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.