The Struggle of the Nation for Life (Just War Theory)

                                                                                          THE STRUGGLE OF THE NATION FOR LIFE

Many worthy people regard war, especially a civil war like that which is now raging in the American Union, as the greatest calamity that can befall a nation, and so great is their horror of war that they seem willing to purchase peace at any price, even by national dishonor and national degradation, yet war is rather the effect of evil than the evil itself.  The real evil is in the causes  that precede and lead to it.  In our case it is the effort of the sound part of the nation to expel a disease long since contracted, and which was gradually but steadily approaching the seat of life, and threatening us with complete dissolution.  To the eye of enlightened patriotism our condition as a people is less deplorable to-day than is was four years ago before the war broke out.

War is never lawful for its own sake, and can be right­fully undertaken only for the sake of a true and lasting peace; but, when necessary to that end, it is not only justifiable, but sacred and obligatory. It is a severe remedy for a desperate disease, what physicians call an " heroic" remedy, therefore good, but one which in certain cases must be resorted to, if recovery is not to be despaired of.  Without it, we had no chance of prolonging our national life. With the slave interest in full power in nearly one half of the Union, and by its combinations ruling the coun­cils of the nation; with Young America, reckless and des­titute of principle, managing our politics at the North under the lead of Fernando Woods and New York Heralds; with the laxity of morals becoming almost universal in politics and business, in public life and private; with the growing tastes and habits of luxury and extravagance prev­alent throughout the land, we were well-nigh a lost people; our destruction as a nation was, if no change came, only a question of time, and thoughtful and far-seeing men were beginning to despair of the republic.  The impending ruin,in the ordinary providence of God, could be averted only by the war which has broken out, and is now raging.  We deplore with all our heart the causes which made the war necessary and inevitable, but we do not and cannot grieve that it has come, or lament the sacrifices it compels us to make.

War is a less calamity to a nation than the effeminate and luxurious tastes and habits generated by a long peace and its attendant exterior prosperity. It can never be so fatal to a nation as the loss of virtue, courage, manliness, and love of glory, which we had suffered during the thirty years pre­ceding the outbreak of the present rebellion, and which renders it yet doubtful whether we have the moral qualities requisite to restore the Union, and preserve our national existence.  What is the loss of blood or treasure in com­parison with the loss of country or of national life?  What are all the losses war can occasion in comparison with the possession of our manhood, and of those self-denying and self-sacrificing virtues which war demands and seldom fails to develop?  Indeed, we look upon the war as our only means of salvation, as sent in mercy to a privileged people to enable them to be a living people, a great, heroic, and chivalric nation, fitted to receive and fulfil the holy mission of proving what is the nobility of man when and where he is free to be himself.  Better to be moved by the inordinate love of glory than by the inordinate love of gain or sensual pleasure, and far nobler are the qualities of the soldier than those of the demagogue or even the shopkeeper.  

Instead of sighing over the calamities of the war, its dis­arrangement of business, its interruption of ordinary pur­suits, or its expenditures in money and in life, we should bring our minds up to the high thought that there are nobler things than these and far more worth living for.  No man ever rises to the dignity of true manhood who has not hovering before him an ideal above all things of this sort, and in whom there has not been developed the power of heroic self-abnegation, and of wedding himself to a cause that transcends all the goods of time and sense, and of counting no loss, no toil, no suffering, no sacrifice in its defence or promotion.  Such a cause is religion, and first on the list of those honored on earth and in heaven stand her martyrs.  Next to religion, and never separable from it, is the cause of our country, and humanity honors, next to her saints, the brave and heroic soldier, next to her martyrs for the cause of God, those who nobly fall in battle for the honor, dignity, and defence of their country.  The church agrees with the human race in all ages in her estimate of the soldier, and bestows peculiar privileges on those who fall in fighting for a just and sacred cause.  Let not modern scepticism or mistaken philanthropy attempt to reverse the verdict of the church and of humanity. He who marches to the battle-field, and pours out his life in de­fence of his country is the brother of him who marches to the stake or the scaffold, and gives his life for his faith.  In both it is the heroism that the world loves and worships, the forgetfulness of self, the power of self-sacrifice, the devo­tion to the great, the noble, the true, the good.  The hero­ism, in the true and nobler sense of that soul-stirring word, which the war for religion or for country generates or de­velops is worth more to a nation than all it costs, for, with­out it, no nation is really a living or an advancing nation.  When a nation has ceased to produce heroes, as a religion when it has ceased to produce martyrs, it has culminated, is on its decline, falling or fallen into the dead and putrid state of Turkey, India, or China, and has no longer a work for either God or man.

