On December 3, Lincoln submitted to the newly reconvened Congress his annual message which did not mention the Delaware plan directly, but it did address the matter of compensated emancipation in a roundabout way. Noting that under the provisions of the recent Confiscation Act, some slaves had become semi-free, he said they must now be cared for. (Less than a month earlier, many slaves had been liberated when the Union joint army–navy expedition captured Port Royal, South Carolina, and a number of nearby coastal islands. When the local whites fled, 10,000 bondsmen suddenly found themselves without masters.) Conceivably, other slaves might also be freed by state legislatures. Such states, he recommended, should be compensated with tax breaks or some other means. (Here was a veiled hint at the Delaware plan, but so heavily veiled that some criticized its obscurity. Others understood its true intent, which was to encourage the legislatures of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware to adopt emancipation.) As it was, slaves who had been taken from their Confederate owners by virtue of the Confiscation Act existed in a legal limbo as virtual wards of the government; Lincoln recommended that such people “be at once deemed free.” Then they, and any bondsmen who might in the future be liberated by state action, should be voluntarily colonized “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them.” Free blacks would be encouraged to follow suit. Implementing that plan might require the purchase of territory “and also the appropriation of money beyond that to be expended in the territorial acquisition.” In a nod toward the prevalent white racial prejudice, he argued that if “it be said that the only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to furnish homes for white men, this measure effects that object; for the emigration of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or coming here.” (This sentence created a sensation among the congressmen when it was read to them.) He asked rhetorically if some kind of emancipation was not “an absolute necessity … without which the government itself cannot be perpetuated?”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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