1
“‘If Any Scheme of Policy Is Thoroughly Virginian’:
James Madison and the African Colonization Movement”
In the fall of 1789, James Madison met William Thornton, an English physician
and abolitionist, at Mary House’s boarding house in Philadelphia. Thornton had
inherited some West Indian slaves whom he hoped to emancipate and resettle on the
Ivory Coast. He apparently solicited Madison’s support. The colonization project never
materialized, but Madison did draft a memorandum endorsing an African colony for
freed slaves as likely to be a “great encouragement to manumission” in the South.
Colonization might well be the “best hope yet presented of putting an end to the slavery
in which not less than 600,000 unhappy negroes are now involved.” Madison believed
intractable white prejudices prevented the integration of free blacks into the broader
society, and their degraded condition discouraged manumissions. To make
emancipation palatable to whites, free blacks would have to be removed from white
communities. If they were resettled in the far West, Madison predicted, they would be
massacred by the Indians. If they were removed to the frontier, collisions with
expanding white settlements would be inevitable. Congress, Madison concluded, would
have to encourage colonization “on the coast of Africa or in some other foreign
situation.”1
The notion of colonizing freed slaves did not originate with Thornton. Others had
similar ideas. Thomas Jefferson had included a plan for gradual emancipation and
colonization in his Notes on the States of Virginia, which had appeared in print a few
1
Memorandum for an African Colony for Freed Slaves, circa October 20, 1789, in William T. Hutchinson and
William M. E. Rachel, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962-91), 12: 431-38; P.J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization
Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 6-11; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The
Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46-47.
2
years earlier. Madison eagerly embraced the concept. When the colonization
movement evolved into a formal organization, the American Colonization Society,
Madison served as an officer in the ACS, contributed to it financially, and never wavered
in his faith in colonization as one weapon in the long war against slavery. 2 How, we
might ask, could so shrewd a politician have embraced such an implausible idea?
The belief that emancipation could be linked to colonization probably
“represented the view of a least a substantial minority of southern whites,”3 especially
in Virginia. As one early supporter, the Virginia minister Philip Slaughter put it, “if any
scheme of policy is thoroughly Virginian, it is the scheme of African colonization.”4 The
idea itself had a long history, but interest in colonization surged during the American
Revolution. Revolutionary rhetoric about freedom and equality undermined the
legitimacy of slavery. Critics of the institution hoped colonization would encourage
private manumissions. Meanwhile, the gradual abolition of slavery in the North raised
new fears among whites about the presence of free blacks in the United States.
2
“Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Merrill P. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin
Books, 1985), 185-187; Paul Finkelman, “Treason Against the Hopes of the World,” in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jefferson’s
Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181-221. Despite his support for colonization,
Jefferson never joined the ACS. Because many of the founders of the ACS were Federalists, Jefferson may have
seen the society as “a cabal of his enemies.” See, Marie Tyler-McGraw, An American Republic: Black and White
Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 35-36.
3
George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American
Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 96.
4
Philip Slaughter, The Virginia History of Colonization (Freeport, N.Y. Books for Libraries Press, 1970 reprint;
originally published, Richmond, Va.: Macfarlane & Fergusson, 1855), xiii; Staudenraus, African Colonization
Movement, 106-107. What white Virginians thought about slavery mattered a great deal. According to the 1790
census, 42 percent of all slaves in the United States lived in Virginia. See, Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 29.
3
Support for colonization grew in the early 1800s. “By 1825,” one historian of the
movement has written, “colonization was one of the most popular causes in America.” 5
The genesis of an organized colonization movement can be traced to Gabriel’s
conspiracy, a failed slave revolt uncovered by Virginia authorities in 1800. The affair
frightened the Virginia assembly into authorizing Governor James Monroe to ask
President Jefferson for federal help in establishing a penal colony for “persons
obnoxious to the laws or dangerous to the peace of society,” but the problem of finding
a place for former slaves to go stymied Jefferson. In January 1802, Virginia lawmakers
passed a second resolution; this one proposed a colony be created for free blacks and
newly freed slaves, as well as for Gabriel’s rebels. The legislature suggested a site in
Africa or Latin America. Jefferson responded by instructing Rufus King, the United
States minister to Great Britain, to investigate the possibility of sending African
Americans to Sierra Leone, which had been founded by Chesapeake blacks who had
joined the British during the Revolution. British authorities said no. In 1804 and again
in 1805, the Virginia assembly, at Jefferson’s suggestion, endorsed the creation of a
black colony in the Louisiana Territory, but the initiative went no further. Madison, who
was then secretary of state, suspected a federal colonization program would require a
constitutional amendment. By Jefferson’s second term, moreover, both men were
preoccupied with worsening relations with Great Britain and France. After Madison
5
Nicholas Guyatt, “ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,”
Journal of American History, 95 (March 2009): 986-1011, 998. See also, Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln
and American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17-19; and Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar
Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 1-2, 6-10.
