain of fair and accurate representation. Though long implicit even in Wheatley’s thinking and certainly exacerbated by the colonization debate, here the idea became something of a guiding principle, calling into question the credibility of the kinds of voices that the colonization society had cultivated and on which it had come to rely. Speaking of the need for such a Journal as they had created, Cornish and Russwurm wrote, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the pub-lick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly, though in the estimation of some mere trifles” (16 March 1827).
Many people agreed with the Journal’s editors about its necessity. As early as July 1827 free people of color in Fredericksburg, Virginia, included toasts to the Journal in a July Fourth celebration of New York’s emancipation of the remaining slaves in that state. A free Virginian wrote to the paper at about the same time that the appearance of such a paper, “edited by persons of our own colour, and devoted to the interests of our long oppressed and stigmatized race; cannot fail to awaken the liveliest joy and gratitude in every bosom, that is not callous to humanity and virtue”; and he expressed his own assurance that the paper could not “fail to produce a happy effect” (6 July 1827).72
The paper drew on a broad array of sources for its content. Given its purposes of self-representation, one function the paper served was to provide a pioneering outlet for African American writers—poets, story writers, and essayists. Nevertheless, the paper also drew freely on the works of white as well as black writers, accuracy rather than authorship being the key to its purposes. It essentially encapsulated the kind of antislavery community that had helped to create an authoritative African American literary presence since before Wheatley’s time.
Individual issues of Freedom’s Journal also covered a broad array of topics, not all of them having to do with problems of color, but these were certainly key to the Journal’s focus and success. Colonization remained a strong focus. The paper’s editorial columns attacked the American Colonization Society, publicizing the anticolonization sentiments of leading African American writers and activists. Within only a couple of months of its creation the Journal published an attack on the Baltimore memorial, asserting that many present at one of the meetings had registered a dissent from the document (18 May 1827). In early 1828 the Journal published a stinging rebuke of the testimony of the Liberian colonists who had sought to counter the Philadelphia remonstrance. John Russwurm, writing for the paper, suggested that even if many African Americans developed an interest in colonization, “we would not ask the aid of the American Colonization Society to carry us to their land ‘flowing with milk and honey’” (25 January 1828).
No less important in the paper’s columns were calls to African American readers for social and cultural “improvement.” The historian Frederick Cooper rightly noted the paper’s significant concentration on concerns about self-help and social improvement, on what the editors saw as a need for blacks to become more “respectable” in their behavior and appearance. According to Cooper, more space was devoted to these kinds of concerns, as well as to related issues such as education and temperance, than to protests against slavery or discrimination or even to the challenge of colonization.73
These questions dovetailed in important ways with the kinds of concerns that lay behind issues of authority and self-definition in the American public realm. They informed the kinds of literary issues implicit in the very founding of the Journal, encouraging literary culture and literary achievement as part of the effort to improve free black society while also responding to that society’s traducers. At the same time, if the editors of Freedom’s Journal saw the need for a potent black voice, they also elaborated on and even expanded the bases for authority and credibility that had underlain its presentation in the past.
Like many of their predecessors, Russwurm and Cornish sought to establish that people of African descent had already proved their right to a place within the realm of American public life. They published an array of pieces devoted to demonstrating human unity and equality, whether through explorations in biology or in history. A lengthy series of articles in 1828 entitled “On the Varieties of the Human Race” took up biological questions, focusing on the variety of colors characterizing many species, the climatic causes of variation, the mutability of coloration, and color’s irrelevance to ability or capacity. Representing the articles not as offering anything new but as a compendium of “long established facts,” the author presented a case for human unity that sought to demolish any arguments for the inclusion or exclusion of people from the “human family” on grounds of color (18 April 1828).
