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105 Abraham Lincoln left little direct indication of his final disposition on the emigration projects in British Honduras or any other Caribbean locale. The president indisputably sustained the schemes throughout 1863, including against the internal resistance of his cabinet. He pitched the West Indies scheme to Lyons at its outset in January, revived it in June when Usher and Stanton declined Hodge’s offer, and prodded a reluctant State Department to finalize the agreement with the British Legation in August. Mitchell claimed Lincoln’s support for the project in his private letters and public newspaper articles alike throughout the fall of 1863 and probably with credence. Lincoln still valued Mitchell’s counsel as shown by the African Civilization Society meeting in November. By June 1864 though, Mitchell was pleading for Lincoln’s response to unanswered letters from Hodge.1 Had political wrangling finally exhausted Lincoln’s patience for colonization? Or was he simply occupied with other, more pressing matters of the raging war? If Lincoln moved away from colonization in the summer of 1864, he did so by simple inattention as the Mitchell-Usher feud overshadowed and consumed any meaningful work on the Caribbean projects. Lincoln intervened to assist Mitchell with his salary but left little indication that he intended to rescue the scheme from his subordinates’ mishandling yet again. But neither did Lincoln ever conclusively distance himself from colonization—a point that was not lost upon his adversaries in Congress. Lincoln had many opportunities to publicly reject his prior colonizationist position; indeed, by 1864 it might have been politically advantageous to do so. Montgomery Blair continued to espouse colonization on the president’s behalf, as did his brother, a congressman from Missouri. In early 1864, echoing the postmaster general a few months prior, Representative Frank Blair publicly identified colonization, carried out in conjunction with emancipation, as the administration’s official policy.2 Chapter 10 Colonization Repudiated, Colonization Revived? 106 Colonization after Emancipation Historians have generally downplayed the Blairs’ influence at this point in Lincoln’s presidency, their remarks amounting to little more than bluster from the cabinet’s conservative faction.3 Montgomery left his post in September 1864 as part of a compromise to stave off a challenge to Lincoln’s reelection from the Radical Republican wing of his own party. His resignation was voluntarily offered and apparently accepted with reluctance by Lincoln, who had repeatedly rebuffed the Radicals’ prior calls to sack the postmaster general.4 Equally significant, Lincoln had endured over a year of vocal hostility against the Blair family from the Radicals, much of it tied directly to colonization . Radical agitation boiled over in October 1863 when Montgomery Blair delivered another bombastic assault on the “abolition” wing of the Republican Party in Rockville, Maryland. The speech avoided explicitly enlisting colonization but echoed his critiques of Stanton from the early summer in which colonization had been a recurring theme.5 The British Honduras project he had helped to craft in June was probably on his mind at the time, as the War Department remained an impediment to the recruitment of the contrabands. By winter it was Frank’s turn to retort the Radicals on their reconstruction agenda, and he made colonization a centerpiece of his counterattack in Congress. Though the colonization program retained its appeal to many moderate Republicans, it had fallen from favor among most Radicals by 1864. They had come to despise the Blair family’s influence with the president and with it their pet project of colonization. Others simply recognized its inconsistency with an emerging strain of egalitarianism in the Republican Party. Senator Henry Wilson complained to Lincoln of the postmaster general’s speeches, which were being circulated in the name of the administration yet were “universally denounced in New England.” The Rockville speech in particular drew the ire of such men as Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner, and prompted a Republican newspaperman to demand Blair’s resignation in Lincoln’s presence.6 Undeterred, the Blairs met their critics in force and openly claimed to speak on behalf of the president himself. On February 5, 1864, Frank Blair delivered a tirade against Stevens and accused the ill-tempered Pennsylvanian of intentionally subverting the administration with radical reconstruction and racial policies. The president, he insisted, wished for emancipation to be carried out with “compensation for slaves in the loyal Border states, and colonization of the freedmen in some suitable locality.”7 As with previous Blair speeches, the Radicals were incensed and none more...

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