Lincoln Meets Black Leaders  On August 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln
did something unprecedented in presidential history up to that
point: he met with a small delegation of black leaders (all free
black clergymen). But the meeting did not auger a decision to
give African Americans a voice in government. In essence,
Lincoln sought to lobby these men in essence to agree to a
divorce. In other words, the President wanted to get black
Americans behind his plan to colonize them abroad. The meeting’s
minutes recorded:   So, in other words, Lincoln subscribed to
the notion common among whites in the North as well as the South
that it would be impossible for whites and blacks to live
together peacefully in a United States without slavery.
Lincoln’s support for colonization was long-standing, the seed
planted by his political role model, Henry Clay, who also
supported the idea.  The reason Lincoln took the unprecedented
step of inviting black leaders to the White House was to
convince them to support his murky colonizatio