1

“NOT ONE WAS WILLING TO GO!”

The Paradoxes of “Liberia’s Offerings”

We want colored men, when colonizationists press upon them the propriety of emigrating to Liberia, or anywhere else, to give them this simple and decided answer: We will not go!

—J. D., editorial in the North Star, September 14, 1849

The Negro-hating disposition of the General Government is also seen in its ungenerous, dishonorable and despicable conduct toward Liberia. . . . The United States has steadily and persistently refused to acknowledge their independence.

—Ohio, letter to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 16, 1855

The U.S. Congress established formal diplomatic relations with Liberia in February 1862. A little less than one year later, on January 13, 1863, a delegation from the new ally disembarked in Washington, D.C., to pursue two goals. First, the Liberian envoys wanted to shore up diplomatic relations with the Abraham Lincoln administration; second, they hoped to stimulate interest in emigration among the black population of the United States. The historical record is largely silent about whether the delegates achieved their first goal; there is no evidence that the delegation met with Lincoln or any of his high-ranking deputies. We do know, however, that the delegates toured free black communities with a stump speech and pamphlet on Liberia entitled “Liberia’s Offerings” and that they had widespread contacts with members of the black elite. We also know that the delegates came away from this tour disappointed that free blacks did not receive the call of their fledgling nation to join in cultivating “Liberia’s offerings” with the enthusiasm that they had predicted.1

Alexander Crummell, the only U.S.-born member of the delegation, wrote to a friend with great sadness about his people’s “diminutive” interest in the “resources of Africa.”2 In his view, the troubles that he and his fellow delegates had in selling their new nation to black Americans were rooted in the fact that generations of slaves had learned to “repudiate any close contact and peculiar connection with Africa.”3 Nevertheless, Crummell also held out hope that subsequent missions would raise black Americans’ consciousness to the point where they would recognize their “duty” to “labor for the salvation of the mighty millions of their kin” in Africa.4

Crummell lived to see the day when a sizable number (and perhaps even the majority) of black Americans took a greater interest in Liberia. Indeed, Liberia Fever ran rampant among the poor and abused victims of the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. Unfortunately, Crummell also suffered the heartbreak of watching men and women of his own social class in the United States squelch the grassroots exodus movements that sought to translate this interest in Liberia into tangible streams of emigration. “The chief obstacle to a healthy emigration from America,” Crummell wrote to a member of the Liberian Senate in 1878, “is the unhealthy meddling of the better classes among the Freedmen [sic].”5

Previous studies of the engagement of the black elite with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during this period have largely concurred with Crummell’s assessment. Indeed, the conventional wisdom within the fields of social history and African American studies is that the members of the black elite quashed the exodus movements because they viewed them as a threat to their own ability to extract patronage positions from the Republican Party.6 Other scholars take a more benign view of the black elite by suggesting that their opposition to the exodus movements was a function of a bifurcated class structure that made them unaware of the hardships that most blacks faced under the Counter-Reconstruction regimes.7

Both these arguments cut against the grain of the vast majority of the political science literature on black representation since the publication of Michael Dawson’s influential Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Dawson argues quite persuasively that members of the black elite have maintained deep bonds of attachment to low-status blacks since at least the rise of the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century. This sense of linked fate, Dawson asserts, has been the modus operandi of the black elite when they have sought to represent the interests of lower-class blacks in the public sphere.8 Although some important studies in the field of black politics have recently questioned whether the black elite act on this imperative when dealing with marginalized members of the black community,9 few political scientists question the general validity of the theory or Dawson’s decision to locate the origins of linked fate in the politics of the abolitionist movement.

In this chapter, I reconcile the opposition of the black elite to the exodus movements of the late nineteenth century with the traditional understandings of the dynamics of black representation in political science. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of archival materials presented here demonstrate that black elites saw themselves as defending the interests of the black lower classes when they entered the U.S. foreign policymaking arena to quash emigrationism. Moreover, the research I present also reveals that lower-class blacks embraced Liberia not as a primordial homeland but as a safe haven from the hardships of the Counter-Reconstruction. Thus, contrary to both Crummell’s analysis and the conventional wisdom in the literature on Pan-Africanism, the black masses did not exhibit a greater commitment to the view that Africa was, in the words of Elliot Skinner, “the land of their nativity.”10

Paul Cuffe’s Movement

Any discussion of black elite engagement with Africa in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena in the late nineteenth century must begin with Paul Cuffe. A free black man and a wealthy merchant, Cuffe launched the most noteworthy of the many back-to-Africa movements that emerged in the antebellum North after the framers enshrined black inequality in the U.S. Constitution.11 It is for this reason that many historians regard Cuffe as the “father of Pan-Africanism.”12

Cuffe’s movement began in earnest when he sailed one of his commercial vessels to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1811.13 The British government had established the tiny hamlet on the western coast of Africa in 1787 to serve as a homeland for freed slaves from both the British Isles and the West Indies. Cuffe was so enamored of what he saw in this colony for “returned” blacks that he informed British authorities that he intended to encourage the “finest characters” among the free black population in the United States to resettle in Sierra Leone.14

Cuffe was apparently a very skilled salesman during his tours through the free black communities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Indeed, less than a year later he had recruited enough volunteers to organize a return voyage to Freetown.15 The strict embargo that the U.S. Congress placed on all intercourse with Great Britain during the War of 1812, however, prevented Cuffe from transporting this first wave of would-be emigrants to Freetown.16

Because the War of 1812 was primarily about access to the shipping lanes that linked the Old and New Worlds, the safest course of action would have been for Cuffe and his followers to delay their plans until after the conflict subsided. For the indefatigable Cuffe, however, a war on the high seas was no reason to put off a scheme that would eventually bring about the demise of slavery in the United States.17 Thus, Cuffe decided to petition the Congress for a special dispensation from the embargo law.18

Cuffe’s request for relief from the embargo passed the Senate on January 25, 1814;19 this made him the first black American to win the support of the upper chamber on a policy matter. When the House of Representatives took up the matter two days later, Representative Timothy Pickering (F-Mass.) took to the floor to speak on behalf of his constituent’s position. His comments, however, exposed his racist orientation more than any genuine support for the Cuffe plan. Pickering’s basic argument was that the House should support Cuffe’s plan because it promised to “remove a population that [the United States] could well spare.”20 Despite the fact that many of his colleagues agreed that Cuffe’s plan represented an excellent opportunity to rid the United States of free blacks, the majority of the House ultimately voted against the petition on the grounds of national security.21

When the conflict between the United States and Britain subsided in 1815, Cuffe immediately set sail for Sierra Leone with forty free blacks from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.22 Cuffe viewed the completion of this mission, which was the first time that anyone had successfully repatriated black Americans to Africa, as a great victory for the race. Moreover, his personal correspondence suggests that he expected the free black community in the United States to celebrate this victory with him. When Cuffe returned to the United States to begin recruiting a new crop of emigrants, however, he found that public opinion within free black population centers was hardening against his movement.23 This shift in public opinion was a function of the activities of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the black community during Cuffe’s absence.24

Black Opposition to the American Colonization Society

The notion of repatriating free blacks to Africa had figured very little in mainstream political discourse before Cuffe emerged on the national scene.25 But this changed dramatically after Cuffe’s campaign to win an exemption from the U.S. government embargo against Great Britain during the War of 1812. Scholars of the black experience have frequently used the phrase Liberia Fever to describe the spike in emigrationist sentiment that took root among the freed blacks during the Counter-Reconstruction period.26 The historical record suggests, however, that the very first outbreaks of Liberia Fever took place among the white men who roamed the halls of power within the U.S. capital in the wake of Cuffe’s petition. Moreover, it is clear that many of the governmental officials who came down with Liberia Fever during this period nurtured a vision of a compulsory program that would eventually remove the entire free black population to West Africa.27

