Before long, most clergy and reform groups, and 14 state legislatures, endorsed the ACS. Virtually every state in the North possessed auxiliaries of the organization, and the state of Maryland became so enthralled with the idea that it formed its own colonization society (which later merged with the ACS’s efforts). Within six years, the ACS began sending settlers to its West African colony in Liberia.
Those who met in Allen’s church had good reason to consider leaving the United States. Black life in the North had grown increasingly difficult. Openly discriminated against, generally confined to the lowest levels of society and the least desirable occupations, denied most civil rights, black people struggled amid growing racial intolerance. But more than anything, they lived in fear. The expansion of slavery in the Deep South threatened the very idea of freedom for blacks anywhere in America, and rings of kidnappers operated with impunity in major American cities, especially in Philadelphia. With slaves in such great demand, no African American was safe. Richard Allen himself had been temporarily seized in 1806 as a fugitive slave. No free black man in the North—no matter how successful or prominent—could ever be sure of his liberty.
In January 1817, more than 3,000 black men filled Allen’s church to hear what their leaders had to say. Richard Allen’s close friend James Forten (1766–1842), one of the most successful black businessmen in the United States, took the podium and exhorted them to return to Africa. Forten’s story crystallizes the broken dreams of a generation of black Americans. Born free in Philadelphia in 1766, Forten remembered standing in the crowd outside the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) to hear the first reading of the Declaration of Independence. After serving on Steven Decatur’s vessel the Royal Louis in 1781, he and his fellow crew members were captured by a British warship. The captain, much taken with Forten, offered him opportunities in England. But the young man rejected the offer immediately, declaring, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interests.” Rather than enjoying a life of leisure, he spent seven months on a British prison ship and only luck saved him from enslavement in the West Indies.27
Instead, he became a master sailmaker and eventually bought the business of his white employer. He proved as accomplished a businessman as a sailmaker and acquired great wealth, investing his profits in real estate, banks, a canal, and later in railroad stock. He—and his family—were the cream of Philadelphia’s black elite. But his experience with white society proved severely disillusioning. He came to embrace the idea of emigration, initiated and organized by his close friend Paul Cuffee, the wealthiest black man in Boston and along with Forten one of the two richest black men in America. Cuffee was the first African American to sail a ship of returnees back to the African continent, to Sierra Leone in 1815. (He also was the first free black man to visit a sitting president in the White House.)
For free blacks such as Cuffee, Allen, and Forten, removal to Africa was grounded in a conviction that endemic racism and discrimination left African Americans with no future in America. The January 1817 meeting in Philadelphia was to be a referendum on the idea, and Cuffee—Forten’s close associate in the emigration scheme—eagerly awaited news from his friend of the results of the vote at the meeting.
Their position seemed well reasoned and grounded in hard experience. But it failed. When Forten called for a vote in favor of going to Africa, not one of the 3,000 men in the room said yes. Their collective decision speaks volumes about the nature of black political priorities during the antebellum era. Although ill-treated because of their skin color and living daily with the possibility of enslavement, they refused to leave. Like Forten during the Revolution, they felt strongly that they had but one country. They were Americans, not Africans.
Paul Cuffee, artist unknown, early 19th century. Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, www.AmericanAncestors.org.
This early “Back to Africa” movement was not completely derailed. The idea of colonization was embraced by many prominent whites—most of them racists who saw it as a way to remove troublesome free black people from the United States. In 1821, the American Colonization Society would begin sending the first of more than 13,000 freed slaves to set up a colony in Liberia. And over the coming decades, virtually every African American leader of note would engage—at least briefly—with the notion of voluntary African- or Caribbean-inspired emigration, while almost all would reject enforced, white-directed colonization.
While enslaved African Americans might well see colonization as their only alternative to enslavement, most free black people made a commitment to gain their rights as Americans—no matter how long that might take. A few free blacks like the Reverend Daniel Coker (1780–1846) in 1820, who founded the West African Methodist Episcopal church in Sierra Leone, and John Russwurm (1799–1851), who would help found this country’s first black newspaper in 1827, did choose the lure of Liberian freedom over the risks at home (although Coker soon moved from Liberia to the British colony of Sierra Leone). However, support for the ACS among blacks largely evaporated.
In fact, reaction to the American Colonization Society would be the driving force behind something else: a rising abolitionist movement determined to end racism and slavery, not through emigration, but through a fundamental reform of the United States—a reform that would seek to extend full civil rights to all African Americans. Opposition to the colonization movement became a core principle of the black abolitionist movement as it called for equal rights and citizenship for African Americans. James Forten himself became an early convert, and soon emerged as one of the central figures in the antislavery movement. His financial support proved critical to the survival of the most important abolitionist newspaper founded before the Civil War: William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston-based Liberator.
