“Let him go, he is not worth your anger!”* Again and again 
English statesmanship cries—recently through the mouth of Lord 
John Russell’—to the North of the United States this advice of 
Leporello to Don Juan’s deserted love. If the North lets the South 
go, it then frees itself from any association with slavery, from its 
historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher 
development. | 

In reality, if North and South formed two independent 
countries, like, for example, England and Hanover, their separa- 
tion would be no more difficult than was the separation of 
England and Hanover.” “The South”, however, is neither a 
territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a 
moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan. 

The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the 
Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the 
Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed 
that the issue for the slaveholders’ party is merely one of uniting 
the territories it has hitherto dominated into an independent 
group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority 
of the Union. Nothing could be more false. “The South needs its 
entire territory. It will and must have it.” With this battle-cry the 
secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their “entire territory” they 

No. 24064, October 15, 1861.— Ed. 

understand in the first place all the so-called border states*— 
Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennes- 
see, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire 
territory south of the line that runs from the nortwest corner 
of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, 
call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory 
hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory 
thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first 
have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, 
however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, 
were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the 
United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free 
labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field 
of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. 
The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of 
defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread 
and perpetuation of slavery. 

The chain of mountains that begins in Alabama and stretches 
northwards to the Hudson River—the spinal column, as it were, 
of the United States—cuts the so-called South into three parts. 
The mountainous country formed by the Allegheny Mountains 
with their two parallel ranges, the Cumberland Range to the west 
and the Blue Mountains” to the east, divides wedge-like the 
lowlands along the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean from the 
lowlands in the southern valleys of the Mississippi. The two 
lowlands separated by the mountainous country, with their vast 
rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the actual area 
of slavery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into 
the heart of slavery, with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an 
invigorating climate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron 
ore, gold, in short, every raw material necessary for a many-sided 
industrial development, is already for the most part free country. 
In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can only 
be cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here the slave 
system vegetates only sporadically and has never struck root. In 
the larger part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these 
highlands comprise the core of the free population, which sides 
with the North if only for the sake of self-preservation. 

Let us consider the contested territory in detail. 

Delaware, the most northeastern of the border states, is factually 
and morally in the possession of the Union. All the attempts of the 
secessionists at forming even one faction favourable to them have 
since the beginning of the war suffered shipwreck on the 
unanimity of the population. The slave element of this state has 
long been in process of dying out. From 1850 to 1860 alone the 
number of slaves diminished by half, so that with a total 
population of 112,218 Delaware now numbers only 1,798 slaves.’ 
Nevertheless, Delaware is demanded by the Southern Confederacy 
and would in fact be militarily untenable for the North as soon as 
the South possessed itself of Maryland. . 

In Maryland itself the above-mentioned conflict between high- 
lands and lowlands takes place. Out of a total population of 
687,034 there are here 87,188 slaves. That the overwhelming 
majority of the population is on the side of the Union has again 
been strikingly proved by the recent general elections to the 
Congress in Washington. The army of 30,000 Union troops which 
holds Maryland at the moment, is intended not only to serve the 
army on the Potomac as a reserve, but, in particular, also to hold 
in check the rebellious slave-owners in the interior of the country. 
For here we observe a phenomenon similar to what we see in 
other border states where the great mass of the people stands for 
the North and a numerically insignificant slaveholders’ party for 
the South. What it lacks in numbers, the slaveholders’ party makes 
up in the means of power that many years’ possession of all state 
offices, hereditary engagement in political intrigue and concentra- 
tion of great wealth in few hands have secured for it. 

Virginia now forms the great cantonment where the main army 
of secession and the main army of the Union confront each other. 
In the northwest highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 
15,000, whilst the twenty times as large free population consists 
mostly of free farmers. The eastern lowlands of Virginia, on the 
other hand, count well-nigh half a million slaves. Raising Negroes 
and the sale of the Negroes to the Southern states form the 
principal source of income of these lowlands. As soon as the 
ringleaders of the lowlands had carried through the secession 
ordinance by intrigues in the state legislature at Richmond” and 
had in all haste opened the gates of Virginia to the Southern 
army, northwest Virginia seceded from the secession, formed a 

b On April 17, 1861.— Ed. 

new state, and under the banner of the Union now defends its 
territory arms in hand against the Southern invaders. 

Tennessee, with 1,109,847 inhabitants, 275,784 of whom are 
slaves, finds itself in the hands of the Southern Confederacy, 
which has placed the whole state under martial law and under a 
system of proscription which recalls the days of the Roman 
Triumvirates. When in the winter of 1861 the slaveholders 
proposed a general convention of the people which was to vote for 
secession or non-secession, the majority of the people rejected any 
convention, in order to remove any pretext for the secession 
movement. Later, when Tennessee was already militarily overrun 
and subjected to a system of terror by the Southern Confederacy, 
more than a third of the voters at the elections still declared 
themselves for the Union. Here, as in most of the border states, 
the mountainous country, east Tennessee, forms the real centre of 
resistance to the slaveholders’ party. On June 17, 1861, a General 
Convention of the people of east Tennessee assembled in. 
Greeneville, declared itself for the Union, deputed the former 
governor of the state, Andrew Johnson, one of the most ardent 
Unionists, to the Senate in Washington and published a “declara- 
tion of grievances”’,* which lays bare all the means of deception, 
intrigue and terror by which Tennessee was “voted out” of the 
Union.” Since then the secessionists have held east Tennessee in 
check by force of arms. 

Similar relationships to those in West Virginia and east 
Tennessee are found in the north of Alabama, in northwest 
Georgia and in the north of North Carolina. 

Further west, in the border state of Missouri, with 1,173,317 
inhabitants and 114,965 slaves—the latter mostly concentrated in 
the northwest of the state—the people’s convention of August 
1861 decided for the Union.‘ Jackson, the governor of the state 
and the tool of the slaveholders’ party, rebelled against the 
legislature of Missouri, was outlawed and took the lead of the 
armed hordes that fell upon Missouri from Texas, Arkansas and 
Tennessee, in order to bring it to its knees before the Confederacy 
and sever its bond with the Union by the sword. Next to Virginia, 
Missouri is at the present moment the main theatre of the Civil 
War. 

¢ The convention actually adopted this decision on March 9, 1861.— Ed. 

New Mexico—not a state, but merely a Territory, into which 25 
slaves were imported during Buchanan’s presidency in order to 
send a slave constitution after them from Washington—had no 
craving for the South, as even the latter concedes. But the South 
has a craving for New Mexico and accordingly spewed an armed 
gang of adventurers from Texas over the border. New Mexico has 
implored the protection of the Union government against these 
liberators. 

It will have been observed that we lay particular emphasis on 
the numerical proportion of slaves to free men in the individual 
border states. This proportion is in fact decisive. It is the 
thermometer with which the vital fire of the slave system must be 
measured. The soul of the whole secession movement is South 
Carolina. It has 402,541 slaves and 301,271 free men. Mississippi, 
which has given the Southern Confederacy its dictator, Jefferson 
Davis, comes second. It has 436,696 slaves and 354,699 free men. 
Alabama comes third, with 435,132 slaves and 529,164 free men. 

The last of the contested border states, which we have still to 
mention, is Kentucky. Its recent history is particularly characteristic 
of the policy of the Southern Confederacy. Among its 1,135,713 
inhabitants Kentucky has 225,490 slaves. In three successive 
general elections by the people—in the winter of 1861, when 
elections to a congress of the border states were held; in June 
1861, when elections to the Congress in Washington took place; 
finally, in August 1861, in elections to the legislature of the State 
of Kentucky—an ever increasing majority decided for the Union. 
On the other hand, Magoffin, the Governor of Kentucky, and all 
the high officials of the state are fanatical supporters of the 
slaveholders’ party, as is Breckinridge, Kentucky’s representative 
in the Senate in Washington, Vice-President of the United States 
under Buchanan and candidate of the slaveholders’ party in the 
presidential elections of 1860. Too weak to win over Kentucky for 
secession, the influence of the slaveholders’ party was strong 
enough to make this state amenable to a declaration of neutrality 
on the outbreak of war. The Confederacy recognised the 
neutrality as long as it served its purposes, as long as the 
Confederacy itself was engaged in crushing the resistance in east 
Tennessee. Hardly was this end attained when it knocked at the 
gates of Kentucky with the butt of a gun to the cry of: “The South 
needs its entire territory. It will and must have it!” 

