White people celebrating the Fourth of July enjoyed nothing more than imagining the providential day when free blacks and emancipated persons would be sent back to Africa. In New England towns miles away from black populations in New York or Philadelphia, to say nothing of those in the plantation South, orators in the 1820s and 1830s mounted church pulpits and lyceum rostrums and spoke longingly about the colonization of Africa by exiles in the nation's midst. Independence Day doubled as “a virtual colonization holiday,”Footnote 1 a ready-made venue for endorsing plans designed to secure the blessings of liberty, but only for some, well into the future.Footnote 2 Along with their counterparts in the South advocating the deportation of free blacks, colonizationists imagined themselves as humanitarians, people of good intentions who would combine census data with their love of Christ to offer a slow but, according to their projections, surely steady solution to the problem of American slavery while redeeming the African continent in the process. “Unmingled benevolence to the coloured population of this land” lent passion and purity to their purpose, as one ardent supporter put it.Footnote 3 Beyond saving free people of color from what whites often viewed as their own insurmountable prejudice, colonization enjoyed the millennial aura of hastening the end of slavery by civilizing Africa and peopling savage lands with Christianized African Americans.
Doing the math each Fourth of July became something of a patriotic duty for whites in the decades following the War of 1812. When Elisha Whittlesey addressed the Tallmadge Colonization Society on 4 July 1833, he registered “the alarming increase of slaves” and backed up his concern by citing decennial censuses of black population over the last forty years: “in 1790, 697,697; in 1800, 896,849; in 1810, 1,191,364; in 1820, 1,538,128; and in 1830, 2,011,320.”Footnote 4 On this festive day when speakers routinely recited the Declaration of Independence in full, the topic shifted from the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit racial security. The barrier to achieving that goal was the combined problem of blackness and population, but for an optimistic subset of white nationalists who supported colonization, it was a problem that could be solved mathematically. At a moment when many whites felt that their historic entitlement had become fragile, destined to vanish before the immutable laws of population increase, a concerted effort to engineer racial homogeneity through colonization promised to secure freedom well into the future. Even though the prospect of removing millions of black people from the United States was never much more than a racist fantasy, supporters of colonization understood themselves as realists acting on biopolitical statistics and other forms of calculation to secure a white racial destiny.
Statistics emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as the “study of the state,” and both French (statisque) and German (Statistik) usages denoted the application of mathematical techniques to comprehending the voluminous data associated with the state and its subjects.Footnote 5 As “the state's knowledge of the state,” per Foucault's gloss,Footnote 6 statistics enables the study of people as a population resource for war and labor. Yet such a resource also constitutes a security threat. Colonizationists obsessed over mathematical data: the ratio of whites to blacks, birth rates, rates of incarceration and insanity, all of which seemed leading up to being overrun by blacks. “They are more than a sixth of our population,” exclaimed Baxter Dickinson of Springfield, Massachusetts in his 4 July oration. “Their ratio exceeds that of the whites … who can look at it even in distant prospect without horror?”Footnote 7 For white nationalists, extrapolating population data and using statistics to make predictions often pointed to an impending racial nightmare.
Rational calculation, of course, is never as rational as it seems to be. In a state of emergency where security is viewed as critical, it is more appropriate to speak of “affective ‘calculation’,” as Brian Massumi does in describing how indiscriminate threats become “indiscriminable.”Footnote 8 When it came to counting up the millions of black people in the United States, at times separating the free black population from the enslaved and at other times lumping both together, the political arithmetic spawned contrasting affects. On the one hand, biopolitical calculations performed a function that is “massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species,”Footnote 9 offering security in the knowledge that a population has been accounted for. But, on the other, the figures generated insecurity merely by documenting the numerical existence, in the most fundamental sense of the word, of a people whose power exceeded the sum of individual bodies’ potential. As we will see, David Walker and other black activists associated with Freedom's Journal invoked these same population statistics to demonstrate the proportional strength, relative to the white republic, of the black community.
Behind the triumphalism that imbued these 4 July orations and other patriotic endorsements of colonization, a pervasive sense of insecurity and nervousness impelled influential white men at all levels of government and social station to call for the settlement of Liberia by the so-called surplus black population of the US. Slave-owners rallied around colonization out of “sheer terror,” according to William Lloyd Garrison. “The increase of the free colored population disturbs the security of the planters,” he explained.Footnote 10 Meanwhile, for northerners, the task, as Calvin Yale put it in his 1827 sermon to the Vermont Colonization Society, was to ensure “national safety” lest northern cities be inundated with black criminals.Footnote 11 So, although white northerners came to the colonization crusade with different motives, like their southern counterparts they were ultimately trying to save themselves from black population increase and a brewing race war that they feared the numbers tokened. At one level, the contrast between southerners who turned to colonization as a means of preserving the slave system by exiling meddlesome free blacks and northerners who saw the movement as an initial step to one day ending slavery could not have been greater, though the American Colonization Society (ACS) endeavored to ignore these regional differences of opinion. But at another level, each responded as nationalists, specifically white nationalists, who acted out of fear that their country would one day be swamped by black population increase. Fundamentally, then, colonizationists relied on political arithmetic to predict and therefore avert a future racial catastrophe; their campaign operated as a prototypical discourse of national security, one that continues to set patterns for policing, immigration, and governance today.
The project of national security, I will argue, was beset by the affective intensities of “Jeffersonian trembling.” No one was more afraid than Thomas Jefferson, who experienced an infamous case of trembling when he turned his eye to the arithmetic of black population increase. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he opined, because the US seemed ill-equipped to handle the problem of growing black biopower.Footnote 12 The phantasmatic notion that whiteness was somehow a vulnerable racial identity had been in play at least since Benjamin Franklin in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751) voiced concern that “the negroes brought into the English Sugar Islands have greatly diminished the whites there.”Footnote 13 This worry became full blown over the next two generations as Jefferson's guilt-ridden musings about race grew into a national-security matter. Despite the assertion that colonization “helped Americans throw off Jefferson's legacy in ideas about race” by promoting Liberia as a venture based on the practices of market liberalism and trade,Footnote 14 Jefferson's unease lasted well into the nineteenth century, a psychopolitical inheritance that shows up in anguished 4 July speeches about the dire need for black expatriation.Footnote 15 The faith in market liberalism that John Saillant sees underpinning support for Liberian emigration may have superseded Enlightenment ideas held by Jefferson, but his affective misgivings were another legacy altogether.
