America Has Done Mass Deportation Before

Among Donald Trump’s numerous promises during the presidential campaign, none generated more enthusiasm from his supporters—or denunciation from opponents—than his plan to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Such a massive uprooting of population would shock the rest of the world, not to mention throwing the labor market in many states into chaos. Yet the idea of ridding a society of persons deemed undesirable is not without precedent.

Large groups have been forcibly removed from their homelands in modern times, including Spanish Jews in 1492 and Acadians—French settlers expelled by the British from Nova Scotia during the Seven Years War. In the United States, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the expulsion to present-day Oklahoma of virtually the entire Native American population east of the Mississippi River, a forced march that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. During the Great Depression, state and national authorities transported thousands of persons of Mexican ancestry out of the United States.

The plan for ridding the country of an unwanted population that gained the widest support from political leaders was spearheaded by the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816. Seeking to end slavery without creating a large new population of free African Americans, the society proposed the gradual liberation of enslaved men, women, and children (who numbered 4 million when the Civil War broke out) and their transportation, along with the half million Black persons already free, out of the United States.

“Almost every respectable man,” Frederick Douglass observed, belonged to the society, including John Marshall, James Madison, Daniel Webster, Roger B. Taney, and even Harriet Beecher Stowe, (whose abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ends with the hero, George Harris, affirming his “African nationality” and emigrating from the United States). Colonization was a uniquely American idea. As Harper’s Weekly pointed out, many societies in the Western Hemisphere harbored slavery, but nowhere else was it proposed “to extirpate the slaves after emancipation.” The idea of colonization enabled its advocates to imagine a society freed from both slavery and an unwanted African American presence.

Like the idea of expelling undocumented immigrants today, colonization formed part of a long debate about who can claim to be “real” Americans and whether the nation should be welcoming or exclusionary. Supporters of colonization believed the United States was intended to be a white republic. Trump’s deportation plan should be viewed in the context of other efforts to curate the population, including Indian removal, Chinese exclusion, and the 1924 law that severely reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, the House Committee on Emancipation and Colonization called for the removal of Black persons so that “the whole country” could be occupied by whites. We hear echoes of this outlook today from adherents of “replacement theory,” for whom deportation is a way of reversing what they claim is a conspiracy to substitute non-white newcomers for white Americans.

Perhaps colonization’s most prominent advocate was Thomas Jefferson, whose infamous discussion of Black people’s physical and intellectual capacities in “Notes on the State of Virginia” was accompanied by an elaborate plan for gradual emancipation and deportation. Children born to slaves would be educated at public expense and when they reached adulthood freed and transported to Africa. Simultaneously, ships would be dispatched to other parts of the world to bring to the United States an “equal number of white inhabitants.” Jefferson acknowledged that it seemed pointless to go to all this trouble to “replace one group of laborers with another.” But, he warned, without colonization the end of slavery would be succeeded by racial warfare or what he coyly called racial “mixture” (something Jefferson himself practiced but, when it came to the broader population, abhorred).

Shortly before his death in 1824, Jefferson proposed that the federal government deport “the increase of each year” (that is, recently born children). He anticipated that, like family separation during Trump’s first term, the removal of “infants from their mothers” would arouse objections on humanitarian grounds. But such complaints struck him as “straining at a gnat.” Trump’s outright falsehoods about undocumented immigrants echo the words of Henry Clay, the Kentucky politician who served as the colonization society’s president. Clay denounced the Black population for being innately prone to criminality. This, he declared, was why the mass removal of liberated slaves was “absolutely indispensable.”

Even the Great Emancipator for years advocated the government-sponsored settlement of black Americans in Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America. Before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln served on the Board of Managers of the Illinois Colonization Society. During the first two years of his presidency, he promoted colonization and urged lawmakers to appropriate funds to implement it. In his annual message to Congress in December 1862, Lincoln stated bluntly, “I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.”

Jefferson and Clay were the statesmen Lincoln most admired. Unlike their’s, however, Lincoln’s plan coupled emancipation with voluntary, not mandatory. colonization, which is why it got nowhere. Slave owners did not wish to give up their human property, even when offered monetary compensation, and nearly all Black leaders insisted that their people should be recognized as “colored citizens” of the United States. Lincoln was not obsessed with the specter of racial “mixture” and did not stigmatize Black people as a danger to the safety of white Americans. He told a group of Black Americans who met with him in the White House that he supported colonization because racism was so deeply embedded in American society that former slaves could never enjoy equality in this country.

At the end of 1862, on the day before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln signed a contract with a shady entrepreneur for the transportation to an island off the coast of Haiti of hundreds of slaves who had found refuge with the Union army during the Civil War. But with the proclamation came a dramatic change in his outlook. The document contained no reference to colonization but instead envisioned emancipated slaves taking their places as productive members of American society. It urged them to “labor faithfully for reasonable wages”—in the United States. And for the first time, Lincoln opened the armed forces to enlistment by Black men, a key step toward recognizing them as American citizens.

Confronted by radically changing circumstances and widespread opposition, Lincoln abandoned his earlier plan. Dropping colonization from his approach to slavery enabled him to begin imagining the United States as a biracial society of equals. It is doubtful that we can hope for the same evolution from Donald Trump.