“I do not argue,” continued the proclamation, “I beseech you to make the arguments for yourselves.  You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times.  I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partizan politics.  This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any.  It acts not the Pharisee.  The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything.  Will you not embrace it?  So much good has not been done, by one effort, in all past time, as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do.  May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it.”

This proclamation of President Lincoln’s naturally created considerable and very diverse comment, but much less than would have occurred had not military events intervened which served in a great degree to absorb public attention.  At the date of the proclamation McClellan, with the Army of the Potomac, was just reaching the Chickahominy in his campaign toward Richmond; Stonewall Jackson was about beginning his startling raid into the Shenandoah valley; and Halleck was pursuing his somewhat leisurely campaign against Corinth.  On the day following the proclamation the victorious fleet of Farragut reached Vicksburg in its first ascent of the Mississippi.  Congress was busy with the multifarious work that crowded the closing weeks of the long session; and among this congressional work the debates and proceedings upon several measures of positive and immediate antislavery legislation were significant “signs of the times.”  During the session, and before it ended, acts or amendments were passed prohibiting the army from returning fugitive slaves; recognizing the independence and sovereignty of Haiti and Liberia; providing for carrying into effect the treaty with England to suppress the African slave trade; restoring the Missouri Compromise and extending its provisions to all United States Territories; greatly increasing the scope of the confiscation act in freeing slaves actually employed in hostile military service; and giving the President authority, if not in express terms, at least by easy implication, to organize and arm negro regiments for the war.

But between the President’s proclamation and the adjournment of Congress military affairs underwent a most discouraging change.  McClellan’s advance upon Richmond became a retreat to Harrison’s Landing Halleck captured nothing but empty forts at Corinth.  Farragut found no cooeperation at Vicksburg, and returned to New Orleans, leaving its hostile guns still barring the commerce of the great river.  Still worse, the country was plunged into gloomy forebodings by the President’s call for three hundred thousand new troops.

About a week before the adjournment of Congress the President again called together the delegations from the border slave States, and read to them, in a carefully prepared paper, a second and most urgent appeal to adopt his plan of compensated abolishment.