remonstrate against any such
suicidal policy, and entreat the Government of the United States and the
people of the North to stand by them in their great distress, through,
until the end. While writing, the following newspaper paragraph attracts
our attention, and is a fair expression of the truth we are seeking to
inculcate:
'The Hon. Silas Casey, of Kentucky, brings news of the most intense
feeling, on the subject of holding slaves in the Border States,
among Union men. They contend that the restriction in the
President's Proclamation has made Kentucky and Tennessee a
'national slave pen,' where slaves, fleeing from the 'confederate'
States, are bought and sold by the thousand. He says the Unionists
to a man are in favor of immediate and sweeping emancipation of all
slaves within their borders--that there can be no protection for a
Unionist as long as aristocratic secessionists are allowed to hold
all their old slaves, and are protected in buying human beings,
once freed by the President's Proclamation. The last and most
important step to be taken by the Government, to insure Unionism in
the Border States, is to emancipate the slaves of disloyalists in
Kentucky and Tennessee. The military once removed from Kentucky,
and again would commence the barbarism of slavery. Defenders of the
Government would be murdered--freedom of speech be denied; the
expulsion of Northern ministers, and the tar-and-feathering of
Northern schoolmasters, for only preferring Union to secession,
freedom to slavery, would go on as freely as in the palmiest days
of the chivalry; Parson Brownlow would be driven from Knoxville,
his press and dwelling burned, Casey and Green and Adams exiled
forever, and the same old war would have to be fought over again,
with all its blood and horror, on Kentucky soil.'
The following comments are equally true:
'Again we call the attention of thoughtful men to the current
phases of 'Border State' politics, and ask that they be deeply
considered. If we open a hundred 'conservative' journals in
succession, we shall find at least ninety of them asserting or
assuming that the revolted States are to be reconciled to the Union
by new concessions, new guarantees to slavery. But those States
themselves emphatically repel this assumption. Every man in
Delaware, in
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