Lincoln and Colonization

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Disunion December 4, 2012, 12:08 pm 56 Comments

Lincoln, Colonization and the Sound of Silence

By SEBASTIAN PAGE

On Dec. 1, 1862, a clerk delivered Abraham Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress. It appeared to be nothing special until halfway through, when, invoking an earlier promise to address Capitol Hill on compensated emancipation, Lincoln abruptly recommended three amendments to the Constitution. The first two were for federal compensation for any state that abolished slavery before 1900, and for those loyal masters whose slaves became free by the disruptions of war. The third was for an affirmation of Congress’s power to support the colonization of African-Americans.



The message was perplexing, a show of rhetorical fireworks – “we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth” – dampened by calculations of future population growth. While the president’s contemporaries focused their incredulity on his plans for gradual emancipation and compensation, scholars have struggled more with the third amendment: colonization.



That amendment, Lincoln argued, “Ought not to be regarded as objectionable,” because both Congress and would-be emigrants had to consent before the plan could work. Expressing his confidence in the eventual separation of the races, the president also criticized lurid fears that freedom would drive former slaves northward. Yet on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation that dropped all reference to compensation and colonization. Indeed, the president’s message of Dec. 1 would be his last ever public appeal for either notion, ideas that had peppered his oratory since the 1850s and underpinned his recent appeals to the border states to quit slavery. What happened?

Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation.Some argue the “lullaby thesis”: that Lincoln spoke of colonization merely to lull opponents of emancipation, who might punish the Republican Party at the polls. Accordingly, the president could go quiet on colonization in 1863, with the fall elections safely behind him and the emancipatory mission accomplished. Others acknowledge that Lincoln was sincere in his plan, but argue that the Proclamation represented a turning point in his thinking. Afterward, both sides argue, the president came to appreciate the impracticality, even immorality of expatriating African-Americans who could now fight for the Union.



The lullaby thesis is particularly appealing, since it helps excuse Lincoln, and since it is indisputably correct that the president appealed to the public for support. But isn’t that what politicians do, and mostly on behalf of measures in which they actually believe? Isn’t the problem that we can claim “it was a ruse” whenever a policy seems unsavory, even incomprehensible? Or that both a politically crafty and a perfectly sincere Lincoln would end up saying much the same thing? After all, Lincoln had advocated colonization long before confronting the issue of emancipation as president.



The case for Lincoln undergoing a change of heart is better, but it reads more like an explanation of why he should have dropped the idea of colonization, not an assessment of whether he actually did. It is questionable how much the temporary enlistment of a minority of African-Americans, or Lincoln’s growing estimation of black ability, soothed his doubts about the prospects of long-term, nationwide racial integration. And surely the president was not that taken aback by the results of his own Emancipation Proclamation, which he had planned for months, alongside a surge in colonization activity?



Clearly, it is easy to get bogged down in abstraction about the depth of Lincoln’s colonization convictions before and after Jan. 1, 1863. Fortunately, compelling evidence exists that he did not, in fact, stop thinking about or planning for colonization of African-Americans after signing the Emancipation Proclamation.



For starters, there are the impressions that Lincoln made on those who witnessed him in office. His secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, and the Indiana congressman George Julian both later doubted that Lincoln would have issued the preliminary proclamation, in September 1862, had he known that colonization would fall through. The German-American politician Carl Schurz, meanwhile, remembered an “earnest” president who “continued to adhere to the impracticable colonization plan even after the Emancipation Proclamation had already been issued.” None of this sounds like someone coolly manipulating the electorate with set-piece messages, or even someone just months away from dropping longstanding beliefs.



In fact, Lincoln didn’t stop at Jan. 1, 1863; he continued to pursue colonization unabated. It is not hard to spot historians’ sidestep in deploying statements like “Lincoln stopped talking about colonization” as substitutes for “Lincoln abandoned colonization,” thus leaving open the possibility that he continued to pursue it out of the spotlight. Surely this quiet activity makes him more sincere, especially where he could no longer derive the public relations benefit that the lullaby thesis demands?



Other historians are more cautious, interpreting the president’s silence on colonization as more of a sign of fast-dwindling interest. But aren’t we still in thrall to a rather “rhetorical,” 1862-focused debate, treating Lincoln like some kind of coal mine canary that just could not stop itself singing about colonization activity? Might we not apply Occam’s razor and suggest that the president consciously stopped issuing pro-colonization messages, because to do otherwise seemed to offer no further benefit for the time being, and not because he stopped believing in them himself?



By the very end of 1862, the overall public response, including Congress’s evident failure to begin work on his constitutional amendments, provided Lincoln plenty of reason to go underground with colonization. The president would later describe Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general and fervent colonizationist, as his “only friend” respecting the message. And indeed, what more could Lincoln say once he had called to modify the very charter of the nation in favor of colonization, and been apparently rejected?



Instead, the president resumed colonization planning on his own initiative, even before Jan. 1. Around that time, a pensive Lincoln approached a Treasury official and asked him to arrange an interview with a contractor for black resettlement in Texas. More significantly, at 9 p.m. on Dec. 31, 1862, Bernard Kock, the leaseholder for a potential colonization site, Île à Vache in Haiti, presented Lincoln with a contract for the resettlement of 5,000 “contrabands.” Kock later revealed that the president actually approved it the next morning, Jan. 1, 1863, shortly before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Considered alongside an anecdote of Robert Todd Lincoln that his father had never retired that night, we have an impression of Lincoln’s tremendous personal misgivings about emancipation without colonization.



The Île à Vache expedition challenges the notion of an 1863 transformation, not least because it represented the first and only federal African-American colonization venture to proceed. Many historians gingerly acknowledge it as an unthinking holdover from the heyday of colonization planning, but they overlook the fact that Lincoln signed a revamped contract and dispatched the settlers in April 1863, learned of their distress by July and yet recalled them only in February 1864. For him, clearly, colonization remained a viable idea. But far from flaunting this experiment to a racist public, the president desperately tried to keep it under wraps.



Indeed, Lincoln was perfectly able to work on colonization in 1863 and afterward without constantly issuing public updates. Using the broad powers delegated him by Congress in 1862, in a second wave of activity in 1863 he granted colonization recruiters privileged access to “contraband” camps, consulted pro-emigration African-Americans and initiated diplomatic negotiations with European empires to accept black settlers as labor for their tropical American colonies. Had Lincoln enjoyed greater success, or entertained fewer misgivings about private contractors, he could also have drawn on sizable appropriations.



Although Lincoln undertook such measures with greater secrecy than during the previous year, we shouldn’t downplay these official actions as merely “private” efforts. Moreover , he always hoped to reinforce such colonization arrangements with treaties, as he said in his second annual message, which would have involved a highly public ratification by two-thirds of the Senate. In retrospect that looks optimistic, but the president had assured an ally in November 1862 that he relished the prospect of further congressional discussion so that colonization could get off on the right foot. That sentiment tallies with the tone of his Dec. 1 message, an appeal to his audience to see sense. It also serves as a reminder that the second wave of activity marked an attempted, although ultimately abortive, scaling-up of colonization after New Year 1863, not its diminution.



By early 1864, faced with bureaucratic dysfunction, inadequate support and diplomatic complications, the president had no choice but to acquiesce in colonization’s stagnation. Yet Secretary Welles recalled that Lincoln had still “by no means abandoned his policy of deportation and emancipation.” In conjunction with the loss of many of the wartime records, the paper trail for a stalled policy thins out for the last year of Lincoln’s life, but it does not disappear.



On the other hand, nothing has emerged to prove that Lincoln ever repudiated colonization, even as angry voices in Congress challenged him to do just that. They did not interpret his continued silence as a tacit show of nascent racial egalitarianism, but simply as a sign that he had not changed his views. The closest thing to proof of rejection is a diary entry by John Hay, one of the presidential secretaries, on July 1, 1864: “the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization.” Probably inspired by Congress’s decision to repeal the relevant appropriations, Hay’s full entry reads less forcefully than its common excerption, hinting less at a tell-all conversation with Lincoln than at Hay’s own inferences from the effects of corruption. Evidence exists that the president actually considered the repeal clause an “unfriendly” rider to an otherwise needful budget bill.  The emigration commissioner James Mitchell.Lincoln’s colonization agent, James Mitchell of the Interior Department, reported at least one conversation with Lincoln in late 1864 about the future of the colonization policy, in which they agreed that the Confederacy’s mooted plan to enlist slaves provided reason enough to delay reviving it for now. Yet Mitchell alleged that Lincoln had also refused to accept his resignation pending a departmental shakeup and consultation with the attorney general, Edward Bates. That finds corroboration in a November 1864 communication from Bates, which also indicates that the president asked whether he could continue pursuing colonization even with the money gone.



