Like many self-styled moderates, Abraham Lincoln supported the resettlement of African Americans outside the United States, notably in Liberia. In 1854, in his Peoria speech, Lincoln articulated two ideas for his support for colonization: first, the unwillingness of "the great mass of white people" to accept black equality, and second, on a note of hesitation, Liberia's liability to be overwhelmed by any sizable influx of immigrants. Accordingly, he supported the colonization program of Francis Preston Blair and his sons Frank and Montgomery (until 1860, better-known Republicans than was Lincoln), who rejected Liberia in favor of closer destinations in the American tropics.
In his first annual message (now known as the State of the Union Address), of December 3, 1861, Lincoln advised Congress to provide for the colonization of any free African Americans, even if it meant the United States acquiring further territory. He encouraged the Thirty-Seventh Congress's insertion of voluntary colonization clauses into its District Emancipation and Second Confiscation Acts, intimating that he would not sign those bills unless they contained such a provision. Once Congress had passed this legislation, which it reinforced with a $600,000 fund for colonization, Lincoln appointed his old collaborator, James Mitchell, to an ad hoc position within the Department of the Interior. Together, they arranged his famous meeting of August 14, 1862, with a deputation of black Washingtonians, whom he told, "it is better for us both ... to be separated." Beforehand American President Abraham Lincoln had ordered his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, to meet with the Mexican chargé d'affaires Matias Romero to and try for the possibility of purchasing the island of Cozumel for the purpose of relocating freed American slaves offshore. The idea was summarily dismissed by Mexican President Benito Juarez. During a series of three cabinet meetings later in September, 1862, Lincoln rebuffed Attorney General Edward Bates's suggestion of compulsory colonization, but decided to ask Congress, in his second annual message of December 1, 1862, to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to promote black resettlement by treaty with putative host states.
Legislators' lack of response drove Lincoln thereafter to his own public silence on colonization, though he quietly continued to pursue colonization schemes, and in two waves. The president's two best-known colonization projects, Linconia (in Chiriquí Province, today in Panama) and the Île-à-Vache (Haiti), would both fail, albeit at different stages of their development, because of Lincoln's initial proclivity for pursuing colonization through U.S.-based concessionaires rather than the sovereign states that had granted them their leases. For over a year from October 1861, Lincoln still hoped to found a black colony in the Chiriquí district of what is now Panama, then an outlying part of Colombia. The settlers would mine coal to supply the U.S. Navy, and might even secure isthmian transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The president appointed the U.S. senator for Kansas, Samuel Pomeroy, to lead the expedition and choose pioneers from the 13,700 African Americans who applied to join him. Lincoln also signed a contract with Ambrose W. Thompson, the leaseholder of the tract in question, which allowed for tens of thousands of African Americans to immigrate. The secretary of the interior, Caleb B. Smith, also issued Pomeroy $25,000 from the colonization fund, to pay for transportation and equipment. However Lincoln suspended the project in early October 1862, before a single ship had sailed, ostensibly because of diplomatic protests by the governments of Central America, but really because of the uncertainty caused by the Colombian Civil War. The president hoped to overcome these complications by having Congress provide for a treaty with Colombia for African American emigration, much as he outlined in his second annual message, but he shelved the Chiriquí project over the New Year of 1863 when he learned that its stakeholders included not only a personal friend, Richard W. Thompson, but also the new secretary of the interior, John P. Usher.
By way of substitute, on New Year's Eve, 1862, Lincoln arranged with a New Orleans businessman, Bernard Kock, to establish a colony on the Île-à-Vache, an island off Haiti. Although the White House subsequently remade the agreement with more trustworthy partners than Kock, the new contractors retained Kock as the supervisor of the settlement, for which more than 400 freed slaves sailed from Fort Monroe, Virginia. Lack of shelter on the island, an outbreak of smallpox, and an ever-growing mistrust between the administration and its contractors doomed the colony. In February 1864, at Lincoln's behest, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton dispatched a vessel to rescue the survivors.
A critic of the "contract colonies," the commissioner of emigration, James Mitchell, encouraged Abraham Lincoln to promote African American emigration to British Honduras (Belize) and the British West Indies at large. Separately, the U.S. minister to the Netherlands, James Shepherd Pike, negotiated a treaty for black resettlement in the Dutch West Indies (Suriname). Lincoln believed that by dealing with the comparatively stable European empires, he could avoid some of the problems that had plagued his earlier contracts with private interests. Lincoln signed an agreement on June 13, 1863 with John Hodge of British Honduras, which authorized colonial agents to recruit ex-slaves and transport them to Belize from the approved ports of Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Later that year the Department of the Interior sent John Willis Menard, a free African American clerk who supported colonization, to investigate the site for the government. The scheme petered out when John Usher refused to release funds to the would-be pioneers of Henry Highland Garnet's African Civilization Society, and when the British Colonial Office banned the recruitment of "contraband" freed people for fear that the Confederacy would deem this a hostile act.
Lincoln left no surviving statements in his own hand on the subject during the last two years of his presidency. An entry in the diary of presidential secretary John Hay, dated July 1, 1864, claims that Lincoln had "sloughed off" colonization, though attributes that change to the president's frustration with corrupt contractors rather than to any philosophical departure. The question of when Lincoln abandoned colonization, if ever, has aroused debate among historians. The government funded no more colonies after the rescue of the Ile à Vache survivors in early 1864, and Congress repealed most of the colonization funding that July. In the fall of 1864, Lincoln wrote Attorney General Edward Bates to inquire whether the legislation of 1862 allowed him to continue pursuing colonization and to retain Mitchell's services irrespective of the loss of funding. General Benjamin F. Butler claimed that Lincoln approached him in 1865 a few days before his assassination, to talk about reviving colonization in Panama. Since the mid-twentieth century, historians have debated the validity of Butler's account, as Butler wrote it years after the fact and was prone to exaggerating his prowess as a general. Recently discovered documents prove that Butler and Lincoln did indeed meet on April 11, 1865, though whether and to what extent they talked about colonization is not recorded except in Butler's account. A postwar article by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles suggested that Lincoln intended to revive colonization in his second term.
In his second term as president, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln gave a speech in which, for the first time publicly, he promoted voting rights for some blacks, stating "It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers." John Wilkes Booth, a Southerner and outspoken Confederate sympathizer, attended the speech and became determined to kill Lincoln for supporting citizenship for blacks. Booth is reported to have remarked: "That is the last speech he will make"; he assassinated Lincoln three days later.
Historians have disputed his motivation, with scholars such as James McPherson, David Reynolds, and Allen Guelzo arguing that Lincoln advocated colonization of the freed people in order to assuage racist concerns about the Emancipation Proclamation. Other historians, such as Phillip W. Magness, Richard Blackett, Phillip Paludan, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., have challenged that contention by highlighting the quiet, even secretive basis of most of Lincoln's colonization activity; the lack of falsifiability to any unsubstantiated claim that historical actors did not mean what they said; and the inadequacy, for a deportationist target audience, of Lincoln's adherence to African American consent. The author of the one book-length study of black colonization during the Civil War era, Sebastian N. Page, argues that Lincoln believed in colonization to his death, but that the policy failed due to the corruption, controversy, and inadequate African American interest that it generated.