At the conclusion of the war, Henry Clay (DR-Ky.), who was in his second term as speaker of the House of Representatives, called a number of these men together with a few prominent members of white civil society and formed the ACS, with the express purpose of making this vision a reality.28 Within weeks of its founding, the ACS initiated an aggressive campaign to raise funds and garner the necessary political support to establish a colony on the western coast of Africa to serve as a dumping ground for the free black population. Not surprisingly, given the wealth and prestige of its founders, the ACS had very little trouble raising funds. Indeed, Philip J. Staudenraus, who has written the definitive history of the ASC, reports that in the its first month in operation “thousands of dollars flowed into the society for the purchase and charter of ships to transplant African-Americans to Africa.”29

The quasi-governmental nature of the ACS also facilitated its ability to make quick gains on the political front. After just two weeks in operation, for example, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that endorsed the efforts of the ACS and called on the White House to cooperate with the group.30 On January 14, 1817, just one month after Henry Clay had organized the first ACS meeting, the House of Representatives began to debate the merits of extending the organization financial and logistical support.31

Historically oriented scholars in working the field of comparative politics and APD researchers use the concept critical junctures to, in the words of Paul Pierson, “mark a point [in a causal chain] at which their cases begin to diverge in significant ways.”32 The formation of the ACS was undoubtedly the critical juncture that turned the black elite against the ideology of emigrationism. Indeed, as the ACS gained momentum on Capitol Hill, boisterous protest meetings sprang up in free black population centers.33 Moreover, like other critical junctures that comparativists and APD scholars have documented within institutions or during democratic transitions, the formation of the ACS and the protest movement that grew up in response to it had an enduring affect on black elite behavior in both the domestic and foreign policymaking arenas.34

Previous researchers have identified the primary source of free black opposition to the ACS as a strong sense of connection—what Dawson calls linked fate—with their kith and kin held in bondage.35 There is certainly a wealth of evidence in the documentary record to support this interpretation. Consider, for example, the account by James Forten of how ACS activities soured public opinion toward repatriation to Africa in the Philadelphia black community. Writing just three days after the Congress took up the ACS petition for support, Forten reported to his old friend Paul Cuffe that black Philadelphians were so convinced that the organization was about continuing the “misery, sufferings and perpetual slavery” of their people that “not one was willing to go to Africa” under their auspices.36

The opposition of the free black community to the ACS was also rooted in a desire to defend their own stake in the United States. This fact comes across quite clearly when we examine the documents that emerged from the mass demonstrations where free blacks registered their disapprobation with the ACS. For example, the resolutions passed by the gathering of 3,000 free blacks who met at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church rebuked the ACS for attempting to deny them their “birthrights” as descendants of the “first successful cultivators of the wilds of America.”37 Similarly the hundreds of free blacks who met in a protest meeting at Baltimore, Maryland, asserted that the fact that many black Americans had “rallied around the standard of their country” during the Revolutionary War had earned the community the right to be free from the harassment of the ACS.38

The free black community also demonstrated an equal commitment to defending the rights of enslaved blacks. Indeed, virtually all the protest documents that survive to this day also assign the inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence to the enslaved. These statements were, however, often quite paternalistic in nature. Here, too, the Philadelphia resolutions are instructive. “Nor do we view the colonization of those who may become emancipated by [the ACS] operation among our southern brethren,” Russell Parrot, the secretary of the Philadelphia protest convention, wrote, “as capable to produce their happiness.”39 This paternalism, grounded in a sense of linked fate, remained a major ideational force shaping the behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena throughout the nineteenth century.

The Black Abolitionists and U.S. Policy toward Liberia

The protests of the free black community against the first ACS petition for federal support for its colonization program yielded mixed results. On the one hand, the protests wounded the ACS by making it more difficult to raise funds among reform-minded white Americans.40 On the other hand, the protests failed to influence the debate on Capitol Hill over the merits of the ACS program.41 Within two years of its founding, the ACS was able to realize its goal of establishing a colony for the resettlement of black Americans on the territory that would eventually become the republic of Liberia. Over the next fifty years, the ACS helped transport more than 1,000 black Americans, mostly the manumitted slaves of their members who had to leave the United States as a condition for obtaining their freedom, to the tiny African republic.

Despite these facts, historians continue to see the protest meetings that erupted in black communities in response to the formation of the ACS as a watershed moment in black political history. It is easy to see why this is the case. After all, the decision of the delegates at the Philadelphia protest convention to appoint an eleven-member correspondence committee to lobby the Congress to reject the ACS petition represented the first time that such an effort had been undertaken on the federal level.42 More important, the independent black newspapers that sprang up in the 1820s were initially developed for the express purpose of “countering the slanders of the ACS” against the free people of color.43 In short, the protests provided the foundation for the emergence of the abolitionist movement.

Historians have long viewed the black-controlled newspapers that emerged between 1827 and 1863 as a resource for gauging black elite opinion on Liberia and a range of other important issues.44 Because the resulting studies have generated largely impressionistic accounts of public opinion during this period, I conducted a systematic content analysis of the six black periodicals that had the greatest circulation in the black counterpublic between 1827 and 1863.45 The results of my analysis support the conventional wisdom that the black elite held largely negative predispositions toward Liberia during this period. Indeed, 434 (50 percent) of the 868 items examined in the analysis had a decidedly negative tone when reporting on events in Liberia, emigration movements, or U.S. policies designed to aid Liberian development.

Surprisingly, 234 (27 percent) of the items contained language that exhibited favorable attitudes toward Liberia and the movements that aimed to stimulate its development. This finding suggests that blacks freely debated the merits of “Liberia’s offerings” within their segregated public sphere. In other words, the editors and owners of the black abolitionist papers did not censor viewpoints that favored emigration to Liberia.

But the most striking finding is that 199 (23 percent) of the items that reported on Liberia during this period did so with a neutral tone. This content category contains two types of items. The obituaries of missionaries and other notables who spent their lives working for the betterment of Liberia during this period constitute 11 percent of this category; the remaining 177 items are editorials and articles that simultaneously repudiate black American emigration to Liberia and portray developments in the nation in a favorable light.

Why would so many of the correspondents to these newspapers engage in this peculiar rhetorical strategy? Figure 1.1, which charts the frequency of these items in the abolitionist papers published between 1855 and 1863, holds the answer to this question: 169 of the 177 items with neutral tone appeared in abolitionist newspapers during these years. These were crucial years in both the sectional crisis in the United States and the development of Liberia. On the U.S. side of the equation, the destabilization of the citizenship status of free blacks in the wake of the infamous Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Sanford (1857) provoked a new debate about the merits of emigration within the black community. Content analysis reveals that 72 (39 percent) of the items with neutral tone reflect the black elite’s response to this ruling.

The vast majority of the neutral items appeared in 1862 and 1863, suggesting that this category is really about the black elite making an important statement about U.S. policy toward Liberia. It was during this period that the wartime 37th Congress conducted a heated debate about the merits of extending diplomatic relations to Liberia. Moreover, the abolitionist movement (including members of the black elite) supported Liberia’s quest for recognition. Indeed, Senator Charles Sumner (R-Mass.; 1851–1874), undoubtedly the most committed abolitionist in the Republican Party, was the one who introduced the bill that carried the day for Liberia in the Congress.46

FIGURE 1.1 Periodical items with neutral tone, 1855–1863.

