The World Colonization Made

The Racial Geography of Early American Empire

Brandon Mills

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297324
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

According to accepted historical wisdom, the goal of the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to return freed slaves to Africa, was borne of desperation and illustrated just how intractable the problems of race and slavery had become in the nineteenth-century United States. But for Brandon Mills, the ACS was part of a much wider pattern of national and international expansion. Similar efforts on the part of the young nation to create, in Thomas Jefferson's words, an "empire of liberty, " spanned Native removal, the annexation of Texas and California, filibustering campaigns in Latin America, and American missionary efforts in Hawaii, as well as the founding of Liberia in 1821. Mills contends that these diverse currents of U.S. expansionism were ideologically linked and together comprised a capacious colonization movement that both reflected and shaped a wide range of debates over race, settlement, citizenship, and empire in the early republic. The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement as a political force within the United States—from its roots in the crises of the Revolutionary era, to its peak with the creation of the ACS, to its ultimate decline with emancipation and the Civil War. The book interrogates broader issues of U.S. expansion, including the progression of federal Indian policy, the foundations and effects of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, and the growth of U.S. commercial and military power throughout the Western hemisphere. By contextualizing the colonization movement in this way, Mills shows how it enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with racial politics at home.

CHAPTER 1

A Republic Once Removed

In 1801 James Monroe, then the governor of Virginia, wrote to President Thomas Jefferson to ask whether the federal government could help his state create a colony of former slaves somewhere within the western territory of North America. Monroe made this request in response to an event a year earlier when Virginia slaveholders thwarted an incipient slave insurrection that was partially inspired by the ongoing rebellions throughout the French Caribbean colonies. Along with other Virginian leaders, he believed that creating such a settlement for some of the state’s free black population might prevent the prospect of a similar revolution in mainland North America. Monroe had reason to expect the president would be receptive to this idea. Since the Revolutionary era, several prominent writers and politicians, including Jefferson himself, had consistently discussed the possibility of creating colonies for former slaves.¹ Despite the growing constituency for such a proposal in Virginia, the recently elected president offered a lukewarm response. While not entirely dismissive of Monroe’s plan, Jefferson questioned the fundamental wisdom of creating such a colony. Instead, he encouraged Monroe to envision a future in which white Americans would displace Native peoples as they settled the North American continent and cautioned that making black colonies part of this landscape would introduce a “blot or mixture in that surface.”²

As this exchange suggests, the nation’s most prominent leaders discussed colonizationism long before the ACS emerged to advance its plan for Liberia in the late 1810s. Throughout the 1790s the ongoing threat of slave rebellion helped inspire a series of colonization proposals that were aimed at combating the possibility of domestic insurrection in the United States. Eventually Africa would become the primary focus for most colonizationists, but at the turn of the nineteenth century, proponents of such colonies often looked westward to assuage anxieties that stemmed from the question of slavery and settlement in postrevolutionary America.³

During this era, colonizationists sketched out plans in which African Americans would create settler societies that were loosely aligned with the United States’ expansion on the continent. However, Jefferson’s response to Monroe demonstrates that the prospect of such colonies carried with it profound implications for the racial geography of the United States’ expanding settler empire. Eventually other white Americans would come to have similar doubts about the long-term consequences of these early western proposals. This growing skepticism likely contributed to the failure of these plans to coalesce into a coherent movement, and ultimately the ideas only appeared in a scattering of books, pamphlets, private correspondence, and legislative debates during the decades immediately following the Revolutionary War. Indeed, when compared to the popularity, formalized ideology, and institutional strength of the later ACS, these plans for western colonies might appear to be trivial at first glance. Despite their relative marginality, these early proposals crucially reveal competing visions of the United States’ settler state in the early years following the Revolutionary era. They demonstrate the ways that the eventual African colonization movement was both an extension and a reinvention of early American empire.⁴

This inchoate vision of a loosely coordinated and racially separate settlement of North America would not survive long. By the mid-1810s, colonizationists began to argue that the looming threat of slave rebellion, a fundamental argument for creating such colonies in the first place, actually made western settlements incompatible with the United States’ plans for expansion. Increasingly, the proposed black colonies in North America were characterized as threats to national security, particularly when viewed through the lens of ongoing wars with Indian nations. Seen from this perspective, African Americans were more likely to be, as Jefferson argued, impediments to the United States’ settlement rather than allies. The abandonment of these proposals highlights how discussions about the character of U.S. expansion helped frame the emergence of colonizationist ideas in ways that scholars have often overlooked. The failure of colonizationism in the West illustrates an early phase in the evolution of the United States’ identity as a white settler republic within North America.

