t human liberty and for the triumph of
treason and slavery, of which the records of the world's
history contain any note.

"If our Government should adopt the first view of the case,
you and your fellow rebels may justly claim to be
considered a most unjustly treated body of disinterested
patriots,--although, perhaps, a little mistaken in your
connivance with the thefts by which your agent, John B.
Floyd, succeeded in arming the South and partially disarming
the North as a preparative to the commencement of the
struggle.

"But if on the other hand--as is the theory of our
Government--the war you have levied against the U. S. be a
rebellion the most causeless, crafty and bloody ever
known,--a conspiracy having the rule-or-ruin policy for its
basis; the plunder of the black race and the reopening of
the African slave trade for its object, the continued and
further degradation of ninety per cent. of the white
population of the South in favor of a slave driving ten per
cent. aristocracy, and the exclusion of all foreign-born
immigrants from participation in the generous and equal
hospitality foreshadowed to them in the Declaration of
Independence,--if this, as I believe, be a fair statement of
the origin and motives of the rebellion of which you are the
titular head, then it would have been better had our
Government adhered to the constitutional view of treason
from the start, and hung every man taken in arms against the
U. S. from the first butchery in the streets of Baltimore,
down to the last resultless battle fought in the vicinity of
Sharpsburg. If treason, in other words, be any crime, it is
the essence of all crimes; a vast machinery of guilt,
multiplying assassinations into wholesale slaughter, and
organizing plunder as the basis for supporting a system of
National Brigandage. Your action, and that of those with
whom you are in league, has its best comment in the sympathy
extended to your cause by the despots and aristocracies of
Europe. You have succeeded in throwing back civilization for
many years; and have made of the country that was the
freest, happiest, proudest, richest, and most progressive
but two short years ago, a vast temple of mourning, doubt,
anxiety and privation; our manufactories of all but war