Websites on the African Civilization Society, Garnet and Delany gave me the impression that Delany was an important figure in the ACS. In fact, he criticized Garnet and Garnet took it badly. It may have been a struggle of egos. Delany, the chairman of the National Emigration Convention, had been an important figure in the colonization movement when Garnet had opposed it. Delany was in Africa when the society was founded, and couldn't have taken kindly to Garnet's challenge to his position. Garnet's and Delany's efforts moved in parallel, but they were not in phase.
But Victor Ullman, Delany's biographer explains: "In November 1861 Delany was invited back into the fold of organized black leadership and even aligned himself with the African Civilization Society after he had won every change in its constitution he demanded. By then Henry Highland Garnet had temporarily been lost to Haitian emigration, and the Society's officers were now chiefly pastors of Negro congregations around New York" (Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism, 1971. p. 264).
Ullman recounts the November 4th, 1861 meeting of Delany with Cain and the other officers and the changes Delany wrote to the Society's constitution. He goes on: "The sum and substance of these meetings and additions of all that Delany had been preaching for nearly a year, was that he now became the spokesman for the organization" (p. 265). I don't have a photostat of Delany's ACS membership card, but it looks like the impression that websites gave of an association between Martin Delany and the African Civilization Society were substantially correct. How much this matters is another question.
In 1852 Delany promoted immigration to Central America in his book. He was not impressed by Liberia because of the power of the White-led American Colonization Society there. Yet by 1859 Delany was exploring in Africa, and in 1860 he spoke in Europe in support of Black-led colonization of West Africa. He even named one of his daughters "Ethiopia." When war was underway, Delany shifted focus to the US. Later, disillusioned by Reconstruction, Delany turned once again to the idea of emigration to West Africa. He died while planning a trip to Central America, but that was for business: in his last Delany years spoke up for voluntary emigration to Africa and fought to keep voluntary resettlement efforts alive.
In so far as Martin Delany is remembered at all today, he is associated with Black Nationalism and its African focus. He considered emigration to both Africa and Central America, and took some time to explore the African option. Delany could change his mind over time. He moved away from resettlement in Central America to African colonization, and then to a focus on the plight of freedmen in the American South. He wasn't wedded to Africa, or Central America or North America or even to emigration. His opinion changed according to what was more likely to be successful and in the best interests of his people. You could compare Delany and Garnet to Theodor Herzl, the early Zionist leader who considered Patagonia and Uganda as well as Palestine for a Jewish Homeland.
And if Delany could change his mind couldn't the same be true for Lincoln? That Lincoln met different Black delegations, suggests that he wasn't the maniacal Negrophobe that you want to make of him. And if two famous advocates of Black colonization could meet towards the end of the war and neither mentioned emigration schemes, it's a clear indication that Lincoln wasn't obsessed by the idea of resettlement to the degree that you imply. That's why I mentioned Delany. There's always been something cartoonish about the vision of Lincoln as a man devoted to getting rid of the Blacks above all else. And "cartoonish" is a kind word for Ben Butler and his fairy tales.
Benjamin Quarles, in his Lincoln and the Negro (p. 193-4), discusses how failed emigration plans and engrosssment in the war weaned Lincoln from his earlier interest in Black emigration. On July 1, 1864, Lincoln's secretary John Hay wrote in his diary that he was happy that "the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization." If that seems late, it's likely that Hay wrote on that date because on the next day, Congress froze the funds for emigration, cutting off all expenditures. Of the $ 600,000 allocated to recolonization, Lincoln had only spent $ 38,329.93, an indication that he wasn't exactly burning to put colonization plans into effect.
Your link to the Congressional Globe for 1858 indicates that resettlement plans were a debatable question in antebellum America (they were never so popular, though, as slaveowners' plans to acquire new tropical territories as future slave states). That one unnamed person said they'd failed is hardly enough to argue that the idea had been abandoned. In the 1850s it was in the interests of slaveowners to argue that resettlement efforts had failed, and in the interests of free soilers, and moderate anti-slavery men like Francis Blair to argue that they hadn't failed and hadn't even been tried. Things changed once freedom had been promised to the majority of slaves.
We can agree today that compulsory resettlement would have been monstrous, though it was a common 19th and 20th century practice. What can't be shown is that supporters of resettlement were more racist than opponents of emancipation. In an age without slavery, it might seem obvious that the supporters of emigration would hate or fear African Americans more and be more hostile to their aspirations, but it wasn't so. Things looked differently at the time. Think of Moses and the Pharaoh: who was "better for the Jews"? When the options are slavery and emigration things look different from when they are life in impoverished Africa and life in affluent America.
