AHC: A mostly African free US post-slavery

Can anyone think of a scenario where slavery would be abolished in the US but at the same time most people of African decent sent back to Africa as a compromise?
 
No one is going to pay for that.
Quite

Indeed, they founded Liberia and moved a few thousand blacks.

Now figure out where the money's coming from for MILLIONS.

Not going to happen.

There are a few ways to get a mostly Black-free US. 1) don't bring nearly as many over. 2) Industrial scale genocide. 3) have the CSA split off and have the borders thoroughly patrolled to keep blacks out of the Union.

All of them involve a very different US. None of them involve shipping millions across the Atlantic.
 
Unless all the African Americans flee to Canada or Mexico as a part of the Underground Railroad, I don't see it happening.
 
Quite


Indeed, they founded Liberia and moved a few thousand blacks.

Now figure out where the money's coming from for MILLIONS.

Not going to happen.

There are a few ways to get a mostly Black-free US. 1) don't bring nearly as many over. 2) Industrial scale genocide. 3) have the CSA split off and have the borders thoroughly patrolled to keep blacks out of the Union.

All of them involve a very different US. None of them involve shipping millions across the Atlantic.


The whole thing is nonsense. You would have to 1) Round them up 2) Put them into local camps 3) Rail them to big camps along the coast 4) Ship them all the way back to Africa and supply them with enough food, seed and tools to last at least until the first crop. You have to do that unless you want them to wind up dead in which case shooting them in the head is much cheaper.
 
Can anyone think of a scenario where slavery would be abolished in the US but at the same time most people of African decent sent back to Africa as a compromise?

No. In the first place, hardly any of them wanted to go. In the second place, few white Southerners wanted to send them; they were the main labor force in the Deep South.

One remote possibility: the Radical Republicans are in charge of Reconstruction from the beginning, and enforce black voting. This produces a backlash as lurid stories of black misrule in the South inflame racist attitudes in the North; also migration of blacks upsets the labor market.

The Democrats gain control in the 1868 elections, and disfranchise blacks, but it becomes clear that if Republicans ever get in again they will restore the black franchise; and whites in the South are fearful of restored black rule. A racist-populist alliance forms... Black removal is promoted to clear plantation land for white yeoman farmers.

Throw in a current of nativist racism left over from the Know-Nothings, and one might get enough political energy for a mass transportation program.
 

Orsino

Banned
It is difficult to envisage what the motivator could be for the kind of huge scale transatlantic transportation required. There's no money to be made from shipping black people back to Africa and if there was such intense anti-black feeling that this was a real prospect then it is a lot easier to stick people in concentration camps and let them die than it is to forcibly deport them to another continent.

Also, the tone of this questions is weird. I hope you didn't mean it to come across this way OP but the phrase "African free US" makes it sound like you're not a big fan of African-Americans.
 
An early CSA wins. Tthe economy collapses in the 1890's. Fascist/Communist esque movements rise in populaorty among poor whites. They blame the blacks for being cheap labour (slaves). A revolution takes place. A Hitler-like/Featherson dictator gets in to power and just like OTL Hitler he removes all the undesireables out of the CSA, primarily into Africa but also to the Caribbean and Mexico. By 1910 they are all gone. As the poor whites dont actually become more wealthier now that all blacks are gone a civil war within the CSA breaks out. With no side quickly winning the country is destroying itself and the USA gets refugees. The rump USA, now filled leftist labour immigrants from Europe and heavily industrialised, decides to end the warhole south of them and invades the CSA, which gets recontructed heavily and after 50 years is re-admitted to the USA. Blacks make up less than 1% in this ATL USA.
 
No. In the first place, hardly any of them wanted to go. In the second place, few white Southerners wanted to send them; they were the main labor force in the Deep South.

One remote possibility: the Radical Republicans are in charge of Reconstruction from the beginning, and enforce black voting. This produces a backlash as lurid stories of black misrule in the South inflame racist attitudes in the North; also migration of blacks upsets the labor market.

