| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.4

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. By Eric Burin. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005. xiv, 223p. Tables, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95.)
Renewed interest in American abolitionism has prompted new questions about one of the most controversial racial reform movements of the antebellum era: the American Colonization Society (ACS). Was it a front for slaveholders or a legitimate antislavery group? Eric Burin's fine new study offers one of the most insightful treatments of colonization in years. His cogent and provocative book makes a substantial case for colonization's centrality to antebellum political and cultural debate. Though he acknowledges that most contemporary scholars doubt colonizationists' antislavery objectives and that the majority of African Americans opposed ACS strategies through the Civil War era, Burin claims that the American Colonization Society did indeed "undermine slavery" (p. 2).	1
Burin rests his claim on a massive database of roughly six thousand slaves-turned-ACS-emigrants and their "manumitters," as he calls the 560 masters who liberated them on condition that they move to Africa (free people of color further swelled the ranks of black expatriates). Although not explicitly dedicated to southern abolition, the ACS became enmeshed in local struggles against bondage (primarily but not exclusively in the upper South) that ultimately illustrated blacks' desire for freedom.	. . .

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