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made on that basis? and second, Whether this settlement would lead to a durable peace?
What shall be the boundary-line? The Rocky Mountains would not be too high, nor the great lakes too broad, as a barrier between two powers exasperated by bitter feuds. But the only natural frontier we can find is the line of the Ohio and Potomac. Can we concede that? South of it there are two States that remained true to the Union during the war, Kentucky and West-Virginia. If we might agree to let the original seceders go, could we be base and treacherous enough to sell our friends, to deliver them helpless to the tender mercies of their mortal enemies?—for the rebels hate the Union people of the slave States more bitterly even than they hate Massachusetts. Can we abandon them? Impossible! What if the rebels do not yield that point? If we are obliged to fight for Kentucky and West-Virginia? Well, then, we can just as well fight for the whole Union, the war may go on, and there is the end of the settlement. (Applause.) But suppose the rebels agree to that territorial arrangement. Then the second question arises, Will this settlement have the necessary elements of stability? To the Confederacy it will be distasteful. As in Kentucky and West-Virginia the majority stood by us, so a strong minority stood by the rebels, and the same moral obligations which bind us to the first bind them to the second. The result will be this: the minority in Kentucky and West-Virginia will unite with the restless and reckless element in the Confederacy to precipitate the latter into warlike enterprises for the recovery of the two States, and the authorities of the Confederacy will not long be able to resist. Does this look like a solid peace? So much for the South.
But can the settlement be satisfactory or even endurable to the North? Remember that the supposed boundary-lines will leave the lower course and the mouth of the Mississippi in the hands of the Confederacy. A foreign power holding the mouth of the Mississippi! In the earlier stages of our history it was regarded as a self-evident truth that such power must be or become our natural enemy. But if at that time, when the great Mississippi Valley was a silently brooding wilderness, it was thought that we must have the mouth of the river, because the foreign hand that held it might choke our future development, what shall we say now when the Mississippi Valley has become the garden of America, the seat of empire? The matter is hardly a fit subject for discussion. The Mississippi is the great harbor of the Gulf of Mexico; it is the Atlantic Ocean ramified thousands of miles into the heart of the Continent. Its great port is not New-Orleans alone; it is St. Louis, it is Cincinnati, and the great cities that will spring up on the upper river and along the course of the gigantic Missouri. And the mouth of the Mississippi in the hands of a foreign power? Let it be so, and half our independence is gone. (Applause.) Indeed, freedom of commerce on the great river might be stipulated by treaty. But what of that? Will not the South, whenever any question of international dispute arises, be able to force us to any concession or to an offensive war merely by suspending the operation of the treaty, and by tightening its grasp upon the great outlet? Is not this as if some person were constitutionally permitted to have his grip upon your throat, able and ready, whenever he wants anything of you, to stop the circulation of your blood merely by squeezing a little? And this humiliating situation anybody expects our active, enterprising, spirited, and brave people to endure? The discussion of this possibility would be a mere waste of words. The people of the United States have bought the mouth of the Mississippi, once with their money and twice with their blood. (Great applause.) To give it away would be merely to produce the necessity of buying it a fourth time. Can the South yield it? No. Can the North do without it? No. And then?
I might go on to show how the proximity of dangerous neighbors immediately on our borders—of neighbors whose guns command our very capital, and who hold the natural outlet of the most productive part of our country—would at once oblige us to be in constant readiness for attack and defence; how large standing armies would swallow up the financial resources we might otherwise devote to the payment of our national debt; how the first success of a secession movement would inevitably draw similar attempts at dismemberment after it; how the minds of the people would be continually agitated by conspiracies and treasonable enterprises; how all this would steadily undermine our liberal institution by producing a centralization of power; how military necessity would become a standing and commanding element in our political life, and gradually transform the republic of peace into an engine of war; but it is enough.
It must be clear to every candid mind, that a settlement on the basis of disunion, far from securing a permanent peace, will be nothing but a mere temporary armistice, and must, after a short trial, produce the strengthened conviction in the minds of our people, that for the peace, liberty, and prosperity of the North-American continent, the restoration of the Union is an absolute necessity. (Great applause.) And what then? The war will be resumed. But under what circumstances! Now we fight the South alone, as a legitimate government fights a rebellious combination; then we shall have to fight a recognized, fully organized, and immensely strengthened Confederacy, with her European cotton allies at her heels. Now we have the Mississippi; we have the most important points on the Atlantic coast; we have the great central position of East-Tennessee; we have the heart of Georgia. We shall give up all this, merely for the privilege of paving every foot of that road again with our dollars and of sprinkling every inch of it again with the blood of our people! (Great applause.) O my good friends in England and France! do you not think, after all, that while we are at it, it will be wisest and most economical for us to go through with it? You, who affect such a holy horror of war and bloodshed, do you not think, after all, that it will be a saving of blood