Sources: Frederick Douglass Paper; Anglo-African Magazine; Christian Recorder

Some scholars suggest that affective ties to the Americo-Liberians and the continent of Africa created a drive within the black elite to protect the gain for black nationality that Liberia represented.47 Although some black leaders may have possessed these sentiments, it is clear from the historical record that most black abolitionists supported the bill because of its implications for their struggle for freedom in the United States. On January 11, 1862, for example, Frederick Douglass, who for more than a decade had been the most outspoken critic of emigration to Liberia, opined in his monthly newspaper that Sumner’s bill would “strike a blow” for black citizenship rights in the United States. He also argued that Sumner’s getting the bill through the Congress would be tantamount to the institution’s “endorsing” black Americans’ fitness for self-government.48

Douglass was by no means the only member of the black elite to see that the Liberian campaign for recognition was crucial to the black struggle for U.S. citizenship rights. On the contrary, the majority of the 122 remaining items with neutral tone (or 89 percent of the category) focus on the Liberian campaign for recognition. Moreover, the other 11 percent of the items are articles and editorials that celebrate the arrival of the Liberian delegation in 1863.

In light of this dimension of the coverage, it is easy to see why the Liberian delegation was so surprised by the cold shoulder they received from black Americans. Moreover, there was no way for the Liberian delegates to recognize that the support they had garnered from the black elite a year earlier was the secondary part of a two-level game that blacks and their allies were playing in the U.S. policymaking arena. On the other hand, it is also clear that had they consistently read the black abolitionist press even just one year before their arrival they would have come to the same conclusion that modern scholars have—the black elite engaged Liberia as Americans and not Africans in diaspora.

Liberia Fever

Only twelve years after the Liberian delegation set sail from the shores of the United States with heavy hearts due to their inability to recruit emigrants to their homeland, a new bout of Liberia Fever broke out among black Americans. As in the case of Paul Cuffe’s movement fifty years earlier, the primary factor stimulating black interest in repatriation to Africa in the late nineteenth century was white backlash. Unlike Cuffe’s movement, however, the participants in these exodus movements of the 1870s and 1880s were disproportionately southern and lower class.

It is easy to understand why this was the case. After all, the newly freed blacks suffered unspeakable violence and oppression at the hands of the white terrorist organizations that took control of the postbellum South during the Counter-Reconstruction. The Counter-Reconstruction grew from seeds sown at the beginning of President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term in office. Grant had been a strong defender of black rights during his first term.49 Indeed, one of his first acts in office was to use his influence to push the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature to reseat the black delegates whom a coalition of conservative white legislators had purged unlawfully from the 1869 state constitutional convention.50

As his first term began to wind down, President Grant found himself an increasingly isolated defender of black rights within his own party. This was so because many party leaders began to turn away from their commitment to protect the freed blacks in the wake a white backlash movement that swept through the North during the midterm elections of 1870.51 Grant’s reluctant decision to join his partisans in their retreat from the tenets of radicalism left rank-and-file southern blacks (and their allies) vulnerable to the terrorist violence of the Democratic Party’s Counter-Reconstruction.52 Most of these atrocities focused on black men who were attempting to exercise the voting rights guaranteed to them by both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. On August 31, 1874, for example, the White League, a paramilitary organization sponsored by the Louisiana Democratic Party organization, summarily executed two would-be black voters in Red River Parish.53

Undoubtedly, one of the most horrific acts of terrorist violence directed at black voters occurred in Eufaula, Alabama, in 1874. In the midst of a local election, a group of Confederate veterans decided to try to suppress the vote in the tiny black community of the town. On the day of the election, the group marched on the local polling station under the banner of their newly formed White Man’s League. Within a few hours, the group had murdered seven unarmed black voters and critically wounded seventy-five others (many as they tried to flee the carnage).54

These outbreaks of terrorist violence were by no means limited to locales and states where there were white majorities. On the contrary, the uprisings that have come to define the Counter-Reconstruction for modern historians took place in areas with large black majorities. The notorious White Line campaign that took place in Mississippi is a prime example of these backlash movements in majority black areas.

Beginning in 1874, the Mississippi Democratic Party decided that it would try to topple the administration of Governor Adelbert Ames and reconstitute a racial dictatorship in the state. Governor Ames, who was one of the few radical Republicans to remain in power in the South during Grant’s second term, made several public appeals for federal intervention. When it became clear that the Grant administration was not going to send federal troops to preserve order in Mississippi, the emboldened white-liners embarked in the months leading up to the election of 1875 on a terror campaign that claimed the lives of several high-ranking members of the Ames administration and dozens of black citizens. The White Line movement was so effective in driving black voters away from the polls that the Democrats won the election by 30,000 votes despite the fact that Republicans had an advantage of at least 25,000 registered voters on the rolls before the election.55

Although this survey of terrorist violence refers to the experience of blacks and their allies in only three states, it is clear that these patterns were prevalent throughout the South during Grant’s second term in office. Several historians have demonstrated that the White Line movement became a model for other terrorist groups throughout the South. Indeed, there is even evidence that southern Democrats talked openly about their desire to put the Mississippi Plan to work in their own states in the years leading up to the federal elections of 1876.

The frequency and widespread nature of the violent dimensions of the Counter-Reconstruction undoubtedly made many blacks feel like Elias Hill, an infirm teacher and minister from South Carolina, who lived in a community consistently terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. When asked by members of the Joint Select Committee to Investigate Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States how he felt about the white race, Hill simply remarked that he was “afraid of them now.”56 Hill also told the committee that many of his neighbors joined him in this sentiment and that they were exploring “means” by which they could be transported to Liberia.57

Hill’s testimony should not lead us to believe that these white terrorists cowed blacks into submission. On the contrary, some blacks, particularly those living in majority population centers, did attempt to organize vigorous defenses of their communities. Unfortunately, inferior military technology and insufficient numbers typically left these grassroots self-defense movements unprepared to provide a response to the likes of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Man’s League, and other paramilitary groups that fueled the Counter-Reconstruction.58 The tendency of these groups to single out black victims; strike at night; and exact reprisals against women, children, and the elderly also worked to keep resistance-minded black men under control.

Testimony from black survivors of the period reveals that their vulnerability in the “free” labor economy of the New South was also a major lever of control at the disposal of the Counter-Reconstructionists. Henry Frazier, a survivor of the Eufaula Riot of 1874, reported to a Senate panel charged with investigating the incident that the White Man’s League significantly reduced the ability of blacks to respond to their activities by forcing black agricultural laborers and tenant farmers (or sharecroppers) to choose between signing pledges to vote for the Democratic Party or unemployment.59 These threats undoubtedly made the cotton, sugar, and rubber plantations of Liberia look more attractive to many downtrodden blacks.60

We also see this reality reflected in the narrative of Henry Adams of Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Adams was in many ways an archetype of a black man predisposed to resist the Counter-Reconstruction. As a soldier in the Union Army, Adams had acquired both combat experience and a formal education. After the war, he, like so many of his fellow black veterans, worked as an organizer among the free blacks. At the beginning of the Counter-Reconstruction, Adams gained notoriety among both blacks and whites in Caddo Parish when he forced a group of white men to back down from threats to him and a female companion by threatening a fight to the death.61

Not even Adams’s extraordinary valor, however, was a match for the economics of oppression as practiced by the leaders of the Counter-Reconstruction in Louisiana. As Adams told the Joint Select Committee in 1880, the White Man’s League forced all his potential employers in the parish to ban him after his heroic standoff with the white highwaymen. “I think a heap of you as a man; I know you are a true man, and that you will do what you promise to do, but under this order I cannot employ you,” Adams reported that his long-time boss, W. C. Hambleton, told him shortly before the election of 1874.62 The loss of his economic livelihood did to Henry Adams what the threats of white violence could not—it forced him from his home parish and turned him into an emigrationist.

