Black Resettlement and the American Civil War

Abstract

Perhaps no subject in early American history has undergone as thorough an interpretive overhaul recently as the colonization movement. Once mostly derided as the self-serving ruse of proslavery southerners and the chimerical fantasy of white American racists, a bevy of studies have now taken colonization seriously, providing a multidimensional understanding of the many and long-standing efforts to remove Black Americans from the land of their birth—a goal that, at its core, remains inscrutable to our modern sensibilities.Into this increasingly crowded field steps Sebastian Page, whose Black Resettlement and the American Civil War provides readers with an encyclopedic analysis of the “embarrassment of projects aimed at removing African Americans from the United States” (12). To cast his interpretive net as widely as possible, Page employs the term “resettlement” rather than colonization—the designation normally assigned to white-guided initiatives of Black repatriation to Africa—or emigration—the word used for the periodic, Black-led undertakings to urge at least some of their compatriots to leave the United States. Using resettlement as his lens allows Page to adopt a kaleidoscopic view that is inclusive of a host of removal schemes: from the more conventionally studied destination of Liberia to the far less scrutinized proposal to relocate freed people on territory within the former Confederacy that remained in Union hands in the aftermath of the Civil War.Page's book covers much more ground than its title implies; it begins in the antebellum era and ends with President Ulysses S. Grant's bid at pairing Black emigration with the annexation of the Dominican Republic. The first two chapters contextualize the birth and growth of Black resettlement and include a nuanced and incisive account of several Black-initiated emigration programs prior to the 1860s. But it is really in chapter 3 that the crux of this monograph begins to emerge. Page chronicles the rise of African American resettlement to, as he sees it, a central place on the Republican Party's agenda. Throughout succeeding chapters Page shows the enduring quest to relocate Black Americans outside the bounds of the American republic during the Civil War and immediate postwar years. From Latin America to the British West Indies to the American South, he illustrates how a motley group of reformers, adventurers, charlatans, visionaries, and prominent politicians—including, as Page painstakingly demonstrates, Abraham Lincoln himself—held on far longer and more sincerely to Black resettlement than historians have heretofore recognized. Even amid one of the United States' most celebrated hours of racial progressivism—when the Emancipation Proclamation recast the republic as a nation of universal human liberty and people of color fought by the thousands to preserve the Union—there remained endeavors to expatriate African Americans.Prodigiously researched and written in lively and clever prose, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War achieves the author's objective to “chronicle the full geographic and institutional range of the drive for black resettlement” (1). This book is now the fullest account we have of the persistent efforts to resettle Black Americans during the Civil War era.But Page is less successful in establishing the greater import of the impressive research he has compiled for the history of race, liberty, and African American rights in the nineteenth century. He conflates the staying power of Black resettlement plans with their significance. And he overreaches several times in the text by making claims about colonization's relevance that outstrip his evidence. For example, a handful of Republican advocates of Black resettlement, who hardly represented the mainstream position of their own party on African American citizenship, are, for Page, indicative of the views of “white Americans” as a whole. Ultimately, there is an expansive difference between the endurance of colonization and resettlement proposals, on the one hand, and their centrality, or even relative importance, to the larger national debate over Black freedom, race, and rights, on the other.By nearly the same time period that Black Resettlement and the American Civil War ends its narrative, a critical mass of the white American electorate had endorsed the abolition of slavery, approved of the incorporation of African Americans into the republic as citizens, and signed off on the constitutional right of Black men to suffrage. We all know how the retreat from Reconstruction and the nationalization of white supremacy made a mockery of much of these accomplishments by the Jim Crow years. And yet during the Civil War era they still seem more noteworthy facts than the fanciful and abortive racially exclusionary schemes of a relatively small number of individuals.