Secretary of the League, 20
Cooper Institute, New York.

OFFICE OF THE WOMEN'S LOYAL NATIONAL LEAGUE, }
Room No. 20, Cooper Institute, New York, _January 25, 1864_. }

_The Women's Loyal National League, to the Women of the Republic:_--We
ask you to sign and circulate this petition for the entire abolition
of slavery. We have now one hundred thousand signatures, but we want a
million before Congress adjourns. Remember the President's
Proclamation reaches only the slaves of rebels. The jails of loyal
Kentucky are to-day "crammed" with Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama
slaves, advertised to be sold for their jail fees "according to law,"
precisely as before the war! While slavery exists anywhere there can
be freedom nowhere. There must be a law abolishing slavery. We have
undertaken to canvass the nation for freedom. Women, you can not vote
or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the
Government is through the exercise of this, one, sacred,
constitutional "right of petition"; and we ask you to use it now to
the utmost. Go to the rich, the poor, the high, the low, the soldier,
the civilian, the white, the black--gather up the names of all who
hate slavery--all who love liberty, and would have it the law of the
land--and lay them at the feet of Congress, your silent but potent
vote for human freedom guarded by law.

You have shown true courage and self-sacrifice from the beginning of
the war. You have been angels of mercy to our sick and dying soldiers
in camp and hospital, and on the battle field. But let it not be said
that the women of the republic, absorbed in ministering to the outward
alone, saw not the philosophy of the revolution through which they
passed; understood not the moral struggle that convulsed the
nation--the irrepressible conflict between liberty and slavery.
Remember the angels of mercy and justice are twin-sisters, and ever
walk hand in hand. While you give yourselves so generously to the
Sanitary and Freemen's Commissions forget not to hold up the eternal
principles on which our republic rests. Slavery once abolished, our
brothers, husbands, and sons will never again, for its sake, be called
to die on the battle-field, starve in rebel prisons, or return to us
crippled for life; but our country, free from the one blot that has
always marred its fair escutcheon, will be an example to all the world
that "righteousness exalteth a nation." The God of Ju