43. Cotton, God’s Promise, 5–7; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 166–68. Cotton quoted many other biblical passages that suggested a divine appointment for settling New England, such as Exodus 15:17: “when he plants them in the holy Mountaine of his Inheritance.”
44. Cotton, God’s Promise, 6.
45. Genesis 21:25; 33:18–19; 34; Cotton, God’s Promise, 14–15; Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., The Indian and the White Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1964), 176–77. Jacob’s only response to Simeon and Levi, who had murdered the males of the city, was to complain that the act would make him “odious” among the Canaanite and Perizzite inhabitants, and provoke retaliation. But much later, in his final blessing and prophecy, Jacob cursed their anger and violence (Genesis 49:5–7).
46. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 47. The English, like other European colonizers, always expressed a desire to convert the Indians to Christianity. But since professions of fairness and goodwill were coupled with fear and brutal violence against “savages” who were seen as the agents of Satan, historians continue to debate the meaning of Indian-white relations. See especially Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Kupperman, Settling with the Indians; Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 11–13, 123–24, 137–39, 147–53; Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Yasuhide Kawashima, Puritan Justice and the Indian: White Man’s Law in Massachusetts, 1630–1763 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986).
47. Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Journal of American History 74 (March 1988): 1187–1212; Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 31–32, 81–86, 184; Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds., So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676–1677 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 3, 34–35, 38–39; Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 38, 55, 83–93. While Adam J. Hirsch presents an original and convincing argument concerning the fortuitous and degenerating interaction of European and Indian “military cultures,” one must also take account of European religious culture, especially with respect to the treatment of unrepentant heathen.
4. COLONIZING BLACKS, PART II: THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY AND AMERICO-LIBERIANS
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” The Crisis (April 1924), 273–74; Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 124–26; Rayford W. Logan, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971), 225–27. It should be stressed that Du Bois was not endorsing African colonization or a movement “back to Africa,” as was his contemporary Marcus Garvey. M. P. Akpan suggests that Du Bois, who was known to be Garvey’s “most formidable Afro-American opponent and critic,” was sent to Liberia to help sever that country’s links with the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Judith Stein argues convincingly that there is no evidence to support this view, and that Liberia’s ruling class needed no American encouragement to torpedo the UNIA. M. P. Akpan, “Liberia and the Universal Negro Improvement Association: The Background to the Abortion of Garvey’s Scheme for African Colonization,” Journal of African History 14, no. 1 (1973): 123–26; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 213–14. Although Du Bois dreamed of an African civilization “without coal, without noise, where machinery will sing and never rush and roar, and where men will sleep and think and dance…,” he urged the State Department to provide the Liberian government with expert advice on economic development, education, transportation, and sanitation. He never visited the hinterland, where President King’s officials were involved in the brutal oppression and virtual enslavement of native peoples. Du Bois, “Little Portraits,” p. 274.
2. W. W. Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes: The Origins of the Liberian Dilemma,” in Western African History, ed. Daniel F. McCall, Norman R. Bennett, and Jeffrey Butler, Boston University Papers on Africa, vol. 4 (New York, 1969), 158. In 1842, missionaries at Maryland’s colony at Cape Palmas charged that the settlers, having been removed from the wholesome restraints of the United States, had lapsed into vices that set the worst example for Africans and thwarted missionary work. Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831–1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 138.
3. See, for example, the letter of Richard Allen to Freedom’s Journal, November 2, 1827, 134.
4. It is worth noting that J. L. Watson, a black abolitionist who in 1849 opposed proposals for emigration, argued that “our ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ ” who first came to this country were not colonizers. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 223.
5. Tyler, an ardent defender of slavery and president of the Virginia Colonization Society, is quoted in Katherine Harris, African and American Values: Liberia and West Africa (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 61. Lawrence J. Friedman, “Purifying the White Man’s Country: The American Colonization Society Reconsidered, 1816–40,” Societas 6 (Winter 1976): 1–23, presents a fascinating psychological analysis of “the parallel between the colonizationist’s underlying quest for purity and the human defecation process” (16); he fails, however, to give adequate attention to the theme of racial elevation and redemption, or to the concern of many colonizationists for the practical consequences of slave emancipation.
6. Andrew Delbanco, “The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed,” Journal of American Studies 18 (Dec. 1984): 343–60; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “The Puritans’ ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly, 59 (June 1986): 231–51; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (January 1988): 70–99. As Karen Kupperman points out, there was no consensus among emigrants that New England was the Promised Land; many English Puritans advocated Caribbean colonization as a more effective means of challenging the Roman Catholic Antichrist and thus of carrying out God’s design.
