I assert that it is perfectly constitutional to repress an armed rebellion by force of arms. It is the sworn duty of the Administration under the Constitution to do so. And all the acts you condemn come in one way or another under powers delegated to Congress and to the Executive. The constitutional right to make war carries with it the constitutional right to employ all the means sanctioned by the laws of war. This is the amply sufficient justification of each and every one of the measures you denounce--the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confiscation acts, the suspension of _habeas corpus_, and the arrest of traitorous abettors of the rebels. As to the _Proclamation_--whether it is to be regarded as in its own proper effect conferring the _legal_ right to freedom, or whether it is to be taken simply as a notification to the rebels (and to the slaves also, so far as it should get to their knowledge) of what the President, in his supreme military capacity, was about to order and enforce, as our armies might come into contact with the slaves--is a question not necessary to determine here. But no intelligent man needs be told that even in a war with a foreign enemy, with honorable belligerents, it is always a matter lying rightfully in the discretion of the commander of an invading army to proclaim and secure the emancipation of slaves; and in a rebellion like this it is the height of absurdity, or of something much worse than absurdity, to quarrel with the military policy of depriving the rebels of the services of loyal men forced to dig trenches and minister supplies to them. What constitutional right have rebels--in arms for the overthrow of the Constitution--to be exempted from the operation of the laws of war? Who but a rebel sympathizer would challenge it for them?