s, but in addition to the usual routine work devolved on him
by the committee of which he was a member, he busied himself in
preparing a special measure which, because of its relation to the great
events of his later life, needs to be particularly mentioned. Slavery
existed in Maryland and Virginia when these States ceded the territory
out of which the District of Columbia was formed. Since, by that
cession, this land passed under the exclusive control of the Federal
government, the "institution" within this ten miles square could no
longer be defended by the plea of State sovereignty, and antislavery
sentiment naturally demanded that it should cease. Pro-slavery
statesmen, on the other hand, as persistently opposed its removal,
partly as a matter of pride and political consistency, partly because it
was a convenience to Southern senators and members of Congress, when
they came to Washington, to bring their family servants where the local
laws afforded them the same security over their black chattels which
existed at their homes. Mr. Lincoln, in his Peoria speech in 1854,
emphasized the sectional dispute with this vivid touch of local color:

"The South clamored for a more efficient fugitive-slave law. The North
clamored for the abolition of a peculiar species of slave trade in the
District of Columbia, in connection with which, in view from the windows
of the Capitol, a sort of negro livery-stable, where droves of negroes
were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets,
precisely like droves of horses, had been openly maintained for fifty
years."

Thus the question remained a minor but never ending bone of contention
and point of irritation, and excited debate arose in the Thirtieth
Congress over a House resolution that the Committee on the Judiciary be
instructed to report a bill as soon as practicable prohibiting the slave
trade in the District of Columbia. In this situation of affairs, Mr.
Lincoln conceived the fond hope that he might be able to present a plan
of compromise. He already entertained the idea which in later years
during his presidency he urged upon both Congress and the border slave
States, that the just and generous mode of getting rid of the barbarous
institution of slavery was by a system of compensated emancipation
giving freedom to the slave and a money indemnity to the owner. He
therefore carefully framed a bill providing for the abolishment of
slavery in the District upo