The Politics of Black Citizenship

Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863

Andrew Diemer, Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, Manisha Sinha

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780820349374
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820349367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, The Politics of Black Citizenship shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics—it was an effort that sought to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex national, state, and local politics in which that concept was determined.

In the early nineteenth century, Baltimore and Philadelphia contained the largest two free black populations in the country, separated by a mere hundred miles. The counties that lie between them also contained large and vibrant freeblack populations in this period. In 1780, Pennsylvania had begun the process of outlawing slavery, while Maryland would cling desperately to the institution until the Civil War, and so these were also cities separated by the legal boundary between freedom and slavery. Despite the fact that slavery thrived in parts of the state of Maryland, in Baltimore the free black population outnumbered the enslaved so that on the eve of the Civil War there were ten times as many free blacks in the city of Baltimore as there were slaves.

In this book Andrew Diemer examines the diverse tactics that free blacks employed in defense of their liberties—including violence and the building of autonomous black institutions—as well as African Americans' familiarity with the public policy and political struggles that helped shape those freedoms in the first place.

PART I

Colonization and African American Identity

CHAPTER 1

The Dialectic of Colonization

In December 1816, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, a Philadelphia publication that was one of the most widely read American newspapers of its time, began publishing a series of pieces laying out the case for African colonization. The first article was a brief notice of a meeting of citizens in Princeton, New Jersey, who asked the New Jersey legislature to promote “some plan of colonizing the Free Blacks,” though few details were given. Weeks later, a writer using the pen name “Argus” argued that colonization offered a “mode of getting rid of this National evil.” The writer scoffed at the notion that “the Middle and Northern States are to afford Asylums for those freed negroes.” Next came a long piece emphasizing the potential for colonization to redeem Africa. A free black transported back to “the abode of his fathers” would become “the instrument of introducing amongst his savage brethren the blessings of civilization,” chief among them, the Gospel.¹

Poulson’s and other U.S. papers also began reporting on the formation of a new national organization promoting the colonization of free blacks. At the group’s December 21, 1816, meeting, Kentucky congressman Henry Clay reiterated some of the themes that had characterized earlier discussions of colonization: it would help civilize Africa and provide some atonement for the wrongs that had been done to the continent via the slave trade. In addition, colonization would remove free blacks, a benefit both to them and to white Americans. Clay also noted that the organization would not “deliberate upon or consider at all, any question of emancipation, or that was connected to the abolition of slavery.” John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, insisted that slaveholders would support the colonization society’s efforts, since the presence of free blacks was widely considered to pose one of the greatest dangers to the security of slave property. The official resolution adopted by this meeting made clear the emphasis on the removal of free blacks and civilizing of Africa, though the question of blacks who were still enslaved went unmentioned.²

On January 10, 1817, Poulson’s printed an account of a meeting of free blacks in Georgetown in the District of Columbia. This group rejected African colonization and instead advocated the creation of a settlement for free blacks along the Mississippi, within the boundaries of what the writers termed their “beloved union.” Before long, black Philadelphians had weighed in on this matter as well. At a January meeting attended by an estimated crowd of three thousand at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, “the large assemblage remained in almost breathless and fixed attention during the reading of the resolutions and other business of the meeting.” When participants were asked who supported the notion of colonization, “you might have heard a pin drop, so profound was the silence.” But when the attendees were asked who opposed colonization, “One long, loud, aye TREMENDOUS NO, from this vast audience, seemed as if it would bring down the walls of the building.”³

It is unsurprising that the mid-Atlantic borderland loomed so large in the early debates about African colonization. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both Baltimore and Philadelphia saw dramatic growth in the number of free blacks, and this growth promised to continue, rendering debates about colonization particularly resonant. In addition, the nature of colonization made black citizenship especially important to those debates. Historians have long noted that one of the great strengths of the American Colonization Society (ACS) was the ambiguity surrounding its purpose.⁴ Those who sought to end slavery could support African colonization, as could those who wished to strengthen it. The ACS attracted those who desired the civilizing of Africa and those who wished to purify the United States, those who sought to benefit American free blacks and those who despised them. Such a coalition would necessarily be fraught with tension. What is less obvious is what held together such a coalition. The colonization of free African Americans was not a self-evident solution to the perceived problems its supporters ultimately hoped it would address. Appealing to such profoundly divergent audiences posed a significant challenge to colonization’s promoters. Critical to making this case was an argument about the nature of the American nation and an attempt to exclude free blacks from membership in that nation. Colonizationists coupled their efforts to physically remove free blacks from the United States with a rhetorical effort to define African Americans as outside of the nation’s boundaries.

