L. J. to Frederick Douglass, September 2, 1853
New Work on Colonization.
MR. EDITOR:—An excellent work on Col
onization is in the press of the enterprizing
booksellers at Boston, JOHN P. JEWETT & Co.,
to be published speedily. The author is
Giles B. Stebbins, of this city. Having read
some of the proof sheets, I venture to pre
dict that the work will be extensively read,
and do great good. It will be a 12 mo., of
some 225 pages, and is to be sold, under
stand, very low, so as to give the work a wide
circulation among the people. Enclosed is
a copy of the Table of Contents and the
Preface, by Judge Jay. They will, doubtless,
excite an interest to see the forth-coming
work.
L. J.
The scheme of sending our free colored
polulation to Africa, prosecuted in the man
ner it is by the Colonization Society, and
forwarded as it is by extraordinary and most
reprehensible legislation, is exciting a disas
trous influence on the prospects of the col
ored people, both bond and free, and is fa
miliarzing the public mind with injustice
and cruelty. The following pages afford am
ple materials, drawn from the writings and
speeches of the advocates of this scheme,
for learning its true origin and real purport.
It will be seen that the idea of banishing
the free blacks sprang from the alarm caused
by a slave insurrection; and that, from the
first to last, the enterprise has been regarded
as intimately connected with the security of
the slaveholders and the permanency of hu
man bondage.
It is freely admitted that benevolent men
of the north have co-operated in this effort,
in the hope of benefiting the unhappy peo
ple whom it was proposed to exile. In the
pursuit of what appeared to them a good
object, they seem not to have been duly
scrupulous about the means used to effect
it.
It may be true, that some of the emigrants
find in Liberia a comfortable asylum from
American prejudice and oppression; but it
should be recollected that the very money
expended in thier transportation was collec
ted by appeals powerfully tending to aggra
vate the sufferings of their brethren who are
left behind. The whole drift of the constant
stream of vituperation directed against our
free colored people, as "a curse and a blight,"
is to encourage such a course of conduct to
ward them as shall extort their "consent" to
abandon the land of their birth.
The original, active, pervading principle of
the Colonization Society is, as Mr. Henry A.
Wise, with more frankness than prudence,
truly asserted, "FRIENDSHIP TO THE SLAVE
HOLDERS." None are better acquainted with
this cardinal principle of colonization ef
fort, nor more ready to avail themselves of it,
that our political aspirants. Hence Mr. Web
ster in his famous and unhappy speech of
1850, himself an officer of the society, of
fered the following magnificent bid for the
presidency:—
"If any gentleman from the SOUTH shall
propose a scheme of colonization to be car
ried on by the government upon a large
scale, for the transportation of the free col
ored people to any colony, or to any place
in the world, I should be quite disposed to
incur almost any degree of expense to ac
complish that object. There have been re
ceived into the treasury of the United States
eighty millions of dollars, the proceeds of
the public land ceded by Virginia, which have
already been sold: and if the residue shall be
sold at the same rate, the whole will amount
to TWO HUNDRED MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. Now, if
Virginia or the south see fit to make any pro
position to RELIEVE themselves from the
BURDEN of their free colored population, they
have my free consent that this government
should pay them, out of these proceeds, ANY
sum of money adequate to that end."
Here we have no idle professions of sym
pathy for the free blacks, subjected by our
own prejudices and cruelty to poverty, ignor
ance, and degradation,—no visionary, but
benevolent predictions of their regeneration,
on being transferred from a land of Bibles
and churches to the darkenss and heathenism
of Africa,—no sickly, puerile sentimentality
about the diffusion of the arts and sciences
and the light of Christianity throughout a
benighted continent, by sending to it "a horde
of miserable wretches,"—"of all classes of
our population," to us[e] the language of Mr.
Clay, "the most vicious, who contaminated
themselves, extend their vices to all around
them." With boldness and directness of
purpose well calculated to conciliate southern
electors, he assumes that the free blacks are
a BURDEN to the slaveholders, and offers his
aid to RELIEVE them from it. He is ready
to levy on the while Union a tax of untold
millions to transport this burden to any
place in the wide world they may select, as
best securing them from its noxious influ
ence.
"To Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord
knows where." Of course, as the removal is
to be effected by the federal government on
a large scale, with unlimited funds at its com
mand; as the burden is to be deposited
wherever the slaveholder pleases; and as they
are to be relieved, the transportation offered
by the Massachusetts senator is to be com
pulsory, rivalling in moral turpitude the
expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the
Huguenots from France.
The legislation of both the free and slave
states has long been directed to rendering
the condition of the free blacks so intolerable
as to coerce them into exile. But these peo
ple, with great firmness and pertinacity,
cleave to their native land, and in spite of
their wrongs, are rising in education and res
pectability, and are attracting sympathy and
friends. Their oppressors are now adopting
the policy of presenting to them the alterna
tive of exile or slavery. Various are the
laws now in operation, and new ones are
forging, to convert the free blacks into slaves.
Until lately, laws of this description have
been confined to the slave states. Illinois,
in her late act for selling free negroes who
came into her limits, has shown us to what
a height of villainy hatred to the free negro,
united with friendship to the slaveholder, is
capable of attaining; for the very law thus
perpetrating an accursed outrage on free
citizens, guiltless of crime, accords to the
slaveholder the privilege of driving his slave
coffles over the soil of Illinois! Now, this
hatred to the free negro, this friendship to
the slaveholder, the Colonization Society
has been actively engaged in fostering, from
the day of its organization to the present
hour. If the reader thinks this assertion
harsh and unjust, he is entreated to study
with deep attention the revelations made in
this work. He will find that colonizationists
have seduously endeavored to screen Ameri
can slavery, as a system, from all imputation
of moral guilt; have been instant, in season
and out of season, in holding up the free
negroes as most pernicious and dangerous
nuisances; and have hailed with applause
execrable laws, aggravating their oppression,
but accompanied with pepecuniary appropria
tions for their banishment to Africa. Most
truly may it be said, that the tender mercies
of this scheme are cruel; for most cruel is
the constant effort to excite hatred to the
free negro, and a morbid apprehension of
danger from his presence. Let the reader sol
emnly ask himself, whether, admitting a re
moval to Africa may be advantageous to some
emigrants, how far a good end can sanctify
unholy means and how far he can counten
ance the means used by the society con
sistently with his obigations to God and
man.
| CONTENTS. | Page. |
| Introductory Chapter, | 5 |
| Origin of the Colonization Society, | 13 |
| Terms of the Partnership.—Disclaims Hostility to Slavery, | 22 |
| Apologies for Slavery.—Appeals to Fear and Interest. | 46 |
| Opposed to Unconditional Emancipation.—Hostile to the Anti-Slavery Movement, | 63 |
| Its Philanthropy would send the Colored People to Liberia, but Degrade them here, | 80 |
| Favors Expulsion of the free Colored People, | 94 |
| Favors proscriptive Legislation.—Asks Government Aid, | 103 |
| Slavery a Providental Dispensation, | 122 |
| Saved the Union, | 131 |
| Plans Cruel and Impracticable.—Influence on Free People of Color Evil; on Views of Duty Deceptive, | 137 |
| Liberia—The Slave Trade.—Impracticable Remedy.—" the Missionary Colony."—Influence on Natives, Education, &c., | 155 |
| Conclusion.—Both Sides, | 189 |
| Opinions of Free People of Color | 194 |
| Letter from Thomas Clarkson to William Lloyd GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. , | 215 |