Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (review)

Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page’s Colonization after Emancipation challenges what the authors consider the two main Lincoln portraits. The first, which they dub the “‘lullaby’ thesis,” held by Gabor Boritt and James McPherson, suggests that Lincoln mollified an anxious northern public by maintaining that freedpeople would ultimately be colonized outside the United States, although Lincoln himself never took the prospect seriously. The “change of heart” thesis, a second reading advanced by Eric Foner and the late George Fredrickson, asserts that Lincoln’s racial views changed as the Civil War progressed, thus causing him to abandon colonization. In Fredrickson’s version, the valor of black soldiers spoke forcefully to contemporaries on blacks’ fitness for citizenship. According to both theses, Lincoln effectively ended plans for the colonization of African Americans after January 1, 1863.

In this slender book the authors argue that Lincoln’s colonization plans persisted long after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and remained in place until his death. While scholars have long noted the administration’s two unsuccessful forays into colonization in the Chiriquí (Panama) and the Île à Vache (Haiti) projects, the authors state that efforts to secure agreements with British Honduras (Belize), British Guiana (Guyana), and Dutch Guiana/Surinam (Suriname) between 1863 and 1865 constituted a “second wave of colonization” that is largely ignored in most historical scholarship. “Curiously,” write Magness and Page, “the instigating causes of their eventual abandonment had little to do with an Emancipation Proclamation–induced change of heart in Lincoln’s thinking, or the exhaustion of the ‘lullaby’s’ political purpose. Rather, the West Indies strategy died amidst bitter political infighting between Lincoln’s subordinates within the bureaucracy of the Interior Department, and a related decision of Congress to repeal the colonization budget” (11).

In its eleven brief chapters, Colonization after Emancipation moves more or less chronologically through several phases of the Lincoln administration’s relationship to black colonization. The first half outlines the efforts of a number of individuals and agencies involved in moving black Americans to labor-starved British Honduras. Spearheaded by the dubious character John Hodge, a cutthroat merchant-planter, the British Honduras Company (BHC) was an organization devoted solely to land speculation. The authors suggest that despite a promising beginning, opposition from Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, ended the project. Stanton had many reasons to oppose the BHC scheme, but a need for black laborers and soldiers was chief among them. Bureaucratic delay, international red tape, and utter confusion appeared to play large parts in the unfolding tale. And regardless, willing black emigrants needed to undertake such an endeavor never appeared.

The authors highlight separate negotiations, following the 1863 breakdown of emigration talks with British Honduras, between the Lincoln administration, British Guiana, and Dutch Surinam. While much of the story is told from the position of Guiana officials, it does not appear that stern opposition from Lincoln’s administration doomed the venture so much as a lack of black support. Whereas British Honduras was “the most developed of Lincoln’s second wave of colonization projects” (55), according to the authors, the subsequent plans as revealed here are less clear, appear more confused, and seem to die even quicker deaths.

The authors illustrate the failures of a paranoid bureaucracy in a time of war through the feuding practices of Emigration Office head James Mitchell and John P. Usher, secretary of the interior. The rivalry played out before a Senate embittered by reports of black emigrants suffering from Île à Vache. Congress repealed the colonization fund, putting an end to Mitchell and his office by mid-1864. The authors posit that the emigration policy had “succumbed to a simple yet pronounced breakdown in bureaucratic government” (95).

Given the work’s rather forceful claims, a significant concern is the authors’ use of evidence. Sources are generally thin, uneven in quality...