Page:History of the Forty-eighth Regiment, M.V.M. during the Civil War (IA historyoffortyei00plumm).pdf/57

 the Mississippi River and that the States of Arkansas and Mississippi lay on the right and left banks of that great stream, 500 miles of whose lower course was thus controlled during the first year of the Civil War by those three States unitedly inhabited by hardly as many white people as the city of New York.

If we observe then the course drained by that river and its tributaries, commencing with Missouri on its right bank and Kentucky on its left bank, we find it to consist of eight or nine large States, large portions of three or four others, and several large Territories, in all a country as large as Europe, as fine as any under the sun, holding at the commencement of the war more people than all the revolted States and destined to become one of the most populous and powerful regions on the face of the globe.

If any at the opening of the war supposed that those powerful States, comprising a great and energetic population, would, ever consent to a peace that would put the lower course of that great national outlet to the sea in the hands of a foreign power far weaker than themselves, they were blind indeed to the lessons of history.

The people of Kentucky alone before they were constituted a State gave formal notice to the Federal Government that if the United States did not conquer Louisiana they would conquer it themselves. In the words of a distinguished citizen of that martial State: "The mouths of the Mississippi belong by the gift of God to the inhabitants of its great valley. Nothing but irresistible force can disinherit them."

Akin to this was the feeling of the men of the North-*west at the outbreak of the Civil War. With them the opening of the Mississippi was an absorbing passion