But
no observation even of that kind is sufficient to open the whole case.
Let him be a Southern man, or a Northern man residing at the South, and
committed to the emancipation policy; let him stay behind and see the
banners of our army gradually retiring to the North, and the banished
leaders of the rebellion and other slaveholding tyrants and harpies
gathering in the wake and gradually surrounding him and his little band
of patriots--reclaiming all their old authority and overawing and
trampling down every incipient blade of the crop of freedom, which had
been planted in the presence and under the shadow of our armies--and he
will be better prepared to judge. From even the high authority of
General Grant himself, on this subject, we dissent. Let him first
grapple with a Southern slaveholding public sentiment, as a peaceable
citizen holding adverse opinions, and without a victorious army at his
back, and he will be better qualified to form and give a reliable
opinion. He is represented as having said, in a private letter to the
Hon. E. F. Washburn, of the date of August 13th, 1863, that the people
of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery; that what
Vice-President Stevens acknowledges as the corner stone of the
confederacy is already knocked out; that Slavery is already dead, and
cannot be resurrected; that it would take a standing army to maintain
Slavery in the South, if we were to make peace to-day guaranteeing to
the South all their former constitutional privileges, etc.
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