A Gendered History of African Colonization in the Antebellum United States

This article marks the first concerted effort to explore the history of gender and the African colonization reform movement during the antebellum era, examining both the actions and discourses of Northern white colonizationists who supported the American Colonization Society (and its auxiliary societies) and of Northern free blacks who opposed colonization or proposed competing plans for black emigration and black nationalism. From its outset, the colonization reform assumed a masculine character, fashioning a reform movement where public politics superseded moral suasion and adopting a gendered discourse that depicted colonizing as a masculine adventure, while also invoking a highly sexualized imagery of Africa and its colonists. Northern free blacks developed their own competing versions of manhood and womanhood within their critiques of white colonization schemes and within their own plans for emigration and national autonomy outside of the boundaries of the United States. The article also exposes the new insights a gendered history of colonization will bring to the history of antebellum abolitionism.