Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/309

 free, subject to apprenticeship for minors born of slave mothers up to the respective ages of eighteen and twenty-one.

One of the drafts was rewritten by the friends of the measure that it might embrace the details and alterations to conform with local opinion and law. It was printed and circulated among the members of the Legislature of Delaware and a special session of that body was called to consider the proposal. The bill, however, was never introduced, because it was feared that it would be voted down by the hostile proslavery majority. The proslavery element, moreover, prepared resolutions to the effect that the bill would encourage the abolition element in Congress, that it bore evidence of an effort to abolish slavery in the States, that Congress had no right to appropriate money for the purchase of slaves, that it was not desirable to make Delaware guarantee the public faith of the United States, that the suggestion of saving expenses to the people by compensated emancipation was a bribe, and that Delaware would abolish slavery of its own volition at a time when its lawmakers would deem it advisable. But these resolutions did not fare much better than Lincoln's bill, for in spite of the fact that they passed the House they were lost in the Senate.

Although disappointed over the failure of his plans for compensated emancipation in Delaware, Lincoln, encouraged by the victories of Thomas and Grant in the West took his next step through Congress to the States. Accordingly, on March 6, 1862, he sent to that body a special message, recommending the adoption of the joint resolution that the United States would cooperate with any State which might adopt gradual emancipation, giving such State compensation for all inconveniences produced by the change of any system within its confines. Lincoln had figured out that less than the cost of the war for a half