you say is
necessary to save your land from sale. It is singular that you should
have forgotten a judgment against you; and it is more singular that the
plaintiff should have let you forget it so long; particularly as I suppose
you always had property enough to satisfy a judgment of that amount.
Before you pay it, it would be well to be sure you have not paid, or at
least, that you cannot prove you have paid it.

Give my love to mother and all the connections. Affectionately your son,

A. LINCOLN.

1849

BILL TO ABOLISH SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Resolved, That the Committee on the District of Columbia be instructed to
report a bill in substance as follows:

Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States, in Congress assembled, That no person not now within the
District of Columbia, nor now owned by any person or persons now resident
within it, nor hereafter born within it, shall ever be held in slavery
within said District.

Sec. 2. That no person now within said District, or now owned by any
person or persons now resident within the same, or hereafter born within
it, shall ever be held in slavery without the limits of said District:
Provided, That officers of the Government of the United States, being
citizens of the slaveholding States, coming into said District on public
business, and remaining only so long as may be reasonably necessary for
that object, may be attended into and out of said District, and while
there, by the necessary servants of themselves and their families, without
their right to hold such servants in service being thereby impaired.

Sec. 3. That all children born of slave mothers within said District,
on or after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord eighteen
hundred and fifty, shall be free; but shall be reasonably supported and
educated by the respective owners of their mothers, or by their heirs or
representatives, and shall owe reasonable service as apprentices to such
owners, heirs, or representatives, until they respectively arrive at
the age of __ years, when they shall be entirely free; and the municipal
authorities of Washington and Georgetown, within their respective
jurisdictional limits, are hereby empowered and required to make all
suitable and necessary provision for enforcing obedience to this section,
on the part of both masters and apprentices.

Sec. 4. That all persons now within this District, lawfull