July 16, 1862, Congress and Lincoln begin legislation to deport all people of color from the U.S. and it’s territories. Later, on July 21, Lincoln signed and an act approving $500,000 to begin “colonization”, AKA deportation.
37th Congess. (US)
No. 148. REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON EMANCIPATION AND COLONIZATION, In the House of Representatives, July 16, 1862:
“It is useless, now, to enter upon any philosophical inquiry whether nature has or has not made the negro inferior to the Caucasian. The belief is indelibly fixed upon the public mind that such inequality does exist. There are irreconcilable differences between the two races which separate them, as with a wall of fire. The home for the African must not be within the limits of the present territory of the Union. The Anglo- American looks upon every acre of our present domain as intended for him, and not for the negro. A home, therefore, must be sought for the African beyond our own limits and in those warmer regions to which his constitution is better adapted than to our own climate,and which doubtless the Almighty intended the colored races should inhabit and cultivate.
Much of the objection to emancipation arises from the opposition of a large portion of our people to the intermixture of the races, and from the association of white and black labor. The committee would do nothing to favor such a policy; apart from the antipathy which nature has ordained, the presence of a race among us who cannot, and ought not to be admitted to our social and political privileges, will be a perpetual source of injury and inquietude to both. This is a question of color, and is unaffected by the relation of master and slave.
The introduction of the negro, whether bond or free, into the same field of labor with the white man, is the opprobrium of the latter… We wish to disabuse our laboring countrymen, and the whole Caucasian race who may seek a home here, of this error… The committee conclude that the highest interests of the white race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Scandinavian, require that the whole country should be held and occupied by those races.”
That’s right,… under the completely Republican controled U.S. Congress, Lincoln’s Administration is moving to, and approved financing the “colonization” ALL black Americans out of the U.S.: With the 13 states having seceded, the Lincoln led Republicans (a Northeastern sectional party) and Whigs controlled BOTH houses of the 37th Congress. One of their select committees was the “Committee on Emancipation and Colonization.” The resolution from that committee explains exactly what motivated Northern “anti-slavery.” Anti-slavery meant nothing more than “anti-black;” and to rid the country of an “inferior race” to prevent amalgamation. It was this kind of immoral racism that led to Southern secession in the first place. Is it any wonder that the Mississippi Declaration of Secession laments that the North “seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.”
“I have urged the colonization of the negroes, and I shall continue. My Emancipation Proclamation was linked with this plan. There is no room for two distinct races of white men in America, much less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the negro into our social and political life as our equal…. We can never attain the ideal union our fathers dreamed of, with millions of an alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation is neither possible nor desirable.”
Lincoln address delivered at Washington, D.C.; in Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume V, pages 371-375
Faced with an inhumane Northern racism, that barred slaves from migrating North or to the territories and wanted them colonized out of the country or landless and penniless to die out, it is no wonder so many African Americans supported and served the Confederacy.
General Lee exclaimed:
“The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution of slavery, and are quite willing to see it abolished. UNLESS SOME HUMANE COURSE, BASED ON WISDOM AND CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES IS ADOPTED, you do them great injustice in setting them free.”
Lee worked to emancipate the slaves in his father-in-Laws estate starting in 1850 by putting them on a payroll and/or shares, provided training and education under his protection. Lee manumitted (emancipated) all estate slaves by 1862.
Howard K. Beale, ed., The Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1960), 1:70–71; David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1954), 95, 98. (Sources)