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In August 1861, with the war now under way, Daniel R. Goodloe, an abolitionist from North Carolina who was working in Washington, D.C., as a reporter for the New York Times, published a pamphlet urging the federal government to propose compensated emancipation to the loyal border states. The editor of the Times, Henry J. Raymond, published and distributed it without charge. To counter white concerns about the creation of a large free black population, Goodloe predicted that the emancipated slaves would voluntarily migrate to the Deep South, which would become their “Eldorado.” It is not known if Lincoln saw this pamphlet, but he later appointed Goodloe to chair the commission that allocated compensation to slaveowners after Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia.37

Compared with later developments, Lincoln’s proposal to Delaware, which envisioned slavery surviving for thirty additional years, seems cautious indeed. Yet in November 1861, when no significant military action had yet taken place, it was a bold initiative. Never before had a president committed the federal government to promoting abolition. Moreover, in aiming not simply to free individual slaves but to abolish the institution, it advanced well beyond Butler’s contraband policy and the Confiscation Act. And, in Lincoln’s view, it was constitutionally unassailable since it relied on the action of state authorities and did not seize property without compensation. In effect, the plan made slaveholders partners in, rather than opponents of, emancipation, and offered a way of ending the institution without violence or social revolution.

Lincoln’s proposal for Delaware, which he soon extended to the entire border, should not be viewed simply as an attempt to outflank the Confederacy. It represented a continuation of prewar Republican plans to promote the demise of slavery in the border region. And when it came to the future status of the freed slaves, Lincoln also thought along prewar lines. When he presented his proposal to Fisher in November 1861, Lincoln did not mention colonization. But he told Orville H. Browning, who had been elected to the Senate from Illinois, that colonization “should be connected with it.” Lincoln was well aware that, as Joshua Speed had warned him from Kentucky, white public opinion in the border would never countenance “allowing negroes to be emancipated and remain among us.” “You might as well,” Speed commented, “attack the freedom of worship in the North or the right of a parent to teach his child to read, as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.”38

Once Fisher prepared a bill, under whose terms slavery in Delaware would end in 1872 with apprenticeship until adulthood for slave children, debate began in the state’s newspapers. Opponents warned that emancipated slaves would demand citizenship rights and that the end of slavery would lead to “equality with the white man.” Fisher went to great lengths to fend off this charge, insisting that not equality but colonization, of blacks already free as well as emancipated slaves, would follow abolition. But by February 1862 it had become apparent that the bill could not pass, and it was never actually introduced in the legislature. Slavery survived in Delaware until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution (and the owners received no monetary compensation).39 The outcome in Delaware offered an early indication that Lincoln’s hope of border owners voluntarily surrendering their slaves was doomed to failure. It also demonstrated that proponents of emancipation needed to have a persuasive answer to the inevitable question of what would happen to slaves once freed. This brought to the fore, once again, the prospect of colonization.

For years, colonization had been one element of a strategy for promoting gradual abolition in the border states pressed by the Blair family and their followers and embraced, although without their fervor, by Lincoln. His cabinet included three strong advocates