of system." He urged this with special
reference to its application in the border States; and, inviting the
Congressional members of these States in a body to the White House, he
pleaded with them earnestly to support the resolution, and apply the
plan. They listened, but were non-committal. Congress received the plan
coolly. The Radicals were little in the humor of compensating
slaveholders, and the Conservatives apprehended a progressive attack on
slavery. But the President's influence triumphed; the resolution passed
in mid-April; and the nation pledged itself to assist compensated
emancipation in any State that would adopt it.

Nothing came of it. The border States did not move. Three months later,
July 12, their delegations were again invited to the White House. The
situation was at the gravest; McClellan's army had been baffled in the
desperate seven-days' fight; factions at the North were growing hot.
Lincoln pleaded reasonably, movingly, that they would bring decisive
help to the national cause, by committing their States to emancipation,
with help from the nation, gradually if they pleased, with colonization
if they desired--peace, union, freedom, all lay that way! Two days they
took to make answer, and then of the twenty-nine members only nine were
favorable; the rest with one accord began to make excuse,--and that hope
failed.

Events were forcing on the question of slavery. In the previous May,
General David Hunter, in South Carolina, finding himself with 10,000
fugitives in his camps, whom the laws forbade him to return to their
masters and did not permit him to hold as slaves, met the difficulty by
a proclamation, declaring that the martial law of the United States was
incompatible with slavery, and the slaves in his military
district--South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,--were set free. Again the
President overruled his subordinate, but in the proclamation he
distinctly said that the question of emancipation as a military
necessity belonged to himself as commander-in-chief. It was a note of
warning. Twenty years before, John Quincy Adams had written,--and the
words came from a conservative statesman of the highest standing: "I say
that the military authority takes for the time the place of all
municipal institutions, and slavery among the rest"; and had elaborated
and reiterated the doctrine that in case of war slavery might be
abolished by the commander. These statements had lately been recalled;
the