Posted on 02/08/2017 3:16:38 PM PST by Kaslin
They weren’t citizens yet so there was nothing to prohibit deportation, other than lack of will. I don’t think it was any more impractical than kidnapping their ancestors in the first place, you gather them up and put em on ships, and I don’t see how it could have worked out worse than what actually happened, they being second class citizen for another century and currently being, for the most part, a poor underclass who’s problems plague larger society.
The beauty part and indeed the point would be that once there were gone they would no longer be our problem. If Liberia ended up not working out for them too well, tough, their destiny would be in their own hands alone. Harsh perhaps and any Black freepers reading this might want to smack me but my POV on this is look out for number 1, our Republic and it’s short and long term well being. As said, neither North nor South wanted free Blacks around.
Another alternative posited by DJ once IIRC was give them some land out west to form their own states.
I wonder how Keitt would have liked it if I held a gun on him to prevent his interference while my friend violently beat his father or someone he liked half to death. He might think it a crime.
He deserved his censure and far worse.
As for Burlingame, sounds like BROOKS challenged him to a duel but wussed out like the chickenbleep loser he was when he heard Burlingame was a good shot. What a loser.
Repatriation to Africa was one avenue Lincoln considered, but it was far too impractical by then. There was no way to logistically work out sending millions of Blacks back across the Atlantic en masse. Even if there were enough ships to move them, what then once in Africa ? You’d need supplies and other resources. Housing, food, et al.
You can’t just drop a group of people that large and say, “OK, provide for yourself starting now.” It would’ve been a disaster. The immigrants would’ve turned into marauders and killed the local populations just to get their food and other resources. Even if you had sent back, say, 100,000 per year, that would’ve taken 50 years to send back just the number of Black Americans as of 1870. By 1920, they’d have already replaced their numbers in America (10.5 million).
Even as early as 1800, when they surpassed a million, it was already impractical. In the early 1700s when there was around 30,000 was probably the cut-off point of practicality. Then you could’ve relocated them to islands in the Caribbean, rather than send them all the way back to Africa.
Recall it was Frederick Douglass who advised President Lincoln on this subject, and he laid out the impracticalities on the subject of repatriation. Lincoln did not pursue the matter any further as a result.
This left other alternatives as possible redress for ex-slaves. One was breaking up plantations in the south and redistributing them (i.e. 40 acres and a mule). That was punitive to White Southerners and would’ve resulted in mass retributions (read: mass murders) as they would’ve sought to get their lands back at any cost. That left the other alternative of perhaps designating the state of Kansas and parts of the OK Territory or even Oregon as explicitly Black states, requiring the removal of White settlers (unless they chose to stay under the new reorganization), as these were only recently settled areas (roughly about 20 years). Granting the aforementioned land, animals, and setting up public schools for both adult and child alike. Allowing these state(s) to be self-governed by Black elected officials without D.C. interference or attempts to reclaim the land on behalf of Whites. Some level of autonomy and protection. Any and all success (or failures) squarely upon them from that point onward.
It would’ve been a curious experiment to watch in the era before public welfare, I think it would’ve succeeded to a degree. Where it would’ve faltered later would’ve been the Depression and natural desires of the population to move about the country in search of better opportunities. I noted in the case of some isolated towns that were farming communities that were mostly or all-Black, many declined in the Depression era and afterwards and never recovered.
So, in the end, there was no magic cure, no panacea for how to deal with the slave problem and their freed descendants and putting them on a surefire path to success and total self-reliance.
In the end, had Sumner chosen to attack the institution of slavery instead of taking cheap, vicious, personal shots at a fellow Senator, one that he didn’t have the common courtesy of facing, the entire incident would never have occurred.
Personally, I think he was looking for trouble and getting his ass kicked. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
President Grant had a different strategy for integrating freedmen into American society: creating an escape valve that would for e Southern whites to cease all violence agsinst blacks lest they no longer have a cheap source of labor for their agricultural production. This was one of the reasons why Grant supported an annexation treaty with the Dominican Republic (whose president had southt annexation by the United States in order to protect his country from invasion be Haiti or by a European power) that would establish a Territory of Santo Domingo and promised eventual statehood. Grant and Frederick Douglass (who advised Grant as he had Lincoln) believed that the Dominican Republic, with its mulatto-majority polulation and ample land, was a possible destination for blacks seeking to leave the South, and that Southern whites would be forced to disband the KKK and repeal the Black Codes if they wanted to stop blacks from leaving. We’ll never know if it would have worked because the treaty was defeated in the Senate thanks to its opposition from Senator Charles Sumner (who had recovered from his injuries caused by the cowardly Congressman Brooks). Sumner believed that annexing an independent creole republic would undermine the efforts to create other such republics in the Americas and would not be conducive to ending slavery; Grant, on the other hand, believed that the annexation of Santo Domingo would result in Spain ending slavery in its remaining colonies (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and Brazil ending slavery as well. One if the great “what-ifs” of history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Santo_Domingo
Sorry for the fat-finger typos in my post; I wrote it on my iPhone.
A cursory review of that proposal seems like it would’ve been a fiasco more than a benefit. Going that route may have launched us on a trajectory to annex more and more in the Caribbean and perhaps even into Central and South America (which, ironically, was a plan by the Confederate Government to expand into slaveholding areas).
Add to that, annexing Santo Domingo would’ve saddled us with the added burden of perennial basketcase Haiti and all of its domestic problems. Of course, Haiti would probably be happy to be annexed by us, and that would provide its residents to leave it en masse for the mainland.
By “Santo Domingo,” they meant the Dominican Republic (whose capital was, and is, named Santo Domingo), the former Spanish colony in the eastern part of the Island of Hispaniola. Haiti (the former French colony of Saint Domingue), which is on the western half of the island, would have remained an independent republic. And as for whether it would have led to further expansion into the Caribbean and Central America, that’s highly speculative.
I don’t know how things would have turned out had Grant’s Dominican Republic plan been enacted, but a century of Jim Crow didn’t turn out so great, and deportation to Africa would have been an unmitigated disaster.
Haitians likely would've flooded the border (a la Mexico) to flee the perennial quagmires, be it political or natural disasters, and the island as a whole, would've been a neverending source of problems to our nation. Language and culture would've been at odds as well, barring a mass-scale program of Anglicizing the Spanish Dominicans and Francophone Haitians.
Neat, I never knew about that.
Could have been big for baseball. ;d
“I noted in the case of some isolated towns that were farming communities that were mostly or all-Black, many declined in the Depression era and afterwards and never recovered.”
Looking at Dave Leip’s Map I noticed this township in
Kankakee County IL that went heavily for Shillery.
Pembroke Township, turns out it’s a world famous craphole, rural Black population, lousy sandy soil, it’s been called a “pocket of the deep south”. No paved roads, no gas, probably no wi-fi. A few politicians used it for photo-ops but never really helped much.
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