Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (23 page)

Virginia lawmakers again gathered in secret in 1802 to respond to their native son. Slavery had to continue, and its natural by-product—resistance—had to stop. So Virginia lawmen took Jefferson up on his proposal, asking him to find a foreign home for the state’s free Blacks. Jefferson went to work, inquiring through intermediaries about West Africa’s Sierra Leone, England’s colony for freed people since 1792. England spurned Jefferson, as did other European nations. Breaking the bad news to Monroe on December 27, 1804, Jefferson assured him he would “keep it under my constant attention.”
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Virginia lawmakers swore themselves to secrecy, agreeing to never reveal their maneuvers for colonization; they did not even inform the next generation of lawmakers. But in 1816, Charles Fenton Mercer, a member of the House of Delegates since 1810, learned of Jefferson’s plan. He uncovered the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson, and he was inspired by the Jeffersonian rationale for sending Blacks abroad. Mercer was an antislavery, anti-abolitionist slaveholder
like Jefferson. Although “slavery is wrong,” he later wrote, emancipation “would do more harm than good.”
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Mercer wanted to remake his region’s agrarian, slave-labor economy into a free-labor, industrial economy. He dreaded the working-class revolts that were picking up steam in Western Europe, but had faith in the ability of a public education system to placate lower- and middle-income Whites. Yet he recognized that the rampant racial discrimination in America would fashion free Blacks into a perpetually rebellious working class. He wanted to expel Blacks from the United States before it was too late.

Colonization seemed like a godsend to Mercer. It also appealed to Robert Finley, who learned about the cause from his brother-in-law, Mercer’s old friend Elias B. Caldwell, the longtime clerk of the US Supreme Court. An antislavery clergyman, Finley had already taken an interest in the plight of low-income free Blacks, and to him, colonization seemed to be the perfect solution to their problems. Mercer, Finley, and the colonizationists they inspired ended up being the ideological children of an odd couple who had disliked each other: Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith. The latter endorsed the cause before his 1819 death. While Smith believed that Black people were capable of Whiteness, Jefferson insisted that they were incapable of achieving Whiteness in the United States. Colonization offered an alternative that both men could embrace.
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In 1816, Finley sat down and wrote the colonization movement’s manifesto,
Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks
. “What shall we do with the free people of color?” he began the pamphlet. Free Blacks must be trained “for self-government” and returned to their land of origin, he wrote. For the enslaved, “the evil of slavery will be diminished, and in a way so gradual as to prepare the whites for the happy and progressive change.”
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Carrying this literary cannonball of racist ideas, Finley invaded Washington, DC, in late November 1816. He lobbied journalists, politicians, and President James Madison, whose views on Blacks mirrored Jefferson’s. Finley and his powerful associates called an organizational meeting for colonizationists on December 21, 1816. Presiding was
Kentucky representative Henry Clay, whose early life had resembled Thomas Jefferson’s. Born to Virginia planters, Clay had become a lawyer, a Kentucky planter, and then a politician. He had expressed an early abolitionism that had faded with time. Clay had just finished his second stint as Speaker of the House when he presided over the colonization meeting that birthed the American Colonization Society. Slaveholder and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington—the nephew of George Washington—was elected president of the society, and the vice presidents included Finley, Clay, General Andrew Jackson, and Mercer’s Princeton schoolmate Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush, who had pledged his support for colonization before his death in 1813.

At the inaugural meeting, Finley’s gradual abolitionism took a back seat to the demands of the slaveholders. The society would ignore the “delicate question” of abolition and only promote the deportation of free Blacks, Henry Clay said. “Can there be a nobler cause than that which, whilst it proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe?” Newspapers around the nation reprinted his words.

In Philadelphia, at least 3,000 Black men packed into Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church on January 15, 1817, to discuss the ACS’s formation. Longtime colonization supporter James Forten, A.M.E. church founder Richard Allen, and two other Black ministers pledged their support for colonization and its missionary potential. Speeches concluded, Forten stepped to the pulpit to gauge the crowd. Those in favor? Forten asked. No one spoke. No one raised a hand. Nothing. All opposed? Forten nervously asked. Everything. A booming “no” rang out, shaking the walls of the church.

These Black men had walked into the church fuming. Their wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers were probably angry, too (but were disallowed from proclaiming it at the male-only meeting). The meeting attendees audaciously denounced the “unmerited stigma” that Henry Clay had “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.”
They did not want to go to the “savage wilds of Africa,” the attendees resolved, demonstrating that they had already consumed those racist myths. But at the same time, they were expressing their commitment to enslaved people and America and demanding recognition for their role in the nation’s growth. It was “the land of our nativity,” a land that had been “manured” by their “blood and sweat.” “We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country,” they resolved.
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American-born descendants of Africa judged the continent based on the standards they had learned from the very people who were calling them inferior and trying to kick them out of the United States. Africans in America had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from White Americans. And White Americans’ racist ideas had been procured from a host of European writers—everyone from Sarah Baartman’s dissector, Georges Cuvier of France, to philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel of Germany.

Around the time of the American Colonization Society’s founding, European nations were increasingly turning their capital and guns from the slave trade to the cause of colonizing Africa (as well as Asia). English, French, German, and Portuguese armies fought African armies throughout the nineteenth century, trying to establish colonies in order to exploit Africa’s resources and bodies more systematically and efficiently. This new racist drive required racist ideas to make sense of it, and Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans arrived right on time. Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people.

