Hosea3.html

Robert Hosea to Abraham Lincoln, February 7, 1861

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regard you as the President and Ruler of the

Country, and not the representative of a section,

and who will give you during your adminis-

tration the respect and allegiance which no

duty as loyal and patriotic citizens requires of us.

The Disclosures

made to me were as follows, and I will be brief

as possible.

They admitted that the south has for some

time been aware of this growing sentiment in

the free states among all parties of the wish for

the non extension of slavery, and frankly ad-

mitted that the manifest destiny of the

peculiar institution was "non-expansion

and final extinction," that the best guaranty

for their possession of slaves, and their rendition

when fugitives, was in the present constitutions

and laws, and that dis-union as a permanent

event, would be suicidal to the south; they confessed

that complaints and fancied grievances about

Personal Liberty bills and non-enforcement of the

fugitive slave law from states whose citizens had

suffered no such restrictions and losses, would not bear

the test of sincerity or truth; they knew that the border

slave states had no such complaints to make or wrongs

inflicted, nor could be induced to make them;

they acknowledged if they were sincere and right

their proper course would have been to retain their

representations in Congress, where with themselves

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