American Colonization Society
© Library of Congress, Manuscript Division
Presbyterian Reverend Robert Finley founded the American Colonization Society on
December 28, 1816 with the assistance of Elias B. Caldwell, Francis Scott Key (StarSpangled Banner fame), and other influential whites. The organization wanted to send
free and recently freed African Americans “back to Africa” as a way to rid the United
States of free black labor and promote Christian morality and industry on the African
coast. Finley’s connections to many wealthy businessmen, slave owners and
government officials earned the organization $100,000 to relocate freed men and
women. Significant involvement from slave owners deterred African American support.
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The idea that people of color in the United States and the Caribbean should be
moved to Africa after they obtained their freedom was not new when Finley began
urging influential colleagues to invest in the American Colonization Society (ACS).
British abolitionists had been advocating for the formation of a Christian colony
peopled by black immigrants as early as the 1780s, when men like William
Thornton and Thomas Peters argued that emancipated men and women in the U.S.
should migrate to a new British West African colony as a means to promote proper
morals and industry (Winch 177). By 1808, the British government controlled Sierra
Leone, a new colony that would soon become the home of exiled Jamaican Maroons
and a diverse array of Africans who had been seized by Royal Navy ships policing
the now illicit slave trade to British colonies. Thus, when Finley traveled to
Washington D.C. in December of 1816 to gain support for his new organization, he
already had a framework for creating a similar movement in the United States.
Finley was well connected to power brokers and businessmen, especially with slave
owners and white entrepreneurs from the border states who held influence in the
nation’s capital. The minister’s brother-in-law was Elias Caldwell, Clerk of the
Supreme Court. This relationship helped him secure Justice Bushrod Washington as
the first president of the organization and likely led to his recruitment of other key
political allies such as Speaker of the U.S. House Henry Clay and Congressman
Charles Fenton Mercer, both of whom served on the ACS’s board of managers. The
ACS’s connection to the federal government helped fund the organization. In 1819,
Congress allocated $100,000 to the society for the purpose of relocating freed men
and women and for the payment of an agent (Edgerton & Mulcahy). The funds
would lead to the creation of Liberia, the United States government’s equivalent of
Sierra Leone.
Although Finley supported abolition and maintained that slavery was contrary to
liberty, he believed that freeing enslaved men and women would lead to the moral
degradation of the United States. Freed people, he maintained, would have a
“recollection of their former servitude” that would be “unfavorable to our” (white
America’s) “industry and morals.” “Intermixture” was bad for society, the minister
argued, so free black people should “live alone” to learn a “love of order and
religion.” Such a scheme would in the long run be financially beneficial to the
government as well, for “society” would not have to carry the “heavy burden” of
caring for the “large proportion of this people” who lived in poverty (Finley
reprinted in ACS 334).
At first, some black leaders expressed a desire to work with the ACS in its infancy.
Most notable were merchant Paul Cuffe and sailmaker James Forten, both of whom
had already been working to establish a black settlement in Sierra Leone. Cuffe, who
was abroad when the ACS came together in D.C., faced staunch resistance from
British officials who did not want an independent settlement in the colony. The ACS
seemed like it might provide the political leverage he needed to advance his own
mission on the African coast. However, when it became clear to interested African
Americans that the ACS was going to be controlled by slave owners whose primary
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interest was sending free people out of the republic, black support nearly
disappeared. On January 15, 1817, Forten faced pews of resistant parishioners at
Mother Bethel Church in Philadelphia when he brought up the issue of colonization
to his fellow congregants. Similarly, a group of free blacks in Richmond, Virginia
responded to the ACS’s resolutions on January 24, 1817 by issuing a statement
declaring that they would “prefer being colonized in the most remote corner of the
land of our nativity” rather than “being exiled to a foreign country” (Reprinted in
Garrison 62-63).
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Works Cited & Further Reading
American Colonization Society, eds. The African Repository and Colonial Journal. Vol.
IX. Washington, D.C.: James C. Dunn, 1834.
Egerton, Douglas R. and Judith Mulcahy. "American Colonization Society" in
Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period
to the Age of Frederick Douglass, edited by Paul Finkelman. Vol. II. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
Garrison, William Lloyd. Thoughts on African Colonization, or, an Impartial Exhibition
of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society
Together with the Resolutions, Addresses and Remonstrances of the Free People
of Color. Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832.
Winch, Julie. A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
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