The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the repatriation of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the Grain Coast. It was modeled on an earlier British Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor's colonization in sub-Saharan Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor". Until the organization's dissolution in 1964, the society was headquartered in Room 516 of the Colorado Building in Washington, D.C.
The American Colonization Society was established in 1816 to address the prevailing view that free people of color could not integrate into U.S. society; their population had grown steadily following the American Revolutionary War, from 60,000 in 1790 to 300,000 by 1830. Slave owners feared that these free Black people might help their slaves to escape or rebel. In addition, many White Americans believed that African Americans were inherently inferior and should be relocated.Nicholas Guyatt, “The American Colonization Society: 200 Years of the “Colonizing Trick”, Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society, December 22, 2016; Nicholas Guyatt, “The American Colonization Society’s plans for abolishing slavery,” Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World, December 22, 2016, /.
The African American community and the abolitionist movement overwhelmingly opposed the project. According to "the colored citizens of Syracuse", headed by Rev. Jermain Loguen,
In most cases, African American families had lived in the United States for generations, and their prevailing sentiment was that they were no more sub-Saharan African than they perceived White Americans to be European. Contrary to claims that their emigration was voluntary, many African Americans, both free and enslaved, were pressured into emigrating. Indeed, enslavers, such as Zephaniah Kingsley, sometimes freed their slaves on condition that the freedmen leave the country immediately.
According to historian Marc Leepson, "Colonization proved to be a giant failure, doing nothing to stem the forces that brought the nation to Civil War." Between 1821 and 1847, only a few thousand African Americans, out of millions, emigrated to what would become Liberia, while the increase in Black population in the U.S. during those same years was about 500,000. By 1833, the Society had transported only 2,769 individuals out of the U.S. According to Zephaniah Kingsley, the cost of transporting the Black population of the United States to sub-Saharan Africa would exceed the annual revenues of the country. Mortality was the highest since accurate record-keeping began: close to half the arrivals in Liberia died from tropical diseases, especially malaria; during the early years, 22% of immigrants died within one year. Moreover, the provisioning and transportation of requisite tools and supplies proved very expensive.
Starting in the 1830s, the society was met with great hostility from abolitionists, led by Gerrit Smith, who had supported the society financially, and William Lloyd Garrison, author of Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), in which he proclaimed the society a fraud. According to Garrison and his many followers, the society was not a solution to the problem of American slavery—it actually was helping, and was intended to help, to preserve it.
Background
Growth of slavery in the South After the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, the growth and export of cotton became a highly profitable business. Central to the business was the setting up of plantations, staffed by enslaved laborers. Due to the increased demand, imports of African slaves grew until legal importation was barred in 1808, after which time Maryland and Virginia openly bred slaves, "producing" children for sale "South", through brokers such as Franklin and Armfield, to plantation owners. This resulted in the forcible relocation of about one million enslaved people to the Deep South. The sub-Saharan Africans and African Americans became well established and had children, and the total number of the enslaved reached four million by the mid-19th century.Introduction – Social Aspects of the Civil War
Growth in the number of free black people Due in part to manumission efforts sparked by revolutionary ideals, Protestant preachers, and the abolitionist movement, there was an expansion in the number of free black people, many of them born free. Even in the North, where slavery was being abolished, discrimination against free black people was rampant and often legal. Few states extended citizenship rights to free black people prior to the 1860s and the Federal government, largely controlled by Slave Power, never showed any inclination to challenge the racial status quo. Even in the North, free black people were often seen as unwelcome immigrants, taking jobs away because they would work for cheap.
Some slave owners decided to support emigration following an aborted slave rebellion headed by Gabriel Prosser in 1800, and a rapid increase in the number of free African Americans in the United States in the first two decades after the Revolutionary War, which they perceived as threatening. Although the ratio of white people to black people overall was 4:1 between 1790 and 1800, in some Southern counties black people were the majority. Slaveholders feared that free black people destabilized their slave society and created a political threat. From 1790 to 1800, the number of free black people increased from 59,467 to 108,398, and by 1810 there were 186,446 free black people.Barton (1850), p. 9.
British "black poor" colonization in Africa
In 1786, a British organization, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, launched its efforts to establish the Sierra Leone Province of Freedom, a colony in West Africa for London's "black poor". This enterprise gained the support of the British government, which also offered relocation to Black Loyalists who had been resettled in Nova Scotia, where they were subject to harsh weather and discrimination from some white Nova Scotians. Jamaica maroons were also deported to the British colony, alongside former slaves freed by the Royal Navy after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1807.
