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Most northern Republicans welcomed the proclamation. Twelve governors were meeting at Altoona, Pennsylvania, to discuss war policy when it was released. They voted to adjourn and sent a delegation to Washington to offer congratulations. “Men vastly more conservative than I have ever been,” reported Senator Ira Harris of New York, embraced Lincoln’s policy. So did many War Democrats. “If they lose their negroes it is their own fault not ours,” one wrote from Illinois. Some abolitionists and Radicals lamented the absence of any moral statement against slavery in the document. It was “merely a war-measure,” complained Lydia Maria Child, with “no recognition of principles of justice or humanity.” But most were overjoyed, including some of Lincoln’s harshest critics. “Hurrah for Old Abe and the proclamation,” exulted Benjamin F. Wade. “From the date of this proclamation,” declared the Chicago Tribune, “begins the history of this Republic as…the home of freedom.” A month after excoriating the president for his embrace of colonization, Frederick Douglass called the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation the most important document ever issued by an American president, the “first chapter” in a new national history. Lincoln, Douglass assured his readers, “will take no backward step.” Commendations poured into the White House (“all that a vain man could hope for,” Lincoln wrote).62

“The liberated men are to have rights before the law,” declared the Springfield Republican. But the preliminary proclamation left unresolved their future status. Lincoln still assumed that large numbers would agree to be colonized outside the country. On September 24—two days after they considered the proclamation—and again on the twenty-sixth, the cabinet discussed colonization. Lincoln, according to Secretary of the Navy Welles, thought it essential “to provide an asylum for a race which we had emancipated but which could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals.” He thought a treaty could be worked out with a government in West Africa or Central America “to which the Negroes could be sent.” It was “distinctly understood,” Welles recorded in his diary, that emancipation and colonization were linked. Attorney General Bates again proposed compulsory deportation (“the more the better,” he thought), but Lincoln demurred: “Their emigration must be voluntary and without expense to themselves.”63

By the time of the cabinet discussion, numerous questions had arisen about the validity of Ambrose W. Thompson’s land grant in Colombia, his grandiose accounts of the region’s natural resources, and the attitude of the local government. Welles considered the entire plan “a rotten remnant of an intrigue of the last administration.” The House Ways and Means Committee had determined that the area was “uninhabitable” and that in any event, Thompson “had not a particle of a title to an inch of it.” The Smithsonian Institution reported that samples of Chiriqui coal examined by a leading scientist were worthless. If loaded onto naval vessels, the coal “would spontaneously take fire.” Since 1860, Colombia had been engaged in its own civil war, albeit one less bloody than that of the United States, making it uncertain who possessed the authority to sign an agreement to settle emancipated slaves in Chiriqui. Moreover, other Central American governments had been complaining to Secretary of State Seward about public discussion of colonies on their soil. The cabinet agreed that colonization could not go forward without the agreement of the relevant governments. On September 24, the administration suspended Pomeroy’s colonization expedition, which had been set to embark the following week.64

Despite sharing the Blair family’s enthusiasm about establishing an American empire in the Western Hemisphere, Seward had long harbored “grave doubts” about colonization, which is probably why Lincoln had previously circumvented him in pursuing the idea. Seward did not believe that any significant number of blacks would