• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Chiriqui project, which Lincoln had discussed in 1861 with Ambrose W. Thompson, who claimed to own land suitable for colonization in this province of Colombia, now came back to life. Thompson’s son, a captain in the Union army, sent Lincoln a long letter detailing the region’s attractions, including its soil, climate, coal mines, even the abundant “turtles and fish” in its harbors. In a more practical vein he predicted that an American colony there would exert “a preponderating influence in Central and South America.” In April 1862, Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith recommended that the government advance $300,000 to Thompson to enable him to open the coal mines in Chiriqui. This, he wrote to the president, would begin “a great national scheme which may ultimately relieve the United States of the surplus colored population.” Lincoln seemed more enthusiastic about Smith’s report than any member of the cabinet. In June 1862, Lincoln appointed Reverend James Mitchell, the Indiana colonizationist he had met nine years earlier, commissioner of emigration in the Department of the Interior.43

As talk of colonization increased, so did black opposition. “No considerable number of colored people have manifested any wish to be colonized,” one Massachusetts newspaper observed. To Mitchell’s dismay, he found blacks who had obtained their freedom in 1861 and 1862 “to a great extent satisfied with their new liberties and franchises.” To counteract this reluctance to emigrate, Lincoln, for the first and only time, took the idea of colonization directly to black Americans. Early in July, he asked his emigration commissioner to gather a black delegation at the White House. Mitchell conveyed the invitation to an audience assembled at one of Washington’s black churches. The group adopted a resolution calling discussion of colonization “inexpedient, inauspicious, and impolitic.” But as it would be discourteous to refuse to meet with the president, a committee of five was appointed. On August 14, 1862, in Mitchell’s words, “in the goodness of his heart, for the first time in the history of the country,” an American president “received and addressed a number of colored men.”44

This was not, in fact, the first time Lincoln had met with prominent African-Americans. In April 1862 he had a forty-five-minute conversation with the black theologian Daniel A. Payne about the District of Columbia emancipation bill. That same month, he discussed colonization with two representatives of the government of Liberia, one of them the prominent pan-Africanist Alexander Crummell. A newspaper report that the two had urged Lincoln to support “compulsory transportation” inspired “severe comments” from black Americans, and Lincoln dashed off a letter to the two to repair the damage. “Neither you nor any one else,” he affirmed, “have ever advocated, in my presence, the compulsory deportation of freed slaves to Liberia or elsewhere.”45

What Lincoln said on August 14 to the black delegation made the meeting one of the most controversial moments of his entire career. “You and we are different races,” Lincoln told them. Because of white prejudice, “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race…. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Lincoln offered a powerful indictment of slavery: “Your race are suffering in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” But he refused to issue a similar condemnation of racism, although he also declined to associate himself with it. Blacks, he said, could never “be placed on an equality with the white race” in the United States; whether this “is right or wrong I need not discuss” (a remarkable comment from one who had so vehemently condemned Stephen A. Douglas for moral agnosticism regarding slavery). Lincoln seemed to blame the black presence for the Civil War: “But for your race among us there could not be war.” He offered