Thoughts on African Colonization

Mr Fisher said:

'If we wait until the free negroes consent to leave the State, we shall wait until "time is no more." They never will give their consent; and if the House amend the bill as proposed, their consent is in a manner pointed out by the gentleman from Dinwiddie – and it is a great question whether we shall force the people to extort their consent from them in this way. – He believed if the compulsory principle were stricken out, this class of people would be forced to leave by the harsh treatment of the whites. The people in those parts of the State where they most abound, were determined, – as far as they could learn through the newspapers and other sources, – to get rid of the blacks.'

What a revelation, what a confession, is here! The free blacks taken from their beds, and severely flagellated, to make them willing to emigrate! And legislative compulsion openly advocated to accomplish this nefarious project! Yes, the gentlemen say truly, 'few, very few will voluntarily consent to emigrate' – 'they never will give their consent' – and therefore they must be expelled by force! It is true, the bill proposed by Mr Broadnax was rejected by a small majority; but it serves to illustrate the spirit of the colonization leaders.

The editor of the Lynchburg Virginian, an advocate of the Society, uses the following language:

'But, if they will not consider for themselves, WE must consider for them. The safety of the people is the supreme law; and to that law all minor considerations must bend. If the free negroes will not emigrate, they must be contented to endure those privations which the public interest and safety call for. – In the last Richmond Enquirer we notice an advertisement, setting forth, that "a petition will be presented to the next legislature of Virginia, from the county of Westmoreland, praying the passage of some law to compel the free negroes in this commonwealth to emigrate therefrom, under a penalty which will effectually promote this object." So, too, at a meeting of the citizens of Prince George county, in Maryland, it was resolved to "petition the next legislature to remove all the free negroes out of that State, and to prohibit all persons from manumitting slaves without making provision for their removal."'

I close this work with a specimen of the sophistry which is used to give eclat to the American Colonization Society.

In the month of June, 1830, I happened to peruse a number of the Southern Religious Telegraph, in which I found an essay, enforcing the duty of clergymen to take up collections in aid of the funds of the Colonization Society on the then approaching fourth of July. After an appropriate introductory paragraph, the writer proceeds in the following remarkable strain:

'But – we have a plea like a peace offering to man and to God. We answer poor blinded Africa in her complaint – that we have her children, and that they have served on our plantations. And we tell her, look at their returning! We took them barbarous, though measurably free, – untaught – rude – without science – without the true religion – without philosophy – and strangers to the best civil governments. And now we return them to her bosom, with the mechanical arts … with science … with philosophy … with civilization … with republican feelings … and above all, with the true knowledge of the true God, and the way of salvation through the Redeemer.'

'The mechanical arts!' – with whom did they serve an apprenticeship? 'With philosophy!' – in what colleges were they taught? It is strange that we should be so anxious to get rid of these scientific men of color – these philosophers – these republicans – these christians, and that we should shun their company as if they were afflicted with the hydrophobia, or carried a deadly pestilence in their train! Certainly, they must have singular notions of the christian religion which tolerates – or, rather, which is so perverted as to tolerate – the oppression of God's rational creatures by its professors! They must feel a peculiar kind of brotherly love for those good men who banded together to remove them to Africa, because they were too proud to associate familiarly with men of a sable complexion! But the writer proceeds:

'We tell her, look at the little colony on her shores. We tell her, look to the consequences that must flow to all her borders from religion, and science, and knowledge, and civilization, and republican government! And then we ask her —is not one ship load of emigrants returning with these multiplied blessings, worth more to her than a million of her barbarous sons?'

So! every ship load of ignorant and helpless emigrants is to more than compensate Africa for every million of her children who have been kidnapped, buried in the ocean and on the land, tortured with savage cruelty, and held in perpetual servitude! Truly, this is a compendious method of balancing accounts. In the sight of God, of Africa, and of the world, we are consequently blameless – and rather praiseworthy – for our past transgressions. It is such sophistry as is contained in the foregoing extract, that kindles my indignation into a blaze. I abhor cant – I abhor hypocrisy – and if some of the advocates of the Colonization Society do not deal largely in both, I am unable to comprehend the meaning of these terms.

