"Her battles fought, her victories won,

No field of bloody strife

Sends forth its cloud to blot the sun
Or drink the nation's life.

But peace and all her shining bands
Their tuneful voices raise,
And sing throughout the happy land
Their songs of joy and praise.

"From sea to sea, from gulf to lakes, And o'er the watery world;

The wind of heaven our banner takes,
Against the sky unfurled;

The dear old flag, its stars all there,
And where it proudly streams
No guilt of treason taints the air,
No slave of Freedom dreams.

"O nation, fairest born of time! O people blessed of fate!

'Tis

yours to make the world sublime, By being nobly great!

To rise from out this trial hour,

If true to man and God,

To heights of fame and fields of power, And glory all untrod.”

APPENDIX.

UNION AND EMANCIPATION SOCIETY.

PRESIDENT-THOMAS BAYLEY POTTER, Esq.

VICE-PRESIDENTS.

TREASURER-Samuel Watts, jun., Esq., Manchester. BANKERS-Manchester and Salford Bank.

JOHN C. EDWARDS,

EDWARD OWEN GREENING,

RESPONSE

FROM THE CHURCH OF THE PURITANS, NEW YORK.

(Note to page 143.)

RESPECTED AND BELOVED,-We respond with delight to your fraternal and sympathizing mission and appeal. We thank you for your Christian and manly utterances against "the slave-trade and slavery," and against "the Confederacy" seeking a new nationality on the basis of the perpetuity and extension of these crimes. We thank you for your "manifestations of sympathy for the coloured race, so long oppressed and debased by Christian nations." Particularly do we thank our British brethren for distinctly saying: "It is the duty of American statesmen and Christian ministers to guard against any reaction in the policy of Emancipation, when arrangements consequent on the termination of the war may come under discussion." Precisely at this point it is, at the present crisis, that your friendly cautions were needed. Since the arrival of the British delegation, our victories in Pennsylvania and at Vicksburg have been made the occasion for reviving the previous clamours of the pro-slavery party for a repeal of the President's edict of Emancipation.

In connection with this, we are compelled to advert to the recent military instructions, Article 32, declaring that although the commanders of our armies have authority, under martial law, to suspend or abolish the relations of "service" from one person to another in rebel states conquered by our armies, yet the permanence of such change, or its temporary nature, must be determined by the treaty of peace. You have well said, in your address to us, that "A retrograde course would assuredly give a triumph to the adversaries of freedom, and put to shame all who have sympathized with the cause of the slave." And just here, honoured and beloved brethren of France and Great Britain, you will allow us, with the frankness of brotherly confidence and affection, to disclose our deepest perplexities and most anxious apprehensions, that you may know at what points we most need your assistance, your sympathies, and your prayers.

We are grieved and alarmed to notice that while the Divine judgments are so heavily resting upon our nation and government for our great national sin, while slaveholders themselves, through their wicked rebellion, are the scourges, in God's hand, by which He is chastising us for our disobedience to Him, in permitting their oppressions, instead of executing justice for the relief of their victims, we witness little or nothing like repentance for the sin, or even a nominal recognition of its sinfulness. In nothing that has been done or attempted by our Government, in nothing that has been proposed in our national councils, in none of the proclamations for national fasts, has our great national sin of tolerating slavery been recognized. Emancipation has not

been proclaimed as an act of obedience to God, or of humanity to the slave, or as a protection for the essential rights of human nature, or as a performance of the essential duties of human government in general, or as the necessary workings of free institutions in particular, nor as a requirement of international and general Common Law, the product of Christianity and natural justice, essential to a true civilization. All this has not merely been ignored, but laboriously disclaimed. The consequence has been that emancipation is resorted to, only as a military necessity, and, in the last extremity, when no other mode of relief seems possible. Emancipation is proclaimed in one region of the country and withheld from another. In States professedly and nominally loyal, though kept such by the presence of national troops, the pretended right of slavery is secured by government, and fugitive slaves are remanded back into slavery, their servitude, in many instances, being enforced by Union soldiers. It is only in rebel states, or in rebel sections of states that emancipation is proclaimed. Thus the slave system, in the hands of our national government, becomes boon offered to the slave states, to bribe them into loyalty. Emancipation, on the other hand, is the threatened punishment of disloyalty. While the rebel states retain possession and power over their own territory, the President's Proclamation fails to secure its objects, because our government cannot enforce it. In the border slave states, in possession of national troops, and where emancipation could be easily enforced, slavery is protected by the national government, because the state is accounted loyal, so that in either case, as a general rule, elavery is sustained, either by the nation or the rebel states. Only the comparatively few who come within our military lines, are protected as "freedmen," and there is no security for the permanence of their freedom.

Whether, on the return of peace, the Emancipation Proclamation would be enforced in the now rebel states, after their submission, is a mooted question among lawyers as well as politicians. The repeal or the inherent nullity, or both, of the liberating proclamation are urged on the ground that, by the Constitution, under which the Union is to be restored, the states will have a "sovereign right" to re-establish slavery, and that the national government cannot interfere. By others it is conceded that although the freedmen under the proclamation may not be legally re-enslaved, yet the returning and restored states may, in the exercise of their "sovereign state rights," enslave whomsoever else they please. You see, then, honoured and dear brethren, that the military conquest of the rebellion is in great hazard of being succeeded by a diplomatic surrender of that very liberty against which the rebellion was itself organized. To prevent this result, more than human wisdom and energy will be required. You perceive the nature of the suicidal concession, that while our national government is fighting to subdue seceding states and charging them with rebellion, those states are, nevertheless, so sovereign that, while loyal, they have the "state right" to enslave any of the citizens of the United States, within their jurisdiction. You perceive the libel against our "free institutions" for which we have challenged the admiration of mankind, that, unlike all other institutions of civil governments on earth, the state governments