So we found public feeling everywhere along the Atlantic coast. So, by the common testimony of all, it was found throughout the limits of the rebellion, down to the period when the terms of the President’s North Carolina proclamation came to be generally understood. On the Gulf we caught the first responsive notes given to that proclamation by the revived Southern temper. By the time we reached New Orleans the change was complete; the reaction had set in. Men now began to talk of their rights, and to argue constitutional points; as if traitors had rights, or treason were entitled to constitutional protection. They had discovered that, having laid down their arms, they were no longer Rebels, and could no longer be punished; as the thief who is forced to abandon his booty is no longer a thief, and may laugh at penitentiaries. As Mr. Randall Hunt dextrously put it, “We withdrew our Representatives from Congress, and tried to go out of the Union. You went to war to keep us in. You have conquered; we submit, and send back our Representatives. What more do you want?” The President had lustily proclaimed treason a crime, but the Southern people took his actions in preference to his words, and were confirmed in their own view that it was but a difference of opinion on a constitutional point, in which, under the circumstances, they were ready to yield. Not less marked was the reaction on all points connected with the negro. He was saucy and rude; disposed to acts of violence; likely, by his stupid presumptions, to provoke a war of races, which could only end in his extermination. In all this the Freedmen’s Bureau encouraged him, and thus became solely a fomenter of mischief. The presence of negro troops tended to demoralize the whole negro population. Negro evidence would make courts of justice a mockery. As to negro suffrage, none but the black-hearted Abolitionists who had brought on this war, and were now doing their best to provoke a second, would dream of seriously asking the South to submit to so revolting a humiliation. The mistake of the last four or five years had been the one against which Henry A. Wise had warned them in the beginning. They ought to have fought for their rights within the Union. That they must do now. * * * * *