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| Figure 1: American Colonization Society member certificate (color, Rev. S. R. Ely), marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons |
Founded in 1816 at the impetus of New Jersey native Rev. Robert Finley and friends, the American Colonization Society (ACS) had the stated goal of ridding the United States of free Black people. At times over the history of the organization their rhetoric appeared benevolent, and they worked very hard to present themselves as a charitable organization. But this charitable rhetoric cloaked a conviction that free American Blacks could not and should not live alongside Whites. In some members of the Society this conviction resulted from a belief in the inherent inferiority of Black people. For others the conviction resulted from a fear of violence or economic competition from free Black people. And for still others, the conviction that free Blacks should not live alongside Whites derived from a strong desire to maintain a smoothly functioning slave society, which the advocacy of free Blacks hampered.[1] Suffice to say, the organization was based entirely on racist principles, even though at times (usually in the north) it presented itself as supportive of abolition.
That the organization was racist, in spite of its protestations that it only had the best interests of African-Americans at heart, can be seen from the near universal rejection of its mission and aims by African-Americans at the time, chronicled in Ousmane K. Power-Greene’s book Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement. Various well-known African Americans resisted the efforts of the ACS, publishing constantly in abolitionist and African American newspapers and journals. Frederick Douglass pushed back against the ACS not only to assert the right of African-Americans to live in the U.S., but because the ACS had advocated for forced deportation of free Blacks.[2] The Rev. Absalom Jones, the first Black priest ordained in the Episcopal Church, opposed the ACS early on.[3] Alexander Crummell, a nationally known Black Episcopal priest and intellectual,[4] also rejected the organization for decades, travelling extensively to combat ACS fundraising efforts.[5]
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| Figure 2: Alexander Crummell (cropped), Internet Archive Book Images, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons |
In spite of these African American efforts, including those by Black Episcopalians, White New Jersey Episcopalians heavily supported the ACS. New Jersey was important to the founding and support of the organization, and New Jersey Episcopalians particularly. Christian leaders generally were the founders and leaders of the organization. Robert Finley, the first president, was a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, but from the outset the ACS involved ecumenical collaboration. Key early members from New Jersey included Commodore (and later Senator) Robert F. Stockton and John Potter. Stockton was instrumental in forcibly obtaining the land that would become Liberia for the ACS.[6] Stockton was also the first President of the New Jersey Chapter (1824), while Potter was one of the founding Vice Presidents.[7] They would jointly go on to found Trinity Church (Episcopal), Princeton in 1833,[8] to continue to own hundreds of slaves each,[9] and to remain life-long boosters of the ACS.
Diocesan records of church giving in New Jersey show consistent congregation and institutional support for the ACS starting in 1834. This interest coincides with the launch of “African Missions” to Liberia[10] supported by the national Episcopal Church in cooperation with the ACS.[11] Both Episcopal mission literature[12] and ACS documentation,[13] along with subsequent scholarship on the Episcopal African mission[14] acknowledge the high degree of cooperation between the institutions. The local manifestation of this cooperation in New Jersey came particularly in the form of fundraising and prayer in the Diocese and in local churches.
In his convention address of 1834, Bishop Doane, in mentioning services held across the Diocese on July 4, acknowledged the fundraising for the ACS in his congregations, noted Episcopal collaboration with the ACS, and encouraged giving in support of the collaborative Episcopal mission to Liberia writing:
One improvement [to the Independence Day worship service] has suggested itself to me as worthy of being incorporated with the plan. The day on which we acknowledge the goodness of God in establishing our own freedom, is a day on which we should do what we can towards letting ‘the oppressed go free.’ As a nation, we are held by peculiar obligations to promote the civil and religious liberation of Africa. The duty has been very generally recognized among American Christian, by the practice of making collections, after the religious services of the day, for the benefit of the American Colonization Society. Of that institution, I design to express no opinion—none certainly of an unfavourable character. But the fact, that the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of our Church, has been… desirous of establishing a Mission there, with the recent resolution of the Board of Directors, instructing the Executive Committee to send two Missionaries to Africa with all convenient speed, has seemed to me, to call especially for our approbation and patronage. I propose, therefore, that the services of the day be partly of a Missionary character; and that a collection be recommended in all the Churches of the Diocese,—the proceeds of which, shall be transmitted to the Treasurer of the Society above named, in aid of Missions to Africa.[15]
Church giving to the ACS that year from St. Peter’s Church, Perth Amboy surpassed its giving to the Episcopal Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and the ACS was the only non-Episcopal organization designated in its giving.[16] Giving to the ACS that year from Trinity Church, Newark was similarly significant, outpacing other categories of giving, and singling out the ACS as the only non-Episcopal organization receiving funds.[17]
Doane’s address had a significant effect. Giving to both the ACS and the Episcopal African Mission increased dramatically during his tenure, with churches often designating gifts to both initiatives. Reports of congregational giving between 1834 and 1856[18] reveal donations to the ACS from Trinity Church (Newark), St. Peter’s Church (Perth Amboy), Christ Church (New Brunswick), and St. John’s Church (Somerville). However, congregational giving to the Episcopal “African Mission” to Liberia, which cooperated with the ACS, exploded following Doane’s exhortation, with regular donations appearing during this same period from the following congregations:
St. Peter’s Church, Perth Amboy
St. Andrew’s Church, Mt. Holly
St. Mark’s Church, Orange
St. James Church, Piscataway
Trinity Church, Woodbridge
St. James Church, Knowlton
St. Luke’s Church, Hope
Christ Church, Shrewsbury
St. John’s Church, Elizabethtown
St. Paul’s Church, Hoboken
St. Peter’s Church, Berkeley at Clarksboro
Christ Church, Middletown
Trinity Chapel, Red Bank
St. Stephen’s, Mullica Hill
St. Peter’s Church, Morristown
Church of the Redeemer, Morristown
Beyond the aforementioned Episcopal strategic cooperation with the ACS in Liberia, at the national level in the U.S., and even at the state Diocesan level, there was significant Episcopal collaboration with the ACS at the local level in New Jersey as well, even beyond the founding of the state auxiliary. For instance, when the Newark, New Jersey auxiliary of the ACS was formed in 1838, the Rev. Matthew H. Henderson (rector) and Joel W. Condit, Jabez Hays, David Clarkson, and Silas Merchant (lay leaders) of Trinity Church (Episcopal), Newark were elected managers of the Society, while Hanford Smith, another lay leader at Trinity was elected Vice President.[19] J. C. Garthwaite, a lay leader of Grace Church (Episcopal), Newark was also elected a manager, as was the Rev. Dr. George T. Chapman, then rector of Grace Church. Clearly, Episcopalians were disproportionately represented among the leadership of the local auxiliary compared to their overall presence in the city, indicating a very strong interest in and support for the initiative.[20]
In the immediate aftermath of the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, general interest in the ACS in the United States grew to at an all-time high.[21] Alexander Crummell actually gave up on changing the United States for the better and emigrated to Liberia, so dismayed was he at the apparently deteriorating state of Black freedoms in America. However, the final mention of the ACS in the New Jersey Diocesan convention proceedings journals occurs not long after this in 1856 (mention of a donation from St. John’s, Somerville to the ACS).[22] Why the loss of interest, or at least, direct financial support at this time when the ACS was at its zenith? By this time much of the direct giving in the Diocese related to Africa had shifted to Episcopal-specific “African Mission.” The Episcopal initiative in Liberia was still cooperative with the ACS and still shared much with it in the way of racist ideology and rhetoric,[23] but it was also big enough by this time that it was a viable and more pertinent charitable target for Episcopal giving, at least at the congregational and diocesan level, than the ACS. An example of the dynamics underlying this shift is in the particular connection felt in the Diocese of New Jersey at the time for the new (non-Liberian) African mission of the Rev. Hamble J. Leacock, a missionary who had formerly served as the rector at St. Peter’s Church, Perth Amboy, and who remained on the New Jersey diocesan rolls while he sought to found a mission station at Rio Pongas (now in Gambia). Some congregational giving within the diocese went specifically to Leacock’s work,[24] and some to the general “Africa Mission” fund which apportioned donations across various initiatives, but after this point, none to the ACS.
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| Figure 3: Hamble James Leacock, cropped, by Henry Caswall, (1810-1870), CC0 1.0 |
After the end of the Civil War, the goal of removing African Americans from the United States became even more obviously absurd.[25] And while the ACS met with even less African American interest in emigration, efforts to revive it nevertheless continued to arise. T. Thomas Fortune, a well-known African-American publisher and important figure in the racial uplift movement,[26] and later a parishioner at St. Thomas’ (Episcopal) Church, Red Bank (New Jersey), continued to reject the ACS project and its rhetoric when attempts were made in the 1880s to revive the organization. He took up the arguments of earlier Black intellectuals who had insisted that at root the “colonization movement [was] an anti-Black program.”[27]
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| Figure 4: Timothy Thomas Fortune, by Booker T. Washington, et al., marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons |
Neither the ACS nor its White New Jersey Episcopalian supporters had managed to rid the U.S. of free Blacks by the time of the Civil War, but they had both managed to produce long-standing suspicion among African-Americans. They had also jointly managed to produce an American colony in Africa (Liberia) that in spite of its increasingly Black colonial political leadership, replicated many of their own prejudices toward Black Africans.[28] Ultimately the Episcopal Diocese of Liberia would come to be administered by a Black Bishop and led by a predominantly Black clergy, but by that time much damage had already been done, including a longstanding normalization of western (and White) cultural chauvinism[29] in the teachings and organization of the Liberian Episcopal Church.[30]
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] These various motives have been documented by a number of scholars including James T. Yarsiah, The Episcopal Church – Early Missionaries in Liberia 1821-1871: Positive and Negative Impact of Missionary Activities (Saarbrucken: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2014), 33-34. Rev. Dr. Yarsiah is currently a priest in the Diocese of New Jersey.
[2] Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 115.
[3] D. Elwood Dunn, A History of the Episcopal Church in Liberia 1821-1980 (London: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 15.
[4] Bishop Doane of New Jersey had supported his admission to General Seminary in spite of racist opposition (Craig Steven Wilder, “‘Driven… from the School of the Prophets’: The Colonizationist Ascendance at General Theological Seminary,” New York History 93.4 [2012]: 157-85).
[5] After decades of fighting the ACS, Crummell only moved to Liberia after the plight of African Americans in the United States had become so dire (after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) that he had given up hope for any successful advocacy in the States.
[6] Colonization Society of the City of Newark, A Sketch of the Colonization Enterprise, and of the Soil, Climate and Production of Liberia, in Africa(Newark: 1838), 2-3.
[7] Society of the American Colonization Society in New Jersey, Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New Jersey, July 14, 1824 to Form a Society in the State of New Jersey to Cooperate with the American Colonization Society (Princeton: D. A. Borrenstein, 1824), 39.
[8] Robert Field Stockton and John R. Thomson, “Subscription Book of 1827 to Build a Protestant Episcopal Church in the Borough of Princeton,” August 16, 1827. See also, The Rector, Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity Church in the Borough of Princeton, “Certificate of Incorporation,” May 17, 1833. MSS held at Trinity Church, Princeton archives.
[9] See Kyra N. Pruszinski and Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski (ed.), “Trinity Church, Princeton and Slavery: A Brief Introduction” Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review (April 10, 2023), https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2023/04/trinity-church-princeton-and-slavery.html last accessed October 1, 2023.
[10] That is, the region that soon became Liberia.
[11] The Episcopal periodical “Spirit of Missions” was begun in 1836 to support the new interest and initiatives in missions.
