The Black History of the White House (21 page)

A Historic Gathering

One of the most significant developments during this period was black political access to the White House, including the first meetings at the White House between a U.S. president and African Americans to discuss policy. Seeking support for his project to relocate blacks to Chiriqui, an area in what is now Panama, Lincoln's Commissioner of Emigration, Rev. James Mitchell, was delegated to bring a group of black leaders to meet with the president.
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It is telling that this historic meeting was not a discussion about the internal revolution that was under way or the emancipation of millions of black men, women, and children, but rather a hard-line sales pitch for the president's grand plan on black colonization.

On August 14, 1862, as the war raged and emancipation was being secretly planned, Lincoln held a meeting at the White House with five African American ministers. Led by Rev. Edward M. Thomas, head of the Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art, the group included John F. Cook, John T. Costin, Cornelius Clark, and Benjamin McCoy. Instead of a thoughtful discussion of a controversial topic—black expatriation and colonization—the meeting turned out to be more of a stern, abusive, and patently racist lecture by Lincoln. A reporter permitted to attend the meeting published an article the next day on the front page of the
New
York Tribune
under the headline “The Colonization of People of African Descent.”
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One of the article's subheadings pinpointed the president's disturbing reasoning for why the races should be apart: “He Holds That the White and Black Races Cannot Dwell Together.”
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Lincoln explained to the group why separation was desirable:

You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.
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The president had little interest in hearing the opinions of the black leaders he had assembled at the White House that day. In clarifying the nature of the one-sided meeting, Lincoln dismissively added, “I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal.”
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He then seems to hold the entire black race accountable for the Civil War, stating:

But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.
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After calling the example of Liberia a “success” as an example of government-sponsored black expatriation, the president
then lectured the group about the value of having blacks relocate closer to the United States in Central America. He did not, perhaps as a tactical measure to keep his options open, specifically tell the group about the Chiriqui plans that were under way. Referring to the region as a country (and denationalizing the group's members whose birth country was the United States), he stated, “The country is a very excellent one for any people, and with great natural resources and advantages, and especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land—thus being suited to your physical condition,” and “there is evidence of very rich coal mines.”
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On the sticky question of whether blacks would be well received, old Abe stated:

The political affairs in Central America are not in quite as satisfactory condition as I wish. There are contending factions in that quarter; but it is true all the factions are agreed alike on the subject of colonization, and want it, and are more generous than we are here. To your colored race they have no objection. Besides, I would endeavor to have you made equals, and have the best assurance that you should be the equals of the best.
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The U.S. president argued, illogically, that he could guarantee equality in a foreign nation over which he had no jurisdiction. Honest Abe was also not so honest on another point. He was wrong about “all factions” agreeing on the subject of black colonization; in fact, all factions, governments, and everyone else vehemently disagreed on Lincoln's plot.

Finally, Lincoln got to the real point of the meeting. He wanted the group (and like-minded blacks, if they could be found) to act as promoters and recruiters for his scheme.
Stroking egos, he argued, “If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed.”
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President Lincoln wanted the group to find one hundred “tolerably intelligent” men, women, and children as volunteers—although he quickly reduced the number to twenty-five—to start off the project.

As emigration out of the United States had long been a strategy for some black activists, Lincoln's plan resonated with segments of the black community. Unlike the racist rationale undergirding the motives and activities of the American Colonization Society, which sought to get rid of the race problem by getting rid of blacks, African American calls for expatriation were rooted in the ideas of self-determination, racial solidarity, and genuine democratic aspirations.

In 1815, Paul Cuffee of Massachusetts, a free black with some Native American heritage, launched a back-to-Africa movement when he took thirty-eight free blacks to Sierra Leone, a country that had long been a destination for free blacks from England and, after the Revolutionary War, Canada.
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Even after slavery ended, black leaders such as Martin Delany and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner continued to call for blacks to move to Africa and in some cases did so themselves. Delany was active in national black politics and worked closely with Fredrick Douglass on his newspaper,
North Star
. By the early 1850s, however, Delany broke with Douglass and became a stirring proponent for black emigration to both Africa and South America.

During the Civil War, however, Delany decided to stay in the United States to help the Union defeat the South. In 1865, he met with President Lincoln two months before his
assassination to propose building a corps of black men who would help recruit Southern blacks to support Lincoln. After the war, frustrated with the attacks on Reconstruction, Delany again promoted emigration to Liberia.

Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a central figure in Washington, D.C.'s black community, Bishop Turner was appointed by President Lincoln as chaplain to black troops during the Civil War. He later moved to Georgia and ran for political office. After being illegally denied his seat, Bishop Turner grew frustrated with American racism and became a major speaker promoting black emigration to Africa as well as to Canada, where he died in 1915.
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One of the strongest movements for black emigration to Africa emerged in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century. On March 10, 1892, about 600 African Americans in central Arkansas participated in an effort to move to Liberia.
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Thus, when President Lincoln made a pitch for black colonization, it fell on receptive ears in a large part of the black community. Rev. Henry Highland Garnet was one black leader who approved. A longtime proponent of black emigration, he called the president's scheme “the most humane, and merciful movement which this or any other administration has proposed for the benefit of the enslaved,” somewhat missing the point that free rather than enslaved blacks were being targeted.
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Some took to calling the still undetermined destination “Linconia,” evoking the naming of Liberia's capital “Monrovia” after President James Monroe.