Of the whole number of individuals constituting the officers of the Society, nearly three-fourths, I believe, are the owners of slaves, or interested in slave property; not one of whom, to my knowledge, has emancipated any of his slaves to be sent to Liberia!! The President of the Society, (Charles Carroll,) owns, I have understood, nearly one thousand slaves! And yet he is lauded, beyond measure, as a patriot, a philanthropist, and a christian! The former President, (Judge Bushrod Washington,) so far from breaking the fetters of his slaves, actually while holding his office offered a large reward for a runaway female slave, to any person who would secure her by putting her into any jail within the United States! What a mockery it is for such persons to profess to deplore the existence of slavery, or to denounce the foreign slave trade! for they neither cease from their own oppressive acts, nor act much more honestly than the slave dealers – the latter stealing those who are born on the coast of Africa, and the former those who are born in this country!

END OF PART II

1

African Repository.

2

Rev. Mr Maffit's 'Plea for Africa.'

3

Western Luminary.

Christian Spectator.

4

The clerical gentleman who presumes to utter this opinion is the same who has also the hardihood to assert that 'many of the best citizens of our land are holders of slaves, and hold them in strict accordance with the principles of humanity and justice'!!

5

Christian Spectator.

6

Memoir of American Colonists – vide 'The African Repository,' vol. 2, p. 174.

7

African Repository, vol. 2, p. 179.

8

African Repository, vol. 6, p. 121.

9

The term evil is used here in a criminal sense. I know that colonizationists regard slavery as an evil; but an evil which has been entailed upon this land, for the existence of which we are no more to blame than for the prevalence of plague or famine.

10

'If the most guilty and daring transgressor be sought, he is a Gospel Minister, who solemnly avows his belief of the Presbyterian Confession of Faith, or the Methodist Discipline, and notwithstanding himself is a Negro Pedler, who steals, buys, sells, and keeps his brethren in slavery, or supports by his taciturnity, or his smooth prophesying, or his direct defence, the Christian professor who unites in the kidnapping trade. Truth forces the declaration, that every church officer, or member, who is a slaveholder, records himself, by his own creed, a hypocrite!' * * 'To pray and kidnap! to commune and rob men's all! to preach justice, and steal the laborer with his recompense! to recommend mercy to others, and exhibit cruelty in our own conduct! to explain religious duties, and ever impede the performance of them! to propound the example of Christ and his Apostles, and declare that a slaveholder imitates them! to enjoin an observance of the Lord's day, and drive the slaves from the temple of God! to inculcate every social affection, and instantly exterminate them! to expatiate upon bliss eternal, and preclude sinners from obtaining it! to unfold the woes of Tophet, and not drag men from its fire! are the most preposterous delusion, and the most consummate mockery.' * * * 'The Church of God groans. It is the utmost Satanic delusion to talk of religion and slavery. Be not deceived: to affirm that a slaveholder is a genuine disciple of Jesus Christ, is most intelligible contradiction. A brother of Him who went about doing good, and steal, enslave, torment, starve and scourge a man because his skin is of a different tinge! Such Christianity is the Devil's manufacture to delude souls to the regions of wo.' – Rev. George Bourne.

11

'We are told not to meddle with vested rights: I have a sacred feeling about vested rights; but when vested rights become vested wrongs, I am less scrupulous about them.' —Speech of Rev. Mr. Burnett, of England.

12

The owners of slaves are licensed robbers, and not the just proprietors of what they claim: freeing them is not depriving them of property, but restoring it to the right owner; it is suffering the unlawful captive to escape. It is not wronging the master, but doing justice to the slave, restoring him to himself. Emancipation would only take away property that is its own property, and not ours; property that has the same right to possess us, as we have to possess it; property that has the same right to convert our children into dogs and calves and colts, as we have to convert theirs into these beasts; property that may transfer our children to strangers, by the same right that we transfer theirs. —Rice.

