An Ohioan accurately noted that the “people are not yet prepared for Hunter’s conclusion.” In time, public opinion would change, he predicted, for the “logic of the war is doing its work slowly but surely.” Henry Winter Davis considered Lincoln’s action “the best disposition that could be made” and hoped that Hunter would be cashiered. (Lincoln did not fire or censure Hunter, nor did he order him to dismiss his black soldiers.) The leading Republican paper in Rhode Island found Lincoln’s proclamation revoking Hunter’s order “admirable in letter and spirit,” and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper lauded the document as characteristically Lincolnian, “rugged, direct, simple and earnest. … pervaded by a spirit sympathetic and paternal.” Also paternal was the president’s statement to the Border State delegation, which resembled an appeal “a father might make to his children.” The editors were glad that Lincoln had apparently not allowed Seward “to make revisions, and bedizen honest, earnest thoughts with a tawdry rhetoric.” A prominent New York merchant, Alexander T. Stewart, urged Lincoln to continue “your policy of maintaining the Constitution. It is our only rock of safety. A grateful Country will in return give you its approval, and its encreased confidence and love.” The conservative New York Herald called Lincoln’s proclamation “opportune and admirable,” the “most important State paper issued since the outbreak of the rebellion.” The editors thought that it “gives another example of the unflinching conservativeness of Mr. Lincoln, while it widens and deepens, if possible, the impassable gulf between him and the baffled revolutionary nigger-worshipping radicals.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