4
succeeded Jefferson as president, the international crisis and the War of 1812 took
precedence over colonization.6
The exchanges between Virginia authorities and the Jefferson administration had
been confidential and might have been forgotten except for Philip Doddridge, a Virginia
lawmaker. Early in 1816, Doddridge complained to Charles Fenton Mercer, a prominent
Federalist in the House of Delegates, that when, years earlier, the assembly had
proposed a colonization plan, Jefferson had not pursed it aggressively. Intrigued,
Mercer researched the Virginia senate journals from the early 1800s for details and
became a convert to colonization. Mercer considered slavery a sin, but he had no
interest in its immediate abolition. He had other priorities. Mercer feared the Industrial
Revolution would create a permanent underclass in America that would corrupt public
morals and jeopardize further economic modernization. Education would uplift poor
whites. White prejudice, however, would leave free blacks hopelessly degraded. To
create a prosperous middle class society, free blacks would need to be relocated.
On a trip to Washington, Mercer shared his vision with the lawyer Francis Scott
Key and with Elias Caldwell, the clerk of the Supreme Court. Caldwell brought his
brother-in-law Robert Findley into the discussions. Findley, a New Jersey minister
strongly opposed slavery, and he took the lead in organizing a colonization society.
Key, Caldwell, and Findley held an organizational meeting for the new American
Colonization Society in Washington in December 1816. Its headquarters would be in
the capital so it could lobby for federal dollars. Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court
6
James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, June 15, 1801, Slaughter, Virginia History, 2-3; Thomas Jefferson to James
Monroe, November 24, 1801, ibid, 3-4. See also, ibid, 5-6; Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 11-13; Ford,
Deliver Us from Evil, 54-63; Allan E. Yarema, American Colonization Society: An Avenue to Freedom? (Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America, 2006), 8-9.
5
justice and a nephew of George Washington, agreed to serve as the society’s first
president.7 That same month, the Virginia assembly passed a resolution, with only ten
dissenting votes, that called on the president to obtain land outside the United States
“for an asylum of such persons of color as are now free, and desire the same, and for
those who may be hereafter emancipated….”8
The American Colonization Society made colonization a national movement.
Mercer and others worked as full time agents and helped establish over 200 local
chapters. In Virginia, the society’s agents included the Episcopal bishop William
Meade. The Presbyterian General Assembly passed a resolution in favor of resetting
free blacks, as did Presbyterian and Episcopal conventions in Virginia, Maryland,
Tennessee, and North Carolina. In North Carolina, advocates of colonization included a
governor, John Branch; John L. Taylor, the chief justice of the state supreme court; and
Joseph Caldwell, the president of the University of North Carolina. Support for
colonization extended beyond the Upper South and Border States where the movement
enjoyed its greatest popularity. In the House of Representatives, at least two New
Yorkers, Stephen Van Rensselaer and Henry Meigg, supported colonization plans. In
1825, New York Senator Rufus King proposed that the proceeds from the sale of public
land in the West be used to finance a colony for American blacks. In Philadelphia, the
newspaper editor Mathew Carey gave money to the colonization society. In the 1820s
7
Douglas R. Egerton, Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of Nationalism Conservatism (Jackson, Miss.: University
Press of Mississippi, 1989), 105-12; Douglas R. Egerton, “ ‘Its Orgin Is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the
American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (Winter 1985): 463-80; Burin, Slavery and the
Peculiar Solution, 13-19; Yarema, American Colonization Society, 15-19.
8
Slaughter, Virginia History, 8.
