Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge Studies on the American South)

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Black Resettlement and the American Civil War sheds new light on the phenomenon of Black removal by broadening its chronological, institutional, and geographic scope.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. In the final chapter, Page surveys a variety of internal colonization schemes, including Reconstruction-era plans for Black enclaves in Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. By contrast, Page begins with the "revival" of colonization and emigration during the 1840s and 1850s (p.

This engagingly written analysis of black resettlement is wide in geographic focus and institutional range. Page diagnoses a deep-seated "separatist impulse" at the heart of nineteenth-century American social and political life (p. He is particularly good on the bureaucratic politics—the personal antipathies and turf battles—that constrained and ultimately hamstrung resettlement efforts (among other things, this book adds new luster to William H.C.–based American Colonization Society (ACS) established a colony for free Black Americans in Liberia. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Examines the scale and complexity of black resettlement projects and proposals between the adoption of the U. All of these projects met with resistance from African Americans and (some) white abolitionists, who insisted that the freedpeople must be allowed to remain in the land of their birth.

Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated. What the Black abolitionist David Walker described as "the colonizing trick" was also a colonizing default: a reflexive and almost universal urge to solve notionally "racial" problems by means of large-scale population transfer and physical separation (p.The core of this book is a detailed reconstruction of the various plans for Black resettlement that swirled around the Abraham Lincoln administration during the Civil War. Page brings the field into the post-Civil War period, covering the endurance of the 'separatist impetus,' which, he claims, amounted to global scale segregation and undermined the foundations of racial integration in America. Magness to give us the most complete account to date of post-1863 efforts to resettle freedpeople in the British, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the Caribbean. By taking a panoramic view of colonization and related projects, Page shows just how pervasive the "separatist impulse" was in nineteenth-century American life.