Disunion Feed

"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 ↗

Next post: New-Haven Daily Register, May 24, 1854 →

"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 ↗