hide Matching Documents

Browsing named entities in John F. Hume, The abolitionists together with personal memories of the struggle for human rights. You can also browse the collection for January or search for January in all documents.

Your search returned 1 result in 1 document section:

John F. Hume, The abolitionists together with personal memories of the struggle for human rights, Chapter 18: Lincoln and Emancipation (search)
matum was reached. Besides his proclamation, which, as we have seen, applied to only a part of the slaves, he devised a measure that would have been applicable to all of them. In his special message of December, 1863, he proposed to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment that would work universal liberation. There were conditions, however. One was that the slaves should be paid for by the Government; another that the masters might retain their uncompensated services until January i, 90000; that is, for a period of thirty-seven years, unless they were sooner emancipated by the grave, as the most of them would be. (See Appendix.) The President's somewhat fantastic proposition was not claimed by him to be for the bondman's benefit. He urged it as a measure of public economy, holding that, as slavery was the admitted cause of the Rebellion, the quickest and surest way to remove that cause would be by purchase of all the slaves, which, he insisted, would shorten the