Colonizationist Measures: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on April 24, 1849
COLONIZATIONIST MEASURES: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 24 APRIL 1849
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 3 May 1849. Another text in Foner, Life and Writings. 5 : 119—25.
The anti-colonization meeting of 23 April reconvened at Shiloh Presbyterian Church the following evening. The 24 April meeting, “full of interest to the last,” was even larger than the first and continued “till near the ‘noon of night.’ ” William A. Tyson replaced the absent J. W. C. Pennington in the chair. Several colonizationists were present although, Douglass observed, they dared not speak in favor of the scheme but chose to ‘ ‘suffer in silence. ” Those who did speak agreed that the Colonization Society, in philosophy and practice, posed a serious threat to slaves and free blacks in the United States.
Charles Reason gave proof of the Liberian colony’s collusion with slave traders, James McCune Smith discussed the anti-colonizationist efforts of Alexander Crummell in England, and Henry Bibb, so Douglass reported, “sang an Anti-Colonizationist song which greatly pleased the audience.” George Downing offered the following resolution to which Douglass responded in his speech: “Resolved that we earnestly beseech our friends in Great Britain not to strengthen the hands of the slaveholders, and aggravate the prejudice that consumes us, by giving their countenance to the Colonization Society, remembering that however unexceptionable its theory may appear to them, the abolitionists of America, and the intelligent portion of the free coloured people cordially concur in deprecating its practical influence as eminently promoting the prosperity of Slavery and Caste. ” The resolution was unanimously adopted, and the meeting ended after James McCune Smith‘s speech. NS, 4 May 1849.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: The resolution which I have beencalled upon to second is an appeal to the people of Great Britain from us, not to unite with our enemies against us, but to set their faces against our enemies and thereby help us. I shall return to this resolution after I shall have said a few things in favour of Colonization and against ourselves. (Laughter.)
I think, sir, to begin with, that we shall be regarded as a very unthankful people—a very unthankful people indeed; strangers to the sentiment of virtue and gratitude. Why, here is a society which springs up in our midst, organized and aided by some of the greatest men in church and state—a society which raises vast sums of money, going not only to and fro in our own land but braving the dangers and perils of the deep, crossing the Atlantic ocean to gather money for the purpose of sending us to the land where we are confidently assured that if we shall go, we shall become Presidents, Vice Presidents, Secretaries, Treasurers;—(laughter)—where we shall become grave Senators, Representatives, diplomatic agents, Ministers Plenipotentiary, judges of the Supreme Court. And yet we are so ungrateful, so unthankful that we meet here to denounce this very class of men who are going to shower upon us those offices of honour and profit! Now are we not an ungrateful class of people? (laughter)—that after all the trouble that our friends have been [through] to bring us from Africa and then to get up a scheme to send us back again, having done it Caudle-like, for our own good and never consulting their own, that we should be so ungrateful as to meet here for the purpose of denouncing that movement! Well we are unthankful—ain’t we? (Laughter.)
But Mr. Chairman, to the resolution:—This meeting is held more with a view to affect this question in England than in our own land. The fact is renegade coloured men, who will consent to make themselves the tools of this Colonization Society in this matter, are easily disposed of; but there is a skilful, an adroit, a subtile son of a Dr. of Divinity now perambulating England and portions of Ireland and Scotland, representing to the British public the desireableness of this emigration scheme, and soliciting funds from the humane and benevolent of that land to enable this Colonization Society to transport us from this land of our birth to Liberia, or to some part of Africa. It is with this agent that we have to deal.1This was the Presbyterian minister John Miller (1819-95), the son of Samuel Miller (1769-1850), who was also a Presbyterian minister as well as a distinguished church historian at Princeton Theological Seminary, of which he was a cofounder. John Miller, who served as a chaplain in the Confederate army, is chiefly known for his heterodox writings on theology and for his break with the Presbyterian Church in 1877. Miller visited the British Isles in 1849 on a voluntary fund-raising mission for the American Colonization Society, which was then in the midst of a major drive to raise passage money for Liberian emigrants, and was telling the English public that Afro-Americans now gave African colonization their most cordial support. Miller collected less than $250 for the Society and failed in his efforts to organize an ACS auxiliary in England, but he did succeed in getting the Society a hearing in high places. On 30 April 1849 he testified before the Select Committee on the African Slave Trade in the House of Lords in an attempt to interest the British government in signing a treaty with the new Republic of Liberia for the purpose of suppressing the African slave trade. The proposal apparently was that Liberia would police the coastline of any territory the purchase of which England agreed to subsidize. Nothing came of the scheme. It was partly in order to counter Miller's mission that the black abolitionist J. W. C. Pennington went to England in May 1849. African Repository and Colonial Journal, 25: 160, 201-02 (May, July 1849), 26: 12-23, 80-89 (January, March 1850); BFASR, 2d ser., 4 : 70-71, 89 (1 May, 1 June 1849); Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 218-19; DAB, 12 : 629-30. 