This letter is already so protracted, that I cannot stop here to develop more at large this part of the subject.  To one acquainted with the state of public sentiment, in what I have called, the farming district, it needs no further development.  There is not one of these states embraced in it, that would not, when brought to the test, prefer the privileges of the Union to the privilege of perpetual slaveholding.  And if there should turn out to be a single desertion in this matter, the whole project of secession must come to nought.

But laying aside all the obstacles to union among the seceding states, how is it possible to take the first step to actual separation!  The separation, at the worst, can only be political.  There will be no chasm—­no rent made in the earth between the two sections.  The natural and ideal boundaries will remain unaltered.  Mason and Dixon’s line will not become a wall of adamant that can neither be undermined nor surmounted.  The Ohio river will not be converted into flame, or into another Styx, denying a passage to every living thing.

Besides this stability of natural things, the multiform interests of the two sections would, in the main, continue as they are.  The complicate ties of commerce could not be suddenly unloosed.  The breadstuffs, the beef, the pork, the turkies, the chickens, the woollen and cotton fabrics, the hats, the shoes, the socks, the “horn flints and bark nutmegs,"[A] the machinery, the sugar-kettles, the cotton-gins, the axes, the hoes, the drawing-chains of the North, would be as much needed by the South, the day after the separation as the day before.  The newspapers of the North—­its Magazines, its Quarterlies, its Monthlies, would be more sought after by the readers of the South than they now are; and the Southern journals would become doubly interesting to us.  There would be the same lust for our northern summers and your southern winters, with all their health-giving influences; and last, though not least, the same desire of marrying and of being given in marriage that now exists between the North and South.  Really it is difficult to say where this long threatened separation is to begin; and if the place of beginning could be found, it would seem like a poor exchange for the South, to give up all these pleasant and profitable relations and connections for the privilege of enslaving an equal number of their fellow-creatures.

[Footnote A:  Senator Preston’s Railroad Speech, delivered at Colombia, S.C., in 1836.]

Thus much for the menace, that the “UNION WILL BE DISSOLVED” unless the discussion of the slavery question be stopped.