Disunion Feed

"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 ↗

"We are glad to get rid of it. It has had for us two very attractive features -- it removed the odious Missouri Restriction, and it has united the South in its support. [...] nor have we pretended that the South was likely to derive any increase of power by these Territories thus organized."

The most striking thing said by the winning side. The Mercury takes the repeal and the unity it produced, and then says plainly that it never expected the South to gain actual power from Kansas or Nebraska — the land, in its own account, being mostly fit for pasturage. A victory valued for what it settled in principle, not for what it delivered.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