6
and early 1830s, legislatures in at least ten states either endorsed colonization in
principle or called for federal aid for the colonization movement.9
Indeed, colonization demonstrated a remarkable appeal to the nation’s political
elite. John Randolph of Roanoke was a charter member of the American Colonization
Society, as was the future Whig leader Henry Clay.10 Chief Justice John Marshall
served as president of the Richmond and Manchester Auxiliary of the national
organization.11 Other prominent supporters included Daniel Webster, Edward Everett,
Stephen A. Douglas, and Millard Fillmore. James Madison’s secretary, Edward Coles,
went on to be governor of Illinois and the founder of the Illinois Colonization Society.12
Abraham Lincoln supported colonization for years; as late as December 1862 Lincoln
was making plans to establish a colony for African Americans on an island off the coast
of Haiti.13
The most effective advocate of colonization proved to be Madison’s old friend
and fellow Virginian, James Monroe. The Slave Trade Act of 1819, which had been
sponsored by Charles Fenton Mercer, authorized the president to expatriate Africans
9
Yarema, American Colonization Society, 20-24; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 48, 71-81, 128, 170,
172-73, 178-81; Van Cleve, A Slaveowners’ Union, 245-46. The states were Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, New
York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.
10
Standenraus, African Colonization Movement, 27-29; Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 179, 507.
11
John Marshall to R. Randolph Gurley, December 14, 1831, in Slaughter, Virginia History, 59-60. See also, ibid., 13;
and Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Holt, 1998), 487-90.
12
Yarema, American Colonization Society, 24-27; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 244-45; Foner, The
Fiery Trial, 22.
13
Foner, The Fiery Trial, 61-67, 239-40; Mark E. Neely, Jr., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional
Conflict in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 19, 118-19; Paul D. Escott,
“What Shall We Do With the Negro?” Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America,” (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2009), 18-35, 50-59, 209, 222-43.
7
rescued from the slave trade, and it made $100,000 available for their expenses.
Monroe had long been sympathetic to the idea of colonization, and his secretary of the
Treasury, William Crawford, was a vice president of the American Colonization Society.
Stretching the language of the law, they decided to buy land on the coast of Africa for
an “operating station” to process freed captives. American blacks soon outnumbered
liberated Africans at the station, and it became the nucleus of the colonization society’s
one success story, the nation of Liberia.14
Colonization drew support from virtually every corner of American society. An
Indian newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix endorsed it. Women’s auxiliaries to the
national organization could be found in Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland. Margaret
Mercer, Charles Francis Mercer’s cousin, was an active advocate. Ann Mifflin drafted a
colonization plan of her own that won praise from Thomas Jefferson. In Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, Harriett Beecher Stowe sent Topsy and George Selby to Africa, and Selby
praised Liberia. The Southern novelist Mary Eastman wrote Aunt Phyllis’s Cabin: Or
Southern Life as It Is as a rebuttal to Stowe, but Eastman embraced colonization.15
Historians have disagreed about the motives of the colonization movement. Was
it an ill-conceived but sincere effort to eradicate slavery by encouraging voluntary
emancipation? Or was it a cynical effort to eliminate troublesome free blacks who could
aid a slave revolt?16 In reality, the motives of the colonizers varied widely. Some saw
14
Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, 28; Yarema, American Colonization Society, 36-39; Egerton, Charles Francis
Mercer, 239-40.
15
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Lynd, January 21, 1811, in Slaughter, Virginia History, 7-8; Guyatt, “The Outskirts of Our
Happiness,” 1003; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 112-13; Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, 8487, 101-102.
16
See generally, Burin and the Peculiar Solution, 1-2; Marie Tyler-McGraw, “The American Colonization Society in
Virginia, 1816-1832: A Case Study in Southern Liberalism,” (Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University,
8
slavery and colonization as part of God’s plan to take Christianity to Africa. At least a
few advocates of colonization believed commerce and Christianity went hand in hand.
