John F. Hume, The abolitionists together with personal memories of the struggle for human rights

[133] cheers and benedictions. Wonderfully different was the treatment he received on his arrival in his own country. Not long afterwards he was dragged through Boston streets by a hempen rope about his body, and was assigned to a prison cell, as affording the most available protection from the mob.

Nevertheless, we have had some excellent people --not slave-owners-who, out of compassion for the black man, or from prejudice against his color, and, perhaps, from a little of both, have favored a policy of colonization in this country. Mr. Lincoln was one of them. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do with the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free the slaves and send them to Liberia.” So said Mr. Lincoln in one of his debates with Douglas.

“I cannot make it better known than it already is,” said Mr. Lincoln in a message to Congress, dated December I, 1862, “that I strongly favor colonization.”

At Lincoln's instance Congress appropriated several large sums of money-then much needed in warlike operations — for colonizing experiments. One of these has a curious and somewhat pathetic history. A sharper by the name of Koch, having worked himself into the confidence of the President and some other good people, got them to buy from him an island in the West Indies, called Ile a Vache, which he represented to be a veritable earthly paradise. Strangely enough, it was wholly uninhabited, and therefore ready for the uses of a colony. Several hundred people-colored, of course — were collected, put aboard a ship, and dumped upon this unknown