ABRAHAM SHADD

Abraham Shadd. Courtesy of the Raleigh Township Centennial Museum.

In 1824, Abraham Doras Shadd, Mary Ann’s father, encountered an anti-black organization making its home in Delaware just a year after his daughter’s birth. The Union Colonization Society of Wilmington must have deeply angered and scared Abraham Shadd as it seduced his white abolitionist neighbors and colleagues toward anti-black ideologies. Purporting that African Americans, free and enslaved alike, were a threat to whites’ economic well-being, colonization societies proliferated across upper southern states with its “philanthropic” solution of exporting all Black peoples of the state to colonies abroad. In 1827, when the Delaware General Assembly adopted a petition by the Union Colonization Society, it must have become perfectly clear to Abraham Shadd that he would need to enter into direct, oppositional action against the group. [2] With so few enslaved African Americans in Delaware, it was clear that free Blacks like himself were the true target of their organizing. The petition’s paternalism and anti-black claims about the incompatibility of free Blacks and white society and governance was a clear threat to the multi-generational effort by Abraham Shadd and his ancestors to establish themselves as economic and social equals with their white neighbors, despite the educational barriers that persisted for him and his children. Abraham Shadd’s anti-colonization stance inspired Mary Ann’s high scrutiny of emigration schemes to Mexico, Liberia, Haiti, and Canada, with the latter meeting her political and ecological criteria for Black resettlement.

Colonization Society Certificate. Public Domain.

Three years later, Abraham Shadd served as a delegate representing Delaware at the inaugural National Colored Convention at Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, PA on September 20th, 1830, presided by convention president Reverend Richard Allen, the church’s founder and fellow Delawarean.[3] The convention was called in response to the violent expulsion of free Black peoples out of Ohio following an 1829 race riot, perhaps an omen of what might be to come for Abraham Shadd and his family. For more information on the first colored conventions view our exhibit called The Meeting that Launched a Movement. 

The delegates lambasted colonization societies while also laying claim to their claim to the tenets of the Declaration of Independence, noting the contradiction between the founding documents’ articulation of their rights and the belief and actions perpetrated by these state-sanctioned organizations. Remarkably, the delegates repeatedly commit to forming a Black resettlement in Upper Canada as its strongest action against their continued oppression on American soil. The convention’s proximity to Shadd’s home suggests other delegates likely visited his home during the intersessions, where it is likely that Mary Ann began to consider and adopt the pro-emigration ideas she later fiercely advocated for as an adult.

“Address of the Free People of Color of the Borough of Wilmington, DE.” The Liberator, Sept. 24, 1831. Courtesy of Accessible Archives.

The following year Abraham Shadd was elected vice president of the national convention, and together with the other delegates they enacted a marked shift in the convention’s focus. The proceedings outlined initiatives for advancing educational and labor reform for African Americans, claiming that their approaches best served the need to improve the poor conditions Black people live in while also stamping out the most corrupt and unchristian practices by racists.[4] Colonization appears only once, only mentioned so as to denounce it as slavery by another name. The September 24th, 1831 issue of The Liberator best records Abraham’s move to denounce colonization by advocating for African Americans to embrace their ties to the land.[5] In response to the Wilmington Colonization Union’s recruitment efforts, Abraham and his colleagues Reverend Peter Spence and William Thomas held a meeting at the African Union Church where they addressed Black Delawareans. For Shadd, colonization in Liberia held no opportunities for the improvement of their living conditions or educational goals. Rather, it was an evangelizing project in Africa that held no real relationship to African Americans, and an insidious way to lure African Americans away from the fight for their freedom and equality in America.

Bearing witness to almost twenty years of her father’s work in the Colored Conventions movement by this time, Mary Ann offers a strong critique in her letter to Frederick Douglass published in his newspaper, The North Star, quoted below. Perhaps this marks an early indication of Mary Ann positioning herself as an insider tapped into the movement’s lines of power, yet also occupying a place at the margin from which she critiques convention norms.