day
clamoring for the privilege of wearing anew the accustomed yoke, and
feeling again the familiar lash! Are these white men, with Anglo-Saxon
blood in their veins, and the fair fame of this country in their
keeping? Why, if the most abject slave that ever toiled on a Southern
plantation, cast off by his master and compelled to claim the rights of
a freeman, should, of his own deliberate choice, elect to return to his
miserable vassalage, who would not pronounce him unfit to enjoy the
priceless boon of liberty? who would hesitate to say that natural
stupidity, or the acquired imbecility of long enslavement, had doomed
him to remain, to the day of his death, a hewer of wood and a drawer of
water?

But, as if to render the humiliation of these Democratic leaders still
more fruitless and gratuitous, mark how their overtures are received by
their Southern brethren. Having sold their birthright, let us see what
prospect our Northern Esaus have of gaining their mess of pottage.
Perhaps no better illustration can be given of the state of feeling
among the chiefs of the Southern Rebellion than is found in a letter
from Colonel R.C. Hill to the Richmond "Sentinel," dated September 13th,
1863. It had been stated by a correspondent of the New York "Tribune,"
that, during a recent interview between General Custer (Union) and
Colonel Hill (Confederate), at Fredericksburg, Virginia, Colonel Hill
had assured General Custer that "there would soon be peace." After
giving an explicit and emphatic denial to this statement, Colonel Hill
(who, it would seem, commands the Forty-Eighth North-Carolina
Volunteers) closes by saying, "I am opposed to any terms short of a
submission of the Federals to such terms as we may dictate, which, in my
opinion, should be, Mason and Dixon's line a boundary; the exclusive
navigation of the Mississippi below Cairo; full indemnification for all
the negroes stolen and destroyed; and the restoration of Fortress
Monroe, Jefferson, Key West, and all other strongholds which may have
fallen into their possession during the war. If they are unwilling to
accede to these terms, I propose an indefinite continuance of the war
until the now existing fragment of the old Union breaks to pieces from
mere rottenness and want of cohesion, when we will step in, as the only
first-class power on the Western Hemisphere, and take possession of the
pieces as subjugated and conquered provinces."

To the same effect is a letter fro