Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation 9780822372752
Ikuko Asaka examines emancipation's intersection with settler colonialism in North America, showing how emancipatio
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Tropical Freedom
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TROPICAL FREEDOM climate, settler colonialism, and black exclusion in the age of emancipation
•
Ikuko Asaka
Duke University Press Durham and London 201 7
© 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Americ a on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-8223-6881-6 (hardcover : alk. Paper) isbn 978-0-8223-6910-3 (pbk. : alk. Paper) isbn 978-0-8223-7275-2 (ebook) Cover art: Stacy Lynn Waddell, Untitled (Island V), 2012, branded, burned, and singed paper with ink, 52 × 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Christopher Ciccone Photography
CONTENTS
vii Acknowledgments xi Note on Terms 1 Introduction 21 Chapter 1 Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order 53 Chapter 2 Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora 81 Chapter 3 Intimacy and Belonging 111 Chapter 4 Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Boundaries 139 Chapter 5 Race, Climate, and Labor 167 Chapter 6 U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom 193 Conclusion 205 Notes 253 Bibliography 281 Index
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ACKNOWLE DGMENTS
It is a great pleasure to thank those who have helped me complete this book. The book originated as a doctoral dissertation. I am deeply indebted to the dedicated teachers in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin‒Madison. Nan Enstad, Susan Johnson, Brenda Gayle Plummer, and Jim Sweet expanded my horizons and opened my eyes to both the liberating possibilities of mobility and the persistent power of race in the intertwined histories of North Americ a and the Atlantic world. I would like to express special thanks to Steve Kantrowitz, who took me u nder his wing when Jeanne Boydston, my original advisor, passed away when I had just embarked on the writing process. Jeanne was the reason I had left Japan to study women’s and gender history in the heart of the American Midwest. Through our many conversations during the years I worked with her, she impressed on me the need to embrace the messiness of history without sacrificing clear prose. I hope I have done a good enough job. To Jeanne I dedicate this book. A host of institutions have provided assistance during research and writing. Travel awards and research grants from the Organization of American Historians, the Huntington Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the National Society of the Colonial Dames enabled me to carry out multisite archival research. During the writing stages I received generous fellowships from the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin System’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
I owe much to many archivists and librarians for their help and advice. Special thanks go to Lucy McCann at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House and Roland Baumann at the Oberlin College Archives. I am grateful to the staff at the National Archives of the United Kingdom; the National Archives of Canada; the National Library of Canada; the Ontario Provincial Archives; the Huntington Library; British Library Newspapers at Colindale; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Detroit Public Library; and the Library of Congress. Reassuring guidance and constructive criticism improved the book. I thank Matthew Guterl for his support at key moments in the writing of this book. Dave Roediger provided crucial advice and generous encouragement. I benefited immensely from the thoughtful suggestions of Pamela Calla, Anne Eller, Solsiree Del Moral, Cary Fraser, Lori Ginzberg, and Nan Woodruff. My appreciation also goes to the commentators, panelists, and audiences at presentations at annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, the Canadian Historical Association, and the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora; and at the Mellon Sawyer Conference on Scale and Racial Geographies at Rutgers. Colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, read the manuscript in its various forms and stages. I am grateful to Jim Barrett, Clare Crowston, Jerry Dávila, Kristin Hoganson, Rana Hogarth, Fred Hoxie, Craig Koslofsky, Bruce Levine, Bob Morrissey, Dana Rabin, and Mark Steinberg for much-needed advice. I am especially thankful to Antoinette Burton for her unceasing support and engagement with the manuscript. The publication of this book owes much to the First Book Writing Group at the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I thank Nancy Abelmann, Maria Gillombardo, and Craig Koslofsky for their assistance with book proposal writing. My sincere appreciation goes to my editor, Gisela Fosado, for seeing potential in my manuscript and for her impeccable professionalism. I am also grateful to Lydia Rose Rappoport-Hankins and the production team at Duke University Press and to the press’s readers for their insightful comments, which significantly improved the manuscript. To the editor and readers of the Journal of African American History, where a portion of chapter 2 previously appeared, I thank you for your suggestions, on which I built the extended and reformulated version that appears in the book. I thank friends who in one way or another helped me keep going after the loss of my advisor: Yanoula Athanassakis, Kori Graves, Aya Hirata-Kimura, viii •
Acknowle dgments
Michel Hogue, Jennifer Hull, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Dorothy Ko, Fuyuko Mitsugi, Leslie Reagan, Honor Sachs, Fumiko Sakashita, Kendra Smith- Howard, and Gina Ulysse. Special thanks goes to Cindy I-Fen Cheng for her generosity and for showing me what mentorship should be like. I am forever grateful to her for the dinners she made every night during the week of my dissertation defense. Also, I was fortunate to have Atsushi Tajima and Yukiko Muroi as wonderful friends. Their company and cooking sustained me through the hard times. I am privileged to have received the support my parents have given me. I thank them for letting go of so many of the t hings they had envisioned when their only d aughter was born. Thank you for supporting my pursuit of gradu ate education in the United States and my decision to have a c areer and f amily far away from you. I now realize the degree of self-discipline and self-sacrifice you endured in letting me pursue what makes me a truly happy person. Also, many thanks to my in-laws, Jeri, Philip, and Rachel Hertzman. I am especially indebted to Jeri, who flew in from New Mexico many times to take care of Kai, her newborn grandson, at the crucial stage of my completing the book. My deepest gratitude goes to Marc Hertzman, my partner in life and love, who has been a constant source of support and inspiration. My trajectory as a historian has coincided with our relationship. Marc, we have known each other for a very long time, yet you still amaze me with the extraordinary degree of interest you show in my well-being. If I am a kinder person and a better scholar, it is because of you. Kai and I are so lucky to have you in our lives.
Acknowle dgments
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NOTE ON TERMS
Canada refers to both the Province of Upper Canada, which existed from 1791 to 1841, and Canada West, a new designation given to Upper Canada when the colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada united to form the Province of Canada in 1841. Upper Canada (and later Canada West) included what is now southern Ontario, a region surrounded by the Detroit River and Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, and the place in Canada where most formerly enslaved people and free black migrants settled. People of African descent living in the United States are referred to as African Americans or black Americans. Their counterparts in Canada are called African Canadians or black Canadians. Nativity is not a primary element in the definition of the terms. I refer to those who w ere born in the United States but identified themselves as British colonial subjects in Canada as African Canadians or black Canadians. When discussing the subjection of both African and Canadian Americans to common patterns of racial control operating across the Canada-U.S. border, I use the term African North Americans to mark their shared experience. ere living in The term f ree blacks indicates people of African descent who w freedom, regardless of their legal status. It encompasses those who fled from bondage, those who were born free, and those who gained freedom by means sanctioned by their owners. I use the terms freed, emancipated, and formerly enslaved to refer to those who experienced bondage and to emphasize the conditions, experiences, and viewpoints rooted in their liberation from enslavement. I use the term legally f ree when I am contrasting legally sanctioned status with the status of others who liberated themselves by processes that
ere not authorized by law. Finally, I avoid using the term fugitive slaves to dew scribe those who emancipated themselves by fleeing from slavery. In consideration of their desire to shed the degrading status of slave, I refer to them as self-emancipated people and former-slave refugees, runaways, or escapees, except when I quote or paraphrase contemporary statements that used fugitive slaves.
xii • Note on Terms
INTRODUCTION
In her 1852 pamphlet advocating African American emigration to Canada, the free black journalist Mary Ann Shadd gave a brief but revealing history lesson on the extensive scope of the African diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Along with noting many advantages of leaving the United States, Shadd deployed the history of the forced transatlantic dispersal to c ounter what was then the prevailing argument in Britain and the United States—that people of African descent w ere more productive workers in the tropics than they were in cold climates. In rejecting the notion that black bodies could thrive only in tropical locales, Shadd cited the transatlantic slave trade, which scattered Africans and their descendants over a wide range of latitudes from “great heat” to “severe cold” and led to “the varied experience of coloured persons in America . . . whether as whalemen in the northern seas, as settlers in the British provinces (far north of the United States), or in the West Indies.”1 The history of the formation of the African diaspora served Shadd’s fight against climatic determinism, providing empirical proof that the black body was capable of withstanding various types of labor across the spectrum of temperatures. Sharing Shadd’s frustration about racial essentialism, Henry Bibb, a self-emancipated newspaper editor living in Canada, noted sarcastically that when “negro slavery” had been legal in the province, “there was no complaint about the climate’s being too cold for the colored people.”2
Free black residents in Canada w ere not the only ones who invoked the transatlantic dispersal of human chattel when refuting charges of climatic unfitness. In the midst of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass cited the slave trade to make his point against a proposal by the Lincoln administration to move southern freed people to Central America. Douglass noted that human trafficking across the ocean had placed people of African origin and ancestry in “nearly all the extremes of heat and cold, and other vicissitudes of climate.” This, he reasoned, demonstrated that they “can live any where in common with other men” and that “neither the direct force of public law, nor the indirect but equally certain force of political theories should be wielded for his removal from the land of his birth.” Like Shadd and Bibb, Douglass converted the legacy of the forced migration into a political tool to prove that “if any people can ever become acclimatized, I think the negro can claim to be so in this country.”3 The above critiques represent one strand of black intellectual thought that evolved in response to the narrow parameters of black freedom set by various groups in the United States and the British Empire. In both places, during the decades between the American Revolution and the end of the Civil War, a person’s achievement of liberty did not automatically translate into his or her enjoyment of freedom of residence. People of African descent in the United States and British North America faced a series of regulatory measures and ideological justifications that restricted where they could live in freedom and what types of labor they could perform. Integral to these interventions was the association between blackness and physical aptitude for labor in a tropical climate. As Bibb astutely observed, climatic determinism did not hinder the establishment of slavery in so-called temperate regions. The institution existed, albeit on a relatively small scale, in what is now Canada until the early nineteenth century. Colonies such as Nova Scotia, Upper Canada, Prince Edward Island, and Lower Canada all permitted h uman bondage.4 The New E ngland and Middle Atlantic colonies, which would institute emancipation in one form or another a fter independence, also allowed the use of enslaved labor in a variety of trades.5 As the numbers of free blacks multiplied in British North America and the United States, however, a multitude of actors in both locales set out to regulate the location of the growing populations. The efforts to manage black freedom on each side of the border were based on historically contingent and nationally distinct ideas and practices, but they shared a certain pattern: they entailed the imagining and pursuit of a racially demarcated Atlantic space in which places of black and white freedom w ere geographically segmented according to a racial taxonomy of climate. These 2 • Introduction
mappings identified certain places as sites for the emancipated to enjoy their freedom, while simultaneously they designated other places for the advancement of white people, associating the former with a tropical climate and the latter with a temperate one. In this formulation, freedom figured as a geographic condition marked by racial difference and climatic character. This conceptualization of freedom, with its recourse to race-based environmental essentialism, ensconced questions of belonging within a realm of the body and nature. Importantly, as with other symbols of blackness and whiteness, the labels of tropical and temperate were not applied in any fixed way. The definition of a place’s climatic character was in flux and subject to political contingency. Tropical Freedom demonstrates how these patterned dynamics shaped a series of emancipations in North America that generated significant numbers of U.S. and U.S.-origin free blacks. The book examines the British wartime emancipations during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the postrevolutionary freeing of slaves in the United States, self-emancipation in Canada after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, and steps t oward abolition in the United States. Each of t hese processes—some of which w ere more long-term than o thers—was accompanied by organized attempts to engage the newly freed population (and their descendants, in some cases) to labor in particular economic relations in the tropics, including such diverse projects as freehold and tenant farming in Sierra Leone, independent landowning in Trinidad and Liberia, and plantation labor in the Caribbean and Central America. In all cases efforts to remove freed blacks to the tropics si multaneously entailed a designation of “temperate” places in which whites should enjoy their freedom. The trajectories of these processes were not uniform, however. Each case was marked by political and economic specificities. And in all cases, black removal to the tropics was never a foregone conclusion. Yet the core principle underlying black displacement—conceiving of freedom as a racially segregated condition distinguished by a distinct climatic feature—became so entrenched in North America that by the time of the Civil War, Republicans who opposed the overseas relocation of emancipated people embraced the tenet of tropical freedom and applied it to a domestic space. They framed the South as a domestic tropical region within which the emancipated p eople would be contained, far from the temperate northern states. Another focus of the book is black responses to the geographic o rders of freedom. Negotiating, disrupting, and countering controls over their location became an enduring strain of political activism among U.S. and U.S.-origin free Introduction • 3
Hudson
Dominion of Canada NORTH Fre e St ate s of 1860
A M E R IC A
Bay
Upper Canada (Canada West after 1841) Lower Canada Toronto Fre e St ates of 1860
Nova Scotia
New York City
Philadelphia
Un i t e d S tat e s
North Atlantic Mexico
Ocean
Gulf of Mexico
Jamaica Île à Vache Caribbean Sea
P a c i fi c Ocean
SOUTH AMERICA
Chiriqui Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Projection, scale 1:50,000,000
Dominion of Canada
NORTH AMERICA
Trinidad
London
E U ROPE Nova Scotia
Un i t e d S tat e s
Nor th Atlantic Ocean
Gulf of Mexico
AFR IC A Caribbean Sea
SOUTH AMERICA
Sierra Leone Liberia
Abeokuta
Robinson Projection, scale 1:90,000,000
MAP I.1 Free territories and black emigration destinations. Drawn by Jake Coolidge.
Oro
Kingston
Lake Huron UPPER CANADA ( C A N A D A W E S T a ft e r 1 8 4 1 ) Queen's Bush Settlement
Wilberforce Settlement
M ICH IG AN
Erin Woolwich Waterloo
Bidulph Dundas Township Brantford
London
Norwich
Toronto
Lake Ontario
Nelson
Hamilton St. Davids St. Catherines Niagara Chippawa
Buffalo NEW YORK
Dawn Settlement
Detroit
Chatham
Windsor
Elgin Settlement Sandwich Amherstburg Gosfield
Lake Erie
0 0
Colchester
50 mi 50
100 km
MAP I.2 Towns and settlements in Upper Canada. Drawn by Jake Coolidge.
p eople in the United States and British North America. They manufactured an assortment of cultural ammunition—some shared, some unique to each place—as they sought to set their own terms of belonging in their respective societies. What emerged in the process were alternative visions of black freedom that articulated aspirations for economic independence and complex under standings of the relationship between race, place, and labor. Such contests and negotiations resulted in an African diaspora characteristic of the era of emancipation and distinct to North Americ a, one that was conditioned by the racialization of freedom but imbued with quests for truly emancipatory futures. The members of this diaspora formed a collective transnational subject bound by corresponding, if not identical, experiences, which warrants their having the common designation of African North Americans. Through an analysis of the geographic demarcations of freedom, Tropical Freedom argues that such exclusionary ideas and practices were intimately intertwined with the processes of settler colonial formation in the United States and British North America. The combination of rapidly growing free black populations and a heightened desire for indigenous expropriation led the architects of the U.S. and British empires to employ tropical removal proj ects in service of white settler colonial rule. In each process of emancipation examined in the book the promotion of black removal came to accompany the drawing of racial boundaries around the landed yeoman status, a settler Introduction • 5
colonial privilege championed in both empires as an economic condition and a guarantee of political liberty.6 To keep white monopoly on this particular status became an abiding imperative among politicians, officials, and social reformers on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border in the first half of the nineteenth century, as an unprecedented growth in the numbers of free blacks coincided with an unwavering desire for colonial settlement in both the United States and British North America. These agents of empire believed that settler expansion was a white-only undertaking and limited entitlement to former indigenous lands to whites through the symbolic and physical placing of black freedom in tropical regions. Even though most of the removal projects bore little fruit, the principle behind them—that blacks must be excluded from settler privileges—often produced material effects in North America. African Americans and African Canadians were marginalized in their respective settler colonial states in concrete ways. The determination that the Northwest should contain only white settlers, an imperative often intertwined with the desire to relocate f ree blacks to Liberia, led to the prohibition or restriction of African-American migration into the region. The tenet of white-only settlement was transplanted to the Pacific West by migrants from the Northwest and materialized in mea sures that banned or restricted free blacks from entering the region or owning land there. In British North America, black residents suffered unequal distributions of land, had limited access to public education, and faced official and de facto curtailments of their political rights. Part of the rationale for these mea sures was the idea that f ree blacks in the empire belonged in its tropical colonies. Recognizing these racial inequalities and geographic stratification directs us to a central aspect of the history of the African diaspora. As the cultural geographer Katherine McKittrick puts it, “the history of black subjects in the diaspora is a geographic story.”7 Whether in Bolivia, the United States, or Canada, members of the African diaspora have countered and negotiated “geographic distributions and interactions [that] are racially, sexually and economically hierarchical.”8 One facet of such geographic domination is the “naturalization of identity and place,” a process that involves the reading and inscribing of bodies in racial, gendered, and sexual terms in ways that define and reinforce regulatory norms of where certain body types naturally belong.9 Performing the work of naturalizing was part of racial conduct entrenched in the centuries-long development of plantation economies in the Americas. From the sixteenth century on, the twin evolution of the plantation complex and European empire building exemplified what Tony Ballantyne and 6 • Introduction
Antoinette Burton call the empire’s “self-consciously spatializing project.” In this project geography played a paramount role in “the creation and maintenance of social, political, and cultural relations” in a way that placed subjugated territories and peoples in hierarchical strata.10 Integral to the case of space making analyzed in this book is the geographic concept of tropicality as a transnationally operative tool of empire. Postulating that “the contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of global imaginings,” tropicality scholars have brought to light the contingent and contested nature of the category of the tropical as well as its historical use as a signifier of otherness in diverse colonial and imperial schemes.11 As European expansion unfolded, expedient definitions of the tropical produced historically specific geographies that structured particular designs of conquest, settlement, and exploitation. In the Atlantic world, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British “development of plantation economies, worked by forced labor,” rested on and contributed to racialized delineations of temperate and tropical zones, with the latter figuring as an environment most suited for black agricultural l abor.12 A fter trying different labor arrangements, Europeans had come to believe that Africans and people of African descent were especially suited to cultivating plantation crops in the tropics. The association of plantation l abor, blackness, and the tropics thus became the triangular foundation of the transatlantic slave trade and racial slavery in the Americas.13 As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, these taxonomies did not automatically dictate the management of f ree labor in the British Empire or in the United States, but they gradually became integral to such projects in the early nineteenth century. Consequently, this book is a study of how tropicality became a discourse of freedom. In tracing the evolution of the tropicality discourse, this book fills chronological gaps in existing histories of racialized climatic geographies of labor. Scholars of the British Empire have pointed out that “racially based socioecological ascriptions” born in the context of New World slavery went on to organize the postemancipation imperial rearrangement of f ree labor.14 Seymour Drescher has brought into focus “the racialization of labor and migration” in the mid-nineteenth-century empire in which “tropical agriculture was an economic activity with images of racialized disease, death, domination and capit alist expansion,” while European workers were placed in “temperate zones” outside of “the plantation tropics.”15 Historians of race in the United States have also claimed that climatic idioms played a vital role in the designing Introduction • 7
of labor during the era of overseas imperialism.16 As Daniel Bender and Jana Lipman observe, “U.S. imperial labor practices” were informed by racialized tropical-temperate distinctions that assigned nonwhite bodies to tropical plantation economies.17 Adopting a broader perspective, others highlight a transnational racial order at work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that divided the world into nonwhite tropical and white temperate zones. Such global mapping was a mechanism of Western colonial pursuits in tropical lands, as demonstrated by Dane Kennedy, but it also involved a white settler colonial dynamic, according to Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, in which “white men claimed a special right to lands in the ‘temperate zone,’ claims made against their Indigenous inhabitants and all those p eoples they would designate as ‘non-white.’ ”18 This book suggests that the recourse to climatic determinism in these patterned configurations of race and free labor did not happen in a vacuum but can be traced back to an earlier period. In addition to climatic tropes, another set of idioms constituted discourses related to black tropical removal: the language of normative gender and sexual relations. This language came to play a role against the backdrop of the importance of the rhetoric of intimacy in British North American frontier politics and in U.S. republican ideology. White colonists in Canada painted fugitive slaves as unwilling and incapable of racially endogamous reproduction and familial relationships, which rendered them a threat to the white settler colonial order and made them candidates for Caribbean emigration. In the United States the trope of the f amily was often invoked by supporters of Liberian colonization to deny f ree black Americans’ aptitude for citizenship in the United States, at a time when the connection between the familial and the political was becoming tightened in republican discourse. Viewed in this way, African North Americans w ere targets of “the management of imperial rule” that unfolded in “intimate domains” of “sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing.”19 As in other cases in which languages and practices of intimacy w ere marshaled to impose white settler rule—such as indigenous land divestiture and Asian immigration restrictions—free black intimate relationships served as the locus of reifying geographic definitions that drew racial boundaries around settler North Americ a.20 As an exploration of different instances of emancipation over time, this work does not offer a fixed-point observation of one society’s social and economic reconfiguration after slavery. Rather, it demonstrates how a series of emancipations in the United States and British North America displayed 8 • Introduction
comparable patterns of racial ordering. The main objectives of the book are to bring to light the intersectionality of settler colonialism and black dislocation and illuminate how this dynamic was intrinsic to different processes of emancipation across borders. Showing the transnational operation of this particular system of hierarchy foregrounds a hitherto unexamined mode of colonial and imperial formation that characterized Anglo-American North America in the era of emancipation. FREE MONARCHICAL AND UNFREE REPUBLICAN EMPIRES
While bringing into relief transnationally operative patterns, this work also illuminates each empire’s particular colonial systems and labor models that were designed and realized through a shared logic of climatic racial mapping. Britain’s engagements with free black populations in North America w ere characterized and informed by its shift to a free empire racially divided into white settler societies and nonwhite extractive colonies. Grounded in a preexisting strain of emancipation thought, a racially organized imperial space developed in the course of two wartime emancipations: one during the American Revolution, which generated freed people commonly called the black loyalists, and the other during the War of 1812, which sparked another surge of emancipated people, the so-called black refugees of the War of 1812.21 Although undertaken with the prospect of owning land and as a result of personal and communal decision making, the travels of black loyalists to Sierra Leone from London and Nova Scotia set the stage for a racialized geography of free labor encompassing the metropole, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. When the War of 1812 brought about another wave of freed people, who traveled from the United States to Nova Scotia and London, official efforts w ere made to send these people to Trinidad and Sierra Leone with the explicit aim of retaining the whiteness of the colony and the metropole. By 1815 philanthropists, settlers, and government administrators had defined the urban economy of the metropole, landed settlement in Nova Scotia, and migration from the former to the latter as exclusive domains of a class of British subjects considered fit for temperate climates—that is, those in the racial category interchangeably referred to as white or European. However, still in flux was the type of free labor assigned to black refugees who were to migrate to the empire’s tropical colonies. While Sierra Leone had built its agricultural production on black dependent laborers by the 1810s, the Trinidad government offered newcomers from Nova Scotia the opportunity to own land—an Introduction • 9
arrangement it abandoned when imperial abolition incentivized the colonial elites to import cheap labor for the plantations. After slavery in the empire was abolished, imperial space became more racially demarcated and the location of f ree blacks was further controlled. The doctrine of a racially organized empire informed the experience of another significant group of free blacks in British North Americ a: self-emancipated people who had fled from the United States to Canada. Although slave escapes after imperial emancipation induced abolitionist alliances dedicated to black advancement in Canada, such radical visions w ere soon overtaken by a drive to order freedom geographically by race. By the m iddle of the 1840s, a renewed push for colonial settlement of Upper Canada and West Indian planters’ demand for estate workers had combined to inspire a diverse array of metropolitan and colonial sectors to pursue the relocation of self-emancipated people from Canada to the Caribbean plantations, considered to be a natural environment for black agricultural labor. Britons’ application of this racial doctrine did not stop with free black populations in Canada; the belief in black tropical suitability extended to free African Americans. West Indian agents saw value in what they deemed common attributes between the two groups of African North Americans: Anglophone, Christian, and physically able to meet the demands of tropical labor, a set of traits thought to be more important than any political and cultural differences between the two groups. Such recruitment efforts brought free African North Americans into the larger global history of postemancipation nonwhite labor mobilization, along with workers from East India, China, and Sierra Leone. Britain’s enthusiasm for former slaves persisted into the Civil War, when the British pursued another opportunity to obtain potential plantation hands. The planters turned their attention to so-called contrabands, or formerly enslaved p eople who fled across Union lines and found themselves greeted by the Lincoln administration’s desire to remove them to tropical locations, including the British Caribbean. Lincoln’s promotion of black colonization doubled as a settler colonial mea sure much like the British schemes of free black removal. The fusing of black relocation and white settler politics was first set in motion when newly indepen dent republicans encountered the British discourse on Sierra Leone and, in particular, its association of black freedom and tropical Africa. This encounter provided a powerful framing device for the way white Americans approached the growing f ree black populations in their midst, while allowing them to diverge from the British in postulating distinct l abor and imperial models. 10 • Introduction
Initially, the idea that blacks could become landowners in the Atlantic tropics was not limited to the United States. Sierra Leone was originally established with that goal. However, black tropical landholding soon became a distinctly American institution not only b ecause Sierra Leone quickly discarded it, but also because this model became closely bound up with the conception of Liberia as “the embodiment of U.S. republican ideals.” As noted by Brandon Mills, replicating U.S. political values in an independent African republic was the cardinal principle of Liberian colonization for many supporters of the venture.22 To replicate the yeoman republic, its proponents envisioned a black “colony of prosperous freeholders” and put Liberia on a path t oward independence, although it departed from colonial governance slowly, much to the black settlers’ frustration.23 The U.S. vision of an independent African nation involved another divergence from Britain: the two countries treated their black-majority colonies differently. Britain locked Sierra Leone (and l ater the British Caribbean) into “economic entities” with a dependent, landless nonwhite majority placed under imperial guardianship, which made Britain what Jack Greene calls an “exclusionary empire” distinguished by unequal political liberty in and between settler and nonsettler colonies.24 In the United States the possibility of Liberia’s joining the Union as a state was precluded from the start b ecause the principle of equal incorporation into the aggrandizing republican empire assumed the white identity of its citizenry. This protocol, codified in the Northwest Ordinance, provided for “a minimal threshold of whiteness” (a white male population of five thousand) as the basic condition for entering the republic.25 By the 1830s a notable segment of supporters of Liberian colonization had linked black Americans’ rise to landed settlers in Africa to the goal of establishing what William Freehling has called “an empire of liberty for ere racially white farmers.”26 In this model, sites of republican yeomanry w separated—whites in the continental United States and blacks in the tropical settler colony of Liberia. What made this white settler paradigm distinct from Britain’s was its enmeshment with the conflict with those seeking to expand slavery. As Peter Kastor observes, that conflict was fundamentally settler colonial in that it was a struggle between “proslavery advocates [who] saw a renewed future for the peculiar institution in the West” and “free soil advocates [who] created their own portrait of landscape for white families freed from the economic inequalities created by slavery”—and, I would add, from the bastardization of labor in the continental empire’s metropolitan Introduction • 11
center.27 In the United States the imperative of populating the country’s expanding territory with white settlers was greatly complicated by the question of whether the white settlers were allowed to own slaves. The projected exclusion of black freedom from continental free soil continued to cast a long shadow on debates about the future of freed people during the Civil War, when emancipation loomed as a realistic prospect. With mounting numbers of escapees crossing Union lines, the Lincoln administration envisioned plantation colonies in the Caribbean Basin for the freed people at the same time that it passed the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted tracts of land to U.S. citizens and t hose legally qualified to become citizens—a category from which African Americans were excluded. The plans for black plantation labor were a harbinger of the nation’s eventual adoption of systems of extractive labor in the aftermath of abolition. During Reconstruction, the triangular conjunction of the tropics, black freedom, and landless, dependent agricultural labor ultimately took root in the South as the region was transformed into a domestic tropical space characterized by its disfranchised and exploitable black-majority labor force. FIGHTING THE HIERARCHIES OF FREEDOM
ese distinct but overlapping racial hierarchies would have never taken shape Th without enslaved people’s steadfast pursuit of deliverance from bondage. Regulations on free blacks w ere repeatedly imposed only because enslaved p eople steadily ran away to spaces whose laws, temporary or permanent, banned the enslavement of people within their bounds. Some of these people attained freedom by crossing military lines to a place where their slave status could be annulled, while others moved to a foreign territory where slavery was illegal. The implementation of these legal and executive measures, however, never automatically led to undisturbed enjoyment of freedom but required formerly enslaved people’s strenuous efforts to mobilize political forces to secure and maintain a boundary between free and unfree spaces. The most illustrative example of such a fight was that of formerly enslaved refugees who worked tirelessly with their allies to make the Canada-U.S. border a political shield against the intrusive hands of U.S. slavery. Black activism in Canada was almost always a joint venture between self-emancipated people and legally free blacks who identified with the self-emancipated by claiming common victimization at the hands of the U.S. slavery regime. Th ese
12 • Introduction
two groups joined forces to secure the freedom of runaways, because entering Canada did not by itself guarantee annulment of slave o wners’ claim to their slaves’ bodies and labor. Until the m iddle of the 1840s, former-slave refugees faced a real danger of extradition because the border did not protect them from legal quests to reinstate their slave status. Therefore, contrary to common scholarly wisdom that presupposes Britain’s unwavering readiness to defend fugitives, cross-border runaways and their defenders had to press for governmental protection against U.S. intrusions. In demanding metropolitan and colonial involvement, self-emancipated people’s most ingenious politics of identity came when they associated themselves with a category of freed p eople already existing in British political discourse. They identified themselves with a group most symbolic of the glorious imperial emancipation—the West Indian freed people—a move that helped put the self-emancipated in Canada on the agenda of British abolitionism. African Canadians’ identity politics, in turn, encouraged African Americans to distinguish their freedom from that of the Canadians, as delimited by territorial boundaries and defined by distinct sets of political ideals and cultural beliefs. Witnessing self-emancipated people’s ardent expressions of British identity compelled African Americans in the northern states to represent the Canadian freed people as foreign others, against whom they would protect the republic if necessary and in contrast to whom they accentuated their American identity. This marked a dramatic shift from the way the northern black community had used Canadian former-slave refugees in its protest culture: in the late 1830s the political value of the refugee population lay in their symbolic function as a racial archetype that demonstrated blacks’ capacity for freedom, a capacity that came to be considered inherent in any population in the African diaspora. Rather than embodying nationally distinct characteristics, formerly enslaved people in Canada had personified a universal blackness possessed of the basic traits of the Western free subject: political loyalty, industry, monogamy, and Christian faith. Collectively, these examples reveal the g reat degree to which U.S. and Canadian black thinkers relied on diasporic groups as objects of identification or juxtaposition in articulating a blackness that suited their political goals. Here, in other words, African descent was considered an effective register of meaning in the constitution of free black subjectivities. While African Americans and African Canadians pursued inclusion in their respective polities, British and U.S. whites increasingly combined both
Introduction • 13
groups into mere physical embodiments of a constellation of racial traits deemed inherent in the black body. Hence, even though their goal was to achieve an equitable place in their own political communities, the two groups were compelled to oppose, negotiate, and resignify transnationally operative discourses of blackness. One such discourse involved the accusations of black sexual and gender deviancy that both groups encountered. Accused of racial mixing by Canadian frontier settlers, self-emancipated and legally free migrants from the United States fashioned an identity as a racial group that reproduced endogamous family units and thus posed no threat to the integrity of the white settler body. Correspondingly, free African Americans claimed to have an ability to practice proper familial norms within the United States in opposition to white assertions that black domesticity was possible only in tropical Africa. Both groups also countered climatic determinism. Against this imperial tradition, black theorists in Canada and the United States together exemplified what Britt Rusert calls “alternative histories of racial science.”28 They formulated radical geographies that mapped free blacks’ unlimited access to temperate locations—whether in Canada, the U.S. North, or other constructed temperate places—by destabilizing the essentialist conceptions about the relationship between the black body and the tropics. Some redefined the physical capacity of the black race, while o thers went so far as to rework racial categories altogether by constructing a new race that obliterated the black- white distinction. Free black populations in Canada and the United States also took aim at the white identity of the colonial settler by using a cultural strategy that reflected the highly mobile world in which both populations lived—a world cut across by transatlantic colonial emigrations, transcontinental settler expansions, and fugitive slave escapes. In this milieu, African North Americans engaged spatial movement in ways that helped them integrate into their respective empires. Th ese engagements reflected what geographers describe as spatial movement’s cultural function—that of producing meanings and reifying differences. Calling this aspect of motion “mobility,” scholars have foregrounded mobility’s operation as “a rich terrain from which narratives— and, indeed, ideologies—can be, and have been, constructed.”29 Through the representation of one’s movement from or to a given place, they argue, we elaborate how the moving subject is related to the place and articulate ideas about differences that underlie the subject’s specific relation to the place. In this way, representations of movements can serve as loci of signification for all sorts of differences, including those related to race, gender, and sexuality. And 14 • Introduction
if mobility works as a way to conceive and produce differences, then it is also a site of contestation over the meanings associated with them. Experiencing and witnessing the intensifying and widespread animus toward free blacks in both Canada and the United States, some African Canadians unsurprisingly did not see much hope in the emancipatory possibilities of the Civil War. They considered equality in North America a mere fantasy, fearing that the continent as a w hole was a site of white advancement in the Anglo-American racial geography of freedom. Indeed, the Union policy of emancipation with colonization plagued black Americans in the U.S. North, vindicating black Canadians’ concern that potential abolition in the United States was just another case of emancipation in North America in which the freed people were subjected to racial determinism and pressures to relocate. Alarmed, black abolitionists in the North protested Lincoln’s colonization schemes, but in d oing so they w ere forced to walk a fine line between refuting the essentialist notion of black natural belonging in the tropics and advocating that freed people be retained as an agricultural labor force in the South, a region many Republicans deemed tropical. EMANCIPATION, DISPLACEMENT, AND SETTLER COLONIALISM
By tracing the evolution of transnationally shared mechanisms of regulating black freedom to the late eighteenth century, this book complicates the prevailing geographic and chronological frame within which scholars have examined the intertwined histories of British and U.S. freedom regimes. The traditional paradigm has viewed the scope and structure of black freedom in nation-centered terms until U.S. universal emancipation. The abolition of southern slavery then becomes the principal theme of comparative and transnational studies of f ree labor systems in the United States and the British Empire.30 This partial lack of a transnational perspective is largely a result of a popular antebellum view of the United States and the British Empire as contrasting sites of slavery and freedom. In the aftermath of British abolition, an influential antislavery discourse emerged in the Atlantic world that condemned the slaveholding republic in contrast to the free monarchy. Exemplified by the expression “the English are our friends,” British emancipation served as an abolitionist weapon against the American cruelty that continued to permit human bondage.31 Within this highly politicized dyad, current scholarly analyses of the antebellum African American experience have rarely looked into the racial logic Introduction • 15
underlying the meaning and praxis of freedom in both the British Empire and the United States. Nor have they adequately examined free African North Americans’ critical stance toward the racialized structures of freedom. Emphasis tends to be placed on Canada’s role as an asylum for freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad, and African American abolitionists’ embrace of the British and denunciation of U.S. slavery in contrast to West Indian emancipation.32 The focus on the freedom-slavery dualism has also generated works that ascribe the distinctiveness of African American freedom to its existence within a slave republic, implicitly and explicitly emphasizing its peculiarity in juxtaposition to black freedom in postemancipation societies.33 This book, in contrast, foregrounds patterned dynamics of stratifying freedom at work in both the slave republic and the free monarchy. Th ese dynamics also complicate our understanding of the Atlantic world during the era of emancipation. Studies of the formation of hierarchies in connection with the rising tide of black liberation in the Atlantic world have mainly stressed the asymmetrical experiences of slavery and freedom. Such a world, demarcated into patches of f ree and unfree territory, entailed an i magined community of what Matthew Guterl describes as “a pan-American slave-holding class” that bound together the U.S. South and Latin America.34 According to Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, this coexistence of slavery and freedom generated relations and processes that were “both hierarchical and highly mobile”— hierarchical because of the discrepancies of experience between those who remained enslaved and those who attained freedom by moving to a free territory.35 What coincided with such uneven conditions was another kind of hierarchy, one embedded in freedom. As people who were enslaved in various locations found their way to liberation in the intricate Atlantic world, by the middle of the nineteenth century African North Americans had become cognizant of racial segmentations of freedom within the space of the Atlantic. And they defied and negotiated these hierarchies through intellectual work and by more implicit acts of negation. What drove and shaped the racial geographies of freedom was a settler colonial impulse. The recognition of this fact joins together historical themes pursued separately in most scholarship. This book illuminates the long- neglected intersection between what Richard Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson call the “ingrained patterns of behavior and racial thought” that informed “the range and latitude of black freedom in the age of emancipation” and what Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis refer to as the “historical patterns 16 • Introduction
of societal development and state formation” that constituted “the concepts of ‘(white) settler society’ and ‘settler colony’ . . . [as] historical constructs.”36 More specifically, acknowledging the intersections between black freedom and settler colonialism resituates African Americans in discussions of U.S. settler dynamics, which have mostly approached “blacks’ relationship with their colonizers” primarily as that of an “enslaved labor force” on the soil taken from indigenous populations.37 As noted by David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, a rich body of literature has placed slavery firmly within “the context of the dispossession of indigenous people by settler colonialism.”38 Nevertheless, the emphasis on slavery has tended to divert attention from the centrality of displacement in black-white relationships. More recently, however, theoretical and historical explorations of Liberian colonization have viewed it as one kind of settler colonial modality—that of “ultimately ‘cleansing’ the settler body politic of its (indigenous and exogenous) alterities”— and pointed to Liberian colonization’s instrumentality in the project of white settler profiteering.39 As illuminating as these expositions are, they provide only snapshots of a geog raphically broader and chronologically longer history in which Liberian colonization was embedded. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the intersection of settler colonialism and free black removal in the field of African Canadian history. The existing literature on attempts to relocate self-emancipated people to the British Caribbean has not connected the schemes to imperatives of white settler colonialism. Nor has it investigated the languages that underpinned black exclusion from Canada’s settler polity or recognized the transnational operation of the underlying racial logic of tropical black freedom.40 In U.S. historiography in particular, recognizing the existence of a s ettler colonial factor in black removal projects contributes to a recent effort to explain the sustained popularity of black colonization up to the end of the Civil War. Foner has observed that the Liberian scheme was “a political movement, an ideology, and a program that enjoyed remarkably broad support before and during the Civil War.”41 David Brion Davis calls for an investigation into the public acceptance of colonization in the antebellum era, since “historians have never really explained why the coupling of emancipation and colonization appealed to leading American statesmen from Jefferson to Lincoln.”42 By showing how colonization supporters bundled their ventures with the imperative of expanding a white-only yeomanry, this book demonstrates that colonization was appealing partly b ecause of its essential role in forming and articulating a core tenet of the U.S. continental empire. Introduction • 17
Importantly, in thinking about freedom and settler colonialism, one should keep in mind that aspirations for landholding by the emancipated were “premised on earlier and continuing modes of colonization of Indigenous peoples.” Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua make this point by poignantly asking: “Out of whose land would the ‘40 acres’ be carved?” The ideal of “black land rights” was, in essence, predicated on indigenous peoples’ “free[ing] up” of land for settlement.43 To foreground that dynamic, this book heeds Lawrence’s and Dua’s call to take note of “how the lands settled by people of color were removed from the control of specific Indigenous nations” and does so by naming the specific groups that had occupied the lands before the new black inhabitants.44 OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS
This book has two major focuses, examining both racialized geographic organizations of freedom and free black people’s own understandings of belonging. These themes are investigated through specific instances of emancipation in North America, each explored chronologically in the chapters. Chapter 1 concerns people who became free under British and U.S. rule during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. It demonstrates how ideas and practices surrounding these peoples resulted in the conception of freedom as a race-specific geographic condition marked by a tropical or temperate climate. By 1830 such racial distinctions had come to undergird white settler projects in both Britain and the United States. This emerging mode of mapping freedom, however, initially held l ittle sway when another group of U.S.-origin enslaved p eople began emancipating themselves in conspicuous numbers in British North America. Chapter 2 looks at former-slave fugitives who escaped to Canada in the aftermath of British imperial abolition. It highlights how formerly enslaved people and their allies in Canada and free African Americans in the U.S. North saw each other’s freedom as two distinct states of being, each characterized by a unique political ideology and contoured by territorial boundaries. Such constructions helped give rise to a British abolitionist discourse that acknowledged the former-slave refugees in Canada as a specific group of black colonial subjects, an acknowl edgment that accompanied the designation of Canada as their rightful site of belonging. Chapter 3 demonstrates that by the middle of the 1840s an array of British imperial agents—metropolitan abolitionists, Canadian colonial settlers, and 18 • Introduction
West Indian planters—had racially mapped Canada and the Caribbean, identifying the former as a white-only settler colony and the latter as a tropical plantation economy cultivated by nonwhite laborers. This racial mapping involved not only self-emancipated people in Canada but also free African Americans, given the assumption that their racial constitutions made them all suited to labor in the tropics. The combining of the two p eoples into a monolithic mass of workers led to attempts to import members of both groups to the postemancipation British Caribbean plantations. Such a move indicated the centrality of black tropicality in the racial configuration of free labor in the postemancipation British Empire as well as the subjection of African Americans to multiple black relocation projects instituted at home and abroad— namely, U.S. Liberian colonization and British West Indian emigration. The chapter also points out how the promotion of and resistance to these schemes played out in Britain and the United States in the languages of domesticity and intraracial reproduction. The next two chapters move us to the 1850s. They consider an enlivened black political activism in North America spawned by a new demographic development that took place a fter the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law: the arrival of seasoned black abolitionists in Canada who renounced the United States for its condoning of the aggressive southern slave interest. Chapter 4 analyzes the ways representations of mobility functioned to enforce or contest the racial bounds of Canadian and U.S. settler societies. African Americans and African Canadians formulated various gendered depictions of black mobility in ways that constructed black versions of settler family. Chapter 5 shows how African North Americans developed alternative ideas of race and environment in response to British and U.S. imperialists’ bids to racially configure freedom through discursive and institutional means. Chapter 6 centers on the U.S. abolition of slavery and discusses the ways in which the long-standing association of black freedom and tropical labor provided a paradigmatic frame for visions and policies of emancipation from the prewar sectional crisis through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The process of universal emancipation entailed efforts to remove freed people to foreign tropical lands, efforts that w ere closely bound to a mandate of expanding white free territory. Importantly, the logic of racially separate spaces of freedom had become so pervasive in the North that it undergirded a new concept of emancipation—one that viewed the South as a domestic tropi cal environment in which emancipated p eople would engage in agricultural labor apart from the temperate white North. While heterogeneous definitions Introduction • 19
of the South’s climatic and hence its racial character sprouted during Reconstruction, the region eventually assumed the economic features of a black- majority extractive tropical economy. The book concludes with a discussion of how the tropicalization of the U.S. South was part and parcel of the continuing segmentation of the Anglo- American world into racially defined zones in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The conclusion touches on the last-minute de jure inclusion of African Americans in continental settler expansion, a citizenship privilege extended at the expense of indigenous p eople. This national incorporation, however, made little change in African Americans’ symbolic and material relationship to land ownership in the West. The following pages chart free black people’s intellectual, cultural, and material responses to restrictive geographies of freedom that solidified in the Anglo-American world during the emancipation era. African North Americans’ struggles against the inequitable and exclusionary arrangements of freedom were often articulated with a desire for spatial and economic mobility via landed settlement. This was b ecause the tenet of tropical black freedom was closely conjoined with the project of white settler expansion, and therefore claims of black belonging in North America were couched in terms of rights to expropriate the land of indigenous people. Free blacks, in other words, were forced to operate in a narrow field of discourse in which the meaning of freedom, equality, and self-realization was predicated on the physical erasure of indigenous peoples. Such dynamics paint a dismal and sobering picture, showing that relations of freedom w ere intrinsically hierarchical. What’s more, these hierarchies knew no national boundaries.
20 • Introduction
Chapter 1
BLACK FREEDOM AND SETTLER COLONIAL ORDER
One of the many ramifications of the military conflicts over the independence of the American republic was the emergence of f ree black populations in the British Empire and the United States. Wartime exigencies, an ideological impetus, and enslaved p eople’s quest for freedom converged to spur a series of emancipations on both sides of the contest. The presence of the now f ree people in and from the United States prompted official and private efforts to manage their location, discursively and materially, in the newly independent republic and in the territory of its former colonial ruler. At first, questions about where t hese people should be did not involve an appeal to biological language. The early discussions designated the home of the freed people without consideration of the place’s supposed compatibility with the black body or its alleged incongruity with the white body. In other words, discourse on black freedom had yet to accompany the racial mapping of geographic entities wherein each place stood for a specific climatic environment suited for the development of either black freedom or white freedom. In short, imperial architects in both places had yet to conceptualize freedom as a geographic articulation of racial difference. By 1830, however, British and U.S. proponents of black relocation had come to formulate freedom as a racialized geographic concept. This chapter shows how ideas and practices related to the postrevolutionary emancipated
populations came to entail the racial designation of places. It also demonstrates that this racializing of place and placing of race occurred in the contexts of settler colonial formations in British North America and the United States. Although these developments played out in distinctively British and U.S. circumstances, the key dynamic was the same: each emancipation was followed by efforts to remove the freed people to a location defined as tropical. And in both places, these efforts became intimately connected to the quest to reserve for whites an exclusive monopoly on principal prerogatives of settler colonial rule: residence in the metropole and North American frontier, migration from the former to the latter, and all the privileges that should come with that movement—especially access to land. Symbolically, what underpinned the racial mappings of freedom was essentialist language—of race-based predispositions to temperate or tropical climates—that gave the geographic constructs a biological grounding and thus a cloak of inescapable destiny. Versions of the doctrine that “blacks naturally belong in the tropics” operated on multiple levels on f ree black populations, serving not only to justify their dislocation to tropical regions but also to legitimate their peripheral economic and social positions in the metropoles and on continental frontiers. The racial triangle of metropolitan center, North American frontier, and the tropics began with British dealings with the black loyalists, an emancipated p eople born out of the American revolutionary conflict who w ere eventually sent to London and Nova Scotia. In response to their marginalization in the metropole’s urban economy and the northern frontier’s small-scale landholding, colonial officials and private philanthropists proposed that they be sent to multiple destinations with an eye to effective colonial development. These propositions carried no regard for the places’ alleged climatic type. But the departure of thousands of black loyalists to Sierra Leone from both London and Nova Scotia and the subsequent takeover of the colony by the Sierra Leone Company soon precipitated racial explanations of the migrations and the racial definition of the two colonial spaces. Merchant interests, antislavery advocates, colonial officials, and white settlers in the aggregate produced the argument that the tropical climate of Sierra Leone rendered the African colony a suitable new home for free blacks who were sidelined in the metropolitan and Nova Scotian societies and that the northern colony provided an appropriate habitat for white bodies and thus a natural destination for colonists from the metropole. This racialization of migrations went hand in hand with the association of each colonial space with a distinct form 22 • Chapter 1
of free labor performed by a specific racial group: tropical Africa signified tenant farming by a free black majority (in spite of the refugees’ hope to become landowners), and temperate Nova Scotia symbolized white-only inde pendent landholding pursued at the expense of the local Mi’kmaq people. The solidification of such mapping coincided with the gradual decline of slavery in Nova Scotia. Two successive chief justices of the colony waged “a judicial war of attrition upon slave owners” by ruling against slave owners’ claim to hold human property.1 By the late 1790s and early 1800s the two jurists had “slowly ended slavery” in Nova Scotia.2 When formerly enslaved refugees from the War of 1812 (the black refugees) began arriving on Nova Scotian shores, there were few enslaved people in the colony. The influx of black refugees to this de facto f ree soil spurred another wave of black removal efforts. Deeply committed to the idea of a white Nova Scotia by this time, the colonial and imperial governments promptly launched schemes to relocate the former-slave refugees to Trinidad with the explicit aim of maintaining white settlers’ monopoly on land. Although only a tiny fraction of the refugee population actually left, the hegemonic discourse of black tropical affinity helped naturalize the marginalization of free blacks in the settler economy. Simultaneously, on the other side of the Atlantic, abolitionist- merchant interests put climatic language to use when black refugees began turning up in London. Attempting to send them to Sierra Leone, white Londoners inscribed residence in England as an exclusive right of the white body, further displaying Britons’ readiness to resort to climatic explanations. Thus, by 1820 we see a growing distinction of the metropole, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and Trinidad according to the racial group assigned to perform free labor in each place. On the one hand, the metropole and Nova Scotia came to be seen as natural environments for nonslaveholding white Britons and, by extension, migration between the two was considered a white endeavor. On the other hand, Trinidad and Sierra Leone were viewed as the empire’s tropical sites, and blackness was the color of their f ree workers. However, Trinidad and Sierra Leone diverged in certain respects: unlike in Sierra Leone, would-be migrants to Trinidad w ere promised landownership and the majority of the island’s workers were enslaved. Despite the dissimilarities, both places were embedded in a racial ordering that defined the tropics as areas of the empire set aside to accommodate f ree blacks, a logic that would have full sway after the abolition of colonial slavery. The seeds for a comparable geographic formation in the United States were planted when news of Sierra Leone reached the nascent republic, which Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 23
was similarly faced with newly liberated populations. Exposure to British advocacy of black migration to Sierra Leone through personal correspondence and published materials led supporters of Liberian colonization to borrow some of the central justifications of the British scheme—that Africa was an appropriate place for indigent black urbanites and that its tropical climate suited their constitutions. British and U.S. models for dealing with newly freed blacks became even more similar when the heightened impulse for western expansion propelled a segment of white Americans to fuse African colonization with a settler colonial project, although it was inflected by a distinctly American concern: the expansion of free soil—that is, land devoid of slavery. Whereas in the 1810s white citizens publicly considered diff erent sites in the West as places to which free black populations in their midst could be relocated, by 1827 a prevailing sense of the inevitability of white continental dominance had given rise to a new colonizationist worldview that melded the desirability of black freedom in Liberia with the impossibility of black freedom in the western expanses. Such a vision of the West described the expansion of f ree soil in climatic terms. It cast residence in the Northeast and free settler expansion from that region as suited only to white constitutions, thereby giving a biological basis for white-only access to the attendant prerogative of independent landholding. This precept of black exclusion in some cases materialized in a ctual laws. Indeed, the impulses of white free soil and Liberian colonization w ere so imbricated that some Northwestern states codified the promotion of colonization and the ban on and hindrance of black immigration as two components of their agenda for whitening the Northwest. In the early nineteenth century, the principle of black exclusion was so entrenched among advocates of free soil expansion that those in slaveholding states who espoused the cause appealed to tropical idioms in much the same fashion as their northern counterparts, even as slavery and freedom were becoming more and more sectionalized at the national level. A case in point is the debates over slavery and colonization that unfolded in Virginia in the legislative and popular arenas. The state underwent a b itter contest over the future of its labor system—whether to maintain black slavery or promote a free economy fueled by white labor. Climatic language was a constitutive ele ment of this rift, as Virginians demonstrated inventive uses of the concept of racial predisposition in their contending views by positing different repre sentations of their state’s environment and that of Africa. The Virginia case sheds light on the distinct trajectories of slavery in the two empires. But it also 24 • Chapter 1
illustrates the imbrication of imperatives for white settler expansion and f ree black removal that w ere common in both places. At the core of this transnational formation of commensurate orders of freedom rested the ideology that was a legacy of plantation slavery in the Americas, an ideology that provided biological underpinnings to the cruelest form of human trafficking and labor. Importantly, the taxonomy of tropicality did not automatically dictate the management of free black populations in the British Empire or in the United States. It was only by the early nineteenth century that climatic determinism had become a widely shared vocabulary used to imagine and implement the demarcation of black and white freedom on both sides of the Atlantic. Conceptions of the black body mediated the definitions of what race of free p eople should settle where—a question endemic to empires situated at the confluence of emancipations, territorial additions, colonial labor exploitation, and oceanic and terrestrial crossings. THE BLACK LOYALISTS
The first emancipatory decree during the Revolutionary War came from the British government. In November 1775 Britain issued Lord Dunmore’s proclamation, which promised liberty to patriot-owned slaves who joined the loyalist forces. Four years later, it extended freedom to all rebel-owned men, w omen, and children who fled across British lines. Together these war time policies effected the emancipation of a few tens of thousands of enslaved p eople.3 After the defeat of the British, the black loyalists, as t hese liberated people were called, were dispersed to different parts of the British Empire. Some were transported to London. A small number were sent to the British Caribbean, and nineteen arrived in Upper Canada. The largest group was sent to Nova Scotia: between 1776 and 1783 over three thousand black loyalists left for Nova Scotia to start their new lives.4 A total of fourteen hundred people or more eventually relocated to Sierra Leone from London and Nova Scotia in the last two decades of the century.5 The vicissitudes of the black loyalists have been well chronicled. Historians have documented their marginal status in London and Nova Scotia.6 In London, the newly arrived blacks were relegated to the fringes of the city’s economy and became the object of white philanthropic efforts spearheaded by the English abolitionist Granville Sharp, who in January 1786 formed the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor to ameliorate their condition.7 The committee’s early relief program centered on the immediate provision of Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 25
food, clothing, shelter, and medical treatment, but as early as one month after its inception the committee declared the ultimate solution to be “a settlement abroad,” quite a predictable course of events given what Dana Rabin describes as the association of the metropolitan space with “freedom and whiteness” that had been established in the Somerset Case fourteen years earlier.8 Scholarly accounts of the black loyalists on the other side of the Atlantic also capture their grim economic situation: t hose sent to Nova Scotia failed to obtain solid footing in the fledgling settler colony, as their access to land was disproportionately limited compared to that of their white counterparts. Due to administrative disregard, many black loyalists failed to benefit from the thirteen million acres of land eligible for distribution, whereas almost all white loyalists secured land titles.9 Even if black migrants received land, they had to settle for smaller tracts than whites received, and in some cases black occupants lost their farms when they were forcibly expelled by white settlers. This allowed large-scale landowners and urban employers to exploit them as tenant farmers and wage workers, or even as indentured servants, placing black loyalists on the margins of a settler colony whose landowners were predominantly white.10 Proposals to send black loyalists to Sierra Leone drew on biological racial ideology. Sierra Leone came to the fore as a prospective destination when Henry Smeathman, an English naturalist and explorer, approached Sharp to recruit the “black poor” to his proposed mercantilist colony in West Africa, where they would grow tropical produce on a jointly owned tract of land, with the ultimate aims of curtailing the West Indian market, subverting the slave trade, and generating profits for Smeathman’s investors.11 In pitching his scheme for black migrants, Smeathman deployed climatic tropes, asserting that Africa was “a country congenial to their constitutions.”12 The flip side of such an assertion was the claim that Africa was incongruous with what contemporaries interchangeably called the “white” or “European” body.13 Smeathman had deployed a similar climatic argument in an earlier discussion about a planned white penal colony in West Africa. The British government initially contemplated sending convicts from the British Isles to Lemain Island in the Gambia River, but the plan was thwarted when Smeathman testified before a House of Commons committee against an African colony for whites because “not one in a hundred would be left alive in six months,” a conclusion he derived from his four-year exploration of the region.14 Accordingly, the administrators decided to transport convicts to New South Wales, while Smeathman recommended blacks for an African colony.15 26 • Chapter 1
What naturalized and authorized this development was western medicine, which advanced a racial classificatory system based on notions of compatibility and incompatibility of certain types of body with the tropical climate. By the mid-eighteenth century, medical literature on the Caribbean and West Africa had connected racial differences to distinct physiological functions of black and white bodies. Medical writers theorized that black bodies perspired more effectively and enjoyed immunity to diseases deemed peculiar to “warm climates”—yellow fever and malaria, for example. The same writers posited that the tropics’ “heat, humidity, and rapid temperature changes” had “a grievous effect on European constitutions” suited to “the temperate zone.”16 Such knowledge of the tropics circulated in the British Empire through networks around and across the Atlantic as doctors shared their observations in metropolitan publications and via intercolonial exchanges between the Caribbean and mainland southern colonies.17 Medical authors in the mainland southern colonies participated in the circulation of knowledge as inhabitants of a greater British American tropics stretching to the Caribbean. They understood their region as part of a tropical zone whose defining feature was its suitability for black agricultural l abor. With that understanding, they turned to the Caribbean colonies for information on disease and health in tropical climates.18 Born out of this intercolonial exchange was what Gary Puckrein calls “the climate-race-health nexus,” a discourse that undergirded the use of black labor in both the southern and Caribbean colonies.19 The tropical designation of the mainland southern colonies was not a foregone conclusion, however. The region’s climate was not initially or always considered detrimental to white labor. In the mid-seventeenth century, South Carolina was described as a “terrestrial paradise,” a designation that was later replaced by concerns about its morbid tropical climate.20 There w ere also conflicting opinions of the climate of Georgia until the m iddle of the eighteenth century. Originally, the Crown-appointed trustees of the colony banned the use of black enslaved labor, but the colonists demanded the repeal of the ban, claiming that white workers became debilitated in the hot climate of the Lowcountry and that only black workers could endure agricultural labor in their colony.21 By the time of the American Revolution, the association of blackness and tropical agricultural labor had taken root in Anglophone medical and popu lar discourse. Yet, as we have seen, this principle did not fully determine where to relocate the black loyalists. Their suitability for different colonial projects Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 27
was evaluated without consideration of climatic compatibility. Individuals in the private and public sectors proposed destinations in wide-ranging latitudes for black loyalists in London without reference to the appropriateness of the climates for black constitutions.22 In like manner, the imperial government suggested multiple locations for black loyalists in Nova Scotia in response to official grievances filed by a group of them about their discriminatory treatment in the colony. Secretary of State Henry Dundas proposed three possible new sites for the Nova Scotians, which were relayed to them by John Clarkson, a recruitment agent for the Sierra Leone Company—the joint-stock corporation that by then was in charge of the African colony, which desperately needed agricultural workers.23 Once in Nova Scotia, Clarkson told the black loyalists that in Sierra Leone they could receive twenty acres of land for a man, ten more acres for his spouse, and five more for each child. Otherwise, they could e ither join a black regiment in the Caribbean—an offer made in the context of French-British rivalry in that region—or stay in Nova Scotia and wait for the colonial government to grant them full allotments of land.24 The diversity of the proposals made to the black loyalists was evidence not of random choices of location but of the fact that the freed people were seen as valuable elements in the empire’s labor planning. A closer examination of the discussions in London illuminates this point. The colonial developers for Nova Scotia pursued the black loyalists in the metropole, for they saw in the expendable black population a convenient workforce for lumbering vast amounts of woodland in Nova Scotia—which was crucial not only for the development of the northern colony but also for the British Empire at large because wood was the maritime colony’s primary export to the Caribbean.25 The idea of using emancipated people to increase imperial prosperity had been part of British antislavery thought since its earliest expressions, in which freed blacks were envisioned as mobile “agents of British expansion” in the Americ as.26 Although the author of those early emancipation plans proposed that free blacks s ettle in tropical climates on the ground of black physical affinity for t hose regions, determinist thinking did not enter the conversation on the black loyalists at this point. F ree black settlement in temperate climates had yet to be portrayed as unnatural. In the end, black loyalists in Nova Scotia and London took a chance on Sierra Leone, given the promise that they would become landowners. However, to their dismay their hope was quickly shattered. Matters deteriorated quickly a few years a fter the black loyalists in London left for Africa to develop their new home in the Province of Freedom, a self-governing land-grant settlement 28 • Chapter 1
with a missionary bent founded by Sharp.27 In December 1789 the settlement was ravaged in a violent conflict between local Africans and American slave traders, which led the Sierra Leone Company to take control of the colony in the spring of 1791. The company envisioned the establishment of an exploitative cash-crop agriculture and a trade hub dealing in produce grown in the colony with a view to replacing the Atlantic slave trade and eventually defeating Caribbean slavery. To achieve their merchant-abolitionist desire, the entrepreneurs instituted a white administrative apparatus and an annual quitrent tenant system, quashing the migrants’ hopes of governing themselves and becoming independent farmers.28 Consequently, when more than a thousand black migrants from Nova Scotia arrived in January 1792, what they discovered was a two-tier society with a white colonial administration and a dependent black labor force. The literature on the black loyalists has rarely discussed these developments in Africa as part of a larger imperial process of spatializing freedom in racial terms. Sierra Leone’s shift to a black-majority extractive economy should be connected to Britain’s ongoing racial mapping of freedom. As Sierra Leone was transformed into a site for the exploitation of f ree black labor, colonial discourses on both sides of the Atlantic converged to view Nova Scotia as a natural environment solely suited for white bodies. These ideas accompanied and undergirded the official policy of promoting colonization by white landowners. The Sierra Leone Company justified its inequitable structure of labor and rule with climatic determinism and notions of black inferiority, a combination that enforced the colonial arguments that white Britons should move to Sierra Leone only as administrators and that hard agricultural labor was the domain of free black migrants. Claims of physical differences between “the blacks and whites” underlay company directors’ “unwillingness to take out [to Sierra Leone] that class among whom the mortality was the greatest, namely, the European settlers.”29 “The difficulty indeed of finding Europeans who can work in Africa, in the sun, without injuring their health,” the directors argued, made it “their duty to discourage labourers g oing from hence; and they trust to the natives, or the f ree American blacks who . . . are expected immediately to arrive.”30 While they agreed that black settlers “appear now to be so well accustomed to the climate that there is l ittle reason to apprehend any g reat mortality among them,” the only positions deemed appropriate for white colonists w ere “the requisite artificers, and the members of their civil government, and of their other establishments.”31 Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 29
The company’s climatic justification of Sierra Leone’s majority-black labor force went hand in hand with its symbolic construction of Nova Scotia as unfit for the black body. The company officers placed the black body in an oppositional relationship with the physical environment of Nova Scotia by explaining the black loyalists’ departure from the northern colony as biologically based. The migration to Africa, they asserted, stemmed from the fact that the refugees’ “experience of the unfavourableness of the climate of Nova Scotia, induced them to seek redress from the British government.”32 Such discursive dissociation of the black settlers from Nova Scotia’s environment was complemented by the colonial government’s decision to promote landed settlement by white Britons. In July 1792 a Nova Scotian administrator stated that the “government intended to encourage the settlement of this Province, by those from Britain.”33 Indeed, a wave of large-scale immigration from Scotland occurred right when the black loyalists were leaving for Sierra Leone. In 1791 and 1792, according to colonial records, at least three shipments of Scottish immigrants—650, 300, and 700 people, respectively—arrived or were expected to arrive in Nova Scotia to settle on land “grants.”34 The building of Scottish settlements in the colony rested on the ideological foundation of climatic determinism. In an appeal to the colonial government for rations, 650 Scots justified their entitlement on the basis that they were fit for hard labor in a cold climate. In a memorial to the lieutenant governor, they invoked their distinctive physical capacities, calling themselves “a hardy, robust people inured to the habit of incessant labour and in every other respect seasoned and adapted for this northern climate.”35 The Scots’ reliance on the notion that h umans could be classified according to their ability to work in a particular climate showed that climatic determinism was part of the vocabulary of ordinary people in the empire.36 Unfolding together with the exclusion of free blacks was another settler colonial mechanism, one ignored by historians of the black loyalists but clearly visib le to the black migrants’ contemporaries in the late eighteenth century: British settlers’ encroachment on indigenous land. John Clarkson observed the devastating erosion of the Native landscape as he carried out his recruitment mission in Nova Scotia. After seeing three indigenous women who had come to a town to trade cranberries and wild fowl, Clarkson touched on the plight of the Mi’kmaq p eople, who w ere “now very much reduced in numbers”: “In this respect, therefore, they w ere wholly at the mercy of the Whites, who might readily have cheated them with impunity and without fear of d etection, seeing that these poor Indians implicitly relied on their honesty—I am afraid 30 • Chapter 1
t here are many in this Province who take every advantage of them.”37 Around the same time, John Wentworth, the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, admitted that the Mi’kmaq p eople were suffering from the loss of their hunting grounds caused by white intrusions. They w ere in dire straits b ecause “the extended needs and settlements have been the means of destroying and driving off the wild beasts which formerly supplied them with food and raiment.” “The poor Savages,” the administrator observed, “were reduced to the greatest extremity and I fear, some of them perished.”38 THE BLACK REFUGEES OF THE WAR OF 1812
The white monopoly on Nova Scotia’s ongoing land expropriation was further fortified when the colony received more formerly enslaved refugees as a result of another war between Britain and the United States over the latter’s independence—the War of 1812, which broke out over Britain’s infringement of U.S. sovereignty in international trade. The newcomers w ere viewed as an alien element in the unfolding settler colonial society and immediately came up against the Nova Scotian and home governments’ promotion of black migration to Trinidad. The War of 1812 also brought about a migration of freed people that triggered the definition of E ngland as a natural environment suited for white constitutions. With recourse to tropes of climate, white Londoners portrayed the metropole and the province as sites of white economic activity, between which white workers moved and from which free blacks were to depart for tropical agriculture. The second wave of black Nova Scotia migration was a result of a British military policy that granted freedom to enslaved people who entered British- controlled territory during the War of 1812. In the hope of tipping the scale of the war in its favor, the British liberated the enemy’s slaves, resulting in thousands of freedom seekers arriving from the coastal states.39 Britain offered the escapees multiple paths to take after emancipation, “either entering into His Majesty’s Sea or Land forces, or being sent as Free Settlers to the British possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they w ill meet with all due encouragements.”40 Accordingly, some were taken to Nova Scotia and others to Trinidad. Still others were sent to England after serving in the British navy. By the end of the war, at least 3,500 slaves had escaped, and 2,000 of them had arrived in Nova Scotia by the end of 1818.41 What the newcomers encountered was popular and official expressions of the vision of a white Nova Scotia. The colonists, feeling threatened by the Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 31
black refugees’ arrival, defended their exclusivity in climatic terms. As early as 1815, local white residents and politicians described the black refugees as a deviant element in Nova Scotia, “unfitted by nature to this climate, or an association with the rest of His Majesty’s colonists”—an assertion rooted in the same logic invoked by the Scottish settlers who grounded their claim of colonial belonging in their physical compatibility with the province’s coldness.42 The white sentiment was expressed in a land distribution policy that relegated the black refugees to the margins of Nova Scotia’s settler economy. The two major farming settlements assigned to the newcomers were Preston and Hammonds Plains. The poor quality of the land gave the migrants no economic security, as had also been the case with the black loyalists who had been assigned land decades earlier. Ironically, some of the new migrants w ere placed on the same barren plots that had been abandoned by people who had relocated to Sierra Leone and that had been left unimproved for nearly thirty years.43 Another unequal aspect of the land distribution was the small allotments the blacks received—ten acres for a head of household, regardless of family size or previous service to the government—compared to those of the white settlers, which w ere adjusted by size and previous service and could easily reach a hundred acres. Finally, while white settlers received land grants from the colonial government, the black refugees w ere given tickets of location that licensed only their occupation of land.44 This put them in a precarious relationship to the lands they cultivated, sometimes leading to their forced eviction by local whites.45 The Nova Scotian government was quick to take action on the alien population in its midst. The solution was to lure the blacks to move to Trinidad with the promise of landownership. In 1820 the imperial government agreed to fund black migration to the Caribbean colony, which led to the transportation of eighty to ninety migrants.46 The following year, the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, James Kempt, asked London to send a vessel to transport more migrants to Trinidad, which the metropole agreed to do. In preparation, Kempt ordered an officer to canvass the black settlers in Preston and Hammonds Plains to gauge their willingness to “join their friends who lately went to Trinidad” and to explain to them that they would be “placed under the immediate protection of the governor of the colony” and would “receive grants of land and be supplied with provisions.”47 The officer, Richard Inglis, visited several refugee communities and quickly learned that the residents disregarded “the kind offer of His Excellency.” Understandably, they suspected that the “government wished to dispose of them.” This annoyed Inglis, who 32 • Chapter 1
reported that the refugees w ere “not even thankful for the kind offer that has been made them by government.”48 Instead of leaving the colony altogether, the refugees tried a variety of measures to improve their living conditions. Some abandoned their plots and moved to Halifax in search of urban employment such as domestic service. Those who remained on the land tirelessly petitioned the government to give them additional allotments and struggled to make do by combining agriculture and urban labor.49 Around the same time that colonial and imperial officials w ere scheming to get rid of Nova Scotia’s black newcomers, some Londoners grounded the idea of a white metropole in the biological basis of climatic determinism as they discussed forwarding black refugees of the War of 1812 to the struggling Sierra Leone colony. In 1815 and 1817 metropolitan philanthropists sought to send to Sierra Leone “a number of persons of color now in London without employment and destitute,” who had been discharged from their service in the navy.50 These philanthropists—members of the African Institution, which had been founded in 1807—saw in the black sojourners perfect agents for their campaign to relieve Africa of the slave trade by promoting its agricultural production and commercial ties with Britain.51 They focused on Sierra Leone b ecause several of the members of the African Institution had been involved in the Sierra Leone Company and hoped to see the failing colony, which had become a Crown colony in 1808, manage to export agricultural products, especially cotton by importing free black laborers.52 Not surprisingly, in advocating this endeavor, the African Institution invoked racial explanations—that England was “a climate inimical to their [blacks’] constitutions” as opposed to Africa where, as one contemporary put it, “a g reat mortality prevails among the Europeans sent out from this Country.”53 As a result of the two British military emancipations, the racial definition of the metropole, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and Trinidad had become solidified in terms of which racial group should use its members’ free labor for a place’s economic development (Trinidad, a full-fledged slave colony, was nonetheless a place for black freedom b ecause colonial and imperial officials understood that if f ree people were to move to the island for work, they would have to be blacks). In this model England was seen as a climate fit for whites, from which migrants would set out for the comparable environment of Nova Scotia, while Sierra Leone and Trinidad w ere seen as natural destinations for f ree black people whose bodies were not suited for the temperate climates of the metropole and Nova Scotia. Such discourse proceeded from actual migratory flows of people and, in turn, informed and justified Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 33
the further racialization of the imperial space, with each location standing for a particular configuration of race, labor, and privilege—or lack thereof. As we w ill see in chapter 3, with the abolition of colonial slavery, the inchoate geographic division of black and white freedom would begin to evolve into racially delineated legally free spaces, with the British Caribbean representing the primary site for the hard agricultural labor of free blacks and other nonwhite people. EMANCIPATION IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
Britain’s African colonization program set an example for recently indepen dent republicans concerned about the northern free black population occupying the periphery of the nonagricultural economy in the metropolitan center. This new group of African Americans emerged as a result of the practical and ideological imperatives of the American Revolution: some became free after wartime decrees emancipated those who fought for the patriotic cause. Others attained liberty via immediate or gradual emancipation after independence. The Vermont constitution abolished slavery in 1777. Courts in Massachusetts declared slavery inconsistent with the state’s constitution, and in 1783 the state’s Supreme Court outlawed slavery, although the ruling did not immediately eliminate the institution in the state. Similarly, the New Hampshire constitution of 1783 started phasing out slavery in the state. Between 1780 and 1804, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey passed gradual emancipation acts, freeing no one at the time of their passage but increasing the numbers of f ree blacks in piecemeal fashion.54 By 1800 about 75 percent of all northern blacks were free, although small populations continued to be enslaved until 1827 in New York and 1865 in New Jersey.55 As few of them were able to afford land, many free blacks moved to cities in search of jobs. By 1800 Philadelphia had a free black community of almost 6,400, at the time the largest in the United States; New York City then had 3,500 free blacks, a population that grew to 10,368 by 1820.56 Personal correspondence across the Atlantic introduced white republicans to resettlement in Sierra Leone as the panacea for impoverished free blacks in the Northeast. John Jay received a letter from Sharp about the colony’s relevance to what Sharp considered a troublesome development plaguing northeastern towns and cities. In answer to a 1788 letter from Jay notifying Sharp that he had been awarded honorary membership in the New York State Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, the English philanthropist informed 34 • Chapter 1
