But the war had inevitably brought a
more radical issue to the front,--the question of slavery in the States.

Under the name of a confiscation act, Congress passed a law, July 17,
1862, which declared freedom to all slaves of convicted rebels; to
slaves of rebels escaping within the army lines, or captured, or
deserted by their masters; and to all slaves of rebels found in places
captured and occupied by the Union army. This came near to making the
abolition of slavery follow exactly the progress of the Union arms. But,
leaving untouched the slave property of loyalists, it spared the
institution as a system.

Lincoln, in many ways a man of the people by his convictions and
sympathies, in other aspects towered in solitude. He was almost unique
in that he could fight--fight if need were to the death,--with no spark
of hatred in his heart. In the midst of war he was a devoted
peace-lover. To an old friend, though a political opponent, Congressman
D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana, who called on him at the White House, he
said with a pathetic look of anxious pain: "Voorhees, doesn't it seem
strange that I should be here--I, a man who couldn't cut a chicken's
head off,--with blood running all around me?" While he was overseeing
campaigns, selecting and rejecting generals, learning the business of a
commander, keeping touch with all the great matters of administration,
besieged by office-seekers, importuned by people in all manner of
private troubles,--he found intervals in which to devise ways out of the
horrid business of war, ways that might lead both to peace and freedom.

The key of the situation he thought lay largely with the border
States,--Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky,--all of them formally in the
Union, but their population divided, sending recruits to both armies,
and with hopes in the Confederacy that they might be entirely won over.
If they could be bound faster to the Union, if at the same time they
could be helped to make themselves free States,--then might the Union
cause be mightily helped, and at the same time the work of emancipation
be begun. Aiming at this result, Lincoln sent a message to Congress,
March 6, 1862, proposing this resolution: "That the United States ought
to co-operate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of
slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State,
in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and
private, produced by such change