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Gradualism, Compensation, and Colonization // Emancipation Proclamation
Wartime Reconstruction

President Lincoln was initially cautious about emancipating the slaves.  He rescinded emancipation orders by Generals Fremont (September 1861) and Hunter (May 1862), reserving the war power to free slaves for himself as commander-in-chief.  However, he did urge the Border States to grant gradual, compensated emancipation by state law.  To encourage that goal, Lincoln suggested in the annual presidential message to Congress of December 1861 that Congress set aside funds to compensate states freeing slaves and funds to colonize those ex-slaves, contrabands, and possibly free blacks, as well, to Liberia, Haiti, or other foreign nations.  At Lincoln’s request, Congress passed a joint resolution on April 10, 1862, providing funds for any state that passed a gradual emancipation law.  No state accepted the offer.  

With Congress enacting the president’s compensation resolution and debating bills to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories, an editorial in the April 5, 1862 issue of Harper’s Weekly pondered, “What to Do with the Negroes.”  The commentary compared two models used in freeing slaves decades earlier in the West Indies:  the British method of gradual, compensated emancipation and the French way of immediate, uncompensated emancipation.  The writer (probably managing editor John Bonner) blamed recalcitrant white slaveowners in the British West Indies for a dismal transition to freedom.  The second half of the editorial explained the impracticality of colonizing American blacks to foreign lands, which was dismissed as a plan advocated by politicians from the “West” (mainly Midwest), such as President Lincoln of Illinois, Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, and the Blair family of Missouri.  The editorialist pointed out the legal discrimination and racial prejudice that free blacks faced in Illinois and other areas of the “West.”  At the time, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oregon, and other Midwestern or Western states and territories had “black laws,” which denied civil rights to free blacks and sometimes even prevented them from settling there.


Harper's Weekly References

1)  December 14, 1861, p. 787, c. 3
“Domestic Intelligence” column, “Contrabands”

2)  April 5, 1862, p. 210, c. 2-3
editorial, “What To Do with the Negroes”


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Gradualism, Compensation, and Colonization // Emancipation Proclamation
Wartime Reconstruction
 
 

     
 

 
     
 

 
     
     

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