Finally, Lincoln’s attachment to colonization resurfaces in Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s recollections of two April 1865 meetings, in which the men resumed a similar conversation of early 1863 about the policy. In recent decades, historians have seized on the account’s off-notes to dismiss it as a fabrication, usually arguing that Butler intended a favorable personal contrast with Lincoln by what sound like suspiciously anachronistic standards of race relations. Yet Butler’s story contains details that a liar would have struggled to know, and it inspired no objections from Lincoln’s surviving contemporaries. Much of the case against Butler also relies on caricature of a man who was actually “a kind of favorite with the President,” according to a White House secretary.


.But stepping back a moment, the assumption that Lincoln must have shunned colonization by 1865, and that the debate revolves around identifying its time of death, betrays a misplaced burden of proof and an incredibly narrow argumentative scope.



We can be defense lawyers, or we can be historians. We can deem Lincoln on trial, even though we know that colonization enjoyed widespread support in his day. We can dismiss perfectly consistent evidence as untruthful, or claim that “Honest Abe” did not mean what he said – for this policy alone. We can demand the benefit of the doubt as to whether Lincoln ceased colonization activity because he had dispensed with a political lullaby, changed his beliefs or had just encountered too many setbacks to carry on during wartime. But historians ask why we are so keen to cross the line into advocacy, and why this need to absolve Lincoln of pro-colonization thinking took shape only in the mid- to late 20th century.



Curiously, the strongest argument for the defense and the most intriguing line of historical inquiry both arise from the voluntary nature of Lincoln’s proposal to African-Americans. Alongside the low initial numbers of settlers that he planned for each scheme, the president inadvertently built remarkable damage limitation into his administration’s policy from the outset, given most blacks’ unwillingness to leave. That provides an easy way to minimize colonization’s significance, although to do so conflates intent and outcome. After all, colonies start small, under a fostering hand, and then grow beyond all original estimates; only hindsight tells us that a few hundred pioneers started something durable at Jamestown and nothing on Île à Vache. The total effort that Lincoln put into colonization refutes any suggestion that he foresaw just how unsuccessful he would be.



Taken together, the precondition of black consent and the persistence that characterized Lincoln’s approach to colonization point to lifelong expectations that significant numbers of African-Americans would eventually choose to depart the United States. While many historians have interpreted the more upbeat parts of his second annual message as a coded attack on colonization, Lincoln really directed his fire at doom-laden prophecies about the domestic results of emancipation; partly, such concerns were hyperbolic, he said, because an “augmented, and considerable migration” would take African-Americans to more “congenial climes.” His overall argument was close, and it certainly covered the bases, but even a serious supporter of colonization had to adjust his message to the undeniable fact that the policy had not yet delivered.



As an assessment of seemingly intractable white prejudices, Lincoln’s supposition that African-Americans would simply want to go elsewhere might appear valid; his administration’s provisions to that end laudable. But as abolitionists charged, such resignation to others’ racism actually perpetuated, even validated, the effects of that prejudice, and allowed colonizationists to avoid political and ideological dilemmas about furthering the cause of racial integration.



The idea of colonization, and Lincoln’s long relationship to it, reminds us that abstract categories and distinctions sometimes break down in historical practice. Lincoln was relatively devoid of personal prejudice, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t incorporate prejudice into his thinking. Likewise, colonization may well have been “unrealistic,” but that doesn’t mean that its enigmatic appeal didn’t impinge on other, down-to-earth policies.

Sources: Roy P. Basler, ed., “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”; Blair Family Papers, Library of Congress; Gabor S. Boritt, “Did He Dream of a Lily-White America?” in “The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon”; “Statement of Facts … of a Colony under Bernard Kock”; Michael Burlingame, ed., “Inside Lincoln’s White House” and “Inside the White House in War Times”; Benjamin F. Butler, “Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences”; Lucius E. Chittenden, “Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration”; Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 12, 1935; Eric Foner, “The Fiery Trial”; Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Phillip W. Magness, “Benjamin Butler’s Colonization Testimony Revaluated,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 29, 2008, and “James Mitchell and the Mystery of the Emigration Office Papers,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 32, 2011; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Colonization and the Myth That Lincoln Prepared the People for Emancipation” in “Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered”; Phillip S. Paludan, “Lincoln and Colonization: Policy or Propaganda?”, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 25, 2004; Allen T. Rice, “Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln”; Carl Schurz, “Abraham Lincoln” and “Reminiscences”; Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of State, National Archives II; Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of the Treasury, National Archives II; Gideon Welles, “Administration of Abraham Lincoln.”





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Sebastian Page is a junior research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, co-author of “Colonization after Emancipation,” and author of “Lincoln and Chiriquí Colonization Revisited.” He thanks Phillip Magness.



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