he recommended Congress to “provide for accepting such persons from such States, according to some mode of valuation, in lieu, pro tanto, of direct taxes, or upon some other plan to be agreed on.”  He desired that these negroes, being “at once deemed free,” should be colonized in some “climate congenial to them,” and he wished an appropriation for acquiring territory for this purpose.  Thus he indicated with sufficient clearness the three cardinal points of his own theory for emancipation:  voluntary action of the individual slave States by the exercise of their own sovereign power; compensation of owners; and colonization.  Congress soon showed that it meant to strike a pace much more rapid than that set by the President; and the friends of slavery perceived an atmosphere which made them so uneasy that they thought it would be well to have the Crittenden resolution substantially reaffirmed.  They made the effort, and they failed, the vote standing 65 yeas to 71 nays.  All which this symptom indicated as to the temper of members was borne out during the session by positive and aggressive legislation.  Only a fortnight had passed, when Henry Wilson, senator from Massachusetts, introduced a bill to emancipate the slaves in the District of Columbia, and to pay a moderate compensation to owners.  The measure, rightly construed as the entering point of the anti-slavery wedge, gave rise to bitter debates in both houses.  The senators and representatives from the slave States manifested intense feeling, and were aided with much spirit by the Democrats of the free States.  But resistance was useless; the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 29 to 14, and the House by 92 to 38.  On April 16 the President signed it, and returned it with a message, in which he said:  “If there be matters within and about this Act which might have taken a course or shape more satisfactory to my judgment, I do not attempt to specify them.  I am gratified that the two principles of compensation and colonization are both recognized and practically applied in the Act.”  It was one of the coincidences of history that by his signature he now made law that proposition which, as a member of the House of Representatives in 1849, he had embodied in a bill which then hardly excited passing notice as it went on its quick way to oblivion.

The confused condition concerning the harboring and rendition of fugitive slaves by military commanders, already mentioned, was also promptly taken in hand.  Various bills and amendments offered in the Senate and in the House were substantially identical in the main purpose of making the recovery of a slave from within the Union lines practically little better than impossible.  The shape which the measure ultimately took was the enactment of an additional article of war, whereby all officers in the military service of the United States were “prohibited from using any portion of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning fugitives from service