The harsh realities of these dual means of social control were the source of Liberia Fever among rank-and-file blacks in the postbellum South. As one historian writes:

Liberia fever followed fast on the heels of Reconstruction in the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. . . . In the aftermath of the violence surrounding the campaign of 1876, many Afro-Americans admitted that they would never be first class citizens in this country. They might as well emphasize their African identity and emphasize their African descent. Turning to the most American part of Africa—Liberia—they envisioned building a perfected America, free from racial hatred and color disabilities.63

Unfortunately for the would-be emigrants, their expressions of affective ties to the continent did not translate into direct passage to Monrovia. Moreover, neither they nor their principal ally, the ACS, had the resources to fund the transatlantic crossing for the torrent of freed blacks who expressed a desire to go to Liberia during the Counter-Reconstruction.64 This lack of resources led the proponents of emigration to turn once again to the federal government for support for their ideals.

Paternalism, Not Patronage

In 1875, the ACS embarked on a new lobbying effort to secure federal funds to provide financial aid for those freed blacks who sought passage to Liberia, but this campaign met with stiff resistance from the black elite. Ultimately, the Republican establishment decided to take its cues on this issue from the latter.65 As a result, the vast majority of would-be emigrants to Liberia remained locked in the oppressive environs of the Counter-Reconstruction South. Indeed, no more than 1 percent of the estimated 100,000 blacks who sought assistance from the federal government in arranging passage to Liberia ever made it to Monrovia.

Previous researchers have attributed this apparent schism between the black elite and rank-and-file blacks on emigration policy to the spoils system. In other words, the conventional wisdom holds that members of the black elite became so enamored of the patronage positions that they had attained in the Reconstruction administrations of the South that they lost touch with the concerns of rank-and-file blacks.66 Nell Irvin Painter goes even further by suggesting that the hostility of black leaders to the grassroots exodus movements of the 1870s and 1880s was a function of their conscious desire to protect their ability to compete with white carpetbaggers for patronage posts; in other words, Painter argues, black elites blocked emigration because they knew that the repatriation of the black masses in Africa would jeopardize their claims to represent a sizable interest bloc within the Republican Party.67

This viewpoint emerges from detailed analyses of primary documents and the testimony of the black Americans who were involved in building these grassroots movements. The Charleston News and Courier, for example, reported that class tensions within the black community prevented the local exodus movement from forming a steamship line to carry would-be emigrants from South Carolina to Liberia.68 The U.S. Senate testimony of Henry Adams, whose frustrations with the climate for blacks in Caddo Parish led him to initiate an exodus movement, also offers great insight into these class dynamics. When asked by Senator William Windom (R-Minn.) to describe the composition of his Louisiana Colonization Committee, Adams replied that:

No politicianers didn’t [sic] belong to it, because we didn’t allow them to know nothing about it, because we was afraid that if we allowed the colored politicianer to belong to it he would tell it to the Republican politicianers, and from that the men that was doing all this to us would get hold of it, too, and then get after us. Nobody that held an office by the votes of the neighborhood could become a member.69

The richness of these historical sources makes it impossible to reject the view that the bifurcated class structure of the black community played at least some role in motivating the black elite to work against the emigration movements.

On first glance, the behavior of at least some members of the black elite during the Reconstruction period also seems to confirm the standard interpretation within the extant literature. After all, patronage had been an important issue for black leaders since the end of the Civil War. Indeed, ensuring that they received their fair share of appointments from Republican administrations at both the federal and state levels was a constant fight for black politicians and activists. Ironically, the position of minister resident to the Republic of Liberia—the only diplomatic post in Africa—was among the two or three opportunities coveted most by members of the black elite.

Martin Delany, the most prominent black emigrationist in the decade before the Civil War, led the most public and vocal campaign for this position. Having traveled widely in Africa before the war, Delany believed that he was more qualified for the job than most of his rivals.70 Delany also believed that the sterling reputation that he had earned as both the first black commissioned officer in the Union Army and as an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina after the war should have given him an inside track for the job.71 Thus, in the aftermath of the election of 1868, during which he had worked tirelessly to turn out the black vote in South Carolina for Grant, Delany began to solicit recommendations for the post from Republican bosses and elected officials throughout the South.72

Despite the glowing recommendations that his allies forwarded to President Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish on his behalf, Delany did not receive the coveted appointment as the administration representative to Liberia. Instead, Grant selected Francis E. Dumas, a white Republican operative from Louisiana, to fill the position.73 Deeply disappointed by his inability to secure the position, Delany set out on a nationwide speaking tour to mobilize the black community to press for more high-level patronage posts. Delany began this campaign with a speech that he delivered in New Orleans’s Congo Square in April 1869. “Any political party appealing to blacks,” Delany told the crowd, “should share the patronage of public office on a pro-rata basis.”74 Continuing along these lines, he argued that it was particularly important that this policy take root in the South, where blacks comprised “a third to one half of the population.”75

The response of the black elite to Delany’s provocative calls for a quota system in the federal civil service challenges the view that this segment of the black community was chiefly concerned with its ability to secure the spoils of office. Indeed, despite the facts that the black vote had helped deliver both the White House and control of Congress to the Republicans in 1868 and that there was widespread evidence of racial discrimination in patronage appointments, few black leaders rallied behind Delany’s campaign. On the contrary, some of the most notable black leaders pilloried Delany’s argument. Given his esteemed position in the black leadership class, it is not surprising that Frederick Douglass was one of the most vocal critics of Delany’s line of argument. “The fact is[,] friend Delany,” Douglass wrote in an editorial in his newspaper the New Era, “these things are not fixed by figures, and while men are what they are they cannot be so fixed.”76

Most scholars have attributed Douglass’s conservative stance in this debate to his optimism about the Republican Party.77 The historical record certainly supports this interpretation. Douglass, after all, had just led a successful lobbying campaign to get President Grant to expand the number of federal positions he awarded to blacks. Douglass referred to this campaign in one of his exchanges with Delany when he wrote that the “present Republican administration” had already appointed “at least two dark-skinned clerks to serve in federal departments.”78

It is also likely that Douglass feared that Delany’s confrontational approach to the patronage issue would place even greater stress on the already fragile coalition between the black community and the Republican Party. Indeed, Democrats and some conservative Republicans were already using the appointment of blacks to patronage positions in the Reconstruction governments as an issue to unite white voters.79 If black politicians and activists were as preoccupied with their own economic well-being under the spoils system as previous studies suggest, it is likely that they would have sided with Delany and not Douglass in their debate over patronage.

There are two other reasons to question whether the testimonies of figures such as Henry Adams provide a complete picture of the motivations of the black elite during the Counter-Reconstruction. First, there is ample evidence that members of the black elite already saw themselves as locked out of the spoils system in the Reconstruction governments long before the rise of the exodus movements in the middle of Grant’s second term.80 Second, the areas of the South where Liberia Fever hit the black population the hardest were already under the control of Counter-Reconstruction regimes by 1876. In short, there were almost no patronage opportunities for black politicians to even covet, let alone protect, once the Democrats began to regain control of the South.

So why did the black elite work to squelch the exodus movements that sprang up after the Hayes-Tilden Compromise? The deep-seated paternalism that the black elite exhibited toward low-status blacks in the first half of the nineteenth century provides an answer to this question. In other words, members of the black elite continued to view themselves as the only capable defenders of the interests of downtrodden blacks in the public sphere. The fact that low-status blacks were now organizing themselves and expressing a desire to go to Liberia did not alter the view among members of the black elite that they were the rightful spokespeople for this segment of the black community. On the contrary, many members of the black elite believed that the exodus movements were a prime example of why downtrodden blacks needed their representation.

