Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, University of Missouri Press, 2011, 164 pp., $28.00 (softcover)
Abraham Lincoln is revered as one of the greatest heroes of American history. His face is on Mount Rushmore and he has a magnificent memorial in Washington DC. There are more schools named for him than for George Washington. Seventeen American counties are named for him, and he has appeared on more than 30 different postage stamps (Washington has been on more than 60 and Ben Franklin on more than 40). His face is on the penny and the five-dollar bill.
Lincoln defeated the Confederacy, but today, he may well be even more admired as the “Great Emancipator” who freed the slaves. This makes Lincoln’s views of blacks a great embarrassment for historians. None can ignore his June 26, 1857 explanation of why he opposed admitting Kansas as a slave state:
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races . . . . A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together.
This passage from his 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas is just as straightforward:
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
Lincoln thought slavery was immoral and should be abolished, but he believed that the only solution to the “negro problem” was racial separation. He was active in the Illinois branch of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, to “colonize” free blacks by sending them out of the United States.
It is well known that during the war, Lincoln actively looked for ways to colonize free blacks. In his first message to Congress, on December 3, 1861, he called for a budget to settle blacks outside the United States, and Congress voted $600,000 for this purpose. To put this into perspective, the entire federal budget the previous year had been a little over $60 million......
Whatever justification Lincoln may have had for going to war to preserve the Union, this book leaves no doubt about his views on race. As the authors write: “Lincoln sought an answer to the dominant question at the end of his presidency, the future of race relations in the United States.” In this, he showed great wisdom of a kind his successors have lacked. President Ulysses S. Grant negotiated a treaty to annex Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), in part, to serve as a haven for American blacks. The treaty failed in the Senate in 1870, largely because many Senators did not want to absorb a mixed-race territory and feared that the flow of non-whites would be into the United States, not out.
America’s inability to solve “the dominant question” at the end of the war was a matter of will. Few whites would have disagreed with Lincoln when he told a delegation of blacks in 1862:
You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.
We continue to suffer. We suffer worse than ever. Yet many Americans now deny their suffering and even claim that “diversity is our greatest strength.”
