My recollection from reading the article is that Butler might have been a little fuzzy on the exact date, but it was more or less shortly before Lincoln's assassination. Spring of 1865.
What gets downplayed in the article are Butler's unreliability and the possibility that colonization was something Butler brought up, not Lincoln.
That has been asserted by modern day critics who adamantly do not wish to believe that Lincoln continued to discuss ideas that he had articulated for most of his adult life.
They insinuate that Butler was simply fueling his own aggrandizement and significance by making this assertion.
I am of the opinion that a Major General of the Union would be a man of high character and not given to lying. (Military men of this period valued honor. ) I am of the opinion that if that is what the man said he heard, then that is what he heard.
Now you can chose to believe one of two things. You can believe that Major General Butler was a liar, or you can believe that he heard Lincoln say what he claims; Sentiments Lincoln expressed for most of his adult life.
I chose to apply Occam's razor and believe that which most simply explains the event.
Now you can chose to believe one of two things. You can believe that Major General Butler was a liar, or you can believe that he heard Lincoln say what he claims; Sentiments Lincoln expressed for most of his adult life.
Joe, do you see how this -- uh, character -- operates? Butler wrote his book over twenty years after the war and published it almost 30 years after the war and one year before he died.
Butler is widely regarded as unreliable. In Butler's book, Lincoln is forever asking Butler what he should do with the freed slaves and Butler is forever telling Lincoln what to do. According to Ben, he was the one who first advised Lincoln to recruit African-American troops.
Butler also says Lincoln offered him the Vice Presidency through Simon Cameron. Butler has the kind of outsized ego one expects in third party presidential candidates (Greenback Party, 1884), and the unreliability one finds in politicians who frequently change their party and their views, moving from one side of the political spectrum to the other.
In Butler's account of his meeting with Lincoln, Butler has Lincoln lavishly praising him for his military career, which was lackluster, and his "friendship" for the black "race," and asking him about "sending all the blacks away."
The conversation has a funny, unlikely feeling that doesn't fade when Butler starts lecturing Lincoln about shipping off the US Colored Troops to build a canal through what's now Panama, something that was a major topic in the 1880s, but much less talked about earlier. It's all just too much to credit.
But for Diogenes, Butler is a "man of honor" so we have to believe what he says. Lincoln is the devil incarnate, so we have to believe the worst of him.
Diogenes stacks the deck. He forms his opinions in advance and the conclusions are already implied in his assumptions. If you don't start out with his assumptions you don't reach his conclusions. How much longer will we have to put up with his garbage?