The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire

The World Colonization Made

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

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Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown,

Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial,

revolutionary, and early national history and culture,

Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes

and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character,

and with a special emphasis on the period from about

1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with

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The World Colonization Made

The Racial Geography of Early American Empire

Brandon Mills

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mills, Brandon, author.

Title: The world colonization made : the racial geography of early American empire / Brandon Mills.

Other titles: Racial geography of early American empire | Early American studies.

Description: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020001876 | ISBN 9780812252507 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Colonization. | American Colonization Society—History—19th century. | Free blacks—America—History—19th century. | Slavery—United States—History—19th century. | African Americans—Colonization—Liberia—History. | African Americans—Colonization—Central America—History—19th century. | Indians of North America—Colonization—History—19th century. | Imperialism. | United States—Race relations—History—19th century. | United States—History—1783–1865. | Liberia—Colonization.

Classification: LCC E448 .M57 2020 | DDC 305.800973/0904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001876

CONTENTS

Introduction. The World Colonization Made

Chapter 1. A Republic Once Removed

Chapter 2. Colonization Doctrines

Chapter 3. Colonization Policies in an Age of Removal

Chapter 4. Settler Republics in Black and White

Chapter 5. The United States of Africa

Chapter 6. Reimagining Colonization in the Americas

Epilogue. The Racial Geography of America’s Imperial Future

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The World Colonization Made

At an 1825 meeting of the American Colonization Society (ACS) held in the U.S. Capitol Building, Robert Stockton delivered a warning about the nation’s future as an empire. Only three years earlier, he had led the U.S. Navy’s effort to create the colony of Liberia in West Africa with the intention that this settlement would ultimately become a republic governed by African Americans. Despite the organization’s recent success in establishing this colony, Stockton addressed the ACS with a cautionary tale of imperial hubris. He pointed out that the Spanish empire, a once-dominant global power, had suffered a steep decline in the preceding decades, recently culminating in the loss of nearly all its colonial possessions throughout the Western Hemisphere. Anticipating a time when the United States would preside over its own sprawling empire, Stockton worried that the nation might follow Spain’s fateful path, ultimately undermining its effort to build a republic rooted in moral rectitude and the equal rights of man. For Stockton, Spain’s empire was defined by avarice and stained by the blood of thousands of unoffending natives, and he warned that the United States could similarly perish from a heart blackened by atrocity and countless cruelties to the Indian and the African.¹

To avoid this fate, Stockton encouraged Americans to support the African colonization movement and to model it around the United States’ republican institutions, which were, in his estimation, the very capital of human freedom and the sublimest structure for the promulgation of human rights the world ever saw. For Stockton, planting a black republic in Africa and the parallel colonization of our aborigines in North America would allow the nation to forge a benevolent empire: one that allowed for the expansion of liberty through racially separate regimes of self-governance for whites, African Americans, and Native Americans.²

Although his speech warned about the dangers of excessive colonial violence, Stockton failed to mention his own violent role in colonizing Liberia. As a naval officer tasked with patrolling the slave trade for the United States, he landed the U.S.S. Alligator on West African shores in late 1821 along with several ACS agents in hopes of securing territory for a colony. Stockton and the prospective colonists entered negotiations with a local Dei leader, known to English speakers as King Peter, concerning the terms of a potential American colony in Cape Mesurado. When negotiations faltered, Stockton allegedly pointed a gun at the man’s head and pressed him into signing a treaty to cede land to the American settlers. Thus, Liberia’s founding event reenacted, in microcosm, the use of force to coerce treaties on the indigenous peoples of North America in order to establish the United States’ own settler republic. Conveniently omitting this history allowed Stockton to claim that the United States could build an exceptional empire based not on exploitation but rather on the principle of self-government.³

As Stockton’s speech and actions suggest, colonizationism offered many white Americans a compelling racial framework for defining, and obscuring, the character of U.S. imperialism.⁴ From the American Revolution to the Civil War, colonizationists envisioned geopolitical arrangements in which African Americans would be severed from the United States’ body politic while remaining part of its broader agenda for expansion. A relatively small number of black migrants left the United States for these colonies, either in search of self-determination or as a requirement of their manumission from slavery. For the most part, free black people in the United States steadfastly opposed these schemes as an affront to their livelihood, natural rights, and basic humanity. On its own terms, the colonization movement was largely a failure, yet it remained an influential fixture for the first century of American political life. As a foundational set of racial ideas within the United States, how did colonizationism evolve to create, and recreate, the United States’ ever-shifting imperial priorities?

To answer this question, The World Colonization Made traces this idea across a wide range of political and cultural debates concerning citizenship rights, strategies of settlement, foreign policy, and economic expansion. By examining the broad circulation of this concept in the early United States, it is possible to see why colonizationism remained so attractive and resilient to many white Americans despite its consistent failures. The colonization movement gained so much traction, in part, because it spoke to American aspiration toward empire and connected this vision of expansion abroad with ideas about race at home. The white citizenry that imagined and set into motion colonization proposals was both self-consciously committed to expanding the reach of its republican ideals and intensely concerned about how the principle of self-rule could coexist with racial hierarchies created through enslavement, settler colonization, and overseas expansion. Indeed, colonizationist views of race evolved along with Americans’ reconfigurations of the racial terms of their empire. While white Americans initially created the ideology of colonizationism in order to manage the domestic racial threats posed by slavery and settlement, it ultimately developed into a thoroughly racialized worldview that foreshadowed later iterations of the United States’ global expansion.

The expansive scope of colonizationism is apparent in the fact that Americans proposed colonies in such a wide range of territories both inside and outside current U.S. borders. The ACS campaign to settle Liberia was the central and most successful effort to create such a colony, but it was by no means the only one. At different moments, colonizationists contemplated a sprawling array of settlements in the far reaches of the Atlantic world, including locations throughout much of North America, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and West Africa. That the United States would eventually claim a significant portion of these sites as part of either its own national territory or its informal imperial domain underscores the fact that the nation’s continental settlement remained in constant dialogue with its global aspirations.

For a movement literally dedicated to founding and settling colonies, colonizationism has remained largely absent from histories of U.S. imperialism. Most accounts view it primarily as a manifestation of domestic politics, positioning it in relation to antislavery activism, growing sectional tensions, racial ideology, and the emergence of black political identity in the United States.⁵ To some extent, this tendency replicates the way that many Americans discussed colonizationism at the time. In the antebellum period, the concept became a central battleground in the war over slavery as a generation of white abolitionists, following the lead of black protesters, defined their movement by rejecting colonizationists’ constrained vision of emancipation. Thus, for contemporary advocates and opponents of colonization, questions of empire were not front and center. While acknowledging the importance of these domestic contexts, this book approaches the subject from a different angle by showing that colonizationism held enduring appeal for white Americans precisely because it was multifaceted: it promised to manage the nation’s internal racial dynamics by structuring them around particular visions of empire.⁶

Offering a powerful and flexible framework for racial thinking, colonizationism helped define the United States’ evolving imperial outlook throughout its early history. Accordingly, the colonization movement revealed Americans’ persistent ambivalence about the nature of their empire: the United States forged its republic through anti-imperial struggle and yet immediately set out to fashion itself as an expansive empire of liberty on colonized indigenous lands. As a settler empire, the United States sought to coalesce its expanding settlements into a single political entity by displacing Native communities through both military conquest and informal violence. At the same time, many Americans envisioned their nation as an aspiring world power and therefore aimed to exert authority over distant populations outside the nation’s ever-expanding borders. Modeling itself both on and in contrast to European empires, the United States competed for resources and control in North America, the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and eventually throughout the entire world.⁷ During the late nineteenth century, the nation became increasingly committed to extending its reach overseas but exercised its authority in ways that were often distinct from its practice of colonial rule in North America.⁸ By viewing the story of U.S. expansion through the lens of colonizationism, we can see how deeply the legacy of the United States’ settlement imprinted the nation’s eventual ascent to global empire.

Figure 1. A map showing some of the proposed sites for creating colonies for African Americans from the 1770s through the 1860s.

The World Colonization Made opens in the years immediately following the American Revolution as the young nation provisionally defined the racial contours of its emerging imperial agenda. The earliest colonization proposals sought to manage an unstable regime of racial slavery on contested indigenous land; therefore, this book’s story begins by highlighting how colonizationism grew out of the United States’ efforts to settle North America. By the time Robert Stockton helped found Liberia in the early 1820s, white Americans definitively favored locating such a colony in Africa. However, in the decades preceding the formation of the ACS, politicians and antislavery writers had debated a series of incipient colonization proposals that were primarily designed to eliminate the threat of slave insurrection in the United States by creating black colonies within various parts of North America. Proponents of these plans presumed that by establishing such colonies in the West, black settlers could remain separate from the United States yet perpetuate the nation’s colonization of the continent.