We see these attitudes reflected quite clearly in the statements on the exodus movements that members of the black elite bandied about the black counterpublic sphere between 1876 and 1880. Moreover, most of these statements recycled the arguments against emigration that had formed the basis of the black elite response to the rise of the ACS in the 1830s. In short, members of the black elite continued to argue that their race had a birthright to equal treatment in the United States, that the ACS was a front that represented the forces that wanted to deny black Americans these rights, and that conditions in Liberia were far worse than those in the postbellum South.

Consider, for example, the open letter on emigration that Senator Blanche K. Bruce (R-Miss.), the first black American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate, published in the Commercial in March 1878. Bruce pointed out that the United States was the homeland of black Americans and the “scheme to colonize” them in Liberia “assumed that there was no future for the Negro here.” Bruce also argued that emigration to Liberia was a “venture” that would “jeopardize” all that blacks had “accumulated” by “slow and painful processes” in the South.81

Bruce’s talk of progress does not mean that he was oblivious to the hardships that downtrodden blacks faced in the South. On the contrary, he “maintained” the “truth” that black Americans had been “made the sufferers of exceptional and inexcusable violence” throughout the South. Ultimately, however, Senator Bruce believed that a “stern sense of justice and sentiment of humanity” would wash over white southerners and allow blacks to “assert and exercise” their rights “without hindrance and without danger.” Because, in his view, “[n]one of the conditions” existed in Liberia “as to make a general exodus of the Negroes of the South either desirable or practicable,” Bruce urged blacks to stick it out until whites realized that there was a “perfect community of interest between the Negro and his white brother.”82

These themes are also present in a report issued by a committee of ministers that the AME Church appointed to study the exodus movements in 1878. The committee, under the leadership of Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner, reminded members of the denomination that Liberia was the “offspring” of “American prejudice and American slavery.” The committee’s statement also recalled the fact that dividing the black community had always been the main goal of the ACS (and other white emigrationists). “Perhaps no one will deny,” the Tanner Committee wrote, “that the first practical object which the slaveholder hoped to reach by Liberian emigration was the getting rid of that troublesome element described as ‘free negroes, mulattoes, and persons of color,’ and thus to render their pet institution more secure.”83

The Tanner committee did recognize, however, that the end of slavery put the emigration issue in a new frame for many black Americans. It also stated that it saw a clear distinction between the programs initiated by the ACS in the antebellum period and the “organic movements” that were “springing up voluntarily” among black southerners. At the same time, the committee expressed concerns about whether the grassroots exodus movements were “safely organized and prudently managed” enough to “meet all [their] promises.” In the final analysis, these concerns led the committee to “express its unqualified disapprobation of any organized effort to expatriate” black Americans “from the country dear to [them] by every memory of [their lives].”84 In short, the Tanner committee recommended to the AME Church that it not endorse the exodus movements because the committee feared that they would fail and have a detrimental effect on the black masses. Thus, the opposition of the black elite to emigration was primarily an expression of paternalism and not a repudiation of linked fate.

Content analysis of the editorials and letters on the exodus movements that appeared in the Christian Recorder between 1875 and 1885 substantiates this claim. The paper, published by the AME Church, is an excellent source for gauging black elite views on emigrationism during this period for two reasons. First, the Christian Recorder was the most widely circulated black-controlled newspaper during the Counter-Reconstruction period. As a result, black leaders frequently opined in its pages in hopes of reaching a mass audience. Second, despite the fact that most of the leadership of the AME Church opposed the exodus movements, they instructed the editor of the Christian Recorder to maintain an open editorial policy with regard to the emigration issue. Moreover, the paper even announced this policy in a front-page editorial on April 18, 1878.85

The Christian Recorder ran fifty-seven editorials and letters from correspondents on the exodus movements between 1875 and 1885. Eight of these items took a neutral position on the exodus movements; in other words, the authors of these pieces spent an equal amount of space discussing the benefits and downsides of repatriation in Liberia. Eighteen of the items took a positive stance on the exodus movements and emigration to Liberia. The remaining thirty-one pieces expressed decidedly negative views of emigration.

Figure 1.2 graphs the results of a content analysis of these thirty-one negative items, focusing on the predominant frames that black leaders used when condemning the exodus movements. As shown, only two of the items cited negative effects on the Republican coalition as the primary reason for opposing the exodus movements; three of the items cited deep concerns that the exodus movements were defrauding freed blacks as the primary source of opposition to these movements. The second most prevalent frame, with seventeen appearances in these thirty-one negative editorials and letters, was that the leaders of the exodus movements and the ACS were misleading downtrodden blacks about conditions in Liberia, in other words that conditions in Liberia were generally worse than the Counter-Reconstruction South. The most prevalent frame, with twenty-two appearances, was that black Americans had a birthright to equal citizenship in the United States and that it was their duty, in light of what their slave ancestors had suffered in previous generations, to remain in the United States and to defend this right at all costs.

This analysis again demonstrates that black leaders opposed the exodus movements more out of paternalism than out of a desire to protect its own prerogatives in the postbellum period. In other words, black leaders assumed that they knew what was best for the black masses, and they remained determined to protect their “ignorant” brethren from the follies of emigrationism at all costs.

Several refugee crises that sprang up in northern port cities between 1877 and 1880 only served to reinforce this attitude. These crises resulted from would-be black emigrants streaming to northern ports without sufficient funds to pay for either their immediate passage to Liberia or accommodations as they tried to obtain these funds.86 On March 26, 1880, for example, one hundred black Arkansans arrived in New York City; their intent was to gain the assistance of the ACS with booking passage to Liberia.87 Of course, because the ACS had not invited these exodusters to New York and lacked advance knowledge of their arrival, there was no one from the organization on hand to provide them with assistance when they arrived in the city.88 Undaunted, these “dusty, travel-worn, and scantily-clad refugees,” to use the words of the New York Times, took up residence at the Young Men’s Colored Christian Association.89

FIGURE 1.2 Negative frames of the exodus movement in the Christian Recorder, 1875–1885; numbers of editorials and letters.

Source: Christian Recorder

Within a few days of their arrival, however, the group had exhausted all of its funds for paid accommodations. Fortunately, the refugees’ story had been so widely reported in the New York press that the local black community became aware of their plight and began to organize relief efforts.90 Reverend Henry Highland Garnett, who had been an ardent opponent of emigrationism in the 1850s and 1860s, led these relief organizations through his Shiloh Colored Presbyterian Church.91

Although the relief committee raised enough aid to feed, clothe, and house the refugees, it was never able to provide for the group beyond a subsistence level. For example, two weeks into their odyssey in New York, most of the one hundred refugees remained housed in the tiny basement of Garnett’s church.92 These poor living conditions quickly gave rise to diseases such as measles and pneumonia among the refugees. By the end of their first month in New York, four members of the Arkansas group had died of these illnesses.93 Despite the fact that the ACS raised enough capital to send the entire party to Liberia within two months of their arrival in New York, which made this effort one of the most successful ACS campaigns of the period, the hardships that the group faced, and not its eventual repatriation, continued to resonate in the black counterpublic.94

These stories, along with narratives about the hardships that the freed blacks faced once they arrived in Liberia, fanned the flames of the paternalistic approach of the black elite to the emigration issue in the postbellum period.

Rethinking James Milton Turner’s Diplomacy

There is no evidence that President Grant was privy to the Delany-Douglass debate over patronage. He did, however, finally appoint a black man, James Milton Turner, to the diplomatic post in Liberia in March 1871.95 Moreover, Grant’s decision to give the post to Turner, who had been instrumental in organizing the black vote in his native Missouri, shows that he was indeed making connections between black electoral clout and the distribution of spoils.