Jay of “the Province of Freedom, on the Mountains of Sierra Leone,” where “many poor Negroes at New York” and other “liberated Negroes of America” would enjoy “a happy asylum.”57 Around the same time, news of Sierra Leone reached Samuel Hopkins, a Rhode Island clergyman, who then contacted Sharp to inquire if “the Blacks in New England” could join those who had already been rescued from urban destitution in London. Hopkins saw a dynamic comparable to that affecting London’s black residents unfolding in his region as white residents denied freed people equitable participation in the area’s nonagricultural economy, whose many sectors included skilled artisanship, market-related occupations, and local service jobs. “The circumstances of the Freed Blacks are in many re spects unhappy, while they live h ere among the Whites,” Hopkins wrote, “as the latter look down upon the former, and [are] disposed to treat them as underlings, and deny them the advantages of education and employment, &c.”58 Hopkins also had conversations with William Thornton, a Caribbean- born Quaker in Philadelphia, who made an abortive effort to send to Sierra Leone formerly enslaved people from New England and the Caribbean, including his own manumitted slaves. Thornton saw parallels between the freed blacks of London and t hose of New E ngland, which he noted in his response to a letter from John Lettsom, another Caribbean-born Quaker, who called the “Black Poor” a metropolitan “nuisance.” Their American counterparts, Thornton hoped, would likewise benefit from moving to Africa, for many of the freed people in New E ngland “have no lands t here, and having been released servants . . . would be incapable of working them.”59 Importantly, African Americans saw in Sierra Leone an opportunity to realize their unique diasporic aspirations. Black residents of Boston, Providence, Newport, and Philadelphia expressed interest in relocating to the African colony.60 In Providence, “a society of Blacks” composed of ten members with families proposed to move to Sierra Leone at their own expense. Like black loyalists in Nova Scotia, they sought “a portion of land and the right of citizenship” as essential conditions of freedom.61 According to Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, their interest in joining other freed p eople revealed a diasporic sensibility based on an identity as “Christianized Africans in the African Atlantic world” who would join together in their homeland for the cause of abolitionism and evangelism.62 Despite the enthusiasm and commitment among black northerners, the plan to colonize Sierra Leone with migrants from the United States did not come to fruition—except for the thirty-eight people who arrived under the auspices of Paul Cuffe’s self-funded venture in 1816. Greatly influenced Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 35
by Rhode Island’s emigration movement, Cuffe, an African-indigenous maritime trader and ship owner, saw Sierra Leone as his “benign imperialistic outpost” in which African Americans would promote transatlantic commerce in lieu of the slave trade and dispense religious and moral instruction among the indigenous population.63 Slaveholders, too, looked to Sierra Leone for their own ends—as a safety valve for the institution of slavery. In 1801 the V irginia legislature passed a secret resolution to remove rebellious slaves and f ree people of color—both called “persons obnoxious to the laws or dangerous to the peace of society”— as a consequence of Gabriel Prosser’s attempt to bring about a revolt among slaves in Richmond. The lawmakers requested Governor James Monroe to direct President Thomas Jefferson’s attention to “the subject of purchasing lands without the limits of this State” to which t hese people could be removed.64 In 1802 the V irginia legislature conveyed to Jefferson their preference for Africa and Iberian South America as possible settlements. Accordingly, Jefferson launched talks with the Sierra Leone Company and with the Portuguese government, but to no avail.65 After all, the Portuguese feared U.S. influence in South America, while the Sierra Leone Company rejected the idea of transferring slaves to the free colony.66 Much like Sierra Leone, Liberian colonization appealed to various groups of people. Scholarly consensus has it that the American Colonization Society (acs)—the organizational backbone of the colonization movement, which was founded in 1816—attracted a diverse array of people with contradicting objectives because of its inclusive stance: “it is simply a society for establishing a colony on the coast of Africa.”67 Some p eople saw colonization as a way to facilitate gradual emancipation, believing that free blacks’ relocation to Africa would induce voluntary manumissions among slaveholders and that crops grown by f ree labor in Liberia would drive down the items produced by slaves in the United States.68 Many antislavery supporters of colonization also viewed Liberia as a foothold for missionary endeavors to “civilize” Africans in terms of religion, literacy, and government.69 In contrast, some slaveholders and supporters of slavery were drawn to the acs in the hope that colonization would fortify the institution by eliminating free blacks from the United States, whom they accused of exciting “a feeling of discontent among slaves.”70 Despite the abundance of scholarship, historians have rarely realized that, to justify their own project, advocates of Liberian colonization directly borrowed some of the rationale put forth by British supporters of colonization
36 • Chapter 1
in Sierra Leone—the ideas that Africa offered a solution to the problem of destitute urban freed people and that its climate suited the black body. This transnational sharing of knowledge took place partly through the individual networks of communication mentioned above. Thornton and Hopkins played a foundational role in molding the goals and philosophies of the acs: the former became a member of its first board of managers, and the latter made an early effort to organize U.S.-based colonization activism, an effort that the acs later acknowledged as taking “almost the exact course of action afterward adopted by this society.”71 It was through the consumption of published material that knowledge of Sierra Leone became fused together with Liberian colonization discourse. The key printed work was Essay on Colonization by C. B. Wadstrom, a Swedish advocate and chronicler of African colonization. The book contained an assortment of quotes from the 1791 and 1794 annual reports of the Sierra Leone Company, which described the company’s justification for the black loyalist migration. The quotes w ere read by U.S. colonization proponents and then excerpted in the third annual report of the acs, published in 1820. Additionally, the 1794 report of the Sierra Leone Company was republished in the United States and read by the likes of James Madison, who served as president of the acs fifteen years after his U.S. presidency ended.72 Dubbing Wadstrom “the ablest writer on the subject of Africa,” the acs consulted his Essay on Colonization and appropriated the Sierra Leone Com pany’s arguments on black urbanites in its explication of “the practicability of founding a similar colony in Liberia.”73 In arguing for Liberian colonization, the acs included in its third annual report a quote that had originally appeared in the Sierra Leone Company’s 1791 report, claiming that the black loyalists were “distressed blacks who then swarmed in London.”74 The British created the colony of Sierra Leone for these “indigent, unemployed, despised, and forlorn” blacks, the acs continued, b ecause “it was necessary they should be sent somewhere and be no longer suffered to infest the streets of London.”75 In the years to come, the understanding of African colonization as a solution to urban problems formed a core strain of Liberian colonization advocacy. Descriptions such as the following abounded in acs publications: “They [free blacks] may be seen in our cities and large towns, wandering like foreigners and outcasts in the land which gave them birth. They may be seen in our penitentiaries, and jails, and poor houses.”76 These people, much “seen and felt in our large cities, and, in a degree, throughout the country,” w ere an unwanted
Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 37
population “crowded together in their wretched hovels, with scarcely the means of procuring a scanty substance.”77 Also borrowed from the Sierra Leone Company via Wadstrom was the logic of black-white biological distinction in establishing each race’s relation to the environment of Africa. The acs grounded the validity of its project in the assertion that there was not “a climate better adapted to the constitution of the black man than” Africa.78 In making this claim, the society excerpted Wadstrom’s passages on the settlers from Nova Scotia, which again originated in the Sierra Leone Company 1794 report. One passage read that a “fever common to hot climates . . . affected in different degrees, the whites and blacks, almost discriminately; but proved much the most fatal to the former . . . almost half the whites living on shore and nearly one tenth of the Nova Scotia blacks, w ere carried off, in this dreadful season.”79 Another read: “[black settlers] now seem so accustomed to the climate, that there is little reason to fear any mortality among them; that there are not many whose health is precarious; that few villages in England, can show more fine children; that in this period, fevers have been pretty frequent among the whites.”80 The ACS went on to allege that black settlers in Liberia exhibited a similar congruity with Africa’s tropical climate. “The result of all the experience [that black migrants in Sierra Leone and Liberia] hitherto had of the African climate,” the ACS maintained, “goes directly to establish the conclusion, that it is not materially unfavourable to the health of coloured p eople emigrating to Africa from countries situated in the latitude of the northern States of America, or even in that of Nova Scotia and G reat Britain.” Such reasoning conceived of resilience to tropical heat as an inherent racial quality residing in black bodies irrespective of their nativity or immediate location, as demonstrated in the acs’s observation that Africa’s “climate is much less noxious to the black p eople, although the natives of temperate countries, than to the whites.”81 Climatic arguments suffused the pages of the annual reports of the acs and began seeping into the Liberian colonization discourse more generally. A good example was an 1832 pamphlet published by the Massachusetts Colonization Society, a state auxiliary of the acs. In a subsection titled “Climate,” the treatise argued that in Africa “for p eople of color, the climate is decidedly salubrious,” while “to the white man the climate seems unhealthy. So is almost every tropical region.” According to this logic, Africa was “physically his [the black man’s] home,” to which “his constitution is suited.”82 38 • Chapter 1
LIBERIAN COLONIZATION AND THE WEST
While colonization supporters had no doubts about the racial character of Liberia, in the years immediately surrounding the founding of the acs, they still considered continental frontier regions to be possible venues for free black settlement. The Northwest and Pacific West had yet to be defined as temperate spaces to be set aside for white settlement, as opposed to tropical Africa. Proposals of black settlements in the West, however, received immediate rebuttals from believers in white Americans’ eventual continental dominance. The place of black freedom was thus still in flux. Continental black settlement was discussed at a meeting of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. It was suggested that a colony for free blacks be established in “the vast wilderness between the Ohio and the g reat lakes.” But a member opposed the location vehemently on account of unstoppable white expansion. “Whether any of us live to see it or not,” said he, “the time w ill come when white men w ill want all that region, and w ill have it, and our colony will be overwhelmed by them.” So the meeting concluded that the colony “must be in Africa.”83 Some advocates of colonization set their sights on southern as well as western frontier regions. In January 1816 the Abolition Society of Pennsylvania discussed the advisability of establishing a colony in “a portion of the un-appropriated land of the South or the West.” The proposition met with opposition from those who feared that “a jealousy would unavoidably exist between the White and Black inhabitants of frontier districts, which would be heightened by private injuries and fomented into war of bloodshed.”84 Around the same time, V irginia legislators contemplated settling the state’s multiplying free black population in e ither the Pacific Northwest or Africa. Due to the relaxation of manumission laws in 1782, the number of f ree blacks in Virginia had increased from 2,800 in 1780 to more than 30,000 by 1810.85 In 1816 the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution that requested President Madison to find “a territory upon the coast of Africa, or upon the shore of the North Pacific, or at some other place, not within any of the States, or territorial governments of the United States.”86 In 1825 George Tucker, a Virginia congressman, introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives calling on the U.S. government to obtain land titles from Native Americans residing west of the Rocky Mountains. Revising his earlier suggestion to relocate free blacks west of the Mississippi, Tucker moved the limit of white expansion from the Mississippi to the Rockies and proposed setting aside a Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 39
location that “may be suitable for colonizing the f ree people of colour” west of the mountain range.87 For him, the West beyond the Rockies was still distant enough from white settlements to provide a new abode for free blacks. Tucker’s vision was refuted at an acs meeting two years later. Isaac Knapp of the Massachusetts Hampden Colonization Society—who later worked at the Liberator in partnership with William Lloyd Garrison, the prominent abolitionist and supporter of black civil rights—explained the rejection. Charting the shift in colonization discourse, Knapp pointed out how resettling free blacks in “some of our uncultivated lands of the remote West” was “first thought by some,” but eventually Africa became the preferred destination, given “how rapidly the Western regions w ere filling up with a white population.”88 Consistently, the acs erased the reference to the Pacific coast when it reprinted the 1816 V irginia resolution in its tenth annual report.89 In 1829, dismissing “the country West of the Rocky Mountains” as a possible location for black settlement, Henry Clay, later a president of the acs, warned that white settlers from across the Atlantic would eventually clash with black residents if the latter reached the Pacific coast. Clay predicted that “that wave of the European race which rose on the borders of the Atlantic, swept over the Alleghany [Allegheny] Mountains, reached the Mississippi, and ascended the two great rivers which unite near St. Louis, w ill at no distant day pass the Rocky Mountains, and strike the Pacific, where it would again produce that very contact between discordant races which it is so desirable to avoid.”90 Clay’s admonition was based on the core principle of his American System, which rendered colonization integral to the project of building a domestic market economy characterized by the balanced and systematic development of free white labor in agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing sectors. His policy agenda, which reconciled manufacturing with “Jeffersonian po litical economy [that] had prescribed making frontier land available on terms easy enough to prevent a class of desperately poor citizens from appearing in America,” proposed reserving western lands for white settlers and protecting them from the encroachment of free blacks.91 Clay’s vision of transcontinental diffusion of f ree labor thus excluded f ree blacks and designated Liberia as their proper migration destination. This shift in outlook very likely occurred in a context in which the Pacific Northwest was increasingly included in U.S. expansionist prospects. During the 1820s the government grew convinced of the eventual unification of the region with the Union, and between 1818 and 1828 the United States established territorial claims to stretches of land in the region in negotiations with 40 • Chapter 1
the British, Spanish, and Russian Empires. Especially important here is the 1818 convention between the American and British governments that provided for the joint occupation of the territory west of the Rocky Mountains, a stipulation that must have influenced Clay’s dismissing the area as a potential home for black settlement. Furthermore, Congress formed a select committee to investigate the potential merits of the Pacific Northwest for the nation’s development, and the committee ultimately recommended the founding of a military post in Oregon and the organization of a territorial government t here.92 In the meantime popular interest in Oregon grew in the 1820s and 1830s, leading to the creation of immigration societies across the Northeast and Northwest. During this time, the Pacific Northwest, which had served postrevolutionary Americans primarily as a hunting ground for the fur trade, began looming large as a likely territorial addition to the Union.93 In this way, within a decade after the founding of the acs, African colonization became closely entangled with the idea that no land on the western horizon was beyond the reach of white Americans, which in turn demonstrated how the constellation of ideas and practices later labeled Manifest Destiny included Liberian colonization as part of its semiotic and material apparatus. Succinctly illustrating this, the acs justified African colonization this way: “Where is t here a spot not wanted by the white man? How rapidly is our population spreading over the whole country? What has been the fate of the poor Indian? . . . Could the colored people hope for a better destiny than has been his? . . . Will they [African Americans] go west of the Rocky Mountains? . . . And if they were there and comfortably fixed, what assurance have they, that their descendants will be allowed quietly to remain there? . . . No! there is no place for them in this country.”94 It is not surprising, then, that the blending of Liberian colonization and settler colonial politics was contemporaneous with what Peter Kastor describes as the elevation of unceasing westward expansion to a national creed during the 1820s and 1830s.95 This racially restrictive idea of expansion symbolically excluded African Americans living in the metropolitan center from the Jeffersonian ideal of leaving the city for a new life as frontier freeholders. Since the birth of the republic, imagery of vacant lands extending westward presented a solution to concentrations of urban populations, and when industrialization progressed in the first half of the nineteenth c entury, labor reformers began demanding that free public lands be provided to eastern workers as a way for them to escape the drudgery of manufacturing and for labor markets to keep wages from falling.96 F ree African Americans had no place in this republican ideal Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 41
of upward mobility through homesteads; instead, they w ere expected to acquire and practice those privileges across the Atlantic. Viewed in this light, the imperative of placing black freedom in Africa was a constitutive aspect of what David Montgomery called “settler consciousness,” which operated in both the British Isles and the U.S. Northeast and “promised working people of the conquering nation the possibility of escape from the class oppression they suffered at home through the subordination or annihilation of previous inhabitants of the conquered territories.”97 The potency and iniquity of this exclusionary “settler consciousness” implicated in Liberian colonization was felt and addressed by opponents of the scheme. A good example is Garrison’s critique that opened his Thoughts on African Colonization, an anticolonization treatise. Garrison began by countering the underlying principle of Liberian colonization that assigned free black Americans to look in the opposite direction of “the emigration from New-England to the far West.” Rhetorically asking, “and yet is there a single mechanic, farmer or merchant, who feels it to be his duty, or would be willing to go [to Africa]?,” Garrison condemned advocates of colonization for demanding that African Americans migrate to Liberia when “ten thousand white mechanics, farmers, merchants, &c” in “the old States” built new lives on the expanses of land on the western horizon. Such racialized delineation of migrations, Garrison recognized, denied free African Americans access to the transcontinental “path of preferment.”98 In symbolically demarcating Africa and the western frontier as spaces of black and white freedom, respectively, supporters of Liberian colonization invoked the most accessible and popular frontier of the first half of the nineteenth century: the Old Northwest. Although the Northwest Ordinance left the existing enslaved people in bondage by going only so far as to prohibit the extension of slavery into the territory, the prevailing ideal of the “free Northwest” as “a republican society composed exclusively of free people” obliterated the presence of enslaved p eople.99 In this view, free blacks w ere also deemed extraneous to the imagined free Northwest. Thomas Corwin, a member of the Ohio Colonization Society, lamented broadening streams of f ree black migrants into the region and called the arrivals an “anomalous population” in “the non slave-holding States of the West.”100 The vision of a white Northwest was accompanied by l egal measures to realize such an ideal, which in some cases included requiring the appropriation of funds for Liberian colonization. With the influx of black newcomers, northwestern states and territories enacted a series of anti-free-black laws coupled 42 • Chapter 1
with popular, and sometimes official, support for the acs. Their legislatures codified measures to expel existing black inhabitants, prevent o thers from arriving, and dictate the conditions of manumission in the South. Ohio spearheaded in this effort. The state passed a series of so-called Black Laws in 1804 and 1807 that collectively required black residents and immigrants to provide registration, fees, a certificate of freedom, and bond securities, although the state left the enforcement of the laws to local officials and residents—a policy that proved mostly impractical and unsuccessful.101 Following in Ohio’s footsteps, state and territorial legislatures in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa required resident and immigrant African Americans to provide proof of freedom and bonds and imposed corporeal and pecuniary punishments on them.102 Ohio and Indiana also a dopted resolutions recommending that manumitted southern slaves be sent to Liberia to nip in the bud “a curse to any settlement of whites.”103 Indiana added Article XIII to its 1851 revised constitution, which stipulated that t hose who hired or encouraged African Americans to live in Indiana be fined $500 and that the fines be spent on promoting colonization.104 Clearly in these states, legislation against black immigration and for African colonization were two arms of a racially exclusionary settler ideology. As one Indiana Supreme Court judge said, “Let them [blacks] be removed and their places be supplied with intelligent freemen.”105 While the elimination of free blacks was codified as a mechanism of white settler rule in the Northwest, colonization supporters buttressed the system by claiming that African colonization formed the black alternative to western migration. For instance, at the acs’s annual meeting, the New England clergyman Leonard Bacon juxtaposed Liberian colonization and migration to the Northwest as racially specific and mutually exclusive endeavors. He compared migration “from the Atlantic to the Western States” to that from the United States to Africa when predicting that “the same spirit which sends the young farmer, the young tradesman, the young adventurer in e very employment and profession, from Massachusetts to Illinois, and from Maine to Michigan, will send young men of color in like numbers to find in the land of their fathers a home and an inheritance for their c hildren.”106 Likening “the ancient wilderness” of Africa to “our own wide forests of the west,” each to be conquered by black and white settlers respectively, Bacon was unequivocally in favor of white monopoly of continental frontier settlement.107 One variation of such contrasting representations involved a comparison between the appropriation of indigenous land for white settlement in North America and that for black settlers in Liberia. As David Kazanjian rightly Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 43
notes, political exclusion, military conquest, and aggressive and manipulative land divestiture created an inequitable relationship between “the black settler-colonials and their descendants . . . and the so-called indigenous pop ulation.”108 In contrast, Joseph Underwood, the pro-colonization jurist and politician, asserted that one of “the prominent differences u nder which North America was settled by Europeans, and t hose which attend the settlement of Africa by descendants of the negro race” was the amicable nature of the latter process. “The return of the c hildren of Africa to her shore,” he contended, “exhibits a scene altogether unlike that [of ] the Indians and white man. . . . They go home to their brethren of the same color and blood.”109 Such a juxtaposition had also appeared during the acs’s scouting expedition in West Africa. Attempting to allay the concerns of a local prince, the agents assured him that their colonization scheme would not result in the settlement of whites in Africa because they had enough land back in the United States. “We did not want lands for white men,” the deputies told him, “because we have vast uncultivated tracts in our country, but for such of the descendants of Africans as might improve their situation by such a change.”110 The antagonistic conquest of indigenous land in North America was contrasted with African American settlement in Africa, which appeared to generate no hard feelings b ecause of the supposed racial affinity between the colonizer and colonized. Integral to the settler colonial imperative of advocates of Liberian colonization was the naturalizing use of climatic language. Their representations cast the Northeast and the Northwest as physically incompatible with black residence and presented migration between the two areas as a movement within one climatic zone that was hospitable only to the white body. Willfully forgetting the history of black slavery in the region to perpetuate what Joanne Melish calls “the myth of a historically free, white New E ngland,” the New Haven-based Christian Spectator pronounced that “the God . . . has placed our habitation where the climate forbade the introduction of Africans and where the hard soil could be cultivated only by the hands of freemen” when it urged that colonization “ought to be done quickly.”111 This characterization accompanied the racial classification of mobility. In 1842 James Hall, a medical doctor and agent of the Maryland Colonization Society, made a climatic and racial distinction between transcontinental migration within the United States and transatlantic migration from the United States to Africa. Drawing a contrast between black American colonists in Liberia and white pioneers from New England, Hall maintained that “the climate of Africa is one 44 • Chapter 1
that will prove as favourable to the American emigrant as does the climate of our Western States to the New Englander.”112 By setting the climate of Africa against that of New E ngland and the Northwest and associating each climate with a racial category, colonization advocates produced a racial geography that cast white continental dominance in biological terms.113 THE V IRGINIA SLAVERY DEBATE AND CLIMATIC LANGUAGE
The dual advocacy of free black removal and white free soil and its under lying language of climate was not unique to the northern states. Debates over slavery, emancipation, and colonization roiled V irginia in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Virginia government had previously looked to colonization as a way to get rid of insurgent slaves, but by the early 1820s defenders of African colonization w ere targeting only f ree blacks, either for the purpose of strengthening slavery (the only procolonization incentive in the state’s slaveholding regions) or to remove f ree blacks and f uture emancipated people as part of their goal to gradually eliminate slavery and create a white Virginia with no black people, either enslaved or free.114 The aberrant status of f ree blacks was codified in V irginia’s expulsion law of 1806, which “stipulated that no black person freed after 1 May 1806, could remain in the state longer than one year after reaching the age of twenty-one without gaining permission” and that any person who gained freedom through his or her relationship to an individual who had been freed after May 1, 1806, also had to leave the state at the age of twenty-one.115 After a couple of amendments, the law eventually allowed local courts to decide whether to grant individuals permission to remain in the state on a merit basis. This provided f ree blacks with a legal channel for residency, but complex court application procedures and the requirement of evidence of remarkable acts of service meant that it proved impossible for many residents to gain permission.116 So while some gained legal status with the help of white neighbors and attorneys, others left or stayed as illegal residents. By the late 1850s, there w ere about twenty thousand free African Americans living illegally in Virginia.117 A small minority even returned to enslavement to be close to their loved ones.118 It was against the backdrop of this legal and social milieu—one underwritten by the idea that black freedom was an illegal state of being in V irginia—that Liberian colonization gained purchase in the state’s political discourse.119 White Virginians who pursued both colonization and gradual emancipation sought to diversify the state’s economy to make it resemble that of the free-soil Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 45
and free-labor North, where an industrial capitalist economy was coupled with mechanized and family-based agriculture.120 This position, largely championed by residents of V irginia’s white-majority western Valley and trans-Allegheny regions, was in direct opposition to that of the defenders of the eastern Tidewater and Southside plantation economy, who saw colonization as a nefarious scheme to destroy their cherished institution of slavery.121 The east-west collision came to a head during the state’s legislative debates in 1831–32 in the after math of Nat Turner’s rebellion, which prompted a discussion of the future of slavery in the state. The legislative debates about and public commentary on emancipation and colonization demonstrated the politically contingent nature of climatic labels. Those who pushed for the whitening of Virginia via Liberian colonization represented the state’s climate as temperate and thus suitable for the growth of a strong yeomanry and industrial sector, which would draw on the labor of white migrants from the North and abroad. In contrast, those who opposed emancipation and colonization presented images of the state’s climate in ways that corroborated their claims about the future of slavery in Virginia and beyond. A good example of climatic rhetoric among colonization proponents was that of James McDowell Jr., a Valley delegate to the state legislature, who attributed the arrested development of Virginia’s economy to the inefficient system of forced labor and advocated that the state’s black population be replaced with more efficient white workers by means of gradual emancipation and colonization. In so doing, McDowell painted Virginia as a temperate place most suitable for white labor. “The labor of a free white man, in the temperate latitude of Virginia,” he asserted, was “more productive than that of a slave—yielding a larger aggregate for public and for private wealth.”122 The flip side of this logic was the familiar racial argument about black physical compatibility with Africa. At a meeting of the Rockbridge Colonization Society a few years earlier, McDowell had recommended sending free people to Liberia because “the climate is every where warm, and being the native climate of the negro race, it is agreeable to their constitution.” This assertion went in tandem with that of “the unhealthiness of [Liberia’s] climate” to “the colour of white men.” By representing Liberia and V irginia in such mutually exclusive terms, McDowell categorized these places as two racially distinct spaces of freedom.123 Another Valley delegate who employed climatic language was Charles J. Faulkner. In line with other western delegates, he felt that slavery was against 46 • Chapter 1
irginia’s best interests b ecause the institution was inimical to the building of V “free white labor” in the state, jeopardizing “our native, substantial, indepen dent yeomanry” in the western region, and suppressing “the mechanic—the artisan—the manufacturer.”124 He denied that t here was any environmental justification for slavery in V irginia and other “Border states” on the ground that there was “no difference of soil, no diversity of climate” between them and the surrounding free states. The slave states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, he asserted, w ere not cursed with a hot climate but blessed with the potential to become a southern Ohio or Illinois.125 Similarly entrenched in the vocabulary of race and climate, proslavery opponents of emancipation and colonization resorted to essentialist arguments to further their agenda. John Thompson Brown of Petersburg attempted to alleviate the concerns of the western delegates by assuring them that slavery would not infiltrate their white-dominant Valley, as some of them feared, for “the peculiarities of their climate, their habits, feelings and pursuits—in the fixed and unalterable laws of nature” would not allow the growth of black enslaved labor there. According to his racial mapping of the state, “the foot of the negro delights not in the dew of the mountain grass”; rather, “he is the child of the sandy desert. The burning sun gives him life and vigour, and his step is most joyous on the arid plain.” The eastern plantations provided that burning environment, but the mountains of western Virginia did not.126 Proslavery anticolonization arguments outside Virginia also referred to climate. Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina, the proslavery namesake of his Revolutionary War uncle, opposed emancipation and colonization with a similar appeal to climate, although his geographic view was distinct from Brown’s. While Brown divided western and eastern V irginia along racial and climatic lines, Pinckney placed both Africa and the slave South on a continuum of hot climates, with the former being “sultry” and disease-ridden for the American black body and the latter being “a comparatively healthly climate,” but with both too hot for white agricultural labor. Here, the South, not distant Africa, was suitable for black constitutions b ecause of its relative mildness. Yet the cultivation of “Cotton, Rice, and Sugar” in the region was “physically impossible for a white man” and only feasible by the use of black forced labor.127 The Virginia legislature took no decisive action on emancipation and colonization, but the debates on the subjects continued outside the official political arena. The most prominent case was the sparring in print between Thomas Roderick Dew, an anticolonization William and Mary professor from the Tidewater, and Jesse Burton Harrison, a procolonization lawyer Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 47
from Lynchburg. Dew’s and Harrison’s stances on the future of labor in Virginia were not so different: they both wanted a white Virginia enriched by enhanced agricultural production and extensive commercial and industrial infrastructure. But Dew favored the reduction in the number of slaves through diffusion southwards. As slavery extended to the Lower South in the early nineteenth c entury, diffusion had become an attractive strategy for slaveholders in the Upper South, who aimed to recover their investments in human commodities by dispensing with enslaved workers who w ere becoming obsolete in their sluggish slave-based agriculture. Dew championed this measure over emancipation and colonization, for he believed overseas relocation to be too impractical and expensive to carry out.128 Much has been written on the two men’s exchange, yet their usage of climatic rhetoric has rarely received analysis as a shared grammar of race that pervaded conversations about slavery, colonization, and emancipation in Virginia and beyond. In making his case for diffusion, Dew used the climatic difference between Virginia and the Lower South to chart each region’s respective suitability for black and white labor. He believed that in V irginia slaves would be replaced by f ree whites, for the state was “far too north” for the former to exceed the latter in productivity. Such climatic incompatibility would eventually compel the sale of slaves in V irginia to “all the states to the south,” which “are perhaps better adapted to slave labor than free.”129 Dew’s refutation of African colonization similarly employed climatic idioms. Much like Pinckney, Dew described an adverse relationship between Africa and the American black body. He believed that the black American had become alienated from the African environment because “the lapse of ages has completely inured him to our colder and more salubrious continent.” To those acclimated blacks in the United States, Africa—although “the original home of our blacks”—was a “destructive climate.”130 Concerned about Dew’s attack on colonization, the acs called on its supporters to defend the scheme, and Harrison responded. In his essay “Slavery Question in V irginia,” he made it clear that emancipation was not to alleviate “the miseries of the blacks” but to relieve “the injuries slavery inflicts on the whites.”131 The injuries of slavery included slave labor’s undermining of the value of work and industry among white men, slaves’ inability to function in an advanced system of agriculture and their unfitness for manufacturing, and a slave economy’s tendency to hamper the development of a large class of mechanics.132 Harrison emphatically alleged Virginia’s incompatibility with slave labor by dissociating the state from the tropical climate and tropical produce. In his 48 • Chapter 1
view, what marked “a prosperous slave-labour state” was a latitude conducive to the cultivation of cotton, rice, and sugar and “a climate so nearly tropical, or otherwise precarious, as to make the exposure and toil insupportable to free (say white) labourers.”133 The prime examples of the prosperous “slave-labour” society were the Caribbean and Louisiana, followed by Alabama, Mississippi, and to a lesser degree South Carolina and Georgia. V irginia was far from making the list, for it “possesses scarcely a single requisite to make a prosperous slave-labour state.”134 Even V irginia’s major plantation crop—tobacco—was being replaced by wheat and corn, which were grown in “all temperate, and most northern regions.” Moreover, tobacco itself was “notoriously cultivated with success by whites in any part of the world, which is temperate enough to grow it,” making it a nontropical crop and thus rendering tobacco-growing Virginia a physical environment unburdened by “the climate which would put slaves on the vantage ground above whites.”135 Importantly, this framing of Virginia evoked representations of the state as a new eastern frontier for white yeomen farmers, a much more hospitable one than “the untenanted quarters of the west” that were devoid of “the blessings of h uman neighbourhood, without proximity to the sea, without markets, without the vicinity of the church, the school-house, the mill, the smith’s shop, &c.”136 Echoing Harrison, the Massachusetts Colonization Society envisioned replacing slaves in Virginia with “the yeoman who cultivates his few fee-simple acres.” The hope was to divert “the g reat tide of population which rolls to the west” and that was now avoiding the land of slavery and heading to “Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.”137 Similarly, at the acs’s eleventh annual meeting, in 1828, George Washington Parke Custis—the step-grandson of George Washington—expressed his optimism that the ongoing westward settlement would turn to Virginia once the state removed its black population through colonization. “Of the vast tide of emigration, which now rushes like a cataract to the West,” Custis lamented, “not even a trickling rill wends its feeble course to the Ancient Dominion.” European immigrants were currently moving into “the Empire of Liberty,” whereas no one was settling in “the regions of the slave.” But with the ousting of the black population to Africa, Virginia would become a land of yeomanry occupied by “a dense population of freemen—when lovely cottages and improved farms arise upon the now deserted sterile soil.” Not surprisingly, Custis justified this mapping by invoking “nature.” Its “mandates,” he argued, had drawn “a line of demarcation between the countries of the white man and the black.”138 Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 49
These propositions compel us to see that the contest over the future of irginia was also about contrasting projections of settler colonial expansion. V Calls for diffusion justified and benefited from what James Ronda calls the “sweeping imperial and racial geography” of slavery made possible by the federal government’s sectionalist policy and the removal of Native Americans to the Indian Territory.139 In contrast, advocates of colonization dreamed of waves of white migration into the state—an image that inserted V irginia into the enlarging sphere of white f ree soil that encompassed the Northeast, Northwest, and Pacific West. In the end, the schism between the east and west in Virginia concluded in a victory for diffusion. Without any governmental measures for colonization and gradual emancipation except for the ineffectual 1833 law stipulating the funding of voluntary removal to Africa, Virginia primarily drove out its enslaved population through the domestic slave trade, exporting approximately 300,000 between the 1830s and 1860s, as opposed to the roughly 3,700 f ree and manumitted Virginians who w ere sent to Liberia between 1820 and 1865.140 During the same decades, Virginians’ defense of slavery took on increased intensity and ornery logic. The institution was praised as a positive good—a moral institution at the basis of the republican virtue of the master race and a natural state of being for the allegedly inferior race.141 By the 1850s the Virginia legislature had come to regard Liberian colonization as contributing exclusively to the strengthening of slavery, which led it to pass measures to aid in the voluntary removal of free black residents in 1850 and 1853.142 •
As considerable numbers of African North Americans came out of bondage by means of military dictates and emancipation policies, discursive and institutional efforts to segregate spaces of black freedom on an Atlantic scale emerged in conjunction with the drive to monopolize indigenous lands and with different imperial and ideological imperatives. Integral to these black removal ventures was the imbrication of black-white difference and the temperate-tropical distinction that gave a biological grounding to arguments for separating sites of black and white freedom. In this paradigm, the metropolitan center and the North American frontier came to signify natural environments solely suited for white residence, and migration from the former to the latter denoted a path to economic advancement and political liberty open only to whites. 50 • Chapter 1
This pattern, although underwritten by transnationally shared ideas about race, was inflected by slavery. In the United States, the debates over the future of the “Empire of Liberty” generated diverse climatic representations that reflected different positions on the intertwined questions of w hether slavery should be continued and expanded, whether white f ree soil needed extending, and how to dispose of undesirable populations. In the British Empire, racial divisions of free labor began to form in a way that presaged its postemancipation segmentation into white settler societies and nonwhite extractive economies. Despite the different paths of Britain and the United States, black freedom in both places became embedded in political and economic structures that stratified access to rights and privileges of settler colonial dominance—structures built on expropriated indigenous lands. Another case of racial stratification of freedom took place in the aftermath of the British abolition of slavery. After 1833 Upper Canada loomed large in the minds of both enslaved people and free black abolitionists as a state- sanctioned haven of freedom. As conspicuously larger numbers of enslaved people began reaching the now officially f ree territory, the racial geographic logic that emerged in the postrevolutionary era came to have an impact on this black population, but in a gradual manner. In the next chapter, we will see how former-slave refugees and their black allies in Canada initially succeeded in convincing the metropole to champion an imperial geography that lodged black freedom firmly in the province. This mapping was part of the geographies of freedom i magined by U.S. and Canadian black thinkers that projected two nationally distinct, territorially bound forms of black freedom, one British and the other American.
Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order • 51
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Chapter 2
BLACK GEOGRAPHIES AND THE POLITICS OF DIASPORA
In 1837 a tale of a slave escape appeared in a New York abolitionist newspaper. The protagonists w ere a formerly enslaved c ouple who had just concluded an arduous journey from Kentucky to Upper Canada.1 The account narrated their flight “through the darkness of the night” from “the land of slavery” to “a land of liberty,” portraying the Canada-U.S. border, not the North-South divide, as the line delineating free and unfree territories.2 Stories such as this one that identified Canada as a place for enslaved people’s self-emancipation became prominent in northern abolitionist circles in the aftermath of British imperial emancipation, which prohibited slavery in almost all of the land governed by the British Empire as of August 1, 1834.3 Among enslaved p eople in non-British states, this historic event generated hopes that they would not be held in bondage if they came u nder the empire’s jurisdiction. Although slaves had been fleeing to the British North American colonies, where slavery had been practically defunct since the 1820s, the 1833 abolition act was impor tant in that it established in the minds of both enslaved p eople and freed black abolitionists the notion that Canada was a state-sanctioned free haven. The wave of slave escapes to Canada after British emancipation created various new political agendas among free black populations on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border that, in turn, gave form to diverse geographic imaginings of black freedom. The emerging activism made clear that both groups,
as divergent as they were, shared a cultural strategy: African Canadians and African Americans produced different representations of the diaspora’s free black peoples in ways that suited their varied political purposes. In the late 1830s black American abolitionists in northern cities began organizing to assist slaves in fleeing across the Canada-U.S. border and to promote their well-being in their new home. This was part of a larger antislavery project in which the black abolitionists invoked diverse emancipated populations across the Western Hemisphere to demonstrate, by proxy, American slaves’ capacity for freedom. The strategy assumed a universal model of black humanity that exhibited the basic traits of the Western free subject—political loyalty, industry, monogamy, and Christian faith—as well as a cognitive mapping of the Western Hemisphere dotted by groups of formerly enslaved people who displayed uniform signs of those attributes. However, such diasporic imagery collapsed when self-emancipated people in Canada asserted their loyalty to the Crown through military service. Because of white Americans’ tendency to question African Americans’ allegiance to their nation and readiness to conflate them with the former-slave soldiers in Canada, U.S. black communities w ere compelled to cast the self-emancipated as foreign o thers possessed of distinctly British characteristics so as to fend off accusations of sedition. This chapter argues that northern African Americans and self-emancipated people in Canada and their legally free allies recognized that, although both free black Americans and former-slave runaways were born in the United States, they were two distinct groups embodying diff erent sets of cultural and political values. And based on that understanding, they pursued incorporation into their respective polities. What emerged from this recognition was a black geography of freedom that postulated two categories of free people of African descent: self-emancipated people in Canada marked by their British identity and free black Americans committed to republican principles. In their effort t oward incorporation, self-emancipated people and their supporters repeatedly and in various venues claimed the benefits of British emancipation by engaging in a strategic diasporic identification. To secure Canada’s border against the extradition of U.S. fugitives and to receive assistance in improving their condition, black Canadians appealed to metropolitan abolitionists and officials to work for their cause by equating themselves with the most prominent symbol of British abolition: the Caribbean freed people. As a result of such ingenious articulation of free black British identity, a shift occurred in the treatment of former-slave refugees in the Anglo-American abolitionist 54 • Chapter 2
world. An American antislavery tool became part of a British postemancipation agenda, with metropolitan sectors increasingly including the cross-border escapees under the rubric of the empire’s emancipated peoples. THE MAKING OF A UNIVERSAL F REE BLACK SUBJECT
Enslaved p eople’s escape to Canada was a historically specific phenomenon informed by both local and international circumstances. The colony began attracting refugees thanks to two pieces of legislation enacted in 1793, one on each side of the Canada-U.S. border. On the Canadian side, the 1793 provincial emancipation law banned the importation of slaves into the colony. The architect of the law, Lieutenant Governor John Simcoe, originally wished to free all slaves in the colony, but protests from slave o wners resulted in a compromise bill that immediately emancipated not a single slave but granted freedom to slaves born after 1793 when they turned twenty-five.4 Aware of this statute, enslaved p eople in the Michigan Territory took advantage of the province’s growing reinforcement of sovereign control over people entering its territory and freed themselves by crossing into Canada.5 For those enslaved in the United States, Canada seemed like a particularly safe haven because runaways faced an increased danger of reenslavement due to a piece of federal legislation passed in 1793: the first Fugitive Slave Law. This law was intended to enforce Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution, which provided that “no person held to service or labour in one state” would be exempted from the labor they owed by escaping to another state. Since slavery had been put on the path to gradual extinction in the North, the slaveholding states—especially Maryland and Virginia, the latter of which had large slave populations in its northern portion—feared their slaves might become free in states that outlawed h uman bondage. The Fugitive Slave Law was enacted to alleviate such apprehensions by equipping the federal government with the power to capture fugitive slaves who crossed state lines. In this sense, the new federal union started its life with an interstate legal dragnet designed to keep the slave states from losing their “property.”6 Together, the two 1793 laws increased cross-border flights to a conspicuous level.7 But it was British imperial abolition that was a watershed moment a fter which enslaved people began heading to Canada in increased numbers and with greater ease. Referring to the heightened visibility of transients bound for Canada during the late 1830s, a contemporary observer attributed the growth to the “increased facilit y” of slave escapes enabled by a “growing anti-slavery Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 55
feeling among the p eople” who regarded Canada as “a home of freedom” for enslaved people.8 The flights produced a considerable demographic shift: on the eve of the Civil War, between 20,000 and 45,000 refugees are estimated to have been living in Canada.9 Most of these escapees settled in towns in the southwestern part of the province surrounded by the Detroit River and Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario. One prominent example of the increased abolitionist interest in slave escapes was the creation in November 1835 of an organization dedicated to helping runaways, the New York Vigilance Committee. The organization’s members included Charles B. Ray, David Ruggles, and Theodore Wright—all leading free black abolitionists in the state.10 Ruggles served as its secretary and general agent. Although women did not hold executive positions in the committee, it consisted of “100 persons, male and female.”11 L ater in 1841 female supporters of the committee created a separate society called the New York Colored Female Vigilance Committee.12 The New York Vigilance Committee proclaimed that it was the first to take up the task of “help[ing] fugitive slaves to places of safety,” which had been “almost wholly neglected previous to the organization of this committee.”13 In addition to overseeing the assistance of fugitives, the committee’s work included defending legally f ree residents from slave catchers, who posed an immense threat to the welfare of New York’s black community. The committee declared in June 1837 that its official goals w ere “throw[ing] a shield of protection around the fireside of the free colored man” and aiding runaways “in escaping to a land of freedom.”14 Its activism included a series of petition campaigns aimed at moving the state legislature to guarantee a jury trial for ese efforts bore fruit in May 1841, when Governor alleged fugitive slaves.15 Th William H. Seward signed a bill providing that persons assumed to be fugitive slaves should have a trial by jury. But the law was never enforced to its full extent, and it was nullified in 1842 by the Supreme Court decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that gave Congress the exclusive power to “legislate regarding fugitive slaves.”16 The black New Yorkers’ involvement in fugitive slave assistance continued to grow. In 1840, five years after its foundation, the vigilance committee prided itself on having assisted as many as 178 fugitive slaves in that year alone.17 One probable reason for the heavy traffic was that New York City was a vital stopping point between the border states and Canada. In particular, the organization received runaways from Philadelphia, the first major Northern city for those coming from Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. 56 • Chapter 2
It is hard to estimate exactly how many refugees moved to Canada in the years after British abolition, but records kept by vigilance committees on escape routes indicate fugitives’ propensity to leave the United States for the province or, less frequently, for other British territories. Runaway traffic handled by the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, which often sent escapees on to the New York Vigilance Committee, gives us some idea.18 Out of the thirty-four fugitives (eighteen men, five w omen, and eleven people not identified by gender) whom the Philadelphia organization assisted between July 3, 1839, and March 3, 1840, twenty-one were forwarded to the New York Vigilance Committee. Of the thirteen who did not intend to proceed to New York City, eleven were in transit to Canada, one to Trinidad, and one to Liverpool, England. Among those who were on their way to New York, two declared their final destinations: one had set his sights on Trinidad and the other on Canada. The records kept by the Philadelphia committee do not specify the intended final destinations of the remaining nineteen fugitives sent to the New York Vigilance Committee. It is possible that some of them proceeded to Canada via New York.19 Indeed, records kept by the New York committee suggest the popularity of Canada as a destination among those who reached New York. At a regular monthly meeting in 1840, the committee reported that all of the forty fugitives it had assisted during a one-month period left for “queen victoria’s dominions forever beyond the reach of the American slave power.” Three people who attended that meeting also “safely landed in Canada.”20 Since no records traced the entire journeys of the forty escapees, it is difficult to know where they actually ended up. Declared destinations were not definitive because runaways could change their routes a fter leaving New York. Some may have stayed in the U.S. North despite their initial plans to leave for Canada, and others may have continued their journeys as planned. What was certain was that the New York Vigilance Committee recognized Canada as a place of freedom and safe refuge for American slaves. This recognition was most strongly felt in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Between 1842 and 1848 six free states (New York not among them) enacted personal liberty laws that made states officially exempt from the capture-and-return process (these laws would be counteracted by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850).21 But in the early 1840s there seemed to be a consensus among the committees’ members that the U.S. North posed too much danger to fugitives b ecause of the high risk of capture and reenslavement. For instance, Ray, a co-founder of the committee and the editor of the Colored American, published in the Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 57
paper a speech that extolled the free soil of Canada. Made at an anniversary celebration of the New York Vigilance Committee, the speech pronounced that “to stay here would be to be in a state of continual jeopardy—for this is the slave catcher’s hunting ground.” The speaker urged instead that the slave should “escape and stand on f ree soil and breathe f ree air by the side of the British lion.”22 The idea of an unfree North was shared by p eople outside New York City. The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia warned of slave kidnappers roaming the city in efforts to grab “a flying captive” seeking “shelter in the shadow of our liberty tree on our boasted f ree soil.” The committee recommended Canada as a truly f ree place for the runaways, as seen in the following paean read at its meeting: While from the dark Canadian woods, The loud reply comes thundering out, Above Niagara’s boiling floods. The rescued bondman’s triumph shout.23 A similar view of Canada was also on display when “a meeting to form a Boston Vigilance Committee” was called at a gathering to support Ruggle’s magazine, the Mirror of Liberty. Black Bostonians and Ruggles, who was in attendance as a guest, maintained that refugees from bondage could be safe and secure in Canada, where they would be “in the full possession of their liberty under the banner of Queen Victoria.”24 In the epicenters of black activism in the North, Canada appeared to be fugitive slaves’ final destination, driving black communities to devote time and money to help the refugees in their cross-border flights to freedom. With more and more fugitives “trooping up from the South and entering the Province [of Upper Canada] almost daily,” black and white abolitionists began to see formerly enslaved p eople in Canada as an ideal instrument of their antislavery cause.25 In 1836 the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society (aass) appointed Hiram Wilson, a graduate of Oberlin College, to canvass settlements of self-emancipated people dotted across the colony’s southwestern region, especially the Detroit and Niagara border areas.26 Wilson was one of nearly seventy agents of the society who were sent throughout the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean to collect information to support the immediate emancipation of American slaves.27 The executive committee expected the agents to gather as much information as
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possible that would help prove “the fitness of slaves for freedom” and the expediency of immediate emancipation in the United States.28 This ammunition was to be directed against proslavery doctrines of black incapacity for freedom. As George Fredrickson and others have pointed out, the justification of h uman bondage on the ground of innate black inferiority had become a major part of southern lingo by the m iddle of the 1830s in reaction to what southerners saw as a mounting abolitionist threat to their institution. Popular and political discourse associated blackness with an absence of qualities such as self-discipline, industry, and intelligence, qualities deemed necessary for freedom.29 The aass used self-emancipated people as evidence that suggested other wise. Wilson reported on their adjustment to freedom and worked to promote their further improvement in material and educational realms. His observations w ere gathered from itinerant visits to small towns along the Detroit River, where many former slaves had formed settlements. His first stop was Amherstburg. He found only a small number of black residents there but reported that more than 3,000 p eople lived in its surrounding areas. Then he came across a settlement of about thirty black families in the small town of Colchester.30 In Niagara Wilson encountered 150 black residents, all self- emancipated refugees. Some of them carrying loaded guns surrounded him on the suspicion that he was a slave kidnapper. Wilson moved on to St. Catherines and St. Davids, home to 200 residents and 15 families, respectively. In both places nearly all the adults had been born in slavery. His subsequent stop at Hamilton revealed the existence of 150 black settlers.31 In Toronto Wilson found 600 p eople, most of whom w ere from V irginia and Kentucky. With a very few exceptions the adult population t here had “spent a considerable part of their lives in slavery.” Two-thirds of them had attained freedom through flight; the rest had become free due to manumission or self-purchase.32 All in all, Wilson estimated that “a population of about 10,000, almost entirely fugitives from American oppression,” had been amassing in Upper Canada.33 Through his regular correspondence with the aass headquarters in New York City, Wilson’s reports on self-emancipated people entered the official discourse of the organization intent on turning them into an antislavery tool. To that end, the executive committee requested that Wilson correspond with the society as frequently as possible to report on former-slave refugees’ “condition and wants, moral and physical,” and to suggest proper ways to provide them with relief and means of improvement. Scribbled in the margins of
Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 59
Wilson’s appointment letter was a note: “What we want is . . . facts, facts of all sorts. You cannot be too particular.”34 The committee hoped that “full and satisfactory evidence of [self-emancipated people’s] good behavior and value as citizens” would effectively refute proslavery propaganda that slaves would languish in freedom.35 Wilson’s reports to the society appeared in the Emancipator, the aass’s official publication, as evidence of formerly enslaved people’s moral and industrious communal lives. In one article, black residents in Niagara were presented as “thriving” and “industrious,” with most of them employed as “farmers, mechanics, house servants, day laborers, barbers, &c.” Reference was also made to a temperance society, a school, and three preachers among escaped residents in St. Catherines and to a church, a temperance school, and a black preacher in St. Davids.36 In addition to his own reports, Wilson relayed testimony of high-ranking Canadian officials about the conditions of black residents in Toronto. The officials answered a list of questions that Wilson had submitted to them. Those were: “Are they loyal subjects of the government?” “As a p eople are they as honest, as industrious, as temperate, and well behaved as the white citizens?” “In proportion to their numbers are criminal cases more numerous among them than among the whites?” and “Do any of them beg from door to door, or depend on public charity for sustenance and if so are cases more numerous proportionately than among the whites?” Answers from the officials were universally favorable. A member of the provincial parliament praised black Canadians’ loyalty to the British government, stating that “there are not in his majesty’s dominions, a more loyal, honest, industrious, temperate and inde pendent class of citizens than the colored people of Upper Canada.” Another official gave an equally complimentary response, commending the blacks’ honesty, independence, and industry.37 The work of propagating positive accounts of fugitive refugees coincided with efforts to improve their circumstances. Wilson set up schools to relieve what he deemed their most dire deprivation: lack of education. He made arrangements for the opening of one school in Amherstburg and two in Colchester during his tour in 1836. He promised the town residents to establish the schools on the condition that the residents boarded teachers and paid their salaries. Subsequently, one female and two male instructors were sent from Oberlin to the two towns.38 At the end of 1837, eight men and w omen from the United States were working as teachers in Upper Canada.39
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Leading African American abolitionists supported Wilson’s mission in anada. At a meeting of the United Anti-Slavery Society of New York, a C chapter of the aass, Bell, Ray, Ruggles, and Wright all praised Wilson and other agents.40 In appreciation of Wilson’s findings, Samuel Cornish reproduced the aforementioned testimony by Canadian officials in the Colored ose words had politi American when he was its editor before Ray’s tenure. Th cal value as a rebuttal to “our detractors who say the colored man is incapable of taking care of himself.”41 Here self-emancipated people’s political and social aptitude in Canada implied that American slaves, too, had the potential to become worthy members of the national polity, despite the republican- monarchical difference. The reproduction of the testimony in the Colored American was part of the paper’s own campaign to disseminate positive accounts of formerly enslaved peoples in diff erent parts of the Western Hemisphere—Canada, the United States, the British Caribbean, and Haiti. Attached to almost all of these stories was the phrase “take care of themselves,” Cornish’s recurring abolitionist motto. For instance, a memorial of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society to the Ohio state legislature appeared in the paper with a heading: “can’t take care of themselves, The above is a subterfuge.” Tracing the majority of African American families in Ohio to formerly enslaved people who had arrived in the state in the early 1820s, the memorial reported on the flourishing of temperance and religious organizations among the black residents. The motive behind the publication of this statement was to refute “an apology for slavery,” namely, the claim that “they [slaves] c an’t take care of themselves” outside of slavery.42 Haiti was another place in which, in Cornish’s words, “a colored community [was] taking care of themselves!” The paper carried excerpts from a published travelogue written by an English visitor to the black republic. To showcase the success of abolition, Cornish included quotes attributing the country’s increasing agricultural production after emancipation to the Haitians’ hard work and moral virtue.43 In the same vein, the Colored American published reports by Joseph Horace Kimball and James A. Thome, aass agents sent to the Caribbean by the executive committee, with a view to showing the improved conditions of emancipated people under British rule. Writing from Antigua, a colony f ree of the oppressive system of apprenticeship, Kimball implied that the emancipated Antiguans’ quick adjustment to freedom guaranteed the success of immediate emancipation in the United States. What he saw in the Antiguan freed p eople—appreciation of
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onogamous, stable marital relations as well as industry, observation of the m law, and moral and religious devotion—was projected onto American slaves on the ground of a common ancestry.44 Reports by Kimball and Thome were invoked to “refute all the arguments leveled against immediate emancipation” in the United States.45 The Colored American’s invocation of these examples projected a universal blackness on recently freed peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Inscribed onto different emancipated groups were labor, moral, domestic, and civic capacities devoid of nationally distinct meanings and divorced from any particular labor conditions. These attributes, thought to reside in black bodies across borders, placed slaves in the United States and formerly enslaved p eople in other areas on a transnational continuum of universal black humanity. THE MAKING OF A FOREIGN OTHER
Despite its symbolic usefulness, Canada was far from a land of absolute freedom in the eyes of the cross-border fugitives. The fragility of their free status was instituted by the Upper Canadian legislature in February 1833 with an act that provided for the extradition of “Fugitive Offenders from Foreign Countries,” u nder which individuals charged with “Murder, Forgery, Larceny, or other crime” could be returned to their original places of crime.46 Another key component of this law was the authority of the governor and the executive council to decide whether to surrender the person charged with a crime. This stipulation might well have allowed compassionate provincial administrators to let some individuals off, but according to Jason Silverman the act still “obviously threatened the freedom of all runaway slaves from the United States: first, because many slaves indeed committed such crimes in the process of escaping; second, because slave owners might bring false charges in order to regain their property.”47 In the face of such a perilous outlook, when an opportunity arose to demonstrate their commitment to the British Crown, some refugees seized it enthusiastically by offering to serve in the military during the Rebellion of 1837. The rebellion occurred against the backdrop of a simmering animosity toward the colonial oligarchy in Upper Canada, whose members had long dominated the political and economic arenas of the province. In December 1837 William Mackenzie, former mayor of Toronto and a member of the provincial parliament, initiated a rebellion to f ree Canada from British rule and form an independent republic.48 Although the U.S. government refused to support 62 • Chapter 2
the rebel cause, individual Americans joined Mackenzie to separate Canada from Britain. Within a month after the outbreak of the rebellion, which unfolded in the C anada-U.S. border areas, nearly a thousand blacks, mostly self- emancipated, reportedly volunteered for service with the British army. Such an act was, to some extent, attributable to their fear of reenslavement, should the colony be annexed by the United States if it gained independence. What motivated a former-slave runaway named Harry, for example, was the concern that he would be immediately sent out of the country and sold back into slavery in case the rebels won.49 Yet, the trope with a wider and longer circulation was that of indebtedness, which appeared in accounts of black refugees’ participation in the military both during and a fter the rebellion. Newspapers and colonial officials explained their service as an expression of the refugees’ loyalty to the British government, to which they owed their freedom. A Toronto newspaper reported that black soldiers joined the British army to “defend with their lives the government which had treated them like h uman beings.”50 Similarly, Francis Bond Head, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada at the time of the rebellion, recounted that black volunteers rushed to “defend the glorious institutions of Great Britain.”51 In the years to come, the experience of military service would be transmuted into a political resource through which black residents claimed British subject status and governmental protection. In the meantime, formerly enslaved p eople’s military participation shifted northern black Americans’ approach to this group of emancipated people, for white Americans began villainizing formerly enslaved soldiers, and as a result the rebellion fractured the abolitionist construction of a universal black identity. The British army’s particular deployment strategy brought about this development. Three “colored” companies were assigned the tasks of both watching over American prisoners of war and patrolling the border areas against American rebel sympathizers.52 Accounts of black frontline battle with the rebels occupying Navy Island, a small island in the Niagara River that became their stronghold, reached white Americans in border towns through newspaper reports. On January 6, 1838, the Detroit Free Press informed its readers of the colonial rebels’ “demolition of a building in which a company of blacks w ere quartered.” The paper followed this up with another account of “negroes” in the British army.53 Residents in the region may also have learned of the Canadian rebels’ particular abhorrence of black soldiers. An officer wrote in a letter to a fellow insurgent stationed on Navy Island that the British were sending blacks to “go down to our camp and enlist as cooks, and in that Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 63
capacity poison our men. Lest you should be made the victims of such a pusillanimous and detestable scheme. For god’s sake seek out for the negroes.”54 These stories, in combination with long-standing stereotypes of black savagery, ultimately generated the figure of the vindictive former slave soldier intent on harming white Americans. A letter written by a resident of Detroit gives us a glimpse of the white fear of the black soldier as “the grinning negro, mad with revenge” for his past enslavement in the United States.55 The image of the savage former slave soldier might very well have been strengthened by news of the Caroline affair which spread across U.S. border towns. The British attack on the Caroline, a steamboat on which American sympathizers carried provisions and arms supplies for the rebels, resulted in the vilification of the British as merciless enemies of American citizens. The Detroit Free Press ran a headline that read: “an american steamboat burnt, and american citizens inhumanly butchered on american soil by armed british soldiers.”56 In Buffalo, New York, white residents orga nized a protest meeting and demonized the British as having no qualms about “imbru[ing] their hands in the blood of Americans with impunity.”57 White Americans expressed their indignation at the British in ways that excluded African Americans from their patriotic national collective, dismissing the fact that the sole crew member killed during the Caroline incident was in fact an African American man named Amos Durfee.58 Protesting “the high-handed aggression” by the British, white residents of Michigan called themselves “the yeomanry of Michigan” who “would rise as one man and avenge the outrage” should “our territory . . . be invaded, our h ouses and property burnt, and our peaceful and unoffending citizens butchered by an armed and blood-thirsty soldiery.”59 The employment of the highly racialized term of yeomanry indicated the whiteness of this perceived community of patriotic republican farmers. Such race-based exclusion went hand in hand with suspicions about black residents’ complicity in the British aggression t oward Americans. In Detroit, reports circulated that the city’s black population was intending to “disturb the peace and quietness of the city.”60 In Buffalo there was an uproar about a “suspicious” black person immediately a fter the Caroline incident. A day a fter the attack, an African American man was arrested for setting fire to a foundry. He was released a fter an initial interrogation, but white residents’ continued furor led to his detention in jail.61 Black citizens in the border areas understood that the paranoia stemmed from whites’ conflation of black Americans with black Canadian soldiers, 64 • Chapter 2
with both considered non-American foreign elements. African American leaders in Buffalo pointed this out succinctly: “As far as we can ascertain respecting the present excitement against us, it originated from the fact that a number of colored people were engaged with the government forces in Canada; is it injustice to implicate us on their account!”62 Black residents in Detroit also met to quell “hostility towards the colored people of this city” excited by “attributing to them wicked and malicious intentions.”63 To refute white associations of them with black soldiers in Canada, African Americans in the border regions made a point of divorcing themselves from African Canadians, describing the two as nationally distinct p eoples under two diff erent governments. In Detroit, black residents stressed that they would combat any force attempting to disturb the city’s peace, “whether made by people of our own color or whites, from this or the other side of the River.”64 Those in Buffalo made the point that black populations in Canada w ere acting according to political interests and agendas dissimilar from their own: Our interests are not identified with theirs; they are under a separate government and are amenable to the laws under which they live, and we do assure you our interests are as much at stake, our feelings as strongly attached to this government, and as fully prepared to act in its defence, if necessary, as any other citizens amongst you, and we hope and trust such feelings will no longer harbored against us.65 To dissociate themselves from the Canadian soldiers, black border residents emphasized the primacy of nationality in defining one’s actions and motivations, unlike white Americans who identified blacks in their midst with those fighting for a foreign state solely on the basis of race. Similarly, black leaders in New York City felt the need to differentiate themselves from “fugitives from bondage” who were organized into “companies and regiments in the British Army of the Province of Canada.” Cornish played up the national distinction between the two groups by invoking an image of an armed collision between black Americans and black Canadians. Declaring that African Americans would “spill more of our best blood, were it necessary, in defense of the principles of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” Cornish promised to fight against former slaves “should they kick up a dust in the north, all out gallantry for their ‘fair Sovereign’ will not prevent us from resisting their encroachments, even unto blood.”66 This stance marked a stark shift from before the Rebellion of 1837, when represen tations of the cross-border refugees as loyal British subjects posed no problem to Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 65
black New Yorkers. Given white Americans’ confusion, however, they began to see in the fugitive population not so much a diasporic archetype but a political foil. Cornish underscored the difference of the republican and monarchical systems to stress African Americans’ separation from and even superiority to black Canadians. Creating distinct political identities for blacks in the republican United States and those in the monarchical British colony, he lauded black Americans for “lov[ing] principle better than men, and esteem[ing] it above kings or even queens.” Formerly enslaved p eople in Canada thus no longer signified the universal political sensibilities deemed to reside in American slaves; instead, they served as a foil in the construction of a black American subject whose “republican, loyal attachment to home and country bend to nothing.”67 The eventual suppression of the rebellion in 1838 did not remove the black armed force from the border. The postrebellion deployment of black soldiers as the main defense force on the Canada-U.S. border drew the attention of the Colored American. The paper published a report in 1839 on an all-black regiment stationed at “the most important post” in the area “in consequence of their acknowledged loyalty to the British Crown.”68 Hostility toward Canadian black soldiers on the part of white Americans was rekindled in the summer of 1840, when shots were fired at two U.S. steamers on the Niagara River. A complaint was made by the American ambassador in London, who condemned the “gross outrage” committed by the black men.69 The persistent presence of black soldiers led black New Yorkers to discontinue material assistance to self-emancipated people in Canada. Aiding in their improvement now seemed an unpatriotic activity that would only help potential enemies and their government. This new approach came to the surface during a debate between Wilson and Ray that unfolded in the pages of the Colored American in early 1841. Wilson wrote to the paper to solicit aid for the sustenance of his mission, for the aass had discontinued his agency in June 1838. In response, Ray, who had replaced Cornish as the paper’s editor, debated with the white missionary about whether American abolitionists should feel responsible for supporting relief work for formerly enslaved people in Canada. In arguing for support, Wilson put black refugees’ past unpaid labor at the center of their identity, presenting them as former contributors to the prosperity of the U.S. nation who had provided for the material comforts of the American people through their blood, sweat, and tears. Wilson called escaped 66 • Chapter 2
p eople “these noble, self-emancipated, self-exiled sons and d aughters of the South” worthy of help from “Americans, who are continually warming their bodies and sweetening their beverages with the fruits of their unrequited toil.” By connecting American citizens and the black population in Canada through the former’s consumption of goods produced by the latter during enslavement, Wilson urged U.S. abolitionists to “lend a hand to the work of elevating [the Canadians’] condition and character.” Otherwise he would “cover his face with everlasting shame for the nation that gave me birth.”70 Dismissing Wilson’s request by saying “Brother Wilson had our best wishes, but he can consistently have no more,” Ray defined self-emancipated people as a potential enemy and an alien other, politically and culturally British, who were “to be forever protected by British law, and educated, elevated, and improved in character by British charity, and made to become a good British subject, to protect forever the British throne.”71 Ray disavowed Wilson’s mission because it “regards the improvement of subjects of another government, all of whose influence will go directly in support of that government.”72 Nevertheless, Ray acknowledged the need to continue aiding escaping slaves who “must be got to Canada to be safe.”73 At first sight, the New Yorkers’ identification of the refugees as a national foe seemed to contradict their perception of Britain as a glorious land of freedom for slaves. Black northerners evidently saw no contradiction, however. One possible reason could have been that, when black New Yorkers engaged with Britain, they did so in the realm of abolition—that is, the business of turning slaves into free people—but they saw no relevance between that business and their campaign for full American citizenship. Emancipating slaves was a commendable act, but that did not mean legally free black Americans should embrace Britain in their capacity as U.S. citizens. Especially since free black Americans were in desperate need to prove their loyalty to the republic, it served their purpose to represent Britain as an object of their military action and to lay claim to U.S. citizenship through such patriotic imagery. Relatedly, the act of helping fugitives reach Canada was a process of enacting their American identity. The recurrent sending of slaves to Canada worked to bring to light the national grounding of African Americans’ freedom by juxtaposing their domestically gained freedom with that granted by a foreign power. Assisting southern runaways provided opportunities to repeatedly mark free black northerners’ Americanness by differentiating between t hose who needed to leave the United States to achieve freedom and those who were indebted to U.S. law for their freedom. This dualism would later fracture with the passage of the Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 67
Fugitive Slave Law, when the legal status of free black people was put at risk and, consequently, Britain’s commitment to black freedom became extremely appealing to them. BRITISH EMANCIPATED SUBJECTS IN CANADA
That rupture was yet to appear in the late 1830s and 1840s. Instead, the differentiation between black Canadians and Americans was well u nder way not only on the American side of the border: opposition to Wilson also came from black residents in Canada, who had become increasingly articulate about their identity as British subjects in the years a fter the Rebellion of 1837. A meeting of “colored delegates” passed a resolution in disapproval of Wilson’s effort to establish schools for self-emancipated people. The participants of the meeting, who called themselves “Her loyal subjects,” resolved that they “highly disapprove of the American school system, introduced into the province by Hiram Wilson.”74 The meeting was convened by two black men, Peter Gallego and Eduard de St. Remy, who had been the leading exponents of the British identity of U. S.-origin fugitive refugees. The two men’s activism in Toronto’s black community is well recorded, but biographical information about them is scarce.75 Scholars agree that Gallego was born in Canada but disagree about whether his father, originally from V irginia, was legally f ree or formerly enslaved. Not much is known about de St. Remy other than that he was born in E ngland and 76 came to Upper Canada via Jamaica. As part of their work to improve black migrants’ lives, in June 1839 the two published a prospectus for a newspaper titled the British American Journal of Liberty, which they intended as a vehicle to advance the welfare of “the numerous and growing colored population of Upper Canada” pouring in from the United States. While the scholarly consensus is that the two men were born outside of the United States, their wording— “our recent passage from the mock Liberty, granted by heartless republicans, to the perfect freedom of a constitutional monarchy”—demonstrated that these men fashioned an identity as expatriates who had fled the oppressive slaveholding republic.77 Gallego and de St. Remy used multiple measures to construct a black British identity. One was military service to defend Britain’s colonial rule. Reiterating sentiments expressed during the Rebellion of 1837, they pledged to help maintain British rule against any attempt to sever “the connection of the Canadas with the mother country.” They also placed political system at 68 • Chapter 2
the center of their identity, in much the same way as northern African Americans did. The former-slave refugees, they explained, would “fight the b attles of that just and free Monarchy,” a system that exceeded “uncontrolled popu lar government.” In this way, the prospectus constituted black inhabitants in Canada as “a body” of people defined by an adherence to distinctly British culture and institutions.78 Another locus of identity formation was discourse on the West Indian emancipated people, who were presented as their fellow emancipated black subjects. Extending its scope beyond the boundaries of colonial Canada, the proposed newspaper promised to cover affairs in the metropole and the British Caribbean. Readers would receive news on metropolitan and provincial legislation as well as reports on “the progress of our fellow subjects in the West Indies,” who would provide an important reference point from which to gauge prospects for the advancement of self-emancipated people in Canada.79 The practice of forming a common identity with the West Indian freed people very likely developed out of annual imperial emancipation celebrations which had originated in the Caribbean to build and evoke loyal sentiments around the British abolition of slavery and which had become widely observed in Upper Canada by 1838.80 This pro-British patriotic function differed from what scholars have generally discussed as the purpose of the cele brations: to use British emancipation as a way to rally support for abolition in the United States.81 But in Canada imperial abolition became a symbol used by self-emancipated people to forge their commonality with the West Indians as valid beneficiaries of that policy. A case in point is an 1841 imperial emancipation celebration in Chatham, one of the small towns on the Canadian side of the Detroit River where self-emancipated people settled in large concentrations. Participants in the celebration explicitly cast themselves as one group of emancipated subjects enjoying the blessings of the 1833 act and “celebrated the important event of their emancipation throughout the British dominions—in a manner, too, that showed the value and consequence attached by them to the boon of freedom.” The celebration included a procession of about one hundred p eople and a festive dinner and dancing in the evening.82 Similarly, a meeting of black escapees in the same town three years later expressed gratitude for “what [Britain] has done and what she is still doing for us,” thanking the home government for “break[ing] the fetters of the Slave.” The “Slave” referred to two kinds of slave populations who benefited from the emancipation act—slaves from the United States and “our brethren in the West Indies,” both “Colored Subjects Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 69
of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.”83 This tradition continued into the 1850s. In 1852 one observer described black residents’ participation in “the anniversary of their West Indian Emancipation,” suggesting a widely held understanding that former slaves and West Indian blacks shared in the benefit and legacy of imperial emancipation.84 These articulations of identification notwithstanding, it should be noted that there was a fundamental difference between the freedoms enjoyed by the two groups. The freedom of formerly enslaved refugees stemmed from their bodies’ presence in the legally free space of Canada, while that of Caribbean freed people resided wholly in their bodies, independent of immediate location. That is, wherever they w ere, technically speaking, emancipated Caribbean blacks had ceased to be someone’s property since governmental monetary compensations had annulled the slaveholders’ claim to their bodies and the potential output of their labor. In contrast, the freedom of self- emancipated people could be nullified if they were taken back to the United States, where their bodies—and their labor—would legally belong to someone e lse. Not least because of this precarious nature of their freedom, self- emancipated people claimed identity with the West Indian freed people, the legitimate beneficiaries of British emancipation policy. This strategy became an essential part of black Canadians’ effort to convince the home government to protect their freedom and aid in their progress under the wing of the British monarchy. It was also a politically effective one, for after imperial abolition, pride in being “an anti-slavery nation” became a core component of the British public’s sense of national superiority.85 In early 1839 Gallego and de St. Remy led a group of formerly enslaved residents in Upper Canada to write a memorial that urgently requested the metropole to grant them the full benefits of British freedom. Casting their demand in a patriotic light—as a necessary measure to “become good Christians, good subjects, and enlightened members of the community”—the petitioners made reference to “the liberal and munificent donations bestowed on their brethren in the West Indies by Her Majesty’s Government, for the purpose of promoting their moral and religious instruction.” As the Canadian counterpart of the West Indian emancipated people, the former-slave refugees pressed their request that “some aid will be extended to the colored population of Upper Canada.”86 The “donations” given to West Indian blacks came in the form of the Negro Education Grant, a subsidy from the imperial government initiated in 1835 for 70 • Chapter 2
the education of freed p eople in the Caribbean.87 This policy emerged against the backdrop of the home government’s broader endeavor to institute, in the words of Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott, a “structure of labor control” designed to ensure the West Indians’ productivity under the new principles of wage labor.88 Embedded in the tenets of bourgeois politi cal economy, this state-initiated effort went beyond economic concerns and aimed to completely restructure the former slave colonies into “the right sort of society and culture.”89 According to that model, freed people would act in pursuit of individual economic advancement and in deference to institutions of authority in a gendered social order divided into the masculinized terrain of wage work and the feminized domestic realm of reproduction and consumption.90 The educational effort was thus a bid to transform black West Indians into colonial free laborers with the intellect, piety, industry, and material desires deemed necessary to ensure stable agricultural production. However, this principle of free labor contradicted both the reality of the plantations and freed people’s own economic and social views. Emancipated people in Jamaica, for example, sought to manage their labor themselves as they combined plantation work and small-scale cultivation for self-sufficiency and local market exchange.91 Also, if some women withdrew from plantation labor, it was not because they complied with bourgeois gender ideology but because they wished to enjoy protection from grueling physical drudgery and to ensure through child rearing and family farming the survival of a domestic and communal life independent of the planter.92 In accordance with t hese alternative ethics, freed men and women carved out a social, familial, and economic life that conflicted with the imperative of maximizing profits through wage-based agricultural production. Likewise, the petitioners in Canada showed no sign of perceiving themselves as wage laborers as they appropriated the powerful banner of postemancipation “reform.” Their aspirations for intellectual and moral improvement were divorced from the capitalist principle of labor efficiency. Their vision was to replicate in Canada institutions of emancipation that w ere devoid of their liberal economic functions. The self-fashioned identity as British emancipated subjects also undergirded the petitioners’ denunciation of extradition as a breach of national sovereignty, whereby “Her subjects . . . but too often [had] been inveigled and forced back into all the horrors of slavery.” The memorial recounted an arrest of a former-slave refugee by authorities from Kentucky, who had charged him with stealing a horse and, with his former owner, hunted him down in Upper Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 71
