ite your attention to the painful excitement
produced in the South by attempts to circulate through the mails
inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints
and in various sorts of publications, calculated to stimulate them to
insurrection and to produce all the horrors of a servile war. There is
doubtless no respectable portion of our countrymen who can be so far
misled as to feel any other sentiment than that of indignant regret at
conduct so destructive of the harmony and peace of the country, and so
repugnant to the principles of our national compact and to the dictates
of humanity and religion. Our happiness and prosperity essentially
depend upon peace within our borders, and peace depends upon the
maintenance in good faith of those compromises of the Constitution upon
which the Union is founded. It is fortunate for the country that the
good sense, the generous feeling, and the deep-rooted attachment of
the people of the nonslaveholding States to the Union and to their
fellow-citizens of the same blood in the South have given so strong
and impressive a tone to the sentiments entertained against the
proceedings of the misguided persons who have engaged in these
unconstitutional and wicked attempts, and especially against the
emissaries from foreign parts who have dared to interfere in this
matter, as to authorize the hope that those attempts will no longer
be persisted in. But if these expressions of the public will shall
not be sufficient to effect so desirable a result, not a doubt can be
entertained that the nonslaveholding States, so far from countenancing
the slightest interference with the constitutional rights of the South,
will be prompt to exercise their authority in suppressing so far as in
them lies whatever is calculated to produce this evil.

In leaving the care of other branches of this interesting subject
to the State authorities, to whom they properly belong, it is
nevertheless proper for Congress to take such measures as will prevent
the Post-Office Department, which was designed to foster an amicable
intercourse and correspondence between all the members of the
Confederacy, from being used as an instrument of an opposite character.
The General Government, to which the great trust is confided of
preserving inviolate the relations created among the States by the
Constitution, is especially bound to avoid in its own action anything
that may disturb them. I would therefore call