Black Resettlement and the American Civil War by Sebastian N. Page (review)

Reviewed by: Black Resettlement and the American Civil War by Sebastian N. Page James Shinn Jr. Black Resettlement and the American Civil War. By Sebastian N. Page. Cambridge Studies on the American South. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 307. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-316-50670-7; cloth, $59.99, ISBN 978-1-107-14177-3.) "For a century from 1770," Sebastian N. Page writes, "almost every American institution, black and white, public and private, state and federal, engaged with the drive to resettle African Americans, even if fitfully or fleetingly" (p. 8). This sweeping insight drives Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, Page's wide-ranging history of the various movements for Black removal (both within and outside the United States) that operated between the 1840s and the Reconstruction era. Page diagnoses a deep-seated "separatist impulse" at the heart of nineteenth-century American social and political life (p. 15). Most notoriously, this impulse gave rise to "colonization," [End Page 575] the largely white-led movement to relocate free Black Americans to West Africa. But as Page shows, colonization in its classic form was only one among a variety of separatist options that captured the imaginations of white and Black Americans in the Civil War era. Black Resettlement and the American Civil War sheds new light on the phenomenon of Black removal by broadening its chronological, institutional, and geographic scope. Much of the scholarship on Black removal centers on the 1810s and 1820s, when the Washington, D.C.–based American Colonization Society (ACS) established a colony for free Black Americans in Liberia. By contrast, Page begins with the "revival" of colonization and emigration during the 1840s and 1850s (p. 15). 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. He writes about not only the ACS but also its many state-level auxiliaries (which were often more active than the national branch). He shifts the focus from Liberia to other, more proximate sites of colonizationist and emigrationist interest, including Canada, Haiti, and Jamaica. In the final chapter, Page surveys a variety of internal colonization schemes, including Reconstruction-era plans for Black enclaves in Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. By taking a panoramic view of colonization and related projects, Page shows just how pervasive the "separatist impulse" was in nineteenth-century American life. 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. 10). The core of this book is a detailed reconstruction of the various plans for Black resettlement that swirled around the Abraham Lincoln administration during the Civil War. Page deftly summarizes the well-known Chiriquí and Île-à-Vache episodes. He also builds on his own earlier work with Phillip W. Magness to give us the most complete account to date of post-1863 efforts to resettle freedpeople in the British, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the Caribbean. 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. However, Page shows that Civil War–era resettlement plans were also doomed by more mundane factors. 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. Seward's reputation as a skilled bureaucratic infighter). 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. Scholars of nineteenth-century political development—and of foreign policy in particular—will find much to think about, as well as leads for further research. Black Resettlement and the American Civil War is an excellent piece of work: incisive, deeply researched, and wide-ranging in its implications. Not least among its virtues, it is written with verve and wit. It makes an important contribution to...

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