for themselves about slavery had been fully admitted, and that four of
the Northern States were themselves slave States all this while.

But this is not the whole explanation of his delay. It is certain that
apart from this danger he would at first rather not have played the
historic part which he did play as the liberator of the slaves, if he
could have succeeded in the more modest part of encouraging a process
of gradual emancipation. In his Annual Message to Congress in
December, 1861, he laid down the general principles of his policy in
this matter. He gave warning in advance to the Democrats of the North,
who were against all interference with Southern institutions, that
"radical and extreme measures" might become indispensable to military
success, and if indispensable would be taken; but he declared his
anxiety that if possible the conflict with the South should not
"degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle," for
he looked forward with fear to a complete overturning of the social
system of the South. He feared it not only for the white people but
also for the black. "Gradual and not sudden emancipation," he said, in
a later Message, "is better for all." It is now probable that he was
right, and yet it is difficult not to sympathise with the earnest
Republicans who were impatient at his delay, who were puzzled and
pained by the free and easy way in which in grave conversation he would
allude to "the nigger question," and who concluded that "the President
is not with us; has no sound Anti-slavery sentiment." Indeed, his
sentiment did differ from theirs. Certainly, he hated slavery, for he
had contended more stubbornly than any other man against any concession
which seemed to him to perpetuate slavery by stamping it with approval;
but his hatred of it left him quite without the passion of moral
indignation against the slave owners, in whose guilt the whole country,
North and South, seemed to him an accomplice. He would have classed
that very natural indignation under the head of "malice"--"I shall do
nothing in malice," he wrote to a citizen of Louisiana; "what I deal
with is too vast for malicious dealing." But it was not, as we shall
see before long, too vast for an interest, as sympathetic as it was
matter of fact, in the welfare of the negroes. They were actual human
beings to him, and he knew that the mere abrogation of the law of
slavery was not the only thing necessary to the