(Signed,)
J. C. Fremont,
Major General Commanding.
Let us not for one moment lose sight of this fact.
We go into this war not merely to sustain the government
and defend the Constitution. There is a moral
principle involved. How came that government
in danger? What has brought this wicked war, with
all its evils and horrors, upon us? Whence comes
the necessity for this uprising of the people?
To these questions, there can be but one answer.
Slavery has done it. That
accursed system, which has already cost us so much,
has at length culminated in this present ruin and
confusion. That system must be put down.
The danger must never be suffered to occur again.
The evil must be eradicated, cost what it may.
We are for no half-way measures. So long as the
slave system kept itself within the limits of the
Constitution, we were bound to let it alone, and to
respect its legal rights; but when, overleaping those
limits, it bids defiance to all law, and lays its vile
hands on the sacred altar of liberty and the sacred
flag of the country, and would overturn the Constitution
itself, thenceforth slavery has no constitutional
rights. It is by its own act an outlaw. It
can never come back again into the temple, and claim
a place by right among the worshippers of truth and
liberty. It has ostracised itself, and that for
ever.
Let us not be told, then, that the matter of slavery
does not enter into the present controversy—that
it is merely a war to uphold the government and put
down secession. It is not so. So far from
this, slavery is the very heart and head of this whole
struggle. The conflict is between freedom on
the one hand, maintaining its rights, and slavery
on the other, usurping and demanding that to which
it has no right. It is a war of principle as
well as of self-preservation; and that is but a miserable
and short-sighted policy which looks merely at the
danger and overlooks the cause; which seeks merely
to put out the fire, and lets the incendiary go at
large, to repeat the experiment at his leisure.
We must do both—put out the fire, and put
out the incendiary too. We meet the danger effectually
only by eradicating the disease.—Erie True
American.
The total white population of the eleven States now
comprising the confederacy is six million, and, therefore,
to fill up the ranks of the proposed army (600,000)
about ten percent of the entire white population will
be required. In any other country than our own,
such a draft could not be met, but the Southern States
can furnish that number of men, and still not leave
the material interests of the country in a suffering
condition. Those who are incapacitated for bearing
arms can oversee the plantations, and the negroes can
