Lincoln’s Colonizing Vision: Today’s Prison System?
When we think about the freeing of slaves in the U.S., we tend to think of two main things: the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth. The former took effect on January 1, 1863, and the latter on June 19, 1865. We tend to credit President Abraham Lincoln with the courage and character needed to make the morally righteous decision to bring an end to chattel slavery. What I never knew to do was look at Lincoln’s underlying intention behind the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln never intended to free slaves and make them citizens; he intended to deport and colonize them. I see today’s prison system as the realization of Lincoln’s colonist vision, and I wonder if he would feel the same.
First, let’s look at what Lincoln had to say before the published version of the Emancipation Proclamation. Then, we’ll look at where things stand today. Finally, after reflecting on a metaphor from Lincoln’s speech regarding the Dred Scott decision, I’ll close with an invitation to all of us who want to see a future that stops reflecting our slaveholding, colonizing past.
On August 14, 1862 (164 years ago), Lincoln met with “a committee of colored men” to pitch them on his idea of colonizing people of African descent outside the U.S. In the most practical of terms, he made his case. First, Black people and white people are two different “races,” and the white race suffers from the Black race’s presence. Second, slavery is “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” and its effects were generally evil on the white race. Third, the Civil War would not exist “without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis.” Finally, there was an unwillingness on the part of white people for free Black people to remain with them. Thus, President Lincoln proposed a solution to colonize a number of “tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children,” in Central America. He even had money appropriated by Congress to aid in this colonization effort.
Just over a month later (September 22, 1862), Lincoln completed a Proclamation slated to be delivered on January 1, 1863. This was to be the Emancipation Proclamation, but in this earlier version, a preamble exists that makes the abolishment of slavery voluntary for each state, with said abolishment to be implemented either immediately or gradually. Furthermore, “the effort to colonize persons of African descent with their consent upon this continent or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the governments existing there, will be continued.” Lincoln didn’t believe he had the power to end the institution of slavery; it was too deeply entrenched and politically divisive. In a reply to religious leaders in Chicago, written nine days before this version of the Emancipation Proclamation, the President writes despairingly, “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?” No, freedom + citizenship was a nonstarter. Deportation + colonization was the winning the equation for this Colonizer-in-Chief.
I don’t know what happened after September 22, 1862, but Abraham Lincoln’s colonist intent was removed from the proclamation he delivered on New Year’s Day. That final version declares all persons held as slaves to be “forever free” and to have their freedom enforced and protected by the full authority of the Executive Government, including the military and navy.
Today, we know the institution of slavery never ended; it merely transformed. First, to sharecropping; then, to convict leasing (nourished by the Black Codes in the Jim Crow era); and finally to the sprawling expanse of forced prison labor that continues to thrive 163 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was first spoken. Slavery remains a Constitutionally sound practice, protected by the Exception Clause in the Thirteenth Amendment. This history is well documented, easily traced, and clearly reflected in the persistently disproportionate representation of Black people in prison: 5 to 1 nationally; 9 to 1 in Maine.
Yet, before any of this happened, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech on June 26, 1857, addressing the famous Dred Scott decision (the Supreme Court decision that denied Black people the right to sue in U.S. courts and denied Congress the power to prohibit slavery in the Territories). He calls the decision erroneous and says the “public estimate of the Black man” was more favorable in the days of the Revolution (1775-1783) than in 1857. He says, “All the powers of the earth seem rapidly combining against [the black man].” Lincoln sees the efforts of his countrymen to keep people enslaved and encased in a prison house with heavy iron doors “bolted with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrent of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention … can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than this.”
One answer: willful blindness. When we choose to avert our eyes from ugly truths, we become complicit in the ever expanding system of mass incarceration. Slavery — and the colonization of slaves in U.S. prisons — marches on, unabated, and assisted by those who choose not to see these direct lineages of today’s prisons.
Choose to see. Choose to look. Refuse to avert your eyes or silence your tongue for fear of retaliation. Hold fast to the truth you know, and speak that truth to power.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
