In the Bible we read how Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord that if he would deliver the children of Ammon into his hands he would do certain things. So Lincoln made a solemn vow before God that if Gen. Lee were driven back from Maryland he would set the slaves free. After "Antietam" he announced his intention of issuing, and on September 22, 1862, he did issue, a proclamation setting free, by his military authority, all the slaves in the rebel States. He still founded his action on "policy and the Constitution."[40] As the Confederate States did not return to the Union as required in his September proclamation, on January 1, 1863, he issued his emancipation proclamation, the slaves having been confiscated by Act of Congress in 1862.
The act of confiscation and the President's proclamation emancipating the slaves in the Confederacy could not abolish slavery, because it existed under the laws of the States. It could alter no State law, still it did affect slavery in this way: it caused slaves to leave their owners, and to this extent diminished their property and their wealth, but under the laws they could purchase others.
The great undefined latent power of the Constitution is embodied in Article I., Section 8: "To provide for the common defense and general welfare." Under this section almost all the outrages of the war were committed, restrained only by international rules of war; but these were ignored under the plea that the war was only a rebellion—quite a family affair, and would soon be settled. Under this article also is found the power to tax to any amount "for the common defense and public welfare."
The confiscation act of Congress was unconstitutional. Ed Burke, in the Warren Hastings trial, said: "I do not know the method of drawing up the indictment against a whole people." The Constitution declares that the "trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury." But this confiscation act punished a "whole people" without indictment, trial by jury, or conviction.
As the slave owners were called the only privileged class in the United States, it is pertinent to inquire if this class of people did not exist in all the States when the Union was formed, and if they of the North did not sell their claim to a privileged class for a "mess of pottage" and then howled at the purchasers for being a privileged class! Who demanded the enlargement of slavery by making it legal to steal or purchase negroes from Africa until the year 1808, to give employment to the six hundred slave ships owned in the North—in New York and New England. We know the town of Newport, R. I.—now the abode of wealth—in the year 1750 had one hundred and seventy ships engaged in the slave trade for "the love of money."
A question presents itself here—and it is a pertinent one, for it commences at the beginning of this whole matter of modern slavery in this country: Who first owned these slaves, how did they obtain them, how did they treat them, and to whom did they sell these human beings for money, and then with the price of blood in their pockets soon began to howl against the sin of slavery, and thank the God they served that they were not slaveholders any longer?[41]
It has been said by a Northern writer that "indirectly, and for the purpose of a more equal distribution of direct taxes, the framers of the Constitution tolerated, while they condemned, slavery, but they tolerated it because they believed it would soon disappear. They even refused to allow the charter of their own liberties to be polluted by the mention of the word 'slave.'" But take heed: did not this convention give ear to the clamor of the owners of slave ships and slaves thereon to continue for twenty years longer to increase slavery and increase their wealth by enslaving free people in Africa?
No, "they could not, consistently with honor or self-respect, transmit to future ages the evidence that some of them had trampled on the inalienable rights of others."
"Though slavery was tolerated by being ignored, we should not dishonor the memory of those who organized that government to suppose that they did not intend to bestow upon it the power to maintain its own authority—the right to overthrow or remove slavery or whatever might prove fatal to its permanence or destroy its usefulness."
To this the answer is yes. But the proper mode of removing it is the real question. It should not be by making war, laying waste the country, burning all public buildings and dwelling houses, sinking ships, blockading ports, killing, wounding, and capturing soldiers, creating debts, levying taxes, exposing our soldiers to deadly battle and all the horrors of war—but by removing the evil by compensation "for the term of service" of the slaves to their owners.