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788    DOUGLASS MONTLHY.   FEBRUARY, 1863
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very, gives the President no right to liberate slaves. I admit that he does not derive it from the Constitution alone. It takes both the Constitution and the Law of civilized warfare to confer it on him. The Constitution makes him the Head of the Army, and the Law of civilized warfare authorizees him, as such, to strengthen himself and weaken the foe by disposing of slaves, or anything else that may stand in his way--by turning them, or anything else, to the best possible account. It is by this Law, and not by the Constitution, that he appropriates the buildings, horses, cattle, and other property of the enemy. By this Law alone is it that he provides for the feeding, clothing, and exchanging of prisoners. By this alone that he is forbidden to poison food or wells or to kill prisoners, or sell them into Slavery. I add that, as this Law shall vary, his rights, being under it, must also vary. If it shall ever require the paroling of all prisoners, then he must parole all prisoners

Let me say that it is solely in the light of this International Law of War, that Congress should have seen what would be a proper dis-position for our nation to make of the lands of the Rebels.  The Constitutional limitation of the scope of Attainder had nothing at all to do with the case.  What a Court may do with the house or farm of a person judicially convicted of treason is very far from being the measure of what the nation may do with the hundreds of millions of acres belonging to millions of Rebels.  Congress, like the President, must look, not at all into the Constitution, but solely into this International Law, to learn the penalties of War.  I say this, not because the Constitution does not clothe Congress with ample powers for its share in conducting War.  For it does.  It empowers Congress to make whatever laws it may deem "necessary and proper" for carrying into effect its Declarations of War.  Thus we see that, whilst the President is restricted in his department by the law of war, Congress in its Department of legislation has unlimited power.  Why I said that Congress should look into this International Law to learn the penalties of war, was because Congress like the President should, in making up an opinion of the kind or degree of penalty suitable in a given case, defer and conform to the usages of the civilized world.  Congress should not make laws that are in conflict with these usages.  There should be none such for the President to execute.

Nothing can be more absurd or disingenuous than this incessant prating of the duty of taking all our steps in the War according to the Constitution.  With the exception of a few Constitutional starting points, an old almanac would be as legitimate and useful a guide as the Constitution.  In a war with Great Britain we would not allow her, nor would she allow us, to proceed by a National Constitution Neither would the other nations allow it.  We should be compelled to proceed by the International Constitution--by the Law of civilized warfare.  So is it in our strife with the South--a strife which has put on the dimensions and character of a national war, and is therefore to be conducted in the main as national wars are conducted.

I might have said, when speaking of the sources of the powers of the head of the Army, that the vexed question whether the President can suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus is reduced to no question at all in the light of the fact, that the Constitution makes him the head of the Army, and that his right in this capacity virtually to suspend the Writ is indispensable. I say his right virtually to suspend it.  For if I could maintain his right literally to suspend it I need not.  To show his right to override, ignore, and nullfy the Writ is sufficient : and that can be shown by a mere illustration--by any one of ten thousand illustrations.  In the march of his Army he meets with a dozen traitors, who try to seduce men from his ranks or prevent men from enlisting in them.  To turn them over to the Civil authority--to its slow, uncertain, and perhaps disloyal proceedings--would by no means meet the urgent demands of the case.
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May he not so much as improsn them, and keep them imprisoned in spite of Writs, or aught else?  If he may not, then theres is no remedy against the ruin of both Army and Country.  But he clearly may ; and as clearly might he thus serve offenders, were they perpetrating such mischief, ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand miles away from his Army.  As clearly, too, might he thus serve those who were in other ways periling the cause and the life of the nation.  I add, that it is not from the Constitution alone that he learns his right to do this.  He learns it, as he learns his right to do the other things mentioned, from the Constitution, taken in connection with the usages of war.  He finds in the Constitution that he is the Head of the Army.  But what he may do in that capacity he finds in those usages.  Let me add further, that the Constitution, having made him unqualifiedly the Head of the Army, if there are words in it which, if applied to him as such, would cripple him, they are clearly not to be construed as entitled to such application.

Do you say, that the President may abuse his right to withstand the Habeas Corpus? and that he may abuse it to the ruin of inno-cent men and their families?  I admit it-- This is one of the fearful but necessary risks of war, which admonish us to be exceedingly slow to get into war.  The Head of the Army, be he Emperor, King or President, must, for this very life of the nation, have the right in time of war to lay hands on whom he will, and as he will.  It is, however, no small security against the abuse of this right, that when Peace shall be restored it may be punish-ed.  The Bill, recently introduced into Con-gress by Thaddens Stevens, does not go to protect the President in the abuse but only in the exercise of the [[r]]ight.  The President, no more than any other person, is at liberty to perpetrate a wrong under the cover and in the name of conceded right. When we shall again be blest with Peace, then patriot Abraham Lincoln, or whoever may be the more responsible one, as severly as you please for the perversions of his office--be it that the perversions have sprung from am-bition, avarice, malevolence or whatever form of selfishness.

