Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/312

 The news of this proclamation did not travel rapidly. It was published in the newspapers one week later, owing to the slow mail by sea from the South. By this means even Lincoln first learned of this decree, on account of which he was being assailed in many parts. "When the news reached Lincoln he took decisive and prompt action. On May 19, he published a proclamation in which he revoked the order of emancipation and recited that the Government had no knowledge of such a decree nor had it authorized General Hunter to give such an order.

Lincoln, however, used this occasion for an admonition to the border slave States, although he carefully distinguished between the limited powers of the commanders in the field and his full executive authority. He reminded the border States of the joint resolution passed by Congress, to authorize compensated emancipation, and he warned them not to neglect this opportunity to obtain financial indemnity, for the "signs of the times" were multiplying to a degree that should have convinced the border States that slavery was doomed.

In the very beginning of the Thirty-seventh Congress there came a series of antislavery measures which constituted a complete and decisive reversal of the policy of the Federal Government. On March 13, 1862, Congress approved an act, which prohibited all military and naval officers and enlisted personnel from returning fugitive slaves. Section 10 of the Confiscation Act, virtually an amendment of the Fugitive Slave Law, which withheld from the claimant the right to use his authority until he had taken an oath of allegiance, and made it tantamount to a crime for any person in the army or navy to surrender a fugitive slave or attempt to validate the owner's claim, was rigidly enforced. Wishing to see Liberia and Haiti welcomed into the family of nations, moreover, Lincoln in his annual message in the previous December recommended the recognition of their independence and the establishment of diplo-