reversing sail a history of the african diaspora

Documents to be consulted include the colonization office records of the US National Archives, the American Colonization Society papers, primary source accounts of voyages and site visitations, and newspaper reports concerning colonization. ports and a variety of intended colonization locales. Information will be drawn upon a variety of primary source records including land records, descriptive accounts from several investigative voyages to proposed colonization sites, and sailing routes between U.S.

This poster will display the first comprehensive geographical representation of the black colonization movement in the Civil War era, synthesizing information about both proposed and attempted colonization sites and the competitive push by their backers to attain federal funding for each. Of similar significance though also neglect, several free African-Americans approached the government's colonization offer by weighing the uncertainties of a post-slavery United States against the prospect of attaining greater political and social equality abroad, wherein geography proved to be of central importance. government's interest in locales across the Caribbean and Latin America. This oversight is striking considering that latent imperial motives often accompanied the U.S. has been written about the wartime colonization movement, including a notoriously failed resettlement scheme in Haiti, surprisingly little attention has been given to the role of geography in the U.S.

This racially tinged policy of colonization traces back to the establishment of Liberia in 1816, though only through the Civil War and the emerging emancipation policies of the Lincoln administration did it receive federal backing. Between April and July of 1862 the United States Congress appropriated some $600,000 to finance the resettlement of emancipated slaves abroad.

Reversing sail a history of the african diaspora