Advisors to Lincoln who had once flown the flag of colonization now showed different colors. Usher, whose counsel on colonization Lincoln had followed so far, wrote to the president in May 1863, just after Secretary Stanton formed the Bureau of Colored Troops, that the War Department's new policy toward blacks precluded further colonization; the office of the commissioner of emigration, wrote Usher, should be turned over to the Pension Bureau. One-time colonizationist Francis Blair, Sr., now admitted that settling the freedmen within the nation's boundaries made far more sense than sending them abroad. Even Ambrose Thompson, the opportunistic schemer behind the Chiriqui plan, recognized that colonization was no longer practical or profitable. By June 1863, he had stopped offering Lincoln a plan of colonization and offered him instead a plan to employ thousands of blacks as well as white immigrants on a railroad running between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh.
