This caution was abundantly manifested in his annual message to Congress of December 3, 1861: 

“In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection,” he wrote, “I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.  I have, therefore, in every case, thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance to the more deliberate action of the legislature....  The Union must be preserved; and hence all indispensable means must be employed.  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.”

The most conservative opinion could not take alarm at phraseology so guarded and at the same time so decided; and yet it proved broad enough to include every great exigency which the conflict still had in store.

Mr. Lincoln had indeed already maturely considered and in his own mind adopted a plan of dealing with the slavery question:  the simple plan which, while a member of Congress, he had proposed for adoption in the District of Columbia—­the plan of voluntary compensated abolishment.  At that time local and national prejudice stood in the way of its practicability; but to his logical and reasonable mind it seemed now that the new conditions opened for it a prospect at least of initial success.

In the late presidential election the little State of Delaware had, by a fusion between the Bell and the Lincoln vote, chosen a Union member of Congress, who identified himself in thought and action with the new administration.  While Delaware was a slave State, only the merest remnant of the institution existed there—­seventeen hundred and ninety-eight slaves all told.  Without any public announcement of his purpose, the President now proposed to the political leaders of Delaware, through their representative, a scheme for the gradual emancipation of these seventeen hundred and ninety-eight slaves, on the payment therefore by the United States at the rate of four hundred dollars per slave, in annual instalments during thirty-one years to that State, the sum to be distributed by it to the individual owners.  The President believed that if Delaware could be induced to take this step, Maryland might follow, and that these examples would create a sentiment that would lead other States into the same easy and beneficent path.  But the ancient prejudice still had its relentless grip upon some of the Delaware law-makers.  A majority of the Delaware House indeed voted to entertain the scheme.  But five of the nine members of the Delaware Senate, with hot partizan anathemas, scornfully repelled the “abolition bribe,” as they called it, and the project withered in the bud.

Mr. Lincoln did not stop at the failure of his Delaware experiment, but at once took an appeal to a broader section of public opinion.  On March 6, 1862, he sent a special message to the two houses of Congress recommending the adoption of the following joint resolution: