Now that the US and Israeli military has bombed almost all of Gaza into a smoldering ruin and killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, President Trump has proposed getting Jordan and Egypt to house the remaining Palestinians. He has threatened to withdraw US taxpayer “aid” to these countries if they do not accept his proposal. This is essentially a revival of Lincoln’s lifelong dream of deporting or “colonizing” all of the black people out of the United States.
Roy Basler, the editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, wrote that as of 1857 Lincoln had no policy regarding slavery “except the colonization idea which he inherited from Henry Clay.” When he was asked what was to happen to the slaves should they ever be freed he said, “Send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” As president Lincoln held a White House meeting with free black men and implored them to lead by example and resettle in Africa. They wisely declined his offer. He did develop plans to send every last black person to Africa, Haiti, Central America, anywhere but in the US. As Phil Magness and Sebastian Page documented in their book, Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and his administration were hard at work until his dying day counting how many ships it would take to deport or “colonize,” as they said, all the black people.
Henry Clay was Lincoln’s professed political idol and role model. In his 1852 eulogy to Clay Lincoln praised him as a founding member of the American Colonization Society and said that “colonization” was one of his “most cherished objects.” Lincoln approvingly quoted Clay in the eulogy as having said that “there is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children.” It would be “a signal blessing to that most unfortunate portion of the globe,” he said.
Lincoln himself said that sending all the black people to Africa would be “the ultimate redemption of the African race” and that every year “had added strength to the hope of its [deportation] realization. May indeed it be realized!” In his December 1, 1862 message to Congress Lincoln reiterated that “I cannot make it better known that it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.”
One major benefit of “colonization,” Lincoln said was that “their places [i.e., jobs] be . . . filled up by free white laborers.” At the time, only adult white males or “free white laborers” had the right to vote. Lincoln was the manager of the Illinois Colonization Society before becoming president, and the Society got the Illinois legislature to allocate tax funds for the purpose of deporting the small number of free blacks out of the state. As president Lincoln appointed Senator Samuel Pomeroy to supervise “resettlement effort.” Pomeroy recommended deporting black people to a new Central American colony that would be named “Lincolnia.” The Lincoln administration paid a businessman named Bernard Kock to establish a colony in Haiti but Kock turned out to be a crook and an embezzler so nothing came of it. All of this caused the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to declare that Lincoln “had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins” and called him “The President of African Colonization.”
Of course the Lincoln Cult has dozens of excuses for Lincoln’s Ku Klux Klanish attitude towards black people. They claimed for generations that Lincoln somehow gave up on the idea in 1863 but the book Colonization after Emancipation proved that to be untrue. The well known Civil War historian Gabor Boritt wrote in his edited book, The Lincoln Enigma, that Lincoln’s colonization proposals were “noble.” He concocts numerous rationales and excuses, which after all is what makes one a “Lincoln Scholar.” The most entertaining excuse is his statement that Lincoln’s lifelong advocacy of colonization is “how honest people lie.” A perfect example of what makes one a “Lincoln Scholar.”
President Trump’s proposal to colonize Palestinians in Jordan or Egypt is hardly different from Lincoln’s colonization fetish. Both men treat a group of people as lepers who should be eradicated from society and who should be denied property rights in their own country no matter how many generations their family has lived there. Lincoln’s rationale was the subtitle of Lerone Bennett, Jr.’s book Forced into Glory: “Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.” (Bennett was the long time editor of Ebony magazine and an author of several books). As for Trump, his rationale seems to be payback for the $100 million campaign donation from Miriam Adelson and the prospect of participating in the Mother of All Real Estate Developments in the Middle East.