If we are wise, we shall accept the present civil war as a much needed and a salutary discipline, necessary to arrest us in our downward career, and to recall us to the virtues of our heroic fathers.  We shall even accept it with thank­fulness, as giving us the opportunity of rivalling, and even surpassing them in glory.  It gives us the opportunity to prove ourselves men, and to achieve greatness for ourselves.  Our fathers won us a country, we can now prove that we are able to defend, preserve, and ennoble a country.  We can now prove that the race has not degenerated in this New World, and that man here is still man in all his vigor, in all his proud daring, and in all his noble deeds.  We of the free states have been taunted by the slaveholding South with being cowards and poltroons, with being ready to sac­rifice honor, dignity, and glory, for the sake of trade and its profits, and poltroons in our politics we have been; we can now prove that if we have been ready to make any sacrifice, even that of honor, to prevent the dissolution of the Union, it has not been through sordidness or cowardice.  Our honor, our very manhood as a free and living people are now at stake, and must be redeemed.  We must wipe out the disgrace of our past concessions, our past crouching to the "Barons of the South," and prove that those con­cessions were not wrung from a timidity that springs from a want of manhood or from insensibility to national honor or national glory; that we have not crouched because we wanted spirit to assert, or strength to defend our own rights and dignity, but because we loved the Union, and are now ready to make any sacrifice to preserve the integrity of the nation.  This we can and must now prove.  We are now called upon to prove that there still lives and burns in our hearts the spirit of our fathers; that we have the old Amer­ican energy and indomitable perseverance that won this continent from the savage and the forest, that forced the proud mother country to acknowledge our independence, framed the federal constitution, and made us a nation full of promise to the future of the world.

But to do this we must take the matter in earnest, and understand and feel that the war is a reality, and that it must be conducted on war, not on peace principles.  The amiable speculations of our late "peace-men," and the charming sentimentalities of well-meaning philanthropists, with which we wiled away the "piping times of peace," for the want of something more amusing, interesting, or spirit-stirring, must be laid aside for the present, for we are now face to face with the stern realities of war.  The real, not the mimic stage is now before us, and the actors are actors in real, not mimic life.  The tragic deeds are doing, not merely represented before our eyes. They are real, not pasteboard soldiers that pass and repass before us, and the charge sounded is a real charge to a real battle, in which the life of a nation, perhaps the whole future of humanity, is at stake.  We are not sitting at our ease in the parterre or a private box, and witnessing a theatrical battle.  There is no artifice, no phantasmagoria, no painted scenery here; it is all real, sternly, terribly real.  The reality itself is before us, and we must meet it with a sternness, a gravity equal to its own.  It is real blood, not red paint that flows, and real lifewarm blood must still flow, and flow in torrents.  We must have not only the courage to be killed, but we must have for brave and generous souls the harder courage to kill, — not simply to bear, but to do harm, to strike the enemy in his tenderest part our quickest and heaviest blows.  War demands not the passive virtues alone; it demands the active virtues, and is the work not of women, but of men,—of men wound up to the highest pitch of their manhood, acting in the terrible energy of their full masculine strength, and the whole directed with an invincible will to the beating down of every obstacle to its advance. There must be no dilly-dallying, no Chinese making up of faces, and trusting to painted dragons and devils, or real noise and clamor.  There must be a downright, straightforward, and earnest advance, with all the death-dealing instruments of war.  The war, while it lasts, is and must be inexorable.  There must be no fear to strike, lest we fell a foe, no fear to fire, lest somebody should be shot.  This fear or hesitancy may do when we are playing soldiers, but it is out of place now.  The very design of war is, while it lasts, to inflict the greatest possible injury in the shortest possible time, and with the least possible loss to ourselves, on the enemy, in order to force him to submit, and cease resistance.  When he submits, but not till then, may pity, compassion, tenderness, love be displayed, and exerted in all their divine sweetness and power.

