Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1863-02-27
THE NORTHWESTERN STATES.

The attention Of the people of the United
States seems to be particularly directed to
The Northwestern States of the Union, and
well may they regard them with anxiety
and fear. If the portcnded movement COM
mence and be carried on With that vigor
which is anticipated in the North, not only
will the Confederacy be to Their. an establish
fact. but the result will be the immediate f.
nancial overthrow Of the remnant Of the
Union.
All that the Abolition Union has contend
ed Cor. as confessed, not Intentionally, by
the writer's of its more prominent journals,
has been to prevent the separation of the
States of the Confederacy, not on account of
the loss of so much territory, not to act the
philanthropic part pretended by the party
in power, and not from the fear that repub-
lican institutions should prove a failure,
(for what care theys when SO willingly they
bow their necks to the yoke Of the Dictator),
but from the great desire to keep that part,
which had so uncomplainingly borne the
burdens Of, and paid the profit to the more
sordid, calculating North. To be forced to
let the Confederate States go has grieved
the North sorely. This regret has con-
tinually blinded them, making them believe
that they could not fail. first to subjugate,
then to conquer, then to restore the Union
by the threat of emancipation, and finally
they would fain believe they can restore it
by some palliative, some second fugitive
slave law, to be placed on its statute books
and disregarded by its mobs, some guaran-
tee to the possession of property in slaves,
which might be worth as much as the pa
per on which it was written, or some other
soothing balm for the ailing South. They
will be mistaken, most grievously mistaken.
No promises held forth, no laws enacted,
can unite these two people who have be-
come SO antagonistic-so hateful TO each
other.
This the Northwestern people will learn
by degrees, just as they have roceded from
the desire for compulsory restoration by
subjugation and conquest, to their talked
of palliative restoration.
1tmay be months. or years, if their trca
sury and forces hold out. before they can
be brought to the conclusion to leave us
undisturbed, but it will be arrived at at
last most assuredly-we having that tenaci-
ty of purpose to contend, as long as our
means will admit, for our separate national
existence, which is plain to any one, who
compares our resources when hostilities were
commenced with our present resources, re-
Numbering the results attained by our
small and necessarily badly equipped forces,
that we are in condition to do so for
greater length Of time than the aoolitionists
can. 1t is then but a question of time, and
we knowing this fact must receive the news
of the rapid awakening of the Northwestern
States with joy and gladness. We see in
it the accomplishment Of our purposes with
speed unanticipated by the most sanguine
among us before these tidings from that
section reached our ears.
Not by their uniting in our Confederacy
do we anticipate any degree of good to us,
for we believe it would be better to toll
through long and weary war Of years, than
to have sudden peace by such a process.
1t would virtually be the bequeathing to pos
terity bloodier trial than the one we
will have passed through.
No one would agree that they should be
incorporated in our Confederacy but by the
adoption of slave constitutions, and were they
to adopt such constitutions every year or
every month, they could never become
slave States in fact. Their climate and pro-
ductions forbid it were they to attempt it.
Such course would then be laying up
hateful antagonism for generations to come.
That the Northwestern States will leave
their national wreck is beyond peradven-
ture. Spcculations as to its hasty accom-.
plishment may be wrong, Blu. their ultimate
separation is inevitable. Possessed of
broad acres which in peace teamed with her
cereal productions, and pastures on which
grazed innumerable herds of cattle, and
with but few manufacturing resources, she
must needs bear the burdens necessary to
sustain the manufacturing States, and this
inequality ofburdens, consequent upon their
diversity of interest, would of itself prove
too great an obstacle to continued peaceful
union. With her immense products forced
through artificial channels to glutted mar
ket, whose customers have either gone to
other markets or turned producers, and a
necessary decline in the value of those pro-
ducts, as we'll as consequent decline in
their property, must impoverish them and
render them totally unable to meet the or
binary demands of their government, with
out reference to the immense debt to he
paid ~ them after peace while her terri
tory is watered by navigable streams tribu-
tary tu the great Father of Waters whose