Page "Abraham Lincoln" Paragraph 66

Lincoln understood that the Federal government's power to end slavery was limited by the Constitution, which before 1865, committed the issue to individual states.

He argued before and during his election that the eventual extinction of slavery would result from preventing its expansion into new U. S. territory.

At the beginning of the war, he also sought to persuade the states to accept compensated emancipation in return for their prohibition of slavery.

Lincoln believed that curtailing slavery in these ways would economically expunge it, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, under the constitution.

President Lincoln rejected two geographically limited emancipation attempts by Major General John C. Frémont in August 1861 and by Major General David Hunter in May 1862, on the grounds that it was not within their power, and it would upset the border states loyal to the Union.