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55 A combination of Hodge’s personal presence in Washington, D.C., and the simple timeliness of his approach made the British Honduras scheme the most developed of Lincoln’s second wave of colonization projects, those in which the partnership of foreign governments would be sought as a surety against the pitfalls of the 1862 negotiations and the corruption of the Île à Vache contract. Its shadow, though a meager part of a historical literature that has tended to neglect all postemancipation colonization programs, could easily obscure other contemporary projects of a similar purpose. Two such efforts, one in British Guiana and a similar program in neighboring Dutch Surinam, replicated the familiar design of the Honduras policy wherein the United States attempted to negotiate an agreement with established European powers to designate specified northern port cities as points of emigration and, from each, induce a voluntary mass migration of the freedmen’s population to the Caribbean. Guiana somewhat paralleled Hodge’s negotiations, albeit with a different political strategy, while Surinam developed through the entirely independent channels of the State Department. Both bear discussion, as they illustrate a long-forgotten component of the colonization story as well as the comprehensive intent of its “emigration” phase, announced to Congress by Lincoln in December 1862. From the perspective of the American records, Guiana takes something of a backseat compared to British Honduras in the negotiations with the Lincoln administration, with Dickson appearing to attach himself to Hodge’s efforts in May or June 1863. But this is not entirely deserved. If anything, Guiana had paid attention to events in the U.S. too early, Walker’s mission being more premature than ill-conceived. The colony continued to show interest after Hodge and the BHC started to look elsewhere for labor, culminating in an April 1864 proclamation of the three aforementioned ports per the 1863 agreement. Guiana reached this point under different circumstances from British Honduras, however. Chapter 6 A Self-Supporting Scheme 56 Colonization after Emancipation Governor Hincks, like others in the colonial and diplomatic services, had his misgivings about the prospects of emigration. His opening letter on the matter to the Duke of Newcastle expressed doubts that America’s black population could be checked by removal and wondered what the appeal of the colonies could be when America had so much uncultivated land in need of development. This was an especially pertinent question, since what Britain offered would involve free men having to tolerate being placed under minimum three-year indenture unless they could pay their passage.1 His instructions to Walker stressed the need to downplay the significance of the indenture system: he was to dismiss it as purely about reimbursement of the share of passage paid by the planter, as well as to present it as beneficial to the laborer due to the body of protective laws that it entailed.2 The pamphlet that Walker brought to distribute in the United States, The Emigration of the Emancipated Negroes to British Guiana, was written in such vein. Not that Hincks was averse to schemes of freer migration, though, suggesting a government-backed system of internal “colonization” of Guiana’s virtually empty frontier. In this model, settlers would receive title to the soil after a series of generously spaced repayments amounting to no more than the actual cost of house and land. It was only experimental, and he acknowledged that it did involve a massive initial hurdle of requiring settlers pay travel costs out of their own pockets. But he was enthusiastic, and it had clearly been a pet project of his for a while: “I had worked out the details of such a scheme for the benefit of the poor whites of Barbados [his previous posting] . . . the essence of such a scheme is that it should be self-supporting . . . in the peculiar circumstances of this Colony its advantage to the Creole population would be almost beyond conception.”3 This was a more enlightened vision than the Guyanese planters were amenable to receiving. The colony’s survival in the face of cheap slave-grown sugar—where other now-free producers of the foodstuff had struggled desperately to remain competitive—was founded on the maintenance of a plantation labor force short of slavery but enforced by strict discipline, limitations on the size of Creole settlements (to bring hands back to the plantation ), and an even harsher indenture system from 1854.4 By this point the old absentee landlords had mostly gone to the wall...

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