Disunion Feed

"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"

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 does not care for this sort of thing. 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 ↗