Lincoln as Abolitionist (8)

Slavery tended to migrate southward and westward, in part due to the exhaustion of fields through poor agricultural planning. But historically, the abolition of slavery in the Northern states was associated with a relative reduction in the number of blacks there. This is one explanation for the popularity of the idea of colonizing freed slaves in Africa, which was widely supported among whites (including by Lincoln, at least nominally) who were hostile to slavery.

Colonization was always a widly impractical notion. And very few freed slaves ever wanted to go there. But it made sense to a lot of whites, in no small part because of the historical experience of the Northern state in which reducing the number of blacks relative to whites had been a precondition of the abolition of slavery.

The colonization movement, as Dwight Lowell Dumond observed, began a "steady decline" in the early 1830s as an active, conscious abolitionist movement began to develop. He characterizes colonization as motivated by a racial attitude that wanted to get rid of blacks, whether slave or free: "Ohio particularly and Pennsylvania and Connectict to a lesser degree were strongholds of colonization societies whose object was not the emancipation of the slave or the elevtion of the free blacks, but ridding the states of an undesirable and degraded element."