\, 
 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS 
 
 A. STUDY 
 
 AMERICAN NATIONALITY 
 
 A FACT OF SCIENCE 
 
 CAPT. E. B. HUNT, 
 
 COEPS or ENGINEERS, UNITED STATES ARMY, 
 
 NEW YOKK : 
 D. VAN NOSTRAND, 192 BROADWAY. 
 
 LONDON: TRVBNEE & CO. 
 18G3. 
 
Entered, accovding to Act of Congress, in tlie year 1S63, by 
 
 D. YAN NOSTRAND, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District 
 of New York. 
 
 9^\ 
 
 ^x> 
 
 electrottped by 
 
 Smith & McDoitgai,, 
 
 82 & S4 Beekman-st. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 As the following discussion of the scientific bases on which our 
 nationality has rested and must rest, was written in September, 
 1862, the partial coincidence of certain views herein set forth 
 with those embodied in a portion of the President's Message of 
 December, 1862, must be regarded as a natural agreement, and as 
 an evidence that these views are truthful and necessary results of 
 candid study. 
 
 The Editor's Table of Harper's Magazine, for February, 1863, 
 contains a condensed re-casting, by an able hand, of many facts and 
 views presented in this study, and I can but hope that the popular 
 audience thus reached, as well as the readers of the following 
 pages, may find therein, not only food for reflection, but new 
 courage, and new hope, amid the gloom and distraction of a 
 trying hour. E. B. H. 
 
 Kew Haven, Coxn., Jan. 20, 1863. 
 
ABSTRACT OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Science interprets God's Designs concerning Man and Nations 1 
 
 Natural Development in Human History 9 
 
 Nations are Organisms. — Growth in Complexity. — Specialization. — Cir- 
 culation. — Nervous Structure and Cerebration. — Definiteness and Pro- 
 tective Boundaries 10-19 
 
 Secession and its Demands 19-21 
 
 No natural dividing Boundary 21 
 
 Data of Physical Geography 22 
 
 General Structure of the North American Continent. — The Continental 
 Plain. — Atlantic Slope. — Appalachian Mountam System. — ^Valley of 
 the Lakes. — The Mississippi Basin. — West-American Mountain and 
 
 YaUey System 23-34 
 
 North and South structural Bonds. — Coastwise Trade and Travel. — Mis- 
 sissippi Eiver System 34-37 
 
 East and West Union Bonds. — Lakes, Canals, Rivers, and RaDroads. — 
 Grain Movement. — Intercommunication. — Coal Mines. — Water-power. 
 
 — Union of great Interests 3 7-42 
 
 Our Future Military Estabhshments 42 
 
 Capacity of United States to support Population. — Actual Population 
 
 Movements. — Prospective Increase 43-47 
 
 The problem of Races. — The Negro tropical. — White men will want all 
 Temperate Lands. — The Amazon Valley providentially destined for a 
 Negro Empire. — Southern Land Problem. — Gospel of Slavery. — Free 
 White Labor, the destined Conqueror 47-57 
 
 Passions derange Natural Economics. — Perversion of our Official 
 
 Tenures 57-59 
 
 Three possible Endings of our Contest, agreeing in a Restored L^nion. . 59-61 
 
"I am compelled to ascribe the frame of this system to an intelligent 
 Agent." — Newton. Second Letter to Dr. Bentley. 
 
 " For it became Hun who created them to set them in order." — Newton. 
 Optics, 3l5i Query. 
 
 " If the laws of Nature, on the one hand, are invincible opponents ; on the 
 other, they are irresistible auxiliaries." 
 
 "There is something in the contemplation of general laws, which power- 
 fully induces and persuades us to merge individual feeling, and to commit 
 ourselves unreservedly to their disposal ; while the observation of the calm, 
 energetic regularity of Nature, the immense scale of her operations, and the 
 certainty with which her ends are attained, tends, irresistibly, to tranquilize 
 and reassure the mind, and render it less accessible to repining, selfish, and 
 turbulent emotions." — Sir J. F. W. IlERSCnELL, on the Study of Xatural 
 Philosophy. 
 
 "Science may attempt to comprehend the purposes of God, as to the des- 
 tiuies of nations, by examining with care the theatre, seemingly arranged by 
 Him, for the realization of the new social order, toward which humanity is 
 tending with hope. For the order of Nature is a foreshadowing of that which 
 is to be." — Guyot's Earth and Man. 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 Truth is King : Cotton and Corn are subjects. Nations, 
 like individuals, owe tlicir first allegiance to truth, wisdom, and 
 duty. Now, wbile our nationality is being tested and proved, 
 while trials beset, and great convulsions perplex us, let us, 
 with all-enduring faith, hold fast to the eternal principles of 
 reality and right. More than ever amid the varying phases 
 of a fluctuating contest, do we need to stand flist on eternal 
 foundations. Calmly trusting that God will not permit chaos 
 to conquer His own divine order, we must defend those social 
 and political principles which we have sincerely and gratefully 
 accepted as our national heritage and trust. As helpful to 
 this end, we now propose to examine in the cold light of 
 Science, those grand Natural realities which, through the ages, 
 must constitute our Union Foundations. 
 
 Science. interprets God. He has wrought into the fabric of 
 material nature those ideas and designs which He has chosen 
 to adopt. The inorganic and organic worlds arc thus records 
 of Divine thought and intent. Science reads these records. 
 Through long historic ages the mind of man has been accu- 
 mulating knowledge and slowly gathering to itself the means 
 for deeper and clearer insight. Science stands in the attitude 
 of devout inquiry, within the courts of the grand temple of 
 Nature, attentive to every whisper of the Divine oracle. Her 
 profoundest faith is in God, who, through special arrange- 
 ments of material masses, and infinitely diversified mechanisms 
 of organic structure, has expressed His own mind, will, and 
 
8 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 nature. Through patient toil and earnest interrogation, Sci- 
 ence has learned much. The work of Nature-interpretation 
 goes on with increasing success and with ever-expanding faith 
 in the Designing Author. Intelligent communion with Him 
 augments and grows intimate. Loftier views and grander in- 
 sights throng upon us. The higher scientific mind of to-day 
 has learned to see in and through "the invariable order 
 of occurrence " which prevails in Nature, a grand expres- 
 sion of God's supreme will, unfolding itself by a secular pro- 
 gress. What once was Fate is now our Father's will. There 
 is no more brute matter ; we see only materials through which 
 the Divine will expresses itself in language which, however im- 
 perfectly comprehended now, will, in the unfolding order of 
 ages, tell forth that Wisdom which was able to incorporate all 
 progress in a germ. 
 
 Man is part of Nature, and human history is the culmination 
 of Natural history. Divine designing has wrought out in man 
 its completest earthly expression. A long-drawn geologic 
 progress and a parallel organic progress have reached their 
 climax, and perhaps their limit, in the human period. Man, 
 from his Eden origin to his expanded and complex present, 
 has half consciously lived out into an epic record, the Divine 
 legation impressed upon, expressed through, and vitalized in 
 human nature. Through myriad years of preparation, the 
 earth had been prophetically forming for man's habitation, and 
 now, for six thousand years, he has been expanding over its 
 surface, and through all fluctuations has been shaping it to 
 his needs. God introduced man upon earth when it had be- 
 come fitted to be his habitation. We but express the profound 
 and fundamental conviction of that noble school of Physical 
 Geography whereof Humboldt, Ritter, and Guyot may be 
 named as expositors, when we say that the earth was not only 
 deliberately framed and organized to be man's habitation, but 
 
UNI O.N FOUNDATIONS. ^ 
 
 SO specially combined as to prescribe and prophesy the actual 
 order of human history. Man and his earth-home were framed 
 in the same mutual adaptation and coordination which we 
 are wont to sec between the house and its inhabiting family. 
 When, therefore, we study the relations between a nation and 
 the country it inhabits, we are, in strict science, striving to 
 read the Divine will as concerning that nation. Earnest piety, 
 duty and profound policy concur in demanding that nations 
 shall conform to the Divine will as expressed in their condi- 
 tions of habitation. The nation which, with true insight, sees 
 and accepts the Divine purpose in its existence, can not fail of 
 that best prosperity possible for it, which our Father had, from 
 the measureless past, held in store for its benediction. On the 
 other hand, a nation which blindly combats its God-given con- 
 ditions of existence, can not fail to suffer frustration and those 
 bitter punishments, masked, perhaps, under the guise of seem- 
 ing prosperity, which arc kindly ready to constrain transgress- 
 ing communities back into the right path of national life. 
 
 A survey of human history shows a well-defined and easily- 
 comprehended progress, from the rude beginnings among no- 
 madic tribes, to the present state of high, but unequal, civiliza- 
 tion. America had only a provisional or transient population of 
 Indians, until Columbus, three hundred and seventy yeai^ ago, 
 initiated a European knowledge of our continent. Amid tho 
 growth and decline of Old-World nations, the knowledge of a 
 New AYorld was held in reserve, until the time should come for 
 its colonization under conditions conformed to the Divine plan of 
 development. It was not until its actual discovery that the intel- 
 lectual, social and political progress of Western Europe had 
 formed a civilization fit to be transplanted into our reserved con- 
 tinent. Not until man had attained worthy ideas of liberty and 
 order ; not until political culture had ripened into a systematic 
 blendinjr of individual freedom with or-T-anized iiovernment. was 
 
10 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 it Divinely permitted, that the permanent population of this con- 
 tinent should be introduced. Then, by degrees, the pressure ot 
 over-population combined with the love of enlarged liberty to 
 afford the emigration needed for the introduction of a vigor- 
 ous colonization. Our whole history has plainly shown our 
 national function to be one which concerns humanity at large. 
 Starting with a clear field and with the benefit of all Asiatic 
 and European experience, it was the mission of America to 
 carry forward social organization beyond any Old- World type. 
 The Spanish- American States, having failed to achieve such 
 progress, the execution of this continental mission has devolved 
 wholly on the United States. By our past history, we have 
 accepted this mission, and, until 1860, we were apparently in 
 the full tide of success. It is a distinctive feature of the true 
 American that, under his daily activities, he cherishes a deep, 
 abiding consciousness of, and faith in, this grand relation of his 
 country to the whole human progress. This is to him not only 
 a grand and hopeful, but a fearfully responsible destiny. Amer- 
 icans can not, if they would, hide from themselves the fact, that 
 the future of a continent is divinely intrusted to their fidelity, 
 and that humanity at large has a special claim on them truth- 
 fully to serve its cause. 
 
 The scientific study of nature throws much light on the 
 question as to " what constitutes a State." Minds which have 
 grown familiar with the organic kingdom and the grand princi- 
 ples of organic growth and structure, can hardly fail to recog- 
 nize that nations are social and political organisms, and that 
 the entire human family constitutes an organism of still higher 
 generality. Germs and eggs are developed by growth into 
 mature, prolific organisms. So do nations, from germinal be- 
 ginnings or colonies, develop, by vital groAvths, into imperial 
 organizations, which, in turn, establish colonies, and finally die 
 by violence, disease or senility. The Sothic period was, by the 
 
UNION -FOUNDATIONS. 11 
 
 ancients even, called the lifetime of great nations, as illus- 
 trated in the Persian, Grecian and Roman empires. Our nation 
 has passed through its feeble infancy, its colonial boyhood, its 
 bold launch into independence, and its early years of youno- 
 manhood. Nations, like other organisms, pass from a primal 
 simplicity of structure to an increasing complexity of parts 
 and functions. Nations too, like organisms, at first manifest 
 but slight mutual dependence of parts, but with their growth 
 into complexity, their functions and subdivisions develop an 
 increasing inter-dependence, until the total life at last rests on 
 the functional perfection of each portion. Man's practical vo- 
 cation is to labor. As society progresses, labor is subdivided 
 or specialized, and the economic prosperity of a nation depends 
 on the perfection of this labor-specialization, or on the proper 
 correlation of its specialties. So too in plants and animals, 
 does progress in the specialization of functions and functional 
 organs and in their normal correlation, increasingly mark every 
 step from germination to maturity. 
 
 In all animal embryos, a serous layer and a mucous layer 
 are formed around the yolk. The mucous membrane develops 
 into the nutritive system, and evolves all the organs for prepar- 
 ing food. The serous membrane develops the nervous, muscu- 
 lar, and osseous systems, all directing their actions outward. 
 So too, in a nation of high organization, there is a food-pro- 
 ducing class, and there is a class supplied with food, whose la- 
 bors of manufacture, skill and administration give back to the 
 food-producers needful compensations. In the further embry- 
 onic progress, the vascular layer appears between the serous 
 and mucous layers, and develops into the system of blood ves- 
 sels, whose function is to take up the food supplied through 
 the mucous or nutritive system, and to carry or circulate it to 
 the serous or nervo-muscular system, or wherever it is needed 
 for growth or repairs. Thus in the social growth, commerce 
 
12 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 arises to interchange food and materials, -wbether raw or man- 
 ufactured. As growth progresses, the nutritive, nervo-mus. 
 cular, and circulating organs grow more complex and special- 
 ized, just as in a mature community, agriculture, manufactures 
 and commerce grow ever more multifarious and special in their 
 matter and methods. The sap of plants and the blood of ani- 
 mals are the analogues of the mass of products circulated by 
 commerce. Liebig compares the blood discs, which, without 
 " an immediate share in the nutritive process, are the medium 
 for all the sustaining activities of the blood," to money, which 
 is "the medium of all activity in the life of the state." The 
 channels of blood circulation grow complex, as organization ap- 
 proaches the higher and maturer types : so, in an advanced so- 
 ciety, do the highways of commerce grow intricate. The main 
 channels of commercial circulation are capacious, direct, crowd- 
 ed, and rushing. Mam arteries, like railroads, send rythmic 
 pulses. From main arteries to the capillaries, from railroads 
 to the footpaths, there is increasing ramification, curvature, 
 contraction, slowness, and irregularity. 
 
