nd are only included
because there is other evidence that Athens, in Limestone County,
and Huntsville, in Morgan County, were to the last possible moment
the head-quarters of resistance to the Montgomery conspirators. It
was the Union vote of these highland counties, notwithstanding the
number of slaves in some of them, which would inevitably have been
rolled down in condemnation of an ordinance of secession. This was
well known by Yancey and his associates, and it was to avoid this
revelation of their weakness over a compact and populous area of
the State, which was in direct communication with East Tennessee,
that they refused the ordeal of the ballot upon the consummation
of their treason to the Union.

I estimate that the district which could readily be rallied in
support of a loyal organization of the government of Alabama, with
its capital at Huntsville, to be equal to the area of New Jersey,
or 8,320 square miles. With the occupation of the Alleghanies by
an army of the Union, and such a base of operations, civil and
military, in North Alabama, a counter-revolution in that State
would not be difficult of accomplishment.[B]

It will thus be seen, that, in the South itself, there exists a
tremendous groundwork of aid to the North, and of weakness to
secession. The love of this region for the Union, and its local hatred
for planterdom with its arrogance towards free labor, is no chimera; nor
do we make the wish the father to the thought when we assert that a
Union victory would light up a flame of counter-revolution which would
in time, with Northern aid, crush out the foul rebellion. And relying on
this fact, we grow confident and exultant. If Europe will only let us
alone--if England will refrain from stretching out a helping hand to
that slaveocracy for which she has suddenly developed such a strange and
unnatural love, we may yet be, at no distant day, great, powerful, and
far more united than ever.

But we have, in addition to all these districts of Alleghania, a vast
reserve in Texas--that Texas which is now more than half cultivated by
free labor, and which is amply capable of producing six times as much
cotton as is now raised in the entire South. An armed occupation of
Texas, a copious stream of emigration thither, to be encouraged by very
liberal grants to settlers, and a speedy completion of its railroads,
would be an offset to sec