The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire
288
The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire
288eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
According to accepted historical wisdom, the goal of the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to return freed slaves to Africa, was borne of desperation and illustrated just how intractable the problems of race and slavery had become in the nineteenth-century United States. But for Brandon Mills, the ACS was part of a much wider pattern of national and international expansion. Similar efforts on the part of the young nation to create, in Thomas Jefferson's words, an "empire of liberty," spanned Native removal, the annexation of Texas and California, filibustering campaigns in Latin America, and American missionary efforts in Hawaii, as well as the founding of Liberia in 1821. Mills contends that these diverse currents of U.S. expansionism were ideologically linked and together comprised a capacious colonization movement that both reflected and shaped a wide range of debates over race, settlement, citizenship, and empire in the early republic.
The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement as a political force within the United States—from its roots in the crises of the Revolutionary era, to its peak with the creation of the ACS, to its ultimate decline with emancipation and the Civil War. The book interrogates broader issues of U.S. expansion, including the progression of federal Indian policy, the foundations and effects of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, and the growth of U.S. commercial and military power throughout the Western hemisphere. By contextualizing the colonization movement in this way, Mills shows how it enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with racial politics at home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812297324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2020 |
| Series: | Early American Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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."
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.
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.
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. 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 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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' early 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. In this conception, aspiring republics such as Liberia would remain racially distinct while ascending to nominal equality as independent nation-states. 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 consistently 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. 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' framework for global engagement. This enduring conceptual framework allowed Americans to envision a world of self-governing nations that recentered the United States' 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 reconcile both their racism and republicanism with a boundless ambition for expansion.
Table of 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