The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (67 page)

26.
Wiley, introduction to
Slaves No More,
4; Shick,
Behold the Promised Land,
29–30, 109; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 220–23; Genser, “Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples.” It should be noted that Blyden was one of the few
Liberian leaders who developed a deep respect for African customs and institutions, which he hoped to preserve. See Hollis R. Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1913
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), chapter 4.

27.
Shick,
Behold the Promised Land,
106–07;
Johnson,
Bitter Canaan,
115–24.

28.
Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, held in Rochester July 6th, 7th and 8th, 1853
(Rochester, N.Y.: Frederick Douglass, 1853), 47–49, 55–56. Pennington claimed that in 1798, an American naval officer had urged the government to colonize America’s free blacks in southern Africa in order to head off Britain’s colonization schemes and encourage white immigration to the United States. When this plan failed, “the Americans then turned their eyes to Western Africa.” For a fascinating account of Pennington’s life, see R. J. M. Blackett,
Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 1–84.

29.
Johnson,
Bitter Canaan,
73, 81, 89–90, 129–31; Shick,
Behold the Promised Land,
66–72, 113; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 227; Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 159.

30.
Shick,
Behold the Promised Land,
65–72, 96, 98–100; Johnson,
Bitter Canaan,
5–9, 72–73, 79–81, 89, 130–40, 175–97, 223–26. In 1930 it would have been difficult to find a more reliable and perceptive investigator than Charles S. Johnson, who was chosen by President Herbert Hoover as America’s representative on the
League of Nations Commission. After doing graduate work in sociology with
Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, Johnson had become director of research and investigations at the
National Urban League and editor of the League’s publication,
Opportunity.
He belonged to the small group of black intellectuals, including
James Weldon Johnson,
Alain L. Locke, and
Arthur A. Schomburg, who nurtured and publicized the Harlem Renaissance. Before embarking on his seven-month tour of Liberia, Johnson visited the
International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London and conferred with
Bronislaw Malinowski and other anthropologists. It was Johnson who wrote the International Commission’s lengthy report, which led to the resignation of Liberia’s president King and vice president
Allen Yancy. Although he began drafting
Bitter Canaan
in 1930, Johnson soon became distracted by other duties and responsibilities, culminating with the presidency of Fisk University. By 1945, when Johnson finally submitted the manuscript for publication, it had become apparent that a devastating critique of Liberian history and society might be detrimental to the emerging nationalist independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean. Although various motives dissuaded Johnson from publishing what he considered to be his best work, the views of
Eric Williams,
Charles Thompson, and
Claude Barnett, all of whom read the manuscript, were probably decisive. The sociologist
John Stanfield deserves much credit for finally making available this brilliantly written account of Liberian society.

31.
Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 229–34; Johnson,
Bitter Canaan,
5–9, 90–91, 135, 138–40, 175–97; Ibrahim K. Sundiata,
Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1929–1936
(Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), passim; Sundiata, “The Black Planters: African Environment and Ecology in the Bight of Biafra in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930,” part 3. (I am much indebted to Professor Sundiata for sending me a copy of this manuscript.)
British naval patrols had used
Fernando Po,
in the Bight of Biafra, as a base for intercepting slave ships. Some of the recaptives and their descendants became successful cocoa planters.

32.
Shick,
Behold the Promised Land,
26–27, 50; Shick, “Quantitative Analysis of Liberian Colonization,” 45–59; Wiley,
Slaves No More,
311n2. Wiley calculates a total by 1866 of 13,136 immigrants sent under the auspices of the ACS and the Maryland State Colonization Society. This number was augmented by 5,722 “repatriated” African captives who were freed by the United States Navy and taken to Liberia; 4,701 of these recaptured Africans landed in Liberia in a single year, 1860. The ACS also listed 346 immigrants from Barbados, and 9 from Indian Territory. Shick,
Behold the Promised Land,
68, table 16; ACS,
Fifteenth Annual Report
(Washington, D.C.: James C. Dunn, 1867), 95.

33.
Despite the official goal of assimilation, only a few hundred Africans, together with two or three favored tribes, had become Liberian citizens after the first twenty years of settlement. In 1884, tribal delegates were given the right to speak in the legislature on matters concerning their respective tribes, but this reform provided natives with little power. It was not until the administration of President
William V. S. Tubman (1944–71) that the government adopted a serious “Unification Policy.” Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 171, 172; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 228, 234–35. African resentment toward the continuing dominance of the small minority of Americo-Liberians (no more than 5 percent of the population) contributed to Samuel K. Doe’s bloody coup of 1980. Despite the survival of American traditions and institutions, Charles S. Johnson found in 1930 that at least 95 percent of the population was illiterate; before World War II, more than 95 percent of all trade was controlled by foreigners, most of the food consumed by Liberians was imported, there were no technicians available to repair broken engines and machinery, and in Monrovia there was not a single qualified physician “apart from those supplied by the missions,
Firestone,
Pan American Airways, and those connected with American military installations.”
Bitter Canaan,
129–33. In the early 1980s, Liberia had a per capita income ($400) below that of Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Egypt; from 1971 to 1984 life expectancy at birth had risen from 44 to 54 (compared to 65 in Jamaica); in 1984 literacy stood at 24 percent (compared to 76 percent in Jamaica).
The World Almanac and Book of Facts,
1987.

34.
Tom W. Shick touches on this question when he briefly compares the nineteenth-century development of Liberia,
South Africa,
Australia, and
Argentina. See
Behold the Promised Land,
135–43.

35.
Ibid., 114–18, 141–42.

36.
Floyd J. Miller,
The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 94–102, 138;
The North Star,
March 2, 1849, in
Black Abolitionist Papers,
microfilm edition, ed. Peter C. Ripley et al. (hereafter
BAP
), reel 5, 992–93.

