You disapprove of the
Emancipation Proclamation, you denounce the employment of armed negroes;
and therefore you have no stomach for the fight.
But has not the President published to the world that the Proclamation
was a measure of military necessity? and has he not also said that its
constitutionality is to be decided and the extent and duration of its
privileges and penalties are to be defined by the Supreme Court of the
United States? If, as you are accustomed to assert, the Proclamation is
a dead letter, it certainly need not give you very serious discomfort.
If it exercises a powerful influence in crippling the energies of the
South, it surely is not among Northern men that we should look for its
opponents. As to its future efficacy and binding force, shall we not do
well to leave this question, and all similar and at present purely
speculative inquiries, till that time--which may Heaven hasten!--when
this war shall terminate in the restoration of the Union and the
acknowledged supremacy of the Constitution?
And now a word about that formidable bugbear, the enlistment of negro
soldiers. For my own part, I candidly confess that I am utterly unable
to comprehend your unmeasured abuse of this expedient.
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