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My dear Sir: I am grateful to the New-York Journals, and not less so to the Times than to others, for their kind notices of the
late special Message to Congress. Your paper, however, intimates that the proposition, though well-intentioned, must fail on the score of expense. I do hope you will reconsider this. Have you noticed the facts that less than one half-day's cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?---that eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense. Please look at these things, and consider whether there should not be another article in the Times? Yours very truly, A. LINCOLN
[1] ADfS, DLC-RTL; LS, owned by Jacob J. Podell, New York City. With the autograph draft of this letter in the Lincoln Papers are extracts from the New York Times, Tribune, Evening Bulletin, Herald, World, and Evening Post of March 7---all supporting the message recommending compensated emancipation. Upon receiving Lincoln's letter, Raymond replied, March 15, ``You will have seen long before this reaches you. . . that the Times has published several articles in support of your special message. As soon as I saw the one to which you allude, I telegraphed to the office to sustain the message without qualifications or cavil, and I believe the paper has done so since. . . . I regard the message as a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy. . . .'' (DLC-RTL).