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By Root 1836 0

their removal as the remedy. Although not mentioning Chiriqui by name, he touted Central America as an area of fine harbors and “rich coal mines” where even a small band of colonists might succeed. Invoking the memory of George Washington and the “hardships” he had endured in the War of Independence, Lincoln urged blacks to “sacrifice something of your present comfort” by agreeing to emigrate. To refuse would be “extremely selfish.” Despite his powerful endorsement of colonization, Lincoln, unlike Bates, the Blairs, and many other border emancipationists, continued to insist that any such plan must be voluntary, in effect leaving the decision to blacks themselves. Nonetheless, as the Washington correspondent of the New York Times observed, Lincoln’s statement “committed him more strongly than ever to the colonization policy as the surest solution of negro complications.”46

A stenographer was present and Lincoln’s remarks quickly appeared in the nation’s newspapers, as he undoubtedly intended. Edward M. Thomas, the delegation’s spokesman, wrote to Lincoln that he found his remarks persuasive: “We were entirely hostile to the movement until all the advantages were so ably brought to our views by you.” But overall, the meeting had the same result as Lincoln’s conference a month earlier with the border congressmen: failure. The bulk of the antislavery public, along with many others, greeted the publication of Lincoln’s little speech with dismay. “The scheme is simply absurd,” wrote James Bowen, the police commissioner of New York City, “and is either a piece of charlatanism or the statesmanship of a backwoods lawyer, but disgraceful to the administration.” Secretary of the Treasury Chase found the encounter shocking. “How much better,” he remarked in his diary, “would be a manly protest against prejudice against color.” A. P. Smith, a black resident of New Jersey, wrote to the president: “Pray tell us, is our right to a home in this country less than your own, Mr. Lincoln?…Are you an American? So are we. Are you a patriot? So are we.” Blacks considered it a “perfect outrage” to hear that their presence was “the cause of all this bloodshed” and their desire to remain in “the land of their birth” a result of fear of “making sacrifices.”47

Most indignant of all was Frederick Douglass. His vision of a society that had transcended the determinism of race stood as the polar opposite of the “pride of race and blood” that Lincoln, he wrote, had revealed. “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass complained, “assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant colonization lecturer, shows all his inconsistencies,…his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass pointed out that blacks had not caused the war; slavery had. The real task of a statesman was not to patronize blacks by deciding what was “best” for them, but to allow them to be free. Fourteen years later, when Douglass delivered his famous speech at the unveiling of a statue of Lincoln in Washington, the 1862 meeting still rankled. He could not forbear to mention the day when the president “strangely told us that we were the cause of the war…[and] were to leave the land in which we were born.”48

Commenting on the meeting with the black delegation, a London newspaper observed, “If ever a public man was aware of the weight of his own words…President Lincoln must have been so.” But Lincoln failed to consider that his remarks might reinforce racism and encourage racists to act on their beliefs. Northern blacks reported that since the publication of the president’s comments they had been “repeatedly insulted, and told that we must leave the country.” The summer of 1862 witnessed a series of violent outbreaks targeting blacks. Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation, wrote the Chicago Tribune, “constitutes the wide and gloomy background of which the foreground is made up of the riots and disturbances which have disgraced within a short time past our Northern cities.” The “kindly” Lincoln, it went on, “does not mean all this, but the deduction is inevitable.”49

Heedless of this