her husband testifies that she begged him to remove her from the custody of the prisoner and of McAfee, lest she should be taken away by force. Besides, whether the wishes of the adults about going or remaining were consulted or not, it is a mockery of truth, as shallow as it is wicked, to attribute consent to the six helpless and mindless children, the oldest of whom was a boy of seven and the youngest a baby but a few months old. It would require a rule of law as repugnant to reason as the extinct slave code of Aranksas was revolting to humanity, to impute the exercise of volition to the unhappy little beings whom his barbarous avarice, proving stronger than his sense of the obligations of the law, human or divine, impelled a presiding elder of the Methodist Church to sell into a life of hopeless bondage in a distant State. Moreover, whatever "confusion" may, as Mr. Rogers avers, have attended the advent of the Union troops at Flat Bayou, it does not appear to have unsettled the perception of the prisoner, who, so far from being in "doubt and uncertainty" as to the law by which he was bound, expressly told McAfee a sale would be illegal, and only forgot his scruples and renunciation of the authority of a master when the tempting bid of $7,000 was finally offered. The crime of the prisoner was a deliberate and willful violation of law. It set at naught the proclamation of emancipation. It snatched two wretched females, free by that charter, away from their husbands, and surrendered them to a thraldom of lust and violence, to end only with their lives. It consigned six unoffending children, fee by that charter, to perpetual servitude in a region deemed by the purchaser (who was also the father of at least two of them), safely remote from the influences of liberty and the restraint of law. All the features of the offense are so brutal and so depraved, that to be abhorred they need only to be recited; but when it is considered that the perpetrator is a presiding elder in the of the State of Arkansas, a man, by his position and his pretensions, the exemplar of public and private morality among the people around him, to whom multitudes looked up as their preceptor and spiritual guide, it must be admitted that the measure of his guilt is incomparably aggravated. That a criminal of so deep a dye, who has been adjudged to suffer the abridgment of his liberty for five years, for depriving eight human beings of theirs forever, should (with the price of his guilt still in his pocket) ask a pardon from the Government he has defied, seems an instance of effrontery scarcely parallel in the annals of the present rebellion. The Government, it is conceived, would be recreant to the principles which it has been forced by treason to inaugurate if it were to treat their flagrant violation with lenity. The proclamation of emancipation is nothing, or it is an irrevocable decree of freedom to all within its terms. It is a solemn law of the land, upheld by the inherent war powers of a nation struggling for self-preservation, sanctioned by reason, and sanctified by precious blood. Violations of it should be punished in proportion to the magnitude their consequences and the importance of sustaining it by warning examples. The absence of prohibitory sanctions in the proclamation itself furnishes no pretext for the misinterpretation which would exempt the prisoner from punishment for his crime. These persons stood before the law disenthralled of the shackles of slavery and absolutely free, and so the prisoner had recognized them to be. He having, with a full knowledge of their emancipation, deliberately re-enslaved them, willfully incurred all the penalties denounced against the most atrocious species of kidnaping. The

11 R R-SERIES II, VOL VII