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

5. “They will never become a people until they come out from amongst the white people”: James Forten and African American Ambivalence to African Colonization

“They will never become a people until they come out from amongst the white people”: James Forten and African American Ambivalence to African Colonization As white abolitionists sought to help but also to control Pennsylvania’s black population, and colonizationists sought to gain the support of black leaders, the black community continued to blossom in the years leading up to the Civil War, despite a number of challenges. As we saw before, leaders such as Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and James Forten shared a number of the biases of the gradualist generation, and by the 1830s, they too found themselves trying to control the growing free black population. At the same time, they were the first antislavery reformers to have to grapple with the implications of the emerging colonizationist movement. Their ultimate rejection of the American Colonization Society gained the attention of a new breed of white abolitionists, a group willing to move beyond gradualist efforts to win over slaveholders and instead label them as “sinners.” As a leader of this community in 1817, an associate of many white gradualists, the man whose support was most strongly sought by Elliott Cresson and other colonizationists, and the man best known for influencing radical antislavery whites such as William Lloyd Garrison, Forten provides the best case study for a closer look at the early black abolition movement and its relationship with gradualism , colonization, and immediatism. James Forten was a fourth-generation American. Born in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, neither James nor his father had ever been owned by another, and both were literate, skilled sailmakers and dedicated Anglicans. By all accounts, the Forten family enjoyed the respect of their Philadelphia neighbors and counted among their friends Anthony 5 / james forten and african american ambivalence / 133 Benezet, who served as executor of at least one Forten estate and oversaw James’s education after his father died. Among the property Benezet helped disperse in this legacy was a slave and a great deal of wealth possibly acquired from involvement in the slave trade. But for their skin color, the Fortens would have been counted among Philadelphia’s elite.1 James Forten himself added to his family’s social and material success . At the age of fourteen he joined the Revolutionary cause, serving on a privateer vessel. Though optimistic of the Revolution’s promise, and of his right to share what America offered, the limitations and prejudices he faced on a daily basis would eventually cause him to grapple with the idea of racial separation. Throughout most of his adult life, Forten considered whether emigration to Africa or Haiti would provide successful free blacks like himself a much-deserved chance for true freedom and self-rule. For Forten, any such move would have to be self-directed under black leadership, so despite their best efforts white colonizationists never succeeded in gaining his trust. Indeed, once African colonization became a white man’s initiative under the American Colonization Society, Forten followed the lead of his black neighbors in resisting the scheme, and he played a crucial role in formulating the organized resistance that would grow into the immediate abolition movement in the 1830s. Forten’s interest in black emigration and his resistance to whiteled colonization adds another dimension to the story of Pennsylvania’s, and the nation’s, abolition and colonization movements. After all, African Americans were never passive onlookers, and the beliefs and opinions of men such as James Forten and his friends were ultimately the most important in shaping the destiny of both African colonization and a biracial America. * * * As a free black man in the first state to legalize gradual abolition, James Forten lived in an environment filled with both hope and uncertainty. He was thirteen years old when lawmakers described abolition as a debt they owed to God for delivering them from British oppression and passed the gradual abolition law of 1780. They also alluded to racial equality by admitting that, though of different colors, all men were created by the same “Almighty Hand.” Such words offered the state’s black residents hope. According to Forten biographer Julie Winch, “What the quality of citizenship might be for a black Patriot he would have to wait and figure 7. “James Forten.” Leon Gardiner Collection. (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.) james forten and african american ambivalence / 135 see, but the abolition law, with its statements about justice and an end...