MONTGOMERY BLAIR¹Montgomery Blair (1813-83) was born in Franklin County, Kentucky. He was the son of Francis P. Blair, owner and editor of the (Frankfort, Kentucky) of the Congressional Globe, the precursor to the Congressional Record. Montgomery Blair graduated from West Point in 1835, served in the army, and studied law in St. Louis, Missouri. He founded his practice in 1837, was appointed U.S. district attorney for the state of Missouri, elected mayor of St. Louis, and appointed judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Blair was a political chameleon, but he supported the gradual emancipation of slaves and came to support the colonization of freed slaves. He represented Dred Scott in his Supreme Court case, and was asked but declined to defend John Brown on charges associated with his attack on Harpers Ferry. Abraham Lincoln appointed Blair postmaster general in 1861. Blair’s tenure was vexed because he expressed strong opinions and was considered tactless. He stirred controversy when he required all employees of the postal department to take oaths of loyalty, excluded from mail delivery service newspapers deemed disloyal to the Union, and organized a team of inspectors to report disloyal postmasters. Blair is perhaps best remembered for his foundational work on the development of the Universal Postal Union, which standardized the systems of weight, rates, prepayment conditions, and postage collection for all international mail. During the war, he devised a plan whereby each regiment appointed its own postmaster, thus relieving the burden on rural postal workers ill equipped to handle the volume of correspondence. Blair reduced the postal deficit by implementing reforms such as the adoption of three classes of mail, standardized rates for letters, a uniform money order system, and a redesigned railway postal service. Under pressure from radical elements in Congress, Lincoln asked for Blair’s resignation, which he tendered in September 1864. Afterward, he practiced law with his son until his death. Rita L. Moroney, (Washington, D.C., 1963). and publisher TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Washington, D.C. 11 September 1862[.]

DEAR SIR:—

My friend General Pomeroy²Samuel C. Pomeroy. has shown me your letter, and that of your son to him, on the subject of the new Empire he has undertaken to establish in Central America,³Frederick Douglass’s letter to Samuel C. Pomeroy, dated 27 August 1862, is published above. and I was much gratified at the prospect it offered of securing your powerful aid in this enterprise.

And it has occurred to me, that a yet more cordial co-operation on your part might be secured if the misapprehension as it Seems to me upon which your protest is founded, could be removed[.] I am so solicitous for the success of this enterprise, and therefore to enlist in it the character and talent necessary to make it successful, that I have concluded to try to remove this obstacle myself.

I take it for granted that your protest expresses only just indignation at the idea which has been used to maintain the propriety of African Slavery, and which you suppose also underlies the colonizing scheme. In this I am sure you are mistaken.

Mr. Jefferson⁴Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a planter and statesman from Virginia, was the third president of the United States (1801-09) and author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson first proposed colonization in his in 1781. Before the invention of the cotton gin, Jefferson, like many other slaveholders, believed that slavery would eventually die out because of economic forces and that slave owners would be forced to free their slaves. Jefferson argued that free blacks and whites could not coexist peacefully and that the best way to remove this potential conflict was colonization or migration. Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., (New York, 1987); Nicholas E. Magnis, “Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: An Analysis of His Racist Thinking as Revealed by His Writings and Political Behavior,” , 29:491-509 (March 1999); , 10:17-35. who was the first of our Statesmen to advocate the plan of colonizing the African race among us, in a neighboring country, put it upon no such unphilosophical grounds. It was the diversity, not the inferiority of race which to his mind constituted the necessity for their separation, and when he knew that it had been found necessary for harmony in various periods in history to separate tribes of people differing far less, this mode of solving the question of slavery and of caste, naturally occurred to his enlightened mind.

But it may be argued that if it be true that the races ought to be separate, why should the colored people go rather than the whites, to another country. The answer to that is that here the whites rule, and it cannot be reasonably expected that they would voluntarily go away. As leading men in society do not abandon their old homes to seek advancement in new communities, so controlling races will not abdicate their power or surrender their country; and it is for the less numerous race who are of necessity overborne by the other, to imitate the young and adventurous in society, who go elsewhere to seek the positions occupied by others at home.

There is in fact, no question of superiority or inferiority involved in the proposed removal. When we say that society is necessarily made up of superiors and inferiors in grades of intellect, and according to the ordinary classification of employments, it is manifest that no removal of the colored race would be necessary on that account, even if it were true that the race was inferior to ours.

This demonstrates that the propriety of the removal arises not from any consideration of the relative merits of the different races, but simply from the differences between them which the Creator himself has made, and it seems as obvious to me as it was to the benevolent and philosophical mind of Jefferson that the opinion against which you protest, is the necessary result of indelible differences thus made by the Almighty. Mr. Jefferson was however among the greatest of men, and of a nature the least subject to mean prejudice but a man after all, and he and those of us who have adopted his teachings may therefore be in error on this point. But if so what more effective way is there to disabuse the people of the error, than for the most enlightened and enterprising of the colored race to avail themselves of the opportunity to establish for themselves an Empire. If they succeed in this enterprise, it will at once free their race from bondage, because when the poor whites see that the colored race can go away they will be for emancipation, and then the opinion against which you protest, if it be as you suppose but a prejudice produced by the enslavement of the race, will soon wear away.

For my own part I do not expect that the colored people will disappear from among us in many generations, even when the colony shall have been successful, and the colored race shall have assumed the control of the whole of intertropical America. But even the first step will do wonders for the peace of this country I believe, and for the good of the colored people who remain. With a country so rich as Central America, possessed by a people adapted to develope its wealth, they must soon become wealthy and powerful, and that will soon open to them the hospitalities of your commercial cities, and admit their children to our Universities; for even now the free colored foreigner is distinguished from our own, nor do I think the bearings of this enterprise will be limited to this continent. If successful and I have no doubt it will be, because all the good men of Europe and America, will wish it to be so, we shall soon have the products of the tropics made by free labor and that puts an end to slavery and the slave trade and redeems Africa itself.

I am Sir very respecfully, Your obedient servant

M. BLAIR.

PLSr: , 5:724 (October 1862).