Category: colonization
Quotes of Category: colonization
After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent.On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that "there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us." He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House-and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks.Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men." Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: "This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race-the governing and self-governing race."Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, "{I have} a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . ."Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: "I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . ." As for Indians, he once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the health of the tenth."William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, "Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times."Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that "civilized white men" could not be expected to work with "barbarous black men."During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: "I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: "Men of both races {black and white} may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be. book-quotelearningracediversity
