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Likethe draft effort of 1862, the experiment with compensated emancipation in Delaware was a last bid by the Lincoln administration to do things the old way before making a radical change.

By the time the Civil War began, fewer than 1,800 slaves lived in Delaware, and 75 percent of them were in Sussex County, mostly in the Nanticoke River basin in the far southwest of the state. In the fall of 1861, Lincoln proposed to George P. Fisher, Delaware congressman, a plan to compensate Delaware's remaining slaveholders from federal funds if they would free their slaves. Lincoln hoped that, if this could be shown to work in Delaware, it could be done as well in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and eventually become a model for the states then in the Confederacy. In his proposal to Fisher, he called it the "cheapest and most humane way of ending this war and saving lives."[3]

Lincoln spoke in pragmatic terms in a July 12, 1862, "Appeal" to representatives of the border states. He told them that if they repudiated slavery it would remove one of the South's principal causes in continuing the war: that the slave border states were being kept in the Union against their will. And he laid out the practical, economic argument: "How much better for you and for your people to take the step which at once shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event! ... How much better to do it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to do it!"[4]

He also emphasized the conservative nature of his proposal for gradual emancipation, and he held out the promise ofcolonization. "I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually. Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply and in abundance, and when numbers shall be large enough to be company and encouragement for one another, the freed people will not be so reluctant to go." The administration, at this time, had agents scouting the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua as a possible destination for freed slaves.

Lincoln also mentioned Gen. Hunter's proclamation of emancipation in his theater of the war, and the embarrassment it caused Lincoln to have to repudiate it. This, he said, had caused "disaffection ... to many whose support the country cannot afford to lose." And he mentioned the mounting pressure on him toward abolition. "By conceding what I now ask," he told the border state representatives, "you can relieve me, and, much more, can relieve the country, in this important point."

Fisher arranged a meeting between Lincoln and Republican Benjamin Burton of Indian River Hundred in Sussex County, who, with 28 slaves, was the leading slaveowner in Delaware. Burton listened to the President's plan, and assured him the state's farmers would go along with it if the price was fair. Fisher then went to Dover, and, with the help of Republican Nathaniel P. Smithers, drew up a bill and presented it to the General Assembly. It would free all slaves over 35 at once, and all others by 1872. The compensation rate was to be set by a local board of assessors, and payments were to average about $500 per slave, which was very generous. It was more than a prime field hand was worth, and was five times the value of a typical slave in the state. Payment was to come from a pool of $900,000 to be provided by Congress, then safely in GOP hands.

But Lincoln was unpopular in Delaware -- he had finished third there in the1860 election, with 24 percent of the vote, behind Breckenridge and Bell -- and even if the money offered was good, the state's politicians seemed disinclined to help the government. Delaware also had a suspicion of federal interference in its internal affairs.

In 1862, the General Assembly replied to Lincoln's compensated emancipation offer with a resolution stating that, "when the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way, having due regard to strict equity." And they furthermore notified the administration that they regarded "any interference from without" as "improper," and a thing to be "harshly repelled."[5]

The states' rights rhetoric probably in part masked a fear of social equality for blacks. Delaware's Sen. Joseph A. Bayard, an opponent of the administration, admitted, "slavery does not exist as a valuable source of prosperity" in Delaware.[6] But the "Delawarean" newspaper on Sept. 6, 1862, called Lincoln's plan "the first step; if it shall succeed, others will follow tending to elevate the Negro to an equality with the white man or rather to degrade the white man by obliterating the distinction between races." It sounds deeply racist to modern ears, but such rhetoric was boilerplate for Northern newspapers, even many of those generally friendly to the administration, throughout the war.

Others played on the old fear that free blacks would prey on whites. Samuel Townsend, a Democrat writing in opposition to the plan, portrayed the white population of Delaware as riding on the back of a tiger from which it dared not dismount, for, "in a short time," free blacks in the state "might equal the white population and cause a massacre." Even Fisher, while pushing the President's plan, supported colonization not just of the freed slaves in Delaware, but of the state's entire black population.

The plan was never put to a vote. Fisher and Smithers canvassed the General Assembly and found that the bill would probably pass the Senate, but lose in the House by one vote. They withdrew the plan rather than see it defeated. The elections that fall produced a decisive Democratic victory in Delaware, which doomed the chance for emancipation there. As it turned out, Kentucky and Delaware, among the border states, continued to tolerate slavery, even after Lee's surrender. Delaware's General Assembly refused to ratify the 13th Amendment, calling it an illegal extension of federal powers over the states. Only in December 1865, when the 13th Amendment went into effect on a national scale, did slavery cease in Delaware. By then there were only a few hundred left. Many male slaves had run off in 1863 and 1864 and gone to the cities to enlist in black regiments.