Hunter’s Proclamation

The President of the United States has issued his proclamation revoking that of Maj. Gen. Hunter’s, although he has not yet received any information with regard to the authenticity of the document attributed to Gen. Hunter.  Outside pressure, and not internal conviction has no doubt been the cause of this move on the part of the Executive.  In due time the world will be ready for General Hunter, but at this stage he too is far in advance of political demagoguery.  A stride too great just now might imperil the whole.  Prudence, caution, discretion, are absolutely necessary at this juncture.

Slavery is a tremendous evil, and has fast hold upon the people; its grasp must be loosened by degrees; any sudden attempt to detach it would render it more tenacious.  Had President Lincoln issued his emancipation message six months before he did, it would have failed of its object.  Had Gen. Fremont waited six months longer, he might have published his order with impunity.  We live in an age of progress, and somehow the United States has come to be the nucleus around which the concretions gather.  The war with its ten thousand evils is doing wonders in the way of enlightening our people upon certain truths, to which they have before been blind.

Before slavery “let slip the dogs of war” upon the North, our people in large numbers had been accustomed to regard it as a local institution – one affecting only those among whom it existed, having no bearing upon the free States of the North; that the efforts of the Republican party to circumscribe its limits was intermeddling with a matter that did not concern them; while the denunciations of the whole institution by certain persons, was looked upon as purely fanaticism.  The lessons of a twelvemonth have opened the eyes of our understanding, and we see things in a different light from what we had been accustomed to regard them.

The enormity of the evil of slavery, its wide-spread influence, is beginning to be felt and acknowledged, and as men get greater insight into it they find it to contain more ills than Pandora’s box, and, as good citizens, they would rid themselves of it altogether.  The feeling is growing; day by day, the tentacles of reason are reaching out and grasping truths with which to fortify the human mind.  What to-day would be temerity, tomorrow may be discretion.  Men who oppose the confiscation of rebel property now, will be as heartily ashamed of their course a year hence, as they are at this time free to disown their actions of a twelvemonth ago.  Gen. Hunter’s proclamation startles the North, and its friends say it is premature – six months hence, and it will be the policy of the Government, and the man who has the hardihood to oppose it will be branded as entertaining secession proclivities.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Wednesday Morning, May 21, 1862, p. 2