SAO PAOLO LETTER:Abraham Lincoln came from a tradition of US abolitionists who felt whites and blacks could never live harmoniously alongside each other, writes TOM HENNIGAN
IT’S THE sort of mad scheme one associates with the planners of the Third Reich – deporting an entire race to the world’s biggest rainforest. Crazy, but such a plan existed, and not in the demented minds of Hitler’s minions.
Instead, the idea of colonising the Amazon Basin with freed US slaves was dreamt up by the underlings of none other than Abraham Lincoln.
All year, Americans have been celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth – surveys show he is the man they rank as their greatest president. Dozens of new books on him have been published, four new Lincoln pennies minted, and plays, concerts and museum exhibitions have been staged across the country, where he is revered as a secular saint.
There is of course much to celebrate. In defeating the rebel Confederacy, Lincoln saved the Union and freed the slaves, finally giving meaning to the Declaration of Independence and its claim “that all men are created equal”.
But today it is little remembered – and downplayed by most of those who do – that Lincoln was very much a man of his time with regard to race, believing that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality”.
Though he ended slavery in the US, Lincoln also sought “to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be”. He came from a tradition of US abolitionists who felt whites and blacks could never live harmoniously beside each other, and therefore the best way to prevent racial conflict (or worse, intermingling) was to remove the country’s African population.
As the civil war raged, Lincoln summoned a deputation of black leaders to the White House in 1862 to tell them: “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.”
Having blamed blacks for the white man’s war, he then told them that “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Lincoln felt abolishing slavery would deal a fatal blow to the Confederacy, but would prove unpopular across the civil war divide.
Promising to remove freed slaves resolved this dilemma and fitted with his own long-held view that the races would be best kept apart. The problem was finding a country that would take in the US’s African population.
Lincoln’s preference was for Central America, but in Brazil he had an ambassador fired by the idea of combining his president’s zeal for resettling freed slaves with the imperial urge within the US body politic to wrest control of the Amazon basin from Brazil.
Even before being Lincoln’s ambassador to Brazil, James Watson Webb lamented that country’s failure to tap the Amazon’s potential in the way the US harnessed the Mississippi.
With this in mind he hatched the plan to create a bi-national company whereby the US would pay to transport its freed slaves to the Amazon, where they would receive grants of land from the government in Rio de Janeiro.
There they would work as indentured servants for five years before becoming citizens of Brazil. Webb sketched a first phase involving 50,000 freed slaves. Thus, according to Webb, would the Amazon become “the future home of the manumitted Negro of the United States” while ridding the US “of a curse which has well-nigh destroyed her”.
Brazil did not dismiss the scheme out of hand. Its economy was dependent on slave labour, but this was in increasingly short supply as British warships sought to impose the ban on the Atlantic slave trade. Eventually Rio politely declined the offer, put off by the arrogant Webb, who they feared was an agent for US imperial designs on the Amazon.
“They did not want an American company to take over a large part of the country that they had spent three centuries trying to defend from outside influence,” says Maria Clara Carneiro Sampaio, a Brazilian historian of Webb’s time in Brazil. With Brazil’s refusal, Webb’s plan was stillborn, and Lincoln dropped his long-held dream of removing his country’s African population, now largely forgotten amid the veneration of his memory.
“There is a cult of leading figures in the US – such as the Founding Fathers – that tends to elide and gloss over that which does not fit a pre-existing image,” says US historian Gerald Horne, author of The Deepest South, a history of slaving relations between the US and Brazil.
Ironically, the only emigrants from the US to show up in Brazil after the end of the civil war were defeated Confederate slave-holders who could not bear the thought of living under Yankee rule alongside their emancipated former property.
Up to ten thousand defeated rebels are estimated to have relocated to Brazil, where emancipation would not come until 1888. However, most of these zealots of slavery were quickly disappointed with life in a land they saw as ruined by miscegenation, and most eventually drifted back to defeated Dixie.