An Act of Colonization: Danish American Negotiations Concerning “Laborers of African Extraction” and the Virgin Islands between 1860 and 1867

When Gideon Welles, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, sat down to write his diary entry on September 26, 1862, his thoughts turned once more to colonization. President Lincoln was an ardent proponent of colonization, “the government-promoted settlement of black Americans in Africa or some other location” and based on the recurring cabinet discussions, Welles understood that “Great Britain, Denmark and perhaps other powers would take them [the black population].”
Since at least 1860, Denmark had encouraged the American government to send the “quite uncivilized (…) Africans liberated” from slave ships to St. Croix. Thus, when the Lincoln administration seriously considered colonization plans in 1862, Danish Charge d’Affaires Waldemar Raasløff offered free transport for freedmen to the Caribbean island, where there was a “distinct lack of laborers.”
As a small first step towards colonization, Denmark and the United States signed an act on July 19, 1862, wherein the U.S. Navy agreed to unload “all negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color, delivered from on board vessels seized in the prosecution of the slave trade.” Yet, despite the two countries’ mutual interests in employing “laborers of African Extraction in the island of St. Croix,” and the Lincoln administration’s continued exploration of colonization arrangements in subsequent years, no further negotiations were carried out at that time and no laborers in American custody were shipped to St. Croix. This paper attempts to answer why.