The correctness of this report made by Mr. Crisfield is certified to by J. W. Menzies, J. J. Crittenden, and R. Mallory, all of Kentucky.

Did this look like a war upon the institutions of the South, either on the part of Mr. Lincoln or Congress, by the sword, or does it exhibit a desire to remove the chief obstacle to harmony by a fair and just equivalent?

In July, 1862, Mr. Lincoln invited an interview with the members of Congress from the Border Slave States, which was held. During the interview Mr. Lincoln addressed an earnest and patriotic appeal to these gentlemen, in the course of which he said, "You prefer that the constitutional relations of the states to the nation shall be practically restored without disturbance of the institution; and if this were done, my whole duty in this respect, under the Constitution and my oath of office, would be performed. But it is not done, and we are trying to accomplish it by war. The incidents of the war can not be avoided. If the war continues long, as it must if the object be not sooner attained, the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion-by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of its value is gone already. How much better for you and for your people to take the step which at once shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event! How much better to thus save the money which else we sink forever in the war! How much better to do it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to do it! How. much better for you as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another's throats!

"I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually. Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply and in abundance, and when numbers shall be large enough to be company and encouragement for one another, the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.

"I am pressed with a difficulty not yet mentioned, one which threatens division among those who, united, are none too strong. An instance of it is known to you. General Hunter is an honest man. He was, and, I hope, still is my friend. I valued him none the less for his agreeing with me in the general wish that all men every where could be freed. He proclaimed all men free within certain states, and I repudiated the proclamation. He expected more good and less harm from the measure than I could believe would follow. Yet, in repudiating it, I gave dissatisfaction

if not offense to many whose support the country can not afford to lose. And this is not the end of it. The pressure in this direction is still upon me, and is increasing. By conceding what I now ask, you can relieve me, and much more, can relieve the country in this important point.

"Upon these considerations I have again begged your attention to the Message of March last. Before leaving the Capitol, consider and discuss it among yourselves. You are patriots and statesmen, and as such I pray you consider this proposition, and at the least commend it to the consideration of your states and people. As you would perpetuate popular government for the best people in the world, I beseech you that you do in nowise omit this. Our common country is in great peril, demanding the loftiest views and boldest action to bring a speedy relief. Once relieved, its form of government is saved to the world, its beloved history and cherished memories are vindicated, and its happy future fully assured and rendered inconceivably grand. To you, more than to any others, the privilege is given to assure that happiness and swell that grandeur, and to link your own names therewith forever."

In September, 1861, General Fremont issued a proclamation from St. Louis containing the following paragraph :

"The property, real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri, who shall take up arms against the United States, or shall be directly proven to have taken an active part with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use, and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men," which clause was instantly revoked by Mr. Lincoln.

In like manner General Hunter issued his proclamation from Hilton Head, South Carolina, on the 9th of May, 1862, declaring all persons in the States of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, comprising his military department, "heretofore held as slaves, are forever free.”

On the 19th of May Mr. Lincoln issued another proclamation, revoking the order of General Hunter, accompanied with a severe rebuke, in which he says,

'On the 6th of March last, by a special Message, I recommended to Congress the adoption of a joint resolution, to be substantially as follows:

"Resolved, That the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt a gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to each state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in its discretion to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.'"

The resolution, in the language above quoted, was adopted by a large majority in both branches of Congress, and now stands an authentic, definite, and solemn proposal of the nation to the states and people most immediately interested in the subject matter. To the people of those states I now earnestly appeal. I do not argue, I beseech you to make the argument for yourselves. You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The changes it contemplates would come gently as the dews of Heaven, not rending or wrecking any thing. Will you not embrace it? So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time as, in the providence of God, it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it.