American colonizationists would experience an array of Jeffersonian symptoms, frequently employing the language of horror, apprehension, and, above all, trembling, as they confronted a black population that had increased from nearly 700,000 in 1790 to over 1.5 million by 1820, according to federal censuses. These and other numbers appear all over ACS reports that sought to provide a practical solution to the moral problem that Jefferson had posed by sending African Americans to Liberia to become settler colonialists. Five years after its founding in 1817, the ACS established a colony on the west coast of Africa for repatriating free persons of color as well as enslaved persons manumitted by owners under the stipulation that they leave US shores. More than two hundred local chapters and auxiliary societies sprang up soon afterward.Footnote 16 (The ACS did not formally disband until 1964.)Footnote 17 Never more than a trickle, the approximately ten thousand to thirteen thousand free persons of color and emancipated slaves transported to Liberia represented less than 3 percent of the total black population at the time.Footnote 18
By gathering and then acting on census statistics and other biopolitical information, colonization functioned as an algorithm designed to manage the statistical risk that black people were thought to pose to future national security. Yet even the purest calculations grow sticky because algorithms “operate through the medium of culture”; algorithms are always attached to “imaginative grammars” that concentrate, refract, or otherwise distort the real phenomena to which they are applied.Footnote 19 When the problem to be solved was the population of black people that the federal census began counting in 1790, the discourse of colonization provided a set of rules for dealing with the numbers. Members of the ACS used mathematical ratios of increase to make grim predictions about a future, which, unless action were taken, looked less white with each census. With rules that sort people into categories and predict their future behavior, algorithms answered the needs of racial governance.
In response to census numbers that fueled ominous predictions about the fate of the white republic, the colonization movement drew on what legal philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy terms “algorithmic governmentality” as a way of handling the population data that was causing such despair about the national future.Footnote 20 While nowhere as technologically sophisticated or concerted as neoliberal societies intent on installing “a government of the social world that is based on the algorithmic processing of big data sets rather than on politics, law, and social norms,”Footnote 21 the early nineteenth-century US, both North and South, found in the data set of population statistics predictive evidence that blackness represented a growing national security crisis. Liberia in this framework represented not so much an actual place that received a few hundred American blacks each year as an affective placeholder for removing uncertainty by removing blacks themselves. Race may not figure explicitly into Rouvroy's description of algorithmic governmentality, but its potential to discriminate among the “indiscriminable,” to return to Massumi's language, should be clear. The projected rates of black population increase of enslaved persons and free persons of color changed the entire calculus of national security by shifting the biopolitical imperative from producing life to grappling with its unpredictability. For political economists the question had been, “Is there sufficient population? And the answer was: There is never enough.”Footnote 22 Foucault's query meets with a totally different answer from white nationalists who, in effect, responded, “Yes, there is sufficient population – unless there are too many.” Instead of targeting individual black bodies, white nationalism read the latest data about black people in toto as a threat. Different in scale from the surveillance techniques described by Simone Browne that overseers, patrollers, and other agents of slaveholding society employed, colonization represented a security algorithm for tackling a data problem that was the size of the black population itself.Footnote 23
Viewing black people as data had many uses, from identifying areas of alarming density, to projecting birth and mortality rates, to calculating transportation costs to Liberia. “Data is the evidence of terror,” as Jessica Marie Johnson writes.Footnote 24 Tracing the long arc of antiblackness from slavery to biometric surveillance keyed to skin color and hair texture, Johnson registers “the devastating thingification of black women, children, and men.”Footnote 25 The scheme advocated by white nationalists placed considerable stock in numbers as a means of combating the unpredictability of biological life. Driven by the era's “statistical enthusiasm” and “fetishism for counting,”Footnote 26 colonization turned to biopolitical metrics to achieve security through statistical surveillance.
PROTOTYPICAL WHITE NATIONALISM
Vulnerability provides affective motivation for white nationalism. Fearful that an influx of immigrants, declining fertility rates among whites, and other demographic changes are endangering white people's status and privilege, white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement. As the marchers at the Unite the Right torchlit rally in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted, “You shall not replace us!” White nationalists deploy the loaded expression “white genocide” to express their anxiety over a supposed surge of nonwhite peoples and a corresponding “decline” of the white population.Footnote 27 Despite the term's recent origins, the conceptual illogic of “white genocide” dates back to biopolitical anxieties that drove the colonization movement to control and manage the chimera of black population excess. In the late twentieth century, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, busing and school integration, affirmative action, and the loss of skilled labor jobs, white supremacists “built a movement around the idea of white dispossession, the notion that the country they believed had once been the sole property of white people was no longer only theirs.”Footnote 28 Their predecessors in the early nineteenth century had no need to view themselves as victimized since they were not a fringe group but seated at the very centers of power. Men like Henry Clay and John Randolph of Roanoke, along with local ministers and invited speakers who addressed Independence Day crowds, embraced white nationalism in an aggressive bid to secure a national future. They were men with a plan: colonization societies provided the infrastructure and access to print media for promoting whiteness as the guarantor of national security.
White nationalism corresponds to much of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies.”Footnote 29 But white nationalism also entails an affectively charged attitude toward security that inflects Gilmore's definition a bit differently. Hence white nationalism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal embrace and promotion of group-differentiated entitlement to membership, belonging, and other forms of property within a geography deemed a rightful and historic homeland. “Whiteness,” as Alexander Weheliye reminds us, “designates not an actually existing grouping but a series of hierarchical power structures that apportion and delimit which members of the Homo sapiens species can lay claim to full human status.”Footnote 30 As a prominent delivery vehicle for this ideology, colonization identified, enumerated, and, above all, targeted those denied the ability to make this claim.
