Hon. Horace Maynard, of Tennessee, on the 16th of July submitted to the President his views of the question, in which he thus set forth his appreciation of the motives which had induced him to make the proposition in question to the Southern States:

Your whole administration gives the highest assurance that you are moved, not so much from a desire to see all men everywhere made free, as from a desire to preserve free institutions for the benefit of men already free; not to make slaves free men, but to prevent free men from being made slaves; not to destroy an institution which a portion of us only consider bad, but to save an institution which we all alike consider good. I am satisfied that you would not ask from any of your fellow-citizens a sacrifice not in your judgment imperatively required by the safety of the country. This is the spirit of your appeal, and I respond to it in the same spirit.

Determined to leave undone nothing which it was in his power to do to effect the object he had so much at heart, the President on the 12th of July sent into Congress a Message transmitting the draft of a bill upon the subject, as follows:

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives :-Herewith is the draft of the bill to compensate any State which may abolish slavery within its limits, the passage of which, substantially as presented, I respectfully and earnestly recommend.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled :-That whenever the President of the United States shall be satisfied that any State shall have lawfully abolished slavery within and throughout such State, either immediately or gradually, it shall be the duty of the President, assisted by the Secretary of the Treasury, to prepare and deliver to each State an amount of six per cent. interest-bearing bonds of the United States, equal to the aggregate value at dollars per head of all the slaves within such State as reported by the census of 1860; the whole amount for any one State to be delivered at once, if the abolishment be immediate, or in equal annual installments, if it be gradual, interest to begin running on each bond at the time of delivery, and not before.

And be it further enacted, That if any State, having so received any such bonds, shall at any time afterwards by law reintroduce or tolerate slavery within its limits, contrary to the act of abolishment upon which such bonds shall have been received, said bonds so received by said State shall at once be null and void, in whosesoever hands they may be, and such State shall refund to the United States all interest which may have been paid on such bonds.

The bill was referred to a Committee, but no action was taken upon it in Congress, nor did any of the Border States respond to the President's invitation. The proposition, however, served a most excellent purpose in testing the sentiment of both sections of the country, and in preparing the way for the more vigorous treatment of the subject of slavery which the blind and stubborn prejudices of the slaveholding communities were rapidly rendering inevitable.

Two other subjects of importance engaged the attention and received the action of Congress during this session; the provision of a currency, and the amendment of the law to confiscate the property of rebels. A bill authorizing the issue of Treasury notes to the amount of $150,000,000, and making them a legal tender in all business transactions, was reported in the House by the Finance Committee, of which Hon. E. G. Spaulding, of New York, was Chairman, and taken up for discussion on the 17th of June. It was advocated mainly on opposed on the ground of

the score of necessity, and was its alleged unconstitutionality. The division of sentiment on the subject was not a party one, some of the warmest friends and supporters of the administration doubting whether Congress had the power to make any thing but silver and gold a legal tender in the payment of debts. The same bill provided for a direct tax, involving stamp duties, taxes upon incomes, etc., sufficient with the duties upon imports to raise $150,000,000 per annum, and also for the establishment of a system of free banking by which bank notes to be circulated as currency might be issued upon the basis of stocks of the United States deposited as security. The bill was discussed at length, and was finally adopted by a vote 93 to 59. In the Senate it encountered a similar opposition, but passed by a vote of 30 to 7, a motion to strike out the legal tender clause having been previously rejected, 17 voting in favor of striking it out, and 22 against it.

