Emancipated and Unwanted: African American Migration Schemes to Latin America during the Civil War

In the beginning of its Civil War the United State's Union government initiated diplomatic negotiations with many territories throughout the Atlantic world. Colonization projects aiming to resettle  African-Americans were proposed to Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Haiti among others. Though these migration schemes did not ultimately come to fruition, the intentions of the United States and the responses of negotiating nations reflect broader debates and concerns over nation building and the transition to “free” labor in the Americas.

            These particular negotiations could be perceived as a particular aspect of the history of the American Civil War. A topic yet to be better investigated. However, the present paper aims to offer contributions to the reflections of how these proposals were received by these tropical territories. While slavery was still largely present in places like Brazil, Cuba and the Southern United States just before the American Civil War, the great majority of the Americas had carried out their independence and emancipation processes. Central to these processes were divergent conceptions of the role to be played by black laborers in these post-emancipation societies. Yet whereas Africans and their descendents were the preferred candidates for New World slavery, in this changing order "free" laborers from other regions - such as India or China - were commonly preferred by many local political elites.

            In that matter, the analysis of the discourses imbedded in the diplomatic negotiations offer at least two interesting scopes of analysis to be confronted: First, how the American's justifications to such migration schemes at the same time that stressed their an internal racial problem were based in pseudo-scientific notions of race and climate. Second, as they saw African-Descendents as best suited for tropical labor that also uncover their views on tropical-American societies and their way of dealing with their racial issues.