posed 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 that he was confident that the people, with his
military co-operation, would reconstruct substantially on that plan. I
wrote to him and some of them to try it. They tried it, and the result
is known. Such has been my only 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 upon 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 answer 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 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 their proper practical
relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to
do this without deciding or even considering whether those States have
ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at
home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had been abroad. Let
us all join in doing the acts necessary to restore the proper practical
relations between these States and the Union, and each forever after
innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts he
brought the States from without into the Union, or only gave them proper
assistance, they never having been out of it. The amount of constituency,
so to sp