8. Peter Cooper, The Death of Slavery. Letter from Peter Cooper to Governor Seymour, Loyal Publication Society, no. 28 (New York: Wm. C. Bryant & Co., 1863). (7 p.)


Open letter to the governor of New York objecting to a proposal to repudiate the Emancipation Proclamation in order to gain concessions from the Confederate States that might lead to a cessation of hostilities. “We, as a people, may well tremble for our country,” the author writes, “when we fail to cooperate with events which have made the slave-owners of the South the grandest abolitionists of the nation. The people of the South, by making war for the destruction of the Union and Constitution, have made it necessary, right and proper, for the government to abolish slavery upon the same principle that it would be right to destroy a city in order to save a nation.”