King Cotton’s Exiles: African American Emigrationism, Abolition, and the British Atlantic World
p. 139-158
Texte intégral
1On August 1, 1855, Black abolitionist William J. Watkins called out to an audience assembled for an annual West India Emancipation celebration in Adams, New York, not to ‘merely meet together and rejoice over the event. . . we commemorate,’ but to ‘search after the heart of the American people . . . to appeal to their moral sense’ in order to show ‘the barbarities which characterize this Oligarchy under which we live.’1 Watkins reassured them that American slaveholders were no more formidable then those Caribbean slaveholders British abolitionists defeated in the 1830s (Watkins 1855). After all, Watkins proclaimed, ‘we owe it to the slave in America, and to the oppressed everywhere, for despotism is a unit the world over.’ 2
2From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, Black abolitionists used the British Atlantic world in order to challenge slavery and racial inequality in the United States. By the time Parliament ended slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833, Black Americans had established a long tradition of utilizing the British Atlantic world in order to change their enslaved status—from fleeing plantations to British ships during the Revolutionary war to sailing to British Caribbean after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Some African Americans who escaped slavery and lived in the North or Midwest left for the British colony Canada when they learned of slave catchers lurking in their neighborhoods or towns.3 Others considered leaving for Sierra Leone and the post-emancipation British Caribbean when they no longer could tolerate race riots, employment discrimination, and oppressive Black laws (Sinha 2016: 340–341). This chapter, then, considers the way in which Black American emigrationists responded to British emancipation in the Caribbean within the context of the movement against slavery and racism in the United States.4
3As early as 1775, African North Americans petitioned state legislatures after they heard White colonists’ read declarations that justified severing ties with Britain based on the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ (Allen 2014: 153–154). One notable example was the petition Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook and Chester Joie sent to the Massachusetts legislature that requested emancipation and passage to ‘some part of the Coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement.’5 While these early Black petitioners had no specific settlement in mind, some Black people who had been enslaved in the colonies escaped to British ships during the Revolutionary War and eventually settled in Canada and London. Britain played an important role in fostering Black emigration from the United States. 6
4The act of fleeing slavery or racial oppression became a central strategy African Americans used to undermine the institution of slavery. Although the term ‘emigrationism’ had not been used in this era, these petitions calling for passage to Africa demonstrated a key element of emigrationism ideology: Black agency. It sought to prove that, given the opportunity, Black people were capable of establishing a settlement or nation on par with the United States or England. Bestes and the other petitioners had no desire to leave the United States and be ruled over by a small group of Whites in Africa. Emigration from America to Africa was based on self-empowerment and resistance (Sinha 2016: 12). For the next half-century, British Canada’s policy of not extraditing fugitive slaves back to the US, made it an important destination for African Americans who fled racial persecution in the North, as well as those Black American freedom seekers from the South who used craft, ingenuity, and at times aid from sympathetic Whites and free Blacks to follow the ‘North Star’ to freedom.7
5Both in the British colonies, like Canada, or in British cities, such as London, Black Loyalists were met with concern, contempt, and at times, violence. 8 Thus, in 1786, Jonas Hanway organized a ‘Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor’ in an effort to provide material support to those who, in his eyes, had done a great service to England, yet had been denied the protection they had been promised. Although Hanway died in 1786, the prominent British abolitionist Granville Sharp took over, and worked with the Committee to fund and support transportation to a settlement in West Africa which they called Sierra Leone.9
6By 1792, Sierra Leone became the destination of another group of Black Loyalists—those who had been relocated to Nova Scotia after the War. Having struggled with the cold climate and White hostility toward them, over a thousand Black Loyalists left Nova Scotia and settled in Sierra Leone. While Sierra Leone offered the formerly enslaved land, their value to the colonial venture was as laborers. This, as well as the presence of slavery in the colony, created racial divisions.10 For these reasons, Black American abolitionists during the late 1700s did not view Sierra Leone as pivotal in the struggle to end slavery in the United States or British Caribbean.11
7Yet Sierra Leone did inspire one notable group of First Wave (1600s–1820s) Black American abolitionists to initiate an emigration movement there (Miller 1975: 29). By the 1810s, Paul Cuffe from Massachusetts joined with James Forten in Philadelphia and Reverend Thomas Paul in New York and organized the first significant free Black emigration movement. One way to show they were capable of living on par with Whites was to emigrate elsewhere and prove it.12 Paul Cuffe, perhaps more so than any other Black American abolitionist, pushed the notion that Black Americans who left and settled in Africa, the Caribbean, or Canada, could establish independent Christian nations with thriving economies and democratic governments. This, Cuffe believed, would disprove the racist ideology that justified enslaving Black people and treating free Blacks with scorn in the North (Sidbury 2007: 157).
8Despite Cuffe’s two trips to Sierra Leone trading and transporting Black people there, James Forten, his friend and supporter, came out against emigration to Africa with the birth of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in late 1816. He led a public meeting in Philadelphia in early 1817, in which the overwhelming majority of people believed the American Colonization Society’s African colonization project was seeking to deport free Blacks to West Africa in order to allow slavery to flourish in the United States (Power-Greene 2014: 11). Forten wrote to Cuffe dismayed that Cuffe’s vision seemed foiled before it could pick up steam.13
9Ironically, the American Colonization Society had claimed to be inspired by Paul Cuffe’s mission and one of its organizers, Reverend Robert Finley of New Jersey even viewed Paul Cuffe’s movement as kin to his own movement and remained in contact with him until Cuffe’s death in 1817. However, the presence of prominent slaveholder politicians, such as Henry Clay, discredited the ACS in the eyes of most Black Americans, causing them to become anticolonizationists.14 This did not, however, impede emigrationist ideology from thriving among Black abolitionists, even if it flustered the ACS and may have undermined their West African colony. Even some prominent Black Americans who joined the colonization movement early on, such as Daniel Coker, who left the US for Liberia, then migrated to Sierra Leone where he lived for the rest of his life.15
10Although many Black American abolitionists held diverse views on the best route toward ending slavery, most prominent Black Abolitionists accepted emigrationism, in theory, because they believed a settlement of Black Americans thriving abroad undermined White people’s belief that people were inherently unequal, deserved to be discriminated against, and even to be enslaved. Black abolitionists in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston found themselves fighting a war on two fronts: one against slavery and the other against racial caste in the non-slaveholding states. Even if slavery ended, they still confronted racial violence, legal discrimination, as well as social scorn (Jackson 2019: 33). By the late 1820s, emigration movements to the Caribbean and Canada captured the imagination of Black abolitionists, such as Reverend Thomas Paul and Bishop Richard Allen, while Thomas Paul and his brother, Nathanial Paul, raised funds in England for the Wilberforce settlement in Upper Canada in the late 1820s (Hinks 1997: 102).
11While Cuffe had initiated a movement to Africa, Richard Allen and others formalized Canadian emigration as a crucial destination for those living in the North in the late 1820s. After racial violence in Cincinnati, for example, there was an upsurge in Black emigration to Canada among Blacks living in that city and other northern cities.16 Allen led a meeting of free people of color at Bethel Church in Philadelphia on September 20, 1830—three years prior to the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS)—and they called their society ‘The American Society of Free Persons of Color, for improving their condition in the United States; purchasing lands; and for the establishment of a settlement in the Province of Upper Canada,’ signaling that emigrationism, in this case to Canada, was central to the Black abolitionists’ struggle. In his address, Bishop Richard Allen used rhetoric that called attention to Black American’s ‘forlorn and deplorable situation’ in the United States which had always been a motivating factor for emigrationists and among Black abolitionists.17
12Emigration to the British colony of Canada did signal British antislavery sympathy. Even though the laws in Canada favored radical equality, the Black emigrants endured racism and social scorn ever since the first group arrived in the 1780s. This had led them to leave for Sierra Leone. Blacks who left Cincinnati for Canada did also confront racial caste, and some, such as Samuel Ringgold Ward, would leave for the post-emancipation British Caribbean (Asaka 2018: 62).
13When the British passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which took effect on August 1, 1834, Black emigrationists turned their attention toward the British Caribbean as a location for resettlement. Black and White American abolitionists viewed British emancipation in the Caribbean as beneficial to their cause for several reasons. One, it undermined the legitimacy of slavery as an institution. Second, it offered a chance for Black and White abolitionists to show slaveholders and those banks in the North that funded slavery in the United States that free labor was more profitable than slave labor. Third, the British Caribbean offered a possible alternative to Canada and Liberia as a location for resettlement. British emancipation was a momentous event and would be a powerful tool, some argued, to counter those American politicians and businessmen who claimed the contrary.18
14For nearly fifty years, Black abolitionists had romanticized Britain’s leadership in the struggle against slavery. Despite the fact that those Black Americans who ended up in Canada and London found White people to be hospitable, Black Americans imagined that British liberal sentiment and antislavery tradition might mean the British Caribbean would become a suitable location for settlement. Thus, African Americans abolitionists followed reports from British and American antislavery groups who went to the Caribbean to document the transformation of the British Caribbean from a slave society to free societies in the anti-slavery press. British abolitionist Joseph Sturge led a group who sought to make objective observations and speak their own opinions without the influence of members of Parliament or British antislavery groups. Over the course of the year, they travelled to Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Jamaica.19 By the end of their travels, they came to the conclusion that:
It is undeniably established, that the abolition of slavery does not affect the safety of the state, nor the well-being of the community, except by insuring the one and establishing the other. The question is liable to no difficulties but those which are raised by the sordid interests of individuals. It is a false view of such interests alone, which demands the perpetuation of violence and fraud. It is already proved that the community, the state, and the whole body of people, would be more prosperous under a state of freedom. (Sturge and Harvey 1838: 347)
15Similarly, the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society sent out their own party, on a tour of the British Caribbean for six months in 1837, to examine what someone in the press called the ‘great experiment of freedom’ in the British West Indies. The two lead investigators were Joseph Kimball and Reverend James Thome. Kimball had been the editor of Herald of Freedom, a New Hampshire antislavery newspaper, and Thome had been raised in Kentucky by a slaveholding father, but joined the movement against slavery as an adult. These men sought to confirm that, by and large, emancipation had happened without negative consequences for White planters or the British interests (Dexter 2021: 167).20
16Thome and Kimball offered several insights that American abolitionists used to show the success of British emancipation. First, they claimed that emancipated slaves did not retreat in the woods and refuse to labor for wages. In fact, according to Thome and Kimball, they ‘readily, faithfully, and efficiently worked for wages’ right from the beginning, and, by and large, ‘the planters who have fairly made the experiment now greatly prefer the new system to the old’ (Thome & Kimball 1839: vi). Central to the transition from the apprenticeship system that preceded emancipation was the obligation for the masters to accept former slaves as free laborers who now had the ability to work for decent wages without the threat of the whip. Ultimately, Thome and Kimball reported that emancipation had done what those who had fought to end slavery in the UK and the US imagined. It had begun a process of raising their moral conduct and Christian virtue to the Church of England’s standards (Thome & Kimball 1839: vi). With the evidence gathered by Kimball and Thome, the executive members of the AASS believed that they had proof that slavery was not only a gross violation of natural law, but that it was anti-capitalist, and a burden on national economic progress (Sinha 2016: 347).
17With these positive reports in mind, Black emigrationists considered the benefits of leaving the US to settle on an island in the British Caribbean. Trinidad became the first British Caribbean island to attract widespread Black abolitionist interest. In the summer of 1839, William Burnley, one of the most prominent former slaveholders in Trinidad, arrived in the United States on a recruiting tour. He met with representatives in Black communities, as well as members of the American Colonization Society (ACS), wealthy slaveholders and national political leaders. He soon learned that those Whites who were most eager to facilitate emigration to Trinidad were frustrated ACS officials who had for two decades tried to fund Black colonization in Liberia. Contrary to the ACS that sought to send Black Americans away from White society, Burnley invited Black Americans to join him and other White planters in the great experiment in interracial democracy. Burnley's invitation seemed sincere, even though some Black abolitionists were concerned that he and other former slaveholders only cared about supplementing the labor supply rather than actually offering free Blacks a chance to participate in building a biracial democracy.21
18In order to promote emigration to Trinidad and soothe Black Americans’ concerns, Burnley toured the United States in the summer of 1839 and answered questions posed by Black Americans that were published in the Colored American. While Charles Ray, the editor of the Colored American was willing to remain openminded about the idea of emigration to Trinidad, he did not trust Burnley’s glowing view of the colony. Ray, and other Black American community leaders, sought a Black American group selected by the community to report back after witnessing firsthand this transition from slavery to freedom, and what employment opportunities existed in Trinidad.22
19In the fall, Black community leaders in Baltimore appointed Nathaniel Peck and Thomas Price to sail to British Guiana and Trinidad in order to assess the transition from slavery to freedom, and to offer objective insights into whether these two British colonies were suitable for Black Americans to emigrate. Having toured these islands, Peck and Price found much to admire about the calm and orderly transition from slavery to freedom. Yet, they chose British Guiana over Trinidad as their first choice for any emigration movement (Peck and Price 1840: 24).
