We meet here again after another week of deep, intense, heartfelf, widesread and thrilling excitement. I have never spent days so restless and anxious. Our mornings and evenings have continually oscillated between the dim light of hope, and the gloomy shadow of despair. We have opened our papers, new and damp from the press, trembling, lest the first line of the lightning should tell us that our National Capital has fallen into the hands of traitors and murderers who have bound themselves as with an oath to break up our national government.
The thing you and I want, most of all, to know, concerning this mighty strife, is yet far from us. We cannot see the end from the beginning. Our profoundest calculations may prove erroneous, our best hopes disappointed, and our worst fears confirmed. We live but to-day, and the measureless shores of the future are wisely hid from us. And yet we read the face of the sky, and may discern the signs of the times. We know that clouds and darkness, and the sounds of distant thunder means rain. So, too, may we observe the fleecy drapery of the moral sky, and draw conclusions as to what may come upon us. There is a general feeling amongst us, that the control of events has been taken out of our hands, that we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles-invisible forces, which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our National destiny.
I cannot claim to speak on this great movement of the great North, as one of the privileged class of the American people. I take my place cheerfully, with the enslaved and proscribed in the land, and from their humble and lowly position, I wish to view the events now transpiring, and rightly interpret their significance as affecting the oppressed and enslaved.
Nevertheless, I am not indifferent, but profoundly solicitous for the character, growth and destiny of the American Republic, which but for slavery, would be the best governed country in the world. While, therefore I may speak as a man, and view the great subject which now comes before us, as one of the oppressed, I can also speak as an American. All that I have and am, are bound up with the destiny of this country. When she is successful, I rejoice; when she is prosperous, I am happy; and when she is afflicted, I mourn with her as sincerely as any other citizen, for though not yet taken into full communion with her, I still feel that she is my country and that I must fall or flourish with her. But what of this war? What does it mean? And what results will it finally arrive at?
We all know what the rebels and traitors mean. They mean the perpetuity, and the supremacy of slavery. They mean that the slave power shall control and administer the American government now and forever, or else that the government shall be destroyed, and that another shall be put in its place, of which slaveholders shall have absolute control; they mean in a word to have Washington, and to drive the present government away.
Once in possession of the machinery of the Federal Government they would place their iron yolk upon the necks of freemen, and make the system of Slavery the great and all commanding interest of the whole country. With their success the historian may record the decline and fall of the American Liberty and Civilization, the banishment and proscription of free speech and a free press, and the domination of a proud, selfish, cruel and semi-barbarous oligarchy-whose arguments are bowie-knives, slung-shot and revolvers.
It is this purpose that animates all their movements. The war on their part is for a government in which Slavery shall be National, and Freedom no where, in which the capitalist shall own the Laborer. And the white non-slaveholder a degraded man-to be classed, as such men are now classed all over the South, as "poor white trash."
But what does the war mean to the North? This inquiry is far more important than any concerning the South, for the South can do nothing without the great North shall see fit to let her. I look upon the war as in the hands of the North. It shall be made short or long, important or insignificant, as they shall and will determine.
There are many conflicting theories of the end had in view of this war. To some it means the complete dissolution of the American Union, the absolute and final separation of the slaveholding States from the non-slaveholding States; a division of national property, and an acknowledgement of the independence of the governments of the respective sections. To others it simply means the suppression of rebellion, and the establishment of things precisely as they were before the election of Mr. Lincoln, without any alteration of a single principle or inference of the old reconstruct of the Union upon the basis which shall remove the objections which slaveholders have raised against the present one. While others see, or think they see, in it the complete humiliation of the slaveholders, and the abolition of slavery, and a strong federal government which will make successful resistance to its authority and power, useless if not improbable.