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

Book Reviews53 accepting patients who were not Quakers, the increasing numbers of chronically ill, mentally retarded or epileptics for whom moral treatment alone was not effective, were operating at other institutions as well. The story D'Antonio tells is not a new one, and the parallels at other institutions are not adequately or effectively acknowledged. Katharine MilarEarlham College Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon, Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848—1880 (University Park, Pennsylvania:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 385. Notes, bibliography, index. $50.00, hardcover. Benjamin Coates (1808-1887) was an Orthodox Quaker and Philadelphia wool merchant who became involved with a panoply ofhumanitarian causes, most notably African colonization. He was also vitally interested in education, serving for a two-year term on the Haverford College Board of Managers and for more than four decades in various roles with the Institute for ColoredYouth, the Quaker-sponsored institution ofhigher education for African-Americans inPhiladelphiathatwas aforerunneroftoday's Cheyney State University. After the Civil War, he was a mainstay of the Friends' Freedmen's Association. This volume combines 150 letters by and to Coates (mostly written from 1848 to 1873, with only a few documents after that date) from a galaxy of Quakers and anti-slavery luminaries, with a thorough and judicious introduction from Lapsansky-Werner and Bacon that serves effectively to highlight the human side of Coates and to warmly invite the reader into a consideration ofCoates' correspondence. The readerfinds out, for example, that one reason that Coates never married was that the love of his life was a Hicksite and that Philadelphia Quakers in the mid-nineteenth century could not tolerate a romance across schismatic lines. When he finally proposed to her after forty years, she is reported to have said that it was too late for marriage. That sadness, however, also paved the way for Coates to channel his considerable energies into numerous humanitarian causes. Three Haverford students. Marc Chalufour, Benjamin B. Miller, and Meenakshi Rajan, were instrumental in providing the copious annotations to the letters found in this volume. One can find informative biographies in the notes, not only ofhis correspondents, but also of anyone mentioned in the body ofthe letters. Thorough indexes are also ofgreat help in using this book. We are indebted to the editors not only for getting this valuable lode of correspondence into print, most of it for the first time, but also for their 54Quaker History making it so accessible to their readers. They are also to be commendedfor contextualizing Coates interms ofhis Quaker background and commitments, and in general for their full and careful examination ofthe man and his work. What little I have discovered thathas beenpreviouslypublished about Coates has treated him exclusively as a humanitarian and colonizationist, with his Quakerism going unmentioned . It is not, however, the case that he has been given the attention due to him, even in treatments of nineteenth-century colonizationism and humanitarianism. One who identified Coates as a neglected figure was the historianArthurM. Schlesinger, Sr., who, in a 1 93 1 review oftheDictionary ofAmerican Biography, deplored those editors' failure to include Coates' biography in that massive, multi-volume work. Whatwere the truths on which Coates was willing to stake his life? Some ofhis strongly held contentions were typical colonizationist positions. For example, he held that black Americans who returned to Africa could introduce civilizationthere; he also believedthatblackAmerican leadership in politics and other key areas ofhuman endeavor would only be possible in majority black societies, not in North American societies where those of African descent seemed guaranteed to remain a minority. He didnot ignore economic considerations. His chiefpublication. Cotton Cultivation in Africa, in 1858, argued that an alternative cotton supply provided by vigorous cultivation in Liberia and elsewhere on the African continent would make southern slavery unfeasible. Liberian cotton cultivation "will be a death blow to slavery in the United States, as it will render not only England but the northern states ofthe Union independent ofour cotton growing states." (70) While his contention was untested prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and subsequent emancipation of slaves in the U.S., Southern cotton...