I appreciate, as I ought, the kind feeling that prompted this invitation, and return you my sincere thanks for it. I would address you . at any time and at any place, if I supposed I could communicate a particle of information not already in the possession or within the reach of every citizen of the State. I could only say in many words, what I now say in a few, that it seems to me that there is no safe alternative before us, but to give a firm and ardent support to the Government in its attempt to put down insurrection and rebellion. More than any State in this Confederacy, Iowa should resist the pretended right of a State to secede from it. Our position in the centre of the continent, without foreign commerce, dependent upon other States for our markets and for our means for transportation to reach them, would soon, if the right to destroy the Union by the secession of the States be conceded, place us in the character of a dependent and conquered province. We need, and must have, at whatever cost, a permanent government and unrestricted access to the Atlantic Ocean and to the Gulf of Mexico. There must be no foreign soil between us and our markets.

As one of the Representatives of Iowa in the Federal Congress, I have sought to give expression by my votes to what I believe to be the opinions of the people of the State, and have uniformly voted all the men, money, ships, and supplies, that were asked for. In doing so, I have not only expressed what I believed to be their wishes, but I have acted upon my own convictions of duty. I shall continue to do so until this unholy war shall be brought to a successful conclusion.

The public debt that this war will impose upon us will appall some and perhaps dampen the patriotism of some. Most erroneous impressions, however, seem to prevail as to the magnitude of our present indebtedness, and that which we are likely to create. The entire public indebtedness of this country on the 6th instant, the day Congress adjourned, was a hundred and eleven million dollars, most of which was inherited from the preceding Administration, and the estimated expenses of the next year, for military, naval, and civil purposes, were less than three hundred million dollars, less than the annual expenses of Great Britain in a time of profound peace. In connection with the aggregate of these two sums let us remember that England paid eight thousand five hundred million dollars to carry on her wars with the first Napoleon. She was contending for her

commercial rights, and the result showed that her money was well expended: we are not only contending for our commercial rights, but we seek to uphold and perpetuate the best Government ever known among men.

Foreigners call us, with great truth, the most impatient people on the earth. This natural impatience is greatly increased by our present troubles. We all want peace restored and business revived, and most of us believe that a permanent peace can only be established by the victorious arms of our soldiers. Our anxieties in this regard are very liable to cause us to do great injustice to the Government and to ourselves also. We clamor for victories, forgetting that the most thorough preparation is necessary to achieve them. We forget the condition of the country four months ago, and ask that that shall be done in a week which requires months of arduous labor to perform. Very few fully appreciate the difficulties by which the President of the United States found himself surrounded, when he assumed power on the 4th of March last. Many of the Executive Departments had recently been under the control of traitors. The army had been dispersed and demoralized, and many of the most trusted and prominent officers were disloyal. Our vesselsof-war were scattered upon foreign and remote stations. The Departments were full of spies and traitors. The public armories had been plundered and their contents delivered to the rebels. The President was without an army, without a navy, without arms or munitions of war, and with enemies within and without. In this condition of things, and after an almost uninterrupted peace of fifty years, he was called upon to organize in a few weeks five armies, each of them larger than any that had ever been marshaled on this continent, and to improvise a navy with which to blockade a coast greater in extent than that which England was unable to blockade with more than four hundred vessels-of-war in 1812-'14. That there have been mistakes committed in the selection of agents and officers cannot be denied, but, that there has been any lack of energy or of devotion to the cause of the country, it seems to me that no fair man who examines the subject will assert. Few persons comprehend all the labor, the time, and the perplexities involved in furnishing clothing, arms, transportation, stores and pay for four hundred and fifty thousand men, and in purchasing or building, manning, arming, and equipping two hundred vessels-of-war by a Government

whose credit was impaired, whose armories had been destroyed, and whose munitions of war had been stolen, and to do all this in the space of three months.

It becomes us to be hopeful and patient, bearing in mind that the authorities in Washington are resolved that their preparation for the conflict shall correspond with the magnitude of the conspiracy they are compelled to encounter.

You say, gentlemen, that you address me without distinction of party, and I find among the signatures appended to your letter the names of many to whom I have always been politically opposed. Permit me to say that the time has arrived when I am anxious to forget all party names, and party platforms, and party organizations, and to unite with anybody and everybody in an honest, ardent, and patriotic support of the Government-not as a party Government with a Republican at its head, but as the national Government, ordained by and for the benefit of the whole people of the country.

63.-To A. C. Barnes, Albia, Monroe County, Iowa.

