Total, $1,346,950

Now then, applying this principle to Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and
Missouri, the cost, the first year, would be $654,450, and, if we
included Virginia, $1,346,950. This sum, we have seen, would decrease
every year. According then to the annual tables, and those of
expectancies of life (as calculated for me), the sum of fifteen millions
of dollars of United States stock, issued now, and bearing interest at
the rate of six per cent, per annum, would make all the border States
free States, in the same sense in which Pennsylvania and other Northern
free States became so; and less than half this sum, if Virginia should
not adopt the measure. The case, then, as regards the border States,
presents no financial difficulty whatever. If this plan were adopted,
the same just and humane course would doubtless be pursued as in the
North, by which the emancipated post nati would remain apprentices until
they reached twenty-one years of age, under the same regulations,
mainly, as were applicable to white children, bound out by the overseers
of the poor. Should the border States consent to proceed more rapidly, I
have no doubt the Government would cheerfully pay to loyal masters such
additional sum as would give freedom to _every slave_ in all the border
States, on the 4th of July, 1876, our first centennial anniversary of
the Declaration of American Independence. That day, then, already so
distinguished in the annals of humanity, would become the great epoch in
the history of our race.

And now let us examine the cost of all these measures. If the seceded
States, including Virginia, should persist in the rebellion until after
the close of this year, the sum to be paid the loyal owners of slaves
manumitted under the President's war proclamation would probably reach
$100,000,000. The emancipation of the post nati, in the four remaining
border States, would cost Sec.7,288,132. The manumission in those States,
of all the surviving slaves, on the 4th July, 1876, according to the
same tables and estimates, would cost a sum equal to $65,000,000, issued
now as United States six per cent. stock, making a total for _complete
emancipation in all the slave States_ of $172,288,132. This is a smaller
sum than four months' cost of the war, whilst wholly and forever
removing the discordant element which produced the rebellion, commencing
a new and glorious career of material, moral, and intellectual progress,
greatly exalti