When the New York Times called the plan too expensive, Lincoln asked editor Henry J. Raymond if he had considered “that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?—that eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense.” Raymond, who was serving in the state legislature at Albany and had not written the editorial mentioned by Lincoln, instructed his newspaper to change its stance. To Lincoln he praised the message as “a masterpiece of practical wisdom and sound policy. It is marked by that plain, self-vindicating common-sense which, with the people, overbears, as it ought, all the abstract speculations of mere theorists and confounds all the schemes of selfish intriguers,—and which, you will permit me to say, has preeminently characterized every act of your Administration. It furnishes a solid, practical, constitutional basis for the treatment of this great question, and suggests the only feasible mode I have yet seen of dealing with a problem infinitely more difficult than the suppression of the rebellion.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
(echo:: @ ⌗)