Paul Cuffe
Paul Cuffe or Cuffee (1759–1817) was a successful Quaker ship owner and activist in Boston. His parents were of Ashanti (sub-Saharan African) and Wampanoag (Native American) heritage. He advocated settling freed American slaves in Africa and gained support from the British government, free Black leaders in the United States, and members of Congress to take emigrants to the British colony of Sierra Leone.Thomas, Lamont D. Paul Cuffe: Black Entrepreneur and Pan-Africanist (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988) pp. 46–56, 93–106. In 1815, he financed a trip himself. The following year, Cuffe took 38 American black people to Freetown, Sierra Leone. He died in 1817 before undertaking other voyages. Cuffe laid the groundwork for the American Colonization Society.Frankie Hutton (1983). "Economic Considerations in the American Colonization Society's Early Effort to Emigrate Free Blacks to Liberia, 1816–36", The Journal of Negro History. . .
Early history Founding The ACS had its origins in 1816, when Charles Fenton Mercer, a Federalist member of the Virginia General Assembly, discovered accounts of earlier legislative debates on black colonization in the wake of Gabriel Prosser's rebellion. Mercer pushed the state to support the idea. One of his political contacts in Washington City, John Caldwell, in turn contacted the Reverend Robert Finley, his brother-in-law and a Presbyterian minister, who endorsed the plan.Egerton, Douglas R., "Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious: A New Look at the American Colonization Society", Journal of the Early Republic (1985), pp. 463–480. .
On December 21, 1816, the society was officially established at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C. Among the Society's supporters were Charles Fenton Mercer (from Virginia), Henry Clay (Kentucky), John Randolph (Virginia), Richard Bland Lee (Virginia), Francis Scott Key (Washington, D.C., and Maryland), and Bushrod Washington (Virginia)."Colonization: Thirty-Sixth Anniversary of the American Colonization Society" , The New York Times, January 19, 1853 Slaveholders in the Virginia Piedmont region in the 1820s and 1830s comprised many of its most prominent members; slave-owning United States presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison were among its supporters. Madison served as the Society's president in the early 1830s. Jefferson even proposed that whites be imported to fill the vacuum left by the colonization of blacks. He suggested that ships be sent out to collect a number of white people equal to the number of black people being colonized to Liberia.
At the inaugural meeting of the Society, Reverend Finley suggested that a colony be established in Africa to take free people of color, most of whom had been born free, away from the United States. Finley meant to colonize "(with their consent) the free people of color residing in our country, in Africa, or such other place as Congress may deem most expedient". The organization established branches throughout the United States, mostly in Southern states. It was instrumental in establishing the colony of Liberia.
The ACS was founded by groups otherwise opposed to each other on the issue of slavery. Slaveholders, such as those in the Maryland branch and elsewhere, believed that so-called repatriation was a way to remove free Blacks from slave societies and avoid slave rebellions. Free black people, many of whom had been in the United States for generations, also encouraged and assisted slaves to escape, and depressing their value. ("Every attempt by the South to aid the Colonization Society, to send free colored people to Africa, enhances the value of the slave left on the soil".) The Society appeared to hold contradictory ideas: free Blacks should be removed because they could not benefit America; on the other hand, free Blacks would prosper and thrive under their own leadership in another land.
On the other hand, a coalition made up mostly of evangelicals, Quakers, philanthropists, and abolitionists supported abolition of slavery. They wanted slaves to be free and believed Blacks would face better chances for freedom in Africa than in the United States, since they were not welcome in the South or North. The two opposed groups found common ground in support of what they called "repatriation".
Prestige When founded, the ACS was "accepted everywhere as 'a most glorious Christian enterprise'." Every church in the land devoted one Sunday a year for a colonization sermon and offering.
Leadership The presidents of the ACS tended to be Southerners. The first president was Bushrod Washington, the nephew of U.S. President George Washington and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. At Google Books. From 1836 to 1849 the statesman Henry Clay of Kentucky, a planter and slaveholder, was ACS president. John H. B. Latrobe served as president of the ACS from 1853 until his death in 1891.
Goals The colonization project, which had multiple American Colonization Society chapters in every state, had three goals. One was to provide a place for former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants to live, where they would be free and not subject to racism. Another goal was to ensure that the colony had what it needed to succeed, such as fertile soil to grow crops. A third goal was to suppress attempts to engage in the Atlantic slave trade, such as by monitoring ship traffic on the coast. Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher proposed another goal: the Christianization of Africa.
Fundraising