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as elsewhere in the Message, you treat the rebels as more against than sinning." Doubtless you hold that State sovereignty can never die:-no, not even in a State whose people have all turned traitors. Possibly, however, you would admit that the Head of the Army has the right to dispose of the hundred Missouri traitors, who just within the north line of Arkansas are plotting and promoting the destruction of our army and country. But how farcical the distinction that he may not dispose of them if, availing themselves of your theory, they return a mile, and claim that they can now perpetrate their treason with impunity, because they are again in their loyal State of Missouri! Moreover, Missouri might, at the time, be the principal seat of the war, and the very State in which traitors could most peril and damage our cause. Whilst writing this letter, I learn that Springfield in Missouri is besieged by rebels. Does not our army there need the right to make the quick and sure military dispositions of both open and suspected traitors? Surely it does: and what folly, not to say what treason, to deny the right, simply because Springfield is in one of the really or nominally loyal States! Upon your theory a single State, and though no larger than Rhode Island or Delaware, might, under its mask of loyalty, by harboring traitors and protecting their operations, accomplish the betrayal of the country into the hands of the enemy. Surely, surely, our nation could not have meant to leave herself at such fatal disadvantage. She could not have failed to mean that, in time of war, her military power should be free everywhere within her borders to deal with traitors in its own sure and summary ways where they could not safely be intrusted to slow, uncertain, and what, even though in a professedly loyal State, might prove to be disloyal civil proceedings. If it be but one State that has broken out in war against the nation, the war power nevertheless is entitled to its paramount rule in every State so long as the war shall continue. So long it must have the right to practice in every State its own means for saving all the States. The military power may not dispose of a man in a loyal State! Amazing error! It may not only arrest him, but reduce his dwelling to ashes. The Head of the Army may, and should, order the arrest of the people of Chambersburgh, and the burning of their town, if he is convinced that it is, and if unburnt will remain, a nest of traitors. Had it been your purpose so to cripple the President and his army, as to render the country an easy prey to its enemy, you could not have written more effectually to this end than you have done. You say: "The unlimited, uncontrolled despotic power claimed under martial law is of itself a reason why it can not be admitted." The answer is, that for this very reason the power must be admitted. No nation ever did or ever can stand, that does not make martial law supreme in time of war. The main reason why the comparatively petty South is still able to resist the gigantic North, is that the one has and the other has not a Democratic Party to hold it back from an unrestricted and successful prosecution of the war. The

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rebels "let slip their dogs of war." But the Democrats are constantly intent on leashing ours. You will argue the danger of the abuse of this martial law. But that will be no argument against the necessity of the law. It will be an argument only against the madness of running rashly into war.

5th. You deny the right of the Head of the Army to proclaim liberty to the slaves of loyalists. You seem to believe that our government must not only not intend injuries to loyalists, but must so conduct the war that not even incidental injuries, though afterward paid for, shall ever befall them. The military commander is however at as full liberty to burn the dwelling of the loyalist as of the rebel, if in his judgment the necessities of war call for it. It is his right to weaken the foe by calling away from him white or red or black men. He may strengthen his ranks by inviting to them the minor sons of loyal fathers and the apprentices of loyal masters. But if he may invite these to break away from their just and natural relations, how much more may he invite slaves, be it those of rebels or loyalists, to break away from their infinitely unjust and unnatural relations! He may not think the slaves to be in any wise fit for his ranks. He may (and this would be an entirely justifying reason) invite them to leave their rebellious or loyal masters simply because he would thereby reduce the force which produces the food and other elements of Southern subsistence and Southern success. In all this the commander would not be saying that the relation of master and slave is any less moral than the other relations referred to. He would but be saying that he feels bound to do whatever he can in accordance with the laws and usages of civilized warfare to weaken his foe and strengthen himself.

