During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln's administration engaged in protracted negotiations with representatives of the Netherlands to aid in the voluntarily colonization of free African Americans to Suriname. The American government also held similar negotiations with representatives of Panama, Haiti, St. Croix, British Honduras, and British Guiana, and made inquiries on the topic of African American migration with Ecuador and Nicaragua. In 1862 and 1863, Panama and Haiti actually received emancipated African Americans as a result of these negotiations, but both attempts to settle American blacks in the region ultimately failed.

In the shadow of these better-known examples of Civil War colonization schemes, the Dutch Suriname case drew the lowest number of mentions in the American press and remains today probably the least known. Most of the discussion about this Dutch-American plan remained in diplomatic circles and was neither leaked to the press, nor recalled in published memoirs after the war. It is, in a sense, a forgotten story that can be reconstructed only from original documents in archival collections. For American history, Suriname's neglect in Civil War colonization literature is unfortunate because the Dutch plan provides an additional and alternative case demonstrating the seriousness and depth of the Lincoln administration's interest in colonization. But this story also has multiple other dimensions worth considering. For example, it sheds light on Dutch racial thinking, the history of Suriname, and the role of governments in shaping new post-emancipation labor systems in the Atlantic world. It is a case of one of the many “what ifs” of history. What if the Dutch and American governments had successfully colonized African Americans in Suriname? How might that have affected race relations and the progress of African Americans in the United States? What effect might such a migration have had on the culture and development of Suriname? How could the post-emancipation Atlantic World labor market have developed in different ways? These are the kinds of questions such new sources encourage us to ask.

In the years 2011 and 2012, I discovered two folders of papers on the Suriname colonization plans kept in two separate collections in the Netherlands’ National Archive in The Hague. The papers were a mix of English, Dutch, and French writing, oftentimes existing only as copies of their originals.