THE JOURNALISTS ON LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.

"2. That no one of you will do any thing which, in his own judgment, will tend to hinder the increase or favor the decrease or lessen the efficiency of the army and navy, while engaged in the effort to suppress that rebellion; and

"3. That each of you will, in his sphere, do all he can to have the officers, soldiers, and seamen of the army and navy, while engaged in the effort to suppress the Rebellion, paid, fed, clad, and otherwise well provided for and supported.

"And with the further understanding that, upon receiving the letter and names thus indorsed, I will cause them to be published; which publication shall be, within itself, a revocation of the order in relation to Mr. Vallandigham.

495

tions, or resistance to the draft; sug

gesting that

"The measures of the Administration, and its changes of policy in the prosecution of the war, have been the fruitful sources of discouraging enlistments and inducing desertions, and furnish a reason for the undeniable fact that the first call for volunteers was answered by very many more than were demanded, and that the next call for soldiers will probably be responded to by drafted men alone."

They express surprise at the President's proffer to revoke the banishment of Mr. V. on the conditions above specified, and decline

to

contracts, or conditions, with the President of the United States, to procure the release of Mr. Vallandigham. They regard the proffer as involving an imputation on their own sincerity and fidelity as citizens of the United States ;" and declare that "they have asked the revocation of the order of banishment not as a favor, but as a right due to the people of Ohio, and with a view to avoid the possibility of conflict or disturbance of the public tranquillity."

"It will not escape observation that I consent to the release of Mr. Vallandigham" enter into any bargains, terms, upon terms not embracing any pledge from him, or from others, as to what he will or will not do. I do this because he is not present to speak for himself, or to authorize others to speak for him; and hence I shall expect that on returning he would not put himself practically in antagonism with his friends. But I do it chiefly because I thereby prevail on other influential gentlemen of Ohio to so define their position as to be of immense value to the army-thus more than compensating for the consequences of any mistake in allowing Mr. Vallandigham to return; so that, on the whole, the public safety will not have suffered by it. Still, in regard to Mr. Vallandigham and all others, I must hereafter, as heretofore, do so much as the public service may seem to require.

"I have the honor to be, respectfully, yours, &c.,

A. LINCOLN."

At this point, the argument of this grave question, concerning the right, in time of war, of those who question the justice or the policy of such war, to denounce its prosecution as mistaken and ruinous, was rested by the President and his assailants-or rather, it was transferred" by the

and duties of the Press, in a season of convulsion and public peril, like the present, are briefly summed up in the following propositions:

ity to the Constitution, Government, and laws "1. We recognize and affirm the duty of fidelof our country, as a high moral as well as political obligation resting on every citizen; and neither claim for ourselves nor concede to others any exemption from its requirements or privilege to evade their sacred and binding force.

"2. That Treason and Rebellion are crimes, by the fundamental law of this as of every other country; and nowhere else so culpable, so abhorrent, as in a republic, where each has an equal voice and vote in the peaceful and legal direction of public affairs.

"3. While we thus emphatically disclaim and

latter to the popular forum, where- siastic thousands, though the speak

especially in Ohio-it was continued with decided frankness as well as remarkable pertinacity and vehemence. And one natural consequence of such discussion was to render the Democratic party more decidedly, openly, palpably, anti-War than it had hitherto been.

ers were generally as chary as the Ohio Democratic State Committee of admitting the existence in our country of a gigantic Rebellion, and insisting on the duty of aiding in its suppression. Not the Rebel chiefs conspiring, nor the Rebel armies advancing at their behest, to overthrow the Government and sever finally the Union, but the directors and chief functionaries of that Government, were regarded and reprobated by those orators as public enemies to be combated, resisted, and overcome.

Ex-President Franklin Pierce was the orator at a great Democratic mass meeting held at Concord, N. H.; and, in lfis carefully prepared oration,amid the ringing acclaim of thousands, he said:

Perhaps the very darkest days that the Republic ever saw were the ten which just preceded the 4th of July, 1863-when our oft-beaten Army of the Potomac was moving northward to cover Washington and Baltimore -when Milroy's demolition at Winchester seemed to have filled the bitter cup held to our lips at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville-when tidings of the displacement of Hooker by Meade, just on the eve of a great, decisive battle, were received with a painful surprise by many sad, sinking hearts-when Grant was held at bay by Vicksburg and Banks by Port Hudson; while Rosecrans had for half a year stood still in Middle Tennessee. At this hour of national peril and depression, when the early appearance of Lee's victory-independence of the several States, all with crowned legions in the streets of Philadelphia and New York was confidently, exultingly anticipated by thousands, our leading Democratic statesmen and orators were preparing orations and addresses for the approaching anniversary of our National Independence, which were in due time delivered to applauding, enthu

deny any right, as inhering in journalists or others, to incite, advocate, abet, uphold, or justify treason or rebellion, we respectfully but firmly assert and maintain the right of the Press to criticise freely and fearlessly the acts of those charged with the administration of the government, also those of all their civil and military subordinates, whether with intent directly to secure greater energy, efficiency, and fidelity in the public service, or in order to achieve the

"The Declaration of Independence laid the foundation of our political greatness in the two fundamental ideas of the absolute independence of the American people, and of the sovereignty of their respective States. Under that standard, our wise and heroic forefathers fought the battle of the Revolution; under that. they.conquered. In this spirit, they established the Union; having the conservative thought ever present to their minds, of the original sovereignty and

their diverse institutions, interests, opinions, and habits, to be maintained intact and secure, by the reciprocal stipulations and mutual compromises of the Constitution. They were master builders, who reared up the grand structure of the Union-that august temple beneath whose dome three generaliberty as were never before vouchsafed by tions have enjoyed such blessings of civil Providence to man-that temple before whose altars you and I have not only bowed

with devout and grateful hearts, but where, with patriotic vows and sacrifices, we have same ends more remotely, through the substitution of other persons for those now in power.

