Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Andrew F. Hammann, author of Words Colliding: The Debate over Slavery and Black Exclusion in Nineteenth-Century America

What inspired you to write this book? 

From the moment that I began work on this book roughly 11 years ago, I had the growing sense that I was putting together the pieces of an important story that had been hidden in plain sight. Historians had told parts of the story of the 80-year debate over Black expatriation (“colonization” as it was broadly known), but they had not fully grasped its continuity, its magnitude, or its larger significance. Along the way, it became increasingly clear that several interpretive premises had muddied the field’s collective view. In brief, the main premises were: failed political movements (like this one) had little societal impact; historical frames of analysis should begin or end in 1865; and nineteenth century attitudes toward slavery could be classified as either antislavery or proslavery (the colonization movement, as I argue, evinced elements of both categories). My chief guide in discerning these premises was the documentary record of nineteenth-century Black activists, whose grasp of the colonization movement’s rhetoric and effects was unparalleled.

In basic terms, I decided to write this book because I wanted to solve a mystery. For more than sixty years, historians had struggled to make sense of the colonization movement, and not just because of the limiting premises mentioned above. Throughout the movement’s eighty year span, its leaders had filled the air with a mass of complex, ever shifting, and seemingly contradictory rhetoric. My goal was to dig into this vast archive more deeply and broadly than anyone previously and to emerge with a new and distinctively coherent analytical account. But the overarching goal of the project was always more expansive. I wanted to enrich our collective understanding of one of the nation’s greatest conundrums: the relationship between the historical institution of slavery, which ended in 1865, and the systems of oppression and exclusion that persist to this day — a conundrum that we will never fully solve, but that we should never stop engaging.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

I learned two related things. Words matter, and they matter even when connected to a political movement that ultimately failed. When powerful and influential people say the same thing over and over, the impact on society is likely to be deep and lasting. This was the case with the colonization movement, which counted some of the nation’s most powerful and influential political figures as its chief proponents. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Black activists that were the colonization movement’s fiercest opponents argued that the movement’s capacity for harm did not hinge on whether or not it won federal support. The colonization movement, they proclaimed, was essentially a prejudice propaganda machine. The chief idea that its leaders promoted over roughly eight decades was that Black freedom was an intractable societal problem. In effect, they claimed that Black freedom should be removed or restricted. As the colonization movement caused this idea to become more and more deeply rooted in the minds of white Americans, they effectively created an environment in which exclusionary laws made more and more sense. Indeed, Black Americans blamed the colonization movement directly for many of the exclusionary laws passed during the nineteenth century, such as the dreaded Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the state constitutional amendments that effectively disfranchised Black Americans during the 1890s and early 1900s. They also frequently referred to the colonization movement as one of their greatest enemies, second only to the institution of slavery.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

I suppose one of the things that surprised me the most was how ubiquitous the exclusionary ideology of the colonization movement was in nineteenth century American politics. It was espoused, to some extent, by hundreds of congressmen and state legislators, governors, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and presidents (almost half of the first sixteen). It was raised in most of the major congressional debates over slavery between 1820 and 1865 and in several of the key post-Civil War debates over Black civil rights. I came to understand fairly early on in my research that the colonization movement had much greater political traction during the nineteenth century than historians had realized, but I was nonetheless surprised by how much evidence I unearthed as I read through thousands and thousands of pages of the nineteenth century congressional record. Despite how radical, absurd, and offensive the colonization movement appears in retrospect, its leaders very much operated in the political mainstream and self-identified as moderates.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize this anecdote as my favorite, given the difficulty of the subject matter, but I would say that it is one of the most striking and illuminating. It is a moment toward the end of Chapter 3, mainly between 1850 and 1852, when the Chair of the House Naval Committee spearheaded an effort to get Congress to fund and operate a line of steamships that would run between ports in the United States and Liberia. The explicit purpose of the steamer lines was to facilitate the expatriation of Black Americans. Although it eventually failed, this federal initiative generated unprecedented levels of support from powerful Americans, including Senator Henry Clay, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President Millard Fillmore, as well as numerous politicians and newspaper editors from the northern and upper-southern states. And yet historians have barely written about it. This has been an enormous miss, because this moment marked a striking inflection point in the movement’s exclusionary rhetoric. In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1850, which brought the nation back from the brink of civil war, colonization advocates characterized Black expatriation as an eminently patriotic political issue. Every state, northern and southern, they argued, suffered the problem of a free Black population. Thus, the Liberian steamer proposal had great potential to revive and strengthen the bonds of Union. Unsurprisingly, Black Americans found this rhetorical shift, along with the enormous amount of support that it generated, greatly alarming. They viewed this national moment as a strong validation of their longstanding claim that the colonization movement’s capacity to spread and intensify anti-Black prejudice did not hinge on its political success.

What’s next? 

My next book project will build on and complement Words Colliding. Over the many years that I researched and wrote this book, I became aware that it was not just high-profile political leaders that supported Black expatriation but also high-profile leaders of the nation’s major colleges and Christian denominations: presidents, professors, and trustees from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, University of Virginia, William and Mary, to name but a few; as well as prominent figures in the Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist churches, among others. My foundational research question is essentially the same as it was for the first book: why did these people cling so tightly and for so long to the cause of Black expatriation? The reasons will undoubtedly overlap with those evinced by the politicians that I focused on in Words Colliding, but my particular interest is in points of divergence or different emphasis. My preliminary research indicates that the leaders of nineteenth-century American colleges and Christian denominations were far more attached to the notion that the “colonization” of Black Americans in Liberia was part of God’s grand plan to separate the races and to civilize and Christianize Africa.