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By Root 1624 0

of policy more evident than in the course of Attorney General Edward Bates. More than once, Bates had advocated compulsory deportation of emancipated slaves. Yet in November 1862, he issued an opinion affirming the citizenship of free black persons born in the United States. Bates had asked the advice of the distinguished jurist and political philosopher Francis Lieber, who responded that there was “not even a shadow of a doubt” that American citizenship included blacks. Bates agreed. The Dred Scott decision, he boldly declared, had “no authority” outside the specific circumstances of that case. Bates added that citizenship did not imply either equality before the law or political rights (women and children, after all, were citizens). Nonetheless, Salmon P. Chase, who had requested Bates’s ruling, immediately dispatched it to Louisiana, where free black activists had been demanding civil and political rights. The opinion, a striking change in public policy, was published early in December. “It properly precedes and ushers in,” wrote Greeley’s Tribune, “that other great act which is to come from the president on the 1st of January.”69

The electoral setback did not affect Lincoln’s outlook. His old friend David Davis visited the White House at the end of November 1862. He found Lincoln’s “whole soul…absorbed in his plan for remunerative emancipation.” Lincoln, Davis reported, remained certain that if Congress authorized the issuance of compensation bonds, the border states would take steps to abolish slavery and “the problem is solved.” Lincoln’s annual message to Congress, which reconvened on December 1, reflected this conviction. This was, to say the least, a curious document. It said almost nothing about the progress of the war, but included an elegiac reverie on the land itself, how it endured while “passing generations of men” and their ephemeral disputes came and went. Half its pages, a Democratic member of Congress complained, were “devoted to the negro.”70 But Lincoln did not discuss the impending proclamation. Instead, he devoted most of this section to reiterating his commitment to compensated emancipation and colonization. He asked for constitutional amendments authorizing Congress to appropriate funds for colonization, authorize payment to states that provided for emancipation by the year 1900 (with provision for repayment if they reintroduced slavery), and compensate loyal owners of slaves who gained freedom as a result of the war. This plan, he said, offered a “compromise” between advocates of abolition with the freed-people remaining “with us,” and those who favored gradual abolition and their “removal.” It would enable freed slaves to avoid the “vagrant destitution” that would likely follow “immediate emancipation.”

“I cannot make it better known than it already is,” Lincoln declared, “that I strongly favor colonization.” Three times, he used the ominous word “deportation,” although he also spoke of his administration’s continuing efforts to sign treaties for the “voluntary emigration” of blacks. He gently chided them for not being willing to leave the country, adding that he hoped a “considerable migration” would eventually take place. Colonization, he maintained, would benefit whites: “Labor is like any other commodity on the market…. Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer…and…you increase the demand for and the wages of white labor.” But at the same time, Lincoln directly addressed the racial fears stirred up in the fall political campaign, offering an extended argument as to why, if freed slaves remained in the United States, they would pose no threat to the white majority. He referred obliquely to exclusion laws such as that of Illinois: “In any event, cannot the north decide for itself whether to receive them?”

The December message contained a last offer to the border and Confederate states of a different path to abolition than immediate emancipation. Lincoln’s scheme would have had the government issue interest-bearing bonds to be presented to slaveowners, with the principal