Robert Findley predicted the “commercial penetration of the vast African interior
promised returns that would ‘more than compensate for every expense’.”17 American
merchants hoped Liberia could become a conduit for trade with Sierra Leone, which
was closed to direct trade with the United States. A committee of the Virginia assembly
saw in an African colony a market for the state’s tobacco.18
Many members of the American Colonization Society despised free blacks as a
dependent underclass that could never be assimilated, and removing them was an end
in itself. At the same time, moderates in the colonization society did not dismiss blacks
as the subhuman products of a separate creation. For relatively liberal southerners,
especially in Virginia, colonization served a propaganda purpose; it allowed them to
claim to be doing something about slavery. For white Americans, like Madison, who
viewed slavery as an evil but who could not imagine an integrated, multi-racial society,
colonization was the only option available.19 In antebellum America, colonization
became the enlightened, responsible solution to the problem of slavery.
1980), 3-19; and Paul J. Polgar, “ ‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation:’ Early National Abolitionism, Gradual
Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic, 31 (Summer 2011),
229-58.
17
Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 15-17, 19-21; Escott, “What Shall We Do with the Negro?,” 15354; Slaughter, Virginia History, iii-viii; Tyler-McGraw, An African-Republic, 25-27; Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization
and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York
University Press, 2011).
18
Yarema, American Colonization Society, 44; Slaughter, Virginia History, 24; Staudenraus, African Colonization
Movement, 157-58.
19
Slaughter, Virginia History, xiv; Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, 5; Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution,
80. Colonization also permitted Virginia to compete with Massachusetts, which abolished slavery in the 1780s, for
primacy in the adherence to the ideals of the American Revolution. See, David M. Streifford, “The American
9
Ironically, the American Colonization Society discredited the idea of colonization
in the eyes of many African Americans. In the early 1800s, free blacks, like James
Forten of Philadelphia, had often supported colonization. Paul Cuffee, an affluent black
ship-owner, took a small group of blacks to Sierra Leone, and Cuffee visited James
Madison in the White House to discuss the colony. The American Colonization
Society’s timid position on slavery alienated most blacks. Clay and other Southern and
Border state members of the society insisted that it publicly renounce abolition.
Whatever their personal feelings, anti-slavery moderates feared a more aggressive
position would cripple the colonization movement in the slave states and ruin them
politically. A few African Americans overlooked the society’s fecklessness. In New
York, John Brown Russwarm, a co-founder of the first black newspaper in the United
States, initially criticized colonization, but then changed his mind, and in 1829, went to
Liberia. Colonization generally, however, had little appeal to slaves or free blacks.20
Besides African Americans, slave owners in the Deep South tended to be hostile.
If the society’s ambivalence about the future of slavery had offended American blacks,
whites in the Deep South mistrusted any initiative with a hint of anti-slavery sentiment.
As attitudes toward slavery hardened after 1830, attacks on colonization by both
slavery’s critics and its defenders increased. Efforts by Henry Clay to secure federal
funding for colonization alarmed southerners routinely suspicious of national power and
aggravated divisions within the American Colonization Society. In 1832, Clay won
Colonization Society: An Application of Republican Ideology to Early American Reform,” Journal of Southern
History, 45 (May 1979): 201-220.
20
Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 33-34; Yarema, American Colonization Society, 53-55; TylerMcGraw, An African Republic, 156; William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, edited by William
Loren Katz (New York: Arno Press, 1986, reprint, originally published in 1832), i-xi.
10
passage of legislation giving money to the states to establish their own colonization
programs, but Andrew Jackson vetoed it.21
The appearance in 1832 of William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on Colonization
dealt the movement a devastating blow among Northern abortionists. Garrison had
once supported the society; now he condemned it for catering to “unchristian
prejudices” toward African Americans. Quoting colonization literature at length,
Garrison exhaustively documented the society’s repeated, public disavowals of any
intent to infringe on the rights of slave owners. He portrayed the colonization movement
as a thinly veiled effort to rid the nation of free blacks, who might incite a slave revolt.
“[T]he governing motive of the American Colonization Society,” he wrote, “is fear,
undisguised, excessive FEAR,” motivated by “a deep sense of guilt” and “an awful
dread of retribution.” Garrison saw practical as well as moral flaws in the colonization
scheme. Allowing the federal government to buy slaves and set them free, for example,
would drive up the prices of slaves and make masters less willing to part voluntarily with
them. In the wake of Garrison’s critique, a generation of future anti-slavery leaders,
including James Birney, Arthur Tappan, and Garret Smith left the colonization society.22
At the same time, support for colonization began to falter in Virginia under the
attacks of Thomas R. Dew, a professor at the College of William and Mary. Dew
defended slavery on historical grounds, and as a tool for civilizing savages, increasing
agricultural productivity, and freeing white women from the drudgery of farm work. Dew
21
Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat
Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 170-79; Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar
Solution, 22-23; Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, 60; Egerton, Charles Fenton Mercer, 237-39; Yarema,
American Colonization Society, 27; Ford, Deliver us from Evil, 309-14.