There is no question that the people of the loyal states are not yet fully wrought up to the stern realities of war, nor fully alive to the gravity and magnitude of the struggle we are now engaged in for the existence of the nation.  We are not yet fully convinced that we are in face of a real rebellion, or that the confederates are really attempting any thing more than their old practice of gambling on our love for the Union, and seeking by the game of bluff to force us to make them new and greater concessions.  We half persuade ourselves that the war is only a bravado on their part, and that the controversy will be settled, as so many controversies between the North and the Sonth have heretofore been, by some political coup de main, by some new "compromise bill," or, at least, by some unforeseen and lucky accident.  But the day for concession and compromise has gone by.  The rebel states are in earnest, and this time the wolf has really come.  They demand our retirement from the family mansion, and the surrender of the family estate to their management, and that we trust to their generosity or their filial piety to dole us out the bare pittance necessary to keep soul and body together.  There is no half-way measure possible.  They will make the Union theirs, or they will dash it to atoms.  In this there is no mistake.  Their motto is, "Rule or Ruin."

Even the administration, able and patriotic as it is, we fear is deceiving itself with a specious, but illusory theory.  Its theory is, that no state has seceded from the Union, and that the rebels are merely a faction in their several states, who, by a wicked and artful conspiracy, have usurped the functions of their respective state governments, and are exercising a gross and intolerable despotism over the people, who are in general loyal and devoted to the Union.  The true policy, it holds, is to strengthen the people in the states where the faction has usurped the government, and to enable them through the ballot-box to recover their political ascendency.  Hence while defending itself against the rebels, it must protect the people of the seceding states,—the Union people,— and avoid irritating them, or doing any thing that might drive them to make common cause with the rebels, or prevent them, when the rebellion is suppressed, from readily fraternizing with their northern brethren, and from looking upon them in any other light than that of deliverers.  Hence it shows itself scrupulously tender of their feelings and pre­judices, and forbears to exercise its full rights, either as a sovereign or as a belligerent, towards even the rebels themselves.  It concentrates not its energies on suppressing the rebellion, and saving the life of the nation, but suffers its arm to be paralyzed by vain efforts to protect the constitutional rights of rebel states, and to provide for the well-being of the Union after the war is over.

This theory may have had some reason in its favor last February, perhaps even last March; but it is worse than idle now.  Prior to the breaking out of the war, a majority of the people of nearly all the southern states, very likely would have preferred the Union to secession, and, perhaps, had not secession been attempted, a majority of them would even yet vote against secession; but we only show our ignorance of the seceded states, if we suppose there is a majority of the people in a single southern state, or even a respectable minority—except, perhaps, in two or three of the border slave states—that is prepared to aid in putting down the rebellion by force of arms, or that would now even give their votes in favor of the Union.  We really can count on no Union party in those states, or a party worth naming that really wishes success to the federal arms.  If the seceded states return to their allegiance, their government and politics will be controlled as now by the leaders and people who have made, and support the rebellion.  There may grow up a Union party at the South, after the rebellion has been suppressed, but it will not find its nucleus in any Union party now existing.  The old Union party in them is defunct, and revocare defunctos is impossible.  Having declared their independence and founded a confederacy of their own, which has successfully resisted all the power of the federal government for nearly a year, state pride, interest, and even loyalty, as they understand it, naturally operate on the mass of those who would have preferred the Union should remain, and compel them now to throw in their lot with the secessionists, and the administration must treat the people of those states as substantially a united people.

As a question of right, no state has seceded or can secede, for no state has or can have any right to secede; but, as a question of fact, eleven states have seceded, and are practically as much out of the Union as if they had never been in it.  In these eleven states the rebels are the people, and it is worse than useless to proceed as if they were only a faction.  The rebels are, whether we like to own it or not, really rebel or revolted states, not simply individuals acting in their individual capacity.  They are practically communities or provinces in revolt, not simply individuals in rebellion.  They are the vassal at war with his suzerain.  In the technicalities of law no state has seceded, and the theory of the government is sustainable; but as a matter of fact, the whole eleven are out of the Union, and constitute a confederated power, though as yet unacknowledged, and, God helping, never shall be acknowledged.  We must rise above legal-technicalities, and look at the facts as they are.  The rebels are not simple individuals, but communities in revolt, and warring against the legitimate sovereign, and it is as such it is necessary to regard them.  The business of the sovereign is to reduce them by force of arms to their allegiance, or, if unable to do that, to recognize them as an independent foreign nation.

