resolves always carry us
further, thank God! than we counted on going. Suppose even that the
border States which refuse to unite with the South design to impose on
the North certain vexatious conditions, they will be none the less
turned from their former alliances, they will have none the less begun
to move in a new direction. We should do wrong if we did not recognize
how honorable is the conduct of several among them; in watching over
their legislatures, in enacting that the vote of secession shall be
submitted to the ratification of the whole people, certain frontier
States seem to have already shown themselves resolved to foil the
intrigues at Charleston.

The cause of emancipation takes, therefore, a very important step in
advance, in the hypothesis of a Southern Confederacy reduced, or nearly
so, to the Gulf States alone. Limited secession is perhaps of all
combinations, the one most favorable to the suppression of slavery.
Picture to yourself, in fact, what this Southern Confederacy will he. It
will be an impossible, short-lived republic, the separation of which
will one day cease, and which, meanwhile, will be incapable of realizing
any of its favorite projects. From the first hour, the extreme South
found itself brought to face a dilemma: either to draw in all the slave
States, and then to await the moment favorable to the execution of its
grandiloquent plans, to hasten towards its destiny, its ideal, to
conquer territories, to people them with negroes, and to perish through
the accomplishment of an impious work; or, to remain alone and undertake
nothing, and still perish, but this time through impotence to exist.
What is to be done when there is only the miserable Confederacy of some
thousand whites, the owners and keepers of some hundred thousand blacks?
Make conquests? They dare not. Open the slave trade? It would draw down
destruction upon them.

Now, mark that, in the bosom of a Confederacy morally isolated from the
entire world, receiving aid neither from immigrants nor capital,
deprived, in a large part at least, of the fresh supply of negroes which
it formerly drew from the North, unable even to incur the risk of
imitating Spain, which buys _free_ negroes from the slave-hunters of the
African continent, not in a condition to stop the escapes which will
take place on all her frontiers, the question of slavery will proceed
necessarily towards its solution. The extreme South, strange to say,
will find