History of the United States I / Unit 13 USH1 1836 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Three Answers to Slavery
The idea
Those who opposed slavery divided into three approaches that were rival programmes rather than stages of one movement. The first was colonisation. Reformers unable to envision Black and White Americans coexisting as equals proposed removing free Black people to Africa or the Caribbean, and the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, founded in eighteen sixteen, was endorsed by Thomas Jefferson among other prominent statesmen. It targeted about two hundred thousand free Black Americans, secured one hundred thousand dollars in federal funding in eighteen nineteen, and helped establish Liberia, whose capital was named for President Monroe. The second was resistance by force. David Walker, born free in North Carolina in seventeen ninety-six, moved to Boston and promoted Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper, and his Appeal of eighteen twenty-nine condemned colonisation and called on Black Americans to fight for equality, including by violence if necessary. The third was abolition by moral argument, which the rest of this unit follows.
In practice
Three organised answers to the same institution, one of which proposed to solve it by removing the people it had enslaved, and one of which was endorsed by the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Where people slip
Colonisation is the one to think hardest about, because it was the most respectable of the three and it was not an antislavery position. It could be held by enslavers. It rested on the premise that free Black Americans were a problem to be exported rather than citizens to be admitted, and free Black communities in the North said so at the time and rejected it. That rejection is why Walker's Appeal attacked colonisation before it attacked slaveholders, and it is why Garrison's later break with the movement mattered so much, since he had supported colonisation and concluded that it deepened the racism it claimed to accommodate. Walker died months after publishing, and many believe he was murdered.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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