This is the great turning point in Emerson’s life. The chapter starts with a comparison to William Ellery Channing’s heroic arc of antislavery activism. Despite dying before the annexation of territories from Mexico that galvanized abolitionism, Channing, starting as a moderate like Emerson, progressed dramatically in his commitment. Where was Emerson in all this? (See Chapter 2.) Suddenly, in 1856 Emerson pivots and from then on rises spectacularly in the abolitionist world. Not because of violence done to Black bodies, but because of violence done to his White friend Charles Sumner and to White settlers in Kansas. The chapter analyzes why Emerson had contempt for most abolitionists and how he became one himself without the characteristics of those whom he disdained. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is an important text here. He used him as an example of someone undergoing a “soft” conversion.

From the mid-1850s, a new force emerged in American politics: the Republican Party. Opposed to slavery and determined to prevent it taking hold in the territories of the United States, a cadre of politicians centered on a family of boosters from the Upper South, the Blairs, lobbied their Republican colleagues to adopt colonization as national policy. But the Blairs failed to persuade their new allies that their own scheme had improved on that of the ACS, despite their abandoning West Africa for the closer, geostrategically valuable Central America. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the secession of the southern states and the outbreak of war transformed the forecast for the Republican colonizationists, whose vision chimed with Lincoln’s own support for colonization. Prodded by the president, the Republican-dominated Congress added voluntary colonization to its laws freeing the slaves of the District of Columbia and in the rebellious states. But that was not enough for Lincoln, who asked legislators to write colonization into the US Constitution – and ignored those abolitionists who argued that his own Emancipation Proclamation should end his attempts to expatriate potential soldiers.

If the Civil War had changed policy makers’ attitudes to black resettlement, it was to divide them into supporters of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of the idea. By 1865, the Blairs had come out for the latter – and for the Democratic Party that embodied it. But the Republicans struggled to break from old ways of thinking. When President Ulysses Grant proposed annexing the Dominican Republic as a potential destination for African Americans, but as a fully fledged state of the American Union, his colleagues divided over whether his proposal was radical or reactionary. Meanwhile, in the southern United States, waves of white oppression in the 1870s and 1890s drove African Americans toward the offer of an ACS that, lacking the financial support of times past, struggled to meet demand. As the United States filled with settlers of European descent, and as the great imperialist land-grab left ever fewer foreign locations for African American resettlement, the proto-segregation represented by black colonization morphed into the local segregation with which modern Americans are more familiar.