Yeah, he was talking about that emancipation thing and being Forced Into Glory. Of course, until the bitter end he had James Mitchell around, he was chatting ("I believe that it would be better to export them all") with Ben Butler about colonization, and reportedly had Dan Sickles off in Columbia working on colonization when he was assassinated.
From the ACW moderated forum:
An interesting point. I just finished "American Scoundrel" by Thomas Keneally and he writes about Lincoln sending Dan Sickles to, IIRC, Panama to negotiate several dealings. One of which was the possible establishment of a colony for freed slaves. In fact, Lincoln was assassinated while Sickles was on this trip. --------------- Keneally claims it was Colombia: "The President needed an emissary to go on government business to Panama and Colombia. Greater Colombia, or New Grenada, as the Federation of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Panama styled itself, formed one loose federal state ruled from the highland capital of Bogotá, Colombia. He was to leave by January with the purpose of persuading the Panamanian authorities to allow Union troops to cross the Isthmus of Panama, something they had recently prohibited. He was then to travel to Bogotá and raise, with the federal authorities there, the possibility of Colombia's offering a home to freed black slaves who were now pooling in Washington and in Northern cities." [Thomas Keneally, _American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles,_ p. 310]
[Wlat] The day after the first battle of Bull Run, President Lincoln wrote down an outline of how to procecute the war, and the war did follow that outline.
You mean you admit that he planned to keep the war going for four years?
Yeah, he was talking about that emancipation thing and being Forced Into Glory.
Well, let's see what he said.
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took, that I would, to the utmost of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I have publically declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving by every indispensible means, that government--that nation--of which that constitution was the organic law...
I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the Nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."
A. Lincoln, 4/4/64
Walt