2.18 - Debates About Emigration, Colonization, and Belonging in America
The Case for Emigration
As abolition spread across Latin America and the Caribbean, some African American thinkers began arguing that the best path to freedom and self-determination wasn't staying and fighting for change in the United States, it was leaving entirely. These emigrationists saw building new communities outside the U.S. as a real alternative to continued slavery and racial discrimination, a view reinforced by devastating legal setbacks like the Dred Scott decision in 1857.
Emigrationists pointed to specific regions as promising destinations, parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, places that already had large populations of people of African descent, shared historical ties, and climates they considered favorable for resettlement.
It's important to distinguish this movement from an entirely different effort with a similar surface appearance. This nineteenth-century emigration movement, led by Black abolitionists themselves, was fundamentally different from the American Colonization Society, a white-led organization that had earlier pushed to remove free Black people from the United States by sending them to Africa. Where the Colonization Society was about expelling Black Americans, Black emigrationists were envisioning something else entirely: a new homeland built beyond the reach of white supremacist systems, chosen and shaped by African Americans themselves.
Black abolitionists who supported this path, figures like Paul Cuffee and Martin R. Delany, embraced Black nationalism, a philosophy centered on Black unity, pride, and self-determination. Paul Cuffee became the first person to actually carry out African American relocation to Africa, when in 1815 he brought 39 African Americans to the British Black settlement of Freetown in Sierra Leone.
Cuffee was a successful ship captain and merchant from Massachusetts, the son of a formerly enslaved African father and a Wampanoag mother. He paid for much of the 1815 voyage himself, hoping a Black settlement in Sierra Leone could build trade and give African Americans a future free from American racism.
Martin R. Delany took this thinking even further, viewing African Americans as essentially a subjugated "nation within a nation." Beyond his political writing, Delany was also one of the first African Americans to publish a novel, and during the Civil War, he became the first Black field officer in the United States Army, serving as a major in the Union Army.
The Case Against Emigration
Not everyone agreed that leaving was the answer. Anti-emigrationists believed that abolition and racial equality actually reflected the true ideals the nation was supposed to stand for, and that staying and fighting would eventually achieve real liberation, political representation, and full integration for African Americans within American society. They saw themselves as holding what amounted to birthright citizenship, a claim to belonging in America that was just as legitimate as anyone else's.
That belief came with real personal danger though. Because of the Fugitive Slave Acts, Frederick Douglass and other formerly enslaved abolitionists weren't safe from recapture even in the North. Many ended up finding refuge across the Atlantic, in England and Ireland, and continued advocating for American abolition from overseas, even while personally living in exile from the country they were fighting for.
Douglass himself toured Britain and Ireland from 1845 to 1847, after his Narrative made him famous and put him at risk of recapture. British supporters raised money to buy his freedom from his enslaver in 1846, so he could return to the United States legally free.
Anti-emigrationists were also quick to point out a glaring contradiction in American life: the nation was busy celebrating nearly a century of independence while simultaneously excluding millions of people from citizenship purely because of race, and profiting directly from their forced labor and exploitation the entire time.
Douglass's 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", given in Rochester, New York, made this argument famous: he told his audience that the Fourth of July celebrated a freedom that enslaved people were denied.
It's also worth noting that Douglass's own views weren't fixed. Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially in the years before the Civil War, his thinking shifted from advocating nonviolent resistance to accepting that violence might be a necessary path to actually ending slavery.
Required Sources
"Emigration to Mexico" by "A Colored Female of Philadelphia," The Liberator, 1832
This letter, signed only "A Colored Female of Philadelphia," appeared in The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, in 1832. The writer, a free Black woman, argues for moving to Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829 and where she believed Black Americans would be welcomed as equals. At the same time, she firmly rejects the American Colonization Society's plan to send Black Americans to Africa. That difference is the key to this topic: she supports emigration that Black people choose for themselves while opposing colonization schemes run by white people to remove them. Her anonymity also shows that ordinary Black women, not just famous leaders, took part in these debates.
Some of your readers may inquire, where is that country to which we may remove, and thus become free and equal? I believe that country to be Mexico. There is an independent nation, where indeed 'all men are born free and equal,' possessing those inalienable rights which our constitution guarantees. [...] whereas in this country we are kept poor, and of course, cannot aspire to any thing more than what we always have been.
[...] I would not wish to be thought pleading the cause of colonization, for no one detests it more than I do. I would not be taken to Africa, were the Society to make me queen of the country [...]
"A Colored Female of Philadelphia," "Emigration to Mexico," letter dated January 2, 1832, The Liberator, January 28, 1832. Source: Internet Archive (scan of the January 28, 1832 issue)
Excerpt from The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered by Martin R. Delany, 1852
Martin R. Delany, a free-born physician, writer, and former co-editor of Frederick Douglass's newspaper The North Star, published this book in 1852, two years after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 left every free Black person in the North open to being seized. In it he describes African Americans as "a nation within a nation," comparing them to oppressed peoples in Europe who lived under foreign rule, and argues that they would never be treated as equals in the United States. He calls for emigration as a path to Black self-government, pointing to Central and South America and the Caribbean, while firmly opposing the American Colonization Society's colony of Liberia, which he saw as a tool of slaveholders. Reading his reasoning shows how Black nationalism led some abolitionists to support emigration.
That there have in all ages, in almost every nation, existed a nation within a nation: a people who although forming a part and parcel of the population, yet were from force of circumstances, known by the peculiar position they occupied, forming in fact, by the deprivation of political equality with others, no part, and if any, but a restricted part of the body politic of such nations, is also true.
[...] Such then is the condition of various classes in Europe; yes, nations, for centuries within nations, even without the hope of redemption among those who oppress them. And however unfavorable their condition, there is none more so than that of the colored people of the United States.
Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852), Chapter I, "Condition of Many Classes in Europe Considered." Source: Project Gutenberg
"West India Emancipation" by Frederick Douglass, 1857
Douglass gave this speech on August 3, 1857, in Canandaigua, New York, at a celebration of the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies, where Britain's abolition law took effect on August 1, 1834. It contains his most famous lines: "If there is no struggle there is no progress" and "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." He encouraged his audience to hold on to hope for abolition and racial harmony and to stay committed to struggle, either by words or by actions. As an anti-emigrationist, Douglass used a celebration of freedom won abroad to argue that Black Americans should keep fighting for freedom and citizenship at home rather than leave.
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. [...] If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. [...]
Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation," speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857, from Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass (1857). Source: University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Project