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LINCOLN’S WAR TALK.
Lincoln is for war in earnest. The blow which he received at Charleston, in the [balling?] of his secret plotting to enheart his armies within the Confederate States, has made him throw off all attempts at disguise, and call the North at once to arms. The proclamation is out for an extra session of Congress, to which he will appeal for greater war powers; and in the meantime he has summoned seventy-five thousand militia, under the act of 1792, to aid him in enforcing the laws against these rebellious States.
In the language of the statute, he announces that “there are combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course” of judicial proceedings, and he calls out this vast army to help him put down this formidable combination. He will be very apt to find the combination too powerful for any extraordinary means he may be enabled to bring out.
The combination consists of the united population of seven States, three millions of people organized in seven communities, under Governments of their choice; who have covenanted with each other, and announced with all the solemnities of a deliberate purpose, and under all the sanctions which lead men to the maintenance of their position at all costs and through all hazards, that these laws shall no longer be enforced within their limits.
It is against this majestic revolution of a great population, sovereign communities, and a Confederated Government, that Mr. Lincoln launches the penalties of statutes made for the repression of vulgar rioters, obstructing in some locality, the process of a sheriff or a marshal. He adopts the form, too, of reading them a sort of riot act, warning them to disperse, like a cross-road mob.
He would have the seven State Governments, the one Central Government, the Confederate army, vanish away at his word of command, disperse “to their several abodes,” and give up these States and themselves to the quiet possession of the militia he may send down from the non-slaveholding States to execute the laws, which no man in these States will either execute or obey!
A good time he may have of it if the North abets him in this insane folly, if he can get the men to carry on his will, and if the border States would let them pass, to get the final answer here, which an indignant people will give to such insolent and intolerable aggression.
