Lincoln’s Colonization Plan and the Political Realities of Emancipation
“Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.”
~ “Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men,” Washington, DC, August 14, 1862
~ “Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men,” Washington, DC, August 14, 1862
The question of Abraham Lincoln’s personal views on the plight of slaves and his real motives for emancipation have long divided biographers and historians. Some authors, such as Lincoln’s first biographer, Josiah Gilbert Holland, have elevated the 16th president to the level of sainthood--what Phillip Shaw Paludan deemed “Jesusifying” (Paludan). According to this perspective, Lincoln’s motives for emancipating slaves were pure and morally-driven; the actions of a good man who saw slavery as a “great wrong.” Still, others have vilified Lincoln as a racist. Lerone Bennett’s Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, depicts Lincoln as a white supremacist, unworthy of the title “Great Emancipator” (Bennett). To Bennett, Lincoln’s “Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men” advocates for separation of the races and the removal of freedmen to Africa or Central America. The attempt to uncover Lincoln’s real attitudes and feelings on the subject of slavery are intertwined with the evolving politics of race following the Civil Rights Era. Ultimately, the true motives and feelings of Abraham Lincoln are subject to historical interpretation--interpretation that often expresses the context of the biographers, rather than the historical context of the times in which Lincoln lived. Carefully using authentic primary source documents crafted by Lincoln himself can shed some light on his views and present Lincoln as a forward-thinking man motivated not by saintliness or bigotry but by the political necessities of the day. President Lincoln’s August 14, 1862 “Address on Colonization” illuminates his efforts to find a constitutional way to satisfy the “free soil” base of the Republican Party, address the consequences of a soon-to-be growing pool of newly freedmen in a society that hated and feared them, and reconcile the incongruity of slavery in a democratic republic.
Editorial Cartoon "Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Free Soiler," 1856
As a self-made man living in Antebellum America, Abraham Lincoln possessed many of the biases of white, male midwesterners. Emerging from the anti-slavery remnants of the Whig Party in the midwestern states, the Republican Party formed to oppose slavery’s spread in the territories, primarily out of concerns about job competition and declining opportunities for white men. The party was galvanized by the 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act, which repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise that had prohibited slavery in the Louisiana territories north of the 36-30 line. In the 1860 election, the Republican Party platform labeled the Democratic Party’s support for the Kansas Nebraska Act as “deception and fraud” and equated the extension of slavery into the territories as a violation of America’s founding principles (Republican). Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist, which was a radical minority group in mid-19th century America, but he did appeal to the “free soil” majority of the Republican Party, who wanted to keep the west open as a land of opportunity for free, not slave labor. According to Paludan, Lincoln addressed the majority of his constituents, white Republican men, who would have better appreciated a reasoned argument about the legal and economic wrongs of slavery rather than an emotional appeal on the sensational horrors of slavery, which would have been considered a feminine tact for the time period (Paludan). In the “Address on Colonization,” Lincoln points to an “unwillingness” from white America to allow numerous free blacks to remain within the country after being freed; in fact, Lincoln argues that it is better for both races to separate, as slavery and its legacy have brought great evil and war to the white race (Lincoln). In fact, the document was not a publicized address to the public, rather it represents the transcripts of a meeting between a delegation of freed black men and the president. President Lincoln appealed to the leadership committee of freedmen to consider the traditional idea of colonization, a generally more palatable “solution” to the slavery question that had been promoted by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others in the Revolutionary generation rather than the more radical, immediate emancipation demands of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison. Lincoln’s repeated references to the “intelligence” and “self-reliance” of the colored men present at the meeting would not be a widely shared perspective of the average white male voter in America at the time; however, Lincoln was not appealing to that audience at that moment (Ibid). This smooth proposition to the freedmen to consider relocation to Liberia or Central America represented one aspect of a larger plan to end slavery in America without trampling the principles of the Constitution.
