A memo that the city’s “negroes” needed to “return to Africa” was the message of then-deemed progressive American Colonization Society, (ACS) which had an active chapter in New Haven in the first half of the 19th Century.
A peculiar organization founded by Southern slave holders both to spread slavery and also to remove the presence of free black men, lest they “excite” the large numbers of their enslaved brethren, the ACS had a history of these kinds of warnings and memos to freed people of color in the United States. On this day back in 1841, the society was featuring a talk by “Dr. Brown, a colored man who has been for more than seven years a citizen of Liberia,” according to the notice about the lecture in the Sept. 24 New Haven Daily Palladium.. It was scheduled at a place called the Orange Street Chapel, and you shouldn’t be late for the “7 1 – 2 o’clock” start of the proceedings.
By the 1840s, the colony in Liberia had been in operation for at least a generation. Some New Haveners like William Lanson, the free black engineer who built Long Wharf, wanted nothing to do with an emigration plan. He believed whites and blacks should do business together and get along.
But lots of other folks, including New Haven “progressive” — though not abolitionist — ministers like Leonard Bacon, threw their support behind the ACS, as did one Abraham Lincoln, until he changed his mind as he became a national politician.
To check out the conversation, click on the audio above, or find the episode in iTunes or any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”
"This Day in New Haven History" is a welcome addition to the Independent; thank you.
It happens that, in a history seminar with David Brion Davis (now an emeritus member of the Yale faculty), I once wrote a paper on Leonard Bacon, minister of the Center Church on the Green.
Bacon's views evolved dramatically over the decades. From his embrace of colonization as mentioned here, to his later praise of martyr John Brown's "godliness," Bacon represented a ripening of Northern abolitionism as the Civil War approached.
For more on colonization (and on Leonard Bacon) among many other subjects, see the latest book by David Brion Davis: "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation" (2014).