13

'Is there no difference between a vested interest in a house or a tenement, and a vested interest in a human being? No difference between a right to bricks and mortar, and a right to the flesh of man – a right to torture his body and to degrade his mind at your good will and pleasure? There is this difference, – the right to the house originates in law, and is reconcilable to justice; the claim (for I will not call it a right) to the man, originated in robbery, and is an outrage upon every principle of justice, and every tenet of religion.' —Speech of Fowell Buxton in the British Parliament.

14

Stuart's Circular.

15

The slaves, they say, are their property. Once admit this, and all your arguments for interference are vain, and all your plans for amelioration are fruitless. The whole question may be said to hang upon this point. If the slaves are not property, then slavery is at an end. The slaveholders see this most clearly; they see that while you allow these slaves to be their property, you act inconsistently and oppressively in intermeddling, as you propose to do, with what is theirs as much as any other of their goods and chattels: you must proceed, therefore, in your measures for amelioration, as you call it, with 'hesitating steps and slow;' and there is nothing you can do for restraining punishment, for regulating labor, for enforcing manumission, for introducing education and Christianity, which will not be met with the remonstrance, undeniably just by your own concessions, that you are encroaching on the sacred rights of property, – the slaveholders see all this, and they can employ it to paralyse and defeat all your efforts to get at emancipation, and to prepare for it. It is on this account, that I wish it settled in your minds, as a fixed and immutable principle, that there is and can be no property of man in man. Adopt this principle, and give it that ascendency over your minds to which it is entitled; – and slavery is swept away. —Speech of Rev. Dr Thomson of Edinburgh.

16

The history of the Revolution in St Domingo is not generally understood in this country. The result of the instantaneous emancipation of the slaves, in that island, by an act of the Conventional Assembly of France in the month of February, 1794, settles the controversy between the immediatists and gradualists. 'After this public act of emancipation,' says Colonel Malenfant, who was resident in the island at the time, 'the negroes remained quiet both in the South and in the West, and they continued to work upon all the plantations.' 'Upon those estates which were abandoned, they continued their labors, where there were any, even inferior agents, to guide them; and on those estates, where no white men were left to direct them, they betook themselves to the planting of provisions; but upon all the plantations where the whites resided, the blacks continued to labor as quietly as before.' 'On the Plantation Gourad, consisting of more than four hundred and fifty laborers, not a single negro refused to work; and yet this plantation was thought to be under the worst discipline and the slaves the most idle of any in the plain.' General Lacroix, who published his 'Memoirs for a History of St Domingo,' at Paris, in 1819, uses these remarkable words: 'The colony marched, as by enchantment, towards its ancient splendor; cultivation prospered; every day produced perceptible proofs of its progress. The city of the Cape and the plantations of the North rose up again visibly to the eye.' General Vincent, who was a general of a brigade of artillery in St Domingo, and a proprietor of estates in that island, at the same period, declared to the Directory of France, that 'every thing was going on well in St Domingo. The proprietors were in peaceable possession of their estates; cultivation was making rapid progress; the blacks were industrious, and beyond example happy.' So much for the horrible concomitants of a general emancipation! So much for the predicted indolence of the liberated slaves! Let confusion of face cover all abolition alarmists in view of these historical facts! This peaceful and prosperous state of affairs continued from 1794, to the invasion of the island by Leclerc in 1802. The attempt of Bonaparte to reduce the island to its original servitude was the sole cause of that sanguinary conflict which ended in the total extirpation of the French from its soil. – [Vide Clarkson's 'Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies,' &c.]

17

How very strange that the slave should 'regard as tyranny and injustice the authority which compels him to labor' without recompense!!!

18

Paupers and criminals are supplied and protected. How invidious to treat them so generously, and leave honest, hard-working men exposed to destitution and abandonment! They ought to be sent to the poor-house or penitentiary forthwith.

19

What right have we to an homestead in the red man's country? Let us return to the land of our fathers, and leave this soil untarnished by the footprint of him who hath a white skin! What right have the hosts of foreign emigrants, who are flocking to our shores, to an homestead among ourselves?

20

A cruel taunt. The wonder is not that colored persons do not more generally visit our sanctuaries, but that they ever should attend. If they go, they are thrust into obscure, remote and unseemly pens or boxes, as if they were not embraced in the offers of redeeming love, and were indeed a part of the brute creation. It is an awful commentary upon the pride of human nature. I never can look up to these scandalous retreats for my colored brethren, without having my soul overwhelmed with emotions of shame, indignation and sorrow. No black man, however virtuous, respectable or pious he may be, can own or occupy a pew in a central part of any of our houses of worship. And yet it is reproachfully alleged – by a clergyman, too! – that 'if we visit the sanctuaries which are open to all (!) to worship, and to hear the word of God, we shall not find them there'! No – I hope they will respect themselves and the religion of Jesus more, than to occupy the places alluded to.

21

Francis Devany, the colored sheriff of Liberia, is reputed by colonizationists to be worth property to the value of twenty-five thousand dollars; and they have trumpeted the fact all over the country, and so repeatedly as almost to lead one to imagine that he is the greatest and wealthiest man in all the world! James Forten, the reputable colored sail-maker of Philadelphia, – a gentleman of highly polished manners and superior intelligence, – with whom Devany worked as a journeyman, can buy him out three or four times over. Joseph Cassey, another estimable and intelligent man of color, or the widow of Bishop Allen, both of Philadelphia, can purchase him. I mention their names, not to extol them, but simply to show, that what begets fame in Liberia is unproductive here.

22

The following statement, recently published in the Philadelphia 'Friend and Advocate of Truth,' is very creditable to the colored inhabitants of that city:

'Many erroneous opinions have prevailed, with regard to the true character and condition of the free colored people of Pennsylvania. They have been represented as an idle and worthless class, furnishing inmates for our poor-houses and penitentiaries. A few plain facts are sufficient to refute these gratuitous allegations. In the city and suburbs of Philadelphia, by the census of 1830, they constituted about eleven per cent., or one ninth of the whole population. From the account of the guardians of the poor, printed by order of the board, it appears that of the out-door poor receiving regular weekly supplies, in the first month, 1830, the time of the greatest need, the people of color were about one to twenty-three whites; or not quite four per cent., a disproportion of whites to colored, of more than two to one in favor of the latter. When it is considered that they perform the lowest offices in the community – that the avenues to what are esteemed the most honorable and profitable professions in society, are in a great measure, if not wholly closed against them, these facts are the more creditable to them. One cause of this disproportion, which we presume is but little known, but which is worthy of special notice, will be found in the numerous societies among themselves for mutual aid. These societies expended, in one year, about six thousand dollars for the relief of the sick and the indigent of their own color, from funds raised among themselves. Besides, the taxes paid by the colored people of Philadelphia, exceed in amount the sums expended out of the funds of the city for the relief of their poor.

'It is also a fact that the proportion of whites in the alms-house in New-York is greater than that of the blacks. I am aware that other evidence, of a different kind, may be adduced in other places; but it is in the highest degree unfair to measure the whole body of blacks by the whole body of whites – for the privileges and advantages of the whites are as ten thousand to one: they monopolise almost every branch of business and every pursuit of life – they have all the means necessary to make men virtuous, intelligent, active, and opulent. Far different is the situation of the free blacks. How slender are their means! how mean and limited their occupations! how inferior their advantages! Almost every avenue to wealth, preferment and usefulness, is closed against them. How are they persecuted! how avoided in the streets! how excluded from the benefits of society! To point at them the finger of scorn, to taunt them for their inferiority or helplessness, is like putting out the eyes and clipping the wings of the eagle, and then reproaching him because he can neither see nor fly. To boast of our superior refinement, intelligence and virtue, is the extreme of vainglory, and adding insult to injury. Shame! shame!