Buoyed by widely shared beliefs in the biblical and historical supremacy of “Anglo-Saxonism,” to use Reginald Horsman's term, white nationalists produced more than enough science, historiography, and literature to convince themselves that American whiteness would lead to the “perfection of governmental institutions and world dominance.”Footnote 31 Even so, as David Roediger points out, the “popular sense of whiteness represented a hesitantly emerging consensus,”Footnote 32 one that remained riven by doubts about whether immigrants, particularly the Irish but also at times French, Spanish, and Italians, counted as white.Footnote 33 Far easier than confronting their own anxieties about the fluidity of white identity or projections of white dispossession, they instead eagerly anticipated the dispossession of others. Despite the consistent antiblackness between white nationalists then and now, significant differences exist between nineteenth-century supporters of African colonization and contemporary advocates of a white ethno-state. Unlike the fringe nature of hate groups and extremist websites today, such as the Daily Stormer, white nationalists in the nineteenth-century mainstream boasted their connections to the founding fathers, sat on the highest courts, and claimed their entitlement in respected public print venues and at annual conventions. “What right, I demand, have the children of Africa to a homestead in the white man's country?” asked George Washington Parke Custis.Footnote 34 But vulnerability did not mean retreating inward, as white nationalists beginning in the 1820s projected risk outward, effectively exporting insecurity and precarity onto blacks.
Never a remotely practical undertaking given the distances, expense, and sheer numbers of people involved, the colonization scheme to outfit vessels and pack their hulls full of black emigrants, whether somehow to undo or cruelly replay the trajectories of the Middle Passage, encouraged supporters to be punctilious about the math behind the enterprise. In sermons and 4 July addresses, speakers turned from the lofty (and paradoxical) prospect of deporting blacks in the name of liberty to more prosaic details by totaling up shipping costs, calculating natural rates of increase from reproduction and birth, and projecting the ratio of blacks to whites ten, twenty, forty years in the future.Footnote 35 For a tax of less than ten cents a person – that is, white people recognized as legal persons – the $140,000,000 needed to transport the entire free black population to Africa could be raised. Baxter Dickinson made this pitch to the Auxiliary Colonization Society of Springfield, Massachusetts on 4 July 1829: his vision of a white republic “destined within the compass of the passing century to embosom a white population of eighty millions” was certainly in reach but only if the unwelcome remainder of a surging black population were removed from the overall national equation.Footnote 36 But for others racial apocalypse seemed equally mathematically possible. Drawing on “one very simple arithmetical calculation,” an 1823 report commissioned by the ACS concluded that since the size of the slave population “doubles in less than twenty years,” in the span of sixty years the United States by the 1880s will have millions more enslaved persons than free white persons at the time of the 1820 census.Footnote 37 The numbers led to a dire prediction: given that this massive data set would total 12 million slaves by 1880, one could only guess at “how many plots must be detected, how many insurrections must be quelled. Plots and insurrections! These are words of terrour.”Footnote 38 With racial violence liable to erupt anywhere and at any moment from now and into the future, uncertainty and contingency made “terrour” more terrifying still. In this context, political arithmetic was doubly affecting, relying on population data for predictive security and also fueling alarm about the extent of the black population whose numbers were so large as to increase the probability of vengeance.
While the threat of slave insurrection might have been most pressing for southerners who embraced colonization as a security measure, projections about what the US population would look like in 1880 stretched insecurity across the better part of a coming century. This elongated horizon was crucial to aligning reformers and racists under the banner of white nationalism that the ACS offered. The 4 July orators in New England town centers who urged a program of exile did not share the same immediate concerns as slaveowners worried about regional black numerical superiority, and yet censuses and other biostatistical information that foretold the eventual waning of racial hegemony made population data a matter of shared white vulnerability. Algorithms were a matter of security, predicting the future in order to preempt it. “The strategy of algorithmic governmentality consists in either ensuring or preventing its [the future's] actualization,” contends Rouvroy.Footnote 39 White nationalists who advocated colonization set their task as dealing with the racial arithmetic of population data in order to detect “plots and insurrections!” before they could erupt. The question was not whether there would be a slave revolt; rather, it was a matter of how soon, how frequent, and how large. Statistically speaking, a population of millions was bound to have its revolutionaries and its cabals, and the goal for anxious observers was to figure out a practical strategy for governing and, most urgently, limiting the population so that it could be parsed, understood, and controlled before a “Toussaint, or a Spartacus, or an African Tecumseh” arose to establish “a Black empire.”Footnote 40 White nationalism, from this perspective, sought to minimize contingency now and into the future by controlling the size of the black population. Yet the racialization of security discourse ultimately instilled insecurity when it became apparent that the efforts of colonization could hardly keep pace with the increase of the free black population alone.
Population, according to Foucault, represents “a kind of thick natural phenomenon” that was absorbed within the science of government starting in the eighteenth century.Footnote 41 When “a population cannot be transparent,” when “the relation between the population and sovereign cannot simply be one of obedience,” and when “the variables on which population depends” are moving and unfixed to the “extent that it [the population] escapes” control and predictability,Footnote 42 its density and variability become an unappeasable source of insecurity. In the context of the nineteenth-century white nationalism and beyond, however, the black population stood as a different sort of phenomenon, a natural but unwelcome phenomenon that required solutions on a scale as grand – and as impractical – as a deportation plan intended to operate for decades, perhaps as long as a half century, to accomplish its object. If nothing else, white nationalists knew how to be patient. Yet the compulsive attention in colonizationist discourse to population, especially “the present annual increase” which “must be continually increasing,” as the black editors of Freedom's Journal noted with a touch of anticipation, introduced insecurity into the project of securing a white homeland.Footnote 43
Math saturated the security discourse of colonization. The explosion of print between 1820 and 1840 triggered what Ian Hacking calls “the avalanche of printed numbers,”Footnote 44 which, in US contexts, witnessed an explosion of numbers in books about slavery, government documents reporting the census, printed orations, and reform pamphlets. Counting the population was not about mathematical knowledge alone: numbers accrued affective intensity, as eight-digit figures, seen for instance in the 1829 projection that “the coloured population in the United States … will in the year 1868, amount to above 10,000,000, in 1882 to 15,000,00,”Footnote 45 punctuated the arguments both for and against colonization. The colonization movement obsessed over numbers, particularly those showing alarming rates of black population increase, and undertook to secure a future where white supremacy remained a numerical guarantee. Knowing the size of the black population now, colonizationists avowed, would allow white Americans to forestall the future that those numbers seemingly predicted. The calculations that went into projecting the ratio of blacks to whites, especially the figures showing that blacks were destined to pull even with and one day overtake whites, provided white nationalists with fodder to develop colonization as a predictive and preemptive algorithm, an advance warning system based on census figures and other numbers. White nationalists foresaw a future that they wanted desperately to prevent, and their plan of action called for massive emigration, deportation, and resettlement that, in the end, sputtered without achieving any real success. Yet despite the obvious failures of colonization, white nationalism and the fear and trembling it draws from and inspire continue to shape security as a fevered reaction to blackness.
