promptly declared, would produce chaos in the South, would subject the Confederate government to the danger of local uprisings of the negroes, and would thus make victory easy. But the Administration was not prepared to take a step so far in advance of popular opinion, and for some months the prevailing policy was one which prohibited the soldiers of the Union from protecting or harboring fugitive slaves, and in some instances made slave-hunters of the troops. When General Fremont, on the 31st of August, issued his proclamation in Missouri, declaring free all slaves belonging to persons engaged in the rebellion, Mr. Chandler was among those who most heartily approved this step. The President was alarmed, as he feared the country was not ready for such an act, and greatly modified the Fremont proclamation, as he also did a still more sweeping order of General Hunter in the following May. Mr. Chandler's disappointment at this was extreme, but within a few months he saw emancipation resorted to by the Administration as a war measure, and a death-blow dealt to "the relic of barbarism." That part of the report for 1861 of Simon Cameron as Secretary of War, which urged the most summary attacks upon the institution of slavery as the surest means of dealing mortal blows to the rebellion, and which Mr. Lincoln suppressed, Mr. Chandler heartily endorsed, and every manifestation by Northern commanders of a disposition to make their armies defenders of the slave system aroused his indignation. The act of March 13, 1862, prohibiting by an article of war the use of the troops for the returning of fugitive slaves to their masters, he earnestly supported, and the act of April 16, 1862, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, was a measure in which he especially interested himself, and whose final passage he celebrated by an entertainment given to its most devoted friends at his rooms in the National Hotel of Washington. The abortive colonization schemes which were tried about this time, at Mr. Lincoln's urgent recommendation, Mr. Chandler privately opposed as utterly inadequate and as a mere diversion of force into useless channels, but for public reasons he made no open resistance to the experiment. For the laws of June 19, 1862, forever prohibiting slavery in the territories, and of June 28, 1864, repealing the fugitive slave statutes, it need not be said that he labored with unflagging industry.