These early colonization proposals reveal that Americans’ ideas concerning the interaction between race and empire were open-ended, provisional, and subject to change. While colonizationism was increasingly popular in the decades following the revolution, by the late 1810s many of its proponents had come to believe that the existence of these colonies would only hinder the prospects of white settlement, and black slavery, in North America. As the context for the colony moved from the terrain of indigenous territories in North America to those in Africa, it retained its foundational logic of settler colonialism even as it suggested new prospects for U.S. expansion around the globe.

This shift resulted in a new concept for the colony in Liberia: one in which African Americans would not participate in the United States’ settlement of North America but would rather reproduce it by becoming an independent settler republic. Despite attracting a dramatic range of support from prominent white Americans, the early colonization movement succeeded far more in popularizing this conceptual framework than in making it a reality. While whites were willing, often overzealous, settlers within North America, most free African Americans disavowed this position in Africa. Marginalized as citizens in the United States and unwilling to become settlers in Liberia, black anticolonizationists laid bare the contradictions of the movement from its inception.

As colonizationism became formalized under the ACS, its proponents developed a more consistent set of ideas rooted in the ideology of U.S. political institutions and foreign policy. Within this context, colonizationists advanced an ideal of racial republicanism in which nonwhite peoples could eventually become self-governing citizens, but within a framework in which they would remain perpetually subordinate.⁹ In this conception, aspiring republics such as Liberia would remain racially distinct while ascending to nominal equality as independent nation-states.¹⁰ By suggesting that African Americans might become unequal partners in overseas expansion, racial republicanism helped Americans envision new forms of U.S. global power while reinforcing white political supremacy and black disenfranchisement at home.

Even after colonizationists largely rejected North America as the location for a potential colony, their ideas remained preoccupied with defining the racial structure of the United States’ settler empire. In his speech, Stockton advocated applying a colonizationist framework to Native Americans, a proposition then endorsed by several U.S. leaders, including President James Monroe. Such supporters believed that reorganizing Native peoples into colonies would help them dissolve their tribal affiliations and form parallel republican societies, thereby freeing up vast stretches of territory where white Americans could settle. While this colonizationist vision of Indian policy never fully came to pass, it would frame the conceptual landscape for the debate over Indian removal even as African colonization, and its distinct vision of U.S. expansion, ultimately faced a more ambiguous fate as national policy.

Despite African colonizationists’ ability to secure only meager federal resources to support Liberia, their influential ideas continued to define both the limits and possibilities of U.S. empire. In forming state-level racial policies, white settlers could justify their claims to Native lands by arguing that Liberia, rather than their own states, provided the proper context for black settler citizenship. This was underscored by the prospect of Liberia’s formal declaration of independence in 1847, which allowed the colony, in theory, to fulfill its republican promise and validate the United States’ claim that its empire was wholly benevolent. While some free African Americans were intrigued by the prospect of an independent black republic, most remained skeptical about the implications of Liberian sovereignty, given that it remained embedded within the United States’ ongoing racial and imperial priorities.

During the years leading up to the Civil War, several politicians reanimated colonizationism by advancing proposals to create colonies such as Liberia throughout Central and South America. Colonizationists of this era advanced more self-consciously global objectives, suggesting that the propagation of such colonies in the Americas could become stepping stones to the Pacific and help the United States establish broader networks of military and economic dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Even as they looked to integrate these colonies within the United States’ budding overseas empire, the politicians advancing them frequently emphasized how they were consistent with the practices of U.S. settlement. By framing African Americans as international homesteaders, advocates claimed they would serve as proxies for U.S. interests in the American tropics by becoming parallel settler citizens enacting their own versions of manifest destiny.¹¹ As a consistently renewable reservoir for imagining the nation’s racial future, colonizationism allowed Americans to reconcile their vision of creating a white settler empire with the racially uncertain prospect of global expansion.

