Don't forget Chiriqui Panama:

Historian William Ernest Smith wrote that there were strong diplomatic reasons to support colonization: "The advantages which were to accrue to the United States were many and important. Safe and well-fortified harbors on each side were to be acquired and a railroad was to be built across the Isthmus. A command of the coal fields would supply our navy with fuel while it sailed in the Caribbean. The United States could and should play a role in Central America like that of England in India. First, spread the free principles of our government over that barbarous region; second, as England maintained her power in Europe by maintaining a dominance over Central Asia, so should the United States use Chiriqui as a 'pivot on which to rest our lever to sway Central America & secure for the free states on this continent the control which is deemed necessary for the preservation of our Republican Institutions,' and to unite our Atlantic and Pacific states, and the oceans which embraced them, in order to exclude all European powers from establishing themselves in Central America from which place they might operate through Mexico and threaten us in our most vulnerable parts — the Southwest and West; third, it would counteract British interests in Belize; fourth, it would provide us with a southern cotton state of free laborers who would compete with English projects in the Caribbean to produce cotton."30

But President Lincoln listened to colonization's advocates — such as the Reverend James Mitchell, who peppered Mr. Lincoln with letters and reports — such as a 24-page printed pamphlet in May 1861 in which he argued: "Our republican system was meant for a homogenous people. As long as blacks continue to live with the whites they constitute a threat to the national life."31 Despite the racist ideas which his report contained, Reverend Mitchell was appointed as the country's commissioner for black colonization. Another recruit for the colonization campaign was Kansas Senator Samuel Pomeroy, who was named a colonization agent.

Colonization in theory may have had appeal but in practice, it ran into this serious problems. Lincoln biographer William E. Barton asked: "But where were they to go? The first answer was, to Liberia. The president had been in conference with 'the old president' of Liberia, Roberts, there was much to be said for Liberia as the ultimate home of the American negro. But he was favorable to a nearer situation on this side of the ocean. He recommended the purchase of a tract in Central America, within the republic of New Granada. It was well adapted in climate to the constitution of the American negro, and favorable to the growing of cotton and other crops to which the negro was accustomed."32 The biographers of Assistant Secretary of the Interior John Palmer Usher, Elmo R. Richardson and Alan W. Farley, wrote that the Administration's two leading Hoosiers, Usher and his boss Caleb Smith, took the lead in promoting colonization: