Indeed, great fault was found, by some of these, with what they characterized as President Lincoln's "obstinate slowness" to come up to their advanced ideas on the subject. He was even accused of failing to execute existing laws touching confiscation of Slaves of Rebels coming within the lines of the Union Armies. On the 19th of August, 1862, a letter was addressed to him by Horace Greeley which concluded thus: "On the face of this wide Earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union Cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion, and at the same time uphold its inciting cause, are preposterous and futile--that the Rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor--that Army officers, who remain to this day devoted to Slavery, can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union--and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union. "I appeal to the testimony of your embassadors in Europe. It is freely at your service, not mine. Ask them to tell you candidly whether the seeming subserviency of your policy to the Slaveholding, Slavery-upholding interest, is not the perplexity, the despair, of Statesmen of all parties; and be admonished by the general answer. "I close, as I began, with the statement that what an immense majority of the loyal millions of your countrymen require of you, is a frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the Laws of the Land, more especially of the Confiscation Act. That Act gives Freedom to the Slaves of Rebels coming within our lines, or whom those lines may at any time inclose. We ask you to render it due obedience by publicly requiring all your subordinates to recognize and obey it. "The Rebels are everywhere using the late Anti-Negro riots in the North --as they have long used your officers' treatment of Negroes in the South--to convince the Slaves that they have nothing to hope from a Union success--that we mean in that case to sell them into a bitter Bondage to defray the cost of the War. "Let them impress this as a truth on the great mass of their ignorant and credulous Bondmen, and the Union will never be restored--never. We can not conquer ten millions of people united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies. "We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers, and choppers, from the Blacks of the South--whether we allow them to fight for us or not--or we shall be baffled and repelled.