among the copies of telegrams seized were those of a certain James E. Harvey, who had been appointed minister to Portugal. These telegrams revealed the fact that Mr. Harvey had been in correspondence with the Rebels at Charleston, South Carolina, and had communicated to them the fact that a fleet of vessels was fitting out in the harbor of New York, designed to provision the garrison at Fort Sumter. This information caused the Rebel authorities to determine to fire upon Fort Sumter, when the said fleet should appear off the Charleston bar. On the 7th of June, the New York Tribune, and the Press generally, violently assailed Mr. Harvey for having betrayed the secrets of the Administration in giving this information to the Rebels. When these newspaper articles reached Mr. Harvey at Lisbon, he wrote a "Card," dated Lisbon, July 7, 1861, which was published in the Philadelphia "North American," on the 27th of that month, wherein he exonerates himself by declaring that all of the aforesaid correspondence was by authority of the President and Cabinet. In his card he says:

"While holding an official position I am precluded from making declarations which would at once give a satisfactory answer to these slanders." "I do not choose to utter a word at this time, which would in any manner impair the action of the Government, or subject others to harsh and unjust comment, when I know that their motives, like my own, were the purest and best."

"The fact is, the Government was in possession of every tittle of the evidence which had accumulated in Washington long before the public seizure was ordered; several weeks before I left there, and before I had received or accepted any commission. If there was any thing to know it was known fully and entirely, as will be shown whenever necessary. I assert the fact distinctly, without condition or reservation. I submitted to their inspection every line received by telegraph, and never held any other correspondence but that, direct or indirect."

Did Mr. Harvey state the case truly? If he did not, why has he been retained in his important mission from that day till this?

If he did, what object had the Administration in revealing the fact of this preparation to provision the fort? Was it that an overt act of rebellion might be committed, "the Northern heart fired," and, in the language of Senator Chandler, in his letter to Governor Blair," the Republican party saved from rupture?" or did Mr. Seward believe it to be his duty, as he subsequently avowed, to take care "that the war should be begun by the enemies of the Union ?"

Well, Sumter was fired upon, the Northern heart was fired, and then came the call for seventy-five thousand troops, and then came from the mountains and the valleys, from the rostrum and the anvil, from the merchant's desk and the laborer's ditch, from the gilded saloons of luxury and the rugged cot of penury, from Democrats and Republicans—one grand, spontaneous shout," The Union! it must and shall be preserved!” Then came "Bull Run;" then the resolutions by Congress, declaring the war to be "for the preservation of the Constitution and the restoration of the Union, with all the rights and dignity of the several States unimpaired," and that when these objects" should be "attained the war

ought to cease," passed unanimously except two votes, one a Northern Abolitionists, the other a Southern Secessionist. In the extremity of alarmcaused by the Bull Run rout, the Republicans voted with the Democrats for these resolutions.

Under the belief that this was the real purpose of the Administration, a vast army of volunteers was obtained, and when the Administration found itself secure behind an impregnable wall of bayonets, the prosecution of the programme was resumed.

