slaves should be paid for by the Government; another
that the masters might retain their uncompensated services until
January 1, 1900; that is, for a period of thirty-seven years, unless
they were sooner emancipated by the grave, as the most of them would
be. (See Appendix.)

The President's somewhat fantastic proposition was not claimed by him
to be for the bondman's benefit. He urged it as a measure of public
economy, holding that, as slavery was the admitted cause of the
Rebellion, the quickest and surest way to remove that cause would be
by purchase of all the slaves, which, he insisted, "would shorten the
war, and thus lessen the expenditure of money and blood."

The public did not take to the President's plan at all, especially the
Abolitionists did not. They no more favored the buying of men by the
Government than by anybody else. They held that if the master had no
right to the person of his bondman, he had no right to payment for
him. And as for an arrangement that might prolong slaveholding for
thirty-seven years, they saw in it not only a measure of injustice to
the men, women, and children then in servitude, the most of whom would
be doomed to bondage for the rest of their natural lives, but a
possible plan for side-tracking a genuine freedom movement.

In the proposition just considered we have not only the core of the
President's policy during much of his official tenure, but an
explanation of his mental operations. He was sentimentally opposed to
slavery, but he was afraid of freedom. He dreaded its effect on both
races. He was opposed to slavery more because it was a public nuisance
than because of its injustice to the oppressed black man, whose
condition, he did not believe, would be greatly, if at all, benefited
by freedom. Hence he wanted manumission put off as long as possible.
It was "ultimate extinction" he wanted, to be attended with payment to
the master for his lost property. Another thing he favored--and which
he seems to have thought entirely practicable--as a condition to
liberation, was the black man's removal to a place or places out of
contact with our white population.

But in entire fairness to Mr. Lincoln, it should be said that,
although his proclamation was inoperative for the immediate release of
any slaves, it was by no means wholly ineffectual. Its moral influence
was considerable. It helped to hasten a movement that had, however, by
that time become practically irresistible.