Dear Sir:—Your name is revered by all here who know and care for the moral struggles of your nation, and the prospects of human justice. I write to you by way of honour, and with great cordiality, though also for expostulation; having no other objects than those sacred interests, Truth and Right, to which you have devoted your life, with sacrifices such as it has not been my privilege to make.

        You have hitherto been strong by fixing your eyes on absolute right, and disdaining any compromise, such as serfdom in place of slavery would be. This may have made you (for aught I know) treasonable or factious; it may have embarrassed and temporarily weakened good men, who were attempting half measures when whole measures were impossible. But it has given to your word immense moral weight in certain directions; nay, and weight even to your silence. If it can be said, "Garrison does not reprove General Banks's measures," it will be inferred that they do full justice to the coloured race. A great responsibility now rests on you to use this power aright.

        From the day that I knew Garrison and Wendell Phillips to have become Unionists and supporters of the war, I believed it to be a glorious and fruitful war of freedom. The English people at large were not able to calculate or understand the advantage which the cause of freedom would assuredly have gained, if the rebels had been terrified at your firm front, and had returned to the Union without war—humiliated, but on their old footing. Hence, while hostile to the wicked South, we were cold to the North until Mr. Lincoln's Proclamation of September, 1862, aroused us. Legal documents are always harsh and obscure to the unprofessional, and we habitually accept their interpretation from others. Leading articles of newspapers interpreted the Proclamation for us, or, rather, misinterpreted it. I have but lately come to understand it aright, reading it as explained by facts. My new perceptions are truly painful, and very unwelcome.

        In the dinner given at Boston to Mr. Roudanez and Captain Bertonneau, colored delegates from Louisiana, I read that you said, (not, I believe, for the first time,) that the President has pledged himself for the freedom of "the three million slaves of the rebel States." That was the sense in which are popularly understood the Proclamation. When any (in true or feigned zeal for freedom) cried out: "Why does not the President free the slaves of Kentucky?" we had the ready answer: "The Supreme Court will overrule him, if he attempt it; his legal powers do not reach so far." But we believed that a free Tennessee would soon ensure a free Kentucky. We were under the delusion that Tennessee and Louisiana would forthwith be made Free States. I believe they together contain above a million and a quarter slaves. This is a horribly large deduction from your three millions; but the principles which have detained them in slavery would be equally alarming, if only thirteen thousand instead of thirteen hundred thousand were here involved.

        A friend of mine (an M. P.) told me that an eminent person, whom I may not name, in conversation with him, called Mr. Lincoln's Proclamation, when we were beginning to glorify it, "a villainous hypocrisy; for he refused to set free those whom he could, while pretending to set free those whom he could not." I need not tell you, that a bitter desire to see your proud Union broken to pieces animated this utterance; but I was surprised that a statesman with a name to lose should commit himself to (what I deemed) an ignorant, vulgar slander; for I thought the reproach to be directed only against the slavery still endured in the States which had not rebelled. I am now pierced in heart to discover, that, however envenomed in the phrase, it was no slander at all, but a terrible truth.

        The Proclamation did not say that, on Jan. 1st, 1863, "the slaves of all the States which have rebelled shall be free;" but, "the slaves of States which shall be then in rebellion;" and since, on that day, the hand of the North was so heavy on Western Tennessee and New Orleans that they could not rebel, (though they would have rebelled in five minutes, had your armies been withdrawn,) your President kept his word to the letter by excepting many hundred thousand persons from freedom. Butler, Chase, Fremont, Sumner, Andrew,—any Northern abolitionist,—any ordinary Englishman,—in the Presidential Chair, would have interpreted his right to neglect Southern institutions as depending—1, on the States having thrown off allegiance; 2, on the immorality and injustice of certain laws; 3, on the inconsistency with Republicanism, which Congress is bound to maintain; 4, on the necessity of providing against future rebellion by a high-handed removal of that which has caused the present rebellion. But Mr. Lincoln puts a Southern interpretation on your Constitution, which is to you a great and threatening calamity. He seems to believe that he has sworn to support slavery for the rebels, and that his oath can only be relaxed in the crisis when your ship of state is foundering. He demands disaster, slaughter, visible impending ruin, as an inexorable condition, before he is allowed to free a slave. You must pay in blood of white men for freedom of black; and the more honest he is, the worse for you. It is now cruelly manifest, that your heroes of Pittsburgh Landing and Fort Donnelson were too brave. If they had been driven back with ignominy,—and much more certainly, if they had been massacred in heaps,—a second year's war would have brought freedom to Tennessee. But, alas for the good cause! You conquered in the first campaign; you stuck firm in the conquest; you did not fulfil the requisite condition of humiliating disasters: hence your arms, instead of striking off fetters from the slave, are become the tools of the slave-owner. And why? Is it because the Supreme Court would have overruled a President who freed the slaves of a State in rebellion? No: but because, with your President, it is not the treason of the rebels, but your "military necessity,"—that is, present and galling danger,—which alone makes his conscience easy in a deed so rash and desperate as that of giving to his innocent, injured, loyal fellow-citizens their elementary natural rights. His Proclamation has done immense good; nor will I yield to you in extolling many of his acts. Yet if we had understood the quality of his logic, his exclusion of morality from Presidential duties, and his wonderful disowning of all duty towards colored men not prescribed in the codes of slaveholders, it would have been impossible to excite enthusiasm for him in an English audience. Had "three groans for the slaves of Tennessee" been called for by a Confederate sympathizer, the meetings must have been broken up in despair, without our being able to send you a single congratulation.

