But the declarations above quoted were all before Mr. Lincoln had become President or had probably thought of such a thing.  Did the change of position lead to a change of opinion on his part?  We are not left in uncertainty on this point.  His official views were declared in what might be called a State paper.  Soon after his inauguration, his Secretary of State sent Minister Dayton, at Paris, a dispatch that he might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said:  “The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails....  It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under the Constitution and laws.”

About the same time Mr. Lincoln stated to a party of Southern Congressmen, who called upon him, that he “recognized the rights of property that had grown out of it [slavery] and would respect those rights as fully as he would similar rights in any other property.”

No steps were taken by Mr. Lincoln to recall or repudiate the foregoing announcements.  On the contrary, he confirmed them in his official action.  He annulled the freedom proclamations of Fremont and Hunter.  He did not interfere when some of his military officers were so busy returning fugitive slaves that they had no time to fight the masters.  He approved Hallock’s order Number Three excluding fugitives from the lines.  He even permitted the poor old Hutchinsons to be sent away from the army very much as if they had been colored people, when trying to rouse “the boys” with their freedom songs.  In many ways Mr. Lincoln showed that in the beginning and throughout the earlier part of his Administration he hoped to re-establish the Union without disturbing slavery.  In effect he so declared in his introduction to his freedom proclamation.  He gave the rebel slaveholders one hundred days in which to abandon their rebellion and save their institution.  In view of such things it is no wonder that Henry Wilson, so long a leading Republican Senator from Massachusetts, in his Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, in speaking of emancipation, said “it was a policy, indeed, which he [the President] did not personally favor except in connection with his favorite idea of colonization.”

It is needless to say that the President’s attitude was a great surprise and a sore disappointment to the more radical Anti-Slavery people of the country, who had supported him with much enthusiasm and high hopes.  They felt that they had been deceived.  They said so very plainly, for the Abolitionists were not the sort of people to keep quiet under provocation.  Horace Greeley published his signed attack (see Appendix) entitled, The Prayer of Twenty Millions, which is, without doubt, the most scathing denunciation in the English language.  Henry Ward Beecher “pounded” Mr. Lincoln, as he expressed it.  Wendell Phillips fairly thundered his denunciations.  There was a general under-swell of indignation.