20However, letters published in the Colored American throughout 1839 and 1840 did not encourage emigration there. One emigrant described Trinidad as a place where those interested should ‘come prepared for life and death.’23 According to George Shannock, ‘a person can make money at the expense of his soul,’ but as far as he could see, Trinidad was ‘no place for a young family, nor for a Christian.’ Despite Trinidadian government officials’ efforts, Shannock wrote that ‘Planters say that they do not want any but those who do not know anything but to work in the cane-fields. These are the people they want to elevate.’ In his letter, he called on the Colored American to discourage emigration because it was so difficult for a poor laborer to find enough work to support his family, and thus he was forced to depend on friends for loans and assistance to survive (Shannock 1840).
21The other reason Black Americans criticized emigration to Trinidad had less to do with a few negative reports that ran counter to Peck and Price’s report and more to do with the way they feared that colonizationists would use this interest to promote colonization of free Black people to Liberia. During the 1840 New York State Convention, for example, those gathered resolved, ‘This convention exceedingly deprecates any system of general emigration offered to our people, as calculated to throw us into a state of restlessness, to break up all those settled habits which would otherwise attach us to the soil (Minutes of the State Convention 1840: 24).Furthermore, the resolution claimed that the American Colonization Society had also intentionally blurred the lines between emigration and colonization whenever the ACS felt they needed to defend their movement against critics who claimed that Black people had no desire to leave America. This shrewd tactic caused members of the 1840 state convention to declare that a Black-led emigration movement to Trinidad, or anywhere outside of the US, would merely, ‘furnish our enemies with arguments to urge our removal from the land of our birth’ (Minutes of State Convention 1840: 24).
22Similar sentiments were described in letters Black Philadelphians mailed the National Reformer. Although Black Philadelphians supported ‘some of our brethren’ taking advantage ‘of the privileges here offered,’ the editorial in the National Reformer declared, they were ‘opposed to any general movement for emigration, anywhere, among our people, but we can see no objection to individuals ‘bettering their condition, so near home’.24 After attending a meeting held by Trinidadian agents in Philadelphia, Joshua Leavitt, wrote in his newspaper, The Emancipator: ‘We cannot wonder that many Americans of color grow impatient under their wrongs, and long to abandon a country which treats its native children with such relentless cruelty’(Leavitt 1839). Yet Leavitt framed his critique of this emigration impulse by quoting Bishop Richard Allen’s argument against the American Colonization Society’s recruitment of Black Americans in the 1820s to go to Liberia. Bishop Allen proclaimed: ‘WE NEVER WILL SEPARATE OURSELVES FROM THE SLAVE POPULATION IN THIS COUNTRY. . . This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now OUR MOTHER COUNTRY, AND WE ARE WELL SATISFIED TO STAY where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free.’25
23Despite Ray’s concerns and criticism, 216 African Americans emigrated from the United States to Trinidad in November 1839. Between 1839 and 1841, 982 African Americans arrived in Trinidad out of a total of 3,897 immigrants.26 Of those who Trinidadian immigration agents recruited in the British Caribbean and West Africa, Black American immigrants were easily the largest number of those who arrived during these early years. With only field labor as an option, many free Blacks who lived in the non-slaveholding states preferred to try and get by in the cities than return to sugar plantations, or any plantation for that matter. By and large, African Americans did not emigrate in large number to Trinidad despite independent free Black agents who offered generally favorable reviews of the British Caribbean.
24This did not mean that other British Caribbean islands did not attempt to induce Black Americans to join these post-emancipation societies. In Jamaica, Alexander Barclay led a commission established in Jamaica to recruit laborers. A member of the House of Assembly in Jamaica, Barclay published a recruitment pamphlet that included the claim that the government had set aside 250,000 acres of land to support immigrants who came to the island. Not only had the House put aside funds, they took precautions to ensure these emigrants had ‘carefully provided for the good treatment and comfort’ during their passage to Jamaica.27
25Ideologically, emigrationism remained an important facet of the struggle against slavery and for Black equality among Blacks in the United States. But, as the Colored American’s editor Charles Ray claimed: ‘Elevate our people anywhere, and it will influence in favor of the crushed slave; but elevate them at home, and that influence is as much greater, as it is nearer.’28
26Although Black Americans had come out against emigration to the Caribbean in the 1840s, things changed after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Some of those who argued against emigration claimed this law was the proverbial ‘last straw’ in the struggle for equal rights in the non-slaveholding states and they began to initiate a much larger emigration movement than had previously been proposed. Martin R. Delany, an abolitionist, newspaper editor, and one of the most outspoken emigrationists from Pittsburg, wrote one of the most widely read pro-emigration treatise of the era titled, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. In it, Delany asked: ‘What can we do? What shall we do? This is the great and important question—Shall we submit to be dragged like brutes before heartless men, and sent into degradation and bondage?—Shall we fly, or shall we resist? Ponder well and reflect’ (Delany 1968: 156). He even made the provocative claim that Black people enslaved in the South were more secure than free people of the North because: ‘He knows who holds the heel upon his bosom—we know not the wretch who may grasp us by the throat.’ Yet, free Blacks in cities like Pittsburg, or Philadelphia were ‘slaves in the midst of freedom.’ According to Delany, if they did nothing to challenge the law or leave the United States to settle somewhere that respected them as human beings and accepted them as members of the ‘body politic’ they would remain ‘slaves in the midst of freedom,’ Delany declared, ‘waiting patiently, and unconcernedly—indifferently and stupidly, for masters to come and lay claim to us, trusting to their generosity, whether or not they will own us and carry us into endless bondage’ (Delany 1968: 155).
27Delany, however, did not advocate emigration to the British West Indies as a location for building a Black nation. Instead, Grenada in Central America was the location he believed offered Black Americans the best place to settle. One reason, though, was because Nicaragua and New Grenada had a treaty with Britain that promised protection (Delany 1968: 188–189). In Latin America and Central America, Delany found no laws that discriminated solely based on race or color. Those polices that did, had been geared toward Whites rather than Blacks, who constituted merely 1/7th of the 15 million in Central and South America. Perhaps even more encouraging, Delany explained, were the ‘vast number of people, our brethren—because they are precisely the same people as ourselves and share the same fate with us. . . stand ready and willing to take us by the hand—nay, are anxiously waiting, and earnestly importuning us to come, that they may make common cause with us, and we all share the same fate’ (Delany 1968: 80).
28While some White abolitionists agreed that the former British West Indies and Latin America represented an opportunity for demonstrating the superiority of free labor over slave labor, Black abolitionists like Delany pushed well beyond abolitionist theory when advocating for emigrationism. In his view, emigrationism sought to unite free Blacks with those who were once enslaved in order to build a national identity based on race that would be fierce defenders of African peoples’ inalienable rights. This ‘romantic racialism,’ as historian George Frederickson has called it, motivated an alternative type of idealism and actually challenged the American national project at its core.29 If America had lived up to these ideals, best expressed by the Declaration of Independence’s claim of ‘inalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ it would have understood that ending slavery was simply not enough: freed people would need to enter into the American body politic as political equals (Delany 1854: 43).
29In late August 1854, Martin Delany stood before a group of distinguished Black American abolitionists at the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. In Delany’s address, ‘The Political Destiny of the Colored Races,’ he called on those gathered to consider the growth of proslavery ideology over the past five years within the context of westward expansion. Delany argued the ‘states rights’ principle of southern slaveholders had been embraced by Californians. After the latter established the gradual end of slavery in their state constitution, California state legislators voted to extend the legality of slavery for another twelve months. This ‘flexibility’ demonstrated to Delany the futility of fighting against slavery in the United States given non-slaveholding White Americans’ willingness to permit slavery despite claiming it as inconsistent with their ideals.30
30Now, Delany called for the establishment of a Black American nation, preferably in Central America, where there would be, ‘No miserable, half-starved, servile Northern slave-catchers by the way, waiting, cap in hand, ready and willing to do the bidding of their contemptible southern masters’ (Delany 1854: 69). Such a nation would provide Black American abolitionists leverage in their struggle against U.S. slavery because, as Delany explained by quoting British politician George Hamilton Gordan, the Earl of Aberdeen: ‘One thing alone is certain, the only way to obtain a sure and honorable peace, is to acquire a position which may command it’ (Delany 1854: 68).
