. When I
speak of your position, I mean that of an eminent citizen of a slave State
and himself a slaveholder. The colored population is the great available
and yet unavailed of force for restoring the Union. The bare sight of
fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers upon the banks of the
Mississippi would end the rebellion at once; and who doubts that we
can present that sight if we but take hold in earnest? If you have been
thinking of it, please do not dismiss the thought.

Yours very truly,

A. LINCOLN.

PROCLAMATION APPOINTING A NATIONAL FAST-DAY.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

A Proclamation.

March 30, 1863.

Whereas the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme
authority and just government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men
and of nations, has by a resolution requested the President to designate
and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation:

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as men to own their
dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and
transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine
repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime
truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that
those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord:

And insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals,
are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not
justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the
land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins,
to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We
have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been
preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in
numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have
forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in
peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly
imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings
were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated
with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the
necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God
that made us:

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to
confe