![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay features a debate in Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, in 1827 and 1828, concerning the proposals of the American Colonization Society. Arguments favoring colonization illuminate the ways in which whiteness informs and constrains the discourse of white self-professed reformers about race, nation, and public rhetoric. As constitutive rhetoric, the anti-colonization arguments of contributors to Freedom's Journal construct African Americans as agents, citizens, and empowered public rhetors. The exchange reveals key, often hidden aspects of the discourses of whites and of people of color about race and reform in the antebellum period and in the contemporary public sphere.
Notes
1. I use the term “reformers” (and “reform”) here and elsewhere not to mean that the ACS's members or goals were progressive or compassionate but rather to connote that their plans were offered as ostensible remedies to perceived societal problems.
2. Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, “Colonization Society,” Freedom's Journal, June 8, 1827, 50–51. In subsequent citations, Freedom's Journal will be abbreviated to FJ.
3. Textual clues indicate that “Wilberforce” and “Subscriber” were white men. “Wilberforce” identifies himself as an associate of Professor Samuel Miller of Princeton Seminary, refers to Russwurm's “coloured brethren,” and uses “they” and “their” to designate free people of color. “Subscriber”—probably also a man, since few white women were involved in colonization efforts (Bruce Dorsey, “A Gendered History of African Colonization in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of Social History 34 [2000]: 80)—similarly speaks of “your race” and “your people.”
The articles and letters published in Freedom's Journal by opponents of colonization considered in this study were, for the most part, written by African Americans, some whose identity is known (the editors, James Forten, William Watkins, and Richard Allen). “A Free Coloured Virginian” is clearly a black author, as is “Investigator,” who refers to “all my brethren” and uses “we” and “our” in reference to people of color. “Clarkson” appears to have been white (he refers to “this people whom we originally stole” and uses “their” and “them” to refer to African Americans).
4. Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, “Colonization Society,” FJ, September 14, 1827, 107; Junior Editor [John B. Russwurm], “Wilberforce,” FJ, September 7, 1827, 103.
5. Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 27–33, 109–64; Christopher Castiglia, “Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship: John Witherspoon, Robert Finley, and the Colonization Society,” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 192–214; Christopher Castiglia, “Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 32–59; Susan M. Ryan, “Charity Begins at Home: Stowe's Antislavery Novels and the Forms of Benevolent Citizenship,” American Literature 72 (2000): 751–82; Kimberly A. Powell, “United in Gender, Divided by Race: Reconstruction of Issue and Identity by the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching,” Communication Studies 46 (1995): 34–44; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 119–209; George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971).
6. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37 (1987): 133.
7. Dexter B. Gordon, Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 39; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 124; Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 186.
8. Lisbeth Lipari, “‘Fearful of the Written Word’: White Fear, Black Writing, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun Screenplay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 95; Jamie Owen Daniel, “Rituals of Disqualification: Competing Publics and Public Housing in Contemporary Chicago,” in Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere, ed. Mike Hill and Warren Montag (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 64; Bacon, Humblest, 120–27.
9. Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, “To Our Patrons,” FJ, March 16, 1827, 1. This brief history of Freedom's Journal is based on Jacqueline Bacon, “The History of Freedom's Journal: A Study in Empowerment and Community,” Journal of African American History 88 (Winter 2003): 1–20, and Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 37–69,which provides a more complete account.
10. Louis Mehlinger, “The Attitude of the Free Negro Toward African Colonization,” Journal of Negro History 1 (1916): 276–301; John Saillant, “Circular Addressed to the Colored Brethren and Friends in America,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104 (1996): 485–86; Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 48, 82–90; Ella Forbes, “African-American Resistance to Colonization,” Journal of Black Studies 21 (1990): 217–23. It is important to distinguish between white-sponsored plans for colonization (the focus of the debate considered in this analysis) and the self-directed emigration of free African Americans to Africa (or other regions). In most cases, those who advocated the latter did not explicitly favor the ACS's plans, but instead focused on ventures that would allow African Americans a more active role. The distinction was crucial; see V. P. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1984), 89–90; Saillant, “Circular,” 486; Glaude, Exodus, 113–17.
11. Early in 1829, Russwurm—at that time sole editor of the newspaper—publicly announced that he had reversed his position on colonization; he emigrated to Liberia later that year. This was, of course, a significant shift with various ramifications for him and for Freedom's Journal. However, the transformation of Russwurm's views takes nothing away from the general ideological thrust of his and others’ contributions on the anti-colonization side of the debate in 1827 and 1828. For a complete discussion of Russwurm's altered views and its effect on the newspaper, see Bacon, “History,” 12–15 Bacon, Freedom's Journal, 54–64.
