they know of is a political fusion; they can deploy around a convention or caucus, and fire their political thunder from the batteries of a demagogue, masked with the negro. If they fired a gun and should hit, they would do it as did Winkle when he killed the rook-he shut his eyes and blazed away in timid despair. My colleague is one of those whose politics and prayers have ever been to be delivered from the men of war. In times past he has thought more of Saint Peter than of saltpeter. When the Mexican war was declared, the class to which he belongs echoed Sumner's "True Grandeur of Nations," when he said "there was no war which was not dishonorable, and no peace which was not honorable.” They sang the ironical Yankee slang of Hosea Bigelow to the recruiting sergeant of Colonel Caleb Cushing:

"Fife away, you fifin' feller,

You may fife till you are yeller,
'Fore you get a hold of me."

There, away down in some New England village," they kind o' thought Christ went agin war and pillage, and that eppyletts warn't the best mark of a saint." Now, they are willing to swear that the apostles were rig. ged out in their swallow-tail coats, an' marched round in front of a drum and fife." Now they agree to the ironical verse:

"John P.

Robinson-he

Says they didn't know every thing down in Judee."

These men whose lives have been dedicated to considering the horrors of war and slavery, and whose consciences were very tender about the down-trodden when they wanted votes, now undertake, by congressional committees, declarations, and military diatribes here, to set squadrons in the field, and to show McClellan how he is not doing it, or how he might do it with the aid of armed blacks so bravely and all at once. Not satis fied with the President of their choice; not content with that which they voted in the Crittenden resolutions as the object to which the war should be devoted; not happy in the progress of a campaign which, so far as General McClellan is concerned, has been comparatively successful, certainly without blunders, they want a movement" at all hazards,” even if it moves the country and the Government to secession, dictatorship, chaos, or destruction. Such political dyspeptics and martial zanies ought to be sent home to teach boarding school misses the doctrines that brought many members here-the beauty of John Brown's life, and the glory of his death.

and

Judging by the remarks made here, one would infer that these gentlemen were all ready to receive and provide for the four millions of blacks who are to be freed by the war power; that the corn bread and fat pork were all provided for the jubilee of freedom. But where will they get the food, or where will they fix the locus in quo for the festive scene? In Kentucky? Ohio? Some of our soldiers, who have just fought so nobly under General Thomas, have written complaints that they get clothes through which they can put their fingers, and chicory for coffee. We do not even feed decently our white braves; but these gentlemen, who reason so lunaticly, think that there is some peculiar virtue in a colored

child or woman, and that the Lord somehow will provide for them as he did for Elijah with the ravens.

Why, do not these extreme gentlemen know that they are, in some part, responsible for this war? Does my colleague from Cleveland [Mr. RIDDLE] want me to prove it by his own speech? They are only fighting what we advised them would come by their action. We Democrats, with McClellan at our head, are now helping them; and how are we met by these ingrates? No, they are not fighting it; but they think they are moving the wheels, when they only sit on the axle and buzz their murmurs about McClellan and the forces which move the chariot of war. What good comes of this sort of debate here and now? Talk about milking a he-goat in a sieve, and it is sense to this. There is a little smack of propriety in this latter idea; but what can we say of this exhibition in a deliberative body, whose only duty it is to increase the army and the revenue, discussing the disposition of the slaves before we get them, and the movements of General McClellan, with the blankest incapacity to understand them. It is too ridiculous for serious controversy. It can only be ridiculed. Yet we have civil warriors, whose only fight is logomachy, barking at General McClellan; and for what? Because he does not proclaim liberty throughout all the land and to all the inhabitants thereof. Ah, there is the trouble! Can you wonder that Wendell Phillips, whose speeches are hailed so rapturously by this class, declared that he should deplore a victory by McClellan, because the sore would be salved over, and it would only be the victory of a slave Union; and that he thanked Beauregard for marshalling his army before Washington, because it conferred upon Congress the constitutional power to abolish slavery? Nor would I wonder to see my colleague from the Cleveland district, who lectured us on our duty to the Union upon the slavery question, rehearsing again his contempt for the Union, which he expressed in his printed speech made at Cleveland on the day of John Brown's obsequies, when he said that no purer spirit than John Brown's had ever entered Paradise for the past thousand years; and that he would rend the Union to destroy slavery, though hedged round by the triple bars of the national compact.

