gentlemen composing the meeting are resolved on doing their part to maintain our common government and country, despite the folly or wickedness, as they may conceive, of any administration.  This position is eminently patriotic, and, as such, I thank the meeting, and congratulate the nation for it.  My own purpose is the same, so that the meeting and myself have a common object, and can have no difference, except in the choice of means or measures for effecting that object.”

Later on followed some famous sentences:—­

“Mr. Vallandigham avows his hostility to the war on the part of the Union; and his arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertion from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.  He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the administration or the personal interests of the commanding general, but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the Nation depends....

“I understand the meeting whose resolutions I am considering to be in favor of suppressing the rebellion by military force, by armies.  Long experience has shown that armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death.

“The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this punishment.  Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?  This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings until he is persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptible government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.  I think that, in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy.”

The Ohio Democrats found themselves confronted with this:—­

“Your nominee for governor ... is known to you and to the world to declare against the use of an army to suppress the rebellion.  Your own attitude therefore encourages desertion, resistance to the draft, and the like, because it teaches those who incline to desert and to escape the draft to believe it is your purpose to protect them, and to hope that you will become strong enough to do so.”

The arguments of the President called out retort rather than reply, for in fact they really could not be answered, and they were too accurately put to be twisted by sophistry; that they reached the minds of the people was soon made evident.  The Democratic managers had made a fatal blunder in arraying the party in a position of extreme hostility to the war.  Though there were at the North hosts of grumblers who were maliciously pleased at all embarrassments of the administration,