Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

In the same interview he held out the bait of colonization of the freed people as an additional palliative, saying: ‘I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually. Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply and in abundance; and when numbers shall be large enough to be company and encouragement for one another, the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.’¹ Five weeks later, having procured an appropriation from Congress with which to make a colonizing experiment, Mr. Lincoln invited a number of representative colored men to hold audience with him at the White House, and appealed to them to second² his efforts to establish a colony in Central America, where some American speculators had recently acquired coal mines for which they wished to procure laborers. It seems scarcely credible that a man of such rare shrewdness and common-sense as Mr. Lincoln usually manifested, could have talked such amazing nonsense as he discoursed in this hour's interview. Mr. Garrison, to whom the suggestions of gradualism and colonization brought up old memories, promptly pilloried these remarks of the President in the ‘Refuge of Oppression,’ pronouncing them ‘puerile, absurd, illogical, impertinent, untimely.’ At³ this distance of time it is impossible to read the President's remarks with either gravity or indignation, but it is quite otherwise with the pathetic story of the dismal collapse of the experiment in colonization actually made in Hayti.⁴

Early in August Mr. Garrison visited Williamstown,