The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [255]
46. CW, 8: 18; Joseph Medill to Lincoln, February 17, 1864, ALP; Springfield Weekly Republican, October 1, 1864; Winfred A. Harbison, “Zachariah Chandler’s Part in the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 22 (September 1935), 267–76; Long, Jewel of Liberty, 240–42.
47. Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biography (New York, 1968), 146; Miller, President Lincoln, 375; Long, Jewel of Liberty, 153–71; Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 160.
48. Harper’s Weekly, September 10, 1864; “The Next General Election,” North American Review, 99 (October 1864), 560–66; Peter Ufland, “The Politics of Race in the Midwest 1864–1890” (unpub. diss., University of Illinois, Chicago, 2006), 13–19; Speeches of William D. Kelley (Philadelphia, 1864), 28, 47–55; William Dusinberre, Civil War Issues in Philadelphia, 1856–1865 (Philadelphia, 1865), 175; Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 3: 406–7, 422–24.
49. Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York, 1962), 224–29; Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men Held in the City of Syracuse, N. Y. (Boston, 1864), 4–5, 44–52; Larry E. Nelson, “Black Leaders and the Presidential Election of 1864,” Journal of Negro History, 63 (January 1978), 42–54.
50. CW, 7: 505, 512, 528; 8: 83; “Abraham Lincoln,” North American Review, 100 (January 1865), 11.
51. CW, 8: 46, 100–101; Paludan, Presidency, 290; William E. Gienapp, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America (New York, 2002), 174; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York, 2007), 186; Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (4 vols.; New York, 1952), 3: 511.
52. Richard J. Oglesby to Lincoln, November 20, 1864, ALP; CW, 8: 149–52; New Orleans Tribune, December 21, 1864.
Two supposed instances of continued commitment by Lincoln to colonization date from after 1864. In January 1865, Lincoln dispatched General Daniel E. Sickles on a diplomatic mission to Colombia, where the colonization plans of 1862 had been focused. A Panama City newspaper reported that Sickles had been authorized to promise the government of Colombia one million dollars to allow the establishment of a colony of 30,000 emancipated slaves. Some biographers of Sickles accept the truth of this report, but neither Sickles’s instructions from Secretary of State Seward nor his own letters to Washington say anything about such a project, and Sickles explicitly contradicted the rumor, explaining to his hosts that the freedmen “were invaluable to us in a military as well as in an economical point of view.” The main purpose of his trip was to establish the right of transit across the Isthmus of Panama for American soldiers on their way to and from California. Mercantile Chronicle (Panama City), February 13, 1865; Sickles to Seward, January 26, February 23, and April 17, 1865, all in Dispatches from U. S. Ministers to Colombia, 1820–1906, vol. 20, RG 59, NA; Seward to Sickles, January 6 and March 18, 1865, both in Diplomatic Instructions of the Department of State 1801–1906, Special Missions: Instructions, vol. 2, RG 59, NA; Thomas Keneally, American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (New York, 2003), 310–14; W. A. Swanberg, Sickles the Incredible (New York, 1956), 269–71.
Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Benjamin Butler claimed that shortly before Lincoln’s death, Butler suggested sending demobilized black soldiers to the Isthmus of Panama to construct a canal and that Lincoln, hoping to revive the idea of colonization, promised to speak to Seward about the proposal. Most historians doubt the reliability of Butler’s recollection. In February 1865, Butler had explicitly repudiated the idea of colonization