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  • Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek
  • Joanne Pope Melish
Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania. By Beverly C. Tomek (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. xxiii plus 296 pp. $39.00).

The antebellum movement to colonize ex-slaves in Africa is surely the poster child for what might be termed organizational multiple personality disorder. Colonization was a northern-led antislavery movement to encourage southerners to emancipate their slaves. No, it was a missionary movement to Christianize Africa. Balderdash! It was a pro-slavery movement led by southerners whose goal was to siphon off dangerous free blacks to secure slavery. Nonsense! Its purpose was to create a homogeneous white republic by expelling all African-descended people from the United States. This is a conflicted history, to say the least.

Now comes Beverly C. Tomek, looking narrowly at one state but broadly across its spectrum of reform efforts, to argue that “colonization, at least in Pennsylvania, was undoubtedly an antislavery movement, and it remained a key part of the antislavery landscape throughout the nineteenth century” (1). In Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania, Tomek supports this argument by tracing the historical connections among the most significant organizations supporting antislavery and showing how their memberships, and thus implicitly their agendas, continued to overlap throughout the antebellum period. She also artfully disaggregates and recombines antislavery efforts under two overlapping categories, political and humanitarian, arguing that seemingly contradictory impulses can be understood as complementary when viewed from one or another of these perspectives.

Tomek traces the interconnections among five constituencies, of which three were organized into formal societies: the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), advocates of gradual emancipation and black uplift; the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), immediatists or “modern” abolitionists; Whig reformers, who opposed slavery because it impeded American political and economic progress; the Pennsylvania Colonization Society (PCS), formed by disillusioned PAS members and political antislavery Whigs, with eventual support from some PASS members as well; and black reformers, committed to uplift and sometimes to emigration as antislavery strategies. Tomek argues that all three formally organized societies were motivated by antislavery, but she defines the efforts of PAS and PASS as humanitarian, in distinction to the “selfish, even racist” exclusionary agenda of the political/economic reformers (4). The PCS encompassed elements of each.

In the first two chapters, Tomek traces the origins of Pennsylvania antislavery in Anthony Benezet’s early and short-lived abolition society, revived as the [End Page 539] gradualist and paternalistic PAS. Resettlement ideas had been percolating in Pennsylvania since before the Revolution, and the fourteenth American Abolition Convention in Philadelphia in 1816 memorialized Congress to set aside land for free black colonization. But after the ACS was established and Pennsylvania’s grass roots black community emphatically rejected colonization, the Abolition Convention retreated, tentatively rejecting colonization by 1820. In the next few years, however, the ACS worked to exploit border-state fears of a growing black immigrant population and humanitarian ideals of fostering manumission and black uplift; in 1826 the PCS was officially formed, motivated by a mixture of humanitarianism and self-interest.

Each of the next five chapters is a case study of an individual who epitomizes one of the strains of thought that animated colonization (or emigration—Tomek generally preserves Floyd J. Miller’s distinction between colonization as white-led and emigration as black-led movements.1) Mathew Carey represents the political, self-interested side of colonization that advocated the end of slavery and the removal of blacks as necessary steps in the development of a strong, unified national economy and a homogeneous citizenry. Elliott Cresson reflected the thinking of former or current PAS members, many of them Quakers, who came to believe that colonization was necessary to end slavery and enable former slaves to achieve moral uplift, demonstrate their equality, and fulfill “a special divine mission to spread republican government, Protestant religion, and the English language to the ‘dark continent …’” (105). Cresson focused the attention of the PCS on sending newly emancipated slaves rather than free blacks to Liberia.

In the 1840s, Benjamin Coates, another...

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