But that he meditated the most liberal terms,
including payment for the slaves, rests neither upon conjecture nor
hearsay, but on documentary proof. It may be argued that he could not
have secured the adoption of any such plan; but of his purpose, and
its genuineness, there can be no question and there ought to be no
equivocation.
Indeed, payment for the slaves had been all along in his mind. He believed
the North equally guilty with the South for the original existence of
slavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was a
Conflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel. He was a
just man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stood
in awe of the Constitution and his oath of office. He wanted to leave the
South no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative,
had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force of
arms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. He fully recognized
slavery as property. The Proclamation of Emancipation was issued as a war
measure. In his message to Congress of December, 1862, he proposed payment
for the slaves, elaborating a scheme in detail and urging it with copious
and cogent argument. "The people of the South," said he, addressing a
Congress at that moment in the throes of a bloody war with the South, "are
not more responsible for the original introduction of this property than
are the people of the North, and, when it is remembered how unhesitatingly
we all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, it
may not be quite safe to say that the South has been more responsible than
the North for its continuance.
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