Disunion Feed

"There is but one way to get along with the question, and that is to exclude both the Wilmot proviso and the Missouri compromise from all territorial bills. [...] We trust there will be found majorities in both houses of Congress who will promptly, and without debate, vote down all propositions, as connected with these territorial bills, relating to slavery."

Printed the same day as the Tribune card beside it, and the contrast is the point: a Northern Democratic paper treats the coming bill as a routine piece of territorial housekeeping, and its proposed remedy is silence — vote the slavery question down without debate. The Missouri Compromise is named here as one of two things to be excluded, not as a settlement to be defended.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"An overt attempt is set on foot in Mr. Douglas's Nebraska bill to override the Missouri Compromise. [...] This plain and unequivocal declaration that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in our North-west Territories is unceremoniously hustled aside by Mr. Douglas, who makes the Compromise measures of 1850 the scape-goat for his sin in doing it."

Same day as the Detroit Free Press card. The Tribune has already read the bill closely enough to quote the eighth section of the Missouri act back at Douglas, and to identify the mechanism — that the Compromise of 1850 is being used as the instrument of repeal. The word "overt" is doing work: the paper is claiming this is not an accident of drafting.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"He plants himself resolutely upon the Compromise of 1850, as a final settlement -- not final merely as to the Territories then in dispute, but final as to all future legislation for territorial governments. [...] We may then gladly proclaim the democratic organization a unit, and repose confidently on the conviction that the federal Union is safe."

A Northern Democratic paper reading Douglas's report the week it appeared, and treating party unity and the safety of the Union as the same question. The test it proposes — whether Northern and Southern Democrats vote together — is the one the bill went on to fail in the North.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"The indications thicken that the organization of this proposed Territory is to be attended with a renewal of strife. [...] It is a prodigious fall from the clouds, for such high-reaching spirits as the Free-soilers."

The Mercury catches an irony worth keeping: antislavery writers who had spent years arguing from a "higher law" above the Constitution were now defending the Missouri Compromise, an ordinary act of Congress. The card is a Southern paper scoring a debating point — and recording, in passing, that the North had shifted its ground.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"A year ago it would have been difficult to find a man who would believe in the possibility of disturbing the Missouri Compromise. [...] How truly is here illustrated the fact that it is only the first step in crime that costs. When that is taken the downward descent is easy."

The editorial notes that Senator Atchison had himself called repeal impracticable and given it up, before the Administration reversed within a year. "Doughface" was the standing epithet for a Northern man who voted with the South; the Tribune is arguing that the ground of the possible had moved, not just the votes.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"Were it simply a bad measure, we might speak of it calmly and measuredly; but as an act of deliberate and bad faith, impelled by the most sordid motives and threatening the most calamitous results, we must treat it as we do other gigantic perfidies and crimes. [...] The conflagration it threatens is not to be extinguished by jets of rosewater."

Written as an answer to critics of the paper's own tone — the Tribune is defending its language, not describing the bill. The question in the headline is asked literally: whether the Compromise of 1850 was understood at the time to repeal the Missouri line, or whether that reading was invented afterwards.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"This is no time for inaction. [...] There has never been before and perhaps there will never occur again, a conjuncture of circumstances so favorable for the re-conquest of the position which the South has lost by successive compromises of its rights."

The Enquirer is not defending the Missouri Compromise repeal as a restoration of calm but urging it as an opportunity — a chance to recover ground the South believed it had given away in 1820 and 1850. It presses Southern readers to organize meetings and petitions rather than rely on Congress alone.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"Every day it becomes more and more manifest that the South will be forced to act as a unit when the issue shall be made up on her constitutional right to enter and enjoy the territories of this Union [...] Throughout the North, the Whigs and free-soil Democrats will coalesce. A large portion, indeed, of the body of the Democratic Party at the North will stand firm to the creed they have heretofore held -- they will join with the South in the struggle for Constitutional right."

A Georgia paper forecasting the realignment while the bill is still in the House: Whigs and free-soil Democrats fusing in the North, the South voting as a bloc. It expected a large share of Northern Democrats to hold with the South, which is the half of the prediction that did not hold.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"At sunrise this morning, one hundred guns were fired from the Public Square, by order of the Democratic Town Committee, in honor of the passage of the bill giving Territorial Governments to the people of Nebraska and Kansas, and the triumph of the principle of Constitutional freedom involved therein. [...] We are not particularly partial to demonstrations of this noisy kind, on party triumphs -- but there has been such an amount of misrepresentation, both of the bill and its friends -- such a bold-faced system of abuse, and calumny, from the press, pulpit, and stump -- that no one can question the propriety of the manifestation of gladness which is felt by the friends of the bill, on its final passage."

The same paper that welcomed Douglas's report in January is here celebrating the bill's passage with artillery — and adding, in the next breath, that it is not partial to this sort of thing, before arguing that after so much abuse of the bill no one can question the gladness. The gun count is itemized in the original: thirty-one for the States, one each for Kansas and Nebraska, thirteen for the original States.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"There is but one subject that should now engage the attention of Northern freemen, -- all other issues and political objects are trivial in comparison to its importance -- and that is, the strides of the slave power towards supremacy. [...] To oppose the extent of the area of slavery is a principle that can bind and ought to bind American freemen together in one great party."

Five days after the House passed the bill, a Whig paper calls for a single Northern party organized on one question. This is the argument that produced the Republican party within the year, and it is the reason the 1854 event sits first in this feed: the coalition that fights every later crisis here is being proposed on this page.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"We are glad to get rid of it. It has had for us two very attractive features -- it removed the odious Missouri Restriction, and it has united the South in its support. [...] nor have we pretended that the South was likely to derive any increase of power by these Territories thus organized."

The most striking thing said by the winning side. The Mercury takes the repeal and the unity it produced, and then says plainly that it never expected the South to gain actual power from Kansas or Nebraska — the land, in its own account, being mostly fit for pasturage. A victory valued for what it settled in principle, not for what it delivered.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight -- I mean the harlot, Slavery."

The passage about Sen. Andrew Butler that provoked the caning three days later; Brooks's own letter cites this speech's language. The provocation was not clean: the same speech mocked the stroke-impaired Butler — 'with incoherent phrases, discharged the loose expectoration of his speech' (verified in the same text).

Read it in the original — The Crime Against Kansas (1856), Internet Archive ↗