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By Root 1666 0

his first extended remarks on the subject in 1852, he was not a candidate for office and his political career appeared to have reached a dead end. Unlike many other advocates of colonization, Lincoln never countenanced compulsory deportation and expressed little interest in creating an American empire in Central America or in the Christianization of Africa. Nonetheless, he believed that blacks would welcome the opportunity to depart for a place where they could fully enjoy their natural rights. Lincoln seemed to envision the bulk of the black population eventually emigrating. In his Springfield speech of 1857, he cited biblical precedent: “The children of Israel,” in numbers comparable to American slaves, “went out of Egyptian bondage in a body.”73 For many white Americans, including Lincoln, colonization was part of a plan for ending slavery that represented a middle ground between abolitionist radicalism and the prospect of the United States existing forever half-slave and half-free.

Lincoln’s thought seemed suspended between a civic conception of American nationality, based on the universal principle of equality (and thus open to immigrants with no historic roots in this country and, in principle, to blacks), and a racial nationalism that saw blacks as in some ways not truly American. He found it impossible to imagine the United States as a biracial society. When he spoke of returning blacks to Africa, their “own native land,” Lincoln revealed that he did not consider them an intrinsic part of American society. In fact, by the 1850s, the vast majority of black Americans—a far higher percentage, indeed, than of the white population—had been born in the United States.

The Blairs made a special effort to enlist Lincoln in their cause. In February 1857, Frank Blair, whose wife Appeline was a Kentuckian and relative of Mary Lincoln, traveled to Springfield, where he met with “the leading men of the party,” Lincoln doubtless among them. Blair advised them, he wrote his father, “to drop the negro and go the whole hog for the white man…the ground we have always taken here in St. Louis.” In April, Lincoln and William Herndon met in their law office with “one of the leading emancipationists of Missouri,” probably Blair, and developed a plan to promote the Republican party in the Upper South. Two months after this meeting, in his speech at Springfield on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln called for “the separation of the races,” adding that while the Republican party had not officially endorsed the idea, “a very large proportion of its members” favored it. Blair and Lincoln met again in December 1857. They agreed that John Hay, then studying law in Lincoln’s office, would become a correspondent for the Missouri Democrat, St. Louis’s Republican newspaper. In 1858, Hay reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Democrat. Despite the urging of some Republicans, the Illinois party did not endorse colonization at the state convention of 1858, following Trumbull’s advice not to “get mixed up with the free negro question” at all. But Blair returned to the state to campaign for Lincoln, perhaps to the neglect of his own political fortunes, as he was defeated for reelection to Congress.74

These encounters seem to have affected both men. Visiting Illinois reinforced Blair’s conviction that Missouri must rid itself of slavery. “No resident of a slave state,” he wrote, “could pass through the splendid farms of Sangamon and Morgan, without permitting an enormous sigh to escape him at the evident superiority of free labor.” As for Lincoln, he clearly saw colonization as part of a broader antislavery strategy aimed, initially at least, at the Upper South. Perhaps the Blairs offered a way of placing slavery in the course of “ultimate extinction,” of which Lincoln had spoken but without any real explanation of how it would take place. Based on the surviving outline, his 1855 address to the Illinois Colonization Society surveyed the history of slavery beginning in the fifteenth century and went on to describe the spread of antislavery sentiment,