7. African Repository and Colonial Journal [hereafter African Repository] 13 (Oct. 1837): 310. While this claim was clearly an attempt to answer accurate charges that many colonizationists fanned the flames of racism, it is still remarkable that colonizationists would admit that racial prejudice could be overcome, a belief that would appear to undermine the very raison d’être of the ACS.
8. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 12. My own research confirms Fredrickson’s conclusion, which I reread only after thinking I had made an original discovery.
9. Letter of Robert Goodloe Harper to Elias B. Caldwell, August 20, 1817, ACS, First Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: R. Rapine, 1818), 20–21; ACS, Seventh Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Davis and Force, 1824), 14; African Repository 13 (Oct. 1837): 310; African Repository 14 (January 1838): 20.
10. Daniel Coker, Journal of Daniel Coker (Baltimore: Edward J. Coale, 1820), 48; ACS, Third Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Davis and Force, 1820), 121. Kizzel was born on Sherbro Island, off Sierra Leone, and taken to America as a slave; in 1792 he joined the 1,190 black refugees who chose to leave Nova Scotia and accompany John Clarkson’s expedition to Sierra Leone. In 1811, Paul Cuffe, the black American shipowner and merchant, induced
Kizzel to help organize a mutual aid society to promote commerce and immigration to Sierra Leone or Sherbro Island. In 1818 Kizzel welcomed the first ACS agents to Sherbro Island. He soon proved, however, to be a misleading interpreter and intermediary with the local chiefs. In 1820 he helped to lead the first American settlers to their deadly encounter with African disease and then charged them extortionist rent for their flooded huts and distributed their supplies to Sherbro kings. Lamont D. Thomas, Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 53, 62, 66, 70, 80, 84, 91; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 59–62; Charles S. Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic, with an introductory essay by John Stanfield (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987), 22, 23, 35, 36, 41.
11. ACS, Third Annual Report, 19; ACS, Fourth Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Davis and Force, 1821), 62.
12. Tom W. Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 61; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 234–36; Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 167.
13. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 24–25, 89–92; A. P. Kup, Sierra Leone: A Concise History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 123, 164–66.
14. Howard Temperley, “African-American Aspirations and the Settlement of Liberia,” Slavery & Abolition, 21, no. 2 (2000): 67–68; Lamin O. Sanneh, Abolitionist Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 41–45; Svend E. Holsoe, “A Study of Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Liberia, 1821–1847,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (1971): 331–56; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 135–36, 159–70; Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina, African History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 231–34, 369–76.
15. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 44–45, 65; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 62–68, 88–90; Richard West, Back to Africa: A History of Sierra Leone and Liberia (London: Cape, 1970), 114–22; C. Abayomi Cassell, Liberia: History of the First African Republic (New York: Fountainhead Publishers, 1970), 67–78; Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 55–57; Holsoe, “Study of Relations,” 336–40. Holsoe shows there was much division among the indigenous chieftains over the acceptability of the settlement. Sao Boso, ruler of the powerful Condo confederation, who came down to the coast from Bopolo, favored peace and amicable commerce. But after Sao Boso returned home, the Dei chiefs began plotting an attack. Sao Boso’s death in 1837 led to several years of heightened disorder and conflict. Ibid., 337–51.
16. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 73.
17. Harris, African and American Values, 18–22, 33–36. Although the United States continued to maintain an informal presence in Liberia as well as an official agency for disposing of recaptives, these intimations of colonialism were more than counterbalanced by a Jacksonian hostility to federal spending and by a racist refusal, from 1847 to 1862, to recognize a government ruled by blacks. American colonizationists were forced to rely on private philanthropy and intermittent support from state governments. Even in the late nineteenth century, Liberia was unable to arouse the interest of either the United States government or private financiers in projects for building roads and railways to the interior, a fact that casts doubt on claims of American imperialism, as distinct from Americo-Liberian imperialism. See M. B. Akpan, “Black Imperialism: Americo-Liberian Rule over the African Peoples of Liberia, 1841–1964,” The Canadian Journal of African Studies 7, no. 2 (973): 224.
