CLASSROOM
Arguments about Emancipation and Colonization, 1861–1862
In December 1862, roughly twenty months after the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln sent his second annual message to Congress. In it, he proposed three constitutional amendments that he hoped would provide a framework for abolishing slavery throughout the nation, in the four Border States that had remained in the United States and in the eleven states that had seceded to form the Confederacy. The first amendment offered federal compensation to any slave-state government that completed a plan of gradual abolition by January 1, 1900. Compensation would be determined by multiplying the number of enslaved people living in each state, as recorded in the 1860 census, by some to-be-determined per capita dollar amount. The second amendment declared that all enslaved Americans who had gained their freedom during the course of the war would be “forever free.” And the third amendment authorized Congress to “appropriate money” for “colonizing free colored persons with their own consent” outside the United States.
The justifications for recommending such a course to the nation and, in particular, to the fifteen slave states should, by this point in the war, Lincoln declared, be clear to all. The “rebellion” would not have commenced without the existence of slavery in the United States. It stood to reason, therefore, that “without slavery it could not continue.” Beginning the process of abolishing this institution, he indicated, was therefore the key to ending the war and to restoring the Union. Moreover, it was the course of action that would save an enormous number of American lives and that would save the tremendous cost of many more years of large-scale combat. There were many in the slave states, most notably the advocates of perpetual slavery, who would offer a range of objections to what he recommended, Lincoln acknowledged, but to them he posed a simple, preemptive question: “Can we do better?”
[As part of his justificatory remarks, Lincoln offered commentary on the proposed colonization amendment, and on the larger issue of the future of Black Americans in the United States. “I can not make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization,” Lincoln summarily declared. To this strong endorsement, he added two main qualifications. First, all decisions to emigrate must be voluntary. Second, despite his strong desire to facilitate Black expatriation on a large scale, this position, he insisted, did not stem from a desire to appease white Northerners’ anxiety that emancipation would cause “freed” Black Americans to “swarm forth and cover the whole land.” “Why should emancipation [in the] South send the freed people North,” he queried, since the main reason Black Americans had “fled North” in the past was their enslaved condition. “In any event,” Lincoln concluded, even if such a migration did commence, “can not the North decide for itself whether to receive them?”
Earlier in his message, Lincoln had made a few relevant remarks on colonization as well. “Applications have been made to me by many free Americans of African descent to favor their emigration,” he stated. Although for the time being, many of those expressing interest, he explained, seemed opposed to emigrating to Liberia or Haiti, the two countries most open to accepting them as “citizens,” Black American interest in voluntary colonization, he noted, seemed to be “improving.” Indeed, he added, it would not be “long” before “an augmented and considerable migration to both these countries” began in the United States.]
[Looking back at the long eighty-year history of the colonization movement, the year 1862 was the effective high point of the long effort to obtain federal support. Between March and December of that year, Congress had legislated the first of only two major appropriations for Black expatriation in American history; a House select committee that Frank Blair served on recommended $200 million in federal funds for the emancipation and expatriation of the enslaved populations of the Border States; and the federal government formally recognized the nations of Liberia and Haiti, after refusing for many years to do so. And then in December 1862, Lincoln asked Congress and the American people to amend the Constitution such that each slave state could, with the aid of significant federal funds, abolish slavery in a way that was similar—though not identical, as will be shown—to the approach that colonization advocates had pushed for decades, and that Thomas Jefferson had recommended almost eighty years ago.]
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DOCUMENTS (think about these, and add hyperlinks)
Lincoln, Abraham "Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes" 1862
Douglass' Monthly “The President and His Speeches” 1862
Douglass' Monthly "The Spirit of Colonization" 1862
Lincoln, Abraham Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation 1862
Christian Recorder "Mrs. Frances E. Watkins on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme” 1862
Lincoln, Abraham Second Annual Message to Congress 1862
Douglass' Monthly "The President's Message" 1863
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