to tower? or is he to cower, and
shrink, and fall to the ground? Why, sir, our ancestors, our fathers
and our grandfathers, those of them that are yet living amongst us with
prolonged lives, would rebuke and reproach us; and our children and
our grandchildren would cry out shame upon us, if we of this generation
should dishonor these ensigns of the power of the Government and the
harmony of that Union which is every day felt among us with so much joy
and gratitude. What is to become of the army? What is to become of the
navy? What is to become of the public lands? How is each of the thirty
States to defend itself? I know, although the idea has not been stated
distinctly, there is to be, or it is supposed possible that there
will be, a Southern Confederacy. I do not mean, when I allude to this
statement, that any one seriously contemplates such a state of things.
I do not mean to say that it is true, but I have heard it suggested
elsewhere, that the idea has been entertained, that, after the
dissolution of this Union, a Southern Confederacy might be formed. I am
sorry, sir, that it has ever been thought of, talked of, in the wildest
flights of human imagination. But the idea, so far as it exists, must
be of a separation, assigning the slave States to one side, and the free
States to the other. Sir, I may express myself too strongly, perhaps,
but there are impossibilities in the natural as well as in the physical
world, and I hold the idea of the separation of these States, those that
are free to form one government, and those that are slave-holding to
form another, as such an impossibility. We could not separate the States
by any such line, if we were to draw it. We could not sit down here
to-day and draw a line of separation that would satisfy any five men
in the country. There are natural causes that would keep and tie us
together, and there are social and domestic relations which we could not
break if we would, and which we should not if we could.

Sir, nobody can look over the face of this country at the present
moment, nobody can see where its population is the most dense and
growing, without being ready to admit, and compelled to admit,
that erelong the strength of America will be in the Valley of the
Mississippi. Well, now, sir, I beg to inquire what the wildest
enthusiast has to say on the possibility of cutting that river in two,
and leaving free States at its source and on its branches, and slave
States down n