The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [142]
During the spring and early summer of 1862, as Congress pressed ahead with antislavery legislation, colonization played an important part in its debates. There was far more discussion of where freed slaves would reside than what rights they would enjoy. The desire to demonstrate the practicality of colonization led its advocates to strange mathematical calculations. Robert Patterson, the treasurer of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, purported to demonstrate that “deporting females alone” when they “arrive at the child bearing age” would make the black population “disappear” entirely sometime in the early twentieth century. (Patterson acknowledged the “inhumanity” of his idea and the disadvantages of leaving the South with “an enormous disproportion of male slaves,” but still hoped Congress would consider it.) In the Senate, James R. Doolittle presented elaborate tables showing that if 150,000 were colonized each year, the “last remnants of the slave population” would be gone by 1907.38
Both the law providing for abolition in the District of Columbia and the Second Confiscation Act included provisions for the colonization of those willing to emigrate. During 1862, Congress appropriated a total of $600,000 to aid in the transportation overseas of African-Americans. With unanimous Republican support, it also approved Lincoln’s request to establish diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia. On July 12, the day he met with the delegation of border congressmen, Lincoln appointed a consul general for Haiti. Radicals hailed the step for recognizing the black republic as an equal member of the “family of nations.” But many members of Congress were motivated in part by the hope of facilitating colonization.39
In Congress, colonization was most strongly promoted by border Unionists and moderate Republicans from the Northwest. Lyman Trumbull, who included a colonization provision in the original version of the Second Confiscation Act, explained candidly, “There is a very great aversion in the West…against having free negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro.” Numerous constituents, including the prominent Illinois Republican James C. Conkling, wrote to Trumbull praising his stance as a way of counteracting Democrats’ “constant hue and cry of negro worshipers etc.” Radical Republicans, most of whom had long defended the rights of northern free blacks, tended to oppose colonization. “The idea of removing the whole colored population from this country is one of the most absurd ideas that ever entered into the head of man or woman,” declared John P. Hale, the Radical senator from New Hampshire. But many Radicals went along to placate the president, the border states, and western Republicans.40
Some Republicans in Congress spoke of blacks as “natural-born citizens,” who, while not entitled to political or social equality, “shall be equal to the white race in their right to themselves and the enjoyment of the proceeds of their own labor” (Lincoln’s own position in the 1850s). Even those who opposed colonization, however, generally maintained that because of a preference for a warm climate, family ties, or some other reason, blacks who became free would remain in the South. Although Lincoln appears to have had little direct influence on congressional deliberations, proponents of colonization invoked the president’s name. The New York Times declared that Lincoln and Frank Blair were in perfect accord “on the entire subject.”41
Numerous colonization schemes surfaced in 1862. From Brazil, ambassador James Watson Webb, who as the pro-colonization editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer had helped to whip up the city’s anti-abolition riot of 1834, proposed the creation of a joint stock company to settle black Americans along the Amazon River. The Danish chargé d’affaires in Washington asked the administration to encourage black emigration to St. Croix, whose