The American Colonization Society: An Application of Republican Ideology to Early Antebellum Reform

Abstract

ADDRESSING THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZAtion Society in 1827 Henry Clay proclaimed: Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free coloured. It is the inevitable result of their moral, political, and civil degradation. Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them, to the slaves and to the whites. In the same breath, Clay emphatically asserted that Every emigrant to Africa is a missionary carrying with him credentials in the holy cause of civilization, religion, and free institutions.' Clay's appraisal of free blacks in America and Africa exhibits an intriguing combination of republicanism and racism. Implicit in his seemingly contradictory assessment is the idea of racial homogeneity. For Clay and many of his contemporaries civil, moral, and political virtue required racial equality among a homogeneous citizenry. But free blacks as a class seemed to be hopelessly dependent in America. If they indeed contaminated all those around them, they deprived whites of the classical republican virtues of independence, hard work, and public-spiritedness. Returned to their homeland, however, and thus leaving America a homogeneous nation of racially equal citizens, the same free