On March 6, Lincoln submitted the revised proposal in a special message to Congress suggesting that it resolve “that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in it’s discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.” (Abolishment was a term less likely to raise conservative hackles than abolition.) Lincoln justified the recommendation not as an act of moral righteousness but “as one of the most efficient means of self-preservation.” If Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky could be induced to abolish slavery on their own initiative, with federal help, then the Confederacy might well despair of winning the war: “The leaders of the existing insurrection entertain the hope that this government will ultimately be forced to acknowledge the independence of some part of the disaffected region, and that all the slave states North of such part will then say ‘the Union, for which we have struggled, being already gone, we now choose to go with the Southern section.’ 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 it. 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 more Southern, that in no event, will the former ever join the latter, in their proposed confederacy.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