"Our people will not soon forget that, while declaiming against Coercion, they closed their doors against the exportation of Slaves from the Border States into the South, with the avowed purpose of forcing us into Rebellion through fears of losing that species of Property. They knew very well the effect to be produced on Slavery by a Civil War, especially in those States into which hostile Armies might penetrate, and upon the soil of which the great contests for the success of Republican Government were to be decided. "They wanted some intermediate ground for the conflict of arms-territory where the population would be divided. They knew, also, that by keeping Slavery in the Border States the mere 'friction and abrasion' to which you so appropriately allude, would keep up a constant irritation, resulting necessarily from the frequent losses to which the owners would be subjected. "They also calculated largely, and not without reason, upon the repugnance of Non-Slaveholders in those States to a Free Negro population. In the meantime they intended persistently to charge the overthrow of Slavery to be the object of the Government, and hostility to this Institution the origin of the War. By this means the unavoidable incidents of the strife might easily he charged as the settled purposes of the Government. "Again, it was well understood, by these men, that exemplary conduct on the part of every officer and soldier employed by the Government could not in the nature of things be expected, and the hope was entertained, upon the most reasonable grounds, that every commission of wrong and every omission of duty would produce a new cause for excitement and a new incentive to Rebellion. "By these means the War was to be kept in the Border States, regardless of our interests, until an exhausted Treasury should render it necessary to send the tax-gatherer among our people, to take the little that might be left them from the devastations of War. "They then expected a clamor for Peace by us, resulting in the interference of France and England, whose operatives in the meantime would be driven to want, and whose aristocracy have ever been ready to welcome a dissolution of the American Union. "This cunningly-devised plan for securing a Gulf-Confederacy, commanding the mouths of the great Western rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Southern Atlantic ocean, with their own territory unscathed by the horrors of war, and surrounded by the Border States, half of whose population would be left in sympathy with them, for many years to come, owing to the irritations to which I have alluded, has, so far, succeeded too well.