uated?" asked Mr. Lincoln by way of reply. "I do not want to issue
a document that the whole world would see must necessarily be
inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet. Would my word
free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the
rebel States?"

In contemplating a proclamation applicable to the rebel States, it is
hardly to be supposed that Mr. Lincoln did not understand the
situation two weeks earlier quite as well as when the document
appeared.

If Mr. Lincoln had been told, when he entered on the Presidency, that
before his term of office would expire he would be hailed as "The
Great Emancipator," he would have treated the statement as equal to
one of his own best jokes. Slavery was a thing he did not then want to
have disturbed. He discountenanced all radical agitators of the
subject, and especially in the border slave States, where he was able
to hold them pretty well in check, except in Missouri. There they
stood up and fought him, and in the end beat him. One of the rather
curious results of this condition of things was that, when the States
came to action on the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, the one
absolutely abolishing slavery, the three border slave States of
Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, over which the President's influence
was practically supreme, gave an adverse vote of four to one, while
Missouri, with whose radical emancipationists he had continuously been
at loggerheads, ratified the amendment by a legislative vote of one
hundred and eleven ayes to forty nays.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President, at the beginning of his
official term, opposed Anti-Slavery agitation and Anti-Slavery action
with all his might, he promptly faced about as soon as he discovered
that the subject was one that would not "down." No one ever worked
harder to find a solution of a difficult problem than he did of the
slavery question. He began to formulate plans to that end, the most
distinguishing feature, however, being the spirit of compromise by
which they were pervaded. All of them stopped before an ultimatum was
reached. Besides his proclamation, which, as we have seen, applied to
only a part of the slaves, he devised a measure that would have been
applicable to all of them. In his special message of December, 1863,
he proposed to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment
that would work universal liberation. There were conditions, however.
One was that the