Edwin Stanton dispatched a vessel to rescue the survivors. Second-Wave Schemes: Emigration to the European West Indies (1862-1864) A critic of the "contract colonies," the commissioner of emigration, James Mitchell, encouraged Abraham Lincoln to promote African American emigration to British Honduras (Belize) and the British West Indies at large. Separately, the U.S. minister to the Netherlands, James Shepherd Pike, negotiated a treaty for black resettlement in the Dutch West Indies (Suriname). Lincoln believed that by dealing with the comparatively stable European empires, he could avoid some of the problems that had plagued his earlier contracts with private interests. Lincoln signed an agreement on June 13, 1863, with John Hodge of British Honduras, which authorized colonial agents to recruit ex-slaves and transport them to Belize from the approved ports of Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Later that year the Department of the Interior sent John Willis Menard, a free African American clerk who supported colonization, to investigate the site for the government. The scheme petered out when John Usher refused to release funds to the would-be pioneers of Henry Highland Garnet's African Civilization Society and when the British Colonial Office banned the recruitment of "contraband" freedpeople for fear that the Confederacy would deem this a hostile act. Final disposition of colonization (1864-65) The question of when Lincoln abandoned colonization, if ever, has aroused debate among historians. The government funded no more colonies after the rescue of the Ile à Vache survivors in early 1864, and Congress repealed most of the colonization funding that July. Lincoln left no surviving statements in his own hand on the subject during the last two years of his presidency. An entry in the diary of presidential secretary John Hay, dated July 1, 1864, claims that Lincoln had "sloughed off" colonization, though attributes that change to the president's frustration with corrupt contractors rather than to any philosophical departure. In the fall of 1864, Lincoln wrote Attorney General Edward Bates to inquire whether the legislation of 1862 allowed him to continue pursuing colonization and to retain Mitchell's services irrespective of the loss of funding. General Benjamin F. Butler claimed that Lincoln approached him in 1865, a few days before his assassination, to talk about reviving colonization in Panama. Since the mid-twentieth century, historians have debated the validity of Butler's account, as Butler wrote it years after the fact and was prone to exaggerating his prowess as a