The bill to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes, reported by Mr. Trumbull from the Judiciary Committee, came up in regular order in the Senate, Monday, July 22, when, on his motion, the following amendment was adopted, every Republican voting for it: “That whenever any person, claiming to be entitled to the service or labor of any other person under the laws of any State, shall employ such person in aiding or promoting any insurrection, or in resisting the laws of the United States, or shall permit him to be so employed, he shall forfeit all right to such service or labor, and the person whose labor or service is thus claimed shall be thenceforth discharged therefrom, any law to the contrary notwithstanding.”[237] This very moderate proposition was the beginning of Emancipation. In the House of Representatives it was changed in form, but not in substance, and the Bill was approved by the President August 6, 1861.[238]
This address appeared in numerous journals, and also in the Rebellion Record, besides being circulated extensively in pamphlet form at home and abroad. Evidently the hostility to Emancipation was softening, although the old spirit found utterance in some of the newspapers.
The New York Herald thus declared itself.
“The Hon. Charles Sumner, the famous orator of the Satanic Abolition school, which first introduced into our happy republic the elements of dismemberment and dissolution, as the Old Serpent introduced sin and death into the Garden of Eden, held forth last evening at the Cooper Institute before the Young Men’s Republican Union of New York. His audience were Abolitionists of the true-blue stamp, and the design of his harangue was to stir up in this city mutiny and rebellion against the Government in the interest of General Fremont, around whom the revolutionary forces of fanatical Puritanism have been gathering ever since he issued his proclamation emancipating the negroes of Missouri.…
“Till the head of the serpent of Abolitionism is crushed by the heel of Abe Lincoln, there can be no salvation for the South, and no hope of redeeming its rebels from the fatal error and delusion into which they have been led by the Antislavery propagandists and sympathizers with John Brown.”
But this same journal spoke otherwise of the auditory.
“Rarely has there been such a large audience assembled in the Cooper Institute,—never one of such general reputation and intelligence. Several hundred ladies were present. As Mr. Sumner made his appearance on the platform, he was hailed with enthusiastic applause.”
The New York Journal of Commerce followed the Herald.