 The most important analogy between a national and an 
 animal organism is that existing between the governmental 
 structure and the nervous system. Nervous organisms, in all 
 animals, consist of ganglionic centres and nerve trunks, the 
 ganglions being cellular and the nerves fibrous. The afferent 
 or sensory nerves bear in impressions to the nervous centres, 
 and the efferent or motor nerves bear outward from the same 
 centres excitations to movement by muscular contractions. In 
 many animals these ganglionic centres are repeated freely 
 without diversity of function, and in other species these multi- 
 plied, homogeneous ganglions are continuously connected by 
 nerve trunks. As we rise from the simpler to the more com- 
 plex and highly organized animal types, the multiplication of 
 ganglionic centres is more and more designed to control special 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 13 
 
 functions by special ganglions. Thus, as we approach the 
 higher forms, not only do wc find special ganglions for deglu- 
 tition, respiration, and locomotion, but ganglions of special 
 sense, as sight, hearing, taste, &c. Just in proportion as an- 
 imal structures rise toward higher types, do some of the an- 
 terior ganglions develop into preponderance ; passing from an 
 inappreciable superiority in the lower forms, up to the fully de- 
 veloped brain of man. Structural rank can be almost meas- 
 ured by brain-preponderance. As multiplication of ganglions 
 without specialization of function marks low or rudimentary 
 organization, so do minute ganglionic specialization and uni- 
 fication through brain-government indicate high organic rank 
 and eifective endowment. 
 
 In a nation, the governing centralizations are the ganglions ; 
 the representative agencies which inform and prompt to action 
 are the afibrent nerves, and the executive agencies which en- 
 force law are the efierent nerves. A single absolute head, a 
 patriarch or barbaric king, forms a one-ganglion government. 
 A multitude of heads essentially independent, a league of 
 barons bound only by some outside pressure, is analogous to 
 animals having many ganglions of like function, such as the 
 inferior art'iculata. When one baron among many grows to 
 superior strength and influence, he becomes the cephalic gan- 
 glion, head or king. When his dynasty is established and its 
 strength fully acknowledged, the brain-predominance becomes 
 fixed and a high, articulate structure appears. As the subor- 
 dinate repositories of political power take special state functions, 
 the vertebrate structure appears. When deliberate legislation 
 on wise, constitutional foundations supervenes, the function of 
 the cerebrum is typified, and pure mind frames the measures 
 which dominant will energizes as effective law. 
 
 It is important to remark that, in an extended country like 
 ours, the geographical subdivisions do not conform to diversities 
 
14 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 of political functions. Throughout the country, states have 
 severally identical functions, as have the counties in a state, and 
 the to-vyns in a county. The organic interpretation of our re- 
 publican government may be thus stated. Convenience dictates 
 subdivision of areas into states, counties and towns. The town 
 is a pure democracy, and the people act in mass. The coun- 
 ties act in such functions as towns cannot, and counties can, 
 appropriately exercise. The states act in such functions as 
 counties cannot, and states can, fitly fulfill. The general 
 government acts in such functions as the states cannot, and 
 the general government can, effectively discharge. The 
 principle is that of graduation of governing functions by lo- 
 cality, so that each grade shall exercise those, and only those, 
 which are appropriate to it. To centralize all government 
 for a vast area, in a single absolute head, is utterly subversive 
 of freedom, and is only possible by absorbing into the nervo- 
 motor system of the centralized head so much of the nation's 
 life and strength as will crush out its diffused vitality. Gov- 
 ernmental diffusion by ganglionic graduation to the greatest 
 convenient extent, gives to all the largest freedom, and im- 
 poses on each grade of governing centres only such a mini- 
 mum and adapted charge as belongs to its place in the scale. 
 To the individual is thus left all the freedom possible. Or- 
 ganically speaking, this graduation of governing ganglions 
 specializes their functions. Thus the individual, town, coun- 
 ty, state and general government severally exercise the 
 special functions appropriate to their places on the scale. The 
 elective and representative process is functionally analogous 
 to afferent nerve-action, by sending in to the several grades 
 of ganglionic centres representative impressions from the 
 people, as data for deliberative consideration. To this affer- 
 ent system belong the various associations which embody the 
 voices of the manifold special interests blended in a commu- 
 
UNIO?f FOUNDATIONS. 15 
 
 nity, outside of its technical political structure. The brain- 
 functions, of intelligent deliberation upon representative im- 
 pressions and of volition in legislation, being performed, ex- 
 ecutive agents act the motor-nervous part in the practical ex- 
 ecution of law. In the normal exercise of specially assigned 
 functions, each grade of ganglions commands those below it, 
 and obeys those above it on the scale. 
 
 It is to be noted that each of these political ganglions is 
 cerebral. Cerebration is only centralized so far as concerns 
 the centralized functions. Special cerebration in graduation 
 seems to be the organic definition of our form of government. 
 We have before indicated functional specialty and cerebral 
 predominance as the criteria of dignity in organic types. The 
 signal blending of both in our government, by the introduction 
 of systematic suh-ccrebraiion and of graduated governing 
 functions^ is organically a great advance over previous sys- 
 tems. Should complexity be objected to it, we need but re- 
 mark that increase of structural complication is an invariable 
 attendant on organic elevation. Our system certainly rests 
 on the presumption of a general loyalty in each component to 
 its assigned part ; just as, in all high organisms, each organ 
 must do its work, or all will suffer. It is a truly significant 
 fact, that this system of graduated government should have 
 taken shape at the precise time it did, and in the country 
 which emphatically, by its vast future, seemed to demand it. 
 
 The views now imperfectly stated are not barren. Nothing 
 can make the heresy of secession seem more heretical than to 
 test its application in our government, when viewed as an or- 
 ganism. Were we but a polype nation, fissiparous division 
 would not be unnatural. Were we but some brainless, articu- 
 late organism, we might be cut in two and each half might be- 
 coipe a living whole. That sub-cerebral states should assume 
 superiority over the cerebral general government, is not less 
 
16 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 monstrous than the fantasy of a peaceful, painless dismem- 
 bering of a high political organism. Treason seemed almost 
 to have found an anesthetic which would enable a nation of 
 high and sensitive structure to be cleft in twain, unconscious 
 of the dividing edge. 
 
 Secession theories rest on the postulate of a nation man- 
 ufactured at a certain date. Nations grow : they are not 
 made. True organisms, they, like all animate beings, grow 
 from embryo to old age. Their governments are vital reali- 
 ties; not parchments nor bargains. Our Constitution as 
 framed and signed was the written statement, the formal ex- 
 pression of the goverment organically embodied in our people. 
 The framers, with wonderful sagacity," drew forth the logic of 
 facts as they stood, and shaped our governing agencies in ex- 
 quisite adaptation to the growing and future nation. To all 
 this obligation of fitness was superadded that of plighted 
 faith, of solemn compact. But the Constitution is no mere 
 contract between huckstering states, to be broken on shallow 
 pretexts of interest or caprice. Above every sanction of con- 
 sent, it expressed the grand governing system, Avhich was 
 then and is now a natural fact in our people. Under this for- 
 mula, we have gi'own into an expanded national development, 
 and are now bound in a living unity, which admits of sever- 
 ance only on the same surgical conditions which attend all 
 organic amputations. We shall do well ever to bear in mind 
 this living, organic nature of our government, and not to rest 
 an unreasoning faith on the mere verba scripta of the Con- 
 stitution. This instrument, with wondrous insight, provides 
 for its own modification, to insure its permaneat agreement 
 with the natural, organic constitution of our people in all 
 stages of our growth. Too exclusive an attention to the his- 
 toric phases of our political organism, and too lawyer-like a 
 concentration on the written charter which formalized it, 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 17 
 
 have perhaps blinded our statesmen to the profounder organic 
 entity, which lives in our people, and which, as it then ex- 
 isted, was so happily appreciated by the framers. To exalt 
 legal formalism above vital realism is to frustrate Nature, 
 or to breed liberating revolutions. 
 
 Definiteness of external form and external protecting envel- 
 opes, are among the most distinguishing and universal traits 
 of individual organisms. From seed-time to sapless age, 
 every plant not only has the defined form of its species 
 throughout its entire development, but it exists under the 
 protectiye covering of a skin, shell, or bark. The tender 
 germ is enfolded in the secure heart of the seed, and the vital 
 cii'culation of the growing bark is covered by a hard, protect- 
 ing rind, which serves only for defense. The egg, whence 
 all animal life emanates, is encased in a shell or protective 
 layer, under cover of which the embryo develops an outer 
 defensive skin, while all the most vital and vulnerable mem- 
 bers are formed in the central cavity. From the embryonic 
 ovisac to the wrinkled skin of old age, the same protective 
 policy is consistently exhibited throughout the entire animal 
 kingdom. The skins and shells of radiates, the shells of mol- 
 luscs, the rings of articulates, the skins, hair, and feathers of 
 vertebrates, concur in testifying that organic life is only pos- 
 sible for individuajs possessii^ properly defined outer bound- 
 aries, and externally guarded by adequate protective envel- 
 opes against the manifold dangers that surround them. 
 
 So is it with a nation. National life is conditioned on def- 
 inite exterior boundaries, and on adequate protective fron- 
 tiers. Organic analogy indicates that nations should only 
 vary their boundaries in conformity with the conditions of ex- 
 pansion by healthful growth. A policy of ambitious conquest, 
 an ungoverned greed of territory, find no sanction in organic 
 law. That a growing nation should expand into such needed 
 
18 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 space as is not vigorously preoccupied, until its territorial 
 requirements are duly answered, is in conformity with the 
 growth-laws of all organisms. It is also clear, that after a 
 nation has achieved its legitimate territorial expansion, its 
 normal career is, while resting content on its defined bound- 
 aries, to foster its internal specialization and cerebration. 
 
 An animal denuded of all external skin or shell would 
 speedily succumb to the irritations and dangers of such a 
 monstrous existence. A nation without protective frontiers 
 would suffer a like fate. History sufficiently exemplifies the 
 unhappy destiny of states without natural defenses. Some 
 stronger neighbor finds ready occasion to invade and subju- 
 gate, to absorb and assimilate, w^hen no intervening mountain 
 range, or impassable water, marsh or forest, enforces respect. 
 We have seen nations expend untold wealth in building walls, 
 castles, forts, fortresses, and citadels, hoping thereby to make 
 good the defects of their naturally weak boundaries. We have 
 seen war brooding persistently along open frontiers, and for 
 ages avoiding mountain barriers. Centuries have respected 
 the sea margins of England, while the German Lowlands have 
 been ensanguined with ever-recurring contests. Poland died 
 from lack of a defensive envelope. Balances of power and 
 grand guarantees do not prevent Belgium from now fortify- 
 ing Antwerp, at great cost, and from maiijtaining a standing 
 army and national guard, vastly disproportionate to her means ; 
 while republican Switzerland rests securely on her faithful 
 Alps, upheld by no combination of " the great powers." It 
 always has been, now is, and ever will be true, that nations 
 can only insure their permanent integrity by secure natural 
 or artificial boundaries, or by an absolute preponderance of 
 available defensive strength. Nations, like animals, rest fun- 
 damentally on their powers of self-defense. For a time, alli- 
 ances may avail, but such supports are precarious and exact- 
 
UNION'FOUNDATIONS. 19 
 
 ing. To do justly is much, but the justest of lambs offends 
 the wolf who is not eating him. Organic and historic teach- 
 ings alike declare that a nation owes it as a first duty to itself, 
 to insm-e the best attainable defensive boundaries. 
 
 The United States had, by the acquisition of Florida, Loui- 
 siana, Texas and California, secured to itself what seemed a 
 most perfect defensive frontier, subject only to maritime at- 
 tack. With neighbors too weak to endanger us directly, we 
 seemed only liable to invasion by Great Britain through, and 
 by the aid of, her American Provinces. All our external dan- 
 gers narrowed down to operations on a naval basis. We had, 
 by a system of fortifications, provided for the defense of our 
 chief sea-ports, and our maritime ^ strength had grown to be 
 formidable even to the greatest naval powers. Devoted to 
 peaceful pursuits, and finding all our energies needed in deve- 
 loping the resources of our country, we scarcely dreamed of 
 war. Fortunate, in our history, wherein only three consider- 
 able wars are recorded, we had neither foreign animosities nor 
 ambitions to gratify. We were content with our boundaries, 
 and we knew that they involved no serious danger to our 
 nationality. Our unexampled prosperity was doubling our 
 population, and quadrupling our Avealth in each twenty-five 
 years. 
 
