There is only one evil greater than disunion: the loss of honor and Constitutional right. But our honor is untarnished; our Constitutional rights, so far as the federal government is concerned, untouched. Not now! say non-slaveholder, slaveholder, and friends in the free States.
Next post: Nashville Union and American, Dec 1, 1860 →
Printed the same day: Frederick Douglass →
The post above is condensed. From the original, word for word
"There is only one evil greater than disunion, and that is the loss of honor and Constitutional right. That evil the people of the South will never submit to. [...] But our honor as a people is still untarnished—our Constitutional rights, so far as the federal government is concerned, are still untouched. If the federal government should attempt even to tarnish the one or to deprive us of the other, we for one would be ready to resist, and ready to dissolve the Union without regard to consequences. But not now! — the non-slaveholder says not now! — the slaveholder, whose property civil war would involve in imminent peril, says not now! — millions of our friends in the free States say not now!"
Between the posts · the narrator, not the paper
By December the machinery is moving. South Carolina has called a convention and set the day to elect its delegates. The rest of the South divides three ways: go at once, go only in concert, or not for this cause alone.
William W. Holden's paper, the leading voice of North Carolina conditional Unionism — it would resist actual federal aggression but rejected secession over the mere election of Lincoln, absent an overt act. The Upper-South counterweight to the fire-eaters. Text from the AHA "Sixteen Months to Sumter" reproduction of Dumond (transcription). Fragments joined with [...].
Read it in the original — North Carolina Standard, Dec 1, 1860 ↗