In the Cooper Union speech, Lincoln made an appeal to slaveowners: if you fear getting killed in a slave revolt, your state still has time to apply Jefferson's remedy of emancipation and, as Jefferson put it "deportation." He explicitly excluded the possibility of federal action, and directly related his quotation of Jefferson to Southern fears of uprisings. Two years later, circumstances had changed, and some federal action was possible. Two years after that conditions were yet different, a wider sphere for federal action to end slavery through constitutional amendment was possible. Other options, like compensated emancipation and resettlement of freed slaves as a condition of liberation, had closed.
Lincoln was growing, changing and coming into contact with African Americans. No one can say what he would have done had he died, but as says, the Lincoln of 1865 wasn't the Lincoln of 1860. Would Lincoln really have deported the Blacks who fought so bravely and loyally in the army? Would he, after advocating giving the vote to educated Blacks and Negro troops have shipped off the rest against their will. If Andrew Johnson, who disliked African Americans far more than Lincoln, didn't advocate recolonization, what makes you think Lincoln would have done so. The obsession looks more like yours than Lincoln's.
Bennett's conclusions are nonsense. Of course immediate emancipation would have been disruptive. It took a century after emancipation for a more egalitarian society to evolve, and former slaveholders and former Confederates were fighting against it at every point. Southerners said time and time again that immediate emancipation would be a nightmare. A large majority weren't even in favor of gradual emancipation. Bennett simply doesn't know what he's talking about.
You seem to have "racial amalgamation" on the brain. Of course it was a concern in the 19th century, but it was only one of many factors that motivated Jefferson and the other gentlemen who promoted emigration. Such fears would be found among those who opposed emigration as much as among those who favored it. Fear of miscegenation was an issue used against Lincoln in his campaigns, not something he had a monopoly or particular obsession with.
Before Garrison, emancipation and emigration were very often regarded as a package. It was felt that abolition wouldn't come if Whites had to live among Blacks. People came to the early colonization movement for different reasons: first because Whites would oppose liberation if they had to compete with Whites so colonization would hasten emancipation, second because of the fear of race war, which had already happened in Haiti and was the "greater evil" you are always asking about, third because of Negrophobia and the fear of race-mixing that so obsesses you, fourth because of a concern for the welfare of the Blacks, who some thought would be victimized in freedom, and fifth because of a hostility to freed Blacks who were regarded as a disruptive element and a threat to White society and slavery.
I don't have access to a Gallup poll from the 19th century about which reasons were most important, but if you look in to the matter, I think you'll find that the concerns of the supporters of resettlement were quite varied. You might start here: the fear was of free black competition and of friction between the two communities, and there was concern for the inability of Blacks to assimilate. More here.
You may want to argue that concern about racial amalgamation or Black sexual potency was behind it all. But those concerns grew more prominent later. Whatever deep psychic fears the supporters of colonization may have had under the surface: James Monroe and the other founders still had much of the command and self-possession of masters. They certainly had their fears, but they weren't dominated by them. Whatever the proportions of fear and bigotry in their make-up, there was also some benevolence, though we might have to look harder to find it now. Colonization was part of the mindset of the founding generation. It's certainly not a defensible idea now, but if you fail to understand it in context, you enter into the territory of today's politically correct misreadings of our past.
You appear to be toeing the current left-wing politically correct line on American history, and using it to single out Abraham Lincoln as in some way especially monstrous. It's a losing strategy. People who ask questions and think independently are going to realize that Lincoln was in no way a unique villain in the history of American race relations, but was typical, and indeed, rather above average for his day.
What you say about Lincoln could also be said about Jefferson and other American icons. To believe in our Constitutional system it helps if we believe that the American founding was about more than racism and oppression. Continual attacks on Lincoln either lead to hypocrisy and scapegoating, as followers single Lincoln out for the faults of his age and ignore the broader picture, or to repudiation of the heritage of the early Republic on the grounds that racism is too widespread (or perhaps to an embrace of racism, since it is so widespread). Seeing events, ideas and personalities in context, rather than simply attacking them for not coming up to our standards is the antidote for such cynicism.
If you are scoring points, you can add one to your subtotal because I got the name of the organization wrong once. Maybe you've won others and maybe you'll concede that I've picked up one or two against you. But tallying points for this and that side isn't of much use. I had never heard of the African Civilization Society when I saw your post and have since learned much about it. An increase in knowledge is worth more than simply throwing arguments or documents at each other.
It looks like you're hiding behind all of your documents and unwilling to come out and say just what you mean and make a cogent argument for it in your own words. Massive document dumps designed to prove that Lincoln was a bad man don't serve any purpose. It's well known that 19th century racial attitudes don't accord with those acceptable today. If you condemn those attitudes, fine. That's good, but it involves far more than Abraham Lincoln. If you want to make a serious point about his Presidency you'll have to understand what his options were.
Right on Brother! But who burned down Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in May, 1838? What rioters in Philadelphia burned down the Friends Home for Colored Orphans the next night?
