or labor;” any officer who should violate the article was to be dismissed from the service.  Again the men from the Border States, rallying their few Democratic allies from the North to their assistance, made vehement opposition, and again they were overwhelmed beneath an irresistible majority:  83 to 42 in the House, 29 to 9 in the Senate.  The President signed the bill on March 13, 1862, and thereafter “nigger hunting” was a dangerous sport in the Union camps.

On March 24, Mr. Arnold[2] of Illinois introduced a bill ambitiously purporting “to render freedom national and slavery sectional.”  It prohibited slavery wherever Congress could do so, that is to say, in all Territories, present and future, in all forts, arsenals, dockyards, etc., in all vessels on the high seas and on all national highways beyond the territory and jurisdiction of the several States.  Both by its title and by its substance it went to the uttermost edge of the Constitution and, in the matter of Territories, perhaps beyond that edge.  Mr. Arnold himself supported it with the bold avowal that slavery was in deadly hostility to the national government, and therefore must be destroyed.  Upon a measure so significant and so defended, debate waxed hot, so that one gentleman proposed that the bill should be sent back to the committee with instructions not to report it back “until the cold weather.”  The irritation and alarm of the Border States rendered modification necessary unless tact and caution were to be wholly thrown to the winds.  Ultimately, therefore, the offensive title was exchanged for the simple one of “An Act to secure freedom to all persons within the Territories of the United States,” and the bill, curtailed to accord with this expression, became law by approval of the President on June 19.

A measure likely in its operation to affect a much greater number of persons than any other of those laws which have been mentioned was introduced by Senator Trumbull of Illinois.  This was “for the confiscation of the property of rebels, and giving freedom to the persons they hold in slavery.”  It made the slaves of all who had taken up arms against the United States “forever thereafter free.”  It came up for debate on February 25, and its mover defended it as “destroying to a great extent the source and origin of the rebellion, and the only thing which had ever seriously threatened the peace of the Union.”  The men of the Border States, appalled at so general a manumission, declared that it would produce intolerable conditions in their States, leading either to reenslavement or extermination.  So strenuous an anti-slavery man as Senator Hale also suggested that the measure was unconstitutional.  Similar discussion upon similar propositions went forward contemporaneously in the House.  For once, in both bodies, the Democrats won in many skirmishes.  Ultimately, as the outcome of many amendments, substitutes, recommitments, and conferences, a bill was patched up, which passed by 27 to 12 in the Senate and 82 to 42 in the House, and was approved by the President July 17.  It was a very comprehensive measure; so much so, that Mr. Blaine has said of it:  “Even if the war had ended without a formal and effective system of emancipation, it is believed that this statute would have so operated as to render the slave system practically valueless.”