Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do proclaim, declare, and make known that while I am (as I was in December last, when, by proclamation, I propounded a plan for restoration) unprepared by a formal approval of this bill to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration, and while I am also unprepared to declare that the free State constitutions and governments already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana shall be set aside and held for naught, thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same as to further effort, or to declare a constitutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in States, but am at the same time sincerely hoping and expecting that a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the nation may be adopted, nevertheless I am fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the bill as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it, and that I am and at all times shall be prepared to give the Executive aid and assistance to any such people so soon as the military resistance to the United States shall have been suppressed in any such States and the people thereof shall have sufficiently returned to their obedience to the Constitution and the laws of the United States, in which cases militia-governors will be appointed with directions to proceed according to the bill.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal
of the United States to be affixed..............

Abraham Lincoln.

By the President: 
William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

TO HORACE GREELEY.

Washington, D. C.,
July 9, 1864

Hon.  Horace Greeley.

Dear sir:—­Your letter of the 7th, with inclosures, received.

If you can find any person, anywhere, professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you; and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall at the least have safe conduct with the paper (and without publicity, if he chooses) to the point where you shall have to meet him.  The same if there be two or more persons.

Yours truly,

A. Lincoln.

TELEGRAM TO J. W. GARRETT.  WASHINGTON, D. C., July 9, 1864

J. W. Garrett, Camden Station: 

What have you heard about a battle at Monocacy to-day?  We have nothing about it here except what you say.

A. Lincoln.

Telegram from general Halleck
to general Wallace. 
Washington, July 9, 1864. 11.57 P.M.