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No. Some factions advocated their forced emigration, and there was some voluntary exit (see: Liberia) but by 1865, the vast majority had been born in the US. It had become illegal to import slaves quite a few years earlier. They were no more African natives/nationals than those of any ancestry in the first or second generation born on this side of the pond.
No. Some factions advocated their forced emigration, and there was some voluntary exit (see: Liberia) but by 1865, the vast majority had been born in the US. It had become illegal to import slaves quite a few years earlier. They were no more African natives/nationals than those of any ancestry in the first or second generation born on this side of the pond.
I don't care to dredge up figures, but the number of slaves imported was a fraction of the total number of slaves at the end of the war - more than ten times?
It's like asking why we didn't send all the Irish back after the Famine had passed. Answer: because there were more Irish-Americans than native Irish by that time. Besides a few other reasons.
President Lincoln favored the idea of exporting the former slaves because he believed that this was what they wished. He dropped the idea after a conversation with Frederick Douglass who explained that the blacks in America knew nothing of Africa and all viewed the US as their home. They wanted to be free Americans, not exiled to an unknown land.
Ive read (heard) that this was the plan all along, especially Lincoln...that after they were freed, they were to be returned to their home countries?
Is there any truth to this?
Why did it not happen?
Not really "return to their home countries" because how could you do that for slaves that have been in America for centuries, but Colonization of freed slaves was one option considered publically, indeed by Lincoln. It's important not to over emphasis this however, some internet postings seem to think Lincoln has some evil plan to force all freed slaves in a ship and dump them in the jungle somewhere in Africa. That is false. The plan was always voluntary, with plans for proper funding.
The emancipation proclamation in 1863 pretty much made any of these ideas obsolete, as at that point Freedman were used for the war effort itself. I think historians believe that Lincoln thought that colonization was a good idea, but it was never brought up in public again.
There was also efforts in the early 1800s to resettle freed slaves from the northern states. That resulted in the creation of Liberia in Africa.
We're talking about people with no memory of 'their country' and who spoke only English. Furthermore, they were kept ignorant of all things worldly so that they did not know where they were other than in The South.
Turning them out in the hostile South was bad enough. I cannot imagine how few would have survived being transported back to Africa just in time to meet up with the age of colonization. In 1884, Africa was divided up by Europeans who felt they had discovered it and therefore owned it.
Welcome 'home', Y'all. You ain't seen slavery yet!
Welcome 'home', Y'all. You ain't seen slavery yet!
Not forgetting that slavery began and was strongly fostered in Africa to start with. Slave traders didn't go there to capture natives; they bought them from existing markets.
I can't quite imagine who thought America-born slaves had any life, much less some kind of "better" life, in Africa. Even more so than today; most in that era knew the history of the slave trade.
Because slavery was legal in the US for almost a hundred years and they slaves that were in the US when slavery was abolished, had little to no ties to Africa.
That would be like shipping you off to some random country.
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