Shortly after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, one James Derby called on his fellow New Yorker, Secretary of State William H. Seward. The secretary had already been recovering from a carriage accident when, on the night of the fateful events at Ford's Theatre, an accomplice of John Wilkes Booth tricked his way into Seward's house and stabbed him repeatedly. Miraculously, Seward survived, though during his second convalescence he received a stream of worried visitors. With Derby, he pondered his relationship with the late president. "'No knife was ever sharp enough to divide us upon any question of public policy,' said the Secretary; 'though we frequently arrived at the same conclusion through different processes of thought.' 'Once only,' he continued, musingly, 'did we disagree in sentiment.'" Derby asked on what matter. "'His 'colonization' scheme,' was the reply, 'which I opposed on the self-evident principle that all natives of a country have an equal right in its soil.'" 1 The foregoing anecdote chafes with the literature on slavery, race, and black "colonization" (resettlement) during the Civil War. Historians have tended to assess that policy with their focus squarely on the "Great Emancipator," thereby saddling their analysis with an unhelpful moral import, and steering it toward optimistic claims that Lincoln either insincerely peddled colonization to calm white racism, or, at worst, renounced the measure 1 Francis B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (New York, 1867), 290-91. 2 partway through the war. 2 Accordingly, it is easy to lose sight of colonization as a real policy, liable to undergo trial and error, experience peaks and troughs, and involve supporters and opponents alike in its formation and execution. Of all the individual casualties of the prevalent emphasis on Lincoln, it is Seward, the statesman upon whom the president called the most consistently, who stands out. Yet the literature on foreign relations has also played its part in underestimating the importance of black colonization to the relationship between the two men. 3 When we think about diplomacy during the Civil War, we picture those external, existential challenges that galvanized the Union: the prospect of the European powers recognizing the Confederacy, the reality of their equipping it, and their exploitation of its challenge to U.S. authority for their own interventions in North America. It is surprising, even embarrassing, that, when we turn instead to points of internal division, the abortive, impractical, and amoral policy of colonization should loom so large. Yet such differences between the president and his secretary of state are attested well beyond Derby's story. Seward's biographer, George Baker, wrote in June 1865 that "Lincoln and Seward never disagreed but in one subject-that was the colonization of the negroes." 4 "In the colonization project. .. he had little faith," reported
