, 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