Ebony and Ivy (41 page)

The organizational meeting in Princeton was telling. Captain Stockton opened the gathering with a lengthy examination of the history and accomplishments of the colonization campaign. He emphasized Robert Finley's original aims: the evangelization of Africa, the end of the slave trade, and, perhaps, laying a path for gradual emancipation. However, in a transition that captured the conflict at the heart of the organization, James S. Green followed with a rant against free black people: “What a mass of ignorance, misery and depravity, is here mingled with every portion of our population, and threatening the whole with a moral and political pestilence,” he bitterly roared. “This enormous mass of revolting wretchedness and deadly pollution will, it is believed, be ultimately taken out of her territory, if the plan of the Colonization Society be adopted.” Green insisted that white people could never be safe so long as black people shared their nation. “The slave is a mere animal” and free black people were “really but little better.” Colored people lacked merit and character, Green added, and the nation would spiral into race war if black freedom was not tied to expatriation. The possibility of failure was unacceptable:

I seriously doubt, whether there is one white father or mother in New-Jersey, who would be willing, that a son or daughter should contract marriage with the best educated negro, male or female, that now exists. And what do you think, Sir, of a black Governor, a black Chief Justice, a black member of Congress, a black member of the Legislature, a black Justice of the Peace, or even a black Lawyer.
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The intellectual cultures of the United States contained little space for the possibility of a heterogeneous society. Theodore Frelinghuysen worried that the history of white injustice toward black people created a cleavage that could never be bridged, and reconciliation, even if possible, remained offensive: it was irresponsible to let loose a “licentious, ignorant, and irritated” population upon white southern communities, which would be the equivalent of asking the white South, “after unsheathing the sword, to place it in the grasp of rapine and murder.” When Senator Frelinghuysen authored the ACS response to the declarations of the New York and American Anti-Slavery Societies, he subordinated the humanitarian objectives of colonization to a full assault on free black people. The senator drew the biological boundaries of democracy. “They are a depressed and separate race,” he began, “excluded from the privileges of freemen.” Frelinghuysen believed that oppression fed a desire for vengeance, and, therefore, black people could be redeemed only through relocation. Justice required that they be uprooted.
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As a student, minister, professor, and politician, Edward Everett viewed the world through a racial prism that narrowed throughout his lifetime. At twenty-five years of age he had traveled in Europe, where he befriended the race scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and other scholars, and studied the ruins of the Mediterranean. “In my last letter, I mentioned the practice of depositing the ashes of slaves & freedmen in the Columbaria,” Everett wrote to Harvard president John Thornton Kirkland. “These were large tombs of twenty or thirty feet height, length, and breadth.” An undergraduate, William Lincoln, found that Professor Everett was fascinated with Africa, especially the regions “where the cradle of the human race was placed by tradition.” Lincoln's winter 1821 class included a series of lectures on Ethiopia—”one of the abodes of the human race & of primordial innocence”—and Egypt. However, the imagined divisions between people became more fixed and less permeable with time. Race emboldened Everett to celebrate the conquest and Christianization of nonwhite peoples, and it also allowed him to treat Africa and Africans as mere instruments of white civilization. “No, no, Anglo-Saxon, this is no part
of your vocation,” Everett came to believe; only black people could Christianize Africa. Blackness, like geography, was a divine limitation.

Sir you cannot civilize Africa,—you Caucasian—you proud white man—you all-boasting, all-daring, Anglo-Saxon, you cannot do this work. You have subjugated Europe; the native races of this country are melting before you as the untimely snows of April beneath a vernal sun, you have possessed yourselves of India, you threaten China and Japan; the farthest isles of the Pacific are not distant enough to escape your grasp, or insignificant enough to elude your notice: but this great Central Africa lies at your doors and defies your power.
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The American Colonization Society's control of the campus has received little attention, but in an era when barely 1 percent of the population had a college education, this relationship heightened its prestige and influence. By the 1830s colonizationists were active on three-fifths of the approximately sixty colleges operating in the free states. The organization operated on at least three-quarters of the campuses in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. The ACS had an even tighter grip on the old northeastern schools. For example, seven of the eight institutions in the Ivy League—an athletic conference established in the early twentieth century—had been founded by this period. Each was a stronghold of the movement, and Yale and New Jersey largely furnished its leadership. Colonizationists headed every college in New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Joseph Caldwell, president of the University of North Carolina, brought his institution into the cause. Colonizationists led several schools in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky, the birthplaces of many of the black émigrés to Liberia, and had strongholds in Ohio. Officers and faculty promoted removal, officiated at ACS
meetings, and donated and raised funds for relocation. They also refined the intellectual and political arguments against abolition.
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American scholars' ability to articulate the racial limits of the society provided a path to influence. Academics formed an important and boisterous lobby against abolitionism. In 1826 Williams students established an antislavery society to host public debates, sponsor Fourth of July lectures, and encourage emancipation. Williams had housed an earlier antislavery association: a campus society appeared among the supporters of an 1809 petition to Congress. However, President Edward Dorr Griffin soon had students donating to the American Colonization Society. The ACS agent John Danforth carried off a collection from the Congregational parish in Williamstown and an endorsement from the president. Danforth reported to his Washington headquarters that one of the undergraduate classes had even rewarded its instructor with a life membership in the ACS.
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Rev. Danforth continued on to the commencement exercises at Amherst College, where President Heman Humphrey, “a warm friend to the cause,” addressed the inaugural gathering of a county colonization society. President of that auxiliary, Rev. Humphrey was also a leader of the state colonization association. “On questions relating to slavery, he has always been regarded as conservative,” an Amherst historian concludes. In 1833 a small group of faculty began a campus colonization society.
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This was no innocent exchange of ideas. The Reverend Ralph Randolph Gurley, Yale class of 1818 and the principal agent of the American Colonization Society, chose colleges as a battlefield in the war to defeat “our enemies—the abolitionists.” The leadership collected intelligence on student activism, deployed professors and administrators to promote colonization, and empowered ACS agents to police antislavery organizations. Colonizationists positioned their movement as the socially responsible alternative to abolition. The officers and agents described abolition as the antithesis of colonization, and attacked abolitionists as dangerous advocates of a multiracial future. Moreover, the inner circle of the national organization responded to its financial mismanagement
and the struggles of the Liberia colony by seeking public confrontations with American abolitionists.
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Rev. Gurley had reason to be concerned. Students and faculty often rejected the ACS despite its influence and its appeals to social order. At Western Reserve College in Ohio, President Charles B. Storrs and Professor Elizur Wright Jr. led a series of debates on slavery that concluded with a decision to affiliate the campus with the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Western Reserve's faculty explained that they “now feel, and feel very deeply too, that they had been blinded by a strange prejudice, which had the effect of infatuation on their minds.” President Beriah Green established an abolitionist outpost at the radical Oneida Institute in New York State. Students and faculty at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati toppled their ACS auxiliary after a two-week community debate; the Lane campus judged colonization to be unchristian.

