their dependencies, forming parts of Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, in which, from the nature of the
climate and of the agricultural and mining industry, slavery to any
material extent never did, and never will, exist. This mountain zone
is peopled by ardent friends of the Union. Could the Union abandon
them, without even an effort, to be dealt with at the pleasure of an
exasperated slave-owning oligarchy? Could it abandon the Germans who,
in Western Texas, have made so meritorious a commencement of growing
cotton on the borders of the Mexican Gulf by free labor? Were the
right of the slave-owners to secede ever so clear, they have no right
to carry these with them; unless allegiance is a mere question of
local proximity, and my next neighbor, if I am a stronger man, can be
compelled to follow me in any lawless vagaries I choose to indulge.

But (it is said) the North will never succeed in conquering the South;
and since the separation must in the end be recognized, it is better
to do at first what must be done at last; moreover, if it did conquer
them, it could not govern them when conquered, consistently with free
institutions. With no one of these propositions can I agree.

Whether or not the Northern Americans will succeed in reconquering the
South, I do not affect to foresee. That they _can_ conquer it, if
their present determination holds, I have never entertained a doubt;
for they are twice as numerous, and ten or twelve times as rich. Not
by taking military possession of their country, or marching an army
through it, but by wearing them out, exhausting their resources,
depriving them of the comforts of life, encouraging their slaves to
desert, and excluding them from communication with foreign countries.
All this, of course, depends on the supposition that the North does
not give in first. Whether they will persevere to this point, or