• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1619 0

due when slavery ended in their state. He offered elaborate calculations of costs, benefits, and population trends to prove that despite the economic value of slave property—over three billion dollars, an enormous sum—the growth of the white population through natural increase and immigration would make the burden of taxation to pay off the bonds less and less onerous as time went on. Lincoln was betting that the white population would grow faster than the black, an outcome that colonization would ensure. The adoption of his proposals, he said, would “end the struggle now, and save the Union forever.”

Lincoln closed the message with a stirring peroration:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves…. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just.

These words, proclaimed the Continental Monthly, should be “committed to memory and constantly recalled by every man.” A century and a half later, they remain among the most eloquent ever composed by an American president. Lincoln implored Americans to embrace the end of slavery—not, however, through the impending Emancipation Proclamation, which he failed to mention, but via his thirty-seven-year plan of compensated abolition. The message to Congress revealed Lincoln’s thinking at a crucial moment of transition. He clung to a proposal he had been promoting for a year with no success, yet pleaded with Americans to abandon the “dogmas” of the past. He again endorsed colonization, yet referred to prospective emigrants as “free Americans of African descent” rather than alien members of some other nationality, and argued that the nation had nothing to fear if former slaves remained in the United States.71

Many observers found the message puzzling and disappointing. “What becomes of the president’s [Preliminary Emancipation] proclamation of the 22nd of last September?” wondered Orestes Brownson. Some Republicans “gently laughed” at Lincoln’s “astounding scheme.” “I could hardly credit my ears,” wrote Colonel James A. Garfield, who heard the reading of the message while visiting Washington. Chase had urged Lincoln, to no avail, not to suggest constitutional amendments that could never be adopted. As Chase anticipated, the proposals went nowhere.72

For Lincoln, December 1862 was among the most trying months of the entire war. Between December 11 and 15, Union forces suffered a disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia. This precipitated a full-fledged political crisis, with cabinet members scheming against one another and a congressional delegation demanding the ouster of Secretary of State Seward, whom many Republicans blamed for the administration’s failures.

Lincoln weathered the crisis. He assured members of Congress that he would not retreat from his pledge to issue the proclamation on January 1. But the weeks leading up to the new year witnessed an unseemly scramble for exemptions. In the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had alluded to the possibility that parts of a state could escape its impact. He offered a precise guideline as to how to do so: a congressional election would have to be held in which a majority of “qualified voters” took part. Lincoln saw this as a way of encouraging white southern Unionism. He urged military commanders in the occupied South to schedule elections before January 1 and to remind local