1
âNOT ONE WAS WILLING TO GO!â
The Paradoxes of âLiberiaâs Offeringsâ
We want colored men, when colonizationists press upon them the propriety of emigrating to Liberia, or anywhere else, to give them this simple and decided answer: We will not go!
âJ. D., editorial in the North Star, September 14, 1849
The Negro-hating disposition of the General Government is also seen in its ungenerous, dishonorable and despicable conduct toward Liberia. . . . The United States has steadily and persistently refused to acknowledge their independence.
âOhio, letter to Frederick Douglassâ Paper, March 16, 1855
The U.S. Congress established formal diplomatic relations with Liberia in February 1862. A little less than one year later, on January 13, 1863, a delegation from the new ally disembarked in Washington, D.C., to pursue two goals. First, the Liberian envoys wanted to shore up diplomatic relations with the Abraham Lincoln administration; second, they hoped to stimulate interest in emigration among the black population of the United States. The historical record is largely silent about whether the delegates achieved their first goal; there is no evidence that the delegation met with Lincoln or any of his high-ranking deputies. We do know, however, that the delegates toured free black communities with a stump speech and pamphlet on Liberia entitled âLiberiaâs Offeringsâ and that they had widespread contacts with members of the black elite. We also know that the delegates came away from this tour disappointed that free blacks did not receive the call of their fledgling nation to join in cultivating âLiberiaâs offeringsâ with the enthusiasm that they had predicted.1
Alexander Crummell, the only U.S.-born member of the delegation, wrote to a friend with great sadness about his peopleâs âdiminutiveâ interest in the âresources of Africa.â2 In his view, the troubles that he and his fellow delegates had in selling their new nation to black Americans were rooted in the fact that generations of slaves had learned to ârepudiate any close contact and peculiar connection with Africa.â3 Nevertheless, Crummell also held out hope that subsequent missions would raise black Americansâ consciousness to the point where they would recognize their âdutyâ to âlabor for the salvation of the mighty millions of their kinâ in Africa.4
Crummell lived to see the day when a sizable number (and perhaps even the majority) of black Americans took a greater interest in Liberia. Indeed, Liberia Fever ran rampant among the poor and abused victims of the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. Unfortunately, Crummell also suffered the heartbreak of watching men and women of his own social class in the United States squelch the grassroots exodus movements that sought to translate this interest in Liberia into tangible streams of emigration. âThe chief obstacle to a healthy emigration from America,â Crummell wrote to a member of the Liberian Senate in 1878, âis the unhealthy meddling of the better classes among the Freedmen [sic].â5
Previous studies of the engagement of the black elite with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during this period have largely concurred with Crummellâs assessment. Indeed, the conventional wisdom within the fields of social history and African American studies is that the members of the black elite quashed the exodus movements because they viewed them as a threat to their own ability to extract patronage positions from the Republican Party.6 Other scholars take a more benign view of the black elite by suggesting that their opposition to the exodus movements was a function of a bifurcated class structure that made them unaware of the hardships that most blacks faced under the Counter-Reconstruction regimes.7
Both these arguments cut against the grain of the vast majority of the political science literature on black representation since the publication of Michael Dawsonâs influential Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Dawson argues quite persuasively that members of the black elite have maintained deep bonds of attachment to low-status blacks since at least the rise of the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century. This sense of linked fate, Dawson asserts, has been the modus operandi of the black elite when they have sought to represent the interests of lower-class blacks in the public sphere.8 Although some important studies in the field of black politics have recently questioned whether the black elite act on this imperative when dealing with marginalized members of the black community,9 few political scientists question the general validity of the theory or Dawsonâs decision to locate the origins of linked fate in the politics of the abolitionist movement.
