y loyal to the Government,
were liberally offered them, with three months for their consideration.
Let those of us who, notwithstanding these ameliorating circumstances,
doubt the good policy of the act, remember that they of the South, our
open foes, invited the measures. Their leaders acknowledged and their
press boasted that the Southern army never could be overcome--if for no
other reason, for this reason, that while the army of the North was
composed of the bone and muscle of the great working classes, drawn away
from the fields of labor and enterprise, which must necessarily, in
their opinion, languish from this absence, the Confederate army was
composed of 'citizens' and property owners (to wit, slaveholders), whose
absence from their plantations in no way interfered with the growth of
their cotton, sugar, corn, and rice, from which sources of wealth and
nourishment they could continue to draw the sinews of war. They went
farther than this, and acted upon their declaration by employing their
surplus slave labor in the work of intrenching their fortifications,
serving their army, and finally fighting in their army.

Upon this basis of slave labor they asserted their omnipotence in war
and ability to continue the struggle without limit of time. The
subsidized press of England supported this theory, and declared that
with such advantages it was idle for the Federal Government to maintain
a struggle in the face of such belligerent advantages! Then, and not
till then, were the eyes of the President open to a fact which none but
the political blind man could fail to observe, and then it was that not
only the President, but a very large proportion of our countrymen,
heretofore strictly conservative men, felt that the time had come when
further forbearance would be suicidal. Although many doubted and still
doubt if slavery was the cause of the rebellion, very many were forced
to the conclusion that what our enemies themselves admitted to be the
strength of the rebellion was indeed such, and that the time had arrived
to avail themselves of that military necessity which authorizes the
Government to adopt such measures as may be deemed the most fitting for
crushing rebellion and restoring our constitutional liberty. Let us
think, then, as we please upon the judiciousness of the
proclamation--that it was uttered with forethought, calmness, and with a
full sense of the responsibility of the President to his God and his
countr