Freedom’s Journal also drew on traditions stressing the historical importance of ancient Africa, a theme that had remained current in the years leading up to the paper’s creation. In December 1828, over two issues, the paper reprinted the 1825 essay by “T.R.” celebrating the greatness of ancient Africa, which had initially appeared in the African Repository In 1827 it published a poem entitled “Africa,” describing the continent as “Land of the wise! where Science broke / Like morning from chaotic deeps.” Prior to that, during the spring and summer of 1827, a pair of original essays on the topic also appeared. “The Mutability of Human Affairs,” by Russwurm, drew heavily on Volney and condemned the hypocrisy of an American society that treasured ancient African civilization but refused equality to those descended from its creators. The other, signed only by “S.,” focused on the subject of “African genealogy,” elaborately tracing Africans’ connections to the other peoples of the world and surveying ancient history to connect contemporary African peoples with an Egypt that “was once the richest and happiest country in the world; flourishing with plenty, and even learning, before the patriarch Abraham’s time” (17 August 1827). Possibly written by the fourteenyear-old James McCune Smith, which the historian Bruce Dain has suggested (the author apologized for any inaccuracies on the ground of being “quite a youth”), the article concluded, similarly, with an indictment of American hypocrisy and, in the tradition of Daniel Coker, with the evocation of God’s promise that Ethiopia would again stretch forth her arms (31 August 1827).74
Such evocations of an ancient pedigree, with their providential overtones, continued to give foundations to an African American self-definition that could demand a place in the American public realm. So did the continuing indictments of American hypocrisy, giving weight to distinctly black perceptions of the society in which they lived. This, for example, was the theme of a poem called “The Sorrows of Angola,” written by “one of the sons of Africa” in response to the American celebration of the “national Jubilee, July 4, 1826,” and published in the Journal, on 8 June 1827, and elsewhere. The poet wrote:
While music, bells and cannons peal,
To hail the festive day,
The thoughts within my bosom steal,
Of helpless—Africa!
The Journal’s approach to the literary enterprise as such built on this sense of the importance of a black literary voice and its distinctive role in American society. The paper’s almost constant encouragement of schools, libraries, and literary societies was understood not only in terms of encouraging respectability but also as an important part of the further integration of black Americans into American public life. The Pittsburgh leader John B. Vashon pointed this out in a letter defending the paper from attack and praising its role in showing black readers that nature had been “beautiful to them as it respects mind,” something that could only be done by a paper “conducted by one of their own race” (8 February 1828). About two months later a Boston meeting in support of the Journal chaired by the minister Hosea Easton resulted in a resolution of support noting not only the need for a black voice to represent black Americans but also, in the words of the merchant David Walker, one of the paper’s local agents, that it helped to remedy what he described as one of the greatest “disadvantages the people of Colour labor under, by the neglect of literature” (25 April 1828).
The Journal itself celebrated African American literary achievement in ways that helped to reinforce the kinds of points Vashon and Walker made by documenting the impact black writing had, and could have, on the larger society. Excerpts from Phillis Wheatley’s work appeared in the Journal along with accounts of her life and career. James Forten’s 1813 “Letters of a Man of Colour” were reprinted in February and March 1828 specifically to illustrate the role a black writer could play in the battle against the color line. The Journal also published a lengthy excerpt focusing on literary achievement from John Finley Crow’s series “The Surprising Influence of Prejudice” that had originally appeared in the Abolition Intelligencer in 1822.
Something similar may be said about the Journal’s efforts to publicize more contemporary literary achievements. When Russwurm published an essay on slavery delivered in 1828 by the twelve- or thirteen-year-old New York student George R. Allen, he appended testimony by white members of the New York Manumission Society attesting to Allen’s authorship of the piece, demonstrating the influence the young man’s eloquence had had on white ideas about African talents and capabilities (14 March 1829).
It was not uncommon for the Journal to stress this kind of testimony when it reprinted works by black authors, often unknown, that had originally appeared in other publications; it confirmed, rather than compromised, the paper’s claims to represent an efficacious African American voice to the larger world. In June 1827, for example, Russwurm and Cornish reprinted from the New Haven Chronicle a poem by “one of the sons of Africa” in the city, a poem that, the Chronicle editorialized, served to prove “that this race, depressed, degraded and trampled upon as they are by the whites, are not entirely brainless, as some seem to suppose.” The poem itself was a paraphrase of the noted passage from the Song of Solomon 1:5, but one more in keeping with past concerns of voice and authority than with the kinds of African-centered ideas with which the passage had often been invested, as in Prince Hall’s citation of it, for example, at the end of the preceding century. The poem began, “Black, I am, oh! daughters fair, / But my beauty is most rare,” going on, however, not to evoke themes of African beauty and identity but instead to provide a black voiced testimony to the glory of salvation: “Black, by sins defiling flood, / Beauteous wash’d in Jesus’ blood” (8 June 1827).
