--The enemies of
Mr. Lincoln have sometimes taken occasion to say that papers presented to the world with his signature attached, were not written by him. We think no man will be found of a nature so skeptical as to doubt that this letter is genuine.
It has a flat-boat, rail-splitting, whiskey-drinking odor about it which allows of no mistake with regard to its origin.--We doubt whether any other man in his dominions could have written exactly such a letter.
To find one who could come nearest to it, we should be compelled to pass in review the whole army of flat-boatmen that once made the
Mississippi and the
Ohio vocal with ribald jests and obscene songs.
In the days of the
Union it was fashionable to defend every infringement of the
Constitution by reference to the general welfare clause.
That was an enactment so wide and indefinite in its signification that it was supposed to cover every usurpation and justify every violence.
It was the entrance by which
John Quincy Adams said he could drive a wagon and team through the
Constitution.
Lincoln scorns to take shelter under any law of indefinite signification.
He is a military despot, and he regards his sword knot as a better warrant for his actions than any law that ever was enacted.
He claims the right to emancipate our slaves, although their possession is guaranteed by the very Constitution, for the restoration of which he professes to be now fighting — under his authority as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the
United States!
This is the boldest avowal of the existence of a military despotism we have yet seen.
It places the property of every man in Yankeedom, as well as the
Confederacy, absolutely at his disposal, whenever he may think proper to denounce such man as an enemy.
The most striking feature of the claim is, that it utterly abolishes the
Constitution for the sake of preserving it. He and his party still regard, or affect to regard, the people of the
Confederacy as citizens of the
Union.
If so, they are under the protection of the laws of the
Union.
The laws of the
Union prescribe trial by jury for the crime of treason, and condemnation only upon proof of guilt satisfactory to such jury, they take especial care to repudiate all attainder of blood, and forfeiture of every kind.
Yet here is a President who undertakes, by a simple proclamation, to do what the
Constitution does not allow to be done in any case, under any circumstances.
His rule of warfare would have suited Timour or Genghis Khan, and was extensively acted upon by those enlightened models.
But it has been repudiated by every Christian people for two hundred years. The last that followed it was
Marshal Turenne, when he ravaged the Palatinate with fire and sword; by which act he doubtless damned his own soul, and earned for himself the execration of posterity throughout the civilized world.
Lincoln, however, but avows the principle on which his plunderers have all along been acting.
Establish the principle that it is lawful to destroy everything which can be useful to an enemy, and you justify the utter destruction of every country into which an enemy may penetrate.
Houses, mills, barns, growing crops, cattle, horses, sheep,
agricultural implements, cities, towns, villages, everything which can support life or be the subject of property, is useful to an enemy.
We thus find the ruler of a people, calling themselves free and enlightened, enunciating doctrines which would disgrace the Sepoys, and which even in the
East have never been acted on since the day when Hyde Ally destroyed the
Carnatic.
The letter closes with the most humiliating confession, or rather avowal, that ever covered a nation with shame.
The mighty Empire of
Yankee Doodle, numbering 20,000,000 of stationary inhabitants, and an untold number of immigrants, after trying in vain for two years and a half to crush a people not one-fourth part as numerous as themselves, is indebted, according to its chief, for its most important victory to the valor of negroes.
But for these negroes, we are allowed to infer, the
Yankees would have been driven like whipped hounds, yelling and screaming, before the
Confederates.
If there is a more shameful avowal upon record we never saw it. It proves exactly what we have always said that the
Yankee is inferior to the negro, and if
Gibbon had known anything of the
Yankee he would never have said that the negro race is inferior to the white race, without putting in a salvo for the infinite degradation of
Yankee Doodle.
