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Chapter 3: Mr. Lincoln’s Hobby
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24 Upon receiving word of the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation, Lord Lyons wryly remarked that it “frees the slaves in all the states or parts of the states in which the United States government has at the present moment no de facto power.” The legation recognized its significance only as a political gamble and speculated about its feared effect of sparking a violent backlash among northern whites.1 The new policy’s much-speculated relation to colonization received no mention in the reports back to London. “Newcastle’s plan” appeared to linger in indeterminacy as it had for many months prior until the highest American authority lent it his considerable weight. Though long characterized as a “transformative” event for Lincoln’s views, the Emancipation Proclamation had little immediate effect on the administration ’s colonization policy. Lincoln identified the goals of that policy in his annual address to Congress on December 1, 1862. He alluded to the collapse of the Chiriquí project with disappointment, noting that “several of the Spanish American Republics have protested against the sending of such colonies to their respective territories.” Colonization still remained his administration ’s policy, though its focus would shift to Haiti, Liberia, and an emerging “emigration” project in the Caribbean. Lincoln made no reference to Britain by name, but his remarks clearly alluded to what the British Legation knew as “Newcastle’s plan.” “I have at the same time offered to the several States situated within the Tropics, or having colonies there, to negotiate with them, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, to favor the voluntary emigration of persons of that class to their respective territories, upon conditions which shall be equal, just, and humane.”2 Lincoln said little more in public about the British negotiations, or any colonization scheme for that matter. This silence and the absence of any colonization clauses in the final Emancipation Proclamation have been mistakenly interpreted as the first sign of Lincoln’s changing views. Yet the events of January 1863 offer no indication of any new policies save for those Lincoln presented to Congress a month prior. Chapter 3 Mr. Lincoln’s Hobby Mr. Lincoln’s Hobby 25 The Interior Department approached colonization as if it were business as usual after the proclamation, albeit under a new head. Caleb Smith resigned the post due to poor health effective December 31. Lincoln elevated Smith’s assistant John Palmer Usher with little fanfare, as Usher too hailed from Indiana, ensuring its continued representation in the cabinet. Furthermore, the new secretary effectively took on many of Smith’s tasks in late 1862 as a result of his illness. Usher had the appearance and excitement of a quintessential bureaucrat according to Noah Brooks, a journalist who befriended Lincoln in 1862 and gained an inside vantage of his administration. He was “fair, fat, fifty and florid, well fed, unctuous, a good worker, as good a liver, an able lawyer, an accidental member of the Cabinet by the law of succession, and is socially dignified and reservedly get-at-able.”3 The new secretary busied himself with the administrative duties of his office and generally stayed clear of public political battles, though like Smith he believed in colonization. He spent the first months of 1863 finalizing the Île à Vache contract that Smith had initiated the previous year.4 Unbeknownst to him, Lincoln already had a new colonization priority. “The President told me the other day that he wanted to have an informal talk with me,” read a confidential January 23 letter from Lyons to London. The official dispatches steered clear of this development, and nothing about the meeting’s purpose was explicitly conveyed by Lincoln, though the British minister had a reason to deduce one. The invitation arrived with a copy of James Mitchell’s 1862 report on colonization, outlining pending proposals, including those in British Honduras and Guiana. “The subject of the talk will no doubt be his hobby,” quipped Lyons, “the exportation of the Contrabands.”5 This presidential invitation offered Lyons the first clear indicator in months that the Americans intended for the proposed “convention” to proceed . “I think something may be done on the Duke of Newcastle’s Plan,” he continued, so long as the appointed agents remained under British supervision and did not attempt to draw laborers from the Confederacy directly. “It is from the Southern ports, that the President most wishes to send Negroes.” To proclaim New Orleans as a port of departure, however, would...