The life and public services of Abraham Lincoln ... together with his state papers, including his speeches, addresses, messages, letters, and proclamations, and the closing scenes connected with his life and death. By Henry J. Raymond. To which are added anecdotes and personal reminiscences of President Lincoln, by Frank B. Carpenter.

568

THE LIFE, PUBLIC. SERVICES, AND

oat hs, directed the District Attorney to bring the subject
before some magistrate. Warrants were accordingly
issued by City Judge Russell for the arrest of General
Dix and the officers who had acted in the matter. The
parties voluntarily appeared before the judge, and an
argument of the legal questions involved was had. The
judge determined to hold General Dix and the rest for
the action of the grand-jury. One grand-jury, however,
had already refused to meddle with the matter, and,
greatly to the disappointment of those who had aimed
to place the State of New York in a position of open
hostility to the Government of the United States, no further proceedings were ever taken in the matter.
An effort was made to bring the subject up in Congress. Among other propositions, Mr. Brooks, of New
York, proposed to add, as an amendment to a bill for
tho, incorporation of a Newsboys' Home in the District of
Columbia, a provision that no newspaper should be suppressed in Washington, or its editor incarcerated, without
due process of law. He succeeded in making a speech
abounding in denunciations of the Government, but had
no other success.
To those men at the North who really sympathized with
the South on the slavery question, the whole policy of
the Administration upon that subject was distasteful.
The Emancipation Proclamation, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, and even the employment of negroes in
the army, were with them grave causes of complaint
against it. The President's views on this matter were
expressed in the following conversational remarks, to some
pr )lminent Western gentlemen:The slightest knowledge of arithmetic (said he) will prove to any
man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed by Democratic strategy.
It would sacrifice all the white men of the North to do it. There are
now in the service of the United States nearly two hundred thousand
able-bodied colored men, most of them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory. The Democratic strategy demands that these
forces be disbanded, and that the masters be conciliated by restoring thein
to slavery. The black men who now assist Untion prisoners to escape

I