The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [165]
On April 17, 1863, Kock and more than 450 men, women, and children embarked from Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Reports soon began to filter back of destitution and unrest among the colonists. It turned out that Kock had declared himself “governor,” taken the emigrants’ money, and issued scrip printed by himself. When they disembarked, the settlers found three dilapidated sheds; funds that were supposed to have been used to build housing had instead been spent on “handcuffs and leg-chains and the construction of stocks for their punishment.” The irate colonists soon drove Kock from the island. Dozens of emigrants perished, and others left for the mainland of Haiti. In July 1863, at a meeting with John Eaton, Lincoln spoke at length of the “failure” of colonization and his distress over the suffering on Île à Vache. In February 1864, Lincoln ordered the War Department to send a ship to bring the survivors home.26
Thus ended the only colonization project actually undertaken by the Lincoln administration. The Chicago Tribune entitled an editorial on the debacle “The End of Colonization.” The disaster convinced Secretary Usher to abandon the entire policy. As he explained to Lincoln, despite “the great importance which has hitherto been attached to the separation of the races,” colonization was dead. He viewed its demise philosophically: “Time and experience, which have already taught us much wisdom, and produced so many consequent changes, will, in the end, solve this problem for us also.” The Senate launched an investigation, and Congress froze its previous appropriation for colonization. On July 1, 1864, John Hay noted in his diary, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization. I have always thought it a hideous and barbarous humbug.” (The last sentence was not accurate, as Hay, whose opinions generally reflected Lincoln’s, had strongly favored the idea in 1862.)27
By 1864, although Lincoln still saw voluntary emigration as a kind of safety valve for individual blacks dissatisfied with their condition in the United States, he no longer envisioned large-scale colonization. In a message to the ambassador to the Netherlands that coyly absolved Lincoln of responsibility for his previous advocacy of the idea, Secretary of State Seward explained why: “The American people have advanced to a new position in regard to slavery and the African race since the President, in obedience to their prevailing wishes, accepted the policy of colonization. Now, not only their free labor but their military service also is appreciated and accepted.” When Congress that spring debated the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, almost everyone supporting the proposal assumed that the emancipated slaves would remain in the United States. A few, such as Congressman John Broomall of Pennsylvania, still predicted that blacks would eventually depart voluntarily for a “promised land” in the tropics. This, however, would be “the work of ages.”28
As Seward’s letter indicated, Republicans were increasingly convinced of the need for black labor in the postwar South. Fears of a national labor shortage led Congress to pass the Act to Encourage Immigration, which Lincoln signed on July 4, 1864, allowing employers to bring workers from abroad under short-term contracts. (The act, the New York Times assured wary readers, contemplated Europeans, not “Chinese, Hindoos or Turks.”) Black labor was essential to what a writer in the Continental Monthly called “the vital and momentous question of cotton production.” If the cultivation of cotton, by far the nation’s leading prewar export, did not resume, economic disaster would follow. Of course, another reason