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 A LETTER 
 
 
 PETER COOPER, 
 
 "THE TREATMENT TO BE EXTENDED TO THE REBELS 
 INDIVIDUALLY," 
 
 "THE MODE OF RESTORING THE REBEL STATES TO THE UNION." 
 
 Sltitjj an ^ppenbis 
 
 CONTAINING A REPRINT OF A REVIEW OF JUDGE CURTIS' PAPER ON THE EMANCIPATION 
 
 PROCLAMATION. 
 
 WITH A LETTER FROM PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 
 
 CHARLES P. KLRKLAND. 
 
 S01K. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH, 
 
 No. 7 7 BROADWAY. 
 1 865. 
 
 tSs2rf 
 
 Edward O. Jenkins, Printer, 2U North William Mieet, New York. 
 

 A L E T T E E 
 
 PETER COOPER, 
 
 "THE TREATMENT TO BE EXTENDED TO THE REBELS 
 INDIVIDUALLY," 
 
 "THE MODE OF KESTOKING THE EEBEL STATES TO THE UNION." 
 
 itjr nit ^pnbfe 
 
 CONTAINING A REPKINT OF A REVIEW OF JUDGE CURTIS* PAPER ON THE EMANCIPATION 
 
 PROCLAMATION, 
 
 WITH A LETTER FROM PRESIDENT LINCOLN 
 
 c 
 
 CHARLES P. KIRKLAND. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH, 
 
 No. 770 BROADWAY. 
 1865. 
 
t4C8 
 
New York, June 14, 1865. 
 MB. PETER COOPER: 
 
 In compliance with your request, I have written out, briefly, my 
 views on two subjects of vital importance and absorbing interest, namely, 
 h The Proper Treatment of the Rebels individually," and " The Mode of 
 Restoration of the Rebel States to the Union." Believing these views to 
 be correct, I publish them in the humble hope that they may receive the 
 approbation of my fellow-citizens. 
 
 Your friend, 
 
 Charles P. Kirkland. 
 
LETTER. 
 
 Reverent thanks to God ! the battle is fought and the victory 
 won ! After a contest of four years of unexampled proportions, 
 in which hundreds of millions of treasure have been expended, 
 and hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed, the 
 glorious end has come ; reason, right, justice, liberty, humanity, 
 have triumphed ; the great truth is demonstrated that " man is 
 capable of self-government ;" the hearts of all lovers of free insti- 
 tutions, here and everywhere, are filled with rejoicing ; the 
 philanthropist witnesses with emotions of unspeakable delight 
 the utter extinction of Slavery in this land, and, by necessary con- 
 sequence, very speedily in every other ; and in this death of 
 slavery the American statesman sees the removal for ever of the 
 great disturbing cause of his country's peace, the source of all the 
 discord, heart-burnings and dangers of the Republic for the last 
 half century. This gave life to the Rebellion, and retributively by 
 the Rebellion it died ! 
 
 The contest has in its progress and in its results exhibited, on the 
 part of the defenders of the country, all the highest qualities of 
 man : heroic courage, patient endurance, unshrinking resolution, 
 persistent patriotism, unexampled military skill, noble generosity ; 
 while at the same time it has shown an extent of material power 
 and resource, of which we ourselves had no adequate conception, 
 and of which other nations were wholly ignorant. It is no vain 
 boast to say that " the United States of America" now have an 
 elevated, influential and distinguished place among the nations. 
 The name of " American citizen " will now be an honored and re- 
 spected name- wherever it is known or heard. These great results 
 have been obtained through enormous expenditures of money and 
 of life ; but who will say that the end is not worth the means ? 
 that the great cause of civilization, of free institutions, of civil 
 and religious liberty, indeed, of Humanity, has not received a 
 benefit equivalent to the costly price which has been paid ? How 
 
 (5) 
 
joyous and blessed is this hour to those who, from the very incep- 
 tion of the Rebellion in December, 1860, by the adoption of the 
 ordinance of secession in South Carolina, have with unwavering 
 and cheerful confidence looked forward to the end now attained, 
 and who with unclouded vision saw in a near future the salvation 
 of their country ! Rich now is the reward of their faith ! Hum- 
 bly and devoutly do the American people thank the Great Lord 
 of all, that in His wisdom and goodness He has seen fit to grant 
 such a termination to such a struggle, and thus to place the 
 blessed institution of their fathers on a lasting foundation and to 
 give us an assured faith that they can and will be transmitted in 
 all their strength and beneficence to future generations. He gave 
 to the men of the Revolution the wisdom to create this beautiful 
 temple ; to us of this day He has vouchsafed the successful per- 
 formance of the task of defending and preserving it. Oh that 
 the American people may manifest their earnest gratitude to Him 
 for this great deliverance ! not only by their words but by their 
 works ; by the more extended cultivation and practice of His 
 precepts, the less engrossing devotion to matters of material and 
 personal interest, and by a higher and purer love of country ; 
 such a love as will embrace the North, South, East and West in 
 the bonds of a common and an affectionate brotherhood, will allay 
 all sectional jealousies, and will carry out to its beautiful results 
 the divine injunction, " On earth peace, good will toward men." 
 
 This mighty struggle having thus been brought to a practical 
 close by the overthrow of the military power of the Rebellion, 
 two questions of exceeding magnitude present themselves for im- 
 mediate decision : First, " The treatment to be extended to indi- 
 vidual rebels ;" and, second, " The manner of restoration of the 
 rebel States to the Union." 
 
 These questions I propose to consider. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE TREATMENT TO BE EXTENDED TO THE REBELS 
 INDIVIDUALLY. 
 
 In the discussion of this subject passion and prejudice should 
 be wholly discarded, for it concerns alike the highest earthly in- 
 terests of many individuals and the present and future welfare of 
 our country, and no one who justly appreciates its importance 
 
can speak or write upon it without a deep sense of responsibility. 
 On its just decision will, in no small degree, depend the future 
 " weal or woe " of the Republic. 
 
 To arrive at just conclusions, it is indispensable to consider the 
 originating causes of the Rebellion ; the moral and legal offence 
 involved in it ; the spirit in which it has been conducted by its 
 authors, and by which it has been plainly . marked in its entire 
 progress ; and after a dispassionate investigation of these mat- 
 ters, to consider what measures, as to the individual actors in 
 this frightful drama, are required by justice, humanity and a due 
 regard to the future peace and security of our country. 
 
 1. It cannot be doubted that the actual inauguration of the 
 Rebellion is attributable to the unhallowed ambition of political 
 leaders, born and nurtured under a system wholly antagonistic to 
 our form of government, and whose keen perceptions exhibited to 
 them, in colors of living light, the inevitable and not very remote 
 melting away of the preponderating political power and influence 
 so long exercised by their section and by themselves as its 
 leaders ; this melting away being the necessary result of the dif- 
 ference in the practical working of the two systems of labor in 
 the two great territorial divisions of the country. Had no such 
 ambition existed in the breasts of prominent Southern men, the 
 attempt to overthrow this Government never would have been 
 made. Had these men been imbued with the spirit of the heroic 
 and pure-minded Pettigru , the people of that region would at this 
 moment have been in the full fruition of the same peace, happiness 
 and security which, as citizens of " the United States of America," 
 they enjoyed on the 21st day of December,* 1860, and which as 
 such they had not for a solitary hour ceased to enjoy from the mo- 
 ment of the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 up to that (to 
 them) fatally disastrous day. These leading conspirators had all 
 ready a field wonderfully adapted to the consummation of their 
 purpose of plunging their States into immediate rebellion. This 
 field they had been for a long series of years assiduous in pre- 
 paring for the harvest they were now about to reap. The people 
 of those States were in general, at the period in question (viz., 
 the inauguration of the Rebellion), deeply imbued with the fol- 
 lowino; qtoss errors and delusions : 
 
 'a a' 
 
 * The day of the passage of the ordinance of secession in South Carolina, and 
 -which was the practical birthday of the Rebellion. 
 
8 
 
 (1.) They had come to believe that the whole population of the 
 non-slaveholding States, with rare exceptions, were Abolitionists 
 of the Phillips and Garrison school. 
 
 (2.) That the people of those States were mean and mercenary ; 
 that they were spiritless, cowardly and time-serving, ready to 
 sacrifice every thing to their material interests ; that, on the con- 
 trary the people of the rebel States were a brave, high-spirited, 
 chivalric, generous race, superior in all things to those of the 
 free States ; that one Southern man was equal, in a military point 
 of view, to three of the North ; they regarded the name of 
 " Yankee " as synonymous with all that was vile, dishonorable 
 and contemptible ; and the epithet " Yankee" they applied indis- 
 criminately to all north of Mason and Dixon's line, alike to the 
 German of Pennsylvania, the adopted citizen of Wisconsin, the 
 New Englander of Vermont, and the Knickerbocker of New 
 York. By necessary consequence, they believed that these " Yan- 
 kees" would succumb at the first sight of the standard of re- 
 bellion and quietly yield to every demand. It is unnecessary 
 to say how much this absurd but fatal delusion was fostered by 
 the acts and the sayings of a large number of Northern men, 
 justly denominated by John Randolph, in the bitterness of his 
 withering satire, " dough- faces." 
 
 (3.) The lower class of their population, the "white trash," 
 comprising an immense numerical majority, had been taught to 
 believe, and did believe, that the sole object of the " Yankee" was 
 to raise the negro to an equality with, if not to a superiority over, 
 them. 
 
 (4.) The large proportion of that population, slaveholding and 
 non-slaveholding, were therefore prepared to believe, and did be- 
 lieve, as they were assured in every possible form by the leading- 
 conspirators, that the election of Lincoln was the triumph of 
 Abolitionism, that he was the favorite chief of that detested sect 
 and the ready instrument of their will ; and that noiv the only 
 remedy was to cast off the yoke of the usurper and the tyrant. 
 
 (5.) The fatal heresy of the " right of secession" had for half a 
 century been taught to those people as a fundamental truth, so 
 that multitudes had embraced it as a primary article of their po- 
 litical creed. Its corollary was " allegiance to a State," so that 
 the destructive error prevailed that a citizen of one of those States 
 
owed supreme fealty and allegiance to his State and none (when 
 they came in conflict) to his Country. 
 
 How was it possible, it may be asked, that such errors and de- 
 lusions could so thoroughly permeate such masses of men. The 
 solution of the mystery is at hand ; it is found in the benighted 
 ignorance of those masses ; and in those masses I include not 
 merely the " white trash" just mentioned but many slaveholders. 
 The great bulk of the latter live in seclusion on their plantations, 
 seldom leaving their own State, and in numerous cases scarcely 
 ever their own counties ; with limited means of even common 
 school education, as is shown by the national census ; with a total 
 suppression, as is universally known, of all liberty of speech and 
 of the press on the subject of their " peculiar institution," seldom, 
 if ever, in communion, either at home or abroad, with men of other 
 parts of the world or other parts of their own country. This 
 statement may seem exaggerated, but no man of ordinary observa- 
 tion, who has visited those States, will thus characterize it.* 
 
 * The reliable volumes (" Seaboard Slave States," " Texas Journey," and " A 
 Journey in the Back Country,") of Frederick Law Olmstead, late General Secre- 
 tary of the United States Sanitary Commission, fully confirm all these statements. 
 A recent authentic publication as to the state of things in Texas (and it was the 
 same in every rebel State) informs us that, " Perhaps there was never a people 
 more bewitched, beguiled and befooled, than we were when we drifted into this 
 Rebellion. We have been kept ao to an amazing extent. Our editors, our preach- 
 ers and stump-speakers, inflamed the people with falsehoods of rights violated, 
 constitutions broken, laws disregarded, on the one hand, and easy victories on the 
 other ; and it is astonishing how easily the pretended secession was made and the 
 war began. True, the people's ignorance made it an easy matter ; but that does 
 not excuse the persevering misrepresentations. Statements like this (by one since 
 an officer of high rank) were common : ' I will give a good bond to drink all the 
 blood shed in a war caused by secession.' " 
 
 Mr. James Brooks, now Member of Congress from New York, traveled exten- 
 sively in the rebel States some years since, and published an account of his obser- 
 vations and experiences. In relating a conversation he had in South Carolina 
 with one of the nonslaveholding class, who could read and was intelligent beyond 
 his fellows, he says : " This conversation gave us a good idea of the feelings 
 which have wrought up the mass of the people in South Carolina to such an 
 exasperation. This man is by no means a specimen of the intelligent Nullifiers, 
 but he is a good specimen of the backwoodsmen who were to do the fighting. The 
 hi<di mettled fellow had been first taught to ' damn the Yankees,' next, to cultivate 
 an undue State pride ; then, to believe his State was omnipotent, and her continu- 
 ance in the Union all-important, and indispensably necessary to support the Gov- 
 ernment. He solemnly believed, and would have taken his oath, that South 
 Carolina paid all the taxes of this vast Union. At a hundred million of dollars 
 he set down her burden ! A foreign nation was about to subdue him and his 
 
10 
 
 There are doubtless exceptions to this general rule; men of 
 culture, of high literary attainments and of varied accomplishments 
 are found in those States ; but the mass was without question in 
 the condition I have stated. Ignorance is the genial soil in which 
 to sow the seeds of error, delusion, prejudice ; abundantly have 
 those seeds been sown, and alike bountiful and baneful has been 
 the harvest. 
 
 The wicked instigators of the Rebellion (while we cannot ac- 
 cord to them sincerity in the belief even of the doctrine of the 
 inherent right of secession) absolutely hieiv, as no intelligent ob- 
 server can doubt, the utter groundlessness of all the other errors, 
 delusions and prejudices above-mentioned ; they were men, for the 
 most part, of intelligence and education, and what is more, they 
 had had full opportunity, by personal association with the people 
 of the North, of knowing the falsity of the appeals they made to 
 " fire the Southern heart." But those appeals were successful ; 
 and. thus the originating cause of the Rebellion is found in the 
 mad ambition of the conspirators, inciting to practical action a 
 people laboring under an amount of error, delusion and prejudice 
 unexampled in the world. The institution of ' ; slavery" doubtless 
 raised up this brood of conspirators and created a state of things 
 favorable to the spread of these illusions : " Abolition" writers 
 and orators furnished an abundant storehouse from which the 
 conspirators drew the falsehoods on that subject, which they im- 
 pressed as truths on their too willing listeners ; but further than 
 just stated, neither " slavery" nor " abolition" was the immediate 
 originating cause of the Rebellion. 
 
 2. It is difficult to find language to describe the moral and legal 
 offence involved in the Rebellion. To say that it is a crime of greater 
 magnitude than any recorded in history is but feebly to express its 
 true character. It was a cold-blooded, deliberate attempt to over- 
 throw the Government of the United States, to destroy the Ameri- 
 can nation, to inflict a deadly and fatal wound on the holy cause 
 of free institutions and civil liberty here and everywhere, now 
 
 State, and Lis pride rose on the reflection, and he was ready to throw his life 
 away in attacking a fortified castle on an open raft ! Mr. Calhoun's well-instructed 
 backwoodsmen of whom he boasted in Congress, are as ignorant of the extent, power, 
 and complicated interests of this Government as arc the Rocky Mountain Indians." 
 He fully confirms all I have said as to the non-slaveholding class. lie also equally 
 confirms all my statements as to the ignorance, delusion and prejudice of that 
 class of slaveholders, to whom I attribute those qualities. 
 
11 
 
 and for ever ; it was treason, deep, damning and infamous. Its 
 immediate consequences, to say nothing of mere material consid- 
 erations, have been the destruction (including those on both 
 sides) of at least half a million human lives, the grievous maim- 
 ino\ wounding or sickness of another half million, and the cloth- 
 ino- in mourning: of tens of thousands of households. For such a 
 crime and for such consequences are those conspirators and their 
 abettors legally responsible : they are responsible to God ; they 
 are responsible to man. 
 
 3. It is an undoubted fact that the Rebellion, from its begin- 
 ning to its end, has been conducted by the rebels in a spirit of 
 savage barbarity. The deliberate plot to murder President 
 Lincoln on his way to Washington in February, 1861 ; the mas- 
 sacre of the soldiers of the Massachusetts Sixth in the city of 
 Baltimore on the loth of April, and the assassination of Colonel 
 Ellsworth at Alexandria on the 26th of May in the same year, 
 were but the fitting precursors of the horrible slaughter at Fort 
 Pillow ; the revolting and incredible cruelties inflicted on the 
 soldiers of the Republic at all the prisons and prison-pens in the 
 rebel States — Richmond, Danville, Salisbury, Columbia, Charles- 
 ton, Andersonville* indeed every place Avhere any of them were 
 
 * At a public meeting at the Cooper Institute in April, 18G5, the Rev. J. I. Greer, 
 Chaplain of the One Hundred and Eighty-third Ohio, stated that, of the Union 
 prisoners sent from Andersonville to Wilmington a few weeks since, not less than 
 two hundred and eighty, in consequence of their barbarous treatment in that 
 charnel-house, had suffered the excruciating torment of the loss of their feet ; and 
 upward of forty of those " footless" heroes arc now in hospital at David's Island, 
 in the harbor of New York ! 
 
