t and persecuted by mobs and other
agents of the disloyal element at the North. Like a man sick unto
death the Government insisted that it only had a slight cold, and that
it would be better soon. The President was no better informed as to
the nature of the war than other conservative Republicans. On the 19th
of August, 1862, Horace Greeley addressed an open letter to the
President, known as "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," of which the
following are specimen passages:

"On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one
disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union
cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the
Rebellion, and at the same time uphold its inciting cause, are
preposterous and futile--that the Rebellion, if crushed out
to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if slavery were left in
full vigor--that army officers, who remain to this day devoted to
slavery, can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union--and that
every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and
deepened peril to the Union. I appeal to the testimony of your
Embassadors in Europe. It is freely at your service, not mine.
Ask them to tell you candidly whether the seeming subserviency of
your policy to the slave-holding, slavery-upholding interest, is
not the perplexity, the despair, of statesmen of all parties; and
be admonished by the general answer!

"I close, as I began, with the statement that what an immense
majority of the loyal millions of your countrymen require of you
is a frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the
laws of the land, more especially of the Confiscation Act. That
Act gives freedom to the slaves of rebels coming within our
lines, or whom those lines may at any time inclose,--we ask you
to render it due obedience by publicly requiring all your
subordinates to recognize and obey it. The rebels are everywhere
using the late anti-negro riots in the North--as they have long
used your officers' treatment of negroes in the South--to
convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope from a Union
success--that we mean in that case to sell them into a bitter
bondage to defray the cost of the war. Let them impress this as a
truth on the great mass of their ignorant and credulous bondmen,
and the Union will never be res