“Bah! These exaggerations, the rhetoric of feeble spirits, and the logic of false, are stuff and rubbish to any true student of human nature. There is no incompatibility between North and South, except what slavery engenders and strives to intensify. Strike away slavery, and the people gravitate to each other by laws higher than the bad passions of your Rhetts, Yanceys, and Maurys. The small-beer orators and forcible-feeble writers of the South, who are eternally raving about the mean, low-born Yankees, and laboring to excite alienation and prejudice, are merely the tools of a few plotting oligarchs who hope to be the chiefs of a Southern Confederacy.” “And must civil war necessarily follow from a separation?” “As surely as thunder follows from the lightning-rent! Yes, Webster is undoubtedly right: there can be no such thing as peaceable secession, and I rejoice that there cannot be.” “But would not a civil war render inevitable that alienation which these Richmond scribblers are trying to antedate?” “No. Enmity would be kept up long enough for the slave-power to be scotched and killed, and then the people of both sections would see that there was nothing to keep them apart, that their interests are identical. The true people of the South would soon realize that the three hundred thousand slaveholders are even more _their_ enemies than enemies of the North. A reaction against our upstart aristocracy (an aristocracy resting on tobacco-casks and cotton-bales) would ensue, and the South would be republicanized,—a consummation which slavery has thus far prevented. South Carolina was Tory in the Revolution, just as she is now. Abolish slavery, and we should be United States in fact as well as in name. Abolish slavery, and you abolish sectionalism with it. Abolish slavery, and you let the masses North and South see that their welfare lies in the preservation of the republic, one and indivisible.” “And do you anticipate civil war?” “Yes, such a civil war as the world has never witnessed.[17] The devil of slavery must go out of us, and as it is the worst of all the devils that ever afflicted mankind, it can go out only through unprecedented convulsions and tearings and agonies. The North must suffer as well as the South, for the North shares in the guilt of slavery, and there are thousands of men there who shut their eyes to its enormities. Believe me, their are high spiritual laws underlying national offences; and the Nemesis that must punish ours is near at hand. Slavery must be destroyed, and war is the only instrumentality that I can conceive of energetic enough to do it. Through war, then, must slavery be destroyed.” “And I care not how soon!” said Vance. Then, lowering his tone, he remarked: “Have you not been imprudent in confiding your views to a stranger, who could have you lynched at the next landing-place by reporting them?”