"By reference to the code under the head of the slaves, free negroes and mulattos you will see that divers offences as well by bond as free, based uponthat relation, such as the unlawful assembly of slaves, trading with them by the whites, the extending to them of undue privileges or liberties by the master, owner, or overseer, stealing of them, the mode of trial awarded to them for felonies, various offences committed by them to which different trial &c., punishments are assigned, to those awarded to the white man and free negro for the same offence, are virtually repealed or rendered inoperative by their emancipation, indeed some of them are expresesly repealed by the Legislature of the restored government at Wheeling and Alexandria.

"When we consider that sudden, compulsory emancipation, however inconvenient and unjust to us, was not brought about by the slaves themselves, but was thrust upon them, as passive recipients of the boon, without their asking., by the interposition of others--an interposition if not uninvited, justified or excused by our own conduct in inaugurating the war, was at least palliates, and when we remember their loyalty, fidelity and exemplary obedience during a bloody struggle of four years in our and their midst, in their behoof, it seems to me we owe them a debt of gratitude to be repaid to them in kindness, generosity and humaninty to the utmost extent of our ability and and its compatibility with our peace and safety.

"For myself I feel no resentment against them on account of their emancipation (and I but echo the general if not universal sentiment in Virginia,) a boon, whether imaginary or real, which when tendered it is not in human nature to reject, but the rather reconcile myself, now that the irrevocable deed is done, to the situation, by the consolitory hypothesis, that it was the work of an all-wise, mysterious and inscrutable providence; of that God who can make the wrath of man to praise him and restrains the remainder of wrath; and to whom it may have seemed good to make the rashness and morbid sensitiveness of the peculiar and superservicable friends of slavery, the means and the instrumentalities of its destruction; seeing that we went to war for the merest abstraction, the right to carry slavery into the territories, we had not and never might acquire, and we have lost slavery in the States, where but for the war it might have remained indefinitely or until gradually abolished.

"May we not hope that its abolition, in the manner in which it has been effected, was designed by providence will prove a future blessing in the disguise of a present evil, the timely removal or eradication of a political and social evil before, by the multitude of slaces, it should become irremovable or ineradicable, without the destruction of one or otherm or of both races. But be the design of providence in its permission or accomplishment what it mayu, whether of mercy to the slave and chastisement to the master, or of eventual an unexpected mercy to both; whatever the motive of the human agents employed to accomplish it, of one thing there is no doubt, the deed is done and it is irrevocable. Therefore interest, duty and necessity all concur in counselling on our part calm submission and cheerful acquiescence in the fiat that has made our former slaves freemen.

We must discharge our duties to them not only in a spirit of justice and humanity, but of liberality and generosity, and leave to the future the solution of the prpoblem, (involved in so much perplexity,) of their future destiny and of our own, so far as it may be dependent on or effected by theirs. . ."