 In this happy attitude of our affairs the frenzy of secession 
 seized upon a portion of our people. A fierce demand for dis- 
 union was suddenly ejaculated and our government, betrayed 
 into false and feeble hands, was by turns narcotized and 
 terrified. The madness grew by indulgence, assumed imperial 
 manners, loftily dictated terms, put on injured airs, and 
 finally when a renovated government proceeded to assert its 
 rights, dramatically summoned the arbitration of arms. 
 Henceforth a contest of force has ruled, our government on 
 the one hand defending its sovereignty, and Secessia on the 
 
20 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 other, demanding a national dismemberment and an indepen- 
 dent sovereignty for the seceded states. Even were we in- 
 different to the dignity and integrity of our government, and 
 ready by a total sacrifice of our self-respect to seek peace on 
 any terms, we could hardly concede the division called for. 
 Any attempt to trace a boundary would raise insuperable 
 difficulties. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, 
 which have never enacted the secession juggle, would be 
 vehemently claimed as due to the South. We should be ex- 
 pected, either to abandon our capital, or to leave it under the 
 guns of a foreign power. Fortress Monroe and the Norfolk 
 Navy-yard would be required at our hands. "Western Virginia, 
 including the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, would be graciously 
 accepted. A joint interest in the navigation of the Ohio 
 might be kindly conceded us, but when we reach the Father 
 of Waters, we must at once consent to intersect it by a foreign 
 boundary. West of the Mississippi, there would appear to be 
 no clue to a boundary except to yield whatever might be ask- 
 ed. In the Gulf we should be invited to relinquish Pensacola, 
 Tortugas and Key West. The time would hardly have come 
 to make a Tnare clausum of the Gulf, but the great North- 
 West would most truly have become a terra clausa. The 
 Pacific States, having lost all faith in, and respect for, the re- 
 mains of the United States, would of course set up for them- 
 selves. 
 
 When secession was inaugurated, the cotton states were to 
 cut loose and the border states were to keep the peace and 
 protect Cottondom by interposing a neutral ground. When 
 the epidemic took hold of the border states, slavery itself 
 was to fix the boundary. The north line of the slave states 
 was then the definite cleavage-trace accepted by the South, 
 when a more vaulting ambition did not purpose to annex and 
 provincialize the upper valley of the Mississippi. This sim- 
 
UNION -FOUNDATIONS. 21 
 
 plc plan has failed. Four slave states have not seceded, one 
 has split and one is in large part reclaimed. The loyal states 
 have fought valiantly for the pristine Union, and the Upper 
 valley of the i\Iississippi is fully purposed to tolerate no 
 foreign domination of its great river. There is no indication 
 that even a simple, geometrical line of true political separation 
 could be drawn ; and even were such a trace agreed upon, it 
 could not possess, in even the most moderate degree, the proper 
 requisites for a defensive frontier. It is a physical fact that 
 there is no such separating line across the territory of the 
 United States ; no possible frontier on which the parts of a 
 divided union could rest in mutual security. Had we then 
 every disposition to concede nationality to the seceded states, 
 we could find no line which Avould serve us as a defensive 
 boundary. We should open ourselves to attack not only from 
 the South, but from the South reenforced by such European 
 allies as might join flags with slavery. Perhaps combined 
 British and Southern attack on three sides might endanger 
 our dismembered nationality. We think it could not ; but we 
 are sure that we should show a signal lack of wisdom were we 
 now to make such an attack possible. 
 
 Nor could any supposable separating line be permanent. 
 Nature has given no hint of any such deliberate purpose. 
 The elements of the present contest are not of a character to 
 rest side by side in peace, out of respect to some wire-drawn 
 parallel of latitude of treaty adoption. History repeatedly 
 shows, how in far less " irrepressible conflicts," strong physi- , 
 cal boundaries have failed to arrest border raids, and chronic 
 recurrences of hostility. We could never bring ourselves to 
 regard any separating line as for ever obligatory. There can 
 be no boundary between the United and seceded States, which 
 will rise above the rank of a belligerent coinpromise line ; and 
 no possible peace, through disunion , can be more than a truce. 
 
22 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 This is a solemn and irrefragable flict ; a fact, consequent not 
 on feeling only, but on imperious natural realities, wliich 
 must inspire and govern our national future. In order to a 
 clearer ajDpreciation of this momentous declaration, we will 
 briefly consider some leading general features of American 
 Physical Geography and Social Development. 
 
 We will first state some prime data and principles of Phy- 
 sical Geography. The land masses of the Earth compose six 
 single or three double continents : Asia- Australia, Europe- 
 Africa, and North and South America, whose respective areas 
 in geographical miles, as given by Guyot are, Asia, 14,128,- 
 000; Australia, 2,208,000; Europe, 2,688,000; Africa, 
 8,720,000; North America, 5,472,000, and South America, 
 5,136,000. Humboldt deduced the following average eleva- 
 tions, above the sea: Asia, 1,151 feet; Europe, 671; North 
 America, 748, and South America, 1,132. Their respective 
 lengths of shore-line and areas in geographical square miles 
 to each mile of shore-line are, Asia, 30,800 and 459 ; Aus- 
 tralia, 7,600 and 290 ; Europe, 17,200 and 156 ; Africa, 
 14,000 and 623; North America, 24,000 and 228, and 
 South America, 13,600 and 376. The general course of the 
 Old World mountain-ranges is latitudinal ; the great Andes 
 and Rocky Mountain backbone of the New World, is nearly 
 meridional. The three northern continents are temperate 
 and arctic ; the three southern are tropical and sub-tropical. 
 The historic course of empire is westward, along the north 
 temperate zone. Cold closes the great arctic plains to human 
 habitation ; heat gives the torrid zone chiefly to the tropical 
 races. Civilization has lingered near shores through South- 
 ern Asia, the Mediterranean basin, Western Europe, and 
 North America. Sea-coasts, islands, peninsulas, and river 
 valleys, have attracted and governed man's migrations, and 
 developed his faculties. The freely intersected and vastly 
 
UNIOl^ FOUNDATIONS. 23 
 
 diversified surface of the Old World along the historic zone, 
 has stimulated man's physical and mental powers, thus orig- 
 inating and ripening his civilization. 
 
 The general structure of the North American Continent is 
 strikingly simple. The Sierra Madre and Rocky IMountain 
 system, extending 4,000 miles north-westerly from the Isthmus 
 to the Arctic Ocean, is the grand axis of upheaval. A vast 
 triangular plain, resting on this great mountain barrier, as a 
 base, projects its vertex outward to the remote coast of La- 
 brador. This magnificent continental plain, having an 
 average elevation above the sea, of between 600 and 700 feet, 
 and nowhere in mass exceeding 2,500 feet, unlike the vast, 
 bleak, sterile and frozen table-lands of Asia, which in Thibet 
 reach an elevation of 14,000 feet, has every orographical, cli- 
 matic, and fertile requisite for playing a master part in the 
 grand drama of human progress. The table-lands of Bavaria 
 and Spain are elevated much above even the summit lines of 
 this great American expanse. Except in a few limited moun- 
 tain ridges, this area nowhere loses its productive capacity by 
 reason of its altitude ; nor do we, on the other hand, find dis- 
 proportionate spaces sacrificed to swamps. 
 
 The general distribution of this continental plain is in two 
 great slopes, declining respectively toward the Gulf of Mexico, 
 and toward Hudson's Bay, and the Arctic Ocean. A low 
 east and west swell, without any well-defined ridge or crest, 
 traverses this plain. Starting from the high base of the 
 Rocky Mountains, between the parallel head-waters of the 
 Missouri and Sasketachewan Rivers, where it is about 3,000 
 feet high, this swell divides the Missouri head-waters from 
 those of the Red River of the North, sinking near the latter 
 to 1,350 feet, and rising around the head-waters of the IMis- 
 sissippi to about 1,700 feet. A short distance west of Lake 
 Superior, this swell divides near the source of the 1^'. 
 
24 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 elevated 1,680 feet, and forks around the basin of the great 
 Lakes and the St. Lawrence. The south ridge divides the 
 Lake and Ohio tributaries at an elevation of from 1,000 to 
 1,300 feet, the Genesee and Alleghany Rivers at 1,488 feet, 
 sinks in the Hudson and Champlain Valley to 140 feet, and 
 rises opposite Quebec to 1,500 feet. The north fork of this 
 swell, dividing the Lake and Lawrentian basin from the Hud- 
 son's Bay basin, smks near Lake Simcoe to 1,100 and 1,200 
 feet, and rises again opposite Quebec to 1,500 feet. As we 
 proceed from the treeless polar plains of the Mackenzie River 
 basin, southerly to the Gulf of Mexico, we traverse 2,400 
 miles of our great continental plain, nowhere rising above 
 an elevation of 1,700 feet, nowhere observing any bold con- 
 trasts or transitions, and yet, by the whole transit, we pass 
 from arctic mosses to tropic palms. The east and west pro- 
 files of this plain exhibit a slight general declivity eastward, 
 from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. They also show 
 a great variety of features which, however, leaves almost the 
 entire area within fertile conditions. It would seem that 
 Providence designed throughout this continental plain, to de- 
 rive meridional variety from simple climatic gradations, and 
 latitudinal variety from diversity of surface features. 
 
 The North American continent consists of the following 
 subdivisions. 
 
 The Atlantic Slope, passing from the St. Lawrence down 
 the coast, including Florida and a portion of the Gulf slope 
 to Mobile Bay, is drained by rivers with short courses, run- 
 ning in general perpendicular to the coast. This inclined 
 slope or plain, varies from 50 to 200 miles in width, and the 
 elevation of its upper margin ranges from 140 to over 1,000 
 feet. It is throughout its whole extent, free from well marked 
 transverse ridges, and profiles parallel to the coast will 
 show a plain-like continuity, intersected by no efiective 
 
UNION- FOUNDATIONS. 2a 
 
 separating features. The ocean frontage constitutes an 
 eflfective union bond, by connecting this narrow slope in a 
 coastwise navigation. This slope is like the half of a river 
 basin ; the coasting trade thus becomes analogous to the 
 Mississippi river trade, and, like that, it is a powerful, natural 
 connecting bond. 
 
 The Appalachicm Mountain Sysicm* extends in a N. E. 
 and S. W. direction 1,300 miles, from the promontory of 
 Gaspe on the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, to North Alabama 
 where it sinks down into the approximately level strata form- 
 ing the Gulf Slope. This mountain system consists of 
 numerous nearly parallel ridges or folds, which are distributed 
 into two general ranges, separated from each other by a nar- 
 row valley, nearly continuous from N. to S. and called the 
 Appalachian Valley. This is locally known as the Champlain, 
 Hudson, Kittatiny or Cumberland Valleys, the Great Virginia 
 Valley and the Valley of East Tennessee, and it varies from 
 an average breadth of 15 miles in the N. E. to about 10 in 
 Virginia, and 60 in Tennessee. The chain of mountains to 
 the eastward of this long valley, is made up of the Green 
 Mountains in Vermont, the Highlands in New York, the 
 South Mountains in Pennsylvania and the Blue Ridge in 
 Vii'ginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, including therein 
 the Black, Iron, Smoky and Unaka Mountains. The White 
 Mountains of New Hampshire, though partially isolated, be- 
 long to this chain, as being the central mass of a curved sweep 
 in the Green Mountains and heights of land extending to- 
 wards Gasp6. The chain of mountains west of the Appala- 
 chian Valley includes the Adirondack, Cattskill, Alleghany 
 and Cumberland ranges, and extends, with some interruption, 
 from Northern New York to Middle Tennessee. The Appala- 
 
 * See Prof. Gujot's admirable paper in the American Journal of Science, 
 March, 1861. 
 
26 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 chian Mountain system is remarkable as possessing no grand 
 central ridge, but in its place appears tbe long valley or 
 "negative axis" already described. A great number of 
 parallel ridges, broken at short intervals, give a series of 
 fruitful valleys and transverse gaps, through which river 
 courses, highways and railroads find passage. The general 
 tendency of the system is to greater elevation in going South, 
 and the culminating region is at the southern end, where the 
 great upheaval dies out abruptly into the Atlantic and Gulf 
 plain. Black Dome, or MitcheU's Peak, the highest point not 
 only of the Appalachian system but east of the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, rises to 6,707 feet and at least twenty-four summits of the 
 southern culminating section overtop Mount Washington, the 
 culminating point of the northern section, which is only 6,228 
 feet high. Mount Mansfield, (the Chin,) the highest summit of 
 the Green Mountains, is 4,430 feet high, and Mount Marcy, 
 the apex of the Adirondacks, is 5,379. ' The western slope of 
 the Appalachian Mountain system rises from, or dies into, a 
 broad plateau base, averaging about 1,000 feet in elevation. 
 
 The portion of the great continental plain included be- 
 tween the Appalachian and Rocky Mountain chains, is com- 
 posed of three great areas, forming the Hudson's Bay and 
 Arctic basins, the Lake and St. Lawrence basin and the 
 Mississippi basin. 
 
 The Hudson'' s Bay Basin offers so little useful land that, 
 in a general view, it must be held as Arctic and nearly un- 
 inhabitable. More to the west, the Arctic Slope extends so 
 much fiirther south, that the valley of the Red River of the 
 North may have an important future. 
 
 The valley of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence is 
 unique in the world. The area of the lakes and river is 
 94,000 geographical square miles, (each equal to ||f statute 
 square miles,) while the entire basin of which they are part 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 27 
 
 only measures 297,600 geographical square miles. That so 
 small a surface should feed such large reservoirs, seems re- 
 markable even when we regard them as simple river expansions. 
 The area of this basin equals 10 Po basins, 4^ Rhine, 7 Elbe, 
 1^ Dnieper, and 37 Connecticut basins. Considering the 
 small evaporation in this latitude, it is not perhaps mysterious 
 that one-third the total area of this basin consists of water 
 evaporating surface, besides which the Niagara and St. Law- 
 rence are duly supplied. Lake Ontario is 231 feet high and 
 6.300 geographical square miles in area; Erie, 565 and 
 9,600 ; St. Clair, 570 and 360 ; Huron, 600 and 20,400 ; 
 Michigan, 600 and 22,400; Superior, 630 and 32,000. 
 The drainage summits along the rim of this basin being only 
 1,500 feet or less in elevation, all fertile lands therein offer a 
 promise of tillage, after yielding their present wealth of forest 
 products. This wealth, intercepted from the sea in great part 
 by the rapids and ice of the Niagara and St. Lawrence, has 
 found a signal natural compensation in that remarkable 
 depression of the Appalachians which made the Erie and 
 Oswego Canal outlets possible. 
 
 The Mississippi Basin* includes most of the vast plain 
 between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountain systems. Its 
 area is 1,244,000 statute square miles and exceeds that of 
 the whole continent of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway 
 and Sweden. The Amazon basin alone upon earth exceeds 
 it, and this has more than once and a half its development. 
 The frozen Obi lacks some 70,000 square miles of equaling 
 it, the La Plata is nearly §, the Yenesei about ^, the Lena, 
 Amour, Hoang-Ho, Yang-tse-Kiang and Nile, about f each, 
 the Ganges less than I, the Indus less than }, the St. Law- 
 rence and Lake basin less than i, the Oronoco, a little over j, 
 
 * See the elaborate and important report of Captain A. A. Humphreys and 
 Lieut, n. L. Abbott on the Mississippi Kivcr, 18G1. 
 
28 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 the Euphrates i, the Columbia and Rio Grande, each lesg 
 than i, the Delaware, ytIj ^^^ the Connecticut j^-. On this 
 vast space fifteen Rhine basins would find room, England and 
 "Wales might be twenty-one times repeated, and Continental 
 France be six times superposed. Over 300,000 square miles* 
 in Texas and New Mexico, belonging to the same structural 
 category as the Mississippi Basin proper, are not included in 
 these statements, and need not be separately discussed. 
 
 Ideas formed on the contracted scale of the river basins of 
 Western Europe, need to be rudely shocked by forcible ex- 
 hibits of the immense magnitudes of the Mississippi River 
 system. Nor are conceptions based on the vast but sterile 
 Siberian basins more adequate. The high plateaus and im- 
 mense mountain spaces of Southern Asia, make even the 
 rivers of China and India somewhat fallacious guides when 
 we would investigate the capacities of the Mississippi basin 
 for human habitation. There is no great river basin on the 
 globe, which approaches it in its proportion of useful fertility, 
 and especially in cereal productive power. In Illinois, for in- 
 stance, corn can be raised at from eight to twelve cents per 
 bushel and wheat at from twenty-five to thirty cents. Hardly 
 an acre in the 55,405 square miles of this state is naturally 
 unproductive ; hence we need hardly wonder that in the last 
 decade (1850-60,) her population has advanced from 851,470 
 to 1,711,753. 
 
 Throughout the Mississippi basin there is sufiicient rain to 
 give effect to the fertility of the soil. The annual average is 
 30.4 inches, of which one-fourth or 21,300,000^000,000 
 cubic feet are discharged into the Gulf. The annual rain-fall 
 ranges from 68.4 inches in Louisiana to 13.1 at Fort Union. 
 In the Ohio and Upper Mississippi Valleys, the annual fall 
 ranges from 24.0 inches at Fort Snelling to 50.9 at West 
 * Statute miles are meant unless otherwise stated, 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 29 
 
 Salem in Southern Illinois. The decrease of rain-fall is pro- 
 gressive and general from South to North, and a prevailing 
 decrease is observable in receding from the ]\Iississippi Riv'er, 
 either east or west, but it is far more marked as in going 
 "westward, we approach the Rocky Mountains. It seems to 
 be a correct general statement of facts, that, starting from the 
 mouth of the Mississippi, there is a gradual decrease of rain- 
 fall as we ascend the river or any of its tributaries. 
 
 It is not easy to realize the immense areas of the secondary 
 basms, drained by the chief tributaries of the Mississippi, 
 Starting at the mouth, we first reach the Red River basin, 
 which contains 97,000 square miles, on which the average 
 rain-fall is 39 inches, of which \ is discharged. The Red 
 River is 1,200 miles long, and has its source 2,450 feet high 
 though at Preston, 380 miles below, it is but 641 feet. The 
 Yazoo basin has an area of 18,850 square miles, and an 
 average rain-fall of 46.3 inches o£ which -~ are discharged. 
 At Horn Lake, 500 miles from its mouth, the Yazoo is 210 
 feet high. The Arkansas and White River basin has an 
 area of 189,000 square miles, and an annual rain-fall of 39 
 inches,' I of which is discharged. The Arkansas has its source 
 1,514 miles from its mouth, and at the -height of 10,000 feet. 
 At Fort Atkinson, 1,095 miles from its mouth, it is 2,331 
 feet high, and its mouth is 162 feet high. The St. Francis 
 basin measures 10,500 square miles, and has 41.1 inches 
 annual rain-fall, --- of wliich is discharged. Its source is 
 380 miles fi-om its mouth, is 1,150 feet, and its mouth is 200 
 feet high. The Ohio basin has an area of 214,000 square 
 miles, and 41.5 inches of rain-fall, of which Z,- are discharged. 
 The Ohio at Coudersport, 1,265 miles from its mouth, is 
 1,649 feet high, and its mouth, near Cairo, is 275 feet. At 
 Pittsburg, 975 miles up, the elevation is 699 feet, and at 
 Cincinnati, 515 miles up. it is 432 feet. The Missouri basin 
 
30 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 has an area of 518,000 square miles and an average rain-fall 
 of 20.9 inches, of which -/- are discharged. The Missouri 
 is 2,908 miles long to its Madison Fork source, which is 
 about 6,800 feet high, while Fort Benton, 2,644 miles up, is 
 2,845 feet, and the mouth near St. Louis, is 381 feet high. 
 The Upper Mississippi basin, above the junction with the 
 Missouri, contains 169,000 square miles, and has 35.2 inches 
 rain-fall, of which ~ are discharged. The river course is 
 1,330 miles, and its source is in a tributary of Itasca Lake, 
 at the elevation of 1,680 feet. It rises in a region of lakes 
 and swamps, entirely free from mountains. From source to 
 mouth, the Mississippi River is 2,616 miles long, and the 
 Mississippi-Missouri River is 4,194 miles long. The 
 total length of all the streams in the Mississippi river-system 
 could hardly be estimated, but it has been computed that they 
 afford 40,000 miles of navigable water. Between the several 
 tributaries of the Mississij)pi, the chief of which rise in the 
 Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, there are no separating 
 mountain ranges. The Ozark Mountains alone rise from this 
 great basin, a short, limited and isolated range, without 
 general significance. The Lake and Lawrentian Yalley is as 
 it were a counter-sloped tributary, and no emphatic separation 
 distinguishes it, as may be realized when we remember that 
 Bellefontaine, the highest land in Ohio, is only 1.400 feet 
 high. Careful consideration of the several heights stated, 
 will sufficiently indicate the general plain-like structure of 
 the great area west of the Appalachians from which the river 
 valleys have been excavated. 
 
 Nearly midway between the Mississippi River and the 
 Pacific coast, the plain-like character which distinguishes the 
 valley proper, disappears, abruptly in .some parts, in others 
 by degrees. This ill-defined line marks the base of the true 
 eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. We are still quite 
 
UNI05r FOUNDATIONS. 31 
 
 unable, confidently to generalize the features of the broad 
 doiiiain between that line and the Pacific, which is so com- 
 plex in structure, and so imperfectly explored, that geologists 
 must expend patient years of observation before attaining a 
 reliable basis for idealization. Geographically, this region 
 contains, within our boundaries, 980,000 square miles, o.nd 
 measures on its longest cross-section, from San Francisco via 
 Salt Lake to Fort Laramie, about 1,000 miles, or 1,125 by 
 extending it to the secondary range of the Black Hills. Its 
 axis or general structural direction is north 20^ west. This 
 is but a section or fragment of the great mountain-system of 
 the earth, represented on our double continent by the Andes, 
 Cordilleras, and Rocky Mountains, and which as Lt. "Warren 
 remarks, is nearly on a great circle from Cape Horn north 
 to Bherings Straits, and thence across Asia to Sumatra, thus 
 ranging through two- thirds of the circumference of the globe. 
 There has been so much theorizing without facts, and map- 
 ping without surveys, on this western portion of the United 
 States, that limitation to realities is not now easy. The 
 various Coast Survey, Boundary, Topographical and Pacific 
 Rail Road surveys, afi"ord much and almost the only reliable in- 
 formation in this field. With Lt. Warren's map and the 
 Pacific Rail Road profiles spread before us, it still remains 
 difficult securely to go beyond some crude discussion. 
 
 It will not be doubted that the mass between the western 
 margin of our continental plain and the Pacific Ocean, be- 
 longs to a single vast upheaval, in which the entire cosmic, 
 great-circle, mountain system participated. The knowledge 
 actually obtained will, perhaps, justify us in tracing a struc- 
 tural analogy between the Appalachian and the West- Amer- 
 ican mountain system. We have defined the Appalachian 
 system as composed of two parallel grand ranges, separated 
 throughout by the Appalachian valley, all trending parallel 
 
82 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 to tlie Atlantic coast. Similarly, wc find running par- 
 allel to the Pacific coast, two grand ranges separated by a 
 broad elevated valley. The Cascade range, Sierra Ne- 
 vada, Coast range, and the Peninsular range of Lower Cali- 
 fornia, form a grand chain Avhich, starting in the Arctic zone 
 and reaching its culmination in Mount St. Elias, thence 
 slopes downward and disappears under the sea in Lower Cali- 
 fornia. The grand interior chain, consisting of the Rocky 
 Mountains, and Sierra Madre or Cordilleras, extends from 
 the Arctic Ocean to the Isthmus, rising gradually from the 
 north to its culmination in Popocatepetl, and thence declin- 
 ing to the moderate elevations at Panama. Both of these 
 chains are complicated and irregular in structure, and are 
 freely intersected by passes, and even by water-courses. In- 
 tervening between them is the broad, elevated, and irregular 
 valley of upheaval, drained in part by Frazers, Columbia, 
 and Colorado Rivers. It is possible that this valley may be 
 a true plateau, but the progress of exploration tends to take 
 from it this character, by interpolating subordinate interven- 
 ing mountain-ridges, such as the Humboldt, Wahsatch, Blue, 
 Mogoltcn, and numerous other minor ranges already made 
 known. On each of the Pacific Rail Road routes explored, 
 four or more summits were crossed, and it can hardly be 
 doubted that the ultimate result of complete surveys will be 
 to define a great number of limited ridges intervening be- 
 tween the two grand chains, and observing a general law of 
 parallelism with them, complicated by some centres of up- 
 heaval from which mountain crests radiate. The analogy of 
 Appalachian structure may re-appear in a wave-system of 
 ranges and valleys, with transverse passes and over-lappings. 
 It may be remarked that there is a general elevation of this 
 grand valley from north to south. The great Columbia Plain, 
 ■west of the Spokane, on the Stevens' railroad route, is raised 
 
UNION-FOUNDATIONS. 33 
 
 at the highest 2,340 feet, and averages about 2,100. The 
 upper valley of Snake River is about 2,500 feet ; Salt Lake 
 is 4,288, and Humboldt River Valley, also forming part of the 
 Great Basin, averages about 4,300 feet. The valley of 
 Grand River is about 4,500 feet, and the Colorado- Chiquito 
 Valley, about 5,000. The plateau of the Sierra Madre, and 
 the Llano Estacado or Staked Plain, are about 4,500 feet, 
 ■while the Guadaloupe Pass, -ffhich connects these areas across 
 the Eastern Mountain chain, is only 5,717. The table-land 
 of Anahuac or Mexico, is from G,000 to 8,000 feet high ; the 
 city of Mexico being 7,471. These average levels of the 
 broadest known areas, -which are here named ia regular order, 
 from north to south, indicate a general ascent southward 
 through the "\Yest- American Valley ; the apparent exception 
 in the Sierra Madre plateau, being possibly a secular result 
 of local diluvial waste. This upward slope tends to counter- 
 act the increase of heat with diminishing latitudes, thus pre- 
 serving a temperate climate even in Mexico. 
 
