Violent Saviors, page 17
Lincoln the politician wanted to end slavery eventually but desperately needed to offer the voters a plan for the ex-slaves. Many white voters in the North feared an influx of freed slaves from the South. Colonization seemed the magic answer. Lincoln’s answer to a failed colonization project in one place was to heroically imagine the same approach could still work somewhere else. Although colonization faced huge implementation challenges, Lincoln insisted in 1857, “We shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.”77
Meanwhile the debate on option number one for Black people—benevolent slavery—got even more furious. In 1857, the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney endorsed benevolent slavery. The Dred Scott decision by Taney announced that Black people were “altogether unfit” for freedom, and so “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” It followed that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”78
Lincoln could have become a footnote to history as an obscure colonization promoter. However, the benevolent-slavery proponents allowed Lincoln to put forward his strongest suit, his moral commitment to freedom.
In 1858, invoking reciprocity like the liberal economists, Lincoln asked the benevolent slave owners if they would want such benevolence themselves. Probably not, he said:
As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it is good for the lambs!!!79
What about the slave owners’ claim to having superior civilization to pass on to their slaves? Even if this were true, Lincoln said, it did not justify slavery. In 1858, Lincoln invoked the classical skeptics’ idea of reciprocity to show whites where such civilizing arguments would lead. The argument for civilizing slavery proved more than its advocates wanted it to:
It proves that among the white races of the world any one might properly be enslaved by any other which had made greater advances in civilization. And, if this rule applies to nations there is no reason why it should not apply to individuals; and it might easily be proved that the wisest man in the world could rightfully reduce all other men and women to bondage.80
The debate on benevolent slavery continued after the Civil War broke out in April 1861. Across the Atlantic, the British debated whether to recognize the Confederacy. The Confederacy had sent emissaries to Britain in the summer of 1861 to plead for recognition, hoping that British textile manufacturers would be desperate to keep access to Southern cotton.81
John Stuart Mill now sought to influence that decision by again ridiculing claims for benevolent slavery. In February 1862, Mill wrote how the Confederates were “loudly vaunting” slavery as a “civilizing” institution. Slave owners like Hammond and British apologists like Carlyle, Mill said, thought slavery “the fit condition not only for negroes but for the laboring classes of all countries.” He mocked Confederate rhetoric that slavery was a “sacred deposit providentially entrusted to the keeping of the Southern Americans, for preservation and extension.”82
Although it was a narrow escape, Mill’s critique would win this round of the battle. No doubt influenced by Union victories as well as by Mill’s eloquence, the British government by 1863 had decided not to recognize the Confederacy.83
Thanks to Lincoln, however, colonization also continued to be part of the slavery debate during the Civil War. Lincoln still thought he needed a plan for freed slaves as part of his opposition to slavery. Colonization could induce the slave states still in the Union to gradually abolish slavery, Lincoln hoped, while getting rid of freed Black people whom white people were not ready to accept, even in the free states.
Lincoln was so eager to advance colonization that he met with a promoter of one possible site on April 10, 1861, just two days before the battle over Fort Sumter began the Civil War. Having given up on Liberia, colonization enthusiasts were now suggesting Central America. Lincoln was eager to talk to Ambrose W. Thompson, who told Lincoln that he owned several hundred thousand acres in a place called Chiriquí on the Pacific coast of the Isthmus of Panama. Panama was then part of Colombia. Thompson told Lincoln that Chiriquí had both abundant coal deposits and a great harbor, making it ideal for a prosperous colony of American Black people. Lincoln authorized negotiations for “coal and privileges” with Thompson.84
The first victory for emancipation with colonization was in the District of Columbia, which was under federal jurisdiction. The emancipation plan, which Congress passed on April 11, 1862, included a provision for colonization of the freed slaves. The ACS was still trying to induce freedmen to go to Liberia. The freedmen did not show much enthusiasm for such a move. “The number known to entertain that desire was one,” the ACS reported.85
Lincoln still hoped that Central or South America would be more appealing to freed Black people than Liberia had been. In July 1862, he tried again to convince representatives of slave states still in the Union to embrace gradual abolition of slavery, combined with colonization. As Lincoln informed the deeply uninterested border-state men, “Room in South America for colonization, can be obtained cheaply, and in abundance.” When “the freed people” heard about this great plan, they “will not be so reluctant to go.”86
Lincoln referred to the Chiriquí scheme. By August 1862, Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas had offered Lincoln a plan to organize one hundred Black families to go to Chiriquí. A few free Black people were willing to go, including even two sons of colonization critic Frederick Douglass.87
That same month, Lincoln advocated the plan in person to a delegation of Black ministers. A Black colony in Chiriquí on the Isthmus of Panama would prosper from its location on the main transit route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Lincoln enthused: “On both sides there are harbors among the finest in the world. Again, there is evidence of very rich coal mines.” It would be “extremely selfish” for free Black people to resist emigration to this paradise, he told the ministers. If only free Black people could begin a Black exodus out of the United States, it would make emancipation possible for their enslaved fellow Black people.