31Like Delany, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, an outspoken and venerated Black abolitionist accepted emigrationist ideology and left for Jamaica in 1853. Garnet shared Delany’s enthusiasm in taking part of building a free society in ways that seemed impossible in the United States in the early 1850s.31 Encouraged and funded by British abolitionists affiliated with the Scottish United Presbyterian Church, Garnet had travelled in Britain to support the Free Produce movement, an initiative that sought to undermine U.S. slavery by consumer power. In January 1853, Garnet moved with his family to Jamaica with hope that he would be able to inspire free Blacks to emigrate to the island to achieve greater economic independence and a sense of liberty unattainable in the United States given anti-Black sentiment and the prevalence of slave catchers tormenting Black communities in the North (Hutchinson 1972: 67).
32By June 1853, Garnet wrote to the editor of the New York Tribune with the hope that he would forward Garnet’s letter to the Baltimore Sun, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, the Albany Evening Journal, Henry Bibb’s Paper, as well as any others willing to publish it in an attempt to recruit Black Americans to join him in the Parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica where he found opportunities for those with a strong work ethic.32 In his view, the benefits of emigration to Jamaica far outweighed the disadvantages, including the inferior ‘local condition of the laboring classes’ compared to ‘same classes in the United States’ (Garnet 1853). In addition, Garnet pointed out the high price of provisions and the horrible condition of the roads, the advantage for unemployed and poor American Blacks struggling in cities like Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia far outweighed the drawbacks. Garnet claimed that he could guarantee thirty Black Americans immediate employment working on George Porteus’ ‘Spring Garden Estate’ and forty on Benjamin Vickers’ ‘Bellile Estate’ which adjoined Garnet’s residence. While Porteus had previously grown wealthy through sugar cultivation, he was open to planting tobacco, rice, and ‘Indian corn.’ To assuage any potential concern Black American emigrants might have, Garnet explained that Porteus was a man of Scotch descent who served as an Elder in Garnet’s Presbyterian Church.
33Perhaps Garnet felt even more confident recruiting Black Americans to work on Vickers’ estate. Garnet certainly had an opportunity to see firsthand the way Vickers treated his workers. It seems that Garnet’s conversations and observations shaped his attitude toward people of African descent in Jamaica (Garnet 1853). Black Americans with ‘good moral and religious character, with industrious habits’ would find wonderful opportunities for employment without the ‘hard laws’ they endured in the U.S. North and Midwest, or the fear of slave catchers.
34While it is unclear how many Black Americans took up Garnet’s offer, Samuel Ward, a Black American who had previously settled in Canada, arrived in Jamaica a year after Garnet. Ward came specifically to help foster Black American emigration based on the abolitionist tenet that free labor could prove slave labor inefficient, and thus undermine the institution in the United States. Ward shared Martin Delany’s criticism of Canada, specifically after he endured years of racist treatment there, and he decided to leave for Jamaica having embraced the emigrationist impulse that inspired Delany, Bishop James T. Holly to go to Haiti, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary to Canada West (Blackett 2002: 173). Although Ward had contemplated leaving for Jamaica ever since the initial debates over Black emigration to the British West Indies in the late 1830s, his experience with White racial hostility in Canada became too much for him to bear (Kenny 2012: 169).
35By the mid-1850s, emigrationism, had even captured the imagination of prominent Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass who had argued for years against it. Douglass left the United States in the early 1860s to investigate the possibility of bringing his family to settle in Haiti.33 Although Douglass had always believed Black American emigration on a large scale would undermine the abolitionist struggle in the U.S., he joined with Delany and others who argued that emigrationsim worked within, rather than outside, the abolitionist movement. While Garnet returned to the U.S after only two years in Jamaica, Ward remained there for over a decade despite his failed efforts to recruit other Black Americans to settle there.34
36On August 1, 1842, a White mob attacked Black people in Philadelphia celebrating British emancipation. Robert Purvis, who survived the pogrom, wrote a letter to White abolitionists Henry C. Wright who had been investigating the event. According to Purvis, Whites had acted in ‘the most ferocious and bloody-spirited mobs’ in ways that demonstrated their ‘wantonness, brutality and murderous spirit’ which he believed had ‘ever cursed a Christian community.’ What was equally lamentable was the ‘apathy and inhumanity’ of the larger community of Philadelphia.35 This and other acts of violence had always fueled Black American interest in emigrating from the United States.
