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By Root 1821 0

of the idea: Edward Bates, Montgomery Blair, and Caleb B. Smith. From the very beginning of his administration, Lincoln considered ways of laying the groundwork for colonization. In March 1861, a month before the outbreak of the war, Elisha Crosby, the new minister to Guatemala, departed for his post carrying secret instructions “conceived by old Francis P. Blair” and endorsed by Lincoln, to secure land for a colony of blacks “more or less under the protection of the U.S. Government.” Crosby found the presidents of Guatemala and Honduras unreceptive. One asked why the Lincoln administration did not settle blacks in its own western territory, “a question,” Crosby related, “which I must confess I found very difficult to answer.” On April 10, even as the crisis at Fort Sumter reached its climax, Lincoln found time to meet at the White House with Ambrose W. Thompson, who claimed to have acquired several hundred thousand acres of land in Chiriqui on the Isthmus of Panama, then part of New Granada (today’s Colombia). Thompson touted the region’s suitability for a naval station because of its fine harbor and rich coal deposits, which colonized blacks could mine.40

After fighting began, the Blairs pressed the colonization initiative. The increasing numbers of “contrabands” who could neither be returned to their owners nor be brought to the North given prevailing prejudices there, increased their urgency. They hoped to use as guinea pigs the refugees at Fortress Monroe. “I am in favor of sending them straight to Hayti,” Montgomery Blair wrote to General Butler on June 8, 1861. “Suppose you sound some of the most intelligent, and see how they would like to go with their families to so congenial a clime.” Lincoln apparently agreed. On July 8, Browning, a longtime advocate of colonization, recorded in his diary that he and the president had discussed “the negro question” at the White House. Both agreed, Browning wrote, that the government should not send fugitives back to slavery and that at the end of the war they should be colonized. Around the same time, Blair approached Matías Romero, the Mexican chargé d’affaires in Washington, about establishing a black colony in the Yucatán. But given that Mexico had recently surrendered one-third of its territory to the United States, the prospect of further intrusions on its soil aroused insurmountable opposition.41

Chiriqui seemed to offer a more promising prospect. Lincoln, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, was “much taken” with Ambrose W. Thompson’s proposal and pressed Welles to look into the matter. The secretary responded that the navy had no interest in a coaling station in Chiriqui, that there was “fraud and cheat in the affair,” and that he doubted blacks desired to become coal miners. Undeterred, Lincoln turned the matter over to Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith. In October 1861, he authorized Smith to agree to a contract for “coal and privileges” in Chiriqui, which, Smith hoped, would not only benefit the federal government but also help “to secure the removal of the negroes from this country.” Lincoln also asked Mary Lincoln’s brother-in-law Ninian Edwards and Francis P. Blair Sr. to look into the Chiriqui matter. Both reported positively. Edwards seemed mainly interested in saving the government money on coal. Blair waxed enthusiastic about Chiriqui as the “pivot” for an American empire in the Caribbean and a site for the “deportation” of the “African race,” thus “removing the element that convulses the whole system.” Soon after meeting with Congressman Fisher, Lincoln informed Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that he was anxious to have the “Chiriqui coal contract…closed.” But in view of Welles’s opposition, the project was shelved. It would be revived in 1862.42

Any doubt that at this point colonization remained part of Lincoln’s plan for dealing with slavery and its aftermath was dispelled when Congress reassembled. In his annual message, sent to the lawmakers on December 3, 1861, Lincoln urged them to provide funds for the colonization of