auty with regard to the emancipation provisions of the new Confiscation Act. These provisions were designed to fight Slavery with Liberty. They prescribe that men loyal to the Union and willing to shed their blood in her behalf shall no longer be held, with the Nation's consent, in bondage to persistent malignant traitors, who for twenty years have been plotting and for sixteen months have been fighting to divide and destroy our country."
He complained that the President had given too much consideration to the advice of "fossil politicians." "The Union cause has suffered and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery."[1]
"I close, as I began, with the statement that what an immense majority of the Loyal Millions of your countrymen require of you is a frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the laws of the land, more especially of the Confiscation Act. That act gives freedom to the slaves of Rebels coming within our lines, or whom these lines may at any time inclose,—we ask you to render it due obedience by publicly requiring all your subordinates to recognize and obey it. The Rebels are everywhere using the late anti-negro riots in the North, as they have long used your officers' treatment of negroes in the South, to convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope for from a Union success,—that we mean in that case to sell them into bitterer bondage to defray the cost of the war. Let them impress this as a truth on the great mass of their ignorant and credulous bondmen, and the Union will never be restored—never. We cannot conquer Ten Millions of people united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies. We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers and choppers from the Blacks
- ↑ New York Tribune, August 20, 1862.
