Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

‘ [48] adopt gradual abolition of slavery, give to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State in its discretion, to compensate it for the inconvenience, public and private, produced by such change of system’; and this was promptly passed by both houses, though opposed by the members from the Border States for which it was intended.

The message arrested general attention as the first attempt of the President to formulate a plan looking to the abolition of slavery; and the evidence of a desire on his part to initiate measures to this end, gradual and indefinite as they were, sufficed to turn the current of popular feeling abroad, and to win sympathy hitherto withheld from the Government by those who were indifferent to the constitutional questions involved in the struggle.¹ Mr. Phillips, in a lecture before the Emancipation League of Boston,² four days later, welcomed the³ message, with his ‘whole heart,’ as “one more sign of promise.” Lib. 32.42. ‘If the President has not entered Canaan,’ he declared, ‘he has turned his face Zionward’; and he justly interpreted the message as saying, in effect: ‘Gentlemen of the Border States, now is your time. If you want your money, take it, and if hereafter I should take your slaves without paying, don't say I did not offer to do it.’

To Mr. Garrison the message caused less elation, for it proposed no limitation as to the period in which the offer might be accepted, held out no inducement for any State to emancipate its slaves immediately, and made no distinction