arolina, or Georgia, with
the authority to assemble and arm the slaves, retreating whenever
assailed to the fastnesses of the mountains, would cause more terror in
those States; would do more, in a word, toward the actual conquest in
three months' time of those rebel commonwealths, than fifty or a hundred
times their number organized in the regular forms of modern warfare,
operating against the whites only, and half-committed to the cooeperative
protection of the institution of slavery, would accomplish in a year?
Who doubts for a moment that, if the South could find a like vulnerable
point in the openings of our armor, she would make, with no hesitation,
the most fearful and tremendous use of her advantage? The whole North is
aware of its possession, in its own hands, of this immense engine of
destructive power over its enemy. The whole civilized world stands by,
beholding us possessed of it, and expecting, as a simple matter of
course, that we shall not fail to employ it--standing by indeed,
perplexed and confused at the seeming lack of any significance in the
war itself, unless we make use of the power at our command in this
fortuitous struggle, not only to inflict the greatest injury upon our
enemy, but to extinguish forever the cause of the whole strife. Still we
forbear to make the most efficient use of our advantage. We for a long
time embarrassed and partially crippled ourselves in all our movements
by an almost unconscious sense of responsibility for the protection of
this very institution of slavery from the disastrous consequences which
were liable to fall upon it as the results of the war.

True, we are slowly and gradually recovering from this perversion of
opinion. The Emancipation Proclamation was probably issued as soon, or
nearly as soon, as the Northern sentiment was prepared to give it even a
moral support. Another term had to expire to accustom the same public
mind to appropriate the spirit of that document as matter of earnest; to
come to regard it as anything more than a mere _brutum fulmen_, a Pope's
bull, as President Lincoln once called it himself, against the comet. Up
to this hour, its effect on the war has been far more as a moral
influence preparing for a great change of opinion and of conduct, than
as a charter of efficient operations. General Thomas's action at the
South, just previous to the capture of Vicksburg, began experimentally
to inaugurate, on something like an adequate scale, the