Colonizationist Counterrevolution

Colonizationism was born amid the anxious racial politics that followed the American Revolution, and no place exemplified this more clearly than Virginia. Here, the national debates about slavery and emancipation and the ever-present fear of slave insurrection were echoed and amplified nationally, leading the state to become a crucial incubator for the earliest colonization proposals that circulated within the United States. The Revolutionary War had caused major disruptions to Virginia’s slave system and helped create the perception that the state suffered from a surplus of slaves. This factor, along with the declining profitability of tobacco, fueled white slaveholders’ pervasive concern about a growing free black population. In this context, Virginia’s politicians, many of whom were also prominent national leaders, increasingly questioned the long-term viability of slavery as an institution in the state.⁵

Thomas Jefferson, a key figure in the American Revolution and one of Virginia’s most prominent planters, would also play a critical role in defining these unfolding debates over slavery, emancipation, and colonization. Approaching the subject as a revolutionary, an early national leader, and an anxious Virginia slaveholder, Jefferson likely did more than any other individual in the early republic to initially popularize the concept of creating colonies for former slaves. In the first years of the Revolution, Jefferson had helped draft a version of Virginia’s constitution that included a proposal for the gradual emancipation of the state’s enslaved population, with the provision that they “be colonized to such place as the circumstances of time should render most proper” where they would become a “free and independent people.”⁶ Although not included in the final version of the document, Jefferson’s plan to relocate emancipated slaves received widespread attention when this earlier draft was published years later in Notes on the State of Virginia, and its prominence had a profound influence on the more detailed plans that would emerge in subsequent decades.⁷

Jefferson’s early colonization proposals stemmed from his view that people of African descent amounted to an inherently antagonistic “nation” contained within the United States. Believing that these two nations would remain perpetually in conflict, he concluded that their separation into different political communities was the only viable solution to this dilemma. Underpinning this belief was Jefferson’s concern that enslaved African Americans would be driven, like the American colonists had been, to demand their natural rights through revolution. As colonization plans circulated during the next few decades, both slaveholders and antislavery advocates alike echoed these sentiments and warned that if whites did not create favorable conditions for African Americans to achieve their political rights peaceably, they would inevitably seize them through a bloody conflict.⁸

As it turned out, these fears were prescient. Only a few years later, enslaved and free people of African descent led a series of revolutionary struggles that permanently transformed social relations within the colonies of the French Caribbean. In the early 1790s a political debate over extending citizenship rights to free people of color sparked a series of slave rebellions in France’s richest sugar colony, Saint-Domingue. Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the primary leader of the struggle on the island and quickly became an international symbol of both the promise and threat of a wide-scale slave revolt. In 1804 Haiti became the world’s first black republic by discarding the shackles of both slavery and colonialism.⁹

This rebellion rapidly spread to other French possessions in the region and radiated its influence out into other British and Spanish slave colonies, and, of course, to the United States. As a consequence, both the successful revolution and the resulting Republic of Haiti came to represent the first sustained challenge to the Atlantic world slave system as well as Eurocentric conceptions of republican citizenship. American newspapers, pamphlets, and books widely publicized lurid and sensationalized reports of slaves massacring white colonists, and, as a result, many Americans predicted that racial revolution was also imminent in the United States.¹⁰ At the same time both enslaved and free peoples of African descent disseminated their own knowledge of these events throughout the Americas, serving as a testament to the prospect of successful resistance against slave regimes.¹¹

As a result, these revolutionary events in the French Caribbean would serve to frame all discussions of colonizationism for the next several decades. Seen within this context, the early colonization efforts in the United States can be understood as an attempt at forging a counterrevolution in the wider Atlantic world: an effort to create the terms on which black republicanism might be cultivated, managed, and ultimately contained. During the 1790s and early 1800s, American politicians and antislavery writers discussed plans for black colonies as a response to the growing panic about slave rebellion. Thomas Jefferson’s initial suggestion of creating black colonies during the Revolution was both provisional and open-ended; however, by the 1790s Americans began to advance more concrete proposals, inspired by British plans for creating a settlement for former slaves in the West African colony of Sierra Leone.

Although some Americans voiced support for these British efforts in Africa, at this early stage many still looked toward North America as a future home for former slaves. In many ways, this tendency illustrates how colonizationism was continuous with the long-standing dynamics of European settler expansion in North America. American colonists had long pushed to advance the boundaries of settlement, sometimes against the wishes of local officials who valued stable relationships with the powerful Indian nations who controlled borderland regions. After independence, the United States, unburdened by British imperial restriction on western settlement, claimed nominal, if not physical, control over a large swath of Native lands where they hoped to build an empire of their own. The sheer vastness of this territory seemed to offer the possibility that African Americans might be accommodated within these visions. While a colony in Sierra Leone might seem remote, costly, unpredictable, and wedded to a British imperial system that the United States had recently rejected, Americans possessed the knowledge, experience, and inclination they would need to support the further colonization of North America.