636-37. But I have no fears for the result of our dealing. The statistics adduced by our eloquent friend Mr. Reason,2Born in New York City, the son of Haitian emigrés, Charles Lewis Reason (1818-93) was a prominent leader in the black community of his native city and state for over fifty years. From the age of fourteen until his death he was a teacher in or principal of various black schools in New York City, except for the brief period in the 1850s when he headed the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, and the few years that he spent before this as professor of belles lettres, French, and mathematics at Central College in McGrawville, New York. He was the first black man to hold a professorship in an American college. Reason helped organize the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a black organization that won from the state legislature in 1847 authority over black schools in New York City. After the Civil War, he was one of the leaders in the successful effort to integrate the city school system. Reason was no less active in the antebellum struggle to pressure the New York legislature into abolishing the property qualification for black voters. In this connection he served as secretary of the Association for the Political Improvement of the People of Color in 1837 (or 1838) and as secretary of the State Convention of Colored Citizens, which met in Albany in 1840. Reason's opposition to Negro colonization, moreover, was of long standing, beginning in 1838 when he joined in the call for a “Great Anti-Colonization Meeting" in New York City, and carrying through into the 1850s when he was outspoken in his criticism of the African Civilization Society, the black colonizationist organization. Speaking immediately prior to Douglass, Reason read a report from the New York Day Book, written by a former American Colonization Society agent in Africa, charging the president and secretary of Liberia with having had business dealings the previous decade with one of the largest European slave traders on the African coast. Reason was presenting evidence for his resolution that Liberia had been “recreant to the cause of human freedom, and an enslaver of its own kindred." NASS, 3 May 1849; NS, 27 April, 4, 30 May 1849; FDP, 15 July 1853, 17 February 1854, 21 September 1855; Cleveland Gazette, 5 September 1885; Anthony R. Mayo, “Charles Lewis Reason," NHB, 5 : 212-15 (June 1942); Charles H. Wesley, “The Negroes of New York in the Emancipation Movement," JNH, 24 :95 (January 1939); William J. Simmons, ed., Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (New York, [1968]), 1105-09; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 114, 145, 172; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 10, 86-87, 148, 175, 258, 270-71; Robert C. Dick, Black Protest: Issues and Tactics (Westport, Conn., 1974), 21, 50, 190; Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City,“ 41-42, 53, 136, 188, 237, 279, 345, 350, 353, 368. the arguments produced from other sources and the extracts from
the report of the American Colonization Society, together with the various speeches that have been made here during these two evenings past, will be gathered up with the resolutions under consideration and sent to England. I have no doubt then I say as to the effect which they will produce upon the public mind of that country.
Sir, it is not the first time that our enemies have sent to England men for the purpose of degrading us. I recollect that about two years ago there were some seventy ministers sent from the United States to attend the Evangelical Alliance at London, and that one of the main purposes of that body of evangelical divines from this land, was to misrepresent and slander the coloured people of this country, and their friends. And I remember well the generous and unsophisticated manner in which the British people were disposed to listen to arguments pro and con, both from these ministers themselves and from the humble individual now addressing you. I remember that their adroit and cunning statements produced upon the public mind of England quite a sensation—quite an impression in favour of their views with respect to us, and but for the presence in the midst of them of one of this despised race and one of the “fanatical Abolitionists”3Douglass alludes to himself and William Lloyd Garrison. to expose their doings the probability is that the churches of England would have been linked to the churches of America, and would have thrown round the guilty slaveholder, who gains his fortune by the blood of souls, all the sanction of the religion of England. That effort failed. This best effort of the Colonization Society will fail likewise; and it will fail by the same means. I was glad at that time to be present in that country when these divines were slandering coloured people in this country. I am equally thankful that one Alexander Crummell,4Alexander Crummell (1819-98), black Episcopal minister, activist, and intellectual, had alerted his associates in the United States to the colonizationist mission of the Reverend John Miller. Crummell was traveling in England at the time, attempting to raise funds for the establishment of a "Negro church." The son of African-born Boston Crummell, an early black abolitionist in New York, Crummell was known to the audience for his involvement in the antebellum struggle for equal suffrage in New York and Rhode Island, for his prominence in the antislavery movement, both old and new organizations, for his efforts in behalf of black education, and for