The telegraph has already announced . . .

. . . the passage through the House, by a decisive majority (two to one) of Mr. Arnold’s bill abolishing and prohibiting slavery in the territories of the United States, also in all the dock yards, forts, magazines, arsenals, or other Government buildings, in all vessels on the high seas and “in all places whatsoever where the National Government is supreme or has exclusive jurisdiction and power.”  We hope this bill will speedily pass the Senate and become a law.  It completes the work.  It fills the bill.  It redeems in letter and in spirit every pledge made by the Republican party touching slavery.  When it becomes a law we will have done all we lawfully and constitutionally can do to confine slavery to the States where it exists and place it in a condition of being ultimately abolished.  We shall thus withdraw from it all support of the Federal Government and clear our skirts, as a nation, of the sin and curse, so far as we can do, and keep within the letter and spirit of the Constitution.  This is as far as the Republican party ever, in any authoritative declaration of principles or measures, declared their intention to go.  We never believed or claimed that the National Government had the power to abolish slavery in the States.  This is one of the numerous oft-repeated lies of our enemies.  The status of slavery in the States will now depend upon future events.  We do not expect it to be wholly abolished by wholesale confiscation.  But should the rebels protract the war by a stubborn resistance, resorting to the barbarous guerilla mode of warfare of the Spanish, Mexican and other half-civilized nations, it will inevitably result in the total destruction of slavery and the devastation of the Southern States.  It will thus result in the very nature of things.  The war cannot thus be prosecuted without producing widespread suffering and distress, “pestilence and famine,” throughout the whole insurrectionary country.  In such a state of affairs slave property could have no value and soon would have no existence.  Having done what we legally can do, let slavery be left to these causes and the madness of its advocates and supporters for its final overthrow.  We wash our hands.  We have done our whole duty – no more – no less. We are ready to meet the responsibility of these acts at the ballot-box – at the bar of an intelligent public opinion – before the world.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 17, 1862, p. 2