[12] E.g. The Protestant Episcopal Church, An Historical Sketch of the African Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. (New York: Foreign Committee, 1884), 6-7. This promotional document even goes so far as to claim that “the colonization scheme originated with us,” which is to say, Episcopalians (here 59).
[13] E.g. American Society for the Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United State, The Twenty-First Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, with the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, December 12, 1837 (Washington: James C. Dunn, 1838), 14.
[14] E.g. Dunn, A History of the Episcopal Church in Liberia 1821-1980, 31, 35, 83-84.
[15] George W. Doane, Episcopal Address Delivered at the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the State of New-Jersey; May 28, 1834(Camden: Josiah Harrison, 1834), 33. Italics original.
[16] Journal of the Proceedings of the Fifty First Annual Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the State of New-Jersey; Held in Trinity Church, Newark, Wednesday the 28th, and Thursday the 29th Days of May, 1834 (Camden, Josiah Harrison, 1834), 17.
[17] Journal of the Proceedings of the Fifty First Annual Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the State of New-Jersey, 10.
[18] As documented in the State Convention Proceedings Journals of the time.
[19] All these men appear as frequent delegates representing their parishes to the Diocesan Conventions at the time.
[20] For the roster of elected leaders see Colonization Society of the City of Newark, A Sketch of the Colonization Enterprise, 13-14.
[21] Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide, 118-120.
[22] See Diocese of New Jersey, Journal of the Proceedings of the Seventy Third Annual Convention; Held, in Grace Church, and in Trinity Church, Newark, on Wednesday, 28 May, 1856 (Burlington: Samuel C. Atkinson, 1856), 41.
[23] As can be seen by the fact that White clergy dominated the mission throughout this period, and that the White American Bishop of Liberia (Bishop Payne) who for decades (1850-1874) insisted on tight control of the diocese, did not trust African or African-American church leadership, worked to prevent power-sharing, and regularly acted paternalistically. See Dunn (A History of the Episcopal Church in Liberia 1821-1980, 93) for a discussion of accusations of racism brought against Payne during his tenure.
[24] Donations from St. Peter’s Church, Morristown noted in the 1856 Convention Proceedings Journal are specifically designated to the “Leacock Fund, Africa.” Diocese of New Jersey, Journal of the Proceedings of the Seventy Third Annual Convention, 34.
[25] It had been rather prohibitively expensive before the war, but afterward it was largely mooted by the significant, if qualified, advance of African-American rights and freedoms within the U.S.
[26] He is actually responsible for popularizing the term “Afro-American.”
[27] Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide, 197.
[28] Rev. (and later Bishop) John Payne wrote in 1848 that “the time has not come yet, nor will it, for a long time when socially, natives can rank with colonists. The latter are destined by providence to be the teachers and governors of the former in this region.” Payne to Latrobe, Nov. 22, 1848 (as quoted in Dunn, A History of the Episcopal Church in Liberia 1821-1980, 80). Early Black Episcopal missionary James Thomson also perpetuated this attitude insisted not simply on teaching Christianity, but promoting western culture and removing natives from their “unwholesome social environment” (Dunn, A History of the Episcopal Church in Liberia 1821-1980, 47). Yarsiah (The Episcopal Church – Early Missionaries in Liberia 1821-1871, 40) notes that this attitude produced particularly problematic approaches toward nation-building: “the settlers’ government focused on increasing the national population through new immigrants rather than from the local ethnic groups whose potential for nation building was great but needed to be developed.”
[29] As noted by Yarsiah, The Episcopal Church – Early Missionaries in Liberia 1821-1871, 39.
[30] Which could be seen in the segregation that was established then in Liberian Episcopal Churches between native Africans and African-American colonists. See Dunn, A History of the Episcopal Church in Liberia 1821-1980, 81. See also Yarsiah, The Episcopal Church – Early Missionaries in Liberia 1821-1871, 40-41: “Many features of the negative effects of the policies and practices of the Christian churches are evident in contemporary Liberia. Two examples were the black/mulatto social cleavage in Liberian society and the absence of indigenous involvement in the affairs of the Church and state.”
