I know what I say when I repeat that the insurgents of the South sneer at all overtures looking to their interests.  They scorn the alliance with the Copperheads; they tell me to my face that they respect Grant, McPherson, and our brave associates who fight manfully and well for a principle, but despise the Copperheads and sneaks at the North, who profess friendship for the South and opposition to the war, as mere covers for their knavery and poltroonery.

God knows that I deplore this fratricidal war as much as any man living, but it is upon us, a physical fact; and there is only one honorable issue from it.  We must fight it out, army against army, and man against man; and I know, and you know, and civilians begin to realize the fact, that reconciliation and reconstruction will be easier through and by means of strong, well-equipped, and organized armies than through any species of conventions that can be framed.  The issues are made, and all discussion is out of place and ridiculous.  The section of thirty-pounder Parrott rifles now drilling before my tent is a more convincing argument than the largest Democratic meeting the State of New York can possibly assemble at Albany; and a simple order of the War Department to draft enough men to fill our skeleton regiments would be more convincing as to our national perpetuity than an humble pardon to Jeff.  Davis and all his misled host.

The only government needed or deserved by the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, now exists in Grant’s army.  This needs, simply, enough privates to fill its ranks; all else will follow in due season.  This army has its well-defined code of laws and practice, and can adapt itself to the wants and necessities of a city, the country, the rivers, the sea, indeed to all parts of this land.  It better subserves the interest and policy of the General Government, and the people here prefer it to any weak or servile combination that would at once, from force of habit, revive sad perpetuate local prejudices and passions.  The people of this country have forfeited all right to a voice in the councils of the nation.  They know it and feel it, and in after-years they will be the better citizens from the dear bought experience of the present crisis.  Let them learn now, and learn it well, that good citizens must obey as well as command.  Obedience to law, absolute—­yea, even abject—­is the lesson that this war, under Providence, will teach the free and enlightened American citizen.  As a nation, we shall be the better for it.

I never have apprehended foreign interference in our family quarrel.  Of coarse, governments founded on a different and it may be an antagonistic principle with ours naturally feel a pleasure at our complications, and, it may be, wish our downfall; but in the end England and France will join with us in jubilation at the triumph of constitutional government over faction.  Even now the English manifest this.  I do not