As a result, early colonization proposals hinged on the question of how they might be integrated within the United States’ own settler empire, a preoccupation initially intended to avoid the uncertain pursuit of an African colony. For instance, William Thornton, a Quaker antislavery advocate who traveled throughout Rhode Island in 1786 and 1787, found considerable interest among the state’s black population in the prospect of migrating to the proposed colony in Sierra Leone. However, when he raised the idea of securing transportation for these individuals with “members of the [Rhode Island] Legislature,” they “expressed an unwillingness to send them out of the limits of the U.S., & wished a Settlement to be made in the most southern part of the back Country between the whites & Indians.” Thornton disagreed with the view that a black colony could act as a kind of buffer between white settlement and Indian country and told the legislators that he “would never be instrument in placing those men, who were now comparatively happy & in a state of protection, between the Indians & Savages on their Borders, where they would become a prey to both.” Moreover, he could see no way that black colonies could be properly integrated into the United States’ empire, asking: “If they should prove capable of defending themselves against all their Enemies, & should preserve their political freedom, could they ever hope to be received as representatives in our Assemblies?” While many Americans would continue to look westward, this concern about a racially divided settler republic anticipated the arguments that would eventually lead most colonizationists, including Thornton himself, to support an African colony by the mid-1810s.¹²

The fact that Thornton consulted black residents on the subject of western colonies is notable because it was so rare. During this period, white colonizationists scarcely mention the perspective of the black men and women who they imagined would become willing colonists. Indeed, there is virtually no evidence that African Americans were interested in the prospect of venturing onto indigenous territory where they would be viewed as potentially hostile avatars of the U.S. settler state. Some free African Americans expressed interest in leaving the United States, but it was almost always for Africa, either to the British colony in Sierra Leone or another unspecified territory on the continent. Therefore, colonizationism, as it came to be expressed through these early proposals, was from its inception an expression of white imagination and designed to serve white interests. Colonizationists flagrantly disregarded the perspectives of African Americans by envisioning them as potential settlers whether they were willing to accept this position or not. While it is likely that most of these early proposals did not reach black audiences to any significant degree, they established a toxic dynamic that caused free black communities to stridently oppose colonizationism when it eventually arrived on the national scene in the mid-1810s.¹³

White colonizationists persisted in circulating a scattered array of proposals over the next few decades, largely without input from African Americans. Around the time when Jefferson’s early colonization proposals became widely known, William Craighead, a magistrate in Lunenburg County, Virginia, locally discussed his own proposal to colonize African Americans in the western territories that the Northwest Ordinance laws had recently opened up for settlement in the late 1780s. Although Craighead clearly viewed these colonies as operating within the broader context of settling that region, he proposed a quasi-colonial relationship by which the proposed colonies’ “relation to the government of the United States was to be something analogous to that in which the Indians now stand.”¹⁴ Craighead’s proposal introduced the vexing question of precisely how such a colony might relate to the United States’ other processes for colonizing territory, in addition to the existing Indian nations throughout the West. Shortly after Craighead made his proposal, an anonymously written antislavery article in the American Museum presented a similar idea by offering readers a stark choice: “Either we should set all our slaves at liberty, immediately, and colonize them in the western territory; or, we should immediately take measures for the gradual abolition of it.” Appearing in one of the United States’ most prominent early periodicals, and shortly following the publication of Jefferson’s Notes, it suggests an elite national audience already familiar with, and receptive to, the prospect of creating black colonies.¹⁵

One of the most influential writings to suggest that the Americans should gradually emancipate slaves and resettle them on undetermined western territory was a pamphlet titled Dissertation on Slavery. Written in 1796 by a prominent and politically connected Virginia lawyer, St. George Tucker, it directly addressed the revolutionary implications of the ongoing slave rebellions in the Caribbean. Tucker was undoubtedly influenced by the prior colonization plans that had slowly begun to take root; however, his proposals were far more comprehensive than the thinly sketched outlines of his predecessors. Focusing primarily on a Virginia readership, he suggested that the state should emancipate all slaves born after a certain date and then compel them to leave the state by denying them any access to citizenship rights. In turn, the state would help create a colony of former slaves somewhere within U.S. territory. Explaining his proposal to a Massachusetts antislavery leader, Tucker noted that “the calamities which have lately spread like a contagion through the West India Islands affords a solemn warning to us of the dangerous predicament in which we stand.” As a result, he believed that the United States faced a choice of accepting an inevitable revolution or following “the liberal sentiments of the national convention of France,” which had recently abolished slavery in response to the ongoing revolutions in the Caribbean.¹⁶

While Tucker’s proposed colony for African Americans was only one piece of the broader plan detailed in his Dissertation on Slavery, it connected colonizatio...