Maryland, in Tennessee, in Missouri, who is heartily
and thoroughly anti-rebel is also anti-slavery, and nearly every
one is for immediate, not gradual, emancipation. They were not
Republicans; not one in twenty of them voted for Lincoln; they make
no special pretensions to philanthropy; but they mean to live and
die in the Union, and they do not choose to have their throats cut
by rebels; so they desire that slavery should die, knowing by
practical experience, by personal observation, that slavery and the
rebellion are but two phases of the same thing--two names for one
reality.'
Slavery, as things are, is neither 'crippled' nor 'half dead.' It is
only a little sick, and threatened with being made more so, if the same
effectual blows which have been dealt it are followed up hereafter with
other blows still more effectual.
We have reason to believe that the writer of the _Times_ article we have
been reviewing, has passed some time with the Army of the Cumberland;
that he has viewed the subject impartially from what he deems a large
field of observation; and that he speaks honestly what he believes. But
no observation even of that kind is sufficient to open the whole case.
Let him be a Southern man, or a Northern man residing at the South, and
committed to the emancipation policy; let him stay behind and see the
banners of our army gradually retiring to the North, and the banished
leaders of the rebellion and other slaveholding tyrants and harpies
gathering in the wake and gradually surrounding him and his little band
of patriots--reclaiming all their old authority and overawing and
trampling down every incipient blade of the crop of freedom, which had
been planted in the presence and under the shadow of our armies--and he
will be better prepared to judge. From even the high authority of
General Grant himself, on this subject, we dissent. Let him first
grapple with a Southern slaveholding public sentiment, as a peaceable
citizen holding adverse opinions, and without a victorious army at his
back, and he will be better qualified to form and give a reliable
opinion. He is represented as having said, in a private letter to the
Hon. E. F. Washburn, of the date of August 13th, 1863, that the people
of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery; that what
Vice-President Stevens acknowledges as the corner stone of the
confederacy is already knocked out; that Slaver
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