Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
different races. . . . You suffer very greatly by living among us while we suffer from your presence.” Lincoln approved a plan to colonize blacks on the Chiriqui land grant on the Isthmus of Panama. His secretary of the interior contracted in September 1862 with the Chiriqui Improvement Company. In August 1862 Lincoln told a group of blacks, “There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.”
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. A day earlier he had signed a bill authorizing $500,000 to fund colonization schemes. One such plan, presented by the promoter Bernard Kock, would have removed five thousand blacks from America to Ile Vache, an island owned by Haiti, at a cost of $250,000. The first four hundred black colonists left in 1863; the surviving 368 returned in 1864 after the attempt failed. The man whom America credits for freeing the slaves also wanted them out of America. Lincoln was not alone in seizing the colonization solution. Republicans John A. Bingham, Owen Lovejoy, and George Julian voted for $500,000 in federal funds to finance the “removal of freed slaves freed in the District of Columbia” and the South.
Again, historians attribute Lincoln’s colonization comments and concrete efforts as clever maneuvering to gain political support in the border states and elsewhere in the North. Eric Foner, for example, points out that Lincoln never mentioned colonization after the Ile Vache fiasco. Foner considers this an example of Lincoln’s pragmatism and evolved position and proof that he was never a true supporter of colonization. In reality, Lincoln realized that colonization was impractical and impossible.
His search for ways to deal with free blacks led Lincoln to a “diffusion” policy. Like most white Northerners, he was concerned with a mass migration north. In 1862 he paid homage to the diffusion principle by which “Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country . . . there would be but one colored to seven whites. . . . Could the one, in any way, disturb the seven?” In the North, Lincoln overlooked the fact that across the region and throughout the nineteenth century, a ratio of even one black person to one hundred whites already greatly disturbed white populations.
Diffusion made its way into proposed legislation. In April 1864 Kentucky senator Garrett Davis proposed that Congress redistribute blacks to Northern states in “proportion to their white population,” but the Senate “scorned” his plan. In June that year a “milder form” of dispersal was presented by West Virginia senator Waitman T. Willey and met with an equally negative response. Willey wanted to give the Freedmen’s Bureau permission to contact Northern governors and city leaders to arrange sending freedmen north. This, Senator Willey thought, would relieve labor shortages and provide guidance for the freedmen.1
Abolitionist Massachusetts was very much against having blacks distributed to their state. The Radical Republican Charles Sumner thought that dispersal was “entirely untenable.” His Massachusetts colleague Senator Henry Wilson thought the diffusion idea would “have a bad influence in the country.” Radical Republicans recognized that the white North wanted no free blacks despite a labor shortage—except in the one case of supplying blacks for the Union Army to help the Northern states fill their draft recruitment quotas.
The day of reckoning for Massachusetts and the Northern states came in 1862. No longer could they attack the institution of race-based slavery without confronting the question of the disposition of free blacks. As the Union Army marched through the South, tens of thousands of enslaved blacks were freed as plantations were abandoned. The federal government had no policy with regard to the destitute thousands whom they had set free. Plans evolved by necessity in different areas of the South, each policy subject to interpretation, violation, and different degrees of enforcement.
The containment policy, a form of domestic colonization in the South, evolved as the white North faced racial judgment day. Thousands of freed slaves, designated as contraband, appeared behind the lines of the Union Army in Virginia. General William Tecumseh Sherman viewed them as a nuisance, “an irritating distraction from winning the war.” But the question of what to do with freed slaves in Confederate territory was no longer abstract. A precipitating event occurred in September 1862 when General John Dix, an anti-slavery Union commander in Virginia, requested that the governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine accept two thousand needy former slaves. Massachusetts governor John Andrew rejected the plea. Andrew had optimistically expected that free blacks in the North would gravitate south, where their “peculiarities of physical constitution” were better suited.
For the . . . [former slave refugees] to come here for encampment or asylum would be to come as paupers or sufferers into a strange land and climate—a trying event to its habitués . . . to a busy community where they would be incapable of self-help—a course certain to demoralize themselves and endanger others.
Governor Andrew is best known to American movie audiences for his role in supporting the placement of black soldiers in the Union Army in the movie Glory (1989). But the film does not mention that less than a year before Andrew’s authorization of the legendary black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, he had denied asylum to black refugees. Western governors likewise warmly supported the policy of keeping black refugees in the South.
In February 1864, however, Governor Andrew changed his tune. He wrote to President Lincoln complaining that Union commanders in Virginia refused to allow contraband to emigrate to Massachusetts, where there was a labor shortage. The governor’s real agenda—pursuing blacks in order to fill Massachusetts’s military quotas—was transparent. Lincoln replied with undisguised sarcasm.
If I were to judge from the letter, without external knowledge . . . I would suppose that all the colored people of Washington were struggling to get to Massachusetts; that Massachusetts was anxious to receive them as permanent citizens; and that the United States Government here was interposing and preventing this. But, I suppose these are . . . [not] the facts. If . . . it be true that Massachusetts wishes to afford permanent home within her borders, for all, or even a large number of colored persons who will come to her . . . I would not for a moment hinder [them] from coming.
The conscription of Northern troops, as we have seen in New York, was a combustible burden. Driven by expediency, Andrew had initiated a meeting of governors at Altoona, Pennsylvania, to demand the recruitment of black troops. Iowa’s governor, Samuel Kirkwood, did not mince words when he insisted on some “dead niggers” in addition to dead white men on the battlefield.
The West had to face a similar situation. When the accumulation of black refugees in the lower Mississippi Valley—in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—prompted federal action, in September 1862 the Union Army began sending freed slaves north. Many were sent by Union commanders to Cairo, Illinois. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton validated this policy by requiring the Union general in Cairo to care for the blacks. In one of America’s extreme racial ironies, Illinois still had a black exclusion law. More important, Stanton was turning a blind eye to racial animosity in the state. As the railroad began carrying trainloads of black refugees to Illinois, white reaction there was instantaneous and predictable. Pike County citizens attacked Secretary Stanton for resettling a “worthless negro population” in their midst. At Olney, Illinois, black refugees were halted and forced to return to Cairo. The mayor of Chicago refused to set up a committee to help resettle the freed slaves. According to the Chicago Tribune, Republican governor Yates declared that the “scattering of those black throngs should not be allowed if [it] can be avoided. . . . The mingling of blacks among us will mean that we shall always have trouble.”
On October 13 Stanton countermanded his order, halting the shipment of black refugees to Cairo. Stanton’s brief foray into the racial cauldron of the white North has been described as a tactical “blunder.” In fact, the secretary of war had inadvertently exposed America’s racial nerve. Lincoln and Stanton learned a hard lesson about Northern white hostility in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” and also in Massachusetts, the land of Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Andrew.
In the wake of this experience in Illinois and Massachusetts, the federal government settled on a “containment policy”: freed slaves would be kept in the