Disunion Feed

"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 ↗

"It appears that we, Secessionists, have been all the while not disturbing the law, not intruding novelties upon the country, not seeking to break up established principles, but that we have been simply a step in advance of the highest tribunal in the country, in declaring what was the law of the land, and seeking honestly and faithfully to enforce it."

The Rhetts' Mercury, the loudest secessionist paper in the South, claiming the Supreme Court has caught up with it. Three years later the same paper would print South Carolina's ordinance of secession.

Read it in the original — Charleston Mercury, Mar 17, 1857 ↗