Did President Abraham Lincoln have special plans for freed slaves after emancipation? Well, two British academics claim the former United States president, hailed (especially by African-Americans) for his campaign against slavery, wanted to send many former American slaves to British colonies in the Caribbean.
“The two British writers are correct,” notes Dr. Claud Anderson, president of PowerNomics Corporation of America, a corporation focused on business development, primarily in inner cities. “President Abraham Lincoln’s interest was strictly in saving the ?Union of States.` The welfare of five million Black people (slaves) was only little more than a logistical problem. Lincoln considered shipping all Blacks in America back to Africa or to the Caribbean. He even considered establishing a Black colony in Texas or Central America.”
The two academics, Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page, write in their forthcoming book, Colonisation After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, that newly discovered documents in British archives prove that Lincoln wanted to relocate as many Blacks as possible.
Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, is often revered for not only winning the American Civil War (1861-65)?but for bringing an end to slavery. But in reality, says Anderson, who wrote Black Labor, White Wealth: A Search for Power and Economic Justice and?PowerNomics?: The National Plan, Lincoln was more interested in?developing the United States as a white country. “Lincoln requested the U.S. Congress to give Reparation dollars to White slave holders who lost their slaves, while he killed Radical Republicans’ suggestions that all freed slaves receive Reparations in the form of 40 acres, a mule, and $100 dollars,” Anderson points out. “President Lincoln even opposed the drafting and initial public announcement of an Emancipation Proclamation for Black slaves. He final agreed and read the Emancipation six months later.”
The British historians agree. In their book, they propose that Lincoln was still considering Black colonization up until his assassination in 1865. According to the two British academics, soon after Lincoln announced the freedom of America’s four million slaves under the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, he also approved plans to set up freedmen’s settlements in what is now known as Belize and Guyana.
Say Magness and Page, Lincoln was ?secretly authorizing? British officials to recruit thousands of Blacks move to the sugar and cotton plantations of Central America. According to Magness and Page, the new documents show Lincoln himself met agents for the then-colonies of British Honduras and British Guiana to recruit Blacks to move to the encampments.
Concludes Anderson, “So, in reality, there is absolutely no reason for Black Americans to be honoring and loving President Abraham Lincoln who was no different from any other White person of the 1800s. Congress did not give Reparations to white slave holders because slave holders had invested approximately $8 billion in slaves which was more money than the nation had invested in all level of government and all other businesses.”
He adds, “If Black Americans just have to honor whites of that time period, it would make more sense for them to recognize and honor John Brown and members of the Radical Republicans, such as Congressmen Charles Sumner, Stevens, and Benjamin Wade.”
