Disunion Feed

"This is a seeming blow at the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, but not quite as hard a one as we could wish the Court had given. As Congress has no power to exclude slavery from the territory and confer freedom upon negroes, it cannot confer that power on territorial agents. The stream can rise no higher than the fountain, as a matter of course."

A Mississippi paper that reads the great pro-slavery victory and wants more. The unanswered question it names — whether settlers could bar slavery on their own authority, without Congress — is exactly the gap Stephen Douglas would try to stand in at Freeport a year later, and it split the Democratic party in 1860.

Read it in the original — Natchez Daily Courier, Mar 14, 1857 ↗

"At a single blow it shatters and destroys the platform of the Republican party. It annihilates the issue which was made paramount in the recent Presidential election, and takes away from the Democratic party all the advantages of its advocacy of popular sovereignty in the Territories. It leaves both of these great parties all abroad, without a single plank of their late platforms upon which to rest."

George D. Prentice's Journal was the leading Whig-then-American paper of the border South, and the only voice in this feed to see at once that the decision wrecked both parties rather than one. It was right: the Democratic split it predicts arrived in 1860 and put Lincoln in the White House.

Read it in the original — Louisville Journal, Mar 16, 1857 ↗