Cincinnati Daily Press

The Future of a Southern Republic.

A peaceable separation of the Union implies but two National Governments, to be formed out of its materials; at least on the Atlantic side of the Continent. The people of the Southern States have shown an affinity for each other, as exemplified by their readiness to take up arms for each other against the Government, and have ties of interest that will consolidate them into a strong Central Government. The right of Secession is purely a Southern right against the North; and a doctrine so destructive to all stability and public safety will be provided against, as soon as the South is relieved from an outside pressure which makes it regard Secession as a Southern right. They will take care at the start to guard against any future tendency of the Border States to Secession, which may grow out of the "irrepressible conflict," which separation will transfer bodily to the south of Mason and Dixon's line. Whatever form the Government may take, it will be a strong Central Government. And, with long Presidential terms, no Government in the world would have stronger central power than one under our constitutional form, with the same scale of official patronage.

The interests of slave labor will control the Southern Republic. It is unnecessary to argue that point. An interest which has controlled a Government in which the interests of free labor comprised two-thirds of the numbers and wealth of the governing class, will have unlimited sway at the beginning of a Republic which is founded entirely on the interests of slave labor.

The Southern Republic will be well and wisely governed, according to their interest. If there is any capacity for government in the people of the North American States, the South has it by prescription and practice in this Union.

We do not agree with the current idea that a Southern Republic will result in the Africanization of the Gulf States. This seems to be based on the theory that the Africans in the South are restrained by the union with the North. The slightest reflection will show its absurdity. Besides, the slaves have learned from the political harangues of their own masters, that the people of the North are Abolitionists. Cuba is not Africanized, although the proportion of slaves and of free blacks to the whites is larger than in any of the Southern States, and it has no outlet for its dangerous characters. Hayti is Africanized, but the same circumstances can not exist in the South; and the Americans are a different people from the French colonists of Hayti. The South has an outlet for its dangerous characters in the North, which operates as a safety-valve. Desperation in the Southern negro turns its energies to means of escape. This carries off the element that would form the leaders of insurrection. Although the Southern people do not seem to appreciate the advantages of the Northern escape-valve, it really promotes their safety. Besides, the necessary measures for their own protection, will naturally make the South a military people; and their form of society creates just the elements for this purpose. This may be seen already in the fact that the military spirit is much stronger in the South than in the North, as is shown by their fondness for military titles. The low estimate in which labor must necessarily be held in slave society, would induce all of the whites who are compelled to earn their own living, to accept eagerly any employment which public opinion made honorable. A regular army would be a service which would be sought for in the South. It would furnish an honorable position for the large class of poor relations of the aristocracy; and thus would have the same hold upon the wealthy classes that the British army has; and the condition of society will make service in all grades to be regarded as more honorable than labor. This will furnish the South a guard for its own protection, and a strong and ready force for enterprises for territorial extension.
In this section we are accustomed to think that the Northern slave States will prevent the opening of the slave-trade, because the slaveholders there are opposed to it. Even if they were, they can do nothing but legislate; and the whole world knows that legislation can not stop the slave-trade. But the slaveholders of the slave-breeding States do not comprise more than one-tenth of the voters; and probably not one-fifth of the voters who represent the ultra pro-slavery sentiment. The few slaveholders would not control the matter; but the many who would be slaveholders. It is notorious that in South Carolina and in the other cotton States, the non-slaveholders are the slave-trade party. The slaveholders of the border States would no more be able to control this than they were the Secession movement, to which they were generally opposed. It is by no means certain that if a proposition to open the African slave-trade were submitted to the popular vote even in Kentucky, it would be defeated.

Would foreign Powers prevent? In the first place, they can not. If, with the slave market restricted to the narrow Island of Cuba, 30,000 slaves are landed in Cuba annually, how can the trade be stopped when 2,000 miles of coast are open to it, comprising, with its inlets and bays, several thousand more, and, with its reefs and hundreds of secluded inlets, furnishing places where slaves would be safe from approach or even discovery?

