Disunion Feed

"Politically, the entire North lies prostrate at the foot-stool of slavery. [...] all efforts of the States to resist his power are declared politically null and void by the Supreme-Court of the United States. Will Massachusetts, will the North submit? [...] The Union formed in 1787 is dissolved. The South has done it. Would that the North had possessed manhood enough to have done the glorious deed! But it is done, thank God! no matter whether by Border Ruffians, Bully Brooks, or Chief Justice Taney."

Ten days after the ruling, a letter to Garrison's paper under the heading "Will the North Submit?" "His power" is slavery's: Wright reads the decision as voiding every State's defence against it. Like Garrison, whose paper printed "No Union with Slaveholders" at the head of its editorial page, Wright wanted the free States out of the Union; he names the decision beside the Kansas border raiders and Preston Brooks, who caned Senator Sumner in 1856, as one more blow that ended it. Text from the archive.org scan; the issue OCR is rough, but these runs were string-verified, and "Supreme-Court" is spelled as in that copy.

Read it in the original — The Liberator, Mar 27, 1857 ↗

Next post: Charleston Mercury, Mar 17, 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 ↗