Colonization and Its Discontents

by Tomek, Beverly C.

• ISBN13: 9780814764534
• ISBN10: 0814764533
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-09-24
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America's abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonization--supporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks to Africa--played in national and international antislavery movements. Beverly C. Tomek's meticulous exploration of the archives of the American Colonization Society, Pennsylvania's abolitionist societies, and colonizationist leaders (both black and white) enables her to boldly and innovatively demonstrate that, in Philadelphia at least, the American Colonization Society often worked closely with other antislavery groups to further the goals of the abolitionist movement. In Colonization and Its Discontents, Tomek brings a much-needed examination of the complexity of the colonization movement by describing in depth the difference between those who supported colonization for political and social reasons and those who supported it for religious and humanitarian reasons. Finally, she puts the black perspective on emigration into the broader picture instead of treating black nationalism as an isolated phenomenon and examines its role in influencing the black abolitionist agenda.

Author Biography

Beverly C. Tomek is an assistant professor of history at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Texas.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
List of Abbreviations	p. xii
Prologue	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
"Many negroes in these parts may prove prejudissial several wayes to us and our posteraty": The Crucial Elements of Exclusion and Social Control in Pennsylvania's Early Antislavery Movement	p. 18
"A certain simple grandeur … which awakens the benevolent heart": The American Colonization Society's Effective Marketing in Pennsylvania	p. 43
"Calculated to remove the evils, and increase the happiness of society": Mathew Carey and the Political and Economic Side of African Colonization	p. 63
"We here mean literally what we say": Elliott Cresson and the Pennsylvania Colonization Society's Humanitarian Agenda	p. 93
"They will never become a people until they come out from amongst the white people": James Forten and African American Ambivalence to African Colonization	p. 132
"A thorough abolitionist could not be such without being a colonizationist": Benjamin Coates and Black Uplift in the United States and Africa	p. 163
"Our elevation must be the result of self-efforts, and work of our own hands": Martin R. Delany and the Role of Self-Help and Emigration in Black Uplift	p. 187
"Maybe the Devil has got to come out of these people before we will have peace": Assessing the Successes and Failures of Pennsylvania's Competing Antislavery Agendas	p. 219
Epilogue	p. 239
Notes	p. 249
Index	p. 291
About the Author	p. 297
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