Colonization: the state's Liberia machinery, and this county's answer

1829 – 1863

The offer the state made: Indiana's colonization course ran parallel to its exclusion law and was funded by its fines. The Indiana Colonization Society, organized at Indianapolis in 1829 as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society, promoted the removal of free Black Hoosiers to Liberia through its newspaper, The Colonizationist, under John D. Defrees. The state act approved 28 April 1852 — its text printed in the African Repository of May 1853 — appropriated $5,000: $3,000 to purchase land in Liberia, styled the "Indiana Colony," to be laid out in 100-acre lots, and $50 in aid to each emigrant, administered by a State Board of Colonization made up of the Governor, Auditor and Secretary of State ex officio. The course ended in admitted failure: the state board's machinery facilitated only 47 of the 83 Indiana emigrants who reached Liberia at all; the Rev. James Mitchell's circular of 1855 conceded that $65 a person was not enough to plant a family; and Secretary William Wick's final report, in 1863, called the enterprise a "total failure."

The answer Black Indiana gave, in convention: the state's Black citizens answered colonization in their own assembly — the State Convention of the People of Color, meeting at the A.M.E. Church in Indianapolis, 1–4 August 1851, days before the Article XIII referendum. The convention resolved to seek the new constitution's amendment, and, if Indiana's laws became intolerable, to emigrate "to Canada, Jamaica, or elsewhere, in preference to Liberia." Removal on the colonizationists' terms was refused in terms. No delegate from St. Joseph County appears on the convention's credential roll as read, and no emigrant from this county to Liberia is named in any record reached; the county's answer, at the strength the record gives it, is the absence of both — no delegation sent, no departure recorded — beside a community that, on the census's showing, stayed and tripled.

Sources

1. African Repository, May 1853 (archive.org) — text of the Indiana colonization act approved 28 April 1852: $5,000 appropriated, $3,000 for the "Indiana Colony" land in 100-acre lots, $50 per emigrant, the ex officio board.
2. Indiana State Library, Indiana historical blog — the Indiana Colonization Society (1829), The Colonizationist under John D. Defrees; 47 of 83 emigrants facilitated; James Mitchell's 1855 circular; William Wick's 1863 "total failure."
3. Proceedings of the State Convention of the People of Color, Indianapolis, 1–4 August 1851 (Colored Conventions Project / University of Delaware) — the amendment resolution; emigration "to Canada, Jamaica, or elsewhere, in preference to Liberia"; the credential roll, with no St. Joseph County delegate appearing.