"It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated. One of the principal difficulties in the way of colonization is that the free colored man cannot see that his comfort would be advanced by it. For the sake of your race you should sacrifice something of your present comfort. In the American Revolution sacrifices were made by the men engaged in it. They were cheered by the future.
"The Colony of Liberia is an old one, is in a sense a success and it is open to you. I am arranging to open another in Central America. It is nearer than Liberia—within seven days by steamer. You are intelligent and know that success does not so much depend on external help as on self-reliance. Much depends on yourself. If you will engage in the enterprise, I will spend some of the money intrusted to me. This is the practical part of my wish to see you. I ask you then to consider it seriously, not for yourselves merely, nor for your race and ours for the present time, but for the good of mankind."
He dismissed his negro hearers and sent again for the representatives of the Border Slave States. Here his plan must be set in motion. He proposed to pay for the slaves set free and arrange for their colonization.
He spoke with deep emotion. His soul throbbed with passionate tenderness in every word.
"You are patriots and statesmen," he solemnly declared, "and as such I pray you to consider this proposition, and at the least commend it to the consideration of your States and people. Our common country is in grave peril demanding the loftiest views and boldest action to bring it speedy relief. You can make it possible to accomplish the just destruction of this curse of our life. It will bring emancipation as a voluntary process, leaving the least resentment in the minds of our slave-holders. It will not be a violent war measure, to be remembered with fierce rebellious anger. It will pave the way for good feeling at last between all sections when reunited. It is reasonable. It is just. It will leave no cause for sectional enmity. This plan of gradual emancipation with pay for each slave to his owner will secure peace more speedily and maintain it more permanently than can be done by force alone. Its cost could be easier paid than the additional cost of war and would sacrifice no blood at all.
"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed. This could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
His tender, eloquent appeal fell on deaf ears. The men who represented the Border Slave States refused to permit the question of tampering with Slavery to be submitted to their people—no matter by what process, with or without pay.
They demanded with sullen persistence that the President defy all shades of Northern opinion and stand squarely by his Inaugural address. In vain he pointed out to them that the fact of a desperate and terrible war, costing two million dollars a day and threatening the existence of the Government itself, had changed the conditions under which he made that pledge.
When the President at last introduced into Congress through his spokesman the bill appropriating fifteen million dollars with which to pay for their slaves, the men from the Border States united with the Democrats and defeated it!
With a sorrowful heart and deep forebodings of the future he turned to his desk and drew forth the document he had written declaring as an act of war against the States in rebellion that their slaves should be free.