Lincoln survives, sends all African-Americans "back" to Liberia

Part of Booth moving the plan from kidnapping to assassination is given by some (think there are strong hints in his diary) because of Lincoln speaking about giving African-Americans the vote. Keep in mind Booth was a snob and, if what I once heard (might have been history Channel, and might have been the Booth family trying to distance themselves) that he would never dine with the family when they had meals with the white fieldhands.
 
19th century... Well, a lot of money spent, and Liberia suddenly finds itself having quite a strong population base.

The plan was that they'd move out West to colonize the area but the reverse happened - many whites moved instead

Yeah, I’ve said before that logistically it makes a lot more sense to move all the freed slaves to west of the Mississippi, as opposed to sending them all back to Africa.
 
Yeah, I’ve said before that logistically it makes a lot more sense to move all the freed slaves to west of the Mississippi, as opposed to sending them all back to Africa.
Noooooope. Part of the whole thing with Free Soilers was keeping farmland open to themselves. This would cause too much friction. Then again, they might just put them in the land most likely to get raided or with the least water.
 
Noooooope. Part of the whole thing with Free Soilers was keeping farmland open to themselves. This would cause too much friction. Then again, they might just put them in the land most likely to get raided or with the least water.

Yeah I am under no illusion that the slaves would get the best farmland because they wouldn't, I’m just suggesting that if the government wanted to protect them from southern reprisals, it would make more sense to send them to settle the west as opposed to sending them back to Africa.
 
Even after the Civil War, African-Americans contributed a lot to the agricultural base of the South. So too, it also contributed to supporting the North. If they were forced to leave, it would mean widespread labor shortages in the South and probably a severe economic downturn.

BTW, as Eric Foner notes, the point that colonization would lead to a labor shortage was one which both the "radical" Sumner and the "conservative" Seward made in arguing against colonization:

"Charles Sumner called attention to another aspect of the colonization plan which bothered many Republicans when he wrote during the Civil War that the deportation of three million slaves “will deprive the country of what it most needs, which is labor.” Many Republicans expected the slaves, once freed, to become the free labor force of the South. The radical Congressman Owen Lovejoy spoke of emancipation as a transformation of the blacks “from slaves into serfs.” Seward discouraged Lincoln’s colonization plans during the war, saying, “I am always for bringing men and States into this Union, never for taking any out .” 44 Pro-colonization Republicans countered by suggesting that deportation be a gradual process, and that free white labor, from Europe and the North, could take the place of the slaves. The New York Times even suggested importing Chinese laborers, although it was not clear how this would serve one of the major aims of colonization, the separation of races. But to Republicans concerned with the nation’s economic development, the idea of transporting out of the country “the whole labor-power of the south” seemed fantastic." https://archive.org/details/freesoilfreelabo01fone/page/278
 
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You might see Liberia become a major power in Africa, and perhaps one with a very anti-American/anti-European stance. This might have huge butterflies in the race for Africa.
 
Noooooope. Part of the whole thing with Free Soilers was keeping farmland open to themselves. This would cause too much friction. Then again, they might just put them in the land most likely to get raided or with the least water.

Actually, as I keep pointing out, by the 1850's and 1860's, most colonization plans did not involve either Africa or the US West but Latin America.

"To many of the earlier colonizationists, whose interest centered on Africa, the plan would not only solve the race problem in the United States but would fulfill a great religious end. American Negroes would serve as Christian missionaries, bringing the gospel to the Dark Continent. In the eyes of Republican colonizationists, however, the Negroes were to be emissaries of a different kind; as black agents of the American Empire, they would help establish the commercial and political hegemony of the United States in Latin America. It is important to remember that during the 1850’s much of the attention of American foreign policy was focused on Central America. That area was a hotbed of international conflict, with the United States and Britain vying for dominance and southern expansionists and filibusters eyeing it as part of a future slave empire. The Blairs argued that the establishment of Negro colonies there would ensure American dominance. Colonization, the elder Blair wrote, would create “rich colonies under our protection, likely in the end, to appropriate the whole region to our use.” 26 Many New York and New England merchants were already interested in commerce with Central America, and Frank Blair made two of his most important speeches on colonization before influential mercantile audiences in Boston and New York. He described the great mineral wealth and trade possibilities of the region, and offered colonization and the Pacific railroad as twin measures which would expand America’s commerce and empire. Central America, Blair declared, “would, in fact, become our India.” 27

"Not only would colonization enable the United States to outflank the British in Central America, but it would also effectively block southern plans to expand the slave system southward. The elder Blair wrote in 1859 that his plan would “build up a free black power, which will counteract the design of making all south of Mason and Dixon’s line to Brazil a slave empire. . . Doolittle drew the analogy between Kansas, where the settlement of white laborers had prevented slavery from establishing a foothold, and Central America, where a free black colony would bar slavery. The peculiar institution and the slave trade, he wrote, could “no more go there than they could go through a wall of fire.” 28

"It was highly ironic that Negroes were considered capable of becoming the agents of American empire in the Caribbean while they were being viewed at the same time as an undesirable population at home. Republicans tried to justify this contradiction by appealing to the widely accepted belief that the white and black races were suited to different climates. 29 Only the blacks could establish American influence in the tropics, because in that climate, as Doolittle put it, “the white race is doomed.” “It is by this race alone,” Frank Blair told his New York audience, “that those regions are to be regenerated, and brought within the circle of civilization.” …" https://archive.org/details/freesoilfreelabo01fone/page/272

Lincoln's statement in his famous 1854 Peoria speech that "My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,---to their own native land" https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm would seem to link him to the older generation of colonizationists (like Henry Clay, whom Lincoln admired so much) and thus to some extent to justify the OP. But in the first place even in the Peoria speech, Lincoln recognizes the impracticality of the idea: "But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days." Second, that speech after all was in 1854. All the colonization schemes during Lincoln's presidency involved Latin America--and moreover were voluntary.
 