Turner’s tenure as U.S. minister to Liberia has figured prominently in the interdisciplinary literature on the black elite’s engagement with African affairs in the nineteenth century.96 Historians have largely viewed Turner’s term as U.S. minister as a failure because his vehement opposition to the exodus movements created tensions between him and the Liberian people.97 Moreover, Turner’s anti-emigration activism has also led some historians to portray him as the quintessential example of how members of the black elite allowed their own interests to stifle the burgeoning transnationalism of downtrodden blacks.98

The documentary record certainly supports the first proposition. Indeed, even Turner’s own dispatches to the Department of State make it clear that the rift between him and the Liberian people over emigration limited his ability to function in Monrovia. On March 30, 1872, for example, Turner wrote to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish that his views had made him the victim of “gross personal indignities” on the part of both “officials and others” in Liberia.99 Although Turner was able to redeem himself somewhat in the eyes of the Liberians by mediating a war between the Americo-Liberians and the indigenous Grebo people in 1875,100 the outbreak of Liberia Fever in the United States later in that same year quickly soured this détente by thrusting his anti-emigrationist views to the forefront of the Liberian media.101

The animosity that the Americo-Liberians exhibited toward Turner deeply distressed him for two reasons. First, as the first black American diplomat to Africa, he felt enormous pressure to serve the interests of both his nation and race. Second, his race consciousness led him to take a genuine interest in the development of Liberia. Turner candidly gave voice to these concerns in a dispatch to Secretary Fish:

I am fully aware and highly appreciative of the importance of the position taken by the Administration in the presence of our entire country in elevating one like myself to a position of great responsibility, trust, and confidence. I have therefore made it my highest acme to be in every sense true to the interests of the Government of our own country. Meantime I am frank to confess that I have desire to be of service to this immature State which is composed of men with whom I am identified by blood and race.102

Because the U.S. government during this period had no position on black emigration to Liberia and the Americo-Liberians actively encouraged the exodus movements, modifying his position to smooth out relations with the government in Monrovia would have certainly guaranteed his ability to achieve both of these ends. Throughout his five years in Liberia, however, Turner refused to soften his anti-emigrationist views to mollify the Americo-Liberians.103 Previous studies have turned up some evidence that Turner was somewhat blinded by his status as a member of the black elite. Indeed, some of his correspondence on the subject of emigration demonstrates that he possessed an overly optimistic view of the United States during the Reconstruction. “Now that such signal changes have occurred in the United States with reference to the conditions of this class of persons [the freed blacks],” Turner wrote to Hamilton Fish on May 25, 1872, “the wisdom of continuing such a policy [emigration] is thought by many at least to be questionable.”104 Although it was clear that the Counter-Reconstruction was already limiting the life chances of downtrodden southern blacks when he penned this letter in 1872, Turner’s background as the leader of a successful biracial coalition in Missouri (one of only two states to avoid the Counter-Reconstruction pattern) made it hard for him to see these realities.

Because Turner garnered his appointment by demonstrating his ability to “control” the black vote in Missouri,105 it is certainly reasonable to hypothesize (as Painter does in her work) that he also opposed emigration because he wanted to keep downtrodden blacks in the South, where their potential votes would continue to bolster the patronage demands of the black elite. There is, however, no real documentary evidence to support this interpretation. Indeed, Turner’s substantial correspondences with Frederick Douglass, Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner, Blanche K. Bruce, and a host of other black Republicans during their efforts to cure Liberia Fever never touch on the subject of patronage.

Most of Turner’s writings do exhibit the same paternalistic vision of the relationship of the black elite to rank-and-file blacks that grew out of the free black community’s first anti-emigration protests. Indeed, Turner’s statements about emigration between 1872 and 1877 reveal that he believed that the grassroots exodus movements in the postbellum South were nothing more than a scheme propagated by the ACS to defraud the most “ignorant” classes of blacks out of their U.S. citizenship rights.106 Turner also accused the government in Monrovia of working in league with the ACS to spread misinformation about the conditions that emigrants would face on their arrival in Liberia.107 Indeed, Turner asserted that none of the migrants that he had observed in Monrovia would have left the “relative comfort” of their “homes” in the United States if they had had a realistic impression of what they would face in Liberia.108

Although Turner had a well-developed ideological position against emigration, the documentary record suggests that this was not just an editorialized statement. On the contrary, Turner often recorded in his dispatches to the Department of State the hardships that black American immigrants who made their way to Liberia faced on their arrival.109 A recent analysis by Kenneth Barnes, a historian, suggests that the kinds of hardships that Turner wrote about led to incredibly high mortality rates among new arrivals in Liberia.110

The letters written by would-be black emigrants to the ACS during Turner’s tenure in Monrovia also seem to support his claims. The results from a content analysis conducted on a random sample of 360 of the more than 2,000 letters that freed blacks wrote to the ACS seeking assistance with emigration to Liberia between 1870 and 1900111 reveals that transnationalism was a motivation for only a tiny minority of the correspondents. Indeed, only 43 (or 12 percent) of the letters frame the would-be emigrants’ desire to go to Liberia primarily as a function of affective ties to the continent of Africa. By contrast, 266 (or 74 percent) of the letters frame the correspondents’ motivation as a desire to escape the hardships of the Counter-Reconstruction; moreover, 164 (or 62 percent) of the 266 letters also use terms like homeland and nativity to refer to the United States.

Although this finding does not justify the paternalism that Turner demonstrated toward low-status blacks, it does reorient our understanding of his efforts to undermine the exodus movements. In short, Turner failed in his role as minister to Liberia not because he was interested in preserving the prerogatives of his own class of black Americans but because of his sense that he was duty bound to protect the freed blacks.

Of course, the Americo-Liberians were never able to see anything positive in Turner’s tenure. On the contrary, after the ACS published some of his dispatches in the Liberian newspapers, the “indignities” that he described to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish throughout the first three years of his term only multiplied. Moreover, the U.S. legation in Monrovia became a constant target of vandalism and mob actions. Ultimately, these acts convinced Turner that he could no longer effectively serve the interests of his government in Liberia, so he expressed his desire for a recall to the United States.112 One month later, James Milton Turner set sail for the United States from the port of Monrovia disappointed with his tenure but convinced that he had done his best for his nation and the “ignorant” classes among his race who were struggling on the home front.113

Dissident Voices

James Milton Turner’s unwavering insistence that the black lower class not give up their U.S. citizenship for life in Liberia was rooted in his observations of the hardships that new immigrants faced in Monrovia. Although the majority of the members of the black elite shared Turner’s commitment to protecting the rights of the downtrodden members of their community, the realities of the Counter-Reconstruction led many of them to take a more sympathetic stance to the exodus movements. In other words, some members of the black elite found the hardships that freed blacks faced in the United States so troubling that it mollified their staunch opposition to emigration.

One prominent example of this trend was Frederick Douglass. As we have seen, Douglass had been a hard-line opponent of emigrationism since he came to prominence in abolitionist circles in the 1840s. In 1855, for example, he described Liberia as a land of “plagues and poisons” that was at the center of a colonizationist plot to “expatriate” black Americans.114 By 1878, however, Douglass was so ambivalent about the conditions facing freed blacks in the South that he was comfortable recommending John H. Smyth, a fervent emigrationist, to President Rutherford B. Hayes for the post of minister resident in Liberia.115

A few notable black leaders even became advocates for the exodus movements during the Counter-Reconstruction. It is not surprising that Martin Robinson Delany was one of the first and most committed of these dissident voices. Delany, who was one of the first blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School, had demonstrated a willingness to challenge the consensus within the black elite against emigration to Africa as early as the 1850s.116 In 1852, Delany, who began his brilliant career in abolitionist politics as a staunch opponent of all variants of emigrationism, published a pro-emigration treatise entitled The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Delany’s central proposition in this book was that free blacks should be more open to emigration in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, which contained a provision that compelled northern law enforcement officials to help southerners track down fugitive slaves.