Canada. The extradition was aborted only b ecause “a body of his coloured brethren who like himself had escaped from the galling yoke of slavery” set the wanted man free. Two of these courageous men, “who were determined to perish to a man, rather than behold their brother surrendered up to the merciless ferocity of his former master,” w ere lost during the rescue. With the memory of the arrest and deaths fresh in their minds, the petitioners displayed their ardent loyalty to the British Crown so as to “be regarded and considered as naturalized subjects of G reat Britain, to be alike protected by as well as rendered amenable to British law.”93 Conveying the refugees’ hopes for unimpaired freedom in Canada, the petition entered British official spheres and reached the metropole after changing hands along the way. It was first entrusted to a white surgeon from England, named Thomas Rolph, who then asked the governor general of Canada to forward it to the colonial secretary in London. To the petitioners’ dismay, no reply came from the metropole. Suspecting that the governor general had failed to act on Rolph’s request, the petitioners turned to George Arthur, the fter lieutenant governor, who diligently sent the letter along in May 1839.94 A arriving in London, the memorial circulated through the metropolitan administrative apparatus, leaving the colonial secretary’s hands for those of legal advisors to the Crown. About two months a fter he forwarded the memorial, Arthur received a reply from London. The imperial government’s response to the 1839 petition boded poorly for the security of the freedom of fugitive refugees. The response mentioned the queen’s “satisfaction at the sentiments of ardent attachment to Her Person and Government” expressed by the petitioners but exhibited the British government’s passive stance on fugitive slave extradition. It cited a report of the Law Officers of the Crown, who had concluded that “no difference was made between colored and white men—between fugitive slaves and other individuals arriving in Canada from the United States—and that it would not be lawful to deliver up a fugitive slave in any circumstances in which a white man would not also be delivered up.” In sum, the report maintained that cross-border runaways would not be subjected to a higher chance of extradition than would white individuals, but that neither would t here be any special legal shield for the former. The response stated that this principle, if implemented properly, was sufficient to protect fugitive refugees and that, beyond the equal application of the law, “Her Majesty has no power to advance, nor to grant to one class of Her Subjects privileges or immunities not enjoyed
72 • Chapter 2
by others.” With regard to the provision of educational facilities, the secretary directed the petitioners to the Canadian legislature.95 While the home government promised no special protection or educational opportunities for formerly enslaved people, the correspondence suggested a certain degree of success in introducing them into official imperial discourse as one group of British emancipated subjects. To begin with, the lieutenant governor found the petition by “Her Majesty’s coloured subjects,” as he called them, legitimate enough to forward it to the metropolitan administrative center.96 The officials in London then decided on the home government’s approach. While the decision was not to implement any concrete measures, the reason for the inaction—that the Crown would grant no favor to one portion of its subjects—implied acknowledgment that the self-emancipated were indeed “Her Subjects.”97 This limited victory did not immediately change the grim reality facing formerly enslaved runaways. The officials viewed fugitive slave extradition as a legitimate bilateral system, not the act of aggression on Britain’s sovereignty that the memorial made it out to be. To black refugees from the United States, the absence of slavery in Canada signified a British condition that should be maintained within its colonial boundaries. Thus, any exertion of jurisdiction by U.S. authorities signified an infiltration of the international boundary between British freedom and American slavery. Nonetheless, the notion of rigid separation of free and unfree spaces was not embraced by British officials, who were well aware of the role of diplomacy in dictating the operation of the Canada-U.S. border. Former-slave refugees’ push for metropolitan tutelage occurred in another avenue of communication. Around the same time that the 1839 petition was traveling across the ocean, similar appeals entered London-based abolitionist circles. The authors’ voice was heard through the medium of Rolph, who used as his platform the World Anti-Slavery Convention of June 1840, an international gathering convened by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (bfass). Black refugees’ call for help was well received at a convention designed to present new directions for British abolitionism in the postemancipation era. The bfass had been established by a group of abolitionists who sought to start a new phase in the antislavery movement. The origins of the society can be traced back to an absence of leadership in British abolitionism after the passage of the Abolition Act. The Anti-Slavery Society, the most influential
Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 73
abolitionist organization at that time, adopted an attitude of indifference toward the oppressive nature of apprenticeship. Its apathy propelled the Birmingham Anti-Slavery Society and its secretary Joseph Sturge to strike out on their own to ensure the welfare of the emancipated p eople, thus emerging onto the center stage of radical abolitionism in England.98 After the abolition of apprenticeship in 1838, the new antislavery force adopted as its goal the universal destruction of slavery outside the British Empire as well as the protection of “the rights of the coloured classes as free British subjects.” The British Caribbean remained on the agenda of antislavery advocates due to concerns over the region’s inequitable labor systems and vagrancy laws, which were designed to relegate the emancipated laborers to a condition of quasi-slavery.99 In April 1839 the bfass officially came into being and began its life as a global promoter of the abolition of slavery and supporter of the rights and privileges of emancipated people in British colonies.100 To inaugurate a new global abolitionist order, the organization convened the World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London on June 12–23, 1840. More than four hundred abolitionists gathered to report on the progress of their antislavery efforts and discuss the paths ahead. Delegates from Brazil, the British Carib bean colonies, British North America, Cuba, Denmark, France, the French Caribbean colonies, Puerto Rico, and the United States were invited to attend the convention.101 This international forum was the first major occasion in which the status of black refugees in Canada came within the purview of the general British abolitionist community, thanks to Rolph. He had successfully convinced the bfass to place self-emancipated slaves on its convention’s agenda, u nder the subcategory of “Condition of the Emancipated,” which also included formerly enslaved people in Haiti, South Americ a, and the British West Indies. As the primary messenger on behalf of the Canadian self-emancipated, Rolph arrived in London with the aim of presenting to the metropolitan audience the refugees’ capacity to be exemplary colonial subjects.102 At the convention, he described escaped people in economic terms, as capable of becoming productive subjects who would contribute to the prosperity of Upper Canada. He assured the abolitionists of black refugees’ value to the empire on the grounds that enslavement had prepared them mentally and physically to become reliable cultivators of Canadian soil and beneficial contributors to the colony’s market economy.103 The highlight of Rolph’s presentation was an excerpt of the proceedings of a meeting of “Coloured People at Ancaster,” a town about fifty miles west of 74 • Chapter 2
Niagara Falls and settled by fugitive refugees who had entered Canada through New York. The meeting had been convened to draft an appeal to the imperial and colonial governments with the intent that it be presented at the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Using a tone similar to that in the 1839 memorial, the participants requested that the Crown pass a law providing for a trial by jury for escaped p eople in any British colony before they could be extradited to the United States. The Ancaster petitioners also called on the provincial legislature and the Crown to enact a law that provided for the naturalization of black migrants “in common with other subjects” in the province.104 A plea for a special naturalization measure also came from Gallego. His letter to Rolph, which was read aloud at the convention, pointed out that for fear that “it might give offence to the Americans,” the Canadian government excluded black arrivals from the existing naturalization process that granted newcomers the rights and privileges of natural-born subjects after a residence of seven years.105 Pressing for a remedy, Gallego complained that the exclusion was “the only objection that has ever been made in the Province against our elevation to all the privileges of natural born subjects.”106 In response to these appeals, Rolph and five delegates from different cities in the British Isles founded an ad hoc committee, which subsequently recommended that the convention press colonial administrators in Canada to address the issues.107 Rolph continued to work as a mediator between the metropole and black residents in Canada. He forwarded to the bfass another letter written to him by Gallego, which reported on the granting of naturalization rights to black newcomers in Canada but simultaneously condemned the racial segregation he encountered in various public venues as a denial of “the freedom of British subjects.”108 With the passage of a second naturalization act in 1841 after the union of Lower and Upper Canada, black immigrants finally gained the right to naturalization after a residence of seven years. Due to the new law, according to Gallego, “all the rights and privileges of naturalization have recently been placed in the reach of not a few of us.”109 Although the refugees were granted access to the path to legal status, Gallego encountered a series of discriminatory incidents as he traveled across Canada to recruit black emigrants for Jamaica, an effort that demonstrated his understanding that Canada was not the only British colony his p eople could call home. Appointed by Governor Charles Metcalfe of Jamaica in August 1841, Gallego canvassed “almost e very direction in the Province” and ran a newspaper advertisement directed at “persons of colour” and encouraging them to stop by his office to learn how the colony offered “the prospect of Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 75
bettering their condition.”110 His concurrent promotion of Jamaican emigration and formerly enslaved people’s well-being in Canada illustrates his view of the empire—that it presented an open space in which its subjects, irrespective of race, could move freely among its colonies. With the increasing communication from African Canadians, metropolitan abolitionists began to conceive of cross-border refugees as one group of British emancipated people in need of their attention. On one occasion, an abolitionist associated Canadian formerly enslaved p eople and West Indian freed people in the context of a distinctly imperial governing structure: the itinerant appointment of administrative officers to different colonial posts. In 1843 Thomas Clarkson, the driving force behind British emancipation, appealed to the governor-general of Canada, Charles Metcalfe (the former governor of Jamaica), to provide protection for escaped p eople in his province. To convince Metcalfe to do so, Clarkson painted a picture of runaways’ becoming “productive of great good to the mother country” and forming “a quiet and orderly people” who gave “no trouble to the government.” Notably, Clarkson based the plausibility of this picture on “the spirit of independency, the industry and the prodigious execution of the f ree negro in Jamaica,” which, he claimed, “no one knows better than Your Excellency.”111 In expressing his confidence that Metcalfe would “protect the unhappy fugitives against the claims of an enraged master,” Clarkson posited a paternalistic image of the governor as a colonial administrator who routinely presided over different groups of freed blacks living across the empire: “When he left his Government at Jamaica, ten thousand emancipated slaves followed him to the w ater’s edge with tears, to take their leave of him. He is the same benevolent man in Canada, as he was in Jamaica as f avors the poor negro is concerned.”112 The figure of a benevolent white governor with mobility between colonies went hand in hand with a vision of separately located emancipated peoples contributing to imperial prosperity u nder the itinerant administrator. The system of rotating colonial governorship thus helped link distant emancipated subjects in the white abolitionist imagination. Importantly, for some metropolitan reformers, African descent was not the exclusive register of commonality linking diff erent groups of British freed subjects. A parallel was drawn between formerly enslaved Canadians and East Indians in Malabar who were freed by the East India Company in 1836. Three years after Clarkson’s correspondence with Metcalfe, William T. Blair, an abolitionist living in Bath, E ngland, asked the bfass to publish a letter he had written that stressed the government’s duty of “elevating the slaves to a real 76 • Chapter 2
state of freedom” and the need for a quick implementation of government- sponsored systems of education.113 The areas of concern were two British colonial spaces—Canada and East India: The government o ught to provide funds for schools, and authorize their offices in the provinces of Canada and Malabar to appropriate government lands and to afford e very facility to their instruction and amelioration. At present nothing is done but by sufferance . . . what is required is a positive order to this government to forward the education, and the amelioration of the classes in every possible way, and to countenance and assist e very population for the freedom secured to them by British law.114 In Blair’s mind, both East Indians and former-slave refugees in Canada were British emancipated subjects whose successful transition to freedom betokened the triumph of imperial abolition. Despite abolitionists’ growing recognition of self-emancipated people as British freed people, the imperial government failed to halt an extradition in 1842, as had been predicted after its reaction to the 1839 petition. The protagonist of this incident was a fugitive slave from Arkansas named Nelson Hackett, who had succeeded in crossing the Detroit River sometime around September 1841. He was tracked down and arrested by two slave hunters from Arkansas and charged with stealing a beaver overcoat, a gold watch, a saddle, and a horse from his master and the master’s neighbors. The grand jury of Washington County, Arkansas, had indicted Hackett for g rand larceny, and the state’s governor requested the Canadian government to surrender Hackett as a criminal fugitive. In January 1842 the governor general of Canada ordered that Hackett be turned over to the state’s authorities. Infuriated, the bfass tried to find ways to block the extradition, but in vain.115 On the heels of the Hackett case came another threat to the freedom of formerly enslaved refugees in Canada: the Webster-Ashburton treaty. The problem was Article 10 of this British-U.S. treaty, which provided for the mutual surrender of fugitive criminals. Fearing that the article would be applied to fugitive slaves in Canada and other British territories, the bfass campaigned for the slaves’ exemption from the article by petitioning Parliament; the foreign secretary, the Earl of Aberdeen; and Baron Ashburton, who had signed the treaty on behalf of the British.116 The bfass’s tireless campaign was a reflection of its acknowledgment of self-emancipated British subjects in Canada, which became apparent in the way the refugees w ere treated in the society’s annual reports. In the fourth Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora • 77
report, which covered the Hackett extradition and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the issue of fugitive slaves appeared for the first time in the “Home Operations” section (which dealt with slavery and postemancipation conditions in British colonies) instead of in the “Foreign Operations” section (which dealt with groups considered not to be British subjects).117 In the fourth and fifth reports, the topic of “Fugitive Slaves within the British Dominions” appeared in the “Home Operations” section alongside t hose of emancipated people in the British West Indies, the abolition of slavery in British East India and British settlements in Southeast Asia, enslaved “British subjects” in Spanish and Dutch colonies, and the Black Seamen Laws.118 Further demonstrating the bfass’s heightened concern with the Canadian population, the “Home Operations” section of the fourth report concluded with the statement that the extradition question required “the best attention of British abolitionists.”119 Feeling the pressure, the British government soon backed away from applying Article 10 to fugitive slave cases and adopted the policy of rejecting requests for extradition on the basis of technicalities. This change became clear in 1844, when seven slaves from Florida escaped to Nassau in the Bahamas and faced extradition on charges of murder. The British government successfully argued that the documents submitted were insufficient to prove the fugitives’ crime.120 Furthermore, the British foreign secretary refused to grant the U.S. government’s request to make it a rule to apply Article 10 to fugitive slave extraditions. By 1845 metropolitan abolitionists had determined British soil to be safe from the diplomatic apparatus of U.S. slavery.121 Although the lobbying work of the bfass played a large part in this change, it is impor tant to reiterate that governmental protection would have never happened if the abolitionists had not repeatedly heard assertions from self-emancipated people that they were entitled to their freedom as British subjects. •
On the two sides of the Canada-U.S. border, discourses on cross-border runaways involved different iterations of freedom and identity. In Canada, since free British status did not come to self-emancipated p eople as a given, strategic diasporic identification followed their catalytic patriotic service during the Rebellion of 1837. Free black Americans, in response, created a foreign other out of the self-emancipated Canadians in a way that reinforced their own belonging in the United States. A shared understanding emerged between 78 • Chapter 2
f ree peoples in the U.S. North and Canada that there were two kinds of black freedom in Anglo-American North Americ a—one recently attained by fugitive refugees in a newly free monarchical empire and the other characterized by its republican nature, however constricted it might be. These nationalized understandings of freedom and belonging would be met with a transnational racial geography that British officials, colonists, planters, and abolitionists sought to implement in the context of an intensified colonial settlement effort in Canada and a postemancipation demand for labor in the British Caribbean. Resorting to essentialist ideas about blackness and the tropics, the British cast free black populations in North America as potential plantation laborers, irrespective of their national identity or immediate location. Unwittingly subjected to such racial ordering, black Americans and formerly enslaved refugees flatly rejected or subtly navigated limiting ideas of black freedom. In all of these contests, gender and sexuality played a primary role.
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Chapter 3
INTIMACY AND BELONGING
On September 30, 1842, the London newspaper Patriot published a farewell address read by Peter Gallego on behalf of 150 black migrants about to embark on their journey from Canada to Jamaica. Directed to Thomas Rolph, the address stated that the migrants “acquiesce[d] in” Rolph’s “conviction” that there was no “reason to expect that our condition could be materially improved in” Canada and that self-emancipated p eople’s proper home was “the West India Islands belonging to the British Crown,” where they would enjoy “advancement and improvement” among “men with the same complexion.” The migrants listed as catalysts for their departure “the bad feeling which exists in almost all quarters against the Ethiopian” and the “utmost readiness evinced [by the Canadian government] to surrender us” to U.S. authorities, as shown in the extradition of “one of our brethren,” former-slave Nelson Hackett. In light of these setbacks, the migrants found Rolph’s view, “however mortifying it be in itself,” to be “too well founded” and agreed to “cheerfully accord to [him] the best of feelings in recommending us to try what can be done in other portions of Her Majesty’s dominions where better prospects await our long injured race.”1 While seemingly grateful to Rolph, the migrants’ use of the words “acquiesce” and “mortifying” revealed their disillusionment at finding that they, as British subjects, could attain equality and social advancement only in the
black-majority Caribbean colonies. As explained in the previous chapter, Gallego had originally understood black belonging in the empire as not limited to settlement in Canada or emigration to the Caribbean.2 By the middle of 1842, however, Gallego had come to accept the idea that the West Indies was black refugees’ only rightful place of belonging in the empire. Importantly, this shortening of the list of appropriate sites of black residence coincided with an increased recognition of self-emancipated people’s British subjecthood among metropolitan abolitionists and administrators. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the freedom of formerly enslaved p eople took on symbolic value for Britain’s favorable self-image as a newly f ree empire, but this did not lead to greater acceptance of their presence in Canada. Rather, black freedom in the province became a problem for the same p eople who embraced former slaves’ British identity. The background for this turn of events included push-and-pull factors in postemancipation imperial labor flows. The push f actor came from calls for increased white colonial settlement in Canada West (Upper Canada became Canada West in 1841), and the pull factor came from demand for plantation labor in the postemancipation Caribbean. Colonial settlers found the arrival of fugitive refugees detrimental to the development of the province, while the Caribbean planters and colonial officials, who insisted that there w ere labor shortages on the plantations, coveted the refugees for their presumed knowledge of advanced farming techniques acquired under American slavery. The shift in the treatment of black refugees became manifest when Rolph backed away from his previous support of black settlement in Canada and began his years-long promotion of black emigration to the British Caribbean. The same about-face occurred with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (bfass). The society’s interest in black emigration to the Caribbean heightened proportionately as it integrated the self-emancipated population into its previous agenda of protesting the importation of white laborers to the West Indian plantations. By the early 1840s former slaves w ere looming large in the minds of the British abolitionists as potential plantation workers who, unlike white migrants, could adapt to the region’s climate and economy. In keeping with this new approach, the bfass relayed Gallego’s farewell address to the Colonial Office as evidence of the feasibility and desirability of black removal to the Caribbean.3 Debates over fugitive refugees’ place in the empire coalesced around the familiar rhetoric of climate and questions of their ability to establish intraracial reproductive and domestic relations. That ability was integral to what had 82 • Chapter 3
become a key tenet of Canadian settler colonialism by this time—the maintenance of white dominance through familial and reproductive unions within the white race. Against this backdrop, whether self-emancipated people had the capacity for racially endogamous matrimony and procreation became a principal component of the debate over their belonging in Canadian settler society. The efforts to restructure colonial l abor in Canada and the Caribbean were part of the larger, ongoing bisection of British colonies into nonwhite tropical plantation economies and white North American and Oceanian settler colonies. However, these configurations of race and labor that divided Canada and the Caribbean were not immediately endorsed by the Canadian and home governments. Administrators were initially skeptical of the desirability of West Indian emigration for reasons ranging from climatic adaptability to economic incentive. Eventually both governments got on board, with the Colonial Office helping facilitate black migration from North America to the Caribbean. Postemancipation Britain’s search for desirable workers went beyond its territory to include free African Americans on the eastern seaboard of the United States. This chapter points out how metropolitan abolitionists and Caribbean planters viewed African Americans and African Canadians as prospective recruits on the basis of their race and how, as a result, the two groups of free black people were homogenized into a mere type of body with an inherent aptitude for hard labor in a tropical climate, irrespective of individuals’ national affiliation or present location. Black residents in the United States and Canada w ere therefore both subjected to biological racial determinism just when they w ere putting more and more emphasis on their distinct political identities. Consequently, Britain’s interest in black migration from the United States put northern black Americans on two concentric mappings of black freedom: U.S. Liberian colonization and British West Indian emigration. African American activists tackled these schemes and their underlying racial and gender assumptions on multiple fronts. They countered advocates of Liberian colonization who accused them of failed f amily life, an accusation with grave politi cal implications—that African Americans lacked gendered qualities required to be part of the republican body politic. Northern blacks also took on West Indian emigration by challenging the transnational application of the biological notion of blackness inherent in the scheme. They differentiated themselves from Caribbean freed people on the premise of their superior gender relations. Intimacy and Belonging • 83
The prevalence of gender and sexual idioms points to this chapter’s other argument: that opponents and proponents of the Caribbean and Liberian relocation projects all employed languages of intimacy in locating black freedom. RACE AND POSTEMANCIPATION L ABOR MOBILIZATION
In the immediate aftermath of the British abolition of slavery, West Indian planters set out to import agricultural laborers on a large scale. Seeking financial assistance and legal sanction from the home government, planters claimed that freed people were leaving the plantations in droves, which was causing dire shortages of labor for the Caribbean economy. This narrative buttressed the planters’ assertion that, without immediate action, Britain would lose its share of the global sugar market to slave-based production in Brazil and Cuba.4 While couched in the rhetoric of imperial decline and the morally tinged dichotomy of slave versus free l abor, at the core of the demand for additional labor lay the planters’ desire to reduce freed people’s leverage in the labor market and control their economic as well as physical mobility.5 The appeals from the Caribbean colonies resulted in various immigration projects, which brought in laborers from a wide range of areas—ushering in what Walton Look Lai calls “the decades of multiethnic immigration experimentation” during the 1840s and 1850s, involving Africans, African-descended peoples, Europeans, Chinese, and South Asians.6 Eventually, the Caribbean planter class found “a solid replacement for the Black ex-slave work force” when importing contract laborers from British East India became a standard practice. More than 400,000 East Indians came to the British West Indies from 1851 u ntil 1917, when the East Indian and British imperial governments called off the state-supervised indentured migration system.7 Before South Asian immigrants became their primary source of labor, the planters looked first to people of African origin. Among the first of those people w ere liberated Africans from Sierra Leone. By this time the colony had become the principal place of settlement for Africans rescued from captivity. That development was rooted in its history of housing three international mixed commission courts, in which Britain and other empires jointly prosecuted slave trade cases.8 Due to the decline of the commission system, by the early 1840s Britain’s vice admiralty court in Sierra Leone, along with another one on the island of St. Helena, had become sole arbiters of the destiny of rescued African captives. The change facilitated the export of Africans to the Caribbean plantations, as did the general feeling among metropolitan 84 • Chapter 3
officials, colonists, and missionaries that Sierra Leone had failed to become a productive field of black agricultural labor and moral advancement.9 In all, approximately 14,000 liberated Africans departed from both Sierra Leone and St. Helena for the Caribbean plantations before the practice waned with the cessation of the Brazilian slave trade in 1852.10 In the meantime, feeling the need to import more laborers to the plantations, some colonies—Trinidad and Jamaica, in particular—attempted to bring in European and white American immigrants to work on the plantations, but with great care not to disrupt the familiar equation of whiteness with incompatibility with tropical labor.11 In advancing emigration from E ngland and Wales to Jamaica, for instance, colonial promoters divided the island into two areas—the lowlands and the highlands—and defined the former as a hot climate, the temperature of which was “ranging between 80 and 85 degrees of Fahrenheit,” and the latter as being “much cooler than the lowlands.” The “hot” lowlands w ere considered “not suited to European laborers,” while the highlands were considered “suited to the European constitution, but not so to the Africans or their descendants [who] prefer the lowlands.”12 This logic enabled the planters to simultaneously keep the association of blackness with the tropics intact and justify the transfer of white immigrants to the colony. This strategic division of the Jamaican landscape worked to convince some officials in London of the desirability of white emigration to the colony.13 This experiment failed, nevertheless. There were high rates of mortality among white workers soon a fter their arrival. Not surprisingly, in explaining the debacle colonial officials in Jamaica and Trinidad cited notions of white incompatibility with tropical labor. The Governor of Jamaica blamed the deaths on the immigrants’ abandonment of the highlands’ “healthy climate” for town areas, most of which w ere situated in the lowlands where “the climate is least favorable to the European constitution.”14 In the end, the high rates of desertion and mortality reduced the “general desire to employ Europeans” among Jamaica’s planters before the end of 1841.15 The pervasive disappointment led the colonial government to pass an act in January 1842 discouraging emigration from Europe.16 Similarly, the governor of Trinidad attributed the high mortality rates among white laborers to their “constitutions” being “unsuited to exposure to a tropical sun.” Such was his grim observation that the governor was shocked to see another ship arrive with 190 German and French immigrants. He called on the Colonial Office to request the French and German governments to discourage emigration to the colony.17 On receiving the dispatch, the Colonial Office instructed the Foreign Office to contact both Intimacy and Belonging • 85
governments and other European nations from which emigrants w ere likely to embark for the Caribbean. By late May 1840, the Trinidad government had given up on the idea of European plantation l abor.18 Eventually, what emerged was a migratory trend that spanned in both the United States and the British Empire. Places deemed tropical received nonwhite agricultural laborers, while British colonists aimed for Canada, the free U.S. states, and New South Wales (although by the early 1840s New South Wales had begun shedding its penal function, its northern districts, which later became the separate Queensland colony, would build their nascent pastoral industry and sugar plantations exclusively on nonwhite indentured labor on the ground that the region had an exceptionally tropical climate).19 The developing transnational geographic demarcation was shown by the fact that the three most popular attractions for emigrants from the British Isles in 1842 w ere the United States (which received 63,852), British North America (54,123), and Oceania (8,534)—places steadily expanding as white settler colonies—while only 813 went to the West Indies and 44 to Africa.20 These flows of people were racially defined and “deliberately so engineered and structurally related,” according to Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine.21 However, some colonial officials had a hard time abandoning European immigration altogether and ventured to replicate a white settler space in Jamaica in accordance with the emerging racialized labor model. They instituted in the island’s cooler regions a form of free labor associated with settler colonies— namely, family-based independent farming.22 The Jamaican government hoped to import “steady families” of “properly selected European agriculturalists” and to settle them in the mountainous area, with each f amily dwelling in “a snug cottage with garden and provision ground.”23 These immigrants were expected to transform themselves into “a hardy race of native mountaineers that may be relied on as the safeguard of our country” amid the increasing numbers of nonwhite laborers.24 What officials sought to achieve through white immigration had not only economic benefits but also military significance, as it would establish a reliable pillar of support for white rule in the colony.25 Jamaica’s interest in retaining f amily units applied only to European immigrants; it and other Caribbean colonies paid no attention to having equal sex ratios among African and East Indian laborers, which prompted strong criticism ere seen as a menace to the idealized from the bfass. Unbalanced sex ratios w social relations that British abolitionists sought to create in the postemancipation West Indies—a “vision of domesticity and society grounded in a heterosexual, conjugal household and sexual division of labor within it,” as 86 • Chapter 3
Madhavi Kale puts it.26 Indeed, one of the abolitionist criticisms of imperial slavery was that it deprived slaves of this domestic style of life. In abolitionist campaigns both before and after 1833, the idealized model of the family was a central reference point for measuring the success of West Indian emancipation.27 Abolitionists believed that “the introduction of an equal number of the sexes” or, preferably, of “families . . . the best class of immigrants” was necessary to achieve “the permanent prosperity of the Colonies.”28 It was partly for this reason that when the imperial government authorized Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica to import laborers from Sierra Leone in December 1840, the abolitionists protested the policy. Objecting to the skewed ratios between men and women preferred by Caribbean planters, the bfass charged that no provision had been made for securing “an equal number of the sexes as emigrants,” which they called an integral f actor “connected with the morals and comfort of those who may be removed, and, indeed, to the future prosperity of the [West Indian] colonies.”29 Planters’ pursuit of free black people in Canada and the United States developed as part of this contested process of colonial labor planning. Of the West Indian colonies, Trinidad and Jamaica made substantial recruiting efforts. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the governments of the two colonies appointed emigration agents whose job was to sign up laborers from North America and lobby in metropolitan commercial and political circles for imperial approval and assistance.30 Of the two colonies, Trinidad was the first to consider free black inhabitants in Canada and the United States, lumping them both with West Indian freed p eople as natural tropical workers. The colony institutionalized a homogeneous categorization of blackness by enacting an immigration law in 1838 that fixed bounty rates for Africans and African-descended peoples. The title of the law, “An Ordinance for Facilitating the Immigration into this Colony of Labourers Accustomed to Agriculture and Inured to Labour in a Tropical Climate,” applied specifically to “immigrants of African race or descent,” and it revealed how the colony’s immigration policy invoked and drew on climatic racial determinism. The law was revised by a privy council order in September 1839, which banned the importation of laborers from Africa.31 In putting this order into effect, Trinidad’s government issued a new proclamation that excluded immigrants from “any part of Africa” but still listed bounties for “immigrants of African race or descent” from Lower and Upper Canadas ($30 per immigrant), the rest of the British North American colonies ($25), the United States ($25), and other West Indian colonies ($5–$16).32 Intimacy and Belonging • 87
Of all the British North American possessions, Trinidad initially looked for workers primarily in Nova Scotia. At first sight, the maritime colony seemed to offer a prime recruitment site for free black labor. According to a governmental survey of 150 families in Preston and its vicinity, the black refugees of the War of 1812 remained “miserably poor” and w ere still dealing with “the extreme poverty of the soil” after scraping by for two decades. Resources in the area were so scarce—there were no forests to provide lumber, no decent roads, and no markets close by—that they could not find any type of employment. The lack of access to resources was exacerbated by the concentration of residents, for “quite too many are settled in one spot.” For these reasons, the surveyors concluded that “there is not in our opinion any hope of them ever being able to maintain themselves.”33 To remedy the dire conditions, the surveyors proposed the black refugees’ “removal to a warm climate.”34 The centrality of climatic rhetoric to the colony’s population management was also apparent in the words of Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor, Colin Campbell. Dismissing the structural inequities of the colony’s land distribution practice, Campbell explained to the colonial secretary that the refugees had quickly floundered economically due to the province’s physical environment. “It was soon found out,” the governor reported, “that this climate was ill adapted for them, and that they never could prosper here.”35 Nevertheless, the proposal for relocation was “uniformly” turned down by the black residents.36 Their firm rejection of Trinidad eventually elicited a concession from the Nova Scotian government. Lamenting that “these refugees have already occasioned so much expense to the Province” but cognizant that they w ere “determined to remain H ere,” Campbell requested the home government to fund the removal of the settlers to more productive lands in Nova Scotia so that they could maintain themselves without recourse to public relief.37 He proposed this scheme as a last resort, since Trinidad’s offer to facilitate black migration to the island—which by this time had been made more than once—had “always been resolutely rejected” by the refugees who, as “wretched as their condition is and must, I apprehend, [would] continue to be here.”38 Yet, the plan to make the refugees into productive cultivators of land in Nova Scotia came to a quick end, thanks to the metropole’s insistence on the whiteness of the landholding settler subject. When the Nova Scotia authorities asked about London’s willingness to defray the refugees’ moving expenses, Colonial Secretary Charles Grant refused. In his opinion, the pursuit
88 • Chapter 3
of better land for them would only foster what he called “the mistaken & mischievous notion, that if they are to subsist at all, it must be as proprietors of Land and not as Laborers for hire.” In other words, the official message was that black residents in Nova Scotia occupied a place outside the settler colonial collective bound by the privilege of material and political advancement through land cultivation and ownership. For the refugees to think they deserved that privilege was “mistaken & mischievous.”39 In 1839, departing from its espousal of black landownership decades earlier, Trinidad’s Legislative Council and lieutenant governor sent William H. Burnley, a member of the council, to Nova Scotia as a recruiting agent to “obtain laborers” for the island’s postemancipation plantation economy.40 Mobilizing climatic assumptions, Burnley asserted that the refugees residing in the northern colony w ere “evidently unable to contend advantageously with the rigour of the clime” and that “the benefit to be derived from their removal to a more congenial clime was so obvious.”41 Despite Burnley’s assessment, Trinidad’s bid to procure black workers from Nova Scotia ended in failure. In explaining this unexpected result, the agent made a preposterous use of climate theory, contending that “the discouraging difficulties which surrounded them” caused by the cold climate of Nova Scotia had resulted in “a depression of mental energies” among the black inhabitants, confusing them about their proper place of belonging.42 Trinidad’s scouting activities in Nova Scotia suggest that its leaders had yet to notice the self-emancipated people who had been congregating in southwestern Upper Canada. It was a letter from Rolph that set in motion Trinidad’s immigration efforts in that province. The letter, written in August 1840, informed Governor Henry MacLeod of the existence of 300–500 “colored people” who would be happy to s ettle in the Caribbean colony permanently, a number that seems considerably inflated given the much smaller number of people who actually emigrated to the island. Calling the prospective emigrants “an industrious and loyal body of men,” Rolph assured MacLeod that they would make a beneficial addition to the colony’s economy.43 The reply from Trinidad was positive: the colony’s lieutenant governor informed Rolph that the colony would pay for the agricultural laborers’ passage.44 Aware that the scheme fell within the jurisdiction of the Colonial Office, which administered migration flows within the empire, the governor of Trinidad accordingly forwarded to the home government the correspondence between Rolph and his government.45 After reaching the Colonial
Intimacy and Belonging • 89
Office, the dispatch moved through the bureaucratic system and ended up with the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners.46 The commissioners expressed skepticism about Rolph’s proposal. They doubted that black residents would be inclined to leave Canada for Trinidad, given the more favorable wages in the province.47 Nor did the commissioners embrace climatic determinism. They called “the difference of climate” between Canada and the Caribbean a probable hazard to the migrants’ health, a contention that denied the black body’s assumed suitability for tropical climates. The commissioners’ concern suggested the officials’ lack of interest in applying essentialist theories to this particular case of demographic management. Their doubts about the feasibility of the scheme notwithstanding, the commissioners acknowledged Canadian blacks’ freedom of residence within the empire, w hether in Canada or the Caribbean. Such an acknowledgment, as we w ill see below, increasingly gave way to what Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds call the “global colour line” that structured racialized forms of imperial belonging.48 The officials professed that “the general rule” was that “no obstacle ought to be opposed to the migration of British subjects to any part of the Empire which they are led, by authentic accounts, to consider favourable to their interests.”49 The colonial secretary concurred with the commissioners and sent copies of their communication to the governors of Canada and Trinidad.50 In a similar vein, Charles Poulett Thomson, the governor general of Canada, expressed to the colonial secretary his doubts about black Canadians’ willingness to leave and exhibited his wholehearted acceptance of their presence in the colony.51 Seeing no “desire on the part of any of that race, to quit the Province,” the governor general felt no need to take any measures to induce them to depart for Trinidad. Above all, he found them to be “a well conducted and orderly set of p eople,” whose “loyalty to the Queen” had demonstrated that they w ere “valuable subjects” of the Crown.52 In 1841 the highest-ranking colonial administrator found no fault with black residence in the province—a view that would change in the face of increasing calls from white colonial settlers for the blacks’ removal. THE CONTESTED GROUND OF INTIMACY IN SETTLER COLONIAL CANADA
Around the same time, the bfass turned to former slaves in Canada as a possible labor force for the Caribbean, in place of immigrant workers from European countries. The issue of European immigration, a central item on 90 • Chapter 3
the society’s agenda since its inception, took on urgency in the early 1840s, right when the abolitionists adopted Canada’s self-emancipated population as another group of British freed people. Their attention was directed to a potential source of tropical labor to replace white workers and gave rise to an exchange of opinions across the British Atlantic on the proper place of black freedom. The basis for the bfass’s opposition to European immigrants differed essentially from its disapproval of importing workers from Africa and India. The abolitionists opposed European migration not because of the conditions under which it was carried out but b ecause it fundamentally contravened the racial model of labor and climate. In a memorial submitted to the colonial secretary and the president of the Board of Trade, the bfass alerted the home government to “the frightful mortality which has attended the introduction of Europeans as field laborers.” The memorial attributed the deaths of immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, Portugal, and the United States— all placed under the rubric of “European” or “white”—to their engagement in agricultural work in the tropical climate of the Caribbean. They perished because “white laborers are unfit for agricultural employments in the tropics” and “only as artisans or mechanics, working under shade, is there a prospect of their bettering their condition.”53 Echoing the views of the Sierra Leone Company, the abolitionists advocated limiting whites’ occupations in the tropics to those of a nonagricultural nature. In lieu of European laborers, the memorial listed f ree black p eoples across the Americas as prospective workers. The list was extensive: emancipated blacks in labor-abundant British West Indian colonies; “a large number of free colored persons” from “North and South Americ a”; slaves in the United States and Venezuela manumitted by their owners on condition of the slaves’ leaving the country; emancipated blacks in Haiti, emancipados in Cuba, and libertados in Brazil; and “many of the fugitive slaves in Upper Canada [who] might, under the protection of the government, be induced to emigrate to the British Colonies.”54 The abolitionists’ simultaneous objection to importing European workers to the Caribbean and recommendation of a variety of p eoples of African descent as laborers there reflected their strong adherence to the doctrine of racially delineated spaces of free l abor. Too impatient to wait for action by the Colonial Office, the bfass went ahead to lay the groundwork for an emigration program from Canada to Trinidad. John Scoble, secretary of BFASS, met with Charles Marryat, an emigration agent for Trinidad, and referred him to Hiram Wilson, a missionary from the Intimacy and Belonging • 91
United States, in the hope that Wilson would serve as “the best channel of making known to them [blacks in Canada] the advantages open to them in the Colony” of Trinidad.55 The Trinidad agent attempted to convince Wilson of the benefits of black emigration using customary climatic terms. In August 1842 Marryat sent an inquiry to Wilson, asking w hether he was willing to accompany self-emancipated people during their journey from Canada to Trinidad. In so doing, Marryat gave Wilson the familiar line of reasoning: “Trinidad like all the West Indies is well suited to all p eople of African descent and there can be no doubt [it] must be much more so than Canada where the winters are so severe.”56 Wilson’s response, which was sent to Scoble, was far from approving. Rejecting Marryat’s premise, Wilson posited his own idea of the relationship between black populations in Canada and their environment. Formerly enslaved p eople, according to Wilson, “find the climate mild and agreeable,” for “the transition as to climate from the northern slave states (Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky) from which most of them escape to the south western regions of Canada West is hardly perceptible.”57 The alleged climatic affinity between southern Canada and the Upper South rendered slave escape a movement sanctioned by natural law. Seeking further opinions, in 1843 Scoble sent a set of inquiries to various people in Canada: Wilson; Rolph; John Roaf, an American-born white minister; William Edwards, a black preacher in Toronto; and the “committee of colored people of Toronto.” Scoble’s questionnaire mainly asked about the number of black residents in Canada West, their sex ratio, how they were “regarded by the white population generally,” and the availability of education and religious instruction.58 The question about the male-female ratio was included because Marryat had spoken of a possible difficulty in achieving a balanced ratio among migrants from Canada on the ground that more male slaves than females had been escaping.59 The responses to the questionnaire revealed how the sex ratio was a point of contention between t hose who favored black removal and t hose who did not, while other details in the letters collectively presented a more uniform picture of black life in Canada. Read together, the responses to Scoble’s questionnaire put the approximate number of black p eople in Canada at somewhere between 7,000 and 20,000, with nearly all of them being e ither former-slave refugees or their descendants. They lived mainly in towns and townships in the southwestern area of the province surrounded by the Detroit River and Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, including Amherstburg, Bidulph, Brantford, Chatham, Chippawa, 92 • Chapter 3
Colchester, Dundas, Erin, Gosfield, Hamilton, Kingston, London, Nelson, Niagara, Norwich, Oro, Queens Bush, Sandwich, St. Catherines, St. Davids, Toronto, Waterloo, Windsor, and Woolwich. Some lived in black settlements such as the Wilberforce and Dawn settlements. Many of these towns and settlements were located in the Western District, a district on the western edge of Canada West where, according to one writer, three-fifths of all of the black residents in Canada West resided. The general picture presented by the responses was that large numbers of former slaves worked in villages and towns. Some were employed in skilled labor, as carpenters, masons, joiners, blacksmiths, shoemakers, traders, and barbers, but most worked as cooks, house servants, cleaners, waiters, and day laborers. The Toronto committee attributed this to the fact that when in bondage only a fraction of slaves were trained as mechanics.60 The letters also tell us about religious and educational opportunities for formerly enslaved p eople. Wilson listed towns with missionary schools: Amherstburg, Brantford, Chatham, Colchester, Dawn, London, Niagara, Norwich, Oro, Queens Bush, Sandwich, St. Catherines, St. Davids, Toronto, and the Wilberforce Colony.61 With a few exceptions, formerly enslaved p eople were excluded from the public common schools, but in the exceptional cases, according to the Toronto committee, “our school privileges . . . are pretty good.”62 All of those who responded to the question about religious worship concluded that the refugees enjoyed “places of worship for themselves.”63 Presumably following a communal tradition from their days in slavery, self- emancipated people created racially separate spaces “not b ecause they cannot worship with the whites, but as a m atter of choice,” suggesting that religious gatherings were sites of collective empowerment removed from the scrutiny of whites.64 In response to the question about whites’ attitudes toward former-slave residents, Wilson relayed his observation that “the majority of white Canadians were deeply prejudiced against them,” a view that was seconded by Rolph. Unlike Wilson, who advocated rectifying black runaways’ marginalized position in Canadian society, Rolph cited white animosity to justify their relocation to the Caribbean, a cause he was now professionally promoting in tandem with his employment as an emigration recruiter for the Canadian government. By 1843 Rolph had been hired by the Trinidadian government, which was seeking to increase black migration to the colony, and by the Canadian government, which was intent on reviving emigration from the British Isles.65 Rolph’s work as emigration agent for Canada had begun in the summer of 1839, when Intimacy and Belonging • 93
he had been invited by a bishop in Canada to visit the metropole to help bolster emigration to the province. In London, Rolph associated with members of the North American Colonial Committee, an organization founded to recruit British emigrants to Canada. Sometime in 1840 Rolph asked the governor general of Canada to station him in the British Isles to gather emigrants. Impressed with Rolph’s connections with emigration promoters and land proprietors, Thomson commissioned him to continue his recruiting in England with a salary of £500, paid out of the annual sum allocated by Parliament to defray the cost of the colony’s emigration agency. When Rolph came back to Canada in the summer of 1841, his position was discontinued due to Thomson’s death. The next governor general, Charles Bagot, reappointed Rolph to resume his work as agent.66 The Canadian government’s employment of Rolph was part of the colony’s initiative for large-scale frontier settlement, an initiative that had begun in the 1820s. During that decade Upper Canada had sought to bring in settlers from Ireland and Scotland through subsidized immigration funded by the imperial government. Transatlantic migratory flows continued to grow, which precipitated the need for more land and thus a series of land cession treaties between the Crown and the region’s First Nations, including the Mississauga and Ojibwa p eoples. Colonial settlement continued into the next decades, resulting in a surge in the number of immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s.67 White Canadians pushed for black removal to Trinidad as part of this drive for colonial settlement. In his letter to Scoble, Rolph vehemently advocated black emigration on behalf of British settlers in the Western District, who feared that former slaves would impede colonial emigration into the area. Rolph conveyed to the abolitionist that “the white population” of the district was “certainly hostile” to any increases in the population of formerly enslaved fugitives because they feared that the concentration of black refugees would “retard the settlement of their district.”68 White settlers’ racial hatred took on the language of interracial sex. Rolph charged that “the more frequent intermarriage of black men with white females in this particular district” added to “a general and formidable antipathy on account of colour.” The alleged interracial mixing was ascribed to a disproportionately male refugee population, “arising from the difficulty of escape for w omen and children.” To avert the “dreadful alternative” of allowing the district to become a breeding ground of sexual and racial deviations, Rolph recommended the immediate and permanent solution of black emigration to the West Indies.69 94 • Chapter 3
Rolph’s claim that there was a growing group of disproportionately male former slaves occurred against the backdrop of a heightened animosity toward intermarriage in British North American settler societies in general. Interracial coupling had become a proscribed behavior in British white settler colonies by this time and was interpreted as a menace to the larger colonial project of securing for white settlers exclusive access to the natural and social resources of the colony. Eva Mackey observes that relationships between white men and indigenous women became less socially acceptable in the early nineteenth century when the migration of single white women became institutionalized as part of Canada’s settler colonial development.70 Adele Perry’s work on British Columbia also illustrates how colonial officials and missionaries saw the management of white w omen’s reproduction and the creation of white families as crucial to restricting land and privileges to British settlers. In both cases, interracial mixing was thought to disrupt a society dependent on steady agricultural production through the reproduction of a racially homogeneous settler body.71 The salience of intimacy in white settler politics thus rendered the question of the sex ratio among former-slave fugitives a point of contention between opponents and supporters of black relocation. Edwards, the black preacher in Toronto, asserted that racially endogamous marriages among the new arrivals were flourishing and enabled by “an equality of the sexes,” which he attributed to the fact that female runaways came “in equal proportions with the men.”72 Edwards tied a numerically balanced population to its desire for normative marital relationships. This was on display when he described efforts made by self-emancipated people who had left their spouses b ehind to create a new domestic life with a new partner in freedom: “The general practice of the fugitives, male and female, who leave wife or husband b ehind them in bondage, is, if they think there is no hope of being reunited to them in Canada, after a time to marry again.”73 Carefully precluding accusations of bigamy, the passage emphasized the possibilities of intraracial reproduction within proper conjugal relationships. Wilson also addressed questions of reproduction and domesticity in his defense of the black presence in the settler colony. When he wrote to Scoble about a school for formerly enslaved fugitives (the British-American Institute at the Dawn settlement), Wilson boasted of the school’s role in the marriages among its students and, thus, in the making of racially endogamous familial units. “Six during the last spring and summer were married and are comfortably settled” on the school premises, he exulted. Featuring the students’ familial Intimacy and Belonging • 95
identities, Wilson called them “fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters” who participated in the “family worship” conducted daily in the school’s boarding establishment. Such showcasing of intraracial f amily life not only exonerated the black newcomers from the charge of interracial mixing but also allowed Wilson to present them as settler pioneers at the forefront of a civilization project. Much like white colonists, Wilson argued, the residents advanced the cause of civilization and progress by building proper domestic relations— the marker of moral superiority—on formerly indigenous land, or “this concentrated ground where 3 years ago the Indians w ere pitching their wigwams and the nightly silence was disturbed by the hooting of the owl and the howling of the wolf.”74 These claims of domesticity coexisted with a desire among the black population to participate in the type of labor emblematic of North American settlerhood: independent small-scale farming. The Toronto black residents explicitly defined cultivating one’s own land as their ideal way of life. Accustomed to growing “wheat, hemp, tobacco, &c in the United States” as slaves, they considered “performing settlers duties” to be most conducive to “the welfare of our p eople, as a body.” If metropolitan abolitionists truly cared about their needs, the committee stated, the bfass should help them “procure a body of land, furnish a few farming utensils.”75 The bfass paid no heed to the committee’s suggestions and sent to the Colonial Office only the responses from Rolph and Wilson. What’s more, they were accompanied by a copy of the farewell address that opens this chapter and a note saying that “Dr. Rolph has had better opportunities of forming a judgment upon this point than other parties who have communicated with Mr. Scoble.”76 The Toronto committee’s desire for landownership was hidden from the metropole, and images of white animosity and racial crisis were put at the forefront.77 Very likely mindful of the increasingly clear expressions of discontent among white settlers in the Western District, Charles Metcalfe, the new governor general of Canada, condemned the residence of self-emancipated people in the region. In an 1843 letter to the colonial secretary, Metcalfe called them an immoral, unwanted population whose presence was a barrier to “the interests of Canada.” While convinced that few blacks would leave the colony, the governor deemed it desirable to persuade “Refugee Slaves from the United States, and generally the Colored Population of African Origin, settled near to the Frontier” to go to the Caribbean voluntarily. White settlers’ charges of hindered colonial development had brought about a change of opinion in the 96 • Chapter 3
provincial government, whose primary objective was to turn Canada into a productive settler colony.78 The Colonial Office did its part in promoting West Indian emigration by relaxing restrictions on the importation of labor from the United States and British North America. The policy in question was a January 1843 privy council order that exempted immigrants of “African birth or descent, emigrating from the Continent of North America,” from the contract restrictions laid out by a privy council order of September 1838. The exception was intended to expedite the immigration of black workers from North America by allowing labor contracts made before departure effective in the West Indian colonies.79 As the governor general predicted, few black inhabitants w ere willing to move to Trinidad, which eventually led to the termination of the emigration scheme. In November 1843, three months after he finished an unfruitful tour in Colchester and Amherstburg—border towns with high concentrations of formerly enslaved p eople—Rolph ended his work.80 Trinidad eventually abandoned its agency in Canada. The home government concurred. The colonial secretary told Rolph that he now considered the scheme to be one “of very fter this correspondence, Rolph disappears from ofdoubtful advantage.”81 A ficial records of the Colonial Office except as an individual who had been involved in a failed emigration scheme. KEEPING FAMILY UNITS INTACT
While all these events were unfolding, Jamaica took a similar path to that of Trinidad. The colony started its recruitment efforts in 1841 and had withdrawn its agents from Canada by 1845.82 Expecting that “people of African extraction in Upper Canada” would keep increasing through the continuous influx of “fugitive slaves from the United States,” the Jamaican government initially hoped to find in Canada an unceasing spring of prospective plantation workers.83 The colony’s campaign differed from that of Trinidad in that it hired black emigration agents and therefore reached broader segments of the black population. Gallego was the first agent for Jamaica to be stationed in Canada. From October 1841 to September 1842, only ten immigrants to Jamaica came from Canada, but t hese ten p eople helped convince Jamaican officials that freed blacks’ past enslavement added to their value as skilled agricultural workers.84 Observing the ten immigrants, John Ewart, the agent general of immigrants, concluded that formerly enslaved workers made an ideal labor force due to their acquaintance with “the use of the various European and Intimacy and Belonging • 97
American implements of husbandry, such as plough, harrow, spade, shovel, and wheelbarrow, &c.” Also, finding them “respectable in their demeanor, and in some degree educated,” he envisioned using them as “head men on properties, where it is so necessary to have accounts of labor correctly kept.”85 In fact, the technically advanced former-slave migrants were precisely the type of worker the Jamaican government had been working to nurture for some time. At the governor’s initiative, efforts had been made to educate planters on the importance of innovation and to train emancipated people on advanced agricultural methods. Bringing in field hands who appeared to have already gained those skills thus seemed highly attractive.86 According to immigration reports, between September 30, 1842, and October 24, 1843, 110 black men, w omen, and c hildren arrived from Canada (it is safe to conclude that they w ere most likely the 150 migrants mentioned in the opening example of this chapter). The group was made up of agricultural laborers, tradesmen, and their families. Th ere were sixty-five adult men and twenty-seven adult w omen, yielding a male-female ratio of roughly 2.5:1. With the adults were thirteen boys and five girls under the age of fourteen.87 The composition of the group demonstrated that black migrants moved in domestic units, a development unexpected by British abolitionists and unwelcome to Jamaican planters. Generally pleased with Gallego’s agency, the Jamaican government appointed another agent, Stephen V irginia (sometimes called Virginny)—a “very sensible and respectable” farmer, according to Ewart.88 Virginia had been sent by a group of black residents in Canada to scout out conditions in Jamaica. A fter meeting with Ewart, he returned to Canada to bring back more immigrants, which raised Ewart’s hopes that Virginia would “have much influence in turning the tide of Canadian colored immigration to our shores.”89 The government also hired a white merchant in Montreal, J. W. Dunscomb, to facilitate the voyage of migrants through Quebec.90 Employing the familiar climatic language, Dunscomb conveyed his positive outlook to Jamaican officials, stating that “these runaway slaves” would be “happier in your climate than in this country.” He also relayed V irginia’s estimate that he could recruit about eight hundred migrants and that he had already found a dozen p eople in London, Canada, who had decided to go to Jamaica with him.91 Hearing the promising reports from Dunscomb and Virginia “with reference to the fugitive slaves from the Southern States of America,” the Jamaican government decided to give the two men much greater discretion in arranging migration.92 98 • Chapter 3
During their search for potential emigrants, the two agents received vari ous responses from black residents they encountered. Some refused to go, others demanded more information, and still o thers expressed a willingness to go as soon as possible. For instance, Dunscomb was not able to induce the residents of a neighborhood near Kingston to emigrate since they had been “settled for a long time” and w ere indisposed to relocate. However, in and near Toronto Dunscomb found “large numbers of coloured p eople,” many of whom showed “some disposition to go to Jamaica but w ere filled with apprehensions.” When the residents requested to see “some person, one of themselves,” who had been to Jamaica, Dunscomb instructed Virginia to pay them a visit. In Hamilton, several people were disposed to emigrate and prepared themselves to leave “as soon as t here is a vessel provided to convey them.” In London, Dunscomb succeeded in moving “some respectable individuals to interest themselves in the matter, on whose advice the people place reliance.”93 It was in the area between Lakes St. Clair and Erie that Dunscomb finally met a fairly large number of prospective emigrants. In this border area, 150 p eople expressed their willingness to emigrate. What further raised his hopes was the observation by one of the residents that slaves had been pouring into this “most favourable landing-place,” with 1,200 of them having arrived the previous year—generating a bottomless well of workers.94 Despite the agents’ work, the number of a ctual emigrants was “very discouraging”—thirty-five people, including several families. Only nineteen of the thirty-five emigrants were adult men, and seven w ere children, which disappointed the governor of Jamaica, who expected to see a larger proportion of male laborers.95 Contrary to white presumptions, these formerly enslaved p eople had built solid familial relationships in Canada and w ere very 96 determined to keep them intact across the sea. Dunscomb attributed the black residents’ change of heart to an anti- emigration convention held “for the purpose of taking the propriety of emigration into consideration.” The convention presented scathing letters from people who had migrated to Jamaica, which contributed to considerable misgivings about emigration among black inhabitants. Adding to the negative sentiment was a majority vote opposing emigration that came out of the convention and immediately became known to a wide segment of the black population. To reduce the negative repercussions, Virginia and a “coloured clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Libertus,” toured the region, but in vain.97 On receiving the “disappointing” news from Dunscomb, the governor of Jamaica concluded that the agency was a failure. The news of the failed Intimacy and Belonging • 99
recruitment efforts reached the home government and resulted in a suggestion from the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners that attempts to encourage emigration from Canada be abandoned.98 Learning about the waning interest at the gubernatorial and imperial levels, C. H. Darling, the new agent general of immigrants, appealed to the governor to continue the work, for he believed that former-slave immigrants constituted “a very valuable people” due to their cost-effectiveness. Although the newcomers lived on meat—unlike “the natives of the colony,” who consumed vegetables and salt fish—and thus demanded wages that would appear extortionate for “laborers of color,” they were skilled and efficient and could readily compensate for the higher cost of hiring them. Also, after observing some of the recent immigrants tending c attle and felling timber for railway tracks, Darling stressed the migrant workers’ general intelligence and efficiency in both agricultural and nonagricultural work.99 The governor took note of Darling’s appeal, but Jamaica’s involvement in Canada had petered out by February 1846. Before then, the governor repeated to the Colonial Office Darling’s point that recruiting former slaves was worth pursuing. His justification illustrated Jamaican officials’ combined reliance on essentialist ideas about the black body and on their belief that self-emancipated people had acquired particular qualities during slavery. Their “physical constitution suited to the climate” and the “superior intelligence and skill” they had developed in enslavement would make the refugees highly valuable plantation laborers, the governor claimed.100 Nonetheless, the subject of former slaves disappeared from the colony’s official records until interest in them rose again after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. The debates over West Indian emigration brought to light the centrality of gender and sexuality in the racial delineation of the imperial space. White settlers viewed Canada as a place where domesticity in their race could flourish. To them, formerly enslaved people made up a disproportionately male population and were incapable of establishing conjugal relationships—and thus they posed a threat to the sexual underpinnings of the colony’s racial homogeneity. Recognizing this, the bfass deemed the removal of fugitive slaves to the Caribbean imperative even when Rolph, whom the metropolitan abolitionists considered the authority on the subject, stressed their population’s sexual imbalance. The perceived disruption of white domesticity and reproduction in Canada seemed more pressing to them than taking the trouble of sending equal proportions of black men and women to the postemancipation Caribbean, and they therefore yielded to planters’ desire for a male-dominated 100 • Chapter 3
plantation labor force. In this sense, contrary to the conventional wisdom about British abolitionism, the bfass made no effort to turn self-emancipated workers from Canada into stable migrant families in the Caribbean, in contrast to its insistence on rectifying skewed sex ratios among African and East Indian laborers. Absent from this mapping of migratory movements was a designated colonial site for the development of domestic relationships among formerly enslaved refugees. However, such disregard for black family faced self-emancipated sojourners’ resolve to build and maintain domestic integrity in the face of the exigencies of both slavery and freedom. AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE DOUBLE BIND OF BLACK DISPLACEMENT
Denials and assertions of black conformity to normative domesticity also unfolded on the southern side of the Canada-U.S. border, where f amily life served as a marker of belonging in the debate about black relocation to Liberia. Supporters of Liberian colonization championed the home as the basic unit of the republic. Such ideology translated the lack of home into the lack of the manly and womanly character traits that were essential to gendered republican citizenship. From this perspective, advocates of Liberian colonization grounded the necessity of black relocation in the supposed inability of African Americans to practice normative domestic relations in the United States. But in tropical Africa, they contended, the home would come easily to African Americans. By the early nineteenth century, white men had become the only category of people who could enjoy manly republican citizenship, characterized by the racial privilege of universal male suffrage. Stereotypes were ascribed to black men that were “diametrically opposite to those that qualified white men for the rights of citizenship.” Depictions of white men as “intelligent, hardworking, thrifty, self-controlled, and civic-minded” coincided with t hose of black men as “stupid, lazy, sensual, improvident, drunken, licentious, and otherwise unqualified for the privileges of democratic self-government.”101 White men’s status as voting republicans intersected with their roles as f athers, husbands, and breadwinners—patriarchal roles that rendered them public. A man’s political identity as a voter was thus connected with his practice of independence, virtue, and industry through his familial authority. According to early nineteenth-century notions of female citizenship, women’s participation in the republic was based on their role as mothers and wives. Through these domestic positions, women were expected to instill in Intimacy and Belonging • 101
their family members the morality required of good republican citizens in an increasingly democratic political arena. In this way, a d aughter could grow up to replicate her mother as the moral vanguard of her family and her nation, while a son could serve the republic through direct political participation. This idealized model of domestic political participation positioned the white middle-class woman as the standard female subject and described the character traits she was assumed to possess as true womanhood.102 Colonizationist efforts to rhetorically exclude f ree African Americans from the republican polity relied on this gendered ideology of citizenship. F ree blacks were depicted to have no home in the United States and thus be devoid of the institution within which men and w omen connected themselves to the republic. In other words, the absence of black homes equaled African Americans’ incapacity to serve as republican citizens. They w ere cast as “a thriftless race of vagabonds” with “no home, no country, no kindred, no friends” who were overcrowding “our penitentiaries, and jails, and poor houses” or “wandering like foreigners and outcasts, in the land which has given them birth.”103 A procolonization newspaper in Connecticut portrayed the male portion of these “homeless” blacks as “bound by no political ties to the community in which they dwell, and excluded for the most part from exercising the rights and privileges of freemen.”104 By having “no home, no country, no such personal interest in the welfare of the community,” black men w ere deprived of “a certain degree of manliness” that allegedly resided in “almost e very white man.” Without his home, one colonization proponent concluded, “the negro cannot, in this country, become an enlightened and useful citizen.”105 This representation of the United States as infertile ground for f ree black family life was accompanied by the contrasting image of Liberia as a natural environment suitable for black domesticity. Colonization supporters advertised the g reat facility with which a black man could attain patriarchal manhood in Liberia. The colony was portrayed as a “fertile country” with much potential for “honest, upright, and enterprising men” to establish themselves and support their families.106 Such descriptions often went along with depictions of the settlers’ acculturation to the tropics, thereby postulating a black version of domesticity tethered to tropical surroundings. In what one might call the concept of tropical black domesticity, black family life was rendered impossible in the United States and strictly confined to tropical regions where “the colonists became acclimated and healthy—[and] have erected comfortable houses for themselves and families.”107
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In response to the claims of tropical black domesticity, free black leaders portrayed the African colony as climatically unsuitable for maintaining a family life and as destructive to domestic unions that free African Americans had established in the United States. Samuel Cornish and Theodore Wright sarcastically identified one of the “benefits” of relocating free blacks to Liberia as “breaking up their domestic relations—relations singularly dear to them,” by risking their lives in “the death-damps of Africa u nder an equatorial sun.”108 Reporting on an anticolonization meeting for an abolitionist newspaper, David Ruggles also stressed that the African climate was fatal to black familial integrity. The meeting featured black migrants who had just returned from Liberia a fter their unsuccessful endeavor to start a new life in Africa. Ruggles wrote that one of the returnees had lost his f amily, which had been “flourishing” before they went to Liberia. The grieving man stated, “with tears rolling down his face, that in a few days a fter his arrival t here, death visited his f amily, and took from him his wife, and three promising d aughters!” The report juxtaposed the former migrant’s enjoyment of family life in the North with his loss of it in Liberia, creating the opposite image of the one used by advocates of colonization.109 Another anticolonization meeting also focused on the repercussions of Liberian migration on African American families. Among the questions asked of one returned migrant were “How soon after your arrival were you and your family taken sick?” and “How many of your family died, and who?” The answer to the latter question was two of his children and his brother and sister.110 In addition to contending with proponents of Liberian colonization, northern black communities had to address Caribbean planters’ attempt to incorporate them into the postemancipation restructuring of colonial labor. Representatives of Trinidad and Jamaica were the main actors, and they tried to attract to their colonies free blacks on the Atlantic seaboard, including those in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.111 Trinidad was the first to send its agent—William Burnley, who had been performing the same role in Nova Scotia—to the region, and thus it received the most attention among northern African Americans. Arriving in New York sometime before August 31, 1839, Burnley advertised emigration in lecture halls and the pages of the Colored American.112 In the Colored American Burnley published a very favorable article about the colony that advertised the possibility of landownership, the enjoyment of equal rights, and the colony’s proximity to the United States. Land was said
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to be available for purchase on arrival or by saving wages from working on sugarcane and cocoa plantations—which, as we w ill see below, turned out to be false. Political and social equality was also featured in the article.113 Burnley expected the guarantee of equal rights to be a great attraction to free black Americans, who he believed would readily leave their “uncomfortable state” in their own country.114 Trinidad’s relative proximity to the United States was advertised as allowing the migrants to enjoy frequent communication with the United States and thus not to have to sever ties with their peers back home.115 These alleged advantages initially appealed to Charles Ray, the news paper’s editor, but he soon realized that the interests of urban black communities were in conflict with t hose of the plantation colony. Initially, the paper proclaimed Trinidad emigration to be “worthy [of ] the attention and careful consideration of our brethren” and promised to “endeavor to collect all the information in our power” to gauge the advisability of emigration.116 By October 1839, however, the paper had come to the conclusion that the emigration scheme would not benefit f ree blacks or the government of Trinidad, due to the former’s lack of enthusiasm for tropical agricultural labor. Ray wrote in an editorial that “we do not at all, like the course things are taking in respect to emigration to the island of Trinidad.”117 Cornish explained a fundamental flaw in the scheme: “500 persons who e ither wished or talked of g oing” since the first communication from Burnley, “not a single one [was] willing to make his living by working in the sun with his hoe.”118 Ironically, it was the very network of communication that Burnley advertised as an advantage of moving to Trinidad that warned those back home of the sufferings on the plantations. A copy of the minutes of a meeting of aggrieved migrants was sent to Wright to be published in the Colored American. The document reached Wright supposedly through his connection with Thomas P. Hunt, the pastor of the Colored Presbyterian Church in Newark, who had left for Trinidad with more than a hundred emigrants. Participants at the meeting in Trinidad criticized the colony’s exploitative labor conditions, or what they called “a substitute for slavery.” The minutes reported their experience of having been “brutally dragged in little groups to the different plantations” after disembarking from the ship and of being “only allowed from 30–60 cents per task, and three pounds of codfish and one bottle of rum, as their weekly allowance.”119 Those at the meeting concluded that half of Burnley’s statements w ere “utterly false and deceptive.”120 The northern black community also rebutted the notions of racialized climatic aptitude that lay at the core of the scheme’s professed advantage. Citing 104 • Chapter 3
“the known unhealthiness of the climate” as one of “the principle objections to the West Indies,” Ray expressed his skepticism of a report that based its conclusion—that “the climate [of the West Indies] has no injurious effect on colored emigrants”—on the “fact” that an eighteenth-century outbreak of yellow fever in British Guiana killed white soldiers in large numbers but “not a single soldier in the regiments of blacks.” Ray denied such essentialist reasoning by attributing the difference between black and white mortality to “the white soldiers [being] foreigners from England, while the others [being] natives.”121 His theory of native immunity was in direct contradiction to the notion of racially inherent disease resistance that had materialized in an imperial military policy in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Guiana. The alleged racial immunity of the black body to yellow fever had impressed the British government so much that in 1795 it formed twelve black regiments and decreased the number of white troops stationed in the West Indies.122 In further dissociating themselves from tropical agricultural labor, free black Americans made use of the bfass’s opposition to white immigration to the Caribbean in an inventive way. This was made possible by the transatlantic print culture: Ray had subscribed to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, the official periodical of the bfass, since the newspaper’s first issue ere unfit for the in January 1840.123 In arguing that free black Americans w Caribbean tropics, he cited the bfass’s claim that the Caribbean’s natural climate, sugarcane cultivation, and social structure did not suit white emigrants: “The general employment of the colony, viz.: the cultivation and manufacture of sugar, is found by experience to be dreadfully destructive to the health and lives of Europeans; while the climate of the colony, except in the mountainous districts, which are only suitable for the cultivation of provisions, is altogether unfitted, on account of its intense heat and the malaria engendered at certain seasons of the year for European laborers.”124 The Colored American presented that statement as applicable to f ree black Americans as well by affixing “the colored people of the United States” to the title of the original Anti-Slavery Reporter article, “why should not englishmen, irishmen and scotCHmen, go to jamaica?” The new version was: “why should not englishmen, irishmen and scotCHmen, go to jamaica?—(and the colored people of the u.s. too.)”125 While the goal of the Anti-Slavery Reporter’s article was to “call on their fellow countrymen in every part of the United Kingdom, to turn a deaf ear to the false representation and delusive promise of interested agents,” the Colored American appropriated the article to assert the undesirability of f ree Intimacy and Belonging • 105
African Americans’ emigration to the West Indies. Ignoring the British paper’s racially exclusive proposition, Ray wrote: “The following, though intended for t hose persons therein mentioned, equally concerns the colored population of this country and applies with equal force to all who might be persuaded to emigrate to any of t hose colonies.”126 Thus, the Colored American negated the Anti-Slavery Reporter’s racial premise and, by implication, undid the naturalized association between the black race and tropical labor. That undoing also contradicted the racial basis of a British geography of freedom that divided tropical plantations and North American and Oceanian settler societies. Championing a racially org anized empire, the Anti- Slavery Reporter denounced European migration to the Caribbean for its violation of the principle of racialized migration destinations: “It can never be forgotten that the West Indies differ essentially from most of the other points to which the current of emigration has been directed. It is one thing to emigrate to the United States, to Canada, to Australia, or to New Zealand; but it is quite another thing to emigrate to Demerara, Trinidad, or Jamaica.”127 In the abolitionist worldview, the first group of places—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—were venues for white colonial emigration from the British Isles while the second group—Demerara, Trinidad, and Jamaica— consisted of plantation colonies, which a fter emancipation received immigrants from Africa, East and South Asia. Although the article presumed racially categorized migration flows, the Colored American destabilized that delineation by stating that it was reprinting the article to “show some of our reasons for deciding against this system [West Indian emigration], and that we are by no means alone in this m atter.”128 Such appropriation unsettled the core princi ple held by white Britons—that race, a transnational category, determined the geographic belonging of free people. African Americans’ identification with British white colonists was based on a transracial identity as long-term practitioners of freedom, in contrast to the recently emancipated West Indians. The British newspaper objected to whites’ emigration because slavery was “a recognized state of society” in the Caribbean. In that region the planter class, made up of “men of tyrannical habits and disposition,” exerted arbitrary control over their laborers. This quasi-slave society was not suitable for white Britons, who had been “accustomed to freedom.”129 Although by people “accustomed to freedom” the bfass meant white Britons, the Colored American repurposed the British
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abolitionists’ logic in identifying themselves as veterans of freedom categorically distinguishable from emancipated West Indians. Differentiation from the Caribbean freed people took on other forms. Black New Yorkers viewed themselves as able to have stable, long-term familial relationships but projected nondomestic characteristics onto black West Indians. When Hunt came back to New York and held a protest meeting at Wright’s church, he founded his objection to emigration on West Indians’ alleged deviation from normative gender relations: “The prospect for moral improvement was dismal indeed, the morals of the people being invariably bad—that marriages seldom occurred among them—that their social condition was bad.”130 Disappointed with the Caribbean and aware of allegations of domestic failures by proponents of Liberian colonization, the returned migrants used the Trinidadian freed people as a foil to place themselves back in the American republic as properly domestic subjects. That strategy can seem confusing at first, given the positive meanings New York black abolitionists had inscribed on the West Indian freed p eople a decade earlier. But the symbolic function of the Ca ribbean blacks was in fact multifaceted and open to different uses in African American political discourse due to diverse and changing agendas in U.S. black communities. Northern activists further distanced themselves from Trinidad by portraying it as a society that did not practice gendered divisions of labor. The inability of migrant women to practice female-specific labor was listed as a disadvantage of emigration to Trinidad. In a searing report on Trinidad, a return mi grant observed that “the women can find nothing at all to do, excepting men’s labor, cutting cane in the field, which is so unlike the labor our American women are accustomed to, they cannot do it.”131 His narrative went well beyond denouncing Trinidad emigration. By associating gendered divisions of labor with Americanness and framing black female emigrants as deserving of such gendered arrangements, it endowed African American women with both normative gender attributes and American identity. Opposition to Trinidad emigration thus created a narrative opportunity for black northerners to express the Americanness of the free black community and the femininity of black women, which had enjoyed little recognition in the dominant gender, national, and racial discourses in the United States. Given the heightened opposition to emigration in the African American community, by June 1840 the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society— which had just split from the American Anti-Slavery Society and whose
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members included prominent black New Yorkers—issued its official opposition to the Trinidad scheme.132 In October 1840 the Colored American declared an end to the debate over Trinidad emigration in New York City, claiming that the city’s black community deemed the idea “dead.”133 Still, the closing of the debate by members of New York’s black elite did not signify an end to migration from other coastal cities. In October 1840, the same month Ray called the issue “dead,” 250 black emigrants set sail for Trinidad from Baltimore.134 Black residents of that city showed great interest in West Indian emigration, sending Nathaniel Peck and Thomas Price as their delegates to Trinidad and British Guiana to gauge the prospects for black immigrants.135 A study estimates overall numbers of black Americans who migrated to Trinidad at 1,333.136 When considering such numbers, however, we should take into account those who returned to the United States: only 148 black migrants were working on plantations in Trinidad in 1848, for many had gone back to their native country.137 The numbers of African Americans who moved to Jamaica generally remained low as well. From October 1841 through September 1842, only eighteen black people relocated to the island from the United States. To make things worse for Jamaican planters, these immigrants refused to work on estates and started their own businesses elsewhere.138 Between September 30, 1842, and October 24, 1843, no more than twenty-three migrants came from the United States.139 •
Canada had become an entry point into the regime of f ree labor that was the postemancipation British Empire. Deploying the racial language of climate, various groups in the metropole, Canada, and the Caribbean worked to integrate black refugee populations into the imperial hierarchy. Demonstrating British avarice for plantation workers, this mapping did not stop at the borders of the empire: free African Americans w ere considered a potential source of plantation labor. The U.S. counterpart of the British geographic model similarly located Liberia as the venue for black freedom and advancement. Central to those designs as well as criticisms of them was the language of domesticity and reproduction, which constituted the meaning of legitimate belonging. The conflict over the proper place of black freedom in the British Empire would intensify in 1850 when the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. Torrents of formerly enslaved people and legally free black migrants poured into Canada, bringing with them experience and expertise they could use to 108 • Chapter 3
c ounter aggravating racial tensions in a settler colonial setting spawned by a growing demographic diversification. On the other side of the border, the exclusion of African Americans from f ree soil settlement was steadily u nder way. At the center of t hese processes in both Canada and the United States w ere representations of mobility, a set of imaginaries that worked to define and redefine the racial boundaries of settler colonial privileges. These discursive practices revealed politicized figurations of human migrations rooted in and indebted to the highly mobile Atlantic world of the mid-nineteenth century.
