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

Epilogue

Epilogue What does this story tell us about the relation between antislavery and the end of human bondage? It would seem logical on a superficial glance to assume that the fiery rhetoric of men such as William Lloyd Garrison led to the dissolution of the Union. After all, Garrisonians had been calling for “no union with slaveholders” for decades by the time the war broke out. Because of their more vocal and dramatic tactics, as both Richard Newman and Julie Roy Jeffrey have shown, immediatists did, after all, win the battle for historical memory. Indeed, when most nonhistorians think about abolition, they picture Garrison. The immediatists truly did win the battle for historical memory and the right to the title “abolitionist.” They were the ones brave enough to see a better social order and to fight for it, even when such a fight clearly put their very lives in danger. Importantly, however, as James Oakes showed by examining the life of Garrisonian-turned-political-abolitionist Frederick Douglass, these “radical abolitionists” played a smaller role than their historiographical presence would indicate because they refused to participate in the political drama that unfolded as the country expanded westward and leaders fought continually over the status of new territories. Instead, their type of antislavery and unqualified civil rights remained in the social arena of moral suasion. Those who were the most influential in the long run were the ones who were adaptable to both social and political tactics and willing to explore a number of different antislavery avenues. Many of these were figure 11. “Freedom to the Slave.” Philadelphia: Philadelphia Supervisory Committee, 1863. (Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) epilogue / 241 African Americans. Though exclusionary antislavery made it to the forefront of the overall movement through the political arena in the 1840s and 1850s, black Americans were able to reshape the movement after the Civil War broke out and push, once and for all, for an immediate and unconditional end to slavery.1 What finally became worth fighting for, to the majority of white Americans, was the need to control the black population, not through colonization but through restricting their entrance into the new territories of the west. It was concern for white self-interest that reached the broader public, and the antislavery appeal that resulted gained support not through the American Colonization Society but through the Free Soil and Republican parties. What it shared with colonization was the political agenda pushed by Mathew Carey and Henry Clay, which focused first and foremost on protecting white society and white freedom. As Matthew Mason has shown in his assessment of politics in the Early Republic, the debates over slavery did not quiet after the American Revolution but instead figured prominently in the years during and after the War of 1812. During this time “a sectionalist, political brand of antislavery was becoming an integral part of Northern sectional identity.” Even so, although “almost every Northerner” disliked slavery, “they saw no need to convert opinion to organized action unless the evil they deplored somehow affected them.” The first time it did clearly affect them was during Jefferson’s presidency, when they became convinced that “slave representation” gave slaveholders a political advantage. At issue was the Three Fifths Clause in the Constitution, which allowed slave states to count their bound laborers as three-fifths of a person for purposes of determining the number of representatives the state would be allowed in the House of Representatives. Northern Federalists were able to point to this clause as evidence that slavery threatened the rights of white citizens even in free states. Mason ties the resentment that grew over this idea to the rise of the first secession threat at the Hartford Convention. Like political colonizationists, northern whites of all stripes, benevolent or merely selfish, could relate to this antislavery sentiment because it was born of what they perceived as their own disenfranchisement.2 In addition to this purely self-interested strain of antislavery, however, there was another that would have resonated with abolitionists, especially in border states such as New York and Pennsylvania. As we saw in the early chapters of this book, Quakers and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society hoped to distance themselves from the national sin of slavery, but, as Mason shows, the presence of slave dealers and kidnappers 242 / epilogue in their states made this quite difficult, and the situation made them choose...