In 1850, most white Americans interpreted black resettlement as meaning one institution and one location: the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the African settlement that it had founded three decades earlier, Liberia. As politicians from North and South sparred over dividing the acquisitions of the Mexican-American War (1846–8) into territories where slavery would be prohibited and those where it would not, they turned to the compromise of Liberian colonization, which promised to remove the source of their antagonism by simply removing black people. State legislators, endowed with greater power than their federal counterparts to proscribe African Americans, also redoubled their support for the ACS and the “black laws” that excluded, even expelled their black compatriots. Yet as lawmakers found it easier to persecute African Americans than to offer them positive alternatives, and as the citizens of a now-independent Liberia protested Americans’ presumption in foisting manumitted slaves and “recaptives” from the Atlantic slave trade on a small, struggling settlement, commentators contended that black Americans might need to colonize other parts of the world instead.

From the mid-1850s, a new force emerged in American politics: the Republican Party. Opposed to slavery and determined to prevent it taking hold in the territories of the United States, a cadre of politicians centered on a family of boosters from the Upper South, the Blairs, lobbied their Republican colleagues to adopt colonization as national policy. But the Blairs failed to persuade their new allies that their own scheme had improved on that of the ACS, despite their abandoning West Africa for the closer, geostrategically valuable Central America. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the secession of the southern states and the outbreak of war transformed the forecast for the Republican colonizationists, whose vision chimed with Lincoln’s own support for colonization. Prodded by the president, the Republican-dominated Congress added voluntary colonization to its laws freeing the slaves of the District of Columbia and in the rebellious states. But that was not enough for Lincoln, who asked legislators to write colonization into the US Constitution – and ignored those abolitionists who argued that his own Emancipation Proclamation should end his attempts to expatriate potential soldiers.

Decades before the ACS even came to exist, white reformers had planned black colonies for what they imagined to be the vacant wilds of the American West. They discerned how internal colonization might address the “race question” while not wasting black labor overseas; for their part, black Americans took less offense at an idea that offered them autonomy without expatriation. But as white migrants, with slaves or without, settled the West at a rate few had foreseen, Americans abandoned continental black colonies. That changed with the Civil War, which rekindled northerners’ faith in internal colonization – but for the South, not the West. While chaos within the White House mothballed President Lincoln’s foreign colonization schemes, policy makers began to trust the white North’s salvation to “natural” trends of racial migration, which just might do the job that conscious design had failed to. Yet the postwar frustrations of conservatives such as President Andrew Johnson, and of the freedpeople (who craved ownership of the land that they had long worked), showed that black resettlement would continue to hold a place in American race relations.

If the Civil War had changed policy makers’ attitudes to black resettlement, it was to divide them into supporters of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of the idea. By 1865, the Blairs had come out for the latter – and for the Democratic Party that embodied it. But the Republicans struggled to break from old ways of thinking. When President Ulysses Grant proposed annexing the Dominican Republic as a potential destination for African Americans, but as a fully fledged state of the American Union, his colleagues divided over whether his proposal was radical or reactionary. Meanwhile, in the southern United States, waves of white oppression in the 1870s and 1890s drove African Americans toward the offer of an ACS that, lacking the financial support of times past, struggled to meet demand. As the United States filled with settlers of European descent, and as the great imperialist land-grab left ever fewer foreign locations for African American resettlement, the proto-segregation represented by black colonization morphed into the local segregation with which modern Americans are more familiar.

Few historians have noticed that, from the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies (1834) to the same milestone in the United States (1865), the planters of the British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guiana made repeated attempts to entice over the black Americans whose white rulers seemed so eager to expel them. The planters’ offer divided abolitionists, who heard echoes of the prejudicial premise of Liberian colonization, but who also saw an opportunity to boost the free-labor British Caribbean. The 2,000 black Americans and Canadians who immigrated to the British West Indies at the turn of the 1840s found many things to commend in their new home – and many things to condemn. Such ambivalence about the entire venture was shared by the British government, which forever feared that colonial canvassers would jeopardize Anglo-American relations by accepting fugitive slaves. Latterly joined by the other European powers with West Indian colonies, namely, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, Britain approached the matter gingerly during the American Civil War, when the prospect of benefiting from wholesale emancipation, but under the fraught auspices of the US military, offered unimaginable risk and reward.

From the Revolution to the Civil War, white Americans believed that the freedom of the slaves, should it ever come to pass, must end in blacks and whites living hundreds, even thousands of miles apart. Most famously, a coalition of slaveholders and reformers founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816–17, which carved out the West African settlement of Liberia for black expatriates. But a vast array of contemporaries, black and white, American and foreign, also staked their claim to plans for moving African Americans from the United States, especially to other parts of the Americas. African American emigrants left for Canada, Haiti, and the British West Indies as well as for Liberia, while white institutions and individuals variously encouraged and resisted schemes to resettle them across the Caribbean and Latin America. Contemporaries were so sure that they would make at least one plan the locus of an African American exodus that, when the Civil War destroyed slavery in the United States at unexpected speed, they found themselves with few intellectual foundations on which to build a biracial nation.

While always hostile to white demands that they expatriate, free black northerners considered emigrating on their own terms, as an affirmation of their dual identity as black and American. Even as stalwart integrationists such as Frederick Douglass criticized his peers for betraying their enslaved kin, emigrationists such as Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, and James Theodore Holly debated the true purpose of black exodus, as well as the most desirable destination, concurring only in their dislike for the ACS and Liberia. Where to go? Canada, for its proximity to the United States? The Niger Valley, for its connection to their African ancestry? Or Haiti, the one black-run state in the Western Hemisphere, and a bastion of black militancy? As emigrationists duly divided, exploring and settling distant lands, they were shocked to realize just how American, even “Anglo-Saxon” their assumptions really were – and how much they had to call on much-resented white assistance. And so, like white colonizationists, they entered the 1860s praying that some more powerful entity would assume the onerous task of fostering African American emigration.

: The Republican colonizationists had always fixated on Latin America, especially Central America, where African American settlers might resist “filibusters,” expansionist expeditions supported by American citizens. For their part, the region’s rulers toyed with an influx of immigrants that would expand their population but darken its complexion. Once Abraham Lincoln came to power, he focused on the province of Chiriquí in what is now Panama (then part of Colombia), where black colonists might secure an isthmian crossing for US troops and traders. Announcing the venture in a notorious address of August 1862, the president had to retreat once he came to realize the instability of Colombian politics and the extent of his own associates’ stake in the business. Accordingly, the very same day that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he instead signed an agreement with a contractor to settle a party of freed slaves on the Île à Vache, one of Haiti’s satellite islands. That colony’s tragic failure finally impressed on him that he should not deal with sovereign states via shady contractors.