Lincoln's election is not a wrong in itself, but the crowning proof that a Northern majority approves the outrages on our rights. He enters a minority President, chosen by an adroit marshaling of sectional hate. The remedy is unity — better the South act as one than divided.
Original passage & context
"This election of LINCOLN is not assumed to be an actual wrong in itself, but only the crowning and authoritative evidence that the series of outrages perpetrated upon our rights meet with the approval of a majority of the Northern people. [...] Unity was never more essential to a people than to the South in our present condition. It is better that we should act with less wisdom, abstractly considered, than that we should be divided in our action."
A pro-Breckinridge Tennessee paper that treats Southern grievance as settled but argues the remedy is a united Southern convention, not separate-state secession — the Middle-South cooperationist position that the Charleston Mercury's 'Delay' (se-009) attacks directly. The 'minority President... marshaling of sectional hate' clause used in the tweet is verbatim from the same article, a few sentences before the excerpt. Text from the AHA "Sixteen Months to Sumter" reproduction of Dumond (transcription). Fragments joined with [...].
Read it in the original — Nashville Union and American, Dec 1, 1860 ↗