The federal government has the right and is bound, if in its power, to reduce them to their allegiance, let it cost what it may, or whatever havoc it may play with our theories; but it must not flatter itself with the vain illusion that in this contest it has only a faction, or even a party, in the seceding states to deal with.  It is the people of those states who are in rebellion, and who second their leaders with a zeal and energy, a unanimity surpassing any thing we see in the loyal states in support of the Union, and submit to toils, hardships, and sacrifices to which we have not yet proved ourselves equal.  We honor the government for its respect for the technicalities and even empty formalities of law; but we should honor it still more, if it would rise above them, and look the facts as they are full in the face.  These technicalities and formalities are wisely devised to restrain its action and limit its power in time of peace, or in the normal state of the country; but they embarrass it, they paralyze its arm, when it has to put down a rebellion of the formidable proportions assumed by that it has now to struggle with, and the sooner it abandons them, and deals with practical realities, the more easy will it be for it to suppress the rebellion, and restore peace and constitutional liberty.  The surest way of building up a Union party at the South is to put down the rebels.

So long as the government proceeds on the supposition that the seceding states are still in the Union, it is bound to treat them in their state capacity as loyal states, and to fulfil toward them all the constitutional obligations it is under to the non-seceding states.  It cannot treat them as states in revolt, but must treat them as equal and loyal members of the Union.  It must respect all their constitutional rights, all their state laws and usages, and exercise its sovereign, or even its belligerent rights, only in accordance with, or rather in subordination to them.  Assuming them to be, as states, still in the Union, it can war only against individuals, and legally let fall its blows only on those who can be proved to be personally involved in the crime of rebellion.  All others it must presume to be loyal, a hair of whose head it can touch only at its peril.  This is a serious embarrassment to the government in its work of suppressing the rebellion.  It makes it afraid to strike the rebel lest it should hit a Union man, and will bankrupt the federal treasury, when the war is ended, and the Union men, who will be numerous enough then, make their demands on it for indemnification for losses incurred during the war, whether losses occasioned by federal or confederate troops.  The states having been declared not out of the Union, but loyal states in the Union, their citizens can prefer no claim of indemnity against them for damages caused by the rebels, and consequently they will have the right to claim it from the federal treasury, which will be bound to pay it. 

It might have been wise in the outset to set up the theory the administration has adopted, for then public opinion was hardly up to the point of prosecuting the war on national principles.  Public opinion had been so long debauched on the subject of coercing a state, that even we ourselves thought it prudent last June, when writing our article on The Great Rebellion, to seek aground on which we could defend the war without asserting the right of the federal government to secession.  The question whether the United States are or are not a nation represented by the federal government, is precisely the issue between the loyal and seceding states, and which the war must settle.  We of the loyal states assert that we are a nation, and that the federal government, though limited in its powers by those reserved to the states so long as they remain loyal, is yet a supreme national government, and all laws and treaties made in pursuance of its constitution are "the supreme law of the land," and override all state constitutions, laws, and usages.  In this national character of the federal government is founded both its right and its duty to suppress the rebellion, and the right and the duty are in no sense weakened by the fact that the rebellious party is a state or several states combined.  Both the right and the duty are full and undeniable, if the federal government be, as we maintain, a true national government.

We should, for ourselves, take little interest in the war, if it were waged on any but national principles, by the national government, for national existence, and the integrity of the national territory.  We support it, and make all the sacrifices in our power to sustain it, as a war for national existence, against a rebellion that seeks to dismember the Union, and destroy our national life.  This is what gives to the war its terrible significance, and justifies its demand for every sacrifice needed on every man who loves his country, and would maintain national life and national integrity.  We do not believe the war can, and we have no wish that it should, be successfully prosecuted on any other principles.  If it does not prove us a nation, if it leaves it to be maintained that we are simply a confederacy of sovereign states, however it may terminate, it will have settled nothing, and all the old sores will remain to fester and break out anew.  We should gain nothing by putting down the rebellion on state-rights principles, for the old pretension of the right of a state to secede would be strengthened rather than weakened, and we should have our old battles to fight over again.

As we look deeper into the controversy raging, we think less and less of the effort that has been made to prove that the secession ordinances of the seceding states were not the acts of the people of those states, but of a faction illegally usurping their authority.  We deny not that the secession ordinances were, in some instances, perhaps in all, passed in violation of the state constitutions, and therefore are not bystate law legally binding on the people of the several seceding states; but we prefer to regard that as a state question, to be settled between the citizens of the state and the authority that professes to act as the state.  We prefer that the federal government should regard these ordinances, even if informal, as in fact ratified by the general acquiescence of the people, and therefore treat the rebels as rebellious states rather than as rebellious individuals.  We prefer this, because it brings the controversy to a distinct issue, and the war must settle once for all the question whether we are a nation or only a confederacy of sovereign states, and establish the nationality of the government without destroying its federal character.

