Slavery was a thing he did not then want to
have disturbed. He discountenanced all radical agitators of the
subject, and especially in the border slave States, where he was able
to hold them pretty well in check, except in Missouri. There they
stood up and fought him, and in the end beat him. One of the rather
curious results of this condition of things was that, when the States
came to action on the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, the one
absolutely abolishing slavery, the three border slave States of
Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, over which the President's influence
was practically supreme, gave an adverse vote of four to one, while
Missouri, with whose radical emancipationists he had continuously been
at loggerheads, ratified the amendment by a legislative vote of one
hundred and eleven ayes to forty nays.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President, at the beginning of his
official term, opposed Anti-Slavery agitation and Anti-Slavery action
with all his might, he promptly faced about as soon as he discovered
that the subject was one that would not "down." No one ever worked
harder to find a solution of a difficult problem than he did of the
slavery question.
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