37Ever since the first Black Americans fled plantations and boarded British ships to London and Nova Scotia in the 1780s, Black Americans looked toward the British to assist their efforts to emigrate from the United States. Fifty years later, slavery ended in the British Caribbean and Black Americans’ optimism seemed justified. When Trinidad and Jamaican officials sent representatives on a recruiting tour in the United States, Black Americans appeared willing to listen to their pitch for joining these new colonies, as equal citizens.36
38Yet their idealism quickly faded as letters from those who left for the British Caribbean had been published in the American press. While Black Americans romanticized British support for Black American exiles, scholars, such as Claudius Fergus, point out that this depiction of the post-emancipation British Caribbean as favorable was deceptive. Fergus argues that British policies allowed for the ‘reconstruction of civil society,’ in the long run, the re-establishment of the White ‘plantocracy’ under the guise of ‘liberal’ principles.37 While Fergus does not address Black American emigrationists’ idealism directly, his assessment of the failure of British abolitionists and progressive reformers attempt to compel former planters to establish post-emancipation societies imbued with human rights principles was one of the reasons so few Black Americans lasted long there (Fergus 2013: 198).
39After the Fugitive Slave law drove Black Americans to organize an emigration movement, few emigrationists boarded ships bound for the British West Indies. This did not mean Britain did not remain a place where Black abolitionists and emigrationists found supportive allies. Black Americans continued to tour Britain in the 1850s and 1860s. William Wells Brown and Sarah Parker Remond, and even Henry Highland Garnet, claimed they felt a greater sense of respect from White Britons than they did among any class of Whites in the United States (Kytle 2016: 196). While most Black Americans returned to the United States after British tours, some, like Parker Remond, remained in exile in Europe. Parker Remond and other Black American exiles in Europe, the British Caribbean, and Canada did continue to fight against U.S. slavery, but from a safe distance.
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Hutchinson, Earl O. Let Your Motto Be Resistance: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
Jackson, Kellie Carter. Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011.
Johnson, Ronald and Ousmane Power-Greene, eds. In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021.
Kytle, Ethan. Romantic Reformers and the Anti-Slavery Struggle in the Civil War Era. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Power-Greene, Ousmane. Against Wind and Tide: African Americans Struggle Against the Colonization Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
Sturge, Joseph and Thomas Harvey. The West Indies in 1837: Being the Journal of a Visit to Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, and Jamaica. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1838.
10.1017/CBO9780511783913 :Taylor, Nikki. Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2005.
Thome, James A., Kimball, Horace, J. Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, in the Year of 1837. New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839.
Whitefield, Harvey Amani. Blacks on the Borders: Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006.
10.2307/j.ctv2pzbkbz :Winch, Julie. A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
10.1093/oso/9780195086911.001.0001 :Wood, Donald. Trinidad in Transition: The Years After Slavery. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1968.
Notes de bas de page
1 Watkins, William J. ‘West India Emancipation Address Delivered on the First of August, at Adams, Jefferson County.’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 10, 1855.
2 Brown, Christopher L. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
3 Manisha Sinha’s recent book on abolition defines the First Wave as one that emphasized philosophical arguments and legislative efforts to end slavery from 1600s–1820s. Second Wave (1830s–1865) abolitionists focused on creating a mass movement in the North and believed slavery would only end by changing the ‘hearts and minds’ of slaveholders. During this phase, abolitionists used petitions, newspaper accounts, novels, poems, and slave’s own narratives about the horrors of slavery in ways that challenged all social and political institutions that supported, or tacitly accepted, slavery. See Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
4 Delany focused chapter twenty of The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People on explaining why Latin America, including the British West Indies, was the best location for Black American emigration. Delany, Martin R. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. New York: Arno Press, 1968.
5 Bestes, Peter. ‘Slavery in Massachusetts.’ National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 7, 1851.
6 Blackett, Richard. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.
7 Whitefield, Harvey Amani. Black on the Borders: Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006.
8 Byrd, Alexander. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008; 123–124.
9 Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011; 129–131.