23

Walker's Appeal.

24

Why is it that the free people of color are now, in almost every part of our country, threatened with banishment from State to State, and with hunting from city to city, until there shall be no place for the soles of their feet in this their native land? Is it because they are in reality, as slaveholders tell us, an inferior race of beings? No, my friends: their consistent conduct, their polished manners, and their great respectability, wherever they have enjoyed the advantages of equality of education and equality of motives, proclaim the contrary. The true cause of this almost universal prescription is to be found in the melancholy fact that we have been guilty of the most atrocious injustice to their forefathers and to themselves. We would therefore now banish the evidence of our guilt from before our eyes: for whom a man has injured, he is almost sure to hate. Some of the finest men I met with, during a residence of three years in London and Paris, were the offspring of African mothers. There no distinction is made in any grade of society, on account of color. I have repeatedly seen black gentlemen sitting on the sofas, conversing with the ladies, at the hospitable mansion of that universal philanthropist, Lafayette; and there were no persons present who appeared more respectable, or who were more respected. – [Address of Arnold Buffum, President of the New-England Anti-Slavery Society, delivered in Boston, Feb. 16, 1832.]

25

In England, it is common to see respectable and genteel people open their pews when a black stranger enters the church; and at hotels, nobody thinks it a degradation to have a colored traveller sit at the same table. We have heard a well authenticated anecdote, which illustrates the different state of feeling in the two countries on this subject. A wealthy American citizen was residing at London for a season, which time the famous Mr Prince Saunders was there. The London breakfast hour is very late; and Prince Saunders happened to call upon the American while his family were taking their morning repast. Politeness and native good feelings prompted the lady to ask her guest to take a cup of coffee – but then the prejudices of society– how could she overcome them? True, he was a gentleman in character, manners and dress; but he had a black skin; and how could white skins sit at the same table with him? If his character had been as black as perdition, the difficulty might have been overcome, however reluctantly; but his skin being black, it was altogether out of the question. So the lady sipped her coffee, and Prince Saunders sat at the window, occasionally speaking in reply to conversation addressed to him. At last all retired from the breakfast table – and then the lady, with an air of sudden recollection, said, 'I forgot to ask if you had breakfasted, Mr Saunders! Won't you let me give you a cup of coffee?' 'I thank you, madam,' he replied, with a dignified bow, 'I am engaged to breakfast with the Prince Regent this morning!'

We laugh at the narrow bigotry of the Mahometan, who feels contaminated if a Christian shares his dinner, and who will not give his vile carcass burial, for fear of pollution. Is our prejudice against persons of color more rational or more just? The plain fact is, our prejudice has the same foundation as that of the Mahometan – both are grounded in pride and selfishness. A law has lately passed in Turkey, imposing a fine upon whoever shall call a Christian a dog. Let us try to keep pace with the Turks in candor and benevolence.– [Massachusetts Journal and Tribune.]

26

'We think the annual increase, as computed by Capt. Stuart, too low by 10 or 15,000. The estimate also of the expense of transportation is much below the actual cost. Besides, there is no provision made for the support of these helpless beings after their arrival in Africa, until they could provide for their own wants. Double the cost of transportation would be required for their subsistence till they could maintain themselves, without making any provision for implements of husbandry, mechanics' tools, &c. &c. without which they would all perish, even without the help of a pestiferous climate. But yet the table shows at one view the utter futility of the whole scheme of African Colonization. Slavery can no more be removed by these means than the waters of the Mississippi can be exhausted by steam engines. And the removal of slavery is the great consummation to which all benevolent efforts for benefitting the African race in this country, should ultimately tend. All schemes that do not promote this end will prove futile, and will end in disappointment. The axe must be laid to the root of the corrupt tree. It is a system that admits of no palliation, no compromise.' – ['Herald of Truth,' Philadelphia.]