23 And mixed with these four millions of children are the poor whites, a great horde of immature and stupid boys instead of men, who never sat at the forms of liberty nor worked out one of her sums. The North must call its master-builders together, and those whose business it is to raise and transport habitations, for the primary school-house must be shifted South, and in the little wake which it creates the people’s chapels must follow, till along that highway of our God, the court and the jury, the ballot-box and printing-press can safely pass to disinfect all half-civilized neighborhoods. And wherever a plough can run, the power-wheel shall follow, and its band shall turn new wants and enterprises, and hum worthy ambitions into ears that have been tuned only to slavery’s lash. And the great turbine shall go down to put to perpetual labor the streams that have carried so much of our blood into the sea. Everywhere the North shall take its revenge, deep, thorough, to the uttermost farthing, by imposing all the firm and gentle arts of liberty, with the uplifted ferule of the school-master, at the edges of reaping-blades, and beneath the weight of every material and mental instrument that can crush clods, pulverize a soil, and scatter seed. There will be a new meaning for the phrase “ a geographical party,” for the new Union will circulate by all the great channels of internal navigation, arteries which God opened for distributing the red blood of an undivided heart. Geography itself, with mountains, streams, lakes, prairies and defiles, shall write a people’s creed; and all platforms, whether made at Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore or Charleston, shall be supplanted by the square miles of the national domain. And it seems as if nature, foreseeing that not cotton but man would be king of this domain, had sealed up craters, cleared out earthquakes, warned off the hurricane, and spread a firm soil for every product, from kitchen comforts to sovereign luxuries—a zone for the orange and the fig, a zone for cotton, rice and sugar, for flax, for wool, for wheat, for cattle ; districts for grapes, for the silk-worm and the cochineal, so that the democrat can dress for dinner and dine in his own house, if he will; and when he wants to ship his surplus to feed and clothe the English pauper, every spar that the wind can stretch without breaking grows, from the live oak
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