Dear Sirrah,—Justly regarding you as the next President of the United States, and an honored successor of my old friend, Georgey Washington, I deem it proper, by reason of my great importance and infirmities, to repeat in writing with a pen what I have before spoken to you with my tongue—this supplement to my printed views (dated April the First) on the highly inflamed condition of our glorious and distracted Union.
To meet the expectations of a populace admiring my venerable shape, I deem it consistent with my retiring modesty and infirmities to dictate to you the four plans you may pursue by way of making yourself President of our distracted Commonwealth in 1865.
I.—Throw off the old and assume a new designation—the sly old party; give the South entire control of the whole country, and, my wig upon it, we shall have no secession; but, on the contrary, an early return of the entire Confederacy to Washington. Without some equally benignant measure, we shall be compelled to fight all the Border States and put them
down at once, instead of keeping two hundred thousand soldiers peaceably employed in making their loyalty continually sure.
II.—Collect the war taxes outside of the States where the tax-payers live, or declare upon paper that they are already collected.
III.—Conquer the seceded States by the unheard-of agency of an actual army. I think this might be done in a few hundred years by a young and able general to be found on some railroad, with six hundred thousand disciplined spades. Estimating a third of this number to remain for ever stationary on the Potomac, and a loss of a still greater number by consummate strategy and changings of base. The loss of chickens and contrabands on the other side would be frightful, however great the morality of the mudsills.
This conquest would cost money that might otherwise go to beautify the South, secure fifteen swearing and deeply-offended provinces, and be immediately followed by a new election for President in 1865.
IV.—Say to the Seceded States, in one of which I own some mortgages: "How are you, Southern Confederacy?"
Deliberately, I remain,
Your father and the country's,
V. Gammon.