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In fact, Lincoln had already settled on tiny Delaware as the place where emancipation could be launched with the greatest prospect of success. The state’s population in 1860 included 90,500 white persons (only 587 of them slaveowners), 19,800 free blacks, and just under 1,800 slaves. Even this last figure was something of an exaggeration, as Delaware had created a legal category of half-freedom whereby slaves whose owners agreed to manumit them served a term as indentured servants before being liberated. Alone among the slave states, Delaware had barred the sale of slaves outside its borders, resulting in a decline in the value of its human property since excess labor could not be shipped farther south. Abolition, Senator James A. Bayard had told the Senate several months earlier, would have no effect on his state’s prosperity. Delaware, moreover, had a significant Quaker population and, in the northern part of the state, a long antislavery tradition. In 1847, a bill for gradual emancipation had failed in the legislature by one vote. On the other hand, the state had also enacted harsh black codes. Free blacks could not vote, testify in court, or send their children to public schools, and the law presumed all black persons to be slaves unless they could demonstrate their free status. The main obstacle to abolition in the state, according to Bayard, was fear it would lead to “the equality of races.”33

Early in November 1861, Lincoln met at the White House with George P. Fisher, Delaware’s lone member of the House of Representatives, and Benjamin Burton, whose twenty-eight slaves made him the state’s largest slaveholder. Both were strong Unionists. Lincoln pressed them to initiate a process of gradual, compensated emancipation, which the federal government would finance. Once Delaware acted, other border states would follow, shattering the Confederacy’s hope of weaning them from the Union and leading to the end of the war in the “cheapest and most humane” manner. Their state, the two men told Lincoln, would be delighted to rid itself of slavery in this manner, whereupon Lincoln drafted two bills that could be introduced in the Delaware legislature. One abolished slavery in five yearly stages, culminating in 1867, with slave children to serve apprenticeships until adulthood. The second bill immediately freed slaves above the age of thirty-five but extended the process of emancipation for the remainder all the way to 1893. Both bills required the federal government to compensate owners with about $400 per slave, and both barred the sale of soon-to-be-emancipated slaves out of state. In keeping with his long-established preference for gradual emancipation, Lincoln noted, “on reflection, I like No. 2 the better.”34

The idea of compensated emancipation had a long lineage. Even though abolitionists had attacked such plans for surrendering the “great fundamental principle that man cannot hold property in man,” the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment distinctly required “just compensation” if the federal government appropriated private property. In one form or another compensated emancipation had been implemented in the British West Indies and most of Latin America. Even as Americans debated the question, the Netherlands early in 1862 adopted a plan for compensated emancipation in its Caribbean colonies. Lincoln had included compensation in his 1849 proposal for abolition in the District of Columbia. All these plans shared an essential characteristic—recognition of the local laws that defined slaves as property.35

During the 1850s, the “learned blacksmith” and veteran reformer Elihu Burritt had organized a Compensated Emancipation Convention in Cleveland. Unlike most such proposals, Burritt’s plan would provide money not only to owners, but, in smaller amounts, to emancipated slaves as well. Burritt lectured widely on the scheme in the northern and border states, including twice in Springfield, where he conferred with William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner. (There is no record of Lincoln having met