The Washington Post has an article this weekend on a disturbing effort to transplant freed slaves to an island off of Haiti and Lincoln’s involvement. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“The intelligent negro may enter upon a life of freedom and independence, conscious that he has earned the means of livelihood, and at the same time disciplined himself to the duties, the pleasures and wants of free labor,” Kock had written in his proposal.
Yet by the end of the voyage that May, about two dozen Black passengers had died of smallpox. Those who landed found their lives worse than the ones they had left. Instead of the promised homes, they were made to sleep on dirt in small huts fashioned from palmetto and brush. Kock was despotic in his work demands. Hunger grew rampant; malnourishment took root; plans for a revolt took shape.
A U.S. government official visiting the island found the settlers “with tears, misery and sorrow pictured in every countenance.”
The disastrous mission — envisioned as the first installment of a grand colonization scheme that would settle 5,000 Black people on the island – had a singularly powerful backer: Abraham Lincoln.
…The 16th president had agreed to the terms of the contract with Kock on December 31, 1862 – on the very eve of proclaiming an end to slavery for about 3 million Black men, women and children.
Americans have so revered Lincoln that they have often placed him above his times — a period in which he and the vast majority of other White Americans held deeply racist beliefs and believed in Black colonization, said Sebastian N. Page, a British historian and author of an acclaimed book “Black Resettlement and the American Civil War.”
…His research unearthed records of colonization schemes into 1864 that Lincoln “did not publicize rather deliberately and that historians have overlooked,” Page said, undermining the notion that the president’s support was primarily a public act for racist White audiences….”
…Black colonization “was almost doomed” from the start, Page said.
“It needs concurrent consent from so many parties,” he said. “It needs it from legislators, if you need funding; it needs it from the host state; and most of all, it needs it from the would-be African American emigrants themselves.”
The African Americans aboard the Ocean Ranger appeared very willing to onlookers who watched them set sail for Haitian isle of Île-à-Vache that April day in 1863.
The emigrants “were described as being wild with delight … They cried ‘Amen’ and shouted ‘Hallelujah,’” Fredric Bancroft, a prominent historian born in 1860, later wrote.
Read the article for more on this “voluntary colonization” disaster.
Lincoln is as much an object of “hagiography” as Geo. Washington. And for the South, Lee, Jackson, Forrest, etc.. Lee requires a hallo according to some neo-confederates .(/ˌhæɡiˈɒɡrəfi/; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος, hagios ‘holy’, and -γραφία, -graphia ‘writing’)[1] is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world’s religions.[2][3][4