The thesis

Americans are told, constantly, that our division is unprecedented. This project lets you scroll the actual discourse of the antebellum crisis — the weeks after John Brown raided Harpers Ferry, the days after Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner on the Senate floor — in the interface you already read the news in. The satire is the format collision, and only the format collision: 1850s words in a 2026 feed. Nothing else is invented. What scrolling it does to the word "unprecedented" is the product.

Every post is real

Each card condenses a passage from a real primary source — a newspaper editorial, a speech, a letter. Every card links to the original document or its archival record. The feeds currently hold 41 passages across the events covered so far: Harpers Ferry, 1859 (Oct 18, 1859 – Dec 2, 1859); The Sumner caning, 1856 (May 19, 1856 – Jul 14, 1856). If you read one thing on this page, read this: the citations are the product. Click them.

The full-spectrum principle

This is not "Confederate Twitter," and it is not a highlight reel of people we agree with. The unit of content is the day's discourse — fire-eaters, abolitionists, border-state Democrats, Republican papers playing defense, and Black voices, in one stream. Pro-slavery voices never appear without abolitionist and Black voices in the same feed. That rule is editorial law here, because the point is the whole argument America was having with itself, not one side of it.

How "tweetification" works

Tweets are condensed and modernized in rhythm, never in meaning or stance. A fire-eater sounds incendiary because he was. Era-specific reasoning is preserved on purpose — the alienness is the point. Specific rules:

• No invented claims, no invented quotes. Every card marked "Condensed — not verbatim" is a paraphrase, and the exact original passage sits one tap away under "Original passage & context."
• Cards marked "Verbatim excerpt" reproduce the source word for word.
• Splices within a single document are marked with [...]. We never splice across documents.
• Obvious OCR scanner errors in 19th-century microfilm are silently repaired ("Shquld" → "Should"); original spelling and punctuation are otherwise preserved, and uncertain readings are flagged in the card's context note.

The verification ledger — including the honest parts

Every passage was verified against its source with targeted string-matching at harvest time, and half were re-verified independently. The full provenance log — every query, dead end, and correction — lives in the project's public repository. Some things we want you to know rather than discover:

• Three cards sit outside the core Oct 16 – Nov 15 reaction window (Mahala Doyle's letter, Frances Ellen Watkins's letter, and the Dec 2 material). Each discloses it on the card. The shape we follow is: event arc, panic to consequence, exceptions allowed if disclosed.
• One citation is weaker than we want. Mahala Doyle's letter to Brown survives in a secondary transcription; we searched the 1859 De Witt trial compilation hoping to upgrade it to a period imprint, and the letter is not there. The card says so.
• The Black press of 1859 is harder to access than the white press. The Weekly Anglo-African sits behind an archival paywall; that inaccessibility shaped which voices we could verify, and we treated it as a constraint to disclose rather than silently work around.
• Famous quotes get checked too. A line attributed to Garrison in half the literature ("misguided, wild, and apparently insane") could not be traced to a locatable primary text, so we do not use it.

Calm by design

No likes. No reply counts. No infinite scroll, no recommendations, no outrage mechanics of any kind. The original engagement machinery is exactly what this format is quietly criticizing, so the feed is a reading experience: chronological, finite, sourced. The only "engagement" feature is a share button, and the image it produces carries the citation with it — the quote cannot travel without its receipt.

Who made this

Disunion Feed is a Skylark Creations project by Dave Kooi. Corrections are welcome and wanted: if a citation fails or a paraphrase drifts from its source's stance, that is a bug in the product's core promise, and we will fix it.

All source material is pre-1930 and in the public domain. Transcription hosts include the Valley of the Shadow project (University of Richmond / New American History), the Secession Era Editorials Project (Furman University), the Frederick Douglass Papers (Yale), Fair Use Repository, the Internet Archive, and the Library of Congress.