Message from the President

WASHINGTON, March 6.

The President transmitted to Congress to-day the following message:

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives:  I recommend the adoption of a joint resolution by your honorable bodies, which shall be substantially as follows:

Resolved, That the U. S. ought to co-operate with any State which may adopt a gradual abolition of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid to be used by such state at its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such  change of system.  If the proposition contained in the resolution does not meet with the approval of Congress and the country, there is the end of the matter; but if it does command such approval, I deem it of importance that the States and people immediately interested should be at once distinctly notified of the fact, so that they may begin to consider whether to accept or reject it.  The Federal government would find its highest interest in such a measure as one of the most efficient measures of self-government.  The leaders of the existing insurrection entertain the hope that the government will ultimately be forced to acknowledge the independence of the disaffected region, and that all slave States north of such parts will then say, the Union for which we have struggled being already gone, we now choose to go with them.  To deprive them of this hope substantially ends the rebellion, and the initiation of emancipation completely deprives them of it, as to all the States; initiating.  The point is not that all the States tolerating slavery would very soon, if at all, initiate emancipation; but that while the offer is equally made to all, the more Northern shall by such initiation make it certain to the Southern that in no event shall the former join the latter in their proposed confederacy. – I say initiative, because, in my judgment, gradual, and not sudden, emancipation is better for all in the mere financial or pecuniary view.  Any member of Congress with the census tables and the Treasury reports before him can readily see for himself how very soon the current expenditures of the war would purchase, at a fair valuation, all the slaves in any named State.  Such a proposition on the part of the general government, set up no claim or right by Federal authority, to interfere with slavery within State limits, referring as it does to the absolute control of the subject in each case to the State and people immediately interested.  It is proposed as a matter of perfectly free choice.  In my annual last December I thought fit to say the Union must be preserved, and hence indispensable means be employed.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, March 7, 1862, p. 1