Bearing this fact in mind, I think you will more readily realize the moral impossibility of our assent, save under the impulse of a last dire necessity, to a Disunion Peace, and for these reasons:
I. Such a peace will naturally secure to Slavery the precise object, for which the Rebellion was fomented. If we consent to divide our country, the victorious Rebels will very fairly say, 'Give us our share of the Federal Territories.' In other words, 'Surrender to Slavery, through Disunion, the very thing which you refused to concede to it to prevent Disunion.' And that demand, if we concede the right and the fact of Secession, can with difficulty be resisted. Yet its concession involves the moral certainty that Mexico and Cuba will in time be overrun, conquered, absorbed, and devoted to Slavery, by the martial, aggressive, ambitious despotism to 'which we shall have succumbed. Read Prof. Cairnes's recent essay on 'The Slave Power,' and you will have a clearer idea of the wolf we now hold by the ears, and which is far less dangerous while so held than he must be if let go.
II. The boundary which Secession proffers is an unnatural and impossible one. It not only alienates from the Union Western Texas, East Tennessee, and other regions wherein a majority have ever been and still are devoted to the old flag, but insists on wresting from us West Virginia--that is, that portion of the old State of Virginia which slopes toward the Ohio river--a region larger in area than three of the States left in the Union put together--a region which, never having been practically slaveholding save to a very limited extent, has ever been preponderately and earnestly loyal--a region mainly held to-day, as it has almost uniformly been held, by the Unionists--a region which, if surrendered to the Confederacy, interposes a wedge of foreign territory between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the East and the West--leaving them connected by a shred (see map) not one hundred miles broad, and rendering a farther and more fatal disruption of the Union wellnigh inevitable. When the Baltimore and Ohio railroad shall traverse for the most part a foreign country--when the Mississippi, through all the lower part of its course, shall have been surrendered by us to a power inevitably hostile to our growth and jealous of our prosperity--when Wheeling and Memphis shall have become foreign ports, and Cincinnati and St. Louis frontier cities--the gravitation of the Free West toward the country to which her rivers are hastening and through which her bulky staples find their natural outlet to the great highway of nations, will be all but irresistible.