Free black opponents of colonization, especially but by no means only those from Philadelphia, recognized this argument as the glue holding together the colonizationist coalition. The effort to refute this argument, to assert the right of African Americans to be citizens in the land of their birth, decisively turned many free blacks against the ACS. Black opponents of colonization recognized that whatever the intentions of white colonizationists, the movement’s rhetoric undermined black citizenship rights in the United States. Opposition to the ACS helped bring calls for black citizenship to the forefront of black politics. Free blacks demanded American citizenship both as their birthright and as something they had earned; they insisted that they were and had always been Americans.

African Colonization, the Black Atlantic, and Early American Politics

In 1816, the project of African colonization seemed promising. It had significant support among prominent free black leaders and fit neatly into the prevailing internationalist black diasporic consciousness. At the same time, white politicians saw colonization as potentially useful both as a practical means of removing some of a troublesome free black population and as a rhetorical means of assuaging some of the political tensions created by slavery.

The ACS’s argument rested on the related concepts of nationalism and consent. The organization’s founders pointed to this historical moment, in the wake of the war with Great Britain, as allowing Americans finally to turn their attention to strengthening and perfecting their nation. The preamble to the ACS Constitution, passed unanimously at its December 1816 organizational meeting, made this sentiment clear. While noting that Americans had always been troubled by the “situation of the free people of Colour,” the document declared that the events surrounding the founding of the United States and “the subsequent great convulsions of Europe” had prevented the new nation from addressing the problem.⁵

The ACS positioned itself as a part of a resurgent American nationalism. Clay took the chair at the group’s organizational meeting, and the rhetoric of his American System echoed the language used to describe the colonization of free blacks. Colonizationists, like Clay’s brand of economic nationalists, made the case that the power of the federal government should be wielded to serve the national interest. Supporters saw colonizationism and economic nationalism as ambitious projects that would strengthen the bonds of union. According to its advocates, colonization was not a sectional undertaking for the benefit of one group of Americans at the expense of another but rather an effort to promote the good of the nation.

From the start, colonizationists paid careful attention to the importance of symbols in expressing this national purpose. Crucial to the portrayal of the ACS as a national institution was its membership. It drew its support from leading men of all sections, including three of the men (Clay, Andrew Jackson and William Crawford, slaveholders all) who would seek the presidency in 1824 as well as northern philanthropists such as Philadelphia’s Richard Rush and Robert Ralston. Not only was the society founded in the nation’s capital, but from the start it held its annual meetings in the U.S. House Chamber. Perhaps just as important, the ACS chose as its first president Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court justice and nephew of the first president (and resident of Mount Vernon) whose stature transcended the sectional and the partisan. Washington’s imprimatur brought immediate national credibility to the ACS. For good measure, the organization’s first annual report also included a copy of an 1811 letter written by Thomas Jefferson in which he supported the idea of colonizing free blacks.⁶

Northern supporters of colonization not only fully embraced the patriotic depiction of colonization but also attempted to portray the ACS as a part of God’s providential design for the American nation, which included both the redemption of Africa and the removal of an unwanted free black population from the United States. This argument helped to depoliticize colonization and make an enormous undertaking seem possible.⁷

The second concept on which the ACS rested was related to but distinct from the first. The word consent was ubiquitous in the printed discourse of colonization, and the propagandists of the ACS generally italicized the word to emphasize its importance to their project. Colonizationists stressed that any eventual emancipation of slaves could occur only with their owners’ consent. Charles Fenton Mercer of Virginia, a driving force behind the early colonization movement, claimed at the organizational meeting that slaveholders generally wanted to emancipate their chattel but refused to do so primarily because of the continued presence of free blacks. Therefore, rather than forcing the actions of slaveholders, colonization would provide them with a liberty which was currently denied them. Clay reiterated Mercer’s point that the society did not intend to “encroach” on the rights of property holders, though he took issue with Mercer’s contention that slaveholders wanted to emancipate their slaves: Clay said that he did not intend to emancipate his slaves even if they would be removed to Africa.⁸

The ACS also argued that any slaves who remained behind would have consented to their status, thereby securing slaveholders’ property. In the words of John Randolph, free blacks “serve to excite in their fellow beings a feeling of discontent” that undermined what would otherwise be the consensual relationship of master and slave.⁹