his well-publicized experiences with racial discrimination at the hands of Episcopal Church authorities. Crummell was educated at various black schools in New York City, at the Noyes Academy in New Hampshire before its demolition by an antiblack mob, at the Oneida Institute in New York, at the Andover Theological Seminary, and at Queens College in Cambridge, England, from which he received an AB degree in 1853. By that time he had undergone a change of heart regarding colonization, and, after his graduation from Queens, accepted an appointment as Episcopal missionary to Liberia, where he remained until 1873, serving as a high-school teacher and principal and as professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at Liberia College. He became one of the foremost exponents of the idea that it was the manifest destiny of Afro-Americans to establish their own national identity upon African soil, specifically Liberia, and to Christianize, commercialize, and "civilize" the entire African continent, by force if necessary. During the 1850s he cooperated closely with the American Colonization Society. After Crummell returned to the United States, he made his residence in Washington, D.C., where he founded St. Luke's Protestant Episcopal Church in 1875 and played a leading part in the formation of many black religious and cultural organizations, most notably the American Negro Academy in 1897. After Reconstruction, Crummell argued that black progress depended less on political agitation than on efforts at material and moral improvement through racial solidarity and self-help. Late in life he began having reservations about the blessings of the gospel of wealth and about the emphasis that Booker T. Washington was placing on industrial education. Shortly before his death Crummell was arguing for the creation of a black college—educated elite in a way that would influence W. E. B. DuBois‘s thinking about the need for a “Talented Tenth." Kathleen O. Wahle, “Alexander Crummell: Black Evangelist and Pan-Negro Nationalist," Phylon, 29: 388-95 (Winter 1968); Wilson J. Moses, “Civilizing Missionary: A Study of Alexander Crummell," JNH, 60: 229-51 (April 1975); Otey M. Scruggs, We the Children of Africa in This Land: Alexander Crummell (Washington, D.C., 1972); Dick, Black Protest, 51-52, 187-88; August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969), 42-44, 50, 56, 94, 222-23, 267; Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana, Ill., 1975), 203-05, 207-08, 220, 231, 248; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 71n, 81, 138, 151, 162; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 69, 71, 87, 171 , 181; Cassell, Liberia: History of the First African Republic, 220, 223, 225, 227, 247-48, 251-52, 263, 342; Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City," 352-53, 372, 376, 395; ACAB (Supplement), 1 :79; NCAB, 5:553. whom you all know, is on the ground at this mo-
ment doing battle against the equally subtile foe in the person of the son of this Dr. of Divinity. I say I have no fear of the result of this meeting upon the English people. They are naturally jealous and they ought to be jealous of propositions coming from the white people of this country, affecting the character or condition of the coloured people. John Bull is honest, strictly honest, in comparison with other nations, especially with our own Democratic Republic, and would be liable to be led astray, but that he is jealous with respect to propositions coming from white people in this country affecting the condition or character of the coloured people. He has seen the efforts made on the part of this country to degrade us. They have seen the various subterfuges and refuges of lies to which they have resorted to sustain their system of Slavery and to keep up the abominable prejudice and
proscription that prevails against us. Therefore the people of England are more ready to listen to what comes from us than to what comes from them.
I do think the Colonization Society is one of the most impudent Societies in the world. I never saw its equal. Once upon a time the immortal Shakespeare said that a thing would die when its brains were out.5Douglass alludes to Macbeth, act 3, sc. 4, lines 78-80: “The time has been, That when the brains were out, The man would die, And there an end . . ." But it is not so with this Colonization Society. It seems to have nine or ten lives (laughter). Why, sir, it was exposed and rebuked by the-noble Clarkson. It was denounced by the benevolent and eloquent Wilberforce. It was thundered at by the eloquent O’Connell, and two or three years ago it was attacked by the ever-to-be-remembered George Thompson. Scarcely have the graves of the philanthropic Wilberforce and the illustrious O’Connell become green, ere this same saucy, impudent Colonization Society appears again on the shores of old England to deceive the public and mislead them. It seems to have been sitting cat-like on the borders of the Atlantic, watching to see this noble man expire, and as soon as the breath is out of his body, this same insidious deceiver, “full of deceivableness of unrighteousness,”6Douglass is closely paraphrasing 2 Thess. 2 : 10: “And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish." walks abroad again on its mission of negro-hatred. But it will not succeed; it cannot succeed. Crummell is there. The spirit that warmed the bosom of Clarkson and Wilberforce and O Connell is there. Thompson and Sturge7Joseph Sturge. are there. They will meet this man, disrobe him of his mask, and send him home to be cheered and pampered by his brother Colonizationists, while he shall quiver under the detestation of the coloured people of the United States. (Applause)
