With the suppression of the late Rebellion, and the abolition of slavery in Missouri, the situation is materially changed.  From Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, there is a large emigration to Missouri.  I was recently informed that forty families from a single county in Ohio had sent a delegation to Missouri to look out suitable locations, either of wild land or of farms under cultivation.  There is every prospect that the State will be rapidly filled with a population that believes in freedom and in the dignity of labor.  She has an advantage over the other ex-slave States, in lying west of the populous regions of the North.  Hitherto, emigration has generally followed the great isothermal lines, as can be readily seen when we study the population of the Western States.  Northern Ohio is more New Englandish than Southern Ohio, and the parallel holds good in Northern and Southern Illinois.  There will undoubtedly be a large emigration to Missouri in preference to the other Southern States, but our whole migratory element will not find accommodation in her limits.  The entire South will be overrun by settlers from the North.

Long ago, Punch gave advice to persons about to marry.  It was all comprised in the single word, “DON’T.”  Whoever is in haste to emigrate to the South, would do well to consider, for a time, this brief, but emphatic counsel.  No one should think of leaving the Northern States, until he has fairly considered the advantages and disadvantages of the movement.  If he departs with the expectation of finding every thing to his liking, he will be greatly disappointed at the result.

There will be many difficulties to overcome.  The people now residing in the late rebellious States are generally impoverished.  They have little money, and, in many cases, their stock and valuables of all kinds have been swept away.  Their farms are often without fences, and their farming-tools worn out, disabled, or destroyed.  Their system of labor is broken up.  The negro is a slave no longer, and the transition from bondage to freedom will affect, for a time, the producing interests of the South.

Though the Rebellion is suppressed, the spirit of discontent still remains in many localities, and will retard the process of reconstruction.  The teachings of slavery have made the men of the South bitterly hostile to those of the North.  This hostility was carefully nurtured by the insurgent leaders during the Rebellion, and much of it still exists.  In many sections of the South, efforts will be made to prevent immigration from the North, through a fear that the old inhabitants will lose their political rights.