Questions touching the Military and
Civil government of regions of the Enemy's country, conquered by the
Union arms; of the rehabilitation or reconstruction of the Rebel States;
of a thousand and one other matters, of greater or lesser perplexity,
growing out of these and other questions; besides the ever pressing and
gigantic problems involved in the raising of enormous levies of troops,
and prodigious sums of money, needed in securing, moving, and supplying
them, and defraying the extraordinary expenses growing out of the
necessary blockade of thousands of miles of Southern Coast, and other
Naval movements; not to speak of those expenditures belonging to the
more ordinary business transactions of the Government.

But chief of all things claiming his especial solicitude, as we have
seen, was this question of Emancipation by Constitutional enactment, the
debate upon which was now proceeding in the Senate. That solicitude was
necessarily increased by the bitter opposition to it of Northern
Copperheads, and by the attitude of the Border-State men, upon whose
final action, the triumph or defeat of this great measure must
ultimately depend.

Many of the latter, were, as has already been shown in these pages,
loyal men; but the loyalty of some of these to their Country, was still
so questionably and so thoroughly tainted with their worshipful devotion
to Slavery--although they must have been blind indeed not to have
discovered, long ere this, that it was a "slowly-dying cause"--that they
were ever on the alert to delay, hamper, and defeat, any action, whether
Executive or Legislative, and however necessary for the preservation of
the Union and the overthrow of its mortal enemies, which, never so
lightly, impinged upon their "sacred Institution."

This fact was well set forth, in this very debate, by a Senator from New
England--[Wilson of Massachusetts]--when, after adjuring the
anti-Slavery men of the age, not to forget the long list of Slavery's
crimes, he eloquently proceeded:

"Let them remember, too, that hundreds of thousands of our countrymen in
Loyal States--since Slavery raised the banners of Insurrection, and sent
death, wounds, sickness, and sorrow, into the homes of the People--have
resisted, and still continue to resist, any measure for the defense of
the Nation, if that measure tended to impair the vital and animating
powers of Slavery. They resisted the Act making Free the Slaves used by
Rebels for Milit