This narrative having been thus extended, it is out of the question to follow step by step the insidious approaches upon the citadel of liberty, over a violated Constitution, under the hypocritical mask of pretending to defend it. Under the plausible cant, the Union," "the flag," "the Constitution," and " 'the unconditional support of the Government,” appeals so potent as to reach every patriotic heart; the masses of the people were for a long time deceived, and many still remain under the fatal delusion; notwithstanding that every promise for the restoration of the Union has been broken, and that blessed consummation put more than ever remote by an insane policy, which looks to the sudden emancipation of four millions of negroes, and their elevation to the condition of white men. Feeble man warring in blind fanatical fury, against the immutable laws of God, whose wisdom is made manifest in an inequality in creation "spreading through all life, extending through all extent," observable alike in the vegetable, the mineral, and the animal kingdoms, one seed producing a delicious fruit, another the deadly upas, the beautiful pearl taken from its ocean bed of innumerable and to the superficial mind, worthless, yet in the wise economy of nature, equally valuable pebbles; while in the higher order of creation we have a Milton and the babbling idiot, a Caligula, and a Howard, a Washington, and a Lincoln ! Nearly every vestige of the Constitutional guarantees to the citizen has been ignored, or crushed beneath the heel of tyrannical usurpation. While the flag of our country is held aloft, as the symbol of the Union of the States, glittering in the splendor of its thirty-four stars, we have it semi-officially announced, by a high functionary of the administration, no less a personage than the Solicitor of the War Department, that the light of ten at least of those stars, is to be extinguished. State lines, says Mr. Whiting, enforcing Charles Sumner's pet scheme, must be obliterated; the domain reduced to a territorial condition; its inhabitants made vassals, with no rights save those which the conqueror chooses to accord to them. VIRGINIA! the Old Dominion! the "mother of States," the State whose very atmosphere is sacred as having first inflated the lungs that gave pulsation to the great heart of Washington; that caught his last expiring breath, and floated his pure spirit up to the eternal throne of heaven; the State, whose "sacred soil"-yes! sacred, indeed, notwithstanding the derision in which the word has been profaned by Abolition traitors, who hate the memory of the slave-holder Washingtonabove whose name Wendell Phillips, of Massachusetts, in a public lecture, has placed on the scroll of fame," the name of Toussaint Louverture, the black demon of St. Domingo-whose sacred soil, I say, received

Washington's precious mortal remains! the State of PATRICK HENRY! and where his immortal words were hurled against British tyranny-" As FOR ME, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH!"-the State of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and a host of patriots and martyrs to civil liberty!—the State that gave to the Union-a free and princely gift-all that Northwest Territory, from which have risen some of the grandest commonwealths in the confederacy!-the State, whose influence, statesmanship, and warriors, more than all others, contributed to achieve for us, and bequeathed to us, the priceless blessings of constitutional freedom!-this is the State, to say nothing of all the others, that Mr. Solicitor William Whiting-gorged with the swill of official patronage, puffed as a toad in his own conceit, redolent of perfume from his darling Africans, with the heart of a spider, and the wisdom of a donkey-declares in five solid columns of type, must be reduced to a territorial condition! Fellow-citizens of America, this is what is called, "unconditional" unionism!

The next step was to abolitionize the army, by getting rid, under various pretexts, of as much as possible of the Democratic element among the field officers. Those who were known to be Democrats, incorruptible and true to the legitimate objects of the war, were, from time to time, removed, and their places filled with officers who sympathized with the Abolition projects of emancipation, confiscation, negro troops, and subjugation.

Thus we find that McClellan, the idol of the army, who thrice saved the Capital from capture; whose brilliant campaign in Western Virginia caused him to be hailed by the public voice as the man for the occasion after the first Bull Run; whose thorough military science first organized and then disciplined a splendid army, and compelled the enemy to abandon his strong position at Manassas; who, to splendid engineering qualities, adds a thorough comprehension of the theory of war, understanding perfectly when caution or strategy is desirable, and when dashing impetuosity is necessary, with a temperament peculiarly adapted to either; whose much-derided pick and spade enabled him to capture the powerful fortifications at Yorktown with scarcely the loss of a battalion, and which said pick and spade have since been adopted by every general who has been successful; whose rapid movements forced the enemy to make a stand at Williamsburg, there to be beaten and discomfited; who, after driving the enemy into his capital, approached to within sight of its steeples, and who pledged his military reputation, that, if furnished with McDowell's Corps of forty thousand men, which had been promised him, and which was lying idly at Fredericksburg, he would march into the enemy's capital in less than twelve hours after the word forward should be given; who repelled the desperate assault on his left wing at Fair Oaks, although, to do so, a lack of sufficient troops required him to endanger his right and centre; whose brilliant achievement at Hanover Court House kept open the communication with McDowell's Corps in the anxious, though vain hope, that the Administration would give him the troops, in expectation of receiving which his military plans had been adopted; who, when finally abandoned to his fate in those dismal pestilential swamps of the Chickahominy, his brave army daily reduced by sickness and death,

