Secretary Cameron twice nearly placed the administration in an embarrassing position by taking very advanced ground upon the negro question.  In October, 1861, he issued an order to General Sherman, then at Port Royal, authorizing him to employ negroes in any capacity which he might “deem most beneficial to the service.”  Mr. Lincoln prudently interlined the words:  “This, however, not to mean a general arming of them for military service.”  A few weeks later, in the Report which the secretary prepared to be sent with the President’s message to Congress, he said:  “As the labor and service of their slaves constitute the chief property of the rebels, they should share the common fate of war....  It is as clearly a right of the government to arm slaves, when it becomes necessary, as it is to use gunpowder taken from the enemy.  Whether it is expedient to do so is purely a military question.”  He added more to the same purport.  He then had his report printed, and sent copies, by mail, to many newspapers throughout the country, with permission to publish it so soon as the telegraph should report the reading before Congress.  At the eleventh hour a copy was handed to Mr. Lincoln, to accompany his message; and then, for the first time, he saw these radical passages.  Instantly he directed that all the postmasters, to whose offices the printed copies had been sent on their way to the newspaper editors, should be ordered at once to return these copies to the secretary.  He then ordered the secretary to make a change, equivalent to an omission, of this inflammatory paragraph.  After this emasculation the paragraph only stated that “slaves who were abandoned by their owners on the advance of our troops” should not be returned to the enemy.

When the Thirty-seventh Congress came together for the regular session, December 2, 1861, anti-slavery sentiment had made a visible advance.  President Lincoln, in his message, advised recognizing the independence of the negro states of Hayti and Liberia.  He declared that he had been anxious that the “inevitable conflict should not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” and that he had, therefore, “thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part.”  Referring to his enforcement of the law of August 6, he said:  “The Union must be preserved, and hence all indispensable means must be employed.”  The shadow which pro-slavery men saw cast by these words was very slightly, if at all, lightened by an admission which accompanied it,—­that “we should not be in haste to determine that radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as well as the disloyal, are indispensable.”  Further he said that already, by the operation of the Act of August 6, numbers of persons had been liberated, had become dependent on the United States, and must be provided for.  He anticipated that some of the States might pass similar laws for their own benefit; in which case