The Continental Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 3, March 1862 | Page 4

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 secession, well worth of itself all that the war has cost. With Texas in our power, with Cumberland Gap firmly held, with the negroes in South Carolina fairly disorganized from slavery, with free Yankee colonies in the Palmetto State, with New Orleans taken--a blockade without and complete financial disorder within, what more could we desire as a basis to secure thorough re?stablishment of power? Here our superiority to the South in possessing not only a navy, but, what is of far more importance, a vast merchant marine containing all the elements necessary to form a navy of unparalleled power, appears in clearest light, giving us cause for much congratulation. To effect all this, time is required. Let those who fret, look over the map of a hemisphere--let them reflect on the condition to which Southern perfidy and theft had reduced us ere the war begun, and then let them moderate their cries. It will all be done; but the programme is a tremendous one, and the future of the most glorious country on earth requires that it shall be done thoroughly, and that no risks shall be taken.
But, beyond all the aid which is to be expected from a counter-revolution in the South, to be drawn from the 'Alleghania' region, there is one of vast importance, insisted upon in a series of articles published during the past year in the New York Knickerbocker Magazine, and which may be appropriately reconsidered in this connection. Should the government of the United States, by one or more victories, obtain even a temporary sway over the South, it will only rest with itself to produce a powerful counter-revolution even in those districts which are blackest with slavery. Let it, when the time shall seem fit,--and we urge no undue haste, and no premature meddling with the present plans or programme of those in power,--simply proclaim Emancipation, offering to pay all loyal men for their slaves according to a certain rate. The proportion of Union men who will then start into life, even in South Carolina, will be, doubtless, enormous. It may be objected that many of these will merely profess Union sentiments for the time being. But, on the other hand, those noted rebels who can have no hope of selling their slaves, save indeed to the Union professors, will have small love for the latter, and two parties can not fail to show themselves at once. Those who hope to see the slave principle ultimately triumphant will oppose selling the chattels; those who wish to 'realize' at once on them, owing to temporary embarrassments, will urge it; and dissension of the most formidable character will be at once organized,--precisely such dissension as the Southern press has long hoped to see between the dough-faces and patriots of the North, or between its labor and capital, or in any other disastrous dissension.
Be it borne in mind that the price of slaves is at present greatly depressed in the South. Those who would sell would speedily acquire more, in the hope of a profit by selling to government. Those too who would willingly act as brokers between those who wished to sell, but who would not dare to openly do so, would be very numerous. Between these and the leaders of the ultra pro-slavery party there would be bitter feud. Let a counter-revolutionary party once succeed in holding its own in the South, and the days of secession would speedily be numbered. In a land where all rushes so rapidly to extremes, we should soon see the war carried on