Emigration and Colonization

Some African Americans did question the benefits of remaining in the United States. In the late 1780s, the Newport African Union Society in Rhode Island developed a plan to establish a community for American blacks in Africa. Many whites, too, viewed the settlement of blacks in Africa as the only way to solve the nation’s racial dilemma. William Thornton, a Quaker physician who had inherited his father’s sugar plantation in the West Indies, joined a group in London who tried to establish a free black commonwealth on the west coast of Africa. He traveled to the United States to promote what he called colonization. But when Thornton presented his plans to the Free African Society in Philadelphia in 1787, local leaders opposed the effort.

Over the next three decades, the idea of emigration (as blacks viewed it) or colonization (as whites saw it) received widespread attention. Those who opposed slavery hoped to persuade slave owners to free or sell their human property on the condition that they be shipped to Africa. Others assumed that free blacks could find opportunities for economic, religious, and political leadership in Africa that did not exist in the United States. Still others simply wanted to rid the nation of its race problem by ridding it of blacks. In 1817 a group of southern slave owners and northern merchants formed the American Colonization Society (ACS) to carry “civilization” and Christianity to the African continent and establish colonies of freed slaves and free-born American blacks there. Although some African Americans supported this scheme, northern free blacks generally opposed it, viewing colonization as an effort originating “more immediately from prejudice than philanthropy.”

Ultimately the plans of the ACS proved impractical. Particularly as cotton production expanded from the 1790s on, few slave owners were willing to emancipate their workers. Indeed, even in the supposedly enlightened communities where higher education flourished, slavery was widely accepted. In southern colleges, in particular, slaves cleared land, constructed buildings, cleaned rooms, did laundry, and prepared meals.