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

6. “A thorough abolitionist could not be such without being a colonizationist”: Benjamin Coates and Black Uplift in the United States and Africa

6 / “A thorough abolitionist could not be such without being a colonizationist”: Benjamin Coates and Black Uplift in the United States and Africa Even with the rise of the immediatist movement, antislavery colonizationists did not give up easily. From the mid 1830s to the late 1850s the Pennsylvania group continued to use the cause as a vehicle for emancipation . Only in 1857, a year that saw the Supreme Court rule that blacks were not citizens of the United States, did they shift their focus to sending free black Pennsylvanians to Liberia. The fallout from the Dred Scott case affected all sectors of the antislavery movement. In many ways, the worsening racial climate brought new emphasis to the vision of colonization as a means of saving the union. On the one hand, this brand of colonization grew in popularity as northerners who held tightly to the political agenda of the founders of the American Colonization Society joined the strange mix of political abolitionists and blatant racists in forming the Free Soil and Republican parties. On the other hand, it led to sectional division within the movement itself as some members of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society continued to focus on the humanitarian agenda of black education and uplift. A young Quaker emerged to take the lead in this endeavor, creating another bridge between abolition and colonization. For Benjamin Coates, who shared the immediatist view of slavery as a sin and wanted civil rights as much as freedom for blacks, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the ACS collectively offered a reform outlet that he could take part in without facing censure from his orthodox Quaker community . Believing deeply in an uplift agenda that he thought depended equally on both causes, he worked to foster what he saw as a natural figure 8. “Benjamin Coates,” ca. 1834 by John Huston Mifflin. (Haverford College Library, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Fine Arts Collection.) benjamin coates and black uplift / 165 union. His vision is best understood after examining the changes in the colonization movement in the antebellum years, the continued efforts of gradualists to help free blacks prove their equality, and efforts to combine the moral imperatives of Free Produce with the search for alternative sources of cotton, as the nation, and the world, began to anticipate the disruptions of Civil War.1 Throughout most of the antebellum years, the ACS struggled to balance the PCS’s insistence on emancipation with the society’s material needs, which relied on a broad base of support. Ralph Gurley, the secretary of the ACS, continued to reach out to northern supporters, especially those in Pennsylvania and New York. Even as these groups began their cooperative effort at Bassa Cove, he called for unity of all colonizationists based on the principle of benevolence. Success of the endeavor as a whole depended on cooperation. It also depended on state and federal aid, and he and other antislavery colonizationists remained insistent about this, so much so that they began to alienate a number of southern supporters . Though one Virginia man at the twenty-first annual meeting in 1837 ultimately decided not to abandon the society, he expressed regret that he and Henry Clay were the only two southerners at the meeting. He also responded to a resolution in which Gurley called for congressional aid with a dissenting statement defending private property interests. He wanted the society to stick to its original goal of sending away free blacks and not to become abettors of the “fanatical crusaders” who had initiated “warfare upon the institutions and domestic rights of the South.”2 This exchange at the twenty-first meeting serves as a stark reminder of the fine line colonizationists walked in their quest for government aid. For supporters of both stripes, this goal was crucial to the movement’s overall success. Political colonizationists such as Clay and Mathew Carey tried many times to tie their scheme to the federal agenda, and humanitarians such as Gurley and Elliott Cresson also shared the hope of government support. Outraged by a Spanish attack on a colonial schooner off the coast of Africa in June 1831, Cresson called for President Andrew Jackson to take active measures to protect both the colony and the African trade. He even took the liberty of meeting with the President and came away furious that colonizationists closer to Old Hickory had allowed him “to remain so wretchedly ignorant of the true condition...