6. From the Classroom to the American Colonization Society: Making Race at Rutgers

exhorted Theodore Frelinghuysen, a fellow New Jerseyan, at an 1824 meeting of the state's colonization society, "-we appeal to you-survey your cultivated fields-your comfortable habitations-your children rising around you to bless you.Who, under Providence, caused those hills to rejoice, and those vallies to smile?-who ploughed those fields and cleared those forests?"His answer may have come as a surprise to some, as he demanded that his audience "remember the toil and the tears of black men, and pay [their] debt to Africa." 1 According to Frelinghuysen, the people of New Jersey owed their prosperity, security-indeed, their very happiness-to African American men.Disregarding the often-invisible labor of African American women, New Jersey's attorney general then invoked the transactional language of debt to convey the urgency of his cause.This language was not neutral.If New Jerseyans-and Americans more broadly-were indebted to Africa, it was because they had plundered its shores, stealing untold numbers of men, women, and children to be monetized first and then later sold.Indeed, the moral debt to which Frelinghuysen gestured was that incurred by Americans as a result of slavery.Serving as an ambassador for the recently formed American Colonization Society (ACS), Theodore Frelinghuysen went on to condemn the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and the Janus-faced idea of freedom that resulted from the American Revolution."On the same breeze have been borne to the ear," he argued, "the grateful shouts of American Freemen and the heart-sickening groans of subjugated Slaves." 2 Frelinghuysen recognized, like many of his fellow