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LETTER 
 
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 BY 
 
 J^ HEFTJGtEE. 
 
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 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 No8. 715 AXi) 717 Markkt St. 
 18 63. 
 

Extract from a Letter addressed to the President of the United 
 States, by the President of a Western University, iDublished in 
 the New York Daily Tribune, January 21, 1863. 
 
 " Shall future history make this record of our struggle ? And in 
 assigning the causes of this sad issue, shall we say, ' The people were 
 at first united, and they raised armies of unexampled numbers, and 
 they furnished munitions of war and money without stint ; but all 
 was of no avail, because the President was not equal to the emerg- 
 ency ; he maintained around him weak and unheroic men, listened to 
 the counsels of hackneyed politicians, and committed the army to 
 imbecile and unskillful generals. He vacillated between the honest 
 wish to save his country and the fear of parties of men who impeded 
 his plans and movements, while engaged in insane struggles for 
 political mastery, until good men and patriots sank into sullen and 
 imbecile despair, and the Republic, like Carthage of old, was split 
 into hostile parties, whereof one of the strongest was in league with 
 the enemy, while the enemy was thundering at the gates of the 
 capital ; and he thus sank ingloriously amid the ruins of his country, 
 because he had not the iron will as well as the heart of a Wash- 
 ington. In fine, that he was a man whose mercy spared spies, 
 traitors, and open enemies, at the expense of the national life- 
 blood.' " 
 
 (3) 
 
LETTER. 
 
 ►«^^• 
 
 To Abraham Lincoln, 
 
 President of the United States. 
 
 It is a privilege to which every citizen of the United 
 States may claim to be entitled, to express his views on 
 matters of public interest, to those who are charged with 
 the responsibilities of government. In soliciting, there- 
 fore, the attention of the Chief Magistrate of the nation 
 to the observations embraced in this communication, I 
 trust I may escape the imputation of presumption, how- 
 ever I may be esteemed deficient in the modesty which 
 should accompany insignificance. I am one whom the 
 great rebellion has, in a worldly sense, ruined; one whom 
 it found in the possession of a highly honorable position, 
 in the quiet pursuit of a favorite and useful profession, 
 in the bosom of a delightful social circle, in the enjoyment 
 of an income ample enough to satisfy every reasonable 
 desire, surrounded by all the comforts and luxuries of 
 life, animated by the near prospect of Ijeholding the con- 
 summation of golden results to which I had devoted il\Q 
 tireless labor of years, and sustained and cheered in the 
 discharge of a difficult responsibility and duty, by the 
 encouraging voice of a wide circle of influential friends ; 
 and whom, in the space of a few short months, it reduced 
 to the condition of a homeless wanderer, without an oc- 
 cupation, without a prospect, without present means of 
 subsistence, and — though life, indeed, remained — without 
 
 (5) 
 
6 
 
 an object for which to live. By what means I was en- 
 abled to escape from the severely-guarded territory of the 
 so-called Southern Confederacy, that huge and horrible 
 sarcophagus in which lie entombed the murdered hopes 
 of thousands whose love for their country was once no 
 less glowing than my own, it is unnecessary for me here 
 to explain. The fact that I have done so, after having 
 witnessed the working out of the giant conspiracy by 
 which an entire people were iDctrayed against their will 
 into overt acts of treason, and open war upon their coun- 
 try, its flag, and its government; and after having had a 
 previous opportunity of observing, during the period of 
 an entire generation, the careful preparation of the mines 
 and magazines, by which it was designed, at the favor- 
 able moment, to blow up the entire political fabric — 
 mines and magazines which have at length been sprung 
 only too successfully — this fact and this experience may 
 serve to give to what I have to say a weight which, 
 under other circumstances, it might not possess. 
 
 The immediate occasion which has emboldened me to 
 the liberty upon which I am venturing, may be briefly 
 explained. Not long since, in taking up one of the pa- 
 pers of the day, my eye fell upon a printed letter which 
 had been addressed to the President of the United States 
 by the head of a flourishing Western university. I read 
 it with attention — an attention probably the more inter- 
 ested because the circumstances and the experiences of 
 the writer, as he presented them, exhibited a singular 
 series of resemblances and contrasts with my own. 
 
 Your correspondent represents himself in that letter to 
 have been, at the opening of the war, in charge of a flour- 
 ishing seminary of learning. He saw himself surrounded 
 by several hundred noble-spirited youths whom he loved 
 with a father's affection, and by whom he was loved in 
 return. He saw them suddenly inspired with the martial 
 
spirit. He could hardly restrain them from rushing in a 
 body to the field. . He saw them organized into a battal- 
 ion and subjected to military drill. He saw some, impa- 
 tient of delay, enlisting in the earliest levies, and fighting 
 on the disastrous day of Bull Kun. He has since seen 
 many scattered over all the wide arena of conflict, pour- 
 ing out their lives for their country, or captured and 
 languishing in Southern prisons, or swept off by disease 
 in unwholesome camps, or stretched on beds of suffering 
 in the homes to which they have returned to die. And 
 besides these, he sees others whom the sword has not yet 
 reached, nor sickness paralyzed, rallying still to the call 
 of that country in whose sacred cause so large a number 
 of their youthful brothers have already laid down their 
 lives. 
 
 In all this, Mr. President, your correspondent has 
 almost literally written down my own history. I, too. 
 like him, was charged with the care of a great educa- 
 tional institution. I, too, saw around me a band of 
 young men numbering some hundreds, whom, for every 
 magnanimous and generous quality, I have never seen 
 surpassed, and of whose devoted attachment to myself 
 I had the most convincing reason to be assured. Like 
 him, I saw my charge suddenly electrified with martial 
 fire. Like him, I found it next to an impossibiUty to re- 
 strain them from rallying as one man to the trumpet call 
 of battle. I saw a military organization erected within 
 the very halls which we had consecrated to learning, and 
 I heard the daily clang of arms beneath the quiet shades 
 of our Academus. I saw many, in hot haste, attaching 
 themselves to every corps which departed for the scene of 
 strife; and I had, subsequently, the unspeakable anguish 
 of knowing that more than one had fallen in the fore- 
 most of the fight on the bloody banks of Bull Run. I 
 have seen others, in every sharply-contested battle which 
 
8 
 
 has since occurred — at Donelson, at Pittsburg Landing, 
 at Malvern Hill, at Corinth, at Antietam, at Murfrees- 
 boro'. And I see those whom war has not yet devoured, 
 still stubbornly maintaining the conflict into which they 
 so early and so impetuously rushed. The parallel be- 
 tween my experience and that of my educational com- 
 peer, whose letter I have cited, is almost complete. 
 There is but this one difference between us — it is a mel- 
 ancholy one — that whereas the victims whose untimely 
 fate he mourns poured out their lives in the noble 
 struggle to uphold the flag of Freedom, mine miserably 
 perished in the mad attempt to beat it down. And shall 
 I not, therefore, be permitted to lament over so much of 
 manly promise blighted, over so much of generous enthu- 
 siasm perverted to its ruin? Does any duty bid me to 
 repress the natural anguish with which I behold so many 
 of the children of my care self-sacrificed on the bloody 
 altars of the Demon of Rebellion? Should I not rather 
 mourn so much the more deeply, in that the cause for 
 which they died presents so little to alleviate the pain — 
 even as David mourned over his ingrate child, when he 
 went up to the chamber over the gate and wept, saying, 
 "0 my son Absalom! Absalom, my son, my son!" 
 And may I not reasonably expect that you, Mr. Presi- 
 dent, will listen to me, at least, without impatience, 
 when I, too, claim, as my educational brother has 
 claimed, the right to speak to you over my dead also? 
 
 The sources from which I have drawn my convictions 
 of the dangers and the exigencies of the hour have been 
 materially different from his. Herein consist some of 
 those contrasts, to which I have alluded, between our 
 several experiences. He, throughout all the duration of 
 this gloomy part, has been happy in the enjoyment of 
 the largest liberty. He has found opportunity to visit 
 Europe, and there, while enjoying the relaxation and 
 
9 
 
 pleasures of travel, has gathered up the opinions of 
 the people of France and Germany in regard to our na- 
 tional affairs, and has listened to the hopes and fears, the 
 anxieties and discouragements, of our own fellow-citizens 
 abroad, in view of the past history of the war, and of the 
 results in which it may possil^l}' terminate. From these 
 premises he has drawn conclusions which he has returned 
 to lay before you. 
 
 Far different have been my opportunities. Hemmed 
 in from the outward world by an unbroken wall of fire, 
 I have counted the heavy months as they rolled over my 
 head, with the feeling of a prisoner in the condemned 
 cells of the inquisition. In the mean time I have seen 
 the light of hope die out in hundreds of bosoms, where 
 the love of country long survived the inauguration of 
 the rebel reign of terror. I have seen the weak, or the 
 timorous, or the base, on the most frivolous of pretexts, 
 repudiating the sentiments which they had always before 
 professed; and with the vociferous zeal of recent converts 
 — a zeal always most vociferous when the conversion is 
 pretended and the convert a hypocrite — mouthing upon 
 the corners of the streets the creed of treason, which, in 
 spite of their ostentatious apostacy, they yet loathed in 
 their heart of hearts. And I have seen even the men of 
 sternest principle — men who through months of anguish 
 cherished the hope that the gigantic wickedness which 
 had deprived them of a country would yet be stricken 
 down by the hand of the government — in despair of re- 
 lief, and in obedience to what they esteemed an inexora- 
 ble destiny, giving in at length their adhesion to the 
 tyranny they could not resist, and hopeless and heart- 
 broken bowing their necks to the yoke. I have seen a 
 whole country converted into one vast camp; every in- 
 dustry suddenly paralyzed, save such as is indispensable 
 to human subsistence, or conducive to human destruction; 
 
10 
 
 every avocation abandoned, save the profession of arms; 
 every court of civil jurisdiction practically suspended; 
 every court of criminal jurisdiction occupied principally 
 with prosecutions for political offenses; and all courts of 
 every description often superseded by martial law; all 
 education arrested, schools and colleges dissolved, religion 
 perverted into an instrumentality for rousing the most 
 vindictive passions, and churches prostituted into schools 
 for the inculcation of treason. I have seen the wide- 
 spread suffering which prevails throughout the insurgent 
 States, from the want of many of the simplest comforts 
 of life, cut off by the blockade, from the scarcity of sub- 
 sistence at home, and from the sudden and universal dry- 
 ing up of all the ordinary sources of private income. 
 And, if to these things it is added that I have had the 
 advantage of observing a portion, at least, of the military 
 operations of the past two years, from an interior point 
 of view, it may possibly appear that my opportunities of 
 forming a judgment of the existing situation have been 
 as favorable as if I had watched the progress of events 
 through the eyes of the people of Europe, or had derived 
 my convictions from the complaints of our ill success 
 which are sent home to us from the pleasant watering- 
 places of Germany, or the gay cities of France, by our 
 own faineants fellow-citizens. 
 
 I have not the presumption, Mr. President, to come to 
 you with counsels. Looking at the actual military posi- 
 tion as it stands, I do not think you need them. Look- 
 ing at the political aspect of affairs, I do not believe that 
 any counsel addressed to you, however wise, or any wis- 
 dom of your own, however profound, could avail in the 
 least to mend it. I will not, therefore, pain you by im- 
 puting the imperfect success of the national arms hith- 
 erto, to any past policy or change of policy of yours. Had 
 your course been different, it is by no means evident that 
 
11 
 
 better results would have followed, or that the voice of 
 discontent would have been any less loud than it is to- 
 day. Nor, on the other hand, will I do you the injustice 
 to assume that it is you only who are wanting to the 
 emergency of the present hour; or to call on you for the 
 sudden manifestation of an energy so startling, so resist- 
 less — in a word, so superhuman — as that by which your 
 correspondent, whom I have quoted, seems to demand 
 that you should extinguish this gigantic rebellion, and 
 bring back peace to our distracted land in a few brief 
 days or months. If I am right in my convictions, the 
 gravity of the present crisis is not owing to any fault of 
 yours or of your administration. The danger which im- 
 pends over the nation is one which no new vigor dis- 
 played by yourself, no new men called to your counsels, 
 no new generals set over your armies, no new measures 
 adopted in the cabinet or in the field, have power to 
 reach or to conjure down. The leaven of treason is at 
 work in the heart of loyal communities, the demon of 
 rebellion is lurking in secret places among our own 
 valleys and hills, and the hour may, at any moment, 
 sound, when the crimson deluge which has already 
 rolled over Virginia, and Tennessee, and Mississippi, 
 and Arkansas, and Missouri, shall burst upon the States 
 north of the Ohio. 
 
 I have been a witness to the entire process by which 
 the people of the insurgent States were betrayed to their 
 ruin. I see the same instrumentalities resorted to to- 
 day, to bring down the same ruin upon the unsuspecting 
 North. The dark conspirators are too wary to declare 
 their purpose in advance. They seek to lull suspicion 
 by setting themselves up as the foremost champions of 
 the Constitution they aim to subvert. They denounce, 
 with furious violence, measures absolutely indispensable 
 to preserve the government from overthrow. They de- 
 
12 
 
 mand for rebels in arms every right to which loyal citi- 
 zens are entitled. According to them, it is unconstitu- 
 tional to touch the property which gives to insurgent 
 traitors the power to be mischievous. It is unconstitu- 
 tional to restrain traitors among ourselves of the liberty 
 which they employ in organizing bands to obstruct the 
 movements of national troops, even on their way to de- 
 fend the national capital. It is unconstitutional to aid, 
 by legislation, a loyal State, in ridding itself of a political 
 ulcer, whose rottenness, where it has been allowed to run 
 its course, has corrupted the whole body politic, and has 
 nearly cost the nation its life. It is unconstitutional, 
 in short, to do anything to save the Constitution; and 
 nothing is constitutional but the right to subvert the 
 Constitution. Thus, open and violent resistance to the 
 authorities which the Constitution itself has created is 
 inculcated as the legitimate and proper and even obliga- 
 tory means of upholding the Constitution ; and revolution 
 is urged as the only possible means of saving the country. 
 The success with which this insidious system has been 
 practiced in South Carolina and the States bordering on 
 the Gulf of Mexico is too well known of all mankind to 
 require proof It may serve, however, to illustrate the 
 tergiversations of dishonest politicians, to call to mind in 
 how many instances the very same measures have been 
 at one time or another constitutional or unconstitutional 
 ■with them, according as it might serve the purpose of 
 the hour. Thus a protective tariff was unconstitutional, 
 though the principle originated in South Carolina; the 
 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, though it was 
 conceded to the South as the price of peace; the Wilmot 
 Proviso was unconstitutional, though it was approved by 
 a Southern President in the territorial bill for Oregon; 
 the principle of popular sovereignty in the Territories 
 was unconstitutional, though it was the platform of the 
 
13 
 
 South in the jd residential canvass of 1848; and even in 
 these latter years, the laws suppressing the African slave- 
 trade have become both unconstitutional and oppressive, 
 to the extent of justifying violent revolution,* though 
 to any reader of ordinary common sense the Constitution 
 explicitly authorizes their enactment. 
 
 In all this prating about the Constitution the latent de- 
 sign of traitors. North and South, has ever been one and 
 the same. It was, and is, this and no other, by artful 
 sophistry and persistent misrepresentation to alarm the 
 people into the belief that their rights or their liberties 
 are in danger from their own servants; to excite them to 
 unreasoning fury against the very government which the 
 Constitution itself has provided; and when at length the 
 delirium seems to have reached a height sufficient to 
 make the next step secure, to precipitate them into a rev- 
 olution of which they, the instigators, may reap the per- 
 sonal advantages, in the possession of place, and power, 
 and plunder, while all the country around them writhes 
 in anguish and welters in blood. Thus the people of 
 the insurgent States were craftily but too successfully 
 assailed on the side of their very virtues; and thus they 
 were insidiously driven, by appeals to their patriotism 
 itself, to drag down upon their country the avalanche of 
 ghastly ruin under which it lies crushed and bleeding 
 to-day. Shall these acts be a second time successful ? 
 Shall our own people, too, with the history of the horri- 
 ble past before their eyes, with a hundred fields yet red 
 with their brothers' blood to tell them what deadly gifts 
 are those which these Greek givers bring; shall they de- 
 liberately walk into the snare that is thus spread to en- 
 tangle them, and join in the mad work of destroying 
 
 * Such was the ground taken by the principal orators at the last of 
 the Southern commercial conventions, held at Vicksburg, in May, 1859. 
 
14 
 
 their country under the miserable delusion that they are 
 saving it? These questions, Mr. President, may seem to 
 many to betray an apprehension which has no reasonable 
 foundation, or at least to originate in an extravagant 
 exaggeration of the many omens of evil with which the 
 time is pregnant. And herein consists one of our great- 
 est dangers. It is the feeling of fond security in which 
 our loyal multitudes live on from day to day, which ex- 
 poses them to become the easy victims of the traitors 
 who are plotting their ruin. They go on buying and 
 selling, and eating and drinking, and marrying and 
 giving in marriage, even as did men in the days of 
 Noah ; and as in those days, too, their first just sense of 
 their situation seems likely to come with the bursting of 
 the flood which is to destroy them. No man who has 
 seen near at hand, as I have, the treachery which be- 
 trayed Tennessee, and the fraud which delivered Vir- 
 ginia over to her tormentors — Virginia, once the proud 
 mother of States, now the pliant tool and unhappy cat's- 
 paw in the hands of South Carolina — will say that I 
 exaggerate the danger of the loyal North to-day. 
 
 But besides this wicked and fraudulent abuse of the 
 people's reverence for their political constitution, and 
 their jealousy of their political rights, there is another of 
 the arts of the Southern traitors and conspirators which 
 is being energetically, and not quite unsuccessfully, em- 
 ployed among us. It is probable that, however wild 
 may have been the excitement aroused by convictions of 
 imaginary wrongs under the Constitution, this excite- 
 ment never could have culminated in actual open war 
 had there not been sedulously cultivated along with it an 
 intensely embittered hatred on the part of the Southern 
 people toward their fellow-citizens of the North. This 
 bitterness, to those who have had no opportunity to wit- 
 ness its manifestations in its birth-place, is such as to defy 
 
15 
 
 all power of conception. It is probable that, since time 
 began, there has never been an example of the hatred of 
 one people for another so measureless in degree, so un- 
 fathomable in depth, so utterly groundless in fact, and so 
 intensely absurd in its alleged causes, as the hatred of 
 the people of the South, and especially of South Caro- 
 lina, for the people of the North, and especially of New 
 England. To foster and cherish, to exasperate and ex- 
 acerbate, this hatred has been one of the objects to which 
 Southern demagogues have for years past devoted their 
 most earnest and untiring labors. And in the crisis of 
 their criminal conspiracy it proved the wisdom of their 
 wicked prevision, and served them well. The anger 
 which is awakened by a sense of wrong has something 
 noble in its character; but the spirit of malignant vin- 
 dictiveness which is the offspring of hatred is nothing 
 less than diabolical. It was not, therefore, merely the 
 desire to vindicate their rights which led the people of 
 the South to follow with so little hesitation their treach- 
 erous leaders into the gulf of insurrection; it was even 
 still more the insatiable thirst to see their desire upon 
 their enemies. And in saying this I do not mean to in- 
 timate that the mass of the Southern people anticipated 
 ivar as a consequence of secession, or looked forward to 
 the desolation of the North by fire and sword borne by 
 their own hands. On the contrary, they very generally 
 believed that the measure, however hostile to the national 
 government it might be in form, would be practically 
 peaceful in fact. They had not the slightest conception 
 of the resources of the North, of its power or of its spirit. 
 They esteemed it to be abjectly dependent on them for 
 the means of daily subsistence. They said, exultingly, 
 " Let us refuse our cotton to the wretched Yankees and 
 cut them off from our trade, and in six months universal 
 ruin will sweep over their whole land. Famishing mobs 
 
16 
 
 will rush frantically through the streets of Northern 
 cities, roaring for bread or blood; famishing operatives 
 will storm the stately mansions of manufacturing lords, 
 demanding money or work; everywhere ferocious eyes 
 will glare upon the men whom the spoil of the South 
 has made fat; everywhere hoarse voices will be heard 
 demanding purses or menacing death; the Nemesis which 
 years of covetousness, robbery, and political injustice 
 have at length evoked, will wreak a terrible retribution 
 on the heads of the guilty, and the bitter wrongs of the in- 
 jured and insulted South will at last be signally avenged." 
 
 There is not the slightest exaggeration in this state- 
 ment. I but repeat literally what, during the early days 
 of the rebellion, I heard on every side from men of every 
 class — from the self sufficient planter and from the "white 
 trash," who are but slaves of lighter hue, alike — from the 
 ignorant, and the stupid, and the silly of course; but, 
 strange as it may seem, from the intelligent, and the edu- 
 cated, and, on other subjects, the men of common sense 
 also. 
 
 And it is one of the favorite instrumentalities em- 
 ployed by our traitors, with the hope of a similar success 
 here, to fan the flame of an imaginary mutual dislike be- 
 tween the East and the West. They denounce New 
 England as the cause of a rebellion which was conceived 
 in South Carolina thirty years ago; which became almost 
 overt even then; but whose authors, frightened for the 
 moment from their purpose, postponed the development 
 to a more favorable hour. That hour they once more 
 believed to have arrived in 1850. At the last moment 
 they became again alarmed. The popular madness had 
 not yet quite reached the hoped-for height, and again 
 they dropped the half-lifted vail. Yet though, when two 
 years ago they found themselves, through the perfect or- 
 ganization which they had instituted, through the entire 
 
17 
 
 control which they possessed of all the machinery of State 
 governments from Virginia to Louisiana, and through the 
 active complicity in their dark conspiracy of the chief 
 executive officers in all those States, fully masters of the 
 situation, and perceived the time to be entirely ripe, in 
 raising at length boldly the standard of open revolt, they 
 avowed exultingly the fact that all this monstrous trea- 
 son had been deliberately premeditated, plotted, and 
 matured during a period of thirty years, we have men 
 among us to-day false enough, and wicked enough, and 
 brazen enough to assert that the rebellion is the recent 
 work of New England. And how did she accomplish it? 
 Did New England beleaguer a Federal garrison? Did 
 New England fire upon a Federal fortress ? Did New 
 England seize the public treasure w^ithin her borders? 
 Did New England possess herself of the arsenals, the 
 mints, the custom-houses, the navy-yards, the ports and 
 the revenue-cutters upon the whole line of coast ? Oh, 
 no ! New England did nothing at all of this ; but New 
 England entertained some opinions displeasing to South 
 Carolina; New England had really an old-fashioned be- 
 lief in the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence ; 
 New England had a prejudice in favor of free speech and 
 a free press, things intolerable to South Carolinians and 
 unknown in their State; and New England, by the ex- 
 ercise of these rights, sometimes made South Carolina 
 angry — in fact, very angry indeed. That an independent 
 sovereignty, every one of whose citizens is a gentleman, 
 should suffer such affronts from a rabble of mud-sills, and 
 men who work with their own hands, and 3^et not be 
 driven by an inexorable necessity to rebel against the gov- 
 ernment on that account, is of course a preposterous sup- 
 position. There is no necessity to pursue the argument. 
 Yet, while admitting the exceeding naughtiness of the 
 culprit section, and abandoning as hopeless the idea of 
 
 2 
 
18 
 
 impeaching the energetic action of States whom her in- 
 excusable conduct and more inexcusable convictions and 
 sentiments have coerced into revolt, Twill not do her the 
 injustice to deny the fact, that in her errors and her here- 
 sies she is only censurable in that she is behind the time : 
 that her bizarre and mischievous notions are only the 
 notions of Washington and his contemporary patriots, 
 whose reading of the Bible was probably limited, and 
 whose acquaintance with the true principles of political 
 and social science was obscure and imperfect to the last 
 deo-ree; that she is under the delusion which seems to 
 have guided the pen of Jefferson, when he wrote of the 
 gigantic blot upon the social system of Virginia, "I 
 tremble for my country when I remember that God is 
 just, and that his justice will not sleep forever;" and 
 that she partakes of those strong, but, as we now know, 
 totally unfounded prejudices, under the influence of 
 which Henry Clay, a native of Virginia and a senator 
 from Kentucky, once excited at the same time the mirth 
 and the indignation and the disgust of every gentleman 
 who heard him, and whose education had not been en- 
 tirely neglected, by making the extraordinary declaration, 
 "I will maintain all the guarantees which the Constitu- 
 tion provides for slavery where it exists ; hut when it is 
 ^woposed to extend the curse into soil yet free, I never will 
 give my consent to the monstrous proposition — no, Mr. 
 President, never, never, NEVER !" 
 
 If I read aright the indications of public sentiment, 
 these assaults upon New England have not been alto- 
 gether without their effect. The men who originated 
 them, and who devote themselves, sleeping and waking, 
 to their prosecution, are not avoided, as it might be 
 reasonably expected that they would be, by every respect- 
 able man whom they meet in the streets. The papers 
 which daily reek with them are not all promptly thrust, 
 
19 
 
 as decency would seem to require that they should be, 
 into the next cesspool, to rot with the kindred filth that 
 is gathered there. Even those who know most thor- 
 oughly their baseness, and feel most deeply their false- 
 hood, manifest little of the active indignation which 
 they ought to evoke, make scarcely an effort to repel the 
 calumnies, and lift hardly a finger to arrest the deadly 
 poison which they are slowly infusing into our body 
 politic. 
 
 Are our people aware of the malignity of this poison? 
 or of the suddenness with which it is capable of pro- 
 ducing its fatal effects? If, on these points, they need 
 enlightenment, let them turn their eyes to those two or 
 three yet loyal States, whose executive or legislative au- 
 thorities are at this moment almost as completely in the 
 hands of disloyal men as were those of unhappy Tennes- 
 see the day before she was betrayed. Let them ask them- 
 selves how the proposition to negotiate a peace independ- 
 ently of the national government, and in spite of it. 
 comports with those loud denunciations of vioLations of 
 the Constitution, of which no one that has been named 
 approaches to this in flagrancy and daring. Let them 
 ask themselves how the declaration set forth by a State 
 legislature, of a purpose to resist the collection of taxes 
 levied for objects which they happen not to apjDrove, 
 how denunciations, from the same source, of the military 
 measures deemed by the government to be indispensable 
 to the successful prosecution of the war, and how direct 
 attempts, from the same source still, to excite our armies 
 in the field to insubordination and mutiny, and thus lay 
 open all our frontier to invasion and ravage, consist with 
 any other supposition than that their mad and disloyal 
 authors are plotting the practical destruction of the gov- 
 ernment — a destruction which they mean to accompUsli, 
 peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must. 
 
20 
 
 Precisely the same machinery is being employed by 
 Northern traitors which was successful in the South. 
 State authorities are set up against the government of 
 the whole country. Local State pride is enlisted. Sec- 
 tional jealousies are enkindled. A conflict is kept up 
 which is designed to last long enough to generate a degree 
 of exasperation among the people sufficient to render the 
 experiment safe ; and then, suddenly, the central power 
 is to be defied, and the revolution made complete. This 
 method of inaugurating rebellion is the most insidiously 
 dangerous that was ever contrived. It apes the forms of 
 legitimate proceeding to an extent which imposes on law- 
 abiding citizens, who presently find themselves rebels 
 without their own consent. And it is a species of rebel- 
 lion, strong in possession from the start of all the regu- 
 lar organization of an established State. Any unhappy 
 recusants among a people so betrayed are deprived of 
 even the equal chance which, in rebellions elsewhere, be- 
 long to the persistently loyal, of striking for their inde- 
 pendence; for, without organization themselves, they are 
 surrounded, from the earliest moment, by an organized 
 police, who repress the first indication of disaffection by 
 arrests, imprisonments, and executions under the forms 
 of law, or are subjected to the violence of mobs, who 
 proceed, with the encouragement of the authorities them- 
 selves, to hang or mutilate without any regard to law at 
 
 all. 
 
 And here we have the obvious and rational explanation 
 of a political phenomenon which has excited the special 
 admiration of Mr. Kussell and other foreign observers, 
 viz., the singular and beautiful unanimity which the in- 
 surgent people have displayed in their ill-omened cause. 
 Such observers have even remarked, apparently without 
 drawing the unavoidable inference, that this unanimity 
 extends no less to the immigrants and adventurers from 
 
21 
 
 foreign lands, too recently arrived in the country to be 
 able to comprehend in the least the alleged causes of 
 grievance, than to the people who are native and to the 
 manor born. Indeed, it may be safely said that there 
 never occurred a rebellion, since history began, in which 
 the insurgent chiefs, from the earliest hour of their 
 usurj)ed authority, were able to command a machinery so 
 comprehensive, so resistless, so thoroughly effectual for 
 securing unanimity among their wronged and betrayed 
 victims, as the Southern conspirators found ready made 
 to their hands in the State organizations. Even before 
 the melancholy farce of secession had been enacted in any 
 single State, these authorities were thoroughly prosti- 
 tuted to the uses of the consjDirators. Citizens who still 
 loved their country were menaced and insulted, in many 
 instances assaulted with actual violence ; yet they dared 
 not appeal to the ministers of the law for protection, for 
 they knew too well that law had no longer any protection 
 for them. On the other hand, the ruffians who thus com- 
 menced the work of preparing a unanimous peoj^le in ad- 
 vance of the hour appointed, were as entirely untram- 
 meled by any fear of consequences to themselves, as the 
 roving bands of Bedouins who plunder helpless travelers 
 in the desert. 
 
 In one particular our Northern conspirators have an 
 advantage over the Southern traitors whom they imi- 
 tate, and with whom they are possibly in league. The 
 Southern people had no war upon their lands ; and what 
 made it chiefly a difficult task to goad them into secession 
 was the grim prospect that with secession war might 
 come. We liave a war existing, whose oppressiveness is 
 felt by all. The promise of peace to be restored by de- 
 stroying the power of the government to continue the 
 war, is, if artfully managed, a most enticing mode of en- 
 trapping men into sedition. We see it now employed 
 
22 
 
 with indefatigable zeal and industry. There are parts of 
 the country where its effects have been already pernicious 
 to the last degree. And in saying this, I do not mean to 
 confine the remark exclusively to tbe political evil it has 
 produced. I allude no less to that monstrous demoraliza- 
 tion of public sentiment, which appears in the infamous 
 terms on which those who are engaged in this work un- 
 blushingly avow their purpose to purchase peace. They 
 propose to give new guarantees to slavery; to wipe out the 
 black and bloody record of the past two years; to receive 
 to their arms and to their bosoms red-handed traitors 
 reeking from the slaughter of their own sons and brothers ; 
 and, finally, to expel New England from the Union. In 
 all this programme there is not a feature, of which even 
 so much as for one moment to think, ought not to suffuse 
 the cheek of aiiy honorable man or honest patriot with 
 the burning blush of shame. New guarantees to slavery ! 
 And what guarantees can be given which have not been 
 given already, except to legalize slavery in every State of 
 the Union? There is no other, certainly, which the 
 rebels themselves would for a moment consider. Nor are 
 they going to be content with a mere legalization on 
 paper. They will demand, and they will see well to it 
 that the demand is realized, that the legalization shall 
 be an actual, visible, tangible fact. And this is precisely 
 what our Northern conspirators intend to make it. So 
 lost are they to honor, so dead to shame, so steeled 
 against conscience, so abandoned even of the commonest 
 self-respect, that they stand ready to-day, in the face of 
 all mankind, and under the clear illumination of the nine- 
 teenth century, to fasten upon a great and free people 
 the ineffable, indelible, and damning disgrace of delib- 
 erately and intentionally engrafting upon their political 
 institutions that relic of j)rimeval barbarism, that loath- 
 some monument of the brutality and ferocity of the 
 
23 
 
 ages of darkness, that monster injustice — cursed of all 
 Cliristian men and hated of God — domestic slavery. 
 History will be searched in vain for a parallel to the 
 gigantic crime here meditated, or the immeasurable base- 
 ness which suggested it. Traitors have been false to 
 their country before ; but here are traitors who have con- 
 trived to be false at once to their country, to civilization, 
 to humanity, and to God. Let them be successful, and 
 America will become the just object of the scorn and de- 
 rision, the contempt and loathing of all civilized man- 
 kind while time endures. Hitherto the vast system of 
 serfdom within her limits has been excused to her as her 
 misfortune rather than severely censured as her fault. 
 To inherit the burden and the curse, and to perpetuate 
 it when relief seemed hopeless, was certainly not a crime; 
 but deliberately to choose it, to introduce it, to welcome 
 it where it had no existence before, surely this is " the 
 sum of all villainies." And if anything could possibly 
 be wanting to the blackness of the guilt or the immen- 
 sity of the baseness of such an act, it may be found in 
 the motive for which it is to be done, and in the chain of 
 incidental humiliations which it draws after it. The aim 
 is to purchase peace with rebels at any cost ; and to this 
 end it is shamelessly proj^osed to yield them more than 
 they demanded when they took up arms ; to humble be- 
 fore them the majesty of the government; to surrender, 
 in fact, substantially, the very government itself into 
 their hands ; and, Avith a meanness of spirit which has 
 no example among nations, to accept for Northern free- 
 men the menial position which Southern arrogance has 
 assigned them, and to acknowledge those insolent lords 
 of the lash to be their natural masters. And all this, 
 without any compensation for tliose stupendous sacrifices 
 which this wronged and insulted nation has made of its 
 wealth and its life ; without any expiation for the mj'riad 
 
24 
 
 murders for wliicli the authors of this horrible war are 
 responsil)le ; without any provision of rehef from the 
 mountain of debt which it has rolled up ; without, in 
 short, any return whatever for the humiliation to which 
 we subject ourselves, except the advantage and benefit 
 of being merely kicked and spit uj)on, instead of being 
 menaced with fire and sword. 
 
 And what shall we say of the proposition to expel New 
 England? Coming as it does from men whose watch- 
 word is " The Union as it was," it affords the happiest 
 of practical commentaries on their truth and their 
 honesty. The Union as it ivas, with six of the States 
 omitted — four of them being of the original thirteen by 
 which the Union was formed ! And this proposition, 
 moreover, comes from the champions, ^^ar excellence, of 
 the rights conferred by the Constitution. Men who 
 writhe with an anguish not to be told, at the bare thought 
 that a rebel's title to his property may be impaired by 
 the innocent fact of his waging war against the govern- 
 ment, propose, with a deliberate assurance worthy of all 
 admiration, to deprive six entire States — say some three 
 to four millions of loyal citizens — of every right which 
 they j)ossess under the Constitution. 
 
 But apart from the absurdity and folly of this propo- 
 sition, or worse than that, the villainy and the treason 
 lurking beneath it, it cannot be denied that it embodies 
 an unintentional compliment to the New England States, 
 the highest which men without principle, men without 
 honor, men without patriotism, could possibly pay her. 
 Assuming it to be possible — and for making such an as- 
 sumption, even for a moment, I very humbly solicit par- 
 don, in advance, of the States concerned — but assuming 
 it to be possible that the remaining States, as yet non- 
 slaveholding, could yield themselves to the deep degrada- 
 tion which these men are preparing for them, the conspir- 
 
25 
 
 ators perceive, by intuition, that such States could no 
 longer be fit society for New England. The thought that 
 New England herself could possibly stoop to the same 
 shameful level — that any cajolery could inveigle, or any 
 hope of gain could corrupt, or any apprehension of dan- 
 ger could intimidate her to sully her yet unspotted gar- 
 ments with the moral filth in which they will have con- 
 demned themselves to wallow, never once crosses their 
 minds. If it did, why should they reject her ? If New 
 England could be mean enough, and cringing enough, and 
 servile enough, and morally despicable enough, to do 
 what these shameless plotters design that her sister States 
 shall do, would she not be worth having ? If she would 
 bend her proud neck meekly to the yoke, would she not 
 be a useful beast of burden ? If she would but trem- 
 blingly kiss the rod held out to smite her, would she not 
 make a valuable slave ? Compared in any point of view, 
 six States like South Carolina are not worth the sixth 
 part of one like Massachusetts; and if Massachusetts and 
 her sister States of New England could be moulded to 
 their will, is it for a moment to be imagined that these 
 reckless conspirators, who are as mercenary and mean as 
 they are unprincipled and base, would lightly throw her 
 away ? But such a thought never occurs to them. New 
 England thanks them for it. So wide is the gulf that 
 stretches between her and them, that there is but one 
 conceivable favor they could render her, and they have 
 rendered it; it is that they should never so much as 
 imagine that this gulf could, by any possibility, be made 
 a hair's-breadth less. 
 