        A secondary yet very grave result of Mr. Lincoln's peculiar conscience is, that while elected (as we thought) to oppose the Southern doctrine, that slavery is national, not merely local; he has for the first time given to slavery the national status which it coveted. In old days, the iniquity was maintained in Tennessee by local wickedness only. Mr. Lincoln has insisted (quite gratuitously, as it has seemed to Europeans) on upholding it there by Federal guilt; and has forced Northern soldiers to become the vile instruments of the slaveholder, which they disdained to be in their native States. This is a deed, to which Wm. Lloyd Garrison's indignation seems justly due. (A friend who reads the Liberator will not believe the fact; oh that I could learn that I am under a delusion!) Mr. Lincoln of late wrote deliberately, "If Slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." Yet he has voluntarily taken an oath which he imagines to bind him to uphold wrong so superlative; and he does uphold it, instead of abdicating and making way for others, who put a freeman's interpretation on your noble Constitution, and do not befoul it with this intense and burning shame.

        He is now establishing in Louisiana,—as a pattern for future reconstructions, I suppose,—another doctrine, still more deadly to your prospects. My hopes in your President did not finally give way, until I read the statement of Mr. Roudanez, which you heard, that the President kindly told them he could not redress their wrongs on moral grounds, but, if at all, only as a military necessity. Horrible indeed is the augury for your future, when your Chief Magistrate dares not indulge the moralities of his heart, through conscientious tremors at the guilt of violating the wicked laws of conquered rebels! Is he not practically invoking a new insurrection, which shall display in glaring colors the "military necessity," now, alas! hidden from your eyes? I confess that your cheerful and highly satisfied speech in reply filled me with deep melancholy. With false immoral principles as the basis of your reconstructions, nothing is safe: all that is apparently won may be lost in a single week. The new-born freedom guaranteed to Louisiana by one tenth part of the State acting for the whole, is surely not so strong as was the Constitution of Washington and Franklin. Your new parchment freedoms are worthless, if white men are to carry arms, and colored men are to be disarmed; as they infallibly will be, under your new régime. In all history, I never read of an insurrection so causeless and so wicked as that of your Southern rebels; and in all history I know not where to find so senseless an infatuation as that of putting power into the hands of your disloyal conquered enemies, and casting your loyal friends under their feet. It is a combination of baseness and folly which demands of you, as a patriarch of freedom, as a historical name, and a real power in America, to prophesy, and even rave, and cry Woe! Woe! against your nation. Your enemies here gloat over it, knowing that it ensures your ruin; your friends almost universally hush the matter up, so that no details can be learned from them. Such a policy, if it is to receive sanction from Congress, and become typical, positively ensures disaffection of the Southern holders of power, and exhaustion of the North. And if New Orleans, or Mobile, or Charleston revolt again after being conquered, be sure that your enemies in the English and French cabinets will know that their hour is come. The revolted parts will be occupied by English and French fleets before we hear of any such scheme. Your Free States, after the prodigious strain of this war, will collapse into comparative apathy. We shall be too much disgusted with your folly to have any pity at your falling in pieces.

        Until recently, I have looked on your war with serene satisfaction as a sublime sacrifice for a magnificent future, glorious to you, beneficent to our millions. I have indulged in glowing anticipations, in which I seemed to friends but a wild dreamer. Since I have learned that your President has sanctioned Gen. Banks's ordinances, I begin to fear that I have indeed been a dreamer, and that your enemies here are substantially correct; one of whom said to me, three years ago: "The North hates slavery; but it hates colored men still more; and it will rather break up the Union, than endure to admit them into real equality." A time of war, and revolution decides the great principles on which future weal or woe depends. New moral principles are needed, not slave-owners' base notions, or you are lost. A purer morality must be enunciated by your Chief Magistrate, and sternly applied, before you can purge your civil and military administration of virtual traitors. Every one in Europe who has any political thought knows that your Union can have no future, unless your stupid and base legislating about the color of a man's skin be now, once for all, extirpated and renounced. In a great revolution, you must strike while the iron is hot, and strike hard; caring entirely for principles, and not at all for persons. If you delay but a little more; if you let the next Presidential elections pass, without sternly enforcing on the candidates a total abandonment of your cardinal and ruinous national insanity,—prejudice against color; your national future may be lost for ever.

        I am, Dear Sir,

Yours with high respect and esteem,    
Francis W. Newman