Today is the 160th Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia. In 1862, Lincoln signed into law a bill ending slavery in the District and freeing 3,000 people. Thirteen years earlier, Lincoln had proposed a law granting compensated emancipation to the enslaved in Washington during his one-term career in Congress. According to the Washington Post, in 1849 Congressman Lincoln called his 1849 legislation, “A bill for an act to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, by the consent of the free white people of said District, and with compensation to owners.”
According to the Post:
Like the law that would emancipate enslaved people in the District in 1862, his 1849 bill would have compensated enslavers. During the 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln told biographer James Quay Howard that he had initially received assurances of local support for the legislation from the mayor, William Winston Seaton, “and others whom I thought best acquainted with the sentiments of the people.”
But, Lincoln said, “subsequently I learned that many leading southern members of Congress, had been to see the mayor, and the others who favored my bill, and had drawn them over to their way of thinking. Finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence, I dropped the matter knowing that it was useless to prosecute the business at that time.”
Even though Lincoln ditched the legislation, his future vice president, Andrew Johnson, then a congressman from Tennessee, cited the bill in a speech a few months later as a recipe for Civil War.
“If this is done in the District of Columbia, it will be followed up in the states,” Johnson said, according to Chris DeRose in “Congressman Lincoln: The Making of America’s Greatest President.” “If Congress keeps up the agitation upon this momentous question, the friction will be so great … that this mighty union will melt in twain.”
The Whigs had chosen not to renominate Lincoln in 1848, and his term ended in March 1849, two months after he drafted his D.C. emancipation bill. Later that year, a reporter for the New York Tribune described him as “a strong but judicious enemy to slavery (whose) efforts are usually very practical, if not always successful.”
Ted Widmer, author of the 2020 book “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington,” said Lincoln had a “quixotic” time as a congressman, not distinguished by great legislative achievement. But his D.C. emancipation bill reflected his antislavery outlook. “He’s seeing slaves as human beings, and feeling pity for them, which most politicians didn’t very much,” Widmer said.
