The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [164]
The President has received yours of yesterday, and is kindly paying attention to it. As it is my business to assist him whenever I can, I will thank you to inform me, for his use, whether you are either a white man or black one, because in either case, you can not be regarded as an entirely impartial judge. It may be that you belong to a third or fourth class of yellow or red men, in which case the impartiality of your judgment would be more apparent.
When Lincoln moved to Washington to take up the presidency, William H. Johnson, a black resident of Springfield who had been working as his valet, accompanied him. Lincoln arranged for him to be placed on the Treasury Department payroll, describing him as a “colored boy” even though Johnson was a grown man. When Johnson died in 1864, Lincoln arranged for him to be buried at Arlington Cemetery, paid for a tombstone with Johnson’s name on it, and chose a one-word inscription: “Citizen.”21
Lincoln also abandoned the idea of colonization. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas predicted that the progress of the war would “educate Mr. Lincoln out of his idea of the deportation of the Negro.” The change Douglas predicted did come, but gradually. After January 1, 1863, Lincoln made no further public statements about colonization, perhaps realizing that such statements had failed both to persuade blacks to emigrate or to reconcile his critics in the northern and border states to emancipation. But later that month, after meeting with an official of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, Lincoln directed the Interior Department to advance money to a black minister who wanted to establish a settlement in Liberia. In February, Lincoln told Congressman William P. Cutler of Ohio that he was still “troubled to know what we should do with these people—Negroes—after peace came.” Cutler replied that he thought the plantations would continue to need their labor.22
Throughout the spring of 1863, John P. Usher, a proponent of colonization who had succeeded Caleb B. Smith as secretary of the Interior, continued to promote various schemes. In April, he met with John Hodge, a representative of the British Honduras Company, “comprising…some of the leading banker capitalists, and merchants of London” and owner of “valuable lands” in desperate need of labor. Hodge hoped the administration would help him transport 50,000 black indentured laborers to that colony or even “a much larger number.” Lincoln gave Hodge permission to visit contraband camps in Virginia “to ascertain their willingness to emigrate.” But Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton refused to allow Hodge’s visit, since the army was now recruiting able-bodied men for military service. “The mission failed,” reported the New York Times, “and the gentleman went home.”23
“The recent action of the War Department,” Usher commented, “prevents the further emigration from the U.S. of persons of African descent for the present.” If James Mitchell, the emigration commissioner, is to be believed (a rather large if), as late as August 1863 Lincoln remained committed to colonization. The president, Mitchell later claimed, alluded to the draft riots one month earlier: “It would be far better to separate the races than to have such scenes as those in New York the other day, where negroes were hanged to lamp posts.” Nonetheless, placing black men in the army suggested a very different future for them than colonization.24
The fiasco at Île à Vache also contributed to the demise of colonization. Early in 1863, Secretary of State Seward convinced Lincoln to delay the implementation of the colonization contract he had signed with Bernard Kock on the eve of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. In March, Kock transferred the agreement to two Wall Street brokers, Paul S. Forbes and Charles