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  • Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement
  • K. Stephen Prince
Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement. Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8262-1909-1, 178 pp., cloth, $34.95.

Abraham Lincoln, W. E. B. DuBois famously stated, was “big enough to be inconsistent.” In Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page force readers [End Page 408] to confront that inconsistency on every page. Based on research in both British and American archives, they have uncovered an important new chapter in the story of emancipation. Historians have long recognized Lincoln’s enthusiasm for the resettlement of African Americans outside the United States, but Magness and Page offer convincing evidence that Lincoln’s embrace of colonization lasted much longer than previously thought. Well into 1863, months after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln hoped to entice the freed people to leave the country and worked to achieve that result.

Colonization after Emancipation, according to the authors, is “the largely untold story of Lincoln’s last major attempt to colonize the freed slaves abroad” (viii). In fact, the authors discuss three understudied Central American colonization schemes, each of which occupied Lincoln’s attention after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The best-developed plan focused on the British colony of Honduras. Desperately in need of free laborers, Honduran planters began making overtures to the Lincoln administration in 1862. Negotiations between the British and American governments on a voluntary colonization scheme stretched into late 1863, coming remarkably close to fruition before collapsing. Discussions regarding a second British colony, Guiana, remained largely hypothetical but continued into 1864. A third would-be colonization site, the Dutch colony of Suriname, also received consideration in the months after emancipation. After the failure of better-known resettlement efforts at Chiriquí (Panama) and Île à Vache (near Haiti), these three sites together comprised a “second wave” of wartime colonization efforts, “wherein the United States would enter into partnership with foreign governments to encourage the emigration of free blacks to designated sites in the Caribbean” (10). A combination of political squabbling (Magness and Page detail an extended feud between John Usher, secretary of the interior, and James Mitchell, commissioner of emigration) and a lack of interest among African Americans eventually doomed the colonization programs.

By necessity, Colonization after Emancipation showcases some fine historical detective work. Because traditional American sources are largely silent on the extensive discussions surrounding Honduras, Guiana, and Suriname, this second wave of wartime colonization has remained almost entirely invisible to historians. The authors have constructed a narrative rooted in British sources, American consular records, and the hitherto largely unexamined personal papers of emigration commissioner Mitchell. As such, Colonization after Emancipation boasts something highly unusual in the crowded world [End Page 409] of Lincoln studies: an untapped trove of documentary evidence with which to assess Lincoln’s views on slavery, race, and emancipation.

The authors take aim at the two most common historiographical views of Lincoln and colonization. The first, which the authors dub the “lullaby” argument, posits that Lincoln’s public discussion of colonization in the run-up to the Emancipation Proclamation was actually a clever ruse to disarm northern racists. In this reading, Lincoln never truly intended to encourage black expatriation, but hoped that his talk of colonization would calm “the public’s anxiety about emancipation” and buy him time “to prepare them for a more egalitarian racial future” (8). The second explanation suggests that Lincoln experienced a racial “change of heart” around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, moving from a belief in the necessity of racial separation to a cautious optimism regarding the future of African Americans in the United States (9). Clearly, that Lincoln continued to promote colonization schemes after the Emancipation Proclamation poses serious problems for both theses. Why would Lincoln continue with this colonization lullaby if his true goal—emancipation—had already been achieved? And if Lincoln’s racial viewpoint had truly shifted (as “change of heart” advocates insist), why would he continue to advocate colonization into 1863 and...

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