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[5] This letter was published in the public journals 9 September.

The single question of policy on which General McClellan differs from Mr. Lincoln, stripped of the conventional phrases in which he drapes it, is Slavery. He can mean nothing else when he talks of “conciliation and compromise,” of receiving back any State that may choose to return “with a full guaranty of all its constitutional rights.” If it be true that a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, it is equally true that there is a certain species of toadstool that would be none the less disgusting under whatever alias. Compromise and conciliation are both excellent things in their own way, and in the fitting time and place, but right cannot be compromised without surrendering it, and to attempt conciliation by showing the white feather ends, not in reconcilement, but subjection. The combined ignorance of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as to what had been going on while they were in their cavern would hardly equal that of General McClellan alone as to the political history of the country. In the few months between Mr. Lincoln’s election and the attack on Fort Sumter we tried conciliation in every form, carrying it almost to the verge of ignominy. The Southern leaders would have none of it. They saw in it only a confession of weakness, and were but the more arrogant in their demand of all or nothing. Compromise we tried for three quarters of a century, and it brought us to where we are, for it was only a fine name for cowardice, and invited aggression. And now that the patient is dying of this drench of lukewarm water, Doctor Sangrado McClellan gravely prescribes another gallon. If that fail to finish him, why, give him a gallon more.

We wish it were as easy to restore General McClellan’s army to what it was before the Peninsular campaign as he seems to think it is to put the country back where it was at the beginning of the war. The war, it is true, was undertaken to assert the sovereignty of the Constitution, but the true cause of quarrel was, not that the South denied the supremacy of that instrument, but that they claimed the sole right to interpret it, and to interpret it in a sense hostile to the true ideal of the country, and the clear interests of the people. But circumstances have changed, and what was at first a struggle to maintain the outward form of our government has become a contest to preserve the life and assert the supreme will of the nation. Even in April, 1861, underneath that desire for legal sanction common to our race, which expressed itself in loyalty to the Constitution, there was an instinctive feeling that the very germinating principle of our nationality was at stake, and that unity of territory was but another name for unity of idea; nay, was impossible without it, and undesirable if it were possible. It was not against the Constitution that the Rebels declared war, but against free institutions; and if they are beaten, they must submit to the triumph of those institutions. Their only chance of constitutional victory was at the polls. They rejected it, though it was in their grasp, and now it is for us, and not them, to dictate terms. After all the priceless blood they have shed, General McClellan would say to them, “Come back and rule us.” Mr. Lincoln says, “Come back as equals, with every avenue of power open to you that is open to us; but the advantage which the slaveholding interest wrung from the weakness of the fathers your own madness has forfeited to the sons.”

General McClellan tells us that if the war had been conducted “in accordance with those principles which he took occasion to declare when in active service, reconciliation would have been easy.” We suppose he refers to his despatch of July 7th, 1862, when, having just demonstrated his incapacity in the profession for which he had been educated, he kindly offered to take the civil policy of the country under his direction, expecting, perhaps, to be more successful in a task for which he was fitted neither by training nor experience. It is true he had already been spoken of as a possible candidate for the Presidency, and that despatch was probably written to be referred to afterwards as part of the “record” to which he alludes in his recent letter. Indeed, he could have had no other conceivable object in so impertinent a proceeding, for, up to that time, the war had been conducted on the very principles he recommended; nay, was so conducted for six months longer, till it was demonstrated that reconciliation was not to be had on those terms, and that victory was incompatible with them. Mr. Lincoln was forced into what General McClellan calls a radical policy by the necessity of the case. The Rebels themselves insisted on convincing him that his choice was between that and failure. They boasted that slavery was their bulwark and arsenal; that, while every Northern soldier withdrew so much from the productive industry of the Union, every fighting-man at the South could be brought into the field, so long as the negroes were left to do the work that was to feed and clothe him. Were these negroes property? The laws of war justified us in appropriating them to our own use. Were they population? The laws of war equally justified us in appealing to them for aid in a cause which was their own more than it was ours. It was so much the worse for the South that its property was of a kind that could be converted from chattels into men, and from men into soldiers, by the scratch of a pen. The dragon’s teeth were not of our sowing, but, so far from our being under any obligation not to take into our service the army that sprang from them, it would have been the extreme of weakness and folly not to do it. If there be no provision in the Constitution for emancipating the negroes, neither is there any for taking Richmond; and we give General McClellan too much credit for intelligence and patriotism to suppose that if, when he asked for a hundred thousand more men at Harrison’s Bar, he had been told that he could have black ones, he would have refused them.