Rejection of Colonization in the United States

The idea of moving to Liberia, or anywhere else in Africa, was rejected by many African Americans from the very beginning of the colonization movement. Most African Americans had lived in the United States for generations and, while they sought better treatment, they did not want to leave. In response to the proposal for blacks to move to Africa, Frederick Douglass famously said, 'Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here.' Starting in 1831 with William Lloyd Garrison's new newspaper, The Liberator, and followed by his 1832 publication, Thoughts on African Colonization, support for colonization dropped, particularly in Northern free states. Garrison and his followers supported the idea of 'immediatism,' calling for the immediate emancipation of all slaves and the legal prohibition of slavery throughout the United States. Garrison declared the American Colonization Society (ACS) to be 'a creature without heart, without brains, eyeless, unnatural, hypocritical, relentless and unjust.' He viewed it not as a plan to eliminate slavery, but as a way to protect it. The ACS was composed of a combination of abolitionists who wanted to end slavery and found it easier to free slaves if they agreed to go to Liberia, and slaveholders who wanted to rid the United States of free people of color. Henry Clay, one of the founders of the ACS, had inherited slaves as a young child but adopted antislavery views in the 1790s under the influence of his mentor, George Wythe. Garrison pointed out that the number of free people of color who actually resettled in Liberia was minute compared to the number of slaves in the United States. As one of his supporters put it, 'As a remedy for slavery, it must be placed amongst the grossest of all delusions. In fifteen years it has transported less than three thousand persons to the African coast; while the increase on their numbers, in the same period, is about seven hundred thousand!'