Slavery does not pay in Virginia. The slavery as it either is or affects to be at the land, especially in its eastern portions, where present time, it might have given freedom to there has been no immigration of the sturdy all the slaves in Virginia, Kentucky, Marymen of New England, is relapsing into wilder- land, Missouri, and the District of Columbia,— ness, while the climate is so mild and genial, in fact, within all the region where slavery as to allow of the labor of white men as freely does not pay, at a less cost in money, than and as harmlessly as in Lombardy or Pied- one month's continuance of the war; a promont. Add to this, that the possession of the ceeding which would have deprived the war, country is strategically and politically neces- if it had still broken out, of much of its comsary to the northern half of the Republic, and plication and bitterness. And unhappy Virthere will be abundance of reason to convince ginia, free of the curse of slavery, to which it the world that the gentlemen of Virginia, the has adhered rather from conservatism than aristocratic "F. F. V.'s," as they were once from any considerations of profit, would have proud to call themselves, must, if they wish to been spared all the horrors that are about to preserve life and fortune, make friends with be poured upon her devoted head, and all the North; or, if that be out of the ques- the bloodshed that will run upon her soil like tion, must withdraw from the homes of their water. childhood and the graves of their fatherslike the Red Indians before them, and make new homes for themselves and their children in that tempting Mexico, which sooner or later, the Southern Confederacy, when freed from war with the North, will attack and absorb.

From The N. Y. Tribune. MODERN NOTES ON VIRGINIA.

WASHINGTON, June 26, 1861.

A WEEK ago I gave you some description of the physical and moral status of the war localities of Virginia and Maryland. I propose to give a sequel thereto now, giving some account of the recent history of secession.

About thirteen years ago the writer was living in the town of Warrenton, Fauquier County, Va. I was fresh from_college, and at once began to go the way of all Virginia flesh- Politics. The first lesson I was taught by my advisers and associates was that Virginia was to be got out of the hands of" old fogies." Scott, Summers, A. H. Stuart, and the rest, were deadly foes to our rights. The first thing I knew was that I was talking in a hot-headed way to my own father, whom I had been told was unsound. I was a promising secessionist, and states'rights boy.

The opinions expressed in this Journal at the time when secession first became a fact, and which we have ever since repeated, that it would be for the benefit alike of North and South, if they would shake hands and part, are beginning to find an echo in the Northern press. "It is not strange," says the New York Daily News, of the 5th ultimo, "that European powers should treat what the North calls Jeff. Davis' Rebellion,' as a very formidable movement, when they are shown the vast extent of country that is declared to be in a state of 'secession,' or separation. The map of the eleven Confederate States covers more territory than England, France, Austria, Italy, Prussia, and Hanover combined (733,000 square miles). They have a population of six million of whites and three and a half million of slaves. A'rebellion' of A short time after this Messrs. Mason and such magnitude has never before occurred in Hunter were invited to a great dinner at the history of the world, and in its results are that town. They came. Ellwood Fisher involved, not only the fate of men, but of em- came with them; also some lawyer from pires. These Confederate States believe that New York to be toasted for unwearied slaveit would promote their interest aud happiness catching for his Southern brethren. I forget to separate from the Northern States. Why who he was; but if he sees this he will not let them try the experiment? The North know; and I will add for his benefit what professes to hate the institution of slavery, and he never heard, that in dining with some bitterly complains of its implication in the very distinguished Southerners next day, I 'great national enormity.' Why not let the heard him (the lawyer) spoken of, and made North separate, and wash its hands at once the text for the remark that "even their of all complicity in the damning sin'?" best men at the North did not know how to We may well reiterate the inquiry. It behave when they got down among gentlewill come to that issue in the long run, when men." At the Mason and Hunter dinner all the belligerents shall have inflicted upon each the speeches were in favor of the secession, other an amount of injury that fifty years of at a proper time, of the South. Mason and peace and prosperity will be unable to efface Hunter went around and visited various or repay. The North might even now con- families, and everywhere the conversation sider that if it had been, five or six years was such as I now see to have been traitorago, half as much in earnest in deprecation of ous. Mr. Hunter seemed to have been

