There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this shall be made a war for the negro.  I am willing that it shall be.  It is a war which was begun to found an empire upon slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it one to establish the freedom of the negro—­against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.  Instead of suppressing the real cause of the war, it should have been proclaimed not only by the people but by the President, Congress, Cabinet and every military commander.  Instead of President Lincoln’s waiting two long years before calling to the aid of the government the millions of allies whom we have had within the territory of rebeldom, it should have been the first decree he sent forth.  By all the laws of common sense—­to say nothing of laws military or civil—­if the President, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, could have devised any possible means whereby he might hope to suppress the rebellion without the sacrifice of the life of one loyal citizen, without the sacrifice of one dollar of the loyal North, it was clearly his duty to have done so.  Every interest of the insurgents, every dollar of their property, every institution, every life in every rebel State even, if necessary, should have been sacrificed, before one dollar or one man should have been drawn from the free States.  How much more then was it the President’s duty to confer freedom on the millions of slaves, transform them into an army for the Union, cripple the rebellion and establish justice, the only sure foundation of peace.  I therefore hail the day when the government shall recognize that this is a war for freedom.

We talk about returning to “the Union as it was” and “the Constitution as it is”—­about “restoring our country to peace and prosperity—­to the blessed conditions which existed before the war!” I ask you what sort of peace, what sort of prosperity, have we had?  Since the first slave ship sailed up the James river with its human cargo and there, on the soil of the Old Dominion, it was sold to the highest bidder, we have had nothing but war.  When that pirate captain landed on the shores of Africa and there kidnapped the first stalwart negro and fastened the first manacle, the struggle between that captain and that negro was the commencement of the terrible war in the midst of which we are today.  Between the slave and the master there has been war, and war only.  This is but a new form of it.  No, no; we ask for no return to the old conditions.  We ask for something better.  We want a Union which is a Union in fact, a Union in spirit, not a sham.  By the Constitution as it is, the North has stood pledged to protect slavery in the States where it existed.  We have been bound, in case of insurrections, to go to the aid, not of those struggling for liberty but of the oppressors.  It was politicians who made this pledge at the beginning, and who have