Black History: When Abraham Lincoln Tried to Resettle Free Black Americans in the Caribbean

On the night of December 31, 1862, a day before he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation to effectively end slavery in America, President Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock, an entrepreneur and Florida cotton planter. Their agreement: to use federal funds to relocate 5,000 formerly enslaved people from the United States to Île à Vache (“Cow Island”), a small, 20-square-mile island off the southwestern coast of Haiti.

Since the early 1850s, Lincoln had been advancing colonization as a remedy for the gradual emancipation of the nation’s enslaved. While he strongly opposed the institution of slavery, he didn’t believe in racial equality, or that people of different races could successfully integrate. And unleashing nearly 4 million Black people into white American society—North or South—was a political nonstarter. So despite the fact that most Black Americans in the 1850s had been born on U.S. soil, Lincoln advocated shipping them to Central America, the Caribbean or “back” to Africa. “If as the friends of colonization hope…[we] succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land,” Lincoln said during his eulogy for statesman Henry Clay in 1852, “it will indeed be a glorious consummation.”