They have not, it is true, taken into their own hands the hatchet
and the knife, devoted to indiscriminate massacre, but they have
let loose the savages armed with these cruel instruments; have
allured them into their service, and carried them to battle by
their sides, eager to glut their savage thirst with the blood of
the vanquished and to finish the work of torture and death on
maimed and defenseless captives. And, what was never before seen,
British commanders have extorted victory over the unconquerable
valor of our troops by presenting to the sympathy of their chief
captives awaiting massacre from their savage associates. And now
we find them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable
warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to
disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated
Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors;
but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and
if they did not belong to a sense of unexampled inconsistencies
might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government
which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on
a charge against the disorganizing and insurrectional policy of
its adversary.
To render the justice of the war on our part the more conspicuous,
the reluctance to commence it was followed by the earliest and
strongest manifestations of a disposition to arrest its progress.
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