How would the USA be now if President Lincoln had shipped all African slaves back to Africa?

The loses are too numerous to mention. Artists. Scientists. Musicians. Leaders. Maybe he should have shipped the KKK to Africa. Now that would have been nice.

Im going to answer the question with a WAG opinion, then ask a question.
"How would the USA be now if President Lincoln had shipped all African slaves back to Africa?"
I think we would have missed out on the good, and had the inevitable bad no matter what.
The mind set that brought us Slavery as a societal ok Norm, could have just as easily decided to enslave any other demographic ..so whats to say slavery would not have happened anyway
Racism, yup that was already here, still here and would be here with out without Africans selling Africans to US slave masters.
I cant think of a single "bad thing" we had at the time of slavery that we did not already have, or would have had anyway.
And now for the question....
Could I, an old white guy have asked this very valid insightful question without backlash?
Could I have posted "How would the USA be now if President Lincoln had shipped all African slaves back to Africa?"
With no follow on context or additional info, posted just as SGT (Join to see) had? Without a hailstorm of criticisms, knee jerk reactions, accusations and general hand wringing?
If you say yes (and I have my doubts)

Could I have done the same on Twitter and received the same thoughtful replies and no backlash?

Could I have posted this anywhere that is not a hate sight, not a "extremism" site of any flavor, LEFT, RIGHT, ALT Right, Occupied Democrat ..ect? without backlash, just as SGT Jacqueem Spratley has done and received only professional, considerate responses?

Mostly a rhetorical question.. but its what the post brought to my thoughts when i read it.

Chiming in with excellent question, because I can't even fathom the loss, as CPT Jack Durish says.

Most people don't realize how close this actually came to reality. There were fairly advanced plans to do exactly that in what is now Liberia.
When President Lincoln was assassinated, the main force behind the movement died as well.
Later, economic interests held sway as freed slaves became more or less cheaply paid resident labor working for many times their former masters. It was a long time before reconstruction and later civil rights movements made real progress to change their day to day lives.
To answer the question, it would have been a grievous cultural loss for America. So many talented people would have led very different lives in Africa. We are fortunate that this did not come to fruition.

The worst, "No SOUL Music".

Honestly, I don't think the South would have recovered during the reconstruction period if they didn't have a massive pool of cheap labor in the form of "former" slaves who were taken advantage of as sharecroppers.

we wouldn't be United anymore, what would just be extremely weird.

The US and England were responsible for ending wholesale slavery because of slavery in the US. So while it was a "black-eye" and sad practice, it wasn't invented here, but for all practical purposes it ended here. I for one am glad President Lincoln had the brass to stand up against it and that shipping all of the "slaves" back to Africa never happened, but the question assumes that all people of African descent in American were slaves, which was not the case. So racism wouldn't have ended; unfortunately it exists still and is demonstrated by people of all colors, races, religions and ethnicities...it is not singular to one ethnicity, or another.

No disrespect to the post, rather in humbly addressing it, I pray for the day when the sins of thousands of years, and in our Country 150 years ago, are no longer the major topic and we don't have to have these conversations any more. I hope we don't have to wait until we have intermarried to a point that there is no basis for discriminating...but I guess many people will find some other way to hate and others will use that as a political tool to divide people and thereby control them. Rather than ostracizing the haters and reaching out and bridging the gaps that separate the multitudes on every side that do not hate others based on physical or geographical differences.

Lots of responses with opinions, feelings, hunches. They're good to see. However, I'm a engineer and systems type that dabbled in history. So let's run through the numbers. By the end of the civil war there would have been about 780,000 or about 19% of the population. Moving that many people given the size and number of ships that would be available isn't an option, hence wouldn't work. If I were Darth Lincoln, an option would be to push everyone I didn't want south of the border and make it someone else's problem or future adversary. Setting that aside, if you could wave the magic wand, a drop in 19% of the population which would be primarily agrarian based as the country was would mean a greater draw on the remaining population to just grow food. If you can't do stuff to people on race, then you do it with a caste system. There'd be the Northern Caste and the Southern Caste. Then within both those, you'd have educated and non educated with an inherent incentive to keep it that way. The harder/faster you make the 19% disappear, the more polarized the castes will be from the get go. In short, history would certainly travel a different path. Although we cherish contributions to science, medicine, etc., if that person didn't do it, someone else will, given time. Einstein's E=MC2 equation was simply 5-7 years ahead of someone else. The peanut would still have been figured out and we'd have peanut butter today. "Certain tragedy", as our current social/cultural lens would depict, wouldn't be in play as the morals/norms, etc. would go a different pace and direction. For sure, the US would be something very different. Just watch the Man in the High Castle a bit and you get the idea.

An interesting alt-history question. I don't know what history would have been like had that occurred, though it is safe to say much would be lost. The speculation is a bit hard for me to get a handle on.

But if going down this road, the first issue is would Lincoln do it after the Emancipation when the President proclaimed them free or prior when the slaves were still considered legal property? By this point, most if not all slaves would be native born in the US as the (foreign) slave trade was outlawed many years prior, and there would be essentially no connection with their ancestral continent for former slaves who would be repatriated. It might be problematic to justify legally and socially (in the North at any rate), particularly after the war.

History honors Crispus Attucks as the Fist Patriot to die for what would become the United States in what became known as the Boston Massacre. He was a free black man (or freely living runaway slave, historians cannot agree). So consider that while their numbers were not great, free black people lived in America well prior to the Civil War along with escaped slaves who lived free in the North. Would the (historically, legally) free black population be sent back as well? If the former would be hard to justify, the latter would be near impossible I would think.