 An unfortunate result of the position and structure of the 
 "West- American Mountain and Valley system, is that a lack 
 of rain and consequent sterility exists to some extent over all 
 this region except along the narrow Pacific slope. It is too 
 early to speak positively, but there is apparently little hope 
 that a proportionate population can find support in this 
 900,000 square miles. Between the Rocky Mountain ridge 
 and the western edge of the continental plain, is a sterile belt 
 varying from 200 to 400 miles wide, in which poverty of soil 
 and lack of rain conspire to prohibit extended culture. The 
 same sad fate broods over a large portion of the Grand Valley, 
 which has a sterile soil, and is cut off" from rains by the moun- 
 tains running North and South on each side. Winds from the 
 Atlantic, almost discharged of moisture in their long transit 
 over the Mississippi Valley, reach the mountain region with 
 3 
 
34 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 but little water for precipitation. On the other hand, winds 
 from the Pacific, being intercepted bj the Cascade range and 
 the Sierra Nevada, -while thej give rain to the Pacific slope, 
 fail to transport and precipitate moisture in the amount needed 
 for. the great valley. Enough is precipitated by the action ol 
 the mountain crests to give fertility and especially grazing 
 capacity to a limited area of valley slopes and bottoms, where 
 the soil favors. This amounts to a valuable natural provision 
 for the mining population, which is sure to be required in 
 developing a mountain mineral wealth now almost unknown ; 
 but cereals can never be largely produced in this region. 
 The favored valley around San Francisco Bay, thanks to the 
 moderate relief of the coast range, has a happy dispensation 
 from sterility. This basin and the Pacific slope or coast belt, 
 averaging about sixty miles wide, within our boundaries, 
 form the chief land of agricultural promise throughout this 
 great western domain. Enough is known to foreshadow a 
 future of mining, with auxiliary agriculture and grazing, for 
 the "West- American mountain and valley system ; a future 
 which will bond itself naturally and indissolubly to the fertile 
 Mississippi Valley by the operation of the already initiated 
 Pacific railroad. 
 
 Having reviewed the main physical or structural features 
 of this continent, and especially of our own national domain, 
 we are now entitled emphatically to renew the declaration 
 that nature has provided no east and west line of separation 
 between the seceded and loyal states. All the grand structural 
 subdivisions of our territory, except the Lake basin, are 
 essentially meridional in direction. The Atlantic coast and 
 slope, and the Appalachian Mountain system, run N. E. and 
 S. W. This mountain system has its southern extremity 
 turned by the broad gulf slope, and it is so freely traversed 
 by practicable routes, that even were it revolved into an east 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 35 
 
 and west direction, it •would be but an imperfect frontier. The 
 great Mississippi basin has the axis or trunk of its tree-like 
 river system, almost perfectly meridional. The Rocky 
 Mountains, the great Western Valley, the Pacific mountain 
 chain, the Pacific slope, and the Pacific coast, have a generally 
 concurrent N. W. and S. E. direction. This average me- 
 ridional distribution not only prevents any natural bounda- 
 ries from east to west, but creates a singularly powerful system 
 of bonds between the North and South zones of our domain. 
 It would seem that the cosmic Designer shaped all the phys- 
 ical features of our country, as if purposely to stabilitate 
 American unity against the disruptive tendencies of diversity 
 in climate, interest, origin, or feeling. 
 
 The Atlantic coast navigation, penetrating on various lines 
 far into the interior of the Atlantic slope, binds the portions 
 of this long and narrow tract by an all-absorbing coasting 
 trade. The raili-oad system east of the Appalachians strongly 
 corroborates this sea-coast bonding, both by its routes 
 parallel to the coast and by those which bring down their 
 tribute from the interior to the coast as to a vast river. The 
 Appalachian Valley converts even the mountain system which 
 it divides, into a north and south bond, by the railroad route 
 it ofiers. 
 
 It is impossible to over-estimate the influence of the Mis- 
 sissippi river-system in binding all the area drained by it, 
 into a compact and powerful organic whole. The immense 
 commerce already developed on the forty thousand miles of 
 navigable rivers in this system, is but the twilight before the 
 dawn. Every year of pacific union must expand its vast pro- 
 portions, until the Gulf, the Florida Channel, and the Gulf 
 Stream shall be known but as its crowded entrance way or 
 outer mouth. Besides this exterior current of commerce, 
 there is an interior interchange of such mati-nitude that the 
 
36 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 analogy of the rain-fall, only one-fourth of which finds its way 
 to the Gulf, may perhaps, represent the relations of total and 
 exterior movement. The eye can scarcely inspect a map of 
 the Mississippi and its tributaries, without being struck with 
 its arborescent form. This tree-likeness, itself the analogue 
 of the system of blood vessels in animals, has a profound 
 meaning. It asserts to the eye, what experience has for years 
 been unfolding in fact, that this river system, this mechanism 
 for commercial circulation, is an organic unity, owing its 
 very vitality to that unrestrained freedom for self-develop- 
 ment, which it has hitherto enjoyed. To dismember it is 
 death ; to restrict it, is strangulation. To permit the mouth 
 of the Mississippi to be in foreign hands is to permit a grasp- 
 ing hand on our throat. That hand might not actually press 
 our jugular vein, but the indignity remains, and the threat 
 of strangulation is hardly less objectionable than the reality. 
 The men of the Upper Mississippi Valley can only look upon 
 a foreign custody of the mouth of their river system as an 
 outrage to be resisted forever. They instinctively and pro- 
 foundly feel that when God made the Mississippi, He also 
 made the Union, and that to sever what He so conjoined, is 
 to war against heaven, and to war as vainly as did Lucifer. 
 Divide the Mississippi ! better divide a tree at half its height 
 and expect the top to grow ! The ostentatious concession of 
 free navigation is like the politeness of a burglar, in asking 
 you to sup with him upon your own dainties and at your own 
 table. 
 
 As if to make more clear the indivisibility of the Missis- 
 sippi basin, the actual railroad routes included, strikingly 
 resolve themselves into north and south lines, bonding the 
 Gulf and the Lakes in significant union. The organic and 
 indestructible unity of the Mississippi Valley would, by its 
 inherent vitality, be ever asserting itself against any lines of 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 37 
 
 separation our vreakness or dereliction might inaugurate. 
 He can have but slender comprehension of our physical geog- 
 raphy, T\ho does not recognize this unity, and who does 
 not see therein a Divine assertion of the substantial unity of 
 this continent. Just because the vast and fertile INIississippi 
 basin is strictly a unit, must our country and the continent 
 have a united future. This valley so largely exceeds the At- 
 lantic and Pacific slopes, and the West- American valley, in 
 productive resources, that its influence must be permanently 
 dominant. This fact involves nothing alarming, as the 
 bonds of union and amity, which have joined the eastern 
 slope with the Mississippi Valley, and which, through the 
 Pacific railroad, will increasingly bind the West- American 
 system to it, are based in Natui-e, and are thoroughly recip- 
 rocal. The Rocky Mountains, indeed, furnish a perfect 
 natural boundary, (the only one on our continent,) were sep- 
 aration thereon desirable, but even this divellent possibility 
 will yield to the superior bonding force of that great des- 
 tined highway, which, like an artificial river, will spread its 
 branches along the Rocky Mountains, in the great western 
 valley, and over California, Oregon, and Washington, devel- 
 oping their vast mineral resources, and returning food from 
 St. Louis and manufactures from the east. 
 
 The east is bound to the Mississippi Valley by many 
 other ties than lineage or consanguinity. Continuity is a 
 powerful bond. From Boston to St. Louis, the traveler is 
 conscious of no break. There are great diversities, but no 
 place afibrds suggestions of boundaries, and, indeed, the bare 
 idea of seeking a boundary between east and west, is physi- 
 cally even more absurd than the like search as between north 
 and south. Stronger even than consanguinity, contiguity or 
 constitution, is the bonding force of that vast system of travel 
 and transportation between the Atlantic and the West, which 
 
38 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 though now but partially developed, stands unrivaled in the 
 world. The Great Lakes were a partial answer beforehand 
 to the need of inter-communication between the East and West, 
 and will eternally enforce, as by Divine sanction, their friendly 
 and compact union. Niagara Falls, the rapids of the St. Law- 
 rence, that river's ice-bound mouth, and the wondrous stretch- 
 ing forth of the Hudson valley toward Lakes Ontario and 
 Erie, form the God-given charter of New York city, and for- 
 ever ordain it as the true outlet of the Great Lakes, and the 
 port of entry for our continent. It is the great American 
 metropolitan heart, through which the life-renewing streams 
 of domestic and foreign commerce must ever circulate in pul- 
 sating rhythm, along arterial and venous highways to and 
 from every portion of our vast continental plain. This can 
 best be appreciated as a fact by considering the magnitude 
 and growth of the lake trade. 
 
 The five lake States, in 1850, produced 252,000,000 bush- 
 els of cereals, and in 1860 the amount rose to 354,000,000. 
 The cereals carried on the lakes in 1861, amounted to 
 101,819,596 bushels, of which Chicago shipped 54,167,007, 
 Milwaukie, 18,778,629, Toledo, 18,706,510, Detroit, 
 7,167,450, and other ports, estimated, 3,000,000. In the east- 
 ward march of this commerce, Buffalo trans-shipped over one 
 half of the total by the Erie Canal, Oswego nearly one sixth 
 by the Oswego Canal, Dunkirk and Suspension Bridge one 
 eleventh by railroad, other points nearly one twelfth, and 
 one twelfth went down the St. Lawrence by Montreal. The 
 annual value of merchandise and agricultural products carried 
 on the lakes, is now between two and three hundred millions 
 of dollars. In 1861 the Erie Canal carried to tide-water 
 2,980,144 tons, of which 2,158,425 tons consisted of broad- 
 stuffs. The New York Central Railroad in 1861, delivered 
 435,956 tons of through down freight. The New York 
 
UNION- FOUNDATIONS. 39 
 
 Canal receipts have gone up from $1,723,945 in 1859 to 
 $4,725,707 in 18G2, to August. The toll receipts Avcre 
 $722,829 in the single month of Julj, 1862. Our exports 
 of breadstuffs and provisions, almost entirely transported 
 over the Erie Canal and the parallel railroads, was valued at 
 $12,341,901 in 1821; $10,624,130 in 1836; $9,636,650 
 in 1838; $16,743,421 in 1845; $68,701,921 in 1847; 
 $77,187,301 in 1856 ; $93,969,682 in 1861, and for 1862, 
 a still larger aggregate will be reached. The cereal imports 
 of Great Britain amounted to 37,918,000 bushels in 1846, 
 when the corn-laws were repealed, and had risen to 
 115,059,000 bushels in 1860, the increase being largelj de- 
 rived from our inexhaustible stores. Russia, the great grain 
 shipping country of the Old World, exported only 27,000,000 
 bushels in 1854, and 49,000,000 in 1857, or less than one- 
 half our grain-crop moved on the lakes in 1861. Already 
 the State of New York produces barely one third of the wheat 
 it consumes, and New England only enough for three weeks' 
 consumption. The total cereal products of the United States 
 were, in bushels — 
 
 1S50. ISCO. 
 
 "U-heat 100,485,944 171,183,381 
 
 Eye 14,185,813 20,976,2SG 
 
 Indian Com 59-2,071,104 830,451,707 
 
 Total 706,7-15,801 1,0-22,611,374 
 
 The value of flour and meal produced during the years 
 ending July 1, 1850 and 1860, is thus distributed — 
 
 1850. ISGO. Per cent, increase. 
 
 New England States $0,320,486 $11,155,445 7G.5 
 
 Middle States 6?,43.3,179 79,086,411 18.5 
 
 W^estern States. 42,073,993 90,038,794 125.0 
 
 Southern States 10,581,817 30,707,457 85.5 
 
 PacificStates 1,^S?,333 6,096,262 222.8 
 
 Total $135,897,803 $223,144,369 64.2 
 
40 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 The great fact stands out boldly that the "West is not only 
 to feed the East, but is to supply European, and especially 
 British deficiencies. The wheat grown in Illinois, at twenty- 
 five to thirty cents, and the corn for eight to twelve cents, by 
 the mere movement of transportation, commands New York 
 and European prices, four or five times the cost of production. 
 Such being the vast importance and bonding power of the 
 lakes, canals, and railroads, they become a perpetual guaran- 
 tee of fii-m union between East and West. The Grand Trunk 
 Kailroad, the St. Lawrence and the Welland Canal, the Erie 
 and Oswego Canals, the New York Central and Great West- 
 em Railroads, the New York and Erie Railroad, the Pennsyl- 
 vania Central Railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 
 with their several connections and extensions, constitute a 
 system of east and west routes for travel or traffic, such as no- 
 where else exists ; a system bonding east and west, with a 
 force even exceeding the north and south bonding force of 
 the Mississippi, and the parallel railroads. If any one thinks 
 the great, dominating, prolific West will consent to be shut 
 in by a foreign South and a foreign East, he is so blind that 
 he should be dumb. 
 
