"
The public did not take to the President's plan at all, especially the
Abolitionists did not. They no more favored the buying of men by the
Government than by anybody else. They held that if the master had no
right to the person of his bondman, he had no right to payment for
him. And as for an arrangement that might prolong slaveholding for
thirty-seven years, they saw in it not only a measure of injustice to
the men, women, and children then in servitude, the most of whom would
be doomed to bondage for the rest of their natural lives, but a
possible plan for side-tracking a genuine freedom movement.
In the proposition just considered we have not only the core of the
President's policy during much of his official tenure, but an
explanation of his mental operations. He was sentimentally opposed to
slavery, but he was afraid of freedom. He dreaded its effect on both
races. He was opposed to slavery more because it was a public nuisance
than because of its injustice to the oppressed black man, whose
condition, he did not believe, would be greatly, if at all, benefited
by freedom. Hence he wanted manumission put off as long as possible.
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