On July 15, Birney wrote a long letter to the secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society to resign as its vice president; the letter was published as Letter on Colonization, addressed to the Rev. Thornton J. Mills in a pamphlet by the AASS shortly after. At its conclusion, he notes that the views contained in it “are my own, and they have been the result of my own reading, observation and thought.” Significantly, he states his primary reason for resigning and renouncing colonization is the lack of consent by the very people to be colonized. By reading Walker’s Appeal and other Black anti-colonization arguments, Birney came to understand that compelled colonization was not in the interest of free Black people and that free consent was necessarily impossible under the circumstances of slavery and racism. In his letter he decries colonization as “the refinement of inhumanity, a mockery of all mercy, it is cruel, unmanly, and meriting the just indignation of every American, and the noble nation that bears his name.”
At the conclusion of Walker’s anti-colonization argument, he points Americans to the Declaration of Independence’s key statement about equality and rights—“See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?”—before inserting it with emphatic typographical emphasis: “We hold these truths to be self evident—that ALL men are created EQUAL!! That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!”
In Birney’s copy, a pencil mark in the margin next to this passage suggests its importance to him recognizing in his 1834 letter—using very Walker-like reasoning and language—that there could be no free consent to relocate to Africa as long as US law left Black American men’s “property, his person, his wife, his children, and all that God has by his very constitution made dear to him, unprotected from the outrage and insult of every unfeeling tyrant.”
In concluding the letter on colonization, Birney declared that he was “a member of no anti-slavery society—nor have I any acquaintance, either personally or by literary correspondence, with any of the northern abolitionists.” Less than a year later, he was appointed as one of the AASS’s vice presidents. A particularly interesting set of pamphlets published in 1834 likely informed Birney’s rapid and radical evolution to play a leading role in the AASS. Importantly, two of the pamphlets confirm strong Black support for the fledgling AASS, founded in 1833.