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Chapter 4
GENDERED MOBILITIES AND WHITE SETTLER BOUNDA RIES
Antiblack sentiment erupted in 1849 when Canadian colonists in the Western District of Canada West learned of a plan to establish in their municipality an agricultural settlement for formerly enslaved people. Conceived by William King, a Presbyterian clergyman from Ireland, the settlement was intended to promote self-sufficiency and attend to the religious welfare of those who had suffered “the debasing influence exerted by Slavery on their character.” Naming the enterprise the Elgin Association after the governor general of Canada, the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Canada applied for a tract of government land in Raleigh, a township in the Western District.1 When news of the application reached the town and its vicinity, colonial settlers quickly filed petitions and convened protest meetings to dissuade the government from selling land to the association. The colonists’ resistance to the settlement should be understood as one facet of their ongoing attempt to make the Canadian settler polity lily-white. In the provincial electoral system, in which property ownership determined the right to vote, land was more than just an economic asset. Especially in this rural region, land was the basis of one’s (a man’s, to be precise) direct involvement in the colonial governing structure. It was therefore imperative for these men, who engaged in habitual curtailment of—and insistently called
for official bans on—black political and civic participation, to withhold land from black “intruders” to keep the polity exclusively white. In delineating racial boundaries for colonial belonging, the white settlers in the Western District drew on the familiar idioms of interracial sex and racialized imperial space. Yet, as I w ill show in detail, the contest between the district’s colonists and their opponents over the legitimacy of black settlement was discussed primarily in tropes of mobility, an understandable choice of language for those whose cultural environs were traversed by migratory flows. The notion that Canada was set aside for “thousands of our countrymen of our own color” found expression in depictions of migration that valued one kind of movement above another in racial terms.2 In defining the racial character of a place through representations of movements to it, the colonists associated slave escape to Canada with traits antithetical to industry, permanence, and loyalty, namely characteristics of an ideal settler, while inscribing economic migration with those characteristics and as an exclusively white undertaking. This drawing of boundaries against the black fugitive coincided with a broadening of the definition of the proper settler beyond the British. The widening of the category of the settler resembled the obliteration of ethnic differences in pursuit of an overarching white racial identity in the nineteenth-century United States. In Canada settler membership expanded to accommodate heterogeneous European immigrant groups, consolidating the British and non-British into a single white race. In response to t hese moves, various organizational and literary forums for protest emerged in the Canadian black community thanks partly to a new demographic development: the arrival of experienced black abolitionists from the United States after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.3 The law, enacted partially in response to the northern personal liberty laws, generated legally free as well as fugitive-slave exiles, for it provided that anyone suspected of being a fugitive slave could be arrested without warrant and returned to a claimant only on the claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership. Denying the accused the right to testify or to a jury trial, the law also subjected legally free people to the threat of enslavement without due process of law. With the federal government abrogating the legal protection of black freedom, African Americans looked to Britain—and Canada, one of its colonies— as the champion of the freedom of both enslaved and f ree people living in the United States. One distinct strain of cultural politics conspicuous in oral and written productions by the recently arrived activists was to narrate black inclusion into 112 • Chapter 4
Canada’s settler collective by redefining the negative meanings assigned to black border crossing. They formulated representations of black mobility in ways that constructed a black version of the settler family in order to counter the hegemonic figure of the degraded, transient fugitive bent on amalgamation. Some of these narrators were legally free or had no recollection of slavery but reinvented themselves as representatives of formerly enslaved people in the process of constructing diff erent black settler figures, variously scripted but all designed to validate the demand for integration. One such figure was a male fugitive slave symbolic of a black settlerhood characterized by patriarchal authority, agricultural productivity, and military service. This cultural construct was the product of an ingenious borrowing of representational tactics from American slave narratives. The appropriation was meant to produce positive meanings of black masculinity through the revision of whites’ negative renderings of black mobility. The resulting figurations tied slave escape to idealized attributes of the colonial settler, portraying successful male fugitives as endowed with enough mental and physical strength to become productive farmers and devoted loyal subjects. In contrast to what was available for male refugees, t here were no widely circulated textual resources useful for the fashioning of formerly enslaved women’s political subjectivities. The dearth of cultural models led to the crafting of a new black female subject encompassing both free and fugitive women in the pages of the Provincial Freeman, a black-operated newspaper edited by Mary Ann Shadd, a legally f ree migrant. Shadd drew on white Canadian settler-immigrant literature as a resource for crafting subject positions for black w omen. What ultimately emerged was a highly ingenious political discourse among black women—both fugitive-slave and legally free—who defined their transborder movement as family-based agricultural migration for material improvement, a type of movement predominantly associated with white colonial settlers. Departing from the narrative politics marshaled by black male Canadians, these women reframed the purpose of their movement in a way that emphasized their identity as upwardly mobile settler-immigrant w omen defined by their gendered roles in black households. This strategy tapped into the politi cal value accorded to motherhood in white settler efforts—that is, efforts to maintain racial unity through the role of m others as “the protectors of character, the sustainers of purity, and the preservers of boundaries.”4 Black w omen fashioned themselves as pillars of a black peoplehood and, by extension, of Canada’s colonial f uture in which black settlers happily coexisted with other Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 113
communities without interracial intimate interactions. In taking on this role, African Canadian w omen claimed a place in the settler colony based on their intraracial reproduction and familial and racial responsibilities. Much as in Canada, in the ever-expanding continental United States the whiteness of settlerhood was solidified through a black-white axis. California and Oregon enacted measures to restrict immigration and landownership by free blacks, codifying their exclusion from the possibility of economic advancement in the far West. Against this background, black northerners engaged in a cultural politics of mobility to construct black settler subjects and, in some cases, exercised settler mobility by moving to become independent land owners. They thus discursively and materially inserted free African Americans into the U.S. settler republic by embracing and participating in its principal ideal of social and geographic mobility from urban labor. In a crucial way, black Americans’ quest for incorporation into the republic revealed the degree to which the settler colonial mechanism of eliminating f ree blacks operated across the Anglo-American divide and, equally important, displayed the hegemonic force of settler colonial conceptualizations of belonging and progress. MOBILITY AND SETTLER COLONIAL HIERARCHY
On August 18, 1849, at the Royal Exchange H otel in Chatham in the Western District, three hundred men from the town and its surroundings showed up to concoct measures to prevent the establishment of the Elgin Association.5 The meeting a dopted an address to “the inhabitants of Canada” decrying the planned settlement (for convenience, hereinafter I call it the Chatham address). The statement was succeeded by a petition by the Council of Western District requesting that the governor general of Canada hinder black migration from across the border and restrict the suffrage of the province’s black inhabitants.6 In problematizing black settlement, the Chatham address employed the proscriptive language of interracial sex. Drawing on the trope of natural law, the address criticized the Elgin Association for violating the rules of nature by “encourag[ing] the settlement in old and well established communities, of a race of p eople which is destined by nature to be distinct and separate from us.” Increasing the number of blacks in the midst of whites, the address warned, would lead to “an evil”—that is, “amalgamation, its necessary and hideous attendant.”
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Further threatened by the coexistence of the two races was what British colonists viewed as the imperial geography separating white and black spaces, an arrangement they considered unassailable even in light of Britain’s celebrated legacy of abolition. While praising “the Imperial Parliament of G reat Britain” for “forever banish[ing] Slavery from the Empire” and “let[ting] the slaves of the United States be free” in Canada, the authors of the Chatham address took issue with the permanent residence of freed people within the same colonial space as white subjects. “The Parliament of G reat Britain,” the colonists asserted, “never intended that any portion of the inhabitants of her wide-spread realm should suffer wrong” that came from living side by side with “a race of p eople, upon whom we cannot look without a feeling of repulsion.”7 In calling for the exclusion of self-emancipated people from the region, the Chatham address inscribed the fugitives’ experience of slavery and escape from it as markers of their inability to become productive and civic subjects. It associated past enslavement with characteristics antithetical to the fundamental virtue of an agricultural settler colony: industry. The address distinguished the industrious British colonist from the lazy former slave, representing the latter as “the old, the maimed, the pauper, the lunatic” who needed “our charity to maintain,” attributing these traits to former slaves’ having “been brought up in a state of bondage and servility.” The experience of bondage also had civic implications. Enslavement had rendered black migrants “totally ignorant, both of their social and political duties” as responsible subjects in Canada. The act of escaping from slavery further compounded the undesirability of black settlement. The address deplored the fact that white settlers would be exposed to “the very worst specimens of that neglected race—the fugitives from slavery, and perhaps from justice.” This la mentable development made the settlement scheme appear “much more revolting.”8 The confounding of fugitives from slavery and t hose from justice framed slave escape as a criminal act and cast fugitive slaves as questionable characters. The black community of Toronto quickly criticized the Chatham address. Alarmed by the segregationist attitude it demonstrated, “the citizens of color of Toronto” posed a fundamental question concerning p eople of African descent inhabiting the Western Hemisphere: why they existed amid whites in the first place. Turning the transatlantic slave trade on its head, they rhetorically asked if “it was destined that our existence should be ‘separate and distinct,’ how came it that the European could go to Africa and from thence
Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 115
brought a class of beings naturally destined to be ‘distinct and separate’ ”?9 This sarcastic enquiry laid bare the expedient nature of the regulation of black mobility and residence in an increasingly segmented post-emancipation empire. The address by the Toronto residents intensified opposition from Western District settlers. The Council of the Western District submitted a petition to the governor general of Canada partly in response to “a late meeting held by the Colored People in the City of Toronto.” The petition, drafted by Edward Larwill, a member of the district council, appealed for immediate action to exclude blacks from the social and political life of Canada. The settlers requested the government to introduce a poll tax on “American Negroes immigrating into this Province” and legal measures against “amalgamation,” and urged the government to “ascertain whether it would be politic to allow [blacks from the United States] the right of suffrage.”10 Similar antiblack petitions to the government continued to arrive from townships and individuals in the Western District. Their primary requests were to disqualify black residents from “certain civil and political rights” and discourage their entry into the province.11 To bring home to the government the white community’s resolve to ensure racial exclusion, the Western District petitioners boasted of actions taken to deny black residents access to the colony’s civic life. For example, at a town meeting convened to elect parish and town officers, “every individual white man at the meeting” refused black participants a say when they “insisted on their right to vote.” And one petition proudly pronounced that “no Sheriff in this Province would dare to summon Colored men to do Jury duty” and that white parents refused to educate their c hildren at public schools “in consequence of the Negroes insisting on their right of sending their c hildren to such Schools.”12 To the dismay of the white settlers, the Elgin Association purchased 4,300 acres in October 1849, and the first group of black settlers arrived before the end of that year. However, this did not stop the colonists from attacking the settlement of black migrants in general. Their efforts ranged from an 1851 petition to “discourag[e] Negro Immigration into this Province” to an 1854 proposal to impose taxes on fugitive slaves arriving in Canada.13 The most active and vocal opponent of black settlement was Larwill, the drafter of the Western District Council petition. In leading the opposition, Larwill echoed the claims of Canada’s immunity from the consequences of imperial emancipation. The abolition of slavery was
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a product of the metropole, a society distant from “those lands where slavery existed” and where the public mind was free from concern for “a collision with the negro” after emancipation. Had the imperial government foreseen that “the city of London would be inundated with West Indian slaves,” he asserted, it would not have passed the abolition act. Nor had the government anticipated that “the emancipation of her slaves in the West Indies would be prejudicial to any of her other colonies.” Emancipation was not meant to change the racial configurations of the empire. What was unfolding in Canada—the settlement of formerly enslaved people in a white settler colony—was an unexpected fallout of British emancipation and hence nothing but “evil results arising from the passage of the act.”14 As Larwill drew rigid racial lines around Canadian settlerhood, he widened the membership of the white settler class. Although still preferring t hose from “the Sister Isles, our own kith and kin,” he nonetheless integrated “our own countrymen and all other Europeans” into a racial category that exclusively signified an “intelligent, industrious, moral, and religious” character in juxtaposition to the black race. He expected the British Isles to be the chief place of origin of immigrants, but in any case “Europe” had become an overarching marker of the legitimate Canadian settler, who stood in sharp contrast to “the Negro from the United States, the lame, blind, deaf, dumb, paupers of every description.” This black-white dichotomy was couched in the language of “nature,” which divided “Negro” and “European” into two “distinct classes” of “the human f amily.”15 In distinguishing between the black race and the European white race, Larwill used as a key index of difference the type of mobility each practiced to come to Canada. Discussing Canada’s natural resources, Larwill contended that this productive colony should be settled by those who arrived voluntarily to better their lives—namely, “the most intelligent, industrious, moral, and religious class of Emigrants we can obtain . . . from Europe.” In contrast, former-slave fugitives w ere presented as a migratory population with “no partiality for either Canadians or their Country,” for they would “all return to the South” in case of abolition in the United States.16 In this dualism, a hierarchy was set up between the two kinds of movement, each associated with a racial group: immigration of white Europeans signified the twin pursuit of personal material improvement and larger colonial development, whereas slave flight symbolized transience, lack of any stake in the land, and thus lack of loyalty to the British Empire or to the colony of Canada.
Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 117
THE CREATION OF THE BLACK SETTLER
As the 1850s progressed, white colonists’ unceasing antiblack activities met with vigorous objections from black migrants who had left the slave republic after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Black newcomers rebutted racially exclusionary ideas of belonging through new social channels, including newspapers, organizations, and conventions. Ironically, the Fugitive Slave Law drove fledgling and seasoned antislavery activists out of the United States and thereby fostered the creation of new sites of resistance in Canada, where they put to work the organizational and rhetorical skills they brought with them. Henry Bibb, a former slave, and his wife, Mary, w ere two of t hose experienced black activists from across the border.17 Henry Bibb had escaped permanently from slavery in 1841 a fter a recurring cycle of escape, capture, reenslavement, and escape again. He settled in Detroit the following year and launched his antislavery career, beginning as a lecturer for the Michigan Liberty Party and then speaking in national lecture circuits.18 In 1848 he married Mary Miles, a legally free woman, and a year later he published The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave. Arriving in Canada in 1850, the couple founded a newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive, and used it as a forum to protest the colonists’ association of settlerhood exclusively with whiteness. For example, the Voice of the Fugitive rebutted Larwill’s call to discontinue subscriptions to newspapers that supported “the establishing of colored settlements in Canada.” The paper confidently proposed that Larwill compare black settlements and “the same number of white” ones in terms of industry, morality, and loyalty. What would come to light, the paper maintained, was “a noble-hearted, proud-spirited, agricultural [black] people” who had been developing a “vast amount of wild land in Canada” and “improving the country in common with other men.”19 The black settler figures constructed in the pages of the Voice of the Fugitive were “refugees from Southern slavery” who would root themselves in family units as “good, peaceable, loyal subjects to her Majesty—the Queen of Great Britain.”20 This insistence on black domesticity informed the nuts and bolts of black settlement efforts. When Bibb convened a meeting in November 1850 to discuss the condition of “the homeless refugees from Southern slavery,” the delegates proposed reselling government land to former-slave refugees and setting aside one-third of the revenue for “the education of the c hildren of those who have settled in Canada as fugitives of slavery.”21 From the beginning, 118 • Chapter 4
Bibb and others assumed the growth of black settler families among the self- emancipated. This 1850 meeting (generally called the Sandwich Convention by historians) evolved into a group named the Fugitive Union Society, which then merged with the Refugee Home Society, an organization that had a similar goal of buying and reselling lands to former slaves. The Refugee Home Society had been formed by white abolitionists in Detroit in 1851, and after its merger with the Fugitive Union Society, it remained based in Detroit. Henry and Mary Bibb assumed local leadership on the Canadian side of the Detroit River.22 The combining of the two organizations was not the first instance of trans-border cooperation involving the Refugee Home Society: some of its original founders had been Canadians, who participated from across the river.23 The operations of t hese organizations revealed the porous nature of the Canada-U.S. border at Detroit, across which people, goods, and ideas moved. The Voice of the Fugitive became a mouthpiece for the Refugee Home Society, disseminating images of prospering domestic relations among self- emancipated people. In a report on “a f amily, consisting of a husband, with his wife and three c hildren, [who had] arrived h ere about ten days ago from Virginia,” the paper informed its readers that “the wife has since given birth to more ‘fine boys’ on British soil.” It lauded the arrival of the boys as “propagating the family of freemen” and in so d oing presented a black h ousehold rooting itself in the British colony through procreation.24 Another article described a wife and children joining a male runaway to build a settler family, presenting the story of a man who had become a “happy owner of a homestead” after escaping from slavery. The paper hoped that “he may enjoy [the homestead] with his own wife and his own c hildren” after they succeeded in escaping to reunite with him.25 While the Bibbs envisioned black settler families composed of a husband, a wife, and children, only male heads of household were discursively inscribed with loyalty to the Crown. Only male “owners and tillers of the soil” who built “settlements as a means of supporting [their] families” were shown to possess patriotic sentiment. The Bibbs guaranteed that male refugees would prove “loyal to the Government u nder which they live” by reprising the role former-slave fugitives played in “the history of 1837–8”—namely, enlistment in the British army during the Rebellion of 1837.26 The effort to assimilate black migrants into Canadian settlerhood was furthered by another black abolitionist, Samuel Ringgold Ward, a self- proclaimed refugee and seasoned activist with experience in New York antislavery circles, ranging from membership in the American and Foreign Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 119
Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty Party to publishing and editing two newspapers.27 Ward was not a typical former-slave escapee, for he had fled from slavery at the age of three with his parents and had lived as a f ree person in the state of New York u ntil he came to Canada. Although having spent his adult life in freedom, he presented himself as a fugitive from American slavery, but of a different kind. In October 1851 Ward and other members of the Syracuse Vigilance Committee rescued fugitive slave William “Jerry” McHenry from federal authorities and helped him escape to Kingston, Canada. Ward and Jermain Loguen, the vice chairman of the committee, soon afterward left for Canada to avoid arrest for obstructing the Fugitive Slave Law.28 Equating his escape from arrest with slaves’ flight from reenslavement—both acts of running away from the U.S. slavery apparatus—Ward identified himself as a black escapee, declaring to formerly enslaved fugitive Henry Bibb that “I am, like yourself, a refugee.”29 Similar to the black settler subject formulated in the Voice of the Fugitive, Ward’s newly constructed fugitive self assumed a patriarchal settler identity. He envisioned “bas[ing] the support of my f amily upon the tilling of the soil,” which in turn would contribute to the British Empire as did the work of his “fellow subjects.” Ward thus re-created himself as a refugee settler who related to the British Empire through his part in the patriarchal governing of his family and in the agricultural development of Canada.30 Such a vision went beyond the private to the entire refugee population. Ward advocated the promotion of black settlerhood in his capacity as a traveling agent for the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada and by writing opinion pieces in black Canadian newspapers. As the founding editor of the Provincial Freeman,31 Ward waged his early campaign to elevate former-slave migrants to the status of landowning settlers: “The refugees from southern plantations shall be made welcome and pointed to means and measures for such improvement and development, as shall make them independent, self-sustaining laborers, justifying the impartial freedom they here enjoy, and contributing by their energy and industry, to the wealth of their adopted country.”32 Conscious of the persistent antiblack sentiment, Ward also retroactively attacked the 1849 Western District Council petition, condemning it as an insult to “equal fellow subjects” and a barrier to their rights to “buy and s ettle upon lands, as have Irishmen, or Scotchmen, or such men as Mr. Larwill, and his fellow petitioners.”33
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FIGURE 4.1 Illustration from Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His
Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & E ngland (1855). Original image held by James Shepard Library, North Carolina Central University. Digital edition courtesy of Louis Round Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
THE SETTLER FUGITIVE SLAVE
In placing black refugees in Canadian settler society, Ward refigured the unfavorable representations of fugitive escape by appropriating from U.S. abolitionist literature the motif of the courageous male fugitive slave. Beginning in the 1840s fugitive slave narratives enjoyed an extensive circulation throughout the U.S. North as a result of the rapid development of organized abolitionism in the region. Fugitive slave narratives, both oral and written, flourished as the northern abolition movement expanded its reach to the general public, especially through the increased production of antislavery news papers and publications and the expansion of lecture circuits. Fugitive slaves’ narration of their days in bondage was expected to lend authenticity to the movement’s goal of immediate emancipation.34 Especially for formerly enslaved abolitionists, images of escaping slaves were effective discursive tools for refuting racist propaganda that slaves w ere content under slavery and lacked the capacities necessary for citizenship. Racialized notions of freedom and citizenship defined black men as lacking the characteristics essential to a male American republican citizen—inde pendence, rationality, courage, patriarchal authority, and love of liberty. To counter such definitions, former-slave authors articulated traits of masculine Americanness through the narration of a slave’s movement from slavery to freedom. In these stories, a male fugitive slave demonstrated resourcefulness and audacity by overcoming dangers during his escape. At the core of t hese formulations was a nineteenth-century popular discourse that grafted manhood and national identity onto an ability to surmount obstacles while on a journey. According to the historian Bruce Dorsey, during the mid-nineteenth century, traveling in the face of difficulties came to be associated with manliness, Americanness, and whiteness.35 Fugitive writers deployed this racialized and gendered myth in their effort to construct a masculine American identity for male slaves.36 The appropriation of “the dominant cultural code of manly power and dignity” enabled Frederick Douglass and others to depict themselves and their enslaved brothers as equipped with the capacities of a true American man.37 In this way, male authors inscribed a distinctively black form of movement—slave escape—with a set of traits traditionally associated with white male Americans. Adapting the representational politics of the American slave narratives, Ward reworked slave escape to Canada as a movement that required for its successful execution the very attributes of the ideal settler that white colonists 122 • Chapter 4
denied in former slaves. In Ward’s version the characteristics demonstrated by a slave’s escape showed male former slaves’ qualifications to be good British settlers: resourcefulness was translated into industry and enterprise, and risk taking into ardent love of the British Crown and the freedom granted by it. The strategic value of Ward’s escape narrative was its ability to produce positive meanings about slave flight by shifting the focus from the purpose of the migration to its process. While Larwill’s hierarchical dichotomy drew on the difference between each group’s reason for coming to Canada—to escape or to work—Ward focused on the mental and physical rigors involved in the process of slave escape to tether this particular kind of movement to settler status. In proving that “the Negro settlers in Canada” were “peaceful and industrious citizens,” Ward scripted a moving male slave figure with idealized capacities.38 He represented former slaves as better settlers with greater levels of energy and industry than white immigrants, basing his argument on the difference in the severity of the two types of migration: slaves’ escape on foot was more physically and mentally arduous than white immigrants’ use of oceanic and ground conveyances. At one meeting, Ward juxtaposed “his p eople who fled from slavery in the United States” and “immigrants from different parts of Europe” and explained to the audience that “the very fact of escaping from slavery” implied a fugitive’s greater physical and m ental “energy” compared to that of “a white man going on board of a steamboat, or in a rail way car, to travel.”39 Ward took this strategy beyond the Canadian borders into the British Isles during his trip as an emissary of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada to raise contributions for the relief of former-slave residents.40 After leaving Canada in April 1853, he toured E ngland and Ireland addressing religious and missionary organizations, including the Congregational Union and the Colonial Missionary Society.41 Some public meetings w ere also held specifically for him and his cause, with a committee established solely to support his fund- raising work in E ngland.42 At one of those gatherings, Ward put into full use his male fugitive imagery to show that “it required quite a man to escape from slavery” and that those who succeeded in escaping w ere so self-reliant and resourceful as to be “about as good subjects as any that Her Majesty had.” A slave’s overcoming of the ordeals—“skulking along by day, and running along by night,” during which “one had to place oneself in circumstances of the extremest peril”—demonstrated a “great deal of the bone and sinew of mankind” possessed by the male slave. Without that, Ward opined, “no one could expose himself to all the hardships and risks which attended flight.” Besides Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 123
physical powers, the fugitive slave had to have “ingenuity” to devise an escape and a steely “determination” to execute the plan. Blessed with muscles, brains, and a mighty heart, escaped slaves in Canada were “men who satisfactorily solved the problem of their own maintenance when work was placed before them.”43 Some of Ward’s lectures in the British Isles were reprinted in the Provincial Freeman. Such transatlantic flows gave the trope of “running away” wider purchase in the debate over the legitimacy of black presence in Canada. Revealing the pervasiveness of this theme, a local newspaper criticized Larwill by asking: “Does our confrere seriously believe that the ‘lazy’ and the ‘vicious’ will make strenuous exertions to reach the elevated platform of freedom?” Former slaves’ flight from slavery, the paper suggested, was far from implying that they possessed the antithesis of the desired settler characteristics, but in fact corroborated the claim that “the ‘runaway negro’ generally settles down and becomes an intelligent member of society.”44 Converting experiences of escape into a cultural weapon, black Canadians took a stand against racially exclusive notions of colonial belonging. THE CREATION OF THE FEMALE SETTLER-I MMIGRANT
Compared to texts on male fugitive slaves, narratives of female slave escapes were scarce in U.S., Canadian, and British abolitionist literature. In most slave narratives, a genre dominated by male authors, enslaved w omen figured as immobile and primarily served as a symbol of frustrated male authority and of undermined female chastity. Juxtaposed with the mobile escaping male slave, the “powerless, passive, fearful, and helpless” slave woman can even be said to imply that “emancipation is not properly a woman’s pursuit or destiny.”45 Even when a female slave character leaves slavery, she tends to be a passive recipient of male assistance. In Henry Bibb’s escape narrative and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, for instance, female slave characters need their husbands to flee from bondage, a narrative structure that reinforces the association between mobility and manhood. Of the existing escape stories featuring enslaved w omen, the narrative plot that enjoyed most popularity was that of the escaping “mulatto” mother, which was primarily employed to foreground slavery’s disruption of racial and domestic norms. Exemplified by the “mulatto” m other Eliza, who crossed the frozen Ohio River in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this popular motif denoted the cruelty of an enslaved mother’s separation (or the possibil124 • Chapter 4
FIGURE 4.2 Illustration from Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,
An American Slave, Written by Himself (1849). Original image held by Joyner Library, East Carolina University. Digital edition courtesy of Louis Round Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina‒Chapel Hill.
ity of separation) from her child, augmented by the perversion of enslaving a woman with fair complexion. For example, a letter published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper recounted the story of a light-skinned female slave mother who fled to Canada after her children had been sold away from her. The letter evoked the theme of maternal loss as it described the m other who “set her face Canada ward” after “her last child was sold down the river to satisfy the claims of her masters’ creditors.” It also captured the racial wrongs of slavery with an allusion to the plot about Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Here is a woman almost white—with her soul crushed, and crushed, as one child a fter another has been torn from her, and sold to the slave-traders, Legree and others.”46 Another account of a slave mother and child who fled from Kentucky to Canada also was written in a way to elicit sympathy from white readers. The mother was depicted as “light, fair and beautiful” and “of noble intellect and [a] refined, ethereal spiritual nature,” and her child was “white, and everyway good looking enough for any body’s child.” The phrase “anybody’s child” meant any white person’s child, and the invocation of racial affinity was intended to foster a recognition of slavery as a wicked system of white enslavement.47 The “mulatto” mother figure was not an ideal discursive tool with which to signify black w omen’s place in settler colonial Canada. First and foremost, the figure signified not so much blackness as whiteness. These abolitionist Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 125
texts condemned the enslavement of humans classified as white. The slave mother and her child were cast as pale-skinned, and their enslavement was denounced not least b ecause of their near whiteness. In countering colonial settlers who vilified blackness, the “whitened” female fugitive figure did not seem to be an appealing cultural resource. It is important to note that, contrary to the representations of black female slaves as passive, helpless, and immobile in male-authored slave narratives, substantial numbers of enslaved women in fact escaped on their own—in all-female groups or alone. In personal letters and organizational records, there is evidence that enslaved w omen acted on their desire for freedom and overcame adversaries without male assistance. Records kept by William Still, a leading member of Philadelphia’s revived vigilance committee, reveal enslaved women’s aspirations and endurance.48 He documented runaways who arrived in Philadelphia between December 25, 1852, and February 22, 1857, taking notes of the details of their escapes such as their places of departure and whom they left b ehind. The 265 fugitives who came u nder Still’s care included 108 men, 96 w omen, and 32 c hildren (the gender was unrecorded for 29 others). Taking into account only those whose gender was known, the ratio of men to w omen was 1:0.89, an almost equal proportion between male and female fugitives. Except for 42 individuals whose traveling conditions were unclear, the fugitives w ere recorded to have come in 155 diff erent parties, 52 of which were either w omen traveling together or alone. These all-female bands accounted for roughly 34 percent of the recorded parties, which testifies to an obvious willingness and ability of enslaved women to break f ree of their bondage without men’s help.49 Women’s desperate yearning for freedom was manifest in the fact that some of them left their husbands and even their children in bondage. Harriet Shepherd fled without her husband and came with her five c hildren by “help[ing] themselves to their master’s h orses and carriages.” Maria Joiner escaped on her own, leaving her husband and sister still in bondage. Sarah Aires also sought freedom while her enslaved husband remained in Maryland. Emeline Chatman ran away without her husband, d aughter, and son. Th ese women all displayed their resolve to be free by their own exertions. One lone traveler, Elza McCoy, voiced what these women had felt but that had failed to enter the standard male-authored narratives—that she had “always wanted to be free.”50 Their determination was supported by legally free women who used their family networks to help female runaways cross the border. Elizabeth Williams, an aunt of Shadd, wrote to her niece about a woman in Delaware who 126 • Chapter 4
“lives in continual dread” of “a Colored man” who knew her former owner. The female fugitive desired to leave for Canada in the near future and had Williams relay her questions to Shadd: “Whether you think she can make a living by her needle there and whether you would be willing to let her come to your house for a short time and whether you would be willing to ade [sic] her in [indecipherable] work when she first come out there.” Williams affirmed the w oman’s character by conveying her determination to work on her own as a seamstress and “not want to come to live on you.”51 Nevertheless, fugitive women’s courage, enterprise, and love of freedom did not result in a fugitive figure that formerly enslaved w omen in Canada could deploy to assert their colonial belonging. Th ere was thus an urgent need for a cultural device to articulate black female British identities, and that need was diligently addressed by Shadd. Before she arrived in Canada, Shadd had been a strong advocate of the social, political, and economic improvement of the northern free black community. She had published a pamphlet titled Hints to the Colored People of the North in 1849 and spent ten years teaching black children in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, where she had attended a Quaker boarding school. In 1851 Shadd visited Toronto to attend the North American Convention, at which black residents of Canada and the United States met to discuss the viability of emigration and different destination options in the face of the deteriorating conditions in the United States. Shadd chose to stay in the British province and settled in Windsor, then a small town by the Detroit River. She soon rekindled her passion for teaching by founding a private school for black children with financial assistance from the American Missionary Association. However, the aid ended after one year, and Shadd reluctantly gave up teaching. Her attention subsequently shifted to publishing and editing, and the Provincial Freeman became her main commitment.52 Shadd used the newspaper as a vehicle to press for black migrants’ integration into Canada as settlers who enjoyed equal footing with white colonists. Following in the footsteps of Ward, Shadd committed the paper to contesting the white monopoly of land ownership and civil rights. One of her sworn enemies was Larwill; articles castigating him appeared in the Provincial Freeman more than once.53 Another entity that incurred her disfavor was the Colonial Church and School Society, which set forth a model of black British subjecthood that contradicted Shadd’s settler-immigrant identity. The organization was a missionary society based in London, which had come into being on January 1, 1851, as a result of the merger of the Colonial Church Society and the Church Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 127
of England School Society for Newfoundland and the Colonies. Tending to the religious welfare of British-born colonists was the society’s official primary duty, in preference to the task of evangelizing “the Heathen” who came under British imperial rule, although each local context necessitated a distinct program.54 The society sent missionaries to colonies as diverse as British North America, the British West Indies, East India, the Cape of Good Hope, Australia, Hong Kong, and Malta.55 Considered an important aspect of British imperial expansion, the society’s effort to maintain colonists’ Anglican affiliation enjoyed the support of high-ranking figures: Queen Victoria was its patron, and the archbishops of Canterbury and York were its vice patrons. Members of Parliament and Anglican bishops in different colonies served as its vice presidents.56 In British North America, the society’s missionary efforts extended to former-slave refugees, French Canadians, and indigenous populations as well as colonists from the British Isles.57 The mission among self-emancipated people was formally put on its agenda at a committee meeting in April 1853 and became known as the Fugitive Slave Mission sometime before 1856.58 The Fugitive Slave Mission was initiated by members of the West London Ladies’ omen of the United States Association, who had written an Address to the W for the Abolition of Slavery, a transatlantic call to exert female influence for the cause of abolitionism. After writing the Address, the women realized that such effort lacked “a practical character” and therefore ventured into new territory.59 The Fugitive Slave Mission was part antislavery project and part colonial mission. The project was devised with hopes that “the spectacle of a large body of the negro race, elevated in social and religious condition” would help effect abolition in the United States.60 It was also considered an endeavor to uplift the moral condition of fellow British subjects. The founding members solicited support for “the fugitive colored population in our own colony of Canada,” who “as our fellow subjects, have a special claim on our regard.”61 On the latter point, the society implemented the Fugitive Slave Mission as part of its broader scheme of administrating the religious needs of black colonial subjects across the empire. In the annual report for 1856–57, the period during which its West Indian missions began operating, religious instruction for self-emancipated populations in Canada and “the emancipated negroes of the West Indies” was portrayed as part of a broader project of civilizing “the African race” in the empire.62 The report set the two groups side by side, pleading for “the sympathies of British Christians of the beautiful and now 128 • Chapter 4
impoverished West India islands . . . [and] of the fugitive slaves also, who are annually seeking the protection of the British empire on Canadian soil.”63 The society’s choice of missionaries also exhibited metropolitan whites’ tendency to combine formerly enslaved people in Canada and the Caribbean into a group of British subjects distinguished by their past enslavement. The appointed missionaries, Rev. M. M. Dillon and a lay missionary named Ballantine, were selected because they were both considered to have had “long and extensive acquaintance with the characteristics of the African race” in a British colonial context.64 Both had worked in Dominica, with Dillon as rector and Ballantine as religious instructor among “the colored boys.”65 At Dillon’s request, the society also appointed two people from the Caribbean as infant school teachers. They were “two young colored females named Titre”— sisters who had accompanied Ballantine from Dominica and who were then studying at the Home and Colonial Institution (the society’s school for the training of missionaries prior to their fieldwork).66 James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, the governor general of Canada and former governor of Jamaica, also perceived the mission as part of an intercolonial rubric of British emancipated subjects. When greeting Dillon, who arrived in September 1854, Elgin “expressed his deep interest in the Mission, arising from his former connexion with Jamaica.”67 Like colonial missions in the West Indies, the Fugitive Slave Mission was structurally and ideologically based on an unequal relationship between metropolitan whites and emancipated black colonial subjects. The underlying sense of white superiority was manifested in an address published in the society’s annual report, which Shadd reprinted in the Freeman. In appealing for donations for the mission, the address painted a derogatory picture of formerly enslaved fugitives in Canada, describing them as being “in the lowest state of ignorance of religion, and even of secular knowledge” and “utterly neglected by all around them.”68 Its denigrating tone met with Shadd’s criticism that it did nothing but “injustice to the colored people, by considering them to [be in] a pit of degradation.”69 At the core of her censure was the conviction that black Canadians’ relationship to the empire should parallel that of white colonists—blacks should be seen not as British emancipated subjects but as equal constituents of the Canadian settler polity. This position resonated with the view of a group of black residents in Toronto, who convened a meeting to refute the aforementioned address and denounce the mission’s treatment of black Canadians as “a distinct class” of “Her Majesty’s loyal subjects in this country where no Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 129
distinction is made on account of color.”70 This statement was echoed by a reader of the Provincial Freeman who complained to Shadd that Canada’s black residents were already “receiv[ing] religious instruction in common with the rest of Her Majesty’s subjects,” in contrast to “the West Indies,” where greater missionary work was in urgent need, specifically among freed populations.71 The reader’s statement made a deliberate distinction between black people in Canada and in the Caribbean: the British Caribbean consisted of colonies with black majority populations in need of race-specific religious instruction from the metropole, while Canada was a society in which black settlers participated in its religious life alongside other Canadians. Such a favorable depiction of Canadian black life was more a political strategy than anything else. It was a way for Shadd and her sympathizers to assert their particular model of British identity, in which they w ere equal participants in a settler polity and not the empire’s black emancipated people locked in the hierarchical racial relationship exemplified by the top-down West Indian colonial missionary system. In further assimilating black populations into Canadian settlerhood, Shadd consolidated formerly enslaved fugitives and f ree black migrants into a single free black people, which symbolically helped erase the chief factor that had been invoked by white settlers to justify black exclusion: the association of slave escape with laziness, transience, and lack of loyalty.72 Such an approach put Shadd in conflict with the Bibbs, who upheld a separate former-slave identity. The conflict led to public wranglings over a land distribution policy at the Refugee Home Society.73 The society’s stance of providing land exclusively to former-slave individuals contradicted Shadd’s position that between “self-emancipated freed men and free men,” “no line of demarcation [should be] drawn among them; all are a dopted British freemen.”74 In her view, formerly enslaved and legally free blacks now belonged in a single people whose members had transcended their past status in the United States. This sense of collective free black identity became a fundamental tenet of a campaign to oppose the Refugee Home Society. Shadd and like-minded African Canadians maintained that “refugees from American slavery” were “now loyal subjects of Her Majesty’s Government” and that between former-slave refugees and “several thousand [who] have never been slaves . . . there is greater unanimity on all questions affecting them, as freemen.”75 Based on this overarching identity as f ree Canadians, Shadd crafted a black female subject that personified a common future for legally free and former- slave migrants. The result was the black female settler-immigrant whose journey 130 • Chapter 4
to Canada was for the purpose of improving her f amily’s material condition and whose womanhood denoted her gender-specific reproductive and maternal tasks. This figure, which evolved during the period 1852–56, first appeared in Shadd’s emigration guide, titled A Plea for Emigration, or, Notes of Canada West. The guide presented to African Americans “the prospect of becoming purchasers and settlers” in Canada and furnished detailed information about the colony’s climate, soil quality, prices of land, and crops and livestock that could be raised there, followed by an explanation of access to political rights, religious instruction, and schooling.76 Constructed in the pages of the guide was a black settler-immigrant subject intent on economic advancement. In creating her black female settler-immigrant figure, Shadd appropriated and reworked a female prototype prevalent in Canadian settler immigrant lit erature. This appropriation was clear in an advertisement for a housekeeping manual published in the Provincial Freeman. The manual, titled The Female Emigrant’s Guide; or Hints on Canadian Housekeeping and written by a Mrs. C. P. Trail, was originally aimed at w omen from the British Isles, but Shadd broadened its target readership to include African American w omen from the United States.77 She recommended the book to any woman “who has left her childhood’s home to find a new one in a strange land.” In Shadd’s mind, this immigrant woman did not have to be white. She predicted that the manual would be a huge hit “now that the advantages of Canada are being discussed so much more freely in the Old Country than formerly, and also among the colored people in the United States.”78 In a broader cultural context, immigration guides written by w omen writers constituted a literature genre called the settlement journal, exemplified by Trail’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide (1854) and Roughing It in the Bush, Or Life in the Canadas (1852) by Susanna Moodie, Trail’s sister.79 Settlement journals provided information about the conditions in the colony to prospective immigrants, offering advice on how to adjust to a new social and natural environment and re-create British life and institutions there.80 Through the reframing of the female domestic immigrant constructed in the settlement journals—a racialized figure understood as white—Shadd invented a figure evocative of African American women’s integration into Canadian settler womanhood. This black womanhood transcended the fugitive-free divide. Having most likely been influenced by Shadd’s idea of an all-inclusive free people, some black women advanced a female settler-immigrant identity for formerly enslaved women. They did so through a conscious redefining of slaves’ border Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 131
crossing—transforming it from an escape from oppression into a quest for material wealth—and through emphasizing their gender role as m others and wives. A letter from a formerly enslaved settler, N. D. Hopewell, was a case in point. Hopewell, who “ha[d] served in the h ouse of bondage for the first twenty years of my life,” wrote to the Provincial Freeman in the hope that the newspaper, unlike regular mail that could be intercepted, would spread her message to her friends and family left in Kentucky.81 In the letter, Hopewell meticulously described her blooming domestic life on her family’s farm. She devoted a great deal of space to details of their “good freehold farm,” describing it as “something less than one hundred acres, with the necessary outbuildings, and a very good frame dwelling and the needed furniture within, with a good young orchard of first rate fruit trees and shrubbery, with grape vines of the best quality, and not a few of very pretty flowers, of which you know, I was always very fond.” She also offered a glimpse of the livestock—“a good cow . . . [who] made no l ittle butter . . . hogs and chickens . . . turkeys and geese and ducks and guinea[hen]s”—and reported on the year’s crop: “We have raised this season a fine crop of wheat and corn.”82 These descriptions conveyed her household’s prosperous state to those who remained in the United States, a practice reminiscent of typical settler letters sent back home that shared details of family activities and opportunities in the New World.83 The portrayal of a thriving farm life went hand in hand with situating a female self within the household and constructing a subject who was wife and mother. Hopewell explained that her most important duty in Canada was to “take care of a family, several of whom are children,” and she pronounced her husband “one of the best of men” and reported that their “two little children are the sweetest little creatures in the world!” Juxtaposed against this perfect domestic world was an inability to practice normative motherhood in slavery. Hopewell grieved for the enslaved mothers, lamenting: “I often think of many of you, who are mothers in the Slave States, in such connection. May God help you and your dear children out of such a miserable condition.”84 In concluding her letter, Hopewell put g reat emphasis on the rich natural resources of the colony, more so than on the eminence of Canada as a haven from slavery. She made a fairly abrupt switch from celebrating the absence of slavery in Canada to elaborating on how “Canada is one of the most productive countries, not only on the Continent, but in the world”:
132 • Chapter 4
Let me tell you dear friends, of the South and you of the North, that canada is the only free country on the american continent! Well that is one good thing, but then another is, Canada is one of the most productive countries, not only on the Continent, but in the world, and that is another good t hing. These productions are of many kinds. The world never saw such babies, as we have h ere, and we w ill put Canada for wheat against that grown in Paradise! And such hogs and h orses as we have . . . —my stars! and we raised them h ere. Nobody ever saw such cabbage and corn, poultry, and strawberries, and e very kind of such things, since father Adam took his last load to the market?85 Stressed here were not the oppressive forces that compelled slaves to flee but a positive incentive that Canada offered to anyone who wished to better his or her material condition. Another example of this reframing of slaves’ mobility was a speech made by a “young lady,” who ascribed migration of “the African slave of America” to the desire for a better economic future. Asserting that a principal motive of human migration was “wealth,” she redefined slaves’ transborder movement as an effort to achieve prosperity. In particular, she found land cultivation to be the key to success and urged “those who wish to acquire wealth by Emigration” to s ettle in “the forest waste, where we can have sufficient land to raise our produce enough to sustain our families.”86 The speaker used the vision of family-based farming as a way to put black women at the center of a new black peoplehood in Canada. She advocated independent landholding because of its ability to turn African Americans currently in the United States into “a free and independent people,” whose sustenance would depend on black women’s performing domestic duties in their respective h ouseholds. If “we desire to be a p eople,” she wrote, “Mothers, your daughters should be thoroughly acquainted with those trades that are necessary to our sex.”87 In this view, w omen w ere responsible for maintaining both their family and the metaphorical family of a black Canadian race. Such a formulation not only fashioned black migrants into settler-immigrants but also placed black w omen in a position of legitimacy in this black settler peoplehood by assigning them a distinctly female role of domestic production and reproduction. However, the concept of the black settler-immigrant did not seem to be an effective category of belonging in mainstream Canadian political discourse,
Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 133
which tended to put black Canadians in the category of British emancipated blacks, alongside the British Caribbean freed people. A case in point is an 1858 motion submitted to the Canadian Legislative Council to levy a tax on black migrants from the United States in the same way that a capitation tax was imposed on white immigrants. The motion, authored by Colonel John Prince, an English-born legislator with a taste for racial demagoguery, met with opposition from other legislators on the ground that black migrants’ unhindered entrance into Canada symbolized Britain’s abolitionist principles and its benevolence to black emancipated p eople across the empire. One legislator denounced the tax proposal as “a most un-British motion . . . brought into the House.” Another disputed Prince’s degrading characterization of the migrants by pointing out that “the blacks in Jamaica . . . were an orderly, well behaved class of people.”88 The politicians discussed U.S.-origin migrants in association with imperial emancipation and British Caribbean blacks, an association that black leaders such as Gallego and Ward had vigorously advocated. In a way the opposition to Prince’s motion represented a benevolent gesture toward the black arrivals, but it also rejected the black settler identity fashioned by Shadd and her supporters. Prince’s critics could not conceive of black subjects other than as beneficiaries of the empire’s abolitionist creed, in much the same way that emancipated Jamaicans were seen. Paradoxically, Prince’s antiblack motion would have treated black Canadians as equal to white immigrants. People outside Canada also refused to recognize the black settler as a category during this era, as shown by new legal measures in Oregon and California. Similar to the model of white settler dominance envisioned by advocates of Liberian colonization, territorial and state regulations were enacted to create a white free-soil Pacific West that was characterized by an absence of free blacks. As we have seen above, the principle of a white monopoly on settler privileges had been affirmed in the Northwest by the series of statutes that banned black migration and promoted Liberian colonization. By this time, the trend of antiblack legislation had hit the Pacific West, a new fron iddle tier for “the use of the white man.”89 Exhibiting “the influence of the M West [that] was evident from the very beginning of government in the Pacific Northwest,” the Oregon territorial government ordered that all f ree black and “mulatto” residents leave the territory within two years or e lse suffer flogging (and later apprenticeship) u ntil they left, a measure reminiscent of an 1803 Illinois territorial law.90 At the federal level, northern lawmakers likewise sought to realize the vision of a white free-soil West by prohibiting free blacks 134 • Chapter 4
from receiving federal land grants in the new Oregon Territory.91 When Oregon achieved statehood, the state legislature banned black residents from owning real estate and in 1857 inserted provisions against black migration into the state’s constitution.92 California followed in its northern neighbor’s footsteps and hampered black landownership in the state by excluding blacks from its homestead law.93 Worse, the federal government deprived African Americans of the right to become free-soil settlers. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied citizenship to African Americans f ree black men and women were legally barred from the government’s distribution of western land. When “a company of colored People” in Pittsburgh “desired to form a party to emigrate westward and settle upon and pre-empt public lands,” the General Land Office flatly refused to apply to them the preemption legislation of 1841 that allowed settlers who had squatted on public land to purchase it for low prices. The reason for the denial was that they w ere “not 94 citizens of the United States.” Faced with the increasingly rigid boundaries of the expanding free soil, northern black leaders developed a politics of mobility. They imagined and practiced settler mobility to assimilate into the republic in practice and ideology as participants in the promise of free soil—that is, of landholding and upward mobility away from urban life. For instance, the black convention movement, an annual conference series inaugurated in Philadelphia in 1830, compiled a report that displayed black northerners’ aspirations for indepen dent farming as an alternative to urban life. The report of the convention of 1843 contained a statement from “a body of colored farmers in Mercer Co. Ohio” encouraging people in the cities to “go out into the country and become a part of the bone and sinew of the land.” The committee in charge of the report, which included Charles B. Ray, urged residents in “the big cities, and large towns” to leave for the countryside to “settle themselves down as freemen” in “the States of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Territories of Wisconsin and Iowa.” Although aware that “some of them [the states and territories], it is true, are, or may be, objectionable on account of their laws,” the committee nevertheless expressed its hope that “time and the growing intelligence of the people . . . are destined to make those laws obnoxious to the people themselves.” Clear from the report was the convention’s serious treatment of the issue and its members’ desire to partake in the popular pursuit of independent landed settlement.95
Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 135
African Americans’ claims of settler mobility were meant to undercut the abiding colonization discourse that designated Africa, not the West, as the frontier for black advancement. At an anticolonization meeting in New York in 1849, the prominent black abolitionist Charles Remond rejected migration to Liberia because it differed from the kind of movement that characterized westward expansion: a voluntary pursuit of wealth driven by “the spirit [with which] the white American goes to California.” “The spirit of the American Colonization Society” was the opposite of the resolve to act on “individual ambitions for elevation and wealth” and “go where they shall choose to go, for the purpose of bettering their condition.”96 Remond clearly recognized that Liberian colonization was antithetical to westward expansion and that challenging the African scheme was also a way to inscribe African Americans with the American spirit of frontier pioneering. Northern blacks’ merging of the quest of landholding and the challenge to Liberian colonization took a concrete form in the settlement of free black families on 120,000 acres of land in the Adirondacks furnished by the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. This was not only an economic venture but also a po litical act on two fronts. First, the settlement signified a free black version of the western settler experience, with black “pioneer cultivators” becoming “the free and independent owners and cultivators of our own farms.”97 This was their way of participating in the dream of free soil—of transforming free black urban residents into “tillers of the soil” through “self-emancipation from the drudgery of the cities.”98 Second, northern black leaders such as Ray used the settlement as evidence of black suitability to the climate of upstate New York, calling it “a climate, in which labour is a means for the full and free development of the energies of mankind.”99 This was designed to refute black tropicality and showcase African Americans’ physical aptitude to labor in a temperate climate. Fully aware that relocation to Africa and exclusion from frontier settlement w ere two intertwined goals in colonization advocacy, t hese black northerners understood that claiming pioneer status meant challenging notions of black tropical affinity. This settler vision also included the establishment of a morally and materially flourishing farming family headed by a male patriarch. Prospective settlers were expected to lead an idealized settler life in which “your fields teem with ripe and mellow harvest, when your h ouse and your barn shall stand cosily by the road-side, when your church shall modestly rear itself in the distance” and “when your wives and children shall cluster round your hearth in the robust health of a country life.”100 This is a vision of a prospering Christian 136 • Chapter 4
ousehold taking root in the fertile land awaiting cultivation. But of course h this vision by no means presented the full picture. What these pursuits and their counterparts in Canada demonstrated was the transnational scope of the intersections of free black exclusion and settler colonial formations in North America. The histories of settler colonial development in both Canada and the United States included the contested delineation of the racial boundaries of what nineteenth-century contemporaries deemed the primary benefits of frontier settlement—that is, landholding, economic mobility and independence, and an attendant social and political status. Equally important, embedded in this shared pattern was the fact that the creation of independent black households necessitated the displacement of indigenous populations. As Canada West was once the home of First Nations such as the Mississauga and Ojibwa peoples, Mercer County in Ohio had been occupied by the Miamis and Shawnees, and the Adirondacks w ere 101 once the territory of the Mohawks. In a settler colonial society in which progress—that of the state and the p eople—presumed the exploitation of actual and symbolic resources of Native lands, it may have been imperative for those deemed inherently inferior, perpetually degraded, and essentially alien to ground their claim for belonging in material and discursive attachment to land. Such an imperative, I would argue, put on clear display the hegemonic power of white settler rule that elicited a desire from non-indigenous people of color to take part in the colonial project as it rested on their exclusion and regulation. •
By the end of the 1850s African North Americans faced heightened opposition to their presence in the settler landscape of North America. The failure of white Canadians—even the most benevolent ones—to acknowledge black migrants’ status as immigrant settlers was poignant testimony to how this category had become rigidly connected to whiteness. The case was the same in the United States. That nation’s highest court buttressed black exclusion from the intertwined privileges of republican citizenship and economic mobility and thus further solidified the whiteness of the free cultivator of the American frontier. A primary signifier used in representing settler colonial membership was mobility. Articulations of belonging and exclusion figured in spatial Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Bounda ries • 137
movements. This mode of enacting meanings had much resonance and effect during this era, when diverse migrations crisscrossed the Atlantic and North America and presented themselves as fodder for representation. Northern black Americans as well as settler colonists and black migrants in Canada all engaged in a politics of mobility, variously rigidifying and disrupting the association of whiteness and settler status through diff erent figurations of black movements. In the process, black activists in Canada and African American abolitionists fashioned themselves as properly gendered settler subjects. Such constructions, in turn, attested to the hegemony of settler colonial structures of self-making. Mobility was by no means the only way in which the settler colonial tenet of black exclusion was reinforced and problematized. Also undergirding the segregationist racial geographies was another formidable language of race and space—climatic determinism. Free black populations in the United States and Canada refuted and revised this ideology as they tackled transnational exertions of control over their locations exercised by both British and U.S. advocates of black removal to the tropics. What emerged as a result were African North Americans’ ingenious reformulations of the relationship between the black body and the tropics and even alternative theories of racial classification that completely rejected the black-white distinction.
