Dear Sir, You send to Mr. W——­ an extract from a letter written at New Orleans the 9th instant, which is shown to me.  You do not give the writer’s name; but plainly he is a man of ability, and probably of some note.  He says:  “The time has arrived when Mr. Lincoln must take a decisive course.  Trying to please everybody, he will satisfy nobody.  A vacillating policy in matters of importance is the very worst.  Now is the time, if ever, for honest men who love their country to rally to its support.  Why will not the North say officially that it wishes for the restoration of the Union as it was?”

And so, it seems, this is the point on which the writer thinks I have no policy.  Why will he not read and understand what I have said?

The substance of the very declaration he desires is in the inaugural, in each of the two regular messages to Congress, and in many, if not all, the minor documents issued by the Executive since the Inauguration.

Broken eggs cannot be mended; but Louisiana has nothing to do now but to take her place in the Union as it was, barring the already broken eggs.  The sooner she does so, the smaller will be the amount of that which will be past mending.  This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.  Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.  If they expect in any contingency to ever have the Union as it was, I join with the writer in saying, “Now is the time.”

How much better it would have been for the writer to have gone at this, under the protection of the army at New Orleans, than to have sat down in a closet writing complaining letters northward.

His Letter to Horace Greeley.  August 22, 1862

I have just read yours of the 19th instant, addressed to myself through the “New York Tribune.”

If there be in it any statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them.

If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here argue against them.

If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it, in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing,” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.  I would save the Union.  I would save it in the shortest way under the Constitution.

The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be,—­the Union as it was.

If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them.

If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.