Encounters
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Lincoln was singing that necessary tune. Another Representative from the Keystone State received a similar message from a Democratic constituent: “If you can only send the whole race out of the country, I think all loyal democrats would be willing to see slavery abolished at once, regardless of any other consideration. … If the black race is once removed, we will have repose—not sooner.” In New York, Democrats at a Tammany meeting declared that they were “opposed to emancipating negro slaves, unless on some plan of colonization.” A former resident of the South assured Senator John Sherman that it was essential “that colonization should be held out in order to win the nonslaveholding and especially the poor whites of the South, and these are the men who must uphold the United States rule in the slave states.” Ninety percent of them “when they once understand it will hail manumission and colonization as a God’s blessing. The slaveholders rule them by creating a horror of what the Negroes would do if freed among them, but with all this there is a strong though secret hatred of slavery.” Appalled by the discrimination that blacks faced in the Free States, a treasury official in St. Louis exclaimed that if emancipation were not accompanied by colonization, “God pity the poor Negro!” for many Northern states would follow the lead of Illinois and Indiana by forbidding blacks to settle within their borders.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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