Monday, December 21, 2020 Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana, by Walker Evans, 1935. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Lee and Maria Friedlander, 2006. Two years after South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States in December 1860, President Abraham Lincolnaddressed the Senate and House of Representatives, announcing his support for a plan that would pay reparations to slaveholders in border states (slave states that had not seceded) if they would implement gradual emancipation and pledge loyalty to the union. It was a last-ditch attempt to prevent further secession, and one that Lincoln justified with his opinion that “gradual, and not sudden, emancipation” would be “better for all.”