better than to take the course I urge? Discarding punctilio
and maxims adapted to more manageable times, and looking only to the
unprecedentedly stern facts of our case, can you do better in any
possible event? You prefer that the constitutional relation of the
States to the nation shall be practically restored without disturbance
of the institution; and if this were done, my whole duty in this
respect, under the Constitution and my oath of office, would be
performed. But it is not done, and we are trying to accomplish it by
war. The incidents of the war cannot be avoided. If the war continues
long, as it must if the object be not sooner attained, the institution
in your States will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion,--by
the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have
nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of its value is gone already. How
much better for you and for your people to take the step which at once
shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for that which is
sure to be wholly lost in any other event? How much better to thus save
the money which else we sink for ever in the war! How much better to do
it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to
do it! How much better for you as seller, and the nation as buyer, to
sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been,
than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting
one another's throats!

_From a Letter to Cuthbert Bullitt. July 28, 1862_

Now, I think the true remedy is very different from that suggested by
Mr. Durant. It does not lie in rounding the rough angles of the war, but
in removing the necessity for the war. The people of Louisiana who wish
protection to person and property, have but to reach forth their hands
and take it. Let them in good faith reinaugurate the national authority,
and set up a State government conforming thereto under the Constitution.
They know how to do it, and can have the protection of the army while
doing it. The army will be withdrawn as soon as such government can
dispense with its presence, and the people of the State can then, upon
the old constitutional terms, govern themselves to their own liking.
This is very simple and easy.

If they will not do this, if they prefer to hazard all for the sake of
destroying the government, it is for them to consider whether it is
probable that I will surrender the government to