ABSTRACT
Whether one agrees with their uncompromising positions and stubborn refusal to embrace political means, the Garrisonian wing of the antislavery movement has at least one obvious virtue for historians: their honesty and blunt rhetoric make them very easy to write about. By comparison, scholars who investigate the American Colonization Society are faced with one central problem. When leading colonizationists insisted that their society had “in truth, nothing, whatever to do with domestic slavery,” how seriously should we take those claims? Although the movement was hardly national, it did include a good number of important men and women from the border South, as well as from New York and New England. Its spokesmen, not surprisingly, tried to make their rhetoric as broad as possible to appeal to various regional constituencies. Moreover, many of its leaders were prominent early national politicians, who found it difficult—in any section of the republic—to endorse any antislavery organization, no matter how conservative and gradualist it might sound.
