Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T03:30:06.587Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The Republican Party and Resettlement, to 1863

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

Sebastian N. Page
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

From the mid-1850s, a new force emerged in American politics: the Republican Party. Opposed to slavery and determined to prevent it taking hold in the territories of the United States, a cadre of politicians centered on a family of boosters from the Upper South, the Blairs, lobbied their Republican colleagues to adopt colonization as national policy. But the Blairs failed to persuade their new allies that their own scheme had improved on that of the ACS, despite their abandoning West Africa for the closer, geostrategically valuable Central America. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the secession of the southern states and the outbreak of war transformed the forecast for the Republican colonizationists, whose vision chimed with Lincoln’s own support for colonization. Prodded by the president, the Republican-dominated Congress added voluntary colonization to its laws freeing the slaves of the District of Columbia and in the rebellious states. But that was not enough for Lincoln, who asked legislators to write colonization into the US Constitution – and ignored those abolitionists who argued that his own Emancipation Proclamation should end his attempts to expatriate potential soldiers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×