Table Of ContentEXPORTING THE RACIAL REPUBLIC: AFRICAN COLONIZATION, NATIONAL
CITIZENSHIP, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF U.S. EXPANSION, 1776-1864
BY
BRANDON MILLS
DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011
Urbana, Illinois
Doctoral Committee:
Professor Kristin Lee Hoganson, Chair, Co-Director of Research
Professor David R Roediger, Co-Director of Research
Professor Antoinette M Burton
Professor Frederick E Hoxie
ABSTRACT
The effort to create a colony of African Americans on the west coast of Africa
was one of the most celebrated and influential movements in the United States during the
th
first half of the 19 century. While historians have often viewed African colonization
through the lens of domestic anti-slavery politics, colonization grew from an imperial
impulse which promised to transform the identities of black colonists and indigenous
Africans by helping them to build a democratic nation from the foundation of a settler
colony. By proposing that persons of African descent could eventually become self-
governing subjects, the liberal framework behind colonization offered the possibility of
black citizenship rights, but only within racially homogenous nation-states, which some
proponents of colonization imagined might lead to a “United States of Africa.” This
dissertation examines how the notion of expanding democratic ideals through the export
of racial nationhood was crucial to the appeal of colonization. It reveals how
colonization surfaced in several crucial debates about race, citizenship, and empire in the
antebellum United States by examining discussions about African Americans’
revolutionary claims to political rights, the bounds of US territorial expansion, the
removal of native populations in North America, and the racialization of national
citizenship, both at home and abroad. By examining African colonization from these
perspectives, this dissertation argues that the United States’ efforts to construct a liberal
democracy defined by white racial identity were directly connected to the nation’s
emerging identity as a defender and exporter of political liberty throughout the world.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation was made possible by the support of countless individuals. First,
I must thank the members of my doctoral committee for helping this project along from
beginning to end. Collectively, their guidance has advanced my dissertation’s intellectual
agenda in innumerable ways. In my co-advisors, Dave Roediger and Kristin Hoganson, I
have benefited from the careful guidance of two brilliant scholars and nurturing mentors.
From the outset, Kristin has steadfastly insisted that my work had great merit and
potential. Her wise guidance and careful attention to detail has helped me produce a
piece of scholarship I can be proud of. Dave has consistently confronted me with
unexpected and challenging questions which have deepened my work tremendously. I
am particularly indebted to his teaching and mentoring early in my graduate career when
he planted many of the seeds that would reach full development in my dissertation
research. Antoinette Burton’s encouragement and criticism of my work has consistently
pushed me to always get out of the weeds of historiography and situate my ideas as
broadly as possible. Fred Hoxie’s advice has been essential to the development of
several aspects of the project and I credit his thoughtful comments on chapter drafts with
helping me clarify and narratively frame many of my ideas.
I would also like to thank the various organizations which have given me
financial and institutional support during the course of my graduate career. This
dissertation has been supported by a Travel Scholarship from the Graduate College, Pre-
Doctoral Fellowship from University of Illinois, and Dissertation and Widenor Teaching
Fellowships from the Department of History. A fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman
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Institute helped to fund my travel for research and the Virginia Winship Memorial Fund
provided fellowship support throughout my entire PhD program at Illinois. Like all
historians, I am deeply indebted to the librarians and administrative staff working at the
various archives and libraries where I have conducted my research. While the individuals
are too numerous to name, I’d like to thank the staff at the Boston Public Library,
Cincinnati Historical Society, Connecticut Historical Society, Countway Library of
Harvard Medical School, Duke University Library Special Collections, Filson Historical
Society, Harvard Law School Library, Indiana Historical Society, Library of Virginia,
Massachusetts Historical Society, New York Historical Society, New York Public
Library, Ohio Historical Society, Ohio State Archives, Pennsylvania Historical Society,
Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, University of North Carolina Library
Special Collections, University of Virginia Library Special Collections, and Virginia
Historical Society. I would like to extend a special thanks to Elissa Englund and Adam
Weimer who housed me at different points during my research travels.
