Cut off as these States would then have been
from the possibilities of carrying on an inter-State slave trade with
the Southern confederacy, the institution of slavery would have lost
much of its value and potency; and allied, as those States would have
been, as a small minority, with a country whose territorial and
institutional preponderance would have been wholly in favor of freedom,
we might have anticipated that, if closely watched and incidentally
aided in its decline, the institution in these adhering slaveholding
States would have reached its term of existence at no very distant day;
at any rate, that it would, from the first, have been neutralized for
any serious bad effects which it might have otherwise impressed upon our
healthy national life. It was even worth reflection at that time
whether, if the whole adjustment of the future were placed at our own
disposition, there would not be less danger incurred, and more promise
of a prompt, healthy, and powerful development on this continent of
those grand purposes of national existence which the true American
people have always had in view and at heart, if this plan were to be
adopted, than if, on the contrary, the whole South were either
quiescently, by the subsidence of the rebellion, or forcibly, to be
reinstated within the limits of the Union, the institution of slavery
remaining intact.
Northeastern Virginia, Southern Maryland, and portions of Kentucky,
Middle Tennessee, and Middle Missouri would still have furnished
pestilent centres of intense slaveholding sentiment, and would have
required, perhaps, as much exercise of vigilance in preventing their
undue influence as our usually sleepy habits of inattention to such
causes would have authorized us to count upon.
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