 Western railroads are everywhere cheaply constructed, 
 and Western rivers are gentle in slope and therefore easy of 
 navigation, simply because the Mississippi Valley is a great 
 plain ; thus throughout this area, free inter-communication by 
 locomotive and steamboat, is naturally provided. This same 
 plaui-like structure also forbids the general prevalence of 
 water-power adapted to manufacturing uses. But water- 
 power and coal are the only bases of large manufacturing 
 organizations. Water-power being in general forbidden to 
 the West by the same structure which gives it fertility and 
 free inter-communication, it must look to coal for supplying 
 the deficiency. It has an enormous area of coal strata, but 
 
UNION' FOUNDATIONS. 41 
 
 it is a notable fact that the coal-beds grow less rich as we go 
 west. Our country has 192,000 square miles of coal fields, 
 which is twenty times the total European coal area. The 
 Appalachian fields, extending from Pennsylvania to Tusca- 
 loosa, contain 70,000 square miles, and in the Schuylkill 
 anthracite basin, there are about fifty seams, twenty-five being 
 workable. The Pittsbui'g bituminous field has twenty beds, 
 ten being workable. The Michigan field of 15,000 square 
 miles is poor, with only two or three workable beds. The 
 Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky basin, containing 50,000 
 square miles, has twelve beds, seven bcmg supposed work- 
 able. The Western basin in Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas, 
 containing 57,000 square miles, has six or seven beds, three 
 or four being supposed workable. We might thus infer that 
 coal mining would be permanently most profitable toward the 
 east, a view which is strikingly supported by the actual 
 statistics of our coal production. The total coal product in 
 1850 was valued at 5^7,173,750, and in 1860, at $19,395,765. 
 Of this last amount, Pennsylvania alone gave 75.9 per cent., 
 consisting of 9,307,332 tons of anthracite, worth $11,869,574, 
 and 66,994,295 bushels of bituminous, worth $2,833,859, 
 or a total of $14,703,433. Vii-ginia produced 9,542,627 
 bushels, worth $690,188, and Ohio 28,339,900 bushels, 
 worth $1,539,713. These facts indicate that the Appalachian 
 field is the great dynamic storehouse of our country, as it 
 is tlie one best provided with transportation outlets by 
 water. 
 
 The Appalachian Mountain system also afibrds most of the 
 useful water-power within the United States, and its structure, 
 especially in the Northern section, is remarkably adapted to 
 produce convenient, constant, and sufficient water-privileges. 
 When this combination of available water-power and pro- 
 ductive coal strata in the eastern section of our country is 
 
42 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 considered, it is as manifestly the Divine plan that this should 
 be the American- manufacturing region, as it is that the 
 prairies are designed for agriculture, the Gulf slope for cotton 
 fields, or the West- American mountain regions for mining. 
 New England and the Middle states are already conscious of 
 their destiny. It is well known that England owes much of 
 her present development to a happy conjunction of iron and 
 coal beds, and to the ease of transportation given by her rail- 
 way system and insular character. Pennsylvania, our iron 
 and coal state, is in nowise less favored by nature. New 
 England and New York, dowered with vast water-power and 
 easy water and railway transport, lack nothing but time and a 
 wise economy to complete the triumph in manufacturing pro- 
 duction, already so well begun. If happily labor is dearer 
 here than in Europe, wheat, cotton, and the American market 
 are nearer. Political economy* demands that agricultural 
 and manufacturmg production should be brought into close 
 neighborhood, and we cannot much longer sin against reason 
 and nature by interposing two Atlantic voyages between the 
 farmer and the factory, whenever this can be avoided. When 
 God placed the Mississippi Valley alongside the Appalachian 
 Mountain system, it was that raw material, manufactures, and 
 food might sustain each other in friendly Union, while supply- 
 ing man's chief wants by a free interchange within a single, 
 happy nationality. 
 
 Among the most sacred duties of those who are specially 
 charged with directing the future of our continent, is that of 
 excluding the European system of great standing armies and 
 armaments. If the " balance of power " system exacts such 
 costly offerings, we cannot too energetically suppress all ten- 
 dencies toward such a policy on American soil. Europe now 
 maintains in its peace-armies, about four millions of soldiers, 
 * See Carey's Works, 
 
UNION. FOUNDATIONS. 43 
 
 and expends on its military peace establishments, exclusive of 
 navies, about four hundred and sixty millions of dollars an- 
 nually, besides the loss by time taken from industrial pursuits, 
 which is estimated at one hundred and forty millions. Thus 
 Europe is six hundred millions of dollars poorer every year 
 because of its military organizations, besides the vast interest 
 payments for old wars, and current naval expenditures. Each 
 modification of the equilibrium between states results in wars 
 more or less general and destructive. It were better for us, even 
 on economic grounds, to fight out our present battle to the bit- 
 ter desolating end, than to perpetuate war and armaments by 
 now consenting to that division of domain which must bring 
 upon us the European system of military establishments, 
 debts, and wars. Our loss by the systematic abstraction of 
 labor from production would in a few years exceed the cost of 
 our present painful contest. Heaven help us if we are driven 
 to exchange our old peace organizations for the exhaustive and 
 demoralizing system which has long cursed European states, 
 which now burdens them to the verge of bankruptcy, and 
 ■which taxes labor to the last point of endurance in behalf of 
 a squad of bondholders. The practical efiect of preserving the 
 Union intact, will be to save us from this fate, and to realize, 
 so far as America is concerned, the project of a congress of 
 nations, in behalf of peace, our general government being in 
 fact our continental umpire. 
 
 The capacity of the United States to sustain population, is 
 but imperfectly comprehended, even by our most sagacious 
 minds. Looking exclusively to the capacity of our land for 
 producing cereals, vegetables, and dairy products, the following 
 distribution of our 3,306,8Go square miles into four grades is 
 a reasonable approximation. The first grade is entirely and 
 hopelessly sterile, and may be assumed as including 306,865 
 square miles. The second grade, which we will assume at one 
 
44 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 million square miles, has but very slight productive capacity, 
 but can raise grass, food, and forest products sufficient to sup- 
 port fifty persons to the square mile. The third grade, in- 
 cluding probably a million- of square miles, contains the in- 
 ferior arable lands, which are, on an average, fully capable of 
 supporting 150 persons to the mile. The fourth grade, 
 including the remaining million square miles, consists of the 
 rich arable lands, capable of sustaining at least 400 persons to 
 the mile by existing modes of culture. This estimate will 
 give a total population within the United States of six hundred 
 millions, when our territory shall be fully occupied. It is 
 almost certain that an improving system of agriculture will 
 very greatly increase these capacities, and that one person to 
 each acre, or 640 to the mile, in the fourth grade, would not be 
 an excessive estimate.* We have not assumed population 
 rates beyond those actually existing. Thus England and 
 "Wales have a population of 340 to the square mile, France 
 183, the Austrian Empire 146, Prussia 163, the Kingdom of 
 Italy 216, Belgium 411, Massachusetts 157.83, and Rhode 
 Island 133.71. When it is remembered how large a portion 
 of these states is occupied by unproductive mountains, and 
 that our prairie soil is unequaled in fertility, our assumed 
 rates cannot be found extravagant. 
 
 The actual movement of our population through seven de- 
 cades, as shown by eight census enumerations, is as follows : 
 3,929,827 in 1790; 5.305,925 in 1800 ; 7,239,814 in 1810; 
 9,638,131 in 1820; 12,866,020 in 1830; 17,069,453 in 
 1840; 23,191,876 in 1850; 31,448,322 in 1860, or 
 31,747,514, including Indian tribes, etc. The ratios of 
 increase in these successive decades are, 35.02 in 1790- 
 
 * A writer in the Encyclopedia Britannica goes so far as to estimate that 
 the New World can support a population of 3,G00,000,000, which would give 
 to the United States a much larger quota than we have supposed. 
 
union'foundations. 45 
 
 1800, and successively, 36.45; 33.13; 33.49; 32.67; 
 35.87 ; 35.59 ; and the average rate is 34.6. This rate slightly 
 exceeds that assumed by Malthus in his proposition that a 
 nation, unrestricted in its supply of food, -vvill double in 
 twenty-five years. Taking the rate of increase per decade at 
 33.33, we find 42,332,374 for 1870; 56,443,165 for 1880; 
 75,257,553 for 1890; 100,343,404 for 1900; 133,791,205 
 for 1910. Making due allowances for all probable hindrances 
 and drawbacks, we can hardly doubt that, in fifty years from 
 this time, there will be, or at least oright to be, over a hun- 
 dred millions of people within the present territory of the 
 United States. A continued application of the Malthusian 
 rate will give 63,49^8,562 in 1885; 126,997,124 in 1910; 
 253,994,248 in 1935 ; 507,988,496 in 1960; 1,015,967,982 
 in 1985. Thus this rule, which, for 80 years past, falls short 
 of our actual increase of population, gives us in a century and 
 a quarter over a thousand millions. It is not too much soberly 
 and after reasonable allowances, to expect, that, in case our 
 Union is preserved, and our normal growth permitted, our 
 people will number at least six hundred millions before four- 
 teen new decades shall bring in the year 2000. True states- 
 manship consists not in the cunning management of political 
 parties, or in the crafty handling of foreign relations, but in 
 giving to the far-off future its rightful consideration in the 
 policy of to-day. The six hundred millions who are entitled 
 to inhabit our land in the year 2000, have as true a right to 
 influence our present policy, as has the transient 2)crsonnel 
 of the passing generation. No man is fit to have a potential 
 voice in the conduct of our national afiairs, still less to bear 
 the honored name of statesman, for whom the developed 
 America of the future is not a living and consistent reality 
 by which he habitually and conscientiously shapes his present 
 course. Prophets foretell, but statesmen foreact. 
 
46 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 The progress of the United States in physical prosperity 
 has even exceeded that of its population ; thus confirming the 
 reasonableness of the anticipations now stated. The total 
 value of our domestic manufactures in 1850, exclusive of 
 amounts under $500 per annum, was $1,019,106,616, and 
 in 1860, this value was nineteen hundred millions, or $60.61 
 per capita of our population. The increase was 86 per cent, 
 in the decade, and 123 per cent, greater than that of tlie white 
 population in the same time. The increase of annual value 
 of our manufactured products from 1850 to 1860 considerably 
 exceeds our present national debt. Our manufactures employ 
 1,100,000 men and 285,000 women, directly supporting about 
 one sixth of our population, and indirectly supporting another 
 sixth, or a third directly and indirectly. The following table, 
 shows the. values and the ratio of increase in ten years of some 
 of our chief manufactured products : 
 
 1850. 1860. Per cent, increase. 
 
 Flour and Meal $135,897,806 $223,144,369 64.3 
 
 Agricultural implements 6,842,611 17,802,514 160.1 
 
 Pig Iron 13,491,893 19,487,790 44.4 
 
 Bar and roUed Iron 15,938,786 22,248,796 S9.5 
 
 steam Engines and Machinery 27,998,334 47,118,550 68.3 
 
 Iron Founding 20,111,517 28,540,656 42. 
 
 Coal 7,173,750 19,365,765 169.9 
 
 Clothing 43,678,802 64,003,975 47. 
 
 Lumber 58,521,976 96,912,286 63.9 
 
 Cotton goods 65,501,687 115,137,926 75.78 
 
 Woolen goods 45,281,764 68,865,963 52. 
 
 Leather 37,791,873 63,090,751 66.9 
 
 Boots and Shoes 53,357,036 89,549,900 67.8 
 
 In 1850, our banking capital was $227,469,077; in 1860, 
 it was $421,890,095. In 1850, the true value of real 
 estate and personal property in the United States, was 
 $7,135,780,228, and in 1860, it was $16,159,616,068 ; the 
 increase being $8,925,481,011, or 126.45 per cent. In 
 1850 there were 113,032,614 acres of occupied farm lands 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 47 
 
 improved, and 180,528,000 unimproved. In 1860, these 
 amounts had advanced to 163,261,389 and 264,508,244, or 
 fifty millions of acres were brought under improvement in the 
 decade. The cash value of farms was $3,271,575,426 in 
 1850, and $6,650,872,507 or over double in 1800. The 
 value of farming implements and machinery was returned in 
 1850 at $151,587,638, and at $248,027,496 in 1860. The 
 value of live stock in 1850 was $544,180,516, and in 1860 
 it was $1,107,490,216, or it more than doubled in the de- 
 cade. The tobacco crop advanced from 199,752,655 lbs. in 
 1850, to 429,390,771 lbs. in 1860, and cotton advanced from 
 2,445,793 bales to 5,198,077. The value of slaughtered 
 aniihals rose from $111,703,142 to $212,871,653. Our 
 railroad system exhibits the most remarkable increase, from 
 8,589 miles, costing $296,660,148 in 1850, to 30,793 miles, 
 costing $1,151,560,829 in 1860. No candid and sagacious 
 mind can fail to see in these typical facts of a decade, which 
 show a physical progress so far exceeding our increase of pop- 
 ulation, the real and well assured foundation for a future 
 national growth at least equal to the preceding estimate. It 
 remains to be seen how far the blight of secession will frustrate 
 our normal development. 
 
