was, in the State of South Carolina, an aggregate population of 703,708, of whom only 291,388 were white in law. The remaining 412,320 (including 9,914 free blacks or people of color) had indeed a contingent and conjectural interest in the conflict, for their instincts taught them that God might have sent in that awful whirlwind the angel of their deliverance. They had, therefore, an interest in the conflict, but they had no interest in the restoration of the Union. Nay, their interest was really adverse to such victories on our part as would have crushed the rebellion in its earlier stages. They could understand (what you recognize as an inevitable incident of the war) that, during the continuance of hostilities, as many of them as might come within our lines, though liable to indignity and cruelty from a certain class of soldiers and officers, would probably not be returned to our enemies, and would perhaps in some way acquire their freedom. But to them our early and complete success would be (as you think that constitutionally and legally it ought still to be) the closing of that door of hope. Here then is the force and bearing of the proclamation as a measure of hostility against the rebellion. It gives to the more than four hundred thousand slaves and free people of color, in South Carolina, a far greater interest in the suppression of the rebellion and the restoration of the national authority, than the less than three hundred thousand white people can possibly have in any other result. Its bearing is the same in other States.

It seems to me that this very simple view of what the proclamation is in its present effect and bearing, as a measure for the conquest of the rebellion and the restoration of the Union, refutes the entire argument in your sixth letter, which has had the honor of being circulated as a tract under the patronage, as I suppose, of the Delmonico Society for the diffusion of sound political knowledge. Surely if the proclamation has an obvious and most important relation to the progress and the early termination of the war-if it has an effect not only within our military lines but far in advance of our armies—if it facilitates all our hostile operations by giving us some millions of most interested friends in the territory held by our enemies the entire argument which you build on the assump

tion that the proclamation is to take effect only after the close of the war, must fall to the ground.

As to what will be after the war is ended, and particularly how the legal status of those who have been slaves is to be adjusted without infringing the reserved rights of the States under the Constitution, allow me to say that I think you need not be troubled. The end is not yet; and this is eminently one of the cases in which it is wise to "take no thought for the morrow," and in which "the morrow will take thought for the things of itself." Many things will have come to pass before the rebellion will have been finally disposed of, and the territory it has ravaged be restored to the Union and subjected to the normal and peaceful administration of government. You see what has happened in West Virginia, where the people, finding themselves emancipated by war from the domination of the slaveholding interest, have freely decreed, in their recovered sovereignty, the abolition of slavery. Just that thing you may be sure will happen elsewhere in the process of reestablishing the Union. For example, when the rebellion shall have been extinguished in Virginia, and a loyal convention of delegates from the people shall sit in the capitol at Richmond to reorganize the State after so long an interregnum, think you that Letcher, and Wise, and Mason, and others like them, will have seats in that convention? Not at all! Before such a convention can be elected, the loyal people in Virginia will have accepted the emancipation of the slaves and the final abolition of slavery as inevitable facts; and the whole race of aristocratic conspirators against liberty, who have brought such shame and suffering upon that once illustrious State, will have become forever infamous there. Please to recollect that there is already a Governor of Virginia who is not Letcher, and who is recognized in that character not only by the President, but also by the Senate and the House of Representatives. When the Government de jure, now represented by Governor Pierpont at Alexandria, or some more obscure locality, shall have become the government de facto at Richmond, there will be no quarreling with the stubborn fact that the emancipation of the slaves has been an incidental yet

In that regen

inevitable and irreversible result of the war. erated Virginia, baptized and purified with fire, the reserved right of the State to determine the legal condition and relations of its inhabitants will not be employed in the insane attempt to obtain a perpetual entailment of poverty and barbarism by reënslaving an emancipated peasantry.

