CLASSROOM
Rise of Lower Southern Opposition
During the mid- to late 1820s, ACS leaders noted, with a mix of concern and frustration, that opposition to their cause was building in the South, especially the Lower South. They had expected this, to some degree, given that they were trying to involve the federal government in a project that sought, even if only indirectly, as they insisted, to facilitate the gradual abolition of slavery. Such an endeavor was bound to attract states’-rights criticisms. And indeed it had. As an 1825 article in the African Repository observed, the ACS, since its founding, had been denounced not just by Northerners for being too “cold and inefficient” on the issue of slavery but also by Southerners for being “too rash and daring.” To counter this emergent Southern opposition, society leaders had, for years, used the strategy of proclaiming, as Clay had during the ACS’s founding sessions, their absolute respect for constitutional limits and states’-rights—a formal resolution passed at the society’s 1826 annual meeting declared, “The Society disclaims, in the most unqualified terms, the designs attributed to it, of interfering . . . with the legal rights and obligations of slavery.” What ACS leaders discovered, however, was that the second of the two tactical adjustments that they had made in order to recruit Northerners into the fold, clarifying and emphasizing the colonization movement’s emancipatory aims, was causing growing numbers of Southerners to protest the society’s political efforts and to accuse it of foul play.
High-profile meetings held by the ACS in 1827 and 1828 in Washington caused a significant inflection in this building Southern opposition. These two sessions, both held in January just after Congress reconvened, were significant affairs in national politics. Both were held, with congressional permission, in the Hall of the House of Representatives. And both were presided over by Secretary of State Henry Clay—he had assumed this office in 1825, when John Quincy Adams, also a National Republican, had become the new president. Nearly all of the official delegates announced at the two meetings were current members of Congress, including many from the North. At the 1828 meeting, Clay shared the chairperson role with Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush, a Pennsylvanian who was, like Clay, a vice president of the ACS. The latter session, in particular, was so well attended, according to the report given in the African Repository, that attendees occupied every seat in the chamber, stood in the aisles, and spilled over into the gallery above. The purpose of both sessions was to publicize the society’s decision to push hard, once again, for federal support.
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