nd
_ours_, and even bring again to their duty thousands of men in the
States of the extreme South, who had been led astray by the popular
fears and impulses of the hour, and who, with the loyal but overborne,
might well look to them for support, since no other had been afforded
them in the reign of terror under which they were suffering. In the
circumstances in which the country was placed, it seemed to your
Commissioners that true policy ran in the course of generous impulse;
that in this matter we were dealing not with treason, but with the
most devoted loyalty which invoked our aid against it; that the
concessions we made, if concessions indeed they were, were made to our
friends that they might be strong enough to triumph over _their_
enemies and _ours_, because the enemies of the country.

If, as is true, in this view of their duty your Commissioners stood in
the main alone amongst the Commissioners from the Northern States, and
ranged themselves by the side of the Central States of the Union, upon
whom the weight of the civil strife must come if come it must, they
need not assure you that no dastardly fears, no feelings of base
compliance, dictated the position thus taken by them. Such motives to
action neither became them nor those whom they represented. It was
because of generous faith and earnest sympathy, of ties which no
distance of time or space, and no difference of institutions can
weaken; which in our fathers' days and our own led our heroes to
_hazard all for all_, and at Guilford Court House, and Eutaw, and at
Erie, with desperate valor to snatch victory for our common country
out of the very lap of defeat; it was because our little State, with a
warm heart and a ready hand, has never failed in counsel or deed to
stand with the whole country in all dangers and in extremest
disasters, that your Commissioners conceived that they best
represented her by averting danger from those with whom they knew she
would hasten to share it. If it be true that the time has arrived when
our sympathy for an alien and a subject race has extinguished all
sympathy for our own, and has hidden from us the ties of a common
origin, common interests, and of a common glory, then, indeed, are we
separated from our brethren, and the curse of slavery has fallen upon
us as well as upon them. Your Commissioners found nothing in
themselves to justify them in attributing such sentiments to the
people of the State; and unitedly recommen