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By Root 1589 0

in the District because it did not provide compensation to slaveowners. The clause concerning fugitive slaves reflected Lincoln’s conviction that the compromises of the Constitution, no matter how distasteful, had to be obeyed. In providing freedom only for the children of slaves born after a certain date, Lincoln followed the precedent of emancipation in the northern states as well as Henry Clay’s well-known preference for such a method. The apprenticeship clause seemed reminiscent of British emancipation in the West Indies. All these provisions would remain elements of Lincoln’s approach to the slavery question for years to come. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates he would reiterate his support for abolition in the District along the lines he had proposed in 1849. During the first two years of the Civil War, he would present for the approval of slaveholders a number of plans for gradual, compensated emancipation. Not until January 1, 1863, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, would Lincoln embark on a different road to black freedom, and even after that date, he would continue to speak on occasion of gradual abolition, compensation to slaveowners, and apprenticeship as a halfway house on the road to freedom.53

Giddings considered Lincoln’s plan “as good a bill as we could get at this time.” Abolitionists outside Congress, however, were appalled. Controversy surrounding it resurfaced when Lincoln ran for president in 1860. In that year, the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips would dub him “the Slave-Hound of Illinois” because of the bill’s clause relating to fugitives from bondage. Lincoln’s plan, Phillips charged, “is no credit to any man, being one of the poorest and most confused specimens of pro-slavery compromise.” Giddings immediately rose to Lincoln’s defense, chastising Phillips for failing to take into account the political circumstances of 1849. Giddings considered it “heroic” that Lincoln had “cast aside the shackles of party, and took his stand…with those who were laboring in the cause of humanity.” Giddings’s strong affirmation of Lincoln’s antislavery credentials, inspired by the events of January 1849, helped to persuade Radical Republicans in 1860 that Lincoln shared their hatred of slavery.54

Southerners had no more interest in Lincoln’s plan than those of Palfrey, Giddings, or Gott. Years later, Lincoln recalled that as soon as his bill became public, his “former backers” in the District deserted him.55 He never actually introduced the bill. After Lincoln left Congress, the Compromise of 1850, originally proposed by Henry Clay and piloted to passage by Stephen A. Douglas, now a senator from Illinois, abolished the slave trade in the nation’s capital, while also providing for a strong Fugitive Slave Act and the organization of territories acquired from Mexico without reference to slavery. Slave dealers, however, simply moved their businesses across the Potomac River to Alexandria. Slavery in the District survived until 1862. When in that year Lincoln signed the measure that abolished it, he noted his pleasure that the law respected the principle of monetary compensation for slaveholders.

Even as the debate over slavery in the District ran its course early in 1849, a different version of the compensation issue came before Congress. This involved a slave, Lewis, who had been hired as a guide by the U.S. Army in Florida during the Second Seminole War (1835–42) and later either was captured by the Seminoles or escaped to them. The heirs of Lewis’s owner, Antonio Pacheco, requested a monetary payment of $1,000 from Congress.

The Pacheco case anticipated a major public question of the early years of the Civil War: Is the federal government obligated to compensate slaveholders for slaves lost as a result of military operations? Or, as an Illinois Democrat defined the “main issue” of the debate, “Does the Constitution of the United States recognize the right of property in slaves?” In an impassioned speech against payment, Joshua R. Giddings insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the principle