From the southwest and southeast its corps of free-booters 
simultaneously invaded the “neutral” state. Kentucky awoke from 
its dream of neutrality, its legislature openly sided with the Union, 

surrounded the traitorous Governor with a committee of public 
safety, called the people to arms, outlawed Breckinridge and 
ordered the secessionists to evacuate the invaded territory 
immediately. This was the signal for war. An army of the 
Southern Confederacy is moving on Louisville, while volunteers 
from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio flock hither to save Kentucky 
from the armed missionaries of slavery. 

The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and 
Kentucky, for example, against the will of these states, prove the 
hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the 
individual states against the encroachments of the Union. On the 
individual states that it considers to belong to the “South” it 
confers, to be sure, the right to secede from the Union, but by no 
means the right to remain in the Union. 

Even the slave states proper, however much external war, 
internal military dictatorship and slavery give them everywhere for 
the moment a semblance of harmony, are nevertheless not without 
oppositional elements. A striking example is Texas, with 180,388 
slaves out of 601,039 inhabitants. The law of 1845, by virtue of 
which Texas became a State of the Union as a slave state, entitled 
it to form not merely one, but five states out of its territory. The 
South would thereby have gained ten new votes instead of two in 
the American Senate, and an increase in the number of its votes in 
the Senate was a major object of its policy at that time. From 1845 
to 1860, however, the slaveholders found it impracticable to cut up 
Texas, where the German population plays an important part, into 
even two states without giving the party of free labour the upper 
hand over the party of slavery in the second state.” This furnishes 
the best proof of the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding 
oligarchy in Texas itself. 

Georgia is the largest and most populous of the slave states. It 
has 462,230 slaves out of a total of 1,057,327 inhabitants, 
therefore nearly half the population. Nevertheless, the slavehold- 
ers’ party has not so far succeeded in getting the Constitution 
imposed on the South at Montgomery” sanctioned by a general 
vote of the people in Georgia. 

In the State Convention of Louisiana, meeting on March 21, 
1861, at New Orleans, Roselius, the political veteran of the state, 
declared: 

No. 6206, March 16, 1861).— Ed. 

“The Montgomery Constitution is not a constitution, but a conspiracy. It does 
not inaugurate a government of the people, but an odious and unmitigated oligarchy. 
The people were not permitted to have any say in this matter. The Convention at 
Montgomery has dug the grave of political liberty, and now we are called upon to 
attend its funeral.” 4 

Indeed, the oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders 
utilised the Congress of Montgomery not only to proclaim the 
separation of the South from the North. It exploited it at the same 
time to reshape the internal constitutions of the slave states, to 
subjugate completely the section of the white population that had 
still preserved some independence under the protection and the 
democratic Constitution of the Union. Between 1856 and 1860 the 
political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the 
slaveholders’ party had already sought to prove, not so much that 
Negro slavery is justified, but rather that colour is a matter of 
indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery. 

One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy 
is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread 
and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states 
and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side 
they have taken first through the ballot-box and then with arms. 
The Confederacy, however, counts them for the “South” and 
seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states which 
the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the 
relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual 
slave states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing 
democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of the 300,000 slave- 
holders. . 