I want to say a word about John Bull. I have a peculiar affection for Englishmen, and a respect for the English character. They were among the first to do us injury and the first to try to right that injury. I respect them—for I forgive them for what they did in days of yore. I respect them for what they have already done, and what they are still doing in our behalf. Englishmen hate American Slavery; they hate American prejudice, and from my experience among them, I can safely say that they do not appreciate the spirit in which this Colonization movement originates. They do not understand what the Americans call prejudice. I have travelled England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales for nearly a year; and during my sojourn in that land, riding on railways, stage-coaches, omnibusses,
steam-boats, and putting up at hotels, I have yet to see the first look or the first act, or to hear the first word from an Englishman indicating a dislike to me on account of my complexion. (Applause) I have had illustration also of the generosity of Englishmen, and of their freedom from all this matter of prejudice in this country. I had occasion, a few days since, to enter one of the hotels of this city for the purpose of seeing one of the chief waiters. I had not been in the hotel two minutes, before a couple of English gentlemen, sitting at the dining-table, and hearing my name mentioned, called for me immediately to come into the dining-room and unite with them around the festive board—to sit down to the table with them and take a glass of wine which I respectfully declined. (Laughter and applause.) They assured me that they felt a deep interest in this matter of Anti-Slavery, and that the people of England were, to a man, Anti-Slavery at heart. I mention this fact to show you that intelligent and respectable English gentlemen when they come to this country, if they have only been here but a few days, are entirely unsophisticated—are such strangers to American taste and democratic aristocracy that they can welcome not only myself, but other coloured gentlemen at the dining-table with themselves. Of course, my friends, I did not look upon it as any distinguished honour, to sit at the table with white men; why, bless my soul! I have often been too near the tables where white men are (great laughter), and I have not the slightest aspiration that way. I only mention the fact to illustrate the character of the English people generally. How different is the case with our American gentlemen. They, so far from being willing to sit at the table with the coloured man, will scarcely allow a coloured man to sit in the same pew with them in church. And they would feel themselves degraded to walk through the streets of New York in company with a coloured gentleman, though he were far superior to themselves,—a Webster in intellect or a Wesley in
piety.
There is one class, however, of transatlantic men who come to this country, to which I wish to call special attention. It is the Irish. Now I am far from finding fault with the Irish for coming to this country, for they have a right to come here or go anywhere else they please; but I met with an Irishman a few weeks ago in the town of Bath in the State of New York. He conversed with me on the subject of Slavery. He had scarcely shed the first feathers of “ould Ireland,” and had the brogue still on his lip. (Laughter.) And that man, newly imported to this country, gravely told me that it was his deliberate opinion that the coloured people in this country could never
rise here, and ought to go to Africa.8 In his editorial correspondence, Douglass said the Irishman was a “Storekeeper of some note." For further details on this encounter, see NS, 9 March 1849. (Laughter.) What I have to say to Ireland is,—send no more such children here. (Laughter and applause.) We do not want any such specimens among us. I told the gentleman that I hoped I should give him no offence, but that I was an American-born citizen, and hoped he would not take any pride in what I was about to tell him, which was, that I intended to stay in this country. (Applause)
Sir, these foreigners who come to this country (I use the term foreigner not invidiously) ought to know that the black people of this country are in fact the rightful owners of the soil of this country—at least in one half the States of the Union. Why, the theory of property in the soil runs thus:—that man has a right to as much soil as is necessary for his existence; and when a human being has incorporated a portion of his own strength and that which belongs to his personality into that soil he therefore has a right to that soil against the universe.9Douglass is paraphrasing John Locke's theory of property, as it is expressed in The Second Treatise of Civil Government. A student of Douglass’s political thought avers that Douglass's views on government were "an almost exact replication of those of John Locke's Second Treatise," but adds that Douglass was “by no means a pure Lockeian." John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1970), 303-20; Leslie F. Goldstein, “The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1974), 55. What is the fact with regard to us? In the language of James Forten10James Forten (1766-1842) was a wealthy black businessman and patron of abolitionism and other reform movements. Born of free black parents in Philadelphia, he attended a school taught by Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet. Forten served as a powder boy in the navy during the American Revolution and spent seven months as a prisoner of war after the British captured his ship. Following the war, Forten learned the sailmaking trade and eventually owned his own shop in Philadelphia. He employed as many as forty white and black workmen and amassed a fortune estimated as high as $100,000. In 1800 Forten joined Richard Allen and Absalom Jones to send a