The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [83]
For decades, colonization had faced the seemingly insuperable difficulty that most free blacks repudiated the idea. In the 1850s, however, the resurgence of interest in colonization among whites coincided with a rising tide of nationalism among northern blacks as well as deep despair about their future in the United States. With the Fugitive Slave Act threatening their freedom, the Dred Scott decision denying that they could be citizens, and the prospect of abolition as remote as ever, a number of northern blacks now embraced emigration. “We must have a nationality,” one wrote. “I am for going anywhere, so we can be an independent people.” Martin R. Delany, an abolitionist editor and lecturer whose pessimism about the prospects for blacks in the United States was strengthened when, as a student at Harvard Medical School, he was dismissed because white classmates protested his presence, advocated the creation of a new homeland for black Americans in the Caribbean, Central America, or Africa. Henry H. Garnet founded the African Civilization Society to promote emigration. James T. Holly advocated emigration to Haiti. Like the Blairs, Delany envisioned mass emigration from the United States. Most black emigrationists of the 1850s, however, looked to a select group of migrants, a talented tenth, to bring to Africa, Haiti, or Central America the benefits of Christian civilization and American economic enterprise. Success abroad, they believed, would redound to the benefit of the descendants of Africa in “our own country,” as the constitution of the African Civilization Society put it.76
Like earlier colonizationists, the Blairs gathered endorsements from black leaders, among them Delany and Garnet. Their emigration efforts sparked a sharp debate within the black community. Black conventions engaged in heated discussions of the future of the race in the United States. Early in 1861, the Weekly Anglo-African, a black-run newspaper published in New York City, apologized to its readers for having devoted so much space to lengthy letters, pro and con, about emigration that “our usual editorial matter is crowded out.” The editor urged correspondents to remember that “brevity is the soul of wit.” The most prominent opponent of colonization, in lectures, editorials, and letters throughout the 1850s, was the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution to the colored people of this country,” he wrote, “than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.” Douglass argued that the idea of colonization allowed whites to devise plans for ending slavery while avoiding thinking about its aftermath in the United States. This certainly seems to have been the case for Lincoln.77
Despite its harsh Black Laws and the growth of the emigration movement elsewhere in the North, Illinois offered scant evidence for Lincoln’s belief that free blacks could be persuaded to leave the United States voluntarily. In 1848, the black Baptist Association of Illinois sent Reverend Samuel Ball of Springfield to visit Africa and report on prospects for emigration. On his return, Ball published a pamphlet praising Liberia as “the brightest spot on this earth to the colored man.” But at the time of Ball’s death in 1852, only thirty-four black persons had emigrated from Illinois to Liberia under the auspices of national or local colonization societies during the previous twenty years.78
Blacks in Illinois held their first statewide conventions in the 1850s, beginning with a gathering in Chicago in 1853. Primarily aimed at organizing to seek repeal of the Black Laws, the conventions also spoke out against colonization.