whatever motive opposed emancipation rested the responsibility for the prolonged withholding by the President of the proclamation of freedom. As soon as he could do so legally and effectively Mr. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Respecting this in his interview with George Thompson, he said: "It is my conviction that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it. Just so, as to the subsequent action in reference to enlisting blacks in the Border States. The step taken sooner, could not, in my judgment, have been carried out. . . . We have seen this great revolution in public sentiment slowly but surely progressing so that, when the final action came, the opposition was not strong enough to defeat the purpose.'

99 28

But, although that "opposition" could not "defeat the purpose," it could and did delay the issuing of the proclamation of which Mr. Lincoln said: "It is the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century."

But important and helpful as was that proclamation it could not make any portion of the nation free territory. It applied to slaves but not to slavery. It freed all the slaves in the insurgent states and it pledged the national Government to "recognize and maintain" their freedom. But it could not repeal nor modify the constitutions and laws of those states granting the right to hold slaves. Slaves were regarded and dealt with as property, and as such they could be given freedom as an act of war. But the right to hold slaves in those states being granted by state constitutions and laws would remain untouched by the proclamation and would be in full force upon the return of peace and the restoration of normal conditions. Those who had been made free by the proclamation could not be again enslaved, but others could be under the constitutions and laws authorizing slavery. The general Government as an act of war could take all the horses 28 Six Months in the White House, p. 77.

owned in the insurgent states, but it could not deny the people of those states the right to hold property in horses after peace was restored. No more could the General Government deny or abridge the right to hold property in slaves in the insurgent states when there was no "military necessity" for so doing. Under the rights "reserved to the states" by the national Constitution the property rights of the property in times of peace were untouched by the Emancipation Proclamation. Proslavery people in the insurgent states who were opposed to emancipation understood all this and declared their purpose to re-establish slavery when peace should be restored.

This purpose was expressed by Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, when, in a speech in the senate, he said: "If you should liberate the slaves in the rebellious States, the moment you reorganize the white inhabitants of these states, as states of the Union, they would reduce these slaves again to a state of slavery, or they would expel them, or hunt them like wild beasts and exterminate them."

In President Lincoln's strong testimony to the validity and effectiveness of the Emancipation Proclamation, he never stated nor intimated that it accomplished all that was in his heart to achieve respecting slavery. He regarded and declared slavery to be "the root of the Rebellion," and he was fully convinced that the future peace and prosperity of the nation required that it be utterly exterminated. But he did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation with the expectation that it would destroy slavery, although he cherished the hope that it would be followed by other measures that would accomplish that result.

Therefore, in the preliminary proclamation President Lincoln stated his purpose to recommend in his next annual message to Congress such action as would tend to promote the abolition of slavery by the loyal slave-holding states. And from that day he was untiring in his efforts to encourage and aid such action in states not included in the Emancipation Proclamation.

From a photograph of the original painting by J. L. G. Ferris. The elder woman is Lucretia Mott, noted abolitionist. By courtesy of the artist and of Wolff & Company, Philadelphia.

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VIII

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

HEN on the 8th of December, 1863, the Thirtyeighth Congress convened for its first session the Emancipation Proclamation had been in force for more than eleven months. All of the members of the House of Representatives of that Congress had been chosen by the people after the preliminary proclamation was issued, and, as already stated, in some cases the proclamation seemed to have exerted an influence on the election unfavorable to the administration. But during the year and more between the election and the convening of Congress there had been great advance in antislavery sentiment throughout the loyal states, and the achievements of the army with its addition of colored troops were proving the wisdom of the Emancipation policy. On the other hand, the efforts by compensation and other methods to secure the abolition of slavery by the action of slave holding, loyal states had not met with encouraging success, and gave little promise of accomplishing the destruction of slavery. But the purpose to remove the evil that all knew had caused the Rebellion and to leave no cancerous root to cause future trouble had become strong and intense in all the free states and was rapidly increasing in the loyal portions of the South.

The President in his annual message to Congress gave a glowing account of the workings of emancipation and especially the employment of colored troops in the Union Army; and in discussing the proclamation of freedom he made the famous declaration that he would never "return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation." He referred very briefly, but earnestly, to his favorite proposition for compensation to "the states not included in the