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the 1830s, African Americans had argued for a decade that the American Colonization Society and its auxiliaries discredited, smeared, and undermined African Americans’ efforts to obtain equal rights and citizenship in America. For this reason the colonization movement became a central topic of discussion among blacks attending conventions and participating in newly formed antislavery societies and colored associations. This “new breed” of abolitionists had, as Richard Newman points out, “revolutionized” the tactics of the movement against slavery in America by 1830, and this pushed white reformers to act with a sense of immediacy toward ending slavery and overwhelming the American Colonization Society and its agents.⁶

      Had it not been for free blacks such as William Watkins and David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison might have continued to hold colonization sympathies as well as his view that “immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable.”⁷ African Americans’ opinions about the American Colonization Society were widely known. Few expressions of black protest against colonization so influenced Garrison to take a different path more than the anticolonization ideas presented in David Walker’s infamous An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker had left for the North soon after Denmark Vesey’s plot in South Carolina in 1822, which made whites even warier about free African Americans’ presence in the slave South. Arriving in Boston in 1825, Walker became a member of an outspoken community of African Americans struggling against colonization.⁸ He joined Prince Hall’s well-known African Lodge No. 459, and participated in the formation of the first black American association, the Massachusetts General Colored Association. This network of black community leaders afforded him the opportunity to associate with many people involved in the Haitian emigration movement and other timely issues within the black community of Boston.

      David Walker used his Appeal to rail against the colonization movement, displaying “a vehemence and outrage,” biographer Peter Hinks argues, “unprecedented among contemporary African American authors.”⁹ While one can only speculate about the degree to which Walker’s Appeal influenced the intellectual maturation of any one abolitionist, what we do know is that Garrison was deeply moved by it. In fact, in the summer of 1830, when Hezekiah Grice, a black community leader in Baltimore, met with William Lloyd Garrison to discuss the idea of a national black convention, Garrison seemed more interested in discussing the Appeal to Coloured Citizens. According to Grice, “Mr. Garrison took up a copy of Walker’s Appeal, and said, although it might be right, yet it was too early to have published such a book.”¹⁰

      It may well be that Article IV of Walker’s Appeal, entitled “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Colonizing Plan,” is what persuaded Garrison to see the connection between colonization and antiblack violence in the North and the system of racial oppression that stifled free blacks and barred them from a life consistent with the American creed. At the outset of his section on colonization, Walker charted the origins of the ACS among the power brokers of the nation, noting the influential role of Henry Clay in promoting the colonization “scheme.” By citing the black community’s immediate and unequivocal rejection of the formation of the ACS, Walker placed this anticolonization sentiment within the framework of the black protest tradition. Likewise, Walker applauded the role of Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All in providing blacks with a forum for expressing their disapproval of colonization, a realm in which African Americans could demonstrate their understanding of the various dimensions of what he perceived as the ACS’s mass-deportation scheme.

      Walker’s condemnation of colonization was grounded not only on the belief that black progress in the North depended on striking down colonization. He argued as well that the fate of Africans held in bondage in the South also depended on putting an end to colonization schemes. “Do they think to drive us from our country and homes,” he wondered, “after having enriched it with our blood and tears, and keep back millions of our dear brethren, sunk in the most barbarous wretchedness, to dig up gold and silver for them and their children?”¹¹ By connecting his plight with that of his southern brethren, Walker established one of the main underpinnings of anticolonization rhetoric: colonization would sever the bond between Africans enslaved and those free. Throughout the antebellum era, black leaders used such arguments to persuade audiences of the detriment of colonization, and this became central to black abolitionists’ anticolonizationism.

      Like other African Americans writing against the ACS, Walker acknowledged that at least a few whites who supported colonization were “friends of the sons of Africa.” Nevertheless, he believed that those white reformers, “laboring for our salvation,” had been duped into “this plot” and needed to “see if the end which they [had] in view [would] be completely consummated by such a course of procedure.”¹² Walker expressed “with tenderness” that he “would not for the world injure their feelings,” but hoped that his words would lead them to realize that “the plot is not for the glory of God, but on the contrary the perpetuation of slavery in this country forever, unless something is immediately done.”¹³ Ultimately, like many other black leaders, he argued that “This country is as much ours as it is the whites’; whether they will admit it or not, they will see and believe it by and by.”¹⁴ With the completion of the Appeal, Walker challenged many white abolitionists to rethink gradual emancipation and colonization, which had been among the most common antislavery ideologies before the 1830s.

      When Garrison did change his mind about colonization, he decided that his first step on the road toward convincing the nation to embrace “immediatism” was a thorough indictment of the American Colonization Society, colonization ideology, and Liberia. He would soon follow in Walker’s footsteps and complete his anticolonization treatise, Thoughts on African Colonization. Animated with Garrison’s penchant for polemics, the volume made American intellectual history by making blacks themselves central to the struggle, demonstrating black agency during a time when most whites believed they themselves knew what was in blacks’ best interest. Anticolonization became the foundation upon which “Garrisonism” was built. It was the “key transitional topic” for those who considered themselves disciples of Garrison, and who vowed to fight slavery.¹⁵

      Even though Garrison’s New England Anti-Slavery Society canvased the Northeast with lectures calling for an immediate end to slavery, black Americans had been waging an intellectual battle on two fronts: one against slavery and the other against colonization. This led them to hold conventions during the first half of the 1830s to discuss the cause of freedom in ways that departed from the previous generation’s effort to “appeal to the heart” of white reformers, as well as gradualists who embraced colonization. As William Hamilton explained, “However pure the motives of some of the members of that society may be, yet the master spirits thereof are evil minded towards us. They have put on the garb of angels of light. Fold back their covering, and you have in full array those of darkness.”¹⁶

      Historians have established that African American conventions in the early 1830s became a venue for free blacks to challenge white people’s declarations of racial supremacy.¹⁷ Like Freedom’s Journal, public conventions offered masterful oratorical performances crucial to demonstrating black American intellectual acumen and self-advocacy. Consequently, blacks used conventions as yet another public space in which to express their anticolonization views. Aware that they were “being watched,” free black convention-goers spoke with eloquence, intelligence, and passion in their attempt to counter colonizationists’ claims that black people lacked the prerequisite traits to warrant citizenship in the United States.¹⁸

      From the inaugural Black Convention held in Philadelphia in September 1830, black Americans declared that these conventions could work to combat the “various ways and means [that] have been resorted to; among others, the African Colonization Society is the most prominent.”¹⁹ Even if some delegates believed that Canadian emigration, or emigration to Haiti, had the potential to aid those who had been ensnared in specific assaults on their livelihood, Liberian colonization, in their eyes, worked against race advancement and the destruction of slavery.²⁰ As would be the case at subsequent conventions, the resolutions at the inaugural convention made clear that free blacks did not doubt the “sincerity of many friends

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