rsons accepted by the General Government be
declared free immediately.

With his plan for compensated emancipation in mind, it was quite
natural that Lincoln should look for a field of experimentation in a
small State, such as Delaware, especially since there was in Congress
from that State, Representative George E. Fisher, who was a staunch
Unionist and a friend of the President. Fisher gladly cooperated with
Lincoln in carrying out this plan. The Congressman tried to have the
Legislature of Delaware pass an act for the gradual compensated
emancipation of the 1,798 slaves which that State claimed according to
the census of 1861, on the condition that the United States would pay
the Delaware slaveholders $400 for each slave. During November of
1861, Lincoln wrote drafts of two separate bills to effect such an
agreement.[22] The first bill provided that, on the passage of the
act, all Negroes over thirty-five years of age should become free;
that all born after the passage of the measure should remain free; and
that the rest, after suitable apprenticeship for children, should
become free in 1893, while the State in the meanwhile should prohibit
the selling of Delaware slaves elsewhere. By the provisions of the
second bill the United States Government should pay the State of
Delaware $23,200 a year for thirty-one years and all Negroes born
after the passage of the act should be declared free, while all others
should automatically become free at thirty-five years of age until
January, 1893, when all remaining slaves of all ages should become
free, subject to apprenticeship for minors born of slave mothers up
to the respective ages of eighteen and twenty-one.

One of the drafts was rewritten by the friends of the measure that it
might embrace the details and alterations to conform with local
opinion and law. It was printed and circulated among the members of
the Legislature of Delaware and a special session of that body was
called to consider the proposal. The bill, however, was never
introduced, because it was feared that it would be voted down by the
hostile proslavery majority. The proslavery element, moreover,
prepared resolutions to the effect that the bill would encourage the
abolition element in Congress, that it bore evidence of an effort to
abolish slavery in the States, that Congress had no right to
appropriate money for the purchase of slaves, that it was not
desirable to make Delaware guarantee the public fait