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Chapter 1: The Curious Politics of Colonization
- University of Missouri Press
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1 “Without being an enthusiast, Lincoln was a firm believer in colonization .” This was the assessment given to him by presidential secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay in a duly celebrated 1890 biography of their late employer.1 The colonization of freed slaves, to either Africa or the tropics of Central America and the Caribbean, featured prominently in Abraham Lincoln’s formative beliefs on race and slavery. Enabled by a $600,000 appropriation from Congress, Lincoln aggressively pursued the policy in the early part of his presidency. Lincoln was by no means the first president to advocate colonization. The idea dated to the revolutionary period, when many of the nation’s founding fathers grappled with the troublesome place of slavery in a country ostensibly founded on the concept of natural equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Writers from Thomas Jefferson to Alexis de Tocqueville openly expressed vexation over the multiracial future of the North American continent should emancipation ever come. Many leading political figures, Jefferson among them, turned to colonization as a corollary to emancipation. Other early colonizationists included such notable personalities as James Madison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Francis Scott Key, and Bushrod Washington, nephew of the first president. A variety of motives—political, economic and humanitarian—drove these men to advocate the separation of the races, imbuing the movement with an ambiguous raison d’être that confounded contemporaries no less than it does scholars today. It received an institutional face in 1816 with the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) whose official policy of removing consenting free blacks, dating from 1822, to its West African progeny, Liberia, gave rise to vastly differing interpretations. The core of the movement was always self-styled moderates, particularly of the border slave states and lower North, who were quietly looking to ease Chapter 1 The Curious Politics of Colonization 2 Colonization after Emancipation the processes of gradual emancipation or individual manumissions by offering the critical quid pro quo of the expatriation of the African Americans thus freed. This would remove not only what most agreed was both a social and political evil, but also one of the stumbling blocks to conservative antislavery . The mainstream colonizationist rationale was an ambivalent one, best viewed through the lens of Enlightenment environmentalism, even into the nineteenth century. According to its misguided philanthropy, the same freedman population whose very presence inflicted only misery upon both black and white in America (due to the explosive mixture of a ‘superior ’ and an ‘inferior’ race) could better itself once placed in Africa and bring Christianity and republicanism to that continent. Not that this middling position satisfied all. Early federal sponsorship of the ACS in its labors of resettling ‘recaptives,’ the rescued victims of the illegal transatlantic slave trade, came under scrutiny as soon as Andrew Jackson came into office, and although it had many prominent friends, bills for U.S. government assistance in other aspects of its work would henceforth fail. Slaveholders of the lower South, who had shown some initial interest in removing the already free blacks alone, had quickly wised up to the slippery implications of the ACS’s definition of “free people of color.” From the 1830s their objections were backed by nascent proslavery theory , which upheld the benefits of the institution for all involved. The more painful attack on the movement though, emerging around the same time, came from the other wing, as immediatist abolitionists demanded universal emancipation without conditions attached and decried the justification of racial prejudice which underpinned colonization. The movement survived due to some disciplined management at the society headquarters and thanks to the existence of state auxiliary organizations which had a freer hand in their work and self-presentation, but they were painful years nonetheless. One of the interesting outcomes of the sectional tension of the late 1840s and 1850s, however, was the countervailing drive for political moderation that it produced in the broad middle of the political spectrum, leading to a resurgence of interest in colonization with its appealing flavor of the apparent unanimity of idealized earlier times. It is questionable, however, how much the ACS itself benefited politically from this. While it enjoyed increased donations, testamentary bequests of slaves for manumission on condition of removal, and a great deal of lip service, its dominant clerical and humanitarian element was still cautious about venturing into politics. Many of the key proponents of this second wave of colonization were midwesterners rather than easterners of either...