“A Better Country Than This”: Black Colonization and Missouri Politics, 1850–1865

While historians of the early republic have long recognized the political importance of the American Colonization Society, which sought to settle free African Americans in the West African colony of Liberia, the ACS won few adherents in antebellum Missouri, where the free Black population was small and slaveholders dominated state politics. In the late 1850s, however, an antislavery Republican from St. Louis, Frank Blair, won a seat in Congress and a national following by proposing to free all U.S. slaves and resettle them in Honduras, thereby ending the sectional crisis and ensuring the social and political dominance of free white laborers. This article examines the role that Blair’s colonization scheme played in Missouri politics on the eve of the Civil War, as the proposed expulsion of Black Americans allowed white voters to begin contemplating a break from the slave South and a reorientation of the state toward the North and West. With the outbreak of war in 1861, Blair’s commanding position in St. Louis allowed him to overthrow the state’s secessionist government and keep Missouri in the Union, profoundly shaping the course of the war and the abolition of slavery in the United States.