Colonizationists in Ohio promised the ACS headquarters that the greater population opposed emancipation, and that Western Reserve's abolitionists were “women and children, and students.” The abolitionist Arnold Buffum saw matters quite differently. That same summer he noted of Amherst: “There are between two and three hundred fine young men, who when they have finished their collegiate studies, will be scattered over the country, exercising a powerful influence in the community, as well as in the various learned professions.”
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An undergraduate at a New England college agreed that students were an emerging political power. “If they grow up as did the last generation with all their prejudices and blindness, slavery will never be abolished,” he warned. In contrast, an editorialist for
Western Monthly Magazine
called on faculties to end the debate of slavery. Colleges belonged to the public, and nothing abrasive to the public harmony or divisive in civil affairs could be tolerated in the curriculum or the culture of a student body, he insisted. The formation of campus antislavery societies insulted the intentions of those who donated money to support education, this writer continued. In his opinion, the ACS was different: its message was appropriate for students, while abolitionism was a sinister institutional
plot, “which would have been creditable to the ingenuity of a college of Jesuits.”
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At Amherst the faculty was “suspicious of the new [abolitionist] movement” and favored colonization. A student in the class of 1830 reported that his professors “disliked negro servitude” but preferred to solve it through a mass removal or “a gradual process of education.” When the professors organized a colonization chapter, several undergraduates began exploring abolitionism. Three students traveled to Boston to hear Elizur Wright Jr. debate Robert S. Finley. Wright's argument pulled them to the principle of immediate emancipation. They returned to campus to organize an auxiliary of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. They also committed to raising funds to support a school for colored youth and to providing instruction to black communities in their area.
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The struggle for Amherst intensified. In 1833 President Humphrey barred the abolitionist Arnold Buffum from the campus. The Amherst faculty eventually permitted Buffum to speak on the condition that he not criticize colonization. The following year the officers attempted to end all discussions of slavery. The abolitionist students continued meeting. To avoid a controversy over destroying the student organization, the faculty imposed rules that ensured its slow death: the student organization could continue as long as it met no more than once a month, did not solicit members, held no public discussions, and corresponded with no newspapers or other public outlets.
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As it had in the South, the sectional crisis made the question of slavery politically sensitive on northern campuses; as they had in the South, college officers responded by silencing the discussion of human bondage. A firestorm erupted when the public learned of a clandestine antislavery society at Hanover College in Indiana. “If you wish to break up your institution,” promised the delighted editor of the
Philanthropist
, “pass oppressive laws.” In the spring of 1836 the student organization had begun meeting in a college that bordered a slave state and attracted students from slaveholding regions. The school's trustees quickly calmed the public outrage by declaring the antislavery association incompatible with the culture of the school and asserting that it was opposed by “at least
nine-tenths of the students connected with the institution.” Hanover president James Blythe, himself a slaveholder, insisted that the public affairs of the nation had no place on campus. “They are here taught to
obey
,” he remarked of his students, “that in the future they may be prepared to
command
.”
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Many students rejected Blythe's sociology of learning. Undergraduates at Hamilton College acknowledged that “young men have less of that reverence for old opinions than those in more advanced life.” They replied that they had an obligation to prepare themselves for life “beyond these collegiate walls,” viewed slavery as an appropriate topic for intellectual and moral debate, and saw this moment as an opportunity to engage the larger community. Rather than retreating, they prayed that every campus would begin examining slavery: “It is not well known that should our College and Seminaries become purified on this subject, an influence would go forth so mighty that very soon the hand of oppression would be stayed, and the groans of its victims be exchanged for the rejoicing of freedom.” In the face of restrictions from the faculty, Amherst students claimed a superior status as “disciples of the
compassionate Jesus
” with an obligation to prepare for a future as missionaries and ministers. They then refused to disband a union forged from prayer and collective conscience:

We look again over two millions of our countrymen—we hear the clanking of their chains—we listen to their moving pleas for deliverance—their deep-toned wailings are borne to us on every breeze. … We would gladly comply with your requests, if we
could
do it consistently with the dictates of conscience, and the wants and woes of perishing millions.
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