calm and enlarged consideration, ranging, if it may be, far above, personal and partisan politics,” of the opportunity of good now open to them.  The hope of the Confederacy was, as he then conceived, fixed upon the sympathy which it might arouse in the border States, two of which, Kentucky and Maryland, were in fact invaded that year with some hope of a rising among the inhabitants.  The “lever” which the Confederates hoped to use in these States was the interest of the slave owners there; “Break that lever before their eyes,” he urged.  But the hundred and one reasons which can always be found against action presented themselves at once to the Representatives of the border States.  Congress itself so far accepted the President’s view that both Houses passed the Resolution which he had suggested.  Indeed it gladly did something more; a Bill, such as Lincoln himself had prepared as a Congressman fourteen years before, was passed for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia; compensation was paid to the owners; a sum was set apart to help the settlement in Liberia of any of the slaves who were willing to go; and at Lincoln’s suggestion provision was added for the education of the negro children.  Nothing more was done at this time.

Throughout this matter Lincoln took counsel chiefly with himself.  He could not speak his full thought to the public, and apparently he did not do so to any of his Cabinet.  Supposing that the border States had yielded to his persuasion, it may still strike us as a very sanguine calculation that their action would have had much effect upon the resolution of the Confederates.  But it must be noted that when Lincoln first approached the Representatives of the border States, the highest expectations were entertained of the victory that McClellan would win in Virginia, and when he made his last, rather despairing, appeal to them, the decision to withdraw the army from the Peninsula had not yet been taken.  If a really heavy blow had been struck at the Confederates in Virginia, their chief hope of retrieving their military fortunes would certainly have lain in that invasion of Kentucky, which did shortly afterwards occur and which was greatly encouraged by the hope of a rising of Kentucky men who wished to join the Confederacy.  This part of Lincoln’s calculations was therefore quite reasonable.  And it was further reasonable to suppose that, if the South had then given in and Congress had acted in the spirit of the Resolution which it had passed, the policy, of gradual emancipation, starting in the border States, would have spread steadily.  The States which were disposed to hold out against the inducement that the cost of compensated emancipation, if they adopted it, would be borne by the whole Union, would have done so at a great risk; for each new free State would have been disposed before long to support a Constitutional Amendment to impose enfranchisement, possibly with no compensation, upon the States that still delayed.  The force of example and the presence of this fear could not have been resisted long.  Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon which he was driven back.