If we are a nation, we have the same right, we repeat, to coerce a revolted state as an individual into submission.  If we have not that right, we are not a nation, and the attempt to enforce the federal authority over the people of any particular state, is, even if defensible in law, worse than useless.  A Union which is only a confederacy is, in our judgment, not worth seeking to maintain; for its action will always be impeded, and its wise and salutary administration prevented, or at least embarrassed, by threats of dissolution from one section or another.  We have seen it for the last thirty years.  The northern states have been more attached to the Union than the southern, and more ready to make concessions for its preservation.  Southern politicians and statesmen have known this, and for thirty years have gambled on it.  Whenever we showed a disposition not to vote to suit them, or to persist in a policy which, though constitutional, did not happen to meet their approbation, they have resisted us with threats to nullify the acts of congress, or to dissolve the Union.  They have at last attempted to carry their threats into execution; and now we wish it settled once and for ever, whether the pretended right of nullification or of secession is to be continually held up, in terrorem, to compel the sincere and earnest lovers of the Union to forego their rights, and stultify their own judgments.  Ever since we were old enough to vote, we have voted under threats of the dissolution of the Union, if we did not vote to please the slaveholding South.  We have borne this long enough.  We want an end put to those threats, and to know, once for all, which is sovereign, the state or the nation.  We wish, therefore, the issue distinctly made up, so that it shall be decided by the result of the war, whether we are or are not a sovereign nation, with the right of protecting itself against dismemberment or death.

Such being our view of the case, we are anxious that this war should be conducted on strictly national principles, against insurgent states, as well as against insurgent individuals.  So conducted, the success of the federal arms will settle the question for ever, and put an end once for all to the threats of dissolving the Union.  It will also relieve the administration from numerous embarrassments occasioned by the rights of real or pretended Union men, and the necessity of protecting the constitutional rights of states, practically in revolt.  It will much simplify the contest; for it at once, as against the Union, abrogates all constitutions, laws, and usages, in the case of such states, and reverts their citizens to their state government for redress in case of rebel injuries.  It would also enable the administration with less seeming impropriety to treat the rebels as belligerents, which they in fact are, and to arrange for a mutual exchange of prisoners according to the usages of civilized warfare.  Such exchanges would affect none of our rights toward the rebels that we shall ever seriously insist on exercising.  All engaged in the war are rebels and traitors, but nobody supposes that, if the government triumph, and the rebels submit, there will be any executions for treason of persons taken in arms.  They will be treated as prisoners of war, and released when peace is made.  We should have to depopulate the seceding states if we proposed to shoot or hang all secessionists.  We expect the men now in war against us, if beaten, will return to their duty as American citizens.  Instead, then, of standing upon a technicality unworthy of a great and strong power, and especially instead of going through the empty formalities of swearing and then releasing them, it would be much better to exchange the confederate soldiers that fall into our hands, for our own who have the misfortune to fall into the hands of the rebel authorities.  It will prejudice no right that we need insist on, and will present no obstacle to a final settlement.

But while we are willing to accord the rebels in certain respects the rights of belligerents, we insist that the war shall be prosecuted on war principles, and that we avail ourselves of all the advantages allowed by civilized warfare.  We insist that, while we observe toward the defenceless, or those who have ceased to resist, the tenderness and compassion of Christians, we shall conduct the war as a war against public enemies, not against friends, and inflict, till they submit, the surest damage in our power on the revolted states and their supporters. 

Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

We must understand that to-day our business is debellare superbos; to-morrow it may be parcere subjectis; but to­morrow will take care of itself.  We need not fear that, if we bring home to the revolted states all the horrors of war, we shall make them one whit more hostile to us than they now are, or more difficult to be reconciled to the Union after the war is over.

