6 - Alternatives to Foreign Resettlement, to 1868

Summary

Decades before the ACS even came to exist, white reformers had planned black colonies for what they imagined to be the vacant wilds of the American West. They discerned how internal colonization might address the “race question” while not wasting black labor overseas; for their part, black Americans took less offense at an idea that offered them autonomy without expatriation. But as white migrants, with slaves or without, settled the West at a rate few had foreseen, Americans abandoned continental black colonies. That changed with the Civil War, which rekindled northerners’ faith in internal colonization – but for the South, not the West. While chaos within the White House mothballed President Lincoln’s foreign colonization schemes, policy makers began to trust the white North’s salvation to “natural” trends of racial migration, which just might do the job that conscious design had failed to. Yet the postwar frustrations of conservatives such as President Andrew Johnson, and of the freedpeople (who craved ownership of the land that they had long worked), showed that black resettlement would continue to hold a place in American race relations.