The Journal devoted still more attention to the works and career of the North Carolina slave poet George Moses Horton, who began to receive significant public notice in 1828. Horton, born in about 1797, had begun to frequent the area around Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina in about 1820. Able to read, he had been egged on by students to present “orations” before them, in a manner not entirely unreminiscent of the treatment accorded “Cuff” in Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry —a cruel joke that Horton seems to have recognized as well as anyone. But Horton, who had long enjoyed making poetry, soon began dictating his poems to students and, somewhat in the tradition of Lucy Terry and Jupiter Hammon, as Blyden Jackson has said, became increasingly appreciated for his real ability.75
Horton wrote on a wide range of topics. Famously, he provided University of North Carolina students with love poems on request. Like Hammon, he composed religious poems and was deeply influenced by the hymn forms and themes of evangelical Christianity. Celebrating poetry for its own sake, he described how, when he was troubled, “My muse ascends above the cloud / And leaves the noise behind.” He also wrote about his own bitterness as a slave in such pieces as “Slavery” and “Liberty and Slavery,” in both of which he concluded, here in words taken from “Slavery”:
Then let me hasten to the grave,
The only refuge for the slave,
Who mourns for liberty.
The first-person imprimatur Horton’s life gave to such lines, however rooted they were in tradition, was to endow them with an impact found not only in their appearance in Freedom’s Journal but in their influence on antislavery writing for years to come.76
Whatever the influence of the poetry itself, moreover, Horton’s early career exemplified the significance that could be invested in a black voice of proven literary attainment. For one thing, it helped to verify the Journal’s contention that literary achievement would be recognized, for Horton’s early work appeared not only in the pages of Freedom’s Journal but also in local North Carolina papers, including the Raleigh Register. It also allowed the paper to play on the possibilities literary achievement should create for overcoming at least some of color’s cruel effects, since Horton’s emergence inaugurated a campaign, including white champions as well as black, to gain him his freedom. The Journal itself editorialized that Horton “is undoubtedly a man of talents, and it seems somewhat hard that they should be buried, as they will be, in a measure, if he is doomed to waste the prime of his days in vile servitude” (12 September 1828). The paper even saw the effort as a kind of test. Announcing the support in Horton’s cause of one of its Boston agents, David Walker, the paper added, “We would manifest to our Southern brethren, that were our means equal to our wishes, the footsteps of a slave should not pollute the soil of our common country” (3 October 1828).77
Unfortunately, the effort Horton inspired had less than positive results. Apparently, enough money was raised to buy Horton’s freedom. Although the offer was refused by James Horton, the poet’s owner, the attempt enlisted the participation not only of the Journal’s readers but also of such influential whites—and white southerners, to boot—as the president of the University of North Carolina and even the governor of the state in negotiations directed toward Horton’s emancipation. The American Colonization Society, believing that Horton hoped to depart for Liberia upon emancipation, also got involved. It sponsored a subsequent effort to raise funds by the sale of Horton’s poetry, which was compiled into an 1829 volume, In Hope of Liberty, published in North Carolina. That effort also failed. If, however, the final outcome was decidedly mixed—and, ultimately, a powerful lesson in the limitations as well as the potential of black literary achievement—the Journal’s campaign showed an optimism and a sense of efficacy that fully cohered with its more general presentation of the black voice in a larger American context.78
In the paper’s own columns such a view also appears to have underlain the kinds of works it published, as well as its presentation of those works. As had been traditional since Wheatley’s time, much that appeared in the Journal was intended to emphasize the importance of a distinctive black perspective on issues of color and authority. Its columns followed tradition in presenting, for example, poems and brief pieces capturing the sorrow of the enslaved, expressing a pain in slavery that only a black voice could portray. Horton’s poem “Slavery” was one example. Another, which appeared in the Journal on 14 March 1828, perhaps by the New Haven black minister Amos Beman but signed “Africus,” described “the tears of a slave,” asking,
Can a land of Christians so pure!
Let demons of slavery rave!
Can the angel of mercy endure,
The pitiful tears of a SLAVE!
And, again, the paper also published similar works by white writers, control rather than authorship being the key to its understanding of independence.79
But Freedom’s Journal also brought new variety to the black voice, investing it with a novel, more subtle significance. For one thing, at a time when “bobalition” satires had been ridiculing the very efforts the Journal represented for more than a decade, its editors did not themselves shy away from dialect. In 1829, for example, the paper reprinted from a Massachusetts paper a lengthy dialogue in which a slave named Cuffee reported a series of family disasters to his young master at college. The dialogue was an exemplar of indirection, beginning with the slave’s report that the pet crow had died because “he been eat too much carrion” and culminating in the news that “old Missa die of a broken heart; for old Massa he been die two or free days afore; and Missa neber get over that” (14 February 1829).
