1852, he made his first recorded remarks on African American resettlement in a eulogy for the president of the ACS (and national statesman), Henry Clay. The next year, he helped an Indiana colonizationist, James Mitchell, who had come to Springfield, Illinois, to rekindle that state's colonization movement. In 1854, in his Peoria speech, Lincoln articulated two motifs of his support for colonization: first, the unwillingness of "the great mass of white people" to accept black equality, and second, on a note of qualification, Liberia's liability to be overwhelmed by any sizable influx of immigrants. Accordingly, he supported the colonization program of Francis Preston Blair and his sons Frank and Montgomery (until 1860, better-known Republicans than Lincoln), who rejected Liberia in favor of closer destinations in the American tropics. Wartime Provisions (1861-62) In his first annual message to Congress (now known as the State of the Union Address), of December 3, 1861, Lincoln advised Congress to provide for the colonization of free African American people, even if it required the United States to acquire further territory. He encouraged the Thirty-Seventh Congress's insertion of voluntary colonization clauses into its District Emancipation and Second Confiscation Acts, intimating that he would not sign those bills unless they contained such a provision. Once Congress had passed this legislation, which it reinforced with a $600,000 fund for colonization, Lincoln appointed his old collaborator, James Mitchell, to an ad hoc position within the Department of the Interior. Together, they arranged his famous meeting of August 14, 1862, with a deputation of black Washingtonians, whom he told, "without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated." Civil War historian Jonathan W. White wrote of this meeting, "Few moments in Lincoln’s presidency appear as regrettable as this one.... Lincoln’s words were terribly condescending." Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame took a more favorable view of Lincoln's remarks to his visitors, finding one statement "remarkably empathetic." During a series of three cabinet meetings of late September 1862, Lincoln rebuffed Attorney General Edward Bates's suggestion of compulsory colonization, but decided to ask Congress, in his second annual message of December 1, 1862, to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to promote black resettlement by treaty with putative host states. Legislators' lack of response drove Lincoln thereafter to his own public silence on