and while the enemy, knowing his weakness and its cause, was gathering up from every quarter an army to crush him-from Corinth where they deliberately walked away from Halleck, and from the Shenandoah Valley where Banks had been driven off by Stonewall Jackson-with military genius, cool brain, and brave heart, and while assaulted by overwhelming odds, swung his army around over thirty miles of territory, with but one road for his trains, and after seven days of continuous and desperate assaults upon his lines, safely encamped his gallant soldiers upon the banks of the James River, thus executing a retreat, which, should he gain a hundred battles, history will record as the grandest and most glorious of his military achievements; who-when General Pope, the pet of the Administration, "whose head-quarters were in the saddle," whose "strategy was to find the enemy," and who knew no such thing in military science as "base lines of retreat," was forced by General Lee to learn that lesson, behind the fortifications which McClellan's pick and spade had prepared for him around Washington-was called with tremulous accents, through pallid and quivering lips to save, as twice before he had saved, the Capital from capture, gathered up with amazing rapidity the scattered, disheartened, and demoralized forces of a routed army, marched against the victorious and exultant foe, drove him from his well selected position at South Mountain, followed him rapidly and again attacked and routed him at Antietam, thus saving Pennsylvania and Maryland from the devastation of invasion and the Capital from capture; then, giving his weary soldiers a brief and absolutely necessary respite for recuperation, and to obtain shoes for their naked feet, crossed the Potomac in pursuit, took possession of the numerous mountain gaps, and while the whole country was excited to exultation in admiration of his triumphant march-suddenly, to the amazement of soldiers and civilians, during the prevalence of a violent snow-storm, received an order at his camp, directing him to report at Trenton, New Jersey !

The blinding snow-drifts that eddied round the tents of that brave Potomac Army, chilled their manly forms, but under the vigilant care of their beloved commander, their hearts were warm. This order from Washington was an ice-bolt driven against every soldier's and civilian's heart, who still fondly clung to the hope of a restored Union under the Constitution of our Fathers, and desired to see the war conducted according to the principles of humanity and civilization.

And so might fame sound her trumpet in eulogizing strains of Buell, and Fitz John Porter, and Naglee, and Andrew Porter, and Burns (not Burnside who distinguished himself only in capturing what was once regarded as an impregnable fortress, to wit, the DOMICILE OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN, and taking prisoner its garrison in the person of Clement L. Vallandigham), but a braver soldier and a better man, a gentleman as well as a soldier, who knows the value and loves with true devotion the institutions of his country; and a host of others who have been suspended under various shallow pretexts.

The places of these officers have been filled with some honorable excep

tions, but wherever it was practicable, with men who have proved subservient tools and parasites at the footstool of power. A majority of the field officers in the higher ranks are of the stripe of Butler, Higginson, Hunter, Shurz, Hooker, whose campaign against McClellan before the War Investigating Committee at Washington, was about as successful as his campaign against Richmond via Chancellorsville; and McNeill and Rousseau, who in a public speech in Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1863, spoke of the "Copperheads and traitors who go about cheering for McClellan."

Having got the army firmly in hand by means of this system among the officers, the Administration proceeded gradually to bolder and more shameful invasions of the rights of the people. It would be merely supererogatory to recapitulate. Not a man or woman, and scarcely a child, who is not familiar with these constantly recurring and most atrocious assaults upon the liberty of the citizen. When I use the term liberty, I do not mean licentiousness. I speak of undoubted, indefeasible rights, which Webster said belonged to the people as undoubtedly and "as naturally as the right to breathe, and the right to eat."

Mr. Lincoln boldly assumes, in his letter to the Ohio committee, of which Mr. Pendleton was chairman, that, in time of war, he becomes the embodiment of all three of the co-ordinate branches of Government-the law maker, the law interpreter, and the law executor! He goes even a step further, and makes laws unknown to our system of jurisprudence— the law of banishment, for instance-and he executes this self-established edict daily, upon all classes of citizens, through his minions sometimes, and occasionally—as in the case of Mr. Vallandingham-by a direct order from himself. Yet Mr. Lincoln has taken a solemn oath to " preserve, protect, and defend" a Constitution whose eighth Amendment reads thus: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

The Constitution ordains (in Article 2d of the Amendments) that,

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Yet Mr. Lincoln has deprived the people, in whole districts far remote from scenes of hostilities, of this solemnly declared right.

The Constitution declares that,

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence."

Yet Mr. Lincoln has violated every one of these provisions in thousands of instances.

The Constitution declares that,

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in