Although the idea of Africa as a homeland waned as more and more enslaved and free blacks were born in the United States, the idea of Africa as that which makes blacks distinctive remained. During the beginning of the nineteenth century, blacks and whites debated the merits of wholesale emigration to and colonization of the motherland.

In 1816, Robert Finley, a white Presbyterian abolitionist who nevertheless held blacks in low esteem, proposed shipping all freed blacks back to Africa. Congress joined the debate when Speaker of the House Henry Clay urged Finley to stop undermining the colonization proposal, which was seen as the answer to the problem of insurrections caused by free blacks, by calling it an abolitionist cause.

Edward Blyden, born in the Dutch West Indies, came to America in 1850 to study for the ministry. Denied the opportunity, he left for Liberia, where he became a Presbyterian missionary agent. Blyden came to discern in blacks a distinctive racial genius that deserved to be preserved and cultivated. Blending his own historical research with the work of other black intellectuals, he argued that slavery had been ordained by Providence to prepare African-Americans for the task of redeeming their ancestral continent.

Martin Delany was to become antebellum America's most famous emigrationist. Born in western Virginia of a free mother and a slave father, Delany grew up in Pennsylvania, where he converted to the AME church. In the late 1840s he joined Frederick Douglass' publication, The North Star. Initially, he opposed colonization, but his faith in his homeland dissipated after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. He then advocated emigration to Central and South America. In 1859, he left the United States and set out to find a place where African-Americans could fully develop their faculties and exercise self-government.