Words Colliding: The Debate over Slavery and Black Exclusion in Nineteenth-Century America

The long history and lasting impact of the rhetoric of Black exclusion in American politics and culture

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson declared that the United States was destined to become a nation free of slavery—and of its entire Black population. Following his cue, Henry Clay and other prominent politicians founded the American Colonization Society in 1816, launching the Black expatriation (“colonization”) movement, a political force that, over the next eighty years, promoted the removal, wit...