ssippi, and Alabama. We shall have cut the gordian knot of slavery,
and the death agonies of the hydra would soon be visible. The importance
of the result would be felt in the North also, and the wretched traitors
there, far more guilty even than those of the South, will shrink from
their atrocious conspiracy to dissolve this Union. The dark plot of
severing New England from the Republic and of reuniting the rest of the
States with the Southern confederacy, will be abandoned. That such a
scheme is contemplated by Northern traitors, and that it is tolerated in
the South, _on condition_ that all shall become Slave States, is beyond
controversy. New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Northwest are
to abandon their free institutions, become slaveholding States, and be
admitted as such into the Southern confederacy. I had supposed that
crime had achieved its climax when the Southern rebellion was
inaugurated; but something more base, more vile, more cowardly,
debasing, and pusillanimous, it seems, is now contemplated. It is that
New England shall be expelled, and that the rest of the Free States
shall come under the dominion of the Southern confederacy. But the
leaders of this scheme seem to have forgotten the fact, that New
England, to a vast extent, has peopled the Northwest, and carried there
their love of free institutions. The descendants of the pilgrims are
scattered throughout the Northwest, and churches, and free schools, and
love of liberty have gone with them. The scheme is as base and cowardly
as it is impracticable. No! New England can never be expelled from this
Union. There the grand idea of the American Union was first conceived;
there the cradle of liberty was first rocked, before as well as amid the
storms of the Revolution; there the first blood was shed, the first
battles fought, the first flag of Union and Liberty unfurled, and there
it shall float forever. There are Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker
Hill, and no traitor hand shall ever sever them from the American Union.
Not an acre of the soil of New England or a drop of all its waters shall
ever be surrendered by this great Republic; and from Lake Champlain and
the Housatonick to the St. Croix and St. Johns, the flag of the Union
shall ever float in undiminished glory. Lake Champlain unites Vermont
and New England with the Hudson, the lakes, and St. Lawrence; and Long
Island Sound, commanding the deepest approaches to New York, completes
the connec