of the city except to send its
tax-gatherers among us or to impose upon us hateful officials,
alien to our interests and sympathies, to eat up the substance of
the people by their legalized extortions.... Nothing has prevented
the city of New York from asserting her right to govern herself,
except that provision of the Federal Constitution which prohibits
a State from being divided without its own consent.... When that
restraint shall no longer exist, when the obligation of those
constitutional provisions, which forbid the division of a State
without its own consent, shall be suspended, then I tell you that
imperial city will throw off the odious government to which she
now yields a reluctant allegiance; she will repel the hateful
cabal at Albany, which has so long abused its power over her, and
with her own flag sustained by the courage and devotion of her own
gallant sons, she will, as a free city, open wide her gates to the
civilization and commerce of the world.

Doubtless the secessionists drew hopeful auguries and fresh inspiration
from this and other visionary talk frequent amid the unsteady political
thought of that day. But, if so, it would have been wiser to ponder
deeply the significance of the following utterances coming from a
different quarter, and representing a more persistent influence, a more
extended geographical area, and a greater numerical force. Clement L.
Vallandigham, of Ohio, said:

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 10, 1860, p. 38.

I speak now as a Western man; and I thank the gentleman from
Florida heartily for the kindly sentiments towards that great West
to which he has given utterance. Most cordially I reciprocate
them, one and all. Sir, we of the North-west have a deeper
interest in the preservation of this Government in its present
form than any other section of the Union. Hemmed in, isolated, cut
off from the seaboard upon every side; a thousand miles and more
from the mouth of the Mississippi, the free navigation of which
under the law of nations we demand and will have at every cost;
with nothing else but our other great inland seas, the lakes, and
their outlet, too, through a foreign country--what is to be our
destiny? Sir, we have fifteen hundred miles of Southern frontier,
and but a little narrow strip of eighty miles, or less, from
Virginia to Lake Erie bounding us upon