Kalamata: "No, I am correct; and since have opened your mouth, put your money where your mouth is."
HandyDandy's problem here is: he doesn't understand that like any Democrat, but unlike every Republican, Kalamata can read Republican minds and tell us with 100% certainty (enough to impeach if not "execute") what was going on there.
So Kalamata **knows** what Lincoln was thinking "in his dying days" -- pretty amazing, isn't it?
The truth is that Lincoln's recolonization ideas were basically the same as many Founders, including Jefferson, Madison & Monroe, plus Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson.
All supported voluntary resettlement for freedmen who wanted to go.
None of their experiments proved entirely successful, though some failed more miserably than others.
At the time of Lincoln's death there were no plans for future recolonization projects and 94% of the funds Congress appropriated for recolonization were never spent.
In fact, there is no reason to believe that Lincoln ever espoused colonization after he issued the Final Emancipation Proclamation.
Scholars who argue that Lincoln still hoped to colonize blacks after the proclamation rely on only two flimsy pieces of evidence.
On July 1, 1864, the day before Congress voted to rescind its colonization appropriations, John Hay, Lincoln's personal secretary, recorded in his diary that "the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization." [39]
Benjamin F. Butler, a leading Union general, claimed that early in 1865 Lincoln told him of the black soldiers, "I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves."
Yet Butler's account is at best dubious, and Hay's allows for the possibility that Lincoln had given up the idea before July 1864.[40]"
The answer I got last time was that Benjamin Butler made it up.
My answer was that I didn't think a Union General would make sh*t up.
Joey's posts are always deceptive. He didn't tell you that Lincoln was possibly scheming for colonization up until his death:
"It is not clear that by his death Lincoln had abandoned his belief in colonization. "I am happy that the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization," Lincoln's secretary John Hay wrote in his diary on July 1, 1864. As late as November 30, 1864, Attorney General Edward Bates gave an affirmative answer to Lincoln's question of whether Mitchell could continue as "your assistant or aid [sic] in the matter of executing the several acts of Congress relating to the emigration or colonizing of the freed Blacks," even though Congress had embargoed funds for further experiments with colonization. General Benjamin F. Butler claimed that shortly before his death, Lincoln had told him in a meeting in the White House: "I wish you would carefully examine the question and give me your views upon it and go into the figures, and you did before in some degree, so as to show whether the Negroes can be exported..." According to Butler, he told Lincoln two days later: "Mr. President, I have gone very carefully over my calculations as to the power of the country to export the Negroes of the South, and I assure you that, using all your naval vessels and all the merchant marine fit to cross the seas with safety, it will be impossible for you to transport to the nearest place for them... half as fast as Negro children will be born here." Although some historians have questioned Butler's veracity, there is no reason to doubt his account in light of Lincoln's obsession with the colonization scheme."
"Lincoln was a colonizationist, as Jefferson, Madison and Henry Clay were," his old Illinois acquaintance Henry Clay Whitney recalled in 1892. Whitney speculated that Lincoln "would have made still more heroic efforts, looking to that end, had he completed his second term; and his policy of emancipation was adopted, against both his judgment, desire and conscience..."
"As president, Ulysses Grant revived the colonization scheme, promoting the annexation of the Dominican Republic as a new home for "the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate." In 1898 Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, proposed protecting white labor by expatriating blacks to Liberia or Cuba. In the twentieth century the idea of colonization was kept alive by black nationalists and white supremacists such as the members of the Ku Klux Klan."
[Michael Lind, "What Lincoln Believed." Doubleday, 2005, pp.224-225]
It appears that both black nationalists and the Ku Klux Klan had the same goal: of colonizing the blacks. A good book on the black nationalist efforts is:
UnAfrican Americans: nineteenth-century Black nationalists and the civilizing mission
This links to more information on General Butler's claim about Lincoln's late colonization endeavors:
Mr. Kalamata