I am also very thankful to my many colleagues, both graduate students and
faculty, who have contributed feedback and guidance to my work over the years. I would
like to thank: Jeff Ahlman, Jean Allman, Jim Barrett, Andy Bruno, Vernon Burton, Sarah
Frohardt-Lane, Janine Giordano Drake, Ian Hartman, Jason Kozlowski, Anna Kurhajic,
Jason Opal, and Liz Pleck. I especially thank the members of my cohort who were
crucial allies during the uncertain and formative years of graduate school: Julilly Kohler-
Hausmann, Anthony Sigismondi, Kwame Holmes, and Brian Yates. All of these
individuals gave me thoughtful criticism at some point during the course of this project;
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however, more importantly they have formed the basis of an extended family which
continues to this day.
Lastly, the only reason I am here today is because of the unwavering love and
support of my family. I could not ask for two more supportive parents than Diane and
Bernie Mills. From an early age, they encouraged me to work hard and trust myself, two
qualities that have proven essential to completing a dissertation. Jenna’s warmth, humor,
and generosity have often lifted my spirits over the seemingly endless years in school.
The love from my family has given me a foundation that has allowed me to achieve
things I would never have thought possible. Amy deserves the most thanks of all. She
has been there from the very beginning and has shaped every facet of my work in
countless ways. During the lowest of lows, she was the only thing that prevented me
from completely shutting down. She has copy-edited more pages than either of us care to
remember. As an intellectual peer, she has been both my biggest supporter and toughest
critic. Most of all, she has simply loved me. That has meant more to me than I can
adequately explain here.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………...…….1
CHAPTER 2: A NATION ONCE REMOVED: THE ORIGINS OF COLONIZATION
IN AN AGE OF DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION AND CONTINENTAL EMPIRE,
1776-1817……………………………………………………………………………..…15
CHAPTER 3: CONSTRUCTING RACIAL REPUBLICS: AFRICAN
COLONIZATION, INDIAN REMOVAL, AND COMPETING VISIONS OF US
EXPANSION, 1817 – 1832…………………………………………………………...…59
CHAPTER 4: “THEY MAY IN SOME OTHER PLACE ENJOY HUMAN RIGHTS
AND PRIVILEGES”: AFRICAN COLONIZATION AND THE REPRODUCTION OF
RACIALIZED CITIZENSHIP, 1829-1851………………………………………….…114
CHAPTER 5: “THE UNITED STATES OF AFRICA”: LIBERIAN INDEPENDENCE
AND THE CONTESTED MEANING OF A BLACK REPUBLIC, 1844-1854……....167
CHAPTER 6: EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………...220
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………….…………………………...........234
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
“The African Colonization scheme… is one of the best foreign projects in which we can
engage because it has its basis on what men can do for themselves, and not what we can
do for them. We hope to bless them only as we can instruct them to bless themselves.
Their abundance is from their industry. Their progress from their arts, their welfare from
1
the liberty they can learn to maintain.” – newspaper editorial, 1817
“The double bind of freedom [is]: being freed from slavery and free of resources,
emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated
2
and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject.” – Saidiya Hartman
W.E.B. Du Bois once tersely summarized his view of the antebellum African
3
colonization movement: “It was inadequately conceived and not altogether sincere.” On
the face of it, his assessment is absolutely accurate. Judged on its own terms, African
colonization was nearly a complete failure. While the effort succeeded in creating an
African colony, it failed to achieve the designers’ stated aims of ending the international
slave trade or removing large numbers of African Americans from the United States. The
resulting nation, the Republic of Liberia, was weak, ineffectual, and plagued by
instability. It was decidedly not a vast African empire of civilization, commerce, and
Christianity imagined by its promoters. As the abolitionist movement highlighted, the
colonization movement’s official motivations offered a thin veil for the racist attitudes,
and in some cases pro-slavery sympathies, that undergirded the logic of the movement.
1
Essex Register (Salem, MA), December 17, 1817.
2
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century
America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 117.
3
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade of the United States of America, 1638-1870
(New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 197.
1
In the century of scholarship that followed Du Bois’s assessment, historians have debated
the efficacy of the movement as well as the sincerity of its advocates. Until recently,
much of this work has been rightly preoccupied with situating colonization within the
long history of anti-slavery struggle in the United States. However, while African
colonization was intertwined with the development of the abolitionist movement, the
impact of debates over colonization extended far beyond the small cadre of white
activists engaged in factional disputes. Colonization’s resonance with a variety of
audiences means that it should be taken very seriously as a way to understand the
national and international dimensions of race in the early United States.
