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Updated: May 13, 2025
The difference of strength between the two armies at this date was considerably in my favor, but the conditions attending my situation in a hostile region necessitated so much detached service to protect trains, and to secure Maryland and Pennsylvania from raids, that my excess in numbers was almost canceled by these incidental demands that could not be avoided, and although I knew that I was strong, yet, in consequence of the injunctions of General Grant, I deemed it necessary to be very cautious; and the fact that the Presidential election was impending made me doubly so, the authorities at Washington having impressed upon me that the defeat of my army might be followed by the overthrow of the party in power, which event, it was believed, would at least retard the progress of the war, if, indeed, it did not lead to the complete abandonment of all coercive measures.
If such a system of education as that briefly outlined above is carefully and impartially considered, the objection that democratic government founded on modern social science is coercive must disappear. So far as the intention and effort of the state is able to confer it, every citizen will have his choice of the task he is to perform for society, his opportunity for self-realization.
Men come in that manner into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation. Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us as it is awful and coercive. Our country is not a thing of mere physical locality.
Congress and committees of Congress of course impeded the executive when there was no coercive public sentiment to check and rule them. But the Presidential system not only gives the executive power an antagonist in the legislative power, and so makes it weaker; it also enfeebles it by impairing its intrinsic quality.
The fact of the revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the desire for it and prepared not a few of its constituents.
This unhappy decline was probably due to several causes, among which the most important were the arbitrary and artificial attempts of the Government to keep down wages, the heavy taxation caused by wars of expansion, and the want of coercive power on the part of labor.
What good can we expect to do amidst such scandalous disturbances, and while we spend our time in attending to informations, accusations, and inculpations, for the most part utterly unfounded? For my part, I see but one means of attaining any thing like dignity and tranquillity, and that is, by submitting ourselves to coercive regulations."
Strict laws and a rigid administration of justice are incompatible with such modes of determining disputes between man and man and village and village. The communities, therefore, break up when the law admits of no coercive action except its own.
He could not see how any view but one was possible to any man who did not desire to be a slave; and yet, in his fanciful scheme of liberty, he did not hesitate to apply coercive measures to Parliament. The nation was to be governed by its own consent; but its consent was to be interpreted by the will of his own little clique.
But should your views be opposed to the policy I recommend, I would entreat you to consider well how impracticable it will become to carry on coercive labor always difficult, it would in future be in peril of constant comparisons with other colonies made free, and with those estates in this island made free by individual proprietors.
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