BURLINGTON, September 16, 1861.
"Ever since

Your letter of the 13th instant, in which you say, Breckinridge made his treasonable speeches in the United States Senate, it is being constantly reiterated that President Lincoln has violated the Constitution, and, as evidence of the fact, it is asserted that the Senate refused to ratify his acts;" and in which you ask me to state whether the charge that Congress did refuse to sustain the acts of the President is true or not," has come duly to hand.

By referring to the " Acts and Resolutions passed at the First Session of the Thirty-seventh Congress," page 89, section 3 of Act LVIII., a copy of which I send you, you will observe that it is enacted "that all the acts, proclamations, and orders of the President of the United States, after the fourth of March, eighteen hundred and sixty-one, respecting the Army and Navy of the United States, and calling out or relating to the militia or volunteers from the States, are hereby approved, and in all respects legalized and made valid, to the same intent and with the same effect as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States."

This section ratifies and confirms, to the fullest possible extent, all the acts of the President that needed or that were susceptible

of ratification, and was adopted by the vote of every Republican and loyal Democratic member of the Senate present. So far as I am informed, I believe it was all the confirmation of the acts of the President that he either expected or desired.

I know it is urged by some, but mostly, if not entirely, by those who are opposed to the vigorous prosecution of the present war, that it was also necessary to confirm the acts of the President suspending, in some cases, the writ of habeas corpus. It must be apparent, I think, to every one who will reflect upon the subject, that to have attempted such confirmation would be to inferentially admit that, as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, the President had no power to suspend the operation of that writ without congressional authority. Very few, if any, loyal members of Congress were willing to admit that. They did not doubt but that he had complete power in the premises, and they chose to leave him to exercise his authority under the Constitution according to his own judgment and as the exigencies of the country might require. They did not believe that his acts in this regard needed confirmation, and therefore confined their ratification and approval to such acts as required legal enactments for their basis, and in the initiation of which they had been anticipated by him.

There may be some who honestly believe that the Senate refused to support the President because of their failure to pass certain resolutions presented by Mr. Wilson, of Massachusetts. The facts in regard to those resolutions were these: They were introduced at an early day in the session, and were put aside from day to day to make room for what was considered more important business, until just at the close of the session, when they had reached that stage in parliamentary proceedings when it was impossible to amend them without unanimous consent, and that could not be obtained. The objection urged by some gentlemen against them as they stood without amendment was, that they were improperly drawn, inasmuch as the phraseology was in the past tense, and declared that the acts of the President were legal and valid when performed, whereas, as they insisted, they ought to have declared that those acts should be legal and valid as though done under the sanction of law. It was a question of grammatical construction. This, if my memory serves me correctly, was the position of Mr. Sherman, of Ohio, whose action has been much criticised in this State, as well

as elsewhere. He declared his willingness, nay his anxiety, to justify and approve the acts of the President, but he was unwilling to say that those acts were legal at the time they were performed. Although not agreeing with him in his construction of the phraseology of the resolutions, it is due to him to say that no man in America was more anxious than he to give to the Administration an honest, hearty, and patriotic support. And, when the legalization of its proceedings was put in what he believed to be proper language, he cordially sustained it.

It was simply on account of this objection in the minds of a few Senators that the resolutions which it was impossible to amend were dropped, and the substance of them incorporated into a law.

Be assured that all these charges of a refusal to support the Administration by Republican and loyal Democratic Senators are devices of the enemy, and should only serve to make the path of duty more plain before us. That duty, it seems to me, is obvious. We should enthusiastically rally to the support of the noble and true men who were nominated by the convention held at Des Moines on the 31st day of July last. They are the representatives of the Government in this crisis. A vote for them will be a vote in support of the Administration, in favor of the integrity of the Government, and for peace through victory. Let us give to Governor Kirkwood, who, in the last six months, has done more hard work, incurred greater responsibilities, and been more causelessly abused than all the Governors that Iowa ever had, that cheering, sweeping majority that his patriotism, his integrity of purpose, and his devotion to the true interests of the State, so justly merit.

64.-To Hon. W. P. Fessenden, Portland, Maine.

BURLINGTON, September 19, 1861.

Of course, you are so terribly oppressed with the great affairs of the finance department of this Government as to be wholly unable to write a letter to one of the outside barbarians in Iowa. I would not disturb your labors or your repose, if I did not deem it important to glorify myself a little over the result of the “circulation Treasury-notes" measures, about the success of which those learned financial pundits, Fessenden and Chase, expressed so many doubts. You learn, of course, as I do, that at least one hundred thousand dollars of them can be floated to the manifest advantage