Foreign Powers can not suppress the slave-trade, and it is unlikely that they would continue the effort. The Southern Republic would not aid it; and the Northern Republic would withdraw from all responsibility for the slave-trade, abroad as well as at home. The North will not continue to pay eight millions a year to maintain a fleet on the African coast, to keep King Badahung supplied with cheap slaves to sacrifice to his deceased father, instead of selling them to the trader for Southern plantations, where, instead of appeasing the soul of the late King of Dahomey, they may have a chance to work out the salvation of their own souls; and where they will increase the products which the world needs and will add greatly to all the other branches of trade and industry. When the North is severed from all connections with slavery, the slave-trade will be to them only a question between slavery as it is in Africa, and as it is in the Southern Republic; and few will say that slavery in Dahomey and Ashantee, is so much better than plantation life, that the difference will be worth eight millions a year to us; especially when the latter makes cheap cotton and sugar, and enlarges the market for Northern products and manufactures. If the Southern Republic wants the effort to stop the trade continued, it will have to continue it. It will cease to be our affair, and we will have nothing in our policy to connect us with the question of slavery in the South.

With the opening of a market for African slaves in the Cotton States, the alliance for suppressing the trade will drop to pieces. England, which is the bulwark of that alliance, has been hitherto sustained in her philanthropy, by its restricting the competition between the products of slave labor and those of her own West India Islands. But when the slave trade will increase the product of cotton, her philanthropy will be in direct conflict with her interest. This would be reversing the usual order of these motives in the British mind; and it is not difficult to foresee which must succumb. The British mind is eminently conservative; and distinguished as its philanthropy is, it is always subservient to its interest.

England and France are looking earnestly for means to increase the supply of cotton, and reduce its price. Both are seriously entertaining projects for the importation of Coolies into their tropical colonies, which are but slightly, if any, preferable to what the slave-trade would be, if relieved from hostile cruisers. The opening of the cotton States to the African slave-trade, would solve the problem of cheap cotton for them. They would have no excuse for hostility to a trade so much like their own imports of labor: and their interest would be directly against it. No matter what course they may pursue, a Southern Republic is the opening of a market as broad as a continent, for slaves. But it requires little sagacity to see that the opening of that market will be the end of the anti-slave-trade alliance, either by its own natural dissolution, or by direct treaty with the Southern Republic.

The opening of the South to the importation of laborers from teeming Africa, will give the same impetus to Southern prosperity that the North derives from the emigration of free laborers from Europe. Southern productions will be greatly increased, and the Southern demand for the products of other industry, increased in proportion. And, with an unlimited supply of laborers to draw on, it will be the manifest destiny of the Southern Republic to overrun all the neighboring territory that is adapted to their great staples. The military spirit and organization, referred to in the beginning of this article, which naturally grow out of the relation of slavery to labor, will make them a people well adapted to acquisitions by conquest from weaker nations, when they have a supply of laborers to make their acquisitions available.

This increase in slave products will be felt in all the channels of commerce, and in all the branches of industry which are affected by slave production, and by the Southern demand for the commodities of other industry. Trade and industry abroad will receive vastly more benefit from slave-laborers than from the same number of free emigrants. A little reflection will show this. The proceeds of a free laborer in agriculture, are chiefly devoted to improving his own place and increasing his stock. In these he puts his profits; and this we in the North regard as adding to the wealth of the country. But the laborer retains the wealth in his own hands.

On the contrary, a slave laborer is employed in converting the wealth of the soil into exportable commodities. These are transferred abroad, to make materials of wealth there. The habits of the master also transfer much of the proceeds abroad in some shape. Nothing stops with the laborer, and the land becomes exhausted and abandoned. This accounts for the abandonment of worn-out lands in Virginia—a feature unknown in the North, where lands increase in value in spite of their deterioration.

Slavery is like gold mining. It takes the natural wealth of the soil and transfers it into the channels of trade. It transports the richness of the soil to other countries, while free labor keeps it at home, and accumulates wealth upon it in other forms. This, briefly, is the reason why the addition of a slave laborer adds so much more to the trade and commerce of other countries, having relations to slave products, than the accession of a free laborer.

The increased production which the importation of laborers will cause in the South, will give a great impetus to commerce and to all branches of industry connected with it. Commercial relations will be greatly extended between the South and all the countries with which she has natural relations of trade. Skilled industry will ever appropriate to itself the lion's share of the profits of Southern production. Emancipated from political questions, and from the sectional hostility which grows out of a yoking of discordant elements, the laws of trade will resume their sway between the South and the North; and their commercial relations will extend without limit. Then the two forms of industry will have an opportunity to run their course untrammeled by each other; and the prosperity of each will result to mutual benefit.