Lincoln admitted to the Black ministers in August 1862 that “the political affairs in Central America are not in quite as satisfactory condition as I wish.” Indeed, contacts with Central American governments had found they had no interest in giving up part of their land and sovereignty to Black Americans. But Lincoln promised the Black ministers that he would try again. The Black ministers politely said they would think about it.88
Lincoln announced his momentous decision to emancipate slaves in the Confederacy on September 22, 1862. On January 1, 1863, slaves in the rebel states “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” He included in the preliminary September proclamation some less inspirational language still promoting his plan for colonization of freed Black people. Just eleven days earlier, the Lincoln administration had signed a contract with Ambrose W. Thompson to buy land for settlement in Chiriquí and to invest in its coal mines.89
However, doubters in Congress and the Cabinet now pointed out to Lincoln a few problems with the Chiriquí scheme. Thompson, as it turned out, was offering lands that he did not own. Colombia was having its own civil war. A Smithsonian Institution scientist tested samples from the allegedly rich coal mines of Chiriquí and found them of zero value.
The collapse of the Chiriquí scheme was swift. On September 24, 1862, two days after pushing colonization in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln suspended the Pomeroy expedition. It was just a week before the hundred free Black families were supposed to depart for Chiriquí. By October 1862, all the backers of Chiriquí had disavowed the plan.90
Lincoln refused to give up on colonization. He set an impressive standard for future aid promoters with his ability to promise future success despite present-day failure. On December 1, 1862, just a month before the Emancipation Proclamation was to take effect, Lincoln brought up colonization again in his annual message to Congress. He admitted that “several of the Spanish-American republics have protested against the sending of such colonies to their respective territories.” Moreover, he noted that free Black people were not “so willing as I think their interest demands.”
For a less fervent believer, these facts might have suggested colonization failure was again likely. But Lincoln went for the classic gerund defense of an unsatisfactory outcome: Black opinion of colonization was “improving.”
Lincoln concluded his 1862 annual message with one of his most inspirational passages: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” The frequent quotations of this beautiful passage (including in Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” as read by Henry Fonda) rarely mention its context. When Lincoln advocated “freedom” here, he was actually referring to colonization. In the annual message, he had announced his plan for gradual emancipation in the border states with colonization.91
Lincoln by then had already moved on to a new site for colonization after Chiriquí. The Charleston businessman Bernard Kock now proposed for colonization an island off the coast of Haiti called Île à Vache (Cow Island). The Haitian government had given Kock exclusive rights to harvest mahogany and other hardwoods on the island, which was seven miles wide and thirteen miles long. Kock wrote a letter to the Lincoln administration in the fall of 1862 offering his “beautiful, healthy, and fertile island” for colonization. There was nobody to get in the way because no Haitians wanted to live on Cow Island. (Liberal skeptics would have asked, Why not?)
Kock would offer employment to the colonists. He would provide houses, schools, churches, and medical care. Kock wrote that he already had purchased sawmills, as well as cotton gins for the planned cotton crop. Farm equipment was already on order. Kock’s plan had each male settler getting title to eight acres of land after ten years.
Meanwhile, at Fort Monroe, Virginia, in late 1862, six thousand miserable people had escaped slavery only to see the Union Army put them to work on fortifications. A Quaker report dramatized the poverty of these former slaves—living twelve people to a room, lacking adequate clothing and fuel for heating in the cold winter. Here was the kind of destitution that colonization was supposed to cure.
On December 31, 1862, the day before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lincoln reached agreement with Kock to take five thousand Black Americans from Fort Monroe to Cow Island. After more back-and-forth, 453 of the ex-slaves from Fort Monroe finally shipped to Île à Vache, arriving on June 1, 1863. An early report had them prospering under the “able, wise, and humane direction” of Mr. Kock. The report was not quite accurate.92
As a later observer reported, the new settlers on Cow Island were starving on sparse rations of salt pork and corn. No houses existed. Settlers huddled under brush or lay directly on the ground, clothed in rags, plagued by insects and torrential rains. Forty had died. Kock had taken all the settlers’ money when they came on board the ship and later stopped paying them the promised wages. Kock soon had to flee from the angry colonists. On learning of the debacle, Lincoln dispatched a ship to bring the survivors home in February 1864.
