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

Done at the city of Washington, this twenty-fifth day of July, A.D. 1862, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-seventh.

Abraham Lincoln.

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

HOLD MY HAND WHILST THE ENEMY STABS ME

To REVERDY Johnson.

(Private.)

Executive Mansion, Washington, July 26, 1862.

Hon.  REVERDY Johnson.

My dear sir:--Yours of the 16th is received...........

You are ready to say I apply to friends what is due only to enemies.  I distrust the wisdom if not the sincerity of friends who would hold my hands while my enemies stab me.  This appeal of professed friends has paralyzed me more in this struggle than any other one thing.  You remember telling me, the day after the Baltimore mob in April, 1861, that it would crush all Union feeling in Maryland for me to attempt bringing troops over Maryland soil to Washington.  I brought the troops notwithstanding, and yet there was Union feeling enough left to elect a Legislature the next autumn, which in turn elected a very excellent Union United States senator!  I am a patient man—­always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance, and also to give ample time for repentance.  Still, I must save this government, if possible.  What I cannot do, of course, I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.

Yours truly,

A. Lincoln.

To Cuthbert BULLITT. 
(Private.)
Washington, D. C., July 28, 1862.

Cuthbert BULLITT, Esq., New Orleans, Louisiana.

Sir:—­The copy of a letter addressed to yourself by Mr. Thomas J. Durant has been shown to me.  The writer appears to be an able, a dispassionate, and an entirely sincere man.  The first part of the letter is devoted to an effort to show that the secession ordinance of Louisiana was adopted against the will of a majority of the people.  This is probably true, and in that fact may be found some instruction.  Why did they allow the ordinance to go into effect?  Why did they not assert themselves?  Why stand passive and allow themselves to be trodden down by minority?  Why did they not hold popular meetings and have a convention of their own to express and enforce the true sentiment of the State?  If preorganization was against them then, why not do this now that the United States army is present to protect them?  The paralysis—­the dead palsy—­of the government in this whole struggle is that this class of men will do nothing for the government, nothing for themselves, except demanding that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident!