The Ship, the Settler and the Palm Tree: Picturing African Colonization as a Solution to Slavery in Antebellum America

Dalila Scruggs

When we consider debates over slavery in antebellum America, we tend to think there were two main sides—the immediate abolitionists and the pro-slavery supporters. Yet a third way was proposed by a motley group of statesmen, gradual abolitionists and slave owners who advocated “colonization,” sending blacks out of the country. These white reformers founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 to establish colonies in Liberia, West Africa for free and manumitted African-Americans. Like abolitionists and slavery apologists, colonizationists also developed a visual vocabulary to espouse their solution to the “problem” of race and slavery in the United States.

My paper will explore how the African-American settler in Liberia was represented in prints and book illustrations and contextualize these pictures within colonization discourse in antebellum America. I will focus on images intended to “sell” the objectives of the American Colonization Society but also consider anti-colonization propaganda issued by abolitionists and representations of colonization found in popular culture. Colonization illustrations focus on the transformation the African-American settler from slave to free man. This is a rhetorical procedure necessary to suture together a paradoxical platform, which argued that African-Americans were at once threatening to social harmony and incapable of social advancement in the United States and at the same time entitled to freedom and capable of self-governing in Africa.