The Democrats gain control in the 1868 elections, and disfranchise blacks, but it becomes clear that if Republicans ever get in again they will restore the black franchise; and whites in the South are fearful of restored black rule. A racist-populist alliance forms... Black removal is promoted to clear plantation land for white yeoman farmers.

Throw in a current of nativist racism left over from the Know-Nothings, and one might get enough political energy for a mass transportation program.

But not nearly enough money unless the US goes into industrial scale genocide like the Nazis.
 
An early CSA wins. Tthe economy collapses in the 1890's. Fascist/Communist esque movements rise in populaorty among poor whites. They blame the blacks for being cheap labour (slaves). A revolution takes place. A Hitler-like/Featherson dictator gets in to power and just like OTL Hitler he removes all the undesireables out of the CSA, primarily into Africa but also to the Caribbean and Mexico. By 1910 they are all gone. As the poor whites dont actually become more wealthier now that all blacks are gone a civil war within the CSA breaks out. With no side quickly winning the country is destroying itself and the USA gets refugees. The rump USA, now filled leftist labour immigrants from Europe and heavily industrialised, decides to end the warhole south of them and invades the CSA, which gets recontructed heavily and after 50 years is re-admitted to the USA. Blacks make up less than 1% in this ATL USA.


With what money? It would tie up virtually all of the US rail and sea transportation to pull off. The only way the US is going to be mostly African Free is Nazi scale genocide.
 
No. In the first place, hardly any of them wanted to go. In the second place, few white Southerners wanted to send them; they were the main labor force in the Deep South.

One remote possibility: the Radical Republicans are in charge of Reconstruction from the beginning, and enforce black voting. This produces a backlash as lurid stories of black misrule in the South inflame racist attitudes in the North; also migration of blacks upsets the labor market.

The Democrats gain control in the 1868 elections, and disfranchise blacks, but it becomes clear that if Republicans ever get in again they will restore the black franchise; and whites in the South are fearful of restored black rule. A racist-populist alliance forms... Black removal is promoted to clear plantation land for white yeoman farmers.

Throw in a current of nativist racism left over from the Know-Nothings, and one might get enough political energy for a mass transportation program.

Even then, I think that there will be an argument it's easier and cheaper to use them to settle the west.
 
Even then, I think that there will be an argument it's easier and cheaper to use them to settle the west.

That makes much more sense. You won't have to tie up all those ships. You also don't have to put them into camps until the next ship goes you just need to move them west at bayonet point.
 

Lateknight

Banned
You could techinally get this if blacks were settled in "black homelands" in the west and south that were de jure not part of the U.S.
 
Can anyone think of a scenario where slavery would be abolished in the US but at the same time most people of African decent sent back to Africa as a compromise?

There might be a *limited* movement to settle African-Americans elsewhere(Liberia primarily, but perhaps other places like Haiti and even Sierra Leone as well), but it would almost certainly be voluntary, and probably wouldn't have gotten much more than maybe a few tens of thousands to move in just the 12 or so years that Reconstruction existed IOTL.

However, though, it's not at all implausible to posit that the Exoduster movement, or an equivalent, could have been significantly more successful than OTL; one thing many seem to frequently forget is that, back then, the Midwest, and West, were viewed as wide open spaces by most. Really, you could fit about 100,000 African-Americans in the various territories in small, spread-out communes of a few hundred or a thousand here and there over the space of 20-25 years, and they'd be barely noticeable by most.

Unfortunately, it can be said that there would likely be a few whites who'd probably still be willing to go out of their way to cause trouble for the black pioneers; look at the Greenwood, Okla. incident in 1921 IOTL for a possible worst-case scenario.....

On the other hand, though, even IOTL, we did have a few black settlers in Washington going back to the 1860's, including one George (Washington) Bush, and by all available accounts we have, there was little in the way of notable strife, and the Bush family themselves were treated fairly decently.
 
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