Lincoln Wanted to Buy Slaves for $400 to End War

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

ROCHESTER, N.Y. —  Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 apiece under a "gradual emancipation" plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities.

The proposal was outlined in one of 72 letters penned by Lincoln that ended up in the University of Rochester's archives. The correspondence was digitally scanned and posted online along with easier-to-read transcriptions.

Accompanying them are 215 letters sent to Lincoln by dozens of fellow political and military leaders. They include letters from Vice President Andrew Johnson and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who both succeeded Lincoln in the presidency in the 12 years after his assassination in 1865.

War Cost $2 Million a Day

In a letter to Illinois Sen. James A. McDougall dated March 14, 1862, Lincoln laid out the estimated cost to the nation's coffers of his "emancipation with compensation" proposal.

Paying slaveholders $400 for each of the 1,798 slaves in Delaware listed in the 1860 census, he wrote, would come to $719,200 at a time when the war was soaking up $2 million a day.

Proposal Didn't fly
Buying the freedom of an estimated 432,622 slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Washington, D.C., would cost $173,048,800 — nearly equal to the estimated $174 million needed to wage war for 87 days, he said.

Lincoln suggested that each of the states, in return for payment, might set something like a 20-year deadline for abolishing slavery.

The payout "would not be half as onerous as would be an equal sum, raised now, for the indefinite prosecution of the war," he told McDougall.

The idea never took root. Six months later, Lincoln issued the first of two executive orders known as the Emancipation Proclamation that declared an end to slavery. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified after the collapse of the Confederacy, ending two centuries of bondage in North America.

"To be given a document that plunks you right into a situation that Lincoln was facing, it's very compelling," said Brian Fleming, a University of Rochester librarian who is heading the online project, which debuted Feb. 18 — Presidents Day.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335189,00.html

It seems an odd tact since so many have invested in the notion the Civil War had nothing to do with the CSA using force of arms to preserve slavery. Why, Lincoln would have to have been absolutely oblivious to the CSA's grievances to propose such a scheme.

But we all know Lincoln was just a dictator looking for the first trumped-up excuse declare MARSHALL LAW against the hapless south. He just wanted to monger war and steal their oil or something.

Probably some neocon forgery.

Just ask gator, he'll tell you.

[Wretched Excess]

from lincoln's first inaugural

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

and the second:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.