"4. That any limitations of this right created by the necessities of war should be confined to localities wherein hostilities actually exist, or are imminently threatened; and we deny tho right of any military officer to suppress the issues or forbid the general circulation of journals printed hundreds of miles from the seat of war." 35 See his letter to Jeff. Davis, Vol. I., p. 512.

FRANKLIN PIERCE ON THE WAR AND ITS CAUSES.

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men in every State of the Union, North and South, East and West, were suddenly smitten with homicidal madness, and 'the custom of fell deeds' rendered as familiar as if it were a part of our inborn nature; as if an avenging angel had been suffered by Providence to wave a sword of flaming fire above our heads, to convert so many millions of good men, living together in brotherly love, into insensate beings, savagely bent on the destruction of themselves and of each other, and leaving but a smouldering ruin of conflagration and of blood in the

so frequently consecrated ourselves to the protection and maintenance of those lofty columns of the Constitution by which it was upheld. No visionary enthusiasts were they, dreaming vainly of the impossible uniformity of some wild Utopia of their own imaginations. No desperate reformers were they, madly bent upon schemes which, if consummated, could only result in general confusion, anarchy, and chaos. Oh, no! highhearted, but sagacions and practical statesmen they were, who saw society as a living fact, not as a troubled vision; who knew that national power consists in the recon-place of our once blesséd Union. I endeavor cilement of diversities of institutions and in- sometimes to close my ears to the sounds terests, not their conflict and obliteration; and my eyes to the sights of woe, and to ask and who saw that variety and adaptation myself whether all this can be-to inquire of parts are the necessary elements of all which is true, whether the past happiness there is sublime or beautiful in the works of and prosperity of my country are but the art or of nature. Majestic were the solid flattering vision of a happy sleep, or its presfoundations, the massive masonry, the col- ent misery and desolation haply the delusion umned loftiness, of that magnificent struc- of some disturbed dream. One or the other ture of the Union. Glorious was the career seems incredible and impossible: but, alas! of prosperity and peace and power upon the stern truth can not thus be dispelled from which, from its very birthday, the American our minds. Can you forget, ought I espeUnion entered, as with the assured march cially to be expected to forget, those not reof the conscious offspring of those giants of mote days in the history of our country, the Revolution. Such was the Union, as con- when its greatness and glory shed the ceived and administered by Washington and reflection at least of their rays upon all Adams, by Jefferson and Madison and Jack- our lives, and thus enabled us to read the son. Such, I say, was the Union, ere the evil lessons of the fathers, and of their Constitutimes befell us; ere the madness of sectional tion, in the light of their principles and their hatreds and animosities possessed us; ere, deeds? Then war was conducted only against in the third generation, the all-comprehen- the foreign enemy, and not in the spirit and sive patriotisin of the Fathers had died out, purpose of persecuting non-combatant popand given place to the passionate emotions ulations, nor of burning undefended towns or of narrow and aggressive sectionalism. *** private dwellings, and wasting the fields of Glorious, sublime above all that history re- the husbandmen, or the workshops of the cords of national greatness, was the specta- artisan, but of subduing armed hosts in the cle which the Union exhibited to the world, field. *** How is all this changed! And so long as the true spirit of the Constitution why? Do we not all know that the cause lived in the hearts of the people, and the of our calamities is the vicious intermedgovernment was a government of men recip-dling of too many of the citizens of the rocally respecting one another's rights, and of States, each moving, planet-like, in the orbit of its proper place in the firmament of the Union. Then we were the model republic of the world, honored, loved, or feared where we were not loved, respected abroad, peaceful and happy at home. No American citizen was then subject to be driven into exile for opinion's sake, or arbitrarily arrested and incarcerated in military bastiles -even as he may now be-not for acts or words of imputed treason, but if he do but mourn in silent sorrow over the desolation of his country; no embattled hosts of Americans were then wasting their lives and resources in sanguinary civil strife; no suicidal and parricidal civil war then swept like a raging tempest of death over the stricken homesteads and wailing cities of the Union. Oh, that such a change should have come over our country, in a day, as it were—as if all VOL. II.-32

Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, cöoperating with the discontents of the people of those States? Do we not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security it affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the calamity which our country is called to undergo? And now, war! war, in its direst shapewar, such as it makes the blood run cold to read of in the history of other nations and of other times-war, on a scale of a million of men in arms-war, horrid as that of barbaric ages, rages in several of the States of the Union, as its more immediate field, and casts the lurid shadow of its death and lamentation athwart the whole expanse, and into every nook and corner of our vast domain. Nor is that all; for in those of the States which are exempt from the actual ravages of war, in which the roar of the

GOV. HORATIO SEYMOUR ON THE CRISIS.

ecuted, as I must understand those procla- | Academy of Music, in language caremations, to say nothing of the kindred brood fully weighed beforehand and temwhich has followed, upon the theory of emancipation, devastation, subjugation, it pered by the obvious requirements of can not fail to be fruitless in every thing ex- his official position, was far more cept the harvest of woe which it is ripening measured and cautious in his assaults for what was once the peerless republic. and imputations than were the great majority of his compatriots. Yet he opened with this allusion to the Nation's imminent perils and the disappointed hopes, the blighted expectations, of those who, whether in council or on the field, were charged with the high responsibility of upholding its authority and enforcing its laws: