and West. Ordinarily, the duty of your supreme commander in this regard would be easy to perform; now it involves a fearful responsibility.

The present supreme occasion in the affairs of your glorious, free, sovereign, and independent Sates demands of you the, D of the high attributes which distinguish manhood, the exercise of the virtues which have in all time adorned and illustrated the American character - those virtues which the patriots and statesmen of the Revolutionary epoch so nobly practiced and inculcated.

there exists to-day a power which calls itself, in the unparalleled arrogance which distinguishes it, " the Government," which has invaded the sacred and hitherto respected sovereignty of your several States; has disregarded the constitutions, laws, and ordinances of those States, which the people thereof have ordained and accepted for their government, for the establishment and preservation of their wise and beneficent institutions, designed for insuring their prosperity, happiness, and advancement toward exalted civilization; has invaded the sacred precincts of your peaceful homes, despoiled your property, and denied you every redress and defence against the outrages and atrocities which had been perpetrated by its filthy hand-marks upon the ermine of her ministers; has even, in the wantonness of its prurient lust, entered the sanctuary of God, expelled therefrom your chosen teachers, denied to you the ceremonial worship which your fathers revered and taught you, or interpolated it with formulas of its own dictation, which are nothing short of positive blasphemy.

I am relieved somewhat of the labor of enumeration of wrongs by the following extracts from an able, stirring, and patriotic address, which has recently emanated from the grand council of one of the noble States within the jurisdiction of our order. I entreat you, read and ponder it well:

The extraordinary condition of our beloved country, the peril which threatens every interest and every institution, and the profoundly excited state of the popular mind, demand our prompt and grave attention.

The war inaugurated by the Black Republican party in its mad efforts to achieve power and revolutionize the noble institutions bequeathed us by our fathers, has already drenched the land in fraternal blood, and now shakes the very temple of American freedom to its foundations.

The unprincipled and desperate faction that now wields, in the very wantonness of frenzied fanaticism, the mighty energies of the Federal Government has denounced the sacred and fundamental covenants of the Constitution, broken in letter and spirit its plainest precepts, its most vital principles, and proclaimed undying hostility to the Union as it came from the hands of its framers.

The suspension by the President of the great writ of liberty, the suppression of the press and of the freedom of speech, the arbitrary arrests of the citizens of the different States, and their transportation to distant bastiles and incarceration for months and years without charge indictment, or trial; the declaration of martial law over whole States and districts of country where peace and order prevail, and where the civil courts are open and the administration of justice unimpeded; the resort of the tyrant's plea of "military necessity" to mark the insidious advances of usurpation and to justify the practice of every outrage upon the rights, the liberties, the lives, and the property of a forbearing, patient, and patriotic people; the mock trial by drumhead court-martial of the loftiest citizens and purest patriots of the and, upon charges of disloyalty for the utterance of free thought to a free people; the tyrant's orders of expatriation by which the most eminent citizens have been driven into exile; the recent acts of a fanatical, servile, and corrupt Congress, by which the body and the life of every able-bodied citizens of the land have been placed at the will of Abraham Lincoln, in derogation of individual right and State prerogative, and by which the properties and the resources of an entire people are mortgaged and pledged to a system of unbounded paper credits and reckless and unbridled extravagance; the absolute disregard of constitutional guaranties and State rights by the unholy partition of the Old Dominion; the suppression of a free