This book’s chapters are arranged chronologically, tracing the life cycle of the colonization movement as a vital political force within the United States. Colonizationism had its roots in the crises of the Revolutionary era, ascended to national stature with the creation of the ACS, stumbled following attacks from both critics and defenders of slavery, and ultimately declined with emancipation during the Civil War. Although the rise and fall of the ACS partially frames the narrative arc of this book, the much larger story traces the path of colonizationist ideas as they moved through the early United States. As a result, each chapter is thematically organized, focusing on how the colonization movement both reflected and shaped a wide range of debates over race, settlement, citizenship, and empire in the early republic. By addressing these themes, this book interrogates how the specific case of colonizationism illuminates our understanding of broader issues of U.S. expansion, including the progression of federal Indian policy, the ideologies of the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny, and the growth of U.S. commercial and military power throughout the Western Hemisphere.

By recontextualizing colonizationism in this way, it is possible to see how ostensibly domestic debates among policy makers, activists, and ordinary citizens helped define the United States’ outlook toward global engagement. This enduring conceptual framework allowed Americans to envision a world of self-governing nations that recentered their racialized political institutions. In the ensuing decades, the United States would pursue a wide range of approaches to expansion, elaborating on its prior practices even as it established new forms of rule abroad. The ongoing transformation of these ideas throughout the nineteenth century demonstrates how Americans situated their own nation amid other empires on the world stage. Ultimately, the enduring legacy of the colonization movement is that it provided one powerful way for Americans to integrate both their racism and republicanism with a boundless ambition for expansion.

CHAPTER 1

A Republic Once Removed

In 1801 James Monroe, then the governor of Virginia, wrote to President Thomas Jefferson to ask whether the federal government could help his state create a colony of former slaves somewhere within the western territory of North America. Monroe made this request in response to an event a year earlier when Virginia slaveholders thwarted an incipient slave insurrection that was partially inspired by the ongoing rebellions throughout the French Caribbean colonies. Along with other Virginian leaders, he believed that creating such a settlement for some of the state’s free black population might prevent the prospect of a similar revolution in mainland North America. Monroe had reason to expect the president would be receptive to this idea. Since the Revolutionary era, several prominent writers and politicians, including Jefferson himself, had consistently discussed the possibility of creating colonies for former slaves.¹ Despite the growing constituency for such a proposal in Virginia, the recently elected president offered a lukewarm response. While not entirely dismissive of Monroe’s plan, Jefferson questioned the fundamental wisdom of creating such a colony. Instead, he encouraged Monroe to envision a future in which white Americans would displace Native peoples as they settled the North American continent and cautioned that making black colonies part of this landscape would introduce a blot or mixture in that surface.²

As this exchange suggests, the nation’s most prominent leaders discussed colonizationism long before the ACS emerged to advance its plan for Liberia in the late 1810s. Throughout the 1790s the ongoing threat of slave rebellion helped inspire a series of colonization proposals that were aimed at combating the possibility of domestic insurrection in the United States. Eventually Africa would become the primary focus for most colonizationists, but at the turn of the nineteenth century, proponents of such colonies often looked westward to assuage anxieties that stemmed from the question of slavery and settlement in postrevolutionary America.³

During this era, colonizationists sketched out plans in which African Americans would create settler societies that were loosely aligned with the United States’ expansion on the continent. However, Jefferson’s response to Monroe demonstrates that the prospect of such colonies carried with it profound implications for the racial geography of the United States’ expanding settler empire. Eventually other white Americans would come to have similar doubts about the long-term consequences of these early western proposals. This growing skepticism likely contributed to the failure of these plans to coalesce into a coherent movement, and ultimately the ideas only appeared in a scattering of books, pamphlets, private correspondence, and legislative debates during the decades immediately following the Revolutionary War. Indeed, when compared to the popularity, formalized ideology, and institutional strength of the later ACS, these plans for western colonies might appear to be trivial at first glance. Despite their relative marginality, these early proposals crucially reveal competing visions of the United States’ settler state in the early years following the Revolutionary era. They demonstrate the ways that the eventual African colonization movement was both an extension and a reinvention of early American empire.⁴

This inchoate vision of a loosely coordinated and racially separate settlement of North America would not survive long. By the mid-1810s, colonizationists began to argue that the looming threat of slave rebellion, a fundamental argument for creating such colonies in the first place, actually made western settlements incompatible with the United States’ plans for expansion. Increasingly, the proposed black colonies in North America were characterized as threats to national security, particularly when viewed through the lens of ongoing wars with Indian nations. Seen from this perspective, African Americans were more likely to be, as Jefferson argued, impediments to the United States’ settlement rather than allies. The abandonment of these proposals highlights how discussions about the character of U.S. expansion helped frame the emergence of colonizationist ideas in ways that scholars have often overlooked. The failure of colonizationism in the West illustrates an early phase in the evolution of the United States’ identity as a white settler republic within North America.

