Book contents
6 - Freedom in the Tropics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
In the spring of 1864, just before General Ulysses S. Grant began the campaign that crushed southern hopes for independence, a Union embarrassment off Haiti’s southwestern coast gave Confederates a rare late Civil War propaganda bonanza. A year earlier, as part of President Abraham Lincoln’s colonization program, four hundred and fifty-three African Americans had boarded the brig Ocean Ranger at Union-held Fortress Monroe on Virginia’s coast, bound for Haiti’s Île-à-Vache, or Cow Island. Nothing had gone right for the emigrants on ship or on the island. Now, a press report of their fate played into Confederate hands (Figure 6.1).
Lincoln’s embarrassment originated in the machinations of a sleazy entrepreneur named Bernard Kock, who in August 1862 signed a contract with Haiti’s government leasing Île-à-Vache for ten years. According to the deal, Kock would deliver 35.25 percent of all timber cut during his lease to Haitian authorities and he would have the work performed by imported laborers “of the African or Indian Race” who would gain Haitian citizenship upon their arrival and later get land. During September and October, Kock had lobbied the Union government to back the scheme. He submitted to Lincoln a synopsis of his contract, a proposal to colonize 5,000 African Americans on the island, and a request that Union authorities provide them with transportation there and subsistence until the immigrants could harvest a crop. On New Year’s Eve, Lincoln gave a short-lived endorsement to Kock’s proposal, changing his mind after Secretary of State William Seward received a negative report about Kock’s character and intentions. On January 6, 1863, Lincoln instructed Seward to withhold the official U.S. seal from the document. Kock then worked around the administration’s displeasure. On March 30, he transferred his contract to Wall Street financiers Paul S. Forbes and Charles K. Tuckerman, and Lincoln approved the scaled-back agreement, which provided the capitalists with $50 per emigrant in federal funds to colonize 500 former slaves.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the TropicsLincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America, pp. 230 - 276Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
References
and Tuckerman to John P. Usher, July 7, 1863, RG 48, Roll 9; “Honduras and Hayti,” African Repository 39 (Nov. 1863): 344Google Scholar
, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010)
, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2008), 2: 395–96
, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters (New York, 2007)
, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 2008)
, “Matías Romero: Mexican Minister to the United States during the Juárez-Maximilian Era,” Hispanic American Historical Review 45 (May 1965): 230Google Scholar
, Reforma Mexico and the United States: A Search for Alternatives to Annexation, 1854–1861 (University, AL, 1981)
, Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican–United States Relations, 1861–1867 (Baton Rouge, 1978)
, Lincoln, President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York, 2008)
, Spain and the American Civil War (Columbia, MO, 2011)
, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (1941; rpt., Boston, 1963)
, Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 (Austin, 2001)
, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill, 2010)
, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York, 2012)
, Diplomacy during the American Civil War (New York, 1975), 155
, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War (Washington, DC, 1999)
and , Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy (Chapel Hill, 1971)
, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965)
, Two Nations over Time: Spain and the United States, 1776–1977 (Westport, CT, 1978)
, “The Relations of the United States with South America during the American Civil War,” Hispanic American Historical Review 21 (Feb. 1941): 69–70Google Scholar
, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2011)
, “Napoleon Is Coming! Maximilian Is Coming?” in The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, ed. Robert E. May (West Lafayette, IN, 1995), 101
, France and the United States: Their Diplomatic Relations, 1789–1914 (Chapel Hill, 1970)
, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York, 1866), 290–91
, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), 48, 50
, Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union (Lawrence, 2011)
, “The Mission of Elisha O. Crosby to Guatemala, 1861–1864,” Pacific Historical Review 24 (Aug. 1955): 276Google Scholar
, “Misconstrued Mission: Expansion and Black Colonization in Mexico and Central America during the Civil War,” Pacific Historical Review 49 (Nov. 1980): 611–12Google Scholar
, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, 1995), 82–84
, “Let Us All Be Grateful That We Have Colored Troops That Will Fight,” in Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2002), 11–12, 17
, comp., Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, from Its Organization, September 29, 1789, to March 2, 1903 (2 vols.; Washington, DC, 1903), 1: 955
, Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829–1861 (Westport, CT, 1985)
, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” Journal of Negro History 37 (Oct. 1952): 418–19Google Scholar
, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1967; rpt., Princeton, 1972)
, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989)
, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994)
, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA, 2010)
, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville, 1996)
, “Lincoln’s Compensated Emancipation Plan and Its Relation to Delaware,” Delaware Notes 7 (1931): 28–29, 37Google Scholar
Jr., “Colonization and the Myth That Lincoln Prepared the People for Emancipation,” Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. and (Chapel Hill, 2009), 64–65
, Lincoln and the Negro (New York, 1962)
, “The Struggle for the Recognition of Haiti and Liberia as Independent Republics,” Journal of Negro History 2 (Oct. 1917): 380–82Google Scholar
, “Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed. Eric Foner (New York, 2008), 152
, “The Lincoln Colony: Aaron Columbus Burr’s Proposed Colonization of British Honduras,” Civil War History 43 (Mar. 1997): 5–16Google Scholar
, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007)
, Almost a Territory: America’s Attempt to Annex the Dominican Republic (Newark, 1990)
, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, 2010)
, “Greeley, Colonization, and a ‘Deputation of Negroes’: Three Considerations on Lincoln and Race,” Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race (DeKalb, 2007), 41–42
, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007)
, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (1965; rpt., Urbana, 1982)
, The Emancipation Proclamation (1963; rpt., Wheeling, IL, 1995)
, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University, AL, 1982)
, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (Lincoln, NE, 1999)
, “Labor, Race, and Colonization: Imagining a Post-Slavery World in the Americas,” The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, ed. Steven Mintz and John Stauffer (Amherst, 2007), 262
, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge, 1985)
, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia, MO,, 2011)
and , John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865 (Urbana, 1989), 427
, Butler’s Book: Autobiographic and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benj F Butler (Boston, 1892)
, “Benjamin Butler’s Colonization Testimony Reevaluated,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 29 (No. 1, 2008): 1–11Google Scholar
, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (2004; rpt., New York, 2006)
, “The Difficulties of Understanding Abe: Lincoln’s Reconciliation of Racial Inequality and Natural Rights,” in Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race, ed. Brian R. Dirck (DeKalb, 2007), 79
Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago, 2000), 149
, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York, 2008)
, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, 1972)
, Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations (Kent, OH, 2008)
, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (New York: Anchor Books, 2004)
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.