Ironically, back in 1807, Hegel had expressed a very antiracist idea in his classic book
Phenomenology of Spirit
, condemning “the overhasty judgement formed at first sight about the inner nature and character” of a person. He revolutionized European philosophy and history in many important matters in the nineteenth century. Legions of philosophy chairs across Europe became Hegelians, and the philosophers he influenced—including men like Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels—constitute a who’s who of European intellectuals. But before his death in 1831, Hegel failed to free himself and
Europe from the Enlightenment era’s racist ideas. “It is . . . the concrete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the principle and character of
Europeans
,” Hegel once wrote. “God becomes man, revealing himself.” In contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” in the “first stage” of human development: “The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.” They could be educated, but they would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing colonization of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, just as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans in the Americas.
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IN THEIR RESOLUTION
against the American Colonization Society, Philadelphia Blacks noted the “unmerited stigma” that had been “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.” The death of Robert Finley later in the year strained the ACS, and it struggled to attract federal funding and the support of slaveholders, especially in the Deep South. The slaveholders would never accept colonization unless they were convinced that it would allow slavery to endure. Free Blacks would never sign on unless emancipation was promised. Neither group was satisfied.
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Still, the society was persistent. In terms of federal funding, Charles Fenton Mercer steered the next offensive after joining the House of Representatives. On January 13, 1819, Mercer introduced the Slave Trade Act, which allocated $100,000 to send “negroes” back to Africa. Signing the bill into law was the old Virginia governor sympathetic to colonization: James Monroe, who had been elected to the US presidency weeks before the formation of the ACS. Almost immediately, debates sprang up as to whether the bill authorized Monroe to acquire land in Africa. By 1821, Monroe had dispatched US naval officer Robert Stockton, as an agent of the society, to West Africa. With a drawn pistol in one hand and a pen in the other, Stockton embezzled—some say for $300—a strip of Atlantic coastal land south of Sierra Leone from a local ruler, who probably did not hold title to his people’s land.
The United States thus joined the growing band of nations seeking to colonize Africa. By 1824, American settlers had built fortifications there. They renamed the settlement “Liberia,” and its capital “Monrovia,” after the US president. Between 1820 and 1830, only 154 Black northerners out of more than 100,000 sailed to Liberia.
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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
had begun with a slave rebellion plot that had caused Virginia enslavers and President Jefferson to think seriously of sending free and enslaved Blacks back to Africa. The slave rebellions kept coming, and nothing accelerated enslavers’ support for the colonization movement more than actual or potential slave rebellions.

In 1818, a fifty-one-year-old free carpenter named Denmark Vesey started recruiting the thousands of slaves in and around Charleston that would form his army—one estimate says 9,000. Vesey was well known locally as one of the founders of Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South. Before receiving his freedom in 1800, Vesey had traveled the Atlantic with his seafaring owner, acquiring a tremendous pride in the agency, culture, and humanity of African people. He had also been inspired by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Vesey likely spent time teaching, motivating, and encouraging fellow enslaved Blacks and challenging the racist ideas they had consumed, perhaps regularly reciting the biblical story of the Israelites’ deliverance from Egyptian bondage. He set the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the French Revolution. Trusted house servants were to assassinate top South Carolina officials as they slept. Six infantry and cavalry companies were to invade the city and kill every White and Black antagonist they encountered on sight. Arsonists were to burn the city to the ground. Spared captains of ships were to bring the rebels to Haiti or Africa—not as colonizers, but as immigrants.

House slave Peter Prioleau betrayed the plot in late May; he received a reward of freedom and later became a slaveholder himself. Prioleau had no desire to abolish slavery, and he probably did not question the racist ideas behind it. In four long years of recruiting
thousands of rebels, no mistakes had been made by Vesey’s lieutenants; no one betrayed the plot—an amazing organizational feat—until Prioleau opened his mouth. By late June, South Carolina authorities had destroyed Vesey’s army, banished thirty-four of Vesey’s soldiers, and hanged thirty-five men, including Denmark Vesey himself, who was defiant to the very end.
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The vast Vesey conspiracy provoked fear in Charleston and beyond. Slaveholders began to contemplate the end of slavery, and ejecting the Black people seemed like an attractive option. In the words of one writer, “the whole United States [should] join in a Colonization Society.” Another Charleston essayist who endorsed colonization pledged that he was ready to help “free the country of so unwelcome a burden.” Instead, new laws tightening the noose on enslaved Blacks soothed the raw fear. Officials stipulated that enslaved Blacks should only wear “negro cloth,” a cheap, coarse cotton sometimes mixed with wool. “Every distinction should be created between the whites and the negroes,” a jurist said, “ . . . to make the latter feel the superiority of the former.”
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Until 1822—until Denmark Vesey—northerners had produced most of the racist books and tracts defending slavery. Writers like Charles Jared Ingersoll, James Kirke Paulding, and Robert Walsh—all from the North—defended slavery from British onslaughts in the 1810s. On October 29, 1822,
Charleston Times
editor Edwin Clifford Holland released the first proslavery treatise by a native southerner. Enslaved Africans, he said, could never “affect any revolution” because of “their general inferiority in the gifts of nature.” He was trying to calm his worried fellows. But they could disrupt society, he said, and Whites should always be on guard. “Let it never be forgotten, that our NEGROES . . . are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become DESTROYERS OF OUR RACE.” Holland did not include the “industrious, sober, hardworking,” and free biracial people in this denunciation. In the event of a rebellion, Holland believed they would form “a
barrier
between our own color and that of the black,” because they were “more likely to enlist themselves under the banners of the whites.”
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