Based on sweeping research in six languages, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated.

Winner, 2022 Tom Watson Brown Book Award, Society of Civil War Historians

'This engagingly written analysis of black resettlement is wide in geographic focus and institutional range. Page brings the field into the post-Civil War period, covering the endurance of the ‘separatist impetus,’ which, he claims, amounted to global scale segregation and undermined the foundations of racial integration in America. This long-awaited study will figure prominently in discussions of resettlement for years to come.'

Beverly C. Tomek - co-editor of New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization

‘This volume enriches the transnational trajectory of US Civil War scholarship and provides fertile ground for delving deeply into specific areas of the controversy.’

J. E. Johnson Source: Choice

‘Prodigiously researched and written in lively and clever prose, [this work] achieves the author’s objective to 'chronicle the full geographic and institutional range of the drive for black resettlement' (1). This book is now the fullest account we have of the persistent efforts to resettle Black Americans during the Civil War era.’

Paul J. Polgar Source: Agricultural History