Introduction

Summary

From the Revolution to the Civil War, white Americans believed that the freedom of the slaves, should it ever come to pass, must end in blacks and whites living hundreds, even thousands of miles apart. Most famously, a coalition of slaveholders and reformers founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816–17, which carved out the West African settlement of Liberia for black expatriates. But a vast array of contemporaries, black and white, American and foreign, also staked their claim to plans for moving African Americans from the United States, especially to other parts of the Americas. African American emigrants left for Canada, Haiti, and the British West Indies as well as for Liberia, while white institutions and individuals variously encouraged and resisted schemes to resettle them across the Caribbean and Latin America. Contemporaries were so sure that they would make at least one plan the locus of an African American exodus that, when the Civil War destroyed slavery in the United States at unexpected speed, they found themselves with few intellectual foundations on which to build a biracial nation.