Non-News About Lincoln

AOL and MSNBC recently posted an article about some Lincoln letters at the University of Rochester that are being placed online. The letters are about Abe’s 1862 proposal to phase in compensated emancipation in the border states over 37 years, by purchasing the slaves in those states. This is not exactly news. As I wrote on page 52 of The Real Lincoln: “Lincoln did pay lip service to various compensated emancipation plans, and he even proposed compensated emancipation (combined with colonization) in 1862. But[he]failed to use his legendary political skills . . . to end [slavery] peacefully,” as every other country of the world had done.

Lincoln made this proposal in his Dec. 1, 1862 State-of-the-Union address.

What the AOL/MSNBC story leaves out is the fact that Lincoln also asked Congress for money to “colonize” the freed border state slaves. “I can not make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization,” he said in the speech. Moreover, colonization would take place anywhere but in the North: “any place or places without the United States,” said The Great Obfuscator (emphasis added).In the speech Lincoln stated that he had already looked into colonizing blacks in the entire Spanish empire, as well as the “Tropics,” Haiti, and Liberia. It is telling that, although he had communicated with the governments of all these places, he did NOT consult with a single governor of any Northern state. That would have been out of the question. The North was a pervasively racist society and some Northern states, including Illinois, had made it illegal for blacks to move there. Lincoln himself had voted to use Illinois state tax dollars to deport free blacks out of Illinois. The reason given by Republican Party spokesmen for opposing the extension of slavery into the territories was that they did not want black people to live among them — free or slave. That would have spoiled their dream of the “New England-ization” of the territories.

At the end of the speech Lincoln appealed to the economic self interest of Northerners by arguing that one “benefit” of colonization (or deportation) was that it would “Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and . . . increase the demand for and wages of white labor.”

In any event, Lincoln never claimed that his proposal was motivated by humanitarianism. “The plan is recommended as a means . . . of restoring and preserving the national authority through the Union,” he said in the 1862 speech.

Lincoln’s lifelong obsession with “colonizing” all the black people in America is what so enraged Lerone Bennett, Jr., the distinguished African-American author of the book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.

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7:47 am on March 5, 2008