 New England does not intend to be left out of the 
 Union. New England does not intend that the Union 
 shall be humbled at the feet of rebels, or prostituted to 
 the base uses of the slaveholding power. New England 
 does not believe that her noble sister States of the Atlan- 
 
26 
 
 tic coast, or of the lakes, or of the great Northwest, will 
 permit themselves to be subjected to the ignominy which 
 these traitors are preparing for them. But one thing is 
 certain, if these her strong convictions, if this her firm 
 confidence shall prove to be unfounded; if this deep dis- 
 grace which is now only threatened shall prove to be a 
 reality ; if all the free millions between her and the set- 
 ting sun are to shrivel into dastards, and the lash of the 
 slave-driver is to become a familiar sound upon the blue 
 shores of Erie and upon the green banks of the Hudson, — 
 then no formal act of exclusion will be necessary; no 
 barricade of paper need be erected; no barrier of bayonets 
 need be arrayed, to keep New England out of a Union so 
 blacl^ with guilt, so steeped in infamy as this Union will 
 have become. No, indeed ! the difficulty in such a case 
 would rather be to keep New England in ! Loyal to the 
 government, loyal to the Constitution, loyal to every duty 
 which she owes to her sister States, she will do anything, 
 and suffer anything, except be false to honor and to God, 
 before she will relinquish one right which belongs to her 
 under the Constitution, or permit the dissolution of the 
 sacred bond which makes all these States one. But when 
 the Constitution itself is practically abrogated, and among 
 the faithless she alone remains faithful to the cause of 
 human right which it was designed to protect, she will 
 repudiate with scorn and indignation all political con- 
 nection or association whatever, no matter how urgently 
 her alliance may be sought, with the miscreants who 
 will thus have murdered Freedom in her own temple. 
 
 Ah, yes, traitors, you do well to announce in advance 
 your purpose to exclude New England! Be assured 
 that, if you did not do so, she would most unhesitatingly 
 and most unceremoniously exclude you. And in the 
 event of such a separation, who would be the loser ? Not 
 New England certainly. Her political importance might 
 
27 
 
 be abridged, her wealth diminished, but nothing could be 
 more greatly grand, more magnificent in moral sublimity, 
 than the attitude she would hold before the nations — 
 condemned to isolation for her love of liberty! And no 
 radiance could shine more lustrously than the light of 
 her unspotted purity, as to the eyes of civilized Europe 
 it would appear relieved upon the dark ocean of political 
 iniquity rolling beyond ! What, then, though from the 
 rupture of ancient ties and the hostile legislation of 
 former friends her material interests might and would 
 doubtless deeply suffer — her very sacrifices would consti- 
 tute her highest glory, and would only swell the exulta- 
 tion with which her steadfast sons would shout to the 
 appalled witnesses of a nation's moral death, " Be not 
 dismayed; Freedom still lives; her home is yet here!" 
 
 But no such separation is possible. The people of Illi- 
 nois, the people of Indiana, the people of Ohio, are not 
 prepared to accept the ignominy into which the dark 
 conspirators in those States are plotting to entrap them. 
 There is no shadow of a doubt that the vast majority 
 among them possess as lofty a sense of self-respect and 
 as devoted a love of freedom as the people of New 
 England. How could it be otherwise, when, to a great 
 extent, they are but another New England transplanted 
 to Western soil ? It is not from the people themselves, 
 by any means, that the danger which, as I believe, im- 
 pends over us to-day, proceeds. It is from those men 
 who have, to a great extent, secured control of the power- 
 ful machinery by which the people may be first betrayed, 
 and then coerced. The people of Tennessee were largely 
 loyal to the Union — loyal in the proportion, at least, of 
 two to one — when, in defiance of the popular vote, and 
 in utter disregard of those outwardly decorous forms 
 which rebellion had, up to that time, observed, it was, by 
 its own legislature, plunged into the vortex of revolution, 
 
28 
 
 and delivered into the power of the despotism organized 
 at Montgomery. Our danger to-day is from a similar 
 species of legislative usurpation. Not that I believe that 
 such usurpation could be successful in Illinois as it was 
 in Tennessee, but that the conspirators, sanguine that 
 it might be so, may be tempted, should opportunity 
 seem to favor the madness, to strike the hazardous blow. 
 But though an act like this would, beyond a question, 
 result in a manner to astonish and confound its perpe- 
 trators, though it would rouse the sleeping lion of the 
 Northwest to hunt them from the soil they had dis- 
 graced, and drive them howling to their own place be- 
 yond the Tennessee; yet there can be no doubt that the 
 civil war which it would temporarily inaugurate upon 
 our own soil would seriously embarrass the government 
 in its efforts to crush the already existing rebellion, and 
 would so far weaken our armies as to enable the South- 
 ern insurgents to remove the scene of conflict from their 
 own exhausted territory to ours. And this is the result 
 which, next to a complete success immediately secured, 
 our Northern traitors chiefly desire. With the invasion 
 of the North by the Southern armies must, in their 
 view, shortly come one of two things : either the com- 
 plete triumph of the rebellion, and the substitution of 
 the Richmond for the Washington government — after 
 which will come the reconstruction of the Union, with 
 special attention to the case of New England, as already 
 set forth; or else a peace accepted by the government at 
 Washington at the dictation of the insurgent chiefs, in 
 which the independence of the Southern Confederacy is 
 to be acknowledged, with boundaries fixed by itself. 
 
 And this is our danger at this moment. It is the dan- 
 ger of the time. Our armies were never so strong as 
 they are now. Our navy never was so efficient. If the 
 operations in progress are slow, they are, nevertheless, 
 
29 
 
 sure. The resources of the rebels have been stretched to 
 the point of exhaustion. Every man and boy capable 
 of bearing arms among them has been driven into the 
 field by the most sweeping and merciless conscription the 
 world ever saw. The natural sources of nitre which 
 exist within their borders are capable of but a limited 
 supply, and yield probably at present not a tithe of what 
 they need; while a blockade, more severe than ever be- 
 fore, effectually neutralizes the efforts of foreign sympa- 
 thizers for their relief. It is morally impossible that we 
 should fail, from this time forward, steadily to gain upon 
 the insurrection, until it is effectually crushed out, ex- 
 tinguished, dead and buried. But this implies and re- 
 quires that while our armies are busy in the field, and 
 our navy along our coast and rivers, pushing back, inch 
 by inch, the rebel battalions, and extending steadily the 
 jurisdiction of the legitimate government over recon- 
 quered soil, we should not permit a new rebellion to 
 burst forth in their rear, to break up their base of opera- 
 tions and cut off" their sources of supplies. 
 
 The situation of things, then, Mr. President, is not, in 
 my view, one for the evils or dangers of which — and they 
 are certainly grave — ^you can justly be held responsible; 
 nor are they evils or dangers which it would appear to be 
 quite in your power to control. They are evils and dan- 
 gers which can only be removed or neutralized by the 
 earnest efforts of good men and loyal men everywhere, to 
 expose, disarm, and trample under foot the treason which 
 is lurking even in the capitals of loyal States, watching 
 the favorable moment to betray the sacred cause of hu- 
 manity and of liberty in its own home. If all such men 
 will but realize the gravity of the crisis, and simjjly ac- 
 quit themselves of their duty, the symptoms in the 
 political sky, which now so justly excite anxiety and 
 alarm, will speedily disappear. If they will not, it 
 
30 
 
 passes human prescience to tell in what condition an- 
 other twelvemonth may find our unhappy country. 
 
 But should the worst arrive, and should a revolution- 
 ary chaos swallow up this majestic political fabric, bury- 
 ing in its ruins the dearest hopes of the human race for 
 ages, I, for one, desire to enter my protest in advance 
 against any such inscription upon the page of future his- 
 tory as that in which your former correspondent, whom 
 I have quoted, has foreshadowed the verdict of posterity 
 upon the calamities of this miserable period. Nor do I 
 believe that any such verdict will be recorded there. If 
 I might be permitted, in my turn, to glance down the 
 vista of time, and to interpret the characters in which I 
 seem to see the fatal narrative traced, my version of the 
 calamity and its causes would run somewhat thus : — 
 
 "The year 1862 opened auspiciously for the cause of 
 the Union. Its arms were everywhere successful — every- 
 where its flag advanced. Disastrously defeated on the 
 banks of the Cumberland and Tennessee, the rebels has- 
 tily withdrew from all their advanced posts in the West, 
 and fell back to the borders of the State of Mississippi. 
 The important City of Nashville fell. Most of the im- 
 portant towns and harbors of the Atlantic sea-board and 
 of the Gulf were captured and held by the Federal forces. 
 The great navy-yards of Norfolk and Pensacola were re- 
 covered. The Union flag waved once more over New Or- 
 leans. The whole Mississippi River, with the exception 
 of a single point, passed under the complete control of the 
 Federal flotillas. In view of these multiplied disasters, 
 the rebels were seized with dismay. Hopeless discourage- 
 ment appeared in every countenance. Their wretched 
 people, left to themselves, would speedily have abandoned 
 the conflict ; but the leaders, rendered desperate by the 
 urgency of the crisis, resisted with the obstinacy of men 
 wdio see the gallows staring them in the face. They re- 
 
oi 
 
 sorted to a conscription, sweeping and merciless to a de- 
 gree unknown in all the history of tyrannies. They pur- 
 sued and punished the disaffected with a vindictiveness 
 which appalled and crushed out opposition. Thus in- 
 subordination was promptly checked, and their rapidly 
 recruited armies soon found themselves numerically 
 superior to the forces opposed to them. Then, in turn, 
 the Federals were at some points driven back. A series 
 of disasters in Virginia unreasonably discouraged a por- 
 tion of the American people, and furnished to secret 
 sympathizers with the rebellion, of whom there were 
 always many in the loyal States, a favorable opportunity 
 to excite, by all the insidious arts which demagogues 
 know how to employ, discontent with the administration. 
 It was not very difficult to mould a popular chagrin, not 
 unnatural under public reverses, into disaffection toward 
 the men who were at the head of public affairs; nor very 
 much more so to turn against the government itself the 
 disaffection which was at first directed toward men. 
 Accordingly, although the President, by wise and prudent 
 measures, soon succeeded in correcting all the evils which 
 had accrued from previous disasters, and had so ordered 
 affairs as to insure, beyond reasonable doubt, the early 
 and complete triumph of the Union arms, yet, precisely 
 at this critical juncture, his plans were totally discon- 
 certed and his power completely paralyzed by a new re- 
 bellion suddenly outbursting in the Northern States. 
 The remainder of the history is soon written. Civil war 
 presently raged from one end of the country to the other. 
 The East was arrayed against the West, and a party in 
 the "West was in secret alliance with the South. The 
 position of the Union armies in the Southern States be- 
 came most critical. They fell back, closely followed by 
 the Southern insurgents. Washington was lost. The 
 central government was broken up. The Union was 
 
32 
 
 practically dissolved. Soon, in the confusion which fol- 
 lowed, the component elements of this once magnificent 
 nationality became so bitterly and irreconcilably hostile 
 to each other as to render reconstruction hopeless, and 
 thus the greatest republic of ancient or modern times 
 miserably perished." 
 
 If, Mr. President, the record of our downfall is to be 
 written, it will, as I most sincerely believe, be written in 
 terms like these. But I will not yet believe that it is to 
 be written at all. My faith is yet strong in the virtue of 
 the people. If it were equally strong in their vigilance, 
 or in their zeal in the cause in which they have so much 
 at stake, I should have no misgivings. Still hope pre- 
 dominates over apprehension; and when, to human view, 
 the clouds around us seem darkest, my trust is in God. 
 Surely He cannot permit this giant iniquity to triumph ! 
 Surely He will reward our patience and our perseverance 
 at last. Surely the time cannot be distant when He will 
 restore to us the blessings of peace; and along with 
 peace will give us back our country, and our whole 
 undivided country. 
 
 I am, sir, respectfully. 
 
 Your obedient servant. 
 
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