The riots were sparked by fears of amalgamation that colonizationists and proslavery advocates alike had fueled. There was plenty of talk on the streets that day about the abolitionists' bending of gender and racial mores. A. J. Pleasonton recorded in his diary that he expected "some terrible outbreak of popular indignation" to occur in response to "the disgusting habits of indiscriminate intercourse between whites and blacks so repugnant to all the prejudices of our education," which abolitionists "not only recommended, but are in the habit of practising in this very Abolition Hall." White Philadelphians had tolerated racially mixed antislavery associations before; yet now white women were addressing "promiscuous audiences" and socializing with black men in public. Indeed, the official police report excused the violence because it had been provoked by agitators who advocated a mixing of the races. How else could Philadelphia residents respond, the report concluded, when confronted by practices "subversive o f the established orders of society," such as "the unusual union of black and white walking arm in arm in social intercourse." The Grand Jury of Philadelphia exonerated the rioters of all misconduct, placing the blame on the abolitionists for the violence that ensued.
Yessir, it must have been the Rev. Jimmy Joe Bob Jackson there saying,
If you amalgamate,
we'll conflagrate.
A GENDERED HISTORY OF AFRICAN COLONIZATION IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES.
Journal of Social History, Fall, 2000, by Bruce Dorsey
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The central premise here is that manhood and colonization were inseparable elements of a comprehensive gender system sustaining movements calculated to resolve the dilemmas of slavery, race, and the place of free African Americans confronted by antebellum Northerners. This article explicates the gender dimension of colonization reform by posing several interrelated arguments. First, colonization reform assumed a masculine character from its inception, and framed its solution to the slavery problem in political terms. Its spokesmen adopted a gendered discourse that simultaneously depicted colonizing as a masculine endeavor while questioning the masculinity of the African American men who actually performed that colonizing. These developments elicit the question of why sizeable numbers of white women were peculiarly absent among colonizationists. At the same time, the sexualized gender imagery of Africa invoked by this colonization discourse reinforced a convergent set of fears among Northern whites about "ama lgamation" that generated a climate in which race riots flourished in Northern cities during the antebellum years. Equally important, in the face of this gendered racial discourse, African Americans in the North asserted their own interpretations of the meanings of manhood and womanhood as they defended their place in American society and reconciled their discordant views over whether blacks should emigrate away from the United States. Their divergent perspectives on colonization and emigration demonstrate that free blacks, as much as white reformers, actively produced the comprehensive gendered discourse that surrounded slavery and race in antebellum America. Black emigration plans unveil the complexity of African American strategies for antislavery, citizenship rights, black nationalism, and familial and community survival. Finally, these factors converge to explain the scarcity of white women colonizationists, while offering a new perspective on white abolitionist women and the contrasting experiences of black emigrationist women.
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The movement's underlying ideological premise, however, was that white prejudice against black people was so debasing and immutable that African Americans could never be accorded equality unless they were removed from white society. "There appears to exist in the breasts of white men in this country," Frederick Freeman declared, "a prejudice against the colour of the African, which nothing short of divine power can remove." With their pessimism rooted in a Calvinist-inspired vision of corporate reform, colonizationists voiced little hope for resolving these conditions. Black and white abolitionists countered by insisting that these claims merely concealed the racism behind colonizationist actions. Colonization was "the offspring of Prejudice," black abolitionist Sarah Forten contended; she was convinced "that it originated more immediately from prejudice than from philanthropy." [6]
From the outset, the American Colonization Society provoked intense opposition from Northern free blacks. Three thousand free blacks rallied together in Philadelphia in 1817, despite hints that some black elites favored the idea, and declared their resolve to "renounce and disdain every connection" with the colonization plan and "respectfully and firmly declare our determination not to participate in any part of it." Colonization, they argued, was merely a ruse by Southern slaveholders to remove free blacks, so that they would not inspire slaves with the hope of freedom nor continue their struggles for emancipation. Free blacks knew full well that some of the colonization society's early publications spoke longingly of ridding the nation of free blacks. They had surely read descriptions of themselves as "an idle, worthless, and thievish race," "a nuisance and a burden," "too often vicious and mischievous," and "condemned to a state of hopeless inferiority and degradation by their color." The tone of these un veiled sentiments fueled Northern black skepticism whenever African Americans heard colonizationists declaring their benevolent intentions. If colonizationists truly felt compassion toward black Americans, then they would nor hesitate to devote a like measure of their energy and resources toward good schools and job training for those who remained on this side of the Atlantic. As one young black man from New York stated, "the colonizationist want us to go to Liberia if we will; if we won't go there, we may go to hell." Black opponents stood alone for more than a decade, as white abolitionists failed to develop an ardent anti-colonization stance until William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in 1831, followed by his Thoughts on African Colonization the next year. From that point forward, both white and black abolitionists echoed each other's cry that colonization was a racist scheme that both accepted and encouraged white racial prejudices. [7]
What is perhaps most remarkable about white colonization in the North is how few white women embraced the cause as their own or organized female societies to support the reform. A scarcity of white women activists within colonization societies is especially notable since white middle-class women frequently surpassed their fathers, husbands, and brothers with their voluntarist zeal for forming female missionary, Bible, poor-relief, Sunday school, and other benevolent societies. Since the colonization society purported to be a missionary society, one would have expected widespread women's participation as in other white missionary actions during the same era. Yet women rarely appeared among colonization records and publications during the movement's first two decades.
