When the message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New Orleans, General Banks wrote me that he was confident that the people, with his military co-operation, would reconstruct substantially on that plan.  I wrote him and some of them to try it.  They tried it, and the result is known.  Such has been my only agency in getting up the Louisiana government.  As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before stated.  But as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest; but I have not yet been so convinced.  I have been shown a letter on this subject, supposed to be an able one, in which the writer expresses regret that my mind has not seemed to be definitely fixed upon the question whether the seceded States, so called, are in the Union or out of it.  It would perhaps add astonishment to his regret were he to learn that since I have found professed Union men endeavouring to answer that question, I have purposely forborne any public expression upon it....

We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States, is to again get them into that proper practical relation.  I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it.  Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.  Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union, and each for ever after innocently indulge his own opinion whether in doing the acts he brought the States from without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.  The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all if it contained forty thousand, or thirty thousand, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand as it does.  It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the coloured man.  I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

Still, the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable.  The question is, will it be wiser to take it as it is and help to improve it, or to reject and disperse it?  Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State government?  Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave State of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections,