This unimpeachable anonymous source specifies Lincoln's first term as a U.S. congressman so we do not confuse it with all those other terms as U.S. congressman.
LINCOLN AND HIS DC EMANCIPATION PLAN
A New York congressman named Daniel Gott offered on Thursday December 21, 1848, a resolution requiring the appropriate House committee to report a bill banning the slave trade in the nation's capital.
The proslavery forces responded by offering a motion to lay Gott's resolution on the table. This, in plain English, was a motion to kill the resolution and to let Gott know who ran the House. But to the consternation of proslavery forces, the House rejected the motion, with eighty-five congressmen, including the entire Giddings antislavery contingent voting nay, and eighty-one congressmen including the whole Southern contingent, voting aye. How did Abraham Lincoln of Illinois vote? Did he side with the proslavery Southerners or the antislavery Northerners? He sided with the proslavery Southerners and voted aye.
After the House voted overwhelmingly to take up the main question with Lincoln and the Southerners voting nay, Gott's resolution was adopted by a vote of ninety-eight to eighty-eight Southerners and their Northern supporters, publicly opposing the call for a bill banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia.
This was not the end of the struggle, which continued for several days, inflaming the climate and triggering intense campaigning by proslavery and antislavery forces. After calling in IOU's and deploying heavy artillery like Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina and President James K. Polk, White Southerners renewed the battle on the same terrain on December 27, offering a series of motions that defined the issue and contesting forces. The first resolution was a pending motion to reconsider the House vote directing the committee on the district of Columbia to report a bill prohibiting the slave trade in the district. The antislavery contingent countered with a motion to kill that motion by laying it on the table.
Thus the issue was joined and members arrayed themselves on one side or the other.
A vote to lay the motion on the table was, as everybody understood, a vote for the Gott amendment and against the slave trade.
A vote against the motion to table was a vote against the Gott amendment and for slavery and the slave trade.
All White Southerners, whatever their party, and all their allies and supporters, whatever their motives, voted against the motion to table, thereby asking for a reconsideraiton of the decision to ask for a bill banning the slave trade in the District. All antislavery members voted for the motion to table, which was defeated.
How did Abraham Lincoln of Illinois vote? He voted with the proslavery contingent, which prevailed with his help and the help of other Northerners.
A contemporary, Congressman George Washington Julian of Indiana, was surprised by Lincoln's vote. "To vote [with the proslavery side, as Lincoln did] would have been regarded as a direct support of the slave trade. This, few northerners were willing to do .... Unlike several of his northern brethren, he [Lincoln] showed no disposition to dodge the question, but placed himself squarely on the side of the South" (qtd. in Riddle 170).
In the midst of all this skirmishing, on Wednesday, January 10, 1849, Lincoln made a strange move, pushing himself to the front ranks of the contending forces by announcing that he intended to offer a bill for the gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia.
In any case, Lincoln offered it as a substitute motion, saying that his proposed measure had the support of some fifteen White citizens of the district. ... Lincoln refused to name his White backers.
What happened to Lincoln's bill? He never introduced it.
Whatever the reasons, Lincoln's retreat was a victory for District of Columbia slaves, who were freed outright by Congress in 1862 and who would have remained in slavery until the 1890s or even the twentieth century under the conservative document Lincoln drafted.
The leading experts on his congressional career, Beveridge, Riddle and Quarles, say his votes on slavery were confusing at best and confused and opportunistic at worst. The major exception to this chorus of criticism is Donald, who said, as we have seen, that Lincoln voted for slavery and the slave trade because he loved free speech so much and thought it was wrong to abolish slavery without the consent of "the [White] inhabitants of Washington," not, mind you, the consent of the slaves.
The most damaging evidence against Donald's theory, however, is Lincoln himself, who voted to table a Giddings bill, which called for a referendum by the people of the District on the question of slavery. There was, to be fair, a slight difference between Giddings's understanding of government of the people and Lincoln's understanding of government of the people. Giddings called for a referendum of all the people of the District, including the White i>and Black residents; Lincoln's bill called for a referendum of the free White residents of the District. Since Lincoln opposed a referendum of all the people, his problem wasn't the absence of a referendum -- his problem, as always, and as his bill proves, was race. Furthermore, and at a deeper level, it can be argued that Lincoln or any other person who believed that the only way to end slavery was to ask slaveholders to voluntarily commit suicide by free ballots either didn't understand the situation or was a de facto supporter of slavery as it existed.
See Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., pp. 236-9
Walt