If, retaining Fortress Monroe, we should then have run with the James
River and the line of Richmond and Lynchburg, or if, ascending higher to
the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock, we were to run with the line of
Fredericksburg, we should reach either the Blue Ridge or the Alleghany
Mountains, as in the case of power on our part, we might have chosen.
With these mountains, sweeping in a southwesterly direction into
Northern Georgia and Alabama, runs the line of division between the
'true-blue' Southern slaveholding opinion and policy, on the south and
east, and the semi-Free-State opinion and policy on the north and west.
One or other of these mountain ranges, with their unfrequent and
difficult passes, would have offered the best natural boundary between
the two future nations, whose divergent national tendencies would not
have ceased with the nominal termination of the war to be essentially
hostile.
Following this line till we reach the Tennessee river, thence along the
course of that stream, turning northwardly to the Ohio, or more
properly, perhaps, to the southern line of Kentucky, we exclude the most
pestilent portion of Tennessee, of which Memphis is the capital, and
retain the middle and eastern parts, along with Eastern Kentucky and
Western Virginia. Thence passing westward with the southern line of
Missouri to the Indian Territory, thence southward with the western line
of Arkansas to the Red river, thence westward along that river as the
boundary between the Indian Territory and Texas, to the one hundredth
degree of longitude west from Greenwich, and with that meridian south,
to the Rio Grande and the Gulf--dividing the western from the eastern
half of Texas--we circumscribe very fairly the exact region of country
in which the slaveholding epidemic is violent and intense, and throw
within the limits of the great Northern Republic all of the region in
which freedom is already established, and all that in which, as above
stated, there was still a surviving and half vital tendency in freedom's
behalf.
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