The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [131]
In fact, in the two months after the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C., only one further piece of antislavery legislation won approval. In May 1862, Isaac N. Arnold of Illinois introduced a bill to abolish slavery in all places of exclusive federal jurisdiction—the territories, forts, dockyards, federal buildings, and American vessels on the high seas. The purpose, said Arnold, was “to render freedom national, and slavery sectional.” But moderates considered the bill too broad. Owen Lovejoy quickly proposed a substitute narrowing its scope to slavery in the territories, the issue that had always united the Republican party. This passed the House on May 12 and the Senate on June 9. The breakdown of votes had by now become familiar. Every Republican was in favor, while every Democrat and nearly all the border Unionists voted against.82
Abolition in the territories, which directly repudiated the Dred Scott decision, affected only a handful of slaves. The Census of 1860 counted fifteen in Nebraska and twenty-nine in Utah. (New Mexico had already repealed its slave code in December 1861, freeing the few slaves within its borders.) Nonetheless, the measure had great symbolic importance. It finally settled the question that, as Congressman William D. Kelley put it, “has kept the nation boiling with agitation for the last thirty years.” The bill provided for immediate abolition and made no mention of compensation to owners or the colonization of those freed. Nonetheless, on June 19 Lincoln signed it into law. Together with other measures of this session—the Morrill Act, which provided states with public land grants to fund the establishment of agricultural colleges; the Homestead Act, which offered free public land to settlers; and the Pacific Railroad Act—abolition in the territories sought to implement the free-labor vision of the American West, as a region free from the presence of slavery and populated by small farmers engaged in forward-looking market agriculture.83
All in all, the first sixteen months of Lincoln’s presidency—the period from March 1861 through June 1862—witnessed noteworthy changes in the government’s relationship to slavery. Lincoln had become the first American president to send to Congress a plan for abolition and had signed measures ending slavery in the nation’s capital and territories and superseding the Fugitive Slave Act. At this point, however, the course of future policy remained uncertain. The war and its consequence, the flight of slaves to Union lines, had weakened but by no means dissolved slavery’s traditional legal protections. The Confiscation Act of 1861 and the additional Article of War dealt with slaves in terms of their relationship to the military situation. Other measures, such as the resolution offering assistance to states that adopted emancipation plans and abolition in the District of Columbia and the territories, operated within the well-established constitutional framework. They attacked slavery either through action by slave states themselves or in places where Republicans believed the federal government enjoyed undisputed authority. Thus far, federal actions had no bearing on slaves in the Confederacy other than those set to work for the military or who managed to escape to Union lines. Nonetheless, the presidential initiatives and congressional enactments of the spring of 1862