The Journal also published one of the first lengthy pieces of fiction by a black American writer. Like the serial essay on African genealogy, it was signed simply “S.” Written specifically for the Journal, it may also have been authored by the teenage James McCune Smith. The story, running over four issues in January and February 1828, was entitled “Theresa—A Haytien Tale.” It was a romance set during the Haitian war for independence, in the time when, “provoked to madness,” the “sons of Africa” in Haiti had “armed themselves against French barbarity” (18 January 1828).
The story, not always easy to follow, recounts the adventures of Theresa, a young Haitian, her sister, and their mother, Madame Paulina, as they seek to flee from their native village, which is threatened by French troops, to the safety of an isolated refuge. The story presents chilling scenes of French destructiveness and cruelty as it follows the women’s daring trek through the Haitian countryside. And it evokes noble images of Haitian womanhood in the image of Theresa herself, much of the plot revolving around her solitary efforts to warn the great Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture of French plans against him. Her efforts require her to leave her mother and sister and to suffer mightily before she ultimately succeeds in her mission and is reunited with a family she feared she had lost.
Whatever its quality as narrative, “Theresa” represents one of the first attempts to confront the Haitian revolution and perhaps the first attempt by an African American writer to create a black romantic heroine. Its author adapted primitivist imagery to describe a Haiti in places free of the French corrupting influences. Making the form more up-to-date, the author evoked Theresa’s feelings for her mother and sister and for her country in ways that were well in line with the familial images of popular nineteenth-century literary emphases on emotional ties and strong, mutual feeling as both appropriate for a well-bred young woman and representative of an ideal virtue. The story also laid claim, in keeping with the Journal’s own concerns about respectability, to the ability of women of African descent to conform to the highest American ideals of feminine character. It was an important effort to put literature into the service of the kinds of purposes Freedom’s Journal had outlined for itself from the beginning, broadening the scope of literary purpose to include the validation of an African American self-definition that, in the Journal at least, had been a matter of great importance.
The same may be said of the range of other literary works appearing in the Journal. Although historically there had been a close connection between the African American voice and issues of color and oppression, Freedom’s Journal made at least some attempt to broaden the scope of that voice by broadening its range. Several writers contributed poems on such popular, genteel American themes as the death of the beautiful young woman and even on poetry itself. Several writers published often in the Journal, including one who signed herself “Rosa,” a poet who for some months helped to bring themes of gentility to the paper’s readers before bringing her career to an abrupt and unexplained end. That her contributions had been enjoyed and were certain to be missed is clear from a brief, poetic correspondence the paper published in March 1828 between Rosa and one “Frere,” a reader who encouraged her to “take thy harp again” and grace the Journal’s pages (21 March 1828). Rosa, however, announced in verse an end to her career, a disillusionment with the effort: “Tho’ sweet the airs,” she said of her songs, “they now afford, / No magic spell upon mine ear” (16 May 1828). Whatever the sources of Rosa’s disillusionment, her presence, along that of others like her, in the Journal’s pages, was evidence of a broadening view of literature and literary achievement, one in keeping with the approach to literary activity proclaimed by the Journal from its earliest days.
Freedom’s Journal ceased publication in March 1829, in part as a result of financial difficulties, even more because the editor, John Russwurm, abruptly decided to shift his position on the incendiary issue of colonization. In mid-February he published a “Candid Acknowledgment of Error,” quickly reprinted in the African Repository, in which he declared himself “a decided supporter of the American Colonization Society.” He continued to express that view, alienating the Journal’s longtime supporters and thus hastening the paper’s demise. By the end of the year he was in Liberia, beginning what was to be a successful African career.80
Even as Freedom’s Journal was doing its part for the encouragement of African American writing and an African American literary culture, however, other movements and concerns were developing in thinking about that enterprise itself. At least something of the tenor of these developments was captured in an address delivered in Providence by the minister and Freedom’s Journal agent Hosea Easton on Thanksgiving Day, 1828. Easton, a member of one of Boston’s most influential black families and an important community leader in his own right, used the occasion to denounce the hypocrisy of American injustice, along with a “colonizing craft” that he described as “diabolical,” and to urge unity and dedication on the part of the free people of color. In a brief passage he also noted how “God has raised up some able ambassadors of truth among our population; and though they are held in contempt by whites, yet God has caused his light to shine through them, to the great shame of our oppressors.” Using literary achievement to highlight American hypocrisy, Easton nonetheless went on to emphasize the lesson that would also be brought home through the story of George Moses Horton, emphasizing that it was the contempt and demeaning treatment that such “ambassadors” could not escape, for all their talent and ability. The mood Easton captured was to become more common in upcoming days.81