re he condemns." Yet so
ineradicable was the race prejudice that it was not until the spring of
1864, after all efforts for action by Congress had failed, that the
attorney-general declared black soldiers to be entitled to the same pay
as white soldiers. Regarding a soldier merely as a marketable commodity,
doubtless the white was worth more money; yet life was about the same to
each, and it was hard to see why one should be expected to sell his life
for fewer dollars than satisfied the other.

Besides these measures, Congress gave evidence of its sentiments by
passing an act for appointing diplomatic representatives to Hayti and
Liberia; also further evidence by passing certain legislation against
the slave trade.

The recital of all these doings of the legislators sufficiently
indicates the hostility of Congress towards slavery. In fact, a large
majority both in the Senate and in the House had moved out against it
upon nearly every practicable line to the extremity of the
constitutional tether. Neither arguments, nor the entreaties of the
border-state men, nor any considerations of policy, had exercised the
slightest restraining influence. It is observable that this legislation
did not embody that policy which Mr. Lincoln had suggested, and to which
he had become strongly attached. On the contrary, Congress had done
everything to irritate, where the President wished to do everything to
conciliate; Congress made that compulsory which the President hoped to
make voluntary. Mr. Lincoln remained in 1862, as he had been in 1858,
tolerant towards the Southern men who by inheritance, tradition, and
the necessity of the situation, constituted a slaveholding community. To
treat slave-ownership as a crime, punishable by confiscation and ruin,
seemed to him unreasonable and merciless. Neither does he seem ever to
have accepted the opinion of many Abolitionists, that the negro was the
equal of the white man in natural endowment. There is no reason to
suppose that he did not still hold, as he had done in the days of the
Douglas debates, that it was undesirable, if not impossible, that the
two races should endeavor to abide together in freedom as a unified
community. In the inevitable hostility and competition he clearly saw
that the black man was likely to fare badly. It was by such feelings
that he was led straight to the plan of compensation of owners and
colonization of freedmen, and to the hope that a system of gradual
emanc