Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge Studies on the American South)

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Page brings the field into the post-Civil War period, covering the endurance of the 'separatist impetus,' which, he claims, amounted to global scale segregation and undermined the foundations of racial integration in America. He highlights the sheer proliferation of institutions and actors working for Black resettlement during this later period, as well as the diversity of the locations under consideration. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

He shifts the focus from Liberia to other, more proximate sites of colonizationist and emigrationist interest, including Canada, Haiti, and Jamaica. All of these projects met with resistance from African Americans and (some) white abolitionists, who insisted that the freedpeople must be allowed to remain in the land of their birth.

This engagingly written analysis of black resettlement is wide in geographic focus and institutional range. By contrast, Page begins with the "revival" of colonization and emigration during the 1840s and 1850s (p. What the Black abolitionist David Walker described as "the colonizing trick" was also a colonizing default: a reflexive and almost universal urge to solve notionally "racial" problems by means of large-scale population transfer and physical separation (p. In this respect, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War offers a revealing glimpse of the decentralized and often haphazard way policy was made under the Lincoln administration. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Sebastian Page is a historian of the United States and Atlantic world during the nineteenth century. By taking a panoramic view of colonization and related projects, Page shows just how pervasive the "separatist impulse" was in nineteenth-century American life. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated.This volume enriches the transnational trajectory of US Civil War scholarship and provides fertile ground for delving deeply into specific areas of the controversy.

Black Resettlement and the American Civil War sheds new light on the phenomenon of Black removal by broadening its chronological, institutional, and geographic scope. Black Resettlement and the American Civil War is the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America s efforts to resettle African Americans outside the United States. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. He is particularly good on the bureaucratic politics—the personal antipathies and turf battles—that constrained and ultimately hamstrung resettlement efforts (among other things, this book adds new luster to William H. Most notoriously, this impulse gave rise to "colonization," [End Page 575] the largely white-led movement to relocate free Black Americans to West Africa.Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.