Lockett follows the money and the correspondence behind the settlement the United States government planted on Ile a Vache, off southern Haiti, in 1863. Congress had voted six hundred thousand dollars for colonisation and made Lincoln its sole trustee. Reading the president's speeches, his 1862 meeting with a black delegation at the White House, and his persistence with the discredited Chiriqui scheme, Lockett places Lincoln among the most committed colonisationists in American public life. Warned about the promoter Bernard Kock by his attorney general and two cabinet secretaries, Lincoln signed with him anyway. Kock sailed with 453 emigrants, took their currency, tried to repay them in scrip he had printed himself, and was dismissed. An investigator found the settlers still wearing the clothes they had embarked in. A naval vessel carried the survivors home in March 1864 and Congress repealed the appropriation. Emancipation destroyed colonisation, Lockett concludes, by giving black Americans a reason to stay.