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n the early winter of 1821, a small group of Richmond free blacks gathered in the parlor of William Crane, a white shoe merchant and Baptist, to organize themselves as the Providence Baptist Church. The families of Lott Cary, Colin Teage, and the elderly Joseph Langford were about to embark for Liberia on the Nautilus, the second ship to the very new settlement founded by the American Colonization Society (acs) on the western coast of Africa. As founding members of the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society, Cary, Teage, and Crane were aware of earlier missionary enterprises and colonizing plans for Africa. Richmond and Petersburg Baptists had sent donations to Baptist missions in the British colony of Sierra Leone and to the black Massachusetts Quaker and African colonizationist, Paul Cuffe.1 According to Crane, “Some letters published in No. VI of the [Latter Day] Luminary (written by Kizell, the Baptist leader in Sherbro Island and by some others) have served to awaken them effectually .”2 The Baptist leader writing in the publication of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions was John Kizell, once enslaved in South Carolina, who had made his way with the British forces to England and then migrated to Sierra Leone, where he became a merchant and participant in the Friendly Society founded by Paul Cuffe. The promotion of African colonization by such black men carried authority with Cary and Teage. Now the Richmond African Missionary Society awaited news from Nathaniel Brander, a Petersburg free black, who had gone to the settlement on the first ship, the Elizabeth. Reliance on assessments of West Africa by fellow African Americans was to be a characteristic of free black I Ho, All Ye That Are by the Pale-Faces’ Laws Oppressed Out of Virginia Four emigrants in Virginia, and Brander’s positive account motivated his father and two brothers to join the Richmond Baptists on the Nautilus.3 Despite an early and active role in emigration to Liberia, Richmond free blacks were as cautious as those in other cities. Shortly after the formation of the acs, a meeting of Richmond free blacks saw some merit in the scheme but emphasized that “we prefer being colonized in the most remote corner of the land of our nativity, to being exiled to a foreign country .” Free blacks meeting in Washington, D.C., also suggested a site within American possessions but were more concerned that the scheme was coercive . By far the largest meeting was held in Philadelphia, at which free blacks expressed fear that emigration would become forced deportation and proclaimed it their duty to remain in the United States as long as blacks were enslaved.4 Yet African colonization was initially attractive to an important and visible segment of urban Virginia free blacks because it was presented to them through missionary societies in which they had some decision-making power. The formation of the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society in 1815 preceded by three years the formation of a similar society within the recently established Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg. The Richmond Society existed within a predominantly white Baptist Church; Gillfield was predominantly black. Both societies consisted primarily of free blacks for whom African missions had the dual appeal of spreading Christianity and connecting with an African homeland. When those societies learned of the acs’s exploratory expedition to western Africa in 1818, the Petersburg church asked the acs to sponsor some of its members as colonists and missionaries . Cary and Teage in Richmond sought to be sent to Africa as missionaries under the auspices of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. The board agreed to sponsor them as missionaries, and their venture was financed primarily by Richmond’s African Baptist Missionary Society which spent almost $700 in outfitting Cary and Teage’s group for emigration to Liberia. That society sent $100 a year or more to Liberia for support of Cary’s enterprise as long as he lived, a very large sum for a small band of free and enslaved blacks.5 The colonizing of West Africa offered an important evangelizing opportunity , but it also offered the prospect of an African settlement where black Americans would exercise political and economic power. In the first decade of emigration, Virginia free blacks held considerable power over whether to emigrate and under what circumstances. After that decade, the “friends of the Negro,” as William Crane called them, lost ground before the proslavery forces in the Virginia General Assembly and the Virginia...

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