We Need To Talk About What Happened The Last Time We Went Back To Africa

In 1816, a group of southern slaveholders led by clergyman and educator, Robert Finley, met with Quaker abolitionists in Virginia to discuss a growing concern for them both, the rising population of freed Black slaves. Following the Haitian Revolution, the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere led by François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, white families flooded the southern coast seeking refuge from violent retribution. As word spread of the atrocities facing the French on the island of Haiti, slaveholders in the South decided the best way to avoid an uprising of their own would be to eliminate the risk altogether by removing freed Blacks from U.S. soil, thereby smothering any talks of collusion with the enslaved.

While they disagreed on the practice of possessing people as property, when it came to the physical removal of Black bodies from American soil, the Quakers were in full support. And in spite of fundamental differences, both sides agreed their partnership was not only mutually beneficial but necessary, the will of God, even, an undeniable opportunity to extend the “civilizing” influence of Christianity around the continent of Africa. With prominent Southern figures like Francis Scott Key, composer of the Star-spangled Banner, Former U.S. President James Monroe, Former U.S…