If the political viability of colonization depended on the consent of slaveholders, it also proclaimed the importance of the consent of free blacks, who had ample reason to fear that forced deportation lay behind the sometimes benevolent exterior of colonization rhetoric. Immediately after insisting that he had no intention of freeing his slaves, Clay added that “it was equally remote from the intention of the society that any sort of coercion should be employed in regard to the free people of color who were the objects of these proceedings.” The ACS’s founders resolved that colonization of slaves could only be carried out “with their consent.”¹⁰

Colonizationists emphasized consent with the goal of appealing to free blacks as well as to white northerners. Many northerners not only hoped that colonization would promote emancipation but also believed that whether or not it had any impact on slavery, the removal of free blacks from the United States would genuinely benefit them. Some historians have emphasized northern racism as the impetus for the support of colonization, but the motives of many northern supporters of the ACS were more complex. Ralston, for example, had also been instrumental in raising funds to build an independent black church in 1791. Appeals directed to him and other Philadelphia colonizationists reinforced the sense that free blacks were a particularly degraded—though not necessarily inherently inferior—people. These appeals often decried the racial prejudice that helped to produce these conditions but suggested that this prejudice was insurmountable. As a result, supporters of colonization contended, free blacks would voluntarily agree to leave the United States. Northern newspapers printed numerous articles expressing great optimism at the prospect of Christianizing Africa combined with a seemingly sincere desire to remove blacks from the oppression of white prejudice.¹¹

African colonization was not a new idea at this time. Both white and black Americans had periodically discussed the idea of establishing a settlement on the west coast of Africa, taking the British colony of Sierra Leone as a model and focus. By the mid-1810s, the emigrationist idea was being advanced most vigorously by Paul Cuffe, a black Quaker ship captain from Massachusetts. His father had been a slave, born in what is now Ghana and later emancipated by his Quaker master, and his mother was a Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard. Cuffe’s father established himself as a prosperous businessman and settled his family in a small Quaker community in southeastern New England. Paul followed in his father’s footsteps and by 1800 had become a successful merchant and ship captain. He promoted education for people of color, establishing a school for all children, regardless of race, on his property.¹²

Cuffe saw African colonization as a means of promoting a larger, more cosmopolitan black Atlantic community that would span national boundaries. He sought not to remove African Americans from the United States but rather to promote Christianity and civilization in Africa, especially as a means of undermining the slave trade. In a June 1813 memorial to Congress, Cuffe noted that several respectable families from Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were eager to go “to Africa for a Temporary residence” to promote the “Civilization of Africa.” Historian Floyd Miller argues that by late 1816, Cuffe had come to believe that colonization would undermine not only the slave trade but slavery itself and that a colony needed to be established in Africa to accept large numbers of African Americans (presumably freed slaves). Nevertheless, he continued to support the idea that blacks should also remain a part of the United States. In fact, he also advocated the establishment of a colony for free blacks in the western United States.¹³

Cuffe found supporters among Philadelphia’s black elite, including perhaps the city’s most respected African American, James Forten. Forten was born free in Philadelphia in 1766 to a family whose members had resided in the colony of Pennsylvania for almost a century. He became one of the city’s leading sail makers and one of the country’s wealthiest black men. In addition, Forten stood in the crowd, listening as the Declaration of Independence was read aloud for the first time, and he went on to serve in the American Revolution aboard the Royal Louis, captained by Stephen Decatur. In short, Forten had distinguished himself as a patriot and had good reason to consider himself an American.¹⁴

The African Institution of Philadelphia, of which Forten was president, supported the idea of a colony of free American blacks in West Africa by providing financial assistance to prospective emigrants. Though he personally had no interest in settling in Africa, Forten saw colonization as a means of promoting commercial ties that would benefit both Africa and African-descended peoples in America. And like Cuffe, Forten believed that some of those who traveled to Africa would not stay permanently. In October 1815, he asked Cuffe who would bear the financial burden for the return of who did not find the African “climet” agreeable. Forten and most black supporters saw colonization as a way to bring Africa and the United States closer together, not a way to permanently remove free blacks from the country.¹⁵

The published rhetoric of black freedom celebrations and other pamphlets produced in Philadelphia from 1808 to 1817 show that the city’s African Americans embraced a cosmopolitan and often Anglophilic worldview.¹⁶ Subsequently, however, African Americans emphasized their birth on American soil, a shift that emerged out of the opposition to the ACS but developed alongside the older interna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: COLONIZATION AND AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY
• PART II: BLACK POLITICS ON THE BORDER
• PART III: THE POLITICS OF BLACK MORAL REFORM
• PART IV: THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index