Finally, having done every thing in his power for the protection of the property of the Southern slaveholder, though engagad in bloody and flagitious war against himself and the government, his patience and his efforts alike exhausted in appeals to the South to accept a system of remote emancipation based upon fair compensation from the government, he sums up, in a letter to Horace Greeley, in a few energetic sentences, combining extraordinary brevity with masculine strength, the policy by which he will be governed in his ever-to-be-remembered and revered determination to put down the rebellion, and save the Union and the liberties of his country, without regard to cost or consequences; and, for one Southern man and Southern slaveholder, I say God bless him for his noble and patriotic resolution.

Letter to Horace Greeley.

"Hon. HORACE GREELEY:

"Executive Mansion, August 22, 1862.

"DEAR SIR,-I have just read yours of the 19th instant, addressed to myself through the New York Tribune.

“If there be in it any statements or assumptions of facts which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them.

"If there be any inference which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here argue against them.

"If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

"As to the policy 'I seem to be pursuing,' as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union; I would save it in the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union as it was. "If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them.

66 My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it: and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

"What I do about slavery or the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

"I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and shall do more whenever I believe doing more will help the

cause.

"I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views as fast as they shall appear to be true views.

"I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free. Yours, A. LINCOLN."

Such was the course pursued by Mr. Lincoln on the question of slavery, until he found that kindness and clemency then, as it has done since the war, only begat more insolent demands and a more defiant attitude on the part of the political tricksters, knaves. and charlatans who have undertaken to control the public sentiment of the South, and who, I am sorry to add, are in a great degree successful.

Let the impartial, enlightened, unprejudiced people of the South, if there are any such left, ponder over this brief sketch of Mr. Lincoln's desire, so often and so anxiously expressed, to protect the slave property of the South, and then say how much reason there was for the foul calumnies heaped upon him at the time of and after his election by designing and infamous men, who have led them on to destruction, and determine for themselves what reliance is to be placed in the representations of such men in the future.

Will the great body of the people never come to their senses? Will

they continue to follow these "bomb-proof" men of war, who talk like heroes, who write like salamanders, until the war comes on, and then do all their fighting on paper, seated on cushioned chairs, by comfortable fires in winter, or sucking ice juleps through glass tubes in summer, and, if called on to go into the trenches to fight the battles of their own creation, effeminately and ingloriously dodge behind the Constitution, and prate about "" an invasion of the freedom of the press" to expect an editor to fight, except on his own hook and at an advantage. Yet, shame to say, of such are the rulers of the free-born, bearded men of the South.

I will bring this work to a close by giving the following extract from a speech delivered in the Senate of the United States by senator, now President Johnson, as to the responsible parties for this war, at least to a large extent. None of the reconstructed will take issue with Mr. Johnson on this point, I presume.

Respecting the vote of January 16 on the Crittenden propositions in the Senate, Andrew Johnson, senator from Tennessee, in his speech on the expulsion of Jesse D. Bright, senator from Indiana, delivered January 31, 1862, made these remarks. When the six Southern senafors refused to vote on Senator Clark's amendment, Senator Johnson said,

"I sat right behind Mr. Benjamin, and I am not sure that my worthy friend (Mr. Latham) was not close by when he refused to vote, and I said to him, Mr. Benjamin, why do you not vote? Why not save this proposition, and see if we can not bring the country to it? He gave me rather an abrupt answer, and said he would control his own action without consulting me or any body else. Said I, Vote, and show yourself an honest man. As soon as the vote was taken, he and others telegraphed South, 'We can not get any compromise.' Here were six Southern men refusing to vote, when the amendment would have been rejected by four majority if they had voted. Who, then, has brought these evils on the country?

"Was it Mr. Clark? He was acting out his own policy; but with the help we had from the other side of the chamber, if all those on this side had been true to the Constitution and faithful to their constituents, and had acted with fidelity to the country, the amendment of the senator from New Hampshire could have been voted down, the defeat of which, the senator from Delaware says, would have saved the country. Whose fault was it? Who is responsible for it? I think it is not only getting the nail through, but clinching it on the other side, and the whole staple commodity is taken out of the speech. Who did it? Southern traitors,