The Daily Dispatch: September 20, 1864., [Electronic resource]

There is no mistaking the object of Sherman in desiring to hold a conference with Vice-President Stephens and Governor Brown. It is to detach the State of Georgia, if possible, from the Confederacy, through the agency of these two gentlemen, whom, from their course with regard to the habeas corpus act and other measures, he takes to be at heart well disposed to promote such a measure. We are confident that he will find himself disappointed in his estimation of these two gentlemen, yet we very much regret that they should ever have advocated any line of policy which a Yankee general can, by any possibility, thus interpret. We trust that the meeting will not be accorded. It can answer no good purpose, and is designed for no good end. If there were no other objection to it, the very fact that it is proposed by Sherman is sufficient of itself to indicate its impropriety. No good citizen ought, especially at such a time as this, to do anything which may, in the slightest particular, serve to indicate that there is a difference in his opinion between the interest of his State and the interests of the Confederacy. The Governor of Georgia, at least, ought to recollect that his State was one of the first (the first after South Carolina) to secede from the Union, and that if she now treat of peace on her own terms, as a sovereign, she withdraws from the Confederacy, and leaves her sisters the bag to hold, after having got them into this scrape.

We make these remarks because separate State action has been agitated of late in more quarters than one. The late deplorable peace delusion gave rise to it, and the depression consequent upon the disappointment of hopes raised by it has kept it up. We hope it has not spread to any great extent; but we may be assured that Sherman has heard of it, and that it encourages him to seek this conference. The Constitution confers upon the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make peace. If a State make peace on her own account, she withdraws from the Confederacy. Sherman knows this, and thinking he has his heel upon the State of Georgia, he hopes in this way to bring her back into the Union. Are the people--not the politicians — are the people of Georgia prepared for this step! Will they consent to abandon Virginia, which entered into this Confederacy because she was determined to share the same fate with her sisters — will she, we say, abandon Virginia now, after having dragged her into this war? We cannot and will not believe it of the gallant State of Georgia. Her sons have fought too gallantly to warrant such a belief.

Our public men, we should think, ought to avoid all communication with Sherman as far as possible. Of all the miscreants that this war has produced among the Yankees, he is the basest and the worst. Beast Butler himself might almost be considered an honest man in comparison with him. That this is the opinion held of him by his own Government, from the fact that they have made him the vehicle of communicating their determination not to receive their hundred days men in exchange; an atrocity which has not its parallel in all history, so far as we can recollect. The tasks to which Governments put their officers always show the estimation in which they hold them. Butler is selected to announce the dependence of the fifty thousand Yankees we hold in captivity for restoration to liberty upon our consent to exchange the hundred or two lousy negroes we have captured bearing arms against their masters on equal terms. The two men, the basest in the Yankee army, are put forward to announce the basest policy ever adopted by a civilized government. Butler has been declared an outlaw; we therefore hold no communication with him. Let the same course be pursued with regard to Sherman.--We hope Governor Brown and Mr. Stephens will not meet him. It would have a bad look !