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 123 passages across the events covered so far: The Sumner caning, 1856 (May 19, 1856 – Jul 14, 1856); Dred Scott, 1857 (Mar 6, 1857 – May 14, 1857); Harpers Ferry, 1859 (Oct 18, 1859 – Dec 2, 1859); The secession winter, 1860–61 (Nov 9, 1860 – Apr 13, 1861). 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 is put through a checking program before it ships. It splits each excerpt at the [...] marks, fetches the cited document live, and requires every fragment to appear in it word for word. Spot-checking a phrase or two is not enough — a spot-check passes happily while a sentence quietly dropped from the middle turns a real quote into a fabricated one. That is a mistake we made, and it is why the check works the way it does. You do not have to take our word for the result: every card links to the document it came from, and following that link is a check you can run yourself.
All 123 passages run through it against a live fetch of their sources. Most match exactly. Where a card and its source disagree, it is because the 19th-century scan itself is garbled — the microfilm reads "Tins event" for "This event" — and in those cases the card carries the correct reading and the scan is the corrupt witness. We had two we could not settle from the text alone; both were resolved in August 2026 by going back to the original page images, and in both the card was right. Some things we want you to know rather than discover:
- Three cards sit outside the core Harpers Ferry reaction window (Oct 16 – Nov 15, 1859): 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 the 1850s 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.
- One card the program cannot check at all. The Provincial Freeman of May 31, 1856 — a Black-owned paper published in Canada West — survives in an archive that serves photographs of the pages and no machine-readable text. Our checker can reach it and cannot read it, which is a different thing from a card that fails. Those words were transcribed from the scan by hand, letter for letter. It is the one passage on this site whose text rests on a person reading a photograph rather than on a program, and the scan is linked from the card so you can do the same.
- 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.
- One link sent readers to the wrong page. A Frederick Douglass' Paper editorial from June 1856 runs across two pages of the issue, and the card linked to the first — where one of the sentences we quoted isn't. The words were real and on the next page, but a reader checking us would not have found them. The link now opens the whole issue.
- One card quoted a real speech from a different printing than the one it cited. John Brown's address to the court survives in several printings whose wording differs slightly. The card carried the widely reprinted version while linking to a broadside that reads a little differently, so we re-sourced it to an edition that prints the words on the card. Both catches came from running the checker over sources it had never been able to reach before.
The full record is published. Read the verification record — all 123 passages, where each one can be read, and every place our card and the archived text disagree, including the ones we changed ourselves. It reports a dated run of the checker described above, not a summary of it, so where an archive did not answer that day the page says so instead of quietly counting it as a match.
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.