clergy and humanitarians opposed to human bondage as well as southern politicians and planters invested in slavery. While these may seem like strange bedfellows, their alliance demonstrates the important way the construction of a national citizenship had been predicated on a notion of “whiteness” that became manifest in the African colonization movement from its earliest manifestations. For this reason, the organization assembled a diverse coalition of whites who viewed both free blacks and those still enslaved as an impediment to national unity and to the future of a white republic.38 Thus, free blacks came to regard their struggle against colonization within the context of the abolition movement and their efforts to attain citizenship in the nation. After all, as the anticolonizationists contended, what would freedom mean if the end of slavery were followed by the colonization of emancipated blacks? As historian Eric Foner explains, “In an era of nation-building, colonization formed part of a long debate about what kind of nation the United States would be. . . . At mid-century, the prospects of colonizing American slaves probably seemed more credible than immediate abolition.”39 For this reason, black Americans believed that their quest for equality and citizenship depended on ending slavery and proving to those in power that free black colonization in Liberia would betray a people who had struggled since independence for a place at the American table.
1. “The Means of Alleviating the Suffering”: Haitian Emigration and the Colonization Movement, 1817–1830
On December 11, 1818, Prince Saunders, the influential black educator and secretary of the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, stood before white antislavery leaders at the annual meeting of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to rebuke the means and ends of the American Colonization Society. In his speech, he explained how the Colonization Society had encouraged congressional and state officials to fund an effort to drive free African Americans out of the United States and “back” to Africa. This colonization project, Saunders argued, was creating a “frenzy” among free blacks fearful of a mass deportation across the Atlantic Ocean reminiscent of the Middle Passage. As an alternative to colonization in Africa, Saunders requested that the delegates consider funding African American emigration to the first black republic, Haiti. Saunders described Haiti as a “magnificent and exstensive [sic] island,” which travelers had labeled the “paradise of the New World.” “If the two rival governments of Hayti [sic] were consolidated into one well balanced pacific power,” he asserted, “there are many hundreds of free people in the New England and middle states, who would be glad to repair there immediately to settle.”1
Like Paul Cuffe and other black leaders in the early nineteenth century, Saunders praised Haiti as an example of African potential, providing Africans in the diaspora with a point of reference when they challenged the racist assumptions that underpinned white supremacy in the United States. By defeating one of the most powerful nations in Europe and shaking free the fetters that bound them, Haitians had demonstrated their willingness to use any means available to them to achieve their freedom. Such a demonstration of African agency and self-determination inspired more than eight thousand black Americans to leave the United States for the small, newly independent Caribbean nation during the 1820s.2
Whether or not Haiti truly represented the best of African potential remained open to debate, yet it continued to inspire black Americans, encouraging some free blacks in the North to join Haitian emigration societies as a sign of solidarity, while others went ahead and packed up their belongings and emigrated there.3 This upsurge in pro-emigration sentiment in the black community was far from universal: most African Americans had no intention of leaving. The primary reason for this was the rise of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its African colonization project. By the end of the 1810s, free blacks had become concerned that the ACS sought, in fact, to drive them to Africa. For this reason, pro–Haitian emigration advocates had to convince free blacks that Haitian emigration would actually undermine the ACS, while affirming blacks’ potential for self-governance. Thus, those who embraced Haitian emigration dismissed colonization to Liberia and were compelled to make their argument clear and persuasive if they were to succeed.4
Indeed, several of the most prominent black Americans of the era took up the task of challenging the ACS while endorsing Haitian emigration. James Forten, the Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist, for example, played an important part both in leading the struggle against the colonization “scheme” hatched by the Colonization Society, and in urging black Americans to consider Haitian emigration.5
But was Forten’s support of Haitian emigration incompatible with, or contradictory to, his denunciation of colonization? Why did some black leaders, like Forten, protest the American Colonization Society’s colonization plan while championing Haitian emigration? This chapter outlines the rise of the Haitian emigration movement in the late 1810s and the 1820s, demonstrating that emigration (to Haiti) and colonization (of Liberia) were far from synonymous, and that black leaders utilized a transnational network of social reformers as a means to undermine colonization, on the one hand, and to fund Haitian emigration, on the other. Furthermore, it explains how black leaders used the rhetoric of nationalism as a discourse that linked the formation of an African diasporic identity through nation building in Haiti with the struggle against white supremacy in the United States and abroad.
Black leaders certainly did envision Haitian emigration in nationalistic terms, which collided with their quest for racial uplift and “respectability” in the United States.6 While northern black leaders spoke publicly of Haiti’s greatness as a rhetorical strategy for urging racial unity and challenging white racist ideology, in reality, Haiti had yet to emerge as a stable nation.7 However, as early as 1815 Prince Saunders called on blacks to turn towards the “slumbering volcano” in the Caribbean in order to start anew and cast their lot with other Africans building a nation free of slavery and racial prejudice.8 Born in Connecticut, Saunders interacted with free blacks from Philadelphia to Boston early in his career as an educator in the African school in Colchester, Connecticut, and Boston’s African School. As a teacher at the African School, Saunders lived amongst Boston’s “Brahmins,” meeting Paul Cuffe, the wealthy black ship captain, and most certainly winning his approval, and then developing a relationship with Cuffe’s daughter. In 1811 these ties allowed him to rise to the role of secretary of the African Masonic Lodge, alongside Baptist clergyman Thomas Paul. As a member of the Lodge, Saunders first began to consider joining with Paul and others to organize a Haitian emigration movement.9
While traveling with Paul on a fund-raising effort to Britain in 1815, Saunders learned about the Haitian project from British dignitaries who had applauded Cuffe’s efforts a few years earlier to settle black Americans on the coast of West Africa.10 Perhaps because of Haiti’s instability during its first fifteen years of statehood, Cuffe had instead placed his hopes in a new African colony to be founded near British Sierra Leone.11 But Paul and Saunders had sailed to Britain to try to convince antislavery activists and politicians that black Americans were just as eager to relocate to Haiti as they were to Sierra Leone or anywhere else in West Africa.12 Even if Paul and Saunders had shifted their plans from Africa to Haiti, they still built upon Cuffe’s previous efforts to unify British and American abolitionists interested in destroying the transatlantic slave trade and ending the oppression of Africans in the West. As it turned out, several leading British abolitionists agreed that Haiti remained an apt site for black American settlement. According to a newspaper account of the meeting with British abolitionists, Saunders and Paul listened to William Wilberforce praise “Christophe, the black king of Hayti,” for having “every princely quality.” Wilberforce declared that Christophe had “a right more legitimate than the ex-emperor of France, or the kings of Spain and Naples . . . besides being the Farther [sic] of his people.” In addition, Christophe was, in Wilberforce’s view, “a patriot, liberator, and hero . . . and pious christian . . . [who] wanted nothing but Bibles, prayer books, implements of agriculture, and information respecting the arts, sciences, and humanity of Europe.”13 Evidently, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce succeeded in confirming Prince Saunders’s view about Haiti, leaving Saunders with the intention to sail to the island and learn more about King Christophe’s plan for African American emigration.
King Henry Christophe had