Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania

4. “We here mean literally what we say”: Elliott Cresson and the Pennsylvania Colonization Society’s Humanitarian Agenda

4 / “We here mean literally what we say”: Elliott Cresson and the Pennsylvania Colonization Society’s Humanitarian Agenda The October 17, 1835, Colonization Herald reads like an obituary. Articles celebrating the progress of education and internal improvements in the colony of Liberia are surrounded on all sides by reports of death and destruction. Trusted natives had attacked Bassa Cove on the night of June 10, 1835, and killed about twenty unarmed settlers. A dispatch from nearby Edina begged for assistance from the Liberian capital: “We are at present in a state of war” with only one barrel of powder. As soon as their appeal reached the capital, the Monrovians provided the needed assistance, and together the Liberians laid waste to native villages, exacting revenge for the slaughter. According to one of the missionaries, this “lamentable catastrophe” furnished sufficient proof of just how “visionary it is to think of erecting a settlement of civilized men among savages, without having in possession ample means of self-defense.”1 This lesson in the dark side of human nature should not have shocked the settlement’s founders. Consciously or not they had long admitted the inherently ugly side of the human psyche by arguing that white Americans could never accept free blacks on terms of equality in the United States. Even so, they expressed complete shock. Supported mostly by Quakers, the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania had joined with the New York City Colonization Society to found this settlement on principles of temperance and peace. They had been careful to purchase the land fairly and secure the acceptance of the nearby kings. As a sign of good faith, one of the kings had even sent his son back with figure 6. “Elliott Cresson,” ca. 1838 by John Sartain. (Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) elliott cresson and the humanitarian agenda / 95 the Americans to be educated in the United States. Excited about the prospect of their new town, they had already sent a second expedition of settlers and were preparing a third when the “disastrous news” reached the United States and “clothed the friends of Africa in mourning.” Refusing to give up, though, they immediately began collecting money to rebuild and fortify their part of the colony.2 Bassa Cove was an independent venture born out of years of bickering and dissent among supporters of the American Colonization Society. Whereas men such as Mathew Carey and Henry Clay had hoped that colonization of blacks to distant lands would save white Americans and their republican experiment, another group of colonizationists, including Philadelphia’s Roberts Vaux, Gerard Ralston, and Elliott Cresson, focused on the movement’s value as an agent to secure the end of slavery and the uplift of blacks throughout the world. This group of supporters looked to missionaries Robert S. Finley and Samuel J. Mills as the most important founders of the movement and tied their efforts to a larger reform agenda that included antislavery and temperance as well as the spreading of Christianity and education. For these men, the colonization movement was the logical extension of gradualist efforts and fit comfortably into Pennsylvania’s Quaker reform legacy. The ACS won their support by promising to free slaves and civilize Africa, and they determined in turn to force the organization to live up to that promise. Indeed, for Cresson, keeping the colonization movement in line became an obsession. He began working for the ACS diligently in 1829 and continued his efforts until he died in 1854, but the high point of his involvement came in the 1830s. At the beginning of this decade he joined the movement full of hope, but he soon grew disenchanted with the parent organization’s efforts to maintain its southern support. Contrasting Cresson’s efforts with Carey’s reveals the dual nature of the colonization movement within the state and offers a better understanding of the forces that split the movement nationally. Such a comparison must look at the humanitarian agenda of some of the movement’s founders and the efforts of men such as Cresson to keep the movement true to the promise of antislavery and black uplift. Colonizationists of Cresson’s persuasion joined the movement because they saw the scheme as the only realistic way to end slavery in the United States. Many were current or former members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, as well as the Society of Friends. The...