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

2. “A certain simple grandeur . . . which awakens the benevolent heart”: The American Colonization Society’s Effective Marketing in Pennsylvania

2 / “A certain simple grandeur . . . which awakens the benevolent heart”: The American Colonization Society’s Effective Marketing in Pennsylvania As late as the 1820s the gradualists held the loyalty of most of Pennsylvania ’s humanitarians, but within a decade the colonizationists managed to find their own niche in Pennsylvania abolition. By 1829 the American Colonization Society would develop the perfect marketing scheme to entice a broad range of Pennsylvania’s white citizens into considering its plan. In desperate need of national support, it saw a chance to capitalize on the conflicting emotions in this border state, which celebrated its antislavery heritage even as it grappled with the tensions created by a growing black immigrant population. Playing on the fears of most whites of the increasing free black community but also reaching out to free blacks, Pennsylvania Abolition Society members, and other humanitarians by continuing to stress colonization’s possible use as a vehicle toward emancipation, ACS leaders found a way to reach both friends and enemies of the state’s black population. By 1830 their work paid off, and the Pennsylvania Colonization Society became a strong force in the nation’s antislavery movement. The PAS decision to try to help free blacks fit into white American society reflected a belief that humankind had potential for improvement. This attitude was quite common in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it comported well with the state’s reform legacy. Efforts to perfect society by suppressing vice, reforming the prisons, training the poor, and offering assistance to the indigent were all movements that appealed to Quakers and abolitionists. Perhaps the most optimistic figure 4. “A view of Bassa Cove (in Liberia).” Philadelphia: Lehman & Duval Lithographers, ca. 1836. (Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) american colonization society’s effective marketing / 45 crusade—the use of prisons to reform rather than merely punish—began early in the colony’s history when founder William Penn sought to introduce hard labor as a substitute for capital punishment. Benjamin Rush pursued this effort in the late 1780s, arguing that the government had no right to take life, even as punishment. By the 1830s, Pennsylvania prisons relied on a combination of solitary confinement and hard labor to teach inmates the error of their ways. This went hand in hand with Pennsylvania reformers’ efforts at educating and controlling the poor of both races. Philadelphia’s House of Refuge played an important role in this effort. Funded by state aid, money from the county, subscriptions from the public, “legacies of the benevolent,” and “the labour of the inmates ,” this organization sought “the employment of the idle, instruction of the ignorant, reformation of the depraved—a general diffusion of good morals, enlargement of virtuous society, and the protection of life and property.”1 This reform spirit and the organizations it spawned spread throughout not just Pennsylvania but the rest of the United States and England as well. Most historians see it as part of a larger evangelical movement. Following the Great Awakening many Americans began to actively try to make the world a better place, and one of the main vehicles was the voluntary association. These groups were staffed by a new professional class of secretaries, media propagandists, and traveling agents, and the state auxiliary played an important part in their efforts to spread their various messages throughout the nation. Religious groups, such as Bible and Sunday school societies and missionary associations, were some of the first to employ these new energetic reform tactics. Their goal was to help usher in the millennium, a time of reformation in which humanity would accept God’s moral agenda and forgo vices such as greed, violence , all forms of crime and dishonesty, and, by extension, slavery. Of course, this reform agenda was always permeated by fear of, and a desire to control, the lower orders.2 Pennsylvania reformers had faith in this agenda and tried to fit abolition into it, but some began to question this effort once the state’s black population grew beyond reformers’ ability to control it. The problem actually stemmed from a growing number of poor newcomers in general, but though the number of white immigrants far outweighed the number of blacks, and both groups shared the vices that alarmed middle-class onlookers, the blacks drew more attention. Because most whites, including abolitionists and government officials, had seen a small black population as desirable all along, black...