Success Quote by Lewis Tappan

The sentence dresses itself in benevolence, but its real work is managerial: it turns Black people into a “population” to be handled and Africa into a problem to be “promised” a fix. Lewis Tappan, a Northern businessman and prominent abolitionist, is speaking in the key of 19th-century reform that often sounded humanitarian while keeping tight control over who counts as fully belonging. “Brethren” signals Christian kinship and moral urgency, yet the kinship is carefully routed away from American citizenship and toward export.

The context is the colonization movement, which promoted sending free Black Americans to West Africa (Liberia) as a supposed solution to slavery’s aftermath and white anxiety. Tappan’s phrasing gives away the double audience: reassure white Americans that Black presence can be reduced, while offering Black Americans a backhanded “benefit” framed as uplift. The line “not without its beneficial effect” is a classic hedge; it anticipates objections and pre-emptively varnishes coercion with the language of improvement.

The most telling move is the pivot from people to places: “these brethren” land “upon our shores,” but the shore is still “our” possession. Black agency is grammatically minimized, submerged under the “event” itself, as if history is happening to them rather than being made by them. “Ill-fated Africa” completes the moral alibi. By casting Africa as doomed and America as the staging ground for salvation, Tappan can advocate a policy that looks like compassion while functioning as a racial safety valve: abolish slavery, keep the nation white, and call it philanthropy.