12. “Wilberforce” [letter to editors], FJ, September 7, 1827, 101–02. The letter to which “Wilberforce” refers is Russwurm's “To the Senior Editor—No. III,” FJ, August 17, 1827, 91.
13. John H. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. III,” FJ, September 28, 1827, 114; J[ohn] H. K[ennedy], “American Colonization Society. No. I,” FJ, September 14, 1827, 106.
14. “Wilberforce” [letter], 101; Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. I,” 106.
15. Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 299; Daniel, “Rituals,” 73. See also Steven R. Goldzwig and Patricia A. Sullivan, “Narrative and Counternarrative in Print-Mediated Coverage of Milwaukee Alderman Michael McGee,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 222, 224; Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness’ Rhetorical Silence,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (1997): 253; Jacqueline Bacon, “Reading the Reparations Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 186–89.
16. “Investigator,” “Colonization Society. No. I,” FJ, September 7, 1827, 102.
17. Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, letter to editors of the New-York Observer, FJ, September 21, 1827, 110. Although the letter to the editors of the New-York Observer was published in Freedom's Journal in the first issue that Russwurm edited on his own, it appears to have been written by both Cornish and Russwurm; it refers to Freedom's Journal's “editors” and distinguishes the “junior Editor.”
18. A Coloured Baltimorean [William Watkins], “Colonization Society” [letter to editors], FJ, July 6, 1827, 66; A Coloured Baltimorean [William Watkins], “American Colonization Society,” FJ, July 11, 1828, 123. Bettye J. Gardner identifies Watkins as the author of the first letter; Watkins used this pseudonym in letters to the Genius of Universal Emancipation and the Liberator as well (“Opposition to Emigration, A Selected Letter of William Watkins [The Coloured Baltimorean],” Journal of Negro History 67 [1982]: 155–58). Watkins's 1828 letter was originally published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation.
19. “Investigator,” “Colonization Society” [letter to editors], FJ, August 31, 1827, 98.
20. A Coloured Baltimorean [Watkins], “Colonization Society.”
21. Samuel Miller, “From the N. Y. Observer” [letter to editors of the New-York Observer], FJ, September 21, 1827; Cornish and Russwurm, letter to editors of the New-York Observer.
22. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–24; Gordon, Black Identity, 70–71. See also Jacqueline Bacon and Glen McClish, “Reinventing the Master's Tools: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 19–47; Tony Martin, “The Banneker Literary Institute of Philadelphia: African American Intellectual Activism before the War of the Slaveholders' Rebellion,” Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 303–22; Timothy Patrick McCarthy, “‘To Plead Our Own Cause’: Black Print Culture and the Origins of American Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 116–18.
23. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999), 59. There are also clearly gendered implications to the exclusive definition of freemen favored by many whites and the efforts of African Americans to claim the term and to link freedom and black masculinity, although an exploration is beyond the scope of this paper. Readers interested in antebellum construction of white and black masculinity should see James Oliver Horton, "Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks," Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 54–57; R. J. Young, Antebellum Black Activists: Race, Gender, and Self (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 55–91; Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 120–41.
24. Glaude, Exodus, 38–40.
25. J[ohn] H. K[ennedy], “American Colonization Society. No. II,” FJ, September 21, 1827, 109–10.
26. Lipari, “Fearful,” 91; Crenshaw, “Resisting,” 255. See also Michael Alan Sacks and Marika Lindholm, “A Room Without a View: Social Distance and the Structuring of Privileged Identity,” in Working Through Whiteness: International Perspectives, ed. Cynthia Levine-Rasky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 143; Dreama G. Moon and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Strategic Social Identities and Judgments: A Murder in Appalachia,” Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2005): 103.
27. “A Subscriber,” “Colonization Society” [letter to editors], FJ, August 24, 1827, 94.
28. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. II,” 110.
29. Cornish and Russwurm, “Colonization Society,” June 8, 1827, 51.
30. “Clarkson,” “American Colonization Society. Conclusion,” FJ, November 30, 1827, 150.
31. “Investigator,” “Colonization Society,” 98.
32. “Investigator,” “Colonization Society. No. II,” FJ, October 5, 1827, 118.
33. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. and expanded ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1; Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 118; Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 300–1; Crenshaw, “Resisting,” 258–59.
34. A Coloured Baltimorean [Watkins], “Colonization Society,” 66. For further discussion of African-American rhetors’ employment and refashioning of resonant American texts and concepts, see Bacon, Humblest, 84–108, 209–15; Jacqueline Bacon and Glen McClish, “Descendents of Africa, Sons of '76: Exploring Early African-American Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006): 9–12, 17–19. The use of Francis Scott Key's famous words is, in this context, also highly ironic; Key was a founding member of the ACS.
35. “From the Baltimore Morning Chronicle,” FJ, September 14, 1827, 107.