22
Garrison, Thoughts on Colonization, 1-21, 102,156; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 194-201,
Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 84.
11
attributed the Old Dominion’s economic malaise not to slavery, but to the protective
tariff. With no qualms about slavery, Dew had no need for colonization, which he
ridiculed as wildly impractical. Following Garrison’s logic, Dew argued that if Virginia
attempted to buy slaves from their owners, the effort would needlessly drive up prices.
The slaves most likely to be sold, Dew added, would be those who would otherwise be
sold in the interstate slave trade. A national program of compensated emancipation
would cost at least $400 million, and most important, threaten states’ rights: “the
emancipating interest will be added to the internal improvement and tariff interests” to
form an “unholy alliance for oppression.” A state program would drain money from
Virginia’s own internal improvements. White Virginians, moreover, need not fear being
swamped by an expanding slave population. Dew predicted industrialization and
urbanization would help the state retain its white inhabitants and attract new immigrants
as slave labor naturally migrated to warmer climates.23
Madison generally avoided the subject of slavery as secretary of state and later
as president, but he addressed the issue of colonization on several occasions after he
retired from the White House. In 1819, the Philadelphia abolitionist Robert Evans
solicited Madison’s opinion on a plan for gradual emancipation. Madison agreed that
any plan would have to be gradual, and he added, it would have to be voluntary, with
compensation to the owners. The slave, Madison wrote Evans, must be convinced that
freedom would be a preferable situation “to his actual one in a state of bondage.” He
went on: “existing and probably unalterable prejudices” required the colonization of free
23
Thomas R. Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Westport, Conn: Negro
University Press, 1970, reprint; originally published, Richmond: T.W. White, 1832), 28-37, 39-54, 82-86, 121-29;
Slaughter, Virginia History, 64. Dew had been motivated to write after the Virginia assembly debated Thomas
Jefferson Randolph’s plan for gradual emancipation. Lawmakers approved emancipation in principle, but took no
further action. See, Wolf, Race and Liberty, 209-35.
12
blacks away from whites, and the denial of “equal rights political or social” meant that
free blacks would lack “the most cogent motives to moral and respectable conduct.”
The status of the nation’s free black population, Madison concluded, “seems to put
these truths beyond question.”
Madison’s pessimistic view of race relations contrasted sharply with his optimism
about colonization. As did many members of the American Colonization Society,
Madison predicted that colonization would not only encourage manumission, it would
also take religious and civil liberty to Africa, “that quarter of the Globe most in need of
them.” Madison admitted that colonization would be expensive; he estimated America’s
1.5 million slaves had a market value of $600 million. Selling 200 million acres of public
land, less than a third of the public domain according to Madison, at three dollars an
acre would fund a program of compensated emancipation. The actual costs of
resettlement would be offset by savings from four sources. Some slave owners would
not sell their slaves; others would liberate their slaves without seeking compensation.
Some slaves would be freed under state law, and a few would not want to go to Africa.
Madison professed to see only minor practical difficulties, including the issue of
determining the value of individual slaves. He expected such a plan to win widespread
support, and if colonization required a constitutional amendment, “it can hardly be
doubted,” he told Evans, “that the requisite powers might readily be procured for
attaining the great object in question.”24
In more sober moments, Madison acknowledged that African colonization could
never be more than “a very partial success.” A less distant asylum for freed slaves
24
James Madison to Robert J. Evans, June 15, 1819, in Jack Rakove, ed., James Madison, Writings (New York:
Library of America, 1999), 728-33.
