On the night of December 31, 1862, a day before issuing the final Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery in America, President Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock, a contractor and cotton planter in Florida. Their deal: Use federal funds to move 5,000 former slaves from the United States to Île à Vache (“Cow Island”), a small 20-square-mile island off the southwest coast of Haiti.
Since the early 1850s, Lincoln had advanced colonization as a remedy for the gradual emancipation of the nation’s slaves. While he strongly opposed the institution of slavery, he did not believe in racial equality or the successful integration of people of different races. And freeing nearly 4 million black people into white American society — North or South — was a political nonstarter. So, despite the fact that most black Americans in the 1850s were born on American soil, Lincoln advocated shipping them to Central America, the Caribbean, or “returning” them to Africa. “If as the friends of colonization hope…[we] succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, restoring a captive people to their long-lost homeland,” Lincoln said in his eulogy for statesman Henry Clay in 1852, “it will be a glorious consummation indeed.
“Lincoln saw colonization as a practical solution to the millions liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation,” wrote Jayme Ruth Spencer, an expert on the Ile a Vache effort. “Thus the proclamation would satisfy those who desired the emancipation of the negro as well as those who feared that the freed slave would invade the North.”
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The Haiti experience
An illustration from a document of the New York City Colonization Society, founded in 1817 by Robert Finley, to support the return of free African Americans to what was thought to be greater freedom in Africa, 1837.
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Nearly a month before signing the contract with Kock, in his second annual message to Congress, Lincoln had proposed a constitutional amendment to colonize African Americans outside the United States. The amendment included federal compensation for slave owners who had lost their human property due to emancipation.
Seeking a proof of concept, Lincoln settled on Kock’s proposal of Île à Vache after serious consideration of an alternate colonization scheme that would have sent freed black Americans to the province of Chiriquí in Panama. In Kock’s plan, former slaves would work on a cotton plantation. Each family would receive homes and access to hospitals and schools. And after their four-year labor contracts ended, they would receive 16 acres of land and the wages they had earned during that time. Colonization was voluntary for former slaves, but deeply encouraged by Lincoln, Kock and his many other supporters.
“The intelligent Negro may enter into a life of liberty and independence, knowing that he has won the means of subsistence,” wrote Kock in his proposal, “and at the same time disciplined himself in duties, pleasures, and needs of free labor.”
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Lincoln met with black leaders to discuss colonization
The colonization movement was never popular with most African Americans and abolitionists. “Shame on the guilty wretches who dare to propose, and on all who accept such a proposal,” wrote Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist orator and publisher, in his diary. The North star in 1849. “We live here – have lived here – have the right to live here and mean to live here.”
On August 14, 1862, Lincoln met at the White House with a delegation of black leaders to advocate for the voluntary emigration of African Americans to countries other than the United States. “Your race suffers from living among us, while ours suffers from your presence… So it’s better for both of us to be apart,” Lincoln told the delegation.
Douglass, who was not invited and who had read about the meeting in a newspaper, wrote in his Douglass Monthly that the proposal “recalls the politeness with which a man might try to remove from his house a troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt”.
READ MORE: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: Inside their complicated relationship
Settlers leave for Île à Vache
Members of the US Cabinet, gathered to hear Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 1862. (LR) President Abraham Lincoln, Solomon P. Chase, William H. Seward, Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, Edwin M Stanton, Caleb B Smith and Edward Bates.
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Lincoln was undeterred by these complaints from Douglass and other African-American leaders. On April 14, 1863, the ship Ocean Ranger left Fortress Monroe, Virginia, with 453 hopeful African-American emigrants aboard, heading for Ile à Vache.
The mission proved a “total failure” from the start, according to historian and lawyer Graham Welch.
By the time the Ocean Ranger reached Ile a Vache in early May, at least 30 of her black passengers had died of smallpox. A second ship, supposed to follow the Ocean Ranger with building and living materials, never set sail. Kock, the island’s self-appointed superintendent, had deceived the government and black settlers about living conditions. During a visit to the island, a government official found the African American settlers with “tears, misery and grief depicted on every face”. Instead of the houses they had been promised, families slept on the ground in small huts made of saw palmetto and brushwood. Kock offered wages in self-printed currency, which workers were forced to spend on food and goods at exorbitant prices in a kind of company store. There was also a “no work, no rations” policy. When the migrant workers threatened to revolt, Kock fled.
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The abandonment of Île à Vache and the failure of colonization
In the summer of 1863, news of the inhumane conditions at Ile a Vache reached Lincoln, who confided to Union Army chaplain John Eaton that the “negroes of the colony of Cow Island on the coast of Haiti were suffering intensely from a “jigging” pest. from which there seemed to be no escape or protection. On February 1, 1864, the President ordered his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, to commission a warship to rescue the Île à Vache group. A month later, the Navy’s Marcia C. Day brought the 350 surviving emigrants back to America, arriving in Alexandria, Virginia on March 20. Also in March, Lincoln signed a bill withdrawing the $600,000 earmarked for settlement, of which the administration had spent only about $38,000.
According to Welch, Lincoln’s signing of the bill signaled that he was finally abandoning colonization as a viable option for those freed from slavery. “After his overthrow of the Ile a Vache enterprise, Lincoln not only remained silent about the failure of the Haitian colony, but also never issued any other public statement regarding colonization,” Welch wrote. . Instead, Lincoln began exploring ways to integrate those he had freed into a post-emancipation society.
While Ile a Vache was a disastrous failure that resulted in the deaths of many African Americans, the end of colonization as government policy with the case comforted many African Americans who had opposed the emigration to another country. “This shift toward assimilation, rather than displacement,” Welch wrote, “found support within black communities, particularly those who saw enlistment as a way to support the nation and the president who had granted freedom”.
