an imperative mood, he made this explicit
announcement: "We are at War. * * * Whether it be a Civil War,
Rebellion, Revolution, or Foreign War, it matters little. IT MUST
CEASE; and I want this Administration to tell the American People WHEN
it will cease!" Again, only two days afterward, he took occasion to
characterize a Bill, amendatory of the enrollment Act, as "this
infamous, Unconstitutional conscription Act!"
C. A. White, of Ohio, was another of the malcontents who undertook, with
others of the same Copperhead faith, to "maintain, that," as he
expressed it, "the War in which we are at present engaged is wrong in
itself; that the policy adopted by the Party in power for its
prosecution is wrong; that the Union cannot be restored, or, if
restored, maintained, by the exercise of the coercive power of the
Government, by War; that the War is opposed to the restoration of the
Union, destructive of the rights of the States and the liberties of the
People. It ought, therefore, to be brought to a speedy and immediate
close."
It was about this time also that, emboldened by immunity from punishment
for these utterances in the interest of armed Rebels, Edgerton of
Indiana, was put forward to offer resolutions "for Peace, upon the basis
of a restoration of the Federal Union under the Constitution as it is,"
etc.
Thereafter, in both Senate and House, such speeches by
Rebel-sympathizers, the aiders and abettors of Treason, grew more
frequent and more virulent than ever. As was well said to the House,
by one of the Union members from Ohio (Mr. Eckley):
"A stranger, if he listened to the debates here, would think himself in
the Confederate Congress. I do not believe that if these Halls were
occupied to-day by Davis, Toombs, Wigfall, Rhett, and Pryor, they could
add anything to the violence of assault, the falsity of accusation, or
the malignity of attack, with which the Government has been assailed,
and the able, patriotic, and devoted men who are charged with its
Administration have been maligned, in both ends of the Capitol. The
closing scenes of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, the treasonable
declarations there made, contain nothing that we cannot hear, in the
freedom of debate, without going to Richmond or to the camps of Treason,
where most of the actors in those scenes are now in arms against us."
With such a condition of things in Congress, it is not surprising that
the Richmond Enquirer announced that the N
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