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Chapter 5
RACE, CLIMATE, AND L ABOR
In 1851 members of the newly formed Anti-Slavery Society of Canada drew a parallel between two kinds of migration schemes: “The West Indies planters desire a supply of coloured labourers while the friends of slavery in the United States are equally desirous to have their coloured population in Liberia.”1 Referring to Jamaica’s recently resumed effort to import black workers from Canada and the decades-long movement to relocate free African Americans to Liberia, the members were on to something when they compared the two projects, both of which were “equally” pushing free black people in North America to distant tropical places. While the Canadian abolitionists assumed that emigration proponents in Britain and in the United States only engaged black populations within their respective territories, their plans in fact encompassed t hose living within the other’s borders as well—albeit with important differences in the way each party sought displacement: the British by institutional means and Americans at a symbolic level. This chapter charts how the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 generated considerable incentives in the United States and Britain to control and manage free black populations outside their borders. On the one hand, an array of colonial and metropolitan interests believed that passage of the Fugitive Slave Law had disillusioned f ree African Americans so much that they would readily make themselves available as plantation laborers in the
British Caribbean alongside formerly enslaved people from Canada—whose ever-conspicuous presence was raising ire among white Canadians. The lumping together of the two groups stemmed not only from a belief in essentialist ideas about the black body but also from a self-serving reading of African North Americans as what I call laborers of the West—workers equipped with the attributes of l abor efficiency and social stability deemed necessary for the British plantation economy: the English language, Christian faith, and experience with Western social customs. On the other hand, advocates of Liberian colonization rejected as physically impractical free and enslaved p eople’s exodus to cold Canada—yet that exodus increased a fter the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. At stake was the African scheme’s fundamental tenet. African Americans’ well-being in Canada directly contradicted the essentialist claim that the black body was inherently suitable for the heat of the tropics.2 Asserting the debilitation of black refugees in Canada thus helped justify sending African Americans to tropical Africa. And, predictably, insisting that blacks were predisposed to thrive in the tropics served a settler colonial function in much the same way that it had in previous decades. Black tropicality gave advocates of colonization a biological ground for eliminating f ree blacks from the free-soil western frontiers. Also highlighted in this chapter are African North Americans’ responses to such multidirectional policing. Those in Canada were not uniformly against leaving the province; many of them were primarily concerned with the how and where of imperial belonging—that is, what type of labor they would pursue in which part of the British Empire. Their main interest was in contesting and negotiating the racial divide between white settler landownership in Canada and nonwhite plantation l abor in the tropical Caribbean. In contrast, African Americans generally dismissed West Indian emigration for the same reason they refused to go to Liberia: leaving their home was not an option for many. Underneath their divergent responses, however, lay a shared critique of the structural commonalities between the Caribbean and African relocation projects: both of them upheld racially segregated spaces of freedom on an Atlantic scale. Apprehensive but undaunted, African North American thinkers set out to tackle what was at the core of the black removal schemes: the idea that the black body was inherently more suited to tropical than to temperate climates and as a result blacks were destined to live in only certain parts of the world. Determined to discredit such fatalism, the thinkers disseminated alternative theories about race and place through publications and speeches. Their intellectual work ranged from redefining the valuations attached to 140 • Chapter 5
blackness to a more radical reformulation of race in an attempt to disrupt the black-white racial categorization itself and create a new race that included both black and white Americans. These challenges by African North Americans eventually succeeded in cracking the powerful transnational paradigm of race and geography. That coup notwithstanding, the struggle continued as new emigration projects arose. The arena of contest moved to a British-based scheme to advance free-labor agriculture in Africa, giving rise to a body of conflicting ideas about pivotal questions: Should the imperial space be segmented by race? What role should North American f ree blacks play in the empire? And what is the relationship between the black body and Africa’s climate? Opinions on t hese issues w ere presented in published ruminations and meeting proceedings, as well as through nonliterary means by formerly enslaved people. CONTESTING THE BRITISH RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF FREEDOM
By the beginning of the 1850s, landownership in so-called temperate climates had solidified in British imperial discourse as a privilege promised only to whites, an expanding category of people who allegedly shared a set of mental and physical characteristics. This precept informed the way land and labor usage was designed in places such as Jamaica. When a handful of planters sought white Americans to help cultivate the land t here in 1850, they advertised emigration to Jamaica as a settler venture, similar to ones that were unfolding in North America and Australia. In a speech urging white Americans to leave for the island that later circulated in the United States in print form, William Wemyss Anderson, a colonial legislator and plantation owner, employed idioms of frontier pioneering, land development, and climatic characteristics. To begin, following the model of North American settler colonial symbolism, Anderson associated Jamaica with a temperate climate, calling it comparable to a Mediterranean country. In language reminiscent of the colonial rhetoric from the previous decade, his speech designated the “mountains of Jamaica” as the area for white settlement, where “the climate is salubrious and delightful.” In an attempt to make the environment of the island attractive to white Americans, Anderson called Jamaica “the Italy of the Western world.”3 Next came frontier imagery. Anderson projected onto the Jamaican landscape a vision of pioneers civilizing the wilderness, an image entrenched in Race, Climate, and L abor • 141
the language of Anglo-American settler colonialism. In the Jamaican version of frontier development, white Americans w ere expected to own a tract of land and turn Jamaica into a land of “fertility and abundance and beauty.”4 Invoking a typical settler colonial motif of a white man and his family “fearlessly enter[ing] the woods” and “subdu[ing] the land around him,” Anderson wished this pattern of “country life” to be replicated in Jamaica, as had been accomplished in the United States, Canada, and Australia: “Such country life . . . is not confined to the Americans, for the same is to be found in Canada, and other British American provinces, and the countries of Australia. Why then should Jamaica, so well calculated as it is, to rejoice the hearts of its people, not be distinguished by like customs?”5 The “country life” in Jamaica required the kind of vigor exemplary of the standard settler colonial enterprise—that is, the vigor used to annihilate indigenous p eople. Enlisting familiar rhetoric, Anderson solicited the emigration of t hose endowed with the ability to transform “the haunts of the wild hog, the bear, and the Indian, to become seats of leaning and the abodes of wealth and comfort.”6 To Anderson’s dismay, the immigration of white Americans proved a failure, and by December 1850 Jamaican officials had turned their attention again to free black populations in Canada and the United States. The colony’s interest in African North Americans was coincidentally rekindled by correspondence between the Colonial Office and Charles Grey, the governor of Jamaica. Grey requested the home government to allow all liberated Africans to be sent to Jamaica on the ground that a recent cholera outbreak on the island hindered it from securing a sufficient supply of l abor. Colonial Secretary Henry Grey turned down the governor’s request, arguing that l abor shortages in other Caribbean colonies w ere no less severe than that in Jamaica and that attempts to implement emigration of Africans had been foiled at every turn and thus were not worthy of any further effort. Instead he proposed promoting the immigration of black workers from the United States and Canada.7 Henry Grey’s recommendation of African North Americans was a result of persistent calls from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (bfass) to promote the relocation of “the People of Color, from the U. States and Canada to Jamaica,” an agenda the organization had continued to pursue since the previous decade and that now appeared even more promising, thanks to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.8 A memorial to the colonial secretary submitted by John Scoble, secretary of the bfass, mainly addressed formerly enslaved refugees in Canada. But Scoble also suggested the possibility of at-
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tracting larger numbers of “the free people of color” in the United States, for “circumstances . . . have been greatly changed by the Fugitive Slave Law”— which he believed had aroused disaffection among black Americans t oward the country of their birth.9 Scoble’s plan envisioned African North American emigrants’ eventual landownership. They would start off on a plantation as hired workers and ultimately move up to owning a small tract of land. To make this blueprint work, Scoble proposed guaranteeing each black migrant the power of “cancelling the engagement at his pleasure, on giving a month’s notice of his desire to do so.”10 Grey apparently took Scoble’s suggestion to heart and forwarded to Jamaica some of the bfass’s recommendations—including the proposed granting of a right to terminate contracts—along with his own positive comments on North American workers.11 Very likely aware of the arguments for the previous recruitment attempt, the colonial secretary saw African North Americans as bringing “many advantages” to Jamaica, more than Africans, East Indians, and Chinese would, for he expected them to be more cost-effective and socially compatible than the other laborers of color. He believed that “these people are in general trained labourers, accustomed to the usages of civilized society, and speaking the language of the colony in which it is proposed that they should settle.” This would make them “much more useful . . . than a much larger number of the rude inhabitants of Africa, or even than the natives of India ere what can be called or of China.”12 In this way African North Americans w laborers of the West, as opposed to workers from Africa, South Asia and China. The black laborers of the West needed to speak English, be Christian, and have experience with Western social mores. Since the days of the Sierra Leone Company, these qualities had mattered a great deal to colonial administrators who desired profitable colonial laborers. Buoyed by supposedly favorable recruitment conditions caused by the Fugitive Slave Law, Jamaican officials launched their renewed emigration project.13 In 1851 the colony decided to appoint an emigration agent whose duty was to obtain “information from the United States and Canada, with respect to the immigration from thence, into this island, of free colored persons.” Assigned this task was William Wemyss Anderson, who arrived in Canada in early September 1851. There he met with Scoble, who was visiting Canada to investigate the conditions of formerly enslaved refugees. The two men had repeated conversations before they embarked on a transborder campaign to promote black emigration.14
Race, Climate, and L abor • 143
Anderson and Scoble were not of the same mind about the type of labor to be performed by black migrants. While Scoble suggested a transitional progression from wage labor to landownership, Anderson—an agent of the planter class—explicitly sought wage workers or, to a lesser extent, sharecroppers for the sugar plantations and never envisaged black independent landowners in Jamaica.15 While the two agreed that p eople of African descent naturally belonged in the tropics, Anderson defined landowners as white, reflecting his stake in the colony’s racially exploitative economic structure. Yet their differences of opinion did not come to the surface during their lecture tour. Scoble’s wage-to-landowning scenario was nowhere to be seen in their speeches and writings. He may have bowed to the need for collaboration. But whatever the reason, Anderson and Scoble presented a united front as they set out for their first public appearance at the North American Convention held in Toronto. Arranged by Henry Bibb, the convention was intended to address what Bibb considered urgent issues concerning black populations on both sides of the border: abolition, Liberian colonization, and the promotion of black emigration to Canada from the United States.16 Opening its doors to all legally free and self-emancipated people, the convention’s fifty- three delegates arrived from Canada and from northern states such as Ohio, New York, Vermont, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.17 Before the North American Convention, attitudes toward West Indian emigration among black newcomers in Canada could be described as neutral, if not negative. For example, Bibb did not comment when he reported in the Voice of the Fugitive on a reading at the Barbados House of Assembly of a colonial dispatch recommending black emigration from North Amer ica. He merely informed readers that he had learned of the fact from Bermudian newspapers available in Windsor, Canada.18 The Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, which had both black and white members, concluded that black Canadians had no desire to emigrate to the Caribbean. Responding to the governor general’s inquiry as to black residents’ willingness to move southward, the society answered that it was “not aware that there is any disposition on the part of the coloured population in Canada to emigrate to the West Indies.”19 However, the general mood of indifference changed in September 1851. The North American Convention reinserted Caribbean emigration into the consciousness of black residents in Canada, who had come to see their role in the empire primarily as agricultural settlers in the province. In fact, prior to the appearance of Anderson and Scoble on stage, the delegates at the conven144 • Chapter 5
tion expressed their loyalty to the British government from the standpoint of “colored settlers in Canada . . . obtaining possession of uncultivated lands, for the laudable purpose of making themselves and their offspring indepen dent tillers of a f ree soil.”20 The delegates’ preference for Canada had also been clear during a session on African American emigration. After a “spirited debate,” a resolution was adopted that entreated “our brethren of the northern and southern states” to leave the United States, for “the infamous fugitive slave enactment of the American Government” clearly attested to the U.S. government’s “cruel” attitude toward black people. Some delegates from U.S. northern states, including Martin Delany, protested that the resolution had been adopted contrary to their belief that leaving the United States would impair their antislavery efforts and would boost the cause of Liberian colonization.21 Despite the dissent, the delegates eventually agreed that residence in Canada was advisable, since it would allow free African American migrants to counter the Fugitive Slave Law by aiding formerly enslaved people in Canada. Accordingly, another resolution was adopted that urged “the colored p eople of the U.S. of America to emigrate to the Canadas instead of going to Africa or the West India Islands.”22 But just when the convention’s members had come to a decision about the question of emigration, Anderson and Scoble called into question the primacy of Canada as a destination for prospective migrants from the United States. Both men made a speech in favor of mass relocation to the island. Anderson contended that the primary advantage of Jamaican emigration was that the colony boasted a black majority and thus was likely to provide a better future for migrants than places “where their race formed only a small fractional portion of the community,” such as Canada. Scoble spoke next, presenting his vision of making the West Indies a home for f ree blacks dispersed across North America. “The ten millions of the colored race, that now inhabit the western world,” he projected, would “build themselves up, and ultimately establish a nationality in the British West Indies, or adjacent countries.”23 The white men’s proposal met with no enthusiasm from the audience. The black delegates refused to call the Caribbean their only desirable place of belonging. Instead, the convention recommended “a self-sustaining inde pendent emigration to the British West Indies” in lieu of mass migration and designated both Jamaica and Canada to be homes for self-emancipated people—an idea that defied the whites’ mapping of the two colonies as racially distinct spaces, each to be populated by one majority race.24 The discussion ultimately ended with an amendment to the original resolution that Race, Climate, and L abor • 145
added the British West Indies to the list of options, pronouncing that “this convention recommend, as worthy of our support, the Government of Britain and her West Indian Colonies and Canadian Provinces . . . and we recommend to all our friends in the free states, to settle under its protection.”25 Such a vision conflicted with Anderson’s predatory scenario in which black migrants occupied nothing but the bottom stratum of the Jamaican economic pyramid. When the delegates voiced concerns to Anderson about the low standard of wages in the Caribbean and disconcerting rumors that the West Indian planters primarily sought indentured workers, Anderson avoided a direct response. So as not to reveal what was r eally expected of migrants, Anderson changed the focus away from labor conditions, telling the delegates that working in Jamaica came with “a better remuneration in the a ctual comforts of life (if not in pecuniary amount).”26 Despite Anderson’s evasive answer, the delegates did not reject Jamaican emigration completely. A fter hearing Anderson and Scoble, Bibb and o thers devised their own scheme by wedding Jamaican emigration with an agricultural organization they had previously set up to turn formerly enslaved people into in dependent agricultural settlers in Canada.27 The organization, called the North American League, now viewed “the British American Provinces, including the West Indies,” as sites for “agricultural pursuits” by self-emancipated people who would spread across British territories in the Western Hemisphere.28 What made the North American League radical was its proposal of an alternative relationship among race, labor, and place. First, it separated Jamaican emigration from plantation labor and made the project compatible with the ideal of landownership. Second, it encouraged formerly enslaved people to engage in independent farming in both Canada and Jamaica. “An Address to the Colored Inhabitants of North America,” a summary report of the North American Convention prepared by Bibb and two other delegates from Canada, advocated turning “refugees from American slavery” into “owners and tillers of the soil” who would “purchase large tracts of land in Canada and Jamaica” and “establish farms throughout t hose colonies.”29 On a practical note, money to purchase land would come from contributions from league members (who would pay $50 each in ten annual installments). F ree African Americans in the U.S. North were encouraged to become contributing members.30 The dual agricultural pursuits in Canada and Jamaica w ere viewed as an antislavery venture to advance the cause of “free produce,” a tactic aimed at toppling slavery by having produce grown by free labor compete with that grown by slave l abor. In the Voice of the Fugitive, Bibb advertised Jamaican em146 • Chapter 5
igration “not as a scheme of colonization, but as a great commercial and agricultural enterprise, possessing, in itself the elements for breaking down the system of American slavery.” The league would replace “the flour, pork, &c., now consumed in Jamaica,” which w ere currently furnished from the United States, by items produced by “the colored population of Canada, who should receive in return for it, free labor cotton, sugar, rice, &c., produced by colored men in Jamaica.”31 The league anticipated that there would be another abolitionist effect: self-emancipated people’s economic independence would serve as proof of black capacity for freedom. “Every refugee in Canada,” being “a representative of the millions of our brethren who are still held in bondage,” assumed the responsibility of demonstrating to “the eye of the civilized world” the familiar abolitionist mantra, that “we can take care of ourselves.” The organizers believed that escaping from slavery and demonstrating industry jointly constituted a male slave’s abolitionist responsibility and preferred such actions to slave rebellions, or in their words, “conspiracies for the shedding of human blood.”32 The league’s redefinition of the purpose and significance of Jamaican emigration notwithstanding, Anderson remained intent on placing black mi grants in a subordinate position in the Jamaican l abor market. When pressed by concerned African Canadians, he never guaranteed migrants the freedom to choose their employer. He even deemed those who aspired to become in dependent farmers unfavorable candidates for emigration.33 Acutely aware of the depth of planters’ commitment to the race-based plantation economy, one black resident of Canada rightly viewed emigration to Jamaica and the Caribbean in general as nothing but a means of perpetuating the racial hierarchy of labor, even if it was cloaked in an antislavery mantle. Mary Ann Shadd, a staunch proponent of Canadian emigration, stated that the banner of “free cotton, &c.” did not hinder her opposition to emigration to “Jamaica or any other tropical country.”34 Shadd’s commitment to landownership ran so deep that she dismissed a form of labor arrangement that Jamaican freed people had painstakingly won as a result of their persistent re sistance to full-scale wage labor.35 Shadd raised her objection when a suggestion was made that black families from Canada each cultivate plantains in a small tract of land, while the husbands worked as hirelings on neighboring plantations. This hybrid model still seemed too exploitative compared to Canada’s settler colonial promise that allowed cultivators to “grow up to the full stature of independent yeomen” in “its temperate climate and cheap lands.”36
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Shadd astutely understood that support for West Indian emigration went hand in hand with the mandate for a whites-only Canada. Concerned and vigilant, she established an organization called the Provincial Union, which vowed to “stand on the watch-tower to notify the citizens of this country” of any discriminatory measures based on “the dangerous doctrine that God’s children, of different complexions, cannot live together under the protection of the British Lion, in British America.” The u nion’s top priorities included combating propaganda that “the West Indies [was] the home for the mass[es], in preference to the free soil of Canada.”37 Given the overall sentiment in southwestern Canada West, Shadd’s vigilance was well founded. A pro-emigration newspaper in Chatham, for instance, pronounced that members of “the colored race who emigrate to Canada [should] feel that this land cannot be their permanent home” and that “the West India Islands [were] a home to the negro.” What underlay this demarcation was the language of climatic fatalism: in the West Indies “constitutionally and physically, they can contribute their portion of the general labour, with more profit to themselves and to us.” According to this geographic model, Canada and the Caribbean were racially distinct sites, with the former standing for the advancement of white economic and political liberty and the latter for the extraction of f ree black l abor. The coexistence of the two races was deemed aberrant, for “nature in a discriminating mood, fitted the colored man to inhabit those regions of the sun, which to the Caucasian race are fatal.”38 OVERLAPPING MAPPINGS OF RACE IN NORTH AMERI C A
Emigration supporters’ steadfast belief in the race-based spatialization of free labor led some African Canadians to see disconcerting similarities between Caribbean emigration and Liberian colonization. They observed that these programs were both founded on the view that black freedom was out of place on the North American continent. In reference to West Indian emigration, Shadd pointed out that “men in Jamaica want lands cultivated, and men in England and elsewhere want this Continent for the ‘white races’ alone.”39 The British were not the only ones to pursue the whitening of “this Continent,” according to a reader of the Provincial Freeman. “This West India scheme,” the reader noted, “is twin to the African colonization scheme, which was conceived in iniquity, and is being carried out in cruelty . . . to drain off the free colored from this continent.”40 These observations called attention to the transnational operation and scale of hierarchies of freedom. While Canada 148 • Chapter 5
and the United States had different relationships to slavery, the border between them had little impact on the ways settler colonial interests addressed and mapped the labor and location of free blacks. African Canadians were not alone in noticing commonalities between Liberian colonization and Caribbean emigration. African North Americans on both sides of the border recognized that both schemes included an ideological component that gave them a biological grounding and thus a sense of inevitability: the association between black freedom and tropical labor. Awaiting Anderson and Scoble in North America was a transnational battleground over the black body’s relationship to locations in the Atlantic. The first war cry was raised in Rochester, New York. Immediately a fter the North American Convention, Anderson and Scoble proceeded to the United States, hoping that northern black leaders and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society would help them recruit free African Americans.41 Their request was answered by Lewis Tappan, the founder of the society, who invited both men to speak at a West Indian emancipation celebration at Henry Beecher’s church in Brooklyn and at a Liberty Party convention in Rochester.42 In Rochester Anderson aggressively condemned the presence of free black Americans in the United States. As they had done days before in Canada, Anderson and Scoble pressed for Jamaican emigration by submitting a resolution to counter one originally made by delegates at the convention. The delegates had already resolved that “the home of the f ree black man is most emphatically where his black b rother is still held as a slave,” but Anderson dared to offer another resolution that designated Jamaica as “the home of the colored man” while rejecting “the American continent, including Canada,” as a place of black residence.43 Reiterating the arguments he had made at the North American Convention, Anderson contended that the advantage of Jamaica for black migrants resided in its racial uniformity as a “colored-community” and the social and political rights of “people of color,” exemplified by “colored” members of local and colonial legislatures.44 Notably, in representing Jamaica as a society with a majority of rights-bearing colored p eople, Anderson did not account for the Jamaican color system, which distinguished “colored” from “black” in determining a person’s access to social and political power—in contrast with the black-white dichotomy of the U.S. racial system.45 So when Anderson claimed that the colony “consists almost entirely of colored persons, there being about 269 thousand colored inhabitants, and only about 16 thousand whites,” he erased the category of “blacks” from the racial composition of Race, Climate, and L abor • 149
Jamaica, lumping “blacks” and “people of color” into the “269 thousand colored inhabitants” and leaving the false impression that they all enjoyed the same level of social and political participation.46 The distortion was followed by Anderson’s recourse to religious and scientific language in grounding his essentialist climatic reasoning. Marshaling the notion of divine will, Anderson asserted that “our Creator did not intend the rigorous countries of the north to be inhabited by the colored man,” while “the country and climate of Jamaica is peculiarly his own.” The next authority he summoned was “medical advisers,” who “assure me that the colored race would undoubtedly live much better, and attain a greater degree of vigor and usefulness in a climate so exceedingly fitted for them as these islands within the tropics.”47 A strong refutation of determinist theories came from one of the attendees, Frederick Douglass. To Douglass, Anderson’s ideas smacked of the essentialism that underpinned Liberian colonization. Douglass recognized “the similarity of the reasons given by him [Anderson] for the emigration of colored persons from this country, to t hose which are given . . . by the agents of the American Colonization Society.” Anderson’s racial categorization of national and colonial spaces, Douglass felt, paralleled the logic of colonization advocates that held the United States to be “the land of the white man” and Africa to be “the home of the negro.”48 Douglass’s astute insight was a product of the northern black community’s ongoing intellectual fight against the climatic determinism of Liberian colonization. African American thinkers in the early 1850s developed original theories of environment and the body that displayed their awareness of the centrality of climatic discourse to political questions of national belonging. One example of such alternative theories was to refer to Africa’s climate as foreign to any person born and raised in the United States, including both African Americans and white Americans. Here, nativity worked as a biological basis for claims of belonging in the republic. This newly imagined African American body was characterized by its long- term acculturation to temperate climates and not by any inherent traits based on racial difference. An iteration of this construct was on display at a black convention in New York at which the delegates contrasted “our native land,” which was “in every respect suited to our natures,” and “the burning deserts of Africa,” characterized by “an uncongenial and unwelcome climate.”49 Instead of invoking race in defining a body’s functions, the delegates made biological
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distinctions between bodies native to Africa and bodies “of all complexion” born in “temperate” North America and Europe. Africa, they declared, constituted “a foreign land, no more peculiar to their natures” than it was to “any other portion of the American p eople, or the European nations.” One’s black skin or African origin—“African complexion, or the descendants of Africa”— did not f actor into one’s relation to the region. Instead, foreigners to Africa, whether they be black Americans or white Europeans, had to go through “the hazard of acclimation.”50 Some took this theory further. The idea of collective incompatibility with Africa among “temperate people” was reformulated to posit a new theory: black and white Americans constituted a racial category—the “American race”— whose primary characteristic was unsuitability to “a tropical climate.”51 This race was also marked by its superior intellect, molded by the favorable climate unique to the United States. James McCune Smith, a prominent black abolitionist and medical doctor, viewed black and white Americans as sharing “the physical character and the intellectual being of the American people” due to their common exposure to “a climate the most favorable for physical and mental development.”52 This classification disrupted a U.S. domestic racial order in which intelligence and morality w ere understood along a black-white divide. By constructing a uniformly intelligent and moral people distinctively suited for a peculiarly American climatic environment, Smith posited a literal body politic that included both black and white citizens. About the same time that African Americans w ere attacking climatic determinism, black activist thinkers in Canada were opposing an increasingly intrusive Liberian colonization discourse. As they witnessed a growing tide of enslaved and free migrants fleeing northward, advocates of the African scheme found black migrants’ successful adjustment to Canada a symbolic threat to the underlying assumption of their program—blacks’ natural suitability for the tropics—and therefore began emphasizing black physical debility in Canada. Writings by colonization supporters abounded with representations of a racial shibboleth—Canada as too cold for the black body—and iterations of its twin, the association of blackness with the tropics. One article in the African Repository, the official organ of the acs, called Canada “entirely unsuited to the black race.” “The torrid zone,” in turn, was “the natural home of the black man. God gave the continent of Africa, the greater part of which lies within that zone, to the children of Ham.”53 Another article stressed “destitution and suffering” among black newcomers in Canada while describing
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Africa as their “home” and “a land which Providence has clearly interdicted to the white race.”54 A pro-colonization New York newspaper dubbed Canada “the cold dominions of Victoria” and recommended African Americans move instead to Africa to benefit from a climate that was “mild and suited to [their] habits.”55 These assertions w ere of particular import to proponents of Liberian colonization who relied on climatic ideology to justify their vision of westward expansion uninterrupted by free blacks—who would instead move to tropical Africa, their natural environment. One of these advocates was John Latrobe, a gradual emancipationist who succeeded Henry Clay as the president of the acs. At an annual meeting of the society Latrobe juxtaposed contrasting spaces of freedom: Africa occupied by “the f ree colored p eople of the United States and their descendants” and “the future of California and Oregon,” in which “a teeming white population will line the Sacramento and the Columbia [Rivers].”56 In this view, sending f ree black Americans to “that Africa of the Tropics” would serve to relieve a population who had no promising future in “the West, which, now, [was] absorbing the foreign immigration” from Europe as well as domestic-born settlers. The whiteness of the western territory Latrobe depicted h ere—with the image of white settlers’ flowing into Native land unimpeded by free black Americans—accompanied a claim of the inevitability of black relocation to Africa, a claim that he underscored with the statement that the tropical “climate [was] genial and salubrious” to the black body.57 Taking Latrobe’s argument further, David Christy, an acs agent, called the entire continental United States a nontropical climate and thus unsuitable for black constitutions. Alternatively, freed black Americans were assigned the task of cultivating cash crops in Africa, which Christy expected to advance both the gradual elimination of U.S. slavery and the expansion of white f ree soil into the South. Calling colonization “the only means of f uture security to the colored man,” he anticipated that anyone who stood in the way of “the rapid and universal extension of the white population” would suffer considerably, as “the history of the Indian tribes had proved.” Since in his opinion settling freed black Americans “upon the territory of the United States would soon become unsafe,” he believed that the “field for the action of the freed-men of the United States” should be Africa, because “men of African blood . . . had constitutions [that] could become adapted to the climate.”58 In Africa they would engage in “tropical cultivation . . . by free labor,” the type of labor most suited for blacks but impracticable in the United States, for “the 152 • Chapter 5
United States, it must be borne in mind, have not one acre of tropical lands” and thus “our crops of cotton and sugar, are both liable to blight, by frosts, before they are fully matured and secured. But it is not so in Africa.”59 Since so much was at stake, allegations of blacks’ physical unsuitability for life in Canada became a conspicuo us theme in pro-colonization discourse, to the point that black residents in the province saw the need to make a counterattack. And they did so with well-crafted expositions. A case in point is Ward’s response to the unsolicited advice from a colonization supporter to African Americans that Canada was “too cold for them” and that “Liberia offers the best prospect now open to them.”60 In refutation, Ward explained in detail that some parts of the United States had a climate comparable to Canada’s and concluded that “any one, then, who can live in the New England, Middle, or Western States, w ill find a climate abundantly congenial to him in 61 Canada.” Strategically invoking black populations across the border, Ward not only argued that the environment of Canada agreed with black constitutions but also stressed that the northern and western parts of the United States were just as appropriate for African Americans. Bibb also understood that assertions of black incompatibility with Canada constituted an integral strand of colonization advocacy. Fully conscious that the notion that Canada was “so cold that colored p eople cannot live h ere” was a staple argument in colonizationist discourse, he claimed that any negative depiction of black life in Canada was an objection “brought up against any scheme to s ettle the colored people this side of Liberia.” Deploying a strategy similar to Ward’s, Bibb compared Canada’s climate to that of “Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, or New York,” in which “the physical and intellectual development of the African race” had been witnessed.62 As was the case with Ward’s formulation, Bibb’s equation of Canada with a collection of primarily northern states had the effect of defending African North Americans’ presence on both sides of the border. Shadd also saw evidence of black well-being in Canada as a direct refutation of arguments for African colonization. In her Plea for Emigration, she presented black compatibility with Canada’s “healthy and temperate” climate in contrast to claims of black fitness to “tropical Africa.”63 To prove that black bodies experienced the Canadian climate as “temperate” instead of “too cold”—as advocates of colonization alleged—Shadd referred to the U.S. climate as Ward and Bibb had done. Her example was black residents in Chicago, who in her view endured more severe weather than that of Canada. Black Chicagoans’ endurance of the city’s harsh winter (the temperature reached Race, Climate, and L abor • 153
thirty degrees below zero when she visited there) not only “remove[d] a stumbling block in the way of Emigration to Canada” but also discredited “attempts . . . made to encourage African colonization” by showcasing the “capability of the colored American to resist the rigour of a northern climate.”64 Here, demonstrating the black body’s ability to withstand the cold climate of Chicago served to defend black settlement in Canada and simultaneously attacked the ideological foundations of Liberian colonization. STRIKING CRACKS IN TROPICAL IDEOLOGY
Faced with criticism from both sides of the border but still intent on recruiting black laborers, Anderson and Scoble backed away from climatic determinism. The first sign of this shift appeared at the Liberty Party convention, where Douglass vehemently opposed Anderson’s race-based rationale for Jamaican emigration. In an attempt to salvage the project after Douglass’s cutting criticism, Scoble portrayed it as a voluntary option for black men, not based on any essentialist grounds. He negated the claim made by Anderson that the globe was racially segmented, painting instead a picture of a world where “God has put no distinction between one color and another, and has given to them the earth, as a common habitation.” In this mapping, “neither the United States, nor Africa, nor Jamaica, nor any particular portion of the earth, is the home of [the black] race.”65 This imagined globe unmarked by racial divisions was open to black men, who were neither confined nor destined to any one place but w ere mobile pioneers entitled to choose their own place of belonging. Agreeing with “friend Douglass,” Scoble concluded that “the colored man may claim any and every portion of the United States, as his own country, and that he can claim the right to remain h ere.” The British abolitionist then cast emigration to Jamaica as a purely economic and social enterprise that any ambitious black man could undertake. Emigration, he argued, was “a matter of policy,” something black men should conduct by “tak[ing] the map before them” and determining where they could enjoy the most economic, social, and political benefits without “confin[ing] themselves to the United States, or the West Indian Islands, or Canada.” Scoble’s studied avoidance of racial determinism led to a “great applause” from the audience, exhibiting American abolitionists’ intuitive grasp of the regulatory nature of racially demarcated geography.66 Anderson later revised his own argument, redefining the climate of Jamaica as a Mediterranean paradise instead of a hot tropical place. In an in154 • Chapter 5
terview with a New York newspaper, which was quoted in Bibb’s paper, he recommended Jamaica to African Americans as possessing “a climate equal to Italy,” the same metaphor he had employed in recruiting white American workers a year before.67 Anderson’s new characterization was a testament to the malleability of racial geography and its economic expediency in British imperial discourse. The opportunistic presentation of Jamaica was also seen in a pro- emigration tract written by a white Canadian. In urging “the colored p eople of this country” to move to Jamaica, W. H. Landon, a school superintendent and Baptist preacher, dispensed with the language of black suitability for the tropics. In fact, Landon cast Jamaica as a desirable space not least because its climate was uncharacteristic of the tropics. The island’s landscape, Landon explained, was “very diff erent from continental intertropical countries” because “among the mountains, in the interior, any desirable climate may be found.” “The vicinity of the sea” also “greatly modifies the heat, while it ensures a daily sea breeze, most refreshing to the panting inhabitants.”68 By recommending Jamaican emigration to black Canadians for the very reason that the island’s climate was not tropical, Landon reframed black relocation to Jamaica as a movement not predetermined by biology. The strategic avoidance of climatic essentialism by Scoble, Anderson, and Landon won the approval of members of the North American League. Bibb, one of its founders, accepted Anderson’s labeling of Jamaica as Mediterranean, repeating the agent’s characterization of the island as “the Italy of the Western World,” whose “climate is known to be mild and genial.”69 Bibb’s embrace of a detropicalized Jamaica reflected his desire to reconcile Jamaican emigration with his belief in his people’s unlimited geographical mobility. By stripping Jamaica of its tropical label, Bibb was able to advance the agenda of the North American League without reinforcing racial stereotypes and thus without compromising the position that “the world is the colored man’s home, and that any attempt on the part of h uman legislation to restrict his boundary, or to circumscribe his field of locomotion, is a gross violation of the fundamental principles of right and justice.”70 Despite the successful divorce of Jamaican emigration from climatic determinism, the North American League never enjoyed steady support from black residents of Canada except for a surge in interest in the summer of 1853, when an American-born resident of Jamaica returned to Canada to give a favorable report on the island. The migrant, John Wesley Harrison, had moved from South Carolina two years before and had offered his services as an Race, Climate, and L abor • 155
e migration agent for the island since he believed that “agents of their own color would be most readily listened to.”71 As he predicted, the recommendation from a black person prompted the North American League to urge “all colored Americans who can go to that Island, by all means to do so.”72 Harrison reportedly attracted a considerable number of potential migrants, and at one point his list of applicants contained as many as 250 names. However, when the news arrived from Antigua about an outbreak of yellow fever, many of the prospective emigrants backed away “panic stricken.”73 Within a year, the North American League went defunct, due largely to Bibb’s untimely death. While the antislavery agricultural league never took off, at least one individual went to Jamaica to realize its visions. During his lecture tour in England, Ward decided to carry out his fight against American slavery by moving to Jamaica. His abolitionist enterprise, discernibly inspired by the North American League, aimed to weaken slavery by setting up a network in which “the free in Canada can trade with the free of the West Indies” in “wheat, flour, pork, fruit and lumber of Canada, and cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee &c. of our British tropical Islands.”74 His plan attracted support from John Candler, a Quaker philanthropist who had purchased 150 acres in Jamaica. In December 1854, when Ward unveiled his scheme at a public meeting in Chelmsford, England, Candler promised to give Ward fifty acres of his land at no charge. Accepting Candler’s offer, Ward and his family moved to Jamaica in 1855.75 Meanwhile, Harrison proceeded to the U.S. northern states with the intention of recruiting black Americans primarily as sharecroppers on sugar plantations. Not surprisingly, his visit generated little positive response. While he won support from J. W. C. Pennington, an influential black leader who let Harrison set up an agency station in his church, it is very likely that Harrison’s efforts were unsuccessful.76 There is no colonial record of his work except about his failure to bring the 250 prospective emigrants from Canada. Another attempt to bring African Americans to Jamaica also proved unsuccessful. Initiated by Samuel Thrasher Lyons, an American-born doctor living in Australia and temporarily visiting his native country, the plan was to arrange the emigration of 3,000–10,000 freed p eople from “sugar growing and other agricultural regions” for indentured labor in Jamaica.77 Nothing seems to have come of the plan, since the Jamaican officials who dealt with Lyons made no mention of it when they convened a year later to discuss the feasibility of procuring free blacks from the United States.78 Eventually, in late March 1854, the Jamaican government halted its pursuit of f ree black migrants from North America, making no further attempts for 156 • Chapter 5
the remainder of the decade. In early February of that year, the governor of Jamaica was still positive that the island would become “the home of a free population of African origin” and requested the colonial secretary to make black emigration from North America “an object of . . . imperial policy.”79 The metropole, however, turned down the request b ecause of the many failed endeavors undertaken by Jamaica and Trinidad since the 1840s.80 In response, the governor informed the Colonial Office that his colony would “abstain from troubling” the home government u ntil reliable information became available on the practicality of the project.81 That time did not seem to come, for the Jamaican government dropped the issue until the height of the U.S. Civil War, when the sizable numbers of formerly enslaved p eople seemed to make their recruitment to Jamaica feasible. Whereas the metropolitan and Jamaican governments found it unpromising to attempt to import substantial numbers of laborers from North Amer ica, the bfass continued to treat “the emigration of Free p eople of Color to the West Indies as a subject of practical importance.”82 Scoble became even more positive about the scheme after his visit to North Americ a, for his experience convinced him that considerable numbers of African North Americans would move to the Caribbean.83 Perhaps Scoble’s calculated divorcing of Jamaican emigration from racial language exposed him to more favorable responses and led to his optimistic view. As it turned out, in his abandoning of tropical determinism, Scoble was an anomaly among the metropolitan abolitionists. The bfass’s chief officers continued to embrace a racially organized geography of freedom. When Scoble retired from his position as secretary and moved to Canada, the bfass was poised to mount a project that reflected its understanding of race, place, and labor. The plan was to send U.S.-born fugitives sojourning in London to the empire’s tropical plantations in Africa and the Caribbean. This move was part of the society’s free produce initiative, launched in the aftermath of the passage of the Sugar Duties Act of 1846 to boost the production of cotton and sugar by free labor.84 Following the parliamentary decision to eliminate protective tariffs on slave-produced sugar, the bfass devoted its organizational resources to propagating voluntary abstention from such sugar and soon extended the free produce principle to cotton as well.85 Employing formerly enslaved people to cultivate crops in the tropics was one component of the bfass’s effort to reduce the competitiveness of slave- produced goods in the market. In 1853 Louis Chamerovzow, who succeeded Scoble as secretary of the bfass, “call[ed] attention to the capabilities of the Race, Climate, and L abor • 157
f ree negroes of Canada to grow cotton in Africa and in Australia . . . to compete with slave labour, especially in the article of cotton.”86 Australia in this case, I suspect, meant the northern part of New South Wales (which would become the separate colony of Queensland in 1859), a region considered to be tropical or subtropical. Beginning in the early 1840s sons of the British aristocracy set out to make their fortunes by developing a pastoral industry and sugarcane plantations in the area. By the time of the establishment of Queensland in 1859, plantation and pastoral farm owners had generally come to associate Queensland with a tropical climate and thus with a form of labor appropriate for it: nonwhite indentured servitude. Eventually, a fter failed experiments with East Indians and Chinese—the archetypal races for indentured labor—Queensland’s leaders turned to Pacific Islanders on the ground that their dark skin made them a perfect fit for the colony’s economic and climatic setting.87 But when the bfass found the chance to send formerly enslaved people to the tropics, Australia was not on the list of possible destinations. The bfass sought to capitalize on the empire’s tropical colonies in the Atlantic for its free produce agenda, a project premised on incorporating former-slave fugitives in the imperial mapping of racialized l abor. Yet the interlocking drive for free labor and race-based geography faced indirect and subtle disruptions by self-emancipated people and their black allies. One arena in which such a contest unraveled was the Ladies’ Society to Aid Fugitives from Slavery, a bfass auxiliary organization founded in November 1853 to raise funds for the relief of formerly enslaved p eople who had come to England.88 The work of the new society included securing former slaves passages out of England, since the bfass considered them “unaccustomed, generally, to other than the labour peculiar to cotton and sugar plantations.”89 Considered useless in London’s urban economy, former slave sojourners w ere deemed best suited to growing cotton in Sierra Leone or cultivating sugarcane in the Caribbean.90 Importantly, most of the individuals under the society’s care declared their preferred destination to be Canada, not the Caribbean or Africa. Of the seven people listed in a report by the society, only one desired a passage for Sierra Leone. That person was Mahommah Baquaqua, a native of what is now Benin who had been enslaved in Africa, where he had had several owners, and then taken to Brazil. His fate took a dramatic turn when he was put to work on a ship carrying coffee to New York. When he reached the city, Baquaqua fled
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and sought protection from local abolitionists. A fter a short time in Haiti, he went back to New York and eventually moved to England with a view to returning to Africa.91 Except for Baquaqua, everyone on the list was from the United States, and except for two whose preferences w ere unknown, all expressed their desire to proceed to Canada. Despite its initial plans, the society eventually conceded that the transients’ past enslavement had rendered them too “disabled” and “precarious” to engage in plantation work in Africa or the Caribbean.92 It is unclear how the subject of health and stamina came up between the sojourners and abolitionists. We may speculate that the refugees described their physical state in ways that helped them secure a path to Canada, even if they were in fact able-bodied. Or perhaps their past enslavement actually had taken such a physical toll on them that the abolitionists saw them as unfit for the harsh environment of the tropical plantations. In either case, these freed people changed their fates through their words and bodies, upsetting the racial order of labor by turning the experience of enslavement into a physical and discursive terrain of negotiation. THE NIGER VALLEY EXPEDITION, SETTLER COLONIALISM, AND BLACK COUNTERSCRIPTS
Another site of negotiation and contest over race, labor, and climate was the Niger Valley settlement scheme, which addressed the interests of metropolitan abolitionists, cotton manufacturers, and black abolitionists disillusioned with the United States. Cotton textile manufacturers found the idea of cotton cultivation by free labor in Africa appealing, for they w ere concerned about Britain’s growing dependence on the U.S. South for raw cotton and about the sustainability of the output from the region’s forced laborers. Economic concerns merged with an antislavery impulse to eradicate the slave trade by encouraging Africans to replace trade in humans with that in cotton. The combination of abolitionist and merchant imperatives was nothing new: a nexus of profit and reform had informed earlier British attempts at free l abor agriculture from the Sierra Leone Company (see chapter 1) to the 1841 Niger expedition sponsored by Thomas Buxton’s African Civilization Society.93 After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the economic and philanthropic interests in the metropole intersected with African American aspirations for emigration and abolition, materializing in the form of the Niger Valley Exploring Party conceived and led by Martin Delany, a f ree black physician and
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journalist who had been born in what is now West Virginia. Disappointed by the Fugitive Slave Law and his expulsion from Harvard Medical School, Delany concluded that the United States, with its entrenched racial caste system, held no promising future for his people.94 Travel accounts by the English explorer David Livingstone and the Southern Baptist missionary Thomas Bowen directed Delany’s sights to Africa, which marked a departure from his previous preference for migration of African Americans within the Western Hemisphere.95 He had expressed that preference at an emigration convention in Cleveland in 1854, but he later explained that he had never opposed black emigration to Africa in and of itself. According to Delany, conversations at secret sessions at the 1854 convention had concluded that transatlantic emigration would advance abolition and the religious “regeneration of Africa,” as long as it took place on an individual basis and not as a mass expulsion.96 In any case, in the spring of 1858 Delany began preparing an exploring party, and in September of that year he assumed the role of “a Commissioner to explore in Africa, with full power to choose his own colleagues” at a convention held in his a dopted hometown, Chatham, Canada, at which the delegates deliberated possible emigration locations for African Americans.97 As Delany drove the project forward in Canada, the expedition’s other commissioner— Robert Campbell, a Jamaica-born educator—visited England to solicit funds for their plan to scout out a location for the colony. During his visit, Campbell received an endorsement from Thomas Clegg, a Manchester cotton magnate, who introduced him to Chamerovzow. The bfass secretary endorsed the expedition and helped collect contributions for it.98 Another player on the fund-raising circuit was William Howard Day—a New York‒born expatriate in Canada—who served the cause by touring E ngland to raise support for the 99 venture among metropolitan abolitionists. In May and June of 1859 Delany and Campbell separately set sail for West Africa, and in December 1859 they signed a treaty with the king and chiefs of Abeokuta (in what is now Nigeria), who granted them permission to establish settlements in the area.100 Of all the features of the exploration scheme, the one that received particularly favorable reception from abolitionist and business circles was Delany’s choice of workforce: the majority of laborers would come from formerly enslaved people residing in Canada and the U.S. North whose past enslavement was thought to have equipped them with advanced skills in cotton cultivation. The bfass lauded the project for its use of “thousands of coloured men” living in the “Northern States and Canada” who were “intimately acquainted with the culture and subsequent preparation of cotton.”101 Canada West was 160 • Chapter 5
an especially promising recruitment ground for Delany b ecause of his many social contacts in the region.102 This made former slaves in Canada the primary target for the African Aid Society (aas), a London-based organization formed in July 1860 as a metropolitan branch of the Niger Valley project. The society’s members included people from the missionary and business sectors, and it aimed to promote “industrial and religious morals in Africa” and assist, “by loans and otherwise, Africans willing to emigrate from Canada and other parts to our West Indian colonies, Liberia, Natal and such other countries as may seem to offer a suitable field of labour.”103 Among the former slave population in Canada, residents of the Elgin settlement became the principal candidates for migration. The settlement’s founder, William King, in collaboration with Delany, backed the venture by sending to the aas a list of self-emancipated people willing to relocate to Africa.104 This plan received governmental support in the form of funds allocated to the British consul at Lagos for the settlement of the migrants from Elgin.105 The aas offered to provide partial support once the emigrants had arrived in Abeokuta, which left them with the responsibility of paying for their oceanic journey.106 The selection of formerly enslaved workers in this way clearly displayed their marginalized place in the Canadian settler society. An agricultural community for former slaves did not give them settler status in the province but instead formed a nurturing ground for tropical cotton cultivators who would increase imperial prosperity. This became acutely apparent when the AAS maintained that the previous ten years of “receiving and instructing fugitive Africans, in agricultural and other pursuits” at the Elgin settlement should be taken advantage of, not for Canadian colonial development, but to benefit “the success of the movement in Africa” and to “hold out an inducement for the more advanced coloured p eople in America to follow.”107 The same mind-set can also be seen in the aas’s arrangement with the governor of Jamaica to send formerly enslaved p eople from Canada to engage in plantation labor on the island. Drawing a racially segmented geography of free labor, the aas opined that “the British colonies in the West Indies afforded a ready field for the labour of the masses,” whose migration would in turn “reliev[e] Canada from the refugees.”108 Put bluntly, what the AAS saw in “the coloured refugees in Canada” was “an abundant supply of labour” for “the cultivation and preparation of sugar, cotton, coffee, and other tropical productions.”109 The aas’s racialist view of labor and empire rested on the familiar idiom of climate. The aas expressed its firm belief that people at the Elgin settlement Race, Climate, and L abor • 161
would happily move from “the severe climate of Canada, to that of Africa.”110 In pitching the viability of black emigration to Jamaica, the organization contended that “the coloured refugees in Canada . . . would not hesitate to leave the climate of Canada for one which is more genial and better adapted for the constitution of the black man.”111 The society reiterated this point in its annual report, claiming that “the climate of the Antilles would be more suited to their physical constitution than that of the Canadas, where numbers of them perish from consumption and other complaints, brought on by the inclemency of the seasons.”112 In the face of the rigid associations between climatic type and labor form, escaped people in Canada and their supporters advanced the cause of African emigration without succumbing to essentialist ideas about labor, race, and climate. Some fugitive people refused to conform to the priorities of the metropolitan proprietors, expressing their desire to engage in work other than crop cultivation after arriving in Africa. The list of candidates William King dispatched to the aas demonstrates this point. The document listed twenty- five individuals and their responses to a set of questions about religion and labor aptitude. In addition to age and the number of children, they answered such inquiries as “Member of what Church?” (one was a Christian Disciple, one belonged to no church, and the rest w ere equally distributed among the Methodist, Baptist, and Church of England denominations), “How long a member?” (the answers ranged from one year to thirty years), and “Can you read and write?” (twenty-three answered yes). The remainder of the questionnaire centered on labor. The prospective mi grants were asked whether they had ever worked on a plantation and if so, in which state and what crops they had cultivated. To this cluster of questions, only twelve—less than half of the total respondents—answered that they had worked on plantations in places such as Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas and had grown corn, wheat, tobacco, and cotton. To make it even less likely that the goal of obtaining adept plantation workers would be achieved, nine of the twenty-five expressed no interest in working on the soil in any form. The fact that not all of the candidates w ere interested in agricultural work indicated freed p eople’s own understanding of their worth in freedom, which contradicted white Britons’ perception of the proper role of free blacks in the postemancipation empire.113 In accord with the self-emancipated people’s explicit refusal to turn into plantation hands, Delany consciously undercut the idea that agricultural l abor in the tropics was free black people’s only acceptable domain of work. Such 162 • Chapter 5
politicized intellectual work can be seen in his advocacy of the Niger Valley scheme and in his musings even before he committed himself to bringing black migrants to Africa. When Delany advocated moving to “the West Indies, Central and South America” at the 1854 emigration convention in Cleveland, he did so with the explicit qualification that the choice of these places did not mean black Americans should limit their movement to the tropics.114 The “Report on the Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent, to the Colored Inhabitants of the United States,” which the convention adopted from a paper authored by Delany, “predicate[d] the claims of the black race, not only to the tropical regions and South temperate zone of this hemisphere, but to the whole Continent, North as well as South.”115 Delany’s refusal to limit black mobility to the tropics was coupled with his recommendation of “the British provinces of North America, especially Canada West” as a possible migration destination not least for its climate and for the economic opportunities it presented—in particular, the prospect of owning land. By praising Canada’s “climate, soil, productions, and the usual prospects for internal improvements” and by encouraging migrants to aspire to “obtaining lands” in the province, Delany unsettled the dichotomy of white landed settlement in North America and black tropical agriculture that had permeated British colonial and imperial discourses by this time.116 The racially transgressive nature of the message notwithstanding, Delany conceded that Canada was not meant for black p eople. It should be only “a temporary asylum,” for it was essentially a white-dominant society that was inundated by constant flows of American immigrants and threatened by the possibility of annexation by the United States.117 But by considering Canada, Delany made a point of contesting the racial geography of free labor. Delany maintained his critical stance in his report on the Niger Valley expedition. When he called for African migration, he constantly disputed the prevailing notion of black predisposition to the tropics, which indicated how compatible his political sensibilities w ere with other black theorists of the day, such as Bibb. Both men w ere aware of the need to dissociate black emigration from the biological grounding of the imperial logic of race-based mobilization of labor. One manifestation of this awareness was Delany’s repre sentation of the climate of Abeokuta as similar to that of temperate regions. According to him, “the climate is generally salubrious, and quite moderate,” with the temperature averaging 85 degrees—which was only 5 degrees “above summer temperature in the temperate zone of America.” In fact, the temperature “in the most favorable shade in the town of Chatham, Kent county, Race, Climate, and L abor • 163
C[anada]. W[est],” where Delany was writing the report, was 96 degrees and “in the sun 113—being one degree above fever heat,” registering temperatures higher than those in Abeokuta.118 Delany contradicted the dominant racial ideology in another way in his report by introducing elaborate acclimatization techniques for black mi grants from Canada. This was more subtle than directly comparing Canada’s and West Africa’s climates but was equally destabilizing, because specifying the need for acclimatization presupposed that people of African descent from North America w ere constitutionally foreign to the tropical sun. Delany recommended to f uture migrants that they drink coffee and always take a parasol “because no foreigner, until by a long residence more or less acclimated, can expose himself with impunity to a tropical sun.”119 Detailed instructions on water, clothing, hygiene, food, bathing, the ventilation of h ouses, and sanitary measures abounded in the report, demonstrating Delany’s conscious renunciation of the supposed natural congruity of the black body to tropical climates.120 Delany’s counterscripts were supplemented by Day’s unequivocal rejection of the principle of a racially demarcated imperial space. During his canvassing for the Niger Valley project in England, Day told audiences that metropolitan abolitionists should strive to eradicate racism in British North America, an argument founded on his belief that Canada and Africa w ere both open to black residence. This belief was also manifest in various lectures he gave to English audiences. At a meeting of the Leeds Anti-Slavery Society, Day stressed that for the g rand scheme of African settlement “we have in Canada the coloured men to pioneer the way—men, reared among the cotton of the United States.”121 On another occasion, this time at a meeting sponsored by the Leeds Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society, Day again emphasized the usefulness of “these fugitive slaves, 50,000 of who had gone into Canada” in the bid to “lift up the African continent, and in a few years produce a supply of cotton to set off against the American slave-grown cotton,” even calling Africa “the land of their fathers.”122 But these statements did not mean that Day believed in the idea of a black Africa and a white Canada. On the contrary, they coincided with his call for racial equality in Canada. At the Leeds Anti-Slavery Society meeting, Day appealed to “the good w ill and active aid of all the friends of liberty” to ameliorate the province’s deteriorating race relations, where “school house doors are closed in the f aces of coloured children, and coloured men denied a place
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upon juries merely because of their colour.”123 In the same vein, at a West Indian emancipation celebration held in London, Day moved a resolution that “it is the duty of the people of Great Britain” to “bring to bear the influence they have acquired through the abolition of slavery” to carry out “the removal of all existing disabilities to which persons of color are subjected in the British dominions.” An example of “existing disabilities” that he mentioned was “a rumour that he had heard of a negro pew having been attempted in one of the mission chapels in Vancouver’s Island, and of the reported endorsement of it by a Mission Board at home.”124 Day’s plea for black equal inclusion in British North American colonial structures attested to his dismissal of the very racial thinking that undergirded metropolitan whites’ support of the Niger Valley enterprise. Despite the intellectual and logistical groundwork that went into it, the Niger Valley scheme eventually failed. Historians have presented a host of explanations. For one t hing, the necessity of paying their own way to Africa prevented many formerly enslaved people from leaving Canada.125 British interventions and growing disinterest played a role as well. Although Delany continued to advocate African emigration as late as January 22, 1862—well into the Civil War—English missionaries in Abeokuta, critical of the scheme, pressured the local leaders to retract the treaty.126 This, coupled with the aas’s shift to advocacy of government-led interventions in West Africa, contributed to the project’s ultimate demise.127 Although it failed, the Niger Valley enterprise has a historical significance that cannot be measured against the obvious yardstick of tangible outcomes. The scheme was important as a crucible of contestation over the racial arrangement of locations of free labor—a contestation that had molded black politics in Canada since the late 1830s. The project was about transatlantic engagements with Africa, but it was equally about the presumed deviance of black freedom in Canada, representing a chapter in the long history of mutual formations of settler colonialism and tropical agriculture in the British Empire. •
hether living in a free empire or in a slave republic, free African North W Americans’ claims of belonging came u nder multifaceted attacks. British officials, planters, and abolitionists sought to use U.S. and U.S.-origin free people in the empire’s grand scheme of global abolition and industrial and commercial
Race, Climate, and L abor • 165
prosperity. Their attempts to mobilize tropical agricultural labor rested on the familiar climatic dichotomy, which also served colonial settlers’ defense of Canada’s racial boundaries by reducing the question of belonging to a claim of physical incompatibility. Assertions of blacks’ inherent incongruity with the Canadian environment also played a role in the discourse about Liberian colonization. The intertwined goal of removing African Americans and instituting white-only settler expansion drew on the notion of blacks’ innate suitability for tropical climates. To keep their logic intact, advocates of colonization repeatedly painted pictures of former slaves withering away in the cold of Canada. These intersecting vectors of control met with African North Americans’ collective refutation of determinist premises, which eventually elicited a certain degree of compromise from British advocates of black tropical relocation. At the same time, however, the eerily comparable schemes led to African North Americans’ gloomy realization that the two removal proj ects signaled a transnationally shared view that black freedom was a deviant condition in the entirety of the North American continent. The contest over the place of black freedom—intense as it was already— would reach a new phase as the prospect of emancipation in the United States became imminent during the next decade. The climatic logic that had long undergirded American and British designs of freedom would dictate how Republicans understood the heightening U.S. sectional crisis and how they envisioned the geographic location of the freed p eople. Acutely aware of the need to steer the course of emancipation, African Americans in turn fought for emancipation sans colonization and argued for black belonging in the entire United States. These propositions were sharply at odds with Republican discourse and policy, which drew on the principle of freedom r unning through Liberian colonization and other projects of tropical relocation: that black freedom was a geographic condition in which blacks were contained in a tropical environment away from whites.
