slave trade. Ask Virginia or
Maryland long to sustain a policy, the result of which would be to lower
the price of her slaves in one day from a thousand dollars to two cents!
This is so clearly felt in the extreme South, that the provisional
constitution, adopted at Montgomery, is drawn up with an express view to
reassuring the producing States on this point. They are afraid of the
African slave trade! It shall not be reopened. They are anxious to sell
their negroes! They shall be bought only of those States forming part of
the Southern Confederacy. It belongs to them to ask now whether this
Montgomery constitution, adopted for a year, really guarantees any thing
to them, and whether it is possible that an attempt will not be made to
revive the African slave trade, provided the Southern Confederacy
succeeds in enduring. However this may be, they are held apart by so
many causes, that they would only unite to-day to separate to-morrow. I
know well that the passions of slavery rule in many of the border
States, especially in Virginia, as violently as in the extreme South. I
do not disguise from myself that the habit of sustaining a deplorable
cause in common has created between the border and the cotton States a
bond of long standing and difficult to break. But I say this: the
impulses of the first hour will have their morrow; when the frontier
States witness the commencement of those territorial invasions which
must necessarily bring the African slave trade in their train; when they
know what reliance to place on the fine promises made to-day to attract
them; when they perceive that in separating from the North, they
themselves have removed the sole obstacle in the way of the flight of
all their slaves; when, in fine, they feel weighing upon them, and them
first, the perils of an armed struggle and a negro insurrection, they
will listen perhaps to those of their citizens who, even now, are urging
them to turn to the side of justice--of justice and of safety. By the
fewness of their slaves, by the nature of their climate, which resembles
that of Marseilles and Montpellier, by the kind of cultivation to which
their country is adapted, by the number of manufactures which are
beginning to be established among them, it seems as if they must be led,
or, at least, some day led back, to the policy of union. This is no
discovery: the _seceded States_ know it already; they form a separate
band. America has not forgotten the retreat