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6th. Our work, as you interpret it, is to save the Constitution as it was and to "restore our Union as it was before the outbreak of the war." Right here, at this great error, is it probable that our nation will perish, if perish it must. The breaking out of the Rebellion found the nation so debauched by slavery as to be incapable of meeting the Rebellion on the one square and simple itsue of putting it down. For thirty or forty years it had cherished, not to say worshiped, slavery and nearly all its contests during that time for the Constitution and the Union were virtually contests for slavery. Hence she had scarcely come to blows with the South before the North found her people divided by feigned, false, impertinent and ruinous issues. Loud and incessant was the cry, that the Constitution and Union must be restored. The Democrats and pro-slavery Republicans meant a restoration to the intensely pro-slavery interpretation that the one and to the intensely pro-slavery character that the other had reached when the Rebellion broke out. The anti-slavery Republicans were for restoring the Constitution and Union to what they were held to be in those early days of the Republic, when slavery was looked upon as sectional and liberty national. A part of the abolitionists said that the Constitution is anti-slavery, and that therefore in the

name of the Constitution, as well as in the name of God, the Union should also be anti-slavery. And another part said that the Constitution is pro-slavery, and that they preferred no Union at all to a Union under a pro-slavery Constitution.

Oh! had we but been uncorrupted by slavery, how quickly would we have put down the Rebellion, if indeed there could in that case, have been a Rebellion to put down! We should then have wasted no time, and produced no division amongst ourselves, by talking about the Union, the Constitution, or even the Country. Our one purpose then would have been to put down the rebels-and to put them down irrespectively of the bearing it might have on whatever interests. Naked plunderers and murderers were these entirely unwronged rebels: and they should have been put down with as total a disregard of consequences, as would characterize the single purpose of a stern father in putting down his revolted child. Who doubts that with such a disregard they had been put down instantly? Suppose that scoundrels in Uticayour adopted and my native home-had, with arms in their hands, and using them too, seized her funds, her fire-engines, and her other corporate property, and that you had, at the time, been her Mayor; would you have sent to the Common Council a Message of the tone and character of that you have just sent to the Legislature? Would you have sought in it to divide her citizens upon a multiplicity of issues respecting the future condition of her Fire Department, her funds and other interests? Oh no! oh no!! You could have made no Democratic and no other gain by such an insane policy. You would, beyond a doubt, have sought to unite them in the one purpose and one endeavor to subdue and punish the miscreants; ay, to subdue and punish them, come what might of Fire Department, Funds, or even Utica herself. I am wrong-they would already have been thus united. Such union would have been the necessary result of the outrage. Only bad counsels and partisan influences could have disunited them. The people of the North were united when they heard of the bombarding of Sumter. But alas our good and patriotic President temporized! The spirit, which should have been taken at the flood, was allowed time to subside. Hundreds of thousands of lives, and directly and indirectly thousands of millions of dollars have already been the penalty of this mistake: and only too reasonable is the fear that the loss of the nation will be needed to complete the penalty. How surely and how quickly would he at that time but for the timidity and hesitancy, which grew out of his proslavery education, have saved our wealth and toil from this oppressive taxation, our tens of thousands of bereaved families from their sorrows, and our country from the appalling prospect of her ruin! The Rebellion should have been shot dead at once. Whoever denies it proves therein that he is insensible of its infernal character, and knows not how to deal with such a crime. Or rather, whoever denies it makes room thereby for the suspicion that he sympathizes with the Rebellion and is a participant in the crime.

At once should the President have brought out the Big Emancipation Gun: and he should have so charged it, and so aimed it, as not to spare one shred of slavery in all the land. The Rebellion would have been ended by the first fire. And what right had the rebels to our shrinking and delay ?-rebels who, without the least provocation, so malignantly and murderously struck at our all?— at the life of our country, and therefore åt our all?