(6.) Frederick Freeman, Yaradee; A Plea for Africa, In Familiar Conversations on the Subject of Slavery and Colonization 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1837), 175-76; Sarah Forten to Angelina Grimke, April 15, 1837, Letters of Theodore Dwight Wald, Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (New York, 1934), 1:380; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 16-19.
(7.) Resolutions and Remonstrances of the People of Colour Against Colonization to the Coast of Africa (Philadelphia, 1818), 3-8; Louis R. Mehlinger, "The Attitude of the Free Negro Toward African Colonization," Journal of Negro History 1 (1916): 277-79; American Colonization Society, First Annual Report, 14-16; Augustus Washington, "Thoughts on the American Colonization Society," African Repository 27 (1851), reprinted in Wilson Jeremiah Moses, ed., Liberian Dreams: Back to Africa Narratives from the 1850s (University Park, PA, 1998), 195; The Liberator, Jan. 22, 1831, Mar. 12, 1831, Mar. 19, 1831; William L. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston, 1832), part II, 9-13; Winch, Philadelphia's Black Elite, 27-47; Nash, Forging Freedom, 233-41.
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Despite its posture as a religious and benevolent organization, the colonization society maintained a political cast to its operations from the outset. The American Colonization Society was organized and headquartered in Washington, D.C., held its annual meetings in the Hall of the House of Representatives, and included among its officers such leading national political figures as Henry Clay, William Crawford, Daniel Webster, and Andrew Jackson. Henry Clay eventually served as president and figurehead of the society for nearly fifteen years (about which Frederick Douglass jibed, it marked the only occasion when Clay would be elected President). [10] In addition to operating among the nation's political elite, the American Colonization Society aggressively sought the assistance of state and federal governments to foster the objectives of African colonization. Petitions were submitted within weeks after the society's founding, imploring Congress to create a colony in Africa and approve financial assistance for the society. Although their early hopes for congressional sponsorship would be frustrated, colonizationists knew that they had to rely on a certain degree of federal assistance (especially from the Navy) if their plan were to survive.
(10.) Annual Reports of the American Society for the Colonizing of Free People of Colour of the United States, vol. 1--33 (Washington, 1818--1850; reprint ed., New York, 1969); Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1 (New York, 1950), 390.
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Elliott Cresson was the hardest working colonizationist in Philadelphia, and the leading activist in the Young Men's Colonization Society. A wealthy gentleman bachelor from a prominent family of merchants, Cresson, like many other Orthodox Friends, moved easily in and out of evangelical reform circles. But colonization became his life's work. Cresson single-handedly served as a liaison between Southern slaveholders, the American Colonization Society, and Philadelphia colonizationists. He was a tireless promoter of the cause, writing letters, publishing public appeals, organizing societies, and editing a colonization newspaper. Cresson served on the Executive Committees of both the Pennsylvania Colonization Society and the Young Men's Colonization Society, and as an agent for the American Colonization Society. As a result, he became the lightning rod throughout the 1830s for opponents of colonization on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1831, the American Colonization Society sent him on a two-year mission to En gland to raise $100,000 for the ACS from Britain's leading humanitarians. However, both British and American abolitionists, especially William Lloyd Garrison and black Baptist minister Nathaniel Paul, hounded Cresson's every step in England, convincing leading antislavery men in Britain that Cresson's antislavery intentions were disingenuous. Soon Cresson found British churches and philanthropists unreceptive to his pleas and returned home with his fundraising mission a dismal failure. [16]
(16.) "Cresson," in Frank Willing Leach, Old Philadelphia Families in The North American (Philadelphia, 1907--1912), Historical Society of Pennsylvania [hereafter, HSP]; Joseph S. Hepburn, "The Life and Works of Elliott Cresson," Journal of the Franklin institute 281(1966); Kocher, "A Duty to America and Africa," 123--28; R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830--1860 (Ithaca, 1983), 53--69; The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 1:235--271.