For all its failings as a movement, African colonization exerted considerable
ideological force during the four decades of the antebellum era in which it maintained a
high profile in public discourse. It was one of the most celebrated and influential
4
movements of the antebellum era. Perhaps, the most limiting aspect of the tendency to
view colonization primarily through the lens of domestic anti-slavery politics is that it has
diminished the fact that the popular appeal of colonization was built on an imperial
impulse to transform the identities of black colonists and indigenous Africans by helping
them to form a liberal democratic nation. Promising that persons of African descent
could eventually become self-governing subjects, this liberal framework offered
citizenship rights but only in a racially homogenous nation-state, which some
5
colonizationists imagined might lead to a “United States of Africa.” In focusing on both
4
In 1833, Amasa Walker, an abolitionist and opponent of colonization, remarked, “This was a highly
popular object, and was hailed with applause in every section of the Union. … Such a dazzling display of
great names has never before been made by any association of modern origin in this country. So extensive
a combination of power and influence has never been brought to bear upon one object before.” “From the
Annual Meeting of the New-England Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, January 26, 1833.
5
Geo S. L. Starks, “Analogy between the Anglo-American and the Liberian,” The African Repository 27,
no. 11 (November 1851): 345.
2
the popular and imperial dimensions of colonization, this dissertation examines a range of
issues in early America which clustered around the idea of colonization while avoiding a
straightforward narrative of the movement which advocated colonization. In displacing
the familiar story of colonization, my dissertation accounts for how the ideas of African
colonization appeared in different political questions in the antebellum US, including
conceptions of continental expansion, revolutionary claims to natural rights, the removal
of indigenous populations, and the foreign and domestic production of national
citizenship. By examining African colonization from these unfamiliar angles my
dissertation reveals how emerging ideas about race and nationhood in early America were
intimately connected with the United States’ imagination of itself as a defender and
exporter of political liberty within a global context.
The justification for racialized nationhood grew out of the discussions about
human freedom during the “Age of Revolution” when the containment of revolutionary
ideas was a high priority of elites in the early United States. On its most basic level,
debates about African colonization were part of a broader struggle over the meaning of
freedom: to whom did it apply, where it should be extended, how it could be managed.
The earliest arguments for colonization were driven by appeals to liberal individualism.
Colonization advocates’ rhetorical emphasis on securing individual rights was frequently
connected to the idea that the expansion of “legitimate trade” by black colonists would
eventually displace the slave trade. Supporters not only imagined the possibility of an
independent African civil society, they frequently viewed this as an example of how the
world could be remade in a similar image. Many supporters of colonization believed that
3
African Americans had the ability to learn the skills that were required to maintain a
functioning liberal society.
The idea of African colonization is an ideal venue for exploring the intersection
between racial identity, nationalism, and imperial expansion because the concept
seamlessly fused both foreign and domestic objectives. I argue that the preoccupation
with African colonization in the early US reveals that the reproduction of racialized
nationhood was a constitutive component of US domestic and foreign policies. The
United States’ efforts to fashion itself into a liberal democracy defined by its white racial
identity, were not just internally generated by the idea of constructing racial purity within
the nation but they were also concerned with replicating this model of racial nationhood
outside its borders, thus making race an indispensible link between foreign and domestic
policy.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Historians have tended to avoid considering African colonization’s place within
the ideological framework of empire by instead studying colonization as a movement of
moderate anti-slavery activists or as the migration of African Americans from the United
States. Colonization has primarily been understood in relation to the steady ascendancy
of abolitionism during this era. Scholarship emphasizing this dimension of colonization
has carefully illuminated how the conflict between these competing movements played
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out on both the national stage, and in particular local contexts. The anti-slavery
6
Some of examples of the earliest work on African colonization which set this trend are: P. J. Staudenraus,
The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1961);
Frederic Bancroft, “The Colonization of American Negroes,” in Frederic Bancroft, Historian, ed. Jacob E.
Cooke (Norman, OK: University Press of Oklahoma, 1957), 145-269; Early Lee Fox, The American
Colonization Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1919); Henry Noble Sherwood,
4
