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9 The Quaker and the Colonist: Moses Sheppard, Samuel Ford McGill, and Transatlantic Antislavery acr
- University of Illinois Press
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9 The Quaker and the Colonist Moses Sheppard, Samuel Ford McGill, and Transatlantic Antislavery across the Color Line Andrew Diemer in February 1849, in a letter to a man named Samuel McGill, a Baltimore Quaker named Moses Sheppard shared his thoughts concerning slavery, the law, and individual conscience. Sheppard asserted his belief in the validity of the law of slavery, provided that an individual may be allowed to keep himself free of the institution. A man must not be forced to own a slave, nor should he be compelled to “arrest fugitive slaves,” but he insisted that one may not “annul a law that he dislikes,” which would produce a state of chaos.1 Sheppard was personally opposed to slavery, yet like many who felt as he did, especially those who lived in the Upper South, he maintained that respect for the law and the Constitution was paramount; violation of either would produce worse evil than even slavery itself. A few months later, McGill responded to this contention with a stern rebuke. He challenged the very notion that a man could be legally enslaved. Let the slave determine the question, he is a living, sentient, immortal being, and would proclaim that those do him an injustice who debar him from his freedom. It is only by force that he is held, by blows that he is forced to unrequited toil. . . . Upon finding and establishing our claim to stolen property, it is restored to us, in this case is the true owner bound to indemnify him who is dispossessed, even although he had purchased it of the thief?2 Such disagreements were not uncommon in these years. What makes this particular exchange more interesting than many others like it is that McGill was a black emigrant to Liberia while Moses Sheppard was a white colonizationist. The American Colonization Society (ACS) had been founded in 1816 by a coalition of northern reformers and southern slaveholders. Its stated goal was to establish a colony in Africa that was to be populated by American free blacks. The ACS would also help to promote the growth of that colony by assisting free blacks who consented to become colonists. Many of its northern supporters (and some of its southern supporters as well) hoped that these 136 andrew diemer efforts would help make possible the gradual end of slavery in the United States. All of the supporters of the ACS agreed, however, that nothing should be done to forcibly emancipate the enslaved. The property rights of slave owners were to be respected.3 The majority of northern free blacks vigorously opposed the ACS and African colonization, denouncing it as a proslavery plot to remove American free blacks from the land of their birth.4 HistorianshavehadwidelydivergentunderstandingsoftheAfricancolonization movement. For much of the twentieth century, colonization was deemed “quixotic,” though even its detractors in general considered it a mild form of antislavery. In the late 1960s, however, historians, especially those who began to take the words and actions of free blacks more seriously, helped to advance the argument that the ACS was a functionally proslavery organization.5 More recently, some historians have made the case that the antislavery claims of the colonization movement need to be reconsidered. In an influential essay, the historian William Freehling argued that colonization posed a genuine threat to slavery. It was possible, he insisted, that colonization could indeed have served as a part of a larger political effort to extinguish slavery in the Border South, which in turn would have threatened the institution in the Lower South. The fear that a Republican president might promote just such a course of events was a crucial factor on the road to the secession crisis.6 Other historians, often looking at local- or state-level colonization societies, have argued that whatever the intentions of their white supporters, such organizations were used by enslaved and free African Americans as a means of promoting emancipation.7 In weighing these conflicting assessments of colonization, it is important to consider both the local-level negotiations over emancipation and colonization as well as the role of colonization in the larger, political struggle over slavery. It is clear that colonization could be used for antislavery ends, but this possibility does not prove that colonization was, on balance, antislavery. Even the most vehement immediate abolitionists recognized that in certain instances, African colonization could lead to the emancipation of the enslaved . These instances, however, needed to be weighed against the larger claims of abolitionists that colonization...