I did intend, Mr. Chairman, to review some of the bills introduced here for confiscation and emancipation, and to discuss their feasibility and constitutionality. But I am glad to announce to the country that there is no hope of such suicidal legislation passing the present Congress. That announcement, which the opinions here justify, will give relief to our Army and to the Union men everywhere. One of the bills of this black batch pretends to strike out the State of Florida. This bill has the paternity of my colleague [Mr. GURLEY]. It is a part of his military plan. While striking for the Union and the flag, with every star on its folds, he would blot out the Statehood of Florida. He would have its everglades and swamps devoted to the business of negro apprenticeship, with the Federal agents as taskmasters, and the Republic as a cotton producer and speculator. Here is the spot where my colleague would imparadise the African. He would have a Federal master watch the negro apprentice, and see to it that he produced a living from that soil, where dying is so much easier. He would have us drop down the little pickaninnies amidst the haunts of the alligator. He thinks he sees here an opening for the

rising generation of colored children; knowing, as my colleague does, that they will all be saved in the other world, he is willing to risk their sudden disappearance here. I can well imagine the holy horror which will pervade the infantile African mind when it comes to understand the confiscating character of my colleague's bill. I can well understand how the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. CAMPBELL] must have startled the people of his State by his proposition to hang all the public plunderers, and thus depopulate so terribly his own State. But that was humanity compared to this scheme of my colleague, which has only a parallel in Dean Swift's plan to get rid of Irish children by eating them. Suicidal absurdity can no further go than this! All such schemes are in derogation of our whole system of polity. Their authors seem bent on prying away mountains of granite with levers of straw!

Such schemes as are here discussed will do no good to the blacks nor the whites, unless a scheme of forced expatriation be at once started; and that is attended with formidable obstacles. The North will become in turn the worse than masters of the slaves. For very self-protection and to prevent such a ruinous and adulterous mixture of society, the North will rise to drive the free blacks from their soil. Interest, which is stronger in society, in the end, than philanthropy, will issue its edict of expatriation, and no good will accrue to the black or white. If you would barbarize the war, undignify its object, and, indeed, make it a failure in every sense, you may follow the impracticable schemes of New England politics, and their neophytes in the country. These emancipation schemes will divide the North, and create new dissension and rebellion in the border States. They will paralyze the efforts of the army, and make cold and indifferent the now ardent and anxious friends of the Union. This division of the North now, when all are united by State legislation and Federal action to defend our flag and sovereignty, would tend to destroy the hope which has buoyed us in this great conflict.

It would be an act of fraud on the soldiers and officers of the grand Army of the Republic. They were called out by a proclamation of the 3d of May, which was in harmony with the action of Congress. The Crittenden resclutions were an explicit avowal of the only and legitimate object of this war. (House Journal of last session, p. 129.)

To divert it now into a war against the institution of slavery will be to make it the "violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle" which the President fears. Besides, it would make it a gigantic swindle upon the people, upon our votes for taxes, and upon the soldiers who imperil their lives in defence of the Union and its authority. This was not the understanding of a large party in this country who rallied at the call of Douglas. He most distinctly disavowed such an object. He would not by a Federal army, any more than by a Federal Congress, interfere with State laws and institutions. So he declared over and over again. This forum is no place for its discussion, much less for its enactment. If the State Legislatures, in their sovereign will, choose to do this, it is for them, not for us. We have no right; and it is none of our business to make the Federal Government a moral reform society. This attempt has broken the Union; and the continuance of the effort may widen the breach until the separation is everlasting. As most of our ills come by slavery discussions and

laws, why may we not now pause? Why do not gentlemen on the other side, who have now before them the results of this most troublesome agitation, cease their clamor? Those who keep it up are disunionists. Their talk is treason. They deserve a traitor's fate as much as Davis or Wigfall. Is it not enough that a million of men are employed in violence and bloodshed; not enough that our trade and commerce are paralyzed; that our revenue has fallen off over $32,000,000; that by 1863 our national debt, as estimated by Mr. Chase, will be $897,322,802; not enough that we are to pledge $150,000,000 this year of taxation to meet interest and expenses; not enough that my own State pays one-tenth of this; is it not enough that our currency is to be vitiated, and bankruptcy to overwhelm us; not enough that our highways are closed, our flag insulted, our sovereignty derided, our whole nationality in peril; not enough that a dictator is openly threatened; not enough that it is declared here that the Constitution shall be overslaughed, on the plea of necessity; that all its limitations shall be overleaped, ruthlessly and aimlessly? Are we to have added the horror of an endless war of hate; the hopelessness of all reconciliation; the prospect and fact of a divided North; the burdens of a taxation only equalled by the monarchies of Europe? Heaven forbid ! If God in his mercy would strike down, not only politically but physically, the marplots who are warring on their own Administration and Government, it would indeed be a blessing compared with this prospect.

