THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH:

Abstract

The African colonization movement was a product of mixed motivations and attempts. Mobilized by the belief that removing freedmen from the United States to Africa was an efficient, practical, and relatively painless means of resolving racial problems in American society, vaired groups of white people across the nation joined forces to form the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817. While some of the participants of the ACS, which was responsible for resettling more than fifteen thousand African Americans in Liberia in the nineteenth century, sought to remove socially $quot;troublesome$quot; free blacks from America, others envisoned an African colony as both an asylum for repressed American blacks and a headquater for African evangelization. Still others were motivated by economic gains as much as philanthropic concerns. If all these stances provided ideological back-ups for the movement, the example of Sierra Leone, a British colony on the west coast of Africa, proved that African colonization was plausible. In addition, both a few, discrete efforts of African Americans to emigrate to Africa and Paul Cuffee`s half-successful venture to transplant his `own people` to Africa seemed to convince white Americans that black Americans did want to go back to their fatherland. Unable to get governmental support, and facing increasing oppositions from free black communities as well as white Americans, the ACS waged public campaigns for support in the 1820s. The ACS especially strove to obtain endorsement of American churches by appealing to the ethos of Christian nationalism. All the efforts were not fruitless. Except for Quakers and independent black churches, both of which were abolitionist and anti-colonizationist in orientation, American Protestant churches became valuable supporters of the African colonization movement. The Methodist Episcopal Church was not an exception, yet its official approval of African colonization came slowly. Initially, concerned with keeping its hold among colonization-opposing slave owners in the South and, thus, the unity of the church, the General Conference of the ME Church declined to back the ACS. Methodist support of the ACS began and grew on a local level, however. What motivated the whole Church to eventually endorse the African colonization movement in 1828 had nothing to do with how to view slavery, but everything to do with a compromise: Getting behind the controversial issue, the northern and southern Methodists agreed that the eight-year-old colony of Liberia could be a promising foothold of African evangelization.