CLASSROOM
Decoding the Colonization Movement's Rhetoric
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in late December 1816 and early January 1817 in a series of meetings in Washington, the second of which was held in the chamber of the House of Representatives. These gatherings were all, technically speaking, private, not private in the sense that they were secret or exclusive but in the sense that they were not occasions for official government business. However, the line between private business and government business was a blurry one. Henry Clay, the current Speaker of the House, presided over all three sessions. Many of those who spoke during these meetings or who helped build the ACS during its early years held significant positions in the federal government’s legislative branch or judicial branch. From the former, the roster included Clay and Virginia Congressmen John Randolph and Charles Fenton Mercer. From the latter, there was Clerk of the Supreme Court Elias Caldwell, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, the organization’s first president. The blurriness between private and public would, in fact, be a defining feature of the ACS over its many decades of operation. One of the organization’s core objectives was to obtain federal sponsorship and funds for a system that would expatriate “the free people of color of the United States.”
If one considers the various statements made during the ACS’s founding meetings, in aggregate, it is hard not to detect elements of internal disagreement, perhaps even confusion. Congressman John Randolph, for instance, made two claims that seemed, on the surface, to pull in opposite directions. He declared that the ACS’s separatist plan would encourage “thousands” of slaveholders to emancipate “their slaves” and would “tend to secure the property of every master in the United States over his slaves.” What kind of organization looked to reduce the size of the enslaved population and, at the same time, make it easier and safer to hold Black Americans in bondage? Furthermore, how did the ACS plan to produce this dual effect? Of further complication, Speaker of the House Henry Clay declared that “it constituted no part of the object of this meeting to touch or agitate, in the slightest degree, a delicate question connected with . . . [the enslaved] population of our country.” The ACS would deal only with free Black Americans, he insisted. Debates regarding “emancipation” or the broader subject of “abolition” were out of bounds. “It was upon that condition alone . . . that many gentlemen from the south and the west” had chosen to attend. And, it was on the same basis, he declared, that he had agreed to participate. How does one reconcile all of this rhetoric?
American Colonization Society A View of Exertions Lately Made for the Purpose of Colonizing the Free People of Colour 1817
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