t a colony of negroes which he was trying to
establish on a small island off Hayti. There flourishes in Southern
latitudes a minute creature called _Dermatophilus penetrans_, or the
jigger, which can inflict great pain on barefooted people by housing
itself under their toe-nails. This Colony had a plague of jiggers, and
every expedient for defeating them had failed. Lincoln was not merely
giving the practical attention to this difficulty that might perhaps be
expected; the Chaplain was amazed to find that at that moment, at the
turning point of the war, a few days only after Vicksburg and
Gettysburg, with his enormous pre-occupations, the President's mind had
room for real and keen distress about the toes of the blacks in the Cow
Island. At the end of yet another interview Eaton was startled by the
question, put by the President with an air of shyness, whether
Frederick Douglass, a well-known negro preacher, could be induced to
visit him. Of course he could. Frederick Douglass was then reputed to
be the ablest man ever born as a negro slave; he must have met many of
the best and kindest Northern friends of the negro; and he went to
Lincoln distressed at some points in his policy, particularly at his
failure to make reprisals for murders of negro prisoners by Southern
troops. When he came away he was in a state little short of ecstasy.
It was not because he now understood, as he did, Lincoln's policy.
Lincoln had indeed won his warm approval when he told him "with a
quiver in his voice" of his horror of killing men in cold blood for
what had been done by others, and his dread of what might follow such a
policy; but he had a deeper gratification, the strangeness of which it
is sad to realise. "He treated me as a man," exclaimed Douglass. "He
did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the
colour of our skins."

Perhaps the hardest effort of speech that Lincoln ever essayed was an
address to negroes which had to do with this very subject of colour.
His audience were men who had been free from birth or for some time and
were believed to be leaders among their community. It was Lincoln's
object to induce some of them to be pioneers in an attempt at
colonisation in some suitable climate, an attempt which he felt must
fail if it started with negroes whose "intellects were clouded by
slavery." He clung to these projects of colonisation, as probably the
best among the various means by which the i