Horace Porter
First Sergeant
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2009
- Location
- Absoltely Nowhere Now, MA
Once in a while I come across a complaint by a modern day Confederate partisan who seeks to take a shot at Lincoln's reputation by asking why Lincoln didn't simply offer to buy the slaves if he wanted to free them. The answer, of course, is that Lincoln did offer to buy the slaves and to relocate the former slaves somewhere else (that this is then cited by modern day Confederate partisans as evidence that Lincoln was a racist reminds me that sometimes you just can't win).
We can say all kinds of things about colonization: it would have been costly, not many blacks prefered it, the price Lincoln offered might have been low, but all that sidesteps the bigger question: why not take the deal? Negotiate a higher price per head, make it a twenty-year program, and avoid the costly destruction and economic suffering caused by a long war that promised to disrupt slavery anyways. You would also avoid the fear of non-slaveholding whites who wanted nothing to do with black people and did not want to compete with them for jobs. As for what blacks wanted, the US government had moved people who were unwilling to move before, as Native Americans could tell you.
So why did whites reject colonization?
We can say all kinds of things about colonization: it would have been costly, not many blacks prefered it, the price Lincoln offered might have been low, but all that sidesteps the bigger question: why not take the deal? Negotiate a higher price per head, make it a twenty-year program, and avoid the costly destruction and economic suffering caused by a long war that promised to disrupt slavery anyways. You would also avoid the fear of non-slaveholding whites who wanted nothing to do with black people and did not want to compete with them for jobs. As for what blacks wanted, the US government had moved people who were unwilling to move before, as Native Americans could tell you.
So why did whites reject colonization?
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