COLONIZATION AND NATIONAL SECURITY
Despite the mathematical impossibility of expatriating an entire population, not to mention black opposition to the plan in the first place, the white nationalist dream of racial security remained a prominent “reform” movement throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 46 The ACS continued to operate well beyond the Civil War, maintaining offices at the Colonization Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC through Reconstruction. While the handful of emigrants sent each year to Liberia made little dent in overall demographics, at an affective level a colony for American blacks across the Atlantic provided a reassurance about one day solving the existential threat that whites saw in the contradictions of a slaveholding republic. Petitions to Congress to fund black colonization might not have netted much support, but the ACS secured testimonials and contributions from powerful, nationally prominent men such as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall (a lifetime member of the ACS); George Washington's nephew and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington (ACS cofounder and president); George Washington's adopted son George Washington Parke Custis (a distinguished ACS member); Francis Scott Key (on the Board of Managers for the ACS); Massachusetts governor and later Harvard University president Edward Everett (an ACS attendee who believed that colonization would civilize the African continent); and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Secretary of State, and presidential candidate Henry Clay (vice president of the ACS and chair of its first meeting). Even though Clay failed to convince his Congressional colleagues to earmark federal funding for this charitable undertaking, his involvement in the ACS, like that of other statesmen and jurists, indicates how counting and surveilling a black population has long been a national priority.Footnote 47 Designed to transcend sectionalism by ultimately targeting all black people within US borders, colonization functioned as a national-security program that mobilized biopolitics in an effort to manage risk as a problem of population.Footnote 48
White nationalists rallied around colonization as a statistical approach to black population management in the 1820s, a moment dubbed at the time the Era of Good Feelings owing to a supposed ebbing of partisan politics. These years witnessed a multipronged campaign to restrict black freedom and rights in virtually all aspects of everyday life: transportation, voting, education, ability to purchase property, access to the mails, just to name a few of the repressive effects of what historian Gary Nash described as the rising “Negrophobia” of the era.Footnote 49 States across the Northeast actively pursued the curtailment of African Americans’ political rights in the first decades of the nineteenth century: New Jersey restricted the franchise to white men in 1807, New York mandated in 1811 that black voters need provide proof of their freedom, Connecticut amended its constitution in 1818 to effectively disenfranchise blacks, New York stood by property qualifications for blacks in its 1821 constitution even as it abolished the requirement for white voters, Rhode Island stripped black inhabitants of the franchise in 1822.Footnote 50 New York adopted property qualifications limiting the franchise to only those African Americans who could prove that they owned $250 in property, and “by 1826, only 16 Blacks in New York City were eligible to vote.”Footnote 51 Leon Litwack in North of Slavery estimated that “by 1840, some 93% of the northern free Negro population lived in states which completely or practically excluded them from the right to vote.”Footnote 52 Starting with the admission of Maine to the Union in 1819, every territory that gained statehood before the Civil War restricted the franchise to whites. The Naturalization Act of 1790 already had laid the groundwork at the federal level by recognizing whiteness in the language of officialdom by decreeing that “any alien, being a free white person,” could apply for US citizenship after two years of residence. Soon after, in 1792, Congressional measures “restricted militia enrollment to able-bodied white male citizens.”Footnote 53 The Era of Good Feelings, it seemed, permitted white Americans to feel good about their common ability to unite around a shared agenda of antiblackness.
In this context, colonization represented a distinct technology for dealing with African Americans not as people but as a population. By aggregating blacks under single demographic category, colonization “responds to and creates the racial calculability of populations,”Footnote 54 which is to say that, for white nationalists, Liberia signified both an actual destination for a handful transportees each year and a purely notional geography that would eventually provide a haven for millions. The project required projections about the future: based on the current size of the black population in any year, how many would there be in ten or twenty years? Yet the math behind population management lent itself more to psychosis than to rationality: surely, some measure of reassurance lay in knowing exactly that “on the 1st of January, 1835, there were in the United States, 2,245,144 slaves,”Footnote 55 but this surety quickly gave way to the unassuageable insecurity presented by the sheer immensity of this figure itself. Knowing how many blacks were in the US produced the fearsome burden of knowing just how many blacks were in the US. This tally did not include free people of color, and the ACS, divided between northern and southern contingents, struggled repeatedly, yet unsuccessfully, over whether to target enslaved or free populations. The white nationalist agenda dictated the exile of free people of African descent even though (but also precisely because) this strategy supposedly kept the slave system secure by removing a class of people thought to sow discord among their enslaved brethren. For white southerners, this feature was precisely the attraction of colonization, and northern members of the ACS generally conceded that the organization should not interfere with slavery at all. This fundamental confusion about the aims of colonization stemmed from intense and intrinsic doubts attached to the project of racial security: just thinking about the existence of a sizable black population, free and enslaved, made whites insecure.
