s over, Missouri, where the Slavery problem
was a comparatively small affair, and Maryland, which had always had a
good record for humanity and justice in the treatment of its slave
population, had declared themselves Free States. The new Governments
organized under Lincoln's superintendence in the conquered parts of the
Confederacy had followed suit. It was a comparatively easy matter to
carry the celebrated Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution declaring
Slavery illegal throughout the Union.

But, as no one knew better than the President, the abolition of Slavery
was a very different thing from the solution of the Negro problem. Six
years before his election he had used of the problem of Slavery in the
South these remarkable words: "I surely will not blame them (the
Southerners) for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If
all earthly power was given I should not know what to do as to the
existing institution." The words now came back upon him with an awful
weight which he fully appreciated. All earthly power was given--direct
personal power to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history--and he had
to find out what to do.

His own belief appears always to have been that the only permanent
solution of the problem was Jefferson's. He did not believe that black
and white races would permanently live side by side on a footing of
equality, and he loathed with all the loathing of a Kentuckian the
thought of racial amalgamation. In his proposal to the Border States he
had suggested repatriation in Africa, and he now began to develop a
similar project on a larger scale.

But the urgent problem of the reconstruction of the Union could not wait
for the completion of so immense a task. The seceding States must be got
into their proper relation with the Federal Government as quickly as
possible, and Lincoln had clear ideas as to how this should be done. The
reconstructed Government of Louisiana which he organized was a working
model of what he proposed to do throughout the South. All citizens of
the State who were prepared to take the oath of allegiance to the
Federal Government were to be invited to elect a convention and frame a
constitution. They were required to annul the ordinances of Secession,
to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and to repudiate the Confederate
Debt. The Executive would then recognize the State as already restored
to its proper place within the Union, with the full rights of internal
self-