Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

If the morality of the Northern policy in the Civil War was questionable, its worldly wisdom was even more so. What would have been likely to happen if the South had been allowed to secede peacefully and with the good wishes of her late partner? That the Confederacy would have suffered from its new commercial isolation cannot be doubted; and that the States of the Confederation would have quarreled is almost equally certain, for hard times make hard tempers. It is easy to predict, then, that a nation built upon the principle of free secession would not have remained long intact. It is very clear, too, that slavery could not have lasted long along the Northern border; for even before the war, with the fugitive-slave law in full operation, a continual stream of escaping slaves found its way across the intervening States to Canada. If nothing but an ordinary boundary line had separated the slave States from free soil, a general exodus of slaves would have begun, and ere long the border States would of necessity have ceased to be slave States. With slavery extinct, the reason for their separation from the North would have ceased, and their commercial interests