18. African Repository 21 (Feb. 1845): 42. Ralph R. Gurley, the leading agent and fund-raiser for the ACS, argued that biblical and secular history showed that God’s “usual mode of civilizing a country is, by planting there, colonies of civilized men, with whom the natives may amalgamate, or before whom they must disappear, as their own character and conduct shall decide.” Gurley admitted that most colonies had been guilty “of more or less injustice to the aborigines around them,” a fact that aroused some prejudice against colonization itself. He insisted, however, that “a rigidly impartial examination of facts would generally show that the natives themselves are not blameless; that they unjustifiably provoke the treatment under which they suffer.” Ibid., 25 (April 1849): 103.
19. Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 157–58; Harris, African and American Values, 60–63; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 219–21, 225–26; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 53–59; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 190–211, 218–33, 246–79.
20. Harris, African and American Values, 63, 66–68; Apkan, “Black Imperialism,” 218–19, 225–29; Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 162–66; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 13, 31–59; Tom W. Shick, “A Quantitative Analysis of Liberian Colonization from 1820 to 1843, with Special Reference to Mortality,” Journal of African History 12, no. 1 (1971): 45–59; Wally Genser, “Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Liberia, 1821–1880” (unpublished paper, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan, April 21, 1986). (I am much indebted to Mr. Genser for allowing me to use this illuminating study.)
21. In 1843, more than half the population of Monrovia was illiterate. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 37. The rate of literacy was of course much higher among freeborn blacks than among manumitted slaves.
22. Bell I. Wiley, ed., Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia, 1833–1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980). John Stanfield points out that Charles S. Johnson was struck by the fact that “Americo-Liberian oppressors, like their White American counterparts, used the term ‘boy’ to simultaneously signify the degradation of natives and reinforce their disenfranchised status in the social order.” See introduction to Johnson, Bitter Canaan, lii.
23. Peyton Skipwith to John H. Cocke, April 22, 1840, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 52–54.
24. Sion Harris to Samuel Wilkeson, April 16, 1840, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 220–23, 332. Wiley notes that the passages concerning mutilations were crossed out in the manuscript and omitted from the ACS’s published version of the letter. For an account of the origins of the conflict, see Holsoe, “A Study of Relations,” 350–51.
25. Skipwith to Cocke, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 53.
26. Wiley, introduction to Slaves No More, 4; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 29–30, 109; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 220–23; Genser, “Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples.” It should be noted that Blyden was one of the few Liberian leaders who developed a deep respect for African customs and institutions, which he hoped to preserve. See Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), chapter 4.
27. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 106–07; Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 115–24.
28. Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, held in Rochester July 6th, 7th and 8th, 1853 (Rochester, N.Y.: Frederick Douglass, 1853), 47–49, 55–56. Pennington claimed that in 1798, an American naval officer had urged the government to colonize America’s free blacks in southern Africa in order to head off Britain’s colonization schemes and encourage white immigration to the United States. When this plan failed, “the Americans then turned their eyes to Western Africa.” For a fascinating account of Pennington’s life, see R. J. M. Blackett, Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 1–84.
29. Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 73, 81, 89–90, 129–31; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 66–72, 113; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 227; Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 159.
30. Shick, Behold the Promised L
and, 65–72, 96, 98–100; Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 5–9, 72–73, 79–81, 89, 130–40, 175–97, 223–26. In 1930 it would have been difficult to find a more reliable and perceptive investigator than Charles S. Johnson, who was chosen by President Herbert Hoover as America’s representative on the League of Nations Commission. After doing graduate work in sociology with Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, Johnson had become director of research and investigations at the National Urban League and editor of the League’s publication, Opportunity. He belonged to the small group of black intellectuals, including James Weldon Johnson, Alain L. Locke, and Arthur A. Schomburg, who nurtured and publicized the Harlem Renaissance. Before embarking on his seven-month tour of Liberia, Johnson visited the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London and conferred with Bronislaw Malinowski and other anthropologists. It was Johnson who wrote the International Commission’s lengthy report, which led to the resignation of Liberia’s president King and vice president Allen Yancy. Although he began drafting Bitter Canaan in 1930, Johnson soon became distracted by other duties and responsibilities, culminating with the presidency of Fisk University. By 1945, when Johnson finally submitted the manuscript for publication, it had become apparent that a devastating critique of Liberian history and society might be detrimental to the emerging nationalist independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean. Although various motives dissuaded Johnson from publishing what he considered to be his best work, the views of Eric Williams, Charles Thompson, and Claude Barnett, all of whom read the manuscript, were probably decisive. The sociologist John Stanfield deserves much credit for finally making available this brilliantly written account of Liberian society.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 49
