The supremacy of the civil power over the military is typified in the Secretary of War, a civilian, from whom Army officers receive orders.

But this beautiful rule, with its lesson to the military of subordination, was suddenly set aside by our President, and the Secretary of War degraded to be a clerk.

I could not understand how a Republican President could consent to weaken the limitations upon the Executive, and so I said,--adding, that in my judgment he should rather reach forth his hands and ask to have them tied.

In this tyrannical spirit, and in the assumption of his central imperialism, he has interfered with political questions and party movements in distant States, reaching into Missouri, and then into New York, to dictate how the people should…

With him a custom-house seems less a place for the collection of revenue than an engine of political influence, through which his dictatorship may be maintained.

Offices in the custom-house were openly bartered for votes in the State Convention.

Here was intolerable tyranny, with demoralization like that of the slave-market.

The Presidential pretension extends everywhere; nor is it easy to measure the arrogance of corruption or the honest indignation it quickens into life.

This whole business, absolutely indefensible from beginning to end, being wrong at every point, is the special and most characteristic product of the Administration, into which it infused and projected itself more than into anything else.

In this multiform disobedience we behold our President.

Above all, those truest allies so essential to prosperous industry, capital and immigration, will turn away from the land that is not blessed by peace.

There must be security in all things,--security in life, security in property, and security in rights, including Liberty and Equality, the great promises of the Declaration of Independence.

Therefore by the impulse of self-interest, now clearly manifest, are the people of the South moved to the present effort for peace.

This same motive assumes another form in the desire to escape from existing misrule, which has left such traces in the disordered finances of the Southern States.

Surely the people in these communities would have been less than men, if, sinking under the intolerable burden, they did not turn for help to a new party, promising reform and honesty.

It is difficult to hear these barefaced allegations, in utter disregard of the prodigious testimony afforded by his long career, without wonder at the extent to which prejudice and invention can be carried.

Had he been presented at Philadelphia with the saving sanction of a regular nomination, the same partisans who now seek to exhibit him as a tool or an imbecile would dwell with pride on his eminent qualities, making him, by the side of his…

To say that under him Slavery can in any way be revived, or that the Rebel debt or the pension of Rebel soldiers or compensation for slaves can find favor, or that the equal rights of the freedmen, to which he is so solemnly pledged, can…

Nothing of the kind can be done without violation of the Constitution as amended,--not to speak of the departure from that rule of life which he has ever followed.

I dismiss the whole partisan extravagance to the contempt it deserves.

The imputation that his election will be the return to power of the old Democratic party is much like saying that he will cease to be himself, and that his surpassing individuality, making him so conspicuous, will be lost.

They who make the imputation forget that this old party, if it has not ceased to exist, is changed in character.

Against all pretended distrust I oppose the open record of his life.

I hardly hope to live to see that day, but hope that those who may remember me, when I am gone, will believe that I earnestly tried to hasten its coming.

To suppose, that, under any circumstances of pressure or temptation, he can fail in loyalty to the cause he has served so constantly, is an offence to reason and to decency.