Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society.

Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. By Eric Burin. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 223. $59.95, ISBN 0-8130-2841-8.)

Eric Burin begins his examination of the American Colonization Society (ACS), the body that established Liberia on the coast of West Africa in 1822, with a discussion of the historiography of the ACS. Burin groups interpretations into two main categories: those that portray the ACS as a proslavery organization and those that picture it as an antislavery movement. Burin's book is of the antislavery/benevolent school.

To validate his supposition that the ACS was an antislavery organization, the author points out that 560 slave owners transferred about six thousand formerly enslaved blacks to Liberia from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the Civil War. Burin also argues that the colonization scheme repeatedly undermined the interests of those who backed slavery. Indeed, central to nearly all of the chapters is what the author considers to be many attempts by the ACS to free slaves and send them to Liberia.

Although based on ample primary sources and scholarly publications, the book advances the antislavery/benevolent nature of the ACS at the expense of its proslavery, racist, and antiblack aspects. Burin's one-sided perspective is not surprising, since be states very clearly in the introduction that his "work confirms, refines, and extends" the antislavery argument (p. 2). Burin's attempt to corroborate the antislavery interpretation seems to have predetermined his analysis, resulting in an emaciated perspective on the ACS.

No doubt the ACS was in theory and in practice a "unity of opposites." In other words, the ACS could be tangibly and conceptually described as an antislavery, proslavery, benevolent, and racist organization. A number of ACS members, especially some of its northern associates, viewed the ACS as a means to eradicate slavery in the United States. They uncompromisingly and consistently linked the ACS with the extinction of slavery, and they also raised a substantial amount of money to support that goal. Like their southern counterparts, northern members also used racist, moral, religious, and patriotic sentiments to justify the colonization of blacks in Africa.

Most important, southern members viewed the ACS as an instrument not only for solving the issue of race relations in the United States but also, contradictorily, for protecting slavery and the right of individuals to manumit slaves. These conflicting perspectives were put into practice simultaneously in the South by a significant number of ACS members. Although they manumitted enslaved blacks, sent a number of them to Liberia, and continued to paternalistically provide material assistance to Liberia throughout the nineteenth century, most southern members remained slave owners and used their political power and material wealth at both state and national levels to protect slavery until that institution was destroyed by the Civil War.

It might also be noted that while the ACS sent approximately fifteen thousand blacks, including emancipated, free-born, and recaptured blacks, to Liberia from about 1822 to 1861, there were still roughly four million slaves in the South in 1861. Indeed, perhaps as many as sixty thousand Africans were illegally imported to the United States between 1808 and 1861, including ethnic groups from the coastal area of Liberia.

These figures clearly illustrate that the ACS did not undermine the interests of the slave-owning members of the ACS, as Burin seems to imply. Overall, the ACS was an attempt at reckoning with American freedom, slavery, racism, and moral, religious, and benevolent rectitude. Only against this background can a comprehensive and thorough history of the ACS be written.

AMOS J. BEYAN

Western Michigan University