Then, as now, national security relied on biopolitical algorithms to anticipate what might happen to ensure that it does not. Security exercises oversight of human potentiality through censuses, tallies of births and deaths, statistics about vice and larceny, and so on. The “space of security” is, above all, a time zone whose figurative clocks always point toward a future made uncertain by “a series of possible events.”Footnote 56 Security anticipates the future so that it can be avoided. A speaker delivering an 1826 4 July oration in Potsdam, New York forecast a day some sixty years in the future when, “at this rate, we shall have a number of negroes larger by 4,000,000, than the present population.” Excerpted and reprinted in Freedom's Journal, this sermon served as a national security advisory about an impending white genocide. “The longing for security – the concern to be without concern – is driven by the wish to render the future motionless, to wrest it from its own futurity,” argues John Hamilton.Footnote 57 For those northerners listening to Independence Day sermons about the surge in black numbers, security concerns forced the recognition that any increase in population would exponentially increase the contingency of possible outcomes, from northerners’ consternation over the eventual erosion of white supremacy to southerners’ alarm at the prospect of immediate and outright rebellion. Today, of course, the dream of mass data is nothing less than the fantasy of preparing for all possible events, and admittedly population projections in the early 1800s fell well short of the complexity of today's mass data sets and algorithms. Nevertheless, this older mentalité de sécurité, to use Michael Dillon's term,Footnote 58 shares the same objective as more advanced systems dealing with terabytes of data: aggregating information about a population in order to dispel uncertainty about the future through prediction and prevention. If St. Domingo had erupted when the ratio of blacks to whites on the island reached a tipping point, what possible outcomes awaited the US when soon “slaves will possess a frightful numerical superiority over their masters?” as William Jay wondered in his 1835 critique of the colonization movement.Footnote 59 A national security issue like none other, this question needed asking if a future apocalypse were to be adverted.
If the sovereign rights of all white people included not just the right to “make live and let die,” as Foucault famously defined biopolitics, but also the right to make blacks live and die elsewhere, the uncertainty immediately arose as to just how many people this plan might encompass. Any precise accounting was made difficult because it was not altogether clear who should be counted in the first place. Many who lent their voices and money to the ACS concentrated on transporting free people of color, who were distrusted as both a source of lurking unrest and an unfortunate exemplar of black freedom that could spread to slave communities. Others rallied to colonization in millennial hopes of one day removing the stain of slavery from America's shores, not by abolishing bondage, but by incrementally shrinking the population of blacks. Colonization offered a flexible strategy for managing distinct black populations (free, enslaved, northern, southern) while also lumping all blacks into a single population. In either case, counting the black population and using statistics to project future rates of increase led white nationalists to believe that they were acting as white rationalists.
Yet population numbers, while at first reassuring, afforded anything but security. Statistics – the science of the state – seeks to tame the potential wildness of the people by construing them as a population. If a people cannot be counted, if they are literally incalculable, their behavior and future actions become incalculable as well. They have no known tendencies; their conduct defies predictable patterns. Efforts to count the people had gaps, and in the 1820s, as Patricia Cline Cohen argues in A Calculating People, what was not quantified and tabulated – “for instance, the number of slaveowners, Black mortality, female illiteracy”Footnote 60 – proved just as revealing as what was recorded. The lack of statistical information about black death reveals a lot about a society that persisted in ignoring the toll of its necropolitical practices. Black life, however, remained a biopolitical problem that white nationalists could not overlook. A Yale College professor's projection that “our colored population” will have increased from 757,178 in 1790 to 7,491,737 in 1870, as with other predictions about rates of increase, relied on the idea that statistics were essential to safeguarding the future. But these same data also fed the nightmare of white decline. The fragile reaction to the evidence of black biopower revealed how even modest mathematical calculations about colonization produced an affective remainder of terror. The political arithmetic that configured a population as racial data inevitably overran its limits in ways that neither the practical arrangements nor conceptual algorithms of colonization could handle.
With each year and every projected annual population increase, the data about the black population became more overwhelming. Quite simply, what were black people going to do? Were they going to steal, as the statistics from penitentiaries suggested to some? Were they going to become insane per the data from mental asylums? The 1840 census would demonstrate, helped along by a series of grave miscalculations and biased assumptions, that “the Black population in the North suffered from insanity at a rate more than ten times greater than Blacks in the South … The further north one went, the likelier it became for Blacks to be insane.”Footnote 61 Would the free population of the North disseminate insurrectionary ideas to enslaved persons in the South, as the frenzied reaction to Walker's Appeal alleged? Such questions at once invited and defied prediction, but one thing for certain was that the black population was going to keep increasing at an exponential rate.
JEFFERSONIAN TREMBLING
No better expression of this constant state of alarm and apprehension exists than Jefferson's famous admonition, which supporters of the ACS ritually repeated to urge action before it was too late: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events.”Footnote 62 This well-known admonition became a staple of colonizationist rhetoric, a last-ditch plea to avert a coming “white genocide.” Few have commented, then or now, on the degree to which Jefferson's entire meditation on the connection between white “passions” and white “tyranny” in Query XVIII of Notes on the State of Virginia rests on the mathematical sensibility of “considering numbers” amid the historical likelihood of “possible events.” If Jefferson identified the possible, the contingency of the future, as a problem, then white nationalists offered colonization as an algorithm to deal with these numbers and avert what would otherwise come to pass.
Jefferson's trembling constituted a frequent and affective topos in debates over colonization, invoked as a warning in ACS publications and also reactivated as an unfulfilled promise, even a threat, in black publications such as Freedom's Journal and Walker's Appeal. Jefferson's shudder did not yield the thrill of sublime terror that can be experienced at a safe distance. The obsessive attraction of Jefferson's warning among white nationalists and other anxious observers was far less aesthetic or philosophical than the Kantian or Burkean sublime: the encounter with data that come by “considering numbers” made white trembling over the prospect of black revolution more visceral and terrifying than a mere thought experiment. “Numbers” predicted a possibility that needed to be preempted. Although racial uprising, revolution, or other “exchange of situation” was by no means certain, there seemed to be a large enough data set – the black population itself – to hazard such fateful predictions. Reckoning with these statistics, Jefferson included whites in his calculations of racial upheaval by observing “that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour.” The ratio that ostensibly concerned Jefferson was the small class of poor slaveholders unable to loll about as landed gentry, but the real point of comparison was the number of whites compared to the blacks. As Jefferson averred elsewhere in the Notes, “Under the mild treatment our slaves experience, and their wholesome, though coarse, food, this blot in our country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites.” The revolution that had only seemed possible looked increasingly probable.
