Lincoln wanted to send them back but thought it couldn't be done. Too bad he didn't at least try.
Liberia started out as a colony of freed slaves from America. Abolitionists thought they’d have a better chance starting over in Africa than they did in the U.S. and formed the American Colonization Society (ACS) to fund them. Lincoln loved the idea. Prior to the Civil War the ACS moved 13,000 people to Liberia.
One challenge is that returning people to their tribe of origin didn’t seem feasible (many didn’t know their tribe of origin), and no African tribe was willing to take in foreigners, so they had to establish entire colonies rather than just getting people “back home” in some fashion. Another challenge was that a lot of black Americans didn’t want to go back to Africa.
Phyllis Wheatley spoke for many when she wrote about the horrors of being enslaved and kidnapped from her family, but she also wrote for many when she wrote, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”:
‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
At the time of the Civil War, many former slaves were Christians who wanted to stay in a Christian country. Despite the Jim Crow laws and numerous other barriers, they were assimilating and improving their lot in America right up to the 1960s. The problem now isn’t that we have so many descendents of former slaves from the American south; it’s that we have so many people who’ve been corrupted by bad government policies.