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A. Lincoln
Response of the New York Tribune to the Proclamation
of Jefferson Davis. Published January, 1863 [The Proclamation
can be read HERE]On the 14th inst., Gen. N.P. Banks arrived at New Orleans, and assumed command there, vice Gen. B.F. Butler, relieved. On the 15th, Gen. Butler issued his farewell order, announcing his supersedure. On the 23d---eight days later---Jeff Davis issued from Richmond his Proclamation herewith given, consigning Gen. Butler and all his commissioned officers to a felon's death---when he shall have caught them. Mr. Jeff Davis proposes to kill all negro slaves who shall be captured fighting against the Slaveholder's Rebellion, and all white commissioned officers when found serving in company with said slaves. ---no matter whether officers of negro regiments or of any color. Such is the way the comet takes the Pope's Bull. Don't he seem to think there's something in it? Jeff. daintily says "all negro slaves"---but who for one moment imagines that any nice inquiry will be made as to the former status of the negro caught in a Federal uniform behind a Federal musket? There will be no time for such inquiry---no thought but to kill as speedily and painfully as possible. Nobody need be told what the punishment of slaves captured in arms and engaged in servile war is by the laws of Slave States. And our white officers found serving in company with them are to be served the same way. In other words, the Rebel Confederacy proposes to meet the policy of Emancipation by inaugurating a wholesale murder of prisoners. It is well for insurgents to thus aggravate the perils and penalties of insurrection? When Kentucky wanted to hang Gen. Buckner---who was a double-dyed, forsworn traitor according to all laws, human and divine---she was not permitted to do so. On the contrary, Kentuckians and Marylanders serving in the Rebel armies have been paroled and exchanged by us the same as other Confederate prisoners. And yet, there is no serious pretence that Kentucky and Maryland have seceded from the Union; and if we had chosen to treat them specially as traitors, there was ample ground for doing so. The first batalion of colored men organized for this war was raised in New Orleans, to fight on the side of the Slaveholder's Rebellion, under the authority of Governor Moore of Louisiana. That batalion became the nucleus of Gen. Butler's [now Gen. Bank's] colored force, now amounting to a brigade of three or four thousand men. Is it a law of civilized warfare that slaveholders and rebels alone may arm and use negroes? Let them show their patent! Jeff. talks largely of the horrors and merciless atrocities of a servile war---but these atrocities are of his own creation purely. The negroes---whether on his side or ours---have thus far shown no disposition to disregard the most humane rules of civilized warfare. But he steps in, and, charging others with exciting to merciless atrocities, proceeds to inaugurate them himself! Were the negroes to do their worst, they could not surpass the atrocities which he from his snug fireside, orders to be perpetrated, until the whole land be drunk with blood. He will frighten nobody. On the contrary, the whole civilized world will see in this savage manifesto a new proof of the unspeakable brutality and cruelty inseparable from the slaveholding system, and will hail it as a striking proof of Rebel desperation. Murder is the last resort of even the most hardened and reckless felon. And while it is easy to launch a threat of wholesale execution from the Cabinet, soldiers in the field, who are to be its victims, and who fully comprehend that butchery involves retaliation, will generally do as they see fit about carrying such sanguinary threats into execution.---New York Tribune The Hanging Proclamation of Jefferson Davis, which appears to concentrate in itself the arrogance, wrath and mendacity of all Rebeldom, is evidently intended, principally, if not entirely, as a rejoinder to President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the time for the operation of which is now near at hand. It would hardly be thought necessary or politic, even by secessionists, to start a proclamation with the falsehood that Wm. B. Mumford had been executed in New Orleans for having pulled down the United States flag in that city before its occupation by the United States forces, and to clinch it with an appeal to the Divine Judge, merely or principally for the purpose of retaliation for an act commited so long ago. To say nothing of the tiger-like savageness of the whole document, that part of the edict of the edict that declares all commissioned officers under Gen. Butler to be robbers and murderers, who are to be reserved for execution, is as diabolical and bloody in its conception and declaration as anything which has been sent forth by any government pretending to civilization since the days of St. Bartholomew, and including even the order for that merciless massacre.---Boston Transcript |
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