Repeatedly Lincoln insisted that bondsmen reaching Union lines would never be surrendered. In early March 1862, he assured New York Judge John W. Edmonds that “no slave freed by the advance of our army would be returned.” A few days later he approved an article of war prohibiting the military from returning runaways. In April, he declared to representatives of the Freedmen’s Association: “I am entirely satisfied that no slave who becomes for the time free within the American lines will ever be re-enslaved. Rather than have it so, I would give up and abdicate.” That month, D. W. Bartlett reported that Lincoln “has said a hundred times that not with his consent, not if he can hinder it, shall any slave ever be remanded to chains and servitude by the restoration of peace.” On July 1, Lincoln showed Orville H. Browning a paper he had drafted stating that while no slaves “necessarily taken and escaping during the war are ever to be returned to slavery,” on the other hand “[n]o inducements are to be held out to them to come into our lines for they come now faster than we can provide for them and are becoming an embarrassment to the government.” Two days later, Stanton informed General Butler that the president “is of the opinion that, under the law of Congress, they [runaway slaves] cannot be sent back to their masters; that, in common humanity, they must not be permitted to suffer for want of food, shelter or other necessaries of life; that, to this end, they should be provided for by the quartermaster and commissary departments, and that those who are capable of labor should be set to work and paid reasonable wages.” When a leading Kentucky Unionist protested that federal troops refused to turn over his runaway slave, Lincoln offered to pay $500 out of his own pocket to settle the matter.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