 At the risk of sickening the reader, but in stern regard to truth, the following 
 extract from the Port Royal South, of May 6, is added : 
 
 " The steamer ' William P. Clyde' arrived here on the 3d, from Jacksonville, Fla., 
 with nineteen Union officers and privates — part of a large number, supposed 
 to be about 3,200, who are coming into Jacksonville every hour from the Ander- 
 sonville prison-pen. The rebels brought them within a few miles of our lines 
 and turned them loose. Nearly the whole number have already arrived at Jack- 
 sonville and are being provided for as well as possible by the Quartermaster's and 
 Commissary's Departments of General Vodge's district. They are now receiving 
 clothing and other articles necessary to making a decent appearance in a civilized 
 community. Many of them are badly troubled with scurvy, chronic diarrhoea 
 and other diseases. About thirty poor fellows were left at Andersonville, prob- 
 ably to die, as they were too sick to be removed. The following horrible account 
 is furnished us by First Lieutenant M. G. Wilson, of the Ninety-ninth United 
 States Colored Troops, who returned on the ' Clyde :' Statement of deaths among 
 
12 
 
 confined in large or small numbers, whereby not less than fifty 
 thousand as gallant and noble men as ever fought on any field 
 were literally tortured to death or consigned to lingering and 
 hopeless disease ; and the whole of this* infernal work finally con- 
 summated by the deliberately-planned assassination of the head 
 of the nation ! I do not dwell on those horrors — the bare men- 
 tion of them is sufficient to cause a shudder through the civilized 
 world. It is enough to say that these enormities could not Lave 
 been perpetrated in any other country professing the Christian 
 faith : and here they can be accounted for only from the dc. 
 humanizing influence of slavery (as it has existed in the rebel 
 States) on the white race, who had been under its operation for 
 generations, and from the partial, if not the total, extinction of 
 their moral sense by means of the crime of the Rebellion itself. 
 
 The state of feeling existing in the rebel States at the begin- 
 ning of the Rebellion, as already stated, the error, delusion, prej- 
 udice, malignant hate, arrogant assumption of superiority, though 
 not universal, were so prevalent that those deeds of matchless 
 cruelty caused no shock to public sentiment there, but, on the 
 
 the Union prisoners confined at Andersonville, Ga., for the eleven months ending 
 January 81, 1S65. — February, 1864, 1 ; March, 2S2 ; April, 576 ; May, 70S; June, 
 1,201 ; July, 1,748 ; August, 2,991 ; September, 2,677 ;' October, 1,595 ; Novem- 
 ber, 494 ; December, 168 ; January, 1865, 199. Total, 12,640. The total number 
 who have died at Andersonville sinco the establishment of that infernal pen 
 exceeds 17,000." 
 
 The preceding are but an insignificant part of this horrible record. The 
 authentic evidence on this subject, which has already been furnished to the 
 public, would fill a volume of hundreds if not of thousands of pages. 
 
 Can it be believed that these awful barbarities had the deliberate sanction fo 
 the rebel Congress? Yet here is the proof. Among the documents found in 
 Richmond after its capture, and now on file in the office of the Secretary of War 
 at Washington, is the following resolution, introduced into that body, read the 
 first and second time, and made the special order for the secret session of February 
 16, 1864: "Resolved, by the House of Representatives of the Confederate States, the 
 Senate concurring, That we do adhere to our opinion that the so-called Emancipa- 
 tion Proclamation of the President of the United States, and the enlistment of 
 aegro slaves in the several Federal armies now opposed to us, are not among the 
 acts of legitimate warfare, but are properly classed among such acts as the right 
 to put to death prisoners of war without special cause, the right to vse poisoned 
 weapons and the right to assassinate, and if persisted in, will justify this Govern- 
 ment in the adoption of measures of retaliation." 
 
 And, after this, who will refuse credence to the statements of a correspondent 
 of au influential paper of this city, writing from Washington on the 16th of May, 
 
13 
 
 contrary, were received with favor. Multitudes of those people 
 regarded the torture and murder of a " Yankee" (as in former 
 times the Turks viewed the killing of a Christian) as a work well 
 pleasing to God, and entitling him who performed it to heavenly 
 rewards. We are informed, by official authority, that the assas- 
 sination of the President was planned by rebels in Canada and 
 approved in Richmond ;* but however this may be, no impartial 
 observer of the events of the last five years can doubt that this 
 enormous crime was the legitimate, if not the necessary, fruit and 
 result of the teachings of the rebel leaders, and of the spirit in 
 which, they and their followers have conducted the war of the 
 Rebellion ;t in other words, that the leaders are morally if not 
 
 1S65 : " The question which has long been agitated as to who is responsible for the 
 cruel treatment of our prisoners confined in Libby and other prisons in the South 
 may now be considered as definitely settled, through no less a person that ex-rebel 
 Senator Foote. It appears that Mr. Foote was a member of the Committee in the 
 Senate to examine into the treatment of the prisoners and the reports of their 
 harsh usage and starvation. His story, as told by his own relatives, show a 
 deeper intention than has been generally supposed, and fastens upon Jeff. Davis 
 and his Cabinet a crime both startling and appalling in its details. Mr. Foote, it is 
 said, states that the investigations showed conclusive evidence that it was decided 
 in Cabinet meeting to reduce the rations served out to the prisoners, that it 
 should so weaken their constitutions in connection with the confinement that it 
 would destroy them as soldiers, and make them when exchanged worthless. 
 Senator Foote determined to report these facts to the Senate, but the balance of 
 the Committee overruled him and suppressed the facts. My informant further 
 states that it was on this point that the quarrel between Davis and Foote broke 
 out afresh, which resulted in the latter leaving Richmond and seeking some seques- 
 tered spot where such horrid deeds were not committed. Here, then, is the evi- 
 dence conclusive of Jeff. Davis and associates' guilt in the diabolical deed of 
 starving our prisoners ; a deed which makes the most stoical person shudder to 
 contemplate. Men who will coolly and deliberately plan a scheme like that will 
 conspire to assassinate a President or any other person. It is a fitting sequel 
 that authors of such deeds should end their career in a cowardly manner, dressed 
 in petticoats. No wonder Jeff. Davis' cloven foot revealed who he was." 
 
 * President Johnson's proclamation of May 2d, 1865. 
 
 f The teachings and the spirit referred to are perfectly illustrated by the follow- 
 ing extract from a recent paper (April 26), published at Shreveport, La. The 
 editor, in commenting on the assassination of the President, says : " In one of 
 his messages he said, with grim and terrible satisfaction, that under all circum- 
 stances our land would remain. Where the fierce Attila, calling himself ' the 
 curse of God,' swept with his barbaric hordes, the historian records, as the marks 
 of his ten-ible wrath, that ' he left only the sky and the earth remaining.' Attila, 
 perhaps, joyed in the devastation. Abraham Lincoln, doubtless, did not. He 
 may have felt pity, but no remorse ; and to fasten despotism upon a people free 
 as himself, entitled to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, like himself, 
 
14 
 
 legally responsible for this, the crowning crime of the Eebelliou. 
 Such, beyond question, is nearly the universal, as it is the just, 
 opinion of our people.* 
 
 he would have stood unmoved and inflexible, and, with no eye turned to heaven, 
 would have seen them swept from the earth, and only the land remaining, and felt 
 himself a great Republican President, and one of the world's heroes. With all 
 allowance for his amiable personal qualities, we yet know it to be true that 
 Abraham Lincoln had as fell a purpose as ever existed in the bosom of despotism ; 
 that the Southern people should be bereft of their liberties, subjugated to a Gov- 
 ernment hateful to their inmost souls ; and ruled for ever, not by their own free 
 will, but by the bayonets and the votes of the more populous North. He was the 
 instrument of the North to effect upon us and our children this destructive, ruin- 
 ous object. Despotism has ever been insupportable to a free people ; and, when 
 practiced, even upon people whose spirits were broken and their pride degraded, 
 its fit retribution has been the secret blow of the assassin, if not the open blow of 
 the patriot. From 1*787 to 1861 no guard had a President of the United States. 
 He was the chosen officer of a free people, with no more concern for his personal 
 security than that of the humblest individual in the land. If the reign of despot- 
 ism is again to be re-inaugurated at this day, and over this people, then let despot- 
 ism and whoever may be its minions beware the deserved fate of tyrants." 
 
 * From hundreds of proofs of the truth of this remark, I select the following : 
 " At a meeting of the New York Board of Fire Insurance Companies held at the 
 Insurance Rooms, No. 156 Broadway, on Monday, the following resolution was 
 unanimously adopted and ordered to be published : ' Resolved, That in the pres- 
 ence of this terrible crime, which is but a natural expression of that bitter malig- 
 nity with which the Rebellion has been conducted from its inception, it would be 
 a mockery to expect the nation, standing over the fresh grave of its noble, faith- 
 ful and forgiving chief, to consent to strike hands with the bloody traitors whose 
 instrument the assassin was, and permit them again to walk unscathed in the land 
 which they have thus smitten anew.' " 
 
 " San Francisco, April 17, 1865. — A large meeting of citizens was held at 
 Piatt's Hall, on Sunday, the Mayor presiding. A series of resolutions were passed, 
 among which was the following, which amply expresses the general feeling on 
 this coast : ' The great, capacious, manly heart of Abraham Lincoln was generous 
 enough to have embraced all within the forgiveness of its loving nature. And 
 in their madness they have killed him. Before his death the atmosphere was 
 filled with generous emotions and kind sympathj^. God have mercy on the souls 
 of the rebel chiefs !' "When this was read there was great excitement, and the 
 people cheered over and over again." 
 
 " A large meeting of the cartmen of this city, was held Monday evening, in the 
 Hall No. 05 Sixth Avenue, to take appropriate action on the death of the Presi- 
 dent, and make preparations to attend his obsequies. The following resolution 
 was adopted : 'Resolved, That the assassination of the President is but the culmina- 
 tion of the crime against the nation which commenced four years ago ; that the 
 same spirit which leveled the first gun against our flag in Charleston harbor, 
 which initiated the murder in cold blood of the Union men of the South, which 
 instigated the atrocities committed upon helpless prisoners, and which fired our 
 city in the dead of night, inflamed the heart and guided the hand of the wretched 
 
15 
 
 A subject of the deepest solicitude, and necessarily involved in 
 the consideration of the question of the treatment of the rebels 
 individually, is the reconciliation of the people of the two sec- 
 tions of the country. The people of the States which have not 
 united in the Rebellion are, to a man, ready, cheerfully ready, 
 
 murderer, and justice demands that the malignant spirit of treason be utterly 
 extinguished ; that all the penalties provided by law be meted out to the instiga- 
 tors and perpetrators of the horrible crime known as the Rebellion, and that our 
 land may know a just and abiding peace ; that the human race may never again 
 be cursed by a war so bloody and unnatural, for the sake of our posterity, and in 
 the name of civilization we demand that justice be done upon the traitors who 
 have desolated our country.' " 
 
 " At a special meeting of the Vestry of Trinity Church, held ou Saturday, the 
 15th day of April, 1865, the following resolution was adopted : 'Resolved, That while 
 we regard the act by which our beloved country has thus been, through indescrib- 
 able malice and fury, plunged into the deepest affliction* as one of those crimes of 
 which no language can adequately paint the atrocity, of which the history of 
 Europe has not for many centuries furnished a parallel, of which our own history 
 has afforded thus far no example, and than which no history presents a more 
 detestable and infamous act to the view, we cannot but hold it to have been 
 dictated by the spirit, which, from the commencement of our national troubles, 
 has sympathized with the enemies of the public peace, and aided and abetted the 
 Rebellion now, as we trust, subdued ; a spirit whose tendencies and essential 
 character had previously been manifested in the July riots, in this city, in 1S63 ; 
 in the attempt to destroy the city by incendiarism in November last, and in the 
 systematic outrages inflicted on our captured soldiers in the prisons of the South." 
 
 These show the concurrence in this view of all classes of our citizens. 
 
 And how can we doubt the correctness of this prevailing opinion, when we 
 read in a leading rebel paper such articles as the following — in the Chatta?ioogcc 
 Rebel (published at Selma) of the 20th of April, 1865 : " William H. Seward, the 
 cold-blooded and heartless political miscreant, who guided the infernal policy 
 which plunged us into this bloody and desolating war, has been arrested by an 
 angry God in the midst of his iniquities, and has paid the penalty of his crimes 
 at the hands of an unknown assassin. Abe Lincoln, too, the political mountebank 
 and professional joker, whom Nature intended for the ring of a circus, but whom 
 a strange streak of popular delusion, elevated to the Presidency — he, also, has 
 fallen. His career was as short as it was bloody and infamous. He has gone to 
 answer before the bar of God, for the innocent blood which he has permitted to 
 be shed, and his efforts to enslave a free people." 
 
 Let it not be said that this is only " a newspaper article ;" conductors of public 
 journals do not utter sentiments revolting to their patrons. 
 
 And when we add that at a large meeting at Shreveport, La., on the 26th of 
 April, at which, among others, were present the rebel Generals E. Kirby Smith, 
 Price, Buckner and Governor Reynolds, Colonel Flournoy of the rebel army ap- 
 pealed to the feelings of his auditory and received their hearty concurrence in his 
 views. He concluded his address by a glowing panegyric on Booth the assassin, 
 whom he " compared to Brutus the assassin of Caesar, and predicted for him (Booth) 
 a like and enduring fame !" — Shreveport Sentinel, April 27, 1865. 
 
16 
 
 for this reconciliation. They are read}', "with exemplary una- 
 nimity, to cast the veil of oblivion over the past ; to pardon 
 the grievous wrongs they have suffered as a people and as indi- 
 viduals, and to welcome back to brotherhood the people of the 
 rebel States ; but for their own sake, as well as for the sake of 
 those people, this receiving and welcoming back must be in such a 
 manner as to insure its mutual cordiality, and the perpetuity of 
 the blessings to flow from it to all. It is manifest from the state- 
 ments already made of the state of feeling in the rebel States at 
 the commencement of the Rebellion, that no real reconciliation can 
 be effected so long as the errors, delusions and prejudices, men- 
 tioned as then existing there, continue. In the very first place, 
 the people of those States must at once and for ever part with the 
 absurdly (I may say ridiculously) false idea of their own " superi- 
 ority," and the consequent inferiority of the rest of the nation. 
 It may well be believed that the delusion of their superior physi- 
 cal courage and " fighting capacity ;" their idea that one man of 
 the South was, in this regard, equal to three of the North, has 
 been dispelled by the hard but inexorable " logic of facts." The 
 innumerable individual instances of the sublimest heroism, and the 
 steadiest courage in our soldiers ; the skillful handling of large 
 Union armies in every one of their States ; the numerous brilliant 
 victories which have given our officers and men a universality and 
 immortality of fame ; and our final triumphant success will have 
 presented the truth in this particular in the clearest light to 
 the mind alike of the slave aristocrat and of the commonest of 
 the " white trash." They cannot but be satisfied by evidence 
 equally plain and irrefragable that they were laboring under 
 a similar delusion in their idea of the mean, mercenary, 
 selfish, craven character of our people, for they have seen 
 throughout every quarter of the North, even its remotest 
 hamlet, constant exhibitions of unselfish patriotism, of stern devo- 
 tion to duty, of generous charity, indeed of every quality that 
 elevates and adorns humanity ; they have seen life, fortune, do- 
 mestic comfort, personal ease, love of kindred, every thing offered 
 in profusion on the altar of the country. Moreover, in our will- 
 ingness to receive them again into the common fold, they will see 
 a spirit of elevated magnanimity and of true Christian love, of 
 which the world has as yet furnished few if any examples. If 
 
17 
 
 there be any of high or low degree in those States whose eyes are 
 not opened by this overwhelming array of facts, such, beyond all 
 doubt, are unfit to be " American citizens." But on every prin- 
 ciple of human reasoning and of human action, it cannot be long 
 before this great but indispensable revolution in the feelings and 
 opinions of the mass of people of the rebel States will occur, and 
 produce its beautiful and lasting fruits of peace, harmony and 
 love. 
 
 In considering the subject of .the restoration of harmony be- 
 tween the people of the two sections, it must ever be kept in 
 mind that the leading conspirators and the arrogant slave aristo- 
 crats of the South, form but a very small minority of that people 
 and that our business of conciliation is not with them chiefly, but 
 mainly with the millions of whites, whom they have so long held 
 in subordination, and the nearly equal number of blacks, whom 
 they have so long held in slavery. The idea that that South 
 which is to be reconciled and conciliated is the slave aristocracy, 
 is an idea alike fallacious and injurious, and the sooner it is aban- 
 doned for ever, the better for the great cause in which we have, 
 by the favor of Heaven, so signally triumphed. No ; it is not 
 with that handful that we have to deal, but our business is with 
 the seven or eight millions of other human beings dwelling on 
 that soil. As to that numerically insignificant minority, we offer 
 to them all, with comparatively few exceptions, the great privilege 
 of returning " home," on the sole condition that, when they are re- 
 admitted to the house of their fathers, they will conduct as brothers 
 of the household, and not as strangers, enemies, aliens or masters ; 
 not as " superiors," but as equals. 
 
 Having thus concisely reviewed the originating cause of the 
 Rebellion, the crime it involved, and the spirit in which the 
 rebels have conducted it, we come now to speak of the treatment 
 to be extended to rebels individually. 
 
 (1.) The very first idea that occurs here is the manifest dis- 
 tinction between different classes of those people, and I assert no 
 more than I know to be the feeling of all in all parts of the Union* 
 who have been steadfast in its support, that no terms or conditions 
 are to be imposed, and no pains or penalties inflicted on the mass of 
 the people of the South. They have grievously erred, but they have 
 received an equally grievous punishment in the great suffering 
 
18 
 
 they have endured in the unholy cause into which their wicked 
 leaders seduced them. May Heaven forgive them as we do ! 
 
 (2.) In determining this question, there are various classifica- 
 tions to be made of the comparatively small remainder of that 
 people. " Treason " is conceded by all to be the very worst of 
 crimes ; that its punishment should be in proportion necessarily 
 follows. But it is the dictate alike of reason, justice and mercy, 
 that a discrimination should lie made in the punishment of the 
 guilty, while we at the same time know that punishment to a 
 proper extent is demanded by every consideration of humanity ; 
 that it is required alike by God's law and man's, and that if we 
 would, we could not as moral and responsible beings, avoid the 
 performance of that duty, though we fully realize that in its per- 
 formance we are bound by equally high and imperative conside- 
 rations to temper justice with mercy ; to limit, as far as consistent 
 with the public safety and with true mercy the number to be pun- 
 ished, and of that number to inflict the extreme penalty on as few as 
 possible, and among the rest to graduate it according to their 
 several circumstances. 
 
