Growing NGO Leading Societies for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery

In part this attitude stemmed from the elite composition of the membership. The founders of the New York Manumission Society, for example, included such distinguished names as Philip Schuyler, James Duane, and Chancellor Livingston, and its first president was John Jay, who was succeeded in that office by Alexander Hamilton. Such men of wealth or high station were highly sensitive to the sanctity of capital investments, however deplorable its form. Not through the purse strings would they strike.

As a national organization the earlier abolitionists were hesitant at first in supporting colonization. Before giving an official opinion, the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery invited James Forten to appear at its meeting in December 1818. After receiving his views the convention issued a report opposing colonization on the grounds that Negroes were averse to it and that they were determined not to be transported to Africa unless by force. Again in 1821 the parent organization expressed official disapproval of colonization. But such action had little influence on the subsidiary societies, the Manumission Society of North Carolina having pledged its support to the American Colonization Society before the latter had celebrated its first anniversary.

After 1821 the American Convention quietly abandoned its opposition to colonization, breaking its silence in 1829 to come out in flat endorsement of the voluntary emigration of free Negroes and of Congressional assistance in effecting it. The school conducted by the New York Manumission Society, the African Free School, worked out an agreement with the colonization society in 1828 and 1829 to educate two young Negroes, Washington Davis and Cecil Ashman, for teaching in Liberia. When one of the students of the school, Isaac H. Moore, expressed an interest in Liberia, he was encouraged by principal Charles C. Andrews to write to the colonization society, and when John B. Russwurm was preparing to go to Liberia as a principal in the summer of 1829, Andrews offered to brief him on school administration.

The early abolitionist movement was by no means barren of accomplishment. It had rescued hundreds of Negroes illegally held in bondage, the Delaware Society alone having liberated twelve in the span of a year. True, the organizations did not admit Negroes to membership; the constitution of a Southern auxiliary was likely to be restricted to free, white males, and the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery admitted only one Negro from 1775 to 1859, the light-skinned Robert Purvis.

But the societies showed an interest in the free Negro, particularly in his education. Its principal work was to maintain schools, reported the New York Society in 1825. Its pride was the African Free School, which in 1834 came under the citysupported system, after an independent existence of forty- seven years. Perhaps the school's more celebrated product was Ira Aldridge, who played Othello at the Royal Theatre in London before he reached thirty and was the rage of Europe for a quarter of a century. In Pennsylvania, too, it was the abolitionists who gave Negroes their first exposure to book learning. In 1802 the legislature authorized public schools, but none existed for Negroes until 1820 when the abolitionists donated a building to the state authorities upon hearing their excuse that they could not build a colored school because no funds were available.

American Abolitionists: Black Struggle for Equality