LINCOLN HESITATED ABOUT emancipation partly because he didn’t know what freedom should look like. At the time, he didn’t share Sumner’s vision for a multiracial democracy after the war. He found it impossible to imagine whites and Blacks living together as equals in the South. To solve this conundrum, he entertained the idea of getting rid of Black people. He sent multiple advisers to Central America to explore the feasibility of colonizing faraway lands to which Black freedpeople could voluntarily immigrate.
