was his desire that legislative action for abolition should be voluntarily initiated among the border slave States themselves. This would save their pride, and also would put a decisive end to all chance of their ever allying themselves with the Confederacy. He was alert to promote this purpose whenever and wherever he conceived that any opportunity offered for giving the first impulse. In time rehabilitated governments of some States managed with more or less show of regularity to accomplish the reform. But it was rather a forced transaction, having behind it an uncomfortably small proportion of the adult male population of the several States; and by and by the work, thus done, might be undone; for such action was lawfully revocable by subsequent legislatures or conventions, which bodies would be just as potent at any future time to reëstablish slavery as the present bodies were now potent to disestablish it. It was entirely possible that reconstruction would leave the right of suffrage in such shape that in some States pro-slavery men might in time regain control.
In short, the only absolute eradicating cure was a constitutional amendment;[[77]] and, therefore, it was towards securing this that the President bent all his energies. He could use, of course, only personal influence, not official authority; for the
business, as such, lay with Congress. In December, 1863, motions for such an amendment were introduced in the House; and in January, 1864, like resolutions were offered in the Senate. The debate in the Senate was short; it opened on March 28, and the vote was taken April 8; it stood 38 ayes, 6 noes. This was gratifying; but unfortunately the party of amendment had to face a very different condition of feeling in the House. The President, says Mr. Arnold, "very often, with the friends of the measure, canvassed the House to see if the requisite number could be obtained, but we could never count a two-thirds vote." The debate began on March 19; not until June 15 was the vote taken, and then it showed 93 ayes, 65 noes, being a discouraging deficiency of 27 beneath the requisite two thirds. Thereupon Ashley of Ohio changed his vote to the negative, and then moved a reconsideration, which left the question to come up again in the next session. Practically, therefore, at the adjournment of Congress, the amendment was left as an issue before the people in the political campaign of the summer of 1864; and in that campaign it was second only to the controlling question of peace or war.
Mr. Lincoln, taking care to omit no effort in this business, sent for Senator Morgan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, which was to make the Republican nomination for the presidency and to frame the Republican platform, and said to him: "I want you to mention in your
speech, when you call the convention to order, as its keynote, and to put into the platform, as the keystone, the amendment of the Constitution abolishing and prohibiting slavery forever." Accordingly the third plank in that platform declared that slavery was the cause and the strength of the rebellion, that it was "hostile to the principle of republican government," and that the "national safety demanded its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic," and that to this end the Constitution ought to be so amended as to "terminate and forever prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits or the jurisdiction of the United States." Thus at the special request of the President the issue was distinctly presented to the voters of the country. The Copperheads, the conservatives, and reactionaries, and many of the war Democrats, promptly opened their batteries against both the man and the measure.
The Copperhead Democracy, as usual, went so far as to lose force; they insisted that the Emancipation Proclamation should be rescinded, and all ex-slaves restored to their former masters. This, in their opinion, would touch, a conciliatory chord in Southern breasts, and might lead to pacification. That even pro-slavery Northerners should urgently advocate a proposition at once so cruel and so disgraceful is hardly credible. Yet it was reiterated strenuously, and again and again Mr. Lincoln had to repeat his decisive and indignant repudiation of it. In the message to Congress,
December, 1863, he said that to abandon the freedmen now would be "a cruel and astounding breach of faith.... I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress." In May, 1864, he spurned the absurdity of depending "upon coaxing, flattery, and concession to get them [the Secessionists] back into the Union." He said: "There have been men base enough to propose to me to return to slavery our black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee, and thus win the respect of the masters they fought. Should I do so, I should deserve to be damned in time and eternity. Come what will, I will keep my faith with friend and foe." He meant never to be misunderstood on this point. Recurring to it after the election, in his message to Congress in December, 1864, he quoted his language of the year before and added: "If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an executive duty to reinslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it." All this was plain and spirited. But it is impossible to praise Mr. Lincoln for contemning a course which it is surprising to find any person sufficiently ignoble to recommend. It was, nevertheless, recommended by many, and thus we may partly see what extremities of feeling were produced by this most debasing question which has ever entered into the politics of a civilized nation.
The anxieties of the war Democrats, who feared that Mr. Lincoln was making abolition an essential purpose of the war, have already been set forth. In truth he was not making it so, but by the drifting of events and the ensnarlment of facts it had practically become so without his responsibility. His many utterances which survive seem to indicate that, having from the beginning hoped that the war would put an end to slavery, he now knew that it must do so. He saw that this conclusion lay at the end of the natural course of events, also that it was not a goal which was set there by those to whom it was welcome, or which could be taken away by those to whom it was unwelcome. It was there by the absolute and uncontrollable logic of facts. His function was only to take care that this natural course should not be obstructed, and this established goal should not be maliciously removed away out of reach. When he was asked why his expressions of willingness to negotiate with the Confederate leaders stipulated not only for the restoration of the Union but also for the enfranchisement of all slaves, he could only reply by intimating that the yoking of the two requirements was unobjectionable from any point of view, because he was entirely assured that Mr. Davis would never agree to reunion, either with or without slavery. Since, therefore, Union could not be had until after the South had been whipped, it would be just as well to demand abolition also; for the rebels would not then be
in a position to refuse it, and we should practically buy both in one transaction. To him it seemed an appalling blunder to pay the price of this great war simply in order to cure this especial outbreak of the great national malady, and still to leave existing in the body politic that which had induced this dissension and would inevitably afterward induce others like unto it. The excision of the cause was the only intelligent action. Yet when pushed to the point of declaring what he would do in the supposed case of an opportunity to restore the Union, with slavery, he said: "My enemies pretend I am now carrying on the war for the sole purpose of abolition. So long as I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of restoring the Union." The duty of his official oath compelled him to say this, but he often and plainly acknowledged that he had no fear of ever being brought face to face with the painful necessity of saving both the Union and slavery.
It is worth noticing that the persons who charged upon the President that he would never assent to a peace which was not founded upon the abolition of slavery as one of its conditions or stipulations, never distinctly stated by what right he could insist upon such a condition or stipulation, or by what process he could establish it or introduce it into a settlement. Mr. Lincoln certainly never had any thought of negotiating with the seceded States as an independent country, and making with them a treaty which could embody an article