it was needless,—­’old custom’ had made them cautious, and mindful of ‘expediency;’ but the mass of them hate ‘the institution.’  It is for the traitorous Northern dough-faces, and the paltry handful of secessionists, ’on a thin slip of land on the Atlantic,’ that slavery is, at present, cherished.  The great area of the South is free from it,—­and ever will be.

It has frequently been insisted on that the mere geographical obstacles to disunion are such as to render the cause of slavery hopeless in the long run.  Yet to this most powerful Southern aid to the North, men seem to have been strangely blind during the days of doubt which so long afflicted us.  These obstacles are, briefly, the enormous growing power of the West, and its inevitable outlet, the Mississippi river.  ’For it is the mighty and free West which will always hang like a lowering thunder-cloud over them.’[N] On this subject I quote at length from an article, in the Danville (Ky.) Review, by the Rev. R. J. Breckenridge, D.D.:—­

Whoever will look at a map of the United States, will observe that Louisiana lies on both sides of the Mississippi river, and that the States of Arkansas and Mississippi lie on the right and left banks of this great stream—­eight hundred miles of whose lower course is thus controlled by these three States, unitedly inhabited by hardly as many white people as inhabit the city of New York.  Observe, then, the country drained by this river and its affluents, commencing with Missouri on its west bank and Kentucky on its east bank.  There are nine or ten powerful States, large portions of three or four others, several large Territories—­in all, a country as large as all Europe, as fine as any under the sun, already holding many more people than all the revolted States, and powerful regions of the earth.  Does any one suppose that these powerful States—­this great and energetic population—­will ever make a peace that will put the lower course of this single and mighty national outlet to the sea in the hands of a foreign government far weaker than themselves?  If there is any such person he knows little of the past history of mankind, and will perhaps excuse us for reminding him that the people of Kentucky, before they were constituted a State, gave formal notice to the federal government, when Gen. Washington was President, that if the United States did not require Louisiana they would themselves conquer it.  The mouths of the Mississippi belong, by the gift of God, to the inhabitants of its great valley.  Nothing but irresistible force can disinherit them.

Try another territorial aspect of the case.  There is a bed of mountains abutting on the left bank of the Ohio, which covers all Western Virginia, and all Eastern Kentucky, to the width, from east to west, in those two States, of three or four hundred miles.  These mountains, stretching south-westwardly, pass entirely through