7th. What a sad exhibition of the power of ambition and party over a great intellect, combined with a gentle and refined spirit, is your insisting that slavery shall be reëstablished; that the Southern "elements of production must be unimpaired;" and, that nothing short of this "can command the support of the majority of the American people "! Yes, even now, when, if there ever was, there is no longer any Constitutional obstacle in the way of the slave's freedom; even now when the slaveholder has himself opened the prison-door-you are still determined that he shall remain in bondage, and his children and children's children after him—still determined that this shall continue to be a land in which multiplying millions have no right to husband nor wife nor children nor wages nor Bibles nor schools nor to aught else but stripes and insults, tortures of the body and tortures of the soul. You are indeed to be pitied. You were not made to be what you are. You were made to be a strong, and helpful, and sustaining brother among your poor, and needy, and weak brethren :`not an object of terror but a tower of safety to them. You were made not to bolt but to unbolt the door of the oppressed: not to extinguish but to multiply and realize their hopes. But alas! your Party turned for strength and success to slavery; and so entirely identified itself with it that the Party can live only in the life of the monster, and must die when the monster dies. Hence it is that you are what you are. You are stone-blind, both morally and politically. You see not God's hand in this war. You see not that His time has at last come for setting free his sable children. So deluded are you as to imagine that pro-slavery will be popular forever and abolition unpopular forever. But the Sun of the Seymours, and Rynders, and Woods will soon set in darkness; and the Sun of the Garrisons, and Phillips, and Cheevers will soon rise in splendor. Your spurious Democratic Party, deserted as it is by the Dickinsons and Butlers, and by all who love country more than party, and freedom more than slavery, will soon pass away, leaving History to tell on one of her blackest pages of as base and wicked a Party as ever defied God or trampled on man.

8th. In your infatuation you propose to cross swords with the President and this too not figuratively but literally. You threaten the forcible supplanting of the military power of the United States by the merely civil power of this single State. This is your way of standing by the President in his patriotic endeavors. This is your way of standing by your country as she reels under the blows of traitors of traitors in arms and of more effective traitors not in arms-of traitors in the rebellious States and of more

dangerous traitors in the loyal States. You say that the Union must be preserved. But your means for preserving it prove what kind of a Union it is that you are so intent on preserving. It is a Union for submission to the South. A Union for slavery and for the Democratic Party. You well know that our nation would have gone down very speedily had the civil power of Missouri, Kentucky and Marylands been allowed to override the military power of the nation. No man knows better than yourself to which side, but for the dread of that military power, the State, whose City shed Massachusetts blood would have gone, carrying with her both her civil and her military power. She might have gone South, even though opposed by a very large non-slaveholding majority.

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To say that slavery is not the cause of the Rebellion is to say what is infinitely absurd. And yet for you to say it is any thing but strange. For you are a politician and as all your political hopes are identified with slavery, you love it, cling to it, and are ever alert to screen it from blame. In consenting to let your idol be held responsible for this horrid Rebellion, you would consent to the only death you dread-your political death. Hence your queer theory that the Rebellion resulted from the characteristic differences between the people of New-England and the people of the Cotton States. I admit the existence of these differences. But who can not see that they have, in the main, proceeded from slavery? You imply that had there been as much homogeneousness between these peoples as is found "in the portions traversed by the great East and West lines of commerce," there would have been no Rebellion. I agree with you. But I bid you remember that this is the homogeneousness of anti-slavery "portions". For save that one of these "lines" is partly in the skirts of the slaveholding section of the country, they all traverse States consecrated to Freedom, and only such. I thank you for this illustration of the homogeneousness and peacefulness of the antislavery "portions" of the country-for this illustration of the falseness of your position that an anti-slavery portion shares in the responsibility of the Rebellion. You further imply that had there been between the people of New-England and the people of the Cotton States the homogeneousness there is between the Border Free States and the Border Slave States, the Rebellion would not have been. You enumerate the causes, namely, "confluent rivers,” etc. etc., to produce this homogeneousness; but you do not give facts to prove that it has been produced. There are none to give. How can there be facts to prove the homogeneousness of two peoples, one of whom holds the family relation sacred, and the other separates its members upon the auction-block ?-among one of whom the laborer is counted to be worthy of wages, and among the other of whips?-among the native adult population of one of whom not a third can read, whilst in such population of the other the individual who can not read is a curiosity seldom to be met with? Homogeneousness between the Border Free and

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