MCLEAN, Va. — Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has inspired Americans for generations, but consider his jarring remarks in 1862 to a White House audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America.
“For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people,” Lincoln said, promoting colonization to resolve the transition from slavery: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not co-exist in the same nation.
Lincoln went on to say that free blacks who envisioned a permanent life in the United States were being “selfish.” He promoted Central America as an ideal location “especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land.”
As the nation marked the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s first inauguration Friday, a new book by a researcher at George Mason University makes the case that Lincoln was even more committed to colonizing blacks than previously known.
The book, “Colonization After Emancipation,” is based in part on documents that authors Philip Magness and Sebastian Page found at the British National Archives and in the U.S. National Archives.
Magness said the documents reveal Lincoln’s complexity. “It makes . . . his racial legacy more controversial,” said Magness, also an adjunct professor at American University.
Lincoln’s views about colonization are well-known among historians, even if they don’t make it into most schoolbooks. But historians differ on whether Lincoln moved away from colonization after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863.
