Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848–1880 (review)

The effort of a young American republic to construct a racially specific national identity by removing blacks—and therefore "blackness"—from the nation remains a lamentable story, but recent historians have tried to understand the multiple and competing meanings given to colonization by both blacks and whites. Such an approach has required a reevaluation of the many leaders of the movement—Robert Finley, Charles Mercer, Paul Cuffe, and Henry Highland Garnet, to name a scattered few. Quaker scholars Emma J. Lapsanky-Werner, professor of history and curator of special collections at Haverford College, and Margaret Hope Bacon, an independent scholar whose latest work includes a biography of Robert Purvis, have added to this list "one of the best-known nineteenth-century white supporters of African colonization": Benjamin Coates, a reformer whose views on slavery grew from his lifelong association with Philadelphia Quakers, the trailblazers of early antislavery (vii). Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848–1880, an edited volume of over a hundred of Coates's letters, "explores the relationship between the abolition of slavery and the establishment of a black colony in West Africa, as seen through the essays and correspondence" of Coates (vii).

Following the editorial standards set forth in Mary-Jo Kline's A Guide to Documentary Editing, Back to Africa attempts to mirror the ever-resourceful Black Abolitionist Papers, by C. Peter Ripley, and John Blassingame's The Frederick Douglass Papers. With the vital aid of three students—Marc Chalufour, Benjamin Miller, and Meenakshi Rajan—the editors "chose to arrange the letters chronologically" and in accordance with three distinct time periods: (1) the antebellum years (1848–1860), (2) the Civil War years (1861–1865), and (3) the postwar years (1866–1888). This layout is much more historically engaging than one organized by subject, for it allows "the reader to develop the clearest picture of how Coates experienced the development of his contemporaries' differing thoughts on the subject of colonization" (xiii). Stated somewhat differently, it shows the historical evolution of the historical subject, something a topical presentation cannot do.

The first and longest section, composed of sixty-four letters, reveals Coates's central interest in the development of Liberia. As leading modern capitalists, the Quakers planted the seeds for Coates's economic and moral argument against slavery. Involved in the textile and wool industries at an early age, Coates became more and more troubled by how the market forces transforming the United States increasingly connected the life of northern industry with southern slavery, a position he undoubtedly came to as a result of being influenced by the more liberal Hicksite Quakers (named after the reformist and staunchly antislavery Quaker Elias Hicks), who split from Orthodox Friends in 1827. Refusing to compromise, Coates criticized fellow Friends for their indirect economic support of southern slavery and tried to find an economic solution to slavery. He recognized that despite its exploitative tendencies, capitalism was the most effective means to end chattel bondage. His widely read Cotton Cultivation in Africa (1858) offered a simple but powerful argument in favor of a competitive alternative to southern slavery: Cotton production in Liberia would make slave labor more expensive, reduce the slave trade among Africans, and strain the South's monopoly on the commodity.

In this way, Coates believed that he was acting as a true abolitionist, for his plan would lead to the eventual collapse of slavery in both North America and Africa. A handful of immediate and radical abolitionist leaders refused to appreciate the value of Coates's pamphlet, especially Frederick Douglass, a "bitter unrelenting enemy" of colonization (Garnet to Coates Letter #56). But some, even Boston's vociferous antislavery advocate William Lloyd Garrison, approved of it. In a private letter written in the same year as Cotton Cultivation, Garrison offered his support to...