author
William Coppinger
1828–1892
An English-born American writer and longtime secretary of the American Colonization Society, he published a stream of late-19th-century pamphlets on Africa, Liberia, and colonization. His work offers a direct window into a movement that shaped public debate in the United States for decades.
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About the author
Born in London on March 18, 1828, he came to the United States as a child. Contemporary notices say he entered the office of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society in 1838, when he was only ten, and stayed connected to colonization work for the rest of his life.
Coppinger later became a leading officer of the American Colonization Society, serving as its secretary and, according to archival descriptions, also rising to secretary-treasurer and serving the Pennsylvania Colonization Society. Library records identify him as the author of pamphlets including The Race for Africa, A New World, New Africa, Winning an Empire, and Progress in Africa, as well as a translation of Johann Jakob Scheffmacher's The Polemic Catechism.
He died on February 9, 1892. Today he is remembered mainly through those pamphlets and society records, which place him at the center of 19th-century American colonization advocacy and writing about Liberia and Africa.