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Updated: May 9, 2025
The task of holding and conciliating this important body, with all its Northern sympathizers, became a controlling purpose of the President, and caused the development of his famous "border-state policy," for which he deserved the highest praise and received unlimited abuse.
But stones are not more deaf to entreaty than were the ears of the loyal Border-State men and their allies to President Lincoln's renewed appeal. "Ephraim" was "wedded to his idols."
We have seen how the loyal Border-State men, through their chosen Representative finding that their steady and unfaltering opposition to all Mr. Lincoln's propositions, while quite ineffectual, did not serve by any means to increase his respect for their peculiar kind of loyalty offered him posthumous honors and worship if he would but do as they desired.
Lincoln at the time could not appreciate the value of his "border-state policy," and thought that he was making sacrifices and paying prices wholly against wisdom, and out of proportion to anything that could be gained thereby. But he understood the situation and comparative values correctly.
In both Houses, the loyal Border-State Representatives spoke and voted against its passage. It was high time, he thought, that the idea of a gradual, compensated Emancipation, should begin to occupy the minds of those interested, "so that," to use his own words, "they may begin to consider whether to accept or reject it," should Congress approve the suggestion.
They were more tolerant towards the idea of letting the country at large share the burdens involved in the liberation of the slaves. Border-state abolitionists naturally favored the policy of gradual emancipation which had been followed in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
In both Houses of Congress, upon all possible occasions, they had been striving, as they still strove, with the venom of their widely-circulated speeches, to poison the loyal Northern and Border-State mind, in the hope that the renomination of Mr.
Harried, and worried, on all sides, threatened even by the Commander of the Army of the Potomac, it is not surprising, in view of the apparently irreconcilable attitude of the loyal Border-State men to gradual and compensated Emancipation, that the tension of President Lincoln's mind began to feel a measure of relief in contemplating Military Emancipation in the teeth of all such threats.
He told Lovejoy and Arnold, strenuous Abolitionists, but none the less his near friends, that they would live to see the end of slavery, if only the Border States would cooperate in his project. On March 10, 1862, he gathered some of the border-state members and tried to win them over to his views.
What he sought to impress upon them was, that an immediate decision by the Border-States to adopt, and in due time carry out, with the financial help of the General Government, a policy of gradual Emancipation, would simultaneously solve the two intimately-blended problems of Slavery-destruction and Union-preservation, in the best possible manner for the pockets and feelings of the Border-State Slave-holder, and for the other interests of both Border-State Slave-holder and Slave.
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