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Chapter 11: Colonization after Emancipation
- University of Missouri Press
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118 Lincoln’s colonization policies have always been a troublesome part of his legacy for historians to accept and analyze. Fredrickson touched a nerve in 1975 when, citing the Butler anecdote of a “colonization interview ” on the eve of Lincoln’s assassination, he wondered whether “Lincoln continued to his dying day to deny the possibility of racial harmony in the United States.”1 Historians have spilt hundreds of bottles of ink since that time attempting to prove or disprove the proposition, ever conscious of the moral gravity its answer could entail. The second wave of colonization programs after January 1, 1863, among them the highly developed British Honduras project, has been overlooked thus far, but it is also a part of Lincoln’s legacy. It escaped significant attention by accident, quite probably as the feud that consumed it also scattered its records and overshadowed its story. Incorporating it into the existent and well-developed colonization literature is accordingly a challenging and potentially disruptive task. The British Honduras project’s relationship to the “lullaby” thesis of colonization is perhaps its most readily apparent implication. This argument, which holds that Lincoln espoused colonization as a lullaby to make the Emancipation Proclamation politically acceptable, is contradicted by his administration’s active attempts to secure and establish colonization sites in the Caribbean well after January 1, 1863. In its typical formulation the lullaby thesis rests on the belief that Lincoln was insincere when he attached colonization to the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 and included it in his address to Congress that December. Rather, he only did so to ease the more radical final proclamation in January. This theory reduces colonization to an auxiliary function in a near-providential drive to the stand-alone policy of emancipation, at most an abandoned stepping -stone in Lincoln’s evolution of thought if not an outright ruse. After the proclamation, Lincoln’s colonization policy is assumed to have consisted Chapter 11 Colonization after Emancipation Colonization after Emancipation 119 of little more than the administrative fulfillment of the Île à Vache project’s obligations and, eventually, the rescue of its survivors in an act of benevolent resolution to a rejected policy. In addition to these requisite assumptions about Lincoln’s motives, the lullaby thesis depends upon the absence of colonization records after January 1, 1863. We find no evidence from the British Honduras colony or any of the lesser Caribbean projects to commend the lullaby thesis. Much to the contrary , they attest to the fault of the argument’s basic assumptions by illustrating Lincoln’s active pursuit of colonization throughout 1863. Lincoln’s actions in the weeks after his New Year’s Day announcement reflect a direct continuation of the West Indies “emigration” program he presented to Congress in December 1862, its development only immediately affected by the emancipation policy insofar as it rapidly expanded the population of “contrabands” to recruit. Lincoln’s conversations with Lyons and Hodge similarly signify his preoccupation with the southern contrabands intended for colonization by the Americans and desired by British canvassers for their agricultural skills. While irregular at times, Lincoln’s pursuit of the policy in British Honduras is also certain and specifically stated. He directly initiated it by way of a dialogue with Lyons in early 1863, and his personal intervention twice revived the negotiations after inaction and hostility from his subordinates over the following summer. The West Indies programs defy the lullaby thesis on at least one other count. To mollify northern fears of emancipation the conjectured strategy required a clear and public overture toward colonization. Lincoln’s December 1862 address to Congress serves this role only when it is also assumed that colonization ceased shortly after the proclamation. The West Indies projects continued for another year, and they were conducted in full secrecy for most of their existence. The diplomatic back channels of their negotiation had the effect of cloaking the effort, partly by design. If the secrecy was intended to palliate an anxious public, the people heard nothing of the scheme between Lincoln’s December 1862 address and September 1863, when Mitchell’s articles supplied its first substantive details to the press and Menard returned from Belize with reports for the black community. In the interval the British and American governments remained virtually silent. The press took only a passing notice of Hodge’s mission upon his arrival; none elaborated on its results; more often, they prematurely dismissed it.2 The corollary Dutch negotiations were kept even further...