America Has Done Mass Deportation Before

Among Donald Trump’s many campaign promises, none drew more enthusiasm from his supporters or condemnation from his opponents than his plan to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Such mass evictions will shock the rest of the world, not to mention the fact that in many countries the labor market will start chaos. However, the idea of ​​ridding society of people deemed undesirable is not unprecedented.

Large groups have been forcibly removed from their homelands in modern times, including Spanish Jews in 1492 and Acadians, French settlers driven from Nova Scotia by the British during the Seven Years’ War. In the United States, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the expulsion of virtually the entire Native American population east of the Mississippi River to present-day Oklahoma, a forced march that became known as the Trail of Tears. During the Great Depression, state and national governments removed thousands of people of Mexican descent from the United States.

The plan to rid the country of unwanted population, which received the widest support from political leaders, was initiated by the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816. In an effort to end slavery without creating a large new population of free African Americans, the society proposed the gradual emancipation of enslaved men, women, and children (numbering 4 million when the Civil War began) and their transportation, along with half a million black people who had already been freed, out of the United States .

“Almost every respectable man,” observed Frederick Douglass, belonged to the society, including John Marshall, James Madison, Daniel Webster, Roger B. Taney and even Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ends with the hero George Harris asserting his “African nationality” and emigrating from the United States). Colonization was a uniquely American idea. How Harper’s Weekly pointed out that slavery existed in many societies in the Western Hemisphere, but nowhere else was it proposed to “exterminate the slaves after emancipation.” The idea of ​​colonization allowed its proponents to envision a society freed from both slavery and the unwanted African American presence.

Like today’s idea of ​​deporting undocumented immigrants, colonization became part of a long debate about who could call themselves “real” Americans and whether that nation should be welcoming or exclusionary. Proponents of colonization believed that the United States should be a white republic. Trump’s deportation plan should be seen in the context of other efforts to heal the population, including the removal of Native Americans, the exclusion of Chinese, and a 1924 law that sharply reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, the House Committee on Emancipation and Colonization called for the removal of black people so that “the whole country” could be occupied by whites. Today we hear echoes of this view from proponents of the “replacement theory,” for whom deportation is a way to reverse what they claim is a conspiracy to replace white Americans with nonwhite newcomers.

Perhaps the most famous defender of colonization was Thomas Jefferson, whose infamous discussion of black people’s physical and intellectual abilities in “Virginia Notes” was accompanied by an elaborate plan of gradual emancipation and deportation. Children born to slaves were educated at public expense, and when they came of age, they were freed and transported to Africa. At the same time, ships would be sent to other parts of the world to bring “an equal number of white inhabitants” to the United States. Jefferson admitted that it seemed pointless to go to all these trouble to “substitute one body of laborers for another.” But, he warned, without colonization, the end of slavery would be replaced by race war, or what he coyly called racial “mixture” (something Jefferson himself practiced but abhorred when it came to the general population).

Shortly before his death in 1824, Jefferson proposed that the federal government deport the “increment of each year” (meaning newly born children). He suggested that, like family separations during Trump’s first term, taking “babies away from their mothers” would raise objections on humanitarian grounds. But such complaints seemed to him to be “disgusting”. Trump’s blatant lies about undocumented immigrants echo the words of Henry Clay, a Kentucky politician who served as president of the Colonization Society. Clay condemned the black population for its innate propensity for crime. That is why, as he stated, the mass removal of freed slaves was “absolutely necessary.”

Even the Great Emancipator advocated government-sponsored settlement of black Americans in Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America for years. Before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln served on the board of governors of the Illinois Colonization Society. During the first two years of his presidency, he promoted colonization and urged lawmakers to appropriate funds for its implementation. In his annual address to Congress in December 1862. Lincoln stated bluntly: “I cannot make it more known than it is that I am strongly in favor of colonization.”

Jefferson and Clay were the statesmen whom Lincoln most admired. Unlike them, however, Lincoln’s plan combined emancipation with voluntariness rather than compulsion. colonization, so it didn’t go anywhere. Slave owners were reluctant to give up their human property, even when offered monetary compensation, and nearly all black leaders insisted that their people be recognized as “colored citizens” of the United States. Lincoln was not haunted by the specter of racial “mixture” and did not stigmatize black people as a danger to the safety of white Americans. He told a group of black Americans who met with him at the White House that he supported colonization because racism was so deeply rooted in American society that former slaves would never be able to enjoy equality in this country.

In late 1862, the day before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln signed a contract with a sad entrepreneur to transport hundreds of slaves who had taken refuge with the Union Army during the Civil War to an island off the coast of Haiti. War. But with the announcement came a dramatic change in his outlook. The document contained no reference to colonization, but instead envisioned freed slaves taking their place as productive members of American society. He urged them to “work honestly for reasonable pay” — in the United States. And for the first time, Lincoln opened the armed forces to the conscription of black men, a key step toward recognizing them as American citizens.

Faced with radically changing circumstances and widespread opposition, Lincoln abandoned his earlier plan. Excluding colonization from his approach to slavery allowed him to begin to envision the United States as a biracial society of equals. It is doubtful that we can hope for the same evolution from Donald Trump.