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.

With the gradual decline of this remnant of slavery in the Northern
Union, and with the thousand contingencies threatening its perpetuity in
the Southern States, after the sustaining influence of the North in its
behalf should have been finally withdrawn, the anticipation would not
have been without high grounds of probability, that the institution, as
a whole, would have hastened more or less rapidly to its final
dissolution; and that, one by one, the States of the South, ridding
themselves of the incubus of slavery and its comcomitants--oligarchic,
mobocratic, and military despotism--would have sought, for their own
protection and happiness, to reenter the original Union as Free States.
Such an issue of the conflict might at the commencement of the war have
been looked forward to as almost fortunate, and as perhaps that which
Providence had in store for us as a people. That larger measure of
success, the entire destruction of slavery throughout the land, now
rapidly coming