Delaney1 arrived in Pittsburgh in the fall of 1831. The first extensive Black awakening was under way. A year earlier, on September 30, the first national Black convention had met in Philadelphia with thirty-eight delegates. This was the beginning of a series of national Black conventions held over the next three decades. A second such affair was held in June of 1831, followed by a convention of the “Colored Citizens of Pittsburgh” on September 1.
These first shoots of the independent organization of Black people in 1830-31 arose out of the awareness that slavery was not going to wither away. Rather than weakening after the First American Revolution, Black slavery had been given a new lease on life with the invention of the cotton gin, an important factor enabling the Southern slaveholders to become the prime suppliers of cotton to the British textile industry. The prosperity of the South fueled the growth of finance and commerce in the North, making more remote than ever the thought of abolishing slavery.
As a solution to the contradiction of having free Blacks walking around among slaves, the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States was formed. This organization, which came to be known as the American Colonization Society, aimed at ridding the country of free Blacks, not slaves. It was covertly backed and financed by the slaveholders and the federal government itself. With their aid, the society purchased what has become known as Liberia. By 1860 the society had transferred 15,000 Blacks to this area, which had been nominally an independent country since 1847.
With the expansion of the society during the 1820s, the free Blacks began to organize in opposition. Regional and statewide gatherings led to the first national Black meeting in 1830. These independent expressions of the Blacks played a direct role in the organization of the abolitionist movement….
The positions held by Blacks helped educate and harden the antislavery attitudes of William Lloyd Garrison2 and other abolitionists. For instance, many whites who started out on the road to the abolitionist movement thought the Colonization Society was acting in the interests of the Blacks by sending them to West Africa, since they obviously couldn’t enjoy the benefits of citizenship in this country. And the chance to do missionary work in Africa ingratiated many Christian churches.
Opposed colonization schemes
Only when the free Blacks met and aired their opposition to the Colonization Society, exposing its complicity with the slaveholders and affirming their right to be American citizens and enjoy the fruits of the blood and toil of their forefathers and mothers, did abolitionists like Garrison become irrevocable opponents of this scheme.
Three months after the first national Black convention, Garrison brought out The Liberator. Two years later he, along with other white and a few Black abolitionists, organized the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Indispensable to this ferment in the North were two other forms of independent activity by the Blacks. One of them was the slave rebellions, the biggest of which was led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. The other was the continued stream of escaping slaves; their flight northward compelled the organization of the Underground Railway, which became the biggest single center of abolitionist activity.
These two kinds of slave resistance heightened the objective contradiction between the expansion of the capitalist North and the slaveholding south, and made impossible any peaceful coexistence between the two regions.
2William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), an abolitionist, was the organizer of the Anti-Slavery Society.
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