We wish the people of the loyal states to understand well that the people of the disloyal states will regard any show of forbearance, tenderness, or magnanimity on our part only as weakness, tameness, or fear of losing them for ever as our customers.  These things are thrown away upon them, and injure instead of serving the canse of the Union and reconciliation.  The South will never believe in our sincerity and magnanimity till we have given them a sound drubbing, and proved ourselves the better men.  Then they will respect us, and consent to live in peace and brotherhood with us.  They take every advantage of us, and we must take every advantage of them, and force them by the damage we do them into submission.  Nothing else remains for us.  They will not submit unless forced to submit; but when forced into submission and fully convinced that further resistance is vain, they will, we doubt not, with far less difficulty than many imagine, become reconciled to national union with us.  They have great respect for power, and worship force as a god.  With them, as with all men in their stage of civilization, perhaps even in ours, the stronger is the better man, and to real superiority they will deem it no dishonor to yield.

If the contest end favorably to us, as it certainly will, unless we throw away our advantages, we shall lag behind no one in our efforts to make the terms of reconciliation easy; but we urge now the prosecution of the war with all of war's severity, and with all the energy of a free government and a brave and heroic people.  Especially do we protest against any compromise.  If we are beaten, as we may be, for the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, we will submit to the victor, and take what comes.  But we insist on preserving our dignity as men, our honor as states, and fall, if fall we must, with our principles.  Let no man dare breathe the word "compromise."  The day for compromise has gone by.  The man, be he president, or secretary, or senator, or general, who shall propose and effect a compromise, will stand branded in history as an infamons traitor to his country and to humanity.  The rights of this nation we hold as a sacred trust from our fathers to be transmitted inviolate to posterity.  We have no right to barter them away, or by our cowardice and want of manhood to suffer them to be wrested from us.  Private wrongs we may compromise or forgive, but not wrongs to our country.

While we write, the president's annual message to both houses of congress reaches us, and we read it with eagerness.  We cannot say much in its favor, and it does not comport with our duty to the chief magistrate of the Union in the present critical juncture of our national affairs to say much against it.  Mr, Lincoln, in part, for the moment, represents the nation, and we cannot well stand by the nation without standing by him; certainly not, till it is clear that he is, through incompetency or some other reason, on the eve of betraying it.  We believe him patriotic, conscientious, and anxious to do the best for the country in his power, and, although we regard his policy as far less bold and determined than that the danger that threatens us demands, we remember that he is placed by his countrymen in a position which for him is and must be one of great embarrassment,—of great difficulty and delicacy, and we are disposed to give to all his words and actions the best possible construction, and to make the most liberal allowance for what may seem to us low, narrow, defective, or tame in his mode of conducting the war for the preservation of our national existence.  We are loyal to the nation, and will be loyal to the administration, so long as it shall be loyal to itself.

The message is comparatively short, and, though it can lay claim to no grammatical purity, or literary elegance, it is a plain, sensible, business-like document, not much above, nor much below what we expected.  We believe the president is disposed to save the Union, but, in our judgment, ho has no adequate conception of the conditions on which, and on which alone, it can be done. He is timid where we should wish him to be fearless, and fearless where we should be willing he should be timid.  He is bold enough before loyal men, timid almost to shrinking before disloyal men. He is afraid to touch with his little finger the "divine" institution of slavery; but has no fear of sacrificing any number of freemen and any amount of national treasure, to prevent a hair of its head from being singed.  He would seem to regard it as a more imperative duty to keep the border slave states nominally in the Union, than to suppress the armed rebellion against it.  We fear that he has not emancipated himself from the old slavery domination, or risen above the old notion that the government must be administered in the exclusive interest and according to the wishes of southern slaveholders.  The rights and interests of millions of freemen he apparently counts for nothing in comparison with the duty of protecting the doubtful rights of slavery.  This is sad, and, if persisted in, will render all the efforts and sacrifices we have made, or are making to save the Union, worse than pure loss.

