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MR. AMBROSE'S LETTERS.

LETTER I.

JANUARY, 1863.

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Y DEAR MR. SEATON:-This year, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, marks our entrance upon the third annual period of the civil war. The quarrel still rages with unabated fury. Indeed, as it grows older, it seems to become instinct with fiercer hatreds and to gather new vigor of resistance from its desperation. Is it not strange that such " zeal to destroy" should so fire the heart of American citizens against the life of a nation whose birth and career have been the theme of more incessant, boastful, and extravagant panegyric than the affection of any people ever before heaped upon their country? Posterity will read the history of this commotion with an interest full of amazement at the intensity of the passion it has stirred in the hearts of its authors, and the utter insignificance of the provocation upon which it arose. They will distrust with natural wonder the narrative which informs them that large communities of intelligent people, as happy in their homes as a propitious Heaven and a beneficent Government could make them, peaceful and prosperous in the enjoyment of every blessing coveted by man, fondly addicted to self-gratulation for their well-earned eminence among nations, envied by the whole world for their freedom, conscious only of Government by its ever-present bounty; that they should turn upon the work of their own hands, and in a year of singular cheerfulness-a year of ovations, festivities, and pa

geants-should, all at once, convert their own Paradise into a Pandemonium, and fall to rending the magnificent structure of their liberties into fragments; that they should pursue this awful labor of demolition through two long years of such carnage and desolation as the world never saw before, and should, with still more bitter hate and eager ferocity, enter upon a third that a thinking, shrewd, kind-hearted, Christian people should do this, with unremitting effort to render the obloquy and disgrace of the American name immortal! How shall after-ages study this terrible anomaly without a charitable doubt of its truth?

I know how painfully you meditate over this crisis, and I cannot but believe-nay, I am sure—that many of our old friends on the other side of the line are in full sympathy with us in deploring the madness that has brought our country into this unhappy distraction. If we could but reach them with an invocation to a calm review of those elements of discord which now separate us, I should be full of hope that the same wise spirit of counsel which won our confidence and love in past time, would bring us, as of old, into full accord, and that the kindly and powerful influence they were wont to exercise over the brotherhood, of which they and we were equally proud as citizens of our broad Republic, would be exerted within their own sphere, to stay the further rage of this tempest and open the path to that harmony and union which have been so causelessly disturbed.

With this intent and the indulgence of this hope, I address these letters to you, purposing, if haply the chances of the war should allow them to cross the line, to send them forth with a message of kind remembrance to old and cherished friends there, who I would fain believe have preserved their integrity and their reason unclouded by the passions which have hurried the multitudes around them into the dreadful vortex of the rebellion. Your friend,

PAUL AMBROSE.

To WM. W. SEATON, ESQUIRE, WASHINGTON.

LETTER II.

SUDDEN CONVERSIONS.

JANUARY, 1863.

When a votary desires to make a sacrifice, he sticks enough under every hedge to kindle the fire.

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There is

a Latin proverb to the same purport-“ Qui vult cædere canem facile invenit fustem." My interpretation of this bit of experience is, that whenever we set our hearts upon a forbidden enterprise, an easy virtue will encounter no difficulty in the search for the means to get it on foot. Or, let me put it in another shape more germane to my present subject: Whenever it is necessary to support a bad or doubtful cause by an argument, he is but a sorry casuist who will have to go far to find one.

I am every day struck by the proof which the rebellion affords to the accuracy of this insight into the nature of the ordinary conscience of mankind. It is curious to note the facility with which, at this time, many of the most respectable minds of the country, even many eminent in public affairs, have permitted themselves to lapse into that fatal apostasy which, in a moment, has cast aside the honorable conservatism of their whole lives, and plunged them into that very maze of political error which they have always taught themselves and others to shun.

It is not long ago when it was almost the universal conviction of our most approved statesmen, both North and South, and still more that of the great multitude who take their opinions at second hand, that the doctrine of secession was a shallow invention of a few Quixotes in politics. In the days of General Jackson it was denounced and derided as the black

est of treasons by the whole of that imperious party which, under his lead, swayed the public mind with absolute authority. When he said "the Union must be preserved," these words meant something more than a policy of conciliation; they were uttered as an angry threat against those who meditated disunion, and intimated that, if necessary, the Union should be preserved by the sword. The words were applauded by thousands and tens of thousands of those who to-day are crying out "this Union shall be destroyed." When he said, in strong and unequivocal phrase, that secession was treason, these same thousands re-echoed the sentiment with such earnest repetition as to plant it in the very heart of the country as an article of faith. The intuition of the masses in this conviction was sustained by the better informed judgment of the most eminent expounders of the Constitution, by the Courts, by Congress, and by the Cabinet, at that time illustrious for the great ability and experience of its members. It was not less sustained by the quiet support of nine-tenths of the educated men in every State, who, taking no share in the popular demonstrations of political action, gave their own healthful tone of thought to the social circles of their respective neighborhoods.

There were notable exceptions, it is true, to this common consent of opinion; many in South Carolina, where a threatened revolt had been staked upon the issue; some in other States, and more particularly. in Eastern Virginia, where a peculiar system of traditionary dialectics had bred a class of hair-splitting doctrinaires, not less remarkable for the eccentricity of their dogmas than for the acuteness with which they maintained them. The philosophers of the Resolutions of '98 were few enough and grotesque enough, in the ordinary estimation of the country, to provoke a good-natured laugh at the perseverance with which they muddled their brains in the mystification of a problem that, in the common computation, had about as much practical value as that more celebrated scheme of Laputa, the extracting of sunbeams from cucumbers. But

even the Resolutionists, for the most part, stood by Jackson, and turned their back upon the doctrine of secession.

Indeed, it may be affirmed, as an historical fact, that the whole South has, in different stages of our national career, at one time or another, repudiated this doctrine.

The present generation is but little aware, and many of the last generation of Southern statesmen now alive choose to forget, that there once was an occasion which called forth a great deal of notice of this pretension of the right of a State to secede from the Union, and that the prevailing sentiment of the South then branded it as a foul treason.

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The Hartford Convention, after much preliminary announcement in the Legislatures of New-England States, met in December 1814, to devise plans for the security and defence of those States in the war with Great Britain, and to adopt such measures of self-protection as were not repugnant to their Federal obligations as members of the Union." A different purpose was suspected by their political enemies; and, whether justly or not, the popular belief of the South was, that notwithstanding the restriction they had set upon their action, it was their design, in certain contingencies, to recommend the retire ment of their States from the Union. The members of that Convention have vehemently denied this charge, but so far as the South was concerned, utterly without effect. Every man, woman, and child of the South who was capable of receiving an impression from the topics of the day, heard the subject alluded to in conversation, or read of it in the papers, only as a scheme to dissolve the Union—a project of secession. It was at that time the word "secession" itself first became familiar as a term of our political vocabulary. Before that date Mr. Jefferson called it "scission ;" and, by the by, pronounced it to be incompatible with any government. Whether, therefore, the Hartford Convention was slandered or not-as I believe it was-by this imputation, the general impression of its truth south of Mason and Dixon's line, brought up the opportunity for expression of Southern opinion on the question of secession.

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