eople; when, says Caines, 'slavery, by exhausting the
soil, had eaten away its own profits, and the recolonization by free
settlers had actually begun, came suddenly the prohibition of the
African slave trade, and nearly at the same time, the vast enlargement
of the field for slavery, by the purchase of Louisiana; and these two
events made Virginia again profitable as a means of breeding for
exportation and sale at the South.

The future geographer who elaborately applies the philosophy of that
science, as interpreted by its modern professors, to our own history,
will find in the events of the last few years in Virginia the richest
and most impressive illustrations of local and physical causes in
determining political and social destinies. Between the eastern and
western portion of that State it will be demonstrated that nature placed
irreconcilable barriers to the supremacy of slave labor and slave
property; and the economical value of each will be shown thus and there
tested with emphatic truth; so that by the laws of physical geography
the first effect of an appeal to arms to maintain the one, was to
alienate, as a civic element, the other, and give birth to a new State,
by virtue of the self assertion incident to the violation of a normal
instinct and necessity of civilization.

What a change came over the scene when the grave civic interests so long
and recklessly involved in the conflict of opinion were submitted to the
arbitrament of battle! Along the river on whose shores the ashes of
Washington had slept for more than half a century in honored security,
batteries thundered upon each passing craft that bore the flag of the
nation: every wood became a slaughter pen, every bluff a shrine of
patriotic martyrdom; bridges were destroyed and rebuilt with alacrity;
the sentinel's challenge broke the stillness of midnight; the earth was
honeycombed with riflepits; campfires glowed on the hills; thousands
perished in the marshes; creeks were stained with human blood; here sank
the trench; there rose a grave mound or a fortress; pickets challenged
the wanderer; every ford and mountain pass witnessed the clash of arms
and echoed with the roar of artillery; the raid, the skirmish, the
bivouac, the march, and the battery successively spread desolation and
death; Arlington House, full of peaceful trophies, once dear to national
pride, was the headquarters of an army; balloons hung in the sky, whence
the movements of the foe