One of the most interesting dimensions of Delany’s argument in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People is his pronounced preference for a destination in Canada or Latin America over Liberia.117 Delany’s preference for these locales over Africa was rooted in his deep disdain for the relationship that the Liberian government maintained with its patrons at the ACS. Although Delany had been something of a maverick on emigrationism throughout his career, he joined his cohorts in the black elite in their near universal condemnations of the ACS.118 Moreover, he believed that Liberia would never be a truly independent nation as long as it was in league with the ACS. Indeed, Delany dismissed the newly independent republic as a “burlesque on a government” and “a pitiful dependency on the American Colonizationists.”119

In the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which strengthened the federal fugitive slave law, Delany became convinced that neither Canada nor Latin America was far enough away from the United States to guarantee the safety and stability of any future black settlement.120 In August 1858, he took his case for African emigration to the tiny cadre of his fellow black dissidents on the issue, who had convened annual meetings under the banner of the National Emigration Convention since 1855.121 As the historical record shows, Delany, who had served as president of this organization since its inception, had no trouble convincing his fellow emigrationists that the future of the race was in Africa.122 Armed with both his vision of establishing a new independent black nation in the Niger delta and the hopes of his colleagues in the National Emigration Convention, Delany set sail for West Africa on May 24, 1859.123

Delany did successfully negotiate a treaty with the king of the Egba that would have allowed the “African race in America” the “right and privilege of settling in common” with his people.124 By the time Delany made his way back to the United States in 1860, however, the British government, which feared that a black American colony in Yorubaland would interfere with its plans for exploiting the region, had convinced the king to renege on the treaty.125 The Civil War broke out just as Delany scrambled to make a new treaty with indigenous peoples. Encouraged by the possibility that blacks might know freedom in the United States in the aftermath of the war, Delany shelved his plan to return to Africa and joined the Union Army.

Delany was one of the most prominent black leaders to sign on to work as a field agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war.126 He began his work among the newly freed communities of South Carolina very optimistic about the possibilities that Reconstruction offered black Americans.127 It did not take long, however, for him to have a number of experiences in the New South that raised fresh questions in his mind about the future of blacks in the United States. Like many of the black elite who went to work in the Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction governments, Delany frequently encountered racist attitudes among his white counterparts in these institutions. These frustrations compounded Delany’s disappointment with Grant’s decision to pass him over for the diplomatic post in Liberia.

Delany’s concerns about the racially exclusive nature of the Republican patronage network paled in comparison to his consternation about the declining environment that freed blacks faced in the 1870s. Indeed, Delany was one of the first black leaders of national standing to express concerns about the refusals of the federal government to stem the rising tide of violence against freed blacks in the South. Delany’s worst fears were realized when the Republican-controlled Senate in the 44th Congress signed on to the Hayes-Tilden Compromise. Crestfallen, Delany came to see independent emigration projects to Liberia as the best chance for black Americans to achieve their dreams of freedom. In fall 1877, Delany joined with three activists from the South Carolina Piedmont region and organized the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company.128

Black South Carolinians reacted enthusiastically to Delany’s new venture. Indeed, by some estimates as many as 30,000 families expressed an interest in obtaining passage to Liberia on one of the company ships.129 Moreover, within six months of its formation, the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company had raised enough money to purchase a ship, the Azor, to transport emigrants to Monrovia.130 In April 1878, the Azor set sail from Charleston with 206 would-be Liberians.131 When the Azor returned to South Carolina a few months later, undercapitalization, opposition from local black leaders, and negative reports on the conditions in Liberia from the first wave of emigrants had ruined the company.132 The demise of the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company spelled the end of Delany’s career as an activist on the emigration issue. It also marked the last time in the nineteenth century that a black-led effort actually repatriated freed blacks to Africa.

As the aging Delany moved toward retirement, Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop of the AME Church in Georgia, emerged as the leading black advocate of emigration to Africa. Turner was born to free black parents in Newberry County, South Carolina, in 1834.133 In his twenties, Turner became an ordained minister in the AME Church.134 During his tenure on the ministerial staff of a church in Washington, D.C., Turner attracted the attention of many prominent white Republicans for his fiery speeches in support of the Union war effort. When Lincoln finally integrated the armed forces in 1863, Turner accepted an appointment as the first black chaplain in the history of the U.S. military.135

After the war, Turner pursued a career in electoral politics. His abilities and national reputation vaulted him into the state legislature of his adopted state of Georgia.136 When a conservative coalition of Democratic and Republican legislators voted to expel black members, Turner led the campaign for federal intervention in the matter.137 Although this campaign was successful, the progress of Counter-Reconstruction during the 1870 legislative session so frustrated Turner that he resigned his seat to become postmaster of Macon, Georgia. And Turner encountered so much resistance from the white citizens of Macon that he resigned this federal post after just two weeks in the job.138 Now completely discouraged with the civil service, Turner returned full time to the work of building the AME organization in the South.

Turner had developed a sympathetic perspective on emigration during an encounter with the Liberian commissioners who toured Washington, D.C., at the height of the Civil War.139 It was not until he began his pastoral work among the freed blacks in Georgia, however, that Turner became a full-fledged proponent of emigration to Liberia. Like Delany, Turner read the violence perpetrated against freed blacks during the Counter-Reconstruction as a sign that white Americans would never share the republic with blacks. “There is no doubt in my mind that we have ultimately to return to Africa than there is in the existence of God; and the sooner we begin to recognize the fact and prepare for it, the better it will be for us as a people,” Turner repeatedly told AME congregations throughout the South during the Counter-Reconstruction.140

Turner stands out among the dissident voices of the postbellum period because he was willing to work with anyone and everyone who advocated that downtrodden members of the black community go to Africa for a new start. He lent his formidable talents as an orator to Delany’s campaign for recruits for the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company.141 Turner was also involved with the ACS during this period. In 1875, for example, Turner accepted the title of honorary vice president from the leadership of the ACS. Turner officially joined the ACS board of directors and began to direct its recruitment efforts among blacks in 1890.142

Bishop Turner’s rationale for working with the ACS grew out of his experiences with the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. In his view, the demise of the company demonstrated the necessity of securing funds from the federal government to provide passage for the vast number of black southerners who claimed that they wanted to try a new life in Liberia. Of course, this was a logical step for any true believer in the promises of “Liberia’s offerings” for black Americans. Turner soon learned, however, that the tolerance that his fellow members of the black elite demonstrated for projects such as the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company at the height of the Counter-Reconstruction did not signal a sea change in their attitudes toward either the ACS or government policies aimed at stimulating emigration to Liberia.

