The Great Conspiracy, Volume 5

This is historical book. While mentally revolving the question of Emancipation--now, evidently 'coming to a head',--no inconsiderable portion of Mr. Lincoln's thoughts centered upon, and his perplexities grew out of, his assumption that the 'physical difference' between the Black and White--the African and Caucasian races, precluded the idea of their living together in the one land as Free men and equals. In his speeches during the great Lincoln-Douglas debate we have seen this idea frequently advanced, and so, in his later public utterances as President. As in his appeal to the Congressional delegations from the Border-States on the 12th of July, 1862, he had held out to them the hope that 'the Freed people will not be so reluctant to go' to his projected colony in South America, when their "numbers shall be large enough to be company and encouragement for one another", so, at a later date--on the 14th of August following--he appealed to the Colored Free men themselves to help him found a proposed Negro colony in New Granada, and thus aid in the solution of this part of the knotty problem, by the disenthrallment of the new race from its unhappy environments here.