Were it to relinquish its plans of conquest, the Southern 
Confederacy would relinquish its capacity to live and the purpose 
of secession. Secession, indeed, only took place because within the 
Union the transformation of the border states and Territories into 
slave states seemed no longer attainable. On the other hand, were 
it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern 
Confederacy, the North would surrender to the slave republic 
more than three-quarters of the entire territory of the United 
States. The North would lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and 
the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow strip from Penobscot Bay to 
Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the Pacific 
Ocean. Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would 
draw California after them.™ Incapable of wresting the mouth of 

the Mississippi from the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic 
in the South, the great agricultural states in the basin between the 
Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the 
Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would be compelled by 
their economic interests to secede from the North and enter the 
Southern Confederacy. These northwestern states,” in their turn, 
would draw after them into the same whirlpool of secession all the 
Northern states lying further east, with perhaps the exception of 
the states of New England. 

What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the 
Union, but a reorganisation of it, a reorganisation on the basis of 
slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. 
The plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by 
the principal speakers of the South at the Congress of Montgom- 
ery and explains the paragraph of the new Constitution which 
leaves it open to every state of the old Union to join the new 
Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole Union. In 
the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice impossible, 
the white working class would gradually be forced down to 
the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly 
proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of 
freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the 
South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the 
Irishman, or their direct descendants. 

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, 
nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of 
slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out 
because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side 
on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the 
victory of one system or the other. 

If the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems 
have hitherto contended for domination, are a thorn in the flesh 
of the South, there can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in 
the course of the war up to now, they have constituted the chief 
weakness of the North. One section of the slaveholders in these 
districts simulated loyalty to the North at the bidding of the 
conspirators in the South; another section found that in fact it was 
in accordance with their real interests and traditional ideas to go 
with the Union. The two sections have equally crippled the North. 
Anxiety to keep the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states in 
good humour; fear of throwing them into the arms of secession, 
in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices and 
sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union 

government with incurable weakness since the beginning of the 
war, driven it to half measures, forced it to dissemble away the 
principle of the war, and to spare the foe’s most vulnerable spot, the 
root of the evil—slavery itself. 

When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked * 
Frémont’s Missouri proclamation on the emancipation of Negroes 
belonging to the rebels,” this was done solely out of regard for the 
loud protest of the “loyal” slaveholders of Kentucky. However, a 
turning point has already been reached. With Kentucky, the last 
border state has been pushed into the series of battlefields between 
South and North. With the real war for the border states in the 
border states themselves, the question of winning or losing them is 
withdrawn from the sphere of diplomatic negotiations and 
parliamentary discussions. One section of slaveholders will throw off 
the mask of loyalty; the other will content itself with the prospect of a 
financial compensation such as Great Britain gave the West Indian 
planters. Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the 
decisive slogan— emancipation of the slaves. 

That even the most hardened Democrats and diplomats of the 
North feel themselves drawn to this point, is shown by some 
announcements of very recent date. In an open letter, General 
Cass, Secretary of State for War under Buchanan and hitherto one 
of the most ardent allies of the South, declared emancipation of 
the slaves the conditio sine qua non of the Union’s salvation.” In his 
last Review for October, Dr. Brownson, the spokesman of the 
Catholic party of the North, on his own admission the most 
energetic adversary of the emancipation movement from 1836 to 
1860, publishes an article for Abolition. 

“If we have opposed Abolition heretofore,” he says among other things, 
“because we would preserve the Union, we must a fortiori now oppose slavery 

whenever, in our judgement, its continuance becomes incompatible with the 
maintenance of the Union, or of our nation as a free republican state.” ¢ 

Finally, the World, a New York organ of the diplomats of the 
Washington Cabinet, concludes one of its latest blustering articles 
against the Abolitionists with the words: 

4 In a letter to Frémont of September 11, 1861, (New-York Daily Tribune, 
No. 6380, September 15, 1861).— Ed. 

No. 6381, September 16, 1861.— Ed. 

“On the day when it shall be decided that either slavery or the Union must go 
down, on that day sentence of death is passed on slavery. If the North cannot 
triumph without emancipation, it will triumph with emancipation.” 

November 7, 1861