Since President Lincoln set a plan for gradual emancipation in motion, he needed to deal with the realities of an increasing body of freedmen living in the United States. It is important to understand Abraham Lincoln’s predicament upon becoming president: he was elected on a free soil platform; he wanted to end slavery in America without violating the constitutional limits on his office or alienating the four, slaveholding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri; and he wanted to end the conflict with the States in rebellion as expediently as possible. According to Professor Allen Guelzo, the Constitution does not grant a president the power to end slavery in the states; this would be a violation of the separate state and federal jurisdictions, and slavery was the result of state, not federal, enactments (Guelzo). Therefore, it would have to be the states, not the presidency or the federal legislature, that would need to initiate the emancipation of slaves. Lincoln tried to provide incentives for the border states, those slaveholding states not in rebellion, to pass legislation to gradually emancipate their slaves on their own, and he drew up a plan for the federal government to offer $700,000 in U.S. federal bonds to compensate the slaveholders for their “property” (Ibid). The midterm election of 1862 could lead to border state legislatures friendly to Lincoln’s plan, and the president met with the Committee of Colored Men a month and a half prior to that election to line up a response to the concerns from constituents in those states who would likely worry about the growing presence of newly freedmen should gradual emancipation pass. In his “Address on Colonization,” Lincoln challenges the freedmen’s inclination to remain in the United States, pointing out that the freedom of those still enslaved could depend on this voluntary and federally-funded emigration; he calls upon their leadership to “open a wide door for many to be made freed” as their voluntary relocation could ease the fears of white America that the end of slavery would not result in a biracial society; instead Lincoln could assure his constituents that the newly freedmen would leave the United States altogether (Lincoln). President Lincoln hoped that freedmen and their families would voluntarily relocate themselves to a place where they could pursue economic prosperity and political rights safely away from the whites who had enslaved them and their brethren. Acknowledging that some of the gathered colored men had long been or were born free, President Lincoln states that their race had long-suffered the “greatest wrong inflicted on any people” (Ibid). As a result of this injustice, the idea of peaceful coexistence must have seemed highly unlikely. The plight of freedmen in America, though far from the horrors of enslavement in the Deep South, was challenging and inequitable. Contrary to popular perceptions, the North was not a haven of freedom and equality for freedmen or even runaway slaves; racial prejudices and white laborers’ concerns over job security and racial superiority made Northern communities hostile to freedmen and their families. As it turns out, the course of the 1862 election did not appear as promising for pro-emancipation legislators in the border states as Lincoln had hoped, and he would eventually adapt his tact to his earlier, more provocative July 1862 drafting of a proclamation to emancipate slaves in the states under rebellion.
"The United States--A Black Business," a political cartoon published in Punch magazine, 1856
Lincoln also had a deep sense that the founding principles of the American Revolution regarding “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were incompatible with chattel slavery (Primary) As James Oakes explains in “Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look at Lincoln and Race,” Lincoln’s inconsistency on race stemmed from his comprehension that relations were regulated on three levels with the “highest” being the rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: while Lincoln thought that free blacks deserved their rights to due process, Lincoln also believed that, constitutionally, states determined the actual and diverse elements of race relations (Oakes). Furthermore, Oakes adds that Lincoln did frequently depict slavery as an evil and freedom as a natural right that all men were entitled to regardless of race (Ibid). In his “Address on Colonization,” Lincoln argues that though the freedmen assembled before him were not bound by slavery, they were far from realizing equality with whites and the political, economic, and legal advantages that that equality entailed; the attainment of this egalitarian goal seemed a distant prospect in 1862 as states would be most responsible for providing and enforcing rights for freedmen (Lincoln). The fact that Lincoln made this point in such a realistic and frank way with the committee of colored men belies his belief that this was a wrong that should be-but likely would not be--righted in America; colonization represented the best hope for the freedmen at that time. In 1862, the flagging Union war effort made the prospects of freeing slaves with victory over the rebels seem uncertain and far away; not to mention the fact that Lincoln would continue to have the same constitutional limitations of taking executive action on this matter. As he encouraged the group of freedmen to strike out on their own in a new land, Lincoln likened the proposed expedition to join the Liberian colony or to form a new one in Central America to the self-empowering actions of George Washington when fighting for his people and his race against British injustice (Ibid). Although their struggles to make a new life in a new land would be fraught with difficulties, this move represented the best hope for freedmen to experience the natural rights that Lincoln believed they were entitled to but would not attain if they remained in the United States.
As historians debate Abraham Lincoln’s true sentiments on the matters of race and slavery, much can be learned about his views from his August 14, 1862 “Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men.” A Republican leader representing the “free soil” base of his party, Lincoln was careful to argue the political injustice of slavery and the contradictions it held for realizing the foundational republican values of liberty and justice for all. Upon attaining the presidency, he set a plan in motion to end slavery in a gradual, compensated, and state-led manner. In order to quell white society’s concerns over an enlarged freed black population that would result from such emancipation laws, Lincoln took steps to convince the leadership of freedmen communities to relocate outside of the United States. With these plans in action, the generations-long contradiction of slavery in a country that idealizes freedom and equality would be over. Unfortunately for Lincoln, his original plans failed. The elections of 1862 brought losses, not gains, to the Republican party. A short time after meeting the black leaders in August 1862, a group of Philadelphia freedmen responded to Lincoln’s appeal with one of their own, respectfully arguing that black people had long toiled in the United States and should be rewarded with their freedom, their natural rights, and their citizenship (Concerning). In the aftermath of the Civil War, these rewards would be legally bestowed upon the freedmen who had fought at great risk to secure these rights on their own.
Works Cited
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This close reading of President Abraham Lincoln's August 14, 1862 "Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men" was completed for Professor Matthew Pinsker's "Understanding Lincoln" course over the summer of 2016. The author extends her gratitude to Joseph Murphy for his feedback and suggestions!