 (3.) Nor is this a matter of difficult practical solution. First, a 
 small number of those men should without delay be indicted for 
 the crime of treason. The humane, just and enlightened would> 
 it would seem of necessity, include in this class the following: 
 
 (a.) The two surviving members of the Cabinet of Mr. Buchanan 
 and the then Vice-President, all of whom, witli unspeakable deprav- 
 ity, betrayed their country by using their official positions to in- 
 augurate the Rebellion ; and with them should suffer that man, who, 
 alone of his brethren of the .Supreme Court of the United States, 
 prostituted to the same unhallowed purpose the august office con- 
 fided to him by his country. 
 
 (b.) The representative head, called the President, of the Rebel 
 Confederacy, and all who have been members of his Cabinet. 
 
 (c) Those members of the Senate and House of Representatives 
 of the United States who, while in the exercise of their sacred 
 trusts at the Capitol of the nation, deliberately, and with malice 
 aforethought, committed the crime of treason in the face of the 
 solemn and repeated warnings then and there given by their col- 
 league who now (wonderful coincidence !) is invested with the 
 
19 
 
 power of making practically manifest the truth of what he then 
 so impressively declared. 
 
 (d.) Each and every man who has by direct and responsible act 
 participated in the murder, by torture in rebel prisons, of the 
 soldiers of the Republic. The whole world stood aghast a few 
 years since at the atrocities of the Sepoys of India ; those were 
 " tender mercies " compared with the cruelties just mentioned. 
 
 (e.) Each and every man who has by direct act participated in 
 the murder of Union citizens in any rebel State. 
 
 (/.) Those who have acted the infamous part of rebel emis- 
 saries and representatives in Europe ; * who by a continued 
 system of flagitious falsehood have obtained there the material 
 means of sustaining the Rebellion, and by which means alone it was 
 sustained after the first eighteen months of its existence, and who 
 have been ceaseless in their efforts to bring discredit, disgrace and 
 ruin on their country. Thousands of the deluded victims of their 
 frauds and deceptions in England and other parts of Europe would 
 rejoice in common with us to know that such criminals had met 
 the just reward of their treason and their fraud. 
 
 Probably many regard the above list as too limited ; possibly 
 others may regard it as too extensive ; but let those latter con- 
 sider that the aggregate number is in reality inconsiderable. 
 
 But humanity itself demands that men guilty of treason, and 
 such a treason, every one of whom is morally guilty of the murder 
 of all who have fallen in this war, and many of whom (as those 
 mentioned under the third and fourth subdivisions) are guilty of 
 actual murder, should at least be placed in a position to receive 
 the severest punishment known to human law. Let no misplaced 
 philanthropy, no unmanly sentimentality, no delusive idea of 
 clemency be interposed between such criminals and their indict- 
 
 * The emissary Mason, in. a letter dated April 2,1, 1865, published in England, 
 and in which he attempts to defend the leaders of the Rebellion against the charge 
 of complicity in the assassination of the President, dared to say : " As to the crime 
 which has been committed, the people of the South will know, as will equally all 
 well-balanced minds, that it is the necessary offspring of all these scenes of blood- 
 shed and murder in every form of unbridled license, which have signalized the 
 invasion of the South by Northern armies, unrebuked certainly, and therefore in. 
 stigated. by their leaders, and those over them." If the combined crimes of treason 
 and the blackest moral perjury are deserving of punishment, what should be the 
 fate of this man ? 
 
20 
 
 ment for treason. We are a civilized, a Christian, a humane 
 people ; as such we now owe a stern duty to ourselves, our pos- 
 terity, our country and the world. Let us with manly courage and 
 dignity perform it ! 
 
 There is no formal or technical difficulty in indicting each and 
 every of those men for treason. Under the Constitution, treason 
 consists in " levying war against the United States," or " adhering 
 to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The rebels in or- 
 ganized association "levied war" against the United States; 
 they were thus legally and practically " their enemies •" all men- 
 tioned in the preceding class were the participants in the actual 
 " levying of war," or, what is tantamount, " adhered and gave aid 
 and comfort " to those who were, and all were thus alike guilty of 
 treason. It cannot be material ivhere such " aid and comfort " 
 were given ; wherever given by citizens of the United States, it 
 renders them guilty of the crime. The prosecution of the in- 
 dictment when found, and the carrying out the judgments in cases 
 of conviction, rests with the Government, and in their hands will 
 the people trustfully and cheerfully leave it. How many (if any) 
 and which of the convicted criminals shall receive the extreme 
 penalty must be decided by the President, with the aid of his offi- 
 cial advisers ; that this decision will be governed by the highest 
 considerations of duty, we unhesitatingly believe. From the ne- 
 cessity of the case, in many instances (such as the continued ab- 
 sence from the country of the party) the indictment, if found, 
 could never be tried ; in other instances reasons might exist for 
 not bringing on the trial ; in cases of actual trial and conviction 
 the good of the country might be promoted by suspension -or com- 
 mutation of sentence, or even by pardon ; all these matters rest 
 with the constituted authorities of the nation. But the voice of 
 mercy, justice, national safety, cries aloud for the indictment for 
 treason in each and all of the above cases. The moral influence 
 of that proceeding would be alike beneficial and powerful, even 
 if. not one single step further were taken ; the indictment for a 
 crime so awful would for ever hang in terrorem over the head of 
 the guilty criminal ; would render him harmless for future injury 
 to his country, and would keep him during life in a most healthful 
 dread of a repetition of his crime ; it would operate, too, as a ter- 
 rible and continuing warning to this generation and to many gene- 
 
21 
 
 rations to come. It is possible that the President may consider 
 that the ends of justice will be accomplished, and the safety of 
 the country insured without bringing to the scaffold any of these 
 great criminals ; if, on the contrary, he sees fit to make this 
 dreadful example of any one or more of them, the people will 
 cheerfully respond, Amen ! The vast majority of the humane, the 
 just and the enlightened of our citizens, at this moment regard the 
 infliction of the extreme penalty on one or more of the traitors as 
 imperiously demanded by the plainest dictates of humanity and 
 of duty. Time may alter their opinion. 
 
 It is to be remembered that in our country there is no power, 
 executive, legislative or judicial, to banish, as can be done in Eng- 
 land ; and no power to deprive a citizen of his privileges as such, 
 except after conviction for crime. It cannot be doubted that the 
 " good of the country " requires that it should be for ever freed from 
 the presence and the influence of the whole baud of traitors above- 
 mentioned, with perhaps an occasional exception. Objects so ob- 
 noxious and loathsome to the Republic cannot be tolerated here* 
 Indictments for treason willfrighten away those still among us, 
 and will for ever keep away those now in foreign lands, and thus 
 the practical benefits of lawful and effectual banishment will be 
 attained* 
 
 Second. Very few will doubt that the following persons (while 
 unpardoned) should not be permitted to hold any office of trust, 
 honor or profit under the Government of the United States :f 
 
 * An amusing, but by no means an alarming, spectacle is presented to us at this 
 moment in the union of two most opposite extremes, namely, the pure, original 
 Abolitionist of the one part, and the earnest sympathizer with the Rebellion and with 
 the leading traitors of the other part, in urgent and clamorous opposition to any pun- 
 ishment of the traitors. It is quite manifest that no union of such discordaut 
 materials can be for good ; and it is equally manifest that it must be wholly without 
 influence on the Government or on the people. 
 
 f Congress has not the power to declare by law this incapacity, nor has the President 
 that power, and no court can adjudge it till after a conviction for treason ; but in 
 this Government there is a power equally operative, namely, the " Voice of the 
 People " — the calm, deliberate, well- considered sentiment of the American people 
 alwaj-s has had, haa now, always should have, and always will have, the power of 
 law. Under the influence of this sentiment, the appointing power would confer 
 no office on unpardoned traitors ; and if unfortunately any such should be sent from 
 any State to either House of Congress, each House has the constitutional power to 
 refuse admission to or to expel such person ; and thus practically the same results 
 follow, as if they were produced by statute or by a judicial judgment. 
 
22 
 
 (a.) Every member of any State Convention, who voted in that 
 convention for the ordinance of secession.* 
 
 (b.) All Governors of the rebel States during the Eebellion. 
 
 (c.) The rebel Vice-President, and all who have been members 
 of the Senate or House of Representatives of the rebel Congress. 
 
 (d.) All who have been members of rebel State Legislatures. 
 
 (e.) All officers in the rebel army and navy above certain 
 grades (and it would not be unreasonable to say, above the grade 
 of colonel in the army and lieutenant in the navy), and all in 
 army or navy of any grade, who have been officers of the United 
 States Army or Navy.t 
 
 * Doubtless some of this class should be exempted from the general rule. The 
 courageous Holden, of North Carolina, signed the ordinance of secession, under a 
 physical and moral duress of unexampled severity ; and he has since heroically 
 exhibited his devotion to the Union. There may be others of other classes who, for 
 special reasons, should have the privilege of a similar exemption ; all such cases, 
 we all know, will be calmly and kindly considered by the President. 
 
 f It is a grave question whether Robert E. Lee ought not to be indicted for 
 treason. He violated his repeated oaths of allegiance and fidelity; he deserted 
 the flag of his country ; he carried with him, and doubtless communicated to the 
 enemy, avast fund of information derived from his official position as a member of the 
 military family of Lieutenant General Scott ; he falsified his assertion that he left his 
 country to fight for his Stale; he has, by his personal and family influence, aided the 
 Rebellion more effectually than any other single individual ; he witnessed, day by 
 day, for years, without sympathy, regret or protest, the murder by torture in the 
 horrible pi-isons in Richmond of thousands of the gallant heroes of our Army, when 
 a single word from him would have saved their lives and their indescribable 
 sufferings ; he is still an unrepentant impudent rebel, for, notwithstanding all the 
 kindness and magnanimity shown him in the terms of his surrender, he had the 
 hardihood immediately after to issue an order to his disbanded army, in which he 
 says, " I congratulate you that your conduct has endeared you to your countrymen^ 
 I bid you farewell with increased admiration of your constancy and devotion to 
 your country : you take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the conscious- 
 ness of duly faith/tdly performed." Instantly on the issuing of this order, the man 
 should have been arrested for violation of his parole in its spirit if not in its 
 letter; for if the sentiments put forth in that document were adopted and acted on 
 by those to whom it was addressed, they never could become in reality " Citizens 
 of the Republic." The unhallowed fires of hatred to the Union would perpetually 
 burn in their hearts, to burst out at any convenient time into treason. It is to be 
 hoped that the Government will take the case of this individual into serious con- 
 sideration, and decide whether he should not be subjected to a traitor's doom. 
 
 There are other rebel officers whom it would seem impossible to pardon : the 
 General (Forrest) who perpetrated the savage massacre of Fort Pillow ; the General 
 (Picket) who ordered twenty-one prisoners of war, soldiers of the First North Carolina 
 Loyal Regiment, to be placed in a row and shot; the wretch (Quantrell) who burned 
 Lawrence, and murdered indiscriminately her men, women and children. These 
 
23 
 
 (/.) Such private and influential individuals (uot embraced in 
 either of the above classes) as actively incited the Rebellion, and 
 were conspicuous in inaugurating and sustaining it ; a sample of 
 these is the infamous Ruffin who boasted that he put the match 
 to the first gun fired at Fort Sumter. On the same list stand 
 those editors who, from the beginning to the very last moment, 
 have contributed so much, so malignantly and with so much ex- 
 travagance of falsehood to fan and keep alive the flame of re- 
 bellion. The injury done by them is incalculable. * 
 
 To say nothing of other official positions, what friend of the 
 Union would not absolutely revolt at seeing either House of Con- 
 gress desecrated, disgraced and endangered by the presence of 
 
 and all other similar monsters, are guilty of the double crime of treason and of 
 actual murder. Their escape from the gallows would be a stigma on the humanity 
 of the age. 
 
 * D. J. Baldwin, an honored citizen of Texas, and one of the few loyalists in that 
 State, in a letter dated May 8, 1865, says: "Monstrous criminals as Davis and 
 Lee are, the rebel editors have been their most efficient workers. Take a specimen 
 or two of their efforts to keep up the spirit of their waning causa It was solemnly 
 asserted, and never denied by them, that Lee accepted four million dollars 
 in gold as a ransom for the city of Philadelphia, in consideration of which 
 he did not occupy and pillage the city. Another, that General Breckinridge occu- 
 pied the President's House at Washington, and Jubal Early the Capitol, with their 
 victorious troops; and the names of the soldiers were given who raised the rebel 
 fia? on the dome of the Capitol. These are two fair specimens of rebel military 
 news. In civil and social matters they characterized and published biographies of 
 our late President, as a bastard son of a mulatto woman by a drunken pauper ; rep- 
 resenting Northern society as disorganized ; women corrupted, and men sunk in 
 venality, lechery, and cowardice. And they are the men who have given the most 
 efficient aid and comfort to the Rebellion. They did this at the bidding of Davis 
 and his minions in rebellion and crime. They have given it hope and heart, which 
 but for them and their acts it could not have had." 
 
 Down even to the last moment has the utterance of those monstrous and malignant 
 falsehoods been continued by this class of men. The Chattanooga Rebel, of April 
 21, 1865, contains the following statement of the condition of things at Washing- 
 ton after the assassination of the President : " The last dispatches exhibit a most 
 shocking and horrible state of society. The President and prime minister killed 
 by assassins, and the new President and the Secretary of War murdered by a mob 
 which has obtained and holds possession of the Capital of the nation. Other cities 
 sacked, and a great popular revolution against the rulers impending. While their 
 armies are devastating our land, their own down-trodden populace, infuriated by 
 tyranny and driven to despair by want, burst the bonds of law, and a reign of 
 terror and of ruin is estahlished. That nation which prided itself upon its strength 
 and prosperity, finds three different Presidents occupying its Executive Chair within 
 the space of a single month, two of whom were murdered ; discord and anarchy 
 riding rampant and ruling the hour." 
 
24 
 
 any one of that traitor band, until at least lie had given the most 
 unequivocal evidence of genuine repentance, and had received 
 pardon from the President. 
 
 Confiscation of the property of the persons above-mentioned, 
 in both the first and second classes, is eminently due to justice : (1.) 
 justice to themselves ; (2.) justice to the country which, through 
 their instrumentality, is subjected to a debt of three thousand 
 millions of dollars, and to all its burdensome consequences. 
 
 Every individual embraced in this second class ought to be 
 profoundly grateful if he is exempted from the punishment uni- 
 versally awarded by human laws to Treason. The President 
 possesses the merciful prerogative of pardon ; his character and 
 his solemn declarations alike show, that in suitable cases this 
 power will be exercised with a pleasure proportioned to the pain, 
 which the infliction of punishment causes to every generous 
 heart. 
 
 It is earnestly hoped that none of the foregoing suggestions will 
 be considered as indicating the slightest feeling of revenge ; that 
 feeling is wholly unworthy the national dignity ; we have con- 
 quered, triumphantly conquered ; magnanimity, gentleness to the 
 vanquished, so far as consistent with imperative duty, will be our 
 crowning honor. These cases of disqualification and even of con- 
 fiscation are within the modifying power of the Presidential pre- 
 rogative, and that power will surely be exercised in every proper 
 case. i 
 
 Having thus briefly considered the treatment of the rebels 
 individually in reference to actual punishment, it remains to speak 
 of another branch of the subject not less important, namely, the 
 course to be adopted in regard to the interior, domestic or social 
 condition of that people ; in other words, in regard to " society" 
 there. The term " reconstruction of the States" is loosely and in- 
 accurately, though by no means infrequently used ; the term " re- 
 construction of society," in respect to those States, is a term of 
 practical import and significance ; and this matter is of necessity 
 involved in the general question of the treatment of the rebels as 
 individuals. The truth of the proposition that " society" there 
 must be " reconstructed" is self-evident. The annihilation of the 
 cherished institution of slavery involves radical "social changes," 
 the practical resumption by those people of their place in the 
 
25 
 
 Union, after the events of the last five years, requires for the 
 peace, comfort and harmony of us all, their abandonment of those 
 errors, prejudices and delusions of which mention has already been 
 made ; or at least the total cessation of all open manifestations of 
 them. Without this, " reconciliation," sincere and true, cannot be 
 hoped for. The habits of thought of that people, the manners, the 
 false estimate of themselves and the consequent false estimate of 
 the people of the non-slaveholding States, the tyranny of caste 
 as to the non-slaveholding white class among themselves, all of 
 which are the fruits of the existence there for so many generations 
 of the institution of slavery, have created a " state of society" in 
 those States, which has received its eternal death in the results of 
 the Rebellion. " Old things have passed away and all things 
 have become new," and to the " things" thus " become new," must 
 the slave aristocrat and his sympathizers now conform themselves 
 or go into voluntary or involuntary exile. When we speak of 
 " Southern society" as heretofore existing, we of necessity mean 
 only that composed of the slaveholder and his associates ; for, so- 
 cially as well as politically, no other " society" has ever been 
 known or recognized within the rebel States. The very first step 
 in this " reconstruction" is the yielding up for ever by them of their 
 arrogant fancy of " superiority," an idea acquiesced in, fostered, 
 encouraged (in sadness be it said) by many, alas ! too many, of 
 our people, those already mentioned as the John Randolph " dough- 
 faces" of the North.* After the stubborn facts of the last few 
 
 * Notwithstanding the overwhelming triumph of the Union Army, this delusion 
 of " superiority " and this contemptuous opinion of the " Yankee" are still ram- 
 pant, as we know by authentic letters from every conquered city in that region — 
 Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, — furnish abundant evidence. Rebel officers have 
 dared to ostentatiously wear the " rebel gray " in the streets of those cities, and 
 even in the Capital of the nation and in Northern cities. Witness, too, the super- 
 cilious impudence of Wade Hampton at the surrender of Johnston ; the brazen 
 hardihood of Davis in his proclamation of the 5th of April from Danville, in which 
 he says, that " no peace shall ever be made with the infamous invaders of our 
 territory ;" the impertinence of the rebel officers confined as prisoners at Fortress 
 Monroe, in adding at the end of their names, in a published letter on the assassina- 
 tion of the President, the odious letters " C. S. A." 
 
 A letter of April 26, 1865, from Washington, says: " Those who went hence 
 to Dixie, four years ago, are returning by scores, generally in good health, shab- 
 bily dressed, defiant, and far from being hopeless in the ultimate success of their 
 cause." 
 
 By a letter from Charleston of the 15th of April, we learn that: "The news 
 of Lee's surrender arrived here by the ' Oceanus.' In the short space of a few 
 
26 
 
 years, there is no longer a shadow of excuse for this arrogance. 
 The facts have demonstrated the existence in profuse abundance 
 among the heretofore despised and hated " Yankees" of the 
 highest qualities of man, moral and physical courage, liberality, 
 philanthropy, magnanimity, unsurpassed military skill, religious 
 faith and reliance. 
 
 The change from " society" constituted as society in the Rebel 
 States has been, to that in which no slave will be found ; in which 
 labor in its varied forms will be, as it should be, among civilized 
 people, honorable and not degrading ; in which thousands of immi- 
 grants from the non-slaveholding States and from foreign coun- 
 tries will form a part of the community ; in which the hereto- 
 fore despised multitudes of the subordinate white race will 
 certainly, though gradually, be restored to manhood ; and in which 
 the " slave" is to be a " free" man : this change is indeed as total 
 
 hours the pardon of all the late rebels was discussed and considered as a fact. 
 But it was received as a right merely. No gratitude was expressed toward the 
 great General who forgave the great wickedness of this people." 
 
 A letter from Richmond, dated some days after its surrender, states that : " To- 
 day there have been over a hundred rebel officers on the streets, most of them in 
 full uniform, to say nothing of privates. Their hatred and bitterness has not 
 abated one iota ; they would do all the injury they could, and it is to be hoped 
 that the order will soon be issued to register our enemies, and put an end to the 
 parading of Confederate uniforms as a matter of glory and honor !" 
 
 Those instances might be indefinitely multiplied. Nor has Northern " toady- 
 ism " ceased. The colored troops were not permitted to participate in the first 
 grand review at Richmond ; a colored sentinel was removed from the house of 
 General Lee's wife out of regard to her feelings, when her own husband had a 
 few days before made the strongest possible appeal to the rebel Congress and 
 people to send 300,000 slaves into the rebel army as soldiers ; ministers of the 
 gospel, belonging to the Christian Commission, paid an obsequious visit to the 
 same General (an act since emphatically repudiated by the Commission by the 
 dismissal of the offender) ; a Northern artist, about the same time, asked of the 
 same General the privilege of taking the photographs of himself and the half 
 dozen rebels that had formed his suite ; some of our officers, on Lee's arrival at 
 Richmond, as a paroled rebel prisoner, saluted him as they woidd have saluted 
 Lieutenant-General Grant; the officer, who received the surrender of one of the 
 large rebel armies, out of regard to the feelings of the commander of that arm}' 
 and of the rebels surrendering with him, prohibited the presence of representa- 
 tives of the loyal press on the occasion ; an officer, whose character is vouched 
 for by an eminent editor of this city, writes from Richmond on the 12th of April, 
 that : " An officer applied to one of the commanding Generals for quarters, and 
 told him he would like to take a certain house. ' Whose is it ?' ' It is that of an 
 avowed secessionist of the blackest kind — the most infernal villain in the Confed- 
 eracy.' ' Oh, certainly,' replied the General, ' you shall have it. If he's a rebel, 
 
27 
 
 and radical as it will be enduring. To this change the old " society" 
 must yield ; the " society" hereafter will be in all senses " free" 
 and not " slave." It may be said, that the heretofore ruling class 
 will not be reconciled to the new order of things : then, as Gen- 
 eral Wool once happily said, " they may go, but they must leave 
 to us their land." Again, all there must exhibit at least outward 
 respect to the Republic and its official representatives, civil and 
 military, who may be placed among them. The fatal heresy of 
 supreme allegiance to a State must be believed, if at all, in silence; 
 no expression of contempt or hatred of the United States should 
 be tolerated.* Above all, full and entire liberty of the press, as 
 it now exists in the non-slaveholding States, must exist there. 
 And what a field is here for enlightened and patriotic editors ! 
 How long, under the potent influence of a free press, would it be 
 before the bright light of truth would shed its beneficent radiance 
 
 of course you can have it for Government use. "What is liis name ? ' Brigadier- 
 General Winder, of the rehel army.' ' No-o-o-o !' said the General ; ' No, you 
 
 can't have his house. Why, he was a classmate of mine at West Point !' 
 
 If you wish a favor from headquarters here, put on a gray uniform, and you can 
 get what you like. The officers of the late rebel army swagger about the streets, 
 sneering at the Union officers and are being coddled by the women of the town. 
 There appear to be more rebels in the city than Union men." 
 
 Many similar acts have dishonored us since our triumph over the Rebellion ; 
 and almost universally those acts are received not as evidences of generosity 
 and kindness, but as matters of just due and of right. Every such exhibition 
 confirms the Southern rebel in his illusion of " superiority," and postpones the 
 day that must ultimately come when that illusion will vanish for ever, and the 
 coming of which, as before remarked, is an indispensable prerequisite to real 
 reconciliation. 
 
 * General Burnside set the proper example on this subject. Soon after he 
 assumed command at Newbern, he issued the following wise and timely order : 
 " General Orders, No. 28— Headquarters Department of North Carolina, New- 
 bern, April 28, 1862. — Whoever, after the issue of this order, shall, within the 
 limits to which the Union arms may extend in this Department, utter one word 
 against the Government of these United States will be at once arrested and 
 closely confined. It must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or im- 
 plied, will meet with a speedy punishment. The Military Governor of Newbern 
 is charged with the strict execution of this order within the bounds of his control. 
 " By command of Major-General Burnside. 
 
 " Lewis Richmond, Assistant Adjutant-General." 
 
 Had this example been faithfully followed in Washington, in Baltimore and 
 in every part of the rebel territory, as it became subjected to the power of the 
 Union, what numbers of valuable lives and what amount of pecuniary expendi- 
 ture would have been saved to us ! 
 
28 
 
 over those people and dispel the moral and mental darkness in 
 which, on one subject especially, they have never ceased to grope. 
 Again, in view of the great demoralization produced by the war 
 throughout that region, and of the multitudes of soldiers of the 
 late rebel army who will abound there, we may, for awhile, rea- 
 sonably apprehend numerous acts of law-less violence* insecurity 
 to the persons and property of those who have not sympathized in 
 the Rebellion ; interference in the free expression of loyal opinion ; 
 words and acts of disloyalty to the Government, and other acts 
 inconsistent with domestic quiet and security, and with the spread 
 and growth of true Union sentiment. All this must be effectively 
 and thoroughly repressed. It may be asserted that such a state of 
 things cannot be brought about, but this assertion implies that 
 common sense, as well as all regard to self-interest, have deserted 
 that people ; and besides contradicts our uniform experience of the 
 facility with which men accommodate themselves to inevitable ne- 
 cessity. This repression may be effected by civil power, or it may 
 require military force. As to the latter, it is highly probable, nay, 
 certain, that for a season its use will be indispensable in many 
 parts of the rebel States, and to this end common prudence re- 
 quires that a portion of our veteran army be retained there ; as 
 much additional force as may be requisite for this purpose exists 
 in abundance on the spot : a force which surely the rebels can have 
 no scruple to our using, inasmuch as its use for military pur- 
 poses was deliberately sanctioned and authorized and declared to 
 be right by the rebel Congress at a period when men do not lie, 
 namely, in its expiring agonies. This force, under the command 
 of the humane, brave and experienced officers of our noble army 
 
 * The following extract shows what may not unreasonably be apprehended for 
 the present in some portions of the rebel States. The Alexandria Journal, May 
 1, says : " Scouts from Fredericksburg report that that city and vicinity need the 
 protection of the Government against rebel officers and soldiers, disbanded from 
 Lee's army, who are now marauding upon the provisions and property of the 
 Inhabitants. Young men belonging to respectable families, who have been in the 
 army, swear they will not work for a living, and devote themselves to plunder. 
 Applications have been made to General Augur for a Provost-Marshal's establish- 
 ment at Fredericksburg, to protect the citizens in their peaceful pursuits. The same 
 thing will have to be done throughout Virginia. A letter from the borders of Loudon 
 County, dated on Friday last, informs us that constant incursions are being made 
 by these paroled rebel soldiers into Maryland, who drive off horses, cattle, etc., 
 and tear down and destroy every American flag displayed in that neighborhood." 
 
29 
 
 ■will be economical, safe and effective.* The dreadful state of 
 things brought about by the Rebellion and the deep-seated errors 
 and delusions from which it sprung, will, for a season, require 
 more or less of military government in all those States ; it will be 
 required till the most malignant of the slave aristocracy are dis- 
 posed of by punishment or voluntary exile, and till truth and 
 reason have time to operate. But earnest is the hope, that the 
 necessity for the use of this force may be temporary ; it must be 
 so, unless the dogged obstinacy or the inveterate, unreasoning hate 
 of those, who have been, and would be again if they dared, 
 traitors, demand its long continuance. 
 
 It cannot, judging from the ordinary motives of human action 
 and the plainest principles of human reasoning, as has been already 
 stated, be long before most of those men, and certainly the vast 
 multitudes of the down-trodden whites of the South, will ap- 
 preciate the benignity, the blessedness, the priceless value of the 
 Constitution and the Union ; they will yet (and soon, we hope,) 
 love them as their Revolutionary fathers did. To effect these ben- 
 eficent results, the people of the North, while extending cordially 
 the hand of brotherhood to the people of the South, must carefully 
 maintain their own self-respect and mark their sense of the great- 
 ness of the crime that has been committed, by refusing to notorious, 
 blatant and unrepentant rebels the courtesies of social life, by 
 sternly prohibiting among us any exhibition, by dress,t word or 
 
 * On this subject we have the emphatic testimony of the rebel commander-in- 
 chief. General Lee, in his letter of February 15, 1865, to the rebel Congress, 
 says : " The negroes under proper circumstances will, in my opinion, make effi- 
 cient soldiers. Under good officers and good instruction, I do not see why they 
 should not become soldiers. They possess all the physical qualifications, and 
 their habits of obedience constitute a good foundation for discipline. They fur- 
 nish a more promising material than many armies of which we read in history, 
 which owe their efficiency to discipline alone." 
 
 If they would make good soldiers in the cause of " slavery," it needs no reason- 
 ing to prove that they would make good soldiers in the cause of " freedom." 
 
 f This matter, it seems by the following order, is fully understood by General 
 Stoneman, and his example should immediately be followed everywhere: 
 
 "Headquarters District of East Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn., May 6, 1865. — Gen- 
 eral Orders No. 31 — Hereafter, any person found within the limits of this command 
 wearing or having about his person the badges, insignia, or uniform of an officer of 
 the late Confederate armies, will be considered as guilty of an act of hostility toward 
 the United States Government, and will subject himself to arrest and imprisonment. 
 By command of Major-General Stoneman. G. M. Bascom, Major and A. A. G. 
 —Official, G. M. Bascom, A. A. G." 
 
30 
 
 act, of Southern arrogance and of rebel sympathy, and by ceasing 
 for ever, in our treatment of the fossil remains of the slave 
 aristocracy, from that, which, for want of more elegant expressions, 
 is designated by the terms " toadyism " and " flunkeyism," and 
 which has for half a century been too common among us. 
 
 We are not to overlook the vast aid, in this matter of the " re- 
 construction of society," which will be given by that small band of 
 devoted men who have' steadily adhered to the Union, nor by that 
 multitude who have been iimoillinghj led or forced into the Re- 
 bellion ; nor, again, by that large number of owners of slaves who> 
 though of the slaveholding class, did not belong to the insolent, 
 overbearing, and arrogant " slave aristocracy," and could not be 
 included in that almost demoniacal class, commonly known by the 
 name of " fire eaters." This " reconstruction " may require time ; 
 but if wisdom, prudence, firmness, kindness, are combined in the 
 execution of the work, we may well believe that, in less than half 
 the time it has required to crush the Rebellion, the task will have 
 been so far performed as to give us the perfect assurance of its 
 entire accomplishment, within an additional period of no greater 
 length. 
 
 Some of the slave aristocracy will prefer exile to a state of things 
 in which the poor white is to be restored to a state of manhood, 
 and the slave to freedom ; and they will depart without regret or 
 sympathy. Many years must elapse before the immense material 
 injury inflicted on those States by the madness of the Rebellion can 
 be repaired, and some time perhaps before the true mode of 
 adapting the emancipated slave to his new condition will 
 be discovered and applied ; but when all this is done, and we 
 cannot doubt it will be at no distant period, those States will enter 
 on a new career of prosperity and of honor, which, while it invigo- 
 rates and elevates them as States, will immensely add to the strength, 
 power, and durability of the Union. "We shall then be, in every 
 sense, social as well as political, a united people. 
 
 In treating of the " reconstruction of society," I repeat, for it 
 cannot be too often repeated, that what has constituted " society " 
 there has embraced numerically but an insignificant minority of 
 the people ; that many of the members of the old slave aristocracy 
 will never consent to live under the new system, and will volun- 
 tarily expatriate themselves, leaving their places to be supplied by 
 
31 
 
 others ; that these latter together with those of the old " society " 
 who are willing to conform to the " new," will thereafter form the 
 " society ;" that, instead of the frightful bugbear of depopulation, 
 presented to us in such vivid colors of horror by the rebel aristoc- 
 racy and their sympathizers, the result will at the worst be the 
 departure of a, few, while the millions will be left, and the place of 
 these few be supplied by men more worthy the privileges and the 
 name of "American citizen." A careful estimate of the numbers cm- 
 braced in all the classes, which have been mentioned in this paper, 
 as being required by every dictate of justice and of true mercy to 
 pay the penalty to a greater or less extent of their treason, will 
 present but a few hundreds out of their five millions of white in- 
 habitants. It is worse than idle then to predicate barbarity, 
 cruelty, inhumanity, of the punishment those men may receive from 
 a country whose life they deliberately and persistently sought to 
 destroy, and hundreds of thousands of whose citizens have, by their 
 act, been consigned to untimely graves. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE MODE OF RESTORATION" OP THE REBEL STATES TO 
 THE UNION. 
 
 It has already been remarked that, the term li reconstruction," 
 as applied to the rebel States, though often used, is used very in- 
 accurately, not to say injuriously. It implies ex vi termini, the 
 previous destruction of that which is to be re-constructed. In the 
 case before us it implies that those States, as States of tJoe Union, 
 arc destroyed ; that they do not now exist as such ; consequently, 
 that the ordinances of secession were valid ; and again conse- 
 quently, that a State has the potoer to withdraw from the Union. 
 It admits the power and the right of secession. 
 
 This is an error as palpable as it is dangerous, and should not 
 for a moment be sanctioned even by inference or implication. No. 
 Those States, as States, have never for an hour in a constitutional 
 and legal sense been out of the Union ; they have ever been and 
 now are substantive and component parts of it as truly as Massa- 
 chusetts or Ohio. Very much has been written on the subject of 
 
32 
 
 the rigid of a State to secede from the Union, so much indeed, 
 that the intellectual argument may well be said to be exhausted. 
 It may with equal truth be said that further argument is wholly 
 useless, inasmuch as the question is for ever settled, and a judgment 
 alike solemn, unappealable and irresistible has been pronounced 
 by the only sovereign power — the people. 
 
 If the mighty war, through which we have just passed and in 
 which we have so entirely and gloriously triumphed, has estab- 
 lished any doctrine or principle whatever, it is " that no State has 
 the right or power to, or by any possibility can, withdraw from 
 the Union, except by an amendment to the Constitution permitting 
 it." The fatal heresy on this subject prevailing so extensively in 
 the rebel States was, as has been already mentioned, one of the 
 instrumentalities by which the leading conspirators were enabled 
 to inaugurate the Rebellion ; it was a dircfully active agent in 
 this fratricidal work : to impress on it the seal of everlasting con- 
 demnation and to sweep it, as an operative principle, for ever from 
 existence, was one of the objects as it is one of the blessed results 
 of the war. 
 
 This judgment of condemnation, obtained by more than four 
 years of deadly conflict and at such an amazing expenditure of 
 life and of treasure, stands, and will ever stand, a proud monument 
 of the intelligent understanding by the American people of the 
 true nature of their Union, of their earnest devotion to it, and of 
 their determination that it shall be perpetual. Never again can 
 this wicked delusion have any practical influence or perceptible 
 existence in this country or in any part of it ; it has lived its day, 
 it has performed its unhallowed work of attempting the national 
 death, and has in the attempt met its own • it now lies buried in a 
 grave of infamy without the hope or possibility of resurrection. 
 If, after all tills, any man in America is found still to cling to that 
 delusion, and to write or to speak in its advocacy, his bitterest enemy 
 could wish him no worse punishment than he will receive in the 
 pity, the contempt and disgust that will await him on every 
 side. 
 
