President speaks about slaves in Union lines

The Tribune’s Washington correspondent states the precise words of the President to the Committee of the Freedman’s Association, at the interview last Saturday, were these: – “I am entirely satisfied that no slave who becomes for the time free within the American lines will ever be re-enslaved.  Rather than have it so, I would give up and abdicate.”

(Liberator, April 25, 1862, pg 3)