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Chapter 6
U.S. EMANCIPATION AND TROPICAL BLACK FREEDOM
In May 1862, roughly one year into the Civil War, the New York Tribune declared that “the wealth and weight of Southern production” rested on the transformation of “the African race” from slaves into workers receiving “fair wages.” Freed people’s continuing presence in the South, however, was anything but a foregone conclusion among Republicans when the article came out; in fact, the Tribune’s assertion was made as an objection to governmental plans to relocate freed people to the Chiriqui region in what is now Panama.1 These two seemingly opposing ideas emerged during the war and formed a focal point in debates over the f uture home of the emancipated p eople. On the one hand, some Republicans—such as Horace Greeley, owner of the Tribune—argued for the utility of black labor in a postemancipation South. On the other hand, the Lincoln administration made colonization a part of its emancipation policy as the war produced successive waves of “contrabands” who came under Union control and whose future was gradually but steadily moving toward liberation. Lincoln’s Central American scheme was not some anomalous development in the trajectory of southern emancipation but a direct continuation of antebellum Republican interest in free black colonization in the tropics, either through the familiar avenue of Liberian colonization or through involvement in Central Americ a, a more recent conception. The latter attracted
Republicans’ attention for a variety of reasons. Before the war, they understood the sectional crisis not only as a domestic territorial struggle but also as a b attle between two types of imperial expansion beyond the southern national border—the slave power’s filibustering into Latin America versus Republican-backed colonization of free blacks to block the southern aggression.2 Free black colonization in Central America would accomplish two other goals: the expansion of white f ree soil within the nation’s current borders and competition with Britain for commercial influence in Central America—a m atter of import for any U.S. imperialist during this time due to the European power’s unnervingly strong presence in the region. Lincoln’s plan adopted the antebellum impulses for an enlarged sphere of influence in Central America and for an extended continental white free soil. At first glance, Lincoln’s outlook on emancipation seemed to directly oppose the Tribune’s proposition of domesticated black freedom. But in fact the two visions shared a paradigm of geographic thinking. Both inscribed their proposed home of freed people as tropical. In the Tribune’s version, it was the South, not overseas locales, where the emancipated p eople would work in “a climate which is agreeable to their physical constitutions.”3 And as was the case with Lincoln’s plans, integral to this construction was containment of the emancipated p eople in a tropical environment and away from a place considered fit for the development of white freedom. The difference was that in the Tribune’s case, the emancipated p eople would be confined in the southern domestic tropics apart from the North, while Lincoln’s venture located freed blacks’ tropical domiciles outside U.S. national borders and deemed a much larger geographic unit—the continental United State—out of bounds to black populations. The difference notwithstanding, both conceived black freedom as a climatically specific and geographically bound condition that segregated blacks from sites assigned to white freedom. Northern black abolitionists were acutely aware of these similarities, as is clear from the ways they addressed the crucial question of where black freedom should take place after emancipation. Plagued with the ominous prospect of overseas removal, a desperate Frederick Douglass echoed the Tribune’s reasoning about black economic utility, emphasizing emancipated people’s value as a mass labor force readily employable for southern agriculture. Even so, Douglass simultaneously contested the ideology undergirding the Tribune’s idea of freed people’s place in the new nation. His rhetoric of profitability went hand in hand with a refutation of black tropical suitability, a dogma at the heart of both anti-and pro-colonization positions in white 168 • Chapter 6
Republican discourse. Cognizant that both factions w ere openly intent on limiting emancipated people to the tropics—whether abroad or in the U.S. South—black abolitionists continued to protest against any spatial circumscriptions of black freedom, which attests to the pervasiveness of the climatic theory in the emancipation debates and the sense of urgency northern black Americans felt about the issue. The question of race and place also continued to shape black life and activism on the other side of the Canada-U.S. border. In desperation, some black residents of Canada chose to leave for “tropical” Haiti when they concluded that the North American continent was not and never would be their home. For those p eople, the Civil War made l ittle difference, for their experience of freedom in Canada had taught them that North Americ a did not offer them a bright future, with or without slavery. As long as a free black person resided in the continent, t hese emigrants believed, he or she would have to contend with the view that free blacks belonged in the tropics and suffer the results in the forms of political, economic, and social inequalities. These emigrants were both right and wrong. North America came to contain within itself a tropical region that resembled the British Caribbean in its denial of economic independence to the majority of its cultivators. What eventually happened was the symbolic and economic transformation of the U.S. South into America’s domestic tropics, characterized by a concentration of dependent black workers living in segregation from the temperate North. However, that shift did not happen all at once. A fter mid-1864, when colonization had lost its validity as an emancipation policy, the Republicans directed their attention to the question of how to restructure labor and land in the southern economy, now that it was clear freed people were here to stay. This was not a straightforward process for the Republicans, nor w ere they the only ones to try new arrangements of black labor. Among the potential scenarios envisioned by the Union government, one that quickly disappeared from its official agenda was black landownership in the South. The disappearance might not have been so much ideological as practical, in view of the northern familiarity with Liberian colonization. As we have seen above, the African project had familiarized white northerners with the idea of black homesteads in a distant tropical land. Ideologically, therefore, Republicans might have felt little or no difficulty embracing the prospect of landownership among the emancipated people as long as it was kept within the South, which the Republican press had come to call the nation’s domestic tropics. Eventually, the prospect of land distribution U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 169
to emancipated people was quashed due to the unavoidable reality that the lands in question had belonged to white southerners—not to native Africans, about whose fate advocates of colonization had few political or racial qualms. Thus, postwar political expediency meant a quick end to the idea of tropical black landownership in the South. By 1866 wage labor in the South had become the ideal model of black f ree l abor among Republicans. Viewed in light of their profound desire for the geographic segmentation of freedom, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s intertwined control of labor and gender relations among freed people may be understood as an alternative to colonization designed to prevent one of the most reviled aspects of southern racial coexistence—white male sexual exploitation of black women. The Republican initiative to implement wage labor coincided with various labor arrangements that southern proprietors tried out with different racial workforces. These arrangements revealed the way the South was enmeshed within a larger global structure of racialized labor migration, whether or not local residents were aware of this fact. Those who were aware operated within the framework of tropical-temperate dualism that had been organizing free labor for decades. Employing the grammar of race-based climatic constitutions, these southerners associated their local environments with distinct climatic labels and, by extension, with particular equations of race and labor form. After a period of experimentation, what eventually evolved was a black- majority tropical South marked by exploitative economic relations and beset with the “continuing experience of New World plantation colonialism” that “most benefited white men in distant metropoles” and “most burdened black southerners.”4 What does this winding trajectory of emancipation tell us? The abolition of slavery in the United States, like previous emancipation processes, accompanied efforts to remove freed p eople to overseas locales, which also meant facilitating the expansion of white free soil. And uniformly these efforts did not amount to much. Yet the core principle of the foreign colonization proj ects had wider purchase and tenacity. Those who opposed freed people’s relocation overseas cast the South as a domestic tropical environment in which emancipated people would live separately from the North, an idea rooted in the fundamental doctrine of foreign colonization: black and white freedom were distinct geographic conditions marked by their respective climatic characters. African Americans w ere fully aware of the overarching power of such discourse and its implications for their presence in the North, for they had confronted similar lines of attack repeatedly during the previous decades. 170 • Chapter 6
In a sense, the Civil War was just another phase of their long-term struggle against the idea of tropical black freedom. The popularity of the idea of the tropical South during the war suggests that quite a few Republicans viewed the initial efforts at landed emancipation as similar to Liberian colonization—both w ere essentially measures to advance black landownership in a faraway tropical location. This suggests that the idea of black freeholders in the South did not so much involve a radical shift in paradigms as it took form within the established framework of geography and race. Furthermore, it can be said that the shift from land distribution to wage labor occurred within the same paradigm. Although the two systems of labor fundamentally differed in the degree of economic autonomy they allowed their workers to have, both were predicated on the belief that the freedom of the emancipated p eople should be contained and appropriated for crop cultivation in a tropical location far from the North. These northern views did not completely jibe with local understandings of the climate and thus the racial character of the South. The South’s tropicality was by no means a foregone conclusion: instead, the climatic character of the region was unfixed and varied. This malleability was manifested in different ideas and practices of emancipation expressed and implemented during and after the war. Although local understandings of the South and its appropriate form of labor were distinct from those of Republicans, both understandings were permeated with the same logic of race and place, which identified freedom as a racially specific condition whose geographic contours corresponded to temperate-tropical distinctions. That logic had also informed a series of emancipations since the American Revolution. In this sense, the varied and shifting approaches to restructuring race and labor in the South unfolded squarely within a paradigm of freedom that had long been established in the Anglo-American world during the age of emancipation. THE SECTIONAL CRISIS, BLACK DISPLACEMENT, AND SETTLER COLONIALISM
The sectional crisis was a case of white settler expansion peculiar to a slave- holding empire. Although James Rawley did not use the term settler colonialism when he called the interregional conflict unfolding in Kansas “a white man’s quarrel over white men’s conflicting rights,” he captured the fundamental dynamic of indigenous land expropriation that was peculiar to the United States.5 While disagreeing on the question of slavery, slavery and free-soil U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 171
expansionists shared a geographic view that ruled out black freedom in the expanding territory. At the heart of such a contested process of territorial expansion lay conflicting views of l abor, but neither vision included black f ree labor. Indeed, for those who hoped to arrest or phase out slavery, the expulsion of free blacks was integral to their fight to secure land for white free labor against the unrelenting progress of the slave power. The principle of free black exclusion bound together a new coalition of free-soil northerners. Quite a few Republicans—ranging from conservatives to antislavery radicals such as Gerrit Smith—embraced black colonization abroad.6 Some of them endorsed it primarily as a means of ridding f ree states of their black residents without interfering with existing slave populations. Others desired the elimination of slavery, albeit gradual, through the sending of freed slaves to colonize the tropics. Some among this antislavery faction, such as Lincoln, saw colonization of Africa as “part of a plan for ending slavery.”7 Others—in particular, Frank Blair Jr., a congressman and a member of an influential political clan from Missouri—hoped that black removal to Central America would result in greater U.S. influence and commercial activity in that region as well as in the proliferation of nonslaveholding white labor in the domestic arena. Influential Republicans, mostly from the western states, endorsed Blair’s scheme. Some eastern politicians and newspapers expressed ill see, his vision, with some modifications, their support for it as well.8 As we w would become the blueprint for the Lincoln administration’s wartime colonization policy. Seeing slavery as the “cause of the deep and bitter feud which threatens to rend us into sections,” Blair proposed a gradual abolition plan in which already free and newly liberated people in the South (who would gain freedom via state-sponsored emancipation or individual manumission) would be induced to leave for Central America—“the American tropics.” This, in turn, would extend the nation’s sphere of influence in the region by building a commercial hub for both surplus goods from the U.S. metropole and tropical produce grown by the freed black settlers.9 The new outpost in Central America was envisioned as a colony of small-scale landowners; the U.S. government would purchase land for the settlers, who would then produce cotton and sugar and teach agricultural techniques to the local population.10 Agricultural skills w ere only one aspect of the American civilization that freed slaves w ere expected to carry beyond the southern border. Blair framed Central American colonization as a tropical version of Manifest Destiny, through which white Americans would “extend our civilization and form of 172 • Chapter 6
government, into the tropics, by means of the black men now among us.”11 Formerly enslaved p eople, he thought, would be well equipped for this task because they had been “christianized in our churches, civilized by our firesides, and educated in government by hearing our political discussions,” and they would readily impart to the local residents the political, religious, and moral principles that Blair thought characterized American superiority.12 Blair’s scheme repeatedly indicated his desire for white continental dominance. His Central American colonization scheme was clearly a means of purging the United States of its black population. This is apparent in the way he explained the project in association with two key processes of U.S. continental expansion: Native American removal and white movement to the Pacific West. On the one hand, Blair equated the purchase of land in the tropics with the creation of Native American reservations, which set apart a place “for the occupation of a particular race of p eople” and made room for white inhabitants when “the Indians began to encumber our Northwest and Southwest Territories.” On the other hand, he compared free black colonization in Central Americ a to the settlement of California by “our free white people,” calling the envisioned tropical journey a less rigorous version of the trek to the West. At the core of this characterization was the belief that western expansion could be carried out only by “our heroic and indomitable race.”13 By discussing tropical colonization in connection to those two dynamics of American settler colonialism, Blair assigned freed slaves a distinct place and role in his imagined hemispheric U.S. empire. Black colonization—like the Native American reservations—was premised on white continental expansion. However, this southward endeavor was not a forced removal; it should not resemble the sorrowful journey of the Trail of Tears. On the contrary, this movement amounted to a variant of Manifest Destiny, but one limited to the tropics. It was a racially specific imperial project carried out by those excluded from North American continental expansion. Freed slaves w ere co- opted into a U.S. imperial project and assigned the task of colonizing Central America but given no place within the current national borders. The fact that tropical colonization was essentially a black exclusion project became even clearer when Blair divorced it from a traditional principle of the American continental empire. He exempted black colonization from the “colonial system” governing continental expansion in which “our own p eople” were sent into the West and then “receiv[ed] . . . back into a share of our Central Government.” Instead, his tropical scheme would satisfy America’s “insatiable thirst” for expansion through the l abor of “civilized” former slaves, U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 173
but without incorporating “the mongrel hordes of Mexico, or Cuba, or any part of tropical America” into the republic. “If we are wise,” he opined, “we shall stop short at the line which bounds the temperate zone with our expanding system of States, and adopt the colonial policy which has stretched the empire of Great Britain around the world, and brought all the races of mankind under her sway.”14 Blair’s familiarity with Britain’s colonial systems can also be seen in his discussion of its expansion in Central America. This was no surprise, for any American with an expansionist bent during this era was fully aware of Britain’s powerful presence and long history of conquest in the region.15 In particular, Blair patterned his plan of transplanting U.S. blacks after Britain’s settlement of Belize “through the instrumentality of her Jamaica negroes” in the eighteenth century. Enviously calling the colony a valuable stronghold for “Eng lish supremacy in Central America,” Blair advocated “planting our enfranchised slaves” in some Central American locale to reprise the history of Britain’s colonization of Belize, which culminated with the cession of Belize from Guatemala in 1859, the year Blair published the treatise.16 Woven through all t hese propositions was climatic determinism. Reiterating the familiar trope, Blair advised white pioneers against occupying tropical areas: “While the white man degenerates and withers in the glare of all its splendor, sinking into a valetudinarian, impotent in body and mind, or suddenly encounters death in breathing the subtle poisons with which its exhalations are pregnant, the black man, by virtue of that mysterious quality of organism conferred by race, finds these exhalations innoxious and the torrid glare an elixir for body and mind.”17 White Americans would inevitably delegate to black colonists the southward portion of their imperial enterprise so that they would not have to “step beyond the tropical line.”18 Such conceptions of race and place in the antebellum era greatly influenced Republican policy when the sectional crisis exploded into a full-blown war and new spaces of freedom emerged due to enslaved men’s and women’s own pursuit of freedom. In 1861 slaves began arriving at Fort Monroe in Virginia, and their numbers swelled to the point that General Benjamin Butler felt the need to declare that these runaways were “contraband of war” and would not be returned to their o wners. As the war proceeded, Union lines turned into legal borders between freedom and slavery. On August 6, 1861, the First Confiscation Act provided that any property, including slaves used in insurrection against the United States, would be the lawful subject of prize and capture wherever found. The law applied in the seceded states and in the 174 • Chapter 6
loyal border states to prevent o wners from using their slaves for Confederate military purposes. While the act said nothing about slaves who had not engaged in Confederate war efforts, northern abolitionists and enslaved people increasingly saw Union lines as new destinations for refuge. They w ere even more encouraged when Lincoln’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1861, declared that the First Confiscation Act in fact “liberated” t hose covered by the law. Three months later, a new article of war applicable to both Union and Confederate states banned army and navy officers from returning fugitive slaves irrespective of their owners’ loyalty.19 Then the Second Confiscation Act was enacted in July 1862, declaring “forever free of their servitude” all rebel-owned slaves who fled to Union lines or who lived in Confederate areas that came under Union control.20 By the summer of 1862 new sites of asylum had emerged in the United States that greatly changed the landscape of slave escape, rendering Union lines as the border between freedom and slavery. HAITI AND THE RENUNCIATION OF NORTH AMERIC A
While the war created floods of freedom seekers within the United States, black residents in Canada, an older haven from slavery, continued to tackle the question of race and place. Concurrent with and largely eclipsed by enslaved people’s liberatory runs to Union lines was the agony of those already living in freedom in Canada. The province’s unceasing antiblack racism was so power ful that some of them were ready to give up on the place they had once deemed their sanctuary. William P. Newman, a formerly enslaved journalist, painted a picture of disappointed black residents, portraying them as “not content to live here, because of the prejudice of the white people against them.” Due to racial segregation in the common school system, Newman noted, “generally, our people, I think, have ceased to progress in this country.”21 Shadd-Cary’s22 brother-in-law, George Cary, also grieved about the deep-seated prejudice that he and his fellows suspected would take “all coming time to eradicate.” Particularly disturbing was the bigotry that doomed their c hildren’s future in Canada: in Cary’s township all of the common schools except one barred black children. This was not only a source of distress but also a grave injustice because “while all our c hildren are actually excluded,” black residents paid taxes on their land for public school appropriations.23 Cary understood racial hatred in Canada on a continental scale, which resulted in his disregard of the possible outcome of the Civil War and inclined him toward emigration to Haiti. He believed that the abolition of slavery U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 175
in the United States would end only in the marginalization and persecution of the emancipated people because equality in North America was merely a mirage. “War or no war,” he wrote, “we are not among t hose who are willing to abide the ‘good time coming’ on this continent.”24 In desperation, Cary proposed Haiti as African North Americans’ alternative venue, which was in stark contrast to Douglass’s cancelling of his trip to Haiti in anticipation that the Civil War would “serve the cause of freedom and mankind.”25 Sensing the general discontent in Canada, Cary predicted that a substantial number of black residents in the Western District would emigrate to Haiti.26 According to Floyd Miller, Canada became a key recruitment ground for an immigration campaign promoted by the Haitian government that began in 1859. To lure migrants, the government offered a set of inducements: free passage to anyone willing to engage in farming, and free board and lodging for the first eight days in Haiti. Prospective migrants were promised an opportunity to purchase land, although they were to start off as sharecroppers.27 Black residents also received positive accounts of the black nation from one of their own. William P. Newman went on a scouting trip in the fall of 1859 and sent promotional letters from there to black residents of Canada West.28 Similar to the Elgin settlers recruited by proponents of the Niger Valley scheme, Newman defined his own terms of freedom, which did not necessarily conform to what the government expected of newcomers. Although Haiti coveted agricultural workers, Newman proposed a wide range of occupations for prospective migrants. He wrote in one of his letters that Haiti was ready to “embrace you as agriculturalists, manufacturers, and capitalists” and offered opportunities to reproduce a black population containing “the military gentlemen, the merchant prince, and the honourable civilian.”29 While Newman’s letter revealed the similarity between the Niger Valley project and Haitian emigration—formerly enslaved people’s refusal to limit the scope of their freedom to agricultural labor—his letters formed a stark departure from the discursive strategy commonly used by black emigration supporters in Canada. Feeling hopeless about his people’s prospect in Canada, Newman did what Bibb and Delany went to great lengths to refute: he invoked a hot climate as a reason for blacks to emigrate to a tropical location. In one of his letters, Newman cited trading the severe coldness of Canada for the warmth of Haiti as one advantage of the emigration scheme. Such reasoning would have never been endorsed by Bibb or Delany, for it risked invalidating black people’s presence in “cold” Canada. However, Newman fully
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embraced Haiti’s “luxuries of perpetual summer,” which he juxtaposed with “my frozen toes in Canadian winters.”30 In his mind the tropics constituted a geographic category for black political and social advancement, much like temperate climates set bounds for white political and economic activity in the eyes of Frank Blair. Indeed, Newman called on black residents to treat Haiti “as a home” and “live in it, and take care of it,” for a government for and by people of African descent “is needed in the tropics.”31 Newman’s abandonment of the customary rhetoric reflected his sense that white racism made the advancement of free black p eople possible only in tropical regions, a conviction publicly challenged by Shadd-Cary. She lamented the growing notion among formerly enslaved p eople that Haiti was now their true “asylum.” Frustrated that “the North Star” was now being replaced by “a star never before heard of, a South Star,” she called on U.S. abolitionists to send contrabands to Canada, the bona fide shining light for the oppressed.32 To her disappointment, however, at least 224 people, including George Cary, reportedly left Canada for Haiti in 1861.33 Shadd-Cary’s objection to Haitian emigration stemmed from her determination to combat the transnational doctrine of a white North American continent, a doctrine that she believed underlay all black tropical emigration schemes. More than ever, she was painfully aware that there existed a “question of residence on this continent for the colored men of the land,” exemplified by efforts to move them to “islands and other continents.”34 To this unwavering proponent of Canadian emigration, supporting Haiti thus equaled conforming to “all of the old, and worn out, and repudiated arguments, about the extinction of our race . . . the invincibility of American prejudice . . . the incongeniality of climate.”35 To her, Haitian emigration was none other than another “nefarious work of expatriating the free colored people from this Continent” along the lines of Caribbean emigration and Liberian colonization.36 Eventually, the Haitian emigration project came to an end for multiple reasons. One of them was that the Haitian government failed to deliver on its promises. It did not provide enough land and supplies for self-sustaining farming or basic necessities such as medical care. Stories told by disappointed return migrants played a major role in the demise of the project.37 Newman’s change of heart added to disaffection. He became an emigration agent for Jamaica and worked in Canada to direct migration to the British island, which nevertheless preserved his preference of the tropics to North America.38
U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 177
TROPICAL EMIGRATION AS AN EMANCIPATION POLICY
The precept of tropical black freedom likewise cast a shadow on the future of escaped people in Union camps. The rapid increase of the number of contrabands turned colonization into an imminent issue for Republican politicians and pundits. The centrality of colonization in Lincoln’s wartime emancipation policy emanated from his own inclination and from the need he saw to court Frank Blair and his clan. Believing that winning the war rested on pleasing the border-state free-soil interests represented by the Blairs, the Lincoln administration chose overseas colonization, Frank Blair’s pet project, as a way to deal with “contraband.”39 In his message to Congress on December 3, 1861, Lincoln expressed the desirability of relocating people who had been liberated under the Confiscation Act to “a climate congenial to them” alongside “the free colored people” and slaves whom border-state o wners decided to emancipate.40 Successive concrete measures were implemented. When emancipation in Washington, D.C., was signed into law on April 16, 1862, Blair and James Doolittle, a senator from Wisconsin, pushed Congress to appropriate $100,000 to be used to fund the voluntary colonization of the city’s freed p eople. On July 16, Congress set aside an additional $500,000 for emigration u nder the Second Confiscation Act. To address the increase in newly emancipated p eople, the administration launched a series of colonization efforts, and the Chiriqui project took off in earnest in April 1862.41 Strongly resembling Blair’s vision, the Chiriqui project sought to create a black colony as a foothold for U.S. expansion in Central Americ a. To Republicans, black colonization in the region meant more than just a solution to the nation’s racial disorder that had been wrought by emancipation—it was also a means of fulfilling their imperial desires for greater influence and profitable markets in the Western Hemisphere and beyond.42 When Chiriqui was first mentioned in 1861 within Lincoln’s closest circle, Francis P. Blair Sr. (Frank’s father) saw it as a potential bastion of U.S. imperialism.43 In 1862 Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith expressed his expectation that “the settlement of a colony of colored Americans . . . would ultimately establish there such an influence as would most probably secure to us the absolute control of the country.”44 Lincoln likewise harbored the idea of using Chiriqui as “an outpost of the United States” secured with naval stations.45 The administration’s pursuit of black removal was also grounded in a desire to enlarge the scope of white free soil. At the same time that the Chiriqui 178 • Chapter 6
plan got u nder way, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law. The act marked the culmination of Republican free-soil ideology and opened up the last frontier territory for white independent landownership, although the railroad, commercial, and industrial sectors eventually eclipsed autonomous small-scale farmers in the region’s economy.46 Yeoman farmers w ere intended to be “natural barriers” to slavery’s expansion, for in 1862 it was still possible that slavery would continue.47 The imagined yeomanry was seen as white. The law stipulated that any U.S. citizen (and anyone intending to become one) who had never rebelled against the United States could, for a small fee, take title of 160 acres of land after living on and farming the land productively for five years. By limiting its application to U.S. citizens and those eligible for citizenship, the law excluded African Americans—who had been denied citizenship by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case. Lincoln’s advocacy of the Chiriqui scheme accompanied imagery of a white continental United States. This was apparent when the president met with a delegation of free black men at the White House on August 14, 1862, to muster support for the project from the African American community in Washington, D.C. Placing his argument in the vision of a whites-only North America, Lincoln remarked to the delegates that “on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”48 This view, together with black exclusion from the benefits of the Homestead Act, indicated that the United States that Lincoln’s administration envisaged was a land where nonslaveholding white Americans would continue to expand westward without interference from free blacks and where emancipated people migrated from the U.S. South to fulfill their imperial functions in Central America. In the end, Chiriqui colonization came to naught in October 1862, as a result of strong oppositions from “several of the Spanish-American republics” in Central America.49 The administration continued to look to the tropics for possible emigration destinations, but it apparently discarded its expansionist goal. Most subsequent plans did not so much foster U.S. southward expansion as they demonstrated the value attached to the southern freed p eople in the matrix of cash-crop economies in the greater Americas.50 U.S. emancipated people appealed to other nations as potential agricultural laborers who could bolster their economies. One of those societies was Haiti. In April 1863 the United States sent some 450 emigrants to Île-à-Vache Island, off the coast of Haiti. Coveting laborers with farming skills, especially in cotton cultivation, the Haitian government promised to grant the emigrants land, citizenship U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 179
after a certain period, and exemption from military service. Due to mismanagement, disease, and eventual mutiny, the colony ended in disaster a year later.51 As the Haitian scheme was unfolding, the Lincoln administration also worked with the Netherlands to devise an emigration plan to Dutch Surinam. The Dutch initiated the process in the hope of obtaining indentured laborers.52 Similarly, the British sought to divert the torrent of refugees from southern slavery to their Caribbean plantations, as they had done with self-emancipated people in Canada. On August 12, 1862, Henry Pelham-Clinton, the fifth Duke of Newcastle and then colonial secretary, wrote to Foreign Secretary John Russell regarding “the possibility of transferring to the British West Indies a large number of the negroes who have been or may be emancipated by force of events in the United States.” The “negroes” in question were “contrabands.” This possibility had been mentioned to the colonial secretary when he received a communication from an American citizen named Henderson who had been sent to E ngland by the U.S. government. Henderson informed the colonial secretary of his meeting with the U.S. secretary of state and conveyed Seward’s view that his government would support sending “contrabands” as contract laborers to the Caribbean. Having received dispatches from the Jamaican government a month earlier that indicated its interest in importing the war time refugees to the island, Newcastle was willing to seize the opportunity and urged the British foreign secretary to give the matter due consideration.53 Seward and Newcastle each had their own reasons for supporting this plan. Seward was concerned that some contrabands in Union-occupied zones in the Upper South and in Pennsylvania would “present considerable difficulty to the government” if they lost their employment as harvest hands at the end of the season.54 Newcastle believed that contrabands would “give an impulse to the growth by f ree labour of tropical produce” in contrast to slave l abor in Brazil and Cuba and with their agricultural expertise would help the Carib bean colonies launch cotton cultivation.55 This attempt was another example of Britain’s pursuit of cheap labor to produce sugar, as well as for sustainable cotton production—which had become even more pressing due to the disruption in the southern plantation economy caused by the war. Whether in its colony or inside Union lines, whenever former slaves entered spaces of freedom in North America, the British stretched out their rapacious hands to boost colonial labor in their empire. Discussions of labor importation to the British Caribbean ensued. In April 1863, an emissary from British Honduras arrived in Washington, D.C., 180 • Chapter 6
along with none other than William Wemyss Anderson, who was now in the service of the British Honduras Company to help facilitate its immigration project. The two received permission from Lincoln to visit contraband camps in Washington and Alexandria, Virginia, to get a sense of how the escaped people felt about emigration.56 In the summer of 1863, the Lincoln administration authorized British Honduras and Guiana to station emigration recruiters in northern port cities and offered them assistance from the Emigration Office, an agency established in 1862 by the Lincoln administration for colonization purposes.57 Britain’s interest in contrabands as potential tropical free laborers coincided with a growing consensus in U.S. and British abolitionist circles that the Union lines had replaced the Canada-U.S. border as the dividing point between slavery and freedom. By 1861, crossing Union lines became the primary definition of slave escape among U.S. abolitionists. For instance, an American antislavery proponent called contrabands the most recent development in the history of transborder slave escapes, following the mutinies on the Amistad and the Creole and the long-established practice of r unning away to Canada.58 Similarly in Britain, the subject of an 1863 meeting to discuss “the present condition of the escaped slaves” was no longer runaway refugees in Canada but the “great numbers [who] have come into the Federal lines.”59 Now that there were two governments—Union and Confederate—with two diff erent approaches to slavery, escape “from bondage to freedom” could happen without crossing into Canada.60 In accordance with this change in perception, assisting the refugees behind Union lines became the primary object of abolitionist assistance in the view of British supporters. The prominent abolitionist Thomas Buxton declared that aiding “contrabands” should be the way for the British to exhibit “our glorious anti-slavery character” and show “to the world that we deeply sympathize with the negroes in this crisis of their race.”61 AFRICAN AMERICAN CHALLENGES TO TROPICAL BLACK FREEDOM
Enslaved people’s liberation from bondage did not bring unrestrained joy for African American abolitionists, who were very much alert to the concomitant colonization projects. Douglass’ Monthly and the Christian Recorder, the official organ of the Philadelphia-based African Methodist Episcopal Church (ame), both published Lincoln’s message to Congress of December 3, 1861, to direct the readers’ attention to its reference to the “colonization of negroes.”62 U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 181
Five months later, the Christian Recorder informed its readers of the provision in the Washington, D.C., emancipation bill that authorized the appropriation of funds for colonization purposes.63 In particular, the White House meeting with black residents of the District of Columbia sparked furious reactions in the black press. A transcript of the meeting was published in Douglass’ Monthly along with Douglass’s castigation of Lincoln as “silly and ridiculous” and obsessed with “his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.”64 The Christian Recorder’s piece on the meeting was no less censorious. Criticizing the delegation as falsely representing African Americans in the free states and Washington, the correspondent determined to “use every effort to defeat, contravene and oppose this most unreasonable edict that would forcibly eject us from the country for which our ancestors fought, bled and died.”65 In answer to the call for action, African Americans in the North protested colonization as a vicious accompaniment of emancipation undergirded by the dismal axiom that the black man “was welcome as a bond man, but is driven out when free.”66 Less than a week after the White House meeting, free black citizens in Long Island denounced Lincoln’s remark to the delegation.67 Similarly, when as many as 3,500 “colored people in New York” gathered in honor of emancipation of the slaves in Washington, they also “deprecated any appropriation of the public money for the purpose of colonization.”68 When they argued against relocating emancipated people abroad, northern abolitionists stressed the newly free p eople’s value as agricultural laborers in the South. A fter Lyman Trumbull, a U.S. senator from Illinois, introduced a bill that prescribed the confiscation and liberation of all rebel-owned slaves (the bill became the Second Confiscation Act), Douglass criticized its third section, in which the removal of the newly freed p eople to “some tropical country” was formally designated as “the duty of the President of the United States.” At the core of Douglass’s criticism was the fact that “for a nation to drive away its laboring population” was “to commit political suicide.”69 His paper published this line of argument frequently in 1862 and 1863, when colonization seemed imminent. Douglass devoted much space to highlighting the utility of formerly enslaved people as readily available resources for cultivating southern cash crops after emancipation. On one occasion, after rhetorically asking “who wants to take their [freed people’s] places in the cotton field, in the rice swamp, and sugar fields, which they have tilled for ages,” he spurned colonization as contrary to “the voice of commonsense”—which would keep in the country the primary producers of southern crops.70 Dou182 • Chapter 6
glass was not the only author to nationalize the freed people in this way. William Lloyd Garrison also spoke in economic terms, attacking colonization as overlooking the importance of freed people to the stability of agricultural production in the South: “This is their native land; their labor is of immense value, indispensable to the South in the cultivation of cotton, rice and sugar, as free laborers.”71 The two men’s recourse to the language of economic value illustrates the narrow field of discourse within which they had to work in legitimizing freed people’s continued presence in the United States. Because their most urgent goal was to prevent foreign relocation, Douglass and Garrison were compelled to make a case for a kind of black national belonging that played to the northern desire for continued southern profitability. Even so, Douglass’s assertions of black economic worth failed to fully conform to white northerners’ assumptions about race and labor. Douglass opposed the theory of black tropicality by defining h uman bodies as capable of adjusting to any type of climate, thereby defending black residence in any part of the world. It was against the law of nature “to arrange the families of mankind over the diff erent belts of the earth, in the diff erent latitudes, longitudes, altitudes of it, and to fix the bounds of the habitation of each color, according to climate, soil and production.”72 Human beings, Douglass maintained, were equipped with a “divine faculty” to master “all latitudes, longitudes, and altitudes” and could “guard [themselves] against nearly all the extremes of heat and cold, and other vicissitudes of climate.”73 The assertion of climatic adaptability was imperative for African American abolitionists, for white northerners who supported black labor in the South concurrently invalidated free black residence in the allegedly temperate U.S. North. Witnessing the value of black laborers during the course of war—as military workers in the Confederate and Union armies and as wage- based cotton cultivators in the Sea Islands—some Republicans were coming to support the idea of black labor in a free South.74 But this model of national belonging came with a caveat. As the Christian Recorder warned its readers, a vision of emancipation circulating in the northern press was filled with the familiar talk of climate. According to the paper, in considering the question “what shall be the future condition of the colored race in this land,” the Philadelphia-based Presbyterian Quarterly Review opposed “emancipation with colonization,” asserting that “the colored race . . . constitutes labor; it is the productive force of that land; it has been for the past two hundred years.” The Review then brushed off the by-now-widespread fear that emancipation would “flood the Northern States with free blacks” on the ground that the U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 183
southern climate was most suitable for their constitutions. What’s more, the Review expected free blacks in the North to “naturally” move southward once slavery was abolished, which would locate the entire black population in the tropical South.75 Republican papers likewise contemplated the worrisome possibility that emancipated people would invade the North but in the end convinced themselves that the freed blacks would naturally remain in the tropical environment of the South. In advocating the retention of freed p eople in the United States, the Tribune divided the country into different climatic zones that accommodated “every variety of soil and climate which is adapted to any portion of our people, Black or White.”76 In this racial mapping, the South signified the domestic tropics of a free United States—it was a tropical region exclusively fit for black agricultural labor, while the North figured as a “White” climate. Thus, if slavery was abolished, the Tribune concluded, “the negro had far rather live in Georgia than in New York.”77 So pervasive was this outlook that Republican newspapers waged a campaign against plans to relocate contrabands from Virginia to Massachusetts. As Jacque Voegeli points out, the protest was based on the argument that “biology and climate destined free blacks to live in the congenial South.”78 The flip side of this argument included outright claims or implicit suggestions that free blacks in the North were an anomalous population. The bottom line for many white northerners was that the space of black freedom should be segregated in a tropical land, w hether that be a foreign locale or a domestic region. In this sense, the Tribune’s proposed geography of freedom was not radically different from the government’s tropical colonization plans. In fact, both w ere formulated within the same paradigm of race and climate: both conceived of black freedom as containment within a tropical environment away from northern whites. The difference was that colonization opponents defined the South as a tropical home of the emancipated, while Lincoln—as noted above—saw the entire continental United States as closed to black residence. In the end, the Union government erased foreign colonization from its official blueprint for emancipation. Th ere w ere a variety of reasons: the declining influence of the border states, the impressive military service of black soldiers, and the catastrophe of the Île-à-Vache Island project.79 In addition, there was an immediate demand in the North for cotton supplies, and the formerly enslaved p eople who had worked u nder Union control had given evidence of sustained black agricultural production in freedom. In the end, 184 • Chapter 6
the government-sponsored return of emigrants from Île-à-Vache pushed Congress in June 1864 to withdraw all funds for colonization.80 The U.S. government also discontinued its talks with the British. By early 1864, negotiations with the Caribbean colonies had virtually ended without producing any results.81 In addition, British abolitionists had backed away from colonization a few years earlier. By the end of 1862, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society “considered it to be no part of their duties” to involve itself in the relocation of free blacks from Canada and the United States.82 THE FAMILIARITY AND INEXPEDIENCY OF BLACK LANDOWNERSHIP
The discontinuation of governmental funding for foreign tropical colonization did not mean that Republicans ceased to see freedom in geographic terms or as partitioned along climatic and racial lines. On the contrary, I suggest that their early policy of land distribution made sense to more than a few Republicans because of the much-publicized idea of the South as a tropical region and the familiarity of the tenet of segregated tropical landownership exemplified by Liberian colonization. Envisioning black homesteads in the South did not seem like a drastic move for Republicans in light of the racial discourse they had been accustomed to and embraced wholeheartedly in previous decades. In the cotton-and rice-growing areas, Republicans were initially quite willing to offer freedmen opportunities to become landowners. With the founding of the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865, they set out to institute a new system in which freed p eople would work their way up from dependent wage workers to become independent freeholders. It was decided that the new bureau would lease and eventually sell abandoned and confiscated lands to freed people (and loyal white refugees) in forty-acre parcels.83 Likewise, the Southern Homestead Act was intended to promote the settlement of freed people and loyal white Southerners on public land.84 Direct redistribution of abandoned lands also took place. Most notably, some emancipated p eople were able to attain land through General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, according to which the Sea Islands and a large strip of the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia would be divided into forty-acre plots on which black families could settle. By June 1865, approximately 40,000 freed people had received tracts on “Sherman’s land.”85 Another trial of “an independent black yeomanry” was a U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 185
farming colony created on confiscated plantations in Davis Bend, Mississippi. This was “a Republican experiment” in which formerly enslaved people w ere 86 trained to fulfill the promise of free soil. What distinguished Liberia and the South was who had previously occupied the land in question—and the identity of the previous occupants in no small measure contributed to the failure of southern black free soil. The fact that the land in Liberia had belonged to local kingdoms enabled the establishment of black settlers. In contrast, black landownership in the Reconstruction South failed b ecause confiscation from southern planters was, after all, a political and military measure undertaken according to “the rules of war.”87 Confiscated property became a tool for the Union government to use in fostering and solidifying southern loyalty, and consequently, President Andrew Johnson ordered in the summer of 1865 that all unsold government- controlled land be restored to its former owners. Titles to “Sherman’s land” were revoked, and Johnson’s land policy forced the farming colony in Davis Bend to close down in early 1866.88 After the return of the seized assets, only an inconsequential amount of southern land remained available for redistribution.89 In addition, the Southern Homestead Act failed to help freed people develop stable and productive landholdings because public lands tended to be inferior. Lack of finance and administrative deficiencies also c ontributed to the act’s “dismal failure.”90 The return of the confiscated plantations, combined with northern merchants’ desire to quickly restore the cotton trade, steered the nation away from black independent farming. Even when land was sold, emancipated people were the last to benefit. Attempts at black f ree soil, or what historians call “a landed emancipation,” failed.91 As Eric Foner notes, Reconstruction’s “policy of according black men a place in the political nation while denying them the benefits of land reform fortified the idea that the f ree citizen could be a dependent laborer.”92 With wages too low to accumulate enough capital for landownership, economic mobility from wage labor to freehold proved unfeasible for many. And as the Freedmen’s Bureau lost substantial amounts of land to redistribute due to Johnson’s restoration policy, its main job became securing contract-based labor for plantations and creating a permanent labor force working on southern soil for low wages.93 Without effective land reform, black landowners in the South (whose numbers increased from 2.2 percent of the entire southern black farming population in 1870 to 24 percent in 1900) had to depend on local whites’ willingness to sell land and black southerners’ sheer “hard work, 186 • Chapter 6
thrift, and good luck,” supplemented by personal patronage from white benefactors in navigating l egal and social hurdles.94 The conversion of freed p eople into a cheap dependent workforce was not the only desired effect of this new free labor system: it also addressed a social concern emanating from the government’s abandonment of colonization. As Sharon Strom points out, antebellum free soilers opposed slavery and endorsed tropical colonization in the belief that it would root out the possibility of miscegenation that flourished in the form of masters’ sexual coercion of female slaves.95 Now that colonization was out of the picture, northerners’ aversion to the sexual exploitation of enslaved w omen attained a heightened sense of urgency. Given that freed people w ere h ere to stay and work for white southerners, it became of vital importance to avoid replicating slavery’s cardinal (and carnal) sin—white male control of black female sexuality—without separating the former masters and slaves spatially. In 1866 the New York Tribune stressed that keeping free black labor in the South should coincide with efforts to divide the two races sexually. “The problem is not how to get rid of Blacks,” the paper contended, “but how to keep them without violating the laws of God, and without utterly wasting the resources of their labor.”96 Viewed in this light, the familiar story of the postwar promotion of black patriarchal households can be seen as a governmental attempt to regulate southern white and freed black bodies when physically segregating the latter overseas was no longer an option. As a number of excellent scholarly works have shown, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s effort to institute marriage among freed people was meant to replace white men’s sexual dominance with black male authority. The bureau’s promotion of a contract system was meant to further this purpose by creating a moral economic relationship between white and black patriarchs in lieu of the tyranny and despotism that enabled sexual vio lence against enslaved w omen. One outcome of this development was a black manhood based on the husband’s claim to the wife’s body in sexual and economic terms. In this iteration the moral value of freedwomen’s sexuality— chastity, in other words—depended on black male protection. Women’s labor was also subject to patriarchal control. As landownership proved more and more unachievable, a husband’s claim to his wife’s labor became increasingly important in the minds of freedmen as a marker of his manhood and freedom.97 Of course, freedwomen did not completely submit to such control. As a rich body of scholarship demonstrates, women did not withdraw entirely from work in the field. Thavolia Glymph argues that despite the Freedmen’s U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 187
Bureau’s construction of the laboring subject as male, freedwomen performed wage field labor, forming a new set of relationships with former mistresses as employee and employer.98 And even if they did conform, freedwomen did so not to achieve the gender ideals set by the bureau but, as Leslie Schwalm points out, “because their own survival and that of their families depended on d oing so.”99 In other cases, women’s absence from wage field labor stemmed from their strategic decision to keep up men’s wage rates.100 The government attempted l abor management, which was negated so capably by freed women, can be understood in the context of the Republicans’ preoccupation with the doctrine of racially separated freedom. The making of black patriarchy may well have intersected with concerns about how to prevent interracial mixing without recourse to colonization. DIVERSE CONFIGURATIONS OF RACE, L ABOR, AND CLIMATE
The Republican idea of a black-majority tropical South did not take immediate hold in the South. Instead, diverse labor arrangements were instituted in tandem with different understandings of the climatic and thus racial character of regional and local spaces. These new configurations illustrated the South’s deep entanglement with the global system of race and labor. Some planters committed a major m istake by attempting to hire European immigrants for plantation work—a move that revealed their ignorance or dismissal of the basic principle of global labor mobilization. Much to the planters’ dismay, but not surprisingly, the immigrants who arrived—most of whom w ere Germans—had no intention of being permanent plantation workers. Some newcomers ran away as soon as they reached the port of arrival; o thers left their plantations after a short while, often in droves. Many also demanded higher wages and then walked away when they accumulated enough money to buy a piece of land.101 This was only to be expected, for the racial structure of the transnational migratory labor circuits had long placed Europeans in l abor categories particular to their race. To immigrants, working on a plantation amid tropical swamps was labor that was closely associated with nonwhites. Other planters had a keen sense of the transnational free labor market, recognizing the doctrine of nonwhite tropical plantation labor. Planters in the Gulf States experimented with Chinese “coolies,” revealing their awareness of the racial stratum of labor that operated in the Caribbean. Louisiana sugar plantations began shifting to wage labor in the fall of 1862 and had achieved a fully established f ree labor system by the spring of 1864, due to a continu188 • Chapter 6
ing demand for sugar production and the Union army’s need to discharge contrabands under its care in the region.102 According to Moon-Ho Jung, the planters, positioning their region as a geographic zone where “the white man can not bear the climate or sun,” decided to import “labourers that can stand this Climate.”103 With increasing competition from abroad and fraught contract negotiations with freed people, planters sought to hire cheap migrant workers from China, as did their Caribbean counterparts. There was also an effort to realize a fantasy of white free soil, much like what we saw happened in Virginia and Jamaica, with similar rhetorical strategies. Between late 1866 and 1870 South Carolinians sought to attract white farming families to occupy small plots of land that would be portioned off from large plantations.104 For that purpose, the South Carolina state legislature created the position of commissioner of immigration, whose main task was advertising the state to European immigrants. To make their state attractive to “a thickly settler, prosperous white population of farmers,” the new commissioner of immigration, John Wagener, likened his state to the Midwest.105 The similarity was marked by the fact that the state could produce not only typically southern crops such as “cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar,” but also “every grain and fruit of the northernmost clime.”106 Such reframing also resorted to the racial geographic model that associated whiteness with temperate Europe. Reminiscent of William Anderson’s representation of Jamaica as Mediterranean, the commissioner compared “the climate of South Carolina” to “that of the south of France and of Italy.”107 The flip side of these claims was the denial of “the widely held belief that the state was disease- ridden, violent, and tropical.”108 Not surprisingly, coexisting with the dream of a white South Carolina was the expectation, however unrealistic, that the state’s emancipated p eople would leave for Africa or other tropical places. Writing to prospective immigrants from Europe, the commissioner proclaimed that its “former bondsmen” were “seeking their fortunes in other lands—perhaps to return to Africa, or, following the inducements and persuasions of speculators and labor agents, to [move to] more southern climes.”109 Such drivel reflected the state’s general racial atmosphere, which convinced its freed people that they were not welcome to remain in the land of their birth. Thus, when six hundred emigrants departed for Liberia in November 1866, roughly half of them were formerly enslaved people from South Carolina.110 Although Louisiana and South Carolina adhered to the transnational racial paradigm of free labor, European and Chinese workers never became U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom • 189
significant occupants of the southern economic landscape. Planters in South Carolina were not willing to sell their lands at cheap prices for immigrants to settle in the state. By 1870 the South’s foreign-born populations were smaller than they had been in 1860.111 The major labor force in the Louisiana sugar plantations remained African American wage laborers, while the system of sharecropping came to dominate southern cotton fields by the early 1870s. For cash-poor planters and freed people seeking a modicum of autonomy, the situation was a product of compromise—an especially b itter and inequitable one for the latter group. The outcome put black farmers into a vicious spiral of debt peonage and crop liens that chained them to the land as a source of exploitable labor.112 •
The political fight over the expansion of free and slave territory was essentially a struggle over how white Americans could profit from formerly indigenous land. In a sense, the sectional crisis was a f amily feud between two factions of U.S. settler colonial interests. This conflict over western expansion accompanied another set of competing imperial ambitions—those to reach into Central America via slave or f ree blacks. When the free-soil camp in this contest was swamped with refugees from slavery during the Civil War, its responses paralleled its prewar understandings of black freedom: the Republicans envisaged tropical homes for the emancipated. Such a development must have come as no surprise to black residents in Canada. Deeply suspicious of the continental scope of f ree black persecution, some in Canada gave up on any hope of equality in Canada or the United States and left for Haiti, even during the war against the slaveholding South. On the southern side of the Canada-U.S. border, African American leaders were also realizing the likelihood that emancipation would be spatially constricted. Douglass and others defended black free labor in the South as they inventively refuted Republicans’ attempts to contain freed people in domestic or foreign tropical locations. Eventually, after a period of experiments and failures, the task of cultivating southern soil fell on emancipated people. And they faced this task in conditions far short of their expectations. U.S. abolition failed them by its inability to create substantial black homesteads. This inability, it may be suggested, was not because Republicans could not accept the idea of free black landownership. Ideologically, Liberian colonization had acquainted the white northern public 190 • Chapter 6
with the idea of black landed settlement in a remote tropical land. Creating black freeholders in the distant domestic tropics, therefore, may not have been a truly radical program in the northern worldview. Yet the goal of land distribution lost to political expediency. In the end, the Republicans laid the ground for an exploitative labor system that would bind southern freed people in an inescapable cycle of debt for generations to come. The South was now firmly a tropical economy worked by a dependent black-majority labor force.
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CONCLUSION
The South had become a domestic tropical space with black-majority dependent labor. Local planters, northern capit alists, and former abolitionists agreed that the freed p eople were here to stay in the sugar plantations and the cotton fields that fed the textile mills and helped support the shipyards of the Eastern Seaboard. This new mapping of f ree black labor had a transnational reach and contours. By 1866 British abolitionists equated the U.S. South and the British Caribbean as two postemancipation societies marked by the same characteristics: both w ere tropical environments with large black populations liable to labor exploitation and in need of benevolent protection from the northern metropole. Looking southward to the Anglo-American tropics, En glish reformers expressed a sense of common destiny with their U.S. counter parts, both feeling bound by a responsibility to secure a fair wage system and create a moral and rational mass of laborers—a responsibility that must be met for the successful execution of emancipation, “whether in Jamaica or the Southern States of America.”1 This sense of a shared objective was expressed in religious, gendered, and racial terms. The abolitionists’ identity as “the friends of the coloured race on both sides of the Atlantic in one common Christian duty” was based on “the harmony and brotherhood of the two great braves of the Anglo-Saxon family.”2 This new geography of black freedom encompassing the U.S. South
and the Caribbean thus presupposed an Anglo-Saxon male identity that unified postemancipation abolitionists across the Atlantic. The tropicalization of the South was part and parcel of the continuing segmentation of the Anglo-American world into racially defined zones in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the British Empire, Canada pressed on with its racial mandate by enacting immigration measures that explicitly invoked the language of climatic determinism to restrict the entry of p eople of African descent. The whitening of Canada coincided with that of Australia, resulting in the firmer demarcation of racial lines around British settler societies although the role of climatic determinism diverged in each case. Canada remained the home of free black people in the aftermath of the Civil War, although their numbers declined somewhat. According to Richard Reid’s recent study, the overall black population in Canada West (which became the province of Ontario a fter the confederation of Canada in 1867) decreased by 22 percent between 1861 and 1871, while the numbers of U.S.- born black residents dropped by 14 percent.3 Among the U.S.-born migrants who returned to the United States w ere black men and w omen who went to serve the Union. For example, Mary Ann Shadd-Cary worked as a recruiting officer for the U.S. Army, and Martin Delany labored in recruiting and was commissioned the army’s first black major. A portion of the estimated 1,247 U.S.-born Union volunteers from Canada West very likely remained on the southern side of the border after the war, partially accounting for the 14 percent drop in population noted above.4 Despite the decrease, black communities were taking firm root in Canada immediately after the war, as we can see by examining colonial missionary activity. In 1866 the Colonial and Continental Church Society, the London-based organization formerly known as Colonial Church and School Society, began treating formerly enslaved people as a permanent population and gave them a new designation: “the colored population of Canada, who were originally fugitive slaves.”5 Accordingly, they altered the name of their decade-old mission from the Fugitive Slave Mission to Mission to the Coloured Population of Canada, shedding the token of their past and affirming their belonging in Canada. In 1870 the society decided to disband the mission, not for lack of a big enough population to serve, but because they no longer found a substantial number of people in need of urgent spiritual and material assistance. Religious instruction of black and white residents was thus merged into one missionary activity.6 The spirit of interracial evangelism was nevertheless at variance with the general sentiment in Canada. White Canadians continued to view the pres194 • Conclusion
ence of people of African descent as antithetical to the creed of a white settler Canada, which eventually led to a series of antiblack immigration mea sures in the early twentieth c entury. At the core of this policy was the familiar racial language of climatic essentialism. To maintain the supposed purity of the white settler polity, according to Alison Bashford, the government constructed an “implicitly racialised” category of “unfitness” in Canadian immigration discourse through a dichotomy of tropical and temperate.7 A case in point was section 38(c) of the Canadian Immigration Act of 1910, which prohibited “the landing in Canada, or the landing at any specified port of entry in Canada, of immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada,” alluding to Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans from the United States.8 The push for a white Canada continued. In 1911 the government explicitly designated people of African descent as one object of the immigration ban by passing Order in Council 115. However, the law was abrogated b ecause by reason of a procedural technicality—in response to pressure from U.S. officials who found it imperative to keep the northern gate open to facilitate the departure of their nation’s undesirable element. In the absence of statutory procedures, Canadian officials resorted to bureaucratic measures to hinder black immigration, such as denying p eople entry under the pretext of failed medical examinations. Railroad companies cooperated by charging full fares to black families or refusing to carry them at all, while often reducing or waiving fares for white families coming to settle in Canada.9 The use of “climate as a racist ploy” continued until it was finally dropped as a way of stopping black immigration in 1953.10 Canada’s adherence to climatic determinism was not duplicated in Australia’s drive to realize “a white and preferably British Australia,” although both societies pursued the same goal of eliminating nonwhite races.11 During the same time that Canada instituted its immigration policy, the Australian Parliament, on the heels of the 1901 federation of the colonies, passed the Pacific Islanders Labourers Act, which prohibited the importation of indentured workers into Queensland a fter 1904 and ordered that t hose already present be deported by 1907. This act, along with the Immigration Restriction Act, remained “the legislative core of the white Australia policy, preserved more or less intact until the 1960s.”12 Australia’s pursuit of whiteness did not rely on theories of climatic essentialism; instead, it used a new line of medical thought about the relationship between the body and disease. The emerging field of tropical medicine laid the scientific foundation for the transformation of the Australian tropics into Conclusion • 195
a white settler space. Maintaining that distinct microorganisms, not climatic surroundings, caused tropical diseases, this body of knowledge ensured that the tropics w ere not inherently incompatible with the white body but could be made habitable through the use of pathology: finding the causes and effects of diseases, and effective ways to prevent them. This “demise of environmental determinism” changed the relationship between the white body and the tropical climate, underpinning Australia’s settler colonial project of building a healthy white citizenry in an environment previously thought adverse.13 The differences between Canada and Australia point out key aspects of the ways medical knowledge about the body and climates circulated and was pressed into political service. First, the differences revealed the uneven dissemination of the new medical paradigm. The emerging germ theory did not trickle down to colonial policy arenas uniformly, nor did it spread evenly among medical experts. As Dane Kennedy has observed, belief in the influence of a climatic environment on one’s health did not disappear automatically from medical discourse; rather, it continued to hold sway among doctors as Western imperial incursion into tropical regions intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 Second, the examples of Canada and Australia show us how white settler projects made expedient use of medical knowledge to achieve their political goals. In Canada policy makers continued to use climatic determinism because the notion of race-based climatic predispositions was appropriate for the mandate of excluding people of African descent. But policy makers in Australia, with the aim of replacing nonwhite workers with white ones, invoked medical theories that denied the tropical climate’s inherently inimical effect on the white body. As commonwealth settler societies steadily built themselves up into “white men’s countries,” the United States went through the final phase of western continental expansion without according African Americans equal access to its attendant material benefits or the symbolic status of the upwardly mobile frontier settler.15 It is true that the Fourteenth Amendment and the resultant eligibility for the Homestead Act of 1862 did give African American citizens the legal right to economic mobility through frontier settlement. Some African Americans took advantage of their new citizenship status to participate in the last thrust t oward an American continental empire. Since landowning in the South seemed out of reach, some emancipated p eople moved to participate in “the last great heyday of the family farmer” in Kansas under the
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Homestead Act.16 Before the end of the 1870s, the act propelled thousands of people to leave Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri to attain land in Kansas.17 While streams of migrants moved to Kansas primarily for homestead possibilities during the 1870s, the dominant discourse in the North negated their identity as aspiring settlers by focusing solely on the short so-called Kansas Fever Exodus of the summer of 1879, which white northerners described as a flight from quasi-slavery. Doubtless, the 1879 migration was spurred by Democratic political terror, but the “Exodusters” who arrived from Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana also shared the goal that had motivated the earlier journeys, that of landholding on the western frontier.18 Nevertheless, white northerners mostly painted the migrants as destitute freedmen and women who w ere forced to try to escape persecution. For example, the New York Tribune attached the headline “Fleeing from Slavery: Negro Exodus from the South” to a speech by a New York senator who called the migrants’ lives in the South “practical slavery.”19 The New York Times cast the Exodusters in contrast to the archetypal American settler—independent, vigorous, resourceful, and above all white and male. The Times reiterated the conventional axiom that “many farmers, now prosperous in the West, began without money or friends, and have worked their way to independence and comfort” through “energy, enterprise, thrift, perseverance.”20 Contrasted with them were the Exodusters whom the Times portrayed as needing charity to sustain themselves in their escape from quasi-slavery. Their westward movement was “not ordinary migration.” Instead of being “a hopeful effort for the attainment of a freer, happier lot,” it was driven by “an indescribable terror” that impelled “the poor creatures to flee as for their lives.” And unlike white settlers, the migrants were not “intelligent” or “thrifty” but “so sorely in need of guidance as well as charity.”21 As these examples suggest, northern whites were unable to accept African Americans into the dominant mythol ogy of American continental empire, even after access to the membership of the U.S. yeomanry became a de jure condition for them. Black participation in Manifest Destiny remained an anomalous concept for the mainstream U.S. society. In that sense, northern journalists replicated Canadian colonists’ inability to see black mobility as anything other than a desperate escape from oppression. Inasmuch as African Americans w ere placed outside the imagined continental settlerhood, the codification of black rights to become settlers was a paradigm-shifting development. What this radical change entailed was the transformation of African Americans into legal beneficiaries of the official
Conclusion • 197
apparatus of native land divestiture. B ecause an ability to claim indigenous land constituted a fundamental right of U.S. citizens during this time, the Fourteenth Amendment officially incorporated African Americans into the American settler colonial state. Indeed, the Kansas migration brought them to the front line of indigenous removal. Some black migrants sought homesteads in areas that had been part of the Kansa Indian Reservation. Just several years before their arrival, the federal government had removed the entire Kansa Indian population to Indian Territory, a process that had begun in 1859 in response to pressure from white settlers.22 Obtaining citizenship rights signaled African Americans’ entrance into the U.S. settler colonial polity, however late the gates opened for them. Yet the legal ability to benefit from imperial expansion did not result in economic independence for most migrants. The Homestead Act failed to provide African Americans with the same degree of wealth and security as it did white Americans.23 The law did not lead to a racially equitable distribution of land, since whites’ violent obstructions, coupled with black Americans’ late admission into eligibility, greatly hindered their acquisition of fertile western lands. As most of the best land was unavailable for newcomers, many Exodusters ended up in urban occupations such as mechanics, teamsters, laborers, and maids. The migrants had no promising reports to send back to the South, which helped dampen enthusiasm for migration after 1879.24 In the end, although the Homestead Act was pathbreaking, it never brought about a fundamental change in the material and symbolic status quo of African Americans’ relationship to the land in the West. The failure to symbolically and materially incorporate southern freed people into the last stages of western settlement ushered in an era of overseas expansion and domestic industrialization in which the conflation of black freedom and tropical location took on new significance. As the United States made its forays into overseas insular territories, attempts were made to place African Americans in the empire’s new tropical possessions, a strategy not out of line with the long- established association of blackness and tropical climates. For example, one of the first measures taken by the U.S. government in the Spanish-American War was to raise ten new volunteer regiments to fight in Cuba who “possess[ed] immunity from diseases incident to tropical climates.”25 The regiments included African American men from the South, who w ere mustered into the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth U.S. Infantry Immune Volunteers. Although regular units concluded the b attle in Cuba before the “immunes” went into combat,
198 • Conclusion
volunteer enlistments kept up during the course of the war and produced soldiers to fight the fierce guerrilla b attles in the Philippines.26 So pervasive was the belief in black immunity that U.S. imperial architects considered using African Americans in roles beyond military service. During the early stages of the occupation of the Philippines, t here was talk of sending African Americans, or “children of the tropics,” as initial settlers to the archipelago.27 However, support for this “Negro colonization” scheme proved short-lived.28 This was attributable to the influence of tropical medicine on colonial policy making. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the perceived advantage of using African Americans for tropical colonization was superseded by a growing concern that they would end up as conduits of tropical disease pathogens due to their presumed unsanitary ways of life and sexual affinity for indigenous Filipino w omen. The new medical emphasis on hygienic containment as a measure of disease control merged with the older belief in blacks’ “inherited advantage in disease resistance” to generate fears that African Americans w ere in fact resistant carriers of tropical diseases who would disseminate those diseases through their interactions with another group of unhygienic “primitives.”29 In the end, allegedly tropical black bodies did not spearhead U.S. overseas colonization. In contrast, the domestic South increasingly became seen as the tropical home for African Americans in the early twentieth century—this time as part of the new U.S. imperial geography. According to Natalie Ring, philanthropists, medical professionals, and government agents increasingly viewed the South—like Cuba and the Philippines—as a torrid colonial space plagued with tropical diseases and occupied by a nonwhite labor force saddled with the production of raw materials. Southern tropicality was now associated with the insular colonial possessions and understood in the new geographic frame of the overseas American empire. Integral to this broader imaginary was tropical medicine. The fact that certain microbes appeared to be endemic to the tropics, including the South, strengthened the belief in the dichotomy between tropical and temperate environments, with the former signifying disease and racial otherness.30 The racial otherness of black Americans took on a particular form in the context of the dramatically changing economic structures of the United States in the early twentieth century. As the nation underwent rapid industrialization, according to Daniel Bender, intellectuals and activists saw African Americans as “a tropical race” that was “awkwardly caught in a temperate
Conclusion • 199
civilization” and destined to languish in the new economic regime.31 Vital to this hierarchical conceptualization of race and labor was black tropicality, which marginalized f ree black labor by providing a biological basis for a white-majority industrial workforce. As was the case during the era of continental expansion, the essentialist ideology supported racial strata of free l abor.32 The discourse of tropicality in its various versions and modalities took hold in the new U.S. empire, organizing racial policies and labor relations at home and abroad. It is important to note that the practice of mapping the world according to racial differences and climatic categorization had a much longer genealogy than has been acknowledged. It is true that questions of race, labor, and climate took center stage in the era of U.S. imperialism a fter 1898, but this development did not come out of a vacuum. The history of this paradigm dates back to the ideological system that developed through a series of emancipations in North America. The ideological matrix that arose from and justified the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery informed the meaning of and attitude t oward black freedom in British North America and the United States. As a sequence of emancipations liberated U.S. and U.S.-origin enslaved p eople—with some emancipations rooted in political and ideological grounds, while o thers were merely expedient wartime actions—a certain pattern became obvious. Each instance of liberation prompted efforts to relocate the newly freed people to locations defined as tropical, which concurred with the designation of certain places as suitable only for the advancement of the freedom of whites, and with the racial particularity of t hese places marked by their allegedly temperate climates. Few of these efforts elicited the kind of mass migration they were intended to produce, but claims that free blacks should practice their freedom outside of supposedly temperate regions and in environments naturally suited to them gave rise to an understanding of freedom as a geographically specific and biologically determined condition. By the time the Civil War broke out, the principle of segregating black freedom in the tropics had taken root in diverse spheres of activity in British and U.S. societies. In Britain the principle permeated metropolitan abolitionism, colonial and imperial policy making, and popular understandings of settler identity, while in the United States the Liberian colonization movement disseminated the notion of tropical black freedom (borrowing it from discourse about Sierra Leone) and laid the foundations for the way Republicans understood emancipation in the crucial de 200 • Conclusion
cade of the 1860s. The idea was so entrenched that it informed influential Union administrators’ and sympathizers’ thoughts on emancipation, leading them to conceive of freedom as a climatically particular and geographic ally contained phenomenon. Despite the different opinions about proper locations for blacks—whether overseas or in the U.S. South—Republicans generally agreed on the spatial confinement of black freedom and its climatic nature. Eventually, the South was cast as another tropical region to be worked by a predominantly black population kept apart from white-majority temperate areas. In this sense, U.S. southern emancipation might very well be the most devastatingly successful case of tropical freedom in the history of North American emancipations. The projects of black overseas removal, in their discursive and institutional iterations, constituted an integral part of settler colonial relations that unfolded in both British North America and the United States. While the perceived advantage of black presence in the tropics varied—from postemancipation demand for plantation labor to an imperialist desire to disseminate U.S. republican values and realize expansionist ambitions in Central America— the relocation schemes examined in this book had a shared imperative behind their quest to dislocate freed p eople from their metropolitan and frontier homes and destinations. From the migration of the black loyalists to Sierra Leone to the Civil War initiative of Central American colonization, each of the black tropical migration schemes helped affirm whites’ monopoly on the prime privileges of frontier settlement—upward economic mobility through small-scale independent farming and attendant political legitimacy as self- governing citizens or subjects. This pattern also indicated that the whiteness of frontier settler migration attained meaning not only through a white-indigenous dichotomy but also through juxtaposing whites and f ree blacks. The white monopoly on formerly indigenous lands gained its racial definition through recurring symbolic and material practices of assigning emancipated populations to varying forms of free labor in the tropics. One caveat to this transnationally shared racial ordering was the divergent paths taken by the two empires concerning slavery. In the slaveholding republic, the imperative of free-soil expansion contended with another facet of settler colonialism: the expansion of slavery. In contrast, the British Empire moved toward becoming a free empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These differences notwithstanding, in both places the bottom line was the same: continental territories existed for the advancement of only one type of freedom—white freedom. Conclusion • 201
The discourse of tropical black freedom was in essence a discourse of alienation with a biological pretext. It provided grounds for denying free blacks the political, economic, and social benefits of frontier expansion. In British North America, free black populations faced inequitable allocations of land, private and governmental refusals to sell land, and public outcries against their settlement just as the discourse of black tropical freedom pointed them to Africa or the British Caribbean. Similarly, free African Americans in the United States suffered legal restrictions on their movement into northwestern states, where support for Liberian colonization meshed with the impulse to whiten the states’ populations. The definition of white western settlement posited by Liberian colonization sympathizers—as an undertaking devoid of free blacks—later seeped into official arenas in the Pacific West and materialized in state statutes banning landownership in California and Oregon. On top of that, the Dred Scott decision became the legal basis for the denial of federal preemption rights to black Americans. Climatic determinism was not the only language that helped draw racial lines around the spaces of freedom. In Upper Canada and the United States, idioms of intimacy played a critical part in the intertwined justification for removing blacks to the tropics and excluding them from colonial settlement. The specter of interracial sex, rooted in the settler colonial principle of endogamous transmission of resources, came into play when Canadian colonists vilified refugees from the United States on the ground that they sexually disrupted the racial order. This opposition simultaneously mapped an imperial geography that defined the province and the Caribbean as two racially distinct spaces. In the United States, the gendered political ideology of republican citizenship entered advocacy of Liberian colonization and worked with climatic determinism to buttress the project. Proponents of colonization limited the viability of African American domestic life to tropical regions, denying its existence in the metropolitan center and on the western frontiers. Recognizing that the idea of tropical black freedom played a constitutive part in Anglo-American expansionist processes compels us to broaden the parameters of our discussion of settler colonialism in North America in multiple ways. First, we need to adopt a larger geographic scope, for the settler colonial o rders in question necessitated spatial imaginings that went beyond North America. That is, they entailed mappings of the Atlantic that signified and undergirded racially hierarchical relations of labor and land use organized along racial lines. Each case of emancipation called forth imagined and actual placements of freed people in locations in the Atlantic, which in turn gave 202 • Conclusion
expression to the whiteness of colonial domination over indigenous land. Second, settler colonial projects in the United States and British North Americ a did not develop this particular mode of racial ordering in isolation from each other: the core logic of the association of black freedom and tropical labor flowed across borders. Moreover, it was U.S. enslaved people’s pursuit of freedom that prompted efforts to control their location in both of these places. Flights for freedom across borders and military lines created sizable populations of emancipated people, but at the same time they initiated and maintained the need for comparable systems of exclusion and hierarchy in both empires. In such a world, freedom was a circumscribed condition. The free black protagonists of this book were well aware of the limitations imposed on them. Claims of innate predispositions bore down on them in various ways, according to the demands of changing political and economic circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic. Accusations of blacks’ inability to form intraracial familial relationships came to the forefront of the contests over belonging, as intimacy became an organizing principle of Canadian frontier politics and U.S. republican citizenship. Escaping from bondage in North America thus marked the beginning of a long fight for belonging. Gaining freedom thrust free populations into struggles over geography. Each case of emancipation was accompanied and mediated by discussions of the proper place of black freedom, discussions anchored in the lexicon of racial slavery in the New World. Slavery’s legacy helped make freedom a racially defined geographic concept in the United States and British North Amer ica, and that rendering was entangled with another kind of Euro-American colonial domination: settler colonialism. At e very turn in each emancipation process, freed people fought and negotiated discursive and institutional constraints on their freedom, putting forth their own definitions of what it meant to be free. These struggles cast a long shadow over the experiences of liberation among North American constituents of the African diaspora.
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NOTES
Introduction
1. Mary Shadd, A Plea for Emigration, 90–91. 2. Henry Bibb, “The American Refugees Home,” Voice of the Fugitive, June 18, 1851. 3. Frederick Douglass, “Postmaster General Blair and Frederick Douglass,” Douglass’ Monthly, October 1862, 725. 4. Frank Mackey, Black Then, 25–32; Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 1–60. 5. James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition; Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery; Joanne Melish, Disowning Slavery. 6. Julian Go, Patterns of Empire; Jack Greene, “Introduction”; Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire. In the United States, Jacksonian democracy shifted the po litical function of property ownership from the prerequisite of civic participation to a “political entitlement” of equal white male citizens, a category that absorbed a widening range of European and European-descended groups over time (Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 20). See also Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design, 256–57; Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 16–17; Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 114–20. 7. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xiv. 8. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xv. On how different African diasporic groups encountered and challenged spatial iterations of racial hierarchy, see Sara Busdiecker, “Where Blackness Resides”; Angel Nieves and Leslie Alexander, “We Shall Independent Be.” George Lipsitz notes that “the racial projects of U.S. society have always been spatial projects as well” and that these spatial mechanisms give “whites privileged access to opportunities for social inclusion and upward mobility” while “impos[ing] unfair and unjust forms of exploitation and exclusion on aggrieved communities of color” (How Racism Takes Place, 6 and 52). 9. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 13.
10. Italic in original. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire,” 2. Matthew Sparke explains modes of colonial space making deployed in white–indigenous relations, such as the erasure of indigenous mappings of land, imposition of topographic orders on conquered territory, and denial of indigenous claims to land through arbitrary cartographic representations of colonized space (“Mapped Bodies and Disembodied Maps”). 11. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, “Views and Visions of the Tropical World,” 3. See also David Arnold, introduction; Gary Okihiro, Pineapple Culture; Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 11–30; Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire. 12. Driver and Martins, “Views and Visions of the Tropical World,” 14. 13. David Arnold, “The Place of ‘the Tropics’ in Western Medical Ideas since 1750,” 307; Seymour Drescher, Abolition, 80, and The Mighty Experiment, 74–75. 14. Melissa Johnson, “The Making of Race and Place,” 598. Scholars have examined how the trope of climate—though occasionally contested and contradicted— structured British imperial and colonial arrangements of labor and race across and beyond the Atlantic. See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness and “Geography, Race, and Nation”; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene; Joyce Chaplin, “Race”; James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; Drescher, The Mighty Experiment; Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, and “ ‘The Tender Frame of Man’ ”; Eva Mackey, The House of Difference; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 15. Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 222, 224. 16. Natalie Ring, The Problem South. 17. Daniel Bender and Jana Lipman, “Through the Looking Glass,” 21–22. 18. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 6. See also Dane Kennedy, “The Perils of the Midday Sun.” On the global scope of settler colonial whiteness, see Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, Re- Orienting Whiteness. 19. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties,” 829. As scholars in feminist colonial studies have pointed out, intimacy was “a crucial instrument of colonization” by which tropes of “sexual morality, gender norms, and regularizing households” produced racial categories that underlay hierarchical relations of empire and colonization (Ballantyne and Burton, “Introduction: The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire,” 7). Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents”; Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 4; Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 5. See also Martha Hodes, Sex, Love, and Race. 20. On deprecations of indigenous gender relations, see Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Bethel Saler, The Settler’s Empire. On colonial regulation of indigenous and white relationships, see Lauren Basson, White Enough to Be American? ; E. Mackey, The House of Difference; Renisa Mawani, “ ‘The Iniquitous Practice of W omen’ ”; Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire, and “Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia, 1849–1871.” On Asian immigration, see Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy. 206 • Notes to Introduction
21. On earlier British emancipation schemes, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital, especially chapter 4. 22. Brandon Mills, “ ‘The United States of Africa,’ ” 80. Nicholas Guyatt conceptualizes Liberian colonization as part of a larger ideological trend called “benevolent colonization,” which held that “blacks and Indians could become more like white Americans by removing from them, and they could create their own versions of the United States beyond the borders of a white republic” (“ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness,’ ” 987). 23. Claude Clegg III, The Price of Liberty, 84. The American Colonization Society provided each adult colonist with five acres of farm land. A family would receive two more acres for the wife and one more for each child (86). On Liberia’s laggard progress toward independence, see Mills, “ ‘The United States of Africa,’ ” 86–87. 24. Greene, “Introduction,” 17. On the economic and political disparities between settler and nonsettler colonies, see Catherine Hall, “The Rule of Difference”; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval- Davis, “Introduction.” On the similarities between British and U.S. colonial systems, see Go, Patterns of Empire; Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire. 25. Basson, White Enough to Be American?, 6. See also Saler, The Settler’s Empire. 26. William Freehling, “The Louisiana Purchase and the Coming of the Civil War,” 70. For discussions on the United States as a republican empire, see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires; Richard Immerman, Empire for Liberty; Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, and “ ‘The Strongest Government on Earth.’ ” 27. Peter Kastor, “ ‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?,’ ” 1030. 28. Britt Rusert, “Delany’s Comet,” 805. 29. Tim Cresswell, On the Move, 1. 30. See, for example, Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom; Matthew Guterl, American Mediterranean; Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane; Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher, The Meaning of Freedom; Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. 31. Van Gosse, “ ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends.’ ” 32. There is an extensive literature on the Underground Railroad. The most recent works include R. J. M. Blackett, Making Freedom; David Blight, Passages to Freedom; Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom. On African American abolitionists’ recourse to the political authority of British abolition, see R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, and Divided Hearts; Gosse, “ ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’ ”; William Caleb McDaniel, “The Fourth and the First”; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists; Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, Liberating Sojourn. Ousmane Power-Greene’s examination of black abolitionists’ activism in Britain against Liberian colonization rests on the dualism of “American racist ideology” and Britain’s “humanistic notion that underpinned emancipation” (Against Wind and Tide, 93). On the symbolic significance of the West Indian emancipation celebrations for African American cultural politics, see J. R. Kerr-Ritchie, Rites Notes to Introduction • 207
of August First; John McKivigan and Jason Silverman, “Monarchial Liberty and Republican Slavery”; Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation. 33. Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery. Peculiarly American conditions of antebellum black freedom pointed out by Hahn, such as the concentration of free black settlements in poor urban neighborhoods and racial persecutions in the lower Midwest, could also be ascribed to the racial boundaries of continental expansion that barred f ree African Americans from escaping from cities to free soil. For comparative studies, see David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, Beyond Bondage. 34. Guterl, American Mediterranean, 6. 35. Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil,” 331. See also Peabody and Grinberg, “Introduction.” 36. Richard Follett, Eric Foner, Walter Johnson, introduction, 2 (emphasis mine); Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, “Introduction,” 8 (emphasis mine). 37. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference,” 867. For theories of blacks’ relationship to U.S. settler colonialism, see Ana Maria Alonso, “Reconsidering Violence”; Dolores Janiewski, “Gendering, Racializing and Classifying”; Gregory Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 99–121; Patrick Wolfe, “Race and the Trace of History.” 38. David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference, 28. See also Randolph Campbell, An Empire for Slavery; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; Tiffany King, “Labor’s Aphasia”; Tiffany Jeannette King, “In the Clearing”; Morrison, Slavery and the American West; Adam Rothman, Slave Country. 39. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 16, 31. A historical study that draws an explicit connection between Liberian colonization and U.S. settler colonialism is Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide. There are works that sketch out instances of free blacks’ exclusion and marginalization from continental expansion. See, for example, Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery; Malcolm Edwards, “The War of Complexional Distinction”; Hietala, Manifest Design; Keith Richard, “Unwelcome Settlers.” David Chang illuminates African Americans’ relation to settler colonialism through the lens of nineteenth-century Creek land dispossession (The Color of the Land ). 40. For example, John Farrell, “The History of the Negro Community in Chatham, Ontario,” 123–24; Donald Simpson, Under the North Star, 142–43. 41. Eric Foner, “Abraham Lincoln, Colonization, and the Rights of Black Americans,” 34. 42. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 5. 43. Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” 130, 134. See also Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” 44. Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” 135.