 In determining then the mode of restoration of those States the 
 very starting point, the first step in the process, is the postulate, 
 that, one and all, they have never ceased, since their admission 
 into the Union, to be, and that they now arc members of it, States 
 
33 
 
 within it* With this rule as the guide, and with a faithful ad- 
 herence to it, all difficulties in the way of restoration vanish. 
 
 It may be asked what is meant by " restoration," and what is 
 the difference between that aud " reconstruction." The meaning 
 of the latter has already been stated ; the necessity for the use 
 of the former term arises from the fact that through the unconsti- 
 tutional, illegal and void acts of citizens of those States, those 
 States and the people thereof have for a period practically omit- 
 ted to exercise their rights, enjoy their privileges and perform their 
 duties in the Union ; though in the family, they have been refrac- 
 tory, rebellious and disobedient members ; their rebellion being 
 at an end and they desiring to be again in the enjoyment of their 
 wonted rights and privileges, and in the performance of their du- 
 ties as members of the family (from which they have been for a 
 season separated in fact but not in law), the question is how 
 that " restoration " is to be effected. This brief " statement of the 
 case " explains clearly the meaning of the term " restoration," 
 and shows the propriety of its use. 
 
 1. A necessary consequence of the proposition above stated 
 (viz., that no State has been, or is now, out of the Union) is, that 
 all acts of any bodies of men in those States by whatever name 
 called, conventions, legislatures, congress, designed or intended 
 and performed for the purpose of withdrawing that State from the 
 
 * How well is this truth stated in a letter from General Sherman dated at Sa- 
 vannah, January 8, 1865, to a citizen of Georgia. He says: "Georgia is not out 
 of the Union, and therefore the talk of ' reconstruction ' appears to me inap- 
 propriate. Some of the people have been and still are in a state of revolt ; and as 
 long as they remain armed and organized, the United States must pursue them 
 with armies, and deal with them according to military law. But as soon as they 
 break up their armed organizations and return to their homes, I take it they will 
 be dealt with by the civil courts. Some of the rebels in Georgia, in my judgment^ 
 deserve death, because they have committed murder, and other crimes, which are 
 punished with death by all civilized governments on earth. You may rest assured 
 that the Union will be preserved, cost what it may. And if you are sensible men 
 you will conform to this order of things or else migrate to some other country. 
 There is no other alternative open to the people of Georgia. 
 
 " My opinion is that no negotiations are necessary, nor commissioners, nor con- 
 ventions, nor any thing of the kind. Whenever the people of Georgia quit rebelling 
 against their Government then the State of Georgia will have resumed her func- 
 tions in the Union." It seems to me that it is time for the people of Georgia to act 
 for themselves, and return, in time, to their duty to the Government of their 
 fathers." 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 Union, and all acts consequent on or produced by such attempted 
 withdrawal or designed to aid in its practical carrying out, are 
 each and every of them merely void : * so as to all similar acts of 
 any pretended executive or judicial authority, the creature of the 
 Rebellion. This proposition would seem self-evident ; the thing 
 
 * This has been emphatically and solemnly declared in a recent Executive paper 
 of President Johnson, in which he pronounces " that all acts and proceedings of 
 the political, military and civil organizations which have been in a state of insur- 
 rection and rebellion within the State of Virginia against the authority and laws 
 of the United States, and of which. Jefferson Davis, John Letcher and William 
 Smith were late the respective chiefs, are declared null and void. 
 
 "All persons who shall exercise, claim, pretend or attempt to exercise any political, 
 military or civil power, authority, jurisdiction or right, by, through or under Jef- 
 ferson Davis, late of the city of Richmond, and his confidants, or under John 
 Letcher or William Smith, and their confidants, or under any pretended political, 
 military or civil commission or authority issued by them or of them, since the 17th, 
 day of April, 1861, shall be deemed and taken as in rebellion against the United 
 States, and shall be dealt with accoi'dingly. 
 
 " The Secretaries of State, War, Treasury, Navy, and Interior, and Postmaster- 
 General, are ordered to proceed to put in force all laws of the United States per- 
 taining to their several departments, and the District Judge of said district to 
 proceed to hold courts within said States, in accordance with the provisions of the 
 acts of Congress. The Attorney-General will instruct the proper officers to libel and 
 bring to judgment, confiscation and sale property subject to confiscation, and en- 
 force the administration of justice within said State, in all matters civil and 
 criminal within the cognizance of the Federal courts ; to carry into effect the 
 guaranty of the Federal Constitution of a republican form of State Government, 
 and afford the advantage and security of domestic laws, as well as to complete the 
 re-establishment of the authority of the laws of the United States, and the full 
 and complete restoration of peace within the limits aforesaid. Francis H. Pier- 
 pont, Governor of the State of Virginia, will be aided by the Federal Government 
 so far as may be necessary in the lawful measures which he may take for the ex- 
 tension and administration of the State Government throughout the geographical 
 limits of said State." 
 
 The case is also very strongly and truly put by General Wilson in the follow- 
 ing letter to the rebel Governor Brown : " Headquarters Cavalry Corps, M. D. M., 
 Macon, Ga., May 9, 18G5, 2.30 p. m. Sir — In pursuance of instructions received 
 this day from Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, I have the honor to inform 
 you that your telegram of the 7th inst., forwarded by my sanction, has been laid 
 before the President of the United States, and the following are his reply and 
 orders : 
 
 " 1. That the collapse in the currency and the great destitution of provisions 
 among the people of Georgia, mentioned in your telegram, have been caused by 
 treason, insurrection and rebellion against the laws of the United States, incited 
 and carried on for the last four years by you and your confederate rebels and 
 traitors, who alone are responsible for all the waste, destitution and want now 
 existing in that State. 
 
 " 2. What you call ' the result which the fortunes of war have imposed upon the 
 
35 
 
 created must derive its vitality and power from its creator ; and 
 where the latter is wholly and absolutely baseless, is without a 
 particle of the spirit of life, and whose death in a constitutional 
 and legal sense was precisely contemporaneous with its very ap- 
 pearance, in such a case, the attempted or pretended creations 
 from such an origin all partake of its character ; all fall with it ; 
 all are equally inoperative, void and dead ab origine. Here the 
 parent, the source of every thing subsequent, was the ordinance of 
 secession ; on this was based the new State, the new constitution, 
 congress, legislatures, every thing ; not a moment of real vital ex- 
 
 people of Georgia,' and all the loss and woe they have suffered, are charged upon 
 you and your confederate rebels, who have usurped the authority of the State and 
 assumed to act as its Governor and Legislature, made acts treasonable to the 
 United States, and by means of that usurped authority provoked the war to 
 extremity, until compelled by superior force to lay down their arms and accept the 
 result which ' the fortunes of war ' have imposed upon the people of Georgia, as 
 the just penalty of the crimes of treason and rebellion. 
 
 '* That the restoration of peace and order cannot be intrusted to rebels and trai- 
 tors who destroyed the peace and trampled down the order that had existed more 
 than half a century in Georgia, a great and prosperous State. The persons who 
 incited the war and carried it on at so great a sacrifice to the people of Georgia, 
 and of all the United States, will not be allowed to assemble, at the call of their 
 accomplice, to act again as a Legislature of the State, and again usurp its authori- 
 ties and franchises. Men whose crimes spilled so much blood of their fellow- 
 citizens, and pressed so much woe upon the people, destroyed the finances, cur- 
 rency and credit of the State, and reduced the poor to destitution, will not be 
 allowed to usurp legislative power that might be intended to set on foot fresh acts 
 of treason and rebellion. In calling them together without permission of the 
 President, you have perpetrated a fresh crime, that will be dealt with accordingly. 
 I am further directed to inform you, that the President of the United States will, 
 without delay, exert all the lawful powers of his office to relieve the people of 
 Georgia from destitution, by delivering them from the bondage of military tyranny 
 which avowed rebels and traitors have long imposed alike upon poor and rich. 
 
 " The President hopes that by restoring peace and order, giving security to life, 
 liberty and property, by encouraging trade, arts, manufactures, and every species 
 of industry, to recover the financial credit of the State, and develop its great 
 resources, the people will again soon be able to rejoice under the Constitution and 
 laws of the United States, and of their own State, in the prosperity and happiness 
 they once had. To all good people who return to their allegiance, liberality will 
 be exercised. 
 
 " If any person shall presume to answer or acknowledge the call mentioned in 
 your telegram to the President, I am directed to cause his immediate arrest and 
 imprisonment, and hold him subject to the orders of the War Department. 
 
 " I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant, 
 " Joseph E. Brow.v, Milledgeville, Ga. J . H. Wilson, Brevet Major-General." 
 
36 
 
 istence have any of them had, because the ordinance was wholly 
 and absolutely null and void for the reasons already stated. 
 
 It is of the last importance to adhere throughout to the propo- 
 sition, that no rebel State has been, or is now, out of the Union, 
 and to accept the legitimate practical results of that proposition, 
 whatever they may be. Nor need any apprehension be entertained 
 as to those practical results, if the views above stated, as to the 
 " reconstruction of society," and the " treatment of the rebels in- 
 dividually," are adopted and truly carried out. Let this be done, 
 (and, as has already been shown, it can be done) and not many 
 months, surely not a long period will elapse before that region 
 will be cleared of the leading spirits of the Rebellion by their 
 punishment or flight, or if they remain, by their quiet and grateful 
 submission to the Constitution and laws of their country ; within 
 a period not longer, the prejudices, asperities and delusions of 
 others will disappear before the resistless light of Truth, and the 
 great bulk of the people will embrace with earnest joy the bless- 
 ings of the mild and paternal Government of their country in ex- 
 change for the horrors of tyranny, despotism and war, which they 
 have so bitterly experienced during the last four years. Then, 
 whether under existing or new State constitutions and laws, that 
 people will become, more emphatically than they have ever yet 
 been, worthy citizens of the Republic and safe depositories of the 
 power reposed in them by the fundamental principles of this Gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 But not till then will there be peace, quiet, real and true rec- 
 onciliation and harmony, whatever course may be adopted by the 
 executive or legislative authorities of the Union. 
 
 It may be asked what is to be the condition of those States 
 and the inhabitants thereof till this state of things is reached. The 
 answer is, that they must, ex necessitate rei, remain in their present 
 anomalous condition — but it is to be remembered that the duration 
 of this condition longer or shorter depends entirely on themselves. 
 They can be relieved from it, if they so elect, immediately.* The 
 
 * The following order for the military re-districting of the State of Virginia 
 shows the modus operandi during this interval : " First. — The sub-district of the 
 Roanoke, Blackwater and Appomattox, as hereinafter designated, will constitute 
 the District of the Nottaway, under command of Major-General George L. Hartsuff, 
 headquarters at Petersburg. Second. — The counties of Accomac, Northampton, For- 
 
37 
 
 constitution and laws of oacli rebel State, as tney pre-existed the 
 ordinance of secession, are at this moment the constitution and 
 laws of that State. This may to some seem a startling, nay, 
 an inadmissible proposition ; but when examined it will be found 
 strictly true and practically safe and beneficent. It must con- 
 stantly be borne in mind, that those State constitutions and laws 
 are by the very fundamental principles of our Union subordinate 
 to the Constitution of the United States and to all legislative and 
 Executive acts conformable to the Constitution. The Constitution 
 
 tress Monroe and the sub-district of the Peninsula, as hereinafter designated, will 
 constitute the District of Fortress Monroe, under command of Brevet Major-General 
 Nelson A. Miles, headquarters at Fortress Monroe. Third. — The counties of Prin- 
 cess Anne, Norfolk, Nansemond, Southampton and Isle of Wight, will constitute 
 the District of Eastern Virginia, under command ofBrigadier-Genei-al G. H. Gordon, 
 headquarters at Norfolk. Fourth. — The counties of Nelson, Amherst, Bedford, 
 Campbell, Appomattox, Pittsylvania, Henry, Patrick and Franklin will consti- 
 tute the District of Lynchburg, under command of Brevet Brigadier-General J. 
 Irwin Gregg. Fifth. — The county of Henrico will constitute a District, under 
 command of Brigadier General M. R. Patrick. Sixth. — The counties of Mathews, 
 Gloucester, New Kent, King William, Charles City, York, Warwick, and Elizabeth 
 City, excepting Fortress Monroe, will constitute the Sub-district of the Peninsula, 
 under command of Brevet Brigadier-General B. C. Ludlow. Seventh. — The counties 
 of Middlesex, King and Queen, Essex, Caroline, Spottsylvania and Orange, will 
 constitute the Sub-district of the Rappahannock, under command of Colonel E. V. 
 Sumner, First New York Mounted Rifles. Eighth. — The counties of Hanover, 
 Louisa, Goochland, Fluvanna, Albemarle and Greene, will constitute the Sub-dis- 
 trict of the South Anna, under command of Brevet Brigadier-General A. C. Yorris. 
 Ninth. — The counties of Surrey, Sussex, Greenville, Brunswick, Dinwiddie and 
 Prince George, will constitute the Sub-district of the Blackwater, under command 
 of Brevet Brigadier-General McKibbin. Tenth. — The counties of Mccklenbur^, 
 Lunenburg, Nottoway, Prince Edward, Charlotte and Halifax, will constitute the 
 Sub-district of the Roanoke, under command of Brevet Major-General Ferrero. 
 Eleventh. — The counties of Chesterfield, Amelia, Powhatan, Cumberland and Buck- 
 ingham, will constitute the Sub-district of the Appomattox, under command of 
 Brevet Brigadier-General C. W. Smith. Commanders of districts and such of the 
 sub-districts as are not included in any of the districts above described, will report 
 direct to these headquarters, and will constitute separate brigades for the purpose of 
 enabling the commanding officers to convene general courts-martial. The com- 
 manders of districts and sub-districts are made superintendents of Negro affairs 
 within their respective limits." To the same import is the following extract from 
 the New Orleans Delta, of May 25, 1865 : " General Sheridan has assumed command 
 of the Military Division of the Southwest, embracing the country west of the 
 Mississippi and south of the Arkansas Rivers. General Canby has divided the 
 Department of the Gulf into the following four divisions — Louisiana, headquarters 
 New Orleans ; Mississippi, headquarters Jackson ; Alabama, headquarters Mont- 
 gomery ; Florida, headquarters Tallahassee. The citizens of Louisiana appear 
 much gratified by the programme of the new military authorities." 
 
38 
 
 and those constitutional acts are the " supreme law of the laud." 
 Consequently, taking for example the State of South Carolina, at 
 this very moment she is in a state of Union, with her constitution 
 and laws as they existed on the 20th of December, 1860, with 
 such modifications, changes, and variations as are created by any 
 acts of the Executive or legislative power of the United States 
 conformable to the Constitution of the United States and now in 
 force. Thus, the provisions of the constitution, laws and customs 
 of South Carolina as to slavery are wholly done away by the Eman- 
 cipation Proclamations of September, 1862, and January, 1S63, if 
 those proclamations were a constitutional exercise of power by 
 the President ; in which case not a slave now exists in that State. 
 It is not proposed here to discuss the constitutional and legal 
 validity of those magnificent State papers, nor whether they pro- 
 duced the effect desired and intended by the President. It is 
 well known that he considered them clearly within his constitu- 
 tional power, and that in his view they instantaneously struck 
 the shackles from every slave in the rebel States.* Those proc- 
 lamations are mentioned simply by way of illustration ; the 
 Confiscation Acts of Congress might be referred to for the same 
 purpose, but it is deemed unnecessary at this time. 
 
 It is sufficient to say that, if those Executive and legislative acts 
 are authorized by the Constitution, they are at this moment the 
 law in South Carolina. In our wonderful and beautiful though 
 complicated system, not fully understood even among ourselves, 
 and quite unintelligible to most foreigners, it is as vitally im- 
 portant to the people to preserve unimpaired legitimate State rights 
 as it is to protect and preserve inviolate the rights and powers of 
 the national Government. Occasionally a foreigner has perfectly 
 
 * The question of the effect of these proclamations is at this moment of great 
 practical importance, and will continue to be so till the Constitutional Amendment 
 as to slavery is adopted by twenty-seven States. That this most desirable event 
 will occur in the course of the next year can hardly be doubted ; but as it may be 
 longer delayed, it is not deemed out of place to add to this paper, by way of ap- 
 pendix, the writer's argument in favor of the constitutional validity of the proc- 
 lamation of September, 18G2. An additional reason for doing so is that that argument 
 received the cordial approbation of President Lincoln, and as every thing from his 
 pen since his martyrdom is an object of interest to his fellow citizens, a copy of an 
 autograph letter received from him is also given. That argument is reprinted 
 verbatim as read by President Lincoln, in order that it may be seen exactly of what 
 he spoke. 
 
39 
 
 clear and just conceptions on this subject, and when he adds to 
 that accurate knowledge of our political system an enthusiastic 
 admiration and a heartfelt love of our institutions, his views are 
 entitled to the highest respect and consideration, and indeed should 
 have the weight of authority. Of this class is the eminent and 
 excellent Du Gasparin. His words at this juncture cannot be too 
 deeply pondered, nor his warnings too carefully listened to by the 
 American citizen. In his great work, " America before Europe, "* 
 he says : " The independence of the States must be protected with 
 jealous care." " I counsel no measure that would not be strictly 
 constitutional. I should have grossly contradicted myself if 
 after having advised Americans to preserve their institutions and 
 retain them at the end of the war as they were at its beginning, 
 I had urged them to violate them in their fundamental principle. 
 The liberty of the States is no less important to be maintained 
 than the sovereignty of the nation. A rebellion by the South 
 against the Constitution should not be combated by a similar 
 rebellion by the North. The two original features of the Ameri- 
 can organization should neither perish in the furnace of civil war. 
 It will be glorious to see the United States come out of it with 
 their local independence and their national unity alike un- 
 impaired." 
 
 Whatever momentary inconveniences may be suffered from a 
 rigid adherence to the fundamental doctrines (1.) that " no State 
 can secede from the Union, except by an amendment of the Con- 
 stitution," (2.) that the rights of the States as States must be 
 preserved inviolate ; whatever those inconveniences may be, a just 
 regard to the preservation of the Union and of the Constitution 
 requires, that those doctrines be steadily kept in view, and on 
 no pretence, in any degree, or in any manner, departed from. The 
 present condition of the rebel States is simply this : The people 
 of those States were in rebellion against the Government, and 
 sought to destroy the Union by the overthrow of the Constitu- 
 tion ; while in this condition, the performance of their duties and 
 the fulfillment of their obligations as members of the Union, were 
 by their own act prevented, and in a constitutional sense, their 
 State functions in that regard (that is as members of the Union) 
 
 * " America before Europe," pp. 362, 367, 368. His other work, " The Upris- 
 ing of a Great People," contains similar warnings. 
 
40 
 
 were in a condition of suspension. The Rebellion is now ended 
 in the only mode in which it could be ended, namely, by the 
 total destruction of its military power ; and those States never 
 having been in a constitutional and legal sense out of the Union, 
 but their duties, obligations and privileges having been merely in 
 a condition of practical suspense for a season, and that suspension 
 being now terminated, they ipso facto, return to the fulfillment of 
 those duties and obligations, and to the enjoyment of those privi- 
 leges. Without inaccuracy of language and without the danger 
 of the implication of erroneous ideas, " restoration " to the Union, 
 in a practical sense, may well be predicated of their present 
 condition. The results which follow from this view of the matter 
 are simple, safe and intelligible. 
 
 Bear constantly in mind the fact, that the Constitution of the 
 United States, and all constitutional acts of Congress and of the 
 Executive now in force, are the supreme law in each of those 
 States — and the further essential and indisputable fact, that there 
 is now, and there need never cease to be, in each of those States 
 abundant national military power to insure implicit obedience to 
 that Constitution and those acts.* And where then is the diffi- 
 culty in tin's mode of " restoration ?" All the civil officers of the 
 nation can safely perform their functions ; her judicial tribunals 
 can exercise their powers and carry into execution their decrees ; 
 taxes, external and internal, can be assessed and collected, and 
 every national duty enforced. It has been demonstrated in a 
 former part of this paper, that the requisite military power abun- 
 dantly exists. Is it said that any State (byway of example again, 
 South Carolina) will not perform its duty to itself by resuming 
 its internal State functions, either under its existing or under a 
 new constitution ; will not elect a governor or legislature, nor 
 appoint judicial and other civil officers, nor send members to 
 either branch of the national Congress ? This, should it be the 
 
 * General Thomas, in a letter of the 22d of May, 1S65, to the Legislature of 
 Tennessee, has well stated what will be clone by him and by our Generals in every 
 rebel State. lie says : " I am prepared to assist the civil authorities in every 
 part of the State, botli by securing- the officers from personal violence when in the 
 execution of their office, in holding courts, etc., and assisting them to capture and 
 bring to trial all persons who offer armed hostility to the State or national 
 Government, and will so assist the civil authorities of the State as long as the 
 national Government affords me the means of doing so." 
 
41 
 
 fact, would lie a truly anarchial state of things ; and at least, 
 would indicate on the part of the people of that State, an utter 
 disregard of all that the people of other States deem essential to 
 their comfort, safety and well being. Yet of what imaginable 
 consequence would it be to the United States, so long as that 
 State (South Carolina) pays its taxes to the General Government, 
 interferes in no manner with the collection of the national duties 
 on imports at its seaports, and offers no obstruction to the due 
 and regular execution of the national laws through the national 
 judicial tribunals ; in other words, so long as the Constitution 
 and laws of the United States are fully operative ? It has already 
 been shown that the nation has now, and never will cease to 
 have, the full "and effective means of enforcing obedience to the 
 national Constitution and laws in any State that has been in 
 rebellion ; and if obedience is not rendered voluntarily it can 
 and will be compelled. Again, if that State refuses or neglects 
 to appoint Senators or elect Representatives to the national Con- 
 gress, no harm is done to the nation; the State absurdly and 
 injuriously to itself throws away its privileges, but in so doing it in- 
 flicts no wound, not the slightest, on the nation ; the national Senate 
 and House are convened and organized as usual, and pass laws ope- 
 rative and binding alike on the people of every State, that State 
 which chooses to bo unrepresented and that which has its full 
 delegation in each House. Suppose that the State of New York, 
 or of Illinois, in a fit of senseless passion, neglected or refused to 
 be represented in Congress, the wheels of the national Govern- 
 ment would not thereby be arrested or even clos-o-ed for a moment 
 in their workings ; those States would render a voluntary or a 
 compulsory obedience to the laws of the nation, and the loss by 
 their wayward conduct would be to them as States and not to the 
 nation. The remarks, applied to South Carolina by way of illus- 
 tration, of course, equally apply to every State that has been in 
 rebellion ; and it is thus seen that all that concerns the United 
 States, the nation, is, that obedience be rendered to her Constitution 
 and laws, and that if any State chooses to be in a domestic point 
 of view, in a condition of anarchy, and sees fit to deprive itself of 
 its rightful power and influence in the national councils, the detri- 
 ment under our wise and beautifully devised system is confined to 
 that State, is local and territorial, and in no degree, not even the 
 
42 
 
 least, extends to the nation, or in any manner affects its power or 
 prosperity, or retards its resistless onward-progress. But will 
 South Carolina, will any State thus stultify itself? Will she 
 deprive herself of the countless blessings of a well-ordered State 
 Government ; introduce domestic anarchy and discord ; cast away 
 her right of representation in the Legislature of the country ? 
 Why should she ? No motive can be imagined for a course so 
 suicidal and of such unmixed absurdity and folly ; and it may 
 well be believed that the world will never be called on to witness 
 a spectacle so miserable and so revolting. 
 
 It is manifest from # the foregoing consideration that the great 
 duty of the Government of the Union under existing circumstances 
 is, first : To adopt sure and unfailing measures to obtain obedi- 
 ence in every State and in every section of every State to the 
 national Constitution and laws ; to permit no violations of duty 
 and no departures from loyalty to the Union by any man or any 
 set of men ; to tolerate nowhere any thing calculated or intended 
 to preserve or foster the infernal spirit that led to the Rebellion 
 — but on the contrary to adopt and pursue practically all such 
 measures as will extirpate that spirit for ever. As has already been 
 suggested, to accomplish these necessary and indispensable ends 
 military force may, for a season (longer or shorter, according to 
 the will of that people), be absolutely requisite ; and, as has also 
 been stated, this great nation has now, and always can have that 
 force to the utmost required extent. 
 
 A second and an equally solemn and imperative duty of the 
 national Government, is to preserve inviolate the rights guaran- 
 teed to the States by the national Constitution. Among those 
 rights, confessedly are : (1.) The right to have such constitu- 
 tion and such laws for their interior and domestic government as 
 they see fit, subject only to the condition that the " form of gov- 
 ernment " shall, in the lano-uac-e of the national Constitution be 
 " republican." 
 
 (2.) The right to prescribe the qualifications of electors, that is, 
 who shall and who shall not possess the elective franchise. It is 
 very clear that without an amendment of the national Constitu- 
 tion, the national Government cannot interfere in this matter. 
 But practically speaking, that Government has, under the Consti- 
 tution, the full power to protect itself against any improper or 
 
43 
 
 injurious exercise of that power by the people of a State, for, first, 
 each House is " the judge " of the qualifications of its own mem- 
 bers, and thus can refuse admission to all deemed unsuitable or 
 unworthy ; and second, -each House has the power of expulsion of 
 members. Thus, if the Legislature or the electoral body in any 
 State were so composed as to send to the Senate or the House of 
 Representatives a man dangerous to the Union, he could be refused 
 a seat or could be deprived of it, if admitted. This is a perfect 
 practical safeguard so far as the nation is concerned. 
 
 It is very clear from the foregoing considerations, that there is 
 no lawful or constitutional mode in which the question of " negro 
 suffrage " can be controlled or decided by the national Govern- 
 ment ; the sooner this fact is understood and appreciated, and 
 acted on by all, the sooner will there be a real and effective 
 pacification and harmony throughout the land. Some regard the 
 extension of the elective franchise to the black equally with the 
 white as vitally essential to the peace and well-being of the 
 country. If this view is conceded to be correct, it is hoped that 
 none entertaining it would desire to attain their ends at the cost 
 of a violation of the Constitution. But if there are such, they 
 form but an inconsiderable class of impracticable enthusiasts. 
 The people resolve, and will take care, that the Constitution, the 
 ark of our safety, be preserved wholly and absolutely from dese- 
 cration. How then is this extension of suffrage, if admitted to 
 be of the very highest importance, to be obtained ? There are 
 but two modes. First : An amendment of the Constitution in the 
 mode prescribed by itself. Second : A steady perseverance in 
 the work of the " reconstruction of society " in those States, and 
 the consequent extinction there of the " spirit of the Rebellion," 
 and the substitution in its place of the views, feelings and dispo- 
 sitions suited to the " new " state of things. 
 
 That this latter result, required as it is by the plainest and 
 most persuasive considerations, can and will be effected has, it is 
 believed, already been shown in this paper ; and when effected, 
 it is certain that this subject (of Negro suffrage) will receive the 
 most mature and enlightened consideration, and will be disposed 
 of in such manner as philanthropy, humanity and the best interests 
 of civilization and of the country require. It is not a " whisper 
 of fancy " nor a " phantom of hope " to believe and to assert, that 
 
44 
 
 at an early period we shall witness such a " reconstruction of 
 society " in the rebel States as is portrayed in the preceding 
 pages ; and, as is beyond doubt, indispensable to the present har- 
 mony and the future safety of the Republic. Let all who look 
 with timid apprehension or gloomy foreboding at the present 
 state and the immediate future of Southern society remember 
 these facts. 
 
 (1.) That the military force of the nation is, and will continue 
 to be, fully adequate in every portion of every rebel State to 
 preserve perfect peace and order ; to suppress all exhibitions, by 
 word or deed, of disloyalty to the country ; to insure entire safety 
 to the judicial tribunals of the Union in the performance of their 
 functions, and to secure perfect respect and implicit obedience to 
 their judgments ; to enable all civil, ministerial and other officers 
 of the Government to execute their duties, such as assessors and 
 collectors of internal taxes, census enumerators, commissioners of 
 confiscated estates, marshals, officers of the customs. 
 
 (2.) That there is and always has been a " leaven" of loyalty in 
 every rebel State, which, though not sufficient to " leaven the whole 
 lump," will materially aid now in all works requisite for social 
 " reconstruction" and political " restoration." 
 
 (3 .) The horrors of the last four years of war and of a despot- 
 ism tyrannical and severe beyond precedent, render the great bulk 
 of the people of that region not only willing but anxious to enjoy 
 once more the blessings of peace, security and liberty. 
 
 (4.) The most obtuse and the most prejudiced rebel mind can- 
 not fail to see in the facts of these four years the most overwhelm- 
 ing evidence of his gross delusion in every important particular 
 as to the character of his brethren of the North. 
 
 (5.) Self-interest, that great motor in human action, most pal- 
 pably and most imperiously demands of those people a full and 
 honest acquiescence in the " new" state of things ; it demands of 
 them a course of conduct whicli will at the earliest moment re- 
 move from among them the last remaining soldier of the Republic, 
 and will place them as their fellow-citizens of the North arc placed, 
 in the perfect fruition of all the privileges of this, " the best Gov- 
 ernment in the world." 
 
45 
 
 (6.) Let us all duly estimate the transcendent influence of 2. free 
 press and si free speech, with which that portion of the Republic 
 is now, for the first time in its history, to be blessed, and by which 
 it is to be instructed, elevated and refined. 
 
 (7 J Consider, too, the genuine brotherly feeling toward the 
 people of the rebel States which pervades the universal North ; 
 no one among us is actuated by a spirit of revenge : no one calls 
 for indiscriminate punishment, all desire and demand amnesty, 
 except in a comparatively small number of cases, where the stern 
 demands of justice and a due regard to the future safety of the 
 Union require exemplary punishment and the necessity of which 
 will be conceded alike by those people themselves, by us and by 
 the civilized world. Who can estimate the kindly and emphatic 
 influence on the people of the South of this generous, forgiving, 
 fraternal feeling so universal at the North ! 
 
 (8.) Commercial and business relations in all their diversified 
 ramifications are fast being resumed between the two sections. 
 What a bond of unity and concord is this ! and how powerfully 
 will it contribute not to " restore" matters to their old condition, 
 but to create an infinitely better and happier personal and social 
 intercourse between them and us. 
 
 (9.) Beyond question, the rebel States will hereafter be freed 
 from the noxious presence of many a " slave aristocrat," many " a 
 fire-eater," many a disturber of the harmony of the country : this 
 will, indeed, be a great boon, and few, very few will be found to 
 shed a single tear over the voluntary or involuntary expatriation 
 of such persons ; scarcely any " so poor as to do them reverence." 
 
 (10.) The large addition that will almost immediately be made 
 to the population of each of those States by citizens from the non- 
 slaveholding States and by emigrants from the various countries 
 of Europe, will subserve a highly useful purpose in the great mat- 
 ter of the " reconstruction of society," and the consequent prepara- 
 tion of the citizens of those States to perform well their duties 
 as citizens of a Republic, in which a political and social aristocracy, 
 founded on Negro slavery, will no more be known for ever. 
 
 To a community thus regenerated, all questions affecting the 
 public weal, the rights of the citizen, whether black or white, and 
 especially the great right of suffrage, may safely be committed. 
 
46 
 
 Let it not be said that this regeneration may be long deferred or 
 may never occur, for while it is believed certain that neither of 
 these assertions will be verified by results, there can be no mistake 
 in saying that patriotism and an enlightened love of the Union 
 plainly declare, that the falsification even of those predictions 
 would be attained at too costly a price by any, even the smallest, 
 violation of the Constitution. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
gttjtitftitf Putin's gcttcv. 
 
 Executive Mansion, Washington, Dec. 7, 1862. 
 Charles P. Kirkland, Esq., Neio York: 
 
 I have just received, and hastily read, your published letter 
 to the Hon. Benjamin R. Curtis ; under the circumstances, I 
 may not bo the most competent judge, but it appears to me to 
 be a paper of great ability, and for the country's sake, more 
 than my own, I thank you for it. 
 
 Yours, very truly, 
 
 A. LINCOLN. 
 
to the honoeable benjamin e. curtis, late associate 
 Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. 
 
 I propose respectfully, but with perfect frankness, to review 
 your recently published pamphlet on the subject of the President's 
 "Emancipation Proclamation" of September 22d, 1862. 
 
 This would have been done at an earlier day, but it is only very 
 recently that I first saw the pamphlet. 
 
 It is to be regretted that, regarding — as you profess to do — 
 this proclamation and that of the 24th of the same month, 
 as fraught with peril to your countrymen, you did not treat them 
 separately. They differ radically and essentially in subject and in 
 intent. The one is limited in its application to the rebel States, 
 the other applies equally there and here. The one involves ulti- 
 mate results and consequences of the most important and enduring 
 character; the other is, in its very nature, temporary. The one 
 gives rise to considerations of a kind wholly different from, and 
 irrelevant to, the other ; yet your pamphlet so confuses them to- 
 gether, that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to discover what, 
 in your view, is the distinguishing fatal error of each. Justice to 
 the subject, which you declare to be of such momentous import ; 
 justice to the Head of this great nation, whose acts you arraign as 
 bordering on, if not actually amounting to, the crime of usurpa- 
 tion; justice to the elevated position you so recently occupied, 
 required that you should at least have pointed out separately, 
 distinctly, and in the most lucid manner, the grounds on which 
 you base a charge of such magnitude. Instead of that, we have 
 here (to use a legal term with which you are familiar) a complete 
 "hotch-potch." These different and distinct matters are thrown 
 indiscriminately together ; and, in many instances, no ingenuity 
 can determine whether your argument, your illustrations, your 
 deprecatory expressions, apply to the one proclamation or to the 
 other. But at present I shall, so far as I can, ascertain from your 
 pamphlet the specific complaints you make as to the " emancipa- 
 tion proclamation," and, if I err in attributing to you allegations 
 
as to this, which you intended solely for the other, my error will, 
 I trust, find an apology in the mode you have adopted of treating 
 the two subjects. 
 
 Before going further, I may be pardoned for imitating your 
 example, and saying a word personal to mj-self. In some essential 
 particulars, I stand in the same position you state yourself to 
 occupy. I, like you, "am a member of no political party." "I 
 withdrew," as you did, "some years ago, from all such connec- 
 tions." I have generally, however, exercised my privilege -as one 
 of the electoral body ; and at the last presidential election I voted 
 against the present incumbent, and at the last State senatorial elec- 
 tion I voted for the Democratic candidate in my district. 
 
 I, like you, " have no occasion to listen to the exhortations now 
 so frequent to divest myself of party ties, and act for my country." 
 I, too, "have nothing but my country for which to act in public 
 affairs," and with me, too, " it is solely because I have that yet 
 remaining, and know not but it may be possible to say something 
 to my countrymen, which may aid them to form right conclusions 
 in these dark and dangerous times, that I now (through you) 
 address them," and make the effort to aid them in "forming 
 right conclusions" as to your views, and the subject of which 
 you treat. Thus, my work, like yours, is purely "a work of 
 love." 
 