 Two great anomalies pervade and vitiate our national pro- 
 gress. Race and caste create discords where all should be 
 harmony. Black and white, slave and free, are our two 
 serious national problems, and problems which we shall be 
 compelled to solve.* 
 
 * Ilistorically, these problems stand as follows : Our total colored popu- 
 lation was T57,363 ia If 90; 1,001,436, in 1800; 1,377,810 inlSlO; 1,771,562 
 in 1820; 2,328,642 in 1830; 2,873,758 in 1840; 3,638,762 in 1850, and 
 4,441,765 in 1860. The decadal ratios of increase are (1790—1800), 32.23 ; 
 37.58; 28.58; 31.45; 23.41; 26.62; 22.07; averaging 28.85, against 34.6 
 for our total, and the decadal ratio of colored increase is 0.834 or five sixths the 
 ratio of increase of our whole population, and 0.806 or four fifths that of our 
 
48 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 Science is not lacking in definite instruction upon the ques- 
 tion of races. As each animal species has its own limits of 
 habitation on the earth's surface beyond which it cannot flour- 
 ish, so have the varieties of the human race. There are 
 tropical races and there are temperate races, each thriving 
 only in its own proper climate. The man of the tropics not 
 only belongs within the tropics, but suffers by transfer to 
 colder regions. Thus, in Rhode Island or Connecticut, the 
 deaths of blacks and mulattoes exceed the births, and in Boston 
 they are nearly as two to one. The man of the temperate 
 zone deteriorates by transfer within the tropics. Climates 
 and races are in such definite mutual adaptation, that it is 
 above all needful to have the right man in the right place. 
 The United States territory lies wholly in the north tempe- 
 rate or truly historic zone, and, as a broad natural fact, it be- 
 longs to the temperate races. The Caucasian race, under 
 
 white population. If we allow for white immigration, the ratio of increase in 
 ihe colored population wiU exceed that of the whites. The total number of 
 ahen passengers arriving in the United States, most of whom were emigrants, 
 was, from 1820-1830, 151,824; 1831-40, 599,125; 1841-50, 1,713,251; 
 1851-60, 2,598,214; 1820-60, 5,062,414. The slave population was 697,891 
 ml790; 893,041 in 1800 ; 1,191,364 in 1810 ; 1,538,038 in 1820 ; 2,009,043 
 in 1830; 2,487,455 in 1840; 3,204,313 in 1850; 3,953,760 in 1800. The 
 ratios of increase are 27.97; 33.40; 28.79; 30.61; 23.81; 28.82; 23.39; 
 averaging 28.11. The free colored population was 59,466 in 1790; 108,395 
 in 1800; 186,446 in 1810; 233,524 in 1820; 319,599 in 1830; 386,303 in 
 1840; 434,449 in 1850; 488,005 in 1860; and the ratios of increase were 
 82.28; 72.00; 25.23; 36.87; 20.87; 12.46; 12.33, averaging 37.43, or 
 nearly three eighths. The wJiite population was 3,172,464 m 1790 ; 4,304,489 
 in 1800; 5,862,004 in 1810; 7,861,937 in 1820; 10,537,378 in 1830; 
 14,195,695 in 1840 ; 19,553,114 m 1850 ; 26,975,575 in 1860, and the ratios of 
 increase were 35.63 ; 36.18; 34.11; 34.03; 34.72; 37.74; 37.97, averaging 
 35.78. The average ratios of increase in seven decades are then : total popu- 
 lation, 34.60; white, 35.78; colored, 28.85; free colored, 37.43; slave, 28.11. 
 A careful examination of these data will show the tendencies of our popula- 
 tion development. 
 
UNIOlf FOUNDATIONS. 49 
 
 various nationalities, has full possession of Europe, and in the 
 westward march of empire has colonized our country. North 
 America directly confronts Europe, and naturally derives its 
 colonization thence. Fostered by progress in civilization, pop- 
 ulation has already become excessive in parts of Europe, and 
 seeks its outlet in America. In the grand order of historic 
 progress. North America belongs to the Caucasian race, the 
 most powerful and actively colonizing branch of the human 
 family. Regarded as a question in the natural history of 
 man, there can be no denial of the title by which Europe has 
 claimed and will claim the right to colonize North America. 
 The great western movement along parallels, climate, and nat- 
 ural adaptation, so ordain. Europe alone sends hither volun- 
 tary colonists, if we except the Chinese emigration on the Pa- 
 cific coast, which is a misdkection of a tropical race, and 
 should not be encouraged. Caucasian civilization has an over- 
 mastering vitality and reality, which not only gives it supe- 
 rior power, but a higher right to expand and assert itself. 
 The Indian title has rightly been swept away before the colo- 
 nizing demands of the highest earthly civilization, and no 
 inferior race is privileged to bar its progress over the New 
 World. 
 
 Our country is not a natural home for the negro, and he is 
 only here on compulsion. He belongs within the tropics, 
 whence he came. There are immense unclaimed tropical 
 regions, which the white man can never till. Caucasians will 
 soon want all the temperate lands of the earth. Thus the 
 African, of all men most tropical, can only be permanently 
 in temperate regions by perversion and misposition. He 
 would never of his own accord go beyond vertical sunshine. 
 He never ha-s attained, and by his own act never would attain, 
 a high organizing civihzation, without which he can have no 
 serious need of colonization. It seems an immense sin against 
 4 
 
50 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 nature that white men, stimulated by a wicked lust of gain, 
 should have torn the sons of the equator from their tropic 
 homes and transferred them to a land which Caucasians 
 must, in the progress of time, claim wholly for themselves. 
 But God educes good from human transgression, and we 
 gratefully recognize that Divine beneficence which even con- 
 verts the forced African colonization of our country into a 
 blessing for the African. We can see that Africa, left to it- 
 self, would merely continue its poor barbaric history, without 
 progress or colonization. By the slave system in this country, 
 a large number of this tropical race have reached higher 
 civilization than they otherwise could have done. They have 
 learned so to live that their increase equals or exceeds that of 
 our own race, under the most favoring conditions. The 
 superior sagacity of white men, stimulated by the base profits 
 of slave-breeding and slave-labor, has not only made the 
 negroes fearfully prolific, but has so ordered their circum- 
 stances of daily life as greatly to promote their health and 
 longevity : a result due in large part also to the praiseworthy 
 humanity of their masters. The slave population, particularly 
 in the cotton states, thus shows a truly threatening rate of 
 increase, which well deserved serious attention from those 
 whose domestic future was wholly involved in this portentous 
 cloud, and whose children were in danger of drowning in an 
 African black sea. If white men are to hold the cotton states, 
 negro fecundity must be counteracted, or the negro race must 
 be deported. 
 
 The main question is, shall these states be hopelessly 
 Africanized, or shall they be reclaimed for the sole use of the 
 white man ? If we look ahead even a single century, we can- 
 not fail to see that every acre of our domain, on which white 
 men can live, will inevitably be required by our own race. 
 It would be in thorough contravention of the natural order of 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 51 
 
 human progress to give up half our country in perpetuity to 
 a tropical race, so inferior in capacity and culture as to in- 
 spii'e no hope of their attaining a high civilization. That 
 these negroes are held in slavery to -white masters does not 
 alter the cardinal fact, that a country perfectly adapted to 
 occupancy by a pure white race is being perverted, contrary 
 to nature, for negro habitation. We can never, under any 
 shallow pretext of occupation by a few white masters, assent 
 to the virtual annexation, forever, of half our domain to 
 Africa. We have but to look at the relative increase of 
 blacks and whites in the slave states, to recognize the alarm- 
 ing fact of utter Africanization looming in the near future. 
 How lamentable is their fallacy, who, because the African is 
 inferior to our race, would, under the figment of slavery, sur- 
 render to him forever more than half our territory ! When 
 there shall be ten, twenty, or a hundred blacks to one white, 
 even though the relation of master and slave remain unaltered, 
 can it be said that those states belong to white men ? Admit 
 that all the profits of all the labor go into the pockets of a 
 few white men ; does this even mitigate the great foundation 
 fact of forfeiture from white to black tenure ? 
 
 Towering far above the social problem of slavery or free- 
 dom for the negro, rises this momentous question of races. 
 It is happily true that the white race is every way the strong- 
 est, and that strength must ultimately conquer. In numbers, 
 in increase, in civilization, in adaptation, the white race has 
 the superiority within our national domain, and the African 
 must inevitably be eliminated. It will be a great duty of 
 our futui-e to remove the negro humanely to his proper trop- 
 ical home. The white race, which has by violence forced 
 Africa into the temperate zone, must transfer the negro to his 
 natural inter-tropical American home so kindly as to make 
 amends for past wrongs. 
 
52 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 As we calmly contemplate this problem in the natural 
 history of races, the impression powerfully grows upon us, 
 that our great misplacement of Africans within the temperate 
 zone, on lands predestined for a temperate race, has been 
 Divinely permitted, as the condition of a progress otherwise 
 impracticable. We cannot but connect our negro problem 
 with the still mysterious future of the Amazon valley. The 
 greatest and most fertile river basin in the world must be 
 designed for some proportionate use. God never made this 
 magnificent garden of tropical luxuriance without some pur- 
 pose of human habitation. Africa stands over against the 
 mouth of the great river of the equator, as if destined, in the 
 westward march of colonization, to give its surplus population 
 to this vast and fruitful realm, which nature forever con- 
 secrates to the children of the sun. It seems to us that the 
 misposition of Africans in our own laud, may have been per- 
 mitted as a needed step in the transfer of a cultivated negro 
 colonization to the plains of the Maranon. These plains are 
 closed to all except African and Southern Asiatic labor. 
 The inert African would never move on alone to this imperial 
 destiny. Obviously his training in the Southern states will 
 make him vastly better fitted to work out a worthy future for 
 his race in equatorial South America. The superior intelli- 
 gence of the white man being thus efiectively impressed upon 
 him, he can go to the Amazon Valley better prepared to 
 achieve enduring progress. The true solution of the whole 
 negro problem may, perhaps, be found in a destined African 
 empire of the Amazon, to be founded by our deported negroes, 
 previously so far civilized by their enforced and abnormal 
 contact with our race, that they can wisely govern themselves 
 in some congenial form of tropical organization. There is 
 apparently no other solution for our race problem, than that 
 which is based on a policy of graduated but energetic deport- 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 53 
 
 ation. Amalgamation is abhorrent and, as a fixed policy, 
 utterly impracticable by decent mothods. The perpetuation 
 of the existing order of castes, or a resolution into free white 
 and free black castes, cannot be accepted as the law of our 
 future. Nothing less than the gradual elimination of the 
 negro element by deportation from all our lands where white 
 men can live and labor, will meet the clearly perceptible ex- 
 actions of our coming development and growth. 
 
 The South American continent is strikingly similar in 
 structure to our own, contrasting chiefly in being tropical and 
 sub-tropical, while ours is temperate and arctic. A like 
 triangular continental plain, buttressed against the Andes, 
 presents similar vast surfaces of low relief, drained by the La 
 Plata waters as the analogue of the ISIississippi, while the 
 Amazon corresponds to the Lakes and St. Lawrence. The 
 Brazilian coast ranges and the Appalachians, the Andes and 
 the Rocky JNIountains, the narrow Pacific slopes, the broad 
 North and pointed South extremities, are features of structural 
 analogy. Fortunately, the vast plain of the Amazon, out-meas- 
 uring one and a half Mississippi Valleys, is liberally watered 
 by a rain-fall exceeding even that of our Gulf states, while the 
 climate is greatly mitigated by the trade-winds. The abound- 
 ing foi'ests, which fringe the great river and its tributaries, 
 proves that exhaustless fertility of soil awaits development. 
 The negro, naturally proof against heat and miasms, is even 
 better fitted than the Southern Asiatic to battle with these 
 primeval groves. Possibly the effete civilization of China or 
 Japan, is here destined to flower forth in some new and vital 
 manifestation, but the African seems providentially on the 
 colonizing road toward the equatorial empire of the future. 
 Already had Brazil three millions of slaves, and half a mil- 
 lion of free negroes, out of a population estimated at five mil- 
 lions in 1848. It can only be through a scientific and truly 
 
54 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 Btatesmanlike grasp of the vast possibilities for the future, 
 now dorma-nt in the West Indies and South America, but 
 especially in Bi-azil, that publicists will be able correctly to 
 Bolye the great problem concerning the proper adjustment of 
 the now ill-understood relations of habitation and intercourse 
 between the tropical and temperate races. A mere fragment 
 of this adjustment is now intrusted to our charge, but the 
 right treatment of our negro controversy can only result from 
 a clear view of the whole earth problem of races. States- 
 manship which does not proceed on this broad and truly 
 scientific basis, can only result in disaster, when it attempts 
 to direct and control the territorial distribution of races. This 
 is the fatal error of those who would push the negro, whether 
 as slave or freeman, away from the tropics into regions con- 
 secrated to white labor. 
 
 [While waiting the providential restoration of the American- 
 ized Africans to their appropriate tropical home, it is, mean- 
 time, a matter of serious regret, and of permanent detriment to 
 the Caucasian race, that negro agriculture, whether as slave or 
 free, is wasting the native fertility of the Southern soil. During 
 the vast primeval ages, a process has been slowly operating by 
 which the falling leaves have borne down, from the air into 
 the soil, their carbonized and nitrogenized products. The 
 accumulated fertility of ages has thus been stored in anticipa- 
 tion of the coming agricultural period. The thriftless system 
 of exhausting lands, which seems inseparable from the rude 
 and unintelligent labor of the negro, whether slave or free, 
 and the successive occupancy of new plantations as old ones 
 are worn out, can only end in the ultimate, general impoverish- 
 ment of the States where the system prevails. A nation's 
 true material wealth must ever consist chiefly in the fertile 
 capacity of its lands; in the carbonaceous and nitrogenized 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 55 
 
 ingredients of its soil. These once exhausted, desolation and 
 poverty must prevail. 
 
 The AYorn-out lands of Virginia, and the desolate circuit of 
 abandoned plantations, which for fifty miles environs Havana, 
 are monumental protests against such frauds on the soil. 
 There will, moreover, be peculiar difficulty in winning back 
 fertility to Southern soils by the agricultural skill of free 
 white labor. The lack of luxuriant and nutritious grasses in 
 the Southern states, is not only a source of present priva- 
 tions, but it takes from the farmer his chief means of making 
 good the waste of the planter. Thus, the temporary sway of 
 slavf or negro labor, threatens to make an irretrievable desert 
 of the lands, from which it is now recklessly exhausting that 
 fertility, which the forest ages have been storing up. When 
 the African shall reach the Valley of the Amazon, he will 
 find a soil, practically inexhaustible, but his enforced residence 
 in our Southern temperate lands seems to be inwrought with 
 the promise of a retributive calamity, a coming curse of bar- 
 renness, from which there will be no rescue, save in the 
 weary toil of unborn generations of free white laborers. The 
 urgent motive thus supplied to work out without needless 
 delay, the providential policy of friendly deportation, is one 
 whose force will be most felt by the most humane and philo- 
 sophical minds.]* 
 
 Every worthy idea of human nature and the human lot, 
 whether derived from historic, social or moral considerations, 
 exalts freedom and deprecates slavery. It was reserved for 
 our generation to hear the gospel of slavery zealously pro- 
 claimed, and, like a new Islamism, propagated by the sword. 
 We have seen eleven states formally abjuring the dearly- 
 bought faiths of freedom, and extolling slavery as a blessing 
 in itself Holding that the negro belongs to an inferior race 
 
 * [ ] January, 1863. 
 
56 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 tliey yrould yet force him into regions congenial for Tv^hite 
 labor. The slave-holding leaders would sustain and glorify 
 their peculiar institution as the Ephesians did Diana ; while 
 "the poor whites" of the South, fearing that negro freedom 
 would involve an equality fatal to their own shabby gentility, 
 and utterly ignorant of the true dignity of labor, fight in 
 illogical concert, little realizing that they are striving to 
 Africanize their own states, to the ultimate exclusion of their 
 own offspring. Whatever be the immediate issue of the con- 
 test now pending, its future progress toward the triumph of 
 freedom, and Caucasianism is naturally assured. Freedom is 
 stronger than slavery, the Caucasian is stronger than the 
 Africa.n, and, historically, the North has been ' ' the hive of 
 nations," which have swarmed in conquering progress south- 
 ward. Free, white, Northern strength must ultimately ex- 
 clude slave, black, Southern domination from the area now 
 in controversy, either by equitable, pacific progress, or by 
 warlike violence. Should we now enact any weak concessions 
 to Southern pro-slavery fanaticism, our posterity will disown 
 our attorneyship, and will re-enact that law of Nature, which 
 gives the seceded states to European, and the Empire of 
 the Amazon to African emigration. The sacred democracy 
 which founds the social organism on man's simple humanity, 
 which recognizes human nature as Divine in origin, charac- 
 ter, and destiny, which honors labor and exalts the laborer, 
 which hopefully strives to make the future ever better than 
 the past in a growing progress, which, amid all discourage- 
 ments, and proofs of man's imperfection, ever lovingly holds 
 fast to the noblest ideal of aspiring, struggling, enduring, 
 triumphant manhood ; this universal and unpartisan de- 
 mocracy, which through ages of travail has painfully and sol- 
 emnly labored into life, now lives, and will forever live, strong 
 in the right, and upborne in all conflicts with ancient wrong 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 57 
 
 and privilege, by the vital energy Avhicli God has implanted in 
 man's nature. Our fidelity to this heritage of regulated and 
 organized freedom, will guide and guard our national progress, 
 and, as years, decades, and centuries roll on, will establish our 
 nationality ever more firmly on Union Foundations. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 The progress of public events since the preceding pages 
 were written, has been conformed to the principles therein 
 defined. Human passions have indeed, during the entire 
 progress of the pending controversy, been too actively en- 
 gaged to permit the free and full working of those great nat- 
 ural agencies to which the ultimate issue of the contest is 
 rightfully committed. It is human passion which has fired 
 our noble temple of Union, founded in an heroic age and 
 adorned by the living virtues of three generations. Nothing 
 but hot anger or frenzied delusion, could have made parricides 
 of men who are our kindred, who were nurtured under the 
 tutelage of the Constitution, who shared all our proud historic 
 memories, and who, by all the titles of common lineage, lan- 
 guage, culture^ growth and hopes, were with us in one nation 
 and under one banner. Vinegar is sugar fermented : the 
 bitterest feuds, the most relentless hates, are also the tendcrest 
 and dearest afiections transformed. But as nature produces 
 no vinegar except by changing sweet to sour, so human hearts 
 are not born imbued with hate, and the bad access of vengeful 
 feeling which marks the bitter controversy of to-day, must die 
 out if it be not studiously nurtured in the rising generations. 
 The unity of race and language, which is an unchangeable fact, 
 must assert itself in the future as in the past. The negrc 
 
58 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 and the social order based on his inferiority, forming as they 
 do, the sole divellent forces, which strive to rend asunder that 
 which God has joined together, must not be permitted to 
 breed eternal discord in our land. The time must come when 
 reason will be heard, and then the African, Tv'ho is the fruitful, 
 but innocent source of all our woes, will go hence where he 
 belongs. With him will go all those mad ambitions of oli- 
 garchy which, building caste on color, now war on the very 
 citadel of democratic freedom. Ood grant, too, that with the 
 negro may depart that fanatical benevolence, so malevolent in 
 its manifestations, whose bitter fruitage we taste and execrate. 
 God has His own ways of working, and however slow these 
 methods may seem, it is not wise for man to try whipping up. 
 It is well to realize that the Creator of the world and of man 
 still lives, and is responsible for the general progress of events. 
 " Learn to labor and to wait," is a mandate of Divine order 
 for nations as for men. It will be a blessed day when peace 
 shall crown reason, when patient, earnest work shall soften 
 hearts now hard with hate, and when fraternal Union under 
 the Constitution, shall nurture into new and enduring life, a. 
 loyalty, heart-felt and universal, toward that great nation and 
 national work which Supreme Wisdom has here predestined. 
 
 Ere this can be we must purge away a great national sin. 
 A demoralized political system which converts public trusts 
 into partisan spoils, has killed true statesmanship, and made 
 the growth of statesmen nearly impossible. Hence the foun- 
 dation elements, the eternal principles, have not received that 
 recognition which was their right. 
 
 The lack of leadership which is now felt as our sorest 
 national affliction, is but the natural retribution on our people 
 for the political dereliction, which has given over the benefi- 
 cent and holy functions of government to harpies, while the 
 great and good have been left unsought and undeveloped in 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 59 
 
 the genial shades of private life. To ask great statesmen or 
 great leaders under this monstrous system, is to ask effects 
 ■ftithout causes. Some great affliction was sure to result from 
 the " spoils" system, and had not secession grown out of it, 
 something else as had was in duty bound to punish us. There 
 can be no hope for us, except in a renewal of political in- 
 tegrity, which will enable us again to restore the government 
 to its pristine virtue. A counter-revolution which shall rein- 
 state the public offices in their old glory, as honorable trusts, 
 confided to the most honest and capable, and which shall end 
 their degradation to the base uses of party, will revive all our 
 dear old hopes, now bowed in the sorrow of disgrace. No 
 opulence of natural bounty can give true prosperity to a 
 people so demoralized as patiently to endure systematic offi- 
 cial simony. God be thanked that this war has shown us 
 how noble, and patient, and hopeful our people are, and that 
 this execrable perversion of official tenures is thus proven to 
 be no real exponent of our national morality. Self-govern- 
 ment on a devil-worshiping basis, is simply hell's unendura- 
 ble hon-or; but a nation governing itself in sincere natural 
 piety, and in profound regard for Heaven-born right, cannot 
 fiiil to triumph over all afflictions, and emerge triumphant 
 from all trials. God has so framed human and material nature 
 as to ensure the ultimate exaltation of a righteous nation. 
 Amid the sorrows of the present, it is consoling to recognize 
 God's government, which chastens to heal, which works on in 
 solemn silence through all the varying phases of our contest, 
 and which will uphold American unity, if our own unwor- 
 thiness shall not unfit us to realize His thoughts and designs, 
 as embodied in the physical features of our national domain. 
 The preceding discussion legitimately leads us to the con- 
 clusion that one of three events must close the contest now 
 joined : 
 
60 UNION FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 1st. The restoration of the Constitutional Union, as a re- 
 sult of the war in progress. 
 
 2d. Temporary disunion, until the Confederacy, based on 
 slavery as its chief corner-stone, shall recognize its impend- 
 ing doom in the overwhelming growth of free white labor, and 
 shall seek the restoration of the Union by friendly means, 
 and on a truly democratic basis. 
 
 3d. Temporary disunion, until the blinded and defiant Con- 
 federacy, by holding the boundary line drawn tight against 
 free white labor, and the democratic spirit of progress, shall 
 again evoke the desolating scourge of war, and thus meet its 
 final fate. 
 
 In each of these contingencies, the perpetuation of the 
 Union should only be regarded as a question of time and 
 growth. Any failure now to effect its restoration will simply 
 remit the completion of the contest to a future generation. 
 The exasperations and arrogances hitherto so conspicuously 
 displayed by the Southern leaders, afibrd but slender ground 
 for hope that the second solution would result from a present 
 relinquishment of our warlike strife, and the evolution of 
 some unnatural boundary. Our main question of to-day 
 seems to be between the completion of the Union contest now 
 and its resumption from the beginning in a still greater future 
 war, which can hardly be postponed through fifty years. 
 When we consider the woes unutterable which our failure 
 would entail on our posterity, the sad obstruction to all pro- 
 gress in good culture and humane development, the bitter 
 anguish of hostile feeling thus made enduring, the bereave- 
 ments and heart-aches of to-day, renewed on a scale greatly 
 enlarged ; when, with serious and sad hearts, we confront the 
 future, which must thus be born from our actions in this 
 crucial year, we can only say, God help us bravely to do 
 what is right and wise ! 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS. 61 
 
 It is ever the heroic endurance of the last weeks of war which 
 shapes the conditions of peace. It is our duty to work out 
 now, if possible, a peace which shall endure. Such good 
 fruit can only grow from the rich soil of old fraternity and 
 of new purposes of right, justice, moderation, and good will. 
 Restored Union means restored citizenship and renewed 
 brotherhood. Our armed assertion of this great Nation's 
 Divinely ordered unity, must keep companionship with a 
 humane spirit of overmastering fraternity. There are other 
 weapons than firearms with which to reclaim the truant and 
 erring. The forgiving heart, the home welcome, the tender 
 oblivion of follies and wrongs, the kindly nurture of returning 
 affection and the generous justice in which magnanimous 
 natures delight ; these must do a work which is beyond the 
 chemistry of gunpowder, ere a living and vital Union can 
 again send its glad pulses through the healthful body of our 
 renewed nation. This we owe, not to soothe Confederate pride, 
 but as a natural fruit of our own earnest loyalty to the great 
 obligations of American Nationality. 
 
 Whatever may be the destined " issue out of all our afflic- 
 tions," the importance of rescuing our government from its 
 perversions and reinvesting it with the majesty of pure pur- 
 pose, exalted ideas, high capacity, secured stability, and faithful 
 execution, remains paramount. 
 
 Nirw Hatejt, Coxx., 
 
 Jauuary 20, 1863. 
 
UNION FOUNDATIONS- \ 
 
 A. ST XJI3 Y 
 
 AMERICAN NATIONALITY 
 
 A FACT OF SCIENCE. 
 
 CAPT. E. B. HUNT, 
 
 OOEPS OF ENGINEERS, UNITED STATES ARMT. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 D. VAN NOSTRAND, 192 BROADWAY. 
 
 LONDON: TRVBNEE & CO. 
 
 1863. 
 
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