Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,409

This is the grave of Joseph Tracy.

Born in 1793 in Hartford, Vermont, Tracy grew up in a reasonably prosperous farming family and both worked on the family farm and went to school. He went to Dartmouth and graduated with a master’s degree in 1814. He became a teacher and evidently was pretty good at it because in 1817, he became the principal of a private school back in Vermont.

Tracy was intellectually curious and so switched professions a few times. While a teacher, he started studying the law. But before he took the bar, he decided to try the ministry instead. He was evidently a pretty indifferent minister, despite actively practicing as a Congregationalist minister from 1821 to 1828. But the church reassigned him that latter year to run the state’s Congregationalist newspaper. So now he was an editor, both at religious and secular papers over the years. He started writing books as well, some religious, some history, including a history of the Great Awakening, of great interest as the Second Great Awakening was underway. By most accounts, he was an absolute traditionalist when it came to religion and was not personally affected in his beliefs by the new religious meetings. He was a very knowledgeable man, but a very conservative one. Not surprisingly, he was friends with his old Dartmouth alumni buddy Daniel Webster.

The reason we mention Tracy today is his work on the issue of colonizing Black Americans back to Africa. This became his life mission. He was one of those Americans who opposed slavery, generally, but really felt that the races could not live together. The American Colonization Society became the solution to this problem for slavery “moderates,” some of whom, such as Henry Clay, were slave owners themselves. Tracy was a great believer in this for two reasons. One is the racial reason, mentioned above. The second is that sending Black Americans to Africa meant sending Christians to Africa and so missionizing Africa was gravy. He became secretary of the Massachusetts Colonization Society in 1842, the state affiliate of the ACS.

By this time, the idea of sending ex-slaves to Africa was mostly discredited. Liberia was a disaster. The people who chose to go there did not have disease resistance and so high death rates were super common. They brought colorism with them and so it was mostly lighter skinned people governing darker skinned people. Moreover, because they were good Christians, they believed the native Africans savaged and treated them as such. On top of this, the vast majority of Black Americans had no desire to move to Africa. They were Americans! And they rejected the ACS and other groups entirely. And yet, as late as 1863, Abraham Lincoln still toyed with colonization schemes, specifically to get freed slaves to move to Panama to mine coal for American ships that would get them out of the country and also expand American power in the Americas. The idea that the races could live together was simply not something that even many abolitionist whites could accept.

None of this got in Tracy’s way. He just loved the idea. In many ways, he was the last truly committed colonizer of this sort. The ACS did continue after the Civil War. By 1858, he was director of the ACS. He held that position until his death. Perhaps most notably, he opposed giving political independence to Liberia, which its leaders wanted. He simply did not trust Black people to rule themselves and he felt that taking the ACS away from its parental position would hurt its reputation and he cared a lot more about that than he did about Liberia itself. Tracy died in 1874, still committed to the idea of sending the now millions of freed slaves out of the United States. He was 80 years old.

Joseph Tracy is buried in Central Cemetery, Beverly, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other people affiliated with the American Colonization Society, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Robert Finley, who founded the ACS, is in Athens, Georgia. Richard Bland Lee, another early supporter and one of the less known members of Virginia’s Lee dynasty of these years, is in Chantilly, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.