“HERE THEY ARE IN THE LOWEST STATE OF SOCIAL GRADATION —ALIENS—POLITICAL—MORAL—SOCIAL ALIENS, STRANGERS, THOUGH NATIVES”: REMOVAL AND COLONIZATION IN THE OLD NORTHWEST, 1815-1870 A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Samuel M. Davis (May 2019) Examining Committee Members: Andrew Isenberg, Advisory Chair, Department of History Bryant Simon, Department of History Harvey Neptune, Department of History Christina Snyder, Pennsylvania State University, Department of History © Copyright 2019 by Samuel M. Davis, IV All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines African colonization and Native removal colonization schemes and their relationship to the development of states carved out of the Northwest Territory. Colonization advocates sought to expunge the nation of slavery, free blacks, and native peoples to make a white republic. This research contends that colonization promoted racial nationalism by campaigning for a safe and homogenous nation free of slavery, ‘degraded’ free blacks, and dangerous Native Americans. It explores the execution and afterlives of American projects for African colonization, through the American Colonization Society, and Native Removal in the Old Northwest. It examines the rhetoric and procedures related to the colonization of Native Americans in the West and free blacks to Liberia in which government officials, journalists, settlers, businessmen, missionaries, and clergy in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois traded in fears of racial degradation and national security as a means to generate fiscal support and positive public opinion for legislation and policies that attempted to create a white republic. Colonizationists appropriated imperial relocation solutions to the domestic problems of black freedom and Native sovereignty that they construed as prohibitory to national expansion and development. Ventures to deport Native Americans and African Americans successfully constructed them as dangerous aliens within the nation that validated their exclusion. In their resistance African Americans, Native Americans, and their allies adapted, fled, petitioned, ridiculed, and negotiated with colonizationist endeavors to maintain residence in the Midwest. The fictions of colonization, driven by its rhetoric, required new constructions about black and Native degradation to justify the calls for their removal. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………iii CHAPTERS 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...…1 2. COLONIZATIONIST AMBITIONS ………………………………….………………..26 3. “TO COLONIZE THIS UNFORTUNATE RACE OF MEN:” TOWARD A POLICY OF REMOVAL IN THE OLD NORTHWEST………………..…………….………………64 4. COLONIZATION AUXILIARIES AND ANTICOLONIZATION ACTIVISM IN THE OLD NORTHWEST……………………...…………………………………………….109 5. “FREE BUT NOT WHITE:” LEGAL DISABILITY AND INTERSECTIONS OF COLONIZATION………………………………………………………………………144 6. “A REMEMDY FOR OUR PRESENT TROUBLES AND FUTURE DANGER:” ANTISLAVERY POLITICS AND COLONIZATION.…………………….…………187 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..……………………..…239 BIBLIOGRAPHY.………………………….......................……………………………………245 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In October 1817, a local citizen in the state of Indiana wrote a letter to Bushrod Washington. The unnamed Indiana citizen lived in Vincennes, Indiana, which had served as the original capital of Indiana territory. Vincennes was the site at which territorial Governor William Henry Harrison contentiously managed relations with Tecumseh over American expansion into Indian territories prior to the War of 1812.1 By 1817, the state capital had moved to Corydon, Indiana but Vincennes was still a growing town in southwestern Indiana that bordered Illinois Territory, separated only by the Wabash River. Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, served most notably as a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as the first president of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Washington supported the founding of the ACS as an original member, which began in 1816 to transport free blacks from the United States to West Africa. In his letter, the letter’s author mentioned that he had learned about the ACS through newspapers that had covered the society’s formation. He wrote to Washington that he felt “a deep interest in your Society, and highly approve the patriotic and benevolent motives which have induced its formation” while also acknowledging how proud he felt that a man by the name of Washington was its president.2 He offered his aid to the ACS and informed Washington that approximately fifty to one-hundred free blacks lived near Vincennes, whom he assumed would be interested in moving to Africa. He attested that local free black residents lived on both sides 1 Patrick Bottiger, “Prophetstown for Their Own Purposes: The French, Miamis, and Cultural Identities in the Wabash—Maumee Valley,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 29-60. 2 “Copy of a letter from a respectable gentleman in Vincennes, in the state of Indiana, to the Hon. Bushrod Washington, President of the Society for the Colonization of Blacks,” Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 127. 1 of the Wabash River in Illinois Territory and the state of Indiana. He described them as generally “industrious and moral. Some of them have landed property and are good farmers; and some can read and write. They are sensible of the existing degraded condition in which they are placed by our laws, respecting the right of suffrage, and other disabilities.”3 He closed out his letter to Washington by requesting a copy of the ACS’s constitution to provide it to local free blacks and even offered his time and energy to help get them to an embarkation point for the ACS to transport them to Africa. This citizen from Vincennes espoused the appeal of colonization in the Old Northwest. Despite the ownership of property, literacy, and the independence of free blacks, in the midst of degradation predominately attributed to the imposition of legal disabilities, deportation to Africa apparently served as a plausible solution to the residence of free blacks in Northwest Territories and states. The War of 1812 and the violence with Native Americans marked a significant flashpoint in the Northwest and throughout the nation. Proponents of American expansion in the Northwest sought to physically, culturally, and demographically transform Indian territories into American spaces. They determined that free blacks and Native Americans posed significant threats to the continued expansion and development of the United States. The emergence of coherent, related projects of Native removal and African colonization following the War of 1812, was accelerated by the fact that enslaved Africans, as well as Native nations, allied themselves with the British during the Late War. These parallel deportation schemes imposed a disparaging rhetoric on free blacks and Native Americans in vindicating calls for the removal and transportation of free 3 “Copy of a letter from a respectable gentleman in Vincennes, in the state of Indiana, to the Hon. Bushrod Washington, President of the Society for the Colonization of Blacks,” Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 127. 2 blacks to Africa and Native Americans west across the Mississippi River.4 African colonization and Native removal sought to expunge the nation of persons potentially hostile to white citizens and American expansion. African colonization and Native removal projects endeavored to create a white republic. These two distinct imperial projects ran parallel to each other in antebellum America. They were connected through colonization proponents who viewed nonwhites as imminent threats to the nation and its citizens. Colonizationists deemed Native Americans and free blacks so dangerous that the only way to protect the nation, and nonwhites, was through their removal from American territories and states. Both relocation projects sought to compensate nonwhites primarily through their removal from white prejudice. Colonization ventures endeavored to use space and migration to circumvent white prejudice and legal disability. Indian removal sought the voluntary emigration of Native people. Removal proponents executed their plan through coercive treaties and land cessions that eventually deteriorated into forced removal by gunpoint diplomacy. Removal compensated for Native land cessions in various ways such as land exchanges, land improvements, and annuities. African colonization sought the voluntary emigration of free blacks. Colonizationists attempted the recruitment and transportation of willing free black emigrants to Liberia. Black emigrants would be compensated by land grants in Liberia. Colonizationists’ preferred nation-building tools, of removal and relocation, absolved white 4 These related colonization projects used a rhetoric of black and Native degradation to support its claims to benevolence. Ryan contends that the antebellum period witnessed the construction of a “benevolent racism” that has “reverberated in U.S. social policy ever since.” Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 16. 3 prejudice by appropriating spatial