ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 apiece under a “gradual emancipation” plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities.
The proposal was outlined in one of 72 letters penned by Lincoln that ended up in the University of Rochester’s archives, which are now online.
In a letter to Illinois Sen. James McDougall dated March 14, 1862, Lincoln laid out the cost to the nation’s coffers of his “emancipation with compensation” proposal.
Paying slaveholders $400 for each of the 1,798 slaves in Delaware listed in the 1860 Census, he wrote, would come to $719,200 at a time when the war was soaking up $2 million a day. Buying the freedom of an estimated 432,622 slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Washington, D.C., would cost $173,048,800 — nearly equal to the estimated $174 million needed to wage war for 87 days, he added.
The idea never took root. Six months later, Lincoln issued the first of two executive orders known as the Emancipation Proclamation that declared an end to slavery.
Read more at www.library.rochester.edu/rbk/lincoln.
