With the gradual decline of this remnant of slavery in the Northern
Union, and with the thousand contingencies threatening its perpetuity in
the Southern States, after the sustaining influence of the North in its
behalf should have been finally withdrawn, the anticipation would not
have been without high grounds of probability, that the institution, as
a whole, would have hastened more or less rapidly to its final
dissolution; and that, one by one, the States of the South, ridding
themselves of the incubus of slavery and its comcomitants--oligarchic,
mobocratic, and military despotism--would have sought, for their own
protection and happiness, to reenter the original Union as Free States.
Such an issue of the conflict might at the commencement of the war have
been looked forward to as almost fortunate, and as perhaps that which
Providence had in store for us as a people. That larger measure of
success, the entire destruction of slavery throughout the land, now
rapidly coming to be a foregone conclusion in most minds, was then
hardly hoped for by the most sanguine, although, as will appear by what
follows, that alternative was then anticipated by the writer.
Finally, in case the war should have proved a drawn game between the two
sections, with no special advantage on either side, some middle ground
of adjustment between the two last suppositions might have been sought
out, and an irregular line, running anywhere between Mason and Dixon's
line and the Ohio, on the one hand, and the Blue Ridge and the Tennessee
river on the other, might have been forced upon us.
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