10 Asaka, Ikuko. Tropical Freedom: Climate Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017; 28–29.
11 Bronwen, Everill E. Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
12 Sidbury, James. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; 146–154.
13 Winch, Julie. A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; 190–191.
14 Power-Greene, Ousmane. Against Wind and Tide: African Americans Struggle Against the Colonization Movement. New York: NYU Press, 2014; 30.
15 Coker, Daniel. Journal of Daniel Coker, A Descendant of Africa from the Time of Leaving New York in the Ship Elizabeth, Capt. Sebor, on a Voyage for Sherbro, in Africa in the Company with Three Agents, and About Ninety Persons of Colour. Baltimore: Edward J. Coale, 1920.
16 Taylor, Nikki. Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2005; 34.
17 Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for Improving their Condition in the United States; For Purchasing Lands; and for the Establishment of a Settlement in Upper Canada, Also The Proceedings of the Convention, with their Address to the Free Persons of Colour in the United States. Philadelphia: J.W. Allen, 1831; v.
18 Dexter, Gabriel. ‘The British Emigration Scheme and the African American Emigration Movement to the Caribbean,’ in Johnson, Ronald and Ousmane Power-Greene, eds. In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021; 167.
19 Sturge, Joseph, and Thomas Harvey. The West Indies in 1837 Being the Journal of a Visit to Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, and Jamaica. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1838.
20 Thome, James A., Kimball, Horace, J. Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, in the Year of 1837. New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839.
21 Editorial, Colored American, September 28, 1839; Cudjoe, Selwyn R. The Slave Master of Trinidad: William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018; 143–145.
22 ‘Trinidad Emigration,’ Colored American, October 5, 1839.
23 Shannock, George to Reverend Charles Gardner, published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 22, 1840.
24 Leavitt, Joshua. The Emancipator, September 26, 1839.
25 Bishop Richard Allen quoted in Leavitt.
26 Burnley, William Hardin. Observations on the Present Condition of the Island of Trinidad: And the Actual State of the Experiment of Negro Emancipation. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842; 176.
27 Barclay, Alexander. Remarks on Emigration to Jamaica: Addressed to the Coloured Class of the United States. New York: James Van Norden & Co. 1840; 16.
28 ‘Emigration to Trinidad and British Guiana,’ Colored American, March 7, 1840.
29 Frederickson, George. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on the Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
30 Delany, Martin. ‘Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent.’ Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored People Held at Cleveland, Ohio August 24–26, 1854. Pittsburgh: A.A. Anderson, 1854.
31 Hutchinson, Earl O. Let Your Motto Be Resistance: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972; 67.
32 Garnet, Henry Highland. Letter to New York Tribune reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 2, 1853.
33 Blight, David. Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018; 337.
34 Scholars are unclear about Ward’s life in Jamaica from his first days there in the early 1850s until his death in 1866. Yet, he did on occasion write letters to Frederick Douglass which were published in Frederick Douglass Paper. He also wrote a pamphlet about what is known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. See Ward, Samuel R. ‘Reflections on the Gordon Rebellion.’ National Library of Jamaica Digital Collection https://nljdigital.nlj.gov.jm/items/show/258ka8.
35 Purvis, Robert to Henry C. Wright, August 22, 1842, Philadelphia, PA, Black Abolitionist Papers; ‘Philadelphia Riot, & c.’ The Liberator, August 5, 1842.
36 Wood, Donald. Trinidad in Transition: The Years After Slavery. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1968; 67.
37 Fergus, Claudius K. Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013; 198.
Auteur
Dr. Ousmane Power-Greene is Associate Professor of History and Program Director of Africana Studies at Clark. A specialist in African American history, Professor Power-Greene teaches courses for undergraduates and graduate students on American history with a focus on African American internationalism and comparative social and political movements. Professor Power-Greene’s first book, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (NYU Press 2014), examines black Americans efforts to agitate for equal rights in opposition to the American Colonization Society’s attempt to compel free blacks to leave the United States for Liberia. He is currently completing two research projects. One examines black colonizationists and the other traces African American emigration movements during the nineteenth century. Also, he is co-editor with Ronald Johnson of a collection of essays titled In Search of Liberty: Nineteenth Century African American Internationalism (University of Georgia, 2021). This volume includes original research essays that represent diverse ways of approaching transnational, diasporic, and Atlantic World histories.
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