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. Southern culture didn't have problem living near black people, arguably southern culture is affected more by living near black people than northern culture. What southern culture have problem is living with EQUAL black people, they didn't want to live in White Only country (that strain is Modern and internationally is more Australian culture). And economically south is dependent on Black labour, replacing it with immigrants bring no benefit (and probably more disbenefit since new immigrants is less subservient and more foreign).

In the time period we're talking about, southern culture had a major problem living with FREE black people. For them, that was already dangerously close to equality. This way, they don't have to.
 

Lusitania

Donor
This thread is...just...too...weird!
It is wierd for us today to contemplate that some people thought at one time in 19th century that free blacks and whites could not live side by side in the US and that they be doing the African-Americans a huge favor to send them back to Africa.

They were not thinking of economics and costs but simply on social cohesion.

Again I shutter to think of the economic implications should an action would happen. I also do not want to consider the genocidal results of dumping that many people on African continent. For it would of resulted in hundred of thousands of people dying being forcibly evicted from US, transported to Africa and power and deaths in África.
 

Dolan

Banned
Maybe some incentives instead of forcible relocation? Make the black people want to move
Promising them a plot of land to farm in Africa might work, especially when the local native Africans never being counted into consideration.

Basically Liberia being settler colony, just with African-Americans.

The initial issue would be how to motivate Blacks to move there, but once a critical mass has been achieved, there will be one hell of a transplanted colony.

I think it would also seriously enlarge Liberia at the expenses of neighboring African natives. Sure, some American Africans would try to actually assimilate to their "ancestral people", but most of them would actually congregate with another American Africans and sooner than later, they would form separate society due to human tendency of Tribalism.

Thus this ATL Liberia might ironically end up seen as outsider/invader nation by Native Africans, even when they both are technically Black. Liberia having more African Americans will likely to result in Liberia end up being admitted as another state on par with Hawaii instead of fully independent.
 
I just don't get people who propose this think black Americans would not riot and go to war.

Y'all don't think they don't know what it's like to be a black person on a boat? Not even getting into them being a fully Western people.
 
Thus this ATL Liberia might ironically end up seen as outsider/invader nation by Native Africans, even when they both are technically Black. Liberia having more African Americans will likely to result in Liberia end up being admitted as another state on par with Hawaii instead of fully independent.
Doubtful. Their wouldn't be enough white people to make Senators, Representatives, etc. I imagine everyone darker than an Irishman are still somehow going to end up disenfranchised. Which reminds me of how the Irish rioted in New York during the Civil War. As well as decades earlier, when New York abolished slavery, and thus new immigrant Irishmen attacked African-Americans who had been there for generations. I also recall a lot thing about White ******s that people would say about Irishmen, though it might have been related to propoganda where the South said they were treated as bad as, or worse than, Slaves in the South. There is a point to all this, though. Namely, without Blacks people might be less focuses on being White. Or they will keep the classification more limited, excluding Sicilians, Slavs, and others.
I just don't get people who propose this think black Americans would not riot and go to war.

Y'all don't think they don't know what it's like to be a black person on a boat? Not even getting into them being a fully Western people.
To be fair, they probably don't know about it themselves, outside of perhaps fifty thousand or so who would presumably have been smuggled from Africa or sent in ships from Brazil or Cuba. I highly doubt they are going to just put their fate in these boats anyways.
 
To be fair, they probably don't know about it themselves, outside of perhaps fifty thousand or so who would presumably have been smuggled from Africa or sent in ships from Brazil or Cuba. I highly doubt they are going to just put their fate in these boats anyways.

You greatly under estimate oral transmission.
 
@Baby Kata you have posted about sending black people "back to where they came from", as well as starting a thread where you posted inflammatory comments calling for extermination, enslavement, forced conversion and deportation of Muslim Algerians. You have also openly called for white settlers to colonise the land, and stated that the result would be a "superior" civilisation. It seems clear what your agenda is.
 

Kaze

Banned
Problem 1. gathering them all up
there are millions of Africans, half-africans, and freemen that would have to be gathered up
Problem 2. transport
there are not enough ships on this planet to transport them back
Problem 3. getting them to willingly leave
see #1 and #2 - some of them won't want to leave the US

but let us say we can get past problems 1 to 3 through ASB.

Problem 4. surviving on Africa.

Nine chances out of ten it would lead to a mass death senerio where the Africans sent back would all die or wish they were dead.
 
I mean if we want a conversation about where the European colonization of the New World fails as a project or devolves into something more along Indian or African lines, I'm all for it.
 
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