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an increasingly normal practice as the century wore on and slavery was gradually elim-
inated: tropical commodity extraction and commercial agriculture clamored for labor.
Prison gangs increasingly featured as a new form of coerced labor.
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Amazon Liberia?
Onepersonwithkeeninterest inLincoln'svisionwastheUSminister toBrazil, General
James Watson Webb. Famous as a bon vivant and ladies' man, Webb had owned news-
papers (the
Courier
and the
Enquirer
) and railroads and later enjoyed many diplomatic
posts, including those to Austria and Turkey. Webb was somewhat of a theorist of com-
parative slavery, having produced a small book on the topic:
Slavery and Its Tenden-
thought the solution to the inevitable problems of emancipation lay in tropical resettle-
ment of ex-slaves. Webb viewed black colonization as an alternative to what otherwise
would develop into socially undesirable miscegenation and “inevitable” race war.
82
Following this view of the nation's needs, and with Webb's understanding of black
adaptation to the tropics, the unusual features of Brazilian slavery, and its free men of
color, Webb advanced a set of proposals to and negotiating points he hoped to raise with
Emperor Pedro II.: (1) the colonization should be cheap; (2) liberation need not be im-
mediate, nor should servitude linger; (3) immigrants would take up an “apprenticeship”
in the colony; (4) colonization costs should be paid for from the products of the appren-
ticeship; (5) colonists would ultimately end their political connection with the United
States because Brazilian society, more tolerant of people of color, would provide more
intheUnitedStatesintoindenturedworkersinBrazil.Hesuggestedthattheemancipated
slaves would be entrusted to a joint stock colonization company (headed, naturally, by
himself), which would then resettle them in Brazil. Thus former slaves would be trans-
formed from personal to corporate chattel until they paid off their settlement costs.
Webb framed these arguments in his dispatch of May 1862 for Seward by using a
comparative analysis of characteristics of slaves, societies, and political economies. The
analysis showed how Brazil's labor difficulties and US racial problems would be solved
through the creation of a free black colony in the Amazon. Webb's reasoning went like
this: (1) free labor was scarce; (2) slaves were scarce and expensive (due to the pro-
hibition of slave imports after 1850); (3) the demands of the burgeoning economies of
southern Brazil were draining labor from the northern provinces, where workers were
increasingly needed. Webb believed that US ex-slaves were more docile and hardwork-
ing than “the fierce, warlike and intellectual” Africans who made up the Brazilian slave
population, who were “ready for insurrection and capable of extensive conspiracies to
effect their liberation.” Webb felt that Brazil's problems with black insurgency could be
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