Jeffersonian trembling became a widespread affective condition by the late 1820s. Who “does not tremble for the political and moral well-being of a country, that has within its bosom, a growing population”?Footnote 63 The African Repository asked this question in its 4 July 1829 editorial, aligning colonization with the patriotic duty of white nationalists everywhere. In seeking support from Congress, the Kentucky Colonization Society set a scene full of Gothic trepidation by suggesting that Jefferson's fears would be realized in “the horrors of St. Domingo” soon to arise at home. “Those dreadful events foreboded by Mr. Jefferson” loomed more ominously after decades of relative inaction, and now the terror had only grown keener. If Jefferson wrote at a moment “when there were only about seven hundred thousand Blacks in the United States, how much more forcibly will they apply to the present, when there are probably not less than two millions and a half?” Jesse Burton Harrison, who could claim to have known Jefferson personally, raised this imponderable question in his 1827 address to the Lynchburg Colonization Society. He began dispassionately enough by considering numbers and observing that “in 1810, there were 30,000 and in 1820 there were 37,000 free Blacks in Virginia, an increase of about one fourth in ten years, which number would double itself, at that rate, in about 33 years.” Yet statistical predictions soon spiraled out of control by pointing to the imminence of a “corroding evil” that caused him to “tremble for the danger of a disaffection spreading through their seductions.”Footnote 64 Ratios and rationality, counting and calculation, made math truly terrifying for white nationalists.
An esteemed chemistry professor at Yale College fared little better when he considered the numbers. Professor Benjamin Silliman (whose name adorns a residential college at the university today) alluded to but preferred not to repeat the familiar topos of Jeffersonian trembling in his 4 July 1832 address to the Connecticut Colonization Society. Yet his remarks made clear that Jefferson's prophecy was on everyone's mind: “Who has not heard the memorable sentiments of Mr. Jefferson uttered more than half a century ago, and which are too familiar to need recital?” he asked.Footnote 65 Instead he simply proposed looking at the data to examine “the progressive increase of the colored population.”Footnote 66 But what he discovered nearly unhinged him (Figure 1).
The data set of black population increase that Silliman found so alarming.
With each passing decade, the future became more insecure, leading Silliman to foresee “the horrors of the first outburst of nocturnal massacre!”, the flower of white American youth cut down by “promiscuous butchery,” the atmosphere rent by “the shriek of terror and despair,” and the entire landscape become a “silent, bloody sepulcher.”Footnote 67 Yes, he admitted, blacks would suffer as well, but their biopolitical supremacy would mean that they would “care not for their own thousands and tens of thousands slain, for they have still new myriads to replace them.”Footnote 68 Wave after wave of black insurgents would overwhelm whites because blacks, from a statistical point of view, were literally an “overwhelming population” that in the space of four score years, from 1790 to 1870, would increase tenfold.Footnote 69
Silliman's math followed a logic of Malthusian displacement that viewed every black subject taking the spot of a potential white citizen.Footnote 70 Black numbers were increasing while white people, according to Silliman, were reproducing at a “lower ratio,” the two factors combining in an incipient expression of the twenty-first-century bugbear of a “white genocide.” In the political arithmetic where every addition to the black population meant one less white person, the overall net gain was +2 in favor of African Americans. Now translate this displacement to a population of millions. The increase of 600,000 blacks between 1820 and 1830, according to the table in Silliman's “Some Causes of National Anxiety,” thus also corresponds to a loss of 600,000 whites that otherwise would have been part of the republic had they not been displaced. The final tally, then, pushed the advantage to 1.2 million in favor of what Silliman's table (borrowed from Matthew Carey) possessively denominated as “our colored population.” Jefferson, who mentioned a knowledge of Malthus in letters, had accepted the notion of displacement by coupling his proposal that enslaved people “be colonized” with a plan to import whites to fill the resulting vacuum. While blacks were being sent elsewhere, American ships should be dispatched “at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants.”Footnote 71 Here, an aesthetic principle of balance subtends Jefferson's political arithmetic to ensure equilibrium lest the total population lack sufficient numbers for a stable racial economy.
A writer for the Christian Mirror echoed the discomfort that “a little calculation” caused. Numbers engendered uncontrollable affect: “The present slave population in the United States, is nearly two millions; and there is an annual increase of nearly fifty thousand; and their situation is such as engenders and fosters in their bosoms the most deadly hate to our institutions and ourselves.”Footnote 72 Each clause heightened the sense of peril, building to an irrevocable chain of events destined to end “same way that it was in Santo Domingo.” If enslaved persons were harboring thoughts of vengeance, what was transpiring in bosoms of white folks? “I tremble at the thought,” wrote this contributor to the Christian Mirror, channeling the nervous strains of Jeffersonian affect. Considering numbers, “we have just reason to fear,” he wrote. The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette recirculated this mathematical nightmare, and before long it landed on John B. Russwurm's editorial desk at Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper in the US. His decision to reprint it seemed to confirm what Silliman and other advocates of national security most feared: free people of color constituted a subversive communication circuit, spreading incendiary ideas with the power to connect black populations of the Atlantic world together in a fearful conspiracy. In his 4 July address on “Some of Causes of National Anxiety,” Silliman, like others of his generation, looked at the projected rates of Black population increase and wondered aloud whether “an African sceptre may not be reared and sustained” over America.Footnote 73
White nationalists intensified these concerns by pointing to specific locales across the Caribbean and slaveholding South where blacks outnumbered whites day in and day out. David Walker was only reiterating what ACS members already knew when he blandly remarked, “In some of the West-India Islands, and over a large part of South America, there are six or eight coloured persons for one white.”Footnote 74 As the columns of Freedom's Journal predicted four years earlier, “The tale of St. Domingo, with all its horrors, will be but infant's prattle” in comparison to a slave rebellion on American soil.Footnote 75 Herman Melville's debilitated captain, Benito Cereno, his frame wracked “with nervous suffering” and “almost worn to a skeleton,” exhibits the full set of symptoms brought on by this acute racial distress.Footnote 76 There is reason to his madness – specifically mathematical reason since aboard the San Dominick he has experienced the bloody consequences of being outnumbered and overrun by blacks. The subject who exhibited Jeffersonian trembling was reacting to racial excess, an unreconciled surfeit, that was simultaneously abstracted as a population and embodied in its blackness. But for this specifically American variant of the sublime, there would be no transcendence, no overcoming of the vulnerability that had come to define whiteness.