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II
With this sexual imagery so prevalent in the discourse surrounding colonization, it is not surprising that supporters of the movement often let slip their own fears of social and sexual contact between white and black Americans, which they merged under the label of "amalgamation." [30] Although colonization publications did not abound with alarmist rhetoric about sex or marriage between black and white Americans, the amalgamation argument still underpinned nearly every pronouncement of the necessity of separating the two races. Colonization polemics in the 1830s fell back on some reference to amalgamation whenever their defenses of the plan reached an end. The specter of amalgamation served, in part, as a convenient strategy for raising alarm among racist whites about the consequences arising from abolitionist plans for immediate emancipation. Colonizationists were not averse to exploiting those fears, and their use of amalgamation arguments certainly escalated following the advent of the immediate abolition movement. Perhaps the most inflammatory of these expressions appeared in the anonymously authored Freemen Awake!, which denounced abolitionists as "nigger hearted amalgamation traitors." [31]
Yet "amalgamation" functioned as more than just a convenient device for terror. [32] Ultimately amalgamation rhetoric represented an interrelated pattern of ideas about race and politics that exploited sex and gender as a strategy to deny political equality and ensure racial dominance through violence. Northern male black activists understood the colonization scheme as part of the same developments that denied them political freedom and suffrage. Since the rights of political participation and citizenship consistently marked manliness in the American republic, they also logically considered their political exclusion as an assault on their own manhood. The first black national convention in 1830 lodged their attack against colonization "as citizens and men," reminding their audience that "many of our fathers, and some of us, have fought and bled for the liberty, independence, and peace which you now enjoy." [33] When Pennsylvania's Constitution was revised in 1838 to disfranchise free black men in the name of expanding white manhood suffrage, young black male reformers leapt forward to challenge it. Petitions, public meetings, and conventions, however, failed to reverse the political exclusion of free African Americans. Black activists again invoked the language of manhood and citizenship in their protests and appeals. Black abolitionists helped publish and distribute Robert Purvis's Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens (1838), challenging white voters to reconsider disfranchisement. The Appeal forcefully stated that when one class of citizens "are wholly, and for ever, disfranchised and excluded" because of their skin color, then they "have lost their check upon oppression... [and] their panoply of manhood," having been "thrown upon the mercy of a despotic majority." John C. Bowers was one of many black activists who saw a familiar and sinister enemy behind disfranchisement, declaring: "If we look minutely, we shall discover the demon of Colonization busy at work." Nearly every protest against disfranchisement called for black men to exert a unified and "manly" resolve against both colonization and political exclusion as two sides of the same evil coin. Both threatened their identity as "citizens and men." [34]
Northern black men knew they had to fashion a competing vision of manhood to counter the vision of masculinity espoused by white colonizationists. Black activists correctly perceived the conflation of sex, black manhood, and political rights that reared its head in racist anti-abolitionist publications like Freeman Awake!, whose author declared:
And who are the instigators of this demand of 40,000 negroes? Are they not men, ay! the very men who would take from a poor white female and give to a big buck nigger, and who would not take up arms in defense of the country that feeds them? And for the sake of the country and future posterity, COLONIZE the niggers! colonize them! Southern men! Look to your rights! and ... discountenance these hot-brained, squash-headed, pumpkin-hearted male and female amalgamation fanatics.
This pamphlet constituted an extreme example of white colonization thought, and hardly typified the public rhetoric adopted by most white colonizationists in the North. Still, "amalgamation" threats (subtle or blatant) represented a sexualization of politics designed to maintain political and social inequality. [35]
Despite the cacophony of white voices expressing multifarious motives for colonization (from missionary zeal to racist fears), most African Americans in the North heard only the same tune--separation, removal, and segregation of blacks from white American society. Colonization hardly seemed more "benevolent" than the treatment blacks received in legislative assemblies or in the streets. In 1829, the Pennsylvania Legislature resolved that removing free blacks was in "the best interests of our country," and then proceeded to endorse the American Colonization Society. Following Nat Turner's uprising in 1831, the legislature restricted the entry of free blacks into the state, and repealed fugitive slave laws from the 1820s that had protected blacks from being kidnapped and sold back into slavery in the South. [36] Northern free blacks knew firsthand that white fears of immediate abolition (and amalgamation) could easily erupt into violence. Northern cities like Philadelphia and New York witnessed recurring anti- abolitionist and race rioting during the 1830s and 1840s. For three consecutive nights in August 1834, anti-black rioters demolished a free black neighborhood, destroying two churches and numerous private dwellings in Philadelphia's outlying district of Moyamensing. African Americans feared for their own lives and for the continued existence of the free black community. [37]
A symbiotic relationship existed between colonization reformers and anti-black and anti-abolitionist violence that took place in northern cities like Philadelphia. Colonization reformers were not directly responsible for the riots, and no colonization activist was known to have engaged in rioting in Philadelphia. Colonizationists did, however, directly benefit from public perceptions of abolitionists as agitators, since they could then present themselves as the proponents of an alternative strategy of moderation, while offering to remove the free black population. Moreover, colonization spokesmen encouraged a climate wherein mobs developed. Virulent colonizationists such as the author of Freemen Awake!, as well as more moderate voices like Calvin Colton and Frederick Freeman, played on white racial fears in their speeches and writings. They cleverly reminded their audiences of the supposed prevalence of vice and crime among blacks, and accused abolitionists of promoting amalgamation. [38] Unless slaves were removed from society after emancipation, they suggested, the only alternatives were race war or race-mixing. In perhaps the greatest irony associated with the cause, colonizationists at once fanned the flames of white prejudices, while at the same time throwing up their hands in frustration that this racism was unalterable. [39]
This climate of racial fear surfaced in the most famous anti-abolitionist riot in Philadelphia--the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in May 1838. Abolitionists constructed Pennsylvania Hall to provide themselves with a meeting place and a headquarters within the city. The building opened during the usual evangelical anniversary week meetings in May 1838, as national abolitionist leaders, including William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimke Weld (who married on the day Pennsylvania Hall opened), Maria Weston Chapman and Abby Kelley, arrived to participate in four days of antislavery meetings. The building was destroyed by a white mob before the week was over. On the third evening, May 16, as abolitionists--men and women, black and white--gathered to hear speeches by Angelina Grimke Weld and Abby Kelley, rioters disrupted the proceedings by hurling stones through the windows. The meeting was disbanded, and white abolitionist women were seen (or allegedly seen) escorted from the hall on the arms of b lack abolitionist men. The next day a crowd began surrounding the hall until as many as three thousand persons assembled outside. City authorities refused to restrain the rioters. "It is public opinion makes mobs!" Mayor Swift stated, "and ninety-nine out of a hundred of those with whom I converse are against you." By morning all that remained were the charred walls and foundation of Pennsylvania Hall. The next evening rioters set fire to the Friends Home for Colored Orphans, stopped just short of completely destroying two black churches, while Garrison was secretly transported out of Philadelphia via the underground railroad. [40]
The riots were sparked by fears of amalgamation that colonizationists and proslavery advocates alike had fueled. There was plenty of talk on the streets that day about the abolitionists' bending of gender and racial mores. A. J. Pleasonton recorded in his diary that he expected "some terrible outbreak of popular indignation" to occur in response to "the disgusting habits of indiscriminate intercourse between whites and blacks so repugnant to all the prejudices of our education," which abolitionists "not only recommended, but are in the habit of practising in this very Abolition Hall." White Philadelphians had tolerated racially mixed antislavery associations before; yet now white women were addressing "promiscuous audiences" and socializing with black men in public. Indeed, the official police report excused the violence because it had been provoked by agitators who advocated a mixing of the races. How else could Philadelphia residents respond, the report concluded, when confronted by practices "subversive o f the established orders of society," such as "the unusual union of black and white walking arm in arm in social intercourse." The Grand Jury of Philadelphia exonerated the rioters of all misconduct, placing the blame on the abolitionists for the violence that ensued. After all, the Grand Jury argued, abolitionists had brought individuals "into close and familiar intercourse, whom long habits, and a well ascertained and established sense of propriety, had invariably kept asunder." The foreman of the Grand Jury was none other than the indefatigable colonizationist Elliott Cresson. Nearly a decade later, a derisive broadside entitled "Abolition Hall" echoed the same gender and racial ideology, especially fears of interracial sex, that inspired the rioters. The lithograph depicted Pennsylvania Hall with abolitionist women hanging out of the windows as if from a brothel, while black and white couples strolled around the building with their multi-colored offspring. [41]
Such a shock was the riot to Philadelphia abolitionists that they never recovered the momentum they had gained throughout the 1830s. Two weeks after the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, the American Colonization Society held the largest colonization meeting ever reported in Philadelphia. Before the summer was over, Philadelphia's evangelical abolitionists had separated from the Garrisonians in the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society and formed another organization called the Church Union Anti-Slavery Society. Churches throughout the city refused access to their buildings for fear of conflagration, leaving abolitionists with no public space to organize their meetings. [42]
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| Footnote Page 25 | Footnote Page 26 | Footnote Page 27 |
(31.) Freeman Awake!, 21; Carey, Letters on the Colonization Society, 12; Oliver Bolokitten, Esq. [pseud.], A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation, in the Year of Our Lord 19--(New York, 1835); Lorman Ratner, Powder Keg: Northern Opposition to the Antislavery Movement (New York, 1968), 14, 24.