Lincoln was finally ready to give up. Congress repealed previous colonization clauses in July 1864. So the white dream of Black progress through colonization, which had entranced seven US presidents over eight decades, finally came to an ignominious end on Cow Island. In the end, despite all his hopeful rhetoric on colonization, Lincoln had not been willing to force Black people to leave the US. The resistance of the Black community meant that colonization would have entailed massive violence. In the end, Lincoln’s belief in liberty won out over his colonization fantasies. Although his colonization support had threatened the cause of equal rights for Black people, in the end he did far more for the cause of liberty with his denunciation of benevolent slavery. Lincoln in the end did contribute to a new birth of freedom.93
10
The Victory of the Man Without a Plan
What was the alternative plan for Black development if both benevolent slavery and colonization were finally defeated? A third way rejected the entire notion of white plans for Black progress.
Liberal thinkers now reached the climactic battle over slavery, this history’s most extreme justification of coercion in the name of progress. One liberal thinker’s response was to develop further a demand for Black agency that would not only help defeat both slavery and removal of Black people but would give Black people a path of dignity after the end of slavery. Frederick Douglass was that thinker. Douglass has not been sufficiently recognized as a liberal, nor for the critical role of his no-plan argument.
Douglass saw Black people demanding the rights they deserved instead of waiting for white saviors. White preoccupation with plans for Black people after the end of slavery would actually delay the end of slavery. In contrast, Douglass preferred rights without plans to plans without rights. This was what actually worked to defeat slavery. It was liberalism’s greatest accomplishment so far.
Douglass also saw how the white preoccupation with relief of Black poverty unintentionally facilitated the retrogression on equal rights that happened after the end of Reconstruction. His vision of Black self-determination prefigured the rise of the civil rights movement and the fall of colonialism in Africa that would happen a century later.
Douglass first articulated his planless vision at a crucial moment for the debate on slavery. In January 1862, he wrote an article acknowledging white philanthropists’ “sincere solicitude for the welfare of the slaves themselves.” The philanthropists asked, “What will you do with them?” Douglass shockingly answered: “Do nothing with them.” Consistent with Douglass’s critique of benevolent slavery and colonization, he pointed out to his well-meaning audience of whites that “your doing with them is their greatest misfortune.” You whites should just not “trouble yourselves with any questions as to what shall be done with” the slave. Just “let him alone.”1
On February 12, 1862, Douglass articulated again the scandalous “do nothing” ideas in a speech to the Emancipation League in Boston. The demand for a solution for freed Black people was itself an obstacle to emancipation. Douglass pointed out that opponents of emancipation loved to ask, “What shall be done with the four million slaves if emancipated?” Such opponents would wait to emancipate until a complete answer was forthcoming, which would be never.
Douglass offered principles instead of plans. Proponents of slavery in the British Empire earlier in the century had sought to derail the abolitionist William Wilberforce by demanding his “plan of Emancipation.” Douglass appreciably noted that Wilberforce had simply responded: “Quit stealing.”
Douglass respected white philanthropists who wanted answers to Black misery. In a classic appeal to reciprocity, however, he wondered what they would say if roles were reversed. What if Black people required white people to have a plan to end white poverty—or else be slaves? He imagined whites would say “mind your own business.” He equally told them, “Leave us to mind ours.” Just “let us alone. Do nothing with us.” Douglass told his audience in Boston, “We ask nothing at the hands of the American people but simple justice.”2
Douglass had given more insight into his “do nothing” thinking in that earlier 1862 article. Given Douglass’s history with white action consisting of benevolent slavery and colonization, he was not a fan of “do something” thinking. As he noted, “something” usually denied equal rights for Black people:
When you, our white fellow-countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you.3
Douglass’s idea of rights denied to Black people included the right to agency. He wanted the right to participate in a free labor market, the “right to work.” Free labor allowed free choice and self-determination. “We only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves” what we want, Douglass demanded. Douglass continued to draw links between different victims of Western superiority—equal rights should be respected for all men, including “Jews, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian.”
He saw markets offered a crucial alternative to paternalism. A free labor market, Douglass said, would “let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows.”4 Douglass told white philanthropists that market participation by the former slaves was “the best way to help them,” which “is just to let them help themselves.”5
Likewise in his Boston speech to white philanthropists, Douglass argued that consensual contracts between employers and Black people should replace the coercion of slavery. The answer was to “pay them honest wages for honest work; dispense with the biting lash, and pay the ready cash.” The incentive to avoid the lash had been to “benumb and degrade the soul.” For the ex-slaves now to respond voluntarily to market incentives was to give them an infinitely more dignified motive “of hope, of self-respect, of honor, and of personal responsibility.”6
Douglass also advocated political rights, the right to vote for the Black man, an amazingly radical notion in January 1862. Whites should “let him alone if he has a ballot in his hand,” where he could “vote for the man whom he thinks will most justly and wisely administer the government which has the power of life and death over him.” Douglass demanded equal rights for Black people to consent to what would happen to them: “His right of choice as much deserves respect and protection as your own.”7
Political rights also included Black people’s right to voluntarily emigrate, or not, and to determine their own colonization schemes, if any: “But why not let them go off by themselves? That is a matter we would leave exclusively to themselves.”8
