30 of nations, but our most sacred duty, to detach these slaves from the service of the rebels, and attach them to our cause in the best possible way. The cause of the country demanded this, not less than the lives of our soldiers in the field. What else could the President do, and be true to the trust reposed in him by the people, and the obligations of the oath he had taken to defend the Constitution ? Sir, I honor Abraham, Lincoln for issuing that proclamation. It has done more already to make the dynasty of Jeff. Davis tremble than any other instrumentality that has been used against the rebels. Put forth by the President as a war measure, to suppress tiie rebellion, to vindicate the Constitution, and maintain the Union, it >s not only sanctioned by the Constitution, but by every writer ou international law that has obtained any celebrity in this or* any other civilized country. The proclamation was not issued for the purpose of destroying slavery, but for the purpose of re-establishing our Government—of crushing the rebellion—of saving the life of the nation. No man who claims to sustain the Administration has ever held, that the General Government had any power to interfere with slavery in any State in time of peace. But when war is upon us, arid the slave- holding oligarchy are seeking to destroy our national life, then every man who loves our free institutions, and desires their preservation, maintains that the Constitution has clearly given all the necessary power to protect and defend the Government. r If slavery is destroyed by this war, and I have no doubt but what it will be, and that it ought to be; it will not be destroyed because that is the object of the war, but because that is one of its necessary results—one of the incidents of the war, under the control of a just God, who wills that slavery shall die, that the nation may live. Sir, on the 22d day of July, 1861, this House, almost unanimously— there being but two votes against it—declared : “That the present deplorable civil war has been forced upon the country by the disvnionists of the Southern States, now in arms against the Constitutional Government, and in arms around the Capital f and I subinir, that it is not according to the record, to now, charge the war on fhe abolition- its. We have estopped any gentleman from doing this, by our recorded votes. Sir, slavery produced secession, and secession made war. It caused the rebellion in 1860, also the rebellion of South Carolina in 1833s; it threatened rebellion in 1844, if Texas was not annexed; in 1850 it tried to rebel again, and in 1856 it was determined t<> destroy the Union. Slavery has ever been aggressive, it is so, from ts very nature. The South, sir, have, as I said before, carefully studied the census reports for years, and they have seen their pow r gradually, but certainly departing from them, never more to return. Mr. Calhoun warned them of this in 1844, and in his letter to Mr. King our Minister at Paris,he urged the necessity for th.; annexation of Texas, for the pm nose, as he said, of “ adjusting the ajuilibrium between the North and South, and giving to the South a political preponderance in the Government forever T Sir, it was this apprehended loss, of political power in etc Cover ment, which the South had maintained for years, by aid. of the ppw given her by toe Constitution, that enabled her to have five of h slaves counted in the ratio of representation to this House, the equ
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