more real and earnest, and his interest this day as ever. These parties may fall, seemed more occupied with states'-rights but their spirits, like those of the Norsemen ideas, than with actually setting in motion in the legend, will fight as they rise above forces practically hostile to the Government. the battle-field. The other day a gentleman This was about the time of the passage of in Richmond, who had been lieutenant-govthe compromise of 1850. ernor of the state, and if his talents, instead of his being an old-line Whig, had been consulted, would have had the highest office, sent word to a Democrat who had inquired what he was about: "Tell him I am bearing arms against my country-that being what he and his party have brought me to." This bitter feeling between the Whigs and the Democrats has by no means been allayed by recent events. I have reason to believe that the Whigs of Eastern Virginia will furnish the basis, as soon as the General Government furnishes the arm to rebuild the government in Virginia. They have long been a defeated and persecuted party in Virginia, and can scarcely share the laurels of the Secession Democracy.

After these gentlemen left, a meeting of a few persons took place in the Clerk's office, to consider whether the Democracy should at once enter upon an agitation of the disunion policy. One of the leading men there was R. M. Smith, who, however, said he was not quite ready to leave the Union, though he thought that we should at once "put that rod in soak" for the North, which was every day getting more and more arrogant. He was editor of the Alexandria Sentinel, which was seized tne other day. The idea was freely discussed and presented that there were some difficulties in the South's governing the country directly. To have Southern men in the Whitehouse perpetually would excite alarm; but the safest There is a fact concerning the secession plan was to have Northern men who would of the state which I have not yet met with be passive in the hands of sundry "powers in print, but which I personally know. When behind the throne." The Pierces and it was found that the Convention would not Buchanans with Davises and Floyds really ruling would be better, at least until things were ripe for our setting up for ourselves. An uncle of mine who was in the Democratic Convention of Cincinnati, that nominated Buchanan, said in my hearing, on his return, that the Virginia delegation did not accede to the nomination of Buchanan until they were presented with the most solemn pledge that in any issue between the North and South he would stand by the latter. (I believe, though of this I am not certain, that he said the pledge was given them in writing.)

With the classes of treacherous and ambitious men, such as Mason and Floyd, the better class of errorists, Hunter, Garnett, Henry A. Washington, and others, were easily brought to co-operate, until Virginia had formed a special Code of Politics of her own, labelled" States' Rights," which South Carolina demanded finally that she should put into practice. I learned, several years afterward, that immediately upon the passage of the "Omnibus Bill," as it was called, the leaders of the Slave Oligarchy saw the handwriting on the wall, and at once promoted and solicited organizations in all the Southern communities, to agitate and gradually promote secession. At one of these meetings I was, as I have said, present.

I need scarcely say that these meetings were entirely confined to the Democracy. The antagonism between the Whig and Democratic parties in Virginia, is much more bitter than I have ever seen it in the Free States. And that antagonism exists as much

take the state out of the Union, circulars
(secret) were sent to leading Democrats
throughout the state, calling for their instant
appearance in Richmond. They were sent
chiefly by the Enquirer, Despatch, and Ty-
ler and Wise set, and such boiling seces-
sionists as Daniel, Beverly, Wellford, and
their clique. About the same time a quar-
rel was got up between John M. Daniel, of
the Examiner, a noted duellist, and Mar-
maduke Johnson, who was anti-secessionist,
merely for effect; i.e., to show the "sub-
missionists" as they were called, what was to
be the order of the day. A challenge from
Daniel passed, but the authorities interfered.
Then the Democrats swarmed at Richmond
in obedience to the call; it was soon semi-
organized, I suppose, for the Convention was
informed one day that unless it passed an
ordinance of secession there was another
convention of men from each of their dis-
tricts to supersede them I am disposed to
think, therefore, that the casual assertion of
your clear-headed Baltimore correspondent
is not an exaggeration, and that the Vir-
ginia members voted in that Convention ac-
tually with pistols at their heads.

When these men returned home, they had harder work to do in snapping the ties that bound unpolitical men to their country. In my native county, at Stafford Court-House, a meeting was held immediately after the fall of Fort Sumter, and the crowd of men sobbed aloud in pain at the idea of abandoning the American Union. At that CourtHouse hangs to-day in frame an autograph letter of Henry Clay to a friend of fifty

to think, can ever have any thing except a groan and a tear for secession. He will hear the guns of the rebel batteries at Acquia; he will never think them so noble as those which boomed up from the Potomac in 1812.

years, who lives there, and who, it is hard | ical. When they cease to think slavery divine, they think it infernal. It is a matter which has inspired a general distrust of the North, that they have always compromised with what they have declared wrong. One hundred thousand copies of Theodore Parker's sermon on Daniel Webster were circulated in the Richmond Examiner and other papers, as the truest estimate of Webster. Indeed, far more of Theodore Parker's writ

I can add a most emphatic testimony, if it is needed, to the fact that an attack upon Washington was the one burning thought with the rebels after the fall of Sumter.ings have been circulated in the South than They only did not advance because they feared that the talk about the exposed situation of Washington was a ruse of Gen. Scott and that if they advanced they might have their army destroyed in the germ. Neither was their army so important at that time, as was believed in the North. The feeling when the uprising of the whole North was heard of was terrific; they could not believe it; but when it was confirmed, European interference was a constant theme. I have no doubt that such men as George Pugh and Vallandigham of Ohio, and Brodhead of Easton, Pa. (who married a niece of Jeff. Davis), had promised aid in men and munitions to secession. The feeling down there now is one of palpitation, although Gen. Scott is certainly mistaken if he thinks that our banner will ever again wave in Richmond except after a fierce battle.

of Edward Everett's The editor of the Examiner wrote in his paper, "If we believed that the negroes were men, in the strict use of that word, we should go the whole extent of Parker and Phillips against slavery." Then Northern men came down in their light wagons, and settled here and there on farms around Dumfries, Warrenton, Falmouth, Fredericksburg, and other towns. It was so to some extent in other states. These Yankees were novelties, and were always watched closely in every thing they did; and I am sorry to say that I never knew of one, east of Fairfax, who did not buy negroes, and only a few who did not use them harshly. A New Hampshire man came to establish the Democratic Recorder in Fredericksburg. There was no length in favor of slavery to which his paper would not go. And so, even more, was it with others who came to raise broom-corn, or start woollen-mills. They were a mean, compromising set.

In closing, I may express my conviction that the only thing that could ever enable What the South thus personally knows the North and the South to live together on has been confirmed by the cowardly way in the same continent in any kind of peace, which the North has stood, with folded would be a complete and unequivocal victory hands, and allowed its colored freeman to of the arms of the Union over them. They be imprisoned-its white ones to be tarred have believed the North cowards: such vic- and feathered-a Lovejoy shot here, a Sum tory would undeceive them. They have be-ner assassinated there without lifting a lieved the North could be bought at any hand or saying a word. Over the Choates, time by money (Cotton): a compromise ad- who approved the assassination of Sumner; mits it a victory says no. A compromise over the Douglases, who stood by in "armed is the victory of their arms, because it can neutrality" and saw it done, the North is now only result from their having taken up profuse in lamentations when they die. arms. Even now I hear the chuckle I have There is no end to the procession following so often heard, "we can bring them to terms one who spent his life in drugging the conwith a little saltpetre." If by any means science of the North into apathy toward the the action of our representatives, after such crime, with which the nation is now called a magnificent response to the bugle as we to settle so formidable an account. All these have witnessed, should make this compro- things I have heard quoted a thousand times mise possible, it will be the most fearful be- in Virginia to prove that the North were trayal of a people and their sacred cause ever" abject cowards," "pseudo-philanthropists," known in history.

and" Puritan hypocrites," which are the political phrases ever used with_reference to them. It is common, too, to hear persons in the best society there say, "There is not one lady in the North."

The arrogant, contemptuous disposition toward the Northern people-to which I never met an exception in the South in the twenty-three years of my life in Slave States -has been fostered by the meanness which The North has merited this contempt beNortherners have shown. The Southerners cause it has for years allowed itself to be have never been a compromising people, misrepresented in its political relationships. except when a compromise is all they can The one chance to restore things to equilibsqueeze out of one. They are naturally rad-rium now appears: will the North be base

enough to justify the contempt of the South and gain that of the world by allowing tricky merchants and politicians to barter away its soul.

From The N. Y. Evening Post. A NEW FRENCH CHAMPION OF THE

UNION.

reclaim their autonomy as an absolutely independent organism? Or, on the contrary, has President Lincoln a right to oppose by force this rupture and disintegration?.

"We do not hesitate to say that by the law of public right and the Constitution of the Union, President Lincoln is justified in resistance to secession.

66

L'Ami de la Religion is a newspaper pub-ereignty is a governing one in the United Assuredly, the principle of popular sovlished at Paris in the interest of the Legiti-States; but it is to be asked whether—as in mist party. It has been celebrated for tak- the formation of all communities, be they ing a strictly feudal and mediaval view of

the facts of the nineteenth century. Here- great or small, republics or monarchiestofore, accordingly, in treating of the Amer-every separate group of population has not abdicated a part of its sovereignty, and ican trouble, it has regarded our country whether, upon the pettiest caprice, or the only from the Southern side, with which it discommoding of the pettiest interest, the has naturally enough felt the warmer sympathy. Its columns have at various times group will be justified in reclaiming that portion of sovereignty so abdicated. been opened to Secessionists residing in Paris, and when an American friend of ours asked room of its editors, a few weeks ago, for a temperate Union article, they politely refused to have any thing to do with him.

Not the least indication of the healthful

result which has flowed from the unflinching courage of our noble President and his counsellors is the daily modifying attitude of foreign journals. Remembering Buchanan, many of them began the discussion of the present conflict upon the supposition that America was given over by her doctors, and the truism that it is safe to kick a dying lion. A very few weeks of executive manliness have altered both their premises and conclusions.

Not to mention other journals, L'Ami de la Religion now publishes a leader of five and a half columns, whose definite object is the establishment of President Lincoln's right to preserve the Union by force. This is but an instalment of articles which are to continue the same subject. The writer looks at the question from a thoroughly French point of view, but not the same point assumed by De Gasparin.

"If so, where shall we stop? The prinstate alone, but quite as truly, perhaps, ciple of sovereignty does not reside in the more truly, in the counties which compose the state. Shall each county have the right If so, what will become of the states! We to demand back its share of sovereignty? have only to carry the principle a step lower and come to the individual, to reach the result of perfect anarchy.

"Against such a result the Union was intended to provide. At such results will those states arrive who are relying upon what they call their rights.

"If a republic be small,' says Montesquieu, it is destroyed by external pressure; if large by an internal flaw.' We have to seek a remedy for this double danger, of which, even since Montesquieu, history has yielded us examples. . . . It is this remedy which was sought by the United States as afflicted republics from their birth. conservative against the evils which have

federations. Without calling on antiquity, "History presents many examples of conwe have before us the Confederation of the United Provinces, and in our own day those of the Swiss Cantons and the German States. But no Federal Constitution, ancient or modern, possesses the features of the United States of America."

"The interests of humanity, of civilization and of commerce are at stake; but by the side of the principal question which divides the North and South, by the side of slavery and liberty, stands the no less im- The writer then quotes Puffendorf's disportant question of public right, and it is in tinction between leagues and confederations. this light alone that we will to-day cast a Nations forming leagues abandon none of glance at affairs across the Atlantic. . . . We their original absolute right to govern themwill treat of America, then, only as com- selves. In a confederation there is a perpetposed of Unionists and Disunionists, waiv- ual abdication of some portion of sovereignty. ing the interests of France, England, slaves," If in an assembly of confederated states afcotton, commercial liberty, abolitionists and fairs are decided absolutely by a plurality of pro-slavery men.

"Have the Slave States of the South, which since the Constitution of 1798 have formed part of the American Union, a right violently to break the Confederation and to

votes, this is no longer a true composite state but a single state." "Now," continues the writer, "this is exactly what happens in the American Union. It is one single sovereignty only."

He next proceeds to review the formation | tuted than in the ancient monarchies of of the Union, relating the difficulties which Europe. The Federal Court has the sole under the old Constitution of 1781 lay in the right of interpreting the law, and this court way of any thing like strong government, and the efforts made by all our best men to accomplish a nationality more vigorous. He quotes Washington calling his fellow-citizens to "an indissoluble Union," and says that he could not crown his glorious career without being the father of his country's permanence, as well as his country's freedom.