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COLONIAL EXPERIENCE                                   O'DELL
anti-slavery spirit of abolitionism was not yet dead. Nevertheless, America sent its official representative to the Berlin Conference in the person of Henry Shelton Sanford, a former United States ambassador to Belgium. Sanford actively aided King Leopold in securing diplomatic recognition from the United States and the European powers for his annexation of the Congo.
However, the United States empire builders coyly avoided any direct involvement in this competition with the European powers for parceling out African territory. They had a continent all to themselves, rich in natural resources and relatively protected by two oceans. They had no need at the time to set up "colonies" in Africa several thousand miles away from American shores. All that was necessary was that there be set up a system of restrictions and subjugation of the seven million Afro-American population within the United States. That is precisely what the rulers of America proceeded to do. The overthrow of the Reconstruction governments, the rounding up of the remaining Indian population in the West and herding them on reservations as in Oklahoma (selected as the place so barren that the Indians world be least likely to survive) set the stage.
Whereas the late 19th century European colonialism in Africa was spearheaded by military occupation, within the continental United States it was the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South (1877) which spearheaded the colonial type subjugation of the black community. Without the presence of Federal troops, they were left to face the armed bands of Ku Klux Klan and other "white supremacy" paramilitary organizations.
A monopoly of land ownership by a few. This pattern and the resulting landlessness for the many who worked the land, as was characteristic of British colonialism in Kenya and Uganda for example, was also one of the mechanisms of colonial rule within the United States. It is well known that the Negro citizens, newly freed from chattel slavery, never got the "forty acres and a mule" promised them so often after the Civil War. This was no accident; it was the result of government policy. President Andrew Johnson's Exectuive Order restored to the Confederates all plantations which had owned before the Civil War; General Sherman's famous field order turning over some 400,000 acres of rice plantation to the 40,000 black Americans living in the Georgia-South Carolina coastal region was nullified; and the Southern Homestead Act which allowed for Federal lands in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas to be sold in small parcels of 80 acres was repealed in 1876.

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