Despite frequent alarmist projections about the annual increase of free people of color and enslaved persons, rarely in the discourse of colonization do women and children appear in any significant way. Contributors to the African Repository sidestepped the indelicate question of how the master class participated in slave breeding. When Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey pledged to contribute a hundred dollars a year for ten years to promote the settlement of Liberia, the connection between population increase and enslaved black women's sexuality came into view but only obliquely. Looking at the “past ratio of the increase of the coloured population,” Carey predicted that their numbers “will in the year 1868, amount to above 10,000,000; in 1882, to 15,000,000 … Who can regard this enormous increase without affright? Who can consider any expense too great to avert the horrible consequences, with which it is pregnant?”Footnote 77 The sexualized brutality endemic to the slave economy added to white trembling: Carey's furtive and perhaps inadvertent allusion to reproductive capacity intimated the ever-present concern that in a not-too-distant future black biopower was sure to become ungovernable. For the time being, however, the arithmetical language of “natural increase” sanitized how the biopolitical regime of slaveholding derived both profit and pleasure from the bodies of black women.
Under “the biocapitalization of the female slave,” as Ingrid Diran explains, slaveholders extracted surplus capital from female reproduction, counting each new birth as a valuable addition to their “stock.”Footnote 78 Slave girls and women were “securitized as the promise of derivative values,”Footnote 79 hedging against the planter's financial risk through the human capital that was literally derived from women's bodies. In Slavery and the Numbers Game, a classic critique of economic historians who downplayed the vulnerability of women's sexuality under slavery, Herbert Gutman parsed the data to reveal slave-owners’ deep investments in fertility and increase in order for “the slave labor force to reproduce itself.”Footnote 80 Like others of the master class, Jefferson balanced his trembling with the callous appreciation that “enslaved Black women gave birth to white wealth,” in Adrienne Davis's words.Footnote 81 His relationship with Sally Hemmings gave him intimate knowledge of this fact, even if at core it is impossible to know exactly how Jefferson appraised the six children she bore. There is no getting around Davis's point that “the political economy of slavery systematically expropriated Black women's sexuality and reproductive capacity for white pleasure and profit.”Footnote 82 In a 17 January 1819 letter to one of his overseers, Jefferson fused black women's sexuality to political economy: “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that. A child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best labor man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our interests & our duties coincide perfectly.”Footnote 83 So fortunate did white men like Jefferson consider themselves that they viewed the biopolitical power they held over enslaved women's sexuality as consonant with the hierarchical order of the universe that accorded them their privilege. Increase was a demographic factor that they tracked impassively but intimately. Jeffersonian trembling, in short, was never that distant from economic gain and sexual violence.
Around the time that Jefferson was instructing his subaltern about the providential arrangements of white husbandry, he recorded in his correspondence and journal deep interest in the new social science of political economy that, by Foucault's account, introduced biopolitics and statistics to the art of governance. On 8 January 1819, a neighboring planter wrote to Jefferson to thank him for sending a recently translated edition of Destutt de Tracy's A Treatise on Political Economy.Footnote 84 Courtesy of Joseph Milligan, a bookseller whom Jefferson frequently patronized, a dozen copies of this work had arrived in Monticello earlier that winter. Milligan also confirmed that John Adams now had a copy at his home in Quincy, which he had sent along with a note explaining that the work “has been translated under his [Jefferson's] eye.”Footnote 85 Two years earlier, Jefferson had outlined a detailed prospectus for an English translation of de Tracy's research, promoting the book as the finest specimen from “the hands of the political sect in France called the Economists,” praising its distillation of “a comprehensive system on the Natural order of societies,” and providing a chapter breakdown that included “of Population” as a main heading. But in the context of slaveholding, political economy was always a “sexual political economy.”Footnote 86 For men like Jefferson, population increase was wondrous: here was a labor force whose ability to reproduce itself was uncontested biological fact. “Racial capitalism swung on a reproductive hinge,” as Walter Johnson states.Footnote 87 Jefferson had no difficulty with numbers when he reduced political economy to the simple but exemplary math of the singular female subject isolated under patriarchy: “I consider the labor of a breeding woman …” But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, “considering numbers” and trembling for one's country entailed calculations of a more complex and threatening order.