13
would have to be found, and a “diffusion” of the nation’s slave population might mitigate
the need to colonize everyone. By the early 1820s, after controversy had erupted over
Missouri’s application to join the Union as a slave state, Madison, Jefferson, and other
supposedly anti-slavery southerners had embraced the theory of “diffusion:” the idea
that slavery ought to be allowed to expand because expansion would dilute the
significance of slavery in any particular locale, making local whites more amenable to its
abolition.25
Colonization, however, remained critical to Madison’s thinking about slavery. He
seemed to believe it would be a simple matter to amend the Constitution to authorize
Congress to free female slaves who reached “a reasonable age.” If only a refuge for
them were available, all other obstacles to freedom “would yield to the emancipating
disposition.” As white southerners become more defensive about threats to slavery, the
Virginia auxiliaries to the American Colonization Society reorganized themselves into
the independent Colonization Society of Virginia. Madison became a vice president of
the new association.26
Yet Madison never turned his back on the national society. In 1831, he donated
$100, then a princely sum. In 1833, he agreed to assume the organization’s
presidency; he held the largely honorary position until his death in 1836. The year he
became president of the ACS, Madison wrote a rebuttal to Thomas Dew’s attack on the
idea of colonization. Madison repeated arguments he had made before, but suggested
25
James Madison to Lafayette, circa 1821, in Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison, 9 vols. (New York:
G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1900-1910), 9: 85; Ford, Deliver Us From Evil, 73-77.
26
James Madison to Marquis de Lafayette, November 1826, WJM, 9: 261-66; James Madison to R. Randolph
Gurley, December 28, 1831, ibid., 468-470; Slaughter, Virginia History, 19.
14
that if African colonization proved impracticable, freed slaves could be relocated in the
Caribbean or in the West. The exiles’ successes would encourage more ex-slaves to
immigrate. White immigration and a transition from tobacco production to less laborintensive agriculture would offset the loss of Virginia’s black workforce. Madison also
disputed Dew’s economic defense of slavery. Dew had blamed the state’s decline not
on the South’s peculiar institution, but on the protective tariff. Madison argued Dew had
exaggerated the negative impact of the tariff and the profitability of slavery, although
Madison admitted the chief culprit in Virginia’s declension was not slavery, but
competition from cheap, fertile land in the West.27
When the English writer and reformer Harriet Martineau visited Montpelier the
year before Madison died, she found the former president preoccupied with the issue of
slavery. Clearly conflicted, he was, she reported, “‘less in despair than formerly.’”
Visitors to Montpelier would find slaves walking to church on Sundays “gaily dressed,”
and Madison believed their “intellects” had improved in his lifetime. Yet Madison did not
assume his slaves were content; he described to Martineau a demoralized people prone
to violence. The presence of its disgruntled slave population rendered the South too
weak to rebel against the North. He continued to defend colonization, while admitting
his own slaves did not want to go to Liberia.28
In the end, Madison’s view of the condition of free blacks in a white society
bound him to colonization. To Martineau, he condemned “vicious free blacks, who
27
Yarema, American Colonization Society, 28-29; Slaughter, Virginia History, 29; James Madison to Thomas R. Dew,
February 23, 1833, WJM, 9: 498-502. Madison also left the ACS $2,000 in his will.
28
Merrill D. Peterson, James Madison: A Biography in His Own Words (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 376-79;
Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 3 vols. (London: Saunders & Otley, 1838), 3: 6-10.
15
induce thievery among the negroes, and keep the minds of the owners in a state of
perpetual suspicion, fear, and anger.” In March 1836, he described a local group of
former slaves: as the ex-slaves died, he wrote, “a new race, raised in idleness and vice,
sprang up” that was so “idle and vicious” they could not survive. As their numbers
declined, they nevertheless remained “a great pest, and a heavy tax upon the
neighborhood.” Madison concluded, “it is most obvious, they themselves are infinitely
worsted by the exchange from slavery to liberty….” Yet, he expected former slaves to
prosper in an environment free from the hostility of whites. Colonization offered
moderates like Madison a middle way between immediate abolitionists and slavery’s
defenders.29 In this case, the middle way went nowhere, and moderation ultimately
failed.
Jeff Broadwater
Barton College
March 1, 2012
29
Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travels, 3: 6-10; Farmers’ Register, March 22, 1836;Tyler-McGraw, An African
Repuiblic, 43-47; Yarema, American Colonization Society, viii-3; Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 36-40.