I alluded to the President's famous Proclamations.  Let me say, in passing, that I am not of the number of those Abolitionists who complain of its heartlessness.  He was not at liberty, in writing it, to study the interests of the slaves or of any other class.  It is purely a military paper, and anything embodied in it beyond the purpose of helping on the War would have been grossly wrong, and would have been utterly void both in the eye of the Constitution and of the law of war.  I readily admit that the President is to aim to do much for the slaves ; but not in his military capacity.  In that capacity, he can help the slaves only incidentally.

I adverted to the present more favorable prospect of putting down the Rebellion.  But, as I added, the Rebellion may be put down, and the country nevertheless be not saved--or in other words, its disease be not cured.  Nor did I mean that it would necessarily be saved by the abolition of Slavery.  Slavery is, and from the day of the bombarding ofSumter it has been in a rapid course of extinction.  It is highly probable that within a very few years it will have wholly disappeared from the country.  Very soon there will be no Democratic party in favor of re-establishing Slavery.  The Democratic Party, which will spring up after Slavery is abolished, will represent a genuine Democracy most widely contrasting with the spurious Democracy of the Party which now presumes to call itself Democratic.  The preset Democratic Party cannot survive Slavery.  It lives in the life of Slavery.  It lives in the life of Slavery, and will die in its death. Full well does it know this: and hence its close and anxious clingings to Slavery.  More than this, when Peace shall have returned, and the passions of War shall have subsided, and the cost of it in life and treasure shall have been counted, the people will be so decided against there being another Pro-Slavery War that they will leave no door open for it, and therefore leave no shreds of 
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Slavery in the land.  They will feel that they have had enough, and more than enough, of Slavery.

Most properly do I speak of this War as a Pro-Slavery War.  France and England, in their eagerness to believe whatever is to the discredit and disavantage of this vast Republic, may try to believe the nonsense that the Secession was caused by our High Tariff. But the South neither believes nor says it. In point of fact we never had a Tariff so nearly approaching Free Trade as that which existed when the War began.  Again, it was by means of the Secession, and the consequent withdrawal of Southern Members of Congress, that we were able to get the High Tariff. And, again, we needed the High Tariff to supply GOvernment with menas to overcome the Secession.  In a word, we must have a War Tariff.  Another, and no less false and nonsensical excuse for the Secession is, that it was provoked by the North's violations of Pro-Slavery laws.  The Democratic Party was certainly not guilty of such violations; and the reason why the Radical Abolitionists would not join the Republican Party was, that it persisted in its Pro-Slavery interpreta-tion of the Constituion, nad in enforcing all the infernal Pro Slavery legislation.  Of all our Presidents, no one ever entered upon his office with so eager and earnest promises as did Mr. Lincoln, (on his inaugural and else-where,) to excuse against [[?]] and holy Freedom all laws, either inside or outside of the Constitution, made to serve bloody and abominable Slavery.  Another, and by far the most popular and generally credited excuse for the Rebellion is, that the South was driven to it by the successful attempts of the Anti-Slavery men in turning the American mind against Slavery.  When I was quite a young man we agitated the question in this State of the suppression of Lotteries ; and we succeeded ; and got them prohibited in the organic law.  I admit it was right for the Pro-Lottery men to hold the Anti-Lottery men responsible for that change in public sentiment.  But I do not admit that had the Pro-Lottery men resorted to arms, it would have been right to hold the Anti-Lottery men responsible for that resort.  It would however have been as right for them to do so, as it is for the Pro-Slavery men to lay the blame of their own recourse to arms on the men whose only crime is the impressions, which their discussions of Slavery had made on the public mind.  If people have a system or an institution which cannot withstand argument, be it Slavery or Lotteries, or even Protestantism or Catholicism, let them hasten to exchange it for one that can.  Above all, let them not get so far back into the Dark Ages as to return argument with lead and steel; the utterances of the soul with the death of the body.

No, this is a purely Pro-Slavery Rebellion. It was begun for the sole purpose of ridding Slavery of dangers and securing to it new advantages: and one of the first steps in it was to eternize the abomination by making it the corner stone of the new Government.  Not any of the Free States have ever favored the Rebellion: but from the first all of them have been banded against it.  Eleven of the Slave States embarked in it : and the great reason why the remaining four did not is that in large sections of each of them the pro-slavery interest and spirit are slight, because of the small proportion which the slaves bear to the whole population.  I added, in respect to one of these four States, Kentucky, that no other of all the slave States has been so effectively in our way as she, with her hostile politics more damaging than even her hostile arms.  In another of the four, Missouri, we have had to fight bloodier battles than in Kentucky.  In another, Maryland, the rebel influence has been peculiarly perilous to us, because peculiarly disingenuous and sly.  No other two States in the nation have periled our cause so much as Maryland and Kentucky.  The other of these four States, Delaware, is too small in both territory and population to be of much account.  Could its Southern half have had its way. Delaware too would have joined the Secession.  All four of them would have[[/column 3]]