But it also drew fury from Southern slaveholders, who saw colonization as a ploy to mobilize Northern opinion against slavery. This attracted fierce denunciations from free blacks and white abolitionists. Beginning in 1816, with the founding of the American Colonization Society, opponents of slavery sugarcoated the idea of emancipation for suspicious whites by promising that freed slaves would be no threat, because they would be gone. Even then, Northerners like Robert Bennett Forbes, who detested slavery, were also terrified that freed slaves would demand “all the privileges of citizenship” and “tax the working community by lowering wages” among whites.Ĭolonization served as the great tranquilizer of white anxiety. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.”īut he also knew that, as president, he had no power to act unilaterally-until the slaveholding states gave it to him by triggering a civil war. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Lincoln, however, had never made any secret of his anti-slavery convictions. No president before Lincoln ever dared hint at putting an end to American slavery. “He believed,” adds Hannah-Jones, “that free black people were a ‘troublesome presence’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people.”īut emancipation is exactly what was hiding behind Lincoln’s colonization statement, although the subtlety of that moment, in the complex political currents of the Civil War, seems to have eluded the 1619 Project. On those terms, Lincoln appeared to be asking the once-oppressed to volunteer to remove themselves from the place where they had been oppressed, so their oppressors could breathe more freely. He read to them a prepared statement, urging them to recruit volunteers for colonization outside the United States.Ĭolonization meant that once freed, former slaves would have to relocate, preferably for a reservation Congress would purchase in Central America. In August 1862, Lincoln invited a committee of black men to the White House. In project leader Nikole Hannah-Jones’ verdict, Lincoln, too, is guilty, largely because of one incident. But Lincoln? The author of the Emancipation Proclamation? Lincoln? Jefferson and Madison, we know, were slave-owners. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison come in for bashing. history, “re-centering” African-Americans as the sole banner-carriers of America’s principles, even as they have been ruthlessly smashed down, enslaved and obliterated from memory by more numerous and more powerful whites. The New York Times’ 1619 Project has aimed at nothing less than a revolutionary re-interpretation of the entirety of U.S.

Abraham Lincoln by Allen C. Guelzo