The South has become generally convinced that it is by hard blows, and not by loud blustering and insulting denunciation, that the sectional quarrel is to be settled. We need not say this has been our opinion for the last twenty years.
Original passage & context
"The South certainly has become generally convinced that it is by hard blows, and not by loud blustering and insulting denunciation, that the sectional quarrel is to be settled. We need not say that this has been our opinion for the last twenty years."
The fire-eater organ generalizing one caning into doctrine — violence, not debate, settles the sectional quarrel — and claiming twenty years' priority on the idea. Verified as the Mercury's own voice, not its quotation of a Northern paper.
Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