 It may not be amiss to say, that there are, in fact, but two parties 
 in our country ; one that is for the country, the other that is against 
 the country. To the former belong the vast majority of the Demo- 
 cratic party and the vast majority of the Republican party, and the 
 few (alas ! so few) Unionists of the South ; to the latter belong the 
 fanatical abolitionists in the Republican party, 'the rebel sympa- 
 thizers in the Democratic party and the Rebels of the South. To 
 the party of my country belong, I say, the great majority of both 
 the Democratic and the Republican parties ; in other words, the 
 vast majority of the "People" of the United States — I say so, 
 because I cannot be persuaded that that majority, by whatever 
 party name the individuals composing it may be called, are insen- 
 sible to the blessings of the form of government under which they 
 live, unaware and ignorant of the indispensable importance of the 
 preservation of the Union to their existence as a nation — forgetful, 
 basely, ungratefully forgetful, of the heroic struggles and sacrifices 
 
of their Revolutionary fathers — deaf and dead to the earnest pater- 
 nal farewell advice and warnings of Washington, lost to all sense 
 of patriotism and of public virtue. And as to the millions from 
 other lands, who are now u of us and with us," who have sought 
 and found shelter and protection and happiness in our Temple of 
 Liberty, and who with such gallantry have recently fought the 
 battles of "The United States of America," and who individually 
 belong to the Democratic or the Republican parties, I cannot be- 
 lieve that these men, whether as individuals they may be called 
 Democrats or Republicans, will ever consent to the overthrow of 
 that Temple, or to the breaking up of those " United States." But 
 notwithstanding this perfect conviction of mine, it is nevertheless, 
 as you say, not out of place for you or for me, or for any others 
 who choose to undertake the task, to " say something that may aid 
 our countrymen to form right conclusions in these dark and dan- 
 gerous" (as you call them) "times." 
 
 These words, " dark and dangerous," in the connection in which 
 you use them, lead me to say another preliminary word before 
 coming directly to your argument. 
 
 These words assure me, that you belong to that class of men 
 among us, not large in number, but sometimes influential in posi- 
 tion, who, from natural temperament and disposition, or from 
 aversion to strife of all kinds, or from a want of proper appreciation 
 of the real character of this rebellion, (I think chiefly from the lat- 
 ter cause,) honestly labor under a fearful distrust or a gloomy fore- 
 boding as to the result of the impending contest for the preserva- 
 tion of our glorious government and of our blessed Union. / do 
 not belong to that class of men. I do not now believe, fear, nor 
 apprehend, and never for a moment have believed, feared or 
 apprehended that a crime, such as this rebellion, a crime against 
 the Almighty and against humanity, wholly without a parallel for 
 enormity in the world's history, and the iniquity of which can 
 scarcely be expressed in any language known to us, I do not, I say, 
 believe that such a crime will be permitted to be carried to a success- 
 ful end, so long as " God sitteth on the throne judging the right," 
 nor until Truth shall cease to prevail over error, reason to triumph 
 over delusion, and Right to overcome wrong.* On the contrary, I 
 
 * In speaking of the crime of this rebellion, the difference in a moral point of view- 
 between the leading conspirators and the both/ of the people of the South engaged in it 
 
6 
 
 look with a clear faith and a, cheerful confidence to the termination 
 of this rebellion at no remote period, and to such a termination as 
 will show to an admiring and approving world that this govern- 
 ment, confessedly the most beneficent, is at the same time the most 
 firm and enduring to be found on earth. 
 
 To proceed to the examination of your argument : 
 
 The first observation I have to make is, that throughout your 
 paper you treat the proclamation substantially as if it were a pro- 
 clamation of absolute emancipation in the rebel States ; that is, were 
 it such a proclamation, your argument would be in substance the 
 same it now is. 
 
 Again, in your copy of it, you entirely omit the clause in refer- 
 ence to compensation ; and it will be found that a portion, and no 
 immaterial portion, of your argument, is based on the non-exist. 
 ence of the conditional and compensatory parts of the proclamation. 
 It is very clear, that a proper regard to truth and fairness would 
 have required a conspicuous place in your paper for these two dis- 
 tinguishing features. 
 
 With these omitted or practically concealed, you could by no 
 possibility attain the object you profess, namely, " the aiding your 
 countrymen in forming rigid conclusions." 
 
 A fatal error underlying your whole argument is, that in sub- 
 stance and effect you treat and argue this matter precisely as you 
 would have done had there been no rebellion and no war ; had the 
 country been at peace; had you prepared and published your 
 views in November, 1859, (if a similar proclamation had been then 
 issued.) You throw the veil of oblivion over the last two years ; 
 you ignore the events that have occurred during that period and 
 the state of things existing in the country on the 22d of Septem- 
 ber, 1862. 
 
 Though you wholly disregard it in your argument, yet you 
 forcibly describe the status of the country on the day of its date. 
 
 should carefully be kept in view. The former are to be execrated, the latter to be 
 pitied ; and while the practical effects of the wickedness of the one and of the delu- 
 sions of the other, combined in action as they are, are the same, yet we are never to 
 cease to draw the moral distinction just mentioned. Any one who desires to know 
 the secret and real causes of the Rebellion, the motives and ends of the arch-conspirator3 
 who originated it, will be gratified and instructed by a perusal of the article entitled 
 "Slavery and Nobility vs. Democracy," ia the July number, 1862, of the Continental 
 Monthly. 
 
You say, " The war in which we are engaged is a just and necessary 
 war. It must be prosecuted with the tchole force of this govern- 
 ment, till the military power of the South is broken and they 
 submit themselves to their duty to obey and our right to have them 
 obey the Constitution of the United States as the supreme law of 
 the land." You thus affirm that, at the date of that proclamation, 
 we were and now are engaged in a war, a just and necessary ivar — 
 a war that must be carried to a success/id termination by the exercise 
 of the whole force and power of the government. You might justly 
 have added, that it is a war infinitely worse, on the part of the 
 rebels who caused it, than a war with any foreign nation could be, 
 in its inception ; in the mode of its conduct by the rebels ; in 
 the motives of its originators, and the ends sought to be accom- 
 plished by it. It was then by necessary consequence a war, in 
 which all the means — and more than the means — we might legiti- 
 mately resort to in a foreign war might and ought to be used and 
 rendered available to the utmost practicable extent consistent with 
 the rules of civilized warfare. 
 
 What, then, if we were at war with a foreign nation immediately 
 on our borders, and that nation had within its bosom millions of 
 slaves ? Can any one, versed in the slightest degree in the prin- 
 ciples of the law of nations and the laws of war, for a moment 
 doubt our right to declare and proclaim freedom to those slaves, in 
 case that nation did not discontinue that war within a prescribed 
 period ? 
 
 It may be asked what would be the utility, the practicalness of 
 such a proclamation ? I answer in your own words, " I do not 
 propose to discuss the question whether this proclamation can have 
 any practical effect on the unhappy race to whom it refers, nor what 
 its practical consequences would be on them and on the white popu- 
 lation of the United States." You discuss and I discuss simply 
 the constitutional right and power of the President, under existing 
 facts, to issue that proclamation. 
 
 "We, in this discussion, are to assume that, in the contingency 
 stated in it, it will go into actual operation as intended. Then 
 we are to inquire what the practical effect of its thus going into 
 actual operation would be, not on the black nor the white race, 
 but on the war the rebels have declared and are carrying on. It 
 requires but a very limited knowledge of facts to answer this in- 
 
8 
 
 quiiy. If any one fact is demonstrated with perfect clearness in 
 this contest thus far, it is, that the slaves in the States in rebellion 
 have furnished to those States means indispensable to them for car- 
 rying on and sustaining the contest on their part* Without the 
 agricultural and domestic labor of the slaves, tens of thousands of 
 whites, who have been and now are in the rebel army, could not 
 have been withdrawn from the cultivation of the ground, and the 
 various other pursuits requisite to the supply, for that whole 
 region, of the actual necessaries of life. Without the slaves, their 
 numerous and extensive earthworks, fortifications, and the like, 
 their immense transportation of military stores and munitions, a 
 vast amount of labor in camps and on marches, (to say nothing of 
 the actual service as soldiers, said in many instances to have 
 
 * Thousands of illustrations of the truth of this statement might be given. Take 
 this one: On the second day of November, 1862, Gov. Brown, of Georgia, "Com- 
 mander-in-Chief," issued this edict : 
 
 To the Planters of Georgia : 
 
 Siuce my late appeal to some of you, I am informed by Brig.-Gen. Mercer, com- 
 manding at Savannah, that but few hands have been tendered. When the impress- 
 ments made by Gen. Mercer, some weeks since, were loudly complained of, it was 
 generally said that, while the planters objected to the principle of impressments, they 
 would promptly furnish all the labor needed, if an appeal were made to them. I am 
 informed that Gen. Mercer now has ample authority to make impressments. If, then, 
 a sufficient supply of labor is not tendered within ten days from this date, he will resort 
 immediately to that means of procuring it with my full sanction, and I doubt not with 
 the sanction of the General Assembly. 
 
 After you have been repeatedly notified of the absolute necessity for more labor to 
 complete the fortifications adjudged by the military authorities in command to be indis- 
 pensable to the defence of the key to the State, will you delay action till you are com- 
 pelled to contribute means for the protection, not only of all your slaves, but of your 
 homes, your firesides and your altars ? 
 
 I will not believe that there was a want of sincerity in your professions of liberality 
 and patriotism when many of you threatened resistance to impressment upon principle, 
 and not because you were unwilling to aid the cause with your means. 
 
 I renew the call for negroes to complete the fortifications around Savannah, and trust 
 that every planter in Georgia will respond by a prompt tender of one-fifth of all his 
 working men. 
 
 As stated in my former appeal, the General in command will accept the number 
 actually needed. 
 
 JOSEPH E. BROWN. 
 
 The Governor, it will be seen, calls for " one-fifth of all the working (slaves) men." 
 The slave population in Georgia, in 1860, exceeded 462,000; it is not an exaggerated 
 estimate, that one in six of that population is a " working man ;" this one-sixth is more 
 than 77,000, and one-fifth of that number is upwards of 15,000. The call is therefore 
 for 15,000 "working men," and this too in a single State, and for a limited pur- 
 pose. And yet we have not the right to try to render unavailable to the " enemy" 
 this powerful force ! 
 
9 
 
 been rendered by slaves,) could by no possibility'- have been ac- 
 complished. , 
 
 The intent and design of the proclamation, its actual effect, if it 
 has its intended operation, is to forever deprive the " enemy" of 
 this vital, absolutely essential, and, as I have just said, indispensable, 
 means of carrying on the war. In reason, in common-sense, in na- 
 tional law, in the law of civilized war, what objection can exist to 
 our using our power to attain an end so just, so lawful, and I may 
 say so beneficent and so humane, as thus depriving our " enemy" 
 of his means of warfare ? I do not believe that you, on more 
 mature reflection, will deny the truth of what I have just stated. 
 
 But you say, " grant that we have this power and this right, 
 they cannot be exercised by the President" and for the exercise of 
 this power, he is charged by you with " usurpation." 
 
 A few considerations will show the fallacy, the manifest un- 
 soundness and error of your views and arguments on this point. I 
 may, in the first place, remark that the very tide of your pamphlet, 
 " Executive Power" is a " delusion and a snare." The case does 
 not give rise to the investigation of the President's "executive 
 power." The word " executive" manifestly and from the whole 
 context of the Constitution, has reference to the civil power of the 
 President, to his various civil duties as the head of the nation, in 
 "seeing that the laws are executed" — to his duties in time of 
 ■peace, though of course the same " executive" duties still con- 
 tinue in time of war ; but to them,' in that event, are superadded 
 others, which, in no just or proper sense, can be termed " execu- 
 tive," but which pertain to him in time of war as " Commander-in- 
 Chief." These latter duties are provided for by the letter and by 
 the spirit of other provisions of the Constitution, by the very na- 
 ture and necessity of the case, by the first law of nature and of 
 nations, the law of self-preservation. What is the meaning and in- 
 tent of the constitutional direction to the President, "that he shall 
 preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution ," unless in time of war, 
 he can do so in his capacity of "Commander-in-Chief," unless in 
 time of war he shall have the power to adopt and carry out as to the 
 enemy such measures as the laws of war justify, and as he may 
 deem necessary ? Is the Constitution designed to do away these 
 laws, and render them inapplicable to our nation — in other words, 
 is the Constitution a felo de se f It cannot be denied, that in time 
 
10 
 
 of war, at least, the President, while in a civil sense the "exec- 
 utive," is at the same time the military head of the nation — " the 
 Command 3r-in-Chief" — and as such his "command" is necessarily 
 coextensive with the country. 
 
 I cannot, on this point, quote anything more true and more ap- 
 posite than a paragraph of your own. "In time of war, without 
 any special legislation, the (our) Commander-in-Chief is lawfully em- 
 powered by the Constitution and laws of the United States to do ivhat- 
 ever is necessary and is sanctioned by the laws of war to accomplish the 
 lawful objects of his command." 
 
 This is, undoubtedly, the constitutional law of the land, and 
 being so, it of necessity upsets and overturns all your objections to 
 the proclamation in question. The " lawful object" of the Presi- 
 dent at this moment is to preserve the Constitution by putting an 
 end to this rebellion. In order to do this, it is necessary to deprive 
 the rebels of their means of sustaining the rebellion — one of the 
 most effective and available of those means, as just shown, is their 
 slaves ; the intent and object of the proclamation are to deprive 
 them of those means. The so depriving them " is sanctioned by 
 the laws of war," and, consequently, this act of the President is, 
 within your own doctrine, perfectly legal and constitutional. 
 
 The same argument which you make against presidential power 
 was made in Cross v. Harrison, 16 Howard, 164, in the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, in a case occurring during, and arising 
 out of, our war with Mexico, in the judgment in which case you, 
 as one of the Justices of that Court, concurred. In that case the 
 President, without any specific provision in the Constitution — 
 without any law of Congress preexisting or adopted for the occa- 
 sion, created a civil government in California, established a war 
 tariff, and (by his agents) collected duties. The Court held that 
 these acts (to use their own language) " were rightful and con- 
 stitutional, though Congress had passed no law on the subject ;" 
 that " those acts of the President were the exercise of a belligerent 
 right ; that they were according to the law of arms and right on 
 the general principles of war and peace." Who will allege, that the 
 acts of the President on that occasion were not, to say the least, as 
 unauthorized by the Constitution and the law as his proclamation 
 in the present case ? And yet you did not dissent from the judg- 
 ment of the Court, yo i did not speak of those acts as acts of 
 
11 
 
 " Executive" power, for the term would have been there, as it is 
 here, wholly inapplicable ; you did not then charge the President 
 with usurpation. The whole case there was, as it is here, a case 
 arising out of belligerent rights and duties, out of a state of war ; 
 and the President's acts were there, as here, not in contradiction to, 
 and disparagement of, the Constitution, but consistent therewith on 
 the great ground that the Constitution nowhere repeals, but, on the 
 contrary, from the necessities of its own existence and preservation, 
 recognizes the laivs of war in a state of war. Similar authorities in 
 abundance might be cited, but it would be a work of supereroga- 
 tion. 
 
 It may not be amiss, however, to refer in this connection to the 
 honored name of John Quincy Adams, on the very point now in 
 question, namely, the constitutional right of the President to issue 
 this proclamation. 
 
 No citizen of this land will deny to Mr. Adams as perfect an 
 acquaintance with the spirit and nature of our institutions, as 
 minute a knowledge of the provisions, expressed and implied, of 
 the Constitution, and as ardent a desire to preserve them in their 
 purity, as were ever possessed by any man living or dead. He 
 was distinguished, too, for the most delicate moral sense, the purest 
 integrity, and the deepest conscientiousness. I think no man who 
 has taken an official oath ever felt a more earnest and constant 
 desire on no occasion to violate it. Now, Mr. Adams, while a 
 member of the House of ^Representatives, in a debate in the House, 
 on an important subject, in April, 1842, after stating that slavery 
 was abolished in Columbia, first by the Spanish General Murillo, 
 and secondly by the American General Bolivar, by virtue of a 
 military command given at the head of the army, and that its aboli- 
 tion continued to this day, declares that " in a state of actual war 
 the laws of war take precedence over civil laws and municipal 
 institutions. I lay this down as the law of nations. I say that the 
 military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal -in- 
 stitutions, slavery among the rest, and that under that state of 
 things, so far from its being true that the States, where slavery 
 exists, have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the 
 President of the United States, but the (subordinate) commander 
 of the army has the power to order the emancipation of the slaves." 
 This is the " true saying" of a great constitutional lawyer, a pure 
 
12 
 
 patriot, a conscientious man — indeed, I doubt whether any man in 
 this country, whose position entitles his opinions to any considera- 
 tion, will be found to concur in your views. They are not adopted 
 — indeed, they are repudiated by the most prominent leader of the 
 Democratic party. Thus, Mr. John Van Buren (in a speech before 
 the Democratic Union Association of the city of New- York, on 
 the 10th of November instant) said : " I never said anything in 
 reference to that proclamation except that it was a matter of ques- 
 tionable expediency. I have never deemed it unconstitutional. I 
 have never even asserted that, as a war measure, it might not have 
 been expedient." It would seem idle to add more in demonstration 
 of the clear, unquestionable power of the President (I may say, of 
 his solemn duty) "as commander-in-chief," in the exercise of a 
 military power, " during a state of war," to issue the proclamation 
 in question. 
 