We tell the president, and we desire to do so with all possible respect, that even the restoration of the Union on a policy shaped expressly to conciliate "Ole Kentuc'," or the slaveholding interest of any of the border states, would now, if possible, not be worth effecting.  Why was he elected to the presidency?  Why have we of the loyal states placed him in his present elevated position?  No man better than himself knows, that we voted for him, at the risk of civil war and the dissolution of the Union, because we were determined that the slave interest should no longer shape the policy and govern the councils of the nation.  It was this determination on the part of the freemen of the East, the North, and the West that took Mr. Lincoln from his lawoffice, and made him president.  He was not elected to preserve slavery, nor to abolish slavery; but he was elected to emancipate the administration and the republic itself from the domination of the slave interest; and we protest, therefore, in the name of those who elected him, against the perpetuation of that domination, even though confined to the slave interest of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.  Slavery may or may not continue to exist, but we insist that the government shall cease to be administered in its interest, or under its dictation.  The government must be administered in the interest of freedom and loyalty.  If not, better yield to the secessionists at once, and take Jefferson Davis for our president.  We will not pour out our blood and our treasure, we will not send the flower of our youth and the glory of our manhood to rot in camp, die on the battle-field, or languish in southern dungeons, for the sake of bringing the Union again under the domination of southern slaveholders, and of exposing ourselves to be again insulted and bullied, or cheated out of our rights and our manhood by the Davises, the Toombses, the Hammonds, the Masons, and the Slidells.  We have resolved that our government shall be emancipated, whatever becomes of slavery and its worshippers.  This is what we beg the administration to bear in mind.  We should be glad to believe that the president has not forgotten it, and that he is prepared to assert his own independence of the slave power, and that of the government, for we tell him never will there, and never can there, be a reunion of the separated states under the domination of the slave interest.

We have no concessions to make to Kentucky, or to any other border slave state.  The slaveholders have rebelled against the Union, and by so doing have absolved the Union from all obligations to protect slavery in either loyal or disloyal states.  If Kentucky, the native state of the president, will not remain in the Union, unless permitted to dictate its policy, and make her slave interest its law, then let her be treated as a rebel state, and coerced as we are coercing the other rebel states into loyalty.  We will no more consent to allow Kentucky than South Carolina or Georgia to impose her slave policy upon the government.  We of the free states intend to assert and maintain our own freedom, our own rights and dignity, and to be something else hereafter in the government of the country than the mere lackeys of southern slaveholders.  We are fighting to vindicate our own rights, and our government must recollect that in this contest it is bound to take our rights, the rights of freemen, into the account.  We wish the administration to consider that we of the free states have accepted the issue tendered us, and that we will spend our last dollar and our last life before we will suffer this Union to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to preserve the infamous institution of negro slavery; and before the slave interest shall ever again shape the policy of the government, or dominate in its councils.  If Mr. Lincoln has not learned this yet, he will, perhaps, learn it before the close of the present session of congress.  We have been in bondage to the capital invested in slavery long enough; we have long enough cowered and crouched under the lash of slaveholding dictators, afraid even to say our souls are our own, lest we should endanger the peace and safety of the Union.  We will do it no longer.  By the memory of our fathers who fought at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Monmouth, Yorktown, whose blood yet courses in our veins, we have sworn we will not.  Timid, weak, narrow-minded, pettifogging politicians may quake at these words, or shrink from them as meaning something, but their day is gone.  There is a spirit rising in the free states, that does not believe in "the divinity of slavery," or that all other interests must be sacrificed to it; and, what is more to the purpose, that does believe in freedom, that it is right, is law, and before it slavery must and shall give way.  Events march, as we said three months ago, and they are marching with fearful rapidity.  We are all carried along with them.  To many of us what six months ago seemed the extreme of rashness now appears timid, tame, and cowardly.  The government, if it would guide events, must march with them.  The president, we perceive, marches, slowly indeed; but, nevertheless, he marches, and his message proves that he is at least some steps in advance of where he was at the close of the extra session of congress.   He will probably march at a more rapid pace by and by, and perhaps catch up with public opinion.

We do not want the war waged or prosecuted for the abolition of slavery; but we do insist that it shall not be waged or prosecuted for the protection of slavery, and its reinstatement in power.  Slavery has rebelled, and let it pay the forfeit.  We have no confidence in the wisdom, we had almost said in the loyalty, of the statesmen who insist that the government has any further obligation toward it now, than to brush it aside, if found in its way.  We do not suppose the president is any more favorable to slavery than we are, but we do fear that he does not perceive that he is under no obligation to protect it, and that with less assumption of extraordinary power than he has assumed in arresting and incarcerating persons suspected of disloyalty without form of law, or bringing them to a speedy trial, a power we do not deny him, he might treat the relation of master and slave as non avenue, and declare the slaves free men.  Why can he not be as bold against slavery as against freedom?  Let him go as far in the slavery question as he has gone in many others, and he will satisfy the loyal people who are now in arms to save the life of the nation.  Let him make an end of the "Eternal Nigger," and feel, think, and act as the chief magistrate of a free people, and we shall be content, and not only support him as our chief magistrate, but do so with cheerfulness and alacrity, with confidence and hope that our sacrifices will not be in vain.