petition from Philadelphia free blacks to Congress calling for the eventual abolition of slavery. Thirteen years later, Forten‘s Letters from a Man of Color appealed to the Pennsylvania legislature to reject a proposed bill to expel free blacks from the state. An early supporter of Garrison’s Liberator and one of the original founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Forten also helped launch the National Negro Convention movement. In addition to abolitionism and civil rights, Forten contributed both his time and money to temperance, women’s rights, and other reform causes of his day. Robert Purvis, Remarks on the Life and Character of James Forten (Philadelphia, 1842), 12-16; Ray Allen Billington, “James Forten: Forgotten Abolitionist," NHB, 13 : 31-36, 45 (November 1949); “The Forten Family," NHB, 10 : 75-79, 95 (January 1947); Lib., 1 April 1842; African Repository and Colonial Journal, 18 : 156 (May 1842); DAB, 6 : 536-37.—whose name I never mention but my heart swells within me— “We have watered the soil of America with our tears, we have enriched it with our blood, we have tilled it with our hard hands; we only ask to be treated as well as you treat ordinary paupers. We are American
born citizens; we only ask to be treated as well as you treat your aliens. We have fought for this country; we only ask to be treated and respected as well as you respect those who have fought against it. We are the lovers of our country; we only ask to be treated and respected as you treat and respect those who are haters of it.” These sentiments are attributed to the venerated and departed James Forten, a coloured man, who, I believe, stood side by side with American freemen and who bared his bosom in defence of this country.
And in this connection I wish to refer to others who fought in defence of our country. We are credibly informed that among the first blood spilt on Bunker’s mound was that which spurted from the bosom of a black man.11A number of blacks fought on the American side at Bunker Hill, but there is no evidence that any of them were killed. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 10-11. We have it also on the page of history that those who stood foremost, who fought bravest, who presented most undoubted valour on the banks of the Mobile, were the black men of Louisiana and Alabama. General Jackson, stern and iron-hearted as he was, stained with the crime of Slavery, was compelled to confess that, to black men he was as much indebted as to any other class for his cotton bale victory.12Douglass is referring to the two regiments of “free men of color" who fought with the Americans during the War of 1812. All of these black troops were from Louisiana, and the only action they saw was at the Battle of New Orleans, where the American barricades were composed in part of bales of cotton. General Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), a large slaveholder from Tennessee, celebrated Indian fighter, and seventh president of the United States, had called the “free men of color" to arms while he was still headquartered near Mobile, Alabama, hence the misleading reference to “the banks of the Mobile," and he was very laudatory of their conduct during the battle, which catapulted him to national fame. Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx (Hartford, Conn., 1890), 83-86; Roland C. McConnell, Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of Color (Baton Rouge, La., 1968), 56-91. (Applause) Why, sir, these foreigners, some of them from Ireland and some of them from elsewhere, come here after we have fought and bled for our country and gravely propose our removal from this to our native land, Africa.
Let me inform my audience and the good people abroad what sort of missionaries are yearly sent off to Liberia. I am a Baltimorean, and that is the very hot-bed of Colonization. I have been on the wharf to hear those men who go about the South for the purpose of teaching and evangelizing the coloured people. I hope it will not be deemed profane in me to give you a specimen of the class of preachers that are found there. You know that we are not as a people very distinguished for the elegance of our use of the Queen’s English. I mean, we are not very distinguished among our white
friends for elegance of language or theological knowledge. Now these colonizationists fail to get the right sort of men to go to Liberia, even if evangelization was their object. I will tell you what kind they take. They take those old exhorters from among the licensed preachers on the Southern stations who have got their freedom in order to go there. And what is the amount of their preaching? Why, I heard one of them one day exhorting thus: “I take my text from de Rebelations ob Saint John. John you know was cast away on de island of Patmos.” (Laughter.) Well he went on in this style until he worked himself up into a paroxysm, and there was no telling head, front, side, end, or beginning of his sermon. He was one of those evangelists to Africa. Now I think the Colonization Society had much better keep such specimens here until they can be instructed and improved before they are sent to Africa.
Friends, in conclusion, I wish to say that I shall return to Rochester, with my hands strengthened and energies increased by the intercourse I have had with free hearts and free spirits in this city. I want to feel that this is no effervescent thing—that the feeling got up against Colonization, and in behalf of freedom is not to disappear and die out the next week, but that the fire kindled here is to continue to burn until slave prejudice, and last, though not least, Colonization, with all its deceptive acts, shall be utterly consumed. Friends, let us unite in a league against the oppressor; all those who are in favour of doing so, say aye!