Think what must be the process of restoring the Constitution, and reëstablishing the constitutionally guaranteed form of government, and the constitutionally limited sovereignty of the State, in South Carolina. First, there must be a provisional military government, under which no question will be raised whether the military emancipation of the slaves, as proclaimed on the first of January, 1863, was valid. Regiments of freedmen, under a rigid military discipline, will garrison the forts, will guard the custom-houses, will protect the cities against insurrection, and will ensure public order. A new population, with new capital, new ideas and habits, will begin to take the place of rebels, banished or emigrating in disgust. Slowly and quietly, thought, speech, industry, enterprise, domestic arrangements, and all the relations of society, will begin to be adjusted to the new basis. Instead of the relation of owner and slave there will spring up the relations of landlord and peasant, of employer and employed, of master and free servant. If some of the freedmen become disorderly and fall into habits of idleness and vagrancy, the provisional government will deal with them and make them know that their subsistence is to be earned by their labor. While these processes of adjustment are going on, every month and every week will diminish the possibility of even an attempt to reestablish slavery. And whenever the time shall have come for a convention to reconstitute the state government, the liberty of those who were once slaves will have become an immovable fact to which the policy of the restored and reëstablished, State will be freely adjusted, even though the adjustment be attended with regrets for the system that has perished. The process of reënslaving, after the return of peace, a population that has been emancipated by war, has not often been attempted; nor am I aware that its success in any instance has been such as to encourage a new experiment in that direction. The prospect of that "good time coming" which you seem to anticipate so cheerfully, when

the rebel states, restored to their places in the Union, shall enter on the enterprise of reducing to slavery again the millions emancipated by the military power of the nation, does not impress me as particularly brilliant.

I do not forget the possibility that another President may repudiate the pledges which President Lincoln has given. I do not forget the possibility that a future Congress may depart from the policy sanctioned by the one which has just expired. Nor do I forget the possibility that the question whether the people to whom the proclamation offers freedom are legally free, may be brought to an issue in the Courts of law. Doubtless an unprecedented crop of law suits will be among the consequences of this war, and you may reasonably expect that some litigated case may turn upon that question. If such a case were to be decided by the same judges who falsified law and history for the sake of denying justice to Dred Scott, it would probably be decided to your satisfaction. But the Supreme Court of the United States is not now, and will never again be, what it was when Judge Curtis threw off his judicial robe and resigned his seat in disgust. Certain preliminaries too must be transacted, before the question of dooming to slavery the millions to whom the proclamation offers liberty can be judicially decided. The war must be ended. The republican form of government guaranteed by the Constitution must be established in the States whose government under the Constitution has been abolished for the time by the enemy. These preliminaries will not be completed without taking time. After that lapse of time, the Supreme Court will be, yet more than now, unlike what it was when, to mark the inauguration of President Buchanan as an epoch in our history, the Dred Scott decision, having been prepared for the occasion, startled the country like an earthquake.

I cannot think that you are really expecting to see the legal invalidity of the proclamation established by any such method. Does not your argument assume rather that the war is to be ended by negotiation and compromise, and that the reënslaving of the emancipated millions is to be part of the bargain? I have never intimated-nor do I now imply-that you are one of those traitors at heart who are laboring to save the rebellion

from its fate by compelling the Government to negotiate for a peace. But, as I have already said more than once, there are such men. Do you ask me who they are? They are the men who in their conventions resolve that the Constitution has been violated by the admission of West Virginia as a State, because, forsooth, though the loyal legislature of Virginia which the Government has recognized in every way, and which has sent two senators into Congress, gave consent to the division of their State, John Letcher and the parliament of traitors over whom he presides at Richmond have not consented. I do not charge that you are one of them, for you seem to hold that the loyal citizens within the boundaries of a rebel State are the State, and that though they be no more than two or three in number, their rights and powers, as a State under the Constitution, are never in abeyance. Yet your argument seems to expect that the war is to terminate in some other way than by the conquest and complete subjugation of the rebels. If we are to have a Congress which will stop the supplies, which will compel the President to negotiate for a suspension of hostilities till the rebels can take breath, which will permit the rebel power to be represented by delegates in a convention called for the purpose of revising the Constitution and reconstructing the Union, I can suppose that the proclamation will pass for nothing, and that your questions about its effect on the legal status of the slaves now actually held by the so-called Confederates will be considered unanswerable.

You take it as a personal wrong to yourself when I say, of the men who are thus endeavoring to obtain peace by negotiation and compromise between the United States and "the Confederates," that they "expect nothing else, and intend nothing else, than some concession to the rebels which shall either divide the Union or subvert the Constitution." I have disavowed, more than once, any intention of putting that imputation upon you. But let me, in closing this letter, commend to your serious attention the dire alternative to which you and I, and all our fellow-citizens of the United States, are brought. Either this great and persistent rebellion must be crushed, completely and finally, by war; or we must make a compromise with it, and take such terms of peace as we can