 The ground of objection you most prominently put forth is, 
 indeed, extraordinary, and, without offence, I trust I may say mon- 
 strous. It is no more nor less than this : " The persons who are 
 the subjects of this proclamation are held to service by the laws of 
 the States in which they reside, enacted by State authority." "This 
 proclamation by an executive decree proposes to repeal and annul 
 valid State laws, which regulate the domestic relations of their 
 people," and this "as a punishment against the entire people of a 
 State by reason of the criminal conduct of a governing majority of 
 its people." Never was more error, gross, palpable, grievous, found 
 in a single brief paragraph. Mark the existing state of things. 
 These "States" are each and every of them in rebellion against 
 their country and their Government; they are waging against 
 it the most bloody and relentless war ; they totally condemn and 
 repudiate the Constitution of their country ; they deny that it 
 has any, the least, authority over them ; they are making almost 
 superhuman efforts to overthrow and destroy it ; the people, as 
 individuals, and the States in their corporate, municipal capacities, 
 go hand in hand together in this awful work, and yet you claim 
 for them the protection of that very Constitution ; you claim the in- 
 violability of their State laws under that Constitution. You claim 
 that those laws are " valid " and operative, and are to shield and 
 protect, aid and assist them in their unhallowed attempt to destroy 
 their country ! ! It is difficult to imagine under what hallucination 
 
13 
 
 you were laboring when you gave utterance to those sentiments. 
 The bare statement of the case must carry to every sane mind, 
 North and South, the instant refutation of your propositions. The 
 very rebels themselves, to whom you offer the protection of the 
 "Constitution," would, with wrathful indignation, spurn the offer. 
 
 You speak of the proclamation as a "threatened penalty" — 
 
 as "a punishment to the entire people of a State by 
 
 reason of the criminal conduct of a governing majority of the 
 people." 
 
 I have already shown, satisfactorily I trust, that the act of the 
 President partakes in no sense of the character of a "penalty" or 
 " a punishment," but is simply the exercise of his constitutional 
 power, in a time of war, to devise and adopt and carry out against 
 the enemy such measures as he may judge to be for the good of 
 his country ; for the defeat of that enemy, and for the success- 
 ful and speedy ending of " the war." You draw a distinction, 
 unheard of, I imagine, till announced by you, a distinction be- 
 tween the "people of a State," and the "governing majority" 
 of that people ; a distinction, too, which is to operate, in a time of 
 war, against the party with whom that " State " is at war ! ! I 
 venture to say, that no writer on the law of nations, no judicial 
 tribunal, no intelligent man, has up to this hour believed or stated 
 that, in the case of foreign war above supposed, the " governing 
 majority" was not to all legal and all practical purposes, "the 
 State." Were the United States at war with any foreign power — 
 a war sanctioned by the "governing majority," (as our war of 
 1812,) but a war which you and others (a minority) wholly dis- 
 approved ; and that foreign power adopted some war measure 
 which would operate on " the entire people" of the United States, 
 could you and your associates of the minority, on any principle 
 of law, military or civil, of justice, of reason, or of merc3 r , claim 
 exemption from the effects of that measure ? The case supposed 
 is precisely the case as it now exists between the " United States 
 of America" on the one hand, and the " Eebel States and people" 
 on the other. 
 
 Again, you state as a serious, if not conclusive objection to the 
 proclamation, that "it is on the slaves of loyal persons or of 
 those who from their tender years, or other disability, cannot be 
 either disloyal or otherwise, that the proclamation is to operate.'' 
 
14 
 
 Have your count^men at this hour, to learn for the first time 
 that the u sun shines alike on the just and on the unjust," that 
 storms and whirlwind overwhelm at the same time the righteous 
 and the wicked, and that the calamities of war, from the very ne- 
 cessity of the case, fall indiscriminately on the innocent and the 
 guilty, the strong and the helpless, on those of mature and those 
 of "tender years" ? But as to this last objection, itlacks one ma- 
 terial quality, namely, foundation in fact. That part of the pro- 
 clamation which you have so strangely, as observed above, omitted, 
 provides for the case of the very persons for whom your sympa- 
 thies are excited. It pledges to them compensation. I say 
 " pledges," for it declares " that the Executive will m due time 
 recommend that all persons who have remained loyal (of course 
 including in its spirit those who from tender years, or otherwise, 
 were incapable of being disloyal) shall be compensated for all losses 
 by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves" ISTo 
 future Congress of the United States will be so lost to all sense 
 of honor and obligation as not to pass," and no future President 
 so degraded as not to approve, a bill redeeming this solemn and 
 sacred "pledge" of the Head of the nation. 
 
 Again, you advert in no part of your argument to the vital fact 
 that this proclamation is not absolute and unconditional, but that it 
 depends even for its existence practically on the acts and will of the 
 rebels themselves. If they so elect, it is never to go into operation, 
 and they have abundant time to make that election, namely, from 
 the 22d of September, 1862, to the 1st of January, 1863. But 
 your argument, in all its essential particulars, would have been just 
 the same as you now address it to your fellow-citizens, if this pro- 
 clamation had been absolute, had declared universal emancipation, 
 to go into effect on the day of its date, and (as already remarked) 
 had not provided compensation to the loyal, and had been issued 
 in a time of profound peace. 
 
 You profess, in your argument, simply to examine " the nature 
 and extent, and the asserted source of the power by which it is 
 claimed that the issuing of this proclamation was authorized ;" and 
 it was " for the purpose of saying something to your countrymen 
 to aid them in forming right conclusions" that you ' reluctantly 
 addressed them." The policy, the expediency, the utility, the 
 practical effects, per se, of the proclamation, you say, you do not 
 
15 
 
 " propose to discuss," yet you intimate, that by means of this pro- 
 clamation, if executed, "scenes of bloodshed and worse than 
 bloodshed are to be passed through," and you express, in no un- 
 equivocal manner, a doubt "as to the lawfulness, in any Christian 
 or civilized land, of the use of such means (that is, this proclama- 
 tion) to attain any end." You intimate, too, that "a servile war 
 is to be invoked to help twenty millions of the white race to assert 
 the rightful authority of the Constitution and laws of their coun- 
 try." All these direful forebodings are put forth in half a dozen 
 lines, certainly not to " aid your fellow-citizens in forming right 
 conclusions," but through their sympathies and their fears to in- 
 duce the concurrence of their reason in your views as to the power 
 to do the act in question. These "givings out" of yours require 
 a passing notice. 
 
 In the first place, where is your authority for the allegations as 
 to " scenes of bloodshed and a servile war ?" I am not an aboli- 
 tionist, nor a believer in the social and political equality of the black 
 and white races, (though I have an opinion on the subject of the 
 effect of the institution of slavery on the white man and white 
 woman, who have been nurtured under its influence, and on the 
 question of the compatibility of the institution with a republican 
 form of government.) I am even called by some a pro-slavery 
 man. Yet I see no " scenes of bloodshed," no " servile war," in 
 the event of the practical carrying out of this proclamation. This, 
 however, is a mere matter of speculation and opinion, and while I 
 freely concede your right to entertain your own, I claim my right 
 to entertain mine. Our means of forming our opinions are the 
 same ; we both have the same lights, and the result alone can show 
 which of us is right. 
 
 But, in the next place, assuming the consequences to be just such 
 as you imagine, who is responsible for those consequences ? They 
 cannot come, as you will admit, if the rebels return to their alle- 
 giance ; if they cease their unhallowed efforts to overthrow their 
 government ; if they become dutiful citizens. If they do not, it 
 is not your fault nor mine, nor that of our fellow-citizens, nor of 
 the President, nor of the government of the United States — it is 
 solely, wholly, unquestionably their own. 
 
 Again, you look with evident heartfelt horror at the events which 
 you thus contemplate. Have you no horror, no tears of sympathy, 
 
16 
 
 no " bowels of compassion," when you reflect on the multitudes, the 
 thousands of valuable loyal lives lost, homes grief- stricken, parents 
 rendered childless, and children rendered orphans ; the desolation 
 and misery of whole neighborhoods, to say nothing of the enor- 
 mous material destruction caused to citizens of the loyal States in 
 this war — a war on our part, as you say, " so just and necessary," 
 and on the part of the rebels so wicked, so wanton, so utterly 
 causeless, and so wholly unjustifiable? Though no man of human- 
 ity could look with other than deep distress on the "scenes of 
 bloodshed," and the " servile war," you imagine, (should they be- 
 come realities,) surely it cannot be believed, that the amount of 
 distress and suffering, that would thus ensue, would equal — it 
 surely cannot surpass — the distress and suffering that have al- 
 ready been endured by the loyal citizens of this republic in con- 
 sequence of this rebellion. 
 
 You doubt the " lawfulness," in this Christian and civilized land, 
 of the use of such means (as this proclamation) to attain any end. 
 And has it come to this, that a distinguished citizen of the republic 
 doubts whether a proclamation emancipating the slaves in those 
 States which shall be in rebellion on the first of January next, 
 may not be " used as the means" " to attain the end" (granting that 
 it may thereby be attained) of ending this war of rebellion, and thus 
 of saving our Constitution, our government, our Union, and of 
 still preserving for ourselves and for coming generations, here and 
 elsewhere, the only real Temple of civil and religious liberty in 
 which men can worship on earth? You speak of " lawfulness" in 
 this connection rather in a moral than in any other sense ; the right 
 and power in a legal and constitutional sense, to issue this proclama- 
 tion has already been demonstrated. 
 
 In a document intended, " after study and reflection," " to aid 
 the citizens of this republic to form a right conclusion" on matters 
 of surpassing magnitude and solemnity — matters imperilling their 
 very liberties, as you state — a religious, scrupulous regard to truth 
 in every material respect, was of course, to be expected ; and de- 
 parture from truth may consist as well in omission and suppression 
 as in direct assertion. I have already mentioned that you have 
 wholly omitted, in the statement of the proclamation, the compen- 
 satory part, and that you omit to bring forward, except merely in- 
 cidentally, another most material part of it, namely, its conditional 
 alternative character. 
 
• 17 
 
 Whether your statement as to the " social condition of nine 
 millions of men," has reference to both white and black, or to the 
 white only, it is difficult to determine from the context ; if it has 
 reference to the white, you commit a very serious error ; for the 
 whole white population of the rebel States, (to which alone the 
 proclamation and your argument relate,) according to the last 
 census, (I860,) does not exceed four and one half millions. 
 
 In quoting the opinion of the lamented Judge Woodbury, you 
 omit to state that it was a dissenting opinion, concurred in by 
 no other Judge, founded essentially, if not solely, on the fact 
 c^ur.? ^ by him, that at the time in question in that case, " a state 
 of war " did not exist in Ehode Island, where the matter arose. In 
 so grave a paper prepared, as you assert, so deliberately, put forth 
 under an imperative and resistless impulse of patriotic apprehen- 
 sion that the liberties of the country were in imminent peril, (not 
 from the rebellion but from the acts of the President, designed to 
 crush the rebellion,) in such a paper, I say, it would seem that we 
 ought not to be terrified by "portentous clouds," "gigantic sha- 
 dows," the phrase "usurpation of power," often repeated, the " loss 
 of his head by Charles I.," " seven hundred years of struggles against 
 arbitrary power," and many other similar appeals, by modes of ex- 
 pression, to anything but that calm reason, which enables us to " form 
 right conclusions in dark and dangerous times." Much less in such a 
 grave document from such a source, should important stress be laid 
 on the expression, of an unnamed and irresponsible editor of a news- 
 paper, " that nobody pretends that this act is constitutional, and 
 nobody cares whether it is or not." That this editor was at least a 
 very inferior constitutional lawyer, is very clear, and that this text 
 from his paper should have furnished a peg on which to hang an 
 alarming commentary on the " lawlessness" of the times, is at least 
 extraordinary, and that lawlessness, too, not the lawlessness of rebels 
 nor of rebel sympathizers. 
 
 You ask, in view of the President's proclamation : " Who can 
 imagine what is to come out of this great and desperate struggle? 
 The military power of eleven of these States being destroyed, what 
 then? What is to be their condition? What is to be our con- 
 dition ?" 
 
 Your questions admit of a ready answer. The United States of 
 America are to come out of the struggle, a great, a united, a power- 
 
18 
 
 ful, a free people, purified by the fires of adversity, and taught by 
 their tremendous calamities the lessons of moderation and humility. 
 The people of the rebel States, who choose to remain in them, are to 
 come out of the struggle as citizens of States forming a part, as 
 heretofore, of the United States, and with them, and as parts of them, 
 they are in future to enjoy the blessings of a well-regulated liberty, 
 they having in the mean time been taught a lesson of infinitely 
 greater severity than that by which their brethren of the loyal 
 States have been instructed. Whatever they have necessarily and 
 legitimately lost in material things, by reason of the war they have 
 waged, is, of course, lost to them forever ; if their slave property is 
 thus lost, it is lost, and that is all that can bo said as to that. Then 
 "their condition" and " our condition" is to be in substance just 
 what it was before the rebellion, and what it would have continued 
 to be but for the rebellion, with this only difference, that they and 
 we will have learned the priceless value of the Union, and for 
 generations to come treason and rebellion will not raise their horrid 
 heads. 
 
 Perhaps you may call this the dream of an enthusiast. Rely on 
 it, I speak only the words of " truth and soberness;" and if you 
 are spared for a brief period, you will be rejoiced, I trust, to wit- 
 ness their full realization. Rejoiced, I say, because from your pam- 
 phlet, you would have your countrymen infer, and I am bound to 
 presume, that nothing but your intense love of your and their 
 country and your agitating apprehensions that the " principles of 
 liberty" are grievously to suffer, (not from, the rebellion, but from the 
 acts of the President,) has induced you to address them. 
 
 You say the u cry of disloyalty" has been raised against any 
 one who should question these executive acts. I know not whether 
 that epithet has been applied to you ; if it has been, I am bound to 
 believe that the imputation was without cause, and that you are a 
 faithful, loyal citizen of the Republic. But the greatest and the 
 best are liable to err, and I may be permitted to say, that, however 
 honestly and sincerely you entertain the sentiments you express, 
 you have selected an inopportune moment for their expression ; 
 and that at this particular period of our country's history, your 
 "studies and reflections," your time and your efforts, would, to 
 say the least, have been more benignly and gracefully employed in 
 presenting to your countrymen a lifelike picture of the real charac- 
 
19 
 
 ter of this rebellion, and in impressing on them with stirring and 
 glowing eloquence the momentous duty it devolved on them. 
 You could, with perfect verity, have told them, that this war, 
 inaugurated by the rebel States, was wholly and absolutely without 
 cause : in proof of that assertion, you could have stated three facts, 
 so undeniable that the hardiest rebel, not bereft of reason, would 
 not dispute them. 
 
 First — That on the 1st day of November, 1860, no people on 
 the globe were in the more perfect enjoyment of civil and religious 
 liberty, of social, personal, and domestic security ; of more entire 
 protection in the possession and use of all their property, of every 
 kind ; and of more material prosperity, than the people of the 
 eleven rebel States. 
 
 Second. — That for all these blessings, as great as were ever vouch- 
 safed by God to man, those people were indebted entirely to that 
 Constitution and that Union which their rebellion was undertaken 
 to destroy. 
 
 Third. — That from the day of the organization of the Govern- 
 ment under that Constitution, in the year 1789, down to the day 
 when this rebellion began its infamous and unhallowed work, 
 there never had been, on the part of that Government, a single act 
 of hostility, nor even of unkindness, toward these States or their 
 people. 
 
 You should then have pointed out to your "countrymen," in 
 language more persuasive and emphatic than I can use, their solemn 
 and imperative duty as patriots, as Christians, and as men, in this 
 hour of their country's suffering and peril ; and you should have 
 told them that if these times are, as you say, "dark and danger- 
 ous," this darkness and this danger have been caused by the 
 wicked acts of these rebellious men. In such an address to your 
 countrymen, your dedication would have been not merely " To all 
 persons who have sworn to support the Constitution of the United 
 States, and to all citizens who value the principles of civil liberty 
 which that Constitution embodies, and for the preservation of 
 which it is our only security," but also, "to all persons who abhor 
 
20 
 
 treason and rebellion against that Constitution, and to all who prize 
 the inestimable blessings of our hallowed Union, and to all who 
 hold dear the farewell words of the Father of his country." 
 
 I had intended, in this letter, to comment on that part of your 
 pamphlet which relates to the President's proclamation of the 24th 
 of September, 1862, but this paper is already sufficiently extended. 
 It would, I think, be easy to show that the dreadful dangers you 
 apprehend are, in truth, to use your own terms, " portentous clouds" 
 and "gigantic shadows" of your own creation. At any rate you 
 may rest assured, if you and I and all others of our fellow-citizens, 
 outside of the rebel States, shall make honest, earnest, determined 
 efforts for the putting an effective end to this rebellion, (and that 
 such will be the case I, loving my country and knowing the un- 
 speakable value of the stake, have no right nor reason to doubt,) 
 those efforts will be crowned with speedy and triumphant success, 
 peace and harmony will be restored to the republic, the " prin- 
 ciples of civil liberty" will not have suffered, and the bugbears of 
 " usurpation," " arbitrary power," and other similar chimeras, 
 which excited imaginations and gloomy tempers have evoked, will 
 disappear forever. 
 
 Had you been an unknown and obscure citizen, any notice of 
 your pamphlet would have been supererogatory ; but because of 
 the influence calculated to be exerted by anything coming from the 
 pen of one who had but recently been the incumbent of the highest 
 office in the gift of the Government, and who is now in the exalted 
 walks of social and professional life, I have deemed it my duty to 
 present these views of your argument, and thus " possibly to aid 
 my countrymen" in "forming right conclusions" as to its merits 
 and the merits of the subject of which it treats. 
 
 I hear that others have published answers to your paper. Not 
 having seen any of them, I know not but that I may have merely 
 repeated their views ; if so, no harm is done ; if I have presented 
 any that are new, " possibly" some good may result. 
 
 New- York, Nov. 28th, 1862. 
 
 Charles P. Kirkland