The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [14]
The first emancipation—the gradual abolition of slavery in the North—contained no provision for colonization. It seems to have been assumed that the former slaves would somehow be absorbed into society. But the rapid growth of the free black population in the early republic spurred believers in a white America to action. Founded in 1816, just as slavery was becoming established in the Cotton Kingdom, the American Colonization Society at first directed its efforts toward removing blacks already free. But the long-term goal of many members was to abolish slavery. Planters and political leaders from the Upper South dominated the American Colonization Society. Few were more adamant about linking colonization with abolition than Henry Clay.37
Despite representing a slave state, and in the face of the spread of proslavery ideology during the 1830s, Clay never retreated from his conviction that slavery was “a great evil.” He continued to look forward to the day “distant, very distant, perhaps” when not a single slave remained in the United States. Clay saw slavery as the greatest threat to the Union to whose preservation he was passionately devoted. He remained equally certain that “abolition is impossible, unless it be accompanied by colonization.” Clay hoped that abolition would transform Kentucky into a modern, diversified economy modeled on the free-labor North. Slavery, he believed, was why his state lagged behind neighboring Ohio in manufacturing and general prosperity. Clay succeeded James Madison as president of the American Colonization Society in 1836 and served until his own death sixteen years later. He manumitted ten of his slaves during his lifetime and in his will offered freedom and transportation to Africa to the future children of his female slaves when they reached adulthood. The presentation of colonization as an adjunct of abolition by Clay and other northern and Upper South advocates helps explain why hostility to the idea became more and more intense in the Lower South.38
Many northern Whigs, observed the Indiana politician Schuyler Colfax, regarded Clay with “great reverence, almost adoration.” Lincoln was no exception. In 1832, he cast his first vote for president for Clay and later referred to him as “my beau ideal of a statesman.” During the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln referred to Clay no fewer than forty-one times. Clay’s outlook on slavery—condemnation of the institution and affirmation of the blacks’ humanity coupled with the conviction that emancipation could only come gradually and should be linked with colonization—strongly affected Lincoln’s. More than once during the 1850s when speaking about slavery and race, Lincoln quoted or paraphrased Clay. “I can express all my views on the slavery question,” he once said, “by quotations from Henry Clay.”39
Some African-Americans shared the perspective of the colonization movement. Almost every printed report of the American Colonization Society included testimonials from blacks who either had gone to Africa or were anxious to do so. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, most black Americans rejected both voluntary emigration and government-sponsored efforts to encourage or coerce them to leave the country. In asserting their own Americanness, free blacks articulated a vision of American society as a land of birthright citizenship and equality before the law, where rights did not depend on color, ancestry, or racial designation. They denied colonizationists’ arguments that racism was immutable, that a nation must be racially homogeneous, and that color formed an insurmountable barrier to equality. Through the attack on colonization, the modern idea of equality as something that knows no racial boundaries