to all such employees, that they
will receive permanent Military protection against any compulsory return
to a condition of servitude."

Public opinion was now rapidly advancing, under the pressure of Military
necessity, and the energetic efforts of the immediate Emancipationists,
to a belief that Emancipation by Presidential Proclamation would be wise
and efficacious as an instrumentality toward subduing the Rebellion;
that it must come, sooner or later--and the sooner, the better.

Indeed, great fault was found, by some of these, with what they
characterized as President Lincoln's "obstinate slowness" to come up to
their advanced ideas on the subject. He was even accused of failing to
execute existing laws touching confiscation of Slaves of Rebels coming
within the lines of the Union Armies. On the 19th of August, 1862, a
letter was addressed to him by Horace Greeley which concluded thus:

"On the face of this wide Earth, Mr. President, there is not one
disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union Cause who
does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion, and at the
same time uphold its inciting cause, are preposterous and futile--that
the Rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year
if Slavery were left in full vigor--that Army officers, who remain to
this day devoted to Slavery, can at best be but half-way loyal to the
Union--and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added
and deepened peril to the Union.

"I appeal to the testimony of your embassadors in Europe. It is freely
at your service, not mine. Ask them to tell you candidly whether
the seeming subserviency of your policy to the Slaveholding,
Slavery-upholding interest, is not the perplexity, the despair,
of Statesmen of all parties; and be admonished by the general answer.

"I close, as I began, with the statement that what an immense majority
of the loyal millions of your countrymen require of you, is a frank,
declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the Laws of the Land,
more especially of the Confiscation Act. That Act gives Freedom to the
Slaves of Rebels coming within our lines, or whom those lines may at any
time inclose. We ask you to render it due obedience by publicly
requiring all your subordinates to recognize and obey it.

"The Rebels are everywhere using the late Anti-Negro riots in the North
--as they have long used your officers' treatment of Negroes in the
Sout