(32.) With the North's largest free black population, it was not unusual for sexual relationships between blacks and whites to appear in the records of Philadelphia's public agencies without provoking outrage or violence. See Guardians of the Poor, Committee on Bastardy, 1821-1825, Philadelphia City Archives; Guardians of the Poor, Alms House Hospital Register of Births, Lying-In Department, Philadelphia Alms House, 6 vols., vol. 1, 1808-1829; and the Public Ledger, 1836-60. In one of the earliest pro-colonization publications, Thomas Branagan declared that he had "seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia," than for the eight years he travelled in Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the South. Thomas Branagan, Serious Remonstrances Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States and Their Representatives (Philadelphia, 1805), 73.
(33.) Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Color (Philadelphia, 1831), 15, reprinted in Bell, Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions.
(34.) [Robert Purvis,] Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1838), reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. 1 (New York, 1951), 176-86; Colored American, January 27, 1838; January 30,1841; May 8, 1841; Pennsylvania Freeman, March 22, 1838; National Enquirer, March 1, 1838; Liberator, April 14, 1832; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 22; Edward Price, "The Black Voting Rights Issue in Pennsylvania, 1780-1900," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1976): 356-73; David McBride, "Black Protest Against Racial Politics: Gardiner, Hinton and Their Memorial of 1838," Pennsylvania History 46 (1979): 149-62.
(35.) Freeman Awake!, 11, 23. For a parallel development in the Reconstruction South, see Martha Hodes, "The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993): 402-16.
(36.) American Colonization Society, First Annual Report, 14; Pennsylvania Freeman, Mar. 15, 1838; Litwack, North of Slavery, 69.
(37.) On Philadelphia race riots, see Nash, Forging Freedom, 273-76; John Runcie, "'Hunting the Nigs' in Philadelphia: The Race Riots of August 1834," Pennsylvania History 39 (1972): 187-218. For New York City race riots, see Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), 162-70; Linda K. Kerber, "Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834," New York History 48 (1967): 131-43. For anti-abolitionist riots, see Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolitionist Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970), 69; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969), 156-57, 163; Presbyterian, August 27, 1835; Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania, August 29, 1835. See also, Leslie M. Harris, "From Abolitionist Amalgamators to 'Rulers of the Five Points': The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City," in Martha Hodes, ed., Race, Love, Sex: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999). With these visible threats, it is hardly surprising that the number of black mutual benefit societies increased rapidly during the 1830s.
(38.) [Calvin Colton], Colonization and Abolition Contrasted (Philadelphia, 1839), 2, 5.
(39.) Protestant newspapers that supported colonization regularly published favorable accounts of anti-abolitionist gatherings and violent riots alongside endorsements of colonization society labors. Presbyterian, August 13, 27, 1835; Colton, Colonization and Abolition Contrasted, 2; Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing", 30-37, 43-46; Litwack, North of Slavery, 20-24. See also Tyson, A Discourse Before the Young Men's Colonization Society; Jesse Burden, Remarks ... in the Senate of Pennsylvania, on the Abolition Question (Philadelphia, 1838); William W. Sleigh, Abolitionism Exposed! (Philadelphia, 1838).
(40.) History of Pennsylvania Hall, Which was Destroyed by a Mob, on the 17th of May, 1838 (Philadelphia, 1838), 3-11, 136-43; Minute Book of the Board of Managers of the Pennsylvania Hall Association, 1837-1864, HSP; Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia, 1968), 131-37; William N. Needles to Wendell P. Garrison, June 23, 1885, Dreer Collection, HSP.
(41.) Diary of A. J. Pleasonton, May 17, 1838, HSP; Public Ledger, July 18, 1838, quoted in Warner, The Private City, 136-37; Pennsylvania Freeman, Nov. 1, 1838; [Zip Coon], "Abolition Hall," (ca. 1850s), Library Company of Philadelphia, reprinted in Yellin, Women and Sisters, 49.
(42.) Othniel A. Pendleton, Jr., "Slavery and the Evangelical Churches," Journal of Presbyterian History 25 (1947): 169, 172.
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What support existed among Northern blacks for colonization in Liberia quickly waned. News of horrendous mortality rates awaiting Liberian colonists contributed mightily to this declining interest. Only twenty-one of those sixty Philadelphia colonists were still alive and residing in Liberia by 1831. Vast numbers died of malaria and other fevers soon after arriving, and high death rates continued for decades. When "A Colored Philadelphian" wrote to The Liberator that the colonization society was busy trying to ship free persons of color off to their almost certain deaths, there was more truth than exaggeration in his words. Although over 4,500 African Americans left for Liberia between 1820 and 1843, a national census in that latter year revealed a population of just over 2,000. [47]
(47.) Prior to 1844, over twenty percent of the emigrants died within their first twelve months in Liberia; "Roll of Emigrants," 152-60; The Liberator, Aug. 20, 1831; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 27, 50; Smith, Sojourners in Search of Freedom, 206-8; Kocher, "A Duty to America and Africa," 147.
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I provide quotes with sources. You provide talking head commentary.