The Butler Bill and the Death Knell Of Emigrationism

The leaders of the ACS had hoped that bringing Bishop Turner into their ranks would mollify critics of the organization among the black elite. But, as the historical record makes clear, Turner’s involvement with the group generated the opposite effect. Indeed, when news of Turner’s work with the ACS became public, the pages of the black newspapers erupted with venomous attacks against him.143

Many of these attacks against Bishop Turner’s views on emigration took place in the pages of the Christian Recorder, the weekly newspaper of the AME Church, which, because of the rapid growth of the denomination in the postbellum South, was the most widely read black periodical in the nation after 1875. A survey of the articles that appeared in the Christian Recorder during this period reveals that the black elite saw Turner’s cooperation with the ACS as an abrogation of his responsibility to protect the interests of lower-class blacks. Professor John H. Sampson, for example, urged the readers of the newspaper to remember that emigrationism had always been the tool of those who sought to “de-Americanize” blacks. So, Professor Sampson argued, Turner’s support for the philosophy must mean that he had joined the ranks of the “greatest traitors” to the black race. In closing, Sampson defended black Americans’ “inalienable right to remain” in the United States and to “expect the highest possibilities” from their “native land.”144

The paternalistic attitudes of the black elite were also on full display in many of these anti-Turner articles that ran in the Christian Recorder. In a series of editorials that ran in the paper in the late 1880s, Bishop Benjamin Tanner, a prominent AME cleric who had worked among freed blacks in Maryland, challenged Turner’s argument that the majority of freed blacks wanted to go to Liberia. When Turner responded to some of these charges with his own editorials, Tanner wrote a piece that tried to bolster his position, arguing that only the opinions of literate blacks should be counted in the debate over emigration.145

The opposition of his fellow members of the black elite did not discourage Turner. On the contrary, he joined the ACS and the Liberian government in lobbying the Congress to pass a bill that Senator Matthew Butler (D-S.C.) introduced in 1890, calling for the federal government to provide financial assistance to blacks who wanted to go to Liberia. The Bourbon Democrats had traditionally opposed emigration for the simple fact that a mass exodus of black laborers would undermine the crop-lien (or sharecropping) system that kept them in their positions of power and privilege in the New South. This situation changed dramatically after the federal elections of 1888.

In 1884, the Republicans lost control of the White House for the first time in the postbellum period. This was a direct result of the Counter-Reconstruction regimes’ suppressing black voting rights, and it jolted Republican leaders to the recognition that the terms of the Hayes-Tilden Compromise weakened their position significantly in close contests. To complicate matters further for the Republicans, black leaders, whom they had ignored for more than a decade, and President Grover Cleveland, a northern Democrat, began to flirt with the possibility of forming an alliance.146 It was in this context that the Republicans decided to abandon their laissez-faire approach to the South when Benjamin Harrison recaptured the White House for the party in 1888.

Harrison’s inaugural address gave the nation an idea of the course that the Republican Party intended to pursue with regard to black civil rights. After urging white southerners to “make the black man their efficient and safe ally” in building the New South, Harrison made it clear that his administration would abandon Hayes’s “let alone policy” in the region.147 Shortly after Harrison’s speech, the Republican-controlled 51st Congress moved to consider legislation enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in the South.148

The reaction of southern whites to these moves was swift and defiant. Democrats waved the bloody shirt in both chambers of Congress by repeatedly denouncing the federal elections measures as “force bills” akin to the Reconstruction amendments. It was in this context that Senator Butler introduced his emigration bill.149 Like the Republican legislators who passed the bills providing for the colonization of blacks in Africa during the Civil War, Butler hoped that his legislative efforts would preserve both the sectional peace and white rule in the South by solving America’s “Negro problem.”

Given the composition of the Congress, Butler knew that he faced an uphill battle in bringing his bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote. However, he hoped that a strong show of support for the bill from his Democratic colleagues and from southern blacks would indicate to the Republicans that both races favored separation for their “mutual progress.”150 By speaking out for the bill in both the black and white presses and by providing Senator Butler with the statements of poor southern blacks who wanted to emigrate, Bishop Turner certainly did his part to move the bill through Congress.151

Of course, the black elite vehemently opposed Butler’s legislation.152 But, in the final analysis, it was misgivings among Butler’s partisans in the Senate that doomed the bill. As the debate over the bill played out in the press, most Democratic senators came to see the measure as a losing proposition for their region for two reasons. First, as their fathers and grandfathers had understood, federal funding for the would-be emigrants would undermine their illegitimate aristocracy and labor system. Second, agreeing to help blacks leave the South would be tantamount to surrender in the sectional conflict between the two parties.153 Thus, the majority of Butler’s colleagues ultimately chose direct confrontation with the Republicans over his emigration bill.154 Without solid support from his own party, Butler’s bill died in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee without ever coming to a vote.

Because private efforts could not provide passage for the vast number of southern blacks who wanted to go to Liberia, Butler’s inability to bring his bill on to the Senate floor for a vote was a death knell for the emigration movement in the United States. Despite this fact, Bishop Turner and his friends at the ACS and in the Liberian government continued to preach the gospel of emigration to downtrodden southern blacks.155 Although Turner’s target audience understood what the demise of the Butler bill meant for their chances of actually going to Africa, the hardships of life under southern regimes that were now emboldened by the Republicans’ decision to renege on their promises to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment continued to give him credibility with many southern blacks.156

At the same time, it is important to note that continued support for emigration among the black masses was also a function of limited options. For Frederick Douglass, James Milton Turner, Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner, and the rest of the old guard black leaders who had led the charge against emigrationism in the nineteenth century, the fight over the Butler bill was a last act in their long crusade to protect downtrodden blacks from giving up their rights on the home front. The retirement of these leaders meant that the traditional position of the black elite vis-à-vis emigration was underrepresented in the black counterpublic during the years immediately following the debate over the Butler bill.

Of course, there is no evidence that the black elite would have done any better in winning the hearts and minds of these men and women that they wanted so desperately to protect from Liberia Fever than they had in the period prior to the debate over the Butler bill. After all, the gruesome violence of the second wave of the Counter-Reconstruction in the South after the Democrats won the federal elections of 1892 undermined the ability of the black elite to counsel patience with the political process.157 What we do know is that scores of blacks joined the internal exodus movements focused on Kansas and that many more continued to write to the ACS about Liberia during this period.158

Although passage to either Kansas or Liberia never came for most, a new black leader did emerge to fill the vacuum created as the old lions of the nineteenth century retreated from public life. In 1895, Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, urged black Americans to abandon both emigrationsim and their demands for social and political equality in his Atlanta Compromise speech.159 Although Washington’s speech did nothing more than announce the complete surrender to the harsh realities of the Counter-Reconstruction that most black southerners had already been forced to accept in their personal lives, the acclaim that he garnered from whites after the speech made him the most powerful and revered figure in black America.160 By embracing Washington as their spokesperson, the black community finally reached a consensus on the emigration issue that bridged the class divide of the postbellum period. As I illustrate in the next chapter, much of the hostility that Marcus Garvey encountered from the generation of radical black leaders who supplanted Washington in the early second decade of the twentieth century was rooted in the fact that his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) program threatened to rupture this long-sought détente on the issue.

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The behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena has never held more significance for black America’s domestic struggle for equality than between 1816 and 1890. This is because the federal government frequently embraced policies (promoted by the ACS) that encouraged black emigration to Liberia as a means of reconstituting the United States as an all-white republic. For the most part, the black elite largely rejected association with the continent during this period and worked hard to block policies that sought to stimulate the growth of Liberia to defend their rights and prerogatives on the home front.

There were also rare instances in which the black elite worked to assist the development of Liberia. The conventional wisdom within the interdisciplinary literature on black engagement in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena suggests that the ideational commitments of the black elite derived from transnationalism trumped their concerns about their citizenship status in America during these periods; however, my analyses of archival materials undermine this assertion. Indeed, my central finding is that members of the black elite entered the foreign policymaking arena in support of Liberia only when they calculated that doing so would shift the national discourse about the capacity of the black race for U.S. citizenship.

When we examine the implications of the hard line taken by the black elite on the grassroots exodus movements that emerged during the Counter-Reconstruction for the dominant paradigm on black representation, we see that the members of the black elite behaved in a manner consistent with Michael Dawson’s theory of linked fate when seeking to undermine these movements. Their paternalistic attitudes toward rank-and-file blacks, however, generated a set of outcomes that prevented a sizable minority of southern blacks from pursuing a strategy that they believed would improve their life chances. This finding bolsters recent cautionary tales about the nature of linked fate that have appeared in the fields of black politics and social history.