208 • Notes to Introduction
Chapter 1: Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order
1. Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 102. 2. Harvey Whitfield, “The Struggle over Slavery in the Maritime Colonies,” 37. 3. Cassandra Pybus calculates the number to be 20,000. Her meticulous research revisits and revises the historiographical orthodoxy that projects an inflated estimate of 80,000–100,000 refugees (“Jefferson’s Faulty Math”). 4. Donald Simpson, Under the North Star, 127; James Walker, The Black Loyalists, 12. 5. In February 1787, 242 passengers in London were recorded to go on board vessels bound for Sierra Leone. See Alexander Byrd, Captives and Voyages, 144. In January 1792, 1,190 black settlers left Halifax for Sierra Leone. See Charles Bruce Fergusson, introduction to Clarkson’s Mission to Americ a, by Thomas Clarkson, 28. 6. See, for example, Stephen Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists; Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism; Byrd, Captives and Voyages; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journey of Freedom; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings; Walker, The Black Loyalists; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks. 7. The committee was also meant for South Asian lascars abandoned in London without a return passage to India, African-descended seamen, and former slaves. It used the inclusive category of “the black Poor,” and when it endeavored to relocate those “poor blacks” to Sierra Leone, some South Asians also left. See Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past, 104–17; Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain, 18–33. For more on the black poor with a focus on African-descended people, see Gretchen Gerzina, Black London Life before Emancipation, 133–204. 8. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists, 71; Dana Rabin, “ ‘In a Country of Liberty?,’ ” 23. F. O. Shyllon traces metropolitan efforts to remove free blacks to the early Tudor and Elizabethan periods (Black Slaves in Britain, 2). On Granville Sharp’s take on the Somerset case, see Brown, Moral Capital, 96–97. 9. Between late 1782 and early 1785, 22,000 p eople moved to the peninsula, doubling the population of the area. See Fergusson, introduction, 15. An average refugee was to receive a hundred acres for a head of household and an additional fifty acres for each family member. See Walker, The Black Loyalists, 19. 10. Byrd, Captives and Voyages, 167–69; Walker, The Black Loyalists, 24–32, 42–46. Notable black settlements included Birchtown and Brindley Town. 11. Pybus, Epic Journey of Freedom, 108–9; William Thornton, Papers of William Thornton, 1:35. After overcoming the committee’s initial reluctance, Smeathman submitted his proposal to the Treasury in May 1786 and subsequently secured funds for his enterprise. See Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists, 84–87. 12. Henry Smeathman, Plan of a Settlement to Be Made Near Sierra Leona, on the Grain Coast of Africa, 18. 13. Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 11. 14. Quoted in Walker, The Black Loyalists, 97. See also Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 141. Notes to Chapter 1 • 209
15. Emma Christopher notes that the distinction of white and black bodily constitutions in discourses on Sierra Leone and New South Wales revealed the primacy of skin color in the definition of race in this particular historical context, but that factors such as lineage, civility, religion, and dress informed conceptions of race in other settings in the eighteenth-century British world (“A ‘Disgrace’ to the Very Colour”). Christopher’s A Merciless Place details Britain’s attempts to establish penal colonies in Africa and Australia. 16. David Arnold, introduction, Warm Climates and Western Medicine, 6–7. See also Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa. 17. A prominent example of this transatlantic intelligentsia was John Lining, a Scottish- born doctor who practiced in Charleston, South Carolina. He described immunity to yellow fever as a distinctive feature of Africans but did not use this claim to justify slavery. See Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, 133. On intercolonial and transatlantic circulations of knowledge, see David Arnold, “The Place of ‘the Tropics’ in Western Medical Ideas since 1750,” 308; Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, 186, 194. 18. Jan Golinski, “American Climate and the Civilization of Nature,” 160. 19. Gary Puckrein, “Climate, Health and Black L abor in the English Americas,” 180. 20. H. Roy Merrens and George D. Terry, “Dying in Paradise,” 534. On English colonists’ concern about hot climates, see also Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience.” 21. Puckrein, “Climate, Health and Black Labor in the English Americ as,” 189; Mart Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe,” 63–64, 83–86. 22. “Nova Scotia Journals of the Proceedings of His Majesty’s Council in Their Session in General Assembly Commencing the 5th Day of December 1785 and Ending the 28th Day of Following,” co 217/58, National Archives of the United Kingdom (tna); “Proceedings of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor,” July 10, 1786, t1/633, tna; Turnbull, Macaulay, and Gregory, “Proposals to Convey Black Poor to Nova Scotia,” July 18, 1786, t1/634, tna; “Messrs. Bryans’ Proposals,” July 6, 1786, t1/634, tna; Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists, 97; Byrd, Captives and Voyages, 134–35. 23. “Memorial of Thomas Peters, a Free Negro, December 18, 1790,” co 217/63, tna; Fergusson, introduction, 8–9, 21; Walker, The Black Loyalists, 96. 24. Byrd, Captives and Voyages, 180; Fergusson, introduction, 21–22; Walker, The Black Loyalists, 117. For an overview of the British West Indian regiments, see Roger Newman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats. 25. “Nova Scotia Journals of the Proceedings of His Majesty’s Council in Their Session in General Assembly Commencing the 5th Day of December 1785 and Ending the 28th Day of Following,” co 217/58, tna; “Proceedings of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor,” July 10, 1786, t1/633, tna; Turnbull, Macaulay, and Gregory, “Proposals to Convey Black Poor to Nova Scotia,” July 18, 1786, t1/634, tna. 26. Brown, Moral Capital, 218. See also Seymour Drescher, Abolition, 81. 210 • Notes to Chapter 1
27. The settlement was to be cultivated through a land-grant system according to which each person over the age of sixteen, regardless of sex, was entitled to a one- acre town lot and a small farm. See Pybus, Epic Journey of Freedom, 109; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 162. On the missionary nature of the settlement, see Claude Clegg III, “The Promised Land, Inc.” 28. George E. Brooks Jr., “The Providence African Society’s Sierra Leone Emigration Scheme,” 190; Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, 5–6, 108; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 159, 162. 29. Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 11, 39. 30. The sentence originally appeared in The Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court, held at London, on the 19th of October 1791. It is quoted in C. B. Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 19. 31. Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 38; Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 26. 32. Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 66. 33. “Extract of a Letter from John Wentworth, Lieut. Governor and Commander-in- Chief of Nova Scotia,” July 18, 1792, co 217/63, tna. 34. “Memorial in Behalf of 650 Emmigrants [sic] Lately Arrived at Pictou from Glasgow, 23 September 1791,” enclosed in John Parr to Henry Dundas, September 27, 1791, co 217/63, tna; “Extract of a Letter from John Wentworth, Lieut. Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Nova Scotia,” July 18, 1792, co 217/63, tna. 35. “Memorial in Behalf of 650 Emmigrants [sic] Lately Arrived at Pictou from Glasgow, 23 September 1791,” enclosed in John Parr to Henry Dundas, September 27, 1791, co 217/63, tna. 36. Climate ideology provided the displaced Jamaican Trelawny Maroons with a language to use in expressing their desire to leave repressive labor conditions in Nova Scotia. The Trelawny Maroons had been deported from Jamaica to Nova Scotia in 1796 a fter their defeat in the Second Maroon War. According to Jeffry Fortin, after being relocated to the distant northern colony, the Jamaican blacks deployed “popular contemporary British scientific and racial theories,” calling “the Soil of Nova Scotia” unfit for their “natures and Constitutions” as it was for “the Pine Apple,” in their attempt to leave exploitative labor conditions in Nova Scotia (“ ‘Blackened Beyond Our Native Hue,’ ” 5). 37. John Clarkson, Clarkson’s Mission to America, 49, 70. 38. John Wentworth to Henry Dundas, May 3, 1793, co 217/64, tna. 39. Harvey Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 31–33. 40. Quoted in Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 33. 41. Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 32. 42. Quoted in Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 47. 43. Theophilus Chamberlain to Charles Morris, November 11, 1815, in C. B. Fergusson, A Documentary Study of the Establishment of the Negroes in Nova Scotia between Notes to Chapter 1 • 211
the War of 1812 and the Winning of Responsible Government, Nova Scotia Archives. By 1816, Preston and Hammonds Plains had 924 and 504 settlers, respectively. See Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 52. 44. Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 51–53. By the early 1840s, the government had replaced the tickets of location with freehold grants (74). 45. Petition of Isaac Jones to the Lieutenant Governor James Kempt, October 30, 1820, in African Nova Scotian Diaspora, Nova Scotia Archives. 46. Colin Campbell to Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg, August 25, 1837, Appendix 16, in Fergusson, A Documentary Study. 47. Rupert George to Richard Inglis, August 14, 1821, in African Nova Scotian Diaspora. 48. Robert Inglis to Rupert George, August 20, 1821, in African Nova Scotian Diaspora. 49. Whitfield, Blacks on the Border, 66, 69. 50. James Banner to Henry Goulburn, September 24, 1817, co 267/46, tna; George Brooks to William [Henry] Goulburn, September 12, 1817, co 267/46, tna; A. J. Griffiths to the African Institution, September 1, 1815, enclosed in Thomas Harris to Viscount Sidmouth, September 26, 1815, co 267/10, tna. 51. Wayne Ackerson, The African Institution and the Antislavery Movement in Great Britain, 18–19. 52. Ackerson, African Institution, 24–25, 31, 66. 53. A. J. Griffiths to the African Institution, September 1, 1815, enclosed in Thomas Harris to Viscount Sidmouth, September 26, 1815, co 267/10, tna; J. C. Donlevy to Carl Bathurst, October 23, 1818, co 267/48, tna. 54. Joanne Melish, Disowning Slavery, 64–76. 55. James Horton and Louis Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 71–75; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 78–79; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery, 3–4. 56. Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 117; Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 429. 57. Granville Sharp to John Jay, March 7, 1789, in Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 335. 58. The Rev. Samuel Hopkins to Granville Sharp, January 15, 1789, in Hoare, Memoirs, 341. 59. John Lettsom to William Thornton, November 28, 1786, in Thornton, Papers of William Thornton, 1:36; William Thornton to John Lettsom, July 26, 1788, in Thornton, Papers, 1:72. 60. Richard S. Newman, Roy E. Finkenbine, and Douglass Mooney, “Philadelphia Emigrationist Petition, Circa 1792”; James Sidbury, Becoming African in Americ a. 61. To the Honourable the Chairman, and Court Directors of the Sierra Leone Com pany, January 31, 1795, co 268/5, tna. 62. W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, “Colonizing the Black Atlantic,” 353–54. On the missionary nature of the settlement, see Clegg, “The Promised Land, Inc.” 63. Jeffrey Fortin, “Cuffe’s Black Atlantic World,” 260. See also To the Honourable the Chairman, and Court Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, January 31, 1795, co 268/5, tna; Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite, 29–30. 212 • Notes to Chapter 1
64. Joseph Tracy, “An Historical Discourse on the Rise and Progress of the Society,” in American Colonization Society, Memorial of the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the American Colonization Society, 66. See also Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 165–66. 65. American Colonization Society, The First Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1818), ree 7, and The Fourth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the F People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1821), 58–59, both in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27 (reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Douglas Egerton, “ ‘Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious,’ ” 467; Tracy, “An Historical Discourse on the Rise and Progress of the Society,” 66; Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 171. 66. Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 166. 67. American Colonization Society, The Seventh Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1824) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 86–87. The acs provided each adult colonist with five acres of farm land. A f amily would receive two more acres for the wife and one more for each child. See Claude Clegg III, The Price of Liberty, 86. 68. See Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution; Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism. 69. Beverly Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents, 10–11. 70. Clegg, The Price of Liberty, 4. See also Robert Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath; George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind; Paul Goodman, Of One Blood. 71. Tracy, “An Historical Discourse on the Rise and Progress of the Society,” 64. 72. The Huntington Library has a copy of the 1794 report that was owned by James Madison. 73. American Colonization Society, The Third Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1820) eople of Coin The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P lour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 22, 67. 74. American Colonization Society, Annual Reports, 68. See also Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 8. 75. American Colonization Society, The Third Annual Report in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 68. 76. American Colonization Society, The Seventh Annual Report in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 87. 77. American Colonization Society, African Colonization, 23. See also Philip Hay, Our Duty to Our Coloured Population, 13. Notes to Chapter 1 • 213
78. American Colonization Society, The Third Annual Report in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 24. 79. American Colonization Society, The Third Annual Report, 69. According to the Sierra Leone Company, “the disorder, which was the fever common to hot climates, while it affected in diff erent degrees the blacks and whites almost indiscriminately, proved much the most fatal to the Europeans . . . almost one half of the whites living on shore w ere carried off during this dreadful season, and nearly one tenth of the Nova Scotians” (Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 11–12). See also Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 33. 80. American Colonization Society, The Third Annual Report in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 71. See also Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 38; Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 52. 81. American Colonization Society, The Fifth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P eople of Color of the United States with an Appendix (1822) eople of Coin The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P lour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 15–16. 82. Massachusetts Colonization Society, American Colonization Society, and the Colony at Liberia (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1832), 6–7. 83. Tracy, “An Historical Discourse on the Rise and Progress of the Society,” 68. 84. Evan Lewis to Thomas Clarkson, June 12, 1816, cn122, Box 1, Thomas Clarkson Papers, the Huntington Library. 85. Lacy Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 37. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 61–62. 86. American Colonization Society, The Eighth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1825) eople of Coin The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P lour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 38–39. 87. American Colonization Society, Eighth Annual Report, 42–43. On Tucker, see Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 107. 88. American Colonization Society, The Tenth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1827) eople of in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 7. 89. American Colonization Society, The Tenth Annual Report, 60. 90. Henry Clay, An Address, 21. Eric Foner writes that the Kentuckian hoped to gradually remove slaves to Liberia so as to replicate the Northern free labor economy in his state (The Fiery Trial, 18). 91. John Van Atta, “Western Lands and the Political Economy of Henry Clay’s American System, 1819–1832,” 665. See also Phillip Magness, “The American System and the Political Economy of Black Colonization.”
214 • Notes to Chapter 1
92. Barbara Cloud, “Oregon in the 1820s”; Warren Cook, Flood Tide of Empire; Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 129–30. 93. Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 7, 235; Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 126, 241. 94. American Colonization Society, Thirty-First Annual Report of the American Colonization Society, with the Proceedings of the Board of Directors, and of the Society at Its Annual Meeting, January 18, 1848 (1848) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 11–20, 1828–36 (reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 44. 95. Peter Kastor, “ ‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?’ ” Susan Schulten discusses the cartographic manifestations of this expansionist doctrine that emerged in the 1820s (Mapping the Nation, 26–27). 96. Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of F ree Soil, 17–48; Foner, Free Soil, 27. In reality, not wage workers in urban areas, but relatively wealthy farmers who w ere able to afford to migrate constituted the primary group of p eople who left for the West (Foner, Free Soil, 32). When migration to the Old Northwest picked up a fter the war of 1812, the first wave of migrants to the region consisted of small farmers from Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and the western parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, who w ere being displaced by a rapidly advancing plantation system. The second wave was composed of farmers from New England who were being displaced by that region’s textile industry and land consolidations by sheep raisers. Farmers from New York and Pennsylvania followed due to their failure to compete successfully with grain grown in the West. See David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler, Manifest Destiny, 40–41. Earle writes that George Henry Evans, a land reformer who coined the term free soil, envisaged the distribution of public lands as homesteads to Native Americans, f ree blacks, and formerly enslaved p eople as well as white urban workers ( Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 35). 97. David Montgomery, “Empire, Race, and Working-class Mobilizations,” 3. 98. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 16–18. 99. John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, 126. In August 1824 Illinois finally settled the question of legalizing slavery in the state when voters defeated a call to hold a constitutional convention to decide the issue. A series of court decisions gradually emancipated the slaves in Illinois. The antislavery effort there culminated in the 1848 state convention that outlawed slavery in the state. 100. American Colonization Society, The Sixteenth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States: with an Ap ree pendix (1833) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F People of Colour of the United States, Volumes 11–20, 1828–36, vii. See also Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 127, for anti-black sentiment in the Northwest. 101. In 1804 a law was passed that required all African Americans to register their names and those of their c hildren and pay a fee for e very name registered. The law also provided that those who settled in the state after June 1, 1804, produce a certificate of freedom. Three years later, another Black Law was passed, ordering all African
Notes to Chapter 1 • 215
Americans settling in Ohio to obtain a certificate of settlement. To do so, each person had to find two people who promised to pay $500 dollars in case the settler became unemployed or disabled. Black settlers had only twenty days to find the required two people. See Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws, 72; Nikki Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 33–35. 102. The Illinois Territory mandated that every immigrant free black and “mulatto” individual leave its borders or face a punishment of thirty-nine lashes e very fifteen days until they left. The Indiana territorial legislature passed a bill levying a $3 poll tax every year on all adult black and “mulatto” men. A fter Indiana and Illinois achieved state status, legislators there instituted almost identical restrictions against free black migration, requiring incoming blacks to furnish proof of freedom and post a bond. Michigan’s and Iowa’s territorial legislatures adopted similar statutes and remained committed to black exclusion after achieving statehood. See Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, 23, 31–33, 43. 103. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 127. 104. American Colonization Society, The Eighth Annual Report in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree P eople of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 4; Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, 45–46; Middleton, The Black Laws, 79. 105. Quoted in Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, 52. See also Ousmane Power- Greene, Against Wind and Tide, especially chapter 4. 106. American Colonization Society, The Fifteenth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix eople (1832) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P of Colour of the United States, Volumes 11–20, 1828–36, x–xi. 107. American Colonization Society, The Twelfth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix ree P eople (1829) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F of Colour of the United States, Volumes 11–20, 1828–36, 45 (emphasis mine). 108. David Kazanjian, “The Speculative Freedom of Colonial Liberia,” 863, 865. On the relationship between indigenous p eople and American settlers in Liberia, see Svend E. Holsoe, “A Study of Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Liberia”; P. J. Staundenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 63–66, 88–89. 109. Joseph Underwood, Address Delivered before the Colonization Society of Bowling Green, 3–4. 110. American Colonization Society, The Second Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the F ree People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (1819) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 43. 111. Melish, Disowning Slavery, 210; quoted in American Colonization Society, The Seventh Annual Report in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Volumes 1–10, 1818–27, 93, 104. 216 • Notes to Chapter 1
112. American Colonization Society, The Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, with an Appendix (1843) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Volumes 21–33, 1837–50, 32. 113. This mapping coincided with the use of what Convery Bolton Valenčius calls a “language of healthfulness” by “land-hungry American settlers” who asserted the “fundamental sameness between nature and h uman body” to claim “ownership and intelligibility” of the western frontier landscape (“The Geography of Health and the Making of the American West,” 122). 114. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 30, 67, 318. 115. Ted Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds, 27. 116. Tommy Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 43, 210n36; Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 134. 117. Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds, 8. On black residents’ appeals for legal residency, see Eva Sheppard Wolf, Almost Free. 118. On reenslavement, see Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds. 119. Free blacks w ere prohibited from testifying against whites and faced the risk of being hired out if they failed to pay taxes. See Wolf, Almost Free, 41–42. 120. Eric Foner, “Abraham Lincoln, Colonization, and the Rights of Black Americans,” 35. See also Daniel Dana, A Discourse Addressed to the New Hampshire Auxiliary Colonization Society; Robert Goodloe Harper, A Letter from Gen. Harper. 121. See Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation. 122. James McDowell, Speech of James M’Dowell, Jr., 4. 123. James McDowell, “Address of the Rockbridge Col. Society,” 277, 279. 124. Charles J. Faulkner, The Speech of Charles James Faulkner (of Berkeley) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, 9, 17. For a similar argument from another western delegate, see Thomas Marshall, The Speech of Thomas Marshall, 6–9. 125. Faulkner, The Speech of Charles James Faulkner (of Berkeley) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, 20. 126. John Thompson Brown, The Speech of John Thompson Brown, 14. 127. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, An Address Delivered in Charleston before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina at Its Anniversary Meeting, 9, 14–15. 128. Christopher Michael Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion, 151; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 73–75. 129. Thomas Roderick Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832, 126. Dew had published an abbreviated version of this essay earlier in the same year under the title of “Abolition of Negro Slavery” in the American Quarterly Review. This short version does not include the quote above. See Thomas Roderick Dew, “Abolition of Negro Slavery.” 130. Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832, 72. 131. Jesse Burton Harrison, “The Slavery Question in V irginia,” 383. 132. Harrison, “Slavery Question,” 384–86. 133. Harrison, “Slavery Question,” 387, 388.
Notes to Chapter 1 • 217
134. Harrison, “Slavery Question,” 388. 135. Harrison, “Slavery Question,” 389. 136. Harrison, “Slavery Question,” 424. 137. Massachusetts Colonization Society, American Colonization Society, and the Colony at Liberia, 12. 138. American Colonization Society, The Eleventh Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix ree P eople (1828) in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the F of Colour of the United States, Volumes 11–20, 1828–36, 23–25. 139. James Ronda, “ ‘We Have a Country,’ ” 163. 140. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 389; Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 233. On the number of emigrants from V irginia, see Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, 2–3. 141. See Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion; Drew Gilpin Faust, Ideology of Slavery. 142. Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds, 123. Chapter 2: Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora
1. Upper Canada was the easiest destination for slaves fleeing from the Upper South and the border states to reach. It had the largest formerly enslaved refugee population in British North Americ a. 2. “Colored P eople in Upper Canada, Letter from Mr. Wilson,” Emancipator, June 15, 1837. 3. Many colonies in the West Indies implemented six-year apprenticeships for slaves above the age of six and committed c hildren under six to a binding-out system until they turned twenty-one. Also, the application of the act to the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius was delayed for four and six months, respectively. The act excluded territories administered by the East India Company. 4. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 96–98. 5. Gregory Wigmore, “Before the Railroad.” 6. Paul Goodman, Of One Blood, 13; Sharon Roger Hepburn, “Following the North Star,” 95. 7. William Renwick Riddell, “The Fugitive Slave in Upper Canada,” 341; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 154. 8. “Report of the Executive Committee,” annual meeting of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, May 5–7, 1840, in Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Minute Book, 1838–46, reel 31, Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hsp). 9. John McKivigan and Jason Silverman, “Monarchial Liberty and Republican Slavery,” 9; William Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia, 4; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 240. Eric Foner assesses the numbers of slaves who escaped to freedom to be 1,000–5,000 per year between 1830 and 1860 (Gateway to Freedom, 4). 10. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 213. 218 • Notes to Chapter 1
11. “Meeting of the Vigilance Committee,” Friend of Man, December 22, 1836, in George Carter and C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 1, frame 0757. 12. “For the Colored American,” Colored American, August 21, 1841. 13. “Meeting of the Vigilance Committee,” Friend of Man, December 22, 1836. 14. “New-York Vigilance Committee,” Emancipator, June 1, 1837. 15. “Important Meeting of People of Color in the City of New York,” Weekly Advocate, February 22, 1837; “Meeting of the New-York Committee of Vigilance,” Emancipator, November 16, 1837. 16. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 109; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 153. 17. “Anniversary of the Vigilance Committee,” Colored American, May 15, 1841. 18. The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia was established in 1837. The driving force behind this predominantly black organization was Robert Purvis, an eminent black abolitionist who lent his talents and support to the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. The committee was affiliated with a female committee that supported it financially though fund-raisers and the collection of contributions. See Joseph Borome, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 320–23; Tom Calarco et al., Places of the Underground Railroad, 247; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 155. 19. Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, Records, Collection 1121, Case Records and Minutes, 1839–44, hsp. On the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, see Borome, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia”; Nilgun Anadolu-Okur, “Underground Railroad in Philadelphia.” 20. “The Vigilance Committee,” Colored American, November 14, 1840. 21. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 110–11. 22. “Speech of Rev. Amos G. Beman,” Colored American, May 22, 1841. 23. Fifth annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society of Eastern Pennsylvania, August 3, 1842, Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Minute Book, 1838–46, reel 31, Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, hsp. 24. “Meeting in Behalf of the Mirror of Liberty,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 18, 1841. 25. “From H. Wilson,” Emancipator, September 21, 1837. 26. John Myers, “American Anti-Slavery Society Agents and the Free Negro,” 215–16. 27. Myers, “American Anti-Slavery Society Agents,” 203. 28. American Anti-Slavery Society, Fourth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 36. 29. George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 46; Harry Watson, Liberty and Power, 22. On the development of pseudoscientific racial ideology, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. 30. “Mr. Hiram Wilson, New-York,” Emancipator, December 22, 1836. 31. “Mr. Hiram Wilson, Colored P eople in Canada,” Emancipator, January 12, 1837. 32. “Colored Population of U.C., Letter IV,” Emancipator, February 22, 1837. 33. American Anti-Slavery Society, Fourth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 34. Notes to Chapter 2 • 219
34. American Anti-Slavery Society to Hiram Wilson, October 3, 1836, Hiram Wilson Papers, rg 30/112, Oberlin College Archives. 35. American Anti-Slavery Society, Fourth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 34. 36. “Mr. Hiram Wilson, Colored P eople in Canada,” Emancipator, January 12, 1837. 37. “The Colored Man in Canada,” Colored American, March 4, 1837. 38. “Mr. Hiram Wilson, New-York,” Emancipator, December 22, 1836. A male missionary at Amherstburg died in March 1837, and a female teacher later replaced him (“Mr. H. Wilson,” Emancipator, April 6, 1837). 39. “From Mr. H. Wilson,” Emancipator, December 28, 1837. 40. “Meeting of the United Anti-Slavery Society of New York,” Emancipator, December 15, 1836. On free blacks in New York, see Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery; David Swift, Black Prophets of Justice; Shane White, Somewhat More In dependent. On free black communities in the North, see Leonard Curry, The F ree Black in Urban America; James Horton and Louis Horton, In Hope of Liberty; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery; Jane Pease and William Pease, They Who Would Be F ree; Quarles, Black Abolitionists; Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North; Harry Reed, Platform for Change. 41. “The Colored Man in Canada,” Colored American, March 4, 1837. 42. “Can’t Take Care of Themselves,” Colored American, March 15, 1838. 43. “Colored Community, Taking Care of Themselves!,” Colored American, July 1, 1837. 44. “Emancipation in the W. Indies. Letter from J. H. Kimball,” Colored American, May 6, 1837. 45. “West India Emancipation,” Colored American, August 5, 1837. 46. Quoted in Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 169, and Jason Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, 37. 47. Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, 37. 48. On the Rebellion of 1837, see Howard Jones, To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. 49. Earnest Green, “Upper Canada’s Black Defenders,” 372. 50. British Colonist, February 8, 1838. 51. Quoted in Fred Landon, “Canadian Negroes and the Rebellion of 1837,” 377–78. 52. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 151. By the end of the rebellion, a total of five all- black companies had been authorized, and two new ones had been convened. See also E. Green, “Upper Canada’s Black Defenders,” 366–70. 53. “Canada,” Detroit F ree Press, January 6, 1838, and “Latest from Navy Island,” Detroit Free Press, January 8, 1838. 54. Thomas J. Sutherland to General Van Rensselaer, December 1837 or January 1838, in William Mackenzie Correspondence, Mackenzie–Lindsay Fonds, ms516, reel 2, Ontario Provincial Archives. 55. Quoted in E. Green, “Upper Canada’s Black Defender,” 380. 56. “Late and Important from Buffalo,” Detroit Free Press, January 9, 1838. 57. “Late and Important from Buffalo,” Detroit Free Press, January 9, 1838.
220 • Notes to Chapter 2
58. Donald A. Rakestraw and Howard Jones, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo- American Relations in the 1840’s (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1997), 29. 59. “The British Massacre at Schlosser,” Detroit Free Press, January 10, 1838. 60. “Meeting of Colored P eople,” Detroit Daily Advertiser, January 1, 1838. 61. Buffalo Commercial Advocate, reprinted in Detroit Free Press, January 10, 1838. 62. “Loyalty of Colored Citizens,” Emancipator, March 15, 1838. 63. “Meeting of Colored P eople,” Detroit Daily Advertiser, January 1, 1838. 64. “Meeting of Colored P eople,” Detroit Daily Advertiser, January 1, 1838. 65. “Loyalty of Colored Citizens,” Emancipator, March 15, 1838. 66. “The Queen’s Army,” Colored American, June 23, 1838. 67. “The Queen’s Army,” Colored American, June 23, 1838. 68. “For the Colored American,” Colored American, September 14, 1839. 69. Quoted in Ged Martin, “British Officials and Their Attitudes to the Negro Community in Canada,” 82. 70. “Canada Mission,” Colored American, March 20, 1841. 71. “Canada Mission, B rother Wilson’s Letter,” Colored American, March 20, 1841. 72. “Canada Mission, Vigilance Committee,” Colored American, February 20, 1841. 73. “Canada Mission, Vigilance Committee,” Colored American, February 20, 1841. 74. “Meeting of Colored Delegates in Toronto,” British Colonist, April 15, 1840. 75. On Gallego’s and de St. Remy’s activism, see Fred Landon, Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage; Adrienne Shadd, Afua Cooper, and Karolyn Smardz Frost, The Underground Railroad; Donald Simpson, Under the North Star, 138, 142, 206–8; Winks, The Blacks in Canada. 76. Landon, Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage, 186; Shadd, Cooper, and Smardz Frost, The Underground Railroad, 49. 77. “Upper Canada,” Emancipator, June 13, 1839. 78. “Upper Canada,” Emancipator, June 13, 1839. 79. “Upper Canada,” Emancipator, June 13, 1839. 80. J. R. Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First, 137. 81. For analyses of West Indian emancipation from this perspective, see Van Gosse “ ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’ ”; Mitch Kachun, Festivities of Freedom; Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First; McKivigan and Silverman, “Monarchial Liberty and Republican Slavery.” 82. Chatham Weekly Journal, August 28, 1841. 83. “For the Chatham Gleaner,” Chatham Gleaner, October 19, 1844. 84. “The Condition of the Blacks in Canada—Rev. Henson’s Statements Examined,” British Banner, August 11, 1852 (emphasis mine). 85. Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 19. 86. “A Memorial from Colored Inhabitants of the Province of Upper Canada,” enclosed in George Arthur to the Marquess of Normanby, May 23, 1839, co 42/459, National Archives of the United Kingdom (tna).
Notes to Chapter 2 • 221
87. See Shirley Gordon, A Century of West Indian Education and Reports and Repercussions in West Indian Education 1835–1935. 88. Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott, introduction, Beyond Slavery, 3. 89. Cooper, Holt, and Scott, introduction, 21. 90. Thomas Holt, “The Essence of the Contract.” On the importance of education in the promotion of liberal economic ideology, see Thomas Holt, “ ‘An Empire over the Mind,’ ” 296. 91. Cooper, Holt, and Scott, introduction, 21. 92. Bridget Brereton, “Family Strategies, Gender and the Shift to Wage L abour in the British Caribbean.” 93. “A Memorial from Colored Inhabitants of the Province of Upper Canada,” enclosed in George Arthur to the Marquess of Normanby, May 23, 1839, co 42/459, tna. 94. “A Memorial from Colored Inhabitants of the Province of Upper Canada”; George Arthur to the Marquess of Normanby, May 23, 1839, co 42/459, tna; Thomas Rolph to Edward Smith Stanley, 29 January 1844, co 42/523, National Archives of Canada (nac). 95. The Marquess of Normanby to George Arthur, August 2, 1839, co 42/459, tna. 96. George Arthur to the Marquess of Normanby, May 23, 1839, co 42/459, tna. 97. The Marquess of Normanby to George Arthur, August 2, 1839, co 42/459, tna. 98. On the origin and character of the bfass, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects; Howard Temperley, British Antislavery. 99. July 6, 1838, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/5, Minute Books of the Committee on Slavery, January 20, 1836–March 12, 1839, British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (bfass Papers). 100. The specific measures the bfass planned to use to attain this goal were revealing the horrible realities of slavery and the slave trade; convincing slaveholding countries of the practicality of free labor; circulating accurate information about the conditions of the emancipated peoples in Haiti, the British colonies, and elsewhere; encouraging abolitionists in the United States, France, and other countries to strive for abolition; promoting the cultivation of crops by f ree labor; and fully implementing the principle that “the slave of whate ver clime or colour entering any portion of the British Dominions shall be f ree” (British and Foreign Anti- Slavery Society, The First Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 5–9). 101. July 26, 1839, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/6, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, February 27, 1839–October 7, 1842, vol. 1, bfass Papers. 102. “Order of Business, Anti-Slavery Convention,” June 12, 1840, mss Brit Emp s22 g114, World Congresses 1840 and 1843, bfass Papers; W. E. Forster to John Scoble, November 11, 1839, c17/35, mss Brit Emp s18 c17, c18, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers; “The Great Anti-Slavery Convention at Exeter Hall, June 12th–June 23d, 1840,” American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, August 1840. 222 • Notes to Chapter 2
Rolph had been assigned this task based on the bfass’s understanding that he was the chief mediating figure involved in the communication between the metropole and blacks in Canada. The bfass first learned about Rolph when he visited London as an agent hired by the Upper Canadian government to promote emigration from the British Isles to the colony. Rolph sought an interview with the bfass’s secretary, John Scoble, to discuss “the condition of the coloured people in Canada and their ill-treatment by our govt [sic]”—namely, the British government’s refusal to take special measures in the wake of the petition Rolph had forwarded to Arthur in May 1839 (W. E. Forster to John Scoble, November 11, 1839, c17/35, mss Brit Emp s18 c17, c18, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers). 103. “Address delivered by Dr. Rolph at the General Anti-Slavery Convention, June 18th, 1840,” mss Brit Emp s22 g114, World Congresses 1840 and 1843, bfass Papers. 104. “Address delivered by Dr. Rolph at the General Anti-Slavery Convention, June 18th, 1840.” 105. “Address delivered by Dr. Rolph at the General Anti-Slavery Convention, June 18th, 1840.” The policy was instituted in 1828. On the history of naturalization, see Jane Errington, The Lion, The Eagle, and Upper Canada, 181; Alexander Freund, Beyond the Nation?, 97. 106. “Address delivered by Dr. Rolph at the General Anti-Slavery Convention, June 18th, 1840,” mss Brit Emp s22 g114, World Congresses 1840 and 1843, bfass Papers. 107. “Minutes of the General Anti-Slavery Convention Called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Held in London, Commencing on the 12th and Continuing by Adjournments to the 23rd of June Inclusive, 1840,” mss Brit Emp s20 e2/18, bfass Papers. 108. Peter Gallego to Thomas Rolph, November 1, 1841, c21/50, and Thomas Rolph to John Scoble, August 11, 1842, c21/51, both mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 109. Peter Gallego to Thomas Rolph, November 1, 1841, c 21/50, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 110. Charles Metcalfe; Peter Gallego to Thomas Rolph, November 1, 1841, c 21/50, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers, Metcalfe to Edward Smith Stanley, December 17, 1843, co42/509, Despatch, November–December 1843, nac; Various articles in British Colonist, August 4–December 22, 1841. 111. Thomas Clarkson to Lewis Tappan, January 10, 1844, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/20, Memorials and Petitions, October 28, 1843–December 7, 1853, bfass Papers. 112. Thomas Clarkson to Lewis Tappan, January 10, 1844, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/20, Memorials and Petitions, October 28, 1843–December 7, 1853, bfass Papers. 113. William T. Blair to John Scoble, March 27, 1846, c13/146, mss Brit Emp s18 c12, c13, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. While the East India Company had emancipated its slaves in Malabar in 1836, the Abolition of Slavery Act V enacted in 1843 probably heightened abolitionists’ attention to East Indians during this
Notes to Chapter 2 • 223
time. On the act, see Nancy Gardner Cassels, “Social Legislation under the Com pany Raj.” 114. William T. Blair to John Scoble, March 27, 1846, c13/146, mss Brit Emp s18 c12, c13, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 115. Colonial Office to John Scoble, June 16, 1842, co 42/500, tna. For an overview of the Hackett case, see Roman Zorn, “An Arkansan Fugitive Slave Incident and Its International Repercussions.” 116. Baron Ashburton to John Scoble, November 4, 1842; John Scoble to Baron Ashburton, October 29, 1842 and November 10, 1842, all cn 146, Thomas Clarkson Papers, Huntington Library; September 30, 1842, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/6, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, February 27, 1839–October 7, 1842, vol. 1, bfass Papers; October 28, 1842, and February 6 and 24, 1843, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/7, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, October 28, 1842–October 29, 1847, vol. 2, bfass Papers. 117. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, The Fourth Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 18–28. 118. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, The Fourth Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 18–28; British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, The Fifth Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 18–27. 119. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, The Fourth Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 28. 120. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, The Fifth Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 22. 121. Zorn, “An Arkansas Fugitive Slave Incident and Its International Repercussions,” 148–49. The bfass would l ater involve itself in the extradition case of John Anderson in 1860–61, which resulted in the dismissal of the case on a technicality. Chapter 3: Intimacy and Belonging
1. “Colored Population, Dr. Rolph,” from the “Examiner” in the Patriot, September 30, 1842, mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a, Canada, British, and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (bfass Papers). 2. Charles Metcalfe to Edward Smith Stanley, December 17, 1843, co 42/509, Despatch, November–December 1843, nac. 3. John Scoble to the Colonial Office, February 10, 1843, co 42/511, National Archives of the United Kingdom (tna). 4. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire, 38, 55. Calling the narrative of exodus an orthodoxy, Kale suggests that this script has been so powerful in contemporary imperial discourse and current academic writing that it overrides accounts contradicting it. Kale cites nineteenth-century descriptions of postemancipation labor situations to argue that “there was not as much consensus among colonial planters, freed people, and officials or among metropolitan abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats” about “freedpeople’s tendency to leave plantation labor than some
224 • Notes to Chapter 2
historians have conceded.” Leaving a plantation did not necessarily mean they abandoned such l abor b ecause of their “laziness” (according to the planters) or because they preferred self-employment or small-scale cultivation (as some historians have argued); rather it may have been that “they left the plantation in pursuit of higher wages offered by owners and managers of rival plantations” (57, 63, 64). As an example of historical scholarship that argues for freed people’s complete switch from estate labor to alternative types of work, Kale cites William Green, British Slave Emancipation. For other academic work that assumes freed people’s complete departure from plantation labor, see K. O. Laurence, Immigration into the West Indies in the 19th C entury; David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism; and G. W. Roberts, “Immigration of Africans into the British Ca ribbean.” Walton Look Lai, calling for the need to interrogate “the extent to which the ex-slaves who removed themselves from the plantation did or did not remove themselves totally from plantation labor itself in the process,” argues that “it is clear that the exodus from plantation to independent village life did not involve an absolute removal” and that “large numbers of freedmen continued to combine their new lives as peasant producers with wage labor on the sugar plantations” (Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 4). 5. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 12. 6. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 17–18. Debates about which group of laborers should be imported and in what capacity generated shifting definitions of race and l abor. Kale writes: “If India became the primary recruiting field for British Caribbean planters, it was not b ecause Indians’ characters, as laborers or otherwise, had made them ideal immigrants; rather, it was b ecause Indian workers were, for political reasons, more readily accessible than workers from other parts of the world.” East Indians w ere portrayed as innately suited to agricultural labor, taking direction, and working steadily and readily at low wages. This idea of Indianness was constructed in comparison to the alleged “laziness” of black workers, thereby enacting “Indians’ perceived difference from Afro-and Euro-Caribbean people” (Fragments of Empire, 146–47, 153). 7. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 18. Before being stopped by Parliament in 1840, indentured laborers from India arrived in Mauritius and British Guiana (starting in 1834 and 1838, respectively). Indian labor importation resumed in 1843 for Mauritius, and on July 13, 1844, Colonial Secretary Edward Smith Stanley announced the legalization of Indian emigration to British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad (Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 107–9). 8. As early as 1835, even before the end of the apprenticeship, Governor George F. Hill of Trinidad asked the Colonial Office w hether the colony could import liberated Africans from Sierra Leone. At this time, the Colonial Office answered in the negative, for fear of being accused by foreign nations of engaging in the slave trade in disguise. See Rosanne Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 71; William Green, “Emancipation to Indenture,” 102, and, British Slave Emancipation, 265. According to Green, the Colonial Office remained firmly against the importation
Notes to Chapter 3 • 225
of liberated Africans throughout the 1830s. James Stephen, permanent undersecretary and legal counsel of the Colonial Office, opposed the idea on the grounds that it would “provoke international scandal by establishing regular intercourse in black labor between the west coast of Africa and the sugar colonies” and that merchants from other European nations would follow the same procedure to acquire laborers to be sold as slaves in the Americas (“Emancipation to Indenture,” 104; see also British Slave Emancipation, 267). 9. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 72–73; Roberts, “Immigration of Africans into the British Caribbean,” 237. Asiegbu Johnson explains the change of heart on the part of the Colonial Office as follows: First, the termination of apprenticeship in 1838 heightened the pressure—some West Indian colonies even threatened to secede from the British Empire—for imperial permission of additional labor supply from overseas. Second, the complaints from merchants and consumers in Britain about the rising price of West Indian sugar pushed the British government to enact a policy that would lower the cost of sugar production in the West Indies. Lastly, the failure of the Niger Expedition to establish a settlement for Africans to engage in “modern agriculture, commerce, and Christianity” shifted politicians’ and administrators’ attention to emigration to the West Indies as the only viable means of “civilizing” Africans (Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, 39, 43). According to Mary Thomas, further supporting the importation of laborers from Sierra Leone was the recognition that the colony had been unsuccessful in its economic and evangelizing ventures. Its market for agricultural produce was too small, jobs w ere too scarce, and natural disasters—hurricanes, epidemics, and locusts—hit the colony in the late 1830s and early 1840s. In the minds of British colonists and missionaries, there was no visible moral improvement among the African population ( Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa, 24–25). See also W. Green, “Emancipation to Indenture,” 110–11. 10. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 72; Roberts, “Immigration of Africans into the British Caribbean,” 238–39; Monica Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo, 8. The importation of liberated Africans waned immediately after 1852, and the last departures of laborers from Sierra Leone and St. Helena took place in 1863 and 1867, respectively. 11. Compared to the 2,676 and 3,157 liberated Africans who had arrived from St. Helena and Sierra Leone, respectively, by the end of 1850, Trinidad received 661 people directly from ports in Britain between 1841 and 1850, and most of these were not field laborers (Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 79, 81). Most of the British migrants, according to Bridget Brereton, w ere “colonial officials, plantation o wners, manag ers and overseers, business men and professional men who came out to Trinidad to work and to make money” (“The White Elite of Trinidad,” 33). 12. H. Hendricks to the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, April 13, 1840, enclosed in John Russell to Charles Metcalfe, July 18, 1840, co 137/252, tna. 13. Report from the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to John Russell, July 9, 1840, enclosed in John Russell to Charles Metcalfe, July 18, 1840, co 137/252, tna.
226 • Notes to Chapter 3
14. Charles Metcalfe, to John Russell, October 27, 1841, co 137/256, tna. 15. Charles Metcalfe to Edward Smith Stanley, February 9, 1842, co 137/261, tna. 16. This act reduced the annual salary of the agent general from 1,000 to 750 pounds and discontinued the use of emigration agencies in Europe. Bounty for the arrival of immigrants was no longer to be paid u ntil they had been successfully settled in the colony for twelve months. A penalty was imposed on those who employed immigrants in “unhealthy situations” (“Act to Amend the Fourth Victoria Chapter Twenty Three Entitled an Act to Repeal and Amend an Act to Encourage Immigration,” January 14, 1842, no. 3472, co 139/79, tna). The passage of the act did not mean that the Jamaican government gave up on bringing in white laborers. Colonial officials proposed a new immigration policy, and in defending it they invoked and further reinforced the racial understandings of tropical labor. The officials proposed to restrict the hiring of immigrants to a limited number of families so that the new arrivals would be more inclined to stay in the highlands and enjoy “the suitableness of our mountain districts to the European constitution” ( John Ewart, ”Papers relative to Immigration into the island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 3, tna). The new governor of Jamaica, James Bruce, called Europeans “immigrants from colder climates” and recommended cutting down their number so that all of them could reside in the highlands due to “the suitableness of our mountain districts to the European constitution” ( James Bruce, Earl of Elgin to Edward Smith Stanley, October 24, 1843, co 137/275, tna). 17. Henry MacLeod to John Russell, May 29, 1840, co 295/130, tna. 18. Colonial Office to the Foreign Office, July 27, 1840, co 295/130, tna. 19. On New South Wales’s transition to a free settler society, see Richard Waterhous, “ ‘. . . A Bastard Offspring of Tyranny u nder the Guise of Liberty’ ”; Christine Wright, Wellington’s Men in Australia. On Queensland, see Warwick Anderson, “Geography, Race, and Nation,” 151; Kay Saunders, Workers in Bondage, 15. 20. “Emigration Statistics,” British Colonist, May 24, 1843. 21. Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire, 5. 22. Elizabeth Jane Errington describes how colonial emigration to Upper Canada during the same era was promoted, perceived, and practiced as a family venture (Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities). 23. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 4, 11, tna. 24. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 3–4, tna. 25. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/280, 28, tna. 26. Kale, Fragments of Empire, 59. 27. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British W omen Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Catherine Hall, White, Male, and M iddle Class; Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery. Notes to Chapter 3 • 227
28. “On the Emigration to the British Colonies,” a memorial to Edward Smith Stanley, principal secretary of state for the colonies, and the Earl of Ripon, president of the Board of Trade, signed by John Scoble, 1842, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/19, Memorials and Petitions, November 9, 1839–October 11, 1843, 112–13, bfass Papers. 29. “On the Proposed Schemes of Emigration from Sierra Leone,” a memorial to John Russell, February 4, 1841, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/19, Memorials and Petitions, November 9, 1839–October 11, 1843, bfass Papers. The bfass also opposed the policy on the grounds that it would lead to slave traffic among other nations and that no arrangements had been instituted to prevent “fraudulent contracts or to ascertain emigrants’ paced adjustment to sugarcane cultivation and the satisfactory nature of their accommodation, food, and health (“On the Proposed Schemes of Emigration from Sierra Leone”). 30. Although as a Crown colony subject to the home government, the members of Trinidad’s Legislative Council appointed William H. Burnley, a sugar planter and a member of the council, as the colony’s emigration agent during the interregnum between the death of Governor George Hill in March 1839 and the arrival of his successor, Governor Henry MacLeod in April 1840. While the imperial government did not recognize him as an official emigration agent, Burnley worked as if he w ere one (Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 60–61). As for Jamaica, its government passed an Act to Encourage Immigration, which the governor signed in April 1840. The act authorized the colonial government to provide financial and organizational assistance to emigration schemes and provided for the establishment of new agency posts to work with an agent in London, whose task was to serve as an intermediary between the imperial government and the colonial legislature. The act created the positions of agent general of immigration and subordinate officials stationed in Jamaica, and of a commissioner who was authorized to appoint agents in the United States, G reat Britain, and other places such as Mediterranean and African coastal areas. The act listed the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, the coasts of Africa north and south of Cape Palmas, Malta and other Mediterranean ports, and places east of the Cape of Good Hope as possible recruiting areas. It specified that the customary term of indenture would be three years (Thomas, Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa, 16–18). 31. The order would be revoked in December 1840. 32. The proclamation in accordance with the privy council order was issued in December 1839. See Colonel John Alexander Mein to E. Murray Macgregor, January 10, 1840, co 295/129, enclosed in E. Murray Macgregor to John Russell, February 10, 1840, co 295/129, tna. 33. Edward H. Lowe and Thomas B. Desbrisay to Rupert D. George, March 9, 1837, in African Nova Scotian Diaspora, Nova Scotia Archives. 34. Lowe and Desbrisay to George, March 9, 1837, in African Nova Scotian Diaspora, Nova Scotia Archives. 35. Colin Campbell to Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg, August 25, 1837, Appendix 16, in C. B. Fergusson, A Documentary Study, Nova Scotia Archives. 228 • Notes to Chapter 3
36. Edward H. Lowe and Thomas B. Desbrisay to Rupert D. George, March 9, 1837, in African Nova Scotian Diaspora. 37. Campbell to Grant, August 25, 1837, Appendix 16. 38. Campbell to Grant, August 25, 1837, Appendix 16. 39. Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg, to Colin Campbell, October 25, 1837, Appendix 17, in Fergusson, A Documentary Study. 40. J. W. Muir to Colin Campbell, April 24, 1839, African Nova Scotian Diaspora. 41. “Mr. Burnley’s Letter to Lord John Russell,” British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, April 22, 1840. 42. “Mr. Burnley’s Letter to Lord John Russell,” British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, April 22, 1840. In September 1839 a newspaper in Detroit had reported that Trinidad had been looking for potential black immigrants in “Nova Scotia, or e ither of the neighboring provinces.” “Colonization at Trinidad,” Detroit Daily Advertiser, September 10, 1839. 43. Thomas Rolph to Henry MacLeod, August 31, 1840, enclosed in Henry MacLeod to John Russell, November 14, 1840, co 295/131, tna. 44. Arthur White on behalf of Henry MacLeod to Thomas Rolph, November 14, 1840, enclosed in Henry M acLeod to John Russell, November 14, 1840, co 295/131, tna. 45. Henry MacLeod of Trinidad to John Russell, November 14, 1840, co 295/131, tna. 46. Colonial Office to Henry M acLeod, February 1841, co 295/131, tna. 47. Colonial Land and Emigration Office to James Stephen, January 21, 1841, co 295/135, tna. 48. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 5. 49. Colonial Land and Emigration Office to James Stephen, January 21, 1841, co 295/135, tna. 50. Colonial Office to Henry MacLeod, February 1841, co 295/131; Colonial Office to Charles Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham, February 3, 1841, co 42/478, both tna. 51. Charles Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham, to John Russell, April 23, 1841, co 42/478, tna. 52. Charles Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham, to John Russell, April 23, 1841, co 42/478, tna. 53. “On the Emigration to the British Colonies,” a memorial to Edward Smith Stanley, principal secretary of state for the colonies, and the Earl of Ripon, president of the Board of Trade, signed by John Scoble, 1842, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/19, Memorials and Petitions, November 9, 1839–October 11, 1843, bfass Papers. 54. “On the Emigration to the British Colonies.” 55. Charles Marryat to Hiram Wilson, care of Lewis Tappan, August 3, 1842, Hiram Wilson Papers, rg 30/112, Oberlin College Archives. 56. Marryat to Wilson, August 3, 1842, Hiram Wilson Papers, rg 30/112, Oberlin College Archives. Marryat enumerated other advantages, including wages for plantation labor so high as to enable one to purchase a land fairly easily if one wished, due to the intense competition among the planters for laborers; churches and schools of
Notes to Chapter 3 • 229
different denominations; and “no distinction” in political privileges “on account of color” (Marryat to Wilson, August 3, 1842). The letter also listed the conditions of transportation legalized by the Trinidad proclamation passed on December 24, 1839: a bounty of thirty dollars per head for passage money; and a set number of passengers to be carried on a vessel of a certain size. 57. Hiram Wilson to John Scoble, October 24, 1842, c23/30, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 58. Hiram Wilson to John Scoble, n.d., c23/31, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 59. Charles Marryat to Hiram Wilson, care of Lewis Tappan, August 3, 1842, Hiram Wilson Papers, rg 30/112, Oberlin College Archives. 60. Committee of Colored People of Toronto to John Scoble, April 10, 1843, c21/46, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble; William Edwards, “Replies to Queries relating to Upper Canada,”, mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a, Canada; John Roaf to John Scoble, April 17, 1843, c21/47, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble; Thomas Rolph to John Scoble, February 8, 1843, mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a, Canada; Hiram Wilson to John Scoble, n.d., c23/31, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, all bfass Papers. 61. Hiram Wilson to John Scoble, n.d., c23/31, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 62. Committee of Colored People of Toronto to John Scoble, April 10, 1843, c21/46, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. See also Hiram Wilson to John Scoble, n.d., c23/31, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, ccorrespondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 63. William Edwards, “Replies to Queries relating to Upper Canada,” mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a, Canada. See also Committee of Colored People of Toronto to John Scoble, April 10, 1843, c21/46, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble; John Roaf to John Scoble, April 17, 1843, c21/47, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, all bfass Paper. 64. Committee of Colored People of Toronto to John Scoble, April 10, 1843, c21/46, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 65. John Scoble to Thomas Rolph, December 1, 1842, enclosed in John Scoble to Colonial Office, February 10, 1843, co 42/ 511; Thomas Rolph to Edward Smith Stanley, January 29, 1844, co 42/523, both tna. 66. Chief agent for the superintendence of emigration in Upper and Lower Canada to governor general of Canada, January 12, 1840, co 384/61; Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to James Stephen, February 18, 1841, co 384/61 and co 42/485;Thomas Rolph to Edward Smith Stanley, January 29, 1844, co 42/523; Thomas Rolph to Charles Poulett Thomson, November 12, 1840, enclosed in Charles Poulett Thomson to John Russell, December 23, 1840, co 384/61; T. W. C. Murdoch to Thomas Rolph, December 22, 1840, enclosed in Charles Poulett Thomson to John Russell, December 23, 1840, co 384/61; John Russell to
230 • Notes to Chapter 3
Charles Poulett Thomson, March 9, 1841, co 384/61 and co 42/485; Charles Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham, to John Russell, December 23, 1840, co 384/61, all tna. 67. Gerald Craig, Upper Canada, 124–33. On First Nations in the region, I consulted Ontario First Nations Maps at http://www.ontario.ca/page/first-nations-and -treaties-map-ontario. 68. Thomas Rolph to John Scoble, February 8, 1843, mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a, Canada, bfass Papers. 69. Rolph to Scoble, February 8, 1843. 70. Eva Mackey, The House of Difference, 28. 71. Adele Perry, “Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia,” 144–45. See also Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire, especially 109–13. On colonial governance through the regulation of female bodies, see Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Bodies, Empires, and World Histories”; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. 72. William Edwards, “Replies to Queries relating to Upper Canada,” mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a, Canada, bfass Papers. 73. Edwards, “Replies to Queries relating to Upper Canada.” 74. Hiram Wilson to John Scoble, August 6, 1845, c23/34, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 75. Committee of Colored People of Toronto to John Scoble, April 10, 1843, c21/46, mss Brit Emp s18 c20, 21, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers. 76. John Scoble to the Colonial Office, February 10, 1843, co 42/511, tna. See also Unknown person to Edward Smith Stanley, mss Brit Emp s22 g83/a Canada, bfass Papers. 77. John Scoble to the Colonial Office, February 10, 1843, co 42/511, tna. 78. Charles Metcalfe to Edward Smith Stanley, December 17, 1843, co 42/509, nac. 79. Edward Smith Stanley to Charles Metcalfe, March 1, 1843, rg7 g1 vol. 104 ( January–April 1843), nac. The rationale for relaxing the restrictions on contracts was that black emigrants from North Americ a “may reasonably [be] presumed to be so far cognizant of the state and prospects of labourers in agriculture and manufactures within the said colonies, as to be competent to protect their own interests in any contracts entered into beyond the precincts of such colonies for services to be performed therein.” Since delegations of blacks from the United States and Canada had been visiting the West Indian colonies to scout out the labor conditions there, the imperial government had the impression that t hose who entered into a contract in North America had “a clear understanding of its meaning and effect” (circular from the Council Office to the Colonial Office, February 17, 1843, co 42/510, tna). For the 1838 privy council order, see “An Order in Council Regulating the Rights and Duties of Masters and Servants in British Guiana, Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Mauritius,” September 7, 1838, pc 2/220, tna.
Notes to Chapter 3 • 231
80. Edward Smith Stanley to Charles Metcalfe, October 31, 1843, co 42/509, National Archives of Canada; Thomas Rolph to Edward Smith Stanley, January 29, 1844, co 42/523, nac. 81. Colonial Office to Thomas Rolph, February 9, 1844, co 42/523; Thomas Rolph to Edward Smith Stanley, January 29, 1844 co 42/523, both nac. 82. C. H. Darling to J. W. Dunscomb, January 24, 1844, and C. H. Darling to J. W. Dunscomb, August 29, 1844, both in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/280, 22, 27, tna. 83. C. H. Darling,”Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica, October 24, 1843, co 137/275, 8–9, tna. 84. John Ewart,”Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 5–6, tna; Charles Metcalfe to Edward Smith Stanley, December 17, 1843, co 42/509, Despatch, November–December 1843, nac. 85. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 5–6, tna. 86. Thomas Holt, “ ‘An Empire over the Mind,’ ” 296. 87. C. H. Darling, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 24, 1843, co 137/275, 11, tna. 88. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 5, tna. 89. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 5, tna. 90. C. H. Darling to J. W. Dunscomb, August 23, 1843, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 24, 1843, co 137/275, 41, tna. 91. J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, November 6, 1843, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/280, tna; Stephen Virginia to J. W. Dunscomb, November 1, 1843, enclosed in J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, November 6, 1843. 92. J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, April 18, 1844, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/275, 23; C. H. Darling to J. W. Dunscomb, January 24, 1844, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/275, 21, both tna. 93. J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, June 28, 1844, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/280, 24–25, tna. 94. J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, June 28, 1844, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/280, 24–25, tna, 25–26. 95. J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, October 24, 1844, enclosed in C. H. Darling to James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, August 8, 1845, enclosed in James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, to Edward Smith Stanley, August 14, 1845, co 137/284, tna. 96. Enslaved people in the United States often decided to emigrate only if they could move in family units. Many manumitted people went to Liberia with their relatives. See Eric Burin, “ ‘If the Rest Stay, I W ill Stay; if They Go, I Will Go.’ ”
232 • Notes to Chapter 3
97. J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, July 30, 1844, in “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 18, 1844, co 137/280, 26; J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, October 24, 1844, enclosed in C. H. Darling to James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, August 8, 1845, enclosed in James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, to Edward Smith Stanley, August 14, 1845, co 137/284, both tna. 98. C. H. Darling to J. W. Dunscomb, January 27, 1845, and J. W. Dunscomb to C. H. Darling, March 22, 1845, enclosed in C. H. Darling to James Bruce, August 8, 1845, enclosed in James Bruce to Edward Smith Stanley, August 14, 1845, co 137/284; C. H. Darling to James Bruce, August 8, 1845, enclosed in James Bruce to Edward Smith Stanley, August 14, 1845, co 137/284; “Report Relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” October 30, 1845, co 137/287, 85, all tna. 99. C. H. Darling to James Bruce, August 8, 1845, enclosed in James Bruce to Edward Smith Stanley, August 14, 1845, co 137/284, tna. 100. James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, to Edward Smith Stanley, August 14, 1845, co 137/284, tna. 101. Harry Watson, Liberty and Power, 43, 52. On f ree blacks’ exclusion from jury ser vice, militia, and public education, see Leon Litwack, North of Slavery, 30, 75, 94, 97, 114. 102. Ruth H. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition,” and “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary Americ a”; Jeanne Boydston, Home and omen’s Activism; Nancy Cott, The Bonds Work; Anne Boylan, The Origins of W of Womanhood; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic; Christine Stansell, City of Women. 103. Quoted in William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 127, 126. 104. Quoted in Garrison, Thoughts, 128. 105. Quoted in Garrison, Thoughts, 128, 135. 106. Thomas C. Brown, Examination of Thomas C. Brown, a Free Colored Citizen of S[outh] Carolina, as to the A ctual State of Th ings in Liberia in the years 1833 and 1834, at the Chatham Street Chapel, May 9th and 10th, 1834 (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1834), 7, in George Carter and C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 1, frame 0435. 107. John Newland Maffitt, A Plea for Africa, 12. 108. Samuel Cornish and Theodore Wright, The Colonization Scheme Considered, in Its Rejection by the Colored P eople—in Its Tendency to Uphold Caste—in Its Unfitness for Christianizing and Civilizing the Aborigines of Africa, and for Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade (Newark, NJ: Aaron Guest, 1840), 5–6, in Carter and Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 3, frame 0362. 109. “Latest Missionary Intelligence from Liberia!!!,” Emancipator, July 20, 1833. 110. Thomas C. Brown, Examination of Mr. Thomas C. Brown, 8. 111. Thomas, Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa, 22; Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 67. 112. “Description of the Island of Trinidad,” Colored American, August 31, 1839. 113. “Description of the Island of Trinidad.”
Notes to Chapter 3 • 233
114. Quoted in Kale, Fragments of Empire, 46. 115. “Description of the Island of Trinidad,” Colored American, August 31, 1839. 116. “Trinidad,” Colored American, August 31, 1839; “Emigration,” Colored American, September 28, 1839. 117. “Trinidad Emigration,” Colored American, October 5, 1839. 118. “Trinidad—An Explanation,” Colored American, October 12, 1839. 119. “Important News from Trinidad,” Colored American, April 18, 1840. 120. “Important News from Trinidad.” 121. “Emigration vs. Colonization,” Colored American, November 16, 1839. 122. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 84; Kenneth Kiple and Kriemhild Ornelas, “Race, War and Tropical Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” 74–75. 123. Colored American, April 4, 1840; April 11, 1840. 124. “Emigration to Jamaica,” Colored American, March 20, 1841. 125. “Emigration to Jamaica.” 126. “Emigration to Jamaica.” 127. “The Immigration Question,” Colored American, May 2, 1840. 128. “The Immigration Question.” 129. “The Immigration Question.” 130. “Trinidad-Return of Rev. Mr. Hunt, &c.,” Colored American, January 16, 1841. 131. “New from Trinidad,” Colored American, April 11, 1840. 132. “Extracts from the Report of the Late Executive Committee,” American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1840, vol. 1, n o. 1. 133. “Anti-Trinidad Meeting,” Colored American, October 31, 1840. 134. “West India Emigration,” Colored American, October 17, 1840. 135. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 15. 136. Roberts and Byrne, “Summary Statistics on Indenture and Associated Migration Affecting the West Indies,” 127, 130–31. 137. Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 68. 138. John Ewart, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica,” September 30, 1842, co 137/274, 5, tna. 139. C. H. Darling, “Papers relative to Immigration into the Island of Jamaica, October 24, 1843, co 137/275, 11, tna. Of the twenty-three, one was a preacher, one a baker, two shoe-makers, and one a washer. The rest were agricultural laborers and their families. Chapter 4: Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Boundaries
1. Ecclesiastical and Missionary Record for the Presbyterian Church of Canada, vol. 5, no. 3 ( January 1849), National Library of Canada. For general information on the Elgin Association, see Peggy Bristow, “ ‘Whatever You Raise in the Ground You Can Sell It in Chatham,’ ” 84–108; C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:254; Sharon Roger Hepburn, Crossing the Border, 41–58; Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 208–18. 234 • Notes to Chapter 3
2. Chatham Chronicle, February 5, 1850. 3. The law put unprecedented numbers of former slaves who had lived in northern states at risk of reenslavement. After its passage, some free blacks left the United States to avoid the danger of being falsely arrested and because of their disappointment with the nation’s denial of fair trial and freedom to its black citizens. 4. Kirsten Mckenzie, “Discourse of Scandal,” 8. 5. “Public Meeting,” Chatham Chronicle, August 21, 1849. 6. “Canadian Negro Hate,” Voice of the Fugitive, September 9, 1852. See also Chatham Chronicle, October 16, 1849. 7. “Public Meeting,” Chatham Chronicle, August 21, 1849. Adele Perry points out that a similar dynamic was seen in the British Pacific Northwest during the same period: many white inhabitants of Vancouver Island disapproved of Governor James Douglas’s promotion of African American migration from San Francisco b ecause it threatened to disrupt the white settler project of maintaining racial homogeneity within the colony (On the Edge of Empire, 132). For further examples of racial constructions of British colonists as white in the nineteenth-century empire, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History and “Introduction”; Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects; John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale; Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness; Robert Young, Colonial Desire. Radhika Mohanram proposes the need to recognize the various factors that shaped the ways and degrees British imperial expansion influenced British “notions of the self ” (Imperial White, xix–xx). See also Joanna de Groot, “ ‘Sex and Race’ ”; Simon Potter, “Empire, Cultures and Identities in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Britain.” 8. “Public Meeting,” Chatham Chronicle, August 21, 1849. 9. “Public Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Toronto,” British Colonist, September 18, 1849. 10. “Canadian Negro Hate,” Voice of the Fugitive, September 9, 1852. See also Chatham Chronicle, October 16, 1849. 11. “Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, from the 14th Day of May to the 10th Day of August, Both Days Inclusive, and in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Years of the Reign of Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, Being the 3rd Session of the 3rd Provincial Parliament of Canada, 1850,” 77, nac. See also xvii, 220. 12. Chatham Chronicle, October 16, 1849. 13. “Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, from the 20th Day of May to the 30th Day of August, Both Days Inclusive, and in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Years of the Reign of Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, Being the 4th Session of the 3rd Provincial Parliament of Canada, 1851,” 82, nac; “A Canadian Doughface,” Provincial Freeman, October 21, 1854; “The Spirit of Slavery in Canada,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 29, 1854. 14. Chatham Chronicle, February 5, 1850. Notes to Chapter 4 • 235
15. Chatham Chronicle, April 30, 1850 (emphasis mine). 16. Chatham Chronicle, April 30, 1850. 17. On Mary Bibb, see Afua Cooper, “Black W omen and Work in Nineteenth- Century Canada West.” 18. Signal of Liberty, September 8, 1845. 19. “Prejudice against Color in Canada,” Voice of the Fugitive, February 26, 1851. 20. “Fugitive Slaves in Canada West,” Voice of the Fugitive, January 1, 1851. 21. “Fugitive Slaves in Canada West.” 22. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 205; “The American Refugee Home,” Voice of the Fugitive, June 18, 1851, and “Home for the Refugees,” Voice of the Fugitive, July 29, 1852. 23. “Refugee Home Society,” Voice of the Fugitive, June 1, 1851. 24. “Colored Immigration to Canada,” Voice of the Fugitive, May 20, 1852. 25. “Home for the Refugees,” Voice of the Fugitive, July 29, 1852. 26. “Prejudice against Color in Canada,” Voice of the Fugitive, February 26, 1851. 27. The newspapers were The True American and The Impartial Citizen, published in 1847–48 and 1849–51, respectively. 28. A February 18, 1851, proclamation by President Millard Fillmore provided that assisting in fugitive slaves’ escape would lead to prosecution for obstructing the Fugitive Slave Law. On Ward, see R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 173. 29. “For the Voice of the Fugitive,” Voice of the Fugitive, November 5, 1851. 30. “For the Voice of the Fugitive.” 31. Ward decided to found the Provincial Freeman a fter hearing, during his lecture tour across Canada West, that “we need a paper, here, says [sic] most of our intelligent men. They say I must edit one.” “S. R. Ward,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 18, 1853. 32. “Introductory,” Provincial Freeman, March 24, 1853. 33. “Canadian Negro Hate (no.2),” Voice of the Fugitive, October 21, 1852. 34. William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story. See also Philip Gould, “The Rise, Development, and Circulation of the Slave Narrative,” 18. According to a current estimate, approximately 6,000 slave narratives (published and unpublished) w ere produced between 1830 and 1865 (Sterling Bland, Voices of the Fugitives, 29). 35. Bruce Dorsey, “A Gendered History of African Colonization in the Antebellum United States,” 84. 36. David Dudley, My F ather’s Shadow, 6–7; Valerie Smith, introduction, xxix, and Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative, 34. 37. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance, 134. See also Andrews, To Tell a F ree Story, 143–44; Kimberly Drake, “Rewriting the American Self,” 92; Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano, 183. 38. “The Anti-Slavery Meeting,” British Colonists, December 21, 1852. 39. “The Anti-Slavery Meeting.” 40. Originally, the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada intended Ward’s visit solely as a trip to obtain “pecuniary aid” from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (bfass). But when it requested John Scoble, the former secretary of the bfass
236 • Notes to Chapter 4
who was living in Canada, to contact the British abolitionist organization regarding Ward’s visit, Scoble suggested expanding Ward’s activity to include lectures to various religious and missionary societies. He proposed having Canadian members of those societies arrange for Ward’s lectures at their home institutions. See John Scoble to the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, April 7, 1853, c23/61, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (bfass Papers). 41. John Scoble to the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, April 7, 1853, c23/61, mss Brit Emp s18 c22, 23, correspondence of John Scoble, bfass Papers; “Congregational Union” and “Colonial Missionary Society,” British Banner, May 11, 1853. 42. “Fugitive Slaves in Canada,” Provincial Freeman, March 25, 1854. 43. Mission to the Colored Population in Canada, in connexion with the Colonial Church and School Society, Occasional Paper, no. 1, February 1854, 7–8, nac. 44. Quoted in “A Lackey to Larwill,” Provincial Freeman, October 21, 1854. 45. Krista Walter, “Trappings of Nationalism in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave,” 243. See also Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 35; Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery, xxx–xxxii; Doveanna Fulton, “ ‘There Is Might in Each,’ ” 249; Charles Heglar, Rethinking the Slave Narrative, 17; Richard Yarborough, “Race, Violence, and Manhood,” 171. Much scholarly work has been done on female slave escape narratives published after 1861, including Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Lucy Delany, From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom. See Bland, Voices of the Fugitives; Joanne Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography; Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Anne Bradford Warner, “Santa Claus Ain’t a Real Man”; Mary Helen Washington, In vented Lives; Jean Fagan Yellin, “Texts and Contexts of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl.” 46. “Fugitive Slaves,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, January 6, 1854. 47. “Escape of a M other and Child,” Pennsylvania Freeman, September 15, 1853. 48. Nilgun Anadolu-Okur, “Underground Railroad in Philadelphia,” 548–49; Joseph Borome, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 328–29; Tom Calarco et al., Places of the Underground Railroad, 248–49. 49. “Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Journal C of Station No. 2 of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, Agent William Still), 1852–1857,” reel 32, Series V, Miscellaneous, Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hsp). On the percentage of women in fugitive slave escapes, see Adrienne Shadd, “The Lord Seemed to Say ‘Go,’ ” 42–43. Shadd calculated that 20 percent of the 311 Canada-bound fugitives were women (making the number 62). In Benjamin Drew’s records, 16 percent of the 114 fugitives (or 18) were w omen. For possible reasons for the smaller numbers of female fugitive slaves (such as being pregnant and having familial responsibilities), see Debora Gray White, Ar’n’t I A Woman?, 70–71. Notes to Chapter 4 • 237
50. “Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Journal C of Station No. 2 of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, Agent William Still), 1852–1857,” reel 32, Series V, Miscellaneous, Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, hsp. 51. Elizabeth Williams to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, January 18, 1858, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Correspondence, Series A, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, Ontario Provincial Archives. 52. Richard Almonte, “Introduction”; Jim Bearden and Linda Jean Butler, Shadd; Jason Silverman, Unwelcome Guests. 53. “To the Editor of the Provincial Freeman,” “A Lacky to Larwill,” “A Canadian Doughface,” Provincial Freeman, October 21, 1854; “Mr. Larwill’s Singular Consistency,” Provincial Freeman, April 14, 1855. 54. Colonial Church and School Society for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and Schoolmasters, to the Colonies of G reat Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World, Occasional Paper, no. 15, 2–3, nac. 55. Colonial Church and School Society, General Minute Book. January 1851–August 7, 1855, reel a23, 528, nac; Colonial Church and School Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and Schoolmasters, to the Colonies of Great Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1851), viii–x ; The Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for the Year 1854–55 (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1855), 123–24. 56. Colonial Church and School Society for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and Schoolmasters, to the Colonies of G reat Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World, Occasional Paper, no. 15, 3; Colonial Church and School Society, Occasional Paper, no. 16, October 1851, 1, both nac; Colonial Church and School Society, The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Colonial Church Society, for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and Schoolmasters, to the Colonies of G reat Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1850), ii. 57. Colonial Church and School Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and Schoolmasters, to the Colonies of Great Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1854), 32–42. 58. Minutes of a Meeting of Committee on Tuesday 19 April 1853, Colonial Church and School Society, General Minute Book, January 1851–August 7, 1855, microfilm reel a23, 526–27; West London Branch of the Colonial Church and School Society, Mission to the Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Occasional Paper, no. 5, August 1856, both nac; Colonial Church and School Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for the Year 1855–1856 (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1856). 59. Quoted in Colonial Church and School Society, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and School-
238 • Notes to Chapter 4
masters, to the Colonies of G reat Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1853), 20. 60. Colonial Church and School Society, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society. 61. Mission to the Colored Population in Canada, in connexion with the Colonial Church and School Society. Occasional Paper, no. 1, February 1854, 2, nac. 62. Colonial Church and School Society, The Annual Report, for the Year 1856–57 of the Colonial Church and School Society for Sending Out Clergymen, Catechists, and Teachers to the Colonies of Great Britain, and to British Residents of the Continent of Europe and in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1857), 79. 63. Colonial Church and School Society, The Annual Report, for the Year 1856–57, 122. 64. Mission to the Colored Population in Canada, in connexion with the Colonial Church and School Society, Occasional Paper, no. 2, December 1854, 4, nac. 65. Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee held on Tuesday May 16, 1854. Colonial Church and School Society, General Minute Book, January 1851–August 7, 1855, Microfilm Reel a23, 682 and 683; Mission to the Colored Population in Canada, in connexion with the Colonial Church and School Society, Occasional Paper, no. 2, December 1854, 6, both nac; Colonial Church and School Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for the Year 1854–55 (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1855), 42. 66. Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee held on Tuesday 20th June, 1854, Colonial Church and School Society, General Minute Book, January 1851–August 7, 1855, reel a23, 703, nac. 67. Mission to the Colored Population in Canada, in connexion with the Colonial Church and School Society, Occasional Paper, no. 2, December 1854, 8, nac. 68. Colonial Church and School Society, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for sending Clergymen, Catechists, and Schoolmasters, to the Colonies of G reat Britain, and to British Residents in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial Church and School Society, 1853), 20. 69. “The Mission to the Colored P eople Again,” Provincial Freeman, September 23, 1854. 70. “The Adjourned Meeting of Colored Citizens,” Provincial Freeman, October 14, 1854. 71. “For the Provincial Freeman,” Provincial Freeman, September 16, 1854. 72. Another possible motivation b ehind Shadd’s approach was to present herself as an effective leader of the black migrant community, the majority of which were formerly enslaved p eople, although she had no personal experience of enslavement. 73. “No More Begging for Farms and Clothes for Fugitives in Canada,” Liberator, October 15, 1852. Shadd and the Bibbs also argued about the validity of collecting old clothing and contributions for the purchase of land, which Shadd and others believed amounted to begging. For more on the strife, see William Pease and Jane
Notes to Chapter 4 • 239
Pease, Black Utopia; Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:24; Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, 115; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 206–7. 74. “Rev. Wm. King. The Buxton Settlement,” Provincial Freeman, April 15, 1854. 75. “No More Begging for Farms and Clothes for Fugitives in Canada,” Liberator, October 15, 1852; “Aid to Fugitives in Canada,” Liberator, December 10, 1852. Shadd also criticized The Voice of the Fugitive, questioning the paper’s ability to represent former slaves: “The Voice of the Fugitive is not the voice of the colored people in Canada” b ecause the paper does not possess the “character, weight, [and] ability, [that] are needed in a journal proclaiming itself the voice of the fugitives, in view of the glorious prospects before them as Her Majesty’s freemen” (“Aid to Fugitives in Canada,” Liberator, December 10, 1852). 76. Mary Shadd, A Plea for Emigration, 45–89. 77. “The Female Emigration Guide; or Hints on Canadian Housekeeping,” Provincial Freeman, August 26, 1854. 78. “The Female Emigration Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping, Part First, By Mrs. C. P. Traill,” Provincial Freeman, December 9, 1854. 79. Lorraine McMullen, introduction, in Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth- Century Canadian W omen Writers, ed. Lorraine McMullen (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 3. 80. Almonte, introduction, 26–29. 81. “To the Editor of the Provincial Freeman,” Provincial Freeman, October 6, 1855. 82. “To the Editor of the Provincial Freeman.” 83. Elizabeth Jane Errington analyzes the contents and functions of letters written by English, Scottish, and Irish settlers in Upper Canada (Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities, especially chapter 1). 84. “To the Editor of the Provincial Freeman,” Provincial Freeman, October 6, 1855. 85. “To the Editor of the Provincial Freeman.” 86. “Emigration,” Provincial Freeman, April 26, 1856. 87. “Emigration.” 88. “The Colored People,” Chatham Weekly Planet, June 10, 1858. 89. Quoted in Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, 93. 90. Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, 80. 91. Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design, 127. 92. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, 93; K. Keith Richard, “Unwelcome Settlers,” 31. 93. Malcolm Edwards, “The War of Complexional Distinction,” 37. 94. Quoted in John Latrobe, African Colonization, 18. On the historical background for the preemption law of 1841, see Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth, 140–44. 95. Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens: held at Buffalo, on the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 19th of August 1843, for the purpose of considering their moral and political condition as American Citizens (New York: Piercy and Reed, 1843), in
240 • Notes to Chapter 4
Howard Bell, Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830– 1864, 32–35. 96. “Great Anti-Colonization Mass Meeting of the Coloured Citizens of the City of New York,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 3, 1849. 97. Theodore Wright, Charles Ray, and James Smith, An Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens of New York, 12. 98. Wright, Ray, and Smith, An Address, 20. 99. Wright, Ray, and Smith, An Address, 9. 100. Wright, Ray, and Smith, An Address, 15–16. 101. H. C. Shetrone, “The Indian in Ohio,” 449; Louellyn White, Free to Be Mohawk, 11. Chapter 5: Race, Climate, and Labor
1. “Emigration to the West Indies,” Toronto Globe, September 20, 1851. 2. Donald Simpson briefly touches on the attempt by the American Colonization Society (acs) to “discredit the success of the Canadian blacks” but makes no mention of the rhetoric of climate essential to the organization’s propaganda (Under the North Star, 138). 3. William Anderson, Jamaica and the Americans, 6, 29. 4. Anderson, Jamaica and the Americans, 15–16. 5. Anderson, Jamaica and the Americans, 16–18. 6. Anderson, Jamaica and the Americans, 24. 7. Henry Grey, Earl Grey, to Charles Grey, February 15, 1851, co 138/68, National Archives of the United Kingdom (tna). On migration of liberated Africans from Sierra Leone, see Rosanne Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”; William Green, British Slave Emancipation, and “Emancipation to Indenture.” 8. March 7, 1851, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/8, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, November 19, 1847–January 6, 1860, vol. 3, British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (bfass Papers). 9. “Immigration of the Free people of Color from the United States to the West Indies, the following suggestions were supplied to Lord Grey, by the Secretary, at his request,” n.d., mss Brit Emp s20 e2/20, Memorials and Petitions, October 28, 1843–December 7, 1853, bfass Papers. 10. “Immigration of the F ree people of Color.” 11. April 4, 1851, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/8, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, November 19, 1847–January 6, 1860, vol. 3, bfass Papers; Henry Grey, Earl Grey, to Charles Grey, February 15, 1851, co 138/68, tna. 12. Henry Grey, Earl Grey, to Charles Grey, February 15, 1851, co 138/68, tna. 13. Internal memo accompanying Henry Barkly to Henry Pelham-Clinton, the Duke of Newcastle, February 9, 1854, co 137/322, tna. 14. “Votes of the Assembly of Jamaica,” February 26, 1852, co 140/146, 540–41, tna.
Notes to Chapter 5 • 241
15. “Colored Emigration to Jamaica,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 10, 1853; “Emigration of People of Color,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 20, 1852; “Public Meeting,” Liberator, July 16, 1852. 16. “Call for a North American Convention,” Voice of the Fugitive, July 30, 1851. 17. “Votes of the Assembly of Jamaica, February 26, 1852, co 140/146, 540–41, tna; August 1, 1851, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/8, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, November 19, 1847–January 6, 1860, vol. 3, bfass Papers; “Call for a North American Convention,” Voice of the Fugitive, August 27, 1851. 18. “The Fugitive Slave Act in the West Indies,” Voice of the Fugitive, April 23, 1851. 19. “First Annual Report of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada held in the St. Laurence Hall, on Wednesday, 24th March, 1852,” 12–13, in George Carter and C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 7, frame 0470. See also Toronto Globe, September 18, 1851. 20. North American Convention, Voice of the Fugitive, September 24, 1851. 21. North American Convention, Voice of the Fugitive. 22. North American Convention, Voice of the Fugitive. 23. “Votes of the Assembly of Jamaica,” February 26, 1852, co 140/146, 541, tna. 24. “An Address to the Colored Inhabitants of North Americ a,” Voice of the Fugitive, October 22, 1851. 25. “North American Convention,” Voice of the Fugitive, September 24, 1851. 26. “Votes of the Assembly of Jamaica,” February 26, 1852, co 140/146, 541, tna. 27. On the organization, see C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:149; Floyd Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 111–12. 28. “An Address to the Colored Inhabitants of North Americ a,” Voice of the Fugitive, October 22, 1851. 29. “An Address to the Colored Inhabitants.” 30. “Agricultural Union,” Voice of the Fugitive, December 3, 1851. 31. Voice of the Fugitive, December 3, 1851. For other articles on the topic, see Voice of the Fugitive, November 19, 1851; Voice of the Fugitive, December 17, 1851; Voice of the Fugitive, February 26, 1852. 32. “Emigration to Canada and Jamaica (No. 2),” Voice of the Fugitive, October 22, 1851. 33. “First Annual Report of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada held in the St. Laurence Hall, on Wednesday, 24th March, 1852,” 12–13, in Carter and Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 7, frame 0470; “Votes of the Assembly of Jamaica,” February 26, 1852, co 140/146, 542–43, tna. 34. “The Circular Calling upon Fugitives from Canada for West Indian Labourers,” Provincial Freeman, July 1, 1854. 35. Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law, 9. Paton traces this combined form of labor to enslaved people’s “day-to-day” efforts to restructure their lives outside estate labor (14–15). On postemancipation labor relations in Jamaica, see Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica; Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom. 36. “The Circular Calling upon Fugitives from Canada for West Indian Labourers,” Provincial Freeman, July 1, 1854. 242 • Notes to Chapter 5
37. Constitution of the Provincial Union. Organized at Toronto, August 9, 1854. Toronto, C.W. (printed at the Provincial Freeman office), 3–4, mg24 k22 File#1, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, Series A, Ontario Provincial Archives. 38. Western Planet, October 11, 1854. For arguments about the continued importance of climatic ideas to the racial identity of Canada well into the twentieth century, see Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene, 144; Eva Mackey, The House of Difference, 30–33. 39. “The Circular Calling upon Fugitives from Canada for West Indian Labourers,” Provincial Freeman, July 1, 1854. 40. “To the Provincial Freeman,” Provincial Freeman, July 15, 1854. 41. “Immigration of the Free p eople of Color from the United States to the West Indies, the following suggestions w ere supplied to Lord Grey, by the Secretary, at his request,” n.d., mss Brit Emp s20 e2/20, Memorials and Petitions, October 28, 1843–December 7, 1853, bfass Papers; “Public Meeting,” Liberator, July 16, 1852; “Colored Americans—Emigration to Jamaica,” Liberator, July 23, 1852. 42. “Emancipation in the West Indies,” Toronto Examiner, November 26, 1851. 43. “Reported for Frederick Douglass Paper,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 2, 1851. 44. “Reported for Frederick Douglass Paper.” 45. The f ree people of color constituted a distinct political and social entity in Jamaica. In 1830 they had obtained l egal equality with whites, and they became a significant political force at the parish level and in the House of Assembly. They had established newspapers (The Watchman and Jamaica Free Press and The Struggler) and entered into occupations that had been restricted to whites before emancipation, becoming bookkeepers, tradesmen, and merchants and holding prominent positions in local government. See Gad Heuman, Between Black and White, 57–152. Paton suggests that “the colored middle class” a dopted the “racist view” held by British whites about emancipated slaves’ inferiority, which was marked by their deviance from the model of the Christian, patriarchal “wage-earning nuclear family” (No Bond but the Law, 193). On white missionaries’ gender expectations, see Catherine Hall, “White Visions, Black Lives.” 46. In 1844 the white population was estimated at 15, 776 with 293,128 f ree blacks and 68,529 colored people. See Heuman, Between Black and White, 7. 47. “Reported for Frederick Douglass Paper,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 2, 1851. 48. “Reported for Frederick Douglass Paper.” 49. “Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored People Held at Albany, New York, on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of July, 1851,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, edited by Philip Foner and George Walker, 65, 67. 50. “Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored People,” 65. 51. “Anti-Colonization Meeting Last Night,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 20, 1854. 52. “African Colonization—The Other Side,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 25, 1851.
Notes to Chapter 5 • 243
53. “Where S hall They Go?: Extract from a Letter from the Rev. Heman Humphrey, D. D., to the N. Y. Observer,” African Repository, February 1851, vol. 27, no. 2. 54. “Condition and Prospects of the Colored Population in the Canadas,” African Repository, November 1851, vol. 27, no. 11. 55. Quoted in “Emigration, or Running Away,” Liberator, June 23, 1843. 56. John Latrobe, African Colonization, 28. On Latrobe, see Eugene Vansickle, “A Transnational Vision for African Colonization.” 57. Latrobe, African Colonization, 19. 58. David Christy, A Lecture on African Colonization, 15–16. 59. Christy, A Lecture on African Colonization, 55. 60. “James G. Birney on Colonization,” African Repository, May 1852, vol. 28, no. 5; “S. R. Ward’s Letters, No. 4,” Voice of the Fugitive, March 11, 1852. 61. “S. R. Ward’s Letters, No. 4,” Voice of the Fugitive, March 11, 1852. 62. “The American Refugee Home,” Voice of the Fugitive, June 18, 1851. 63. Mary Shadd, A Plea for Emigration, 43–46. 64. “For the Provincial Freeman,” Provincial Freeman, January 26, 1856. 65. “Reported for Frederick Douglass Paper,” Frederick Douglass Paper, October 2, 1851. 66. “Reported for Frederick Douglass Paper.” 67. Quoted in “Colonization of Jamaica,” Voice of the Fugitive, November 19, 1851. 68. “Letters on Jamaica,” Toronto Globe, September 16, 1851. 69. “Emigration to Canada and Jamaica,” Voice of the Fugitive, December 3, 1851. 70. “Emigration to Canada and Jamaica.” 71. “Emigration of P eople of Color,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 20, 1852. 72. “Report of the Committee on Emigration of the Amherstburg Convention, Presented at the First Baptist Church, Amherstburg, Canada West, June 17, 1853,” in Minutes and Proceedings of the General Convention for the Improvement of the Colored Inhabitants of Canada, Held by Adjournments in Amherstburg, C. W. June 16th and 17th 1853 (Windsor: Bibb and Holly, 1853), in C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:272–75. 73. “A Meeting of the Board of Immigration Correspondence,” March 14, 1854, enclosed in Henry Barkly to the Duke of Newcastle, March 20, 1854, co 137/322, tna. 74. “Editorial Correspondence,” Provincial Freeman, June 10, 1854. See also “S. R. Ward’s Letters, No. 4,” Voice of the Fugitive, March 11, 1852. 75. Chelmsford Chronicle, supplement, December 15, 1854. On John Candler, see Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 227. 76. “Colored Emigration to Jamaica,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 10, 1853. 77. S. Thrasher Lyons to Mr. Wright, February 22, 1853, enclosed in Charles Grey to Henry Pelham-Clinton, June 24, 1853, co 137/317, tna. 78. “A Meeting of the Board of Immigration Correspondence,” March 14, 1854, enclosed in Henry Barkly to Henry Pelham-Clinton, March 20, 1854, co 137/322, tna. 79. Henry Barkly to Henry Pelham-Clinton, February 9, 1854, co 137/322, tna.
244 • Notes to Chapter 5
80. Internal memo accompanying Henry Barkly to Henry Pelham-Clinton, February 9, 1854, co 137/322, tna. 81. Henry Barkly to Henry Pelham-Clinton, March 20, 1854, co 137/322, tna. 82. January 2, 1852, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/8, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, November 19, 1847–January 6, 1860, vol. 3, bfass Papers. 83. Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, February 6, 1852. 84. Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, June 4, 1852, and October 1, 1852. 85. Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 100, 108. 86. Quoted in John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 200. 87. Kay Saunders, Workers in Bondage, 1, 14–15; Ralph Shlomowitz, “Epidemiology and the Pacific Labor Trade,” 587, and “Markets for Indentured and Time-Expired Melanesian Labour in Queensland,” 70–73. 88. “Circular by the Ladies’ Society to Aid Fugitives from Slavery,” n.d., mss Brit Emp s22 g85, U.S.A., bfass Papers. 89. Report of the Ladies’ Society to Aid Fugitives from Slavery (London: printed by R . Barrett, 1855), mss Brit Emp s22 g85, U.S.A., bfass Papers. 90. “Circular by the Ladies’ Society to Aid Fugitives from Slavery,” n.d., mss Brit Emp s22 g85, U.S.A., bfass Papers. 91. For more on Baquaqua, see Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. 92. Report of the Ladies’ Society to Aid Fugitives from Slavery (London: printed by R. Barrett, 1855), mss Brit Emp s22 g85, U.S.A., bfass Papers. 93. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 163; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 12, 128, 138. 94. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 124; Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad, 170. 95. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad, 171. 96. Martin Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 8–9. 97. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 8; Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 171. 98. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 176–77, 182; Cyril Griffith, The African Dream, 41; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 138; Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 206–7. 99. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 7. 100. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 175; Richard Blackett, “Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell,” 14–17; Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad, 171. 101. “African Industry versus American Slavery,” British and Foreign Antislavery Reporter, June 1, 1859. 102. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 125. 103. African Aid Society, First Report of the African-aid Society, 1–3. 104. African Aid Society, First Report, 4. 105. African Aid Society, First Report, 14. Notes to Chapter 5 • 245
106. Richard Blackett, “Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell,” 23. 107. African Aid Society, First Report, 4. 108. African Aid Society, First Report, 5. 109. African Aid Society, First Report, 21–22. 110. African Aid Society, First Report, 4. 111. African Aid Society, “Letter from African Aid Society to Governor Darling, Jamaica, Relative to the Immigration into that Island of F ree Africans from Canada,” August 31, 1860, in First Report of the African-aid Society, 21. 112. African Aid Society, First Report, 5. 113. African Aid Society, First Report, 54–55. 114. Delany’s argument was a dopted in Martin Delany, William Webb, William Lambert, J. Theodore Holly, et al., “Report on the Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” 43. 115. Delany, Webb, Lambert, Holly, et al., “Report on the Political Destiny,” 47. 116. Delany, Webb, Lambert, Holly, et al., “Report on the Political Destiny,” 65. 117. Delany, Webb, Lambert, Holly, et al., “Report on the Political Destiny,” 38, 40, 66–67. 118. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 20. 119. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 44. 120. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 41–46. 121. Leeds Mercury, December 8, 1860. 122. Leeds Mercury, August 3, 1861. 123. Leeds Mercury, December 8, 1860. 124. Anti-Slavery Advocate, September 1, 1860. 125. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 251–58. 126. “Dr. Delany on Africa,” Weekly Anglo-African, January 25, 1862. 127. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 187. Chapter 6: U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom
1. “Colonization Crotchets,” New York Tribune, May 27, 1862. 2. Robert May, Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics, 181–88. On filibustering, see May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, and Manifest Destiny’s Under world, especially chapter 9. 3. “Colonization Crotchets,” New York Tribune, May 27, 1862. 4. John Smith and Deborah Cohn, “Introduction,” 2. 5. James Rawley, Race and Politics, x. 6. May charts the wide range of Republican politicians who supported colonization (Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics, 181–85). According to Eric Foner, colonization enjoyed support from a large percentage of Republican party members (“Abraham Lincoln, Colonization, and the Rights of Black Americans,” 39–40). On Free Soilers’ white-only antislavery ideal, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 267; George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 130–40.
246 • Notes to Chapter 5
7. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial, 127. On Lincoln’s support for colonization before his presidency, see also Philip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation; Robert Morgan, “The ‘Great Emancipator’ and the Issue of Race.” 8. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 126. 9. Frank P. Blair Jr., Colonization and Commerce, 15. 10. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 4, 8. 11. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 2. 12. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 5; see also 7, 8. 13. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 2. 14. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 8. 15. Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine, 125. 16. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 5, 8. On the cession, see Assad Shoman, Belize’s Independence and Decolonization in Latin America, 29–33. 17. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 3. 18. Blair, Colonization and Commerce, 8. 19. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 187, 195. 20. Quoted in Foner, The Fiery Trial, 215. 21. “Letter from Rev. W. P. Newman,” Weekly Anglo-African, August, 31, 1861. Newman succeeded Mary Ann Shadd-Cary as editor of the Provincial Freeman in 1855. 22. Shadd changed her name when she married Thomas F. Cary in 1856. 23. “From Canada,” Pine and Palm, September 14, 1861. 24. “From Canada.” 25. Quoted in Floyd Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 240. 26. “From Canada,” Pine and Palm, September 14, 1861. 27. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 236. 28. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 237. 29. “To the P eople of African Origin in the United States and Canada,” Chatham Tri- Weekly Planet, June 21, 1860. 30. “Haytian Correspondence,” Chatham Twi-Weekly Planet, March 22, 1860. 31. “To the P eople of African Origin in the United States and Canada,” Chatham Tri- Weekly Planet, June 21, 1860. 32. “Haytian Emigration,” Weekly Anglo-African, September 28, 1861. 33. “Haytian Emigration,” Weekly Anglo-African, October 26, 1861. See also Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 241–42. 34. “A Voice of Thanks,” Liberator, November 29, 1861. 35. “Haytian Emigration,” Weekly Anglo-African, September 28, 1861. 36. “Haytian Emigration,”Weekly Anglo-African, October 19, 1861. 37. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 246–49. 38. John McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand, 74; Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 164. 39. Sharon Hartman Strom, “Labor, Race, and Colonization,” 262. 40. “The President’s Message,” New York Tribune, December 4, 1861. See also Foner, The Fiery Trial, 186.
Notes to Chapter 6 • 247
41. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 223; Michael Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization,” 28–33. 42. Although he reportedly held reservations about colonization, Secretary of State William Seward was interested in Central Americ a to secure a southern route to Asia and ultimately bolster U.S. commercial involvement in the Pacific. See Richard Immerman, Empire for Liberty, 114–15. 43. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 185. 44. Quoted in Paul Scheips, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” 426. 45. Quoted in Scheips, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” 421. 46. Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 182–89. 47. Adam Dean, An Agrarian Republic, 93–99, 167. 48. “The President in Conference with a Committee of Colored Men,” Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862. 49. Quoted in Scheips, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” 441. 50. An exception was the discussions about sending African Americans to Mexico to drive Napoleon’s puppet emperor Maximillian out of Mexico. See Nicholas Guyatt, “ ‘The F uture Empire of Our Freedmen.’ ” 51. James Lockett, “Abraham Lincoln and Colonization.” 52. Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation, 73–81. 53. Lieutenant Governor Eyre to Henry Pelham-Clinton, Duke of Newcastle, July 5, 1862, co 137/367; Henry Pelham-Clinton, Duke of New Castle to John Russell, August 12, 1862, co 137/367, both National Archives of the United Kingdom (tna). 54. Henry Pelham-Clinton, Duke of Newcastle to John Russell, August 12, 1862, co 137/367, tna. 55. Clinton to Russell, August 12, 1862. 56. Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation, 29–30. 57. Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation, 41, 82. 58. “Fugitive Slaves,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 10, 1861. 59. “Circular of Freedman’s Aid Society,” May 20, 1863, 1, mss Brit Emp s22 g88, National Freedmen’s Aid Association, British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (bfass Papers). 60. “Circular of Freedman’s Aid Society.” 61. “Circular of Freedman’s Aid Society.” 62. “The President’s Message,” Douglass’ Monthly, December 1861; “First Annual Message of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States,” Christian Recorder, December 7, 1861. 63. “The Emancipation of the District of Columbia,” Christian Recorder, May 10, 1862. 64. “The President and His Speeches,” Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862. 65. “For the Christian Recorder,” Christian Recorder, August 30, 1862. 66. “Central American Scheme of Colonization,” Douglass’ Monthly, November 1862. 67. “Reply to the President by the Colored People of Newtown, L.I.,” New York Tribune, September 3, 1862. 248 • Notes to Chapter 6
68. “3500 Colored P eople in Council,” New York Tribune, May 14, 1862. 69. “Speech of Frederick Douglass on the War,” Douglass’ Monthly, March 1862. 70. “Speech of Frederick Douglass on the War.” 71. Quoted in “The President’s Message,” Douglass’ Monthly, January 1863. 72. “The Spirit of Colonization,” Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862. 73. “Postmaster General Blair and Frederick Douglass,” Douglass’ Monthly, October 1862. 74. Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth, 209–30. 75. Quoted in “The Future of the Colored Race in America,” Christian Recorder, September 13, 1862. 76. “Black Colonization,” New York Tribune, May 2, 1862. 77. “Colonization Crotchets,” New York Tribune, May 27, 1862. 78. V. Jacque Voegeli, “A Rejected Alternative,” 774. 79. Foner, “Abraham Lincoln, Colonization, and the Rights of Black Americans,” 47. 80. Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization,” 41. 81. Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation, 74. 82. November 7, 1862, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, March 2, 1860–December 6, 1872, vol. 4, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/9, bfass Papers. 83. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 322; Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 69–70; Steven Hahn, Steven Miller, Susan O’Donovan, John Rodrigue, and Leslie Rowland, Freedom, series 3, 1:18–19. On the ways bureau agents’ ideas about free l abor shaped their dealings with freed people, see James Schmidt, Free to Work, chapter 4. 84. Foner, Reconstruction, 246. 85. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 320–21. 86. Steven Ross, “Freed Soil, Freed L abor, Freed Men,” 214, 215, 227. 87. Ross, “Freed Soil, Freed L abor, Freed Men,” 230–31. 88. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 322, and Reconstruction, 163; Hahn, Miller, O’Donovan, abor, Rodrigue, and Rowland, Freedom, series 3, 1:51; Ross, “Freed Soil, Freed L Freed Men,” 228. 89. Foner, The Fiery Trial, 294. 90. Gavin Wright, “The Economics and Politics of Slavery and Freedom in the U.S. South,” 94. See also Foner, Reconstruction, 246. 91. Hahn, Miller, O’Donovan, Rodrigue, and Rowland, Freedom, series 3, 1:53. 92. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 113. 93. Foner, Forever Free, 98–99, and Reconstruction, 164; Hahn, Miller, O’Donovan, Rodrigue, and Rowland, Freedom, series 3, 1:64. Heather Cox Richardson shows how Republicans’ free labor model did not manage to secure black landownership (The Death of Reconstruction). See also Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract. 94. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 183. See also Adrienne Petty, “The Jim Crow Section of Agricultural History”; Mark Shultz, The Rural Face of White Supremacy, Notes to Chapter 6 • 249
51. Notably, owning land did not necessarily lead to economic stability and prosperity for black farmers. See Manning Marable, “The Land Question in Historical Perspective.” 95. Strom, “Labor, Race, and Colonization,” 266–68. See also Ronald Walters, “The Erotic South.” 96. “A White Man’s Government,” New York Tribune, February 12, 1866. 97. On the Freedmen’s Bureau’s twin promotion of labor and marital contract, see Stanley, From Bondage to Contract. See also Nancy Cott, Public Vows, 80–95; Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 229–47; Leslie Shwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 240–43. On southern whites’ use of the rhetoric of miscegenation to construct racial hierarchy within male citizenship, see Peter Bardaglio, “ ‘Shameful Matches’ ”; Martha Hodes, White W omen, Black Men; Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Free omen dom. Rosen argues that a fter learning of the rape of African American w by white southerners during the Memphis Riot of 1866, Congress pushed for African American male suffrage to equip black men with political and patriarchal power against “uncivilized and dishonorable” white men (Terror in the Heart of Freedom). 98. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage. 99. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 177. See also Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women. 100. Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay. 101. Matthew Guterl, American Mediterranean, 172–73. 102. William Messner, Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor, 35, 59. 103. Quoted in Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane, 39–40. 104. Guterl, American Mediterranean, 175–77. 105. South Carolina Commissioner of Immigration, South Carolina, 9; see also 33. 106. South Carolina Commissioner of Immigration, South Carolina, 16. 107. South Carolina Commissioner of Immigration, South Carolina, 9. 108. Guterl, The American Mediterranean, 179. 109. South Carolina Commissioner of Immigration, South Carolina, 5–6. 110. American Colonization Society, “Fiftieth Annual Report of the American Colonization Society: with the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting and of the Board of Directors, January 15 and 16, 1867,” in American Colonization Society, The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free P eople of Colour of the United States, volumes 44–53, 1861–70, 11–12. 111. Guterl, American Mediterranean, 175, 179. See also Rowland Berthoff, “Southern Attitudes toward Immigration.” 112. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture,” 84; Foner, Forever Free, 164–65; Guterl, American Mediterranean, 123. Conclusion
1. January 31, 1866, mss Brit Emp s20 e2/9, Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, March 2, 1860–December 6, 1872, vol. 4, British and
250 • Notes to Chapter 6
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (bfass Papers). 2. “Farewell Meeting with the Reverend Robert J. Pawin, Executive Committee, National Freedmen’s Aid Union,” August 3, 1866, mss Brit Emp s22 g88, National Freedmen’s Aid Association, bfass Papers. 3. Richard M. Reid, African Canadians in Union Blue, 179. Scholars have disagreed on the magnitude of wartime and postwar migration out of Canada. Robin Winks argued that “two-thirds of t hose in the Canadas . . . moved in reverse down the Underground Railroad” (The Blacks in Canada, 289). However, Michael Wayne concluded that “the black population of Canada West decreased by about 20 percent during the period of 1861–1871” (“The Black Population of Canada West on the Eve of the American Civil War,” 471). I rely on Reid’s statistical analysis of the 1861 and 1871 censuses. 4. Reid, African Canadians in Union Blue, 48, 63. See also Robert Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity; Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary. 5. Colonial and Continental Church Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial and Continental Church Society, Late the Colonial Church and School Society for Supplying Clergymen, Catechists, and Teachers to British Residents and Sojourners in the Colonies, on the Continent, and in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial and Continental Church Society, 1867), 31. The term colored population first appeared in Colonial and Continental Church Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial and Continental Church Society, Late the Colonial Church and School Society for Supplying Clergymen, Catechists, and Teachers to British Residents and Sojourners in the Colonies, on the Continent, and in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial and Continental Church Society, 1866), 242. 6. See Colonial and Continental Church Society, The Annual Report of the Colonial and Continental Church Society, Late the Colonial Church and School Society for Supplying Clergymen, Catechists, and Teachers to British Residents and Sojourners in the Colonies, on the Continent, and in Other Parts of the World (London: Colonial and Continental Church Society, 1870). 7. Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene, 144. 8. Quoted in Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration, 17. 9. John Boyko, Last Steps to Freedom, 157–58. 10. Boyko, Last Steps to Freedom, 167. 11. Kay Saunders, Workers in Bondage, xix. 12. Saunders, Workers in Bondage, 151. 13. Saunders, Workers in Bondage, 159. See also Warwick Anderson, “Geography, Race, and Nation.” 14. Dane Kennedy, “The Perils of the Midday Sun,” 124. 15. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 6. 16. Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 463. 17. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters. Notes to Conclusion • 251
18. Painter, Exodusters, 158–59, 184. 19. “Fleeing from Slavery,” New York Tribune, April 11, 1879. 20. “Editorial Article,” New York Times, April 19, 1879. 21. “The Black Exodus,” New York Times, April 24, 1879. 22. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 137. 23. Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American, 190. 24. Q. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 143. 25. Brian Shellum, Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment, 75. 26. Shellum, Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment, 75, 116; Vincent Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 161. 27. Quoted in Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 101. 28. Quoted in Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 102. 29. Quoted in Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 103. 30. Natalie Ring, The Problem South, 58–94. 31. Daniel Bender, American Abyss, 88. 32. It was not u ntil the demand for African Americans as industrial workers rose due to the WWI wartime suspension of European immigration that eugenicists began reframing the fitness of black Americans for surviving the grind of industrial America. See Bender, American Abyss, 84–90, 243.
252 • Notes to Conclusion
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INDEX
Page numbers followed by f indicate illustrations. Abeokuta, 160–61, 164–65 abolition: and Anglo-Saxon male identity, 193–94; British abolition vs. American slavery, 15–16, 207–8n32; and commercial interests, 26, 29, 33, 36, 159–62; inde pendence/industry mantra of, vs. slave rebellions, 147; in the United States, 34. See also U.S. emancipation Abolition Act of 1833 (Britain), 53 abolitionists (Britain): on Jamaica and the U.S. South, 193; on refugees inside Union lines, 181; on self-emancipated people, 76–77. See also British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society abolitionists (Canada). See Anti-Slavery Society of Canada; Bibb, Henry; Shadd- Cary, Mary Ann; Ward, Samuel Ringgold abolitionists (U.S.): aid to escaping slaves, 56–58; arrival in Canada from the U.S., 118; disagreements over self-emancipated people in Canada, 66–67; on Liberia’s destruction of black families, 103; in London, 74; reports on formerly enslaved p eople, 59–62; on Trinidad, 107–8; and vigilance committees, 56–57. See also American Anti-Slavery Society; and individual abolitionists
Abolition of Slavery Act V of 1843 (India), 223–24n113 Abolition Society of Pennsylvania, 39 Act to Encourage Immigration of 1840 ( Jamaica), 228n30 Act to Provide for the Apprehending of Fugitive Offenders from Foreign Countries, and Delivering Them Up to Justice of 1833 (Upper Canada), 62 Act to Repeal and Amend an Act to Encourage Immigration of 1842 ( Jamaica), 85, 227n16 Address to the Women of the United States for the Abolition of Slavery, 128 Africa: as black alternative to white western migration, 10–45, 152–53; Delany on black emigration to, 160, 163–65; as destructive climate for African Americans, 48; emigration to Trinidad banned, 87, 228n32; as foreign climate for anyone from the U.S., 150–51; as ideal climate for blacks, 26, 29, 38, 46, 152–53, 162; labor importation to Caribbean from, 84–85, 225–26n8. See also Liberia; Sierra Leone African Aid Society (aas), 161–62, 165 African Civilization Society, 160
African descent, designations for people of, xi African diaspora, generally, 1, 6, 203 African Institution, 33 African Methodist Episcopal Church (ame), 181 Aires, Sarah, 126 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 107–8, 149 American Anti-Slavery Society (aass), 58–61, 66, 107–8 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 39 American Colonization Society (acs), 36–38, 40, 43–44, 48, 152, 213n67, 241n2 American Missionary Association, 127 American Revolution, 9, 18, 25, 34–38, 171, 209n3 Amherstburg (Canada West), 59–60 La Amistad (slave ship), 181 Ancaster (Canada), 74 Anderson, John, 224n121 Anderson, William Wemyss: with the British Honduras Company, 180–81; on Jamaican emigration, 144–47, 149–50, 154; on Jamaica’s climate, 141–42, 150, 154, 189 Antigua, 61–62 Anti-Slavery Society (England), 73–74 Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, 120, 123, 139, 144–45, 236–37n40 apprenticeship, abolition of, 74 Arthur, George, 72 Article XIII (Indiana state constitution), 43 Australia, 26, 86, 106, 128, 142, 158, 194–96 Bacon, Leonard, 43 Bagot, Charles, 94 Ballantine (missionary), 129 Baquaqua, Mahommah, 159 Belize, 174 belonging: and family, 62, 94–96, 101–3, 107, 118–20, 131–33, 136, 142; and tropics, 26, 32, 38, 44–45, 85–86, 102, 105–6, 145, 148–49, 152–53, 157–58, 162, 173, 183–84, 189
Bibb, Henry: climatic determinism refuted by, 1, 153–54, 176; death of, 156; former slave identity of, 120, 130; Jamaican emigration promoted by, 146–47; on Jamaica’s climate, 155–56; The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, 118, 124–25; North American Convention role of, 144, 146; North American League role of, 146; personal life of, 118–19; on race-based mobilization of labor, 164; vs. Shadd- Cary, 239–40n73 Bibb, Mary (née Miles), 118–19, 130, 239–40n73 Birmingham Anti-Slavery Society (England), 74 black convention movement, 135 black freedom: of African Canadians vs. African Americans, 65–68; based on body vs. location, 70; and Britain’s self-image, 70, 82; crossing Union lines as defining slave escape, 181; escape from oppression reframed as quest for prosperity, 130–33; freed women’s labor, 187–88; “fugitive slaves,” use of/ alternatives to, xii; geographic restrictions on (see displacement of blacks); “legally free,” definition of, xi–xii; marriage among freed people, promotion of, 95–96, 118–20, 131–33, 187; and self-emancipation (see self-emancipated blacks); and settler expansion (see settler expansion/privilege); and the universal free black subject, 55–62; and Upper Canada as haven, 51, 53–62, 218n1; and West Indian freed people, 69–70 Black Laws (Ohio), 43, 215–16n101 black loyalists, 25–31 black patriarchy, 113, 136–37, 187–88 black population: climatic fitness of (see climatic determinism); grouped as a race, 83, 87, 91, 130, 133–34, 143; landownership by (see landownership by blacks); military service by, 62–68, 198–99, 220n52; poverty of, 35, 37, 88; religious education of, 60–61, 70, 93, 111, 127–30,
282 • Index
194; sexual violence against women by white men, 170, 187, 250n99; universal blackness personified by, 59–62 Blair, Frank, Jr., 172–74, 177–78 Blair, Frank, Sr., 178 Blair, William T., 76–77 Bond Head, Francis, 63 Boston Vigilance Committee, 58 Bowen, Thomas, 160 Brazil, 85, 180 Britain: antislavery identity of, 70, 82; colonial system different from the U.S., 11 (see also Caribbean colonies); extradition, attitude toward, 72–73, 77–78; freedom granted to enemy’s slaves by, 25, 31; imperial labor planning by, 28, 31, 84–86, 142, 180–81; as a merciless enemy of the U.S., 64 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 105 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (bfass): on black emigration to the Ca ribbean, 82, 90–91, 100–101, 143, 157–58, 228n29; on Britons as “accustomed to freedom,” 106; on European emigration to the Caribbean, 90–91, 105; on extradition, 77–78, 224n121; founding and goals of, 73–74, 222n100; free produce initiative of, 157–59; landownership desires of Canadian blacks ignored by, 96; and Rolph, 74–75, 222–23n102; on sex ratios of nonwhites in the Caribbean, 86–87; and Ward, 236–37n40 British Guiana, 105 British Honduras Company, 180–81 British penal colonies, 26, 86, 210n15. See also Australia Brown, John Thompson, 47 Bruce, James, Earl of Elgin, 129, 227n16 Buffalo, 64–65 Burnley, William H., 89, 103–4, 228n30 Butler, Benjamin, 174 Buxton, Thomas, 160, 181 California, 134–36, 152, 173 Campbell, Colin, 88
Campbell, Robert, 160–61 Canada: African American opposition to emigration to, 145; anti-black sentiment in, 94, 111–12, 114–15, 118, 235n7; black emigration to Haiti from, 169, 175–77, 190; black settlements in, 59–60, 92–93; British identity of emancipated blacks living in, 68–79; as a climate unsuitable for blacks, 92, 151–53, 162, 166, 177; confederation of, 194; definition of, xi; discussions of black well-being in, 151–54, 241n2; exclusion of blacks from common schools, 93, 175; land cession treaties in, 94; map of black settlements in, 5f; Naturalization Act of 1841, 75; petitions for black exclusion in, 116; provincial emancipation law in, 55 Canada West (later Ontario): black population of, 194, 251n3; definition of, xi; extradition in, 77; Niger Valley project recruiting in, 161–62. See also Canada; Upper Canada Canadian Immigration Act of 1910, 195 Canadian Legislative Council, 134 Candler, John, 156 Cape of Good Hope, 218n3 Caribbean colonies: black recruitment efforts of, 31–33, 81, 88–89, 91, 93, 97–100, 103, 108, 139, 142–47, 156–57, 177, 229–30n56, 234n139; differentiation of African Americans from, 106–7; East Indian labor in, 84, 225nn6–7; education in, 70–71; equality and social advancement for blacks via, 81–82, 143, 145, 175–77; labor importation from Africa to, 84–85, 225–26n8; labor shortage claims in, 84, 142; mortality of whites in, 85, 91; multiethnic emigration to, 84, 225n6; plantation labor in, 71, 84–85, 108; sex ratios of nonwhites in, 86–87, 100–101; and the U.S. South, 15, 193. See also Jamaica; Trinidad Caroline (steamboat), 64 Cary, George, 175–77 Chamerovzow, Louis, 158, 160 Chatham (Canada), 69–70
Index • 283
Chatham address, 114–15 Chatman, Emeline, 126 Chicago, 153–54 Chinese laborers, 84, 143, 158, 188–89 Chiriqui project, 178–79 Christy, David, 152–53 Church of England School Society for Newfoundland and the Colonies, 127–28 citizenship: and gender, 101–2, 202–3; relationship between land and, 135, 179, 186, 196, 198 Civil War (U.S.), 174–75 Clarkson, John, 28, 30 Clarkson, Thomas, 76 Clay, Henry, 40, 214n90 Clegg, Thomas, 160 climatic determinism: in Blair’s proposals, 174; Douglass on, 2, 150, 183; England as climatically suited for whites, 33; and the Jamaican Trelawny Maroons, 211n36; as language of white settler dominance, 32, 45–50, 148, 173–74, 178–79, 189, 195; and Liberia, 37–38, 44–46, 49, 150, 152–54; naturalizing function of, 6–7, 138; refutation of, 1–2, 14, 90, 92, 104–6, 136, 148, 150–51, 153–55, 164, 177, 183; and Scottish settlement of Nova Scotia, 30; slave/slave trade history ignored by, 1–2, 44; used in service of black labor importation by Britain, 29–30, 87–89, 91–92, 98, 100, 105, 150, 158, 162, 180; and U.S. emancipation, 168, 174, 178, 183–84, 189; and western medicine, 27, 195–96, 199, 210n17; white avoidance of, 155; and white migration to Africa and the Caribbean, 26, 29, 38, 85, 105, 141–42. See also tropicality Colchester (Canada West), 59–60 Colonial and Continental Church Society (formerly Colonial Church and School Society), 194 Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, 90, 99–100 Colonial Missionary Society, 123 Colonial Office, 82–83, 85, 89, 91, 96–97, 100, 142, 157, 225–26nn8–9
Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, 25–26, 209n7 Confiscation Act of 1861 (U.S.), 174–75, 178 Congregational Union, 123 Connecticut, 34 Cornish, Samuel, 61, 65–66, 103–4 Corwin, Thomas, 42 cotton trade/production, 33, 47, 49, 147, 153, 156–65, 172, 179–90 Creole (slave ship), 181 Cuba, 180, 198–99 Cuffe, Paul, 35–36 Custis, George Washington Parke, 49 Darling, C. H., 100 Davis Bend (Mississippi), 186 Day, William Howard, 160, 164–65 Delany, Martin: on Abeokuta’s climate, 164; on black emigration, 145, 160, 163–65, 176; climatic determinism challenged by, 164; as first black army major, 194; Niger Valley project role of, 160–61, 163 Detroit, 64–65, 119 Dew, Thomas Roderick, 47–48 Dillon, M. M., 129 disease resistance, 27, 38, 105, 198–99, 210n17 domesticity. See f amily Doolittle, James, 178 Douglas, James, 235n7 Douglass, Frederick: on black economic utility, 168, 182–83, 190; on black tropical suitability, 150, 168–69, 183; on the Civil War, 176; on climatic adaptability, 183; The Heroic Slave, 124; Lincoln criticized by, 182; masculine American identity of, 122 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 135, 179 Dundas, Henry, 28 Dunmore’s Proclamation, 25 Dunscomb, J. W., 98–99 Durfee, Amos, 64 East India Company, 218n3, 223–24n113 East Indians: emigration of, 225n7; as indentured laborers in the Caribbean,
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84, 225nn6–7; as indentured laborers in Queensland, 158; as lascars, 209n7; of Malabar, 76–77, 223–24n113 Edwards, William, 92, 95 Elgin, Earl of ( James Bruce), 129, 227n16 Elgin Association, 111, 114, 116, 161–62 Eliza (fictional character), 124–25 emancipations: American Revolution, 25, 209n3; British imperial abolition, 53, 55, 74, 218n3; Civil War and aftermath (see under U.S. emancipation); in the U.S. North, 34; War of 1812, 31–34 emigration convention (Cleveland, 1854), 160, 163 Emigration Office, 181 England, part of racial mapping, 33, 86. See also Britain Essay on Colonization (Wadstrom), 37–38 Evans, George Henry, 215n96 Ewart, John, 97–98 Exodusters, 196–98 Expulsion Law of 1806 (Virginia), 45 extradition: of John Anderson, 224n121; as a breach of national sovereignty, 71–73; Britain’s attitude toward, 72–73, 77–78; of Hackett, 77, 81; laws, 62, 77; in Upper Canada, 71–72, 77 family: as central to belonging, 62, 94–96, 101–3, 107, 118–20, 131–33, 136, 142; efforts to maintain through migration, 86–87, 91, 97–101; of emancipated women, 71, 124–26, 132–33, 187–88; language of, 8, 14, 19 Female Emigrant’s Guide, The (Trail), 131 Fillmore, Millard, 236n28 Fourteenth Amendment, 196, 198 free blacks, definition of, xi Freedmen’s Bureau, 170, 185–88 free soil (U.S.): expansion of, and expansion of slavery, 11, 49–50, 153, 168, 171–72, 178–79; and freedom as a geographic condition, 3, 33–34, 55, 166, 168, 170–71, 200, 203; origin of term, 215n96 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 55
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: abolitionists’ arrival in Canada after, 118; emigration sparked by, 143, 145; free African Americans disillusioned by, 160; interest in former slaves after, 143; legal status of free blacks threatened by, 67–68, 235n3; obstruction of, 120, 236n28; personal liberties curtailed by, 57; and Ward’s flight to Canada, 120 Fugitive Slave Mission, 128–30 Fugitive Union Society, 119 Gallego, Peter, 68, 70, 75–76, 81–82, 97 Garrison, William Lloyd, 40, 183, 219n18; Thoughts on African Colonization, 42 gender: and Americanness, 107, 122; black female identity in Canada, 130–33; as central to racial mapping, 86–87, 90–97, 102; and citizenship, 101–2; in fugitive slave narratives, 122, 124–25; labor divisions based on, 71, 107, 187–88; masculinity of fugitive slaves, 122–23; masculinity of white men, 101–2; superiority of northern blacks over Caribbean freed people, 107 General Land Office, 135 germ theory, 195–96 Grant, Charles, 88–89 Greeley, Horace, 167 Grey, Charles, 142 Grey, Henry, 142–43 Hackett, Nelson, 77, 81 Haiti, 61, 175–77, 179–80 Hall, James, 44–45 Hamilton (Canada), 59 Harrison, Jesse Burton, 47–49; “Slavery Question in Virginia,” 48 Harrison, John Wesley, 156 Heroic Slave, The (Douglass), 124 Hill, George F., 225–26n8, 228n30 Hints to the Colored People of the North (M. A. Shadd), 127 Home and Colonial Institution, 129 Homestead Act of 1862, 179, 196–98 Hopewell, N. D., 132–33
Index • 285
Hopkins, Samuel, 35, 37 Hunt, Thomas P., 104, 107 hygienic containment, 199 Île-à-Vache Island project, 179, 184–85 Illinois, 43, 215n99, 216n102 Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (Australia), 195 Indiana, 43, 216n102 Indian Territory, 198 indigenous populations: annihilation of, 142; displacement of, 5–6, 8, 17–18, 30–31, 43–44, 96, 137, 171, 198, 201, 203; indigenous–white sexual relationships, 95; and missionary efforts in Canada, 128 industrialization, 200 Inglis, Richard, 32–33 interracial mixing, 94–96, 114, 187–88, 202, 250n99 intimacy: definition of, 8 Iowa, 43 Jamaica: black Canadians’ resistance to emigration to, 99–100, 147–48; black emigration from Canada to, 81, 97–100, 108, 139, 142–47, 156–57, 177, 234n139; blacks’ labor status in, 71, 84, 144, 146–47, 242n35; “colored” vs. “black” in, 149–50, 243n45; discussion of climate of, 85, 141–42, 155–56; frontier image of, 142; home government’s positions related to emigration to, 97, 142–43, 157, 228n30; mortality of whites in, 85; plans of white settlements in, 86; recruiting efforts in Canada, 75–76, 97–100, 143–46, 156; recruiting of white labor in, 85–86, 141–42, 226n11, 227n16; recruitment failure in, 85, 99–100, 142, 156–57; visions of black landownership in, 144, 146–47; Ward in, 156 Jamaican Trelawny Maroons, 211n36 Jay, John, 34–35 Jefferson, Thomas, 36 Johnson, Andrew, 186 Joiner, Maria, 126
Kansa Indian Reservation, 198 Kansas Fever Exodus (1879), 196–98 Kempt, James, 32 Kimball, Joseph Horace, 61–62 King, William, 111, 161–62 Knapp, Isaac, 40 labor: Caribbean demand for, 84–85, 142 (see also under Caribbean colonies); East Indian, 84, 225nn6–7; by freed women, 71, 187–88; in Jamaica (see u nder Jamaica); mobilization of, 84–90; in the Niger Valley, 161–63; for plantations, 84–85, 87, 144, 146, 180–81, 188–89; Republicans on black l abor in the South, 167, 169–71, 183–84; Sierra Leone as a source of, 84–85, 225–26nn8–10; slave vs. free labor in Virginia, 45–50; in Trinidad (see under Trinidad); white labor recruiting, 85–86, 141–42, 226n11, 227n16 Ladies’ Society to Aid Fugitives from Slavery, 158–59 land: as a basis of political involvement in Canada, 111; blacks banned from owning in the Northwest, 135; Homestead Act of 1862, 179, 196–98; land cession treaties in Canada, 94 Landon, W. H., 155 landownership by blacks: acs land grants, 207n23; in Canada, 111, 119; in Jamaica, 144, 146–47; in New York, 136; in Nova Scotia, 26, 32, 209n9; in Ohio, 135; Republicans on, 185–86, 249n95; in Sierra Leone, 28–29; in Trinidad, 32; after U.S. emancipation, 185–88, 196–98, 249–50nn95–96 Larwill, Edward, 116–18, 120, 123–24, 127 Latrobe, John, 152 Leeds Anti-Slavery Society (England), 164–65 Leeds Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society (England), 164–65 Lettsom, John, 35 Liberator, 40, 219n18 Liberia: black domesticity and advancement in, 102; colonization advocacy
286 • Index
in the Northwest, 42; colonization advocacy in Virginia, 45–49; colonization as a means for free soil expansion, 45–47, 49, 152–53, 214n90; colonization rejected by blacks, 103, 150–51, 153–54; departure from South Carolina to, 190; family deaths in, 103; funding for colonization of, 43; as a gradual emancipation model, 36, 45–49, 152–53, 172; indepen dence of, 11; landownership/distribution in, 11, 207n23, 213n67; local royalty in, 44; and Sierra Leone, discourse on, 36–38; similarities between Caribbean emigration schemes, 140, 148–49 Libertus, Rev. Mr., 99 Lincoln, Abraham: annual message to Congress (1861), 175; Chiriqui scheme promoted by, 179; Douglass’s criticism of, 182; Homestead Act signed by, 179; promotion of black colonization by, 172, 178–81; proposal to move freed blacks to Central America (see under U.S. emancipation) Lining, John, 210n17 Livingstone, David, 160 Loguen, Jermain, 120 London, 25, 28, 31, 33, 35, 37, 73–74, 94, 157–58, 165, 209n7, 223n102 Louisiana sugar plantations, 189–90 Lyons, Samuel Thrasher, 157 Mackenzie, William, 62–63 MacLeod, Henry, 89, 228n30 Madison, James, 37, 39 Malabar East Indians, 76–77, 223–24n113 Manifest Destiny, 41, 172–73, 197 manumission laws, 39 Marryat, Charles, 91–92, 229–30n56 Maryland Colonization Society, 44 Massachusetts, 34 Massachusetts Colonization Society, 38, 49 Massachusetts Hampden Colonization Society, 40 Mauritius, 218n3, 225n7 McCoy, Elza, 126 McDowell, James, Jr., 46
McHenry, William “Jerry,” 120 Metcalfe, Charles, 75–76, 96–97 Mexico, 248n50 Miami people, 137 Michigan, 43, 64 Mi’kmaq people, 30–31 miscegenation. See interracial mixing missionary work, 60, 127–29, 194 Mississauga people, 94, 137 Mohawk people, 137 monarchical vs. republican empires, 9–12, 66, 68 Monroe, James, 36 Moodie, Susanna: Roughing It in the Bush, Or Life in the Canadas, 131 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, The (H. Bibb), 118, 124, 125f Native American reservations, 173, 198 Naturalization Act of 1841 (Canada), 75 Navy Island (Canada), 63–64 Negro Education Grant, 70–71 Newcastle, fifth Duke of (Henry Pelham- Clinton), 180 New Hampshire, 34 New Jersey, 34 Newman, William P., 175–77 New South Wales, 26, 86, 158 New York Vigilance Committee, 56–57 Niagara (Canada), 59–60 Niger Valley settlement scheme, 159–66, 176 North American Colonial Committee, 94 North American Convention (Toronto, 1851), 127, 144–46 North American League, 146–47, 155–56 Northwest Ordinance, 11, 42 Nova Scotia: black landownership in, 26, 32, 209n9; black loyalists in, 25, 28, 209n9; black refugees of the War of 1812 in, 31–33; as climatically unfit for blacks, 30, 32, 89, 211n36; Hammonds Plains (farming settlement), 32; land distribution in, 32; Preston (farming settlement), 32, 88; racial discrimination
Index • 287
Nova Scotia (continued) in landownership in, 26, 32, 88–89; Scottish settlement of, 30; slavery in, 2, 23; Trinidad’s recruitment of blacks from, 31–33, 88–89 Ohio, 43, 215–16n101 Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, 61 Ohio Colonization Society, 42 Ojibwa people, 94 Oregon, 41, 134–35 Pacific Islanders, 158, 195 Pacific Islanders Labourers Act of 1901 (Australia), 195 Pacific Northwest, 41, 134–35 Peck, Nathaniel, 108 Pelham-Clinton, Henry, fifth Duke of Newcastle, 180 Pennington, J. W. C., 156 Pennsylvania, 34 Philadelphia, 34 Philippine colonization scheme, 199 Pinckney, Charles C., 47 plantations: African Americans working in Trinidad, 108; black Canadians recruited for, 75–76, 88–89, 92–93, 97–99, 143–45; in the Caribbean, 84–85; f ree black Americans recruited for, 103–4, 143–44, 149–50, 180–81; in Jamaica, 71; race-based economy of, 85–86, 106, 142, 144, 147, 158–59, 161–62, 188–89; in V irginia, 47 Plea for Emigration, A (M. A. Shadd), 131, 154 Presbyterian Church of Canada, 111 Preston (Nova Scotia), 32, 88 Price, Thomas, 108 Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 56 Prince, John, 134 Prince Edward Island, 2 property ownership and political participation, 111, 205n6 Prosser, Gabriel, 36 Province of Canada, definition of, xi Province of Freedom, 28–29, 34–35, 211n27
Provincial Emancipation Law of 1793 (Canada), 55 Provincial Union, 148 Purvis, Robert, 219n18 race: American, as unsuited to a tropical climate, 151; based on color, 210n15; based on intelligence/morality, 151; black reformulation of, 151; colored–black vs. black–white distinctions, 149–50, 243n45; essentialist view of the black body as suited to the tropics, 27, 29–30, 37–38, 44–46, 87–89, 91–92, 100, 105, 150, 152–54, 158, 162, 168, 174, 178, 180, 183–84, 195, 199 (see also climatic determinism); and mobility, 14; and the Niger Valley settlement scheme, 159–66; plantation economy as based on, 85–86, 106, 142, 144, 147, 158–59, 161–62, 188–89; transracial identity, 106–7 racial mapping: and African diaspora history, 6; areas deemed black, 26, 32, 38, 44–45, 85–86, 102, 105–6, 145, 148–49, 152–53, 157–58, 162, 173, 183–84, 189; areas deemed white, 30, 32–33, 40–42, 44–45, 85–86, 88, 115, 148–49, 162, 173, 179, 183–84, 189, 195–96, 217n113; of Atlantic space, 2–3, 16, 33, 41, 49, 86, 105–6, 172, 178–79; black reformulation of, 1–2, 103, 105–6, 146–48, 155, 164; by Britain, 29; British officials’ disagreements on, 90; defined by migration patterns, 33–34, 43–45, 85–86, 139; and gender, 86–87, 90–97, 102; genealogy of, 7–8; highlands vs. lowlands, 85, 142, 227n16; and justification of further racialization of space, 33–34; of North American continent, 148–49, 175–76; of North vs. South, 183–84; Republicans’ disagreements on, 167 Ray, Charles B., 56–58, 61, 66–67, 104–6, 108, 135–36 Rebellion of 1837 (Upper Canada), 62–66, 78, 220n52 reconstruction, 186 Refugee Home Society, 119, 130
288 • Index
Remond, Charles, 136 Republicans: on black colonization, 167–68, 172, 178, 184, 246n6, 248n42; on black labor in a post-emancipation South, 167, 183–87; on black landownership, 185–86, 249n95; free-soil ideology of, 172, 179; and gender and sexuality, 187; and the South as a domestic tropical environment, 167, 183–84 Roaf, John, 92 Rockbridge Colonization Society, 46 Rolph, Thomas, 72–75, 81–82, 89–90, 92–97, 100, 222–23n102 Roughing It in the Bush, Or Life in the Canadas (Moodie), 131 Ruggles, David, 56, 58, 61, 103 Sandwich Convention, 119 Scoble, John, 91–92, 143–46, 149, 154–55, 157–58, 222–23n102, 236–37n40 Second Confiscation Act of 1862 (U.S.), 175, 178, 182 self-emancipated blacks: and British abolitionists, 73–78, 91–92, 143, 158–59; in the British army, 62–68, 220n52; British identity of black Canadians, 68–70, 82; Canadians relocated to the Caribbean, 81, 97–98, 177; and Caribbean freed people, 68–70, 76, 78, 134; catalysts for migration from U.S. to Canada, 55–56, 112; comparison to East Indians, 76–78; as evidence of black capacity for freedom, 59–61; extradition risk for (see extradition); gender breakdown of refugees, 237n49; as ideal productive British subjects, 74, 122–24, 130–33; Jamaica’s efforts in recruiting, 75–76, 97–100, 143–46, 156; and legally free migrants, 130; masculine identity of, 122–23; and mobility, 117, 122–24, 130–33; “mulatto” mother escape stories, 124–26; petitioning of Britain for rights, 70–75; reinvention as black settlers, 118–20, 122–24, 130–33; reports on, 59–60, 92–96; viewed as foreign/British, 64–68, 78; white settlers’ vilification of, 111, 114–17,
130; and the World Anti-Slavery Convention, 74. See also black freedom settlement journals, 131 settler colonialism and emancipation, 16–17, 201 settler expansion/privilege: black female settler identity, 130–33; black migration to Kansas, 196–98; black participation in, 95–96, 116, 118, 135–36, 196–98; black settlement in Canada, measures against, 111, 114, 117; black settlement in the West, measures against, 43, 134–35, 215–16nn101–2; as conflict over slavery and free soil, 11, 49–50, 171–72, 179; European immigrants included in, 117; global scope of, 8; and intimacy, 94–96, 119–20, 130–33, 136; Manifest Destiny, 41; as political privilege, 111, 205n6; and sectional crisis, 171–72, 179; as a solution to urban life, 40–42, 135; tropical migration as black Americans’ alternative to, 40–45, 136, 152–53, 173, 178–79; tropical migration as black Canadians’ alternative to, 93–94, 96–97; tropical migration as black Nova Scotians’ alternative to, 30–32; as white-only, and slave ownership, 47; white settlement of Canada West, 94 Seward, William H., 56, 180, 248n42 sexual relations: and empire and colonization, 8, 206n19; endogamy and white fears of racial mixing, 94–96, 114, 187–88, 202, 250n99 (see also interracial mixing); and maintaining white settler colonial dominance, 95; and natural law, 114 Shadd-Cary, Mary Ann: as an army recruiter, 194; vs. the Bibbs, 130, 239– 40n73; climatic determinism refuted by, 1, 154, 177; as editor of the Provincial Freeman, 113, 127, 129–31, 148, 247n21; on emigration to Haiti, 177; on emigration to Jamaica, 147–48; on free black identity, 130–32; fugitive woman aided by, 126–27; Hints to the Colored People of the North, 127; as a leader of the black
Index • 289
Shadd-Cary, Mary Ann (continued) migrant community, 239n72; marriage of, 247n22; A Plea for Emigration, 131, 154 Sharp, Granville, 25–26, 28–29, 34–35 Shawnee people, 137 Shepherd, Harriet, 126 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 185–86 Sierra Leone: African American interest in, 35–36; black loyalists in, 28–29; black migration to, 28–29, 35, 209n5, 209n7; British vice admiralty court in, 84; exploitation in, 29–30; failure of, 33, 84–85; influence on Liberian colonization, 36–38; as labor source for the Caribbean, 84–85, 225–26nn8–10; and Liberia, 11; plans to send fugitive slaves in 1853, 158–59; promise of land in, 28; and the Province of Freedom, 28–29, 34–35, 211n27; racial inequities in, 29; slaveholder interest in, 36 Sierra Leone Company, 22, 28–30, 33, 36–38, 143, 160, 214n79 Simcoe, John, 55 “Slavery Question in Virginia” ( J. B. Harrison), 48 slavery/slave trade: African North Americans’ views of, 1–2, 115; British antislavery stance, 53, 70, 82, 181 (see also British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society); in Canada, 2, 55; and climatic determinism, 7, 27, 200; crossing Union lines as defining slave escape, 181; defense of, 50, 59; effect on whites, 48; and free soil, 11, 153, 168, 171–72, 178–79, 4950; “fugitive slaves,” use of/alternatives to, xii; in Nova Scotia, 2, 23; as settler expansion, 11, 49–50, 171–72, 179; transatlantic slave trade, 1, 7, 26, 29, 33, 36, 84–85, 159, 200; U.S. domestic slave trade, 50; U.S. fugitive slave narratives, 122; Virginia debate on, 45–50; in the West, 42, 215n99. See also abolition; abolitionists; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; U.S. emancipation Smeathman, Henry, 26, 209n11 Smith, Caleb B., 178 Smith, Gerrit, 136
Smith Stanley, Edward, 225n7 South, the (U.S.): and British Caribbean, 193; disagreement on climate of, 46–47; as a domestic tropical environment, 167, 183–84, 188–90, 193, 199–200; foreign- born populations in, 190; Republicans on black labor in, 167, 183–87, 249n95 South Carolina, 189–90 Southern Homestead Act of 1866, 185–86 Spanish-American War, 198–99 Special Field Order No. 15, 185–86 state incorporation: racial threshold for, 11 St. Catherines (Canada), 59–60 St. Davids (Canada), 59–60 Stephen, James, 225–26n8 St. Helena, 84 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 124–25 de St. Remy, Eduard, 68, 70 Sturge, Joseph, 74 Sugar Duties Act of 1846 (Britain), 157–58 Syracuse Vigilance Committee, 120 Tappan, Lewis, 149 Thome, James A., 61–62 Thomson, Charles Poulett, 90, 94 Thornton, William, 35, 37 Thoughts on African Colonization (Garrison), 42 Toronto, 59–60, 115 Trail, C. P.: The Female Emigrant’s Guide, 131 Trail of Tears, 173 transatlantic slave trade, 1, 7, 26, 29, 33, 36, 84–85, 159, 200 Trinidad: African American views of, 107; appointment of emigration recruiting agent, 228n30; exploitation in, 104; immigration from Africa banned, 87, 228n32; mortality of whites in, 85; promise of landownership in, 32; recruiting of white labor in, 85–86, 226n11; recruitment of blacks from Canada, 89, 91, 93, 97, 229–30n56; recruitment of blacks from Nova Scotia, 31–33, 88–89; recruit-
290 • Index
ment of blacks from the U.S., 103, 108; transnational grouping of blacks by, 87; white settlement discouraged in, 85–86 tropicality: African North American refutation of, 105, 136, 150–51, 153–54, 164; and domesticity, 102–3; and immunity to disease, 27, 38, 198–99, 210n17; as an inherent racial quality, 38, 138 (see also race); as a symbol of otherness, 7; vs. white temperate zone, 7–8, 32, 44–45, 85–86, 148–49, 162, 173, 183–84, 189 Trumbull, Lyman, 182 Tucker, George, 39–40 Turner’s (Nat) rebellion, 45 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 124–25 Underwood, Joseph, 44 United Anti-Slavery Society of New York, 61 Upper Canada (later Canada West): British imperial abolition celebrated in, 69–70; definition of, xi; extradition in, 62, 71–72; full British freedom requested by blacks in, 70–72, 75; as a haven of freedom, 55–58, 218n1; map of, 5 f; missionary effort in, 60; slavery in, 2. See also Canada West U.S. emancipation, 167–91; African American response to colonization proposals, 181–83; black landownership following, 185–87, 196–98, 249–50nn95–96; Civil War era, 10, 174–75; and colonization schemes, 167–68, 172, 178, 184, 248n42; failings of, 186–87, 190; race/ labor/climate configurations following, 170–71, 184, 188–90; refugees behind Union lines, 174–75; Republican debates over future home of the emancipated, 167; tropical emigration as a policy of, 178–81, 184–85, 200–201, 248n50. See also under emancipations U.S. Infantry Immune Volunteers, 198–99
Vancouver Island, 235n7 Vermont, 34 Victoria (Queen), 72–73, 128 Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, 57–58, 219n18 Virginia, 36, 39, 45–50, 217n119 Virginia, Stephen, 98–99 Virginia General Assembly, 39 Virginia l abor legislation, 24–25 Wadstrom, C. B., 38; Essay on Colonization, 37 Wagener, John, 189 Ward, Samuel Ringgold: as an abolitionist, 119–20, 156, 236–37n40; Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 121f; on Canada’s climate as suitable for blacks, 153; emigration to Jamaica, 156; Provincial Freeman founded by, 236n31; slave escape narratives used by, 122–24 War of 1812, 31–33 Webster-Ashburton treaty, 77–78 Wentworth, John, 31 West, the: vs. Africa as location for blacks, 40–45, 152–53; black settlement in, mea sures against, 43, 134–35, 215–16nn101–2; as non-slaveholding lands, 42 Western District (Canada), 93–94, 96, 111–12, 116, 176 Western District Council petition, 116, 120 Western medicine, 27, 195–96, 199, 210n17 West Indies. See Caribbean colonies; Cuba; Haiti; Jamaica West London Ladies’ Association, 128 Williams, Elizabeth, 126–27 Wilson, Hiram, 58–61, 66–68, 91–93, 95–96 World Anti-Slavery Convention, 73–75 Wright, Theodore, 56, 61, 103–4, 107 “yeomanry,” use of, 64
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