Colonizationist Counterrevolution

Colonizationism was born amid the anxious racial politics that followed the American Revolution, and no place exemplified this more clearly than Virginia. Here, the national debates about slavery and emancipation and the ever-present fear of slave insurrection were echoed and amplified nationally, leading the state to become a crucial incubator for the earliest colonization proposals that circulated within the United States. The Revolutionary War had caused major disruptions to Virginia’s slave system and helped create the perception that the state suffered from a surplus of slaves. This factor, along with the declining profitability of tobacco, fueled white slaveholders’ pervasive concern about a growing free black population. In this context, Virginia’s politicians, many of whom were also prominent national leaders, increasingly questioned the long-term viability of slavery as an institution in the state.⁵

Thomas Jefferson, a key figure in the American Revolution and one of Virginia’s most prominent planters, would also play a critical role in defining these unfolding debates over slavery, emancipation, and colonization. Approaching the subject as a revolutionary, an early national leader, and an anxious Virginia slaveholder, Jefferson likely did more than any other individual in the early republic to initially popularize the concept of creating colonies for former slaves. In the first years of the Revolution, Jefferson had helped draft a version of Virginia’s constitution that included a proposal for the gradual emancipation of the state’s enslaved population, with the provision that they be colonized to such place as the circumstances of time should render most proper where they would become a free and independent people.⁶ Although not included in the final version of the document, Jefferson’s plan to relocate emancipated slaves received widespread attention when this earlier draft was published years later in Notes on the State of Virginia, and its prominence had a profound influence on the more detailed plans that would emerge in subsequent decades.⁷

Jefferson’s early colonization proposals stemmed from his view that people of African descent amounted to an inherently antagonistic nation contained within the United States. Believing that these two nations would remain perpetually in conflict, he concluded that their separation into different political communities was the only viable solution to this dilemma. Underpinning this belief was Jefferson’s concern that enslaved African Americans would be driven, like the American colonists had been, to demand their natural rights through revolution. As colonization plans circulated during the next few decades, both slaveholders and antislavery advocates alike echoed these sentiments and warned that if whites did not create favorable conditions for African Americans to achieve their political rights peaceably, they would inevitably seize them through a bloody conflict.⁸

As it turned out, these fears were prescient. Only a few years later, enslaved and free people of African descent led a series of revolutionary struggles that permanently transformed social relations within the colonies of the French Caribbean. In the early 1790s a political debate over extending citizenship rights to free people of color sparked a series of slave rebellions in France’s richest sugar colony, Saint-Domingue. Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the primary leader of the struggle on the island and quickly became an international symbol of both the promise and threat of a wide-scale slave revolt. In 1804 Haiti became the world’s first black republic by discarding the shackles of both slavery and colonialism.⁹

This rebellion rapidly spread to other French possessions in the region and radiated its influence out into other British and Spanish slave colonies, and, of course, to the United States. As a consequence, both the successful revolution and the resulting Republic of Haiti came to represent the first sustained challenge to the Atlantic world slave system as well as Eurocentric conceptions of republican citizenship. American newspapers, pamphlets, and books widely publicized lurid and sensationalized reports of slaves massacring white colonists, and, as a result, many Americans predicted that racial revolution was also imminent in the United States.¹⁰ At the same time both enslaved and free peoples of African descent disseminated their own knowledge of these events throughout the Americas, serving as a testament to the prospect of successful resistance against slave regimes.¹¹

As a result, these revolutionary events in the French Caribbean would serve to frame all discussions of colonizationism for the next several decades. Seen within this context, the early colonization efforts in the United States can be understood as an attempt at forging a counterrevolution in the wider Atlantic world: an effort to create the terms on which black republicanism might be cultivated, managed, and ultimately contained. During the 1790s and early 1800s, American politicians and antislavery writers discussed plans for black colonies as a response to the growing panic about slave rebellion. Thomas Jefferson’s initial suggestion of creating black colonies during the Revolution was both provisional and open-ended; however, by the 1790s Americans began to advance more concrete proposals, inspired by British plans for creating a settlement for former slaves in the West African colony of Sierra Leone.

Although some Americans voiced support for these British efforts in Africa, at this early stage many still looked toward North America as a future home for former slaves. In many ways, this tendency illustrates how colonizationism was continuous with the long-standing dynamics of European settler expansion in North America. American colonists had long pushed to advance the boundaries of settlement, sometimes against the wishes of local officials who valued stable relationships with the powerful Indian nations who controlled borderland regions. After independence, the United States, unburdened by British imperial restriction on western settlement, claimed nominal, if not physical, control over a large swath of Native lands where they hoped to build an empire of their own. The sheer vastness of this territory seemed to offer the possibility that African Americans might be accommodated within these visions. While a colony in Sierra Leone might seem remote, costly, unpredictable, and wedded to a British imperial system that the United States had recently rejected, Americans possessed the knowledge, experience, and inclination they would need to support the further colonization of North America.

As a result, early colonization proposals hinged on the question of how they might be integrated within the United States’ own settler empire, a preoccupation initially intended to avoid the uncertain pursuit of an African colony. For instance, William Thornton, a Quaker antislavery advocate who traveled throughout Rhode Island in 1786 and 1787, found considerable interest among the state’s black population in the prospect of migrating to the proposed colony in Sierra Leone. However, when he raised the idea of securing transportation for these individuals with members of the [Rhode Island] Legislature, they expressed an unwillingness to send them out of the limits of the U.S., & wished a Settlement to be made in the most southern part of the back Country between the whites & Indians. Thornton disagreed with the view that a black colony could act as a kind of buffer between white settlement and Indian country and told the legislators that he would never be instrument in placing those men, who were now comparatively happy & in a state of protection, between the Indians & Savages on their Borders, where they would become a prey to both. Moreover, he could see no way that black colonies could be properly integrated into the United States’ empire, asking: If they should prove capable of defending themselves against all their Enemies, & should preserve their political freedom, could they ever hope to be received as representatives in our Assemblies? While many Americans would continue to look westward, this concern about a racially divided settler republic anticipated the arguments that would eventually lead most colonizationists, including Thornton himself, to support an African colony by the mid-1810s.¹²

The fact that Thornton consulted black residents on the subject of western colonies is notable because it was so rare. During this period, white colonizationists scarcely mention the perspective of the black men and women who they imagined would become willing colonists. Indeed, there is virtually no evidence that African Americans were interested in the prospect of venturing onto indigenous territory where they would be viewed as potentially hostile avatars of the U.S. settler state. Some free African Americans expressed interest in leaving the United States, but it was almost always for Africa, either to the British colony in Sierra Leone or another unspecified territory on the continent. Therefore, colonizationism, as it came to be expressed through these early proposals, was from its inception an expression of white imagination and designed to serve white interests. Colonizationists flagrantly disregarded the perspectives of African Americans by envisioning them as potential settlers whether they were willing to accept this position or not. While it is likely that most of these early proposals did not reach black audiences to any significant degree, they established a toxic dynamic that caused free black communities to stridently oppose colonizationism when it eventually arrived on the national scene in the mid-1810s.¹³

White colonizationists persisted in circulating a scattered array of proposals over the next few decades, largely without input from African Americans. Around the time when Jefferson’s early colonization proposals became widely known, William Craighead, a magistrate in Lunenburg County, Virginia, locally discussed his own proposal to colonize African Americans in the western territories that the Northwest Ordinance laws had recently opened up for settlement in the late 1780s. Although Craighead clearly viewed these colonies as operating within the broader context of settling that region, he proposed a quasi-colonial relationship by which the proposed colonies’ relation to the government of the United States was to be something analogous to that in which the Indians now stand.¹⁴ Craighead’s proposal introduced the vexing question of precisely how such a colony might relate to the United States’ other processes for colonizing territory, in addition to the existing Indian nations throughout the West. Shortly after Craighead made his proposal, an anonymously written antislavery article in the American Museum presented a similar idea by offering readers a stark choice: Either we should set all our slaves at liberty, immediately, and colonize them in the western territory; or, we should immediately take measures for the gradual abolition of it. Appearing in one of the United States’ most prominent early periodicals, and shortly following the publication of Jefferson’s Notes, it suggests an elite national audience already familiar with, and receptive to, the prospect of creating black colonies.¹⁵