In this chapter, I reconcile the opposition of the black elite to the exodus movements of the late nineteenth century with the traditional understandings of the dynamics of black representation in political science. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of archival materials presented here demonstrate that black elites saw themselves as defending the interests of the black lower classes when they entered the U.S. foreign policymaking arena to quash emigrationism. Moreover, the research I present also reveals that lower-class blacks embraced Liberia not as a primordial homeland but as a safe haven from the hardships of the Counter-Reconstruction. Thus, contrary to both Crummellâs analysis and the conventional wisdom in the literature on Pan-Africanism, the black masses did not exhibit a greater commitment to the view that Africa was, in the words of Elliot Skinner, âthe land of their nativity.â10
Paul Cuffeâs Movement
Any discussion of black elite engagement with Africa in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena in the late nineteenth century must begin with Paul Cuffe. A free black man and a wealthy merchant, Cuffe launched the most noteworthy of the many back-to-Africa movements that emerged in the antebellum North after the framers enshrined black inequality in the U.S. Constitution.11 It is for this reason that many historians regard Cuffe as the âfather of Pan-Africanism.â12
Cuffeâs movement began in earnest when he sailed one of his commercial vessels to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1811.13 The British government had established the tiny hamlet on the western coast of Africa in 1787 to serve as a homeland for freed slaves from both the British Isles and the West Indies. Cuffe was so enamored of what he saw in this colony for âreturnedâ blacks that he informed British authorities that he intended to encourage the âfinest charactersâ among the free black population in the United States to resettle in Sierra Leone.14
Cuffe was apparently a very skilled salesman during his tours through the free black communities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Indeed, less than a year later he had recruited enough volunteers to organize a return voyage to Freetown.15 The strict embargo that the U.S. Congress placed on all intercourse with Great Britain during the War of 1812, however, prevented Cuffe from transporting this first wave of would-be emigrants to Freetown.16
Because the War of 1812 was primarily about access to the shipping lanes that linked the Old and New Worlds, the safest course of action would have been for Cuffe and his followers to delay their plans until after the conflict subsided. For the indefatigable Cuffe, however, a war on the high seas was no reason to put off a scheme that would eventually bring about the demise of slavery in the United States.17 Thus, Cuffe decided to petition the Congress for a special dispensation from the embargo law.18
Cuffeâs request for relief from the embargo passed the Senate on January 25, 1814;19 this made him the first black American to win the support of the upper chamber on a policy matter. When the House of Representatives took up the matter two days later, Representative Timothy Pickering (F-Mass.) took to the floor to speak on behalf of his constituentâs position. His comments, however, exposed his racist orientation more than any genuine support for the Cuffe plan. Pickeringâs basic argument was that the House should support Cuffeâs plan because it promised to âremove a population that [the United States] could well spare.â20 Despite the fact that many of his colleagues agreed that Cuffeâs plan represented an excellent opportunity to rid the United States of free blacks, the majority of the House ultimately voted against the petition on the grounds of national security.21
When the conflict between the United States and Britain subsided in 1815, Cuffe immediately set sail for Sierra Leone with forty free blacks from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.22 Cuffe viewed the completion of this mission, which was the first time that anyone had successfully repatriated black Americans to Africa, as a great victory for the race. Moreover, his personal correspondence suggests that he expected the free black community in the United States to celebrate this victory with him. When Cuffe returned to the United States to begin recruiting a new crop of emigrants, however, he found that public opinion within free black population centers was hardening against his movement.23 This shift in public opinion was a function of the activities of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the black community during Cuffeâs absence.24
Black Opposition to the American Colonization Society
The notion of repatriating free blacks to Africa had figured very little in mainstream political discourse before Cuffe emerged on the national scene.25 But this changed dramatically after Cuffeâs campaign to win an exemption from the U.S. government embargo against Great Britain during the War of 1812. Scholars of the black experience have frequently used the phrase Liberia Fever to describe the spike in emigrationist sentiment that took root among the freed blacks during the Counter-Reconstruction period.26 The historical record suggests, however, that the very first outbreaks of Liberia Fever took place among the white men who roamed the halls of power within the U.S. capital in the wake of Cuffeâs petition. Moreover, it is clear that many of the governmental officials who came down with Liberia Fever during this period nurtured a vision of a compulsory program that would eventually remove the entire free black population to West Africa.27
At the conclusion of the war, Henry Clay (DR-Ky.), who was in his second term as speaker of the House of Representatives, called a number of these men together with a few prominent members of white civil society and formed the ACS, with the express purpose of making this vision a reality.28 Within weeks of its founding, the ACS initiated an aggressive campaign to raise funds and garner the necessary political support to establish a colony on the western coast of Africa to serve as a dumping ground for the free black population. Not surprisingly, given the wealth and prestige of its founders, the ACS had very little trouble raising funds. Indeed, Philip J. Staudenraus, who has written the definitive history of the ASC, reports that in the its first month in operation âthousands of dollars flowed into the society for the purchase and charter of ships to transplant African-Americans to Africa.â29
The quasi-governmental nature of the ACS also facilitated its ability to make quick gains on the political front. After just two weeks in operation, for example, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that endorsed the efforts of the ACS and called on the White House to cooperate with the group.30 On January 14, 1817, just one month after Henry Clay had organized the first ACS meeting, the House of Representatives began to debate the merits of extending the organization financial and logistical support.31
Historically oriented scholars in working the field of comparative politics and APD researchers use the concept critical junctures to, in the words of Paul Pierson, âmark a point [in a causal chain] at which their cases begin to diverge in significant ways.â32 The formation of the ACS was undoubtedly t...