Of the many political discussions between President Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist in America in the 1860s, among the most important began when the two men first met in the White House this week (Aug. 10) in 1863. The topic was Lincoln’s belief that even if all black slaves were eventually emancipated, free blacks and whites could never live together peacefully in a post-Civil War America.
Lincoln, who truly believed slavery was evil, was still a product of his times, and he doubted that blacks could compete with whites in the commercial, political and even intellectual marketplace. That is why he favored a “colonization movement,” in which free blacks were sent back to Africa to start their own nation, which, Lincoln told Douglass, would truly enfranchise them and make them masters of their own economic, social and political fate.
Douglass vehemently disagreed, saying that most blacks in America had been born in America, considered themselves Americans, and had no concept of life in Africa. And Douglass added, those many thousands of blacks that were fighting for the Union in the Civil War felt they were owed the right to remain in America as free men.
In addition, as Lincoln soon realized, there were serious financial, logistical and political challenges to black colonization. How would the U.S. government, which was burdened by a huge Civil War debt, purchase enough African land to create this new nation? And how would it pay for the transportation and re-settlement of some 4 million former slaves, which would include the steep cost of compensating their former owners for their loss?
As for Lincoln’s contention that having their own nation would make these former slaves masters of their own fate, in truth they would be highly dependent on the United States. Creating a nation from scratch meant creating a viable economic, educational and political system, plus all of the necessary infrastructure, equipment and training. The United States would need to pay for farming supplies, building materials, educational resources, and so on, plus training professionals in a variety of fields. That would cost millions of dollars, as would the cost of protecting this new nation diplomatically and militarily from surrounding predatory African nations. In effect, this new nation would be a U.S. colony, and since when did America — once an unhappy colony of Great Britain — get into the colony-owning business?
Finally, if all former slaves left America, from where would come the laborers to work the fields, but also work the countless industries, both old and new, that would grow and desperately need workers in the war’s wake?
For these reasons and more, the “Back-to-Africa” colonization movement eventually, and understandably, failed.
