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rescinded emancipation orders by Generals Fremont (September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. |