Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 5: the African colonization idea, anti-slavery and anti-black

Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) was the author of The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857). In my Confederate “Heritage” Month posts in 2017, I discussed Helper and his Impending Crisis book, starting with this April 27 post and continuing with two others on April 28 and April 29.

Helper’s book was an influential anti-slavery tract which made a systematic argument that slavery was actually damaging to the slaveowning states, refuting the planters’ claim that it was superior to the free-labor capitalism of the rest of the country. Helper himself was a Southerner, which gave his book a kind of contrarian, counter-intuitive appeal. But Helper is also interesting as an illustration of a common phenomenon that neo-Confederate ideologists use polemically and is awkward to address from the kind of superficial “woke” position on race that corporate Democrats have been commonly using for the last few years in contemporary politics. And that is the historical reality that whites could be and very often were both antislavery and racist against black people.

So we can find plenty of quotations from antislavery politicians from Thomas Jefferson (who was, yes, a slaveowner) to Abraham Lincoln expressing racist views against blacks of various levels of intensity and hostility. One illustration of that phenomenon was the popularity of the African colonization movement among white opponents of slavery which advocating freeing black slaves and sending them back to Africa. The creation of the colony (later nation) of Liberia was one product of this effort. This was a view of opposing slavery while also opposing the presence of black people in the US, or, at a minimum, thinking it was impractical to expect that an integrated black and white society could function in the US. (On the colonization movement, see: Becky Little, How a Movement to Send Freed Slaves to Africa Created Liberia History.com 04/05/2019)

But by the 1830s, white antislavery activists became much more critical of the colonization scheme. Very few black activists had ever found it appealing or convincing. As Becky Little writes:

In 1854, future president Abraham Lincoln agreed with this sentiment when he gave a speech that mentioned colonization as an appealing solution to the moral evils of slavery—but noted its logistical and ethical challenges:

“If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing insti­tution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,–to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days." [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]

However, Lincoln still spoke positively about the possibilities of colonization when he was President, mentioning it in the Emancipation Proclamation itself and in an 1862 message speech known as the "Address on Colonization to a Delegation of Black Americans".

In the next post, I'll discuss a mystery about the antislavery but also anti-black Hinton Rowan Helper.