Even benevolent colonizationists attacked abolitionists while sparing proslavery ideologues to keep enslavers’ goodwill

Evidence

Thomas Roderick Dew’s Review accomplished in enslaving circles what Garrison’s Thoughts accomplished in abolitionist circles. “After President Dew,” who became president of the College of William & Mary in 1836, “it is unnecessary to say a single word on the practicability of colonizing our slaves,” said one South Carolinian. The ACS did its best to fight back. In November 1832, ACS secretary Ralph Gurley argued that “it is not right that men should possess freedom, for which they are entirely unprepared, [and] which can only prove injurious to themselves and others.” Gurley’s piece, in the ACS’s journal, was the opening volley in a nasty ACS counteroffensive against immediate abolitionists that took place on the lecture circuit, from the pulpits, in the colleges, in the newspapers, and in the streets with mobs. Still trying to woo enslavers over to the cause, the ACS did not wage a similar offensive against Thomas Roderick Dew or the slaveholders he represented. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 467