32 them, sufficient to vindicate the nation's justice, if arrested, should be indicted, tried, convicted, and hung for treason. The remainder sliould be either driven from the country into exile, or if permitted to remain, forever disqualified from holding any office of profit or trust under the Government of the United States. It is not my province to sketch the legislation suitable to meet these ends ; but something like these ends I would gain. Justice cries for it; the law of God cries for it ; and the future safety of the nation cries for it. These men have fought you desperately, and they will continue to fight you till they can fight you no longer ; they have ruined their own section of the country, and it is not their fault that they have not ruined the whole nation ; and now when you have been compelled to conquer them to save the life of the nation, and have actually done the work, then I plead for such an exercise of justice as will make their fate an instructive example to all ages. Would it not be pusillanimous, yea, absolutely ridiculous, to fight treason to the very death, to marcli large armies against it, to spend millions of money, and bathe the land in blood ; and then when at this costly sacrifice you have blasted its j^ower, to turn round and welcome the traitor to your bosom as if he had committed no crime? This nation, I trust, will never be guilty of such an enormous fatuity. It would be a moral anachronism, for which Heaven would condemn us, and all the nations of the earth despise us. In respect to the slavery-question, —that sad knot of all knots in our political history— I take the following grounds : first, that all those slaves who have actually acquired their freedom during the war, especially those who have served in the Army and N^avy, should retain that freedom, and by the Government be defended in its jjossession : secondly, that as a question of law, the Emancipation Proclamation of the President covering the Rebel States, and by him adopted as a military measure for the conquest of this rebellion, should work out the freedom of all tlie slaves not having actually acquired it in those States, provided the Judiciarv of the United States shall not reverse this as the tnie legal effect of that Proclamation : thirdly, that at an.
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