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Colonization was central to the Blairs’ plan to speed the rise of the Republican party and the progress of gradual, compensated emancipation in border states where slavery was weak or in decline. The Blairs looked to Central America, not Africa, as the future homeland of black Americans and hoped that the promise of land and financial aid would make a colony attractive enough for a large number of blacks to settle there. Frank Blair developed an elaborate scheme, not unlike a proposal of Henry Clay’s in the 1830s, for Missouri to use the proceeds of public land sales to purchase the state’s slaves and transport them to Central America. This would be followed by an influx of white immigrants into Missouri and a restructuring of its economy on the model of the free-labor North. The Blairs believed that the United States should be reserved for “the Anglo-Saxon race,” while blacks, “worse than useless” in this country, would flourish in the tropics, to which they were naturally suited. They attacked slavery not on moral grounds but for degrading nonslaveholding whites and retarding southern economic development.65

The colonization movement had long been divided between those who saw it as a way of ridding the country of free blacks and others for whom it formed part of a long-term strategy for ending slavery. Despite their overt racism, the Blairs were firmly in the latter camp. Before the Civil War, no one, except perhaps John Brown, could conceive of a way to end slavery without the consent of slaveowners; there was simply no constitutional way that this could be accomplished. And it seemed impossible that whites would ever consent to emancipation unless coupled with the removal of the black population. Republican endorsement of colonization, the Blairs insisted, would be “an enabling act to the emancipationists of the South.” Colonization would refute the charge that abolition meant racial equality. In the late 1850s, Republican conventions in the border states endorsed colonization while simultaneously repudiating “negro equality and…all who favor negro equality.”66

The Blair plan would have the added bonus of expanding the American commercial presence in the Caribbean (the region would become “our India,” said Frank Blair) and blocking southern efforts to create a slave empire embracing the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America, an idea that gained increasing currency during the 1850s. In mid-decade, the filibusterer William Walker conquered Nicaragua, established himself as president, and during his brief reign legalized slavery and reopened the slave trade. Similar expeditions landed in Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and Cuba. Colonization, Frank Blair told Congress in 1858, would enable black emigrants to secure American access to “the intertropical region” while preventing “the propagation of slavery” there.67

During the late 1850s, Frank Blair tirelessly promoted the idea of colonization in speeches throughout the North and in letters to prominent Republicans. In 1860, he delivered a major speech at New York’s Cooper Institute one month before Lincoln’s celebrated oration at the same venue. In it, Blair touted colonization as “the only solution to the Negro question” and presented a curious proposal for the acquisition of tropical areas that would be open to settlement only by owners who emigrated with their slaves and promised them eventual freedom and landownership.68

The idea of colonization remained highly controversial in Republican ranks. Many Radicals shared the abolitionists’ conviction that such proposals, by denying that blacks were part of the American nation, added to the obstacles to racial equality within the United States. After Blair spoke in Chicago in 1858, the Press and Tribune felt compelled to chide him for “ignoring the moral and religious aspects of the slavery question, and basing all anti-slavery movements on the superior claims of the white race.” Others deemed the idea unworkable. But Blair won the support of a number of Republican leaders, including Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin,