d
to abandon Northern fields to shoulder a musket in defense of the Union.
As a war measure and to deprive the South of such a great advantage,
your President, the immortal Lincoln, issued a proclamation in
September, 1862, in which he gave public notice that it was his purpose
to declare the emancipation of the slaves in the States wherein
insurrection existed on January 1, 1863, unless the offenders therein
lay down their arms. That notice, thank God, was disregarded, and the
proclamation of January 1, 1863, proclaiming universal emancipation
followed. Had the requirements of the first proclamation been observed
by the people to whom it was addressed who can doubt what would have
been the fate of the colored people in the South? It is reasonable to
assume, inasmuch as the war was waged to perpetuate the Union and not to
destroy slavery--that they would have remained in hopeless bondage. On
more than one occasion President Lincoln officially declared that he
would save the Union with slavery if he could, and not until it became
manifest that slavery was the mainstay of the Confederacy, and the
prosecution of the war to a successful close would be difficult without
its destruction, did he dare touch it. I do not think that President
Lincoln's hesitancy to act upon the question arose from sympathy with
the accursed institution, for I believe every pulsation of his heart was
honest and pure and that he was an ardent and devoted lover of universal
liberty; but he doubted whether his own people would approve of his
interference with it. Assured by the manner in which the people of the
North received his first proclamation that they appreciated the
necessity of destroying this great aid of the enemy, he went forward
bravely declaring that, "possibly for every drop of blood drawn by the
lash one might have to be drawn by the sword, but if so, as was said
over eighteen hundred years ago, the judgments of the Lord are just and
righteous altogether," and abolished human slavery from the land
forever.

That this great act was a Godsend and an immeasurable blessing to the
colored race, I admit, but I declare in the same breath that it was
dictated and performed more in the interest of the white people of the
North and to aid them in conquering the rebellion than from love of or a
disposition to help the Negro. The enfranchisement of the colored race
also sprang from the necessities of the nation. At the close of the war
the South