Undoing the Evils of the Slave Trade

Prior to Lincoln’s intent to colonize the Negro outside of the United States postwar, numerous and serious attempts were made to repatriate and correct the evil caused by Britain’s colonial labor system which imposed African slavery upon both North and South. After assuming the presidency in 1868, Grant considered purchasing Haiti as center for colonized Africans from the US.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Undoing the Evils of the Slave Trade

The idea of the “colonization” of free Negroes was not new, for as far back as 1817, the South and the North, both felt it was best for the whole country that they should be colonized. Before the period of Negro servitude had ended in most of the North Atlantic States, societies for the purpose of colonizing them were organized; and in the South in 1817 this plan had the earnest support of W.H. Crawford, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Marshall, John Tyler, James Madison, James Monroe, and other leading Southern men, who were slave owners.

In 1856, General Tyler wrote: “The citizens of the Southern States since the adoption of the Constitution, have emancipated two hundred fifty thousand Negro slaves. Assuming the average value of these slaves to have been five hundred dollars, the citizens of the Southern States have contributed one hundred and twenty-five million dollars towards emancipation.

“And when we consider that in almost every case of individual emancipation at the South, a sum equal to the value of the slave has been invariably given to him to enable him to purchase a home for himself, and in addition to this the immense sums contributed to the “Colonization Society” by others, we do not exaggerate the sum voluntarily bestowed in this way by the South, when we set it down at two hundred and fifty million.

“This immense sum has been paid not by a rich public treasury, but by private families who lived by labor of slaves they surrendered; not with the slightest hope of pecuniary emolument, but from no other possible motive than quiet and conscientious sentiment.” (DeBow’s Review, December 1856)

(Authentic History Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1877, Susan L. Davis, American Library Service, 1924, pp. 292-293)

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