ir best for the Bills.
It would have been idle after the failure of these proposals to
introduce the Bills that had been contemplated for buying out the loyal
slave owners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which was now
fast being regained for the Union. Lincoln after his Message of
December, 1862, recognised it as useless for him to press again the
principles of gradual emancipation or of compensation, as to which it
is worth remembrance that the compensation which he proposed was for
loyal and disloyal owners alike. His Administration, however, bought
every suitable slave in Delaware for service (service as a free man) in
the Army. In the course of 1864 a remarkable development of public
opinion began to be manifest in the States chiefly concerned. In the
autumn of that year Maryland, whose representatives had paid so little
attention to Lincoln two years before, passed an Amendment to the State
Constitution abolishing slavery without compensation. A movement in
the same direction was felt to be making progress in Kentucky and
Tennessee; and Missouri followed Maryland's example in January, 1865.
Meanwhile, Louisiana had been reconquered, and the Unionists in these
States, constantly encouraged and protected by Lincoln when Congress
looked upon them somewhat coldly or his generals showed jealousy of
their action, had banded themselves together to form State Governments
with Constitutions that forbade slavery. Lincoln, it may be noted, had
suggested to Louisiana that it would be well to frame some plan by
which the best educated of the negroes should be admitted to the
franchise. Four years after his death a Constitutional Amendment was
passed by which any distinction as to franchise on the ground of race
or colour is forbidden in America. The policy of giving the vote to
negroes indiscriminately had commended itself to the cold pedantry of
some persons, including Chase, on the ground of some natural right of
all men to the suffrage; but it was adopted as the most effective
protection for the negroes against laws, as to vagrancy and the like,
by which it was feared they might practically be enslaved again.
Whatever the excuse for it, it would seem to have proved in fact a
great obstacle to healthy relations between the two races. The true
policy in such a matter is doubtless that which Rhodes and other
statesmen adopted in the Cape Colony and which Lincoln had advocated in
the case of Louisiana. It wou