Disunion Feed

"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 ↗

"If the issue must come, we say let it come. If Southern insolence and bullyism is so rampant as to invade the sacred precints of our legislative halls, to find victims among American Senators to appease its fury, it is time that they should learn that there is a North that will be mighty, powerful and united, if it is not now. For years the South has reigned in Washington, with absolute sway. [...] It is time that its sceptre was broken and its domination destroyed."

Mary Ann Shadd Cary's paper — the first newspaper in North America edited by a Black woman — nine days after the caning. Transcribed letter-for-letter from the Canadiana page scans (no OCR layer exists); the paper's own spellings 'precints' and 'bullyism' preserved. The same article pairs the caning with Kansas: Southerners 'trying to play the same high-handed game in Washington... which they have been playing upon a poor, weak territory struggling into existence in the West.'

Read it in the original — Provincial Freeman, May 31, 1856 (Canadiana page scans) ↗