Lincoln was eulogizing Henry Clay. He was restating the holy, annointed words of the saintly Henry Clay from years earlier. The Founding Father of the term "greater evil" was not Honest Abe but Holy Henry. Holy Henry, owner of dozens of slaves, and President of the American Colonization Society, was not talking about Haiti.
Clay answered the petition by declaring that while he looked on the institution of slavery as an evil, it was ‘nothing in comparison with the far greater evil which would inevitably flow from a sudden and indiscriminate emancipation.’ATTRIBUTION: State of Indiana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943). Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (The WPA Guide to Indiana), p. 338, Oxford University Press (1941).
Henry Clay’s response to demands from a Quaker group that he free his own slaves.
GERRIT SMITH
[The Amalgamation Issue]
You [Henry Clay, pro-slavery Senator] say of the abolitionists, that "they are in favor of amalgamation."
The Anti-Slavery Society is, as its name imports, a society to oppose slavery-not to "make matches."
Whether abolitionists are inclined to amalgamation more than anti-abolitionists are, I will not here take upon myself to decide.
At the South there are several hundred thousand persons, whose yellow skins testify, that the white man's blood courses through their veins.
Whether the honorable portion of their parentage is to be ascribed exclusively to the few abolitionists scattered over the South-and who, under such supposition, must, indeed, be prodigies of industry and prolificness-or whether anti-abolitionists there have, notwithstanding all their pious horror of "amalgamation," been contributing to it, you can better judge than myself.
[The Colonization Issue]
Another of your charges is, that the abolitionists oppose "the project of colonization."
Having, under another head made some remarks on this "project," I will only add, that we must oppose the American Colonization Society, because it denies the sinfulness of slavery, and the duty of immediate, unqualified emancipation.
Its avowed doctrine is, that, unless emancipation be accompanied by expatriation, perpetual slavery is to be preferred to it.
Not to oppose that Society, would be the guiltiest treachery to our holy religion, which requires immediate and unconditional repentance of sin.
Not to oppose it, would be to uphold slavery.
Not to oppose it, would be to abandon the Anti-Slavery Society.
Do you ask, why, if this be the character of the American Colonization Society, many, who are now abolitionists, continued in it so long?
I answer for myself, that, until near the period of my withdrawal from it, I had very inadequate conceptions of the wickedness, both of that Society, and of slavery.
For having felt the unequalled sin of slavery no more deeply-for feeling it now no more deeply, I confess myself to be altogether without excuse.
The great criminality of my long continuance in the Colonization Society is perhaps somewhat palliated by the fact, that the strongest proofs of the wicked character and tendencies of the Society were not exhibited, until it spread out its wing over slavery to shelter the monster from the earnest and effective blows of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1834, the Philadelphia Convention continued its protests, saying of colonizationists:
They have resorted to every artifice to effect their purposes. By exciting in the minds of the white community the fears of insurrection and amalgamation; By petitioning state legislatures to grant us no favors; By petitioning congress to aid in sending us away; By using their influence to prevent the establishment of seminaries for our instruction in the higher branches of education.
This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?' join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
~ Thomas Jefferson ~
Notably, Delany did evidently volunteer not.
Considering the distance and expense of travel to Africa, only an insignificant fraction of the American Black population could possibly have traveled to Africa. Mass emigration was a logistical impossibility. Using the technology of the day, sailing ships, it could not be done. Unless Scotty beamed them over there, or some such thing, it wasn't happening.
[x] What can't be shown is that supporters of resettlement were more racist than opponents of emancipation.
I will accept your point, that supporters of resettlement such as Lincoln, cannot be shown to be more racist than supporters of eternal slavery.
[x] That Lincoln met different Black delegations, suggests that he wasn't the maniacal Negrophobe that you want to make of him.
I did not call him a maniacal Negrophobe. I called him a racist and a white separatist. I supported said argument with the words that came out of Lincoln's own mouth.
[x] You seem to have "racial amalgamation" on the brain.
You seem to be confused. I extensively quoted Lincoln and his Minister of Emigration, James Mitchell. They both went on and on about it. You seem to have gotten so enthusiastically caught up in what they had to say that you forgot who said it.
[x] in 1860 he [Martin Delany] spoke in Europe in support of Black-led colonization of West Africa. He even named one of his daughters "Ethiopia."
Last time you had Central America in Africa. Now you have Ethiopia in West Africa. You must work on this geography deficiency. Ethiopia is in East Africa, north of Kenya and west of Somalia. Let's see. One of your anonymous websites told you Delany spoke in support of Black-led colonization to West Africa. Another anonymous source told you he named one of his daughters "Ethiopia." Presto, without researching to so much as find out where Ethiopia is, you add 2 plus 2 and get 7. Your comment makes about as much sense as if Delaney had advocated going to the west coast of North America and you comment that he even named one of his daughters Virginia.