’I further make known that whether it be competent for me as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy to declare the slaves of any State or States free, and whether at any time or in any case it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the Government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which under my responsibility I reserve to myself, and which I can not feel justified in leaving to the decisions of commanders in the field.  These are totally different questions from those of police regulations in armies and camps.  On the sixth day of March last, by a special message, I recommended to Congress the adoption of a joint resolution to be substantially as follows: 

“Resolved, That the United States ought to co-operate with, any State which may adopt a gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.’

’The resolution, in the language above quoted, was adopted by large majorities in both branches of Congress, and now stands an authentic, definite, and solemn proposal of the Nation to the States and people moat immediately interested in the subject-matter.  To the people of those States, I now earnestly appeal.  I do not argue, I beseech you to make the arguments for yourselves. You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee.  The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking any thing.  Will you not embrace it?  So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time as in the providence of God it is your high privilege to do.  May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it.’

If any one can see in this aught save the clearest sympathy with the gradual advance of Emancipation, he must be indeed gifted with a strange faculty of perversion.  If, however, the Democrats indorse the President’s recommendation and approve the Executive policy of gradual emancipation for the sake of the white man, why do they continue to abuse so fiercely presses which agree exactly with the Administration, and ask for nothing more than a recognition of the great principle and its realization according to circumstance?