Read the following passage and choose the correct alternative to answer the question that follows.
In modern times Abraham Lincoln stands as the model of a compassionate statesman. He showed this quality not only in striving for the emancipation of the American blacks but in the dignity with which he conducted the American Civil War.
Lincoln did not fancy himself as a liberator. He thought it would be better for all if emancipation was a gradual process spread over many years. He proposed compensation for slave–owners in US bonds and grants for the rehabilitation of blacks – ‘colonisation’ as he called it. But fate was to deem otherwise. The haste with which the South wanted to break away from the Union with the North, compelled him to move faster than he expected. Perhaps more than most men of his time he had thought through the issue of slavery. “We must free the slaves,” he said, “or be ourselves subdued”. Before reading his first draft of the proclamation of Emancipation, he told his colleagues. “In giving freedom to the slaves, we assure freedom to the free”.
On September 22nd, 1862 Lincoln set his hand on the Proclamation of Emancipation declaring that on the first day of January 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state “shall be then and forever free”.
Lincoln’s revulsion for slavery left him without any moral indignation or passion against the salve-owners. The guilt of the salve-owners, he felt, should be shared by the whole country, the North and the South, for it seemed to him that everyone in the nation was an accomplice in perpetuating that system. To have whipped up any hatred against slave-owners would, to him, have been an act of malice.
“I shall do nothing in malice”, he wrote, “what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing”. As the Civil War was coming to a successful conclusion, a Northerner demanded of Lincoln, “Mr. President, how are you going to treat the Southerners when the war is over?” Lincoln replied, “As if they never went to war?”
When the news came of the victory of the North against the Confederate forces, someone suggested that the head of the Confederation Administration, Jefferson Davies, really ought to be hanged. “Judge not, that be not judged.” Lincoln replied. As to the demand for the prosecution of rebels. Lincoln replied, “We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.” This was his last recorded utterance.
What came in Lincoln’s way of carrying out emancipation as a gradual process?
