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n the winter of 1817, a young woman living near Annapolis wrote a chatty letter, full of gossip from the national capital, to her brother in Liverpool. “There is a glorious scheme in contemplation and indeed going into execution to make a colony of the free blacks in Africa. It originated with Fenton Mercer. . . . It is intended to induce so many as can be persuaded to go voluntarily and join the establishment of Sierra Leone from where it is hoped good accounts will soon attract followers . It will also be a great inducement to slave holders to emancipate . Oh, it is glorious. Our national sun will yet attain its zenith freed from the foul blot which Britain left upon it. It has been the fondest of my dreams since infancy.” In the same letter, Margaret Mercer referred to the new British ambassador, Mr. Bagot, as so “handsome and charming” that he might have been able to avert the American Revolution. The Russian ambassador, however, was a “bear” and a “brute,” and she wished that the Emperor Alexander knew how he treated his poor wife. Miss Mercer was certain, she confided to her brother, that he “carries one of those Russian shilelaghs [cudgels] over his shoulder .”1 Elsewhere, Margaret Mercer sighed over the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots: “If only she had been firm about marrying Bothwell .” And she hoped to be relieved at the backgammon table by visitors to her family home.2 The romantic and perhaps slightly frivolous young woman in these letters became the most prominent woman in the African colonization movement, a woman for whom the national sun would rise in proportion to the numbers of slaves emancipated and colonized. African Americans frequently maintained a certain skepticism about white women’s good intentions, partly expressed in the black folk rhyme: “My old mistress promise me, when she die she set me free. She live so long her head git bald; she give Five My Old Mistress Promise Me I out’n the notion of dyin’ a-tall.”3 In Margaret Mercer’s case, emancipation was accomplished, but it had to be joined to African colonization, a dubious prospect to many of those asked to undertake it. The folk rhyme offers a sharp contrast to the hagiographic biographies published of Mercer and other Virginia colonization women after their deaths. Those slender didactic volumes portray the women as so saintly as to be one-dimensional.4 But their commitment to African colonization was the stuff of real world vexations, frustrations, personal risk, and frequent disappointment. Coming primarily from Virginia gentry families prominent in the American Revolution and from the evangelical movement within the Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches, they were a generation of women who were collectively the most active female advocates of African colonization. Their lives exposed them to public affairs. A sense of Revolutionary heritage —passed on as a prized possession in these Virginia families—kept alive their sense that they had roles to play in the republic.5 This small cohort of educated gentry women saw the pernicious effect of slavery on their families and their society, as much as they saw the injustice and inhumanity of slavery to African Americans. Domestically, that pernicious effect included the moral corruption that human bondage produced in the souls of masters and slaves. It included the habits of tyranny encouraged in their children and the sexual license granted their male relatives. It included their own households, in which they were the frontline troops in confronting indirect and constant slave resistance. It included their fear of slave rebellion and of mulatto progeny. When they considered Virginia and its place in the nation, slavery appeared a fatal corruption of the promises of republicanism and salvation. In its degradation of master and slave, in its inefficiency and recalcitrance, in its thwarting of moral and intellectual improvement, slavery in Virginia was an evil that had to be ended by voluntary and gradual emancipation.6 African colonization appeared to remove the one obstacle—the presence of a large and unassimilated free black class—that prevented greater voluntary emancipations. These Virginia women saw themselves as in the tradition of gradual emancipation. Their emancipation advocacy was not derived from a desire to make slave property more secure or to make Virginia more economically competitive. Their insistence that the black family, enslaved and free, be recognized as inviolate—with gender roles distributed as they were among white families—reflected their belief that encouraging respectability...

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