This proclamation was the first announcement by President Lincoln of a deliberate purpose to preserve the integrity of the Republic by a resort to arms. In his recent Inaugural Address he had, almost pathetically, pleaded for peace--for friendship; and there is no doubting that his sincere desire was to avoid bloodshed. He then had no thought of attacking slavery, but rather to protect and grant it more safeguards in the States where it existed. Later, on many occasions, when the war had done much to inflame public sentiment in the North against the South, he publicly declared he would save the "Union as it was." His most pronounced utterance on this point was: "I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."(22) But Abraham Lincoln was not understood in 1861, nor even later during the war, and not fully during life, by either his enemies or his personal or party friends. The South, in its leadership, was implacable in the spirit of its hostility, but the masses, even there, in time came to understand his true purposes and sincere character. Two days after the call for seventy-five thousand troops, President Davis responded to it by proclaiming to the South that President Lincoln had announced the intention of "invading the Confederacy with an armed force for the purpose of capturing its fortresses, subverting its independence, and subjecting the free people thereof to a foreign power." In the same proclamation he invited persons to take service in private armed vessels on the high seas, tendering to such persons as would accept them commissions or letters of _marque_ and reprisal.