36. “Investigator,” “Colonization Society. No I,” 102.
37. A Man of Colour [James Forten], letter to editors, FJ, May 18, 1827, 38. A decade after its publication in Freedom's Journal, Cornish reprinted the letter from “A Man of Colour” in the Colored American, May 13, 1837, specifying that it was written by Forten (I am indebted to Julie Winch's A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 205, for bringing this identification to my attention).
38. “Clarkson,” “American Colonization Society. No. IV,” FJ, November 16, 1827, 141.
39. John B. Russwurm, “Letter, No. V. To Rev. Samuel E. Cornish,” FJ, November 2, 1827, 135.
40. “Clarkson,” “American Colonization Society. No. IV,” 141.
41. “Clarkson”'s mocking imitation of the obtuse language of colonizationists is a form of signifying, a powerful African-American rhetorical strategy that uses the language of the dominant in order to undermine it; see Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, "Signifying," in Mother Wit From the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1973), 310–28; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Bacon, Humblest, 97–108, 215–29.
42. See Mehlinger, “Attitude,” 283; Saillant, “Circular,” 486; Theodore S. Wright, “The Progress of the Antislavery Cause,” in Negro Orators and Their Orations, ed. Carter G. Woodson (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1925), 88.
43. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. III,” 114; “Wilberforce,” 102 [letter].
44. “Subscriber,” “Colonization Society,” 94.
45. Jacqueline Bacon, “Brighter Prospects? Ms. Bush and White America's Rhetoric of Limited Alternatives,” Black Commentator, September 22, 2005, http://www.blackcommentator.com/151/151_bacon_barbara_bush.html (accessed September 4, 2006); Ernest Allen, Jr., and Robert Chrisman, “Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz,” Black Scholar 31, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 54; Tim Wise, “Situational Ethics, Conservative-Style,” ZNet Daily Commentaries, July 5, 2004, http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-07/05wise.cfm (accessed September 4, 2006); Patricia J. Williams, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 221.
46. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. III,” 114.
47. “Subscriber,” “Colonization Society,” 94.
48. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. III,” 114; Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 125.
49. John H. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. V.—(Concluded.),” FJ, October 19, 1827, 126; John H. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. VI. Objections Answered,” FJ, October 26, 1827, 130; Lipari, “Fearful,” 94–95.
50. John H. Kennedy, “American Colonization Society. No. V,” FJ, October 12, 1827, 122.
51. Daniel, “Rituals,” 73; Bacon, “Reading,” 186–89; Vorris Nunley, “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition,” in African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson II (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 231; Goldzwig and Sullivan, “Narrative,” 222–25.
52. Crenshaw, “Resisting,” 272.
53. Phil Cohen, “Laboring Under Whiteness,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 251; Bacon, Humblest, 30; Houston A. Baker, Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 13; Laura L. Behling, “Reification and Resistance: The Rhetoric of Black Womanhood at the Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Women's Studies in Communication 25 (2002): 173–96.
54. Williams, Rooster's Egg, 39; Lipsitz, Possessive Investment, 28; Seth N. Asumah, “Racial Identity and Policy Making: Redefining Whiteness,” Western Journal of Black Studies 28 (2004): 509; Roopali Mukherjee, “Regulating Race in the California Civil Rights Initiative: Enemies, Allies, and Alibis,” Journal of Communication 50, no. 2 (2000): 34.
55. A Coloured Baltimorean [Watkins], “Colonization Society,” 66; A Free Coloured Virginian, “For the Freedom's Journal,” FJ, July 6, 1827, 66; “Investigator,” “Colonization Society. No. I,” 102; Richard Allen, “Letter from Bishop Allen” [letter to editor], FJ, November 2, 1827, 134.
56. “Clarkson,” “American Colonization Society. No. I,” FJ, September 28, 1827, 134; John B. Russwurm, “Liberian Circular,” FJ, January 25, 1828, 175.
57. “Clarkson,” “American Colonization Society. No. I,” 115.
58. See, for example, Bacon, Humblest, 21–50; Castiglia, “Abolition's”; Castiglia, “Pedagogical”; Powell, “United”; Ryan, “Charity”; Ryan, Grammar; Melish, Disowning; Frederickson, Black Image.
59. Terry D. Novak, “Frances Harper's Poverty Relief Mission in the African American Community,” in Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by Women, ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 217.
60. Ryan, Grammar, 186; Charland, “Constitutive,” 143; Gordon, Black Identity, 39.
61. Gordon, Black Identity, 31.
62. Daniel, “Rituals”; Williams, Rooster's Egg, 28–40; Mukherjee, “Regulating Race,” 27–47; Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Bacon, “Reading,” 171–95; Bacon, “Brighter Prospects?”