“I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things.”[390] Strange to state, even at that early date, he writes of the South possibly being compelled to “rebel,” to preserve her “peculiar institution.” Fortunately for the Lower South, Lincoln and not Seward was elected president in 1860; for had Seward been raised to that position of preeminence, in all human probability the seven States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would have been allowed to secede and attempt the experiment of government involved therein, with a population of 2,619,116 whites, 36,861 free persons of color, many of whom were slave owners, and 2,312,372 Negro slaves. That the colored population would have increased rapidly is a reasonable conclusion. Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, in all probability, would have speedily divested themselves of a great proportion of the 1,324,166 slaves they held and, even if such Southern statesmen as Leonidas Washington Spratt had not been able to reopen the African slave trade, the smuggling in of slaves on a greater and greater increasing scale would have been a consequence. Slavery being the corner stone of the new political structure, it would have been natural that the view of Governor Seabrook, that slave holding Negroes should be admitted to the ballot, would have eventually prevailed. War might have come between the large and small sections of North America from some frontier incident concerning Arkansas, the Indian Territory or Mexico; but it could scarcely have been the pulverizing conflict which the Lower South sustained by the two and a half million additional whites of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, maintained for four years of desperate struggle. Each year that the conflict was delayed would have found the States which remained in the old Union stronger and whiter, sickling the seceded States with railroads and quite possibly drawing Canada into their orbit; for as Sir Charles Dilke has pointed out in his Problems of Greater Britain, published when the annexation of Canada was still a debatable question— “a fact often overlooked in England is that hitherto the western centres of population of British North America have been more intimately connected with districts lying South of them across the American frontier than with places East and West of them, within the Canadian border.”[391] The days of the “Little Englanders” were only then passing, when the colonies had almost been considered a nuisance.