The lofty and diversified mountain range, or system of ranges, known as
the Appalachian or Alleghany, rises or reappears in the State of New York,
midway between the Atlantic coast and the shores of those fresh-water
seas, Erie and Ontario. It then stretches down south-westward, with its
adjacent spurs, through the great States of Pennsylvania and Virginia;
then, dividing, it forms, with its eastern range, the western and northern
limit of North and South Carolina and Georgia; and with the western it
intersects Tennessee, forming that beautiful basin known among the white
men as East Tennessee, but among the traditions of the red men as the
Garden of the Manitou--their God. In Northern Alabama, the separated
ranges seemingly unite; and passing southward, towards the central portion
of the State, the mountain summits gradually contract, and finally sink
into the level of the great alluvial plains, which stretch away, without
undulation, to the shores of the Gulf. These huge masses of rock,
dislocated and elevated like the Vosges and the Hartz Mountains at the
close of the carboniferous or devonian period of the earth's age, contain,
with the adjacent and connecting bands,--which are composed of the
silurian, primitive, and metamorphic ledges,--most of the accessible
mineral wealth of the republic. And the collective beds of iron, coal,
marble, zinc, copper, and gold are unsurpassed in similar extent and
richness by the mines of any country of the known world, with the
exception of those wonderful deposits of ores and minerals among the
unexplored and almost inaccessible recesses and plateaus of the Sierra
Nevada or the Andes.
With the exception of the northern extremity of this mountain group, these
mines of natural wealth may be said to have been unexplored. Below the
rich and populous State of Pennsylvania, the hum of human industry ceases;
for we then pass into the paralyzing shadow of Slavery. This Slavery
forbade the development of the earth's treasures, as well as the
enlightenment of the minds of the poor and ignorant whites. The forges of
Vulcan would have hammered out and broken into fragments the chains of
that bondage which not only oppressed the fettered blacks, but debased,
with its corroding influence, the competing labor of the white man.
The slaveholders concealed this immense natural wealth from the eyes of
science from motives of policy; and rather than incur the hazard of
revolution, by educating the masses of their own people, they preferred to
neglect their natural advantages, and to send to distant and even foreign
lands the products of their fields and their system, to be worked up into
the marvellous fabrics of human ingenuity and skill. This same State of
Virginia, which is the real gateway to the empires of the West, and which
is not surpassed in natural physical advantages by any equal extent of
territory on the globe, is the most ignorant of all of the States of the
republic. Ninety thousand of its native-born free people, over twenty
years of age, before the war could not read nor write; whilst sterile and
stormy Maine, with her cold lands and colder skies, contained but two
thousand of the same class, out of a population more than half as great.
And New England, with a population of almost three times as great as the
free people of Virginia, is ashamed by the number of seven thousand
illiterate natives past the age of twenty. Who will wonder at the display
of barbarity and audacity when the statistics of education and ignorance
are exhibited? "Education and liberty," says Mirabeau, "are the bases of
all social harmony and all human prosperity."
Which can civilization curse the most, London or Amsterdam? the Dutch who
introduced Slavery, or the English who thought Virginia a good place to
"colonize aristocratic stupidity," and who sent colonists, who were,
according to the historian, "fitter to breed a riot than to found a
colony." The condition of the present day shows how rigidly the first
instructions have been observed and enforced. "Thank God," writes one of
its early governors to the English Privy Council, "thank God there are no
free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have any these hundred
years! for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the
world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best
government. God keep us from both!"