On the 27th of May, General Butler, having in a previous communication reported his interview with Major Cary, called the attention of the War Department to the subject in a formal despatch,--indicating the hostile purposes for which the negroes had been or might be successfully used, stating the course he had pursued in employing them and recording expenses and services, and suggesting pertinent military, political, and humane considerations. The Secretary of War, under date of the 30th of May, replied, cautiously approving the course of General Butler, and intimating distinctions between interfering with the relations of persons held to service and refusing to surrender them to their alleged masters, which it is not easy to reconcile with well-defined views of the new exigency, or at least with a desire to express them. The note was characterized by diplomatic reserve which it will probably be found difficult long to maintain.
The ever-recurring question continued to press for solution. On the 6th of July the Act of Congress was approved, declaring that any person claiming the labor of another to be due to him, and permitting such party to be employed in any military or naval service whatsoever against the Government of the United States, shall forfeit his claim to such labor, and proof of such employment shall thereafter be a full answer to the claim. This act was designed for the direction of the civil magistrate, and not for the limitation of powers derived from military law. That law, founded on _salus republicae_, transcends all codes, and lies outside of forms and statutes. John Quincy Adams, almost prophesying as he expounded, declared, in 1842, that under it slavery might be abolished. Under it, therefore, Major-General Fremont, in a recent proclamation, declared the slaves of all persons within his department, who were in arms against the Government, to be freemen, and under it has given title-deeds of manumission. Subsequently President Lincoln limited the proclamation to such slaves as are included in the Act of Congress, namely, the slaves of Rebels used in directly hostile service. The country had called for Jacksonian courage, and its first exhibition was promptly suppressed. If the revocation was made in deference to protests from Kentucky, it seems, that, while the loyal citizens of Missouri appeared to approve the decisive measure, they were overruled by the more potential voice of other communities who professed to understand their affairs better than they did themselves. But if, as is admitted, the commanding officer, in the plenitude of military power, was authorized to make the order within his department, all human beings included in the proclamation thereby acquired a vested title to their freedom, of which neither Congress nor President could dispossess them. No conclusive behests of law necessitating the limitation, it cannot rest on any safe reasons of military policy. The one slave who carries his master's knapsack on a march contributes far less to the efficiency of the Rebel army than the one hundred slaves who hoe corn on his plantation with which to replenish its commissariat. We have not yet emerged from the fine-drawn distinctions of peaceful times. We may imprison or slaughter a Rebel, but we may not unloose his hold on a person he has claimed as a slave. We may seize all his other property without question, lands, houses, cattle, jewels; but his asserted property in man is more sacred than the gold which overlay the Ark of the Covenant, and we may not profane it. This reverence for things assumed to be sacred, which are not so, cannot long continue. The Government can well turn away from the enthusiast, however generous his impulses, who asks the abolition of slavery on general principles of philanthropy, for the reason that it already has work enough on its hands. It may not change the objects of the war, but it must of necessity at times shift its tactics and its instruments, as the exigency demands. Its solemn and imperative duty is to look every issue, however grave and transcendent, firmly in the face; and having ascertained upon mature and conscientious reflection what is necessary to suppress the Rebellion, it must then proceed with inexorable purpose to inflict the blows where Rebellion is the weakest and under which it must inevitably fall.
