nteen hundred and
ninety-eight slaves all told. Without any public announcement of his
purpose, the President now proposed to the political leaders of
Delaware, through their representative, a scheme for the gradual
emancipation of these seventeen hundred and ninety-eight slaves, on the
payment therefore by the United States at the rate of four hundred
dollars per slave, in annual instalments during thirty-one years to that
State, the sum to be distributed by it to the individual owners. The
President believed that if Delaware could be induced to take this step,
Maryland might follow, and that these examples would create a sentiment
that would lead other States into the same easy and beneficent path. But
the ancient prejudice still had its relentless grip upon some of the
Delaware law-makers. A majority of the Delaware House indeed voted to
entertain the scheme. But five of the nine members of the Delaware
Senate, with hot partizan anathemas, scornfully repelled the "abolition
bribe," as they called it, and the project withered in the bud.

Mr. Lincoln did not stop at the failure of his Delaware experiment, but
at once took an appeal to a broader section of public opinion. On March
6, 1862, he sent a special message to the two houses of Congress
recommending the adoption of the following joint resolution:

"_Resolved_, that the United States ought to cooeperate with any State
which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such State
pecuniary aid, to be used by such State, in its discretion, to
compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such
change of system."

"The point is not," said his explanatory message, "that all the States
tolerating slavery would very soon, if at all, initiate emancipation;
but that while the offer is equally made to all, the more northern
shall, by such initiation, make it certain to the more southern that in
no event will the former ever join the latter in their proposed
Confederacy. I say 'initiation' because, in my judgment, gradual, and
not sudden, emancipation is better for all.... Such a proposition on the
part of the general government sets up no claim of a right by Federal
authority to interfere with slavery within State limits, referring, as
it does, the absolute control of the subject in each case to the State
and its people immediately interested. It is proposed as a matter of
perfectly free choice with them. In the annual message last December I