Undoubtedly, immense advantages were to be contemplated in the restoration of the United States to their primitive boundaries and united power. But it was not without deep apprehension of moral taint and ulterior evil consequences, that a wise patriot could look even then to any attempt of the old matrimonial partners to dwell again in a common household, upon the old terms, and with no real settlement of the dispute between them.
The latter of these suppositions, the remanding of a hostile and rebellious tier of States, who had long and proudly enjoyed the dignity of State sovereignty, to a subordinate condition, had also its proportion of difficulty and danger. To carry out a programme of this kind would demand a great increase of the army and navy, and would give to the military spirit and power a preponderance in the councils of the nation which has always been deemed dangerous to the liberties of the country. A constant drain of expenditure of the resources of the nation; a continuous unrest and anxiety of the whole people; a succession of outbreaks and partial renewals of the civil war; the installation of a necessary system of proconsular or viceroyal commissions; the appointment of men who, whether as provost-marshals, dictators, or what not, would be in the stated exercise of authority unmeasured by the theories of republican policy—all these were serious and threatening considerations, which must give the thoughtful mind some pause ere it entered upon their adoption.
There were other remaining possible suppositions in respect to the termination of the war, of a middling character, or those lying between the two opposite extremes. In case, without any positive conquest or submission on either side, the general tenor of success throughout the war should be with the South, so that it finally behooved the North to secure the most favorable terms, but to submit, nevertheless, to great deductions from its confident expectations, a theory then not wholly impossible, we had to contemplate, as one evil of the war, a final disruption of the original territory of the United States into two nationalities, coincident, as to boundary, with the Free and the Slave States. Except in the way of absolute conquest, the South would be little inclined to insist upon the addition to itself of any territory absolutely free. We were not required, therefore, to make this supposition any less favorable to the North than the division just suggested; and unless, again, power had been acquired by the South to impose terms on the North little short of those which a conqueror imposes on a conquered people, the North, within its own limit of Free States, would be left in a condition boldly to announce and actively to defend its own legitimate policy in behalf of the extension of free institutions and their development to the supreme degree of beneficent truth.
But again, it might have been foreseen that in case the eagle of victory should perch on the banners of the North; in case our arms should be generally victorious after a few incipient disasters; in case our armies should move in power southward, meeting, nevertheless, a steady and resisting front on the part of the South, making the prospect of ultimate conquest remote or hopeless; in case, in a single word, the North should find herself in position to dictate terms short of absolute submission and return to the common fold, but substantially in accordance with her own wishes, the question of boundary and of the future policy of the new North would have become one of immense importance.
Had such considerations been forced on the attention of the country by the course of the war, it may not be uninteresting to speculate upon the nature of the possible boundary, which a drawn game in the contest—a possibility at least, viewed from that early point of observation—might have imposed upon the two future nationalities. We are considering the case still in which the preponderance of advantage should have remained with the North. It would have been, in that event, of the first importance that we should retain within the limits of the North all that portion of the South—by no means inconsiderable in extent—which has never been thoroughly debauched by Southern slaveholding opinion and theories of government; where the true American feeling is still extant; and where a good degree of loyalty to the Government of the United States has been hitherto exhibited. Such are especially Delaware, Maryland, Western Virginia, Kentucky, Western North Carolina, Eastern, and to some extent, Middle Tennessee, Northern Georgia, Northern Alabama, and Missouri. An important object would have been, had the power of the North proved inadequate to do more, to secure this territory within the boundary of the new North, and upon such terms as to give strength and new impetus to the freedom-loving sentiment there extant. A second object would have been the retention of Washington City, to be used, at least for the time being, as the capital of the country; avoiding the disgrace of being driven from that centre of national authority; and to secure it on terms in respect to territorial arrangement which should prevent it from being continually threatened from the South. To this end, it would have been necessary that the boundary be carried far enough south to include a portion of Northern and Northeastern Virginia, as thoroughly imbued at that day with slaveholding faith and practice, and as little loyal, perhaps, as any portion of the South—a region, however, which at this time has been so completely devastated by the operations of the war, that it would be readily liable to be resettled from the North, and made into an efficient military border.
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.
In addition to a boundary so favorable to ourselves, and forced by our commanding position upon our unwilling adversary, we might have imposed upon her such other terms in relation to her foreign policy, custom-house regulations, and the like, as the extent of our power should have authorized. We might even have consigned the Southern States to a species of provisional and quasi nationality, with the claim and expectation of their ultimate return within the pale of the Union, when, through the severe ordeal of military despotism or anarchy at home, or from other causes, they should have purged themselves of that institution, adverse to all our policy, which has been the sole cause of all our woes.
Still more important it would have been, under the theory of this essentially victorious position of the Northern people, that Northern opinion and the purposes of Americanism on this continent—the assertion and defence of freedom and of free institutions of all sorts—should have been distinctly, peremptorily, and finally impressed upon the character and future career of our own Northern nationality. While those portions of slaveholding territory which would still have remained within the Union, would have had, of course, to be treated with courtesy and consideration, if the institution of slavery were to have been permitted to survive, they should have been thoroughly made to know from the first, that slavery among us was no longer to be regarded as a perpetuity; that it was only tolerated provisionally; and that we, as a people, had no intention of permitting its renewed influence in the councils of the nation. 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.