Cincinnati Stands On The Ohio
River, Separated By A Ferry From Kentucky, Which Is A Slave State,
Ohio Itself Is A Free-Soil State.
When the time comes for arranging
the line of division, if such time shall ever come, it will be very
hard to say where Northern feeling ends and where Southern wishes
commence.
Newport and Covington, which are in Kentucky, are suburbs
of Cincinnati; and yet in these places slavery is rife. The
domestic servants are mostly slaves, though it is essential that
those so kept should be known as slaves who will not run away. It
is understood that a slave who escapes into Ohio will not be caught
and given up by the intervention of the Ohio police; and from
Covington or Newport any slave with ease can escape into Ohio. But
when that division takes place, no river like the Ohio can form the
boundary between the divided nations. Such rivers are the highways,
round which in this country people have clustered themselves. A
river here is not a natural barrier, but a connecting street. It
would be as well to make a railway a division, or the center line of
a city a national boundary. Kentucky and Ohio States are joined
together by the Ohio River, with Cincinnati on one side and
Louisville on the other; and I do not think that man's act can upset
these ties of nature. But between Kentucky and Tennessee there is
no such bond of union. There a mathematical line has been simply
drawn, a continuation of that line which divides Virginia from North
Carolina, to which two latter States Kentucky and Tennessee belonged
when the thirteen original States first formed themselves into a
Union.
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