August 4/63

    My dear Nicholson,

.  .  .  .  .

         . . . I hope that you now, with me, believe that the era of Southern "successes" (i.e. hard and HOPEFUL resistance) is finally past. I believe nothing now remains but the resistance of despair, which cannot long animate the masses. Hatred of the free negro may awhile move them. But, the Mississippi once open, the N. W. has no longer a party favourable to the South; and the exhaustion of the South is so marked and undeniable that the real end may be much earlier than the people think. . . . General Neal Dow (now a prisoner at Richmond) in his last letter to England observed that the moral end served by the prolongation of the war had notoriously been the immediate legal emancipation of the negroes in the Gulf States; but the further prolongation of it is to determine the future internal government and possession of landed property in these States as the guarantee for the future. But it is a hard wrench on the politicians of the North to consent to this. Lincoln and Blair evidently would still much rather export the negroes if they could. Lincoln will not do anything against the will of the blacks; but it is evidently his weak point to deprecate them as equal citizens.