Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848–1880 (review)

Abstract

Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880. Edited by Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2005. Pp. xiv, 385. Cloth, $50.00; Paper, $27.00.)Reviewed by Ryan McIlhennyThe effort of a young American republic to construct a racially specific national identity by removing blacks-and therefore blackness-from nation remains a lamentable story, but recent historians have tried to understand multiple and competing meanings given to by both blacks and whites. Such an approach has required a reevaluation of many leaders of movement-Robert Finley, Charles Mercer, Paul Cuffe, and Henry Highland Garnet, to name a scattered few. Quaker scholars Emma J. Lapsanky-Werner, professor of history and curator of special collections at Haverford College, and Margaret Hope Bacon, an independent scholar whose latest work includes a biography of Robert Purvis, have added to this list of best-known nineteenth-century white supporters of African colonization: Benjamin Coates, a reformer whose views on slavery grew from his lifelong association with Philadelphia Quakers, trailblazers of early antislavery (vii). Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880, an edited volume of over a hundred of Coates's letters, explores relationship between abolition of slavery and establishment of a black colony in West Africa, as seen through essays and correspondence of Coates (vii).Following editorial standards set forth in Mary-Jo Kline's A Guide to Documentary Editing, Back to Africa attempts to mirror everresourceful Black Abolitionist Papers, by C. Peter Ripley, and John Blassingame's The Frederick Douglass Papers. With vital aid of three students-Marc Chalufour, Benjamin Miller, and Meenakshi Rajan-the editors chose to arrange letters chronologically and in accordance with three distinct time periods: (1) antebellum years (1848-1860), (2) Civil War years (1861-1865), and (3) postwar years (18661888). This layout is much more historically engaging than one organized by subject, for it allows the reader to develop clearest picture of how Coates experienced development of his contemporaries' differing thoughts on subject of colonization (xiii). Stated somewhat differently, it shows historical evolution of historical subject, something a topical presentation cannot do.The first and longest section, composed of sixty-four letters, reveals Coates's central interest in development of Liberia. As leading modern capitalists, Quakers planted seeds for Coates's economic and moral argument against slavery. Involved in textile and wool industries at an early age, Coates became more and more troubled by how market forces transforming United States increasingly connected life of northern industry with southern slavery, a position he undoubtedly came to as a result of being influenced by more liberal Hicksite Quakers (named after reformist and staunchly antislavery Quaker Elias Hicks), who split from Orthodox Friends in 1827. Refusing to compromise, Coates criticized fellow Friends for their indirect economic support of southern slavery and tried to find an economic solution to slavery. He recognized that despite its exploitative tendencies, capitalism was most effective means to end chattel bondage. His widely read Cotton Cultivation in Africa (1858) offered a simple but powerful argument in favor of a competitive alternative to southern slavery: Cotton production in Liberia would make slave labor more expensive, reduce slave trade among Africans, and strain South's monopoly on commodity.In this way, Coates believed that he was acting as a true abolitionist, for his plan would lead to eventual collapse of slavery in both North America and Africa. …