In some the authorities have
not dared to publish the numbers; in some it is asserted that no vote
has ever been taken. Further (as was pointed out in an admirable
letter by Mr. Carey), the Slave States are intersected in the middle,
from their northern frontier almost to the Gulf of Mexico, by a
country of free labor--the mountain region of the Alleghanies and
their dependencies, forming parts of Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, in which, from the nature of the
climate and of the agricultural and mining industry, slavery to any
material extent never did, and never will, exist. This mountain zone
is peopled by ardent friends of the Union. Could the Union abandon
them, without even an effort, to be dealt with at the pleasure of an
exasperated slave-owning oligarchy? Could it abandon the Germans who,
in Western Texas, have made so meritorious a commencement of growing
cotton on the borders of the Mexican Gulf by free labor? Were the
right of the slave-owners to secede ever so clear, they have no right
to carry these with them; unless allegiance is a mere question of
local proximity, and my next neighbor, if I am a stronger man, can be
compelled to follow me in any lawless vagaries I choose to indulge.
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