On Saturday, Washingtonians will celebrate the 160th anniversary of Emancipation Day, which commemorates President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the law that freed enslaved people in the capital. It wasn’t his first try at eradicating slavery here.
Thirteen years earlier, at the tail end of a largely unremarkable single term in the House, he drafted a similar bill. Although mostly forgotten today, his 1849 legislation turned out to be a dry run for the 1862 law that freed roughly 3,000 enslaved people in the District.
Nearly 125 years before President Richard M. Nixon signed 1973 legislation granting home rule to the District, Lincoln’s bill would have given a nod to the concept, at least for some residents. Under a provision Lincoln included in his bill, even if it had been signed into law, the legislation would have gone into effect only if a majority of “free white male” citizens over 21 voted for it in a subsequent local election.
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.
Michelle Krowl, a historian at the Library of Congress, said Lincoln worked within the realm of the practical in the House. “He had to be mindful of his audiences in Illinois,” she said in an interview, adding that abolitionists considered his D.C. antislavery bill a weak measure. The legislation included a provision that would have required local authorities to “arrest, and deliver up to their owners, all fugitive slaves escaping into said District.
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