Yes and President Lincoln was putting together a colony somewhere in Latin America, I forget where. I tend to think that’s why he was assassinated.
That’s the first time I heard about the colony in Latin America but I’m not surprised. I know it’s useless to speculate on how different things would be today if all that had worked out.
There have been some interesting developments lately which further displays the duplicity and bias of the media. Like those two reporters in Virginia attacked last week-end and others scattered around the country. If it wasn’t for Fox News and otehr sources I don’t think anyone would have known about them.
For the last two or three years of the war, Lincoln had Gen. Dan Sickles (of the Wheatfield at Gettysburg) down in Panama, which was then a province of New Granada, and in Bogota.
Lincoln's idea was to use about 2,000,000 emancipated slaves to dig the Panama Canal. After the canal was completed, they would remain in Panama as their new country.
Evidently, Lincoln had deep reservations about the utility and feasibility of leaving 4-5,000,000 emancipated slaves in the U.S., or the ability of two large and distinct populations to get along. Frederick Douglass may have changed Lincoln's mind about the capacity of the black man to learn and articulate a reasoned argument; but if black people were educable, that implied nothing very hopeful about whether two different peoples, two societies, could co-exist within the same borders, in the same political economy.
Just a few days before the assassination, Lincoln received a progress report from Sickles, apparently transmitted by General Ben Butler, who had an appointment with Lincoln that week. Butler, Gen. Nathaniel Banks, members of the Blair family, and , early in the war, Thurlow Weed and Ward Hill Lamon (Lincoln's Marshal of Washington and White House Chief of Protocol), were the people Lincoln typically engaged in confidential or sensitive matters (such as his arrest warrant for Chief Justice Taney, given to Lamon, and the illicit black-market cotton trade with the Confederacy, which was entrusted to rings led by Banks and Butler, and possibly others).
FReeper GOPcapitalist took an interest in Sickles's confidential legation to the New Granadan (Colombian) government, and while in DC about 10 years ago, he accessed what should have been Sickles's correspondence with State Department superiors about his discussions with Panamanian leading citizens as well as the government; but GOPcap found almost nothing, zippo. He thought the files -- which existed, there were files -- had been cleaned out except for a few pieces of paper. Sickles's journals, daybooks, correspondence, and memos back to President Lincoln and/or Gen. Butler were not there. It may be that there is a separate, confidential White House file; or the material may have been moved during indemnification proceedings in the 1920's , when Congress compensated the Bogota government for the alienation of Panama.
Certainly, Abraham Lincoln's plan to dig the Panama Canal with emancipated slaves, and leave them there (and this before the mosquito had been identified and defeated as a vector of terrible diseases), will certainly have remained a sensitive subject, with its racial implications and Stalinesque grandiosity, from that day until this.