37.
Douglass is quoted in Wilson Jeremiah Moses,
The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), 92. In
Martin Delany’s earlier phrasing of this idea, which had long been advanced by many white colonizationists, “we believe it to be the duty of the Free, to elevate themselves in the most speedy and effective manner possible; as the redemption of the bondman depends entirely upon the elevation of the freeman.”
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Politically Considered
(Philadelphia: printed by author, 1852), 205. But in his famous 1843 Address to the Slaves,
Henry Highland Garnet had nearly inverted the argument: “While you have been oppressed, we have also been partakers with you; nor can we be free while you are enslaved. We therefore write to you as being bound with you.”
An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
(New York: printed by author, 1848), 90. And in 1856,
John Gains pointed out that the existence of Haiti had not diminished American racial prejudice or “removed one unholy law”; he concluded that “a Negro Republic, on the coast of Africa, the Caribee Islands, or South America, will never induce the haughty Saxon to respect us at home, unless it be a
power physically as strong as Russia, and morally [as strong] as England or France.” Quoted in Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease,
They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861
(New York: Atheneum, 1974), 266–67.

38.
Richard MacMaster, “Henry Highland Garnet and the African Civilization Society,”
Journal of Presbyterian Church History
48 (Summer 1970): 99–100; Joel Schor,
Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 154. The argument that even black radicals were committed to the redemption of American institutions is admirably documented in a 1987 Yale senior essay by Matthew A. Lamberti, “ ‘Mismatched Messiahs’: Black Abolitionists and the Redemption of American Institutions, 1829–1860.”

39.
Garnet to Douglass,
The North Star,
Jan. 26, 1849,
BAP,
reel 5, 959–60.

40.
African Repository
22 (November 1846): 347; Schor,
Henry Highland Garnet,
101–3.

41.
The Patriot,
May 22, 1851,
BAP,
reel 6, 942. For guidance to Garnet’s writings, I am much indebted to a brilliant Yale senior essay written in 1986 by Seth Moglen, “Henry Highland Garnet and the Problem of Black Nationalism in Antebellum America.”

42.
Hollis R. Lynch, “Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World, before 1862,” in
The Making of Black America: Essays in Negro Life and History,
ed. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 51, 52, 58; Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden,
3–6; Anthony J. Barker,
The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807
(London: F. Cass, 1978), 96, 192–93; Robert O. Collins, ed.,
Problems in African History
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 7–55; ACS,
Tenth Annual Report
(Washington, D.C.: Way & Gideon, 1827), 8–10; ACS,
Fourteenth Annual Report
(Washington, D.C.: James C. Dunn, 1831), vii–xi. It was not until the 1840s that the “American school of ethnology,” led by Dr.
Samuel George Morton and
George R. Gliddon, asserted the view that ancient
Egyptians were Caucasians and that blacks had been held as slaves in antiquity just as in modern times. William Stanton,
The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 39, 50–51, 97. For a discussion of blacks in Hannibal’s army and in antiquity in general, see Frank M. Snowden Jr.,
Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Snowden,
Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

43.
Gregory U. Rigsby,
Alexander Crummell: Pioneer in Nineteenth-Century Pan-African Thought
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 65–66, 71–73; Wilson J. Moses, “Civilizing Missionary: A Study of Alexander Crummell,”
Journal of Negro History
60, no. 2 (April 1975): 233–39; Moses,
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
63–68.

44.
Miller,
Search for a Black Nationality,
182–205; Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden,
24–25.

45.
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly
(Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1888), 482–84. For Delany’s hostility toward Mrs. Stowe for approving the “dependent colonizationist settlement of Liberia,” see Cyril E. Griffith,
The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 20–21.

46.
Lynch, “Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World,” 52;
African Repository
14 (Jan. 1838): 20.

47.
Wiley,
Slaves No More,
162; Jo M. Sullivan, “Mississippi in Africa: Settlers Among the Kru, 1835–1847,”
Liberian Studies Journal
8, no. 2 (1978–79): 79–94.

1.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses perceptively shows that assimilation and nationalism were not mutually exclusive and that black nationalism should not be equated with territorial separation. However, his hostility to “civilizationism” brings a tone of contempt to his treatment of black nationalists, whom he regards as “conservatives.”
With the exception of
Crummell, they were not seen as conservatives by their contemporaries, and it can be argued that the true conservatives were those who opposed “elevation” and improvement and who idealized dysfunctional traditions. Moses,
The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).

2.
E. J. Hobsbawm,
The Age of Capital, 1848–1875
(New York: Scribner, 1975), 97.

3.
Robert M. Berdahl, “New Thoughts on German Nationalism,”
American Historical Review,
77 (1972): 65–80; G. Eley, “Nationalism and Social History,”
Social History
6 (1981): 83–107; E. J. Hobsbawm,
The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848
(New York: New American Library, 1962), 164; François Fejtö, “Europe on the Eve of the Revolution,” in
The Opening of an Era: 1848: An Historical Symposium,
ed. François Fejtö (New York: H. Fertig, 1948, 1966), 41–42. Hobsbawm, who also notes the messianic claims of “the
Russian Slavophils with their championship of Holy Russia,” maintains that it was “rational” to look only to Paris: “But in those days there had been only one great and revolutionary nation and it made sense (as indeed it still did) to regard it as the headquarters of all revolutions, and the necessary prime mover in the liberation of the world” (
Age of Revolution,
164). Such reasoning, which seems to accept the possible messianic role of a nation-state, could apply with even greater force to the United States, whose revolution had led to a kind of political stability and economic growth that was attracting hundreds of thousands of immigrants.