Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880.

Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880. Edited by Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon, with others. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 385. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-271-02684-8.)

This collection of letters to and from Quaker activist Benjamin Coates contributes to the ongoing reinterpretation of nineteenth-century debates about African American emigration. Like much of the recent scholarship, Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880 reveals the colonization movement as complex and multifaceted, at once a white-led endeavor to rid the U.S. of an unwanted "race," a missionary movement to evangelize far-off lands, and an African American quest to escape oppression.

The product of a group enterprise coordinated through the Special Collections Library at Havertord College, Back to Africa highlights the life and letters of Coates, a wealthy businessman who devoted considerable energy and money to promoting the colonization of black Americans in Africa. Haverford's recently acquired collection of some 160 letters sent to Coates is at the center of the book. The editors have supplemented that collection with letters written by Coates, the majority drawn from the papers of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which are located in the Library of Congress and available on microfilm. Their introduction contextualizes Coates's correspondence by providing information on his family, his position among Philadelphia Quakers, his stance on colonization, and his attitudes toward African Americans--both globally and in his own neighborhood. Annotations to the documents offer useful details about supporting characters and about the histories of Liberia, the ACS, the abolitionist movement, and the post-Civil War freedmen's aid movement.

Coates, best known for his collaboration with Henry Highland Garnet in the 1858 rejuvenation of the African Civilization Society and for penning a pamphlet titled Cotton Cultivation in Africa, was more publicist than organization man. Closely aligned with the ACS and in frequent contact with its agents and officers, he also recognized that the organization lacked credibility among African Americans because of its hostility to free blacks and its patronage by slaveholders. Indeed, Coates was ecumenical in his approach to black emigration. Consistent with his affiliation with the ACS, he supported and corresponded with black emigrants to Liberia such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and Joseph Jenkins Roberts, that nation's first black president. At the same time, though, Coates was a committed abolitionist who energetically promoted Garnet's African Civilization Society, an organization that sought to encourage emigration to Africa under black leadership and to avoid Liberia and the taint of the ACS. Coates plied prominent African Americans with pamphlets (including his own) on agricultural development in western Africa, attempting to persuade them of the merits of emigration. The letters he received in response, from Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frederick Douglass, John B. Smith, Henry O. Wagoner, and others, are among the most interesting in the collection, for they illuminate the intensity of the ongoing debate among northern African Americans about their future in North America.

The correspondence published here does not add up to a unified narrative or even a series of coherent vignettes. The editors emphasize the significance of Coates's correspondence with the Liberian president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, yet the collection contains just nine Roberts letters spread over a period of twenty-one years. As the editors concede, "the real substance of Roberts's relationship with Coates is unclear" (p. 22). The collection contains few letters from southerners and little that illuminates southern African Americans' attitudes toward emigration. Still, the intriguing fragments included in Back to Africa will be of interest to scholars investigating the organizational history of the ACS, the early history of Liberia, Quaker activism, and the motivations of black and white northerners for supporting or rejecting emigration. Researchers will be pleased to find an extensive subject index, as will teachers hunting for primary sources for classroom use.

KATE MASUR

Northwestern University