Strong recorded his response to Lincoln’s message and proclamation and to a message sent by Jefferson Davis to the Confederate Congress on December 7. The report that Strong noted regarding Alexander H. Stephens, “Vice-President of Rebeldom,” turned out to be false.
December 11. Visited by unknown author of The New Gospel of Peace, which has been attributed to a score of people, myself among them. The Cincinnati Sanitary Commission Fair people had written to his publisher, Tousey, to ask for the original manuscript that they might make merchandise thereof, whereupon, Mr. X. Y., the evangelist, came to me to say that our Metropolitan Fair could have it for the asking. I closed with the offer, for the manuscript will bring money. Though the squib does not seem to me very particularly clever, it has hit the average popular taste very hard. Seventy thousand copies of the first part and forty thousand of the second have been sold. The author is ____. Who’d have thought it!
President’s message and proclamation of conditional amnesty to the rebels, certain classes excepted, finds very general favor. Uncle Abe is the most popular man in America today. The firmness, honesty, and sagacity of the “gorilla despot” may be recognized by the rebels themselves sooner than we expect, and the weight of his personal character may do a great deal toward restoration of our national unity.
Rebeldom has just played us a pretty prank; its audacity is wonderful. Sixteen “passengers” on the peaceful propeller Chesapeake, which left New York for Portland last Saturday, took possession of her during her voyage, killed some of her officers and crew, put the rest ashore near St. Johns, and then steamed off with their prize in triumph under Confederate colors. A whole armada has been sent in pursuit, but they won’t catch her.
There is almost universal feeling that rebellion has received its death-blow and will not survive through the winter. It is premature, but being coupled with no suggestion that our efforts may safely be slackened, it will do no harm. The soi-disant Chivalry shews no sign of disposition to back down and is as rampant, blatant, and blustering as ever. The most truculent and foul-mouthed bravoes and swashbucklers of the South feel a certain amount of discouragement, no doubt, but they generally keep it to themselves. There will be no enduring peace while the class that has hitherto governed the South continues to exist. They are almost universally given over to a reprobate mind and past possibility of repentance. Southern aristocracy must be dealt with as the Clans were after 1745. Parton’s life of Butler (a readable book) tells how that general treated their case in New Orleans. Even his remedies were too mild, but they come nearer to what is required than any others yet administered. That book will do much to raise Butler in popular favor. It paints him as of that Jacksonesque type of beauty which we especially appreciate and admire. Parton colors very high and tries to make a demigod of his hero, but I have always thought Butler among the strongest men brought forward by the war.
December 13, Sunday. Dr. Peters brings news of a bulletin at Union League Club announcing that A. H. Stephens, VicePresident of Rebeldom, has just presented himself once more at Fortress Monroe with a couple of colleagues as Peace Commissioners, that Butler refused to receive them in any official character, but offered to hear what they had to say as prominent citizens of Secessia, and that they thereupon went back again in a huff, sending a vindictive Parthian shaft behind them in the shape of a notification that they would no longer allow supplies to be sent our starving prisoners at Richmond. If they have done this, it won’t much help their cause abroad; but that’s a small matter. Government should notify them that inasmuch as they have declared their inability to give their prisoners rations sufficient to sustain life, their refusal to allow us to make up the deficiency will be followed by the execution of the rebel officers in our hands per diem, till such refusal is revoked.
Message of Jefferson Davis, “anti-President,” to the squad of malefactors now gathered at Richmond and styling themselves members of Congress from Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and other states, is long and doleful and dull—a mélange of lies, sophistry, swagger, lamentation, treason, perjury, and piety. He admits that rebellion has been drifting to leeward during the past year, but refers his gang for consolation to the boundless capacities of the future. He is moral, also, and objects to any action inconsistent with the letter or the spirit of “the constitution we have sworn to obey.” This is cool. He and probably the majority of his pals and councillors in Congress assembled had held not less than twenty offices apiece before they concluded to rebel. How many hundred broken oaths to uphold another constitution were represented on the floor while this pious message was being read? Could all these several perjuries have been combined in one colossal act of blasphemy, I think the earth would necessarily have opened and swallowed the perpetrator. Jefferson’s act of hypocrisy is (time, place, and presence considered) of like enormity, though less criminal and black. I wonder the assembled peers of Secessia were not startled by a vast resounding guffaw from the Powers of Nature, reverberating from the Chesapeake to the Alleghenies. Jefferson Davis has outbrazened Louis Napoleon himself.