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By Root 1777 0

for abolition in the District during his term in Congress. At the opening of the December 1861 session, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts introduced an emancipation bill, which came before Congress the following March. It received final approval on April 11, but not before spirited debate over its method and consequences. Taking the two houses together, every northern Republican voted for the bill, and all but five northern Democrats against. Most representatives of the border states strenuously opposed it, charging that it would drive Unionist southerners to embrace the Confederacy, lower the wages of white workers, and produce “a war of extermination between the two races.” Blacks, they insisted, had only one understanding of freedom, “freedom from labor,” and would become “lazy, indolent, thievish vagabonds,” in the words of Garrett Davis of Kentucky.72

To avert this supposed fate, Davis proposed an amendment for the compulsory colonization outside the United States of all persons freed under the act. This touched off a debate on colonization that revealed sharp disagreement between Radical and moderate Republicans. Orville H. Browning, probably the most conservative Republican senator, said that compulsory deportation might become necessary. Many moderates believed, as Senator John Sherman of Ohio declared, that given the strength of prevailing prejudice, emancipation would grant blacks a freedom “stripped of everything but the name.” Colonization, Sherman believed, should be voluntary, but every antislavery bill should include a provision making it possible for blacks who so desired to “seek freedom elsewhere.” Most Radicals agreed with James Harlan, who told the Senate, “I am disposed to leave them where they are.” Davis’s compulsory colonization amendment failed, as, initially, did a substitute offered by James R. Doolittle to provide $100,000 to promote voluntary black emigration. Later, some Radicals changed their votes for fear Lincoln would veto the measure without it, and Doolittle’s proposal became part of the bill. “My amendment saved and carried through” the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital, Doolittle claimed.73

Lincoln exerted little direct influence on the deliberations. “I do not talk to members of congress on the subject,” he wrote, “except when they ask me.” He feared, however, that immediate abolition in the District would arouse opposition to his border policy. Privately, he expressed the hope that one or more border states might move toward gradual emancipation before Congress acted. If this did not happen in a “reasonable time,” he preferred that the bill have “three main features—gradual—compensation—and vote of the people” (like his 1849 draft legislation and, in part, his 1837 legislative “protest”). But Congress disregarded Lincoln’s preferences. The measure did provide for compensation to loyal owners, up to a maximum of $300 per slave (well below their market value, critics charged). But emancipation was immediate, not gradual, and the law made no provision for a popular vote on the subject.

For a few days, Lincoln hesitated. “I really sympathize with him,” Congressman John W. Crisfield of Maryland wrote to his wife. “He is surrounded [by] immense difficulties.” Crisfield claimed after a meeting at the White House that while Lincoln “greatly” objected to some of the bill’s features, he felt a veto would do more harm than good. He hoped Maryland would understand. Lincoln feared that immediate abolition might result in chaos. He told Browning that he had qualms about disrupting the lives of white families and about whether blacks could truly make their way in freedom. According to Browning’s account, Lincoln remarked, “Now families would at once be deprived of cooks, stable boys, etc., and [slaves] of their protectors without any provision for them.” On April 16, Lincoln finally signed the D.C. emancipation measure into law, informing Congress of his gratification that “the two principles of compensation, and colonization, are both recognized, and practically applied.” “Only the damnedest