s now; and although those who have settled above us are now
opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale.
They are ours by all the laws of nature; slave labor will go
to every foot of this great valley where it will be found
profitable to use it, and some of those who may not use it are
soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and
inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the
sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper
tributaries to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the
ice-bound North. There is the great Mississippi, bond of union
made by nature herself. She will maintain it forever.

As the Seaboard South had transferred the mantle of leadership to
Tennessee and then to the Cotton Kingdom of the Lower Mississippi, so
New England and New York resigned their command to the northern half of
the Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes. Seward, the
old-time leader of the Eastern Whigs who had just lost the Republican
nomination for the presidency to Lincoln, may rightfully speak for the
Northeast. In the fall of 1860, addressing an audience at Madison,
Wisconsin, he declared:[199:1]

The empire established at Washington is of less than a hundred
years' formation. It was the empire of thirteen Atlantic
states. Still, practically, the mission of that empire is
fulfilled. The power that directs it is ready to pass away
from those thirteen states, and although held and exercised
under the same constitution and national form of government,
yet it is now in the very act of being transferred from the
thirteen states east of the Alleghany mountains and on the
coast of the Atlantic ocean, to the twenty states that lie
west of the Alleghanies, and stretch away from their base to
the base of the Rocky mountains on the West, and you are the
heirs to it. When the next census shall reveal your power, you
will be found to be the masters of the United States of
America, and through them the dominating political power of
the world.

Appealing to the Northwest on the slavery issue Seward declared:

The whole responsibility rests henceforth directly or
indirectly on the people of the Northwest. . . . There can be
no virtue in commercial and manufacturing communities to
maintain a democracy, when the democracy