The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [81]
A variety of motives inspired these endorsements, including political expediency, racial prejudice, the belief that blacks were innately suited to a tropical climate, and a desire to assist slave-state Republicans. After Benjamin F. Wade told the Senate that he wanted his party to include colonization in its platform, a constituent commended him: “I like this new touch of colonizing the niggers. I believe practically it is a d——n humbug. But it will take with the people.” Whatever one thought of the idea, Charles Francis Adams wrote in 1859 after hearing Frank Blair speak in Boston, “we must respect it as coming from an earnest and sincere emancipationist in a slave state.”70
Many Republicans accepted the Blairs’ argument that an embrace of colonization would enable the party to expand into the Border South. Like Lincoln, most Republicans envisioned a distant future without slavery. But, as the New York Tribune observed, even “our wisest statesmen” could not “tell us how slavery is to be abolished in the southern states.” Were the Blairs harbingers of a new generation of southern Republicans who would set in motion the abolition of slavery? Many northern Republicans believed a significant number of border residents were anxious to make common cause with their party. They celebrated, and exaggerated, the importance of the Blairs and other border-state critics of slavery, such as Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, another advocate of colonization. William H. Seward, who thought the idea of sending a large part of the nation’s labor force out of the country absurd, nonetheless called Frank Blair “the man of the West, of the age.” Within eight years of a Republican national victory, declared the Chicago Press and Tribune, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri would “rid their states” of slavery, and Kentucky and Virginia would soon follow. Some southerners feared the same outcome. One congressman from Mississippi declared in 1859 that in parts of the border, slavery was already “almost a nominal thing.”71
By 1858, Lincoln had emerged as a public spokesman for colonization. His first extended discussion, as we have seen, came in 1852, in his eulogy of Henry Clay. By the next year, Lincoln was closely enough identified with the idea that when Reverend James Mitchell, a prominent colonization organizer from Indiana, traveled to Springfield seeking allies to promote the cause, a local minister referred him to Lincoln. Lincoln addressed the annual meeting of the Illinois Colonization Society in 1853 and again in January 1855, even as his first bid for election to the Senate unfolded. No record has survived of the first speech and only a brief outline of the second. In 1858, when he ran for the Senate, Lincoln’s was the first name listed among the eleven members of the society’s Board of Managers. (The vice presidents included Chicago Republican editor John L. Scripps and William Brown, at whose behest Lincoln compiled his “book” on racial equality.) In his first debate with Douglas, Lincoln read aloud the passage from his Peoria speech of 1854 in which he said his “first impulse” in dealing with slavery would be to free the slaves and send them to Africa.72
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s advocacy of colonization or to explain it solely as a way of deflecting Douglas’s accusation that Republicans favored racial equality. When Lincoln made