Over time, Richard Allen also concluded that the destiny of African Americans had to be found in the United States, although in 1824 he saw in the Haitian republic a place where America’s “poor and oppressed” could find “an asylum where they will enjoy the blessings of freedom and equality.”28 In August 1824, Allen sent about 50 settlers to the black republic, which grew to about 200; and over the next year anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 black Americans immigrated to Haiti, at much personal sacrifice to themselves and those blacks who remained behind in Philadelphia. While some thrived, many did not, and 2,000 quickly returned, unable to speak French, dissatisfied with the meager economic opportunities, resentful of the hostility of the Haitian government, and unsympathetic to the Catholic and indigenous religions they found there.29
In November 1827, chastened by the Haitian experience, Allen made a compelling argument in Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black-owned newspaper, against the plans of the American Colonization Society, writing: “This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country.” Then, in 1830, he organized the first National Negro Convention. Forty of the most prominent black Americans gathered in Bethel Church to call for civil rights and oppose African colonization projects—which they now saw as blatantly racist. It was the first concerted effort of black male leaders from across the nation to come together and explore what it meant to be black in America. They debated the most basic aspects of their identity and future, from what they wanted to be called (Africans, Negroes, colored, Afric-Americans) to whether it might be advisable to immigrate to Canada. The convention would meet another dozen times before the Civil War, eventually including such legendary figures as Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, and Martin R. Delany.
Map of Liberian coast, from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas, by A. Finley, Philadelphia, 1830. Library of Congress.
American abolitionism is typically portrayed as a movement led and dominated by whites, but black abolitionists played a central and defining role from its inception. Indeed, Allen and Forten were just two of many in a tradition going back to Prince H
all, articulate, committed advocates who first formulated black abolitionism’s goals—the destruction of slavery and racial prejudice—as early as 1797, and even before, as we have seen in the challenges to slavery, such as Mum Bett’s, that were mounted in the courts. And their numbers increased with each passing year, spreading to every state and community in the North, with the centers of action based in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT LEADERS TO EMERGE IN BOSTON DURING THESE EARLY YEARS WAS DAVID WALKER (1796–1830), A FREE BLACK TAILOR AND CLOTHES MERCHANT FROM NORTH CAROLINA. He left Charleston, South Carolina, about the time of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in 1822. Vesey, an educated former slave and successful businessman, led Charleston’s black community and conspired with other free blacks and slaves to kill whites, burn the city, and flee to Haiti. After his plot was exposed by other blacks, city officials hanged 35 of the accused and executed Vesey on July 2. By 1825, Walker had settled in Boston. The following year he joined the Prince Hall Freemason Lodge No. 459 and became a member of the General Colored Association, placing him in the leadership of the city’s black community. In 1829, he published the pamphlet for which he is best known, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker’s rhetoric rang out in a call to action as no other African American had ever dared publicly to proclaim:
Can our condition be any worse—Can it be more mean and abject? If there are any changes, will they not be for the better though they may appear for the worst at first? Can they get us any lower? Where can they get us? They are afraid to treat us worse, for they know well, the day they do it they are gone. But against all accusations which may or can be preferred against me, I appeal to Heaven for my motive in writing—who knows what my object is, if possible, to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!
… Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression? Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes put them to death? “God works in many ways his wonders to perform.”30
The book was sewn into the lining of sailors’ uniforms so that it could be distributed surreptitiously by free black sailors traveling throughout the South—where it had a tremendous impact. Mocking Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and his racial views, Walker castigated American hypocrisy on race and called for militant resistance to slavery. It would echo through black culture for decades.
Boston would also be home to Maria Stewart (1803–1879), the first African American woman to publish a political manifesto. An uncompromising critic of the colonization movement, she readily proclaimed her preference for death rather than submit to deportation. She tirelessly urged her brethren to commit to the antislavery fight and bolstered her call by rejecting—as David Walker had done—the revolting racial ideas of Thomas Jefferson.
Many think, because your skins are tinged with a sable hue, that you are an inferior race of beings; but God does not consider you as such. He hath formed and fashioned you in his own glorious image, and hath bestowed upon you reason and strong powers of intellect. He hath made you to have dominion over the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea [Genesis 1:26]. He hath crowned you with glory and honor; hath made you but a little lower than the angels [Psalms 8:5]; and according to the Constitution of these United States, he hath made all men free and equal.31
In perhaps one of the most memorable opening lines in all of American political discourse, on September 21, 1832, Stewart proclaimed to a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, “Why sit ye here and die?” Don’t tell me about southern slavery, she declared, because her condition in the North was little better. She called on her sisters to take charge and help lead their race to freedom, to educate themselves if others would not, to force whites to acknowledge their abilities and, in the end, recognize their right to freedom.
But she assigned special responsibility to black men to speak out, just as she had done. “I would ask,” she proclaimed in February 1833, “is it blindness of mind, or stupidity of soul, or want of education that has caused our men who are 60 or 70 years of age, never to let their voices be heard, not their hands be raised in behalf of their color?… If you are men, convince then that you possess the spirit of men…. Have the sons of Africa no souls? Feel they no ambitious desires? Shall the chains of ignorance forever confine them?” Why have you not spoken out as David Walker did, she asked? As the first black woman to speak out on political issues, Stewart blazed a trail for scores of others.32
Stewart would live to see many black men answer her call, one former Maryland slave in particular. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), who taught himself how to read as a slave, escaped to the North in 1838 and joined the abolitionist movement in 1841. His first autobiography (he would write two more), published in 1845, is one of the most powerful indictments of slavery ever written. It catapulted him into international celebrity and into a leadership in the abolitionist movement—transforming the nation’s very concept of democracy. Douglass not only battled slavery and racism, but also whites within the abolitionist movement, one of whom even told him to be less articulate in public and to put a little more of the “plantation” in his speeches. Although widely acknowledged by his fellow African Americans as the movement’s leading force, he was sometimes opposed by other black leaders, including Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882), who was the first to support slave insurrections, and Martin R. Delany (1812–1885), often described by historians as the father of Black Nationalism.
Especially after founding his first newspaper, the North Star, in 1848, Douglass transformed himself from a black spokesman for white abolitionists (who sought to reform slavery through moral suasion) to an independent black voice seeking to transform the entire American political system. By the 1850s, Douglass shocked white audiences by telling them that if anyone wanted to make the hated Fugitive Slave Act a dead letter, they should kill some fugitive slave catchers. Moreover, he expressed his desire to hear that slaves in the South had revolted and “were spreading death and destruction.” Douglass was one abolitionist in whom Maria Stewart and all other African American advocates of militant opposition against slavery could take pride.
Frederick Douglass, circa 1840s. Daguerreotype. Collection of Greg French. This is one of the earliest known images of Douglass.
Fired by the stories of former slaves like Douglass, more and more African Americans were drawn into antislavery and civil rights organizations, vigilance committees, and activist church groups. Inspired by Great Britain’s abolition of slavery throughout its colonies in 1834, the movement grew in prominence and scope, expanding the antislavery message to include full citizenship rights and elimination of Jim Crow segregation in marriage, education, and public transportation. Members assisted in countless ways, including boycotting slave-produced goods and organizing fairs and food sales to raise money for the cause. They could also support the informal network known as the Underground Railroad, which helped runaway slaves find their way to freedom and resist the escalating efforts of slave catchers. Indeed, it was through the Underground Railroad system that church groups, women, and ordinary African Americans could exert the most effort to challenge the institution of slavery directly.
Activists like William Still (1821–1902), who ran the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, the nation’s central hub of the Underground Railroad, played crucial roles in resisting slavery and rallying black communities. His book, The Underground Railroad, published in 1872, is a dramatic account of the stories of hundreds of former slaves who passed through Philadelphia on their way to other northern cities or to Canada.
One of the most fascinating stories that Still recounted, and which received enormous international attention, began on March 23, 1849, when Henry Brow
n (1816–1889)escaped slavery by having himself mailed from Richmond to Philadelphia in a wooden crate. Outraged that his family, including his pregnant wife, had been sold away to North Carolina, Brown had trusted friends seal him up in a wooden crate and ship him by Adams Express to abolitionists in Philadelphia. When Still and his antislavery colleagues pried open the box, out popped Brown, reaching out his hand, saying, “How do you do, gentlemen?” and then singing the hymn “I waited patiently for the Lord, and He heard my prayer.”33 Brown, forever after known as Henry “Box” Brown, then spent about a year traveling across the North lecturing on the evils of slavery. He also published an account of his escape, the Narrative of Henry Box Brown (1849), and in 1850 accompanied a moving panorama, Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery, which opened in Boston. Fearing for his safety after passage of the new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Brown escaped to England.
Perhaps the most ingenious escape recounted by Still was that of William (1824–1900) and Ellen (1826–1891) Craft, who escaped enslavement in Macon, Georgia. On December 20, 1848, the two entered a train on the Macon-to-Savannah railroad, a line built by Ellen Craft’s owner. They could do so without raising any suspicions as the light-skinned Ellen had cut her hair and dressed as an ill and effete young planter attended by “his” slave, William. Ellen had her faced wrapped in bandages and her right arm in a sling and, feigning lameness, used a cane with her left hand. She wore dark green spectacles and pretended to be “hard of hearing and dependent on his faithful servant (as was no uncommon thing with slaveowners), to look after all his wants.” Thus disguised as master and slave, the two made their way north, stopping in Charleston and staying in a first-class hotel. When questioned, William explained that they were headed to Philadelphia for lifesaving medical treatment for his young master. The deception worked. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, the infirm “master” suddenly became a freed female slave. The two went to Boston, where for the next two years they became celebrated heroes and published an account of their famed escape. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, however, their former owners sent slave catchers to retrieve them. Fearing for their lives, they too fled to England.34
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