that the people of
Louisiana had began to move in accordance with it. From about July,
1862, I had corresponded with different persons supposed to be
interested [in] seeking a reconstruction of a State government for
Louisiana. When the message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned,
reached New Orleans, General Banks wrote me he was confident that the
people, with his military cooperation, would reconstruct substantially
on that plan. I wrote him and some of them to try it. They tried it,
and the result is known. Such only has been my agency in getting up
the Louisiana government. As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as
before stated. But as bad promises are better broken than kept, I
shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it whenever I shall be
convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest; but I have
not yet been so convinced.

I have been shown a letter on this subject, supposed to be an able one,
in which the writer expresses regret that my mind has not seemed to be
definitely fixed on the question whether the seceded States, so called,
are in the Union or out of it. It would, perhaps, add astonishment to
his regret were he to learn that since I have found professed Union men
endeavoring to make that question, I have _purposely_ forborne any
public expression upon it. As appears to me, that question has not
been, nor yet is, a practically material one, and that any discussion
of it, while it thus remains practically immaterial, could have no
effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends. As yet,
whatever it may hereafter become, that question is bad as the basis of
a controversy, and good for nothing at all--a merely pernicious
abstraction.

We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their
proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of
the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to
again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it
is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do; this without deciding
or even considering whether these States have ever been out of the
Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be
utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join
in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations
between these States and the Union, and each forever after innocently,
indulge his own opinion whether in doing