ABSTRACT
Written fifteen years after my first essay on the American Colonization Society, this chapter reflected a change in mind, brought on in large part by my annual discussion of things ACS with Bob McColley at the Society for Historians of the Early Republic Conference. I was slowly—far too slowly, regrettably—coming to understand how my original view of the Society as a capitalist organization led by border South politicians bent on modernizing their region might be expanded to include those who wished to impose a free labor society on the South by removing both free blacks and slaves. Over dinner in Boston in 1994, Bob argued that it was time for a deck-clearing operation when it came to the ACS, and he suggested a panel on the society at the upcoming meeting of the Southern Historical Association. More than that, Bob challenged me to explain why, if the ACS truly had no intention of eradicating slavery, deep South statesmen were so hostile to the movement. According to Garrisonian abolitionists and most modern scholars, the ACS was a deeply racist, even proslavery operation, bent only on removing troublesome free blacks like Denmark Vesey, a goal that should have met with the support of early southern fire-eaters like James Blair, Robert J. Turnbull, and Robert Hayne. What I uncovered convinced me that the ACS was indeed an antislavery organization, although not an abolitionist one.