We may differ here about our interior government. We may have our parties of Administration and opposition. These differences of opinion are privileges of constitutional sanction and individual conscience. Matters may go on in our Government as to which we may have a sad and painful reticence, and as to which we may withhold our denunciation out of regard to the common weal. Even patriotism may for a time be silent in the eclipses of a mismanaged administration of a good Government. The national feeling may still be paramount, and all may go well. Thousands of our people now regard with dampened spirit and sad silence the condition of our country; and they are almost dismayed by our terrible present and still unpropitious future; yet not altogether despairing, but seeking in the unity of the people, yet loyal, the hope of restoration. They will be patient in paying taxes, in trusting our commanders and rulers, in giving their sons to the war and their daughters to the labors of beneficence.

But what will become of this sad yet undismayed patriotism, if the hopes of Union are to be quenched by this persistent and unreasoning fanaticism? Are not such schemes fraught with the very vital and permanent principle of mischief? If so, will not the very essence of national existence be irrecoverably lost by their success? We shall lose our place among the nations, our relative importance on the globe, our physical independence, our weight in the equilibrium of powers, our frontiers, alliances, and geography. These make up the immortality of a nation. They are above the changes of administration and outlive dynasties. He who remains silent when such interests are at stake is treacherous to his land and to his God."

It is in this most vital point that these movements here in Congress, which are the continuation of contumacious fanaticism, will do their mis

chief. To succeed in their bad schemes these fanatics undermine the young general in command, deride the movements of the army, create impatience, distrust, and coldness, and will rejoice in our ruin. On behalf of the taxpayer, the soldier, the citizen, the patriot, the section I represent, and the very physical and moral relations of our Government, I protest against that dangerous and horrible malversation of our Congressional office, which would usurp the power of the States over their own institutions, seek through the army the further disruption of the Government, destroy the last vestiges of our confederation, and stop its magnificent career among the nations.

EMANCIPATION AND ITS RESULTS.

AMBIGUOUS POLICY-EXTREME MEN-CONFISCATION AND KINDRED MEASURES-POLICE RIGHTS OF STATES OVER THE NEGRO-IMMIGRATION AND SUFFRAGE-FREE NEGROES AND THEIR COLONIES.

Delivered June 6th, 1862.

Mr. SPEAKER: At the beginning of our civil conflict this House passed almost unanimously a resolution offered by the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. CRITTENDEN] as to the character of the war. It was a pledge that the war should not be waged in hostility to the institutions of any of the States. On the faith of that pledge men and money were voted. Since then that pledge has been broken both in this House and out of it.

Sir, I have watched with anxiety the conduct of this House. No heed is given here to the warning of loyal Union men from slave States. Their advice is met with the cry, "Oh, they are for slavery; and no proslavery man can be loyal." No attention is paid to old-time political opponents whose friends are the majority in the field. For aiding to preserve the Union, which they have been taught by their party canons to revere, they are treated to taunts and slander.

Measures like those from Massachusetts, which would hold States as conquered fiefs; which would recognize republics abroad because they are black; which would create equality of black and white, in carrying the mails, such as passed the Senate; which, like the acts of confiscation and emancipation here urged, are to prematurely free the whole or a portion of the black population; all these measures, sir, are subversive of the institutions of the States, and have created apprehension and distrust.

Before the President can crush this revolt, he must reassure and reanimate the public mind. He has already done well in crushing the Fremont and Hunter proclamations. He has done well in protecting General McClellan from the fanatics, who hungered for his overthrow. He has done well in many other respects from which I would not detract by any hostile criticism now. I would sustain my country and its constitution even if I were not on oath so to do. It is in this spirit that I wish that there were no ambiguity in our public counsels. This war can have no end until the President clears away all uncertainty. The more definite the object, the more firm will the Government be in asserting it. Its gen