Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,682
By The grave with the cracked stone is the grave of Robert Finley.
Born in 1772 in Princeton, New Jersey, Finley grew up pretty well off. His parents had come from Scotland and his father was in the yarn trade. Yarn and whatever else made enough money to send their son to the College of New Jersey, today’s Princeton. Finley started there at the age of 11 and graduated in 1787, only 15 years old. The key to understanding a place like Princeton back then is that it really was more a super elite and advanced boys school more than a university, at least for some of the students. In any case, Finley decided to become a minister and he spent a lot of time in the South in his early years, including in Charleston, at a variety of churches. He then came back to New Jersey in 1793. Interested in advanced education, he went back to Princeton for a divinity degree. He stuck around to become a trustee of the university and continued as such until 1817, when resigned and moved to Georgia. He ran some schools as well in New Jersey in these years, associated with his Presbyterian ministry, but mostly as elite training schools.
Two things happened right in 1816 and 1817 that changed Finley’s life. First, he accepted the presidency of the University of Georgia. Second, he helped found the American Colonization Society. The latter is far more interesting and why we are discussing him here. The ACS was the attempt by supposed moderates on slavery to thread the needle between slavery being bad and the obvious impossibility of freeing them and having large free Black populations in the U.S. Or they thought it was impossible. So the idea was to ship them “back” to Africa. Of course, even by 1817, the large majority of American slaves were born in the United States and each year that majority with the end of the legal slave trade in 1807.
As it turned out, very few Africans wanted to return to Africa. Some did, in love with the idea of freedom and wanting nothing to do with whites every again. But it was a complete disaster. The free Black population that did return to Africa thought themselves superior to Africans, had every intent of ruling them, and had lost all immunity to African diseases. Death by disease and endless conflict resulted. Even if the colony had succeeded, the free Black population in the US exploded in these same years so it would have been at best a drop in the bucket, even if it was more successful. By the 1830s, the abolitionists rose up and the ACS became their enemy, targeting these hypocrites as almost as bad as slavers themselves, and of course many were both.
But Finley didn’t live to see any of that. Shortly after these two major events, he died after falling sick traveling to Athens to take the presidency job. He made it three months there before dying later in 1817. He was 44 or 45 years old, as it’s unclear what his actual birthdate was.
Robert Finley is buried in Jackson Street Cemetery, Athens, Georgia. Unfortunately, it was closed when I visited but I was able to get that picture.
If you would like this series to visit other Americans involved with the American Colonization Society, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles Fenton Mercer is in Leesburg, Virginia and Richard Bland Lee is in Chantilly, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.