n American soil; and our
country would never for a moment have forfeited her proud
position as the highest exampler of the blessings--morals,
intellectual and material--to be derived from a free form of
government.

"Whether your intention of hanging me and those of my staff
and other officers who were engaged in organizing the 1st S.
C. Volunteers, in case we are taken prisoners in battle,
will be likely to benefit your cause or not, is a matter
mainly for your own consideration. For us, our profession
makes the sacrifice of life a contingency ever present and
always to be accepted; and although such a form of death as
your order proposes, is not that to the contemplating of
which soldiers have trained themselves, I feel well assured,
both for myself and those included in my sentence, that we
could die in no manner more damaging to your abominable
rebellion and the abominable institution which is its
origin.

"The South has already tried one hanging experiment, but not
with a success--one would think--to encourage its
repetition. John Brown, who was well known to me in Kansas,
and who will be known in appreciative history through
centuries which will only recall your name to load it with
curses, once entered Virginia with seventeen men and an
idea. The terror caused by the presence of his idea, and the
dauntless courage which prompted the assertion of his faith,
against all odds, I need not now recall. The history is too
familiar and too painful. 'Old Ossawatomie' was caught and
hung; his seventeen men were killed, captured or dispersed,
and several of them shared his fate. Portions of his skin
were tanned, I am told, and circulated as relics dear to the
barbarity of the slave-holding heart. But more than a
million of armed white men, Mr. Davis, are to-day marching
South, in practical acknowledgement that they regard the
hanging of three years ago as the murder of a martyr; and as
they march to a battle which has the emancipation of all
slaves as one of its most glorious results, his name is on
their lips; to the music of his memory their marching feet
keep time; and as they sling knapsacks each one becomes
aware that he is an armed apostle of the faith preached by
him,

"'Who has gone to be a soldier