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

8. “Maybe the Devil has got to come out of these people before we will have peace”: Assessing the Successes and Failures of Pennsylvania’s Competing Antislavery Agendas

8 / “Maybe the Devil has got to come out of these people before we will have peace”: Assessing the Successes and Failures of Pennsylvania’s Competing Antislavery Agendas According to a July 4 sermon delivered by William Henry Ruffner in 1852, Liberia had given blacks a place to succeed, free of racial prejudice , where their talent and merit were indeed recognized. Thanks to the progress of black Americans who were now succeeding in Liberia, “whole nebulae of phrenological speculations and scientific infidelities have thus been dissipated; and there, star-like, shines out the negro intellect , clear and bright.” Black achievement was making it harder and harder for whites to justify slavery. At the same time, the outlet Liberia provided had encouraged many manumissions. Indeed, the years between 1841 and 1860 saw over twice as many American Colonization Society manumissions as had occurred between 1820 and 1840.1 From this assessment, the colonization society could be credited with helping both slaves and free blacks in the United States. Whether white Americans were any more willing to accept black equality in the 1850s than they had been in the 1820s was up for debate, though evidence such as the Dred Scott decision shows that it was highly unlikely. Sending conditionally freed settlers, however, had allowed philanthropists in the movement to convince themselves that they were contributing to the fight against human bondage. The specific-case tactic of telling donors exactly whom they helped free also carried a tremendous human -interest appeal. Whether the ACS or the Pennsylvania Colonization Society realized it, however, focusing on the enslaved had another important function. It allowed them to obtain colonists from the most figure 10. “A Printing Press Demolished,” from the Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1839. (Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) assessing competing antislavery agendas / 221 likely source—those who had little choice. Thus the society could at least appear to thrive in the absence of voluntary free black emigrants, and colonizationists could keep telling themselves and others that their cause was successful. But was it? As Eric Burin has shown, the efforts of the PCS and the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania did foster manumission. By 1854 the group had helped send nearly five hundred blacks from other states to Liberia. Most of these were from the South and had been slaves before emigrating. Some of these bondspersons had been purchased by the PCS so they could go to Liberia with their families. Indeed, at this point, Pennsylvania colonizationists had funded the emigration of many more slaves than it had free blacks from Pennsylvania. Many had been owned by North Carolina Quakers who kept them in a state of semifreedom. Their situation was much milder than that most slaves faced, yet they were still owned legally as property. These Quakers faced the same situation that many others had throughout the years. In fact, many slave owners had been in touch with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society over the years, hoping the gradualists would help them find safe and legal ways to free slaves they no longer wanted to keep in bondage but could not legally free. The North Carolina group came into contact with the PCS primarily through Elliott Cresson, and, as we saw, much of his work with the PCS was for the benefit of Quaker-owned North Carolina slaves.2 The antislavery work of the PCS, though minuscule in terms of the actual number of people freed, was “symbolically important, rhetorically valuable, and psychologically comforting.”3 The PCS’s change in focus from slaves to free blacks, however, changed the movement. Most obviously, it removed emancipation from the equation and essentially allowed Mathew Carey’s vision of colonization to triumph over Cresson’s. The focus on free emigrants also lent credence to the claim, made by immediatists, that the ACS supported compulsory removal. The evidence, however, does not clearly support this assertion. Free blacks, abolitionists, and some historians have repeatedly accused the colonizationists of wanting to forcefully remove free blacks all along, but the Pennsylvania group had been so busy focusing on manumission that this was not likely the case, especially in the early years. Nevertheless , James Forten and William Lloyd Garrison made this argument on several occasions and often managed to use it to win over former supporters of the ACS.4 Though abolitionists exaggerated the point, perhaps the idea of forced removal was not so far-fetched...