Northern Democrats in particular moved easily from traditional concerns about the economic dependency of formerly enslaved people to visions of Black criminality and racial inferiority. Many white northerners who considered themselves forward-thinking on issues of race and slavery believed that the United States was destined to be a white nation in which free African Americans would never truly have a place. Among them were supporters of the American Colonization Society and its decades-long drive to persuade free Black people to emigrate to Liberia.
