Now that the US and Israeli military has bombed almost all of Gaza into a smoldering ruin and killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, President Trump has proposed getting Jordan and Egypt to house the remaining Palestinians. He has threatened to withdraw US taxpayer “aid” to these countries if they do not accept his proposal. This is essentially a revival of Lincoln’s lifelong dream of deporting or “colonizing” all of the black people out of the United States.

Roy Basler, the editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, wrote that as of 1857 Lincoln had no policy regarding slavery “except the colonization idea which he inherited from Henry Clay.” When he was asked what was to happen to the slaves should they ever be freed he said, “Send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” As president Lincoln held a White House meeting with free black men and implored them to lead by example and resettle in Africa. They wisely declined his offer. He did develop plans to send every last black person to Africa, Haiti, Central America, anywhere but in the US. As Phil Magness and Sebastian Page documented in their book, Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and his administration were hard at work until his dying day counting how many ships it would take to deport or “colonize,” as they said, all the black people.

Henry Clay was Lincoln’s professed political idol and role model. In his 1852 eulogy to Clay Lincoln praised him as a founding member of the American Colonization Society and said that “colonization” was one of his “most cherished objects.” Lincoln approvingly quoted Clay in the eulogy as having said that “there is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children.” It would be “a signal blessing to that most unfortunate portion of the globe,” he said.

Lincoln himself said that sending all the black people to Africa would be “the ultimate redemption of the African race” and that every year “had added strength to the hope of its [deportation] realization. May indeed it be realized!” In his December 1, 1862 message to Congress Lincoln reiterated that “I cannot make it better known that it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.”