American Colonization Society - Criticism and Decline of The ACS

Criticism and Decline of The ACS

Lemuel Haynes, a free black Presbyterian minister at the time of the Society's formation, argued passionately that God's providential plan would eventually defeat slavery and lead to the harmonious integration of the races as equals. Beginning in the 1830s, some abolitionists increasingly attacked the ACS, criticizing colonization as a slaveholders' scheme and the ACS' works as palliative propaganda to soften the continuation of slavery in the United States. The presidents of the ACS tended to be Southerners. The first president of the ACS was Bushrod Washington, the nephew of U.S. President George Washington and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. From 1836 to 1849 the statesman Henry Clay of Kentucky, a planter and slaveholder, was ACS president.

Three of the reasons the movement never became very successful were the objections raised by free blacks and abolitionists, the scale and costs of moving many people (there were 4 million freedmen in the South after the Civil War), and the difficulty in finding locations willing to accept large numbers of black newcomers (no African tribe accepted newcomers, so the society relied on creating settlements at small colonial ports).