Had we been exempt from slavery and its influences, it is difficult to conceive what possible pretense could have been raised up for revolution.  What position could have been taken showing the necessity of disenthrallment from oppressive government?  There would have existed no element of political discontent that could by any possibility have culminated in rebellion, aside from the active, jealous, and unscrupulous influence of slaveholders.  Rebellion and treason required the lead and direction of an ambitious and reckless class; a class actuated by gross and selfish passions, in disconnection with sympathy for the masses.  It required a class stripped and bereft by habits of thinking of the spirit of political beneficence, devoid of national honor, national pride, and national fidelity.  Nothing less unscrupulous would have answered to plot, to carry forward, and to manage the incidents of the attempted dismemberment of the Union.  It required something worse in its nature than Benedict Arnold susceptibility.  His might have been crime, springing from sudden resentment or imaginary wrong.  The other is the result of thirty years’ concoction under adroit, hypocritical, and unscrupulous leaders.  The slaveholders’ rebellion has assumed a magnitude commensurate only with long contemplation of the subject.  Making all due allowance for the honorable exceptions, this is substantially the phase of pro-slavery infidelity to the Union.

Were further argument needed to establish this position, it is found in the fact that the seeds of rebellion are wanting in proportion to the absence of slavery.  There is no reason to believe that Kentucky or Maryland, without slavery, would have been less loyal than Ohio.  In Eastern Kentucky, Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, Western North-Carolina, a small portion of Georgia, and Northern Alabama, the Union cause finds a friend’s country.  These sections, in the main, contain a population dependent upon its own labor for subsistence.  Schooled by diligent industry to habits of perseverance, and learning independence and manhood by relying on itself, it has preserved its patriotism and attachment to the Government under which it was born.  It saw no cause of complaint, imaginary or real.  Six or seven per cent of slave population has not proved sufficient as a slave interest, to prostrate or corrupt its national fidelity, nor to undermine its national pride.  It still retains its representation in Congress against the influences of surrounding treason.  There is a cheering satisfaction in the belief that this plateau of civil liberty and freedom, even unassisted, could not have been permanently held in subjection by the myrmidons of rebellion.  The secessionists themselves bestow a high compliment to the patriotism of this people, when they complain of its ‘idolatrous attachment to the old Government.’