“An Impossible Idea?”: The Curious Career of Internal Colonization

In the summer of 1865, newspapers across the United States reported an unexpected twist in the Ohio gubernatorial election. The Republican candidate, Gen. Jacob Dolson Cox, had come under pressure from the state’s Democratic newspapers to reveal his position on black suffrage. Democrats suspected the worst. Cox was a graduate of Oberlin College, perhaps the most racially progressive institution in the nation, and a confirmed opponent of slavery. (He was also the son-in-law of Oberlin’s crusading president, Charles Grandison Finney.) During his years as a state senator before the war, Cox had opposed the Fugitive Slave Act, urged clemency for John Brown and his associates, and voted against a bill to outlaw intermarriage in Ohio. He had fought under Sherman in the Atlanta campaign, and he seemed destined for a national political career.

At the end of July, a group of Oberlin residents—perplexed by Cox’s silence—wrote the general for clarification of his views. Cox’s reply took everyone by surprise. In what became known as his “Oberlin Letter,” Cox proposed to “take contiguous territory in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida” and “organize the freedmen in a dependence of the Union analogous to the Western territories.” Cox had several suggestions for how blacks might be persuaded to move to this new territory without physical coercion, including the award of suffrage rights to those who consented to the separation. But he was clear that the problem of black political involvement—which he held to be at the heart of Reconstruction—required geographical as well as legal redress. “It seems to me,” he concluded, “that the solution I have offered rids us of most of the difficulties in our way.”¹

The Oberlin Letter has received little attention from historians for two reasons: It goes far beyond what we consider conventional wisdom about Reconstruction, and it seems to have had very little impact on the national debate about rights and race. The Boston Transcript maintained in August 1865 that Cox was “under a strange hallucination” and that he was merely trying “to revive the exploded idea of the colonization of the blacks.” Thaddeus Stevens, writing to a friend in Ohio about Cox’s scheme, was crushingly blunt: “The segregation of the blacks—their colonization—is an impossible idea.” Cox’s proposals created a brief sensation in the summer of 1865, then made no headway in Congress. But the letter was neither sui generis nor delusional. Instead, it was only the latest in a series of proposals for “internal” colonization, dating back to the earliest days of the United States, and it focused ideas about race and place that were urgently circulating during the war years.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians of the Civil War era have become much more willing to take seriously the continuing appeal of external colonization in the 1850s and 1860s and to challenge the assumption that emancipation necessarily made colonization obsolete. But a similar logic also informed proposals for racial resettlement within the boundaries of the United States. Some were explicitly racist, promoted by white politicians seeking relief from the prospect of racial integration. Others, though, were focused on the immediate needs of freedpeople: for land, in particular, but also for security from hostile whites.²

This essay situates the Oberlin Letter within a spectrum of plans for black resettlement after emancipation. Against this backdrop, we can understand why Cox believed racial separation could be secured without threat to his liberal conscience and why he imagined his proposal would win widespread support. The essay also considers how African Americans navigated a complex landscape in which land redistribution, self-determination, and segregation might be uncomfortably juxtaposed. Finally, we will weigh the influence of internal colonization on Reconstruction more generally. In 1867, Cox complained to a friend that he had managed “to influence nobody” on the suffrage question. The legislative trajectory of Radical Reconstruction, which diverged from the course marked out by the Oberlin Letter, seems to confirm his pessimism. But the sheer number of resettlement ideas in circulation during the first half of...