Paris Oxford Democrat, April 26, 1861

We are in the midst of a revolution, and that revolution has been caused by the institution of slavery. It is a struggle on the part of its advocates to perpetuate it. What logical results will follow this conflict? This is an important question for the North, but a more important one for the South. We start with this proposition, that whatever settlement may be made between the two sections, the final abolition of slavery will be hastened by the movement.

A re-construction of the government, giving slavery new guaranties, as contended for now, by which the cotton States would be brought back, would do more than any other settlement that could be made to strengthen and perpetuate the curse. If the cotton States undertake to maintain their own independence without the border slave States, their new confederacy will inevitably be the scene of numerous slave insurrections, and these will increase from year to year, until a large standing army will be required to protect them from violence from their negroes. If the border States remain in the Union and the cotton States stay out, the latter will re-open the foreign slave trade and ruin the domestic traffic in slaves, raised in the former. If the border States go out, Mason and Dixon's line will hereafter be the Canada line, between freedom and slavery. The constitutional provision for the rendition of slaves will become a dead letter. The moment their slaves step into a free State they will be free, and no power can carry them back except mob violence, and that would not be permitted by the general government.

The cotton States, as between them and the border States, in one confederacy, will have the control. The foreign trade in negroes will be opened, and negroes raised in Virginia, formerly worth from eight to fifteen hundred dollars, will be reduced down to two hundred. This will ruin slavery in the border States, and ruin the slaveholders themselves. Its operation will be the extinction of slavery from a direful necessity, for slave labor in the border States alone can never keep the institution in running order a single year.

Another thing, slavery will be hemmed in. There will be no new territory outside the States to give it expansion. Girdle it and it will die out. The new confederacy will be cut off from the acquisition of foreign territory. If it makes war on Mexico to acquire new territory, it will fail, because our government will interfere to prevent any such negro stealing, fillibustering operations.

Slavery in the border States out of the Union, would be an uncertain institution. Negro insurrections will be common occurrences, and will finally settle down into a reign of terror. The Southern Confederacy will be hated and despised by every civilized government upon the earth. Barbarism would be its chief corner stone. Its whole basis would be a magazine of death, liable to be touched off by any John Brown or Nat Turner that has the courage to apply the fuse. Say what you will, the general government is the great protection of slavery in this country. A separation, on a line dividing the free from the slave States, will be the greatest agency that can be brought into existence to extinguish slavery in the United States. We therefore come to this conclusion, that a confederacy composed of the cotton States will hasten the abolition of slavery; that a confederacy, embracing all the slave States, will utterly work out its entire extinguishment in a few years.

What will become of the African race in this country, who in such a contingency will escape from their masters, or who may gain their liberty by insurrections or otherwise, is a question not legitimately belonging to this discussion. We may speak of it hereafter at length.