Rich Lowry points out that “Lincoln was broadly pro-immigration…
Lincoln was also Pro-EMMIGRATION, he wanted to send the freed Blacks back to Africa and I believe the Country of Liberia was to be the destination for them.
Possibly. James Monroe started that program in 1820, Liberia's capitol (Monrovia) was named after him in 1847.
Close, but no panatela ... just a Swisher Sweet. ;)
The Liberian experiment of the 1840's was well advanced when Lincoln came to office. He was thinking more about Panama and the Panama Canal, and in April, 1865, had had Gen. Dan Sickles down in Panama (New Grenada) talking to locals and to the government in Bogota for two years about the U.S.'s acquiring certain rights to build the canal and import over 1,000,000 emancipated black Americans to do the labor. They would then be settled in-country at the completion of the canal. This, mind you, was a generation before Walter Reed appeared. It was a major mercy for everyone that the idea went on the back burner with Lincoln's death.
By the wayyyy.... a FReeper named GOPcapitalist ("GOPcap" for short) took an interest in this subject about nine years ago and had a look in the government files. Everything Sickles had sent back (letters, journals, everything) had been removed from State Department files, and GOPcap came to believe the files had been rifled. Touchy subject, perhaps.
The Liberian experience brought colonization into disrepute; critics pointed to the short longevity of American ex-slaves in Liberia, against which must be laid the fact that the ex-slave colonizers were largely in their forties and much worn after a life spent in unremitting toil in the fields. Richard Hofstadter, in his America at 1750, published posthumously, pointed out that colonial-era indentees, white or black, also had weak life prospects after full-term indentures of seven years or more, or imprisonment at labor (convict labor). They served longer than seven years if they'd run away and been assessed compensatory time extending their indentures: just such a Virginia case in 1645 actually resulted in the establishment of lifetime slavery -- it was a case involving two black indentees who'd run away successfully for a period of years, and a planter plaintiff who was a time-served indentee from West Africa himself.
Persons who, as convicts or full-term indentees, had served long periods of service especially in the field (clearing raw land was the most arduous and dangerous work), did not enjoy long lives or good health afterward, census scholarship has showed; and a significant proportion of such persons as survived returned to the Old World after their service was up.
Indentees who'd served shorter terms of three or four or two years, on the other hand, went on to establish themselves much more successfully, and few of them found themselves living as charges on the community charity as the burnt-out cases did. These successful indentured servants, together with those who were able to get passage to the New World without indenturing themselves, became the backbone of Jacksonian America who so deeply impressed British visitors and Alexis De Tocqueville alike with their health, happiness, and robust enjoyment of their liberty.