The subject of confiscating the property of rebels excited still deeper interest. A bill for that purpose was taken up in the Senate, on the 25th of February, for discussion. By one of its sections all the slaves of any person, anywhere in the United States, aiding the rebellion, were declared to be forever free, and subsequent sections provided for colonizing slaves thus enfranchised. The bill was advocated on the ground that in no other way could the property of rebels, in those States where the judicial authority of the United States had been overborne, be reached; while it was opposed on the ground that it was unconstitutional, and that it would tend to render the Southern people still more united and desperate in their rebellion. By the confiscation act of the previous session, a slave who had been employed in aiding the rebellion was declared to be free, but the fact that he had been thus employed must be shown by due judicial process; by this bill all the slaves of any person who had been thus engaged were set free without the intervention of any judicial process whatever. This feature of the bill was warmly opposed by some of the ablest and most reliable of the supporters of the Administration as a departure from all recognized rules of proceeding, and as a direct interference with slavery in the States, in violation of the most solemn pledge of the Government, the Republican party, and individual supporters of the Administration. Senator Collamer, of Vermont, urged this view of the case with great cogency, citing Mr. Sumner's opinion expressed on the 25th of February, 1861, when, on presenting a memorial to the Senate in favor of abolishing slavery, he had added: "In offering it, I take this occasion to declare most explicitly that I do not think that Congress has any right to interfere with slavery in a State;" and quoting also Senator Fessenden's declaration in the debate on abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, when he said: "I have held, and I hold to-day, and I say to-day what I have said in my place before, that the Congress

of the United States, or the people of the United States through the Congress, under the Constitution as it now exists, have no right whatever to touch by legislation the institution of slavery in the States where it exists by law." Mr. Sherman's opinion, expressed in the same debate, that "we ought religiously to adhere to the promises we made to the people of this country when Mr. LINCOLN was elected President-we ought to abstain religiously from all interference with the domestic institutions of the Slave or the Free States," was also quoted, and Mr. Collamer said he did not see how it was possible to pass the bill in its present form without giving the world to understand that they had violated those pledges, and had interfered with slavery in the States. Mr. Collamer accordingly offered an amendment to the bill, obviating the objections he had urged against it; and this, with other amendments offered by other Senators, was referred to a Select Committee, which subsequently reported a bill designed, as the Chairman, Mr. Clark, of New Hampshire, explained, to harmonize the various shades of opinion upon the subject, and secure the passage of some measure which should meet the expectations of the country and the emergency of the case. The first section of this bill provided, that every person who should hereafter commit the crime of treason against the United States, and be adjudged guilty thereof, should suffer death, and all his slaves, if any, be declared and made free; or he should he imprisoned not less than five years, and fined not less than ten thousand dollars, and all his slaves, if any, be declared and made free.

The distinctive feature of this section, as distinguished from the corresponding section of the original bill, consisted in the fact that a trial and conviction were required before any person guilty of treason could be punished, either by death, imprisonment, or the forfeiture of his property. It was opposed on the one hand, by Mr. Trumbull, of Illinois, on the ground

that it "made treason easy"—and on the other, by Mr. Davis, of Kentucky, because it set slaves free. Mr. Sumner offered a substitute to the whole bill, which in his judgment did not go far enough in giving the country the advantage of the opportunity which God, in his beneficence, had afforded" it for securing universal emancipation. Mr. Powell, of Kentucky, moved to strike out the eleventh section, which authorized the President to " employ as many persons of African descent as he might deem necessary and proper for the suppression of the rebellion, and to organize and use them in such manner as he might judge best for the public welfare," but his motion was rejected by a vote of 11 to 25. While the bill was thus denounced by one class of Senators as too violent in its method of dealing with the rebels, it was resisted with still greater vehemence by another class as entirely defective in that respect. Mr. Sumner was especially severe in his censure of Senators who proposed, he said, "when the life of our Republic is struck at, to proceed as if by an indictment in a criminal court." His remarks gave rise to considerable personal discussion-which was interrupted by the receipt of a similar bill which had been passed by the House of Rep resentatives, and which was decidedly more in harmony with the extreme views of Mr. Sumner and his friends, than the Senate bill. It assumed that the rebels were to be treated like a foreign enemy, without regard to the limitations and requirements of the Constitution, and that Congress, instead of the President, had the supreme and exclusive control of the operations of the war. This bill on coming before the Senate was set aside, and the bill which had been reported by the Senate Committee substituted in its place, by a vote of 21 to 17, and the latter was finally passed; ayes 28, noes 13. The House did not concur in this amendment to its own bill; but on receiving the report of a Committee of Conference which made some amendments to the Senate bill, it was