| Summary: | "From the Revolution to the Civil War, white Americans entertained the strangest of notions: their black compatriots, who comprised one-fifth of the population in 1770 and one-seventh by 1860, could, would, and should leave the United States for some other land. Stranger yet, the same blacks whom whites thought too degraded to ever form part of the American nation would civilize other peoples, thanks, ironically, to the American influences that they had imbued.1 That belief was called "colonization," at once an ideology, a movement, and, most famously, the eponymous project of the American Colonization Society (ACS), established in 1816-17.2 In the 1820s, the northern reformers and southern slaveholders who had founded the ACS secured a settlement in west Africa for black Americans, which they named Liberia. Although these "colonizationists" - that is to say, the supporters of colonization, as distinct from the colonists themselves - would be the best-known face of the movement, the ACS (and Liberia) was far from the only scheme (and location) that Americans had in mind. Indeed, the major contribution of this book is to chronicle the full geographic and institutional range of the drive for black resettlement"--
|
|---|