Returning to the 1862 meeting between Lincoln and the group of black leaders, it appears that some in the delegation mumbled a few “Yes, sirs,” and after Lincoln finished his monologue they replied by saying they would get back to him with a response. Reverend Thomas stated that they would consult
with other black leaders around the nation to get their opinion on Lincoln's proposal, but he felt optimistic. There is little evidence that Thomas or the other four had much influence over the opinion or politics of the black community. Two days after the meeting, on August 16, Thomas wrote Lincoln confidently, “We were entirely hostile to the movement until all the advantages were so ably brought to our view by you and we believe that our friends and colaborers [
sic
] for our race in those cities [Philadelphia, New York, and Boston] will when the subject is explained by us to them join heartily in sustaining such a movement.”
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Two days later, on August 18, Thomas proposed to Lincoln a national tour of black leaders who would promote his idea to other African Americans.
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As it turned out, Thomas's optimism was a bit premature. “Leading colored men” and blacks in general unambiguously and even angrily rejected Lincoln and Thomas's overtures, just as they had for decades rejected the colonization plans of the American Colonization Society and others.

Free blacks saw their future as citizens of the United States and nowhere else. In Philadelphia, in an immediate response, the Statistical Association of the Colored People of Philadelphia met on August 15 and sent a letter to Reverend Thomas condemning Lincoln's presentation and his proposal. Statistical Association President Isaiah C. Wears wrote, “To be asked, after so many years of oppression and wrong have been inflicted in a land and by a people who have been so largely enriched by the black man's toil, to pull up stakes in a civilized and barbarous nation, simple to gratify an unnatural wicked prejudice emanating from slavery, is unreasonable and anti-Christian in the extreme.”
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Addressing Lincoln's assertion that African Americans were the cause of the war, Wears lashed out at the president, stating, “But it is not the Negro that is the cause of the war; it is
the unwillingness on the part of the American people to do the race simple justice.”
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Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass's response to news of the meeting was hostile and dismissive. He wrote that Lincoln's proposal regarding free blacks “expresses merely the desire to get rid of them and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt.”
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He further wrote that “the President of the United States seems to possess an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous, if nothing worse,” and that his remarks were “unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely.”
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Lincoln moved forward despite opposition from African Americans, radical Republicans, Democrats, Southerners, and even the American Colonization Society, even after the Chiriqui plan fell apart when Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica all refused to take part in it. On December 31, 1862, the day before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln approved a contract to send 5,000 volunteer black men, women, and children to an island off the coast of Haiti known as the Île à Vache. The project became a total catastrophe. More than 400 people left the United States on April 6, 1863, and quickly discovered that little preparation had been made for their arrival. After nearly a year of deprivations, illness, death, and little production, the surviving members of the expedition, about 365 people, were brought back to the United States, arriving in Virginia on March 20, 1864. Lincoln's dream of convincing blacks to permanently leave the United States was never heard of again after the incident.
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For African Americans, and ultimately the White House, the goal of the Civil War was nothing short of black people's
liberation through the illegalization of slavery. For tactical, political, and arguably for personal reasons, Lincoln hesitated, retreated, and then moved forward in pursuit of that goal. His sense of reluctance and caution was demonstrated in his reaction to four key incidents that preceded the Emancipation Proclamation: the Confiscation Act of 1861, the Fremont Declaration, General Order 11, and the Confiscation Act of 1862.

Consistently more radical than the moderate Lincoln, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the first Confiscation Act on August 6, 1861. The Act gave the federal government authority to seize property—including blacks that were enslaved and could be claimed as property—from those in rebellion against the Union, unless they surrendered or ceased such activity within sixty days of the Act's passage. There were several weaknesses to the Act, however, including Lincoln's disinclination to sign and enforce it, the fact that it only applied to those enslaved in territories controlled by the Union, and, most important, the reality that it did not free any of the enslaved—it only “confiscated” them. Wary of frightening the border (and slaveholding) states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky, Lincoln opposed the Act and signed it very reluctantly.

As hesitant as Lincoln was about the first Confiscation Act, he was absolutely horrified when on August 31, less than a month later, General John C. Fremont issued an order to free black people enslaved by whites who were in revolt against the Union. The commander of Union forces in Missouri, General Fremont issued his own proclamation, as a war measure, that stated:

I do hereby extend, and declare established, martial law throughout the State of Missouri. . . . All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands within
these lines shall be tried by court-martial, and, if found guilty, will be shot. The property, real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri who shall take up arms against the United States, and who shall be directly proven to have taken an active part with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use; and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free.
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