The statistics amassed in each city survey and federal census, compounded by projections about future rates of black increase, undercut illusions of white mastery. With more data came more uncertainty. To be sure, for much of the nineteenth century, the white inheritors of Jefferson's social order wielded terror over the people they bought and sold, tracked and separated from kin, raped and tortured. But they also inherited Jefferson's trembling, as they realized that the very demographics and composition of that social order spelled a threat. In an ominous distortion of the American Revolutionary ethos to democratize power, terror became widely dispersed, accessible to any white person worried about what the unregulated biopower of the black population meant for the nation's destiny. The racial fear that suffused the discourse of national security altered the vectors of terror. “Terror is not when some command and strike fear into others,” as Foucault recognized. Instead, he drew the opposite conclusion: “There is terror when those who command tremble with fear themselves.”Footnote 88 Jefferson shared this recognition, but he also provided an important supplement by intuiting how central race is to the biopolitics of terror.Footnote 89
Detractors of the colonizationist movement took notice of political arithmetic to accentuate these fears: from the 500,000 free persons of color that Freedom's Journal addressed in its inaugural issue to David Walker's assertion that there are “five or six hundred thousand Coloured persons” in Virginia, the simple enumeration of people as a population became a source of terror in its own right. For Walker, the attestation that 450,000 of Virginia's half-million blacks were ready to die if a race war erupted constituted one more piece of information tipping the scale toward an American Armageddon. And for Freedom's Journal, “the principles of freedom,” like black people themselves, “are too rapid in their growth” to hope that the “drizzling process of transporting two millions of people across the Atlantic” will lessen the overwhelming tide of racial revenge on the horizon.Footnote 90 Written when Freedom's Journal was barely a month old, this column raised what was unthinkable for whites: the alarming possibility that a population could act and behave not like a manageable data set, but like a people. Ultimately, then, Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish at Freedom's Journal and Walker envisioned collective prospects that went beyond heightening white insecurity. They were more than detractors, and their redeployment of biostatistical information first collected by whites provided the groundwork for collective self-recognition and shared purpose. When the editors of Freedom's Journal in their opening editorial “to our patrons” drew attention to “interesting fact that there are FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND free persons of colour,” they spoke to more than the prevailing media, “the press and the pulpit” that “daily slandered” black people; they were also announcing that this “medium of intercourse between our brethren in the different states of this great confederacy” could help propagate a different sort of nationalism. As Frances Smith Foster argues, “African Americans developed a print culture as one means of creating and nurturing their own individual and communal agendas.”Footnote 91 Early expressions of black nationalism encompassed more than a mere counterimage of the era's white nationalism. It is thus crucial to see black uses of political arithmetic as more than a challenge to colonizationist thinking lest whiteness remain at the center in ways that prevent black community from coming into view.
In short, the algorithms that drew together the black population as a conceptual category to justify surveillance and exile might be unraveled to promote thinking and acting like a people. Unlike a population whose size provides a data set large enough to make predictions to foresee what is probable, people do what is improbable. A population behaves according to established patterns and likely tendencies; people, in contrast, “do not really belong to the population.”Footnote 92 To whom, then, might they belong? What if they belonged to no one other than themselves? It was this possibility that white nationalists identified as a high-priority security matter, spurring them into action. Or, more exactly, they moved toward reaction, throwing their energies and charitable contributions behind a plan to curb, systemically diminish, and finally extirpate blackness from the total US population.
TREMBLING OVER “NOTHING”
No matter how prophetically 4 July orators spoke of a near-total removal of American blacks at some future day, colonization proceeded by fits and starts. Early in its two-and-a-half-year run, Freedom's Journal drew attention to the infeasibility of an experiment in population management designed “dispose of 30,000 Blacks in a year,” the minimum number thought to be required to keep the black population from growing any larger given statistical rates of increase. David Walker, who served as an authorized agent for the paper, pointed to regions of the South with sizable black majorities that caused whites to “quake and tremble.”Footnote 93 With the right amount of prodding, as these vocal contributors to a widening black public sphere discerned, this fear of increase could itself be increased. In their hands, biopolitical estimates of blackness contributed to a fraught emotional register that instilled uncertainty and contingency into the future that white nationalists endeavored to secure.
The population figures that set Jefferson and other white nationalists trembling inspired a very different set of affects in black print culture. Jefferson had no better interlocutor than Walker, who identified Notes on the State of Virginia, with its remarks about an impending racial cataclysm, as the virulent source code of American racism. When Walker claimed that “a much greater philosopher the world never afforded” than Jefferson,Footnote 94 he hinted at the formidable problem of overcoming this statesman's declaration about blacks’ place in the national future. Walker riffed on Jefferson's prophecy, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” inhabiting and transforming the locution so that it read, “But when I reflect that God is just, and that millions of my wretched brethren would meet death with glory.” If Jefferson wanted to “conside[r] numbers,” Walker promised to give him more than his fill. In an effort to restore his affective equilibrium, Jefferson told himself that “change” was “already perceptible” and that a solution without bloodshed, one that did not require the “extirpation” of slave-owners, lay on the national horizon. But with the numerical increase by the million referenced in his meditation on divine justice, Walker expressed impatience with the hazy timeline for “total emancipation” set out in the Notes and instead described the fixed resolve of blacks who are ready to “be torn into particles as minute as the atoms which compose the elements of the earth” and “shrink back into nothingness.”Footnote 95
At a time when counting and statistics fed into an early form of algorithmic governmentality, Walker commits to an altogether different calculus. Contemplating the infinitude of matter and the moment of its ultimate annihilation, he approaches terror without any of the recuperative energy that typically graces the subject's encounter with the sublime. “Nothingness” is a protest at once mathematical and ontological, emptying out the foundations of both numbers and existence. Above all, it represents a refusal to surrender one's body and being to biopolitical calculation. How can “nothingness” be counted? More than mere negation, this moment of provocation fits with Walker's rhetoric that both vacates and acknowledges “Black collective being,” in Stephen Best's reading.Footnote 96 When Walker declares, “For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead,”Footnote 97 he is not voicing resignation but rather an intention to withhold life from an extractive system of racial capitalism. His declaration is opposed to life only insofar as life becomes the property, quite literally, of biopolitics. As such, it stands in severe opposition to another document that Walker references, as he circles back to Jefferson one last time, specifically the assertions to life found in a “declaration made July, 4, 1776.”Footnote 98 He quotes Jefferson's language at length, stopping only when he reaches the assertion that people have the right “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” At this point, he interrupts, “see your Declaration Americans!!!”Footnote 99 He then continues, “Hear your language further! ☞” pointing readers to the same sentence that ends the previous passage he has just quoted, closing a second time with dark intimations about “future security.”Footnote 100 If security tries to tame the future, using biopolitical information to pin down and predict “aleatory events that occur within a population,”Footnote 101 “nothingness” makes that project forever incomplete and always uncertain – in a word, insecure.
