From
Lincoln in Caricature by Rufus Rockwell Wilson
The cartoon by Tenniel, Oberon and Titania,
appeared in London Punch on April 5, 1862. Mr. Lincoln garbed as Oberon is
represented as thus supplicating Virginia, who as Titania holds a negro child by
the hand:
Oheron—” I do but beg a little nigger boy
to be my henchman.”
Titania—” Set your
heart at rest. The northern land buys not this negro child from me.”
Tenniel’s drawing reflects British
reaction, cynical and shortsighted, to Mr. Lincoln’s patient and persistent
efforts to end the conflict between the sections by purchase at a fair price of
all the slaves owned in the South, which he argued, in conferences with Union
leaders and in messages to Congress, would assure the saving of unnumbered lives
and dollars. He first urged such a measure on the slave holders of the Border
States, and in April, 1862, induced Congress to pass a joint resolution
approving his plan in principle, and pledging pecuniary aid to any State that
would adopt gradual abolishment of slavery. But, as his secretaries phrase it,
the attitude of Union leaders in the Border States, was “one of doubt, of
qualified protest, and of apprehensive inquiry”; and, due to a miscarriage of
plans by the lawmakers regarding Missouri, no grant of money to any State was
ever made by Congress to aid in the purchase of slaves.
Slavery, however, was abolished in the
District of Columbia with reasonable payments to owners, and even after he
issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Mr. Lincoln continued to labor valiantly
but in vain for compensation to Southern owners as in his belief a prompt and
fair solution of the slavery issue. Alexander H. Stephens reports that at the
Hampton Roads Conference in February, 1865, he declared that he “would be
willing to he taxed to remunerate the Southern people for their slaves’’; that
he believed that ‘‘the people of the North were as responsible for slavery as
the people of the South,” and that he would favor “the Government paying a fair
indemnity for the loss to the owners.”
And Gideon Welles, records in his Diary
that on the morrow of his return from Hampton Roads, Mr. Lincoln in “an earnest
desire to conciliate and effect peace,” proposed to his cabinet that four
hundred million dollars—the cost of two hundred days of war—be paid to the
Southern States “for the extinguishment of slavery, or for such other purpose as
the States were